The Everlasting

THIS TIME, WHEN you died in my arms, I did not go mad. This time, when they pulled your corpse from my lap, I let them take you.

I hadn’t remembered everything—it was like remembering someone else’s dream, or a play you’d heard described but never seen yourself—but I had remembered enough to know this was not truly the end, but only the turning of a great wheel.

I knew one day I would stand again beneath the yew, and one day you would find me there.

They led me up to that high, cold room. I went placidly. I sat without speaking while the blood clotted and congealed, itchily, on my chest. The cut truly wasn’t deep; the bruise around it, already blackening, would take longer to heal. Odd, that a traitor would hesitate to kill a bystander.