The Everlasting — Chapter 22

22

I HAD BEEN afraid you wouldn’t remember me, but of course you did.

We’ve done this too many times to forget, you and me.

I stood with my hand against the yew, breath misting in the cold, heart stuttering. I waited without turning for the metal slither of sword leaving sheath, the kiss of steel against my nape.

It never came. Dry needles snapped beneath your boots as you approached. Your footsteps—always so swift and sure—were clumsy now, shuffling through the frost. At my back you paused, close enough that I could feel the heat of you. Your breath ghosted against the back of my neck, and I knew an instant of desperate, keening lust. Because you were warm and alive and with me, and they were not; because everything had been taken from us, save one another.

Then your arms came around my waist, carefully, as if you were new to your own body, unsure of its strength. You buried your face in my hair, inhaled once, raggedly, and wept. I pressed my hands over yours and held you to me until it passed, until your body slackened against mine and we stood quiet in the hasty blue twilight of midwinter.

I led you to the cottage by the hand. I wasn’t sure you could find the way on your own—your steps were still uncertain, your gaze opaque.

A whuffing sound greeted us in the clearing, and the stamp of a hoof. I had the sudden, implausible fear that Hen had been left waiting here for nine years, desiccating steadily, so that there would be nothing but a bad- tempered skeleton left to greet us.

But only a few minutes had passed since his master walked alone to the yew, from his perspective. He still looked exactly as I remembered him (a bad-tempered skeleton with hair).

He put his head to your chest as you approached, and you stood for a while with your cheek against his forelock. When you straightened, you looked a little less lost.

I tried to scratch beneath the point above Hen’s withers, in gratitude, and he knocked his jaw so hard into mine that I bit my tongue. Dog meat, I whispered to him. Leather gloves.

By the time I’d spat the blood from my mouth and cleaned my teeth, you were standing with your back to the cottage. Your lips were pressed so hard together they formed a white seam, and your eyes were the holes moths leave behind in linen. “I can’t,” you said.

“That’s alright. We’ll sleep outside.”

“It’s cold.” This you stated as something you observed, clinically, rather than something you felt.

I lifted one shoulder. “I’m used to it.”

We didn’t speak again for several hours. We only sat, feeding the fire, remembering and forgetting. In other lives, I’d talked until my throat was sore, explaining and arguing, circling, urging you to take up the quest you had abandoned. But you had not abandoned your quest this time, because you couldn’t.

Eventually, you said, in a voice nearly as awful as mine, “It won’t last.”

I was sitting with my back to your chest, a half-rotted fur wrapped around both our shoulders. Your words hummed down my spine. “Even if she keeps her word and lets us live—even if she lets us return here—it will only be for some little while. Eventually her reign will falter, and she will need this story told again, adjusted to suit some new strategy.” Your voice lowered, a bitter rumble. “She’ll need a different enemy to conspire against the crown. Or perhaps it’s God she’ll need, and Ancel will have to play his part dressed in a devil’s horns and rags. Perhaps I will survive Cavallon and die in pursuit of some other damned false trinket, so she can discover it a thousand years later.”

“It would be difficult.” I spoke idly, without conviction. “We remember ourselves, now, and wouldn’t willingly do her bidding.”

“Then perhaps she will find herself a new scribe! One I don’t know or can’t remember. Perhaps she will make infants of us again, and have us live

a dozen lives apart, until we forget each other. Perhaps she already has.

Even if we get ten years, Owen, or twenty—” You choked, and when you spoke again it was less than a whisper. “It’s not freedom, if it can be taken

away.”

I said, “No.”

“Yet—we can’t run.”

“No.” There was no freedom in running, either, if you knew one day you would be caught.

“And so, I am hers, after all.” A sickly calm came into your voice as you said it, as if it comforted you. You had never liked holding the reins. “I am her weapon, her tragedy, forever.”

It took so many tragedies, to make a nation. I listed them in my head like the names of the dead the papers used to print: the False Kings and their followers, the heathens and rebels; my mother, who took a bullet in the back, and my father, who put another in his own leg; the idiot boys who marched with me in the war and went home in boxes; the children who packed our shells with powder and the children we orphaned on the battlefield and our own children, who were never born.

There was not enough red paint in the world to write their names on the wall, but I supposed it didn’t matter; their blood had been mixed into the mortar.

In the silence, your laugh rang too sudden and too loud. “Well, and what else could I have been? It’s why I was born, after all.”

“Horseshit,” I said, calmly.

“Owen.” You didn’t want to tell me. You imagined that I would care.

“Before I died, that last time, she told me—”

“She lied.”

“Don’t be so—we even look alike! She arranged every second of my life. Is it really so unlikely that she gave it to me in the first place?”

There was guilt in your voice, which puzzled me. Had you wished, in your starving, orphaned heart, that the queen was your own true mother, returned to you? Did you imagine it was your fault that your wish had come true?

I turned in your arms to face you, but you wouldn’t look at me. You averted your face so that all I could see was your blind left eye. I had missed the shape of it, the way the pupil spilled like ink into the iris. “Yes,”

I said, “Vivian Rolfe gave birth to you.”

You looked at me sharply. I lifted my eyebrows the way Professor Sawbridge did just before she suckered an undergraduate into saying something very stupid. “Tell me. Does that make her your mother?” You knew me well enough to suspect a trap, and stayed quiet. “Was it childbirth that made you their mother, or everything that came after? And our children —were they yours, to dispose of as you liked? Or were they yours to protect? Yours to raise, yours to hold, yours to love—”

“Stop.” You closed your eyes. A pair of tears tracked down your cheeks and met at the end of your chin.

More gently, I said, “Both of my parents took bullets for me. You did the same, for your children. Whatever Vivian Rolfe is to you, it is not a mother.”

The tears came faster then, and your lashes gathered into sharp white points. “Did—did they see me, Owen? Did they find my body on the

cottage floor, as I found—”

“No, I swear they didn’t.”

“But they might, the next time! What is the point of me if I can’t protect them? What is the point of any of this?”

“I don’t know.” I pulled myself gently away from you. The fire had blinded me, so that I had to crouch and run my hands over the frozen ground to find what I needed now. “You were right, though. We can’t run.”

Boiled leather beneath my fingers, and the cold steel of a pommel. “What do you do, when you can’t run?”

I drew the sword from its sheath, and your body moved before you even opened your eyes, snapping upright. I held Valiance in two hands, back braced against the weight of it. God, you were strong. “I should never have taken this from you. If I hadn’t—if you’d been armed, when she found us —” I stopped, swallowing salt. “I’m sorry. I was scared, and I thought if I took away your sword and your courage, if I made you small and ordinary enough, I could keep you safe.”

I had thought the same about myself. I thought if I told no more stories and asked no more questions, if I poured grease in the bright brass gears of my mind, I would survive, even if my dreams did not. Vivian must have laughed and laughed, like a general watching her enemies saw off their own limbs.

I lifted Valiance high, so that the blade caught the firelight and shone a hectic gold. “But it’s not an ordinary woman that I need, now. I need a hero, Una. I need you to fight again.” I met your eyes around the blade and found them huge and hungering. “But not for her.”

“Owen—”

“Kneel, love.” This was purest pageantry. Sawbridge had doubted whether such rituals of knighthood were ever truly practiced, or whether they were the invention of romantic poets and playwrights. But the whole of Dominion’s history was an invention, a theater production which we had made real by the strength of our belief.

Still, I half expected you to laugh in my face.

You didn’t laugh. Instead, the line between your brows smoothed suddenly away. You looked at me with a kind of bewildered surrender, of the kind I’d only seen before during sex, when you were very near to the edge but couldn’t quite fall. You never could, until I told you to.

It didn’t feel like pageantry when your knee hit the earth, or when your head bowed, so that your hair fell like dove’s wings over your shoulders.

Your chest was rising and falling fast, as if you didn’t know whether you knelt before your executioner or your savior.

I brought Valiance down as slowly as I could, but the flat of the blade still smacked hard on your shoulder. “Do you so swear, by your good right arm, to serve with honor and with valor?”

The words came easily, by rote; I’d sworn a version of this same oath when I joined the army, while a bored recruitment officer had tapped my shoulders with a cheap tin sword, and again when I was knighted.

“I swear it.”

I lowered the sword to your other shoulder. “Do you so swear, by your good left arm, to serve with faith and with constancy?”

“I swear it.”

I touched the blade to the back of your skull, so the point rested on your vertebrae. “Do you so swear, by your life and death, to serve no master save —” Here my recruitment officer had said Dominion; you must have said Yvanne, when you were first knighted. I was tempted, for a long and ugly moment, to say my own name. To take you away from Vivian, like a child snatching a toy, and make you finally and fatally mine.

Your shoulders had drawn tight as you waited.

I said, rough voiced, “—to serve no master at all, ever again, save your own heart, and to fight for no cause, save the one you choose?”

I heard the air rush from your lungs, as if the words had struck you across the back. You answered, shakily, with shame, “I cannot.”

A prickling embarrassment began at my scalp and moved down my spine. I felt suddenly very stupid, standing there in the freezing dark, my wrists shaking under the weight of your damn sword— “I cannot,” you said, and your voice had evened, grown stronger.

“Because my heart is not my own. It belongs to you, and to our children.”

My arms stopped shaking, suddenly. Valiance felt light as spun sugar in

my hands. “So fight for us.”

“I swear it.”

“Then rise, Sir Ulla.” Here I called you by your oldest name—the one your fathers had given you, the one I had called you before you were called anything else, back when you were only a girl running barefoot and beloved through the deep green woods. You do not want it remembered, so I have stricken it from the page.

Your face turned up to mine. You were not smiling, but your eyes were

hot and bright as embers.

I held out my hand, and you took it.

We did not linger in the Queen’s Wood, this time, but rode out at first light.

I fretted as we rode. We were several days ahead of schedule—would Vivian be ready? If she wasn’t, would she send us through it all again, like a director whose actors have missed their cues? But you said, flatly, “She shot

me in the chest and took my children from me. If she’s not ready, she’s a fool.”

I fretted less, after that, but only watched the countryside shift from forest to scrubby woodland, from wind-scoured heather down to the low, grain-stubbled heartlands. We rode less often on the queen’s roads, this time, keeping to shepherd’s tracks and game trails. When I asked why, you answered, “Because, after dozens and dozens of lives, you’ve finally found your seat in the saddle.” Hen snorted, conspicuously, and you amended, “More or less.”

When, for want of fresh bread or hot baths, we passed through a township, it went differently than I remembered. I no longer pressed the townsfolk for tales of Sir Una, and no longer spent the evenings feverishly writing them down. Instead, I filled Vivian’s flimsy yellow notebook with stories of my own invention. They were brief, odd tales, featuring no heroes and no great deeds, but only a place: a green and secret place, beyond the reach of crowns or gods, under the protection of a nameless knight.

I strewed these stories carefully behind us, like seeds. I knew all this work would be undone, if things went as I planned, but I hoped some sign or sentiment would linger. So I told them to the freckled girl who sold us griddle cakes and to the fishwife who smiled at us without teeth, and to the Hinterlander boys who leapt from riverboat to riverboat, wearing rags for shoes.

These boys liked my story so much they begged for another; I would trade it to them, I said, if they would teach me a few phrases in Shvalic.

This they did happily, although the phrases were very specific, and puzzling to them.

It occurred to me as we rode away that I was living like one of my mother’s people: on horseback, telling stories for my bread. This thought produced an anxious, overdue sort of pride in my chest. Perhaps one day, when all of this was done, I would meet a band of geweth and ask to travel with them for a season or two. Perhaps I would learn their language and some of their stories and teach them to my son and daughter.

We made good time, on our journey north. Even when we rode through towns and villages, people did not gawk or gather. They did not seem to

recognize you. It was the way you held yourself, I thought: Your spine had loosened, and your face had eased. Your expression shifted easily now: You scowled at overpriced goods and smiled at small children, as anyone would.

Saint Una the Everlasting was a carven image, a figure woven in a tapestry, ageless and changeless. How could you—mobile, visibly human— be her?

It also helped that you had scraped the device from your shield with a sharp stone, leaving a pile of flaked red lacquer beside the fire one night.

You would have been content to bear the shield as it was, scratched and bare, but one evening as we passed along the edge of a Gallish temple, I slid from the saddle, untied the shield, and told you to wait.

At the temple I asked after the artist of their painted alcoves and was introduced to a laughing young woman with flecks of color beneath her nails. She listened closely to my instructions, took several heavy coins from your purse, and set to work.

When I showed the device to you—a great white tree, roots and all, on a green field—you touched it once, wonderingly. The paint hadn’t quite dried, so that your fingertips left two marks on the trunk of the tree, almost like the hollows of eyes.

There were still some who recognized you, of course, even with your new colors. When we passed once more through that bitter, mud-slicked village in the far north, I saw the same resentful looks, the same hateful faces. No one forgets the face of their conqueror.

You took their venom as you always did: peacefully, as your due. But this time, when that tall, scarred Hyllman man reached for your hair, you spun and caught his hand in mid-air.

“Don’t,” you advised him, lowly, and he spat full in your face.

I’m afraid I lost my temper, then. Forgive me—there are only so many times I can watch a man insult you. I dropped the reins and shoved the bastard hard, with both hands. His boots slid in the mud, and he landed on his back with a damp, comic slap. He floundered, swearing, and I stepped forward— “Owen,” you said, softly chiding. I discovered that my fist was raised, and that it held Vivian’s slim silver knife. I lowered it, somewhat sullenly.

You knelt down beside the man, studying his haggard, hate-whittled features. One cheek was concave, where he was missing several molars, and his head was covered in glassy pink scars, as from burns.

You looked at those scars and asked, calmly, “Who did you lose, at the Bastion? A son?” The man’s face warped with fresh fury, and you said, “Ah, two sons. Were I you, I would spit in my face, too.”

The man’s mouth worked, soundlessly. He looked suddenly less like a man than like a walking wound, still weeping.

“Would it help if I told you I, too, lost my children?” Your voice now was musing, almost disinterested. “That I, too, dream of them every night?

And when I wake, I think: If I cannot have them back, then God give me revenge for the loss of them?”

A shadow seemed to pass over me as you spoke, a premonitory chill, like a sudden cloud. But we will, I thought, a little desperately. We will get them back. And if we didn’t—God save the queen.

The man was staring at you, but sightlessly, without comprehension.

You clucked your tongue. “Well. It’s too late and too little, yet still”—you bowed your head formally—“I am sorry, sir, for the grief I brought to your house.” You unhooked your purse and set it humbly by his feet. “It is not a debt that can be paid, I know, but—”

The man kicked the purse away and hissed something in Hyllish. It sounded like some variation of Keep your fucking money, worm-feeder.

Behind him, his wife and daughters had gathered fearfully. The coins in the bag chimed as he kicked it, and one of the women made a small, hungering sound, quickly choked.

You plucked the purse from the mud and stood, weighing it in one hand.

You addressed the women. “Do you have any quilts or furs to sell, good ladies? The weather will turn soon, and he whines like a babe in the cold.”

You gestured at me with your chin.

I scowled at you—you would whine, too, if you’d watched your own fingers turn black—but when the women returned with a pair of matted yellow sheepskins, I rolled them gratefully beneath my arm.

You asked the oldest of the women what it would cost us. She tilted her chin and said, in accented Mothertongue, “Everything you have,” and I

knew she hated you just as much as her husband did.

You handed the whole purse to her and turned away, leading Hen.

I lingered. I said, loud enough that the whole of the ragged village might hear, “If you need to run, run south to the forest. They call it the Queen’s Wood, now, but they won’t soon.” I looked toward you, and their eyes followed mine. “You will find protection there, from all comers, for as long you need it.”

I followed you away from that place, and hoped fervently that I would never see it again.

Seven days later, you fought the last dragon of Dominion.

You had confessed to me, long since, that dragons were not the fell demons I knew from folklore—and yet you still tried to make me stay behind.

“Oh, for the love of God,” I said, disgustedly. “Not again.”

You frowned at me in obscure alarm. “Have I ever failed, in all the times

I’ve slain this dragon?”

“No, but—”

“Have you not read the stories? Everything I do, I do alone.”

I said, through gritted teeth, “Not anymore you don’t. Not ever again.”

You came closer to me, and I blinked rapidly, like a man staring at the sun. It was the first time in nine years I’d seen you in your full armor, and the sight of it struck me like a hammer to the skull. You were a hero stepped straight from myth, shining and true, and you were a mortal woman, scarred and weary, and God forgive me for trying so hard to separate the two.

You bowed your forehead to mine and said, softly, “Do not ask me to risk you, too.” Then, more desperately, “Stay.”

I tilted my face upward, brushing my lips against yours, and whispered, “Make me.”

In the end you made me carry your shield and ordered me to stay six paces behind you. I waited outside the shallow, stinking cavern while you ducked inside. I heard a hissing sound, the thrash of scale against stone, and then nothing. I waited for that awful, keening death cry, but it never came.

You emerged a few seconds later, bleeding freely from a scrape across your brow, grinning like a child with a stolen sweet. You tossed the grail to me, said, “Quickly, now,” and we ran together back down the mountainside.

Later, as we rode away from Cloven Hill, I asked, “Why did she want them all dead, do you think? The dragons, I mean.”

You snorted, cynically. “Because it kept a lot of restless young bastards busy, probably.” You shrugged, plate metal moving against my back. “Or because it made my story that much grander, if it was the very last one that I killed. Or only because they were—” You hesitated, casting about for the right words. “Out of her reach, beyond any law or border. To see a dragon in flight was to see something … free.”

I looked back at the hill once, as we made camp that evening. I thought I saw, through the shifting mist, the glint of white scales. A pair of pale wings, which arced briefly into the light and then vanished once more, beyond reach.

The weather turned on the way to Cavallon, as it always did. The high hills of the north flattened once more into low, wet farmland, the fields veiled now by scant, dirty snow. The wind slithered and bit as industriously as it ever did, chapping my lips and turning your cheeks a wild, profligate red— but this time we had the sheepskins, and each other.

On the coldest night we slept with the skins pulled over our heads. The air was black and close, and it smelled of sheep piss and sweat and the sharpening tang of arousal.

Our lovemaking had changed over those nine years in the woods, gentling into the easy, half-laughing sex of two people who know there will be a tomorrow and a tomorrow after that. But since we returned here, it had become desperate again, death-haunted, nearly violent.

I slid my hand between your thighs and pushed my fingers into you, not gently. You pulled my head back by the hair and set your teeth to my throat.

There would be bruises in the morning, and raised marks left by your teeth.

“Touch me,” I said. I tried to make an order of it, but the word left my lips on a gasp.

You bit me, hard. “Do it yourself.” You pulled my hand from between your legs and closed my wet fingers around my cock. You moved my fist up and down, mercilessly, in the rhythm I liked best, until my teeth were gritted from the effort of holding back.

“God, Una,” I breathed, and your hand loosened, just a little. Enough that I could grab your wrist and twist it, forcing you onto your stomach. I had not spent nine years—more, so many more—in the battlefield of our bed without learning a few tricks. Still, I think you let me.

I moved behind you, disarranging the sheepskins and not caring. I kneed your legs apart and pushed inside you. I went slow. Cruelly slow, punishingly slow, so that it might last forever, as nothing did—until you said, with a hitch in your voice, “Please.”

Neither of us lasted long after that. I bowed over your back and worked my hand beneath you and said, “Now, love, yes, that’s right,” and you cried out as you came.

Later, when our breathing had slowed and we were curled face to face beneath the sheepskins once more, I asked, somewhat plaintively, “Did you really sleep naked with your men, for warmth?”

“No.” A huff of laughter against my face. “Only with Ancel and his boy.”

I was jealous enough that I didn’t especially like this answer, but I comforted myself with the memory of his pretty dyed-blond head smacking on the throne room floor. Then I noticed that you had fallen quiet, and that you were breathing carefully, as though to keep back a sob.

I slipped my hand over your bare hip. “You … miss him?”

Slowly, you answered: “When Yvanne found me, I knew nothing of court, or of fine speech, or the tourneys where knights made their names.

She taught me some of it, but Ancel taught me the rest. He bullied me and mocked me, but he taught me. How to bow, how to speak, how to flirt, how to fuck.” I flinched, and you said, “He was my brother, Owen, or my brother-in-arms, or something else. I hated him and I loved him, often on the same day. Of course I miss him.”

I pruned the envy ruthlessly from my voice, until all that remained was grief, for your loss. “I’m sorry.”

Your hip moved beneath my hand, restless, agitated. “I still don’t understand it. How he could—that he would—”

“Murder you?” That came out a little too sharply; perhaps a little envy had survived. I imagined stamping it, nobly, beneath my boot. “Vivian— Yvanne—ordered him to do it. Would you have betrayed him, if she asked it of you?”

You were quiet for a long time. “No. I don’t know. But then, I was her favorite, and had nothing to gain by it. And … I loved her—even now, the habit of love still catches me sometimes, unawares.” You exhaled, began again: “I loved the queen, but I never loved her like Ancel did.” You shivered as you said it. After a while you said, so softly I wasn’t sure if you were speaking to me, or to yourself: “I will spare him this time, if I can.”

The last of my jealousy flaked like ash and drifted away. I pulled you close to me, so that your face settled between my collar and jaw. You cried then, in the humid dark. For yourself, I thought, who had been forged like a blade for a master you no longer served, and for Ancel of Ulwin, who served her still.

Cavallon rose on the horizon as it always did: gracefully, regally, so perfectly fulfilling my expectations for a castle that it might have been cut and pasted from the pages of The Legends of Una Everlasting: A Children’s Retelling of the Classic Tragedy! Which it had been, more or less: It was a castle as built by a woman who had only read about them in books, nine hundred years in the future.

Structurally, it was unsound. It had been constructed too hastily and too grandly, by conscripted prisoners and bewildered masons who’d never heard the words barrel vault in their lives. You’d told me about the cracks that formed in the mortar almost as soon as it was finished, wide enough to slip your hand inside. The curtain walls would fall well before Tilda the Younger’s reign, and the cellars would collapse soon after. By the time of Lysabet I they’d abandon the Keep altogether, in favor of a new capitol in the city.

But it didn’t matter. It only mattered how it had looked: impressive enough that bards had written of it in songs and people had spoken of it in awed whispers, and ministers and chancellors still sometimes described Dominion, poetically, as “the castle upon the hill.”

You sat once more on the low stone by the road, your eyes on the Keep.

I had braided your hair this time—stupid, to send you into battle with it loose—and tucked the braid neatly beneath your collar. Already the wind had worked a few tendrils loose from your temples.

I fished in my pocket for my second-to-last cigarette. I held it between my teeth as I drew my Saint Sinclair and flicked the cylinder open against

my palm. “You know the signal?”

“I know the signal.”

I checked the chambers carefully, spun the cylinder once and snapped it back into place. “And you’ll listen for it? You’ll come, no matter—”

“I swore to serve you, did I not?” Your eyes were still on the Keep, cold and yellow as the eyes of a lynx. “By my life and death.”

There was such ease in your voice that I said, sharply, “Only by your life, please.”

You didn’t answer. You only pulled yourself back into the saddle and settled your shield on your left arm. It shone a defiant, summer green against the drab winter sky.

You turned Hen to face the gates of Cavallon, and he pawed eagerly at the earth, his hoof digging great gouges into the dirt road.

“Soon, boy,” you said, and you were smiling.

OceanofPDF.com