The Everlasting — Chapter 16

16

WHEN I RETURNED to campus the following summer, I found my office had reverted to its natural state as a storage closet. I wandered, adrift, until a smiling secretary guided me to a palatial room on the fourth floor. In the middle of the room there was a desk that must have taken ten men and a crane to move, and on top of the desk there was a brass nameplate: Sir Owen Mallory.

I had settled behind the desk, feeling like a child trying on grown-up clothes, when Harrison finally found me.

I hadn’t seen him since the day the book arrived in the post, and the past year hadn’t been kind to him. There was a pouchy, droopy quality to his features, as if the air had been let out of his face, and his skin had gone the color of chewed nails.

He made a circuit of the office, wearing an arch expression that suggested he found it all rather gauche. “My, haven’t you done well for yourself,” he drawled.

I had. In the past month, I had received two honorary degrees, a handful of prestigious job offers, and a prize which I suspected the Cantford Board of Fellows had invented and bestowed purely to get me to stay. I had the fawning, if somewhat false, admiration of my colleagues; I had an embarrassingly large office with mullioned windows and thick carpeting; I had more money than I knew how to spend, a knighthood, and the endowed faculty position in Middle Dominion Studies.

I stared at Harrison, willing myself to feel even a flicker of pride or accomplishment, or at least petty delight at having won our inane little war.

But all I felt was the impotent regret that follows a bad trade. I knew I had

lost something in exchange for all of this, and I knew it had been precious to me, though I could no longer quite recall what it was.

“Thank you,” I said, in that steady, smooth voice that never sounded like it belonged to me. And then, surprising myself: “I’m not sure it was worth it.”

Harrison wheeled on me. “Of course it’s—any of us would—” I watched as the last tatters of his composure slipped from his hands. He stepped forward and leaned over the desk until his face was so close, I could see the cobwebs of blood in his eyes and the tremor in his jaw. I wondered if he’d had trouble sleeping, too, and if the doctors had prescribed him the same chalky white pills.

“It should have been me.” The hate in his voice was bare now, unadorned by false manners or good breeding. “It was supposed to be me. I remember—I can remember—” He broke off abruptly. He was looking down at his own hands with an expression I knew well: a weary, mad dread, as if he knew there was nothing there, but still expected to see a knife between his knuckles.

Our eyes met, very briefly. I wondered, with an irrational rush of jealousy, if Harrison had read your stories when he was a boy, as I had. If he, too, knew your eyes were not blue, and did not know how he knew it.

He left without saying anything more.

At my appointment later that day, my hands shook too badly to sign the receipt. The doctor prescribed a long visit to the seaside. The sunlight and the sound of the waves would calm my nerves, he said.

So I was looking out at the Slant Sea, quietly despising the sunlight and the sound of the waves, when I first heard the news. Someone had a wireless playing in the back of the café, and the Sunday sermon had just been interrupted by a breathless announcer.

“The cup and crown,” he panted, and even through the static I could hear the awe running under his voice, as if he knew already that people would tell each other, years later, where they’d been when they first heard the news, “they’ve been—well, they’ve been found.”

By noon the following day I was back on campus, sweating outside Professor Sawbridge’s office door. It was slightly ajar, as it hadn’t been in months, and light shone around the frame. I could hear someone moving on the other side.

I walked in without knocking, the way I used to.

“It was you, wasn’t it.” My lips felt strange, and I realized I was smiling. “That’s what you’ve been up to all year.”

Professor Sawbridge—who did not flinch from anything, who teased the college archivist and kept uncensored versions of dirty novels on her shelves, where anyone could see them—flinched from the sound of my voice.

When she recognized me, she closed her eyes in relief. “Saints,

Mallory.”

“Sorry, Professor, I—”

“What are you doing here?” Her eyes snapped open, blue and querulous as they always had been. “Shouldn’t you be cutting a ribbon or kissing a ring?”

Cutting remarks were Sawbridge’s standard greeting, but there was a new jaggedness to her voice, as if it had been snapped off and poorly sharpened. Her cheeks, once broad and well-freckled, were now sallow, and her hair was thin and brittle.

My smile faltered. “I came straight here, as soon as I heard. It was you, wasn’t it, who found them?”

“Yes. It was me.” Her eyes were on her work, which seemed to be sorting books into piles of varying height and stability. The air in the office was stale and swampish, like the inside of a closed mouth, but she hadn’t opened a window. “Well, me, Sylvie, and a couple of interns.”

“Sylvie?”

“Mistress Sylvia Shaw? The archivist.”

I tried and failed to imagine anyone addressing the college archivist—a woman with the stature and temperament of a starved heron—by a nickname. I wasn’t even sure I could imagine her outside the archives; I had assumed until now that she spent the night in one of her own glass cases, arms folded across her chest. Eventually I offered, “Congratulations.”

Professor Sawbridge ignored this, as if the greatest—well, perhaps second-greatest—discovery of the century was not worth mentioning. She hauled another armload of books off her shelves and began sorting it according to her own inscrutable system. Some of them—mostly dirty novels, a few dictionaries—she piled in a musty traveling trunk.

My smile returned, somewhat battered. I would miss her terribly. “Let me guess. Head of Curation at the Royal Museum? Vice-Provost of

Cantford?”

This earned me a harassed look. “What?”

“I was trying to guess which position you’ve accepted. You wouldn’t pack your favorite books unless you were switching offices.”

She paused, finally, and looked at me with her customary mix of pity and love, as if I were a very stupid pet that she was inexplicably fond of.

Gently, she said, “I was fired, Owen. I have until Friday to clear out my things, or what remains of them.”

It was only then that I registered the state of her office. Sawbridge was not a naturally neat person, but she did not typically rip all the drawers from her desk or smash her potted plants against the wall. There were loose papers covering the floor in drifts, and the shelves were half emptied, the remaining books slumped over one another like witnesses to some awful disaster.

Sawbridge nodded at the shelves. “They took all the really filthy stuff, of course. I hope they get an eyeful. Even plundering goons deserve an

education.”

“I—I don’t—Fired?”

Professor Sawbridge had been the second woman ever to receive an advanced degree from Cantford College. She had spent the next decade traipsing across the countryside, digging up the most astonishing artifacts and publishing monographs under the name G. Sawbridge. She didn’t reveal her gender until the Board of Fellows had begged her on bended knee to accept a faculty appointment. And—despite decades of inflammatory statements, seditious lectures, and illicit book collecting— they hadn’t fired her. She was a genius, a real one, and geniuses are permitted their eccentricities.

“Why?” My voice was hoarse.

“Attempted destruction of objects significant to our national heritage.”

When I blinked at her, she clarified, “I tried to smash the grail with a big rock.”

I blinked some more. I was aware that I ought to be worried about the destruction of a priceless historical artifact, but I found myself saying, almost in awe, “Mistress Shaw must’ve tried to skin you alive.”

“Sylvie was the one holding the flashlight, love.” There was a nearly imperceptible softening around her mouth. “I know she likes to frighten the undergraduates, but who doesn’t? She’s really quite … decent.” This constituted the highest praise I’d ever heard Professor Sawbridge offer a living person and caused me to blink several more times.

She returned, somewhat showily, to her book sorting. “We would have managed it, but one of the interns turned out to be on the Chancellor’s payroll. Sylvie and I were marched off the dig site with rifles to our backs.”

“But—but—” I said, inanely, as if I could offer some counter or defense, as if this were an argument I could win if I only cited the correct source.

“Where have you been? Why didn’t you write?” I sounded peevish and young, even to myself.

Sawbridge’s eyes narrowed. “Mallory, I have spent the last five weeks detained without trial while my home and office were searched for evidence of conspiracy, answering very boring and repetitive questions about my loyalty to crown and country. Forgive me if I didn’t mail a letter.” The corner of Sawbridge’s mouth curled sourly. “They might be good with trains, these fascists, but they’re quite stingy with postage.”

Her voice was perfectly dry, as if she were reviewing a second-rate hotel, but I saw her teeth worrying her lower lip, a nervous habit she hadn’t had before. The flesh between her teeth was raw and red.

“Professor, I’m so—”

“Your father sends his love, by the way,” she said, in the slightly disgusted tone she used to deliver the killing blow in a debate, as if she knew there was about to be a great deal of blood and only hoped it didn’t stain her good coat.

“My father,” I echoed, faintly. “My father is—detained? And he said—”

“Well, no, actually he said something like ‘The boy—tell him I—never mind.’ Eloquence must run in the family. I chose to communicate the spirit of his remarks.”

I thought of all the headlines I’d ignored for the last year, the raids and protests and mass arrests. I thought of my father as I’d last seen him, furious and sorry and old. I thought of the blood I’d seen congealing on the capitol steps—his, I was sure of it, though I couldn’t say why.

Had I been lecturing on my stupid little tour, while the only two people I cared about were imprisoned? Had Vivian known, when she clinked her glass against mine, that my father was shackled in some windowless basement?

I looked at my own hands, and found they were shaking badly. I couldn’t tell if it was another of my fits, or simple rage. “I’m sorry. I should have looked for you.” I swallowed, hard. “If you are in need of legal or financial assistance, I am in a position to help.”

Sawbridge was attempting to close her traveling trunk, apparently under the impression that books might shrink themselves if glared at with sufficient force. “Thank you, dear,” she said, “but Sylvie and I have decided not to wait around for the next arrest. We’re going abroad—tonight, if I can get this damn thing—to shut—”

I crossed to the desk and added my weight to the trunk lid. There were several worrying pops from the hinges. “You’re fleeing the country? That doesn’t strike you as a little … premature?”

“Speaking as a recent guest of the government: It strikes me as post- mature, flirting with postmortem.”

The latch clicked. Sawbridge hauled the trunk around her desk, marching for the door with her chin high, as if it didn’t bother her in the least to leave behind her research and notes, the desk where she had worked for so many years, the place she had carved for herself in a college where nine-tenths of her students still assumed she was a secretary on the first day of class.

I touched her arm, lightly, as she passed. “Why did you do it? Why would you destroy the grail?”

She made an amused sound in her throat. “I would set fire to the national archives myself if I thought Vivian Rolfe wanted them.” She sobered, looking up at me with an expression I didn’t recognize on her face.

I’d never seen her uncertain. “There’s something wrong with it, Owen, with the structure of it all. I’ve spent my whole life chasing it and have nothing to show except bad eyes and back problems. But it’s not right, I know it’s not.”

“What’s not right?” I was careful to keep my voice neutral.

Her lips thinned anyway. “You are a great historian, Mallory, or you could have been. You know that history is mostly happenstance. Accidents piled on top of mistakes, a series of dice rolled in dim rooms by careless hands. It is not a lesson, until we learn it. It is not a story, until we tell it.

And every story serves someone.” This was an abbreviated version of the lecture she gave in every class she ever taught. I nodded, somewhat warily.

“It’s why I listen more to material evidence than the written word. Words

lie, but—”

“Bones don’t,” I finished for her.

She very nearly smiled at me. “But this—it’s all so neat. The book, suddenly resurfacing. The cup and crown discovered. The prophecy fulfilled after a thousand years. I’m surprised Sir Una herself hasn’t popped out of her grave, Valiance in one hand and the flag in the other.”

A chill crawled down my spine, settling like swallowed ice in my stomach. “What are you suggesting?”

“I am suggesting that someone is telling this story because it serves them. I was given my little part to play and—Savior save me—I played it.”

That jagged bitterness had returned to her voice. “Just as you played yours.”

“If you are referring to my translation of The Death of Una Everlasting, a perfectly legitimate contribution to—”

“You know I’m not. Or do you?” Her eyes moved over my face, and I had the old sense of being professionally vivisected. More quietly, she said, “You haven’t asked me where I found them. The cup and crown.”

“Where did you find them?”

“In the tomb of Una Everlasting,” Sawbridge said, and I wasn’t surprised, not at all. For a moment I could picture it so clearly that the

cluttered office fell away, replaced by cold limestone and the fresh green smell of ulla flowers. In my ears I heard the snap and pop of tallow candles.

Sawbridge’s voice turned musing. “If anyone had asked me, I would have told them the Everlasting was just a myth, an amalgamation of heroic traditions stuffed into a single character.” She had, in fact, said this often, to anyone nearby, without provocation. “But then we unsealed the chamber, and there she was. There was her armor, and there was her sword—though if that damn thing was forged in the ancient age, I’ll eat my left boot—and there were her bones.”

The tremor in my hands was worsening. My head hurt, suddenly and badly, and my lungs no longer seemed to be the correct size. I took sharp, shallow breaths.

“And beside her—placed there long after her death, judging by the sediment deposits—were the grail and the crown. Don’t ask me how they got there. The Chancellor’s pet priest has produced a letter from the Church archives claiming that Sir Ancel repented on his deathbed and had the items secretly returned, but I’d swear it’s a fake. Anyway, the grail and crown were only the second- and third-biggest mysteries in that tomb.” Sawbridge fished a twist of grubby paper from her pocket and handed it to me. “This was the first.”

I unfolded the paper clumsily, and a single cigarette butt rolled into my palm. It had been smoked down to the last pinch of paper and tobacco, then ground flat beneath a boot heel, but I could still make out the crumpled edge of a tiny silver star.

I stared and stared at it, remembering the taste of cheap tobacco in my mouth.

Sawbridge said, softly, “I don’t know anyone else who smokes those damn things. And I’m telling you, that tomb had been bricked up for hundreds of years. I don’t…” She shook her head once, sharply. “I don’t know how or why any of this is happening, but I sure as hell know who it serves.”

I couldn’t seem to reply. My blood was rushing in my ears, and the walls around me felt tenuous and unconvincing, like cheap stage props.

I heard Sawbridge say, dryly, “Enjoy the coronation.” Then, softer, “And take care, Mallory.”

Then she was gone, leaving me with nothing but a faint heat against my cheek, as if she had kissed it before she left, and a cigarette I’d smoked a thousand years ago.

I didn’t remember everything, not then.

But I knew, finally, for certain, that there was something I could not remember—and once I knew that, it was only a matter of time. Sawbridge used to say that a good historian tells us what’s in the records, and a great historian tells us what isn’t. And I had been a great historian, once.

I tucked the cigarette butt in my coat pocket, gathered up the remains of Sawbridge’s papers, and went to work.

I barely left my office for the rest of the summer. It was restful, in a way; I declined every invitation and engagement. I asked—loudly, in several crowded faculty meetings—to be excused from teaching duties, as I was busy working on my new monograph. A history of the First Crusade, I said, intended for a popular audience. My colleagues recoiled—if I would stoop to popular history, what depravity might be next? fiction?—but I had the somewhat paranoid idea that one of them might send a discreet telegram to the Chancellor, and that the Chancellor might decide she had nothing to worry about from me.

I worked methodically, without rushing; it seemed to me I had all the time in the world.

I began with the earlier fragments of the Everlasting Cycle, moving steadily up through Lazamon and Montmer, guided by Sawbridge’s private notes. I’d read it all before, of course, but this time I tried to see it as a story told over and over, rather than historical fact, and to wonder who it served.

A pattern emerged, hazily, like one of those pictures that doesn’t come clear until you unfocus your eyes. I don’t want to bore you, but consider: In Lazamon’s compilation of legends—the earliest complete version of your story—it isn’t the Hinterlanders who betray Yvanne, but the Norns.

This legend was recorded just before the Nornish Plot, which resulted in the

death of a king of Dominion and all his heirs. The only survivor was the wife of his youngest son: Tilda the Younger.

Several centuries later, de Meulan composed her Everlasting Psalms— based, she claimed, on The Death of Una Everlasting, which had been given to her by an angel. Lazamon had mentioned God only in passing, but de Meulan spent long verses on your piety and chastity. It was the first time you were referred to as a saint.

The psalms were written during the reign of Lysabet I. She was under pressure from her archbishop to marry and give the throne to her husband or son, but she refused—in the name of Saint Una the Virgin. The archbishop was found to be a heretic and burned, as part of the spiritual cleansing of the country. It was during Lysabet’s reign that the last of the Gallish temples were destroyed, and the Roving Folk were driven south.

It was Montmer’s Dominion Historica, in the early modern period, which first named the Hinterlanders as your killers. When a Dominion ship was sunk, shortly after, everyone knew it must have been the Hinterlanders: They were, after all, Dominion’s oldest enemies. Our first war with the Hinterlands began shortly thereafter.

Do you see, now, what Sawbridge did? That’s not history—that’s a story, designed to teach us who to hate and who to obey, what god to worship and what flag to fight for and what color eyes are the most beautiful. It’s a story that made a continent into a kingdom into an empire, that put a woman on the throne—more than once, I suspected—and was about to do so again.

Shortly after Professor Sawbridge fled the country, the ministers had voted to restore the monarchy. Vivian Rolfe would be crowned before winter. She would take the name Yvanne the Second, she said, reverting to the Middle Mothertongue version of her name. Dominion would have a queen once more.

I looked at her face in the paper and imagined a crown on her brow. It was very, very easy to imagine.

I decided abruptly to copy all my notes into code, in case she had spies going through my office. It was a quick and simple cipher—one simply made a great number of punctuation errors in a given text. If there were an

even number of errors, you wrote down the first letter following the mistake; if there were an odd number, you wrote the second. I hadn’t used it since I was a child.

But, as I made the first false comma on the page, I thought: Yes, I have.

I considered this thought carefully, turning it like a stone in my hands. I considered the Lucky Star cigarette in your tomb. I considered my dreams, which were still, always, of you.

Then I unlocked the bottom drawer of my desk and withdrew the thick folder where I kept the photographed pages of The Death of Una Everlasting. They were the property of the state, technically, but I hadn’t been able to bear leaving them behind.

It didn’t take me long, now that I knew what I was looking for. I counted twenty-six false punctuation marks. An even number. I copied out the first

letter past each mark.

W a i t

F o r m E My hands were not shaking at all. I wrote the rest of it quickly, easily, barely even pausing to look up each letter, and when it was finished, I said

the whole of it aloud.

“Wait for me, beneath the yew tree.”

I remembered hearing those words, over and over, in your voice. I remembered holding your face with my bloody hands.

And then I remembered everything.

I became aware, after some little while, that I was on the floor, with my cheek resting on the thick carpeting and the contents of the folder scattered around me. My head hurt, as if my skull was too small for all the memories inside it.

I stood, somewhat unsteadily. “I’m coming,” I said, and my voice was smooth and sweet because—this time—my throat had never been cut.

Because, this time, it hadn’t needed to be. “Oh, Una. I’m coming.”

Following my conversation with Professor Sawbridge, I’d sent letters and telegrams to every government office I could think of. In response I had received a truly masterful range of administrative stonewalling, including outright denial, waffling, misdirection, subtle threats, unsubtle threats, lies, and envelopes marked RETURN TO SENDER. No one would tell me the whereabouts or health of my father, or even admit to his existence.

It took me far too long to realize I could not only afford a solicitor, but a good solicitor. I had immediately engaged the services of an openly unethical young man who did not seem to blink with normal human frequency, and who had produced, just the previous day, an obsequious letter from the Ministry of War, apologizing for the confusion and inviting me to visit my father and ascertain for myself his physical health.

Now I went straight from campus to the address listed in the letter. It was several hours before dawn, but the wait no longer struck me as significant.

I tried to lean unobtrusively against the wall, but passersby still cast me concerned looks and made wide arcs as they passed. It was the twitching of my hands and face, I imagined; a person wasn’t meant to remember several different lifetimes, all at once.

At half past eight I walked into the building—a blandly carceral structure, like a sanitarium or a school—and presented my solicitor’s letter to the clerk. The clerk called her supervisor, who called his chief, who escorted me to a small room the color of soap scum.

I waited. Eventually the door opened, and my father walked through it.

He wasn’t wearing chains. For a moment I was relieved—but the skin around his wrists was chafed and pale. His limp had worsened, so that his top half had canted sideways, like a building with a crumbling foundation, and the whites of his eyes had turned the faint, malarial color of old lemons.

He looked—to my profound shame—genuinely surprised to see me. The corners of his eyes folded up. “Hello, son. How’s the autocracy faring, these days? I have to bribe these boys”—he gestured here to the guard behind him—“for newspapers, and I’m out of booze.” He sat, legs wide, expression determinedly jovial, because he was the kind of man who would wink at the executioner as he walked up the scaffold. It had embarrassed me once, his

flippancy, his refusal to worry, but now I wondered if it was a species of bravery.

I gave the guard an imperious nod, praying that my solicitor had put the fear of God, or at least civil damages, into them all. The guard left.

I wet my lips. “Hello,” I said, and didn’t know what to say next.

When I’d received the letter from the Ministry of War, I had indulged in a little fantasy of sweeping heroically into my father’s cell and rescuing him —somewhat belatedly—from his imprisonment. Perhaps he would forgive me. Perhaps he would even be proud of me.

In the fantasy, I had come to save him, rather than to ask a very specific and highly criminal question.

My father had never suffered silence well. “How’d you rig this, then?

Did Her Majesty grant you a boon?”

“No, I paid a bad man a lot of money. But, speaking of Her Majesty, I was wondering if…” I laughed, extremely awkwardly. “If you could tell me how a person might break into the personal quarters of the Chancellor of Dominion. If they needed to.”

For the first time, my father’s smile faded. “Now, why would I know a thing like that?” His voice had acquired a hard, hollow ring, like knuckles on a shut door.

“Well, someone certainly broke into Chancellor Gladwell’s room and painted the names of dead boys on his walls. If it wasn’t you, at least tell me who it was, so I can go ask them.”

My father had looked at me with variations of disappointment for most of my life. But the expression on his face now was far worse: a bewildered betrayal, which soured quickly into something meaner. He said, with dignity, “I know I wasn’t much of a father to you. I know we’ve never seen eye to eye on—well, most things. But there’s no call for this.” He shook his head. His scalp shone pinkly through his thinning hair. There was a livid scar on the left side of his skull that hadn’t been there before. “I already told them everything, anyway.”

Mortification arrived, thick and sour in my mouth, but I managed another awful laugh. “Like hell you did. You always said the worst circle of hell was for sympathizers and squealers.”

“And centrists.”

I swallowed, dry mouthed. “I’m not—this isn’t a trick.” That my own father would suspect me of informing against him—that it would not be the first time I’d led someone I loved to their death—the scum-colored tiles swam, sickly, around me. “I’m not trying to get a confession out of you. I swear.”

Bewilderment returned to his face. “Then what exactly are you trying to do?”

“I am trying,” I said, tiredly, “to break into the personal quarters of the Chancellor of Dominion.”

He looked at me, closely and for a long time, as he rarely had. His eyes had always tended to slip over me, as if it pained him to linger.

The silence thinned like stretched putty between us. I broke it in a guilty rush. “I understand how you must feel about me. But I didn’t know you were in here until a few weeks ago, and then for a long time no one would admit they had you, and—” I broke off, swallowed again. My memories were piled atop each other now in unwieldy stacks, so that every scene was haunted by its own variations. But I remembered our last argument clearly enough; it always went the same. “I said some—very cruel things, the last time we spoke. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t you dare apologize. Not to me.” My father was breathing hard, and the color had left his face, so that the burst veins stood out like wet fireworks. “You don’t owe me anything—not a damn thing.”

“Yes I—”

“You don’t understand!” A shrill, almost petulant note entered his voice.

He passed a hand over his face, scrubbing hard, and then he said, “I thought I was doing the right thing. Just one good and proper thing, after so many wrong ones. Or maybe I just took a shine to you—I was half cracked, by then.”

I knew then that he was speaking of his time during the last war, which he hadn’t done in any of the dozens of lives I could remember. I willed myself into total stillness.

“We’d made it to the Marro River, far in the south. We were hungry and frightened, just beginning to understand that we were losing. That a

backward little island could outlast and out-fight and out-hate the most powerful country in the world. And then we heard movement in the rushes, and we…”

He trailed away, unable to say what they had done. But I, too, had once been a frightened young man surrounded by other frightened young men, far from home; I already knew. I could almost hear the whizz and thock of bullets into muddy ground.

He continued, eventually, “When … when it was over, and nothing was moving anymore, we went to look. We found ten or twelve people on the bank. Roving Folk, probably—they had the finest little ponies, and hundreds of scrolls rolled up in their packs … not that it mattered. We wrote them down as hostiles, in our report.”

His right foot had begun tapping, arrhythmically. “Anyway. There was a girl—a woman, I suppose, but God she looked young. She hadn’t tried to run when the shooting started. She’d just knelt down, curled around something, like it was the most precious thing in the world.” His eyes, rheumy and yellow, met mine. “Which it was, of course.”

A tide, cold and prickling, seemed to be tugging at my limbs, pulling me under. I had wondered, in an idle, morose sort of way, who my mother was: a desperate camp follower, or a reckless village girl, or one of the Hinterlander guides that sold maps to the soldiers.

I had never, not once, wondered who my father was.

He had not looked away from me. I had the idea he was refusing to spare himself.

I said, like a child, “So you didn’t—you weren’t in love with her, or anything. My mother.”

“I never even met her. She was dead before we found her.” His voice matched his expression, hard and unflinching. “Just the one bullet, straight through the spine. It might have been any of ours, but I was always a dead shot.”

I thought: I must have gotten it from him, out of habit, before I realized I hadn’t gotten anything from him at all. The two of us had lived in that narrow gray row house not as father and son, but as two strangers, tied by nothing but bad luck and clumsy, unsober love.

He coughed, twice, phlegmily. “You were crying. I picked you up, patted you like I used to pat my baby brother, before he died, and you quieted right down. And it felt—it was like a miracle to me. That anything or anyone would still trust me, after what I—” He rubbed the back of his fingers beneath his nose. “I don’t think I set you down once over the next hundred miles of marching. When we reconnected with the main force, I told them I was through. I’d known it was wrong all along, begun to see that I was a tool of empire—one of the other boys had a copy of The Sin of Statehood—but I’d been too much a coward to do anything about it. Until you.”

“But you weren’t charged with desertion. I looked it up.” It was the second or third thing I’d done when I arrived at Cantford. It had been a small, secret comfort to me that he hadn’t been a true deserter, despite what people said. “You were relieved of duty and stripped of rank and benefits, following an injury.”

The man who was not my father made a small grimace of embarrassment. “They, ah, didn’t accept my resignation. Tried to keep me marching at gunpoint, so I shot myself right through the hip.” He rubbed his thigh, in a gesture so familiar it made my throat suddenly tight. “I was half cracked by then, like I said. But they couldn’t make me march on one leg.”

His eyes finally left mine, moving mistily around the little room. “All these years, I told myself I was sparing you. Giving you a good Dominion name, pretending you were my own flesh and blood. But really, I was just selfish. I wanted you to love me, or to forgive me, though I didn’t deserve either. I wanted to be—to you, if no one else—a good man. And I thought, if I made Dominion a better place—more just—less hateful…” He gestured, not without humor, at the red marks around his wrists. “Hell of a job I’ve done, eh?”

He sobered. He looked at me, his eyes damp and pink-rimmed and full of regret. “Should’ve told you the truth. I owed you that much. I owed you … everything.”

“Was it guilt, then?” My own voice sounded clinical, incurious. “Is that why you drank?”

“I drank because I was a shit father and my leg hurt like a bastard.” I watched him chewing the inside of his own cheek, jaw flexing hard enough to hurt. “And because I loved you, but before I loved you—before I even knew you existed—I’d hurt you badly. And there was no fixing it. No going back.”

Both of us let the silence stretch, after that.

I was sifting through the heaps and drifts of my memories, holding them up like flawed gems to the light of the truth: I was not my father’s true son, nor a true son of Dominion. I had no grand destiny or secret purpose. I was a mere byproduct of war, one of tens of thousands of orphans left by centuries of wars and crusades, and I had never been destined for anything except a shallow grave on the banks of the Crown River, which was once called the Marro.

But I had lived, because my mother loved me enough to take a bullet to the spine, and my father—yes, he was my father, though perhaps not my only one—had loved me enough to put a bullet in his own leg.

With this thought came a great clarity. Everything I had believed in and fought for—crown and country, the flag and the church, even the past itself —had proved false. What remained were those trivial, nameless moments which would be swallowed up by the tide of history and forgotten: my father’s hand on my hair when I was a boy, ruffling it awkwardly; the brusque press of Sawbridge’s lips on my cheek; your eyes on mine at the very end, full of faith, so certain I would come back for you.

If I serve anything, let it be that. If I die for anything, let it be you.

A tear splashed on the back of my hand, and I realized I had been crying, steadily and quietly, for some time. My father was watching me with the stoic heartache of a man who had just broken something which he had always known he would break. I opened my mouth but couldn’t decide whether to say thank you or I’m sorry or I forgive you, so I covered his hands with mine. The knots of his knuckles trembled beneath my palms.

Eventually I said, “I hurt someone I love, too.” I had killed you, actually, over and over again, for all it hadn’t been my hand on the hilt.

“But I can change it, Dad. I can go back.” I wondered for the first time what else I might change. If I saved you, would Dominion still invade the

Hinterlands? Would my mother live, and my father walk without a limp?

The chains of causation seemed to crack and reform, fractal, ineffable.

My father asked, “How?”

I felt myself smiling, lopsidedly. “By breaking into the personal quarters of the Chancellor of Dominion.”

My father looked at my face for a full minute. Then he leaned forward across the table and whispered a name in my ear.

I had anticipated a certain amount of difficulty. I had imagined unclimbable fences and unpickable locks, and perhaps an exchange of fire with twenty men in red coats shouting, Seize him!

But my father’s friend—an unamused woman who had worked in the capitol laundry room for ten years—had suggested dryly that I simply walk in the front door and ask to check something in the archives. Then, when everyone forgot about me, which they would do almost instantly, I could hide in a linen closet until nightfall and take the service elevator to the Chancellor’s bedroom. She added that my father was a good man and that, if I ever so much as thought her name in the presence of the authorities, she would put me through the mangle and dissolve my remains with lye.

Which is how I came to be sitting in the humid dark of the Chancellor’s bedroom, two hours after midnight. The air was thick and floral, sweetly familiar.

I rapped my knuckles smartly on her bedside table.

Vivian shot up, displaying the reflexes of a woman who had been surviving assassination attempts for a thousand years, and might continue for another thousand. One arm was already fumbling behind the headboard, reaching for whatever bell or button would summon help.

In the muffled bedroom, the doubled click of the hammer was loud. It was difficult to see anything but the spectral white of the Chancellor’s nightgown among the rich drapes and shadows of her bed, but I could tell she had gone very still.

I propped my service revolver casually on one knee and said, mildly, “I will not miss. As I think you know.”

I saw the nightgown sag petulantly back into the pillows. “Corporal Mallory.” Her voice was not as surprised as I would have liked it to be, but it had a pleasingly tense undercurrent. “I feel bound to inform you that you will not get away with this, whatever it is.”

I had an inappropriate urge to laugh. I was filled with a reckless, fey delight, born from the knowledge that I had, for the first time in any of my lives, stepped off the path that had been laid out for me.

I cleared my throat. “Where is it?”

“Where is what?” From a woman who had lied to me more or less continuously since the day we met, it was a weak effort. I waited, not particularly patiently, until she clucked her tongue. “It’s under my pillow.

Don’t you read the papers?”

“Remove it, please, and place it on the floor between us.”

She did so, moving with an exaggerated show of caution. She perched on the edge of her bed with hands raised mockingly high.

I kept the revolver dead level as I retrieved the book and opened it across my lap. The smell of woodsmoke and winter rose from the pages like cold hands, beckoning.

I brought my left knuckles to my teeth and bit down hard, stopping only when I tasted blood. Then I held my hand over the page, palm hovering just above the paper.

I could make out the wet shine of Vivian’s eyes as she watched the blood well, not quite dripping. “Ah,” she said, without any emotion at all.

“You’ve remembered.”

“I have.” It was unexpectedly difficult to keep my hand still. The centuries between you and I had been reduced to a bare inch, a single gesture, and my arm shook slightly with the effort of restraint. “And yet, I neither intend nor desire to kill you.” I hoped, fervently and with all my heart, that I would never again wipe anyone else’s blood from my hands.

“However, if you lie to me, or attack me, or scream for help, I will instantly overcome my personal preferences and pull the trigger. I have three shots, but I assure you I will only need one.”

Her hands returned to her sides. She inclined her head, very slightly, and I saw the dull gleam of gray hairs among the brass. I wonder if she ever let

it go wholly white, or if she constantly traveled back to her own youth, making herself whatever age she pleased.

“Now. The queens that came after Yvanne—Tilda the Younger, Lysabet I and II, et cetera—they were all you, weren’t they? At different ages, perhaps?”

She tilted her chin, considering me. The gas lamps on the street below cast a ghoulish green-gold light across her face. “The queen is dead,” she said, and spread her hands. “Long live the queen.”

“Answer the—”

“Yes, they were me.” Her lips twisted. “I knew I should have burned the archives somewhere along the way, but it’s a delicate balance. You want a robust national history, but you also want to cover your tracks.”

“And Lazamon and de Meulan, and the others. You gave them this book, the book I wrote, in different iterations?”

“Yes.”

“And then you spirited it away until you needed a new version. At which time you returned to the present, mailed the book to me again, and sent me back to her.”

“Yes.” Vivian was perfectly calm, even a little proud. “You could never refuse me, and Una could never refuse you.”

“Do not,” I advised her, with a little flick of the barrel, “ever speak her name again.” My temper—which had been absent since the day Professor Sawbridge put the cigarette butt in my hand, lost in a tide of urgent hope— was simmering once more in my chest, licking up my throat. “What I don’t understand is why you had to make it real. Why not just rewrite the book yourself, however you wanted? Why make me—why make us—”

“I tried that, obviously.” Vivian shook her head, much in the manner of a master craftsman reflecting on the quality of his early-career work. “But— to my lasting dismay—the truth matters. It matters what the court of Cavallon sees on the day she dies. It matters what the villagers of Dominion whisper to one another, and what stories they tell their children and grandchildren about the time the Red Knight rode past. Without them, without that germ of actual memory, her story is just a story, and your book

is just a book. Also,” she added, wryly, “I could never quite capture the tone. You bring a real pathos to the project, Corporal.”

I found my finger had tightened on the trigger. I loosened it, fractionally.

“But I wasn’t the first person you sent back, was I?”

“You were not.” For the first time, I detected a note of genuine surprise in her voice. “It was a bit like holding auditions, for a while. I needed someone who was clever enough to play the part, but not so clever that he would realize he was reading from a script. Someone who loved her legend enough to let her die but loved her enough to write a hell of a eulogy. It’s a —”

“Delicate balance.” My lips felt numb, separate from myself.

“But of course, what I needed most was the person she was willing to die for. I was that person, once, at the beginning.” A look of such longing crossed her face that I understood, against my will, that she really had loved you, and perhaps still did. But the look passed, and I understood, too, that it did not matter. She had killed what she loved, over and over, and would do it again, and would not lose a single moment’s sleep. “None of my other candidates even came close. The Harrison boy—what a disaster. That fucking horse killed him, the first time around. Make a note—if you’re trying to engineer the perfect warhorse, you can only send them back in time about twenty times before they get absolutely demented.” Oh, Hen, you poor bastard. “Anyway, I tried Harrison a few more times. He never even got her to the dragon. But you…” Another shake of her head, indulgent this time. “It was like you already knew each other, even that first time.”

The scent of flowers seemed to thicken the air, pooling at the back of my tongue like bile. It was a moment or two before I could ask my final question. “Why?”

“Why does anyone fall in love? Brain chemistry and proximity.

Although I always wonder how it works between you two. Do you take turns giving the orders? I hope you listen to her better than you did to poor Colonel Drayton—”

“Stop.” I caught the shine of a jagged gray tooth, the curve of a pleased smile. I thought a little nauseously of that night when you’d wrapped me in

your cloak. If you had moved your hand half an inch farther down—if you had begged or demanded, shouted or whispered— But you hadn’t. Perhaps some wary, battle-tried part of you knew bait when you saw it. You’d wanted me—I’d felt it, smelled it—but perhaps you wanted your free will more.

It was a moment before I could retrieve my line of questioning. “I meant —why did you do it? What could possibly be worth it?” My voice was fraying. My shoulders ached from holding my arms so still. “Did you want to be on the radio that badly?”

Vivian’s smile vanished. “Mallory, look around you. We are standing in the capitol of the most powerful nation on earth. A prosperous, united, peaceful nation, which I have spent a millennium building with my own two hands, my own sweat and blood—”

“Not yours.” My voice dragged across hers, a serrated whisper.

She exhaled, annoyed, then stood. I kept the barrel of the revolver pointed just to the right of her sternum, hardly breathing, but she came no closer. She edged around the bed and leaned on the nearest windowsill, slope shouldered, infinitely weary. She looked like a woman badly in need of a cigarette.

“I was nothing, once,” she said to the window. Her face was so close to the glass that her breath misted over it. “I mean that literally: I came into this world lower than the meanest pig farmer, lower even than his scrawniest sow. But I was smart, and I was hungry, and I would not remain nothing.”

I tried to picture her as a girl, spindly and square jawed, perhaps begging on street corners or scrounging scraps from alleys. But it was like imagining an asp as an egg; it may have been true, but I couldn’t see how it mattered.

“I found my way, eventually, beneath the wing of a great man. A powerful man. One night I told my—teacher, we’ll call him—that I would be great, too, someday. He laughed. He asked me to name a great woman of history. Just one. And then, in the silence, he kissed me on the forehead.”

One of her hands drifted upward to rub, hard, at her brow.

When she turned back toward me, the light from the street fell full on her face, and I could see the black gash of her lips, the beaten steel of her

jaw. In her eyes I could see what she kept so carefully hidden behind rueful smiles and ugly jokes: a bottomless, terrifying resolve, of the kind that could bend the whole history of the world to its will.

“There were no precedents for what I wanted to become, you see. No stories. So I made my own precedents.” A small, proud smile, here. “I built my own ladder, rung by rung, and climbed it all the way to the top. And now every child on the street could tell you their names, and every name is mine.” The smile widened, became beatific, so that she looked younger and more alive than I had ever seen her. “Of course it was worth it.”

This part of the speech was, I understood, intended to make her cause more sympathetic to me. To recast the last few centuries of bloodshed as a noble struggle toward justice. But all I could see was your face as you died, over and over. Was it a ladder she had climbed, or a pile of bodies? Was it justice, if it only served one person?

I thought then of the queen’s other guards, who had not looked as I expected them to look. Who had been altered, erased, unsubtly remade in the image of one woman. “What color was Ancel’s hair, before you made him change it to match yours?”

Vivian blinked. “Red.” Her nose wrinkled. “A Gallish grandmother, I believe.”

“How trying,” I said, dryly. “Last question. Once you had your crown—

crowns—why did you rule Dominion so…”

“Competently?”

“Ruthlessly. Violently. Every one of your reigns is marked by wars, executions, arrests. The First Crusade, the burning of the heretics, the conquest of the Hinterlands and the occupation after. The indecency laws— my father—” I choked on the word.

“Oh, I see.” Vivian widened her eyes and flapped her lashes with showy, false innocence. “Why didn’t I hold bake sales for the schools? Why didn’t I tax the rich and tie a suffragette sash around my waist? Perhaps at my coronation I could have called for world peace and released a flock of fucking doves.” She stopped flapping her lashes. “I wouldn’t last a month, you sweet, stupid child. Even now, after all my precedents, there are jackals at my heels. Wealthy men waiting for the slightest sign of weakness, the

smallest dip in the polls. I’ve given them contracts, factories, new markets —prestigious appointments for their shitty sons, quick divorces for their inconvenient wives—I’ve given them an empire—and still, still, I am not safe. I cannot be too young or too old, too beautiful or too ugly. I cannot weep or rage. I cannot refuse a man nor fuck him nor marry him—a queen is only powerful if there are no kings or princes nearby.”

In the electric glow of the streetlight, her shoulders rose and fell. Her voice was hoarse and honest, and very tired. “I will not apologize for being powerful, but … it can be a prison, too.”

I thought of the red marks around my father’s wrists. “Spoken like someone who’s never been to prison.”

“I rule as I must, Mallory,” she snapped. “Because if I don’t—if I falter —they will eat me alive.”

I said, sincerely, “God, I hope so,” and watched her eyes calcify into a pair of small and nasty rocks. I rolled a crick from my neck. “When I take this book back and unwrite it, and unmake your whole house of cards, I hope they forget you so quickly they don’t even know what name to write on your fucking tombstone.”

Her jaw worked briefly. When she spoke, it was not with her radio voice or her sincere appeal voice, but with the flat, disinterested certainty of an oracle. “I will find you. There is no period in history where I am not. If I am not on the throne, I am very near to it, and there is no corner of Dominion, no cave nor hollow nor dreary little village, that is not marked on the maps of Cavallon. I will know what you have done as soon as you do it, and then the hunt will begin.”

She wasn’t looking at me as she spoke. She had turned to a bookshelf and was running the flats of her hands beneath the shelves. “You might hide, for a time—perhaps even a long time. You might begin to convince each other that you are safe, that I have given up the chase. When you have stopped waiting for me, when the hairs on your neck no longer prickle— then will I find you, and then will you suffer. You will lament, and there will be no end to your lamentation. You will weep, and there will be no end to your weeping.” She had slipped into Middle Mothertongue as she spoke, as easily and naturally as if she had learned it in the womb. “You will wish,

with all your shattered heart, that you could return to this moment and walk away. You will beg me for it, before the end. And I will laugh.”

There was a brief moment here, which hung suspended between us, swollen with the weight of unmade choices. And then the moment ended, and all the choices were made, as neatly as dominoes clacking one against

the other.

I dropped my left palm to the page.

Vivian Rolfe made a small, satisfied sound, as when a person finds their lost hair pin, and turned back to face me. In her hands was a sword I’d last seen laid atop your bier. She held it awkwardly across her breast, but it was already half drawn.

I didn’t hesitate. I tightened my right index finger that last, fatal centimeter. For you, for us, I would bloody my hands a hundred times over.

There was the familiar boom of the revolver, the kick of the grip in my hand—then a weird, metallic slap, like a hammer on a nail.

Vivian had been thrown back against the bookcase, but she did not look distraught to have been shot. Valiance was still in her hands, but she had moved it four inches to the left, directly over her heart. There was a small, round pock in the blade, just below the hilt, and I realized she had not intended to kill me, after all.

The room was falling away from me. The scent of summer flowers was replaced by the cold, wild smell of winter.

The last thing I saw before I left was Vivian, smiling patiently, as if she had known exactly where my bullet would fly, as if it had all happened just this way, many times.

I was alone, before you came. (You’ll forgive me for telling this part, but it always makes you cry, Owen.) The woods of my fathers had grown wild in my absence, the old paths choked with bitterthorn, the old cottage covered over with bracken. It occurred to me that they would not find my remains for years and years, if they ever did, and the thought did not distress me as much as it once would have.

I did not even wear my armor, on the day I went to the yew. Let them think me a lost herdswoman, an unwise traveler, and let them bury me with only a plain stone for a marker, if indeed there is anything left to bury.

Yet, as I approached the yew, there was no peace in my chest, no resignation. I felt instead a sudden, sharp joy, like the snap of a harrier’s wings at the very bottom of the dive. I walked faster, and still faster, till the bare branches struck my cheeks.

There was a man waiting for me beneath the yew. His back was turned, so that I saw only the battered red of his coat, the careless profligacy of his hair.

One hand was pressed hard to the bark of the yew, and the other was holding a lumpen iron ornament. (A gun, I thought, and did not know where the thought had come from.) I drew my sword. The blade whispered against the sheath.

He turned, and it was—you. Of course it was you.

You smiled at me, and I remembered that smile. A little crooked, a little wry, as if you were trying to make up for the ardency of your eyes.

You said my name, and I remembered your voice, though I remembered it lower, harsher, like a frayed rope.

You stumbled over the roots until you were near enough to reach out— foolishly! trustingly!—and touch two long fingers to the back of my hand.

I did not pull away. I looked down, saw the ink that stained the beds of your nails, admired the delicate callus where your pen rested. I have always liked your hands.

I turned my palm slowly, wonderingly, until it met yours, until we stood

hand in hand beneath the yew.

And then I remembered everything.

It came on me suddenly, the remembering, like a spring storm, and took me to the ground. You were there with me, kneeling in the snow. Your hands were cradling my jaw, and you were saying my name over and over, in a kind of terror.

I felt myself smile, wide and loose, the way I hadn’t smiled since I was a girl. “You came back for me.”

I watched you choke with relief, eyes closing as if you could hardly bear the sight of me. “Always,” you said, and your voice sounded more like the voice I remembered: fractured, scarred over.

I lifted my arms, hesitating still, just a little. But in all the lives that I could remember—and Lord, there were so many—I had never once hurt you.

I buried my hands in your hair, wrapped them in the boyish extravagance of your curls, as I never had, as I had done many times, as I would do many more. I felt time unweaving between us, the beginnings and endings lost in a reckless tangle, and I tightened my fists in your hair, holding fast to this one moment. You made a small and lovely sound, deep in your throat, and pressed your brow hard to mine.

We remained like that for a time, clinging to one another like children, our breath mingling and rising, riming our lashes with silvery frost.

You spoke first. “She’s coming. She knew I would run, I think, and she knows where we are—or at least, when we are—”

I pulled my face back from yours, just a little, so that I could see the lovely loam-black of your eyes. “Who is coming?”

You didn’t want to tell me. You stretched the moment out like a gift, letting me linger a little longer in a world where I didn’t know what you knew.

There was only one name you could say that would hurt me. I felt my fingers sag and fall from your hair. I closed my eyes and said, without any real conviction, “No.”

Your hands caught mine, thumbs circling soft as moth wings over the cracked stone of my palms. “I’m sorry,” you said. “She’s not who she says she is. She’s—her name isn’t even Yvanne.”

I did not answer. I did not open my eyes. I only listened, while you told me the story of the queen-who-was-not-the-queen, who was every queen.

You told it well, of course; you had been telling stories for more lifetimes than either of us could remember.

Once, there was a woman who wanted more than she was given. She wanted it so badly that she shattered time itself beneath her heel and pieced it back together in the way that suited her best. History no longer simply

happened, like an accident; it was told, like a story. And the queen told it many times.

The story of Dominion had many villains over the years, shifting along with the borders of her empire, and many storytellers. But it only ever had one hero, and her name was Una Everlasting.

Una the dragon-slayer, Una the queen-maker, Una the tragedy. Una, who died and was resurrected a hundred times, until she fought as no mortal could fight, with the memory of every battle burned into her very bones. (There was awe in your voice, even now—but surely a dog might learn any trick, given a thousand years of practice.) I was not alone, in your story. I was trailed always by a cowardly historian, a man chosen by the queen to lead me to my death, like a farmer driving a balking animal to the butcher. And so—here your voice turned bitter as burnt hair—the historian buried the hero, over and over, and wrote her tale in the queen’s book.

Until at last they began to remember themselves, or at least each other.

This the queen could not permit. So she told one final story—a story so perfect it gave her an empire and a crown, a thousand years from now—and hid the book away. But the historian stole it and ran back to his hero.

And now, finally, we might write our own ending.

I let myself go slack, sagging against you, so that your voice hummed and buzzed in my skull, lingering even after you fell quiet.

I was sorry, I supposed, to lose whatever stubborn pride still remained to me. To learn that all my great deeds and noble battles had been carefully staged performances, my victories assured, my death predetermined.

I was even sorrier to lose the last scraps of my selfhood, to know that I had not lived a life but merely played a part. That I was not a woman but only a painted icon, with lacquer for skin and oil paint for eyes.

But I was sorriest of all to lose Yvanne, finally and forever.

The woman who gave birth to me, whoever she was, had abandoned me beneath the yew soon after. I had neither missed nor resented her as a child; I had a full belly and two parents who loved me, and I’d seen enough of the world beyond the woods to know myself lucky indeed. I hoped she was

well, but it was a polite, impersonal emotion, as you might hold for a stranger.

Then I lost my fathers, and learned what it was to be hungry, to be alone, to be no one at all. When I first saw Yvanne that day in the woods, gazing down at me with such endless needing—when she whispered my new name in my ear—it was like being born anew. In this new life, she was my god and my religion, my savior, my queen—my mother.

I knew now I had never been her daughter. I was just a tool well suited to her work, a lost girl she had stumbled across by chance in the woods one day.

But—my heart went suddenly cold—was there any such thing as chance, in Dominion? If my fathers had not died, would I ever have drawn the sword from the yew? Would I have slain the Brigand Prince? Would I have so eagerly abandoned my old name, and taken the one she gave me?

I felt all the muscles of my back drawing tight, pulling away from you. I remembered my fathers the way I’d found them so many times: side by side, hand in hand, as if, with the very last of their strength, they had reached for one another.

The cruelty of it had sunk into me like the iron point of an arrow, and never fully worked loose. Father Foy and Father Theo were not weak or fearful men, but neither of them would have risked the other’s life for the sake of a few pigs; they would not have fought the Brigand Prince and his men. Their deaths had been senseless, serving no purpose.

Save, perhaps, the queen’s.

I wondered how many tries it had taken her, before she found the thing that would send me to the yew, and then to war, the single moment that would turn me from a child to a blade. I wondered how many times my fathers had been killed, how many times they had clasped hands as they died.

And suddenly I didn’t want to run away at all. I wanted to ride back through the gates of Cavallon, sword drawn, and scream the queen’s name until she met me in the yard.

If it was a tragedy Yvanne wanted, I would make her weep; if it was blood she wanted, I would drown her in it.

Your voice came to me in pieces, between the pounding of my own pulse in my ears. “Please, Una,” you were saying. “Please, let her go. It doesn’t matter. None of it matters.”

I felt your fingertips on the back of my hand and discovered that I had clenched my fist hard around my hilt.

I had climbed halfway to my feet. You were still on your knees, a supplicant to some vengeful god. Your head was tilted back so that I could see the long, clean line of your throat, unmarked by war.

“Please,” you said again. “Come with me. Leave her, leave all of it.”

The hinge of my jaw creaked when I opened my mouth, stiff and reluctant. “The things she has done—the things I have done, in her name —”

“We can’t go back anywhere within our own true lifetimes. We could forget again, and she could find us too easily. She’ll be looking for us.” You tilted closer, urgent now. “But I have the book, which means we can go further and faster than she can follow. I know how it works, more or less—”

I looked away from you, at the bare bones of the trees. “You want to run.”

“I told you I was a coward.” I heard the flinch in your voice.

“You want to run, and leave her alive.”

“I want to run and leave you alive, you ass.” You ran your hands over your face, so that your spectacles lay crookedly over the too-sharp bridge of your nose. “If we run now, we leave her story without its proper ending, and we take away her chance of ever fixing it. I don’t know if it will be enough to take away her throne, but it will weaken her badly.”

I said, stubbornly, knowing I was a fool and not caring, “There is no honor in running.”

And you answered, with infinite exhaustion, “Fuck your honor, Una

Everlasting.”

I was struck silent.

You reached for my sword, and I let you ease my fingers from it, joint by joint. I even let you draw it, clumsily, and cut away the fine leather cording of the hilt. Beneath the leather there was a sign stamped in the steel: the letter S, repeated twice.

Then you set your gun beside my hilt, turned so that I could see the same mark pressed into the grip. I looked up at you, bewildered.

You tapped the mark on Valiance. “Saint Sinclair. The finest weapons maker of the modern age. Vivian must have had fifty swords made, a hundred. Each time it broke or chipped, she simply replaced it with a new one. Manufactured magic.” More quietly: “It’s a prop, Una. A fake. All of it is.”

I remembered shattering that sword and finding it whole again in the morning. I remembered the strange comfort of it; if I was cruel or violent, if I cut like a knife through the world and left a bloody wake behind me— perhaps I had no choice. Perhaps it was my fate.

You went on: “You and I both swore to serve crown and country when we were too young to know better. But we served a lie. We have no honor.

We have no duty. We are sworn to nothing and no one, now—save each other.”

You lifted your hands and laid your palms along the planes of my thighs.

You were not a supplicant now, but something much more dangerous, and a shudder moved through me at the sight of you.

You said, low and ragged, “I have loved you since before I was born, I think. I have studied you, worshipped you, lost you, mourned you. I have wept at your bier and fought beneath your flag. I have killed you, Una, over and over.” Your voice dragged now like a dull blade, whetting itself against me. The tips of your thumbs pressed into my flesh. “This once, please—let me save you.”

I sagged back to the earth. I nodded my head once, very slightly.

It felt awful, that letting go. Like falling on the field, like losing a limb.

Like killing the girl who’d been born that day in the woods, bathed in the blood of her enemies, and not knowing who was left.

You asked for my hand. I gave it to you. You took Valiance in your other hand and drew my thumb carefully, so carefully, along the blade. You hissed as the skin parted, as if my flesh were yours.

You pressed our hands to the open book, and our blood swam together on the empty page. I did not ask where or when we were going; it did not matter where we ran, so long as you ran beside me.

Very soon we were gone, and there was nothing beneath the yew save a gun, misplaced in time, and a sword beside it.

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