The Everlasting — Chapter 12

12

THE NIGHTMARES FOUND me the first night after we left the wood.

It was the smoke that did it, I think; I’d built a fire rather than listen to your teeth clack, and the wood was green and sullen. The fire had smoldered in the night, and the smoke had fallen thickly into my mouth and nose. I can tolerate the smell during the day, but at night it brings the worst kind of dreams: memories.

I woke panting, half mad, with your face hovering above mine. You were very still, your eyes dark and yielding. I stared into them until I returned to myself, piece by piece. The cold. The faltering fire.

My fist around your throat.

I unclenched my fingers, swearing, but kept my hand at your neck in warning. “I told you not to come near to me, boy,” I spat, ashamed and aggrieved by the shame. “I could have killed you.”

You swallowed, and I felt the movement against my palm, the slight scrape of stubble, the slickness where the scar began. “You’ve called out twice in your sleep already tonight.” You shrugged, demonstrating an upsetting disregard for your own survival. “You haven’t killed me yet.”

“I still might.” I pushed my thumb back into the vein of your throat, shaking you a little.

But your pulse beat evenly beneath my touch, and the corner of your mouth lifted in that wry twist. “You won’t,” you said, and a hot surge of something—let us call it annoyance—made it briefly impossible to speak.

I looked at you—at the single curl hanging loose over your brow, at the fine, high bones of your cheeks and the red marks your spectacles left on either side of your nose—until I felt your skin warming beneath my hand. I released you suddenly, as if burnt.

It was bad enough, the way I’d touched you earlier. You’d been seized by terror, shaking and stuttering, as some soldiers do, and I’d held you until it passed. But then the bone of your hip had felt so good against my palm that I’d kept it there, and entertained thoughts of such astonishing lechery that I’d had to dismount and walk to clear my head.

Now you returned to your own side of the fire in silence. Eventually I offered, with ill grace, “Forgive me. I dream often of things I would rather forget. Old battles. Old wounds.”

It was not untrue; sometimes I even dreamed of battles I’d never fought, or hadn’t yet fought, so that when I met my enemies on the field their faces were familiar to me. (I’d confessed this to Yvanne once. She’d told me they were visions from God, and stroked my cheek softly, over and over, until I quieted.) But it wasn’t battle I’d been dreaming of, this time, or even the Bastion.

It was you. Your face, looking down at me with awful, endless grief, as if you were watching the world end, and as if you’d seen it before. There had been fine flecks of blood on your spectacles.

God knew what I’d been saying in my sleep. I tightened the cloak around my shoulders. “Many soldiers suffer so.”

“So I’ve heard,” you said, very dryly, and I was chastened, remembering your shaking, and your scars.

You lay back beneath the furs with that damn book as your pillow. The sight of it soured me, a reminder that you were here with me not as a companion but as a chronicler.

I asked, nastily, “Will you write that the great Sir Una cries out in her sleep, like a babe?”

You blinked at me. “No,” you answered. “I will write that she gave everything—her sight, her youth, even her sleep—for her country.” You paused. “And that she is a lout and a wretch who doesn’t know how to say thank you.”

A long pause before I said, “Thank you.” Your teeth flashed, crookedly, and I added, “Keep to your own side of the fire.”

But you disobeyed me.

When I called out again—that night and on the nights that followed— you were always there, near enough to touch. You spoke to me sometimes, your voice so thin and splintered I was never sure if I heard the words or merely imagined them: Always, you whispered, I swear.

When I traveled alone, I kept to the wild edges of the country, where the wind rushed unhindered through the grass and the only people I met were as wary and lonesome as I: vagabonds and brigands, thieves and poachers, the oathless and homeless. They neither loved me nor hated me, but only watched me carefully as I passed, like pine martens watching a hawk.

But you sat on a horse like a sack of swedes with legs, and I loved Hen too well to make him suffer your bouncing over rough country. The queen’s roads were smooth and fine, so we would ride straight through the heartland of Dominion, and I would bear the glares and whispers.

I would have passed through every croft as quickly as possible, but we hadn’t even made it through Farnvall before you’d charmed a pretty little baker’s daughter out of half her griddle cakes and directions to the nearest bathhouse.

I preferred to bathe in springs and streams—I did not care to be gawked at—but your face tipped up to mine, wistful and wind tousled, and very soon I found myself stepping into the warmish, sour water of a Farnvall tub.

It felt—good. Gooseflesh chased up my arms. The fist I made of my body unclenched, just slightly. I sighed a little, and heard you make a small, pained sound behind me.

I asked, without turning, “Did you seek a bath only for my sake? Was I so rank?”

There was a long pause, during which I recalled how carefully and ineffectively you held your body away from mine in the saddle, how far away you walked to piss. Modesty, perhaps, or distaste; the first time I’d gone to bed with Ancel he’d touched my shoulders, gingerly, and told me I was lucky he liked men, too. Maybe you preferred your women small and soft-bodied, like that pretty baker’s daughter.

I tilted my head against the wooden ledge and closed my eyes, firmly. I waited for the sound of the door closing behind you, the sting of it so clear in my mind it felt prophetic, preordained.

But instead I heard clothes hitting the floorboards, a faint splash. I slitted my eyes and caught the quick bronze flash of your limbs. You hunched yourself down into the water so that only your collarbones were visible. You ought to have hidden them, too, I thought; there was a pair of hollows right where the bones met the muscle of your shoulders, where my thumbs might fit perfectly.

You began to babble, of course, eyes bouncing comically from my breasts to my hair to the ceiling and back to my breasts. “Do—do men and women not bathe separately?” you asked, hoarsely. “I thought—”

I turned around to wash and your sentence ended on a sharp gasp. I felt your eyes on my bare back like a pair of live coals, hot and hungry; I did not think you liked soft-bodied women, after all, though it shouldn’t have mattered to me. I stretched, purposefully, just to hear your breath catch.

But you did not reach for me. Instead, you washed yourself with frantic urgency and fled the room. I lingered for a while in the tepid gray water and let one hand slip between my legs, thinking of your collarbones and your long limbs and your quick, helpless gasp. I hardly lasted a minute; it was not easy, riding day after day with you in my lap.

By the time I emerged, damp and sated, you’d charmed all the laundresses into telling you stories about me, and your eyes met mine firmly, without wandering.

The same thing happened in the next town, and the one after. You were forever lingering and talking, charming the fishwives and gossiping with the stone masons’ sons. You had a way of lifting one shoulder and ducking your head that made you look younger than you were, though your face was canny as a crow’s.

“The Duel of the Stone Keep?” you would say, blinking those black doe’s lashes. “You say your cousin’s husband saw it all?”

And they would tell you everything they knew about me: rumors and slander; ballads they’d never heard properly and only half recalled; tales of heroes from far away and far before my time, which had been given to me

like hand-me-down clothes; even the truth, or pieces of it. As we left each village you would badger me for my own account, and I would growl and glare, but in the end, I could resist you no better than the fishwives. I told you everything about everything—save the Black Bastion. I only rubbed the scar over my right eye when you asked, hard enough to hurt, and stared into the fire.

Later you would sit cross-legged by the coals, your hand moving back and forth across the book in your lap, and I would watch you with a jealous ache in my breast. I could tell from the look on your face you were half in love with her, this woman you were inventing. Sometimes when you looked at me your eyes would go hazed and warm, and I would wonder which of us you saw.

I did not take advantage of your confusion—I made my bed across the fire from yours and did not touch you except when I pulled you into the saddle each morning, or when you were taken by one of your shaking spells. Then I would wrap my arms around you and press your spine to my chest, holding fast until your breathing eased and your body slackened against mine.

I did not always let you go as quickly as I should have, afterward.

Forgive me—a monster so rarely feels wanted.

We made it farther than I thought we would—to the very edge of the Northern Fallows—before you saw the truth of me.

We were passing through a gathering of hovels too mean even to be called a village, watched by thin, hateful faces. The last time I’d come north, I’d brought an army with me and left nothing behind but pyres and widows, and they had not forgotten it.

I didn’t blame them. Theirs was a just and pure hatred, which burned straight through the shine of my armor and found the butcher inside it. It was nearly a relief, to be cursed and spat at, after days of your hazy, stupid looks.

We would have passed through that place without incident, if only they’d contented themselves with insults and thrown swedes.

But then that fucking fool grabbed me by the hair.

I want you to understand that I intended to kill him. That I would have, or already had. In that moment I could feel the memory of his death in my nerves: the gristling crack of his vertebrae separating; the wet, hollow sound of his head—no, it was his hand, only his hand—striking the mud— I blinked. My fist was around my hilt, but the sword was not fully drawn. The villager was not dead, or even injured.

You were standing between us, looking up at me through the fine glass windows of your spectacles. Your fingers were tight around my wrist, as if you thought you could stop me. As if it had never crossed your mind that I might cut you down to reach him.

I was tempted, for a long red moment, to teach you better.

Then I felt something trickle warmly down my wrist, slipping between my knuckles, and I realized you were holding me hard enough that your wound had opened afresh.

I sheathed the sword with a quick metal slither and let go the hilt. I have never liked to see you bleed.

I looked up at the villager, now swaying with a strange, sick expression on his face, as if he knew how close his own death had flown by him and was not wholly relieved that it had missed. Half his hair had been burned away, replaced by slick pink scars.

“Run,” I told him. He ran, and the others—his daughters or sisters, grim-faced Hyll women who could not afford the indulgence of dying—ran after him.

At the edge of the village, I knelt and linked my fingers together. After a pause, you stepped carefully in my cupped hands and let me lift you into the saddle. I walked; you surely would not want to touch me, now that you knew what I was.

We traveled miles before we made camp that night, and for once you had nothing to say. The silence was less welcome than I thought it would be, after so many days of your jackdaw chattering.

Eventually you said, “Bastard.”

I shrugged. I had been called worse that day.

Then you said, “He shouldn’t have touched you. None of them should have dared,” and I realized that it was not me you were angry with. I watched a faint flush spread across the bridge of your nose as you paced and ranted. You gestured violently with your injured hand; a fleck of blood

hissed in the fire.

“Come here,” I said, and you did.

The wound was deep, still oozing, the bandages crusted yellow and pink. I ought to have tended to it sooner, but I had been reluctant to hold your hands in mine. It was sinful enough, the way I looked at them.

I spoke while I worked, to distract myself. I tried to make you understand why they hated and feared me, and why they were wise to do so.

You argued with me until I snapped—no one else provokes me so—“They should fear me, boy. And so should you.”

I tied the bandage and drew away, but you caught my hand in yours.

“Well,” you said, your voice high and hoarse, “I don’t.”

And this time when you looked at me, I knew you did not see the Una Everlasting you wrote about in your book, pure and true and beautiful. You saw me as I was: old and scarred and brutal, a monster that would turn on even a harmless villager.

You had seen the truth of me and yet you were still here, holding my hand, and I couldn’t seem to pull away.

I watched, feeling both drunk and dead sober, as you turned my hand gently in yours. You studied it for a moment, running your thumb over the hard planes of callus, then bent and touched your lips to my open palm.

A shudder wracked me from skull to spine, and I knew suddenly how it would be with you. Most of my lovers—camp followers and soldiers, crofters’ daughters and the idle sons of lords—had wanted only to take or be taken; they came to me warily or arrogantly, shy or swaggering, as to a caged wolf. But you—oh, you would come to me on your knees, as to a king, and you would give and give.

I was leaning down to you, ready to let you, when you looked up from

my palm. You met my eyes—and flinched.

So you were afraid, after all. Good.

I pulled my hand sharply from yours and strode back to my side of the fire. I felt your eyes follow me, huge and dark. “Una, I—”

“Don’t.” The word was harshly hewn. “Don’t.” For once, you listened; for once, I wished you hadn’t.

I fell asleep with my fist clenched around my own palm, as if your kiss were a dove or a lark, which would fly from me unless I held it fast.

Six days later, we climbed Cloven Hill.

You were nervy and overtalkative the whole way up. You dressed me well for battle—had you squired in your youth? had armor changed so little, in nine hundred years?—but your hands shook badly. I should have told you how many dragons I had slain, but I didn’t; it was such a novelty, to be fussed over.

It had been one of Yvanne’s very first decrees as queen, that Dominion should be rid of dragons. They were the devil’s own creatures, she said, for they lived on and on, undying, and only the Savior was deathless.

There was some opposition at first, especially in the north, where dragons were still carved into lintels and coffin lids for luck. And there were the stories told by the Roving Folk: that a drop of dragon’s blood could heal any wound or cure any sickness; that a dragon’s heart might be planted, like a seed, and the tree that grew from it would live forever.

But these, the queen said, were pagan superstitions, which would not be tolerated in Dominion. If a person was pious and loyal, he would report all dragon sightings to the crown, and after the dragon was slain, he would burn the carcass three times over, and scatter the ashes.

I had slain nearly a score myself, and hated it every time.

I told you Hen’s name before I left—he didn’t usually kill people who called him by name—and you said, woundedly, “You’re leaving me here?”

“Yes,” I said.

Dragons were not especially vicious; in truth, I was not even sure they breathed fire. They reminded me more than anything of the whales I’d once seen in the coves of the Slant Sea: vast and placid, wholly alien.

But there was always the chance this dragon had learned to be vicious, over the years, and the idea of you standing nearby, unarmored—no.

Yet you argued with me! You told me I couldn’t slay a dragon alone; I assured you that I could. You begged to come with me, although you looked nearly sick with fright as you said it.

I had never minded a coward at my side, in battle. A coward is reliable, in his way—every choice he makes is the one that serves him best. I didn’t know what to do with whatever you were.

In the end I said, roughly, “Stay,” and you did, though I felt your eyes follow me until I disappeared into the low, shifting clouds.

It was not hard to track, even in the mist. There were scuff marks on the stones where a long, scaled belly had scraped past, and furrows in the earth where something huge had launched itself into the sky.

The marks led me to a cleft in the mountaintop too shallow to be called a cave, too huge to be the den of a bear or lynx. The air around the entrance smelt of snake piss.

I did not slow down or even soften my steps; dragons were torpid in winter, like adders. I simply ducked beneath the granite ledge and there it was, coiled over itself like an enormous serpent. The last dragon in all of Dominion.

It was not the largest I’d seen—there had been one on the Isle of the Penitent with wings like a pair of ship’s sails—but I thought it might be the oldest. Its claws were cracked, the points worn and blunted. Its scales, once lightning-white, had turned translucent, like old teeth. That must be how it had survived the dragon hunts—in the mist, it would disappear entirely.

It was sleeping. I was so close now that its breath fogged my armor, obscuring its own reflection. I drew my sword with only the meanest whisper of steel on leather, wrapped both hands around the hilt—and hesitated.

I had sworn once, in the ashes of the Black Bastion, with the warm fluids of my own eye oozing down my cheek, that I would never again take a life in the queen’s name. But it was not for the queen that I lifted my blade, nor even for Dominion. It was for you, with your rook’s voice and your doe’s eyes and your long, fine fingers. You, who waited down the

mountainside, a pen held in shaking hands, for the hero of his story to return.

The dragon opened one eye. Its iris was a shadeless gold, like all dragons’ eyes, like mine. My reflection was distorted on its surface, so that all I could see was my own gauntleted hands.

I aimed carefully—there was no need to hurry—and drove my sword deep into its pupil.

There was a turgid pop as the sword broke the jellied surface of the eye, then the gristle of tendons snapping and the long slide into the soft tissue of the brain. A great shudder moved down its body. Its limbs and tail thrashed, and something whipped hotly across my brow.

It screamed. They always scream, at the end: a long, unearthly wailing that goes on and on. It was a sound that brought men to tears, or to their knees. Once I had seen a grown soldier drop his spear and shield and walk west. He had not returned.

I stood and listened with my head bowed, letting the sound burrow deep, letting it hurt, because when it was done there would be no more dragons in Dominion.

Quiet fell. I slid my blade from the eye and wiped it clean against the scales. Then I shoved at the cooling meat of its body, heaving the coils aside, boots slipping in clear ichor and strange-smelling blood. It took days and days to burn a dragon properly, but Yvanne insisted.

I’d never found any gold or treasure in a dragon’s den—I had always suspected those tales were invented, to spur the hunt—but there, wedged in the very back of the den, was a small, fine casket. And inside the casket, there was a cup.

What an absurd, gaudy thing, to hold the hope of a nation. And yet this was the reason you had come back, the reason Yvanne would live and Dominion would prosper.

I wanted, suddenly and violently, to cast it off the mountaintop and let it rust at the bottom of some nameless ravine, forgotten.

Then I heard you crashing through the trees, breathing hard. Why can you never do as you’re told?

You smashed into me before I could catch you. When you staggered back, I saw your eyes were white-rimmed, your cheeks bloodless.

“Una! Are you alright?”

“Of course.” Had you really thought I wouldn’t be?

I waited for you to ask after the cup or the dragon, but you didn’t. You frowned and licked your thumb. Your fingers splayed carefully over my cheek while you rubbed at my forehead. It stung.

Eventually I said, “The grail. I have the grail.”

I held up the cup and you cast it a brief, baffled glance, as if you’d forgotten all about it. “Oh,” you said. “Good. Now sit down and let me see to that cut.”

Later, as we rode away from Cloven Hill, you asked me if the dragon had been terrible, and I told you it had been beautiful.

“But we ride now to the Keep,” I said. “And there the story ends.”

There was a pause before you answered, and in that pause I understood —with piercing certainty, as if it were something I had known before and only forgotten—that I would never again see the woods where I was born, or the home of my fathers.

Whatever waited for me at Cavallon, I would not survive it. And you knew it.

But you said, in a voice like an early grave, “Yes. The story ends there.”

It is a strange thing, to ride toward your own death, like running toward a cliff with both eyes open.

I daydreamed sometimes about turning away. I could have thrown you from the horse and run back to the woods. I could have tossed the grail into the fire. I could have simply slipped away in the night, and let you carry the grail alone.

But these fantasies seemed to belong to someone else, someone braver and freer than myself. I could only trot obediently onward, like a hog to slaughter.

I would have preferred silence—even condemned men are allowed a vigil—but you chattered and nagged and pestered and wheedled at me. I answered, if only to pass the miles. You asked about my armor, so light and strong, and I told you the queen kept the maker a secret, so that no one else might have anything so fine. You asked about Hen, and I told you about the mean red colt who had crippled the farrier and maimed several grooms, but who had eaten from my palm like a lamb, as if we were old friends.

You asked about Yvanne, and I told you the truth: that she was brave and brilliant. Not a woman so much as a force that swept over the world.

You said, relieved, “You do love her.”

I didn’t answer; it would only upset you.

At night I watched your face across the fire, searching for malice or subterfuge, and found only an awful, writhing guilt, which you tried and failed to hide. But if you did not hate me, how could you lead me hooded and fettered to my death?

I suppose you’d answered that question on the first day I spoke with you: I swear to you, it was worth it, you had said. At the time I’d thought you meant the dragon’s death, or all the deaths that came before it—but really, you’d meant mine.

I would die so that Yvanne would live, and in this way even my death would serve Dominion. The thought settled over me like snow, beautiful and numbing. I had always wanted to be of use.

The weather turned as we left the hills. The wind blew hard and mercilessly, so that our fires snapped and leapt in the night, the heat whipped away before it reached us.

I listened to your teeth chattering with something glittering and sharp in my throat, like chewed glass. It galled me that you would cross to my side of the fire only for my sake, after a bad dream, but never your own.

Perhaps it was only ever pity that brought you to me. Perhaps you were simply a coward, as you had so often told me. Or perhaps you didn’t want to share a bed with the woman you were leading to the gallows.

A sudden surge of bitterness made me say, one night, “It’ll get colder, before dawn. Might even snow.”

You were shaking so hard by then you could barely nod.

“We fought the Hyllmen in winter, did you know? At night we stripped bare and slept pressed together.” It had only been Ancel and his squire, and they were occupied more with each other than me, but I wanted to make you blush.

You did. You looked at me and then away, your expression churning, almost panicked. You opened your mouth to make some excuse or apology, and I found I did not want to hear it. I wrapped my cloak tight around myself and lay down with my back turned to you.

I knew you would not come to me. Knew I would spend the night alone, hating both of us in turns—myself for inviting you, and you for refusing me.

But later—much later, when the fire was black and the stars were a clear, cruel white—I felt my cloak tugged away from my stiffened fingers.

I had your throat in my hand again before I even opened my eyes.

You gave a faint, polite cough, and I released you, swearing. “What are you doing, boy?”

“Trying not to lose any limbs to frostbite,” you answered, somewhat testily. Then, less certainly, “I thought you’d offered to—but if you’ve changed your mind, you need o-only say so.”

I was planning to refuse you, until you stuttered over that word. Your lips must have been numb with cold.

I held up the edge of my cloak. You burrowed awkwardly beneath it, in a chivalrous and absurd effort to sleep next to me without actually touching me. I let you wriggle unhappily for a moment before I hauled you firmly against my chest. I held you, my arm across your ribs, my cheek in your curls, until the shivering eased.

Then—you were very warm and pliant in my arms but not asleep, and my lips were very near the bare back of your neck. I exhaled, and a different kind of shiver passed through you, and I knew in a sudden flush of heat that I could have you, if I wanted.

And, Savior save me, I wanted. Not with tenderness, but with a kind of fury: When you dressed for my funeral, I wanted you to see the marks I’d left on your skin; when you raised your cup in my name, I wanted the wine to sting your lips.

And why not? Why should I go to my grave without a little pleasure, first? Why should you send me there without a little suffering, after?

I opened my mouth, just a little, as if by accident, so that my lip brushed the hollow behind your ear. You went very still, but I felt your pulse rise against my mouth.

I opened my palm across your stomach and your muscles tensed under my hand. Your coat had ridden up, so that two of my fingers found skin, and the coarse line of hair beneath your navel. You shuddered again, more violently, and I knew if I slid my hand farther down, I would find you hard and eager.

We lay like that, balanced together on the precipice: my breath ragged against your pulse, the tips of my breasts tight against your back. If you had said a single word—if you had moved at all— But you didn’t.

You might have wanted me, but not as much as you wanted my corpse.

You had come to me tonight because you were cold, and I was of use to you. Let me be used, then.

I set my jaw and did not move until dawn.

In the morning I rode toward Cavallon, praying that you were right, and that it was worth it.

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