The Everlasting

I WAS BORN not quite ten centuries after your death; the first time you saved my life, I was nine.

It was between the wars, when my father and I lived in a narrow gray row house in the narrow gray village of Queenswald, in the part of the country that had once been a fathomless green wood but was now nothing but bald hills and pit mines.

I woke that morning and listened, as I did every morning, for the gentle engine of my father’s snoring. The house was silent, so I laced up my boots and slipped out the door.

It wasn’t far to the tavern, but it was dark and cold, and I did not like the dark or the cold.