The Everlasting — Chapter 8

8

THE JOURNEY TO Cavallon is distorted in my memory.

I recall it—every bitter and aching mile—but it’s like recalling a play I saw once as a young man. My own voice sounds rehearsed, stiff with portent. Your every gesture is an elegy. All the ordinary, unscripted labor of the road—tending the tack, skinning the kill, striking the flint, burying the offal—is lost to me, drowned by the bright lights of the stage.

But I remember the cold. The weather turned as we left the hills, the sky turning the bluish-white of a frostbitten finger. Each night we huddled miserably on either side of the wind-whipped fire, sleeping fitfully and shivering ourselves awake.

At these times I found myself watching you, remembering the heat of your hand around mine, thinking of all the obvious ways two people might drive away the cold.

But I was too much a coward to cross the fire without an invitation, and you did not invite me. You barely even spoke to me. You had drawn subtly away from me since the dragon. There were times I thought I saw something in your eyes—an anger that festered and wept, like a gut wound —but then you would look away, and it would be gone.

Eventually I resorted to blunt provocation.

“She must be truly something. Yvanne, I mean.” I couldn’t see your face as we rode, but I felt you flinch from her name. “Or perhaps the stories have exaggerated, and I’ll be disappointed.”

When you answered, the words came in bloody lumps, as if they’d been chewed and spat out. “She never misspeaks or missteps. She is never afraid, no matter the odds. She is never, ever taken by surprise, no matter how clever her enemy or how slippery her quarry. She is five—ten, a thousand—

steps ahead of you or I or anyone I have ever met.” And then, with unmistakable pride, “You won’t be disappointed.”

“You do love her.”

You answered softly, with grief, “Always.”

You didn’t speak again until late that night when you said, “It’ll get colder, before dawn. Might even snow.” I nodded, miserably. You went on, “We fought the Hyllmen in winter, you know. At night we stripped bare and slept pressed together.” Then, meeting my eyes, “I barely felt the cold.”

You had a hectic, mean look on your face as you said it. A look that invited me, finally, to come across the fire, but guaranteed no gentle treatment if I did.

And oh, I was tempted. I flushed with heat, hungry to be handled as roughly as I deserved. To have something of you that would linger after your death, even if it were only teethmarks.

But if I touched you, and found only flesh—if I tasted you, and found only the ordinary bittersweetness of a wet cunt—then you would no longer be a legend to me, but only yourself.

I could kill a legend; I didn’t know if I could kill you.

I’d hesitated too long. You’d turned away, wrapped in your cloak. I did not sleep that night, but curled around myself, face tucked into the collar of my jacket so that I could smell my own sour, unspent desire.

In the morning we rose and rode east, into the third act.

In my own era, Cavallon Keep was a ruin: a haunted tumble of stones gathered on the hill above the capitol, admired only by historians and bloodthirsty schoolchildren. Even I had only visited once, and hadn’t lingered. The wind had whistled mournfully through the walls, and my hands had shaken too violently to take notes.

But here in the youth of the world—looking up at it from horseback, in the early dusk of winter—the Keep was a wonder. It seemed less a castle than a child’s drawing of one: a perfectly symmetrical assemblage of turrets and towers. Curtain walls that met at ninety-degree angles. Battlements like the teeth of a zipper. And the size of it—ten times taller than even the great

yew in the grove, a hundred times taller than any village church, built in less than a decade. It was said that any man who died in the quarry or on the scaffolding had his blood mixed into the mortar, and that it was counted a great honor. I wondered, a little queasily, how many men had been honored so.

At my back, I felt the muscles of your stomach tense. “The queen’s colors are still raised,” you said. “She yet lives.” There was no inflection in your voice.

Indeed, the bright flag of Dominion snapped smartly in the wind. It was the only sound in the whole valley: No voices drifted down from the Keep, no figures walked the walls. The great gates stood open and waiting, like the gullet of a wolf.

And suddenly I could hardly breathe, suffocated by a grief that was both premature and a thousand years too late.

“Your armor,” I said, buying time, knowing it wouldn’t matter. “You should ride in full armor through the gates. It’s—how it looks in all the paintings.”

I expected you to scorn such vanity, but instead your muscles loosened at my back. “As you say.”

My hands shook as I drew the straps of your armor tight. You sat on a low stone without being asked, offering me the tangle of your hair, and I closed my eyes as I drew my fingers through it. I would not braid it this time, but let it run loose and heavy down your back. I was picturing you as you’re painted in Goletti’s Sir Una and the Grail, or perhaps I was picturing you somewhere else, running young and barefoot between the trees— “This will truly heal her, then?” I opened my eyes to find you studying the grail. It looked gaudy and absurd in your hand, like a stage prop.

I cleared my throat. “It will. She reigns for another thirty years and brings peace and prosperity to all of Dominion. And even centuries afterward, during our darkest times, it’s that golden age that we remember, that we fight for.” I clung childishly to my own words, trying to see you for what you were: a necessary tragedy, a single red knot in the grand tapestry of history.

You made a small, musing sound in your throat. “When she first fell ill, I thought: Perhaps there is a God, after all. Perhaps every sin is counted and gathered on a great scale. Perhaps everyone gets what they deserve.”

I tried hard not to flinch. Who knew better than I how war could warp the mind, until you hated what you ought to love?

Somewhat at random, flailing for a distraction, I said, “I never asked— why were you armored, that first time I saw you in the woods? Must have had a devil of a time doing the buckles in the back.”

You shrugged one shoulder, eyes slitted as if you did not mind the feel of my hands in your hair. Drowsily you answered, “So they would know me when they found me. I suppose even there, at the end of reason, I did not want to be forgotten.”

My fingers stilled. There was a metallic ringing in my ears, like bullet casings on stone. “Pardon?”

You shrugged again, more forcefully. “I could see no other way out. I could not bear to serve her any longer, and I could not bear to let her die. I loved her too well, even then, even still. So I thought, I have taken so many lives. What’s one more?”

I did flinch, then. Another of those lurid visions arrived, awful in its clarity: you, lying flat on the forest floor. Dead needles in your hair, dirt under your nails. Valiance growing from your sternum like a silver sapling.

I shoved my hands beneath my elbows to stop their shaking. “But you couldn’t do it. You wouldn’t have.”

You turned slowly around on the stone, looking up at me with eyes gone oddly gentle. “I know what you want me to be. What you have made me, in your book. But you should know what I truly am.” You closed your eyes then. The wind rose, lifting your hair, so that you spoke through a tangled white veil. “Had I been alone—had you not come when you did”—you were whispering now—“I would have done it.”

I stood looking down at you, while the ringing went on and on in my ears.

Then, clumsily, numb fingered, I folded down the collar of my service jacket for the second time, baring the pink whorls of scar to the cold. Your eyes were still shut, so I took your hand carefully in mine—your eyes

snapped open, hot and yellow—and brought it to my throat. I could feel nothing but a faint, faraway heat, like winter sun; the nerves there had been boiled away by the infection.

“I didn’t get this from the enemy,” I said, and for once my voice did not break. “The Hinterlanders had retreated to the southern beach. They couldn’t win, but it was going to be—well. I couldn’t face it. Threw down my rifle and turned around. My own commanding officer slit my throat.”

Oh, the change that had come over Colonel Drayton’s face as I dropped my rifle, as I transformed from one of his boys to one of his enemies. The bite of his knife into my neck. The clean black hole that appeared in his temple, by purest happenstance, by fate, and saved my life.

I lowered my voice, felt it thrum against your palm. “We are both of us deserters. Cowards, maybe. But when you ride through those gates, bearing the grail you won from the last dragon—it will all be wiped clean. Our doubts, our mistakes, will be forgotten.”

You watched me closely, hungrily. “And what of our sins?”

They came to me one after the other: the Hinterlanders and their thrown- stone eyes; the Hyllman’s hand standing upright in the mud; the cry of the last dragon as it died. And on and on—every soldier I’d shot, every enemy you’d fed to the worms—until the earth beneath my boots felt soft and foul,

like grave dirt.

“Those, too,” I said, desperately.

“You don’t know the whole of it.” Your pupils had eaten up the gold of your eyes, and some awful confession swam in the black. “You don’t know what I’ve done. At the end, at the Black Bastion—”

“It doesn’t matter.” Weeks of pestering and wheedling, and suddenly I was begging you not to tell me anything more. “In a thousand years, they will sing your name in the streets. They will raise their children on stories of brave Sir Una Everlasting, the Red Knight, who fought for crown and country. You may not have lived as a hero, but I swear: You will die as one.

Just—” My voice split and bled. “Just do this last thing.”

Your eyes fell closed again. “As you will,” you said, and I let go of your wrist. There were thin pink bands where my fingers had been.

You mounted. For the first time, you did not reach your hand down to me.

I walked alongside you some of the way, one hand on the stirrup. Hen nipped me once, nastily and for no reason, and I let him. None of the stories said whether your horse outlived you.

We approached the gates, where no guard called out to us, no watchmen cried greeting—did you not wonder why?—and I fell back.

I watched you ride toward the bloody end of your story alone, as you always were, as you must be.

You passed beneath the stone arch and paused. You turned your face back to me. I caught the wry lift of your lips, that smile that was not a smile but only the premonition of one.

And that old weakness came over me, the fault line that had cracked wide during the war and healed poorly. A tremor began at the base of my spine and shivered through my limbs. My teeth clacked together.

For crown and country, I thought, numbly.

And then I thought: It is not worth it.

“Una!” I shouted, and God, let my voice not be too weak—let me not be too late—“’Ware the archers!”

I knew before the words formed on my lips that I was too late. I heard the taut thrum of bowstrings, the whistle of fletching in the air, and knew no

one could move fast enough.

But you could.

There was a sound like bullets hitting a tin can and then there were two arrows sprouting from your shield, held high to guard your face. The third arrow was lodged just above your left elbow, nestled in the slit between two plates of metal.

You didn’t seem to notice. You swung low in the saddle, shield still raised, as the second volley found you. Hen screamed. Someone shouted orders. Boots clanged on stone.

I knew who they were: Hinterlanders, come to pay their respects to the fresh-made queen of Dominion. But instead of finding a monarch in the

fullness of her power, they had found a dying woman and a worried court.

They had waited and watched, drinking the queen’s wine and eating the queen’s bread, until someone had whispered to them that the famed Red Knight was gone away on a fool’s quest.

The temptation had proved too great. The Hinterlanders had called for toast after toast—to the queen’s health! to Dominion!—and waited till even the Queen’s Guard was laughing and stupid with drink. It had been easy to take the Keep, then, and easy to lie in wait for the Red Knight’s return.

Their plot would fail, of course. Valiance would cut them down, every one, and their corpses would be hung from the gates for the crows to pick clean, and their treachery would be remembered for a thousand years. When the Hinterlanders sued for peace during the war, Vivian Rolfe had laughed in their faces. Her answer had become famous, printed on posters and shouted in battle: Dominion does not forget.

Dominion would survive this. But you would not.

You would kneel before the queen one last time, pierced by a dozen arrows. You would lift the grail in one bloodied hand, head bowed, and the queen would touch your hair and say, Rest now, my Red Knight.

And the Drawn Blade of Dominion would die with a smile on her lips.

I was not aware of making a decision. But I found my feet moving, my hand reaching for the service revolver that rested warm and heavy against my breast. I crouched behind the low wall of the courtyard well, finger already hooked around the trigger.

You shouted, angrily, “Run, boy! Are you not a coward?”

I was. A brave man would have stood at the gates and let the past take its course, for the sake of the future. But I was too much a coward to watch you die, Una.

The archers were already notching arrows again on the curtain wall, taking aim. I counted three of them.

And for a moment I felt sure that the whole machine of the world, every birth and every death, every tick of every clock, had been designed to bring me here, now: with three bullets in my revolver and the best eye in the 2nd Battalion.

I looked at my hands and found them perfectly steady.

I aimed—except I never had to aim, I only had to fall away from myself and let my body move without me, like giving a horse its head. I fell into alignment, eye to arm to barrel, and all I had to do was pull the trigger.

Three shots, one after the other. Three bodies bursting on the stones of the courtyard, one after the other.

An odd silence, as if the entire Keep had been suspended in amber. The Hinterlander soldiers looked at the broken shapes of their archers. They looked at you, mounted upright once more, another arrow now sprouting from your back.

Then the Red Knight drew her blade, whose name was known before their mothers’ mothers were born, and the silence was replaced by screaming.

It was the first time I’d seen you truly fight. I suppose I had grown used to the disappointing gap between myth and reality; I suppose I thought your skill had been embellished by time, exaggerated as all legends are.

It hadn’t been. You fell among the Hinterlanders like a mad dog cut loose from its leash, like a scythe across dry wheat, like a weapon wearing the skin of a woman.

You did not fight cleanly or prettily; it was nothing like a dance. It was an annihilation, brutal and inexorable, and the only beauty was in the sheer fucking speed of it. You swung Valiance one-handed, quick as a cleaver, and if your enemies did not meet your blade they met the blunt edge of your shield, and when the shield was ripped from your arm, they met your mailed fist. You were Una Everlasting, and there was no surviving you.

I understood then why the villagers feared you, and why you feared yourself. I closed my eyes, like a child, so that I would not fear you, too.

When I opened them again, there was a fine spray of blood on the lenses of my spectacles, and hot, grassy breath on my face. It was Hen, still somehow alive—I supposed it was difficult to kill a cadaver—now nibbling delicately at my hair.

I knew a moment of true terror when I saw his empty saddle—but no.

There you were: alone in the awful silence, your hair slicked redly to your

armor, still standing.

Still alive.

I thought, with a distant, obligatory panic: Oh God, what have I done, but all I truly felt was giddy, euphoric relief. More than relief—reprieve, as though it was my own life that had been spared.

I rested my head gratefully against Hen’s jawbone. “Well done, old man.” He nuzzled at my curls until he found my ear, which he bit. Glue, I whispered to him, eyes watering. Great vats of it.

By the time my eyes cleared, you were standing above me, one gauntleted hand extended. I took it, as I always did, and you hauled me to my feet.

I swayed a little, looking up at you through smeary glasses. There was a wet gobbet of something stuck to your cheekbone, steaming faintly in the cold. A bruise was blooming at one temple, and you were scowling down at me like the wrath of God. I thought how funny it was, how baffling, that I’d

ever thought you unbeautiful.

You snarled, “I told you to run, boy!”

You seemed very upset, but you also seemed very alive, and so I found it impossible to stop smiling. I shrugged and gestured vaguely with my Saint Sinclair, which I was surprised to find still in my hand.

You looked at the revolver and then, eyes narrowing, at the fallen archers. Your face unsnarled, became still. “You killed them. With your— gone.”

“My gun, a standard-issue Saint Sinclair six-shot, yes.” I nodded, a little sloppily. I’d nearly forgotten this feeling—the drunken, clammy high that comes after battle, after the danger but before the vomiting. “It’s the archers that get you, usually. Almost all the sources agree.”

Your expression didn’t change, but your eyes became a pair of coins, cold and yellow. “You knew, then. What awaited me here.”

Guilt drew me back to earth as surely as an anchor around my ankle. I swallowed hard. “Yes. God, Una—” I experienced a moment of regret: If I’d let the archers get you, at least you wouldn’t be standing there, looking at me like that, and my heart wouldn’t be splitting in my chest. “I’m sorry. I should have told you. Or I shouldn’t have, I don’t know—this is how it ends, how it has to end. And now it’s all wrong, I suppose, but—”

“You meant me to die.” You said it quietly, almost to yourself. “And yet —you saved me.” You were looking at me now with a kind of furious ambivalence, like a judge who couldn’t decide if a criminal ought to be hanged or merely locked away in the madhouse. You asked, white-lipped, “Why?”

“I just—couldn’t.” I laughed, poorly. “The whole reason I was sent here in the first place—the one real duty I could have done for my country—and I couldn’t do it.” I looked down, spread my hands in another shrug.

“Coward.”

“Who first called you that, I wonder? But give me a name, and I will bring you his tongue.” You sounded so annoyed, so alarmingly sincere, that I couldn’t speak, or look up.

Then: the clank of your gauntlets hitting the cobbles. Your gloved hands on either side of my head, unhooking the spectacles carefully from my ears, reaching for the hem of my jacket. You rubbed the lenses in circles on the red wool until the blood flaked and fell away.

When it was done, you touched a knuckle to my chin, tilting my eyes back to yours. “To charge into battle, with neither shield nor mount, against terrible odds—to know the odds, and charge anyway—” You shook your head. You settled the spectacles back on my face, and your features came into sudden focus: the severe line between your brows, the faint flush over the bridge of your nose. “There is a word for someone like that, and it is not coward.”

I suggested, a little thickly, “Traitor?” and wasn’t entirely joking.

“Madman,” you answered, and neither were you.

You turned to Hen, fussing over him as if he were a child with a scraped knee rather than a serial murderer with a saddle. He knocked his head against your chest and pawed fretfully at the ground as you drew the cup from his bags. You turned to face the Keep—and stumbled.

I’d never seen you stumble. It was only then that I remembered the arrows.

One, haft snapped, nestled in your left elbow. Another was buried in the gap between your backplate and chest, right at the bottom of your ribs.

God, what if it hit something vital? What if—even now, after I had overturned all of known history to keep you alive—the story wrenched itself true, and took you away?

“Saints, woman, don’t—just come here.” I took your wrist and hauled your arm across my shoulders, grunting a little under your weight. I expected you to protest, but instead you sagged into me, and shuddered hard.

I aimed us toward the front steps of the Keep, speaking in the same soothing nonsense-voice you used on the damn horse. I said stupid things, embarrassing things, like You’re alright, now and I’ve got you. The shudders seemed to ease, so I kept going. My babble took us up the steps, through the door, into the shadows of Cavallon Keep.

I should have been fretting about the flow of time and the disruption of our national narrative, my failures as a soldier and historian, et cetera, but I wasn’t.

Instead, I was listening to the sound of your breath moving in and out of your chest, over and over, as if it might go on forever, and thinking: It was worth it.

The Keep hummed and rattled as we passed through it, like an engine sputtering to life. Doors were unbarred. Bells were rung. Serving boys and soldiers ran past, calling to one another, and fine lords and ladies crept fearfully out of hiding, rushlights trembling in their hands.

In the time it took for my sight to adjust, there was a crowd gathered, and all of them were staring up at you with slack jaws. A few of them approached, their voices merging into a low, worshipful susurrus. You shook them off, as an injured lion would shake away flies.

You gestured wearily through an arched entranceway. The cup was in your hand, glinting richly. “There,” you said. “She’ll be waiting.”

“Then she can keep waiting. You need a surgeon”—I recalled one of Sawbridge’s lectures on medieval medical instruments and rates of infection —“or a place to lie down, maybe.”

You didn’t seem to hear me. You staggered on like a figure in a cuckoo clock, propelled by hidden gears to tell the same story over and over.

Through the archway was a high, vaulted hall, and at the end of the hall was a throne, and on the throne was a woman.

Even across the long hall, it was impossible to mistake the queen for anything but a dying woman. Her face was veiled, but the cloth was so fine it was possible to see the fragile bones of her face beneath it, the sunken pit of her mouth when she drew breath. Her hands lay like a pair of felled doves in her lap.

Yet she held herself upright on the throne, chin high. A vast dragonscale mantle flowed over her shoulders, the same eerie, irradiant white as your hair. A heavy crown sat on her brow, pinning the veil in place. I’d seen the Crown of Dominion before, in the Royal Museum. There, displayed on a fussy velvet pillow, it had looked gaudy, almost childish, like a piece of costume jewelry.

But here, in the shadowed hall, with the pigeon’s blood rubies gleaming like eyes in the torchlight, it did not look childish. It looked like a legend, a thing forged by the Saint of Smiths and won by the Red Knight, which would be worn by every queen until the rise of the republic.

There were knights gathered on either side of the throne like iron wings.

It took me a long beat to recognize them as the Queen’s Guard—heroes, all of them, with ballads and legends of their own. But none of my comics or adventure novels had mentioned that Bodrow the Giant had Hinterlander blood, obvious even at this distance. And that must be Sir Gladwyn, beside him, with the winged lynx on his shield—but no portrait had ever given him silky black hair, or skin the color of oiled leather. It was with relief that my eyes landed on the man at the right of the throne: his hair a perfect, pure gold, his face so handsome it might have been cast from plaster. Ancel, the Knight of Hearts, the only swordsman whose skill rivaled yours.

You didn’t seem to notice any of them. Every inch of you, the whole weight of your gaze, was for the woman on the throne.

I had still doubted, until then, that you loved her. But despite all your bitter words and bad dreams, all your talk of sin and regret—you looked at her like you would set your own neck in the noose, if she held the rope. It

was beyond loyalty, closer to the sort of flayed, mad devotion you find in mistreated dogs.

Yvanne, First Queen of Dominion, said, “Sir Una,” and the gathering crowd fell quiet, although her voice had been thin and weak.

You pulled away from me so quickly it was almost a flinch. I watched you stride toward the throne as if reeled in on a line, heedless of your wounds, heedless of the eyes on you. The hall was wholly silent now, but for the occasional, faint drip of your blood.

The crowd, which had parted before you, closed ranks in your wake, so that I had to shoulder my way through. If anyone took offense, I didn’t see it; I couldn’t look away from you.

You knelt when you reached the throne, ignoring the arrow still lodged in your rib cage. Your hair was a sticky red curtain, obscuring your face.

“And so,” the queen said, in that deathbed voice, “you have returned to me at last.”

“Yes, my queen.” You said it to the flagstones.

“And you have slain the last dragon of Dominion.”

“Yes, my queen.”

“And you have brought me the lost grail, which they say restores all that time takes from us.”

“Yes, my queen,” you said, and raised the golden cup, face lifting for the first time, gazing up at your queen with that awful, doglike love. Yvanne reached out to stroke your brow with trembling fingers, and you closed your eyes, as a child would.

She took the grail. “Wine,” she said, and a serving girl brought wine.

“Pour,” she said, and the girl poured.

Then the First Queen of Dominion lifted her veil just enough to reveal her mouth and bent her head to sip from the lost grail.

There was no heavenly choir, no blinding light, and yet: Yvanne’s spine unbowed. Her chin lifted. She stood—smoothly, easily, as a person in the prime of life—and lifted her arms to her people. In a bold and ringing voice she said, “So long I have prayed for one thing and one thing only. And now, by the grace of God and Sir Una, I am given it: time.”

She lifted her veil fully back from her face. The crowd gasped, but I wasn’t looking at the queen. I was looking at you, still kneeling, still breathing. You had survived the end of your own story.

Perhaps now you could rest. Slip away to the woods where you were raised and bury your sword beneath the yew. For a moment I could see you laughing, unarmored, lips stained with summer berries. You were watching someone, and you loved them—God, how you loved them— But then, from the courtyard: an animal scream. Your shoulders jerked.

The queen said, quietly but with feeling, “I hate that fucking horse.”

And the Knight of Hearts drew his sword.

I would have warned you, but my voice—my treacherous, useless voice —snapped and broke beneath the strain, so that when I shouted nothing emerged but a hoarse rush of air. I would have shot him, but my three bullets were spent.

You would have seen the blow coming, but he was on your fucking blind side.

You were turning your gaze back up to the queen when his blade slid neatly, almost surgically, between the plates of your armor, through the great muscle of your body and out the other side.

You did not react, except—as Ancel drew his sword back out of your body with a wet, gristling sound—with a small, polite cough. The cough sprayed blood across the flagstones, painting a delicate arch on the hem of the

queen’s robes.

I thought, madly, wearily: Not again.

Someone yelled. Panic rippled through the crowd. They surged in every direction, forming a writhing wall of sweat-sour velvet and clawing hands. I shoved through them, aware that I was yelling your name over and over, my voice too thin and weak to rise above the noise.

Through the thrash of limbs, I saw you rise, unsteadily. I saw you turn. I tripped over someone’s ankle and the next thing I saw was Valiance, bare and bright. You held it with two hands, now, your body bent around the wound, teeth bared.

Ancel faced you with an odd expression on his face, a tired camaraderie, as if the two of you were starting the same shift on the factory floor. Then he drew himself up—shoulders back, hair falling in glossy, angelic waves— and lifted his blade. His lips moved, but I couldn’t make out the words.

You fought, then.

The Knight of Hearts might have been made by the Savior Himself as your opposite: He was light and glancing and lovely, a golden cat that struck and slipped away. Any single movement could have been painted in oil and hung in the hall, and it would have been the portrait of knighthood.

It was difficult to imagine anyone defeating him, if only because it would have ruined the painting.

But he could not win against a dead woman. Blood was sheeting down your chin, bubbling pinkly from your nose. I could hear the whistling sound of your lung as it collapsed. You did not bother to protect yourself; you simply strode through the beautiful pattern of his sword work, ignoring the wounds that opened on your jaw, your right wrist, the soft underside of your thigh.

Your fist shattered the beautiful arch of his cheekbone. Your boot bent his knee inward, the angle obscene. Valiance split his clavicle with a sound like a tongue clucking, a damp snap, and lodged in his sternum.

The Knight of Hearts looked at you with chagrin, as if you had beaten him at cards, and as if he wasn’t surprised. He fell, and you followed him.

Ancel hit the stones hard, with a graceless, meaty slap. But your head never touched the ground because I had finally pushed through the crowd.

We landed together in a bloody tangle, my arms clutched around you.

“No, not again, not again—” I should have comforted you, told you how well you would be remembered, how long Dominion would love you, but instead I babbled uselessly over your body, spectacles askew, ruining the dignity of your death.

But you were not dying with dignity. You were not proud or peaceful; you were gasping for air, blue-lipped, wild-eyed, convulsing in my arms.

Blood was pumping unevenly from the hole in your back, overfilling my palms.

I was aware, distantly, that people were moving around us. The queen was speaking again, the crowd was calming. History was striding on

without us.

I didn’t care.

“Owen,” you said. Your pupils were black, frenzied, as if you were running fast through dark trees. “Come back for me, you have to come back —”

I slid my hands—and oh, they were so red and so wet—around your shoulders until I cradled your face. There were tears sliding toward the fine hair of your temples, running over my thumbs. I couldn’t tell if they were mine or yours.

“Come back,” you said again. “Please.” Your voice cracked on the word.

I didn’t know what to say, but my mouth formed the word without me, easy as aiming a gun. “Always,” I said. “Always.”

Your body slackened. The muddy, clawing panic left your eyes. You said, your voice cool and even now, “Wait for me, beneath the yew tree.”

And then you died.

Your eyes stared, emptily. Your blood turned cool and tacky on my hands.

At first, I felt nothing. Just a distant, disgusted weariness, as if I was back at the front opening another shitty tin of beans. This again.

Then that fault line inside me, the flaw that ran through my character like a vein of coal, split open. It tore right down the middle of me, and then — I’m sorry. I don’t remember the next part very well; I went away from myself, because it hurt too badly to stay.

It was a woman’s voice that called me back. Not yours, but one I knew.

It said, “Enough now, you’ll hurt yourself.” And then, “Just let go of her, there’s a good man.”

There was something incorrect about the voice, but I was still not quite returned to myself and couldn’t place it.

“Get the body out of his sight—there, now. That’s better, isn’t it?”

I blinked, and found myself crouched on the stones, my arms empty.

Three of my fingernails had been ripped away, leaving nothing but pink pulp. Perhaps that’s why my hands were shaking so badly; perhaps that’s where all the blood had come from.

Fine white skirts brushed my knees. Gentle fingers touched my face, tilting it upward, and I was sufficiently returned to myself to feel shame, that Queen Yvanne the First would see my coward’s face covered in snot and tears.

She did not look ill anymore. Her veil was pulled back over her crown, and her cheeks were flushed, her skin taut.

She smiled down at me, and for a tilted, dizzy moment I was standing again in a dark-paneled office with a white card clutched in my hand. The back of my hand throbbed sharply, in memory.

I realized then what had been wrong about the voice: It had not spoken in Middle Mothertongue.

“Well done, Corporal Mallory,” said Vivian Rolfe.

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