And slowly, slowly, the right hand at my throat weakened. Slowly, slowly, her good eye rolled so that I could see my love’s bright soul once more. She stared at me, and then she began to cry.
“Nimue,” I said, and she put her arms around my neck and clung to me. She was sobbing now in great heaves that racked her thin ribs as I held her, stroked her and spoke her name.
The sobs slowed and at last ended. She hung on my neck for a long time; then I felt her head move. “Where’s Merlin?” she asked in a small child’s voice.
“Here in Britain,” I said.
“Then we must go.” She took her arms from around my neck and settled on her haunches so she could stare into my face. “I dreamed that you’d come,” she said.
“I do love you,” I said. I had not meant to say it, even if it was true.
“That’s why you came,” she said as though it were obvious.
“Do you have clothes?” I asked.
“I have your cloak,” she said. “I need nothing else except your hand.”
I crawled out of the cave, sheathed Hywelbane and wrapped my green cloak around her pale shivering body. She pushed an arm through a rent in the cloak’s ragged wool and then, her hand in mine, we walked between the bones and climbed the hill to where the sea folk watched. They parted as we reached the cliff’s top and did not follow as we walked slowly down the Isle’s eastern side. Nimue said nothing. Her madness had fled the moment my hand touched hers, but it had left her horribly weak. I helped her on the steeper portions of the path. We passed through the hermits’ caves without being troubled. Perhaps they were all asleep, or else the Gods had put the Isle under a spell as we two walked our way north away from the dead souls.
The sun rose. I could see now that Nimue’s hair was matted with dirt and crawling with lice, her skin was filthy and she had lost her golden eye. She was so weak she could hardly walk and as we descended the hill towards the causeway I picked her up in my arms and found she weighed less than a ten-year-old child. “You’re weak,” I said.
“I was born weak, Derfel,” she said, ‘and life is spent pretending otherwise.”
“You need some rest,” I said.
“I know.” She leaned her head against my chest and for once in her life she was utterly content to be looked after.
I carried her to the causeway and over the first wall. The sea broke on our left and the bay glimmered a reflection of the rising sun on our right. I did not know how I was to take her past the guards. All I knew was that we had to leave the Isle because that was her fate and I was the instrument of that fate, and so I walked content that the Gods would solve the problem when I reached the final barrier.
I carried her over the middle wall with its row of skulls and walked towards Dumnonia’s dawn-green hills. I could see a single spearman silhouetted above the final wall’s sheer, smooth face of stone and I supposed some of the guards had rowed across the channel when they saw me leaving the isle. More guards were standing on the shingle bank; they had stationed themselves to bar my passage to the mainland. If I have to kill, I thought, then kill I shall. This was the Gods’ will, not mine, and Hywelbane would cut with a God’s skill and strength.
But as I walked towards the final wall with my burden light in my arms the gates of life and death swung open to receive me. I half expected the guard commander to be there with his rusty spear, ready to turn me back; instead it was Galahad and Cavan who waited on the black threshold with their swords drawn and battle shields on their arms. “We followed you,” Galahad said.
“Bedwin sent us,” Cavan added. I covered Nimue’s awful hair with the cloak’s hood so my friends would not see her degradation and she clung to me, trying to hide herself.