The Everlasting — Chapter 11

11

I WAS ALONE, before you came.

The woods of my fathers had grown wild in my absence, the old paths choked with bitterthorn, the copses untended. Their home—our home—was not a house but only the remains of one, a corpse of wattle and thatch.

Of my fathers, there was nothing left at all. They had been shriven and buried in the manner of the woods then: their flesh taken by rooks and flies, their bones dragged down into burrow and den. I didn’t think either of them would mind—Father Theo always said these woods were the only heaven he would see, and Father Foy was fond of animals—but still, I couldn’t bring myself to sleep inside. I didn’t mind the cold, and I liked the sound of Hen’s snoring; it meant I was not quite alone.

As a girl I’d met pig herders and basket weavers in these woods, charcoal burners and wolf hunters. There had even been a boy who met me sometimes beneath the yew, though it was a half-day’s walk to the nearest village. For years he was my shy, gamine shadow, watching me from under lashes as long and dark as a doe’s.

I wondered sometimes if I’d seen his face again, unknowing, years later: If he had been one of those who knelt in the mud of some nameless village and cried mercy, or one of those who refused, and found none. I wondered if some part of me had been hoping, childishly, that I would find him still here, waiting beneath the yew.

But this was the Queen’s Wood, now—where before it had belonged to everyone and no one—and any trespassers would be branded and pilloried.

I told myself I was glad of this because there would be no one to find my remains for years and years—yet, on the day I decided to die, I donned

my armor. A lingering streak of vanity, I suppose: Even now, I wanted them to remember my name.

Or perhaps I only wanted Yvanne to get word, one day, and know I had abandoned her of my own free will.

I had loved her, once, as a child loves God. After the Black Bastion, I had hated her with that ardent, blazing hate that is merely love’s other cheek —but lately even the hate had burned away, and left only a weary, ashen regret.

Now, walking toward the yew for the last time in my life, I felt nothing at all. Nostalgia, perhaps, for the woods where I had run free and feral as a lynx, barefoot and berry-stained, a beast among beasts. On summer evenings I would stay out past moonrise; in the winter I would curl like a cub in Father Theo’s lap, and Father Foy would sing soft, silly songs by the firelight, replacing all the animals in the songs with my name.

I don’t remember that name, now.

If I were any other child—if the sword had not come so easily to my hand, if I had not known, somehow, just where to slip the blade between a man’s ribs, how to part one vertebra from the next—I would have died with them that day.

It was right, that my bones would finally join theirs, twenty years too late.

I reached the yew. High as a hill and old as a dragon, with some of a dragon’s secret, wild otherness. Sometimes I thought I saw a stranger’s face in the bark, and sometimes I saw my own.

I drew Valiance from my hip. It shone unblemished, still as perfect as the day I pulled it from the tree.

It was only I who had aged, and cracked, and finally broken. Only I who could no longer serve my purpose.

I would be sorry to die. I would miss the simple, animal joy of being alive in the world: food and sex and sleep, the scour of wind on bare skin, the sting of sweat, the smell of dragonscale flowers in full bloom. I would miss Hen. I would miss Bodrow and Gladwyn and even Ancel. I would miss Yvanne, or at least the way she sometimes looked at me, with a pride so ferocious it burned all my doubts away.

But I could no longer be what they needed me to be. I could not end the story as I should—fêted, beloved, remembered—and so I would end it here, alone.

But then, suddenly, I was not alone anymore.

I found you on the other side of the yew. You were standing very still, as if you were waiting for me, as if we’d agreed to meet here long ago and I’d somehow forgotten.

Your back was turned. All I could see of you was the black of your curls and the bowed line of your shoulders beneath that strangely cut coat. Yet I thought, with joy but not surprise: You came back for me.

Then I saw the little knife in your hand, slicked red, and before either of us drew another breath I had Valiance braced at the nape of your neck.

It took you far too long to turn around. My God, Owen, even a field mouse knows when a hawk is watching it! But you only stood, quivering and panting, until Valiance skimmed the fine hairs of your neck.

You turned slowly.

Your face was long and thin and sad. I thought you might have been beautiful once—fragile things are always a little beautiful—but somewhere along the way you’d been broken badly and poorly mended. Now your skin hung like old laundry from the sharp bones of your cheeks, and your jaw was roughly stubbled.

It was the face of an ascetic or a madman—who else would wear tiny panes of glass beneath their brows, like the windows of a fairy’s church?— but your eyes were black and lucid.

I waited for those eyes to fill with terror, but they didn’t. (They never did.) Instead, you looked up at me like a condemned man who had been granted his last request. Like you would climb the gallows tomorrow with a smile on your face. Your lips parted, and I saw that you were still quite beautiful after all.

For a moment I couldn’t speak. When my voice returned it was roughened, as if it had traveled far over hard ground. I told you to drop the

knife.

Instead, you fainted.

I caught you before your head hit the earth. It seemed a shame to damage those tiny panes of glass.

I tried to be gentle with you, but I was not made for it. My hands felt awkward, overlarge, the gauntlets catching and pinching your coat. Your head knocked against the plate of my cuirass, and your legs—great gangling things, much longer than I expected—thudded sometimes into trees and low branches.

On the threshold of my fathers’ house, I hesitated. But night was falling, and a bitter wind was rising, and your body was cold in my arms. Blood dripped gently from your sinister hand and left dark holes in the frost.

I ducked below the lintel. I hadn’t needed to duck, the last time I walked through this door.

I kicked the leaf litter and mouse nests from my old pallet and laid hides over you while I fixed a fire. I made myself think only of flint and tinder, rather than the flames themselves.

Your injury I tended less gently than I might have. By then I’d seen the book you carried, and the symbol carved into the cover, and knew these were the hands of a bard or a scribe: finely wrought, fragile, uncallused but for the slight dent where the quill rested. The sight of those hands sent a bitter heat through me, a kind of resentment that anything so soft, so unspoiled, should have been left in my care. I wiped the blood away and wrapped the wound as quickly as I could, then moved across the fire, away from you.

You roused a little while later. You ought to have quaked when you saw me, but you smiled instead. A lover’s smile, slow and hazy, which caused my mouth to bend in answer.

I tamped it flat. “Something amuses you?”

You said, “No. My apologies.” I knew as soon as you spoke that you were no bard: Your voice might have been stolen from a jackdaw, high and rough and unlovely.

Yet it was familiar to me. As was everything about you: the angle of your chin, the black of your eyes; the way you slid those glass panes back up the long arch of your nose.

I had seen you before, though I couldn’t say where.

One of the geweth, then, chasing stories, or a court scribe sent by Yvanne. It wasn’t enough that I return to Cavallon with a miracle; I must also bring another legend in my wake, another tale of Dominion’s hero.

I had liked being a hero when I was younger. I liked the songs they sang about me; I liked falling on my enemies, fast and fey. And if sometimes those enemies seemed too young or too old—if they fought with stones and scythes more often than steel—it was surely worth it. In Dominion, there would be no more good men slaughtered in their homes, no more monsters with black hearts and bloody hands.

But then had come the Black Bastion. Afterward, I had seen myself reflected in the eyes of a young girl—a giant in ash-stained armor, blackhearted, bloody handed—and understood there would always be at least one monster left, while I lived.

I could not abide the songs, after that.

I asked how you found me. You prevaricated. I may have raised my voice.

Then, of course, you told me you’d been sent from the far future to save Dominion, and I was ashamed for berating a madman.

You talked and talked that night, and I let you; I have always liked the sound of your voice.

I left the cottage before dawn. I wore no armor, this time, because this time I intended to return. I couldn’t say why, except that your face was hollowed in the way of a man who has missed too many meals, and it seemed uncivil to disappear without at least feeding you first.

When I returned, Hen was canted toward the cottage, lips peeled up in the way that meant he’d met a new person and was hoping to kill them soon. “Be easy,” I told him, firmly. “He’s harmless.”

You said, “I’m sure,” and stood blinking stupidly in the doorway, unaware that your life had been spared.

I slung my kill—a tierce of hares—over a downed log to skin and dress them. You began talking again almost immediately.

Words had never come easily to me, but you seemed to have twice the usual supply. You argued and joked, muttered and questioned, observed and wheedled. You moved constantly as you spoke, a ceaseless fidgeting, as if your skin had difficulty containing all the sentences you hadn’t yet said. It was strangely mesmerizing, like the swooping and twittering of a swallow, so that I found it difficult to focus on my work.

Until you asked, with the first stirrings of doubt in your voice, “What are you doing here?” Then suddenly it became difficult to look up.

I wanted to make you understand. But how could I explain the things I’d done to a man who’d never had anything worse than ink on his hands? How could I tell you—you, who looked on me with the hungry awe of a child in search of a hero—what I was?

I bowed my head, instead, and did not answer. You understood then that I was not seeking the grail because I no longer wanted to find it.

You were angry with me, and a little repulsed. I listened in silence until you mentioned Yvanne.

I stood and stalked toward you, my muscles quivering with the promise of violence, my vision shifting so that I saw you not as a man but as a list of ways you could die: belly, spine, throat, skull. I wouldn’t even have drawn steel. I know what they say about Valiance, and God knows it’s an uncanny blade, but my body has always been my first and best weapon. It is a goshawk kept tightly tethered, a mad horse on a short lead. I didn’t need a sword to kill you, or even a reason; all I needed was a little slack in the reins.

You knew it, I think. Your eyes were wholly black behind your glasses and your pulse ran quick and wild as a rabbit in the hollow of your throat— yet you stood your ground. Whole armies had fled before me, and yet you —with your delicate hands and your doe’s eyes—did not move.

The sight sent a prickling, reckless heat through me. I wanted to teach you better. To shake you by the shoulders. To take your chin in my hand and

cover your mouth with mine, hard enough to bruise. You would learn then, too late, to be afraid of me.

Shame saved you. I stepped away, sick with myself. “Forgive me,” I said. I tried, clumsily, to explain why I had come here, and why I had stayed. I thought disgust or pity would drive you away, where fear failed.

Instead, you crouched beside me. You unfastened your collar and bared your scars to me, and for the first time I thought you might have been telling the truth when you said you were a soldier. Only war could chew a man’s flesh like that, down to the bone.

There was a brazen look in your eyes as you held your collar open, as if you expected me to flinch from the sight of your scars. I didn’t, and you looked nearly faint with gratitude. I wondered idly who had flinched from you before, and if you would prefer their thumbs or their ears in recompense.

You were talking again, about honor and courage and the cost of loyalty.

You told me I would be a legend. You told me it was worth it, and your voice was so sweetly broken that I nearly believed you. “Please,” you said, “I—we need you.”

Then you took my hand, and I lost hold of the reins.

Once I had touched and been touched easily, without thought. Soldiers would clap me on the back as I passed. Servants would rub salve into my bruises. A woman would slide my hand up her skirt, where the hair turns thick and damp as fresh-mown hay, or a man would put his open mouth beneath my ear. I was good at sex, as I was good at war; mine was a body born to be used.

But I had learned to mistrust myself, after the Bastion. I didn’t touch anyone, now, unless I knew they could defend themselves.

You were sitting beside me, touching my hand, and then you were beneath me, flat on your back, wrists pinned.

For the first time since you’d woken, you stopped talking. You looked up at me with the color rising fast in your face. You swallowed. Said, softly, “Let go.” You did not sound as if you meant it.

I released you hastily and stood. I was not—quite—so dissolute that I would take advantage of a madman, no matter how good he felt beneath

me.

“You may stay if you like,” I said, and offered guest-right, as my fathers would have. “But do not touch me unawares, and do not go unarmed in my presence.”

Then I drew that useless little knife of yours from my boot and knelt to fold your long, fine fingers around the hilt. It wouldn’t save you, but if I ever forgot myself again, I hoped at least you would make me bleed for it.

“And tend to that,” I added, touching your bandaged hand. “The blood will draw beasts.”

I left you there, laid flat, flushed. It was not easy.

As I walked away, you told me God would come to me in a dream. He didn’t, of course. But you did.

I did not fear God. My fathers hadn’t raised me to believe in anything higher than the sky or lower than the earth, and Yvanne’s efforts to teach me piety had not survived my first battle.

Yet still: I did not sleep that night, or the next.

I slept only during the daylight hours, in fistfuls of minutes, waking at the first whisper of dreaming. I was in hiding, not from God, but from the truth: that these gentle, quiet days were stolen, and could not last.

But oh, they were sweet. I liked the honest work of the hunt—harder now, with only one good eye—and the clean smell of frost. I liked to watch your face as you scribbled in your book, your eyebrows arching and furrowing like a man performing a silent play. I even liked the fire, or at least the way it glittered in the glass of your spectacles.

You knew what I was doing, of course. You were quite clever, for a madman.

Eventually you said, “Let me tend the fire tonight.”

I let you take the stick from my hand, and then—forgive me, I was so tired, and you did not pull away—I let my head fall to your shoulder. You went very still, and then you tucked your jaw against the crown of my head.

I let myself sleep.

When I woke, I knew where to find the last dragon.

Your voice had spoken in my dream as clear and harsh as a rook, and even in the dream I had felt a great, wistful sadness. I would have stayed with you in those woods forever if I could.

I roused you roughly. You answered my questions with your usual excess—save the last one. I asked you if this was truly my last quest.

You looked me dead in the eye and said, “Yes,” though your voice cracked on the word. “This is your last quest.”

And for the first time since the queen’s messengers had dragged me from my cups and slung me at her feet, I allowed myself to believe it, or at least to imagine that I believed it. That I would return in triumph with the grail and my kingdom would prosper forevermore. That my queen would be healed, and in her grace and gratitude, she would release me from her service.

I could go anywhere, then—even return here. I could spend a whole spring sleeping in those little white flowers, and a whole summer drying wheat for my fathers’ roof. I could still disappear, but gently, in my own time, with my name untarnished. I could go to my grave knowing that all of it—the blood and the bad dreams, the endless carnage—had been worth it, in the end.

Still, I think I would have refused—except you were watching me, and God, the way you watched me: with a pure and piercing beseechment, as if you needed me more than you had ever needed anything else.

Yvanne had looked at me like that, the first time she saw me. She had needed me, and I had spent the last two decades becoming whatever she needed: her sword and her shield; her sinner, her servant, her saint; her butcher and her best beloved.

I couldn’t do it any longer, not for her. But for you—I would be a hero.

One last time.

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