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 every direction at once, with no lids yet thick enough to properly hold it back. There was cold. There was a sound like the inside of a seashell pressed 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 newly made to have learned how 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 she could call her own, only a vast, wordless pressure of being, arriving all at once, with nothing behind it and nothing yet ahead of it either.
Something is—
The thought did not finish. It could not finish. There was no one behind it to finish it, no earlier self standing quietly in the wings, waiting patiently to be remembered. There was only a strange and total newness, as though she had never been anything at all before this exact, unbearable moment of arriving. Cold air moved across wet skin. Gravity pressed down, enormous, on limbs far too weak to answer it. A hunger rose in her that felt less like a single feeling and more like the whole of existence, narrowing itself down to one unbearable point, and held there.
And yet.
Underneath the newness, in some place too deep for thought to reach, something in her did not behave the way a true newness ought to have behaved. When the light struck too hard, she did not simply cry out. She went still first, some old and wordless instinct weighing the light before troubling itself to react to it, the way a creature that has learned, somewhere, at some point it could never have named, that stillness is very often safer than sound. When she was lifted, she did not simply accept the arms closing around her; something in her tested them first, briefly, the way a hand checks the strength of a rope before trusting the whole of its weight to it. There was no memory behind any of this. There was only a groove, worn into her the way water wears a groove into stone long after the water itself has moved on and been entirely forgotten, leaving only the groove behind to prove that something with purpose had once passed through.
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 to explain what the coming rain will feel like on the skin. A woman's voice, first, ragged with exhaustion and with something closer to fear than joy, sharp with the particular defensiveness of someone bracing for an argument she had already lost several times before, and fully intended, just this once, to win through stubbornness alone if reason would not carry her through it. And a second voice, older, quieter, edged with a formality that did not belong to the room at all, the cadence of a man reciting ritual rather than offering comfort.
"She does not cry," the older voice said.
"She breathes," the woman answered. "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." There was a pause, and she felt herself lifted, carried in arms that held her the way a man holds something he has not yet fully decided whether to trust, careful the way a man is careful with a blade he has been warned is sharper than it looks. "Look at her eyes."
"All infants have eyes."
"Not like these. Not gold at the edges, not on the first night." The old voice grew quieter still, careful now in the particular way a man is careful around something he respects and fears in roughly equal measure, the two feelings traveling together far more often, in his long experience, than most people were ever comfortable admitting. "You know what fathered her, Elen. You have known since the spring, whatever comfortable story you have told yourself since."
She could not have said, in that moment, what her own eyes looked like, having never yet seen them, having in truth 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 all the same, the strange, groove-worn sensation of being assessed and weighed and 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 arrived so fully formed, and so entirely at home in a mind this new.
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 fully 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 as she said it. 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 between them. "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 managed to find a target willing to 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." Elen's voice stayed steady, though something older moved underneath it, a grief worn smooth over months of carrying it alone, the way a stone caught in a shoe is eventually worn smooth by the very walking it makes so painful. "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 afterward that we did not speak for three full days."
"I remember it."
"I was not gathering rushes." She said it plainly, the way a woman says something she has rehearsed alone, quietly, many times, in the dark hours before dawn. "I met a woman on that riverbank who was not a woman at all, Aedan. Beautiful in a way that made my teeth ache simply to look at her. She spoke to me the way water speaks, if water could ever be troubled to choose its own words. I do not remember agreeing to anything. I do not remember refusing anything either. I remember waking at dawn among the reeds with my dress entirely dry and my mind full of holes, and I have been carrying this child a good deal longer than nine months would ever account for, if you have been counting, which I know perfectly well you have."
Silence settled over the room, and the fire cracked and resettled itself in it, the way a fire does when it senses it is the only thing left in the room still willing to make a sound.
"A succubus," Aedan said, finally.
"That is the word the old man used, when I finally told him. Three months gone, and already showing more than I ought to have been." Elen looked down at the sleeping infant as she said it, and her expression was not fear, exactly, though fear moved somewhere underneath it, patient, the way fear so often is when it has decided to wait rather than announce itself outright. "He tells me such beings rarely leave behind what they plant. That whatever she wanted, that night on the riverbank, she decided, in the end, that this was worth more to her than the keeping of it."
"Then she is not mine." Aedan said it flatly, testing the shape of the words in his own mouth, the way a man tests a blade he has just been handed and does not yet fully 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. Not by blood." She looked up at him then, and there was no apology anywhere in it, only a plain, unflinching demand, the kind she had made of him only a handful of times across their whole marriage, and always, he privately admitted to himself, over things that mattered a great deal more than her voice ever let on at the time. "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 discovering that the argument he had spent the whole evening bracing for was never actually the one he needed to have. He laid one broad, careful hand against the child's small back, testing, gently, whether the strangeness his wife had described might also be felt from the outside. 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, quietly, almost surprised by it, the way a man is surprised to find something perfectly ordinary 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 that was a promise, and how much of it was a countdown, the two of them sitting so closely together, in that quiet room, that not even she could have said with any certainty which one she truly meant.
She did not know, sleeping, what had been said above her that night, or what it meant that half of what she was had walked out of a riverbank wearing a shape no mortal woman had ever worn before her. She only knew, in the single clear and wordless impulse that finally carried her down into something that might have been sleep, though she had no earlier sleep of her own to measure it against: 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 newly made. 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 catch sight of it, waiting patiently to be grown into, the way a seed waits, entirely 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 the sky had turned, the night that had apparently caused so much quiet concern among the adults now 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 rather more like a man carefully cataloguing an omen he fully 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, either, to know how much of it had already been decided for her on a riverbank, months before she had ever had a single thought of her own to raise in objection to any of it. And no way yet to know that the two people arguing so quietly over her cradle that first night, for all their fear and all their evident uncertainty, had already, without quite managing to say so aloud to one another, decided to keep her.