The Everlasting — Chapter 13

13

YOU TOLD ME I should wear my armor, before I rode through the gates of Cavallon, because “It’s how it looks in all the paintings.” You must have thought I was a fool.

Perhaps I was, because I did not run, or demand to know what waited for me beyond those gates, but only stood like a doll and let you dress me for battle.

You took your time with it, fastening and refastening each tie and buckle, adjusting what did not need to be adjusted. There was such grief in your face when you looked at me, as if you were already picking flowers for my grave, that I felt a certain degree of insult. You might have seen my future, but you hadn’t yet seen me go to war.

You combed my hair. I shouldn’t have let you—the expression you wore when you touched my hair was indecent, nearly heretical—but my time was running short, and I was greedy.

As you worked you asked, innocently, why I had worn armor on the day I met you.

I told you the truth, which made your lips go very thin and white. I found your anger a little tedious—why were you allowed to decide the time and place of my death, and not me?—but then you unbuttoned your collar again. You told me that you, too, were a deserter, and my heart broke for the boy you had been.

You picked up my hand and set it on the slick, gnarled surface of your scars. “When you ride through those gates, bearing the grail you won from the last dragon—it will all be wiped clean. Our doubts, our mistakes, will be forgotten.”

Oh, how badly I wanted to believe you. “And what of our sins?”

“Those, too,” you said, and I could see how badly you wanted to believe yourself.

An urge rose in me, ugly and irresistible, to wrest that belief away from you. “You don’t know the whole of it. You don’t know what I’ve done.”

You didn’t want to know. I could tell by the bob of your throat under my palm, the tacky sheen of sweat. You were clinging by the barest tips of your fingers to your idea of me—to Una the hero, Una the good and golden— and you knew whatever I had to say would sully her beyond saving.

But you said, in your gallows-bird voice, “Tell it to me,” so I did.

“The Black Bastion was not always black. Did you know that? The walls were pure limestone, white as gulls.” It had been winter when we reached the Bastion, after a long autumn spent chewing our way across the Fallows, and some of the men had mistaken the walls for the snowy cap of a mountain.

“We laid siege. Dull work, but we had all the grain and cattle the Hyllmen had left behind them as they fled. It was only a matter of time.

Another fortnight, another month, and they would have opened the gates themselves, I swear they would—”

It was only when I felt your thumb rubbing soothingly over my knuckles that I realized I’d made a fist against your collar. I opened my hand, pressing the palm flat against the hot glass of your scar. “But Yvanne was impatient. She said a swift victory would serve Dominion best. I said there were too many innocents behind those walls, and she said if they were innocent, they would have no need of walls. I said it would cost us too many men, and she said No, it won’t. And she was right.” I felt my mouth wracking itself into an awful smile. “Fire is fast.”

I should’ve stopped there—I could tell by your sudden stillness that you knew what I’d done next—but I couldn’t. I wondered if this was how confession felt, like bad humors leaving a wound. “I don’t know how long she’d been planning it. She had these silver casks of golden oil, so foul smelling they made your eyes run. We wrapped hemp and linen around our arrows and painted them with that oil, and they burned like nothing I’ve seen before or since.” The flames had been an uncanny blue, shining coldly in the wets of our eyes.

“The only soldier we lost was a boy who spilled a cask down his front. I killed him before his screaming could give us away. And there were those few—those brave few, like you”—a slight hitch in your breathing, there —“who threw down their weapons. They were dead before their bows hit the ground. Fire is fast, but Ancel is faster.”

The wind rose around us, tangling my hair before my face so that I looked at you through a shroud of white. “You wanted the tale of my greatest victory? Take it, then. Drink it down. I stood on a hill in the dark and watched a castle burn. I put wax in the ears of my men, so the sound of it would not torment them. I drank a cup of wine and cast it up again, but quietly, so the queen wouldn’t hear.” My throat had grown thorns, and the words came out ragged. “By dawn, we had won the Crusade, and the walls of the Bastion were not white any longer.”

The wind blew harder, whipping hair across my cheeks. You tucked it carefully back behind my ear, one knuckle grazing lightly across my scarred brow. “And this?” you asked, softly. “If there was no battle, then—”

“After. A girl, hiding in the ruins.” I’d gone half mad by then, or half sane. It was the smell that had undone me—not the battlefield reek of offal and spoiled flesh, but the disquieting, homey smell of charred wood and cooked meat. “She came for me with nothing but a piece of sharp stone in one hand, and I … let her.” I had knelt in the street so she could better reach my throat. It should have been easy; Yvanne had never let me wear a helm or gorget. “But Ancel was with me. He cut her down before she could get more than my eye.”

I had thanked him later, after I’d stopped swearing and weeping, and he’d said, lightly, I could hardly let a peasant best the knight who bested me. Think of my reputation. But his smile had been thin, and he had not liked to leave me alone for a long time after.

A little silence fell between us, broken by the dry click of your throat as you swallowed. “Th-there are always casualties, in war.” The words had an echoing quality, as if you were quoting someone else. “But, for Dominion, it’s worth—”

“The queen stitched the wound herself.” My voice was a blade scraping from a scabbard. “She spoke as she worked. She told me—everything I

wanted to hear. How proud she was. How well she loved me.” Colder now, and sharper, a flash of naked steel: “How glad she was that it would be spring when we returned to Cavallon, so there would be fresh flower petals for the court to strew before us.” Now, the killing blow: “And I knew then why she’d been so impatient for the Bastion to fall. So there would be flowers for our victory march.”

I had looked up into the queen’s face—the face I had loved since the day she found me in the woods—and felt the tipping of a scale in my chest. The next morning I went to the smith’s tent and shattered my sword on his anvil.

Your voice, nearly frantic now: “It doesn’t matter. I won’t let it matter.

Una, please—don’t cry—” I hadn’t known I was crying, but I could feel my shoulders heaving, my spine rounding. It was only your hands holding me upright. Your palm found the nape of my neck, fingers cupping the curve of my skull. “In a thousand years, they will sing your name in the streets. They will raise their children on stories of brave Sir Una Everlasting, the Red Knight, who fought for crown and country. You may not have lived as a hero, but I swear: You will die as one. Just—” Your voice split. “Just do this last thing.”

It had the cadence of a myth or a prayer, mesmerizing in its simplicity.

Die, and be redeemed. Die, and be remembered. Die, and live forever. My destiny, and the last request of my queen.

I looked up into your face, made fractal by tears but still so familiar, too familiar. I knew those glasses, perched lopsidedly on the arch of your nose.

The fine angle of your jaw, scruffed now with the beginning of a beard. The wide black pools of your eyes, full of guilt and want.

I could deny my destiny, and even my queen. I could never deny you.

I closed my eyes. “As you will.” You made a small, strange sound, as if the words wounded you in some way, but your hand left my nape.

I did not look at you as I swung into the saddle and rode toward the gates. You walked beside me, unspeaking, even when Hen nipped you affectionately on the arm.

The shadow of the wall came over us. This was where you ought to fall back and send me on alone—I was always alone, at the end—but you didn’t. You clutched at my stirrup instead, breath heaving in and out of your

lungs. Another of your fits, I thought, and wished keenly that I could hold you one last time.

But you said, wonderingly, in a voice that did not shake at all, “I can’t. I can’t do it.” And then, “Fuck.”

Your head tilted up, and I knew that face. It was the face of someone whose scale had tipped, who was about to break every oath and bond. “You have to run, now. There are twelve Hinterlander traitors waiting for you.

They’ve taken Cavallon.” You wet your lips. “If you ride through those gates, you die. Your story, Una—it’s a tragedy.”

I think you kept talking—you so rarely stopped—but I wasn’t listening.

A heady warmth was spreading through my limbs, settling in my stomach, like strong wine. You were trading away everything you cared about—your book, your future, your country’s future—for my sake. Because you wanted me, more than you wanted the legend I would leave behind.

My fathers had loved me like that, just for being alive. Later, Yvanne had taught me that love was a thing received in trade, for the purpose I served. My survival did not serve your purposes at all—and yet there you stood, begging me to run.

I could not help it. I bent low over the bow of my saddle, took your face in my hands, and covered your mouth with mine.

The first kiss is like the first blow in a fight—a test, an invitation, a wordless question. But it seemed to me we already knew all the answers.

I already knew the way your lips would part for me, instantly, without hesitation, and the way your breath would catch. I knew how it would feel to kiss you in hunger or in comfort, sweetly or sorrowfully, early in the morning or long after moonrise, quietly, so we wouldn’t wake the— I pulled away, panting a little. I had to.

I loved you by then, or would soon, or always had. It was inevitable, foretold: When I look up, I will see the sky; when I fight, I will win; when I meet Owen Mallory, I will love him.

And you must have loved me, too, at least a little—but it wasn’t me that you needed. It was Una the Everlasting, the Drawn Blade of Dominion, the hero, the saint, the story. For you, I would become her, just once more.

I unbent your fingers carefully from the reins.

“Una, did you hear me? There are a dozen men waiting for you. It’s a trap.”

I shifted my weight in the saddle and Hen took two high, prancing steps.

He was old, but not so old that he had forgotten what it meant when I rode

in full armor.

“What are you doing?”

Hen tossed his head as he broke into an eager trot. I was eager, too— how sweet it was to die, knowing someone wanted you to live.

“They have archers—God damn it.”

Do not ask me to recount the battle. Every battle is the same, anyway: There is a beginning, and there is an end, and between them there’s nothing but butchery.

There were arrows flying down from the ramparts, then there were three strange booms, and then there were no more arrows. There were enemies, then there was blood, and then there were no more enemies. There was screaming, then there was begging, and then there was quiet.

In the quiet I stood, breathing hard, returning reluctantly to my body. I felt very little during battle beyond a vague, muscular satisfaction at my own skill, but coming back always hurt like the devil. That was when I felt, all at once, the arrows that had not missed, the bruises that bloomed beneath my armor. That was when I saw the bodies around me, their faces frozen in pain or terror or childish confusion, and remembered what I was and always had been.

I looked for Hen before I looked for you. Forgive me—I had learned over the years not to look for people, after battle, because they were not always there. But Hen was. Ancel liked to say that Hen would live forever because Heaven didn’t want him, and Hell didn’t want him back. Everyone always laughed no matter how many times they’d heard it before.

Hen was bleeding now, and favoring his foreleg, but still standing. He was nosing at a body huddled against the well. The body was wearing a red jacket.

He whuffed at you, impatiently, and you lifted your head. You saw me, and the relief in your face was so obvious, so unguarded, that I looked away.

You rested your head against Hen’s jaw, and he nuzzled your hair. You said something to him too soft to hear but—I swear—there were tears in your eyes. I knew you loved him, despite all your complaining.

I lurched across the courtyard toward you, wading through carnage. I reached my hand down to you before it occurred to me that you might not want to touch me—my hair was clotted to my armor, and I smelled like a slaughterhouse. But you took my hand and kept it even after I’d pulled you to your feet.

Your spectacles were spattered with gore. Your skin had the patchy, greenish cast of bad fruit, and you were scowling up at me with perfect, angelic fury. “I told you to run, woman!”

I shrugged, and you made a frustrated gesture with that strange silver- and-black relic you carried. I recalled the odd booming sounds, and the archers falling from the ramparts. It seemed you were not so fragile as I had feared; the thought warmed me strangely.

You were still upset. “You knew. You knew what was waiting for you, but you didn’t run. Why?”

I shrugged again. “I just … could not.” I found it easier to answer if I looked away from your accusing, red-flecked gaze. “It was the whole reason you were sent here in the first place. You wanted a grand story, a fitting end to your book. And I wanted … to be what you wanted.” Was that not how you loved someone? By hammering your body into whatever shape they liked best, and handing yourself to them like a hilt?

Apparently it was not, for you whipped your glasses from your face and began to scrub them roughly against your coat. Your hands were shaking so badly that I took them away and cleaned them for you.

As I settled the lenses back over your eyes, you said, tiredly, “To charge into battle, against terrible odds—to know the odds, and charge anyway— there is a word for someone like that, and it is not ‘grand.’”

“Hero?” I suggested, not entirely in jest.

“Dead,” you answered, and your voice wobbled a little on the word.

I took your hands carefully in mine. They trembled like a pair of caged doves. “Owen,” I said, “I am not dead.”

You exhaled harshly, only half soothed. “You aren’t dead yet. It’s the Betrayer who kills you in most versions, although some of the older iterations have you shot full of arrows.” You cast an edgy, shadowed look up at the ramparts. “Let’s get inside.”

I tended to Hen first, which you didn’t like, and then I might have stumbled a little, which you liked even less. You swore and fussed and hauled my arm across your shoulders. I grunted a little as the arrowheads shifted in my flesh.

It was slow going. Perhaps I’d lost more blood than I’d thought. I was dizzy and sluggish, and my vision kept doubling or tripling, so that I saw the same courtyard repeated over and over with minor variations. The corpses arranged differently. The sun higher or lower. I leaned too heavily on you, but you bore it well. You even spoke to me, softly coaxing, as if I were a lover, or a mule.

We passed into the shadow of the Keep. Through the great doors.

Through the gawping, chittering court. I tilted my head toward the throne room. “There. She’ll be waiting.”

Yvanne was always wherever she would look the most holy and beautiful, as if she weren’t a woman but only a series of staged portraits.

And yet I could feel my heart hitting the back of my ribs as we approached, my breath catching in my throat.

There was the throne. There was the veiled woman in the dragonscale mantle, and there was the crown I had set on her brow with my own hands, when I was still young enough to believe she deserved it.

And there was that weary, hateful hunger rising in me again, as predictably as the sun. I had stopped loving her a long time ago, but I had never stopped wanting her love.

You hissed something in my ear. I didn’t hear it. You asked again, urgently, “Where’s Ancel?”

“Why?” I couldn’t help the slight sullenness in my tone; it had never seemed fair, that I won every battle and Ancel won every heart. “You know his hair isn’t even naturally yellow. He dyes it.”

You looked at me blankly. Blinked twice. “Of course, you don’t know.

It’s him. Ancel is the Betrayer.”

“No, he isn’t.” The answer came easily, with certainty.

“Remind me which of us has seen the future?”

But it wasn’t a matter of knowing the future. It was a matter of knowing Ancel of Ulwin. Ancel had been my brother, my comrade, my rival—even my lover, sometimes. After the Crusade he had been the only man I thought could stop me, or at least slow me down, if I tried to kill him. He had listened to my reasoning in silence, shaken his head, and said, “Oh, Una, you flatter me.” He had not visited my chambers again.

I did not like him very much, but I loved him, and I knew him. He was spiteful and vain and viciously jealous; he was charming and brave and he would pluck his own eyes from his face before he betrayed Yvanne.

I opened my mouth to explain, but another voice called out—a thin, plangent voice that closed like fingers around my jaw and turned my head back to the throne. “Sir Una,” said the queen, and the crowd parted like skin beneath the knife.

I flinched upright, away from you. Yvanne had never liked me to look weak.

You pressed the grail into my palm and whispered, “Take care.”

I had a wild urge to turn away, to take your hand and flee, but a sense of inevitability had fallen over the scene, as if every step and breath had already been decided.

I walked to Yvanne without looking back.

There was a gap at her right hand, where Sir Ancel should have stood.

He was never far from Yvanne’s side, especially when I was away—for her protection, he said, but then he would let his collar fall open so that I could see the marks she left on his throat.

Yet still: I did not believe you. I knelt before the throne and bowed my head.

“And so, you have returned to me at last.”

“Yes, my queen.”

“And you have slain the last dragon of Dominion.”

“Yes, my queen.”

“And you have brought me the lost grail, which they say restores all that time takes from us.”

“Yes, my queen,” I said again, and lifted the grail between us. I heard the court inhale all together, like a many-headed animal. They had heard enough ballads to know when they were witnessing one.

Yvanne stroked my face once, gently, and I closed my eyes against a rush of shame and devotion.

I heard her call softly for wine. Then scurrying steps, the glottal splash of wine into wood. A single, delicate swallow, then silence.

The queen of Dominion stood and addressed her court. “So long I have prayed for one thing and one thing only,” she said, and her voice was not the frail, cancerous whisper I recalled. “And now, by the grace of God and Sir Una, I am given it: time.”

I opened my eyes just as Yvanne pulled back her veil. The last time I’d seen her face it had been fatless and gray, the skin stretched like cobwebs between the sharp bones of her skull. Her hair had been so thin I could see the blue veins of her scalp, and her eyes had been a pair of candles at the bottom of a well.

But the face beneath the veil was smooth and young, her eyes blazing once more with vital purpose. She smiled down at me, and all the years between us seemed to slough away. I was a girl again, lost and desperate, struck dumb by the sight of her.

From outside came the high, wild scream of a horse. The queen’s beautiful face creased in irritation. She hissed something in a language I didn’t understand. The horse screamed again, and this time I recognized it as the warning Hen gave in battle, when enemies were approaching unseen.

I heard the mad crack of hooves against the Keep door—and then sudden,

sickening silence.

Oh, Hen.

Only then, too late, did I look away from the queen.

He came at my blind side—no fool, was Ancel—and by the time I turned my head he had already cut through the crowd and thrown back his hood. There was his dyed golden hair, there was his proud and perfect face, there was his blade falling through the air. I watched its descent with a

strange, detached lassitude, almost like boredom. It would land above my collar, right where my neck met my shoulder.

But then—you were there, between us. You took the blow awkwardly across the middle, your body bowing around it. Ancel flinched. You staggered.

I was on my feet before you hit the floor. Ancel met my eyes. He smiled, and it was not his glittering court smile, nor even the caustic snarl he wore in private. It was sad and tired, and strangely gentle.

“Sorry, love.” The tiniest lift of his shoulders. “Make it quick.”

I would like to say I hesitated, before I killed the only brother I ever had, but I didn’t. Valiance was drawn and the blow was struck before either of us took another breath. His head smacked heavily on the stones, still wearing that weary, sorry smile.

Then I was crouched at your side, rolling you onto your back, and you were—not dead, after all.

You were speaking, a near-whisper that was difficult to hear over the desperate rush of blood in my ears. “It’s alright, I’m alright, it’s really quite shallow—I think he pulled the blow, to be honest—”

“You…” I paused to swallow something; I decided it was fury. “You bastard—what were you thinking? Why would you—”

I stopped speaking then, because there was a knife in my left lung.

The blade had entered my back between the fourth and fifth ribs, right below the wing of my shoulder. A second knife entered closer to my spine, angled upward, and I found myself admiring the precision of it. Someone, at least, knew where to find the heart. Ancel had chosen his fellow traitors

well.

“Una? What’s—”

I coughed. Blood splattered across the glass panes of your spectacles. I wanted to apologize, but I couldn’t seem to draw enough air, and there was something wrong with my vision. I closed my eyes, briefly.

When I opened them, our positions had reversed, so that I was lying across your lap and your face was hovering above mine, full of grief. Feet were running around us. The queen was wailing, “The crown! The grail!

They’ve taken them!”

You were saying my name, over and over, and you were crying. You always cried, at the end.

I babbled and writhed, trapped inside a body that no longer obeyed me.

“Come back for me, you have to come back—please—”

“Always,” you answered, and I knew suddenly that it was true, and that you had said it many times before. I remembered, and in remembering came a great peace.

I was dying, but I had died before, and would die again. We had told this story so many times, you and I, and we would tell it so many more, and it would always end here, like this: with my blood on your hands and your tears on my face.

Call it God or fate, bad luck or good—all I knew is that I would see you again, and it was enough.

I lifted my arm, feeling the muscles of my back rip like poorly sewn seams. I touched your face, knuckles scraping the stubble of your jaw, thumb resting on the bow of your lips.

“Wait for me,” I told you, with the very last of my breath, “beneath the yew tree.”

You went entirely still. You met my eyes, and I knew by the sudden weight of years in your gaze that you, too, had remembered, at least a little.

That time, I died smiling.

You’ll have to tell the rest of it.

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