"I know," Freda said quietly. "I know I'm alive. I know it's — I know." She looked at Morgana. "I just—" She stopped. Her voice, which had been so carefully controlled, cracked slightly at the edge. "I reached for fire this morning and it wasn't there. It's always been there. Every morning. For years." She pressed her hands together, feeling the absence in them. "And it felt like — it felt like reaching for you and finding you weren't there. That's what it felt like."
Morgana didn't say anything for a moment.
Then she moved from her chair to sit on the edge of the cot, and she pulled Freda into an embrace the way she had done in Freda's first year of training when the work was too hard and the progress felt too slow and the exhaustion was real — without ceremony, without performance, just the specific warmth of someone who had been your entire world for seventy years and intended to keep being it.
