The Everlasting — Chapter 24

24

SOMETIMES, WHEN WE passed through time, it reminded me of climbing the yew with you when we were children. I felt, or imagined I felt, ghostly branches against my palms, forking and dividing and rejoining endlessly. My brain’s puny attempt to make sense of the great tangle of history, I’d thought, by using a metaphor drawn from my own memory.

But it was not a metaphor. The book was the yew was time itself, and now I followed those branches down to the trunk, and then the roots, and then farther still, until I found the tiny, hard seed where everything began.

When we opened our eyes, we were not standing beneath the yew, because there was no yew. There were not even any woods, yet. It was just after daybreak, and the light poured eagerly, almost lavishly, over our faces, unobstructed.

We were lying together, face to face, upon a high, grassy knoll. The shape of the land was different—sharper, unsoftened by time—but I had walked these hills in too many centuries to fail to recognize them. In your era, they would be hidden beneath a thick green rime of trees. In mine, they would be shaved bare, sewn together by the neat stitches of railroad tracks.

Here, in the beginning of everything, there was only the long grass, rippling whitely in the wind, and the lavish yellow light, and the two of us.

I settled my head back into the pillow of the grass and looked at you. At the light which turned your armor to gold and your eyes to amber and your hair the piercing, perfect white of distant stars. In that moment you seemed to be everything at once, a series of contradictions: You were a knight with no master and a mother with no children; a manly woman and a womanly man; a hero whose name would be sung for a thousand years, and an orphan whose name had already been forgotten. You were Sir Ulla, who I had loved

long before my birth and long after your death, in the past and the future, and here, now. Always.

Your fingers tightened around mine, and I discovered that we were holding hands, and that our hands were dug strangely into the soil. Pressed between our palms was something small and smooth and wet, like a pearl.

I drew our tangled fingers from the earth and held the pearl up to the light. You gasped, softly, beside me. It was not a pearl, of course, but the thing we had come all this way to find, and to destroy: A seed, which would grow one day into the yew.

Every night of our journey north we had discussed it. How we might not only escape the endless wheel of our story but shatter it beyond repair. How we might survive its shattering, and what it might cost us.

In the end, we had come to this. We would find the fragile beginning of the yew tree and tear it out before it could take root. We would burn the book and the seed and strand ourselves forever in the ancient past.

The seed was a strange thing: glassy and red, like a jewel. It splintered the light and threw bloody shards over our faces.

A shadow fell across us. “That’s pretty.”

Both of us startled. We scrambled upright, spinning to face the figure. I grabbed for the book, which had been lying between us, and you went for Valiance.

But it was only a young woman—a girl, really, tall and fleshy, with a roughly spun dress and cheeks the ruddy pink of nail beds. She regarded us without alarm, hands clasped politely behind her back.

Your grip eased on your hilt, but I said, sharply, “Who are you?”

“No one and nothing.” The girl answered easily, her accent so odd to my ear it was difficult to understand the words. Then she frowned, as if remembering a dream she’d once had. “Though I think—I think I will become someone, one day. It’s only that I haven’t yet.” Her eyes fell to my fist, where I held the red seed of the yew. “What are you going to do with it?”

“Burn it,” I said, shortly. Every second it existed in the world was a second Vivian Rolfe might contrive to return to. I fumbled for a match and

drew the head against the heel of my boot. The girl gasped a little as the flame caught, like a child watching a street magician.

I set the book on the tousled grass and lifted a single page. I set it carefully alight, and then another, and another, until the book was lost behind a yellow bloom of flames. It was the second time I’d burned this damn book, and I meant it to be the last.

The wind came again up the knoll, and great gray flakes of ash lifted from the book and drifted upward, away. The fire burned hotter. Into the very center of it, where the flames were tipped with blue and white, I tossed the seed.

You watched it warily, almost fearfully, breathing hard. “When it’s gone, when it’s done, none of it will have happened.” You were holding yourself back from the very edge of hope, unwilling to feel it again. “The Black Bastion. Ancel. My fathers—”

I set my hand over yours, pressing silently. We would be stuck here forever. We would never see our fathers again, or anyone we had ever

known. But it was worth it.

“I don’t think it will burn.”

I startled again. I’d forgotten the girl was standing there, watching us.

She laughed. “It would be a great jest if it did. Imagine a dragon’s heart, burning!”

You said, so calmly that the question flattened into a statement, “A what.”

The girl bent down and plucked the seed from the ashes. You swore. I tried, too late, to stop her.

The girl ignored us both, rolling the seed fearlessly in her palm before handing it back to me. “See? It’s not even hot.”

I flinched as it touched my hand, but the girl was right: It was merely warm against my skin. “How … did you know?” I asked. And then again, more urgently, a nameless terror clamoring in my skull, “Who are you?”

“No one, I already told you.” The girl shrugged, and the wind carried her perfume to me. A sweet, summery smell, which I knew and refused to name. “And it was my—teacher, who taught me about dragons.”

“Your…” I’d heard someone hesitate in just that way before they said the word teacher. I remembered who it had been, and in remembering, I suddenly knew what her perfume smelled like, what it had always smelled like: ulla flowers.

I grabbed you by the pauldron and hauled you abruptly backward, away from the girl. “How did you do it? How the hell did you—shit.” I was searching for the silver knife, not finding it. Must have dropped it in the throne room. God, to have made it this far—to have the seed in my grasp and still not be free of her— Your head whipped back and forth, looking for a threat. “Owen, what

—”

“It’s her,” I spat. “Look.”

The girl stood watching us both with mild interest, hands still behind her back. She smiled at you—a good smile, friendly and white—and I felt a stillness fall over you. “No,” you said.

But it was obvious, now that I knew. Her hair was a little lighter, but would darken eventually to metal yellow. Her jaw was hidden by baby fat, but would one day harden into a perfect right angle. Only her eyes were unchanged: zealous, relentless, entirely devoid of doubt.

The girl smiled at me. “Hello, Cor-por-al.” She pronounced the word carefully, as if it were foreign to her.

My fist seized around the seed. “Hello, Vivian.”

The girl—who was not yet Vivian Rolfe, but would be one day—scrunched up her nose at the sound of her name. “I suppose so. I wish I will choose a better name, but I know I don’t.” She paused while her verb tenses slithered and bivouacked in my mind. “I remember it all, I do, but it’s a little … blurred. I’ve done it all so many times, and haven’t done it yet—well, you know.”

I did. Every time I returned to that day in my office—to my own natural lifespan—it grew worse. The memories multiplied, piling one atop the other until every voice was an echo and every gesture was familiar. The had-been

and will-be converged, swallowing the present, leaving nothing but confusion.

But Vivian had never once seemed confused. I looked at her again, more sharply. She stood so comfortably in the rough-woven dress, and those odd, archaic vowels came so easily to her tongue. She was younger by far than I’d ever seen her.

“You’re not from my era at all, are you? Originally, I mean.” It shouldn’t have taken me so long to suspect it. Vivian hadn’t suffered from the same circling amnesia because she’d so rarely returned to her own lifespan. I imagined Professor Sawbridge making a pained noise at my slowness. “You’re from here, from now.”

I’d promised you we would go back to the beginning, but where was the beginning of a circle? I felt that circle tightening now around my throat, like a noose.

“Yes,” said not-yet-Vivian. “Well, not here—I was born miles and miles away, one and twenty years past.” She was older than I’d thought, then. I had been misled by the softness of her face and belly, which slumped oddly beneath her dress. She looked over my shoulder and her eyes softened.

“Wilt thou kill me, then, daughter?”

I turned and discovered that your sword was braced across your forearm, the point aimed precisely toward the girl’s throat—but you weren’t moving. Your eyes cut once to me, and I saw turmoil in them. Here was the architect of all your misery: a sweet-faced child, defenseless and unarmed.

Here was your worst enemy, before she had committed any crime against you. Here was the egg, soft and pale, that came before the asp.

You waited, and I realized you were hoping I would make an order of it and absolve you—but I wouldn’t.

When you’d knelt in the woods and handed your heart to me hilt first, as if you were nothing but a weapon, I’d made an oath of my own: never to wield you like one.

Into the silence, not-yet-Vivian said, “Look at you. So grand, with your silver sword and your silver armor. And tall—even taller than me!” She laughed, but hiccuped halfway through. “Do they sing songs about you?

They do, I know they do, for I made it so.” There was a sudden, disconcerting sheen to her eyes.

The point of your sword wavered. “Tell it all to me, first. Tell me how— I came to be.” You were buying time, perhaps. Or perhaps not—what would I ask my own mother, if I could speak to her? “I don’t even know your name.”

The girl blinked the sheen away. “No? But—you must know all of them, by now. Yvanne, Tilda, Lysabet, Vivi—”

“Your true name. The one you were born to.”

“Oh.” She frowned a little. “But I wasn’t born to anything. My mother and father were midden-rats who lived on scraps and offal. I was Brat or Babe. I was Another-Mouth-to-Fill, before they sold me. My teacher called me other things when he bought me for his household. I was Girl and then Clever Girl and then Sweet Girl.” She smiled shyly as she said it, as if she were bragging. Then her lips flattened, and her tone turned older and more world-wise. “And then, of course, I was Cunt, there at the end.”

She didn’t say anything further, and you didn’t ask. I sighed a little. All these years together, and you still hadn’t learned how to pull a story from someone. “And who was he? Your teacher.”

“Oh, a great man,” the girl answered eagerly, as if it mattered. As if a person might call you any name he liked, so long as he was great. “A king!

Or at least, what passed for a king, before I came along. He conquered a pretty piece of land in his youth, and in his old age he set himself to conquer higher things. Mathematics, astronomy, history, alchemy. Life and death. Time, above all. I was only his fetch-and-sweep girl, at first, another no one in his hall—but I didn’t remain so. I refused.” Her chin lifted, and I could see the hard line of her jaw through the fat. “I had no letters or numbers when I came to his service, but I saw that they were precious to him, and so I learned them. Just by watching and listening and stealing scraps he abandoned. The work it took, the will—for years I studied late into the night, slapping myself to stay awake.” She cast you an odd look, resentful and proud. “You had help. You had someone to make you what you are, someone to guide you, but I had to do it myself. I was alone, always.”

You said, in a voice like a whetstone, “So was I.” Everything I have done, I have done alone.

“Oh? And yet every time you die, I have to pull this man off you like a leech from a wound.” There was the Vivian I knew, suddenly visible, the asp moving in its leathery egg. She ducked her head, a mere girl again.

“And if you were sometimes lonely—it made you strong, as it made me strong.” There was compassion in her voice, but no regret. To regret would be to doubt, and Vivian had never once doubted herself.

The wind rushed over us all, laying the grass low and pressing the girl’s skirt against her legs. There was a funny-colored stain just above her knees, still damp. She continued, unprompted, “But he was a great man, as I said, and very busy. He didn’t notice me until I made him. He left his slate lying on the workbench one day with a calculation unfinished. I finished it for him. He came storming into the kitchens where we slept, kicking us from our nests and asking who had meddled with his work. He was so angry— until he saw me.” A memory so sweet she had to close her eyes. “He looked me over. He checked my teeth and pinched the fat of my arms. He called me clever, and I never slept in the kitchens again.”

I wondered where she had slept instead. I wondered how old she had been. I swallowed, and it tasted foul. “And so, the king became your … teacher?”

I left the same pause before the word that she had, and the girl gave me a wary, furtive look. “He would not have called himself such. But what else should I call him? Master, though it was I who mastered him, in the end?

Majesty, when I had seen him panting and stupid, brought lower than a rutting dog?” She snorted. Both you and I flinched. “No. I call him teacher, for he taught me so many things.”

Your sword sagged until it pointed at her knees, rather than her throat. I glanced at your face and found it startled, almost fearful, as if Vivian was undergoing some hideous transformation, and you were no longer sure

whether she was villain or victim.

I asked, “What did he teach you?”

“He taught me of the past, first. He read me holy scripture and ancient myths and showed me how to tell truth from myth. The Savior was his

particular obsession: The man who died, yet lived again. The mortal who became God.”

“Next, he taught me of the future. About ambition, which is the future on purpose.” Her voice had a sing-song rhythm to it, as of a child reciting a lesson they’d learned by rote. “I had plenty of ambition, I thought. I wanted to eat the next day. I wanted to survive to see my next spring. But my teacher wanted … more.”

She paused again, and it was you who prompted her this time. “What more could a king want?”

Not-yet-Vivian cast you a patronizing look, incongruous on her young face. “What does every king want? To stay king.” She looked between us and spoke in the slow, overloud voice shopkeepers sometimes used with me when they thought I was foreign. “He was old, I told you. Soon, his crown would be someone else’s. His story would end. His name might be remembered for a time, but he’d studied history well enough to know that nothing that lives lasts forever.” Her head tilted. Her eyes fell to my closed fist. “Save, perhaps, dragons.”

The seed felt suddenly hot in my hand. I unclenched my fingers. “He made a study of them. He had them caught and staked, carved and pickled.

And eventually he found … that.” She nodded at the seed in my palm, and I saw it doubled in her eyes, like a small red spark. “A seed, hidden in the heart of every dragon, which burns on even after their death. He thought it was something to do with their life cycle—when a dragon dies, a tree grows from its heart. And one day, when the tree is grown, the dragon will be reborn, curled around the trunk. But he didn’t want more dragons.” A shrug.

“He wanted more time.”

“That’s why you hunted them all down, then.” I remembered, so vividly I could almost hear it, that long, keening cry as the last dragon died. “So that no one else would discover what your teacher had.”

“Yes, of course, but please don’t interrupt. I’m still doing my list,” said not-yet-Vivian, crossly. “He taught me the past, and the future—and he taught me what it cost.” One hand came out from behind her back and clutched, convulsively, at the flesh of her stomach. “We studied that seed for months and months. Then one morning he woke me with a cup of sour

tea. I drank it, and he explained that he’d solved the puzzle long ago. He said all he needed was a heart—but a heart that had never been born. A soul, misplaced in time.”

My eyes fell to the stain on her skirt, crusted and glossy. At the rucked fabric where her hand had fisted over her empty belly. It had been recent, I thought. Only hours ago, although she told the story like a distant memory.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“You’re quicker than me.” Her voice had gone clipped and modern, less youthful. “I didn’t understand what he meant until the bleeding started.”

You asked, blankly, “The bleeding?” and I wanted to press my hands over your ears.

She ignored you. “The hell of it was, I would have drunk that tea myself. I would have drunk arsenic if he’d asked it of me.” She laughed, blackly. “But he didn’t ask, did he? He didn’t have to. I wasn’t his student or his daughter or his lover or even his whore, not really. I was only his.

And he hadn’t chosen me because I had wits and ambition. He’d chosen me because I had most of my teeth and a working womb.”

The sun was high enough now that it was difficult to look directly at the girl who would become Vivian Rolfe. She was a shadow, a hole torn neatly in the sky, which told us a terrible story. “You were born still in the caul,” said the shadow. “Tiny and curled up, like the fiddlehead of a fern. But dead, of course.” At my side, you began to shake. “Remember that—you were born dead. Every breath you’ve drawn since then, every second you’ve lived, was a gift, which I gave you.”

I stepped stupidly in front of you, as if I could shield you, as if I could catch the words before they found you. Your breath at my back was uneven, too fast.

The shadow continued. “A necessary sacrifice, he called you, in exchange for greatness. I told him I would be great, too, one day, and he couldn’t imagine it. He laughed at me—laughed! While I held our little dead daughter! Then he kissed my brow and told me to go to sleep, and so”—the shadow shrugged—“I killed him.”

You said, like a woman holding fast to one guiding star in thick fog, “Good.”

“Yes,” said the shadow. “I should have done it sooner, probably, but I loved him so. Another thing he taught me: There is nothing a person will not endure, for love.” A lesson she had passed down to her daughter. Who is free, who loves another?

“And then?” I asked. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know, but you did, and the sun was hot on my face and my legs were tired and I wanted, badly, to be through with this.

“And then I came here. It’s a pretty place, and far from my teacher’s holdings. I buried you and planted the seed in your chest—your heart was so small it was difficult to find, like the pit of a cherry—and then I waited.”

A flash of white in the shadow’s face: teeth, curved in a sharp smile. “And then came the yew, and then came everything else.”

Your voice, when it came, was thin and unsure. You had lost sight of your star and were drifting now in the mist. “My fathers said they found me as a baby, laid at the foot of the yew.”

“Your—the woodcutter and his beau, you mean?” Odd, to hear slang from my own era on the lips of an ancient queen. “They didn’t lie to you.

They weren’t clever enough for lies. They were simple men, but … good, I thought. Caring. Another gift I gave you, which no one ever gave me.”

Another jealous lash there, as if you owed her, as if children were born indebted to their parents.

You waited, unspeaking. Eventually Vivian—she was all Vivian, now, the asp unfurled—said, “I didn’t know, when I buried you, whether I would ever see you again. But one day, when the yew was full grown, there you were among the roots. Just the same as you’d been when I buried you— except you were alive. And your hair, and your eyes…” A flash of teeth.

“Well. I did not choose your device by accident.”

“It’s not her device any longer,” I said. The words scraped against one another like stones on a riverbed.

I still couldn’t see Vivian’s features clearly, but her shadow clucked its tongue. “A sweet gesture, I’m sure, but she’s worn my colors for centuries, and she’ll wear them for centuries more, I promise you.”

You said, suddenly sure of yourself again, “I will not.”

The shadow stamped its foot. “Ungrateful, that’s what you are. Don’t you see what I’ve done for you? I named you. I trained you. I loved you.

And oh, I was so patient with you! When you fell in battle, we began again.

When you shattered your sword, I brought you a new one. When you were heartbroken, I brought you him.” In the many monologues I’d heard Vivian Rolfe deliver, I don’t think she’d ever truly lost control. Every emotion she showed was a calculation, a mask presented for a purpose. But now her voice rose and fell erratically, pleading and scolding, childish and horribly ancient. “I made you—you the fetus, you the dead thing which died before it could even be named—into a knight. A champion, a hero, a saint, a legend—I made you someone who could never, ever be forgotten.” She stepped sideways a little, so that the sun touched her face, and she was suddenly not a shadow but a girl, crying freely, her accent veering back toward the archaic. “Everything that was denied to me, I gave to thee.”

“Yes,” I drawled, purposefully dry. “Before you killed her.”

Vivian’s eyes narrowed at me. “He killed her first,” she snapped. “And I couldn’t save her or change it. I can’t go back further than this moment, when I first buried the seed. I can’t undo anything that was done to me, or that I have done up till now.” How that must eat at her: To have mastery over the whole of history, but not her own. “She was sacrificed before she was born. It’s what she’s for.”

She stepped closer to me. “But look what I have built in her honor.”

Vivian’s voice turned rich and smooth. Her radio voice, which had driven men to war and children to factories. “On her altar, I built a kingdom, a nation, an empire. Though it took centuries upon centuries of work—though even my champion abandoned me, and forswore herself—still I built it, stone by stone. You’re a soldier, aren’t you?” That slight vagueness in her eyes, as she struggled to remember the future. “And a student of history.

Who better to judge my work? Can you look at what I’ve made, Owen Mallory, and say truly that it was not worth the death of one woman?”

“One woman?” I asked, softly. “Are you quite sure of your math?” They assembled silently in my mind, her generations of sacrifices, so that you and I shrank and shrank, invisible among the suffering crowd.

Vivian had opened her mouth to answer, but I cut her off. “Say it’s true, for the sake of argument. Say all it cost was the endless torment of one person. What is it that you have built, exactly?”

Vivian answered, in a kind of bewilderment, “Dominion.”

But the Dominion I’d believed in as a boy—the castle on the hill, the ivory paradise to which I might one day ascend, if I was loyal and docile and good—was obscured to me now. Instead, I saw a throne teetering atop a stack of bones. An appetite, unslaked. A nation obsessed with a past that had never existed, in memory of a queen who had never died.

But even if Dominion had been a paradise—I stole a glance back at you, bloodied but still standing, gold limned in the rising dawn—I suspected my answer would have been the same.

“No,” I said, easily. “It’s not worth it.” I pinched the little red seed between thumb and forefinger. “And so, I’m afraid … this is it. We’re through.” This sounded somewhat melodramatic, so I clarified, “I don’t know how to destroy this thing yet, but surely you know we will not let you plant it in your daughter’s heart.”

“Well, no.” Vivian agreed, so easily that the hairs stood up on my arms.

“I gave her a decent burial, this time. I planted my favorite flower over her grave.” This she said proudly, even defiantly. “My teacher says they’re common, but I always loved the smell of them.”

I recalled the sweet summery scent that Vivian wore in every era and felt a sick twist of pity. “Why did you bury her, this time?”

“Because I don’t need her anymore. Because you came. You always do.”

Her eyes lifted from mine and found yours, and there was no doubt in them at all. Her faith in you was the faith a smith might feel for his favorite hammer, or a hunter for his best hound: pure, without flaw. “A heart that hasn’t been born. A soul misplaced in time. Very soon now you’re going to put that sword through your heart, and then I’m going to plant the seed in your body. And it will grow and grow, watered by your blood, fed by your rot, until one day a woodcutter finds a babe beneath the yew, and it begins again.”

The words hung for a moment, spectral, prophetic, and then you said, gently, almost wonderingly, “No, I will not.”

Then came the whip of metal through air, followed by a biting crunch. I flinched, but you’d only driven Valiance into the earth. You took your hand from the hilt and stepped back. “I will not be your tragedy or your sacrifice, ever again. I will not die for you.”

It was then—as you stood clear-eyed, shoulders back, like a woman loosed from a long confinement, like a saint who had torn herself down from the church wall and now walked free, among the mortal—that Vivian struck.

Her motions were eerily smooth, inhumanly fast, as though she’d practiced them a thousand times. Maybe she had. Maybe we’d made it here before, over and over, and stood on the very cusp of freedom before she dragged us back down.

Vivian’s foot found the back of my leg, so that I collapsed down to my knees. Her left hand fisted in my hair as I fell, and her right hand held a slim silver blade to my throat.

“I know,” she said to you, conversationally. “But you’ll die for him.”

The knife nipped into my neck, parting the silver knots of my scars, coming to rest against the fragile sheath of my carotid. If her hand twitched, if I turned my head so much as three degrees to the left or right, I would be dead.

You hadn’t moved, but I watched emotions move like seasons over your face: terror into fury into grief into vacant weariness. Had you ever truly believed we’d escaped, or had you been waiting, like a loosed hawk, for the falconer to call you back to her fist?

A trickle of blood pooled in the hollow where my clavicles met. The earth dampened the knees of my trousers. I had been here before, I thought; the body remembers.

In remembering, I discovered that I knew exactly what would happen next.

Very soon you would reach again for your sword. You would turn it awkwardly in your hands. The hilt would be too far away even for your long reach, and so you would hold it by the bare blade, pommel slanted

down toward the earth. Then you would fall, and I would watch you, and in a hundred years or a thousand, in my time or in yours, we would meet again beneath the yew.

There was no such thing as fate, but this was ours.

Even if we remembered again—and we would—we would only find ourselves back here, caught in the same endless, unsolvable equation.

It would never stop because Vivian would never be satisfied. She had paid the price herself once, for a king’s ambition. She had killed him, but instead of casting his crown into the mud, she had claimed it for herself.

And now she wanted what any king wanted: to stay king, no matter the cost.

And it would be you who paid it, who would never stop paying it.

Because you loved me, and in loving me, you would never be free.

Dizzily, sickly, in a long string of metaphors, I saw everything we could make of love: chains, debts, cages, circles. And, too, I saw everything it could make of us: tragedies, traitors, madmen, cowards.

Your hand was closing now around your hilt. Your eyes were the dull yellow of dead pine, and your limbs moved as if they had strings affixed at every joint.

I thought suddenly of my father, and of the mother I’d never met. Of Professor Sawbridge and even of Ancel, at the very end.

Vivian had made a mistake in her calculations, I thought. For sometimes —when we could not run any longer, when all our choices had been whittled down to one—love made heroes of us.

I felt my own hands resting placidly on my thighs. They were not shaking at all, because I wasn’t afraid. I was only relieved, hugely and guiltily, that I wouldn’t have to watch you die again—and I was sorry. For the children.

Let me write their names here, just once. They’re only a dream, now, of the future that will never come to pass, but I won’t have them forgotten.

Marro. Our son, named for the river where my mother died.

Thea. Our daughter, named for one of your fathers.

I smiled up at you, my neck arched unnaturally by Vivian’s clawed grip.

I smiled at the wild bone-white tangle of your hair—God, I would miss

your hair—and at the great grim shape of your shoulders. At the age lines that puckered the corners of your eyes so sweetly, and the scar that bit through your left pupil. You had survived so much. You would survive this, too.

That deep furrow appeared between your brows. It asked, plainly: What the hell are you doing?

I kept my eyes on yours. I neither blinked nor flinched; I was no coward. Setting you free, love.

Then I turned my head, hard and fast, three degrees to the left.

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