Summer could not have said how long she lay across Mordred’s unmoving chest and wept. Long and long, for certain, and somehow not so long, for the sun was just setting when she raised her head at last, empty and hollowed. With gentle hand she smoothed the curls at his brow, mouth trembling.
“I said I would go even to the gates of Annwn to have you back, cariad, and so I will do,” she whispered. She forebore to kiss him again; that for when he breathed again, smiled again. Rather, she laid his limbs straight, tucked about him that dark cloak to hide the wound, and rose to her feet. “Someone else served her that justice which I would have, so I leave you now only to bring you back. Wait for me on the road; I will catch you up.”
She went afoot, alone, unarmed on the path, moving steadily by day and by night until she should come to the Blessed Isle. She met no one on the way, and strayed not a step from her goal. When at last she reached the shores of the Isle, she was almost astonished — the going had consumed all her thoughts, leaving none for arriving.
The altar gleamed in the fading light; it might have been mere moments from when she left Mordred’s slain body. She walked to it, around it, trembling, before going to her knees before it as tears overcame her again. In the midst of her storm of grief, a presence made itself known before her, and she looked up.
The Cailleach smiled, a shadowed smile of knowledge and wisdom and the cost of those things. “I know what you will here, and I tell you, it may not be.” The words were gentle, so gentle against the harshness of their truth.
Summer shook her head wildly. “Please. This is not how it was meant to be! Surely not how. I loved him, do you not see, I love him so, he loved me. Is that not a thing that matters?” More words spilled from her, words born of grief and pain and love, yet the Cailleach made no reply, only looked with sorrow and regret.
At last Summer ran down, heartsore. “Did our love mean nothing? Nothing at all? If so, better we had never met.”
“Even the smallest thing has meaning, for so long as it lasts. Would you have this fate be on someone else?”
Unwillingly, “No. I — would have had it not be at all.”
“That too is a choice, but not always yours to make.”
“It was always going to be this, wasn’t it.”
The only answer was the wind.
Coming to her feet, bright hair rippling in the rising breeze, Summer saw that one thing, at least, was given to her: Mordred lay on the altarstone, not as she had left him, clad not in the darkness of Morgana’s madness, but in the red and silver of Camelot, whom he had loved. In his hands lay his sword that he had received from Arthur’s hands, and that broken blade with which he had worked Morgana’s will was nowhere to be seen. No sign of the battle of Camlann marked his skin.
And on the Isle’s deserted shores, she found a boat, and alone she filled it with flowers and laid him within. At his feet, she coiled a long braid of her own red hair, and on his finger she put that ring that had been the first cause of their coming together, and then she pushed the boat out into the waves.
When it had sailed seven lengths from shore, Summer lifted a hand, and called fire.
