The Everlasting — Chapter 20

20

IT HAPPENED SO quickly: We were dreaming, and then we were awake.

We were safe, and then we weren’t. We were nameless, forgotten, hidden away in time, and then I was Corporal Owen Mallory again, and you were — “Sir Una,” said the voice. You flinched from the sound of your own name. The line between your brows returned, harshly drawn. The voice said, more softly, “It’s been too long.”

It sounded as if she meant it. As if she’d missed you, these nine years, and longed to look at you. You kept your eyes resolutely, almost desperately, on mine; it occurred to me that you’d run away from her without ever once facing her.

A sigh, from above us. “Up, now—carefully. I’ve told these boys you’re witches, and heavily implied cannibalism. They’re jumpy.”

I got slowly to my feet, arms half raised. The ulla flower slipped out from behind my ear and fell to the earth.

Vivian Rolfe greeted us with the warm, delighted smile of someone who has run into old friends unexpectedly. She was in one of her more modern incarnations: short hair, crisp martial clothing. But the men behind her—six or seven of them—surely belonged to this era. They wore boiled leather armor and carried short, brutish blades.

I glanced sideways at you and found your gaze judging the reach of their arms, calculating the force of each blow. Your face was very remote, as if you were watching your body from a distance.

Your eyes skipped over Vivian—you still hadn’t looked directly at her—

and met mine, eerily flat: Now?

I lowered my lashes: Not yet.

“So,” I said, in modern Mothertongue, loud enough that it might carry to the glassberry thicket where the children were playing. “You’ve found us.”

I’d taught them enough of my native language to recognize it if they heard it, and if they heard it, I’d taught them to hide. The rustling, scuffling sounds from the thicket fell suddenly still.

“I did warn you I would. Don’t tell me you forgot my little monologue.”

Vivian looked very slightly put out. “It was a good one.”

You will lament, she had said, and there will be no end to your lamentation.

“No.” My throat was dry, the words rattling from it like dice from a cup.

“I didn’t forget.” But I had. I’d stopped running, and she’d come for us, just as she’d said she would.

“Good, then we’re all working from the same script. Now, what have you done with my book?”

“This way.” I turned sharply and led them to the cottage, the only place in all of history that had ever felt like home.

I could hear your steps behind me, a steady pulse: Now?

I jerked my head: Not yet.

Say you killed her. Say you killed all of them. Say you survived it, even —would you? unarmed, nine years out of practice?—Vivian had found us once, somehow. What would prevent her from doing it again? I felt like a rat caught in a mill, watching the stone roll inexorably toward me.

The cottage was too small for a group of this size. Vivian’s men pressed against the walls, trampling furs, overturning baskets. I wondered if any of them would notice the doll fashioned from sacking and twine, the too-small pairs of shoes, the crib our daughter had learned to escape before she could walk.

Vivian snapped her fingers. “The book, if you please.”

It was too late in the year for a fire, but the children had wanted porridge for lunch, and the last log was still crackling in the pit. The air was close and warm as a gullet. It smelled, sickly, of flowers.

Beside me, you inhaled: Now?

I touched my shoulder to yours: Not yet.

But I felt the slab of your muscle through your shirt, tense as coiled wire, and knew I didn’t have long. I should have kept my fucking revolver; you should have kept your sword. We should have known we couldn’t hide forever.

I took the book from its high shelf. Unwrapped it, clumsily. My hands hadn’t shaken like this since our son was born.

Vivian said, “Open it.”

I opened it. The pages stared blankly up at me, still empty. I’d thought they might remain that way, but now it seemed our story would be written again and again, no matter how far we ran or how thoroughly we disappeared.

The log popped brightly. The coals were a fresh, hot yellow. I thought, distantly, that the only way the rat could escape the mill is if it burned to the ground.

There was no one standing between me and the firepit. Perhaps Vivian thought a Cantford-trained historian would balk at the burning of a book, lest the archivist somehow got wind of it. Or perhaps she thought I loved the book more than I loved you. She had convincing evidence; how many times had I let you die, so that your story would survive?

But not another. In a single, easy motion, without hesitating, I threw The Death of Una Everlasting to the flames. I didn’t wait for it to catch, but spun, half crouched, ready to fend off Vivian’s men. A few lifted their blades, uncertainly. At my side I felt you loosening, uncoiling, rising to meet them— But Vivian raised her hand and said, in Middle Mothertongue, “Hold.”

A tenuous silence fell, as smoke gathered thickly at the eaves, seeping through the thatch. It was bluish and sweet smelling, like burning pine.

Vivian observed the smoke with no particular expression. I wondered if she was truly unsurprised, or if the muscles of her face had simply forgotten how to form the necessary shapes.

“It’s done.” I said, willing it to be true. “We are finished.” At my back, the pages caught with a faint rush of air.

The sudden flames cast garish shadows up the walls, dancing madly in Vivian’s eyes. She closed them. “No,” she corrected, “we are annoyed.” Her

eyes opened, and the mad light was gone. “I had forgotten how much you love a grand gesture, Corporal. Now if you’ll both come with me—”

“Why?” My voice was pitched too high. “We are stuck here, all of us, a hundred years before your sick little play begins. You can’t send us anywhere, ever again.”

Vivian opened her mouth, but another voice interrupted her. It took me a moment to recognize it as yours. You had never sounded so young, so uncertain. “Even if you could, it would do you no good.” You were looking Vivian dead in the eye, finally, but the tendons in your neck were tight with the strain of it. Some part of you still wanted to bow before her, to fall to your knees and beg her favor. “I am no longer what you made me. I will not fight for you again. I will not”—your voice shook, then steadied—“die for you.”

Vivian smiled, not without sympathy. “You will, though. Do you want to know why?”

“There is no reason you could give that would—”

But Vivian held a finger to her lips, and you were so accustomed to obeying her that you fell quiet. Through the silence, which stank of sweat and pine and flowers and the bitter copper promise of violence, came the distant cry of children’s voices. Mama? Papa?

Vivian took her finger from her lips, pointing over her shoulder, toward the woods, where our son and daughter were calling for us. “That’s why.”

You made no answer, but only turned your body very slowly so that you and I stood back-to-back, our shoulder blades brushing. Now?

I whispered, “Now.”

It was like pulling the pin from a grenade. You didn’t move so much as detonate. Your shoulders left mine, heaving forward, as if there weren’t four naked blades facing you. It was how you’d always fought—unfeeling, heedless, as if even your death wouldn’t stop you. It had been true, before.

But I’d burned the book, and made you suddenly, horribly mortal.

From behind me came a yell, cut short. The muffled snap of a bone breaking. The wet slap of viscera on bare dirt.

The men facing me started forward and I kicked the fire at them, scattering coals, sending a rush of sparks between us. They blinked,

blinded, and by the time they opened their eyes you were there.

For nine years, I’d tried to make you forget yourself. I’d taken away your sword, your story, your armor, your honor, your name. I’d wanted you to disappear, and for my sake, you’d tried.

I should have known: If you couldn’t kill Una Everlasting, then what chance did those poor bastards have?

You went through them like a scythe through late-summer hay. You came bare-handed, unshielded, blood-slicked, and you left only bodies behind you. A sword arced downward; you caught the hilt and thrust it through another man’s throat. A hand reached for your ankle; you stamped it with a sound like dropped porcelain.

The last man—a little older than the others, clever enough to know what his own death looked like when it came for him—did not even try to strike at you. Instead, he struck at me.

I watched his sword drive toward my chest, aimed just to the left of my sternum, where the blade wouldn’t get caught in the bone. I minded less than I thought I would; I had sworn never to watch you die again, and now I wouldn’t have to.

But the blade never arrived. You caught it, inches from my breast, in your bare hands.

I watched the blood well up from your fists and knew a moment of sick vanity. When you had fought for your queen, you had conquered Dominion; if you had fought for love, you might have conquered the world.

You ripped the sword away from the soldier, lips peeling back in an animal snarl. You turned the blade—still holding it by the naked edge—and drove it into his belly. The only mercy you had in you was that you killed quickly, but you had none for him: You twisted the sword, burrowing cruelly into his bowels, before you drew it out.

You stood watching him choke and whimper, your chest heaving like a great bellows. You held the blade one-handed now, the edge biting so deep into your palm that blood coursed down the blade and dripped from the point. The man fell to his knees, hands full of his own guts, and still you

watched him.

I said, gently, “Una.”

You didn’t look at me, but your grip eased on the sword. You drew it cleanly across the man’s throat—his eyes closed in awful gratitude—and let it fall.

I went to you then, stumbling over sprawled limbs. You turned to face me, and I reached for your hands—God, your hands— I stopped myself just before I touched them, in case my shaking hurt you worse.

“I’m sorry,” you said, earnestly. Your pupils were huge and black. “I know you wanted me to be other than I am, and I tried, I swear I tried.

But…” You looked vaguely around at the scattered corpses. A shudder moved over you, and your voice went low and raw. “Have you learned to fear me yet, boy?”

I touched my palms very carefully to the backs of your hands. “Never.”

You exhaled, shakily. “Madman.”

“Yes, but I’m your madman.” You snorted, then hissed as your hands jostled. You looked down at them as if surprised to find them still attached

to your wrists.

“We’ve still got some iodine, let me—”

But when you lifted your face again, you were smiling. A summertime smile, sweet and easy, as if we were still eating berries in the woods, or would be soon.

You lifted both your mangled hands high, a pagan priest blessing his flock. Blood ran down your wrists and several of your fingers flopped obscenely. The blade had cut through tendon, straight to the bone. I’d spent enough time in field hospitals to know you would never hold a sword again.

You looked over my shoulder and said, still smiling, “I’m no good to you now.”

I wondered, briefly, who you were speaking to; it simply didn’t occur to me that you would have spared her.

But you had. Vivian answered easily, calmly, as if she wasn’t standing among her butchered men, “But you’re still mine.”

You shook your head. “Not anymore. Not ever again,” you said, and stepped around me. Our floor—packed earth, swept clean—had turned to

black, brackish mud. Your feet sank slightly into it as you crossed the cottage to face Vivian Rolfe.

You placed your ruined hands carefully, almost respectfully, around her neck. She didn’t flinch or blink. She tucked her own hands in her trouser pockets, showily indifferent. Well, perhaps she was right: You had refused her, and you had run from her, but you could barely meet her eyes.

She smiled fondly up at you. I imagined the scene as a painted portrait: two women standing face to face, both bright-haired, both tall, both unbending. You might have been sisters, if it weren’t for the blood seeping from your palms to stain her collar.

“You’ll always be mine, love,” Vivian said. Then she stood on tiptoe and laid her cheek along yours. She whispered something in your ear.

And you—faltered. Your lips parted soundlessly. Your hands lifted away from her collarbones. They trembled slightly.

I like to imagine you would have recovered, given another second. You would have remembered everything she’d done to you and everything you’d done for her, and you would have killed her. We wouldn’t have been free of her—if she’d found us once, then some iteration of her would find us again, and now we didn’t even have the book to help us run—but we might have had another year. Another decade, even. It wouldn’t have been enough—a lifetime with you wouldn’t be enough, my love—but it would have been sweet.

In that second of hesitation, Vivian Rolfe drew a revolver from her pocket, put it to your breast, and pulled the trigger.

Of all the times I’d held you as you died, that was the worst.

That time you wore no cloak or armor, so I could feel the heat of your skin through your shirt. I could feel the weight and shape of your shoulders in my arms, which I’d held every night for nine years. I could feel, too, the soft pulp where the bullet left your body. I pressed my hand over it, knowing it wouldn’t save you.

That time, too, I could hear the voices of our children, coming nearer. It seemed impossible that they hadn’t reached the cottage yet, but it had only

been a handful of minutes since we’d arrived. And perhaps the alien boom of the gun had startled them; perhaps they were hesitating at the edge of the clearing, wondering whether they should run.

That time it was a bullet that killed you, and it killed you too quickly.

You had only moments. You touched my face once, clumsily, with torn and stiffening fingers, and spoke the names of our children.

I said, “I know, I will, I promise.”

Then you said, “Wait for me,” and that was all.

I had to finish it for you, pressing your face to my chest and whispering it into the curve of your ear, still warm against my lips: “Beneath the yew tree.” My hands seized around you, fisting in the sodden fabric of your shirt, tangling redly in your hair. “Always.”

But—that time, for the first time—I was lying. Because the book was nothing but ash and char, and I would never again meet you beneath the yew.

“Oh, get up.” From above me came the metal ratchet of a hammer drawing back. “And stop making that noise.”

I looked up to discover that Vivian Rolfe’s good-humored mask had finally fallen away. There was no madness or passion beneath it, after all, but only the grim irritation of a woman doing the work no one else would do: whipping a horse, or a digging a grave. Her eyes and cheeks were reddened, as if she’d scrubbed them hard, but she held her revolver in perfect military form—two hands on the grip, feet spread, barrel pointed steadily at my skull.

The sight of it sent relief rushing over me, so sweet and fast I was nearly dizzy with it. She knew I wanted to kill her, and she knew I could—anyone will pick up a few tricks if they’re sent to war enough times—but she also knew I was a coward. She thought a bullet would stop me because she thought I was afraid to die.

I almost laughed. The only thing I wanted more than my own death was hers; if I moved quickly enough, I might have both.

I gathered myself, loosing my fingers from your hair, setting your head gently on the churned earth. Your eyes were the dead, transparent yellow of

old sap. They bored into mine, mutely accusing. Even in death, I understood you: You promised.

I closed my eyes in supplication. I can’t. Don’t ask me to.

But I felt your endless, unblinking stare pressing like thumbs into my eyelids. I imagined our children finding us dead together in the cottage, as you had found your fathers. I imagined them running barefoot and tear streaked through the woods, as you had. If there was no hell waiting for us in the afterlife, I imagined you would build one with your bare hands, just

for me.

I thought: As you will.

I opened my eyes. Climbed slowly, drunkenly, to my feet, a condemned man granted mercy he didn’t want.

Vivian sniffed. “Good man. Now out we go.” She stepped carefully backward through the door. I followed her over the threshold, stunned by the soft light of summer. It ought to be cold, I thought. It was always cold, when you died. “And call the child out from wherever it’s hiding.”

I must have twitched or blinked, because Vivian laughed, a little of her unsettling cheer returning. “Don’t tell me you had more than one? I turn my back for five minutes, and you turn my great hero into a housewife.” She shook her head. “Call them both, then.”

I shouted, in modern Mothertongue: “Come out, children! Right now!”

Not a single sound came from the woods, not a creak or a rustle or a drawn breath. Oh, Una, they were so clever, our children. Bright as comets, and just as fleeting.

I turned back to Vivian, smiling, helplessly proud, “They must have run off, I’m afrai—” I began, but she put a bullet through my left knee before I could finish. The knee folded under me like wet paper, and I went down hard. I stared up at her, alight with pain, lips sewn shut over a scream.

She gave me a look of extreme fatigue. She said, neutrally, “The problem with playing the hero is that someone will have to play the villain,” and then she kicked my left knee, hard. I screamed.

Vivian lifted her voice, addressing the trees. “I’ve hurt your father very badly. Come out now, or I’ll hurt him worse.”

I yelled “No!” but it was too late. Our son burst out from behind a tree, his eyes black with terror, his knuckles white around his sister’s fingers.

Vivian watched them come without surprise, or even much interest. I wondered if people were merely systems of levers and buttons to her, predictable and dull as engines: For you, I would keep living. For me, my

children would come running.

For them, I would do anything at all.

I caught them both in my arms, half kneeling, and pressed their small and perfect heads to my chest. “It’s alright, I’m alright,” I lied. My knee snarled and gibbered with pain, a rabid animal more than a limb, and Vivian’s revolver was pointed between my eyes. As I watched, the barrel wavered between our children, weighing their worth. It settled on our son’s quicksilver hair. My arm around him tightened.

“Where’s Mama?” That was our daughter, though I hardly recognized her voice. She had so rarely been afraid.

“She.” My voice flailed to a full stop. I tried again. “She got away. She’s well.”

Our daughter’s body untensed, but her brother turned his head slowly toward the cottage. There was blood seeping from under our door, thick and dark as motor oil. I turned his face back to my shirt. “Don’t look.” I said it sternly, without quarter, one soldier giving orders to another. I had never wanted my son to take orders from anyone.

Vivian said, patiently, “Up, please,” and I stood, sweating hard, feeling the bullet move like a hot tooth in my leg. Then, less patiently, “Move out,

Corporal.”

“To where?”

“To the yew, of course.” Vivian tipped her head, quizzical. “Where else?

You first, then the children.”

It wasn’t far to the yew, but it seemed to take years and years, epochs, whole ages of the earth. There was time for the flesh to swell and weep around the shattered bone of my knee, until my leg dragged behind me, a sausage casing stuffed with glass. There was time to listen to the sweet patter of our children’s feet and wish, as I had wished my whole life, that I

were someone else, someone like you: strong and brave enough to save them.

There was time to think of the yew, and the girl I’d played with once beneath its branches, and the book that took us—always, over and over— back to it. A strange chance, I’d thought, that the pages of The Death of Una Everlasting had been milled from wood pulp, rather than the vellum or parchment that would have been more common, in this era.

But there was no such thing as chance, in Dominion.

Hope hit me like a second bullet, straight to the heart. I stumbled to a halt, breathing hard. The yew stood before me, a thousand years younger than I’d known it as a boy, and still older than the Savior Himself. It struck me suddenly as the only true miracle I’d ever seen, a slow and green magic that defied time itself. You’d told me once that you thought even dragons had no true sorcery in them, save their long, long lives.

But the yew hadn’t lived forever. I had come home for the war—so many times, I’d come home from the war—and walked up the rise and found nothing but stumps and rotten roots where the grove had once stood.

Of the yew, there had been nothing left at all.

I said, belatedly, “It was you.”

“Most of the time, yes,” Vivian answered, from behind me. “You’ll need to be more specific.”

“You had the tree taken down.” I swallowed, remembering the sharp pine-needle smell of the book as it burned. “And you had the wood made into paper.” How had I ever believed that she’d simply found a book like that? She was a woman who engineered all of history, who made her own fate. I could almost hear Professor Sawbridge: Everything that is, was made, and everything that was made, was made for a reason.

“Well, you can see how an entire tree is something of a logistical challenge, as an instrument of time travel.” I had forgotten how eager she was to discuss her schemes; it must be lonely work. “Every time I wanted to make some small adjustment I had to hike back to these damned woods.

You cannot believe,” she added, sincerely, “how much I hate it here.”

High above us, the wind tousled the tops of the yew branches, so that the needles whispered against one another. When our children played here,

they pretended it was the sound of the sea.

“So,” Vivian continued, “eventually I had it milled and pulped. It wasn’t easy—the wood ruined a dozen sawblades, and the first crew quit before they’d even limbed it properly. Claimed it gave them gray hairs, and arthritis.” I heard the shrug in her voice. “But it was only a tree, in the end. I had the book bound, and I burned what remained. No sense taking—ow, you little shit!”

I tried to whip around and lost my balance, staggering back to one knee.

Our daughter crouched like a fox kit between me and Vivian, snarling. Her brother stepped in front of her—your son, surely, not mine—as Vivian swore, shaking her hand. There was a bright red ring on her wrist, in the shape of small teeth. “Una didn’t make much of a mother, did she?” She switched smoothly to Middle Mothertongue. “Sit down, little savages—no, farther away—and be still.”

They didn’t move until I asked them to. They sat, their eyes fixed on me with awful, unwavering trust, as if I hadn’t already failed them. I looked away, to the ground beneath my knees. Blood had soaked through the legs of my trousers, trickling among the roots of the yew.

I remembered, for no reason, the very first time I’d gone to the grove as a child. I’d been lonely and hungry, chased by that hollow feeling that sometimes came over me, as if I’d lost something very precious but couldn’t recall what it was. I’d tripped over the tangled roots of the yew and scraped both knees bloody.

When I’d looked up, there she was: the girl, bright-haired and bold, my first and only friend. Her eyes, I remembered suddenly, were the color of spring sap, and her name was Ulla. Like the flowers.

The realization arrived without fanfare or shock. I’d always known it was you, but I didn’t understand how it could be you, and so I’d let myself pretend I’d made her up. But now I knew: It wasn’t the book that first brought us together, or even Vivian Rolfe. It was the yew.

And it was the yew that could take me back to you, now. You were not lost to me forever. This was only one death among many, a brief and bloody pause in the endless circle of our lives. I felt myself falling toward you, slipping out of time—already I smelled frost, clean and sharp—

“Not just yet, Corporal.” For the second time that day, I opened my eyes to the sound of a gun cocking. This time, it was pointed at our children.

“No—please, don’t hurt them, don’t.” I was pleading now, beyond pride or shame. “Just let me go to her. Let me find her, and fix this—”

Vivian laughed at me. You will beg me for it, before the end, she’d said once. And I will laugh. A prophecy I’d outrun for nine years.

But how? If she’d known we would return to the yew every time we disappeared, how had we eluded her for so long? Unless— “You let us go.” I felt those nine stolen years contracting around me, shrinking inward. Everything we’d done and everything we hadn’t—the price we’d paid for the freedom that wasn’t even real, for a future that wouldn’t last—bile burned my throat. “You let us think we were safe—I bet you even made sure the sword in the tree had no maker’s mark, just to soothe us. Why?”

“Because you’d remembered yourselves. And after that, no threat or punishment could make you play your parts willingly. Believe me, I tried.”

Had she? Had we been here before? Was I a man or merely a palimpsest, scrubbed clean and rewritten so many times that my oldest memories were obscured entirely?

The bile bubbled, acidly. Vivian continued, “The stick failed me. I needed a carrot.” Her eyes cut to the children. She corrected herself, “Carrots.”

I looked at them—our pretty, clever son; our fierce, stubborn daughter— the sum of all our hopes, the final proof of our freedom. They were the future itself, given form. I loved them as I had never loved anything, save you.

But they were not the future, after all; they were only bait. Another link in Vivian’s long, long chain of cause and effect, action and reaction.

“Oh, don’t give me that look.” Vivian tsked. “It’s a very fine offer—a compromise, even. If you will simply return to your correct role and play your part as written, I’ll give you your happy ending. Sir Una will be grievously injured when the grail is stolen. We’ll spirit her away to a tower room and say she succumbed to her wounds, Erxa Dominus, et cetera. And then I’ll let the two of you escape to the woods and play house to your

heart’s content. You can have your children back—a boy and a girl, fair- haired and dark. They come out the same, every time.” A pause here, while my pulse rushed in my ears. “Do you hear me, Mallory? All this drama and gore—you made me cripple you, you made me kill her myself, in cold blood, my own—” Vivian’s voice hitched oddly. In another woman, I might have thought it was a sob. “When all I wanted was to cry truce.”

I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. I became fascinated by the small, sweet sounds of the wood: the soft crackle of needles underfoot, the endless chirp of the beck. There were no birds; the gunshot had sent them winging away.

Our daughter said: “Papa?”

I flinched from the sound of her voice. As soon as I went back through the yew—and I already knew that I would, already felt the jaws of Vivian’s trap snapping neatly shut around me—she would disappear. No: A person had to exist, in order to disappear, and our daughter never would.

Unless I did as Vivian said.

“Well?” she said. “Go to them. Say goodbye.”

I went to them, limping badly, clammy and cold with blood loss. They watched me come with docile, trusting eyes. All of this was frightening, but they hadn’t yet encountered anything so frightening that their parents couldn’t solve it. I said, “I—I have to go away,” and then—only then—did their faith finally break.

Our daughter screamed for you. Our son asked why, over and over, his voice rising in pitch until I crushed them to me, desperately. Their bodies felt light in my arms, almost insubstantial, as if they were already fading away.

“We will—hush, listen to me—we will be together again. I swear it.” I ran my hands over the sharp wings of our daughter’s shoulders and the downy nape of our son’s neck. The body remembers. “You’re going to disappear for a little while. It won’t hurt. It’ll be like going to sleep. And one day, when your mother and I find you again, you’ll wake up, and all of this will be a bad dream.”

I laid them down among the roots, where I had lain as a boy. I placed our son’s hand around his sister’s. They curled toward one another, fetal in their fear, forming the uneven shape of a heart—mine, I thought, and yours.

I kissed them. “Wait for us,” I said, and then I stood and faced the yew.

I placed my hand just above Valiance, where the bark was swollen and tumorous around the hilt you hadn’t yet pulled.

Vivian Rolfe stood just behind me. She placed her chin over my shoulder, like a lover, and laid her hand over mine.

I asked, softly, “What did you say? Before you shot her.”

“The truth, only.” Vivian spoke in Middle Mothertongue, her breath ghosting over my cheek. “That I love her, and always have, from the very day I gave birth to her.”

The chain lengthened in my mind, link upon link, receding out of sight.

Then Vivian set the barrel of her revolver against the back of her hand and pulled the trigger.

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