The Everlasting — Chapter 14

14

THIS TIME, WHEN you died in my arms, I did not go mad. This time, when they pulled your corpse from my lap, I let them take you.

I hadn’t remembered everything—it was like remembering someone else’s dream, or a play you’d heard described but never seen yourself—but I had remembered enough to know this was not truly the end, but only the turning of a great wheel. I knew one day I would stand again beneath the yew, and one day you would find me there.

They led me up to that high, cold room. I went placidly. I sat without speaking while the blood clotted and congealed, itchily, on my chest. The cut truly wasn’t deep; the bruise around it, already blackening, would take longer to heal. Odd, that a traitor would hesitate to kill a bystander.

Had I been hurt, the last time? No—I’d been too slow, and Ancel’s sword had run you through. He had been alone, before, but this time there had been a shadowy swarm of cloaks and daggers. My memories were hazy and out-of-focus, but I felt the truth of them in my skin, as if my body remembered what my brain could not.

Eventually the queen arrived. I did not bow or kneel. I only said, evenly, “I’d like to see her.”

She—who was the queen, who was Vivian Rolfe—opened her mouth, then closed it. She nodded once.

I let her lead me down into the catacombs, though my feet knew the way. The air grew stale and greasy, the scent so familiar that I hardly flinched when I saw you laid out on your bier. I remembered the ulla flowers gathered around your corpse, the perfect white fall of your hair, the mesmeric gold light of the candles. In another life, Vivian Rolfe might have made a very fine photographer, or perhaps a stage director.

My hands were steady as I lit a cigarette. I did not offer one to Vivian.

Eventually she said, “I know none of this is easy, Mallory, but I need you to understand why we’re here, why you’re here, particularly.”

This was the opening line of what proved to be a long and fairly compelling speech. She spoke of fate and God, of Dominion and Una Everlasting, of a woman who had broken time itself to serve her country.

There were little pauses after certain lines, as if she anticipated questions or objections, but I said nothing at all.

“In order to have a future worth fighting for,” she said, “you must have a past worth remembering.”

A more significant pause followed, and I realized this was her closing argument. I took a long drag from the cigarette and asked, “How many

times?”

“Pardon?”

“How many times has this happened before? How many times has she died?” My calmness was a porcelain shell over my skin, encasing me. I might have been asking if she had any plans for the holiday weekend.

Vivian’s expression underwent several rapid changes, the muscles of her face twitching too quickly to seem quite sane. She settled on a look of mild chagrin, as if she’d been caught in an accounting error. “Do you know, I’ve lost track,” she said, and I punched her as hard as I could, full in the face.

The knuckle of my index finger split. Vivian fell back against the stone wall and slid down it, landing cross-legged on the floor. She rolled her jaw several times, said “shit,” and spat a sticky stream of blood to the floor.

Something wet and white shone in the blood: the point of a canine.

She tongued the blood from her teeth, thoughtfully. “Answer me this, Mallory—does it matter? No, no, think”—she held up both hands, palm out —“I’ve told you what this story means, how much depends on it. Does it truly matter how many times it takes to get it right?” Her lips were swelling fast, so that the edges of the words were slightly slurred.

I was looking down at my own hand, pinching the skin of the knuckle back together, experimentally. “I don’t understand why you would need to repeat it at all—ah.” I shook my head. “You’re not repeating it, are you?

You’re altering it, changing the story to suit. That’s why I remember— different versions of events.”

There had been a time when I had kissed your hand and a time when I hadn’t; a time when I shivered alone all night, tormented by your absence, and a time I had slept beside you, tormented by your presence. A time when I had felt your mouth on mine, a second’s stolen joy, and a time when I had only dreamed it. The two of us were like a pair of merlins circling overhead, or two dancers in a line; with each pass, we drew a little nearer.

Unless we were actually paper kites on a string, flying only where we were led. Had she somehow manufactured each look we exchanged, each passing touch? “No,” I said, a little too loudly. “I don’t see how you could have—you weren’t even there. You can’t control every tiny choice, every variation—”

“No,” Vivian said comfortably, “but I can control everything that counts.

The details don’t concern me.”

I felt selfish relief that, at least those little details—which didn’t count, which didn’t matter at all in the course of history—still belonged to us. “I see. So all the conflicting historical narratives are actually leftovers, relics of each iteration. I bet Ancel really was a hero, once. God, Professor Sawbridge had it right.”

Vivian pulled a face. “Remind me to have that woman arrested.”

“But why make him into a traitor?”

“Because you got too soft, and she got too damn good.” Vivian, still sitting, nodded at your body. Her expression was proud and a little exasperated, like a mother despairing of her precocious child. “She started making it past the Hinterlanders—twelve seasoned soldiers, and she barely broke a sweat. I even gave them archers, but by then you’d decided you loved her more than you loved your country. It’s a shame you’re such a crack shot, but I suppose anyone will pick up a few tricks if they’re sent to war enough times. Even you.”

This last sentence gave me a severe and instantaneous headache. If I had been to war more than once, then when did this story start? How far back did the circle go? I felt like a man holding a snarl of thread, unable to find either the beginning or the end of it.

Vivian continued, casually, “I had a devil of a time getting Ancel to do it. I told him I loved Una best. I petted and kissed her and made him watch.

I told him Una was the traitor, planning to kill me—he laughed in my face.

In the end I told him the truth: that Una must die, so that Dominion would live. He argued, he raged, he drank—but he did it. Ironic, isn’t it? That my most loyal knight would make the best traitor? But!” She sniffed. “Ancel the Betrayer has proved much more useful than Ancel the Good.”

I didn’t see how Sir Ancel’s character could affect the political ambitions of a woman born nine hundred years after his death, but then I remembered the cartoon in the paper with the radicals labeled Sir Ancel’s Heirs. My father’s body slumped over the capitol steps. Every story needs a villain, I thought, and we had all heard this story before.

After a moment I asked, dispassionately, “Did you have the Chancellor killed, or did you do it yourself?”

Vivian tsked, then winced and touched her lip with her tongue. “Don’t be unsubtle, Mallory—on any given day, plenty of people want to kill the Chancellor. The chain of causation is really such a delicate thing. You change a few tiny details—a custodian has a date and forgets to lock a door, a guard has a stomachache and leaves his post three minutes early—and you change the entire flow of history. Give me a lonely secretary and a laxative and I can move the world, to coin a phrase.”

I remembered, patchily, the speech she’d given me the last time around.

Do you honestly think it was chance? she’d asked, and it wasn’t. It was always and only her. Which meant—“There was never a woman named Yvanne, then.” How had I swallowed that story? “You didn’t conveniently replace her on her deathbed. You are her.”

Vivian blinked. “I knew the body-double thing was a little much.” She got to her feet, laboriously, and went to your bier. One hand toyed with your hair, idly possessive. “Very well. Yes. I came back much, much earlier in the tale. In the middle of nowhere, in the dead of winter. I was taken captive —I do not recommend traveling alone as a young woman in this or any other era—and Una rescued me.” Her fingers were combing through your hair now, tracing the shell of your ear. “I saw her potential at once. Even

that first time, I could tell she was something special. And I knew I could make her something extraordinary.”

Anger rippled somewhere beneath my porcelain shell. You weren’t made. You simply were, a giant who strode through the world scarred and shining, strewing legends in her wake.

But: “I invented a lineage for myself. Gave myself a name, a title, a birthright—oh, don’t give me that look, how do you think any king gets his crown?—and made her my champion. She was very good, but I made her better. Each time I sent her back, she was a little faster, a little stronger. Her blows were more precise, her deflections more perfect. The body remembers, you see, even when the mind forgets. The first time Ancel challenged her in the name of the False King, I had to send her back through the book in pieces. By the tenth time, she could disarm Ancel in forty seconds.”

I pictured it: you as a young woman, untried, desperate to prove yourself, falling in your very first duel. But you were not buried and mourned. You were dragged back to the beginning, sent out to die and die again. You were not a girl, but iron in the furnace, and Vivian was the hammer that fell over and over. She had not made you, but forged you, and

whet you in your own blood.

I asked, thickly, “Why?”

“There is no Dominion without Una Everlasting.”

“No, I meant—why does she have to die?”

“Ah, a much better question.” Vivian looked genuinely pleased—a clockmaker, finally asked how clocks work. “I tried it other ways, of course, but the tragedy is absolutely critical. If there’s something lost, there’s something to restore. If there’s sacrifice, there’s something worth sacrificing for. There are only two kinds of stories worth telling: the ones that send children to sleep, and the ones that send men to war. I needed the second kind.” She added, less grandly, “And it keeps us exceptional, she and I. Alive, Una would be an inspiration to every schoolgirl and housewife. Dead, she’s a warning.”

But I wasn’t really listening. I was feeling my way back along the story of my own life, lingering on the little twists and flourishes that had altered

the course of it: the storybook that found its way into the barkeep’s basket when I was nine, the poster that sent me to war when I was twenty-three, the strange luck that kept me alive on the battlefield, that killed Colonel Drayton just before he killed me.

If my throat hadn’t been cut, perhaps you would have heard my warning before Ancel struck; if your eye hadn’t been gouged out, perhaps you would have seen him coming.

The work of fate, I’d thought, or maybe even God. But there was no God in Dominion; there was only Vivian Rolfe, telling a story.

And she wasn’t finished. She was telling it again, tweaking the ending. I said, slowly, “You had the grail and the crown stolen, this time. Why?”

“Because of the prophecy, of course.”

“What prophecy?”

“The one you’ll put in the book. Something like, ‘When the cup and crown return, so, too, will the rightwise queen of Dominion.’ Or perhaps it ought to rhyme—I defer to your judgment.”

A little silence fell. I could see, reluctantly, how it would go: Chancellor Gladwell assassinated, Vivian sworn in on a wave of patriotic verve, the crown and grail discovered, the prophecy fulfilled—the monarchy reinstated. Vivian would win the Last Crusade as she had won the first one: wearing a crown. There was a madness to it, a labyrinthine complexity that suggested a somewhat warped mind, but I thought it would likely succeed.

Dominion has always loved its queens best.

And so all of this—my life and your death, and the lives and deaths of every soldier in every crusade—was to put the same woman on the same throne, twice.

I flicked my Lucky Star to the floor and ground it out beneath my boot.

Then I said to Vivian Rolfe what I should have said to her the last time, and the time before that: “Go to hell.”

“Probably,” Vivian answered, unoffended, “but may I ask why?”

“Because it isn’t worth it. None of this is worth it.”

She was still stroking your hair. “A whole nation—a safe nation, a peaceful, proud nation—is not worth the life and death of one woman? Are you quite sure of your math, Corporal?”

I wasn’t. I’d been a soldier. I’d gone to war—more than once, apparently—and the whole calculus of war depends on the belief that the nation is more valuable than any one life or death. But I looked at you laid out on your bier, your face stern and harsh even beneath the powder and pink rouge, and found I no longer believed it.

Perhaps this is what happened to my father. Perhaps he went to war and met a Hinterlander girl—my mother—and lost his faith, or found a new one. Perhaps he and I were the same and hating him had been like spitting in a mirror over and over.

I said, again, mulishly, “It’s not worth it.”

An impatient tsk of her tongue. “You are not the only one in this room who loves her, Mallory.”

I looked very deliberately at the place where Vivian’s hand still rested on your head. Her fingers had curled into claws, knotting in your hair. “I disagree.”

Vivian’s mouth twisted, the swelling stretching her lips ghoulishly. “If it weren’t for me, she would have died in those woods, alone and forgotten.

I’m the reason you even know her name, boy.”

The porcelain shattered. “You’re the reason she’s dead!” Why had I stopped hitting her, once I’d started?

“Nothing that lives lasts forever,” she said, softly. “But her name—that will never die, I swear.” Vivian’s face was ardent, full of conviction. She fumbled something from her skirts and thrust it toward me: an ancient book, bound in wood. “If you loved her at all, Owen—”

“Don’t—”

“You would make them remember her.”

I stood breathing hard, staring at the book. I could not imagine, in that moment, ever touching it again. “I won’t do it.” My voice was so low it caught, like the belly of a truck scraping over gravel.

The urgency went out of her face. It was replaced by the same chilly, pragmatic expression she’d worn just before she plunged the knife into my

hand. “You will, actually.”

“Like hell I—”

“Because it’s the only way you’ll get another chance to save her.”

Vivian gave a little shrug which suggested she was sorry for my troubles, but that her hands were tied. Then she called two names in Middle Mothertongue and tucked the book back inside her skirts.

I lunged for her, but before my fingers found her throat, there were guardsmen pouring through the door, prying me away. A boot slammed into the back of my leg with a sound like an oyster popping. My knees hit the floor.

Vivian straightened the crumpled collar of her gown. She said, “I’ll give you a little time to reflect, I think,” and swept out.

I struggled—not toward the door, but toward the bier, fighting with a mindless, animal desperation—until one of the men cracked my head, quite hard, against the stone wall. I kept struggling, but my limbs grew weak and disobedient, and one of my eyes refused to focus.

They dragged me up flight after flight of stairs, and I knew by the sudden chill that we were back in that miserable tower room. This time they tore the curtains from the windows and the blankets from the bed. They stripped my service jacket from my limbs and left me shivering in my torn, blood-stained shirtsleeves.

They locked the door behind them. This, I thought distantly, must be why I had never liked locked doors, or the cold; the body remembers.

When they returned, three days later, the bottoms of my feet and the tops of my ears had turned the mottled black of old fruit, and there were blisters in the creases of my fingers. They asked me questions, but my tongue was too swollen to speak.

They went away again. A little while later the queen arrived.

Vivian studied me dispassionately. I closed one eye so that her features came into focus and saw her shake her head. “I told them no head wounds, but these peasants have no respect for the frontal lobe.”

She bade a serving girl to fetch bread and water and light the fire. I stared at the flames in an agony of longing, knowing how badly the heat would hurt and desiring it anyway. It was birchwood, and the flames were the same driven white as your hair.

The serving girl set a stack of vellum and a fresh-cut pen at my elbow, along with my battered spectacles. I slid them carefully over my nose and saw Vivian’s smile splintered and multiplied by the cracked lenses.

She turned away. Over her shoulder, she said, “Make sure you work that prophecy in.”

I did what I was told. I always did, in the end.

It was harder, this time. My blisters kept bursting and oozing, and my head hurt badly. At least two pages were blotched by tears, which ran down my face in a continual seep, like a spring from a mountainside.

But I finished your story, as I had before, and would again. I changed only the final few paragraphs. Ancel betrays you, and while the two of you duel—I could not bring myself to cheat future generations of a good fight scene—his wicked accomplices make off with the crown and grail. It struck me as a clumsy addition, inserted without foreshadowing or gravity, but perhaps Ancel’s treachery once felt similarly abrupt. Perhaps there’s no story we won’t swallow, so long as we’ve heard it before.

I crammed the prophecy into the last lines:

But the queen cared not for her stolen treasure. She knelt on the floor, humble as a peasant, and took Una’s head into her lap.

Gently she touched her face and wept with love for the first and best of her knights.

But Sir Una did not weep. She spoke, and though her voice was weak, it rang out so that every corner of the court heard the words and remembered them after. She said, “Whoso finds the crown and cup once more is rightwise queen born of all Dominion.”

And as the last of her heart’s blood stained the stones of Cavallon, she smiled up at the queen, for she knew one day, in Dominion’s darkest hour, the cup and crown would return.

Two words left her lips before she died: Erxa Dominus.

I stared for a long time at those two final words, the last, tiny lie in a whole book of them. Then I flipped back through the pages and added twenty-six grammatically incorrect punctuation marks, spaced very deliberately throughout the text. It didn’t take me long; I learned this trick when I was ten.

I slept for a little time after that, and dreamed of Ulla, the girl I used to visit beneath the yew, who never existed. It’s summer in the dream, when the shadows are deep blue, and the shafts of sun are so bright they seem almost solid, like poured gold. Ulla is sprawled like a great cat beneath one of these, her face tipped up to the light. Her hair is so bright it’s difficult to

look at her, but I do.

I have always liked to look at you.

When I woke, Vivian was standing over the desk with The Death of Una Everlasting in her hands. My new pages had been sewn hastily into the back, the edges sticking out from the binding like wagging tongues.

Vivian was smiling down at the book, shaking her head in admiration. “I know I’ve said it before, but truly: Well done, Owen. I choked up at the end, and I love what you did with the prophecy. There are perhaps more grammatical errors than I’m used to seeing from you”—they were not errors—“but I think we can chalk that up to frostbite and a mild concussion.”

She set the book on the desk, and beside the book she set a slim silver knife. “Thought you might like to do the honors yourself, this time.”

I picked up the knife, turning it clumsily in my crusted, numbed hands.

It was small, but sharp; I might have slit her throat quite neatly, if my fingers could’ve closed properly around the hilt, if my feet could’ve borne my weight, if both my eyes could focus properly. I wondered if this, too, had been accounted for, arranged just so.

I asked, “Why do I forget? When I go back.”

I expected obfuscation or reprimand, but she answered promptly, “Because you’re going back to your native lifespan.”

I considered this. I didn’t think it would’ve made sense even without the concussion. “Pardon?”

“There’s only ever one of you, in the course of time. You cannot travel back and have tea with your younger self—if I sent you to your childhood, you would be a child again, and know only what you knew in that moment.

You cannot remember what hasn’t happened to you yet.”

I considered this, too. Then I said, “But I do, or at least I’ve begun to.

How?”

“How do birds know where to migrate?” A dismissive flick of her chin.

“Sheer repetition, I imagine.”

I slid the tip of the knife into the barely healed wound in the center of my left palm. The pain was familiar to me, almost intimate, as if my flesh recalled every time this blade had cut me before. The body remembers, she’d said.

But if the body remembered pain, it surely remembered pleasure, too.

Perhaps your lips remembered mine, and my hands recalled the shape of yours; perhaps each time you touched me it left a subtle mark, so that my skin had become a map drawn in invisible ink, which might lead me back to you.

Perhaps those little details mattered more than Vivian thought.

I dug the knife in deeper, making it hurt, thinking of the red X on a child’s treasure map.

As I laid my hand on the book, I met Vivian’s eyes. “Next time, I’ll remember more. Next time, I’ll save her.”

She nodded. “I agree,” she answered, as the world fell away. “That’s why there won’t be a next time.”

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