The Everlasting — Chapter 4

4

WINTER SUNLIGHT, THIN and crosshatched. Air so fresh it burned in the lungs, like gunpowder. Branches circled all around, bowed low with frost.

I concluded—reluctantly, against all reason—that I was no longer in the office of Vivian Rolfe.

I was in the woods, with one hand pressed tight to the trunk of a tree so huge it seemed built rather than grown, a cathedral of bark and sap.

Despite my cowardly and flinchful nature, I’d never actually fainted, and I did not faint then. But I found that my thoughts were coming slowly and effortfully, as if they were climbing a steep hill.

I thought: It’s summer. But my breath rose in milky clouds and my sweat had chilled to a gelid film beneath my coat. It was cold—the deep, rheumatic cold of midwinter—and I did not like the cold.

I thought: I don’t know where I am. But I did. I knew the muscled shape of the bark beneath my hand and the striations of light that fell between the needles. I knew the brilliance of the berries hanging like red bells from the branches and the weight of the air on my eardrums, hushed and heavy.

This was the grove, my grove, though I’d been miles and miles away from Queenswald. This was the old tree, my tree—the one I had run to as a boy, which had been my castle, my refuge, my only-good-place—though it had been cut down years ago.

I thought: What’s that awful sound? A pitiful, sniveling whimpering. I took a breath and the sound stopped, and then I thought: Oh.

I looked at my left hand, which I had so far carefully avoided, and saw Vivian’s letter opener—actually a slim, sharp knife—still buried between

my second and third knuckles. The pain immediately tripled, as if it had been waiting for my attention.

Unsteadily, praying I didn’t choose this moment to faint for the first time, I braced myself against the tree and used my right hand to draw out the blade. I made a mess of it, of course—my damn hands were shaking again—and was relieved there was no one around to hear the sounds I made.

I leaned against the great trunk of the tree, waiting for the tremors to recede. My thoughts now were loud but inscrutable, like the static between radio stations or the noise of a crowd. It was easier to make sense of my body: My hand hurt. My feet were cold. The skin on the back of my neck

was tight and prickling, as if— As if someone was watching me.

I turned slowly. Something drew a bright, stinging line from the hollow beneath my ear to the column of my throat.

The tip of a sword. It came to rest over the knot of my larynx. I swallowed and felt my flesh part easily, almost eagerly, like the skin of an overripe plum.

My eyes moved up the blade, refusing to make sense of the whole, seeing only scattered details. The long, long edge of the blade, sharpened almost to invisibility; lettering etched into the surface, illegible at this angle; the hilt braced crosswise on a mailed forearm. A cloak the color of a picked scab hanging from a truly vast pair of shoulders, capped in shining, scarred metal.

And, above everything: A face that I knew better than my own.

A face I had seen in penny papers and fine oil paintings, in terrible street theater and political cartoons and every night in my dreams. A face I had feared and coveted and envied since I was nine years old.

Later, I would wonder how I was so sure, because none of those artists had done you justice.

They had shied from the sheer scale of you, narrowing the great sweep of your shoulders, tapering your wrists and waist. They had made your face smooth and poreless, forever youthful, when in truth it was pocked and wind-burnt, with heavy lines carved between the brows. Your hair was not

the sulfuric yellow of a Saint of Dominion, but the stark white of a snapped bone. A thick welt of scar fell through your left brow and into the eye beneath it, so that the pupil was misshapen, elongated into a black tear.

You did not look like any kind of angel. Yet still, I knew you.

“Una,” I said, and could not imagine why I’d addressed you so informally. I tried again, voice cracking. “Sir Una Everlasting.”

Your eyes—not blue, never blue, but a dark, resinous gold, like burnt sap—did not flicker. You spoke, but it took several moments for me to parse the words. I’d rarely heard Middle Mothertongue spoken aloud, and I was distracted by the sound of your voice, deep and cool and familiar.

You said, “Drop the knife.” And then, “Drop the damn knife, boy.”

I tried—although privately I thought thirty was a decade past the time when anyone was pleased to be called boy—but my hand was so far away from my body, and so hard to see through the narrowing tunnel of my vision.

It was only when my cheek hit the earth, the wire of my spectacles biting into the bridge of my nose, that I realized I had—for the first time in my life—fainted.

My last, petulant thought was that my father had been wrong: It was the perfect weather for my service coat, after all.

The next time I opened my eyes, I was somewhere else again. This, I thought, would quickly grow tiresome.

I was indoors now, rather than out, but the line between the two seemed uncomfortably thin. Starlight fell through ragged thatch. One of the walls had sloughed away, revealing bare wattle. Coals hissed on a dirt floor, smoky and sullen.

And crouched across from me, regarding the coals with a vexed expression, was the founding myth of my nation. I’d thought I imagined you.

But you sat as any soldier might on a long night’s watch: straight spined, red-eyed, a little grim. The armor was mostly missing now, except for the pauldrons capping those immense shoulders, the straps crossing over the

quilted wool of your chest. Your hair was half loosed, hanging over your collar in a rough white skein. At your temples I could see the faint tarnish of true silver.

It unsettled me greatly, that tiny, pedestrian evidence of your mortality.

You had always been ageless and hale in my mind, like one of those creatures preserved perfectly in amber at the peak of its health. Now you looked dangerously exposed, vulnerable to the ordinary violence of time in a way that made my chest constrict.

I looked at your hands instead. Broad and veined, scarred so thickly in some places the skin tugged the fingers at odd angles. I watched the play of firelight over the knots of your knuckles, and all the questions I’d been trying not to ask myself—where was I, when was I, had I gone finally, fantastically mad, et cetera—fell away. I have always liked your hands.

You looked sharply up at me. You were already frowning—a stern, weary expression you’d worn often enough to wear a deep furrow between your brows—but now you scowled.

“Something amuses you?” you asked, which caused me to become aware that I was smiling, somewhat doltishly.

I stopped. “No. My apologies.”

I sat up, discovering that stiff, rank furs had been piled over me, and that my hand had been bound roughly with linen. I flexed it once and sucked air between my teeth.

“Do you write with the sinister hand?” The question suggested concern, but your voice was flat and gray as gunmetal.

“What? Oh.” I switched to Middle Mothertongue, the words welling up easily. “I’m right-handed. I’ll be fine.”

“A shame,” you said, coldly.

I looked up in time to see you move. It was a fluid, muscular gesture, almost too fast to follow, which resulted in something arcing over the coals toward me. I fumbled the catch and had to scrabble to keep it out of the fire: the book, again.

My hand spasmed around it. The last time I’d touched this book I’d been flattered, then frightened, then stabbed and transported—here. (I was

too clever not to know where—and when—here was, but too much of a coward to let myself think the words.) You were watching me closely with those mismatched eyes. When you were not moving you were inhumanly still, as if you had been carved rather than born. “How did you find me? I would swear no one tracked me from Cavallon Keep.” Still that chilly, taut voice. I had the worrisome impression of a fraying leash.

“No,” I said carefully, “I did not track you from the Keep.”

“You are geweth, then?”

“Pardon?”

“Then how?” Another thread or two snapped in your voice. “How far must I run before I am free of you? When I go to Hell, shall scribes and bards wait at the gates like carrion birds?”

“I’m not a bard or a scribe. If that helps.”

Your brows went flat. You looked pointedly at the book in my arms. “I am no great scholar, boy, but I recognize my own device.”

“Ah.” My hand spasmed again on the cover. I wondered if you had opened the cover, and if you were literate enough to read the title. “I can see how you would think—but it’s not—well, I suppose it is, but—”

“All my life men like you have followed me.” You were dangling now by a single thread. “Hounding me, lapping up the blood and begging for more. You have turned all my graves into glory, all my carnage into pretty songs they sing at court.”

“That’s very … vivid, but I’m telling you I’m not—”

The leash snapped. Suddenly you were on your feet and that enormous bastard of a blade—the most famous sword in the whole of history, the sword every child in Dominion had pretended to wield, swishing sticks at nothing—was back at my throat. The hilt was long enough for at least one- and-a-half hands, but you held it steadily in one, tendons corded around your wrist. It occurred to me, with a queer shiver, that you must have carried me from the yew to this cottage, and that you wouldn’t have found it difficult at all.

The point of the sword dipped lower, settling in the scarred hollow between my collarbones. And yet, your expression was not angry, after all.

It was—lost. Bewildered. Afraid, almost, as if you were a stranger to yourself. I felt I’d seen that look before, though I couldn’t say where.

“Liar,” you said. “I know your face. I know your voice. I’ve seen you at court, or the tourneys, watching me—but no more. I’m finished.” There was a sheen over the sap of your eyes, and I thought you would probably kill me rather than let me see you cry.

I should have been terrified, reaching for the revolver at my hip—but I wasn’t. I was perfectly calm, as if I’d seen this play before and already knew my character survived.

I resettled my spectacles. They were bent slightly out of shape. “Listen to me. I am not a bard or a scribe. I am Lance Corporal Owen Mallory of the 2nd Battalion, a shit soldier and a decent historian. I was sent here from”—I paused there, lingering in this last moment of sanity and order —“the distant future, to record your story and—somewhat indirectly, I suppose—save Dominion.”

“Oh,” you said, after a pause. You sounded strangely contrite. “I beg pardon. You are mad.”

You sheathed your sword with another of those inhumanly quick gestures and did not speak to me the rest of the night, no matter what I said or did.

The next time I woke the fire was dead and the sky was pale. I wasn’t sure whether the sun ever properly rose here, or if it merely slunk, catlike, between the branches.

There was frost in my hair and on the lenses of my spectacles. My throat was raw. I’d talked and talked to you, while the coals rusted into ash and the stars brightened, and you had ignored me politely, as you would ignore a drunk or a street-corner preacher. Sometime in the blue hours before dawn I’d given up, tucking myself sullenly back under the bad-smelling furs. I had fallen asleep watching your face, baffled and irritated and strangely,

childishly content.

I was alone, now.

I scrabbled out from under the furs and ducked beneath the sagging lintel. I was no longer within sight of the yew but in a nearby clearing that —in my boyhood—had contained nothing but brambles and goosegrass.

Now there was the cottage behind me, which already had one foot firmly in the grave, and an enormous blood-bay gelding, which had at least three.

He reminded me of the skeletons they displayed in the Royal Museum, or a tarp draped over a stack of chairs. His spine protruded tumorously from his back, and his muzzle was the color of dust, or dull knives.

He fixed me with a rheumy eye and peeled back both lips, revealing teeth so long and yellow they might have been whittled from pine.

A voice said: “Be easy.”

It was you, ducking beneath the horse’s neck and running a palm over the ladder of his rib cage. You wore no armor now, but only plain wool beneath that scabrous cloak, which ought to have been a proud Dominion red, but was actually a middling, stained brown. “He’s harmless.”

“I’m sure,” I said, and understood from your expression that you had not been speaking to me.

You spent another moment communing with your horse, or at least his remains, before crossing to a downed log and laying several limp, furred bodies over the wood. Your knife flashed and dipped, peeling them easy as apples.

I lit a cigarette before the smell of blood could reach me. I ought to ration them, but I’d already whimpered, fainted, and babbled in front of the nation’s greatest hero, and I was rather hoping not to vomit, too. I slouched in the doorway and blew out a long stream of smoke, which rose, switchbacking into the sky. Your eyes followed it.

I twiddled the cigarette at you, obnoxiously. “Lucky Stars. Half sawdust, half tar, a testament to modern manufacturing. Uncommon in this era, I imagine.”

I didn’t know how well I was making myself understood. My mouth produced the odd vowels and archaic syntax of Middle Mothertongue with unnerving ease, as if it had been waiting in some unlit corner of my skull, but I wasn’t sure dry condescension had been invented yet.

Apparently it had, because you made a sound that would be described as a snort in anyone who was not a mythic hero. The little corpses, now stripped pink, steamed faintly in your hands.

“What about these, then?” I tapped my spectacles, now slightly

misshapen.

No response.

I fished around in my jacket and brandished the revolver at you, somewhat rashly. “How about this? It’s called a gun. See the stamp, just here? The mark of a genuine Saint Sinclair, the finest munitions maker in Dominion.” Still nothing. My voice rose a half octave, whistling through my macerated larynx. “It’s a deadly modern weapon of war. If I pointed it at you, and pulled this little bit here, you would be dead before you could say ‘anachronism.’”

You looked at the revolver briefly, with the tolerant curiosity of a parent being shown a snail shell or a shiny rock, then looked down again. You didn’t say anything.

I put the gun away. “Test me, then. Ask me whatever you like. I know everything that’s ever happened to you.”

That got me a wry, sad smile. “Who doesn’t?”

I have no real temper to speak of—I rarely raise my voice and frequently apologize to people who cut in front of me in queues—but I found a nervy anger rising in me. I had dedicated my life to the legend of Una Everlasting. It was you who sent me to war and you who brought me back, you who stalked my dreams and consumed my days.

And now here you were, the object of all my reverence: a weary, hard- weathered woman who would not even look at me.

I flicked ash forcefully over the threshold. “And do they know everything that will happen? Because I do.”

Your hands went briefly still, fingers cradling an animal skull.

I pressed into the stillness. “Where are you in your story? You’re not young, so you’ve already defeated the False Kings and won the crown for Yvanne. Some of the tales make mention of a ‘great injury’ during the First Crusade—was that your eye?” A hot, uneven glare that I interpreted as a yes. “So. You’re hunting the last dragon, then, and the grail.”

Now you looked away. You staked the animals neatly along the spine and nestled them into the coals of another sullen fire. “It is no secret,” you said, after too long a pause to appear casual. “The Queen did command it so before the whole court.”

“But then—what are you doing here? This isn’t where you find it.”

“And I suppose you, a madman, know where the last dragon dwells?” you drawled, removing all doubt about the existence of dry condescension.

“Yes,” I answered promptly, and was pleased by the fractional widening of your eyes. “It was a subject of some debate—Lazamon’s map was the only record, and he was famously unreliable—but they found the bones in Lysabet I’s reign, and that settled it.” I paused, eyes narrowing. “If you don’t already know where it is … shouldn’t you be out there looking?”

I felt as if the machine of my brain was finally grinding into motion again, after stalling out from sheer shock. Assuming I had truly fallen through time to the era of Una Everlasting and was not suffering a colorful mental breakdown—what were you doing in the woods outside of Queenswald, huddling in the remains of some poor peasant’s hovel? In the ballads and books, you struck forth with pure heart and fiery eye, praying to the Savior to guide your feet true.

Your expression had not changed, but somehow—by the bend of your shoulders or the angle of your neck, by the way your eyes fled from mine— I knew: “You’re not looking for it at all, are you. You’ve abandoned the quest.” My voice was high, a hoarse accusation. “You can’t. You’re supposed to—you must—”

“Only one person has the ordering of me.” Said sharply, with one lip peeled up to reveal the white tip of a tooth. “And she is not here.”

“The queen, you mean.” That nervy anger was sharpening, edged with disgust that felt outsized, misdirected. “The queen whose death would mean the end of Dominion. The queen who called for you—her champion, her right hand—as she lay dying?”

“And I answered, as I ever have!” You were on your feet, striding toward me, hands balled into red fists. I was taller than most men, but you stood head and shoulders over me, glaring down at me in a way that made my palms hot.

“Though I swore I would never again ride to battle, I rode out that very night, for her.” Your voice was low and viperous. “Though I had put my sword aside, I took it up once more, for her. Though the hope of the grail is no more than the echo of an echo, the whisper of a whisper—I have scoured the countryside since midsummer. For her.”

I did not retreat or look away, although I felt the force of your furious despair like a battering wind. I saw your eyes move to my throat, where my pulse beat fast and uneven.

Shame chased the wildness from your face. You took a deliberate step back. The muscles of your jaw rolled before you said, stiffly, “That is three times now I have frightened you. Forgive me. I sometimes—forget myself.”

You unclenched your hands with an effort so visible I expected to hear cartilage popping.

You continued evenly, almost formally, “I have searched, and I have failed. I came here because I had not returned to this place since”—a pause, a drawing up of your shoulders—“the day my fathers were slain. Though I have dreamed of it, these many years.”

These sentences slotted into my mind like keys into locks. I badly wanted a pen and paper. Ha, I would write, and also Eat it, Harrison, because I was now the only living scholar who could definitively state the location of Una Everlasting’s childhood home.

But there were other things I would not write down, like the wistful pang I felt at the idea that you and I had played beneath the branches of the same tree, separated only by a millennium. I would leave out the plural fathers, too, which had never been in the books or ballads, and which bewildered me; I’d had a vague conviction that homosexuality was a recent invention, symptomatic of modernity, or at least boarding schools.

And, of course, I would not mention the dreams; a courtesy, from one madman to another.

I prompted, carefully, “And why have you stayed?”

You were quiet for so long I thought you wouldn’t answer. You busied yourself at the fire again, the flames hidden by the slab of your cloaked shoulders.

Then you said, “Because it is quiet here, where there is no one to bid me rise or kneel. Because I can sleep, at least some nights, and I am so damn tired.” You pulled a charred body from the coals and studied it. “Because, for weeks now, I have butchered only animals.”

That lost, fearful expression had returned to your face, as if you had been walking for a long time in a country you did not know under stars you could not name. As if you had forgotten where you had meant to go in the first place, and no longer believed it was worth it.

I knew, suddenly, where I’d seen that look before: in my father’s eyes when he sobered up and in my own mirror every morning. It was the look of a coward, a turncoat, someone with a crack running down the center of them, so that all the honor and courage ran out and left nothing but shaky hands and bad dreams behind.

And I knew, too, why Vivian Rolfe had called me to her office. Why she had slipped her blade between my knuckles and sent me tumbling into the past. It wasn’t because of my articles or my Medal of Valor or my uncommon grasp of dead languages.

I wasn’t here to translate or transcribe your story; I was here to make

sure there was a story to tell.

She needs you, Vivian had said.

You had lost your way. And I—who knew every turn and twist in your journey, every step you must and would take—was your compass.

I crouched at your left side, near enough that you turned your head sharply. I wondered if you had learned to guard your blind side yet, or if it still startled you, the way I was still taken unawares by the frailty of my voice.

I held myself motionless, palms loose, trying desperately to assemble the right words. I wished I could retire to my office for a week and return with a typewritten speech. I wished for the first time that I were more like my father, who never stuttered or second-guessed.

Eventually I began: “I know you don’t believe me. I don’t blame you, really. But imagine I was telling the truth. Imagine I really had seen Dominion nearly a thousand years from now—still strong, and growing stronger, all because of the foundation laid by you and Yvanne. Imagine I

could tell you that all of this—the fighting and the killing, everything you’ve done—is worth it?” It was not possible to say the words without thinking of Colonel Drayton: of his big pink jowls and his big pink hands, the way he clapped us on the back as if we were choking on our dinners and the way he looked at me just before he died.

I dragged again on the cigarette, although it had burned down nearly to my knuckles.

I went on: “Every queen since Yvanne has worn the crown you won her.

Every war since the First Crusade has been fought beneath your flag. The highest military decoration is named after you, for God’s sake, and do you know what they call the very best and bravest soldiers, at the front? Red knights.” Technically the term only applied to men who died in battle, but I thought it might be poor taste to say so. “Now, you are legendary. One day, you will be a legend.”

You looked away again, but not before I saw the hunger in you. That same burning, aching desire I’d felt as a boy, and again when I stood in Vivian’s office—to matter, to make something good and great out of the pitiful meat of my life.

“Listen, I grew up not far from here. I was—still am—nobody. Nothing.

I was lonely and frightened and foreign, or foreign-looking, which is just as bad. But then I found you.” I was glad for my thin, wisping voice, which disguised the tightening of my throat. “I read your stories—I mean, everyone does, but I read them over and over. And I found the courage I needed to serve my country.”

I reached for the collar of my jacket, hands shaking, and folded it down so you could see the wreckage of my throat. It was not the handsome, dashing sort of scar that every soldier privately hopes for. It was fat and wormy, stretching the skin unevenly over my collarbone and knotting over my windpipe like a badly tied cravat.

The first civilian who’d seen the whole of it had gasped once before pressing her hands over her mouth. But her shock had transitioned quickly into fawning admiration, as if the scar were a medal I couldn’t take off.

She’d kissed it—sweetly, even eagerly—as if she had been appointed by the

state to thank me for my sacrifice, and I’d escaped her flat seconds before the shaking fit began.

You did not gasp or fawn. You considered me steadily, like a woman who had both suffered and committed much worse. I experienced such a keen rush of gratitude that little spots danced briefly in my vision.

I blinked them away. “This was the price of my service. Of my loyalty.”

This was an absolute lie, but it was such a familiar lie by now that the words tripped out of my mouth like soldiers in a line. “But I swear to you: It was worth it.”

And, for the first time, I thought maybe it was true. Maybe my whole life—my shame and my torment, my bad dreams and my pitiful manuscript —had been in service to this moment, when I recalled Una Everlasting to her duty.

“Please,” I said, and you looked at me as if you, too, felt some grand design at work, the invisible thread of fate tugging you toward your destiny.

Your eyes were a dark and lambent amber, without grain or variation. “We need you.”

I reached, impulsively, for your bare hand.

I had time to think: I should not have done that, before I found myself looking up at you from the cold ground, your knee on my breastbone, your hands pinning my wrists on either side of my head.

There followed my first moment of real terror: that I might respond disgracefully. That you might notice. I twisted beneath you, suddenly frantic. “Let go—”

You threw yourself away from me and sat staring, breathing hard, so obviously horror-stricken that my pride suffered a slight injury. You climbed slowly to your feet. “Four times, now,” you said, almost to yourself.

Then, louder, “You may stay if you like. I will share my fire and food, in memory of my fathers, who let no one go cold or hungry in this wood. But do not touch me unawares, and do not go unarmed in my presence.”

You drew a slim knife—Vivian’s letter opener, which I had forgotten about entirely—and flicked it so that it buried itself point-first in the dirt, bare inches from my head.

I blinked at it. “Why?”

“So that you might feel … safe.” You looked at your own hands as you spoke, as if you mistrusted them. I did not think a letter opener, nor even a revolver, would greatly extend my life if you desired to end it, but I didn’t say so. I reached for the handle.

You nodded stiffly at my hand. “And tend to that. The blood will draw

beasts.”

You turned and strode into the trees.

“It will come to you in a dream.” I threw the words at your back, a prophecy lobbed at an unwilling subject. “That’s what the stories say. God- the-Savior speaks to you in a dream, and you follow His word to the last dragon.”

You stopped but did not turn. “I have not dreamed since I came here.”

“You will,” I said.

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