Black water swallowed the oar without a sound. Wicker hauled it back, and the blade surfaced trailing filaments of pale light, as though the mire had been weeping something brighter than brine. The boat rocked. Mara steadied herself against the gunwale, her fingers leaving prints in a skin of frost that was not quite frost.
The vessel had no name carved into its prow. When she looked at its hull, she saw only the grain of the wood and, beneath the grain, the faint inverted image of a forest burning somewhere far from here. The oars wept light. The water held its tongue.
"Keep the rhythm slow," Wicker said from the bow, his voice papery and low, a sound like pages turning in an empty room. He sat with his staff across his knees, the bronze curl of its head catching nothing. His eyes, though they seemed to look outward, were angled inward, as if he watched something playing out behind the curtain of his own thoughts. "The Mirror-Mire does not care for haste. It remembers the living longer than it remembers the dead."
Mara pulled. The oar came up clean and bright. She set it, pulled again. The boat moved in a direction that might have been forward or might have been some subtler translation, a sliding across rather than a movement through.
Around them, the water was a black so absolute it seemed less a color than an absence, a place where light went to be consumed. But floating in that blackness, drifting like lilies that had forgotten how to die, were shapes. Reflections, but reversed. A tower, upside down, its spire a root, its windows mouths. A street of houses with their roofs below and their floors above, the chimneys dripping not smoke but water, always water, black and slow. Each reflection showed what was not. Where a bell tower stood in the drowned city they were approaching, the reflection showed a hollow where a tower should be, a wound in the image of the sky.
Mara stopped rowing. The oar hovered.
"They're wrong," she whispered. "Everything is backwards."
Wicker did not turn his head. "The mire shows the unbuilt. The forgotten. The unchosen. What you see inverted is what was refused."
She looked at her own reflection in the black water beside the boat. The face that looked back was not hers. It was older, crowned in something that might have been coral or bone, and it was weeping from its left eye only, a single dark tear that fell upward and dissolved into the mist.
Mara looked away. The oar bit the water and the boat slid on.
The mist here was warm, which was wrong. Warmth in a place of drowned stone and black water. It pressed against her cheeks, her lips, the back of her throat, carrying a taste of salt and something older, mineral and clean, the taste of limestone caves where no foot had ever walked. The sound that reached her came from no direction she could name. A tolling, deep, slow, each strike separated by a silence so wide it seemed to have its own weather.
The bells.
She had heard them since she was a child, in the fishing village, in the small hours when the tide turned wrong. Her mother had said it was the sea's complaint. Her father had said nothing, only tightened the nets and watched the horizon with a jaw set like wood. Now the bells were here, in the air, in the water, in the bones of her inner ear, and they were close.
The drowned city rose from the mire in stages, like a sentence spoken slowly. First the spires, pale and barnacled, leaning at angles that no architect would have allowed. Then the rooftops, the gables, the carved faces of saints and governors whose names had been eaten by the water's long attention. Then the walls, some still standing, some fallen into themselves, the stones wearing a green-black pelt of something that was not moss and not seaweed but something between, a memory of both.
Wicker raised one hand. The boat slowed of its own accord, the water thickening around the hull until it moved like cold honey.
"There," he said. "The Cathedral of the Lower Court. Where the last queen knelt before the tide took her vows."
Mara looked where he pointed. The cathedral stood at the heart of the drowned city, half-submerged, its nave filled to the altar steps with water that glowed faintly from some impossible source below. Through the broken rose window she could see, impossibly, a single candle still burning, its flame the color of bone.
The bells tolled again. This time, the sound rose from beneath the water, not from the tower. The bronze had sunk. The clappers had followed. Somewhere far below the hull, in the cathedral's drowned crypt, the bells were being struck by hands that no longer had names, and the sound traveled up through the black water and the black stone and entered her chest and lived there, vibrating, a second pulse beside her own.
"How," she said, and stopped.
Wicker turned at last. His eyes were the color of old paper, and in them she could see the inverted reflection of the cathedral playing out in miniature, a little upside-down ruin inside each iris. "The bells were blessed to mark the hours of the living kingdom. When the kingdom drowned, the hours continued. The bells toll for a court that no longer sits. The wind does not ring them. The hands do not ring them. They ring because the hours must be kept, even when no one comes to count them."
"There is no wind," Mara said. "I have not felt a breath since we entered the mire."
"There was never wind here. The bells do not need it. They need only the idea of wind. The idea is enough."
The boat drifted closer. The cathedral grew. Now Mara could see the individual stones, the carved friezes of fish and saints intertwined, the names of the drowned queens running around the architrave in a script that seemed to shift when she did not look at it directly. She could see the windows, their leading still intact, holding panes of glass that had not been glass for centuries, that had become something else, something translucent and weeping, a substance that held the black water's color and gave back a faint, sourceless light.
She leaned over the gunwale. The water beside the boat showed her the cathedral inverted, and in that reflection the building was whole, unruined, its spires reaching down into a sky that was upside down, its rose window blazing with the candle's doubled flame. The reflection was the lie. The drowned stone was the truth.
Mara sat back. Her hands were cold. The frost on the gunwale had thickened where she had touched it, and in its crystals she thought she could make out the shape of a face, a young man's face, eyes closed, mouth open in a soundless word. She did not try to read the lips.
"Wicker."
"Mm."
"The Ferrywoman. Where is she?"
The old man was quiet for a long time. The bells tolled. The water held its black tongue. The cathedral waited with the patience of a thing that had been waiting since before waiting had a name.
"She will come when the boat is still," he said at last. "She will not board a vessel that moves. She considers motion the prerogative of the living. When we stop, she will step onto the prow as though she had always been there, and she will ask her question, and the answer will determine whether we cross the rest of the mire, or whether we join the court below."
"What is the question?"
"I do not know. The question changes. It is always a question you think you have answered a hundred times, until she asks it."
Mara looked at the cathedral. The candle in the rose window had not moved. The bells had not stopped. The water lapped at the altar steps with a sound like a slow, patient tongue.
"Stop the boat," she said.
Wicker's hand came down on the oar beside hers. The boat slowed. The water around them seemed to exhale. The miasma of warm mist thickened until the drowned city was only shapes, suggestions, the memory of a place. Then, from the mist, at the very prow, a figure took form.
The Ferrywoman was tall, taller than any woman Mara had ever seen, and thin in a way that suggested not starvation but a refusal of the horizontal. She wore a gown of the black water, hem trailing into the boat, pooling, never quite wet. Her face was pale and set, the features arranged with a precision that implied they had been chosen rather than grown. Her eyes were the same black as the mire, and they reflected nothing. Her hair, if it was hair, floated around her head as though she were always underwater.
She did not speak at first. She looked at Wicker. She looked at Mara. She tilted her head, the angle slightly wrong, as if her neck had one more joint than a neck should.
"The living," she said, and her voice was the bells' echo, cold and ringing and without warmth, a sound that had been allowed to forget where it had been. "In the last boat. I had thought the craft empty. I had thought the court below would have no need of passengers for a long while yet."
She looked at Mara again, and the bells in the crypt beneath them seemed to quiet, to listen.
"What is your name, child of the drowned village, and what is the name of the thing you have lost that you have not yet allowed yourself to name?"
Mara opened her mouth. The mist pressed close. The cathedral waited, its candle burning, its bells ready to toll again as soon as the question was answered or refused. The boat was still. The Ferrywoman's eyes were the color of the water and held no image of her at all.
The bells tolled again, and Wicker answered.
It was not a word. Mara could see that in the set of his shoulders, in the way his hands uncurled from where they had been gripping the gunwale, in the way his lips moved around shapes that were not shaped for a human mouth. The sound he made was low, guttural, pulled from somewhere beneath his chest, a vibration she felt in her teeth before it reached her ears. The bone-language. He had been listening to the bells parse it, and now he spoke it back, syllable for tolling syllable, the way one might echo a dialect heard in a dream.
The Ferrywoman's reflectionless eyes moved from Mara to Wicker. The candle in the cathedral guttered. The mist held its breath.
Wicker's voice was wrong. That was the worst part. The voice of the man she had followed through the drowned village, the old scribe with his papery burr and his theatrical pauses, the keeper of forbidden histories who had not spoken a name aloud in thirty years, that voice was gone. In its place was something older, something that moved through him the way wind moves through a hollow reed, something that had been kept in the bone-language all this time and was only now, in the presence of the cathedral and the bells and the Ferrywoman who served them, being let out to breathe.
The bells answered him. Their toll was no longer the single note she had heard before but a chord, a shifting harmony that seemed to fold over itself, harmonics layering on harmonics until the air was thick with the smell of salt and old bronze and something sweeter, cloying, like lilies left too long in a closed room. The black water around the boat shivered, and Mara saw shapes move beneath the surface, pale and slow, the drowned courtiers of the Coral Court turning in their long sleep to listen.
Wicker sang back. The sound that came from his throat was not singing, not exactly, but it was not speech either. It was a recitation, a string of syllables that seemed to have weight, that fell from his lips like stones dropped into still water, each one sinking, each one leaving a ring. His eyes were open but did not see her, did not see the boat, did not see the Ferrywoman standing at the prow in her gown of black water. They saw something else. They saw something that had happened before, in this place, in this water, in a time that the bells remembered even if the kingdom above did not.
Mara gripped the gunwale. Her palms were slick with mist, with the cold sweat that the bone-language always drew from her, the same cold sweat she had felt the first time she had heard it, in the drowned chapel of her own village when she was eleven years old and had gone down among the submerged stones to look for her brother's name on the memorial wall. She had not known then what she was hearing. She knew now. It was the language the dead used to speak to each other when the living were not supposed to be listening.
Wicker's recitation slowed. The bells answered, slower too, and there was a sense of two ancient things circling one another, testing, remembering. The Ferrywoman tilted her head at that wrong angle and watched, and her face did not change, but something in the air around her shifted, a tightening, a recognition.
"You have spoken this before," the Ferrywoman said, and her voice was the bells' echo, cold and ringing. "Not here. Not in this vessel. But here." She gestured, a small motion of one hand, at the cathedral, at the water, at the mist. "Long ago. When the tide last took a king."
Wicker's recitation stopped. The bells did not answer. The silence that followed was so complete that Mara could hear the candle in the cathedral burning, a faint hiss, a faint whisper of wax giving way to flame.
The old scribe stood very still. His hands hung at his sides. His face was the color of wet chalk, and there was a trembling in it that he could not quite suppress, a trembling that began at the corner of his mouth and worked its way inward, into the muscles of his jaw, into the tendons of his throat. He did not look at Mara. He did not look at the Ferrywoman. He looked at the water, at the place where the bells' sound had been, at the absence the sound had left behind.
"I do not remember," he said. His voice was his own again, thin, papery, the soft coastal burr of an old man who had lived too long among stones. "I do not remember speaking it before."
The Ferrywoman's eyes did not change. The candle in the cathedral burned on, steady and patient. The mist pressed close. The boat was still, and the pale shapes of the drowned courtiers had settled again beneath the black water, though Mara thought she saw one of them move, just slightly, a slow turn of a head that was not quite a head, a slow drift of a sleeve that was not quite a sleeve.
"The bells do not lie," the Ferrywoman said. "The bells do not forget. If they say you have spoken here before, then you have spoken here before, even if the speaking was taken from you. Even if you were not yet old enough to hold the memory of it. Even if the memory was sealed in you and lost, drowned, the way so much was drowned."
Wicker's hands tightened at his sides. He did not answer at once. He breathed, slowly, the breath of a man who is trying to hold himself together against a wind that blows from somewhere he cannot see. When he spoke again his voice was measured, deliberate, the voice of the court scribe, the keeper of the forbidden histories, the man who had lived among the drowned stones for decades and had learned to keep his thoughts behind his teeth.
"What was the name," he said, "of the king the tide took?"
The Ferrywoman regarded him. The angle of her head did not change. The mist moved around her gown of black water, and the gown did not move at all.
"You know the name," she said. "You have always known it. It is the name you will not speak, the name that lives in the language you have just used, the name that is sealed in you the way a name is sealed in a bell. You have carried it for thirty years, scribe, and you have never let it toll."
Wicker's face did something then that Mara had never seen it do. It broke. Not into pieces, not into a weeping or a rage, but into a stillness so complete that it was like a face made of stone suddenly remembering that it had once been a face made of flesh. The trembling stopped. The color went out of his lips. His eyes, which had been fixed on the water, lifted, and for a moment they met Mara's across the boat, and in them she saw something she did not expect.
Recognition. Not of her. Of himself. Of the man he had been before the exile, before the decades among the drowned stones, before the long self-imposed silence of a court scribe who had been sworn to keep the forbidden histories and had kept them, perhaps, too well. He looked at her, and she saw that he understood, in the way that the Ferrywoman had said the bells understood, that something in him had been speaking a language he had not known he knew, and that the language had been waiting, all this time, in the drowned places of his own keeping, for the cathedral to call it out.
"The Smith-King," Wicker said, and the name tolled in the air like a bell struck in a vault, and the bells of the cathedral answered, a single great chord that shook the mist and the water and the bones of the boat and the bones of the two living souls who sat in it. "It was the Smith-King who was taken. It was the Smith-King whose name I sealed in the bone-language when the court fell, when the water rose, when the coral took the throne room. I was there. I was the one they chose to sing him down."
The bells tolled again, a confirmation, a mourning, a recognition of the name that had been spoken. The candle in the cathedral guttered and flared. The pale shapes beneath the water turned, all of them, at once, a slow wheeling of the drowned court, the Coral Courtiers in their long sleep turning toward the sound of the name of the king they had served and lost.
Mara could not speak. The name of the Smith-King was one she had heard only in whispers, in the half-remembered fragments of the songs her mother had sung to keep the terror of the water at bay, in the few lines of the histories that had survived the drowning of the coastal villages. He had been the last king, the one who had tried to hold the kingdom together when the curse came down from the deep, the one who had stood in the throne room of the Coral Court and spoken the words that were supposed to bind the tide and had failed, and had been taken for his failure, pulled down beneath the black water with his crown still on his head.
She looked at Wicker. The old scribe stood in the boat with the mist curling around his shoulders, and he looked, for the first time since she had known him, like a man who had just remembered that he was not the only thing in the room that could drown.
"You sang him down," she said. Her voice came out rough, edged, the rasp of the coastal accent she had never quite lost. "You sang him down, and then you lived, and then you walked away, and then you went to the drowned village, and then you watched the water take my village too, and you never said a word."
Wicker's eyes did not leave hers. The trembling had not come back. The stone of his face held.
"I was sworn," he said, "to keep the histories. I was not sworn to remember them aloud. The name of the Smith-King was forbidden because it was the name the bells use to call the tide. If I had spoken it above water, the tide would have answered. If I had spoken it in the hearing of the living, the water would have risen again. I sealed it in the bone-language, which the living do not speak, and I sealed it in me, and I have carried it for thirty years in the place where the bells cannot reach it."
He stopped. The bells did not answer. The mist held its breath.
"Until now," he said, and his voice cracked on the word, a small sound, the sound of a thing that had been sealed too long being pried open. "Until you came down to the drowned stones and asked me to take you to the ferry, and the ferry brought us here, and the bells began to toll the name I had sealed, and the Ferrywoman asked her question, and I answered, in the only language I had left to answer in."
The Ferrywoman stood at the prow. Her gown of black water trailed into the boat. Her eyes were the color of the water and held no image of any of them.
"The living have come down to the court below," she said, and her voice was the bells' echo, cold and ringing, without warmth. "The name has been spoken in the hearing of the cathedral. The bells have answered. What the bells have answered cannot be unanswered. What the tide has been called to do cannot be uncalled."
The boat moved. Mara did not see what moved it. The oars were not in the water. The Ferrywoman did not touch them. But the boat moved, slowly, toward the cathedral, toward the candle burning in the water above the altar, toward the sound of the bells settling into a long, low, waiting hum.
Wicker sat down on the thwart across from her. The mist curled around his knees. He looked older than he had a moment before, older than he had been when she had first seen him in the drowned village, older than the decades he had spent among the submerged stones could account for. He looked like a man who had just set down a weight he had been carrying since before she was born.
"I am sorry," he said, and the words were not for her, not quite, but she heard them anyway, and the warmth that had once been in his voice, the dry papery warmth of the old scribe who had taught her to read the stone-tablets of the drowned, came back into it, briefly, like a candle relit. "I am sorry that I did not tell you. I am sorry that I could not. I am sorry that what I sealed in me has been let out by the bells, and that you have heard it, and that you will have to carry it now too."
The boat moved on. The cathedral grew larger. The candle burned. The bells hummed their long low hum, and the mist parted, slowly, before them, and the black water of the Mirror-Mire was still, and the pale shapes of the Coral Court turned in their long sleep, and somewhere beneath them all, in the drowned throne room of the kingdom that had fallen, the crown of the Smith-King waited on the floor of the sea.
The boat scraped against stone.
Wicker felt it before he saw it, the soft jar of the hull meeting the first submerged step of the cathedral's eastern approach, and he gripped the gunwale, his old bones remembering the angle of descent better than his eyes could see it through the mist. He had climbed these steps once. He had climbed them with the light still warm on his face, with the sun not yet a memory of a thing swallowed by the sea. He had climbed them with Ireleth's hand in his, her voice bright in the morning air, the bells not yet tolling for anything but the ordinary hours.
He let go of the gunwale now. He did not need the boat for balance. He had not needed a boat for balance in a long time.
"Easy," Mara said, and he heard the edge in it, the protective edge, and he was glad of it, and he was sorry for it, and he did not say so because there was no way to say both things without making them untrue.
He stepped from the boat onto the first stair. The water rose over the toes of his boots. It was cold in the way that deep water is cold, not a temperature but a presence, and it soaked through the cracked leather in a single breath, and he felt the chill climb his ankles, his shins, his knees, as if the cathedral were greeting him by remembering the warmth he had once brought to it.
The Ferrywoman did not follow them onto the steps. She remained in the boat, her long pale hands folded in her lap, and the mist gathered around her like a curtain being drawn, and her voice, when it came, was the voice from the reeds, the voice without warmth or cruelty, the voice of a thing that does what it is made to do.
"The due," she said.
Wicker stopped on the second step. He did not turn. He knew what the due was. He had always known. He had hoped, in the small human way that old men hope, that the due would be paid another way, that the Ferrywoman would find some other coin in his pocket that he had forgotten, that the drowned kingdom would accept a lesser tribute from an old scribe who had already given it so many years.
But the drowned kingdom was not a thing that accepted lesser tributes.
"Take it," he said.
He felt her move behind him. He did not hear her move; there was no sound of water, no displacement of the mist, no soft footfall on the stone. He only knew that she had come close because the cold of the deep water deepened into something else, a colder cold, a stillness that was not the absence of warmth but the presence of its opposite, and the candle on the altar, far up the stairs, flickered once, as if a breath had passed over it that was not a breath at all.
She would not take Wicker's memory. He had nothing left to take. She had taken it from him, year by year, and he had let her, and what remained of him was the scaffolding, the bones of the man he had been, and there was no warmth in those bones to feed a kingdom.
So she would take from the living.
"Mara," Wicker said, and his voice was the driest voice he had, the voice that had read the stone-tablets of the drowned for decades without flinching, and he made it dry now because if it broke he would not be able to say what he had to say. "Come here. Stand where I can see you."
Mara came up the stairs. She came slowly. She came with the stubborn set of her shoulders that he had come to know, the set that said she would not be moved by anything she could not see or feel or hear, and he loved her for it, in the way that old men love the children of the friends who died before them, with a love that is partly memory and partly invention.
She stopped beside him. The water rose to her calves. Her hair was slicked to her temples. Her eyes were on the Ferrywoman, who had not stepped from the boat but who was there, on the stair beside them, close as a shadow at noon.
"I do not want this," Mara said. The edge was gone. The voice under it was very young, and very tired, and very afraid, and Wicker heard it and the scaffold of him ached.
"Nor I," the Ferrywoman said. "Nor the king who lies beneath the water. Nor the queen who broke him. Nor the bells that remember them both. The due is the due. The kingdom is hungry. It has been hungry for three hundred years. It will be hungry for three hundred more. A memory is a small thing to pay for safe passage across the Mirror-Mire."
"It is not a small thing," Mara said.
"It is the smallest thing the kingdom accepts," the Ferrywoman said. "It is the only thing the kingdom accepts."
Mara looked at Wicker. He looked back. He could see, in the dim light of the candle on the altar, the way her jaw was set, the way her hand had come up to rest against the hollow of her throat where the pendant of the Hollow Crown lay beneath the soaked cloth of her shirt, the way her eyes were steady even while the rest of her was not.
"Brother," she said, and the word was a question, and the question was the only question she had ever really needed to ask, and Wicker heard it and felt the old weight of it, the weight he had carried for her for years, the weight of the brother who had drowned in the storm of the curse, the brother whose name she had been forbidden to speak, the brother whose memory the drowned kingdom had taken as its due the night the village sank.
The Ferrywoman did not answer. The Ferrywoman did not need to answer. The Ferrywoman was already reaching.
Wicker saw her hand go out. It was a long pale hand, the hand he had felt on his own memory in his younger years, the hand that had drawn out the shape of a day in the drowned market and the warmth of a morning with Ireleth and the taste of the bread from the baker on the corner of the quay where the boats came in. The hand did not move quickly. The hand moved with the unhurried patience of a thing that had all the time the drowned kingdom had, which was to say, all the time in the world and none of it at all.
The hand touched Mara's temple. The touch was light. The touch was the lightest thing Wicker had ever seen, lighter than a moth, lighter than the first flake of snow, lighter than the breath of a sleeper who does not know she is watched.
And Mara screamed.
It was not a loud scream. It was a small scream, the scream of a child who has lost a thing in a crowd, and Wicker heard it and felt the scaffold of him shudder, because he had heard that scream before, he had heard it years ago when the Ferrywoman had come for him, when the hand had touched his temple and drawn out a day, and then a year, and then a decade, and the scream had been his own and he had not been able to stop it.
Mara did not fall. She stood on the step, the water around her calves, the mist in her hair, the hand of the Ferrywoman still at her temple, and her eyes were open, and the tears were coming down her cheeks, and her mouth was shaped around the scream that was already leaving her, and Wicker watched, and could not look away, because to look away would have been to deny that the thing was happening, and he could not deny it.
The Ferrywoman drew her hand away. The hand was wet. Not with water. The wetness on it was not the wetness of the sea.
Mara closed her mouth. She opened her eyes. She blinked.
She looked at Wicker, and her face was the face of a woman who had been struck by a thing she could not remember, and the place where the memory had been was a wound, and the wound was clean, and the wound would never close, and there was no name for it now, no shape for it, no way to mourn what had been there.
"What," she said, and her voice was hoarse, and her hand went up to her temple where the Ferrywoman had touched her, and the hand trembled there, and she did not know why it trembled. "What did you take. What was it. Why am I."
She could not finish the sentence.
The bells tolled. They did not toll for Mara. They did not toll for Wicker. They tolled because the Ferrywoman had taken what was owed and the kingdom was, for this moment, less hungry than it had been, and the lessening of that hunger was a thing that the bells marked, the way a heart marks the easing of a long pain.
Wicker reached out and took Mara's hand. His hand was cold and hers was warmer, and the warmth of her was a small thing, the smallest thing, and it was the only thing he had left to give.
"Come," he said. "Come up the stairs. The candle is burning."
They went up. The water rose to their knees. The water rose to their thighs. The water rose to their waists, and Mara did not ask him what was missing, because there was no way to ask what was missing, because what was missing had been taken, and the place it had been was a hollow, and the hollow was where the weight of it had been, and the weight was gone but the hollow was there, and the hollow was a thing she would carry the rest of her life without ever knowing what she carried.
Wicker walked beside her. He walked the way old men walk beside the young, with the gait of one who has learned that the only useful thing he can do is to be there.
At the top of the stairs, the cathedral opened. It was larger than it had any right to be. The arches rose into the mist, and the mist rose into the dark, and the dark was the dark of the sea, the dark that had swallowed the kingdom, the dark that was the kingdom now. The pews were gone. The altar was gone. The walls were gone in places, and where they were gone the sea had come in, and the sea was still, and the stillness was the stillness of a thing that is waiting.
The candle burned on the altar that was not there. It burned above the water that was the floor. It burned in the silence that was not silence, that was the long low hum of the bells, the hum that was the memory of the kingdom, the hum that would go on tolling whether or not there were any ears left to hear it.
Mara stopped. She stood in the nave of the drowned cathedral, and the candle threw her shadow long across the water, and the shadow was the only thing about her that was not confused, and she looked at Wicker, and her face was the face of a woman who had been struck by a thing she could not remember, and the place where the memory had been was a wound, and the wound was clean, and the wound would never close.
"What was his name," she said, and the question was not a question, it was a stone, it was the stone that Wicker had carried for years, the stone of the brother's name, the name he had been forbidden to speak, the name the Ferrywoman had taken as the due.
"I cannot tell you," Wicker said. "I never could."
She nodded. The nod was the nod of a woman who had known, somewhere beneath the wound, that the answer would be that.
The candle burned. The bells hummed. The water of the Mirror-Mire was still, and the pale shapes of the Coral Court turned in their long sleep, and somewhere beneath them all, in the drowned throne room of the kingdom that had fallen, the crown of the Smith-King waited on the floor of the sea.
Wicker put his hand on her shoulder. She did not shrug it off. She stood in the nave of the drowned cathedral with the wound where her brother had been, and the candle burned, and the bells tolled for the kingdom that was, and would be, for three hundred years more, and the Ferrywoman had gone back into the mist, and the boat was gone, and the only living things in the cathedral were an old scribe and a fisherman's daughter who was no longer a fisherman's daughter, who was now, in the way that the drowned kingdom recognized, the heir to the Hollow Crown, and who did not yet know what that meant, and who would learn it, in time, as all heirs learn it, by the tolling of the bells and the long low hum of the sea.
"Come," Wicker said. "We have to keep going."
She nodded. The nod was the nod of a woman who had lost a thing she could not name, and who had to keep going anyway.
They walked into the mist, toward the candle, toward the sound of the bells, toward whatever lay beyond.