The Everlasting — Chapter 9

9

I WASN’T SHOCKED or dismayed. I wasn’t anything, really, except tired, and a little chagrined, as if I had fallen for a rather cruel joke. I wanted to leave. I wanted to fall asleep, or wake up, or run away.

But the first queen who was also the former Minister of War, a paper doll of a woman switching from one costume to the next, looked down at me and said, quietly, “On your feet, Corporal.”

I stood up.

A flock of attendants descended, cooing and fretting as they shuffled me out of the hall. I followed them placidly, holding my hands out from my sides so they did not accidentally brush against my body.

We spiraled up one staircase and then another. They deposited me in a small, barren tower room and left.

It was cold. The windows were uncovered, and the wind licked through the room like a tongue, worming beneath the collar of my coat, tasting the ruined beds of my nails. There were logs stacked in the hearth, but it did not occur to me to search for a tinderbox, or even to button my coat. I would have had to use my hands, and I didn’t want to use my hands.

The light fell. The tongue of the wind grew teeth and chewed at me.

Snow spat through the windows, scudding over my boots.

Footsteps sounded sometimes on the other side of the door, and I called out, but it was difficult to speak through the chattering of my teeth. Once I managed to ask, “Where is she?”

A voice answered, soothingly, “Her Majesty will speak with you soon.”

I hadn’t been asking about the queen.

Eventually, though, she arrived, sweeping into the room like the sun itself, orbited by attendants. They scurried to light the fire and pull the

drapes, sending me furtive, appalled looks from the corners of their eyes, as if I were embarrassing myself somehow.

I recalled that people were supposed to bow before royalty, or was it kneel? I knelt. My knees cracked like frost underfoot.

The queen looked down at me with her hands folded gracefully at her waist, one atop the other. She murmured softly and the room emptied around us.

Her posture changed as soon as we were alone, loosening at the joints.

She rolled her neck to either side and sat, wide kneed, patting the mattress beside her.

“At ease, Corporal.” There was such dry good humor in her voice, such natural authority, that something in me eased, instinctively. I never missed the war, but I missed the sense that someone else, someone better and braver, held the reins of my life.

I rose and perched at the very edge of the bed.

“Sorry for hustling you offstage. It’s just a delicate situation down there, at the moment. Half those bastards were planning coups of their own, before the Hinterlanders beat them to it.” She shook her head. “They loved Yvanne, but love isn’t enough, for a queen. If there’s a woman on the throne, there are ten men trying to take it from her.” At my silence, she prompted, gently, “I imagine you have questions.”

I did—why is the (former) Minister of War dressed up as a medieval monarch, what the hell is going on, et cetera—but I found I didn’t care much about the answers. I shrugged.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” Vivian said. “If it matters—I can see why you

loved her.”

“I didn’t—that is, I admired her very—”

Vivian continued before I could perjure myself further. “I knew how it would end. I’d read the stories, too. But I really thought, up until the end, that she’d done it.” There was, I thought, real regret in her voice. “And then that little shit killed her. Ancel was in league with the Hinterlanders, as you may have guessed.”

I suppose I had. I hadn’t wanted to think about it, but my brain must have been ticking coldly along, picking at the torn edges of the story and

stitching them into something new, as if I were taking notes in the archives.

“It was Ancel who told them my champion was away, who had the wine served unwatered, who urged me to accept their envoy in the first place. I suppose he had grown tired of his part in the story, and wanted more, and didn’t care what it cost.” She added, fretfully, almost maternally, “He always was jealous of her.”

I shrugged again. My attention kept sliding off the surface of the conversation, falling into some lightless place.

Vivian studied me, sidelong. In a gentler voice, she asked, “Would you

like to see her?”

I could not speak; I nodded.

There were vaults beneath the Keep, carved deep into the bedrock, where the air was still and cool. Normally I think they kept wine and meat down there, but now the chamber was empty but for a few stinking tallow candles, a stone table—and you.

In death, you looked more like your posters and paintings than you ever had in life. Your hair had been carefully washed and combed until it fell in long white sheets over the edge of the bier. Your armor had been scrubbed and polished so brightly that I could see my own face in the curve of your pauldron, bony and bespectacled. Your face had been caked with chalk, so that all the crags and scars were smoothed away. There were clownish pink circles drawn on both your cheeks, and tiny white ulla flowers tucked all around your corpse. They had a sweet, green scent, like spring.

I wanted, quite badly, to rip the flowers away from you. To rub my thumb between your brows until I found the knotted lines beneath the chalk —except I wouldn’t want to touch you with these hands.

I fumbled for a cigarette instead. I dropped the match twice before Vivian plucked the cigarette from my shaking fingers and held it to a candle flame. She took a second one for herself.

We smoked for a time in silence. The candles spat. The air turned sickly fragrant, like meat and perfume.

Vivian said, “I know none of this is easy, Mallory, but I need you to understand why we’re here, why you’re here, particularly.” Her tone had a clipped efficiency I associated with military commanders, or librarians.

“The first time around, we lost the war.”

A pause. I waited obediently for my brain to arrange the verbs and tenses in a way that made sense. When it didn’t, I said, “Pardon?”

“I know you like a good story, so listen: Once upon a time there was a shitty little backwater country whose name everyone forgot on their geography quizzes. It wasn’t so much a country, really, as a border drawn around a group of strangers, united by nothing more than a tax code. They had a noble history, but they had forgotten it. They had myths and legends, but they had buried them. So when war came—as it always does—they lost it. Badly.”

She put the cigarette back between her lips. Her cheeks hollowed as she inhaled.

“Now, in this shitty country, there was a woman—yes, I’m talking about myself in third person, see what monarchy does to a person—who wanted better for her people. She listened to the stories they barely told anymore, of heroes and crowns and enchanted swords and so forth, and she went digging. She was looking for a weapon; she found a book.”

From the heavy drape of her skirts, Vivian produced a book bound in polished wood, the hinges like moss creeping around the spine, your sigil burnt deep: a dragon, eating its own tail.

For the first time since it had arrived on my desk, I had forgotten the book existed. I supposed some unlucky servant had been sent to retrieve it from Hen’s saddlebags. I wondered how many fingers it had cost them.

Vivian was rubbing her thumb over the cover. “I don’t know who first made this, or when, so don’t bother asking. But it’s old, and it has an old magic to it, of the kind that died out before the dragons. I opened it and cut my finger on the page. I suppose you know what happened then.”

I did.

“It’s quite a shock, isn’t it? I was in my study, and then I was here. Well, not here, but several floors above us, at the bedside of a dying woman.” She

tapped a little shower of ash to the floor. “She was beautiful, Mallory. Even on her deathbed, Yvanne was something to behold.”

I felt a weird surge of relief at the sound of the name. A part of me had begun to fear it was all some terrible pantomime, that the oldest and most vital story of Dominion was nothing but sleight of hand. But Yvanne had truly lived, and so had you. I dragged again at my Lucky Star, trying not to let my fingers touch my lips.

Vivian went on, musingly, “She thought I was an angel, at first. And then, when I explained, she decided I was something better: a second chance. A way to outlive herself.”

I had begun to see, unwillingly, where this monologue was headed, but my thoughts were slow, smoke swaddled.

“She could hardly draw breath, but she presented her case efficiently.

She said there was too much left undone, that Dominion would not survive her passing. She said it wasn’t her the people needed, but only the idea of her, and anyway we looked enough alike that her clothes would fit me.”

Vivian smiled fondly. “I refused, of course. I knew my history, even if no one else did: The grail was never found. Sir Una never returned. Yvanne’s dream died with her.”

“That’s not—ah.” In the stories I knew, you slew the dragon and saved the queen. But perhaps they’d been told differently, once. Perhaps there was a version where you’d lain down beneath the yew, after all, because I’d never arrived to stop you.

You’d said it yourself: Had I been alone … And then: As you will.

I swayed a little, suddenly dizzy; Vivian didn’t notice. “But then I thought: What if the first queen had lived? What if Dominion had a stronger foundation, a better history? What if this was what I had been searching for?” She gestured at herself, the heavy drape of her skirts, the yellow gleam of her crown. “In order to have a future worth fighting for, you must have a past worth remembering.”

It was a good line; the heartless scholar in me tucked it quietly away for the conclusion of my next article.

“It was easier than you’d think, to take her place. I carried her body up to the tower roof—her idea—and let the birds have their way with it. By the

time her attendants returned, I was wearing her gown and veil, laying where she had lain. We really do look very much alike.” Vivian had taken off the crown and was turning it in her hands, cigarette crooked expertly between two fingers. In the low candlelight the gold seemed sinuous, nearly alive. “I kept thinking someone would catch me, doubt me, demand I remove the veil—but no one did.” A crooked smile, which revealed the point of her canine. “It’s not bad, being queen.”

I blinked smoke from my eyes. “But you looked so ill. When I saw you, in the throne room—”

“You see what you expect to see.” She sounded apologetic, as if she were explaining to a child that the actors in the film were just pretending.

“Even now, the court is convincing themselves that they misremembered my features over the long months of my sickness, or that the miracle of the grail changed them. As if a cup of wine could cure cancer.”

I hadn’t known, until that moment, that there was still a stubborn cinder of hope somewhere in the banked hearth of my chest. I wet my lips twice before I spoke. “So it’s not—it isn’t real. The grail can’t—heal anyone.”

The apology in her face turned to awful, stinging sympathy. “The cup is real enough. I’m sure it’s the very same grail that Galawin carried three hundred years ago. But no one can cheat death, Mallory.”

I imagined a boot stamping out that last, pitiful coal, leaving nothing but bitter ash. It filled my mouth, acrid and foul, so that when I spoke it all came pouring out. “It’s all a lie, then. She killed the dragon and brought you the grail for nothing. She died for—” I bit my own tongue until I tasted salt.

Vivian held my gaze evenly. “No. I swear to you. Without her sacrifice —without the tragedy of Una Everlasting—none of this will matter. It won’t do a damn thing for Dominion.”

“What the hell do you—” But then, in a rush of cold certainty, I knew.

“You’ve done this before. Differently.”

A ripple across the surface of Vivian’s face, as if something dark had swum close to the surface but not broken it. “It’s true. The first time I came back, I didn’t bother with all the … pageantry.”

All those hard, cold miles we rode together. The scream of the dragon as it died. Your blood filling my palms, staining them, ruining them.

Pageantry. My vision pulsed, redly.

Vivian continued, unconcerned, “No quest, no grail, no miracles. The queen was sick. The queen got better. What could be simpler? I uninvited the Hinterlanders, foiled a few assassination attempts, and ruled well in Yvanne’s stead. I made treaties and trade agreements, held the borders, wrote charters, made speeches. I thought it would be enough.” That dark thing swam up in her eyes again. “But it’s never enough, simply to be competent. I was overthrown in less than three years, and Dominion fell with me. When I returned to my own era, I found a Dominion that was still divided, disillusioned, weak. For a king to hold the throne it takes skill, lucky genetics, good timing, and hard work; for a queen, it takes a fucking miracle.” She strode closer to your bier. “It takes a story. And every story needs a hero.”

I watched, with a hot spike of jealousy, as she leaned over you and stroked the hair tenderly from your brow. She traced your jawline with one fingernail, her expression odd, almost desirous. “She must have loved Yvanne very much, don’t you think? As a mother, maybe. Make sure you put that in the book. And crucify Ancel for me, would you.”

“The book?” Anger swelled like a tumor in my stomach, fatal, full of bile. “You want to turn this, turn her, into a fucking campaign ad? A tragedy you can tell on the radio?”

Vivian clucked her tongue. “This from the man who led her to the gallows in the name of—what? A byline? An endowed position?” She fisted her hand in your hair and gave your head a small shake. Your body had stiffened in death, so that your neck and shoulders moved together, like the joints of a cheap puppet. “Tell me. Was it worth it?”

Oh, I deserved that: I had buckled your armor myself. I had sent you through those gates, knowing what was waiting, though I could not now remember why.

I discovered I was kneeling again, panting hard, choking with guilt and grief and cancerous fury. My cigarette had fallen from my fingers. “Send me back again,” I said, and for once my wreck of a voice suited me perfectly. “Let me change it. I won’t let her go alone, this time. I’ll slit Ancel’s throat. Just let me try again.”

“You think I hold the power here, but I don’t.” Vivian settled you back on the bier and arranged your hair, fussily. “You and I are serving something higher than ourselves, now. Neither of us chose where that book sent us. It took me to the queen just before she died, and it took you to Una just before she failed. Do you honestly think it was chance? Call it fate, call it the hand of God—this is how the story goes, and this is our part in it.”

A little of that old, childish hunger—to be chosen, to matter, to earn my place in a country that didn’t want me—rose up in me. I closed my eyes against it.

In the dark, I heard the approach of slippered feet. Vivian spoke in a near-whisper now, poisonous, inexorable, like one of those harpies who drove men mad with prophecy. “She dies, and they forget her. I’ve seen it.

She becomes a footnote, a piece of trivia. And she wanted so badly to be remembered.”

She pressed something heavy into my hands. “This is why you’re here, Mallory. Dominion is nothing without Una Everlasting, and she is nothing without you.”

I opened my eyes, blinking down at the book I’d always dreamed of finding. At my hands holding it, and the blood crusting in the beds of my nails.

“I don’t—I don’t understand,” I said. “If we forgot her, then why do I remember her? If her story was never written down, how do I already know it? And why did I have to watch her—to know her—”

A vexed expression crossed Vivian’s face, familiar to me from professors who did not appreciate interruptions to their lectures. “Because time travel is very fucking complicated, Corporal.” She exhaled carefully, as if counting to five. “Because you were born a thousand years after all of this happened, in the aftermath of a choice you’d already made. Because the past becomes the present which becomes the past.” A small, wry smile.

“Her device was no accident, I think.”

I traced the design on the cover of the book, my thumb circling the dragon over and over.

Vivian knelt before me and covered my hand with hers. Her fingers were very cold. “Understand me. Her death is worth nothing. It is

meaningless. It is a waste—unless you make it matter.”

I couldn’t think of anything to say.

Eventually she stood. Her cigarette butt landed beside mine, and she ground it beneath one delicate toe. Her voice echoed back to me as she left, clear and hard as a rung bell: “If you loved her at all, Owen—make them remember her.”

I lingered for a time in the vault, knees stiffening on the stone. I didn’t weep or yell or tear my hair, but only watched the candlelight chase over your corpse.

I imagined this was how a saint must feel after a holy vision: as if a great curtain had been pulled aside, and the secret engine of the world revealed in all its vastness and cruelty. I didn’t understand most of what Vivian had told me—the story looped and doubled back in my mind, cause and effect hopelessly tangled—but I understood that you and I were a pair of gears turning together in the belly of that engine.

You had to die, and I had to watch you, and then I had to wipe your blood from my hands and make sure it had been worth it.

Did I consider refusing? Did I imagine crawling to your bier and lying down beside you among the flowers, so that a thousand years from now they would find our bones so intermingled it would be impossible to tell which were mine and which were yours, and no one would care, because no one would know our names?

Of course. But I had sworn to you that your name would be remembered, and though I was a coward and a deserter, though I had broken every trust and faith, I found I could not break yours.

I pressed my lips to your brow before I left. Your skin was the same temperature as the air, so that I felt nothing but a slight pressure against my mouth.

In the tower room I found the fire blazing and a fresh-cut pen waiting beside a pot of ink. I sat down at the desk and did not rise again until dawn.

UNA AND THE BETRAYER

We come now to the end, and I find I do not want to tell it. I would finish the story here if I could: with Sir Una kneeling before her queen, sorely wounded but still breathing, the cup held high in triumph.

Yet I cannot. For evil days will come again to Dominion, and it will be the memory of Una Everlasting that lights our way.

When our sons and daughters ask how she died, we will answer: bravely, for crown and country.

And when they ask what killed her, we will answer: treachery. And then we will say the name Ancel of Ulwin, Ancel the Betrayer, because Dominion does not forget.

Sir Ancel had loved his queen, once. But Yvanne had never loved him in return, or had loved him only with the generous, mothering love a queen has for her people. For Una, this love was enough: She was content to serve her queen, to stand by her side and sometimes brush her lips across the back of her fair hand. But Ancel—proud Ancel, beautiful Ancel—wanted more.

His love withered and blackened on the vine, until all that remained were the bitter seeds.

When the queen fell ill, he reveled secretly in her suffering.

Some said it was he who poisoned her in the first place, driven mad with longing. It was certainly he who welcomed the Hinterlanders and laid a trap with them for Sir Una.

But his trap failed. Ancel watched in an agony of jealousy as Sir Una threw open the castle doors, bloodied but not beaten, and knelt at the queen’s feet. He watched Yvanne gaze down at her champion, the knight she loved first and best, and suddenly he could bear it no longer.

He drew his sword. No one saw, not even Sir Una. The most dangerous enemy is the one we trust enough to turn our backs on.

While she looked loyally up at the queen, Sir Ancel drove his blade through her body. Who can say what he might have done next? He might have struck down the queen herself. He might have burned Cavallon to the ground and smothered the dream of Dominion in its cradle.

But Sir Una had sworn to defend her country by her life and death, and she was not dead yet.

She stood, and drew steel, and the Knight of Hearts fought the Drawn Blade of Dominion once more. The battle was just as beautiful, just as long and glorious, as it had been all those years before, when they and their country were still young and unbloodied. But this time, when Ancel’s sword flew from his hand, the queen did not cry mercy. Dominion has no mercy for traitors.

After, they threw his corpse in the midden, and the Knight of Hearts became the Knight of Worms, because in the end it was only the worms that loved him.

But the battle had drawn the very last of Sir Una’s strength.

She fell at Yvanne’s feet.

The queen knelt on the floor, humble as a peasant, and took Una’s head into her lap. Gently she touched her face and wept with love for the first and best of her knights.

But Sir Una did not weep. She smiled, perfectly at peace.

And as the last of her heart’s blood stained the stones of Cavallon, two words left her lips: Erxa Dominus.

—Excerpted from The Death of Una Everlasting, translated by Owen Mallory At sunrise a girl came to scrape the ashes from the hearth. I had the impression there had been others in the night, fetching candles and feeding the fire, scurrying like stagehands through the shadows, but I couldn’t be certain. Only one thing had mattered to me, and now it was done, and all I wanted was to fall asleep or disappear, to excuse myself from reality like a man escaping a long and awful dinner party.

Instead, I said, “Bring the queen,” in a voice like the wind over dead grass. The girl startled so badly she spilled ashes down her front. She looked from my face to the book in my hand; she hurried away.

I waited. My eyes hurt. My hands hurt. My back had given up hurting and stiffened into a shape like an italicized C. My stomach was full of a vague, acidic dread.

It was the last line that bothered me most. I don’t know why. The Death of Una Everlasting was full of lies and omissions; what was one more?

Perhaps it was just pride. Perhaps I wanted the world to know that in your final moments you had not thought of crown and country, but of the wild green woods you loved best—and of me. Wait for me, beneath the yew tree.

“Quick work, Corporal.” Vivian’s voice made me flinch. I handed her the book with an aching, trembling hand.

I expected her to whisk it away, but she didn’t. She pulled a chair up to the hearth and settled with the book in her lap. For a long time there was silence except for the hiss of coals and the rasp of pages turning.

I stared vacantly out the window, not thinking anything at all. My missing fingernails throbbed, fiercely.

When she finished, Vivian closed the book and said, softly, “It’s well done, Owen.” She gazed into the fire, stroking the spine with one thumb.

The expression on her face made me want to turn away, politely, as I would turn away from a woman laying flowers on a grave. “Truly. Well done.”

I didn’t say anything.

Eventually I heard her draw a brisk, bracing sort of breath, stand, and stride toward me. She laid the book on the desk between us, and I was struck with a sudden, visceral memory of the last time we’d faced each other across those pages. My left hand spasmed.

“I think it’s just what we needed. A little overwrought in places, but people will lap it up. And Ancel, my God! I couldn’t have asked for a more thorough assassination if I’d given you a grenade. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before now—every story needs a villain.” Her voice was light now, her face polished so smooth that all the grief had slid off the surface.

She stuck her hand across the desk. “Thank you, Corporal.”

I took her hand with a feeling of deepening unreality, as if I might blink and find we’d never left her office in the first place, and everything in between had been a disturbing daydream. “Is it—will it be enough? Will they—” The sentence caught on the barbed wire of my throat and went down, thrashing.

Vivian softened, just slightly. “They’ll remember her. I promise.”

I swallowed several times, my hand shaking badly in hers. “As will I,” I said, and that, too, was a promise. The world might remember you as I wrote you, but I would remember you as you were: hard and strange and silent, your hands bloodied and your soul sick with it. I would remember the line between your brows. I would remember that you were not beautiful, not really, but that the sight of you struck me as a hammer strikes hot iron,

reordering my very atoms.

“As will I,” I said again, thickly.

Vivian smiled fondly down at me. Then her grip tightened without warning, crushing my hand in hers until I cried out, until the crusted beds of my missing nails burst open and bled fresh.

Both of us watched a fat drop fall from my hand and splash, lavishly, across the open book.

Vivian’s smile had not faltered. She said, “Oh, Mallory. You never do.”

And time unraveled again.

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