The Everlasting — Chapter 18

18

IF YOU RUN far enough, for long enough, you will catch the rhythm of it.

It’s the same thing that drives the swifts south before the frost and rats uphill before the flood: a thrum in the blood, a second pulse that whispers now, now, now.

The knight and the scholar followed that pulse north and south, forward and backward in time. They went by foot, most often, but they went, too, by ferry and galley, by coach and carriage and even—once the knight could tolerate the stink and noise of them—by automobile. They traveled along ancient dirt tracks and roads so freshly paved the tar still stuck, hotly, to the soles of their shoes. They slept in lofts and fallow fields, in boardinghouses and shabby hotels and, once or twice, gaols.

They learned which elements of the world change most quickly and dramatically (hairstyles, fashion, medical advice) and which linger, stubbornly, no matter the decade (filthy words, trade routes, children’s rhymes). They learned how to ask for work in half a dozen languages, which crossroads would always have inns no matter the century, which streams would never be dammed, and which borders would never be well guarded.

Most of all they learned one another, as few people ever have or will. In the churn and tumult of their lives—where summer did not always follow spring, where even their own names were tricksome and shifting—they were to one another what fixed stars are to sailors: the only way through the dark.

They knew each other’s taste and smell, the sounds they made in the night and the old wounds that turned stiff in the rain. The scholar knew every scar on the knight’s body and where it came from—save the small,

silver circle between her breasts, which she must have gotten as a child, for she couldn’t recall a time when it wasn’t there.

Each knew the other’s face by moonlight and rushlight, candle and gas, and even by the sharp-edged glare of streetlights—though they spent less time in the modern age than in others.

The knight found it overloud and overcrowded, and it found her wrong sized, roughly hewn, almost comical in scale. The scholar didn’t miss his own time much, save for the cigarettes; the whole of modernity—with its bank accounts and receipts, its leases and cameras and pay stubs—seemed engineered to expose them.

And if they were exposed, she would find them. She came very close, sometimes. Once when they lingered too long in the same year and town and were heard to call one another by names other than they ones they’d given; once when the knight challenged their landlord to a duel, long after duels had fallen out of fashion; once when the scholar left his spectacles on the table of an inn, long before their invention.

Soon after such blunders they would wake to fists on the door or boots in the street, or perhaps the rumor of a cold-eyed stranger asking if anyone had seen a man and woman traveling together. Once there were even dogs, great black hounds that cornered them in a narrow alley; the scholar had never liked dogs.

But they were never truly cornered because they had the book.

They tried, though, to use it as little as possible. Partly because there was always an awkward few days while they adjusted their accents and outfits and overheard enough political gossip to determine whether there was a queen in Dominion, and if her hair was the color of beaten brass; partly because people talk when two strangers vanish from inside a locked room, or when two hungry travelers never return to finish their meal. Even their absence left footprints.

But mostly they avoided the book because there was, to their bafflement, a fourth rule: No matter where they were when they touched the book—no matter how carefully they willed themselves elsewhere—they always found themselves back beneath the yew.

The scholar had a dozen theories. Perhaps the book somehow sensed their secret desire to return to the place they’d both felt most at home.

Perhaps the wicked queen had sent them back to those woods so many times that their souls had left grooves along the path, like penned animals wearing tracks in the grass. Perhaps the yew was so unspeakably ancient it made a sort of well in time itself, which they fell back into, over and over.

The knight did not care why. There was no place in the world she liked better than those woods, and the queen—who had found them in caves and foreign cities, in the swede fields of the north and the cold deserts of the far south—had never once found them there. She’d claimed the land for the crown and driven the small folk from it, and seemed to have forgotten it, as if what is conquered will remain so.

Slowly, even the scholar came to trust the woods. They began to loiter there, for days, then weeks, then whole greedy seasons, seeing no one but pig boys and berry pickers, runaway lovers with flushed faces and ragged peasants fleeing the queen’s soldiers.

They began to bury caches there for their future selves to find: rolls of bandaging, tins of fish and beans, arrows, fresh socks, soap, clothes from twenty different decades, furtive cartons of Lucky Star cigarettes. They shored up the walls of the woodcutter’s cottage with fresh daub and left firewood split and stacked beneath the eaves.

They began to miss it when they were away from it. They began to think

of it—guiltily, secretly—as home.

And so they broke the first rule.

The first time the knight missed her menstrual cycle, she cursed, dressed in the dark, and went to visit the nearest brothel. After a short and practical conversation with a very pretty woman, the knight was given a sachet of sharp-smelling herbs. She thanked the woman, who blushed a little and encouraged her to return ‘if she was tired of men.’ The knight kissed her hand, gallantly, and apologized; she did not think she would tire of this man.

The tea she brewed with the herbs had a familiar, grassy taste—the queen had kept a supply for such occasions.

Later, when the knight explained to the scholar why she was ill, he turned very white. He stammered and apologized many times, as if she hadn’t known the risk, as if she hadn’t held him inside her while he thrashed, only because she liked the feel of it, and liked it even better when she took him again later, still slick with it.

But the scholar rubbed the muscles low in her back and boiled cloths for the blood. His fretting startled the knight—it was only one of those dull bodily tasks, like picking dirt from a wound, or pulling a bad tooth!—but that night she let him curl around her, like human armor, as if she needed protection.

The second time the knight missed her menstrual cycle, they were in the woods. The scholar kissed her sweetly on the brow, opened the book, and disappeared. He returned two minutes later with his arms full: fresh white cloths, paper sachets of tea, a hot water bottle, and a glass vial of pills.

She rolled the pill between her fingers, hesitating, though she couldn’t say why. It was just that the light was dappling through the cottage door the same way it had when she was a girl. It was just that it was spring, when the whole world quickens, and the forest was littered with pollen and shed teeth and the fragile, speckled shells of hatched eggs.

It was just that she had always known precisely what purpose her body served—bloodshed—and she felt suddenly uncertain.

Ancel had fathered six or seven bastards, who he supported so handsomely that their mothers never made a fuss about their red hair. But Saint Una the Virgin could never be allowed to fall pregnant. Nor could Sir Una the Queen’s Champion—how would her armor fit? Now, though, the knight had no armor to wear or name to uphold; she caught herself wondering what other names she might bear.

And then she wondered if mother was another of those names, like saint or sir, that built a cage around you. She was through with cages.

She swallowed the pill. It tasted like metal.

The third time the knight missed her cycle, they were still in the woods, and she noticed that the scholar’s hands were shaking when he handed her

the glass vial.

She said, stunned into bluntness, ‘You want it, don’t you?’ He flushed, guilty as a child caught with his nose pressed to a bakery window. ‘No. I mean, yes, of course, if—but it’s not safe. We couldn’t.’ The knight said, slowly, surprising both of them, ‘We could.’ It felt like biting into a fruit long forbidden to her. The heady taste of it filled her mouth.

The scholar’s eyes went very wide, filling with such obvious, reckless wonder that the knight coughed and looked away.

She said, roughly, ‘Though I’m not—I don’t know how—that is, I don’t know that I’d be everything a mother should.’ The scholar tilted his head at her. ‘I suppose I wouldn’t know—I never had a mother, either. But … I’m not sure you’ve ever been what you should be, love.’ She scowled at him; he smiled his crooked smile. ‘You were a woman who carried a sword. A saint who slept with nuns—don’t pretend you never visited Morvain in the convent! Now you’re a knight without armor, and a wife without a ring. No matter what you are, you’re always…’ ‘Bad at it?’ ‘Yourself,’ said the scholar, stubbornly. ‘And you’ll remain so. Whatever you become next.’ The knight rolled the pill in her fingers, marveling a little at the certainty in the scholar’s voice when he said the word next.

There had never been a next for her, no after. How had she never noticed it? The queen had showered her with praise songs and titles, but never land or tithes. Lovers had been tolerated, but never marriage or children. Men might follow her into battle, but never be sworn to her service. There had never been any provision for her future because she had never been intended to have one.

But now the future hung on the vine, hers for the taking, and she found she was ravenous for it.

She dropped the pill to the earth and ground it dispassionately beneath her heel.

The scholar gasped. ‘But how—we couldn’t raise a baby, the way we live.’ His voice was miserable with want. ‘Wherever we went, she would

find us, eventually.’ ‘Unless we go where she never was.’ It was an argument they’d had before. But—before—it hadn’t seemed worth winning. ‘Unless we went back further, before all of this.’ Now the scholar’s hands were running frustratedly through his own hair.

The knight liked the way his curls looked afterward, startled, harassed. ‘And what if we forget everything again? What if the book doesn’t even go back that far? What if she anticipated us, and she’s waiting, somehow, before you were even born?’ The knight had learned that it was best, at these times, to let the scholar argue both sides against himself. He paced and gestured while she watched. ‘Although … without the book, how would she ever travel to us, even if she suspected where we’d gone? Suppose I tested it, first, just in case—’ Eventually the knight caught his hands in midair and tugged him down into her lap. ‘We could settle here in the woods, long before I was born.

Before even my fathers were born, or Yvanne! I could build a fine home for us, you know I could.’ This was true; there were few kinds of work they hadn’t taken, in their years of travel, and even fewer she hadn’t taken to.

She looked up at the thatched roof of the cottage and added, musing, ‘Father Theo said he found it standing empty when he first came to the woods. It might be this very house that I build for us. Perhaps I already have.’ Still the scholar hesitated, until the knight took pity on him and said, in the same voice she used to drive men into battle, to make them forget their fears and fight for victory rather than mere survival, ‘Please.’ And he answered, in relief, ‘As you will.’ And so they broke the second rule.

They ran again, further than ever before, to a time when the woods belonged to no one, when Dominion was not even a whisper of a dream, and the yew was so young the sun could fall cleanly through its canopy.

For a moment they stood wondering and disoriented, but then the scholar said, ‘No.’

The knight turned and saw it buried in the bark of the yew: the hilt of a sword. The sword she would pull from the tree as a young girl, a century from now, which had been placed there like a stage prop by the wicked queen. The wood had already swelled around the metal, like an unlanced boil. ‘But if it’s here, this far back—then Yvanne must have been here before us. We’re not safe, we’ll never be—’ the scholar broke off, swearing.

But the knight studied the hilt carefully. Then she drew a knife from her hip and cut the rotted leather wrapping away. ‘Look,’ she said. ‘No mark.’ The scholar looked and saw that it was true; the tang of the sword was perfectly smooth. His brows arced and furrowed as he thought. ‘If it’s not a Saint Sinclair … then it’s not one of hers. Perhaps there really was a sword in a tree—the stories about Valiance certainly predate yours—and she merely made copies, later. Perhaps she never came this far back.’ The scholar chewed at his lips, fretfully. The knight put her knuckle beneath his chin and tipped his face up. ‘Even if she did, she cannot return here without the book, and she will not have any reason to try, because she will never hear of us.’ The scholar swallowed, wanting badly to be convinced. The knight said, ‘There is no crown and no country here. There are no legends about a lady knight. We are safe, the two of us—three, I suppose.’ At this, the scholar buried his face in the soft hollow of the knight’s throat and wept.

The knight stroked his back, soothingly, and did not look at the sword.

Eventually the scholar took her hand and pulled her away from the yew, toward the clearing where they would build their home. She told him about the fen where she would dig the clay for their walls, the hazel copse where she would cut the wattle, the distant farmstead where she might find wheat for their thatch. They would be simple folk of the forest, and such people had no need of swords.

The cottage was finished well before the cold came, and they’d only cheated a little. If it rained, they traveled a few days later, when it was dry.

If the wheat was too green, they took it with them a few months back, and left it to cure. The scholar made a single, furtive trip into the early modern

age, returning to the yew with a bow saw and mallet, an ax, and a good sharp augur.

He also brought a cheap mirror, which he hung by the wash bucket for shaving. The knight found herself moving carefully around it, keeping her back turned, until one day her own reflection caught her unawares. She was still herself—big and rough, badly scarred—and yet different. Changed.

The line of her jaw had softened with fat. Her hips had widened, and her belly and breasts pushed against the rough wool of her dress. She had always been a woman, she supposed—but she’d never looked like one.

She didn’t mind it, really. She had found ordinary skirts much easier to manage than court dresses, and she and the scholar both liked to run their hands over her belly like cartographers surveying a brand-new country. And yet—she felt something like grief, that her child would never see her in full armor. He would only ever know her in hiding, half disguised.

The scholar came home then and found her looking at her reflection as if it were a stranger in their home. He took the mirror down without saying anything, and neither of them mentioned it in the months that followed.

It was midwinter when the knight felt the first ripple of labor. She looked out at the bare gray branches and decided that she wanted her child to meet the world when it was warm, and the sun was shining. So they traveled to spring, as other people might travel to the sea or the market, and their son was born, sudden and pink and slick, beneath the yew.

His hair was thick and curling, but so pale it could be mistaken for a caul. He had very fine fingers, long and delicate as willow branches, and a round birthmark, red as a yewberry, on his left foot.

The scholar looked down at his son and thought: Here, at last, is something worth dying for. The knight looked at the scholar, looking at his son, and thought: Here, at last, is something worth killing for.

They named him—but no. You asked for mercy. I will not make you remember his name.

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