The first thing she understood, before she understood anything else, was that she could not understand anything at all, which is, on reflection, a fairly universal complaint among the newly born, and one that the newly born are, through no fault of their own, entirely unequipped to voice.
There was light, enormous and unfiltered, pouring in from everywhere at once with no lids thick enough yet to properly shut it out, and there was cold, and there was a sound like the inside of a seashell held against the ear, roaring and formless, that she would not learn for some time yet was simply the sound of her own blood, moving through ears too new to have learned to ignore it. She reached for thought the way a hand reaches for a rail in the dark, and found nothing there to hold, no name, no history, no shape to call her own, only a vast, wordless pressure of being, arriving all at once with nothing behind it and nothing yet ahead. It is a strange thing, if one stops to consider it properly, that every creature capable of later wondering what it is must first spend some considerable time simply being it, without the smallest notion of what that entails.
Something is— The thought did not finish. It could not finish. There was no one left inside her, not really, no earlier self standing quietly behind the eyes waiting to be remembered, only a strange and total newness, as though she had never been anything at all before this exact, unbearable moment of arriving. There was only sensation, vast and directionless: the cold air on newly-wet skin, the enormous weight of gravity on limbs too weak to answer it, a hunger so total it felt less like a feeling and more like the whole of existence, narrowing down to a single unbearable point, the way, I am told, a drowning man's whole world narrows to the single question of his next breath, though she had, as yet, no memory of drowning, nor of breathing, nor of anything at all beyond the enormous, indifferent fact of having just begun.
And yet.
Underneath the newness, in some place too deep for thought to reach, something did not behave the way a true newness should have. When the light struck too hard, she did not simply cry out; she went still first, some old and wordless instinct assessing the light before reacting to it, the way a creature that has learned, somewhere, sometime, in a manner it could not have named, that stillness is often safer than sound. When she was lifted, she did not simply accept the arms around her; something in her weighed them, briefly, the way a hand checks the strength of a rope before trusting its whole weight to it. There was no memory behind any of it. Only a shape, worn into her the way water wears a groove into stone long after the water itself has moved on and been forgotten, leaving only the groove behind to prove it had ever passed through at all. One could spend a lifetime studying such a groove and never once catch sight of the water that made it, and yet no one who has seen the groove doubts, even for a moment, that something with purpose once ran through that stone.
Somewhere above her, voices moved, low and urgent, in a language she did not recognize and yet somehow, impossibly, understood the shape of, the way a person understands weather without needing the science of it, sensing the coming rain in the particular color of the sky long before any cloud has troubled itself to explain the matter properly. A woman's voice, ragged with exhaustion and something closer to fear than joy. A second voice, older, quieter, edged with a formality that did not belong to the room, the cadence of ritual rather than comfort, the voice of a man who has read a great many signs in his life and has learned, the hard way, not to enjoy being right about the worrying ones.
"She does not cry," the older voice said.
"She breathes," the woman answered, sharp with the particular defensiveness of someone braced for an argument she had already lost several times before and intended, this once, to win purely through stubbornness if reason would not serve her. "That is enough for me tonight. Let the omens wait until morning."
"The omens will not wait. Not for a child conceived the way this one was." A pause, and she felt herself lifted, carried in arms that held her the way a man holds something he has not yet decided whether to trust, careful in the manner of a man handling a blade he has been told is sharper than it looks. "Look at her eyes."
"All infants have eyes."
"Not like these. Not gold at the edges like that, not on the first night." The old voice was quieter now, careful, the way a man is careful around something he respects and fears in equal measure, two feelings that, in his long experience, traveled together far more often than most people were comfortable admitting. "You know what fathered her, Elen. You have known since the spring, whatever comfortable story you have been telling yourself since."
She could not have said, in that moment, what her eyes looked like, having never yet seen them, having in fact never yet seen anything beyond the smeared, oversaturated light of a world she had no framework left to interpret. But she felt the weight of being looked at, the strange, groove-worn sensation of being assessed, weighed, priced, though she had no memory of a table or a ledger or a name that might once have made grown men flinch to explain why the feeling landed the way it did, only the plain and immediate fact of it, arriving the way an old habit arrives in a new body, unasked for and entirely at home.
The old man left before dawn, and did not say where he was going, only that he would return before the child's naming was finished being spoken of in the wrong company, a phrase Elen turned over twice in her mind and liked less each time she turned it. The father, a broad, quiet man named Aedan who had said almost nothing since the birth, waited until the door had closed behind him before he finally spoke, low, so as not to wake the small, sleeping weight his wife still held against her chest.
"You should not have let him near her."
"He is the only reason either of us is still breathing tonight, Aedan. I did not have the strength left to argue with him." Elen did not look up from the child. There was something in the way she held her, careful and unwavering, that suggested she had already made a decision the two of them had not yet discussed. "And he is not wrong. You know he is not wrong."
Aedan crossed to the small fire and did not sit, his hands opening and closing at his sides in the particular restlessness of a man who very much wanted to be angry at something and had not yet located a target that would hold still long enough to be angry at properly. "Say it plainly, then. I would rather hear it from you than from him."
"You remember the spring. The night I went to gather rushes by the low river and did not come home until well past dark, and would not say why, and you were angry enough with me that we did not speak for three days after." Elen's voice was steady, but there was something underneath it, old grief worn smooth by months of carrying it alone, the way a stone in a shoe is eventually worn smooth by the very walking it makes painful. "I was not gathering rushes. I met a woman on that riverbank who was not a woman at all, Aedan. Beautiful in a way that made my teeth ache to look at her, and she spoke to me the way water speaks, if water could choose its words, and I do not remember agreeing to anything, and I do not remember refusing anything either. I remember waking at dawn in the reeds with my dress dry and my mind full of holes, and I have been carrying this child for a great deal longer than nine months would account for, if you were counting, which I know you have been."
Aedan was silent for a long moment, the fire cracking and settling in the quiet the way fires do when they sense they are the only thing in a room still willing to make a sound. "A succubus."
"That is the word the old man used, when I finally told him, three months gone and already showing more than I should have been." Elen looked down at the sleeping infant, and her expression was not fear, exactly, though fear moved somewhere underneath it, patient, the way fear so often is. "He says such beings do not often leave what they plant behind. That whatever she wanted from that riverbank, she decided, in the end, that this was worth more to her than keeping."
"Then she is not mine." Aedan said it flatly, testing the shape of the words in his own mouth as though checking whether they'd cut him on the way out, the way a man tests a blade he has just been handed and does not yet trust.
"She is not yours by blood," Elen said, "and she is not fully mine either, if the old man is to be believed, though I carried her and bled for her and I do not intend to let that count for nothing simply because of what was mixed into her on the way in. But no, Aedan. She is not yours. Not by blood." She looked up at him then, and there was no apology in it, only a plain, unflinching demand, the kind she had made of him only a handful of times in their marriage, and always, he privately admitted, over things that mattered a great deal more than she let her voice show. "The question I need answered tonight is whether that is going to matter to you, going forward, or whether we are simply going to raise her."
Aedan came and knelt beside her then, some of the anger finally draining out of his shoulders into something closer to exhaustion, the particular exhaustion of a man who has just discovered that the argument he'd been bracing for was never actually the one he needed to have. He put one broad, careful hand against the child's back, as if testing, gently, whether the strangeness his wife had described might be felt from the outside as well. He said nothing for a long moment, long enough that the fire had time to settle twice more before he finally spoke.
"She's warm," he said finally, quietly, almost surprised by it, the way a man is surprised to find an ordinary answer waiting for him at the bottom of an extraordinary question. "Whatever else put her here. She's just warm, and small, and asleep in my house."
"For now," Elen said, and did not know, saying it, how much of a promise that would turn out to be, and how much of a countdown, the two things sitting so close together, in that quiet room, that not even she could have said with any certainty which one she meant.
She did not know, sleeping, what had been said above her, or what it meant that half of what she was had walked out of a riverbank in the shape of something no mortal woman had ever been. She only knew, in the single clear and wordless impulse that carried her down at last into something that might have been sleep, though she had no earlier sleep to compare it to: whatever this is, whatever I am, I will not simply be handed to it. There was no name behind the feeling. No history to explain where it had come from, or why it arrived so certain of itself in a mind this new. It was simply there, the one thing that had made the crossing intact, buried far too deep for anyone standing over the small stone cradle that night to ever see it, waiting patiently to be grown into, the way a seed waits, indifferent to the size of the field it has landed in, for the one season that will finally suit it.
The name they gave her, in the days that followed, was not one she chose, any more than she had chosen the blood in her that was not wholly human, or the small, straining lungs she now breathed with, or the particular color of the sky that had apparently caused so much quiet concern among the adults entrusted with deciding what to call her.
Ambrosius, they called her, in that older voice, the formal one, the one that spoke less like a father and more like a man cataloguing an omen he intended to make use of eventually. Merlin. The second name came later, murmured over her more like a title than a name, weighted with an expectation she had no way yet to understand, let alone earn, and no way yet to know how much of it had been decided for her on a riverbank, months before she'd had a single thought of her own to object with, and no way yet, either, to know that the two people arguing quietly over her cradle that first night, for all their fear and all their uncertainty, had already, without quite saying so aloud to each other, decided to keep her.