I wipe at my eyes with the back of my hand and take a long, slow breath before releasing it. I kiss her forehead. “I want you to know that I love you and if you see my dad before I do, tell him I love him, too?”

She doesn’t respond. It’s the best I can do.

When I step outside the room, everything feels numb and I’m not even sure I want that to change. Maybe “numb” is okay, if this is the price of loving people just to find new ways to lose them.

60

EARLY THE NEXT morning, the main hall of the Keep is packed with Legendborn Scions and Squires, and Lieges led by Gill and Samira.

I avoid it entirely.

I step out onto the back patio of the Keep and walk up a hill I’d found last night that will work nicely. It is a good hiding spot.

There’s a small bit of grass before a large copse of bushes and towering old trees, with shadows growing deeper among them as the sun shifts overhead.

I am ready for the first step.

I take a seat on the soil, set the wrapped, broken pieces of Excalibur down beside me, and close my eyes.

When I open them, I am standing in the center stone of the ancestral stream.

“Wound turned weapon.”

“Our sword.”

“Crown Scion.”

The voices crowd me. Maybe they have always crowded me.

I think of all the women before me, all eight, and then Vera herself, and the streams that open up before me widen. I imagine Arthur’s and, even now, his stream appears in the soil.

So many different voices and paths to follow, ready for my steps.

Vera is at my shoulder. “What are you doing?”

“Giving myself room,” I mutter, “to be someone other than who you all keep telling me to be.”

“What do you mean by this?”

I turn to face her. “I realize now why Jessie’s mantra to call root didn’t work for me. She said, ‘Think of the power you possess and the woman who gave it to you.’ ” I smile, sadly. “I used to think that woman was my mother, and, through her, you. Tried it her way, and it didn’t work.”

She tilts her head. “And why is that?”

“Because you all didn’t give me my power.” I kneel to face the streams, thrust my hands into the earth from which they came. “I did.”

At once, the furnace of root is in my chest, and I let it grow from my hands. Let it burn hot, hotter, hottest—until it is a swirl of fire at my feet. I use it to burn through Arthur’s inlet, until the bed beneath is dry, but I don’t stop there, because the whispers and expectations and pressure don’t stop with him.

“Pain-welded blade.”

“Our resistance.”

“The tip of our spear.”