Chapter 24 #3
“And then I came here. It’s a pretty place, and far from my teacher’s holdings.
I buried you and planted the seed in your chest—your heart was so small it was difficult to find, like the pit of a cherry—and then I waited.
” A flash of white in the shadow’s face: teeth, curved in a sharp smile.
“And then came the yew, and then came everything else.”
Your voice, when it came, was thin and unsure. You had lost sight of your star and were drifting now in the mist. “My fathers said they found me as a baby, laid at the foot of the yew.”
“Your—the woodcutter and his beau, you mean?” Odd, to hear slang from my own era on the lips of an ancient queen.
“They didn’t lie to you. They weren’t clever enough for lies.
They were simple men, but … good, I thought.
Caring. Another gift I gave you, which no one ever gave me.
” Another jealous lash there, as if you owed her, as if children were born indebted to their parents.
You waited, unspeaking. Eventually Vivian—she was all Vivian, now, the asp unfurled—said, “I didn’t know, when I buried you, whether I would ever see you again.
But one day, when the yew was full grown, there you were among the roots.
Just the same as you’d been when I buried you—except you were alive.
And your hair, and your eyes…” A flash of teeth.
“Well. I did not choose your device by accident.”
“It’s not her device any longer,” I said. The words scraped against one another like stones on a riverbed.
I still couldn’t see Vivian’s features clearly, but her shadow clucked its tongue. “A sweet gesture, I’m sure, but she’s worn my colors for centuries, and she’ll wear them for centuries more, I promise you.”
You said, suddenly sure of yourself again, “I will not.”
The shadow stamped its foot. “Ungrateful, that’s what you are.
Don’t you see what I’ve done for you? I named you.
I trained you. I loved you. And oh, I was so patient with you!
When you fell in battle, we began again.
When you shattered your sword, I brought you a new one.
When you were heartbroken, I brought you him.
” In the many monologues I’d heard Vivian Rolfe deliver, I don’t think she’d ever truly lost control.
Every emotion she showed was a calculation, a mask presented for a purpose.
But now her voice rose and fell erratically, pleading and scolding, childish and horribly ancient.
“I made you—you the fetus, you the dead thing which died before it could even be named—into a knight. A champion, a hero, a saint, a legend—I made you someone who could never, ever be forgotten.” She stepped sideways a little, so that the sun touched her face, and she was suddenly not a shadow but a girl, crying freely, her accent veering back toward the archaic.
“Everything that was denied to me, I gave to thee.”
“Yes,” I drawled, purposefully dry. “Before you killed her.”
Vivian’s eyes narrowed at me. “He killed her first,” she snapped.
“And I couldn’t save her or change it. I can’t go back further than this moment, when I first buried the seed.
I can’t undo anything that was done to me, or that I have done up till now.
” How that must eat at her: To have mastery over the whole of history, but not her own.
“She was sacrificed before she was born. It’s what she’s for. ”
She stepped closer to me. “But look what I have built in her honor.” Vivian’s voice turned rich and smooth.
Her radio voice, which had driven men to war and children to factories.
“On her altar, I built a kingdom, a nation, an empire. Though it took centuries upon centuries of work—though even my champion abandoned me, and forswore herself—still I built it, stone by stone. You’re a soldier, aren’t you?
” That slight vagueness in her eyes, as she struggled to remember the future.
“And a student of history. Who better to judge my work? Can you look at what I’ve made, Owen Mallory, and say truly that it was not worth the death of one woman? ”
“One woman?” I asked, softly. “Are you quite sure of your math?” They assembled silently in my mind, her generations of sacrifices, so that you and I shrank and shrank, invisible among the suffering crowd.
Vivian had opened her mouth to answer, but I cut her off. “Say it’s true, for the sake of argument. Say all it cost was the endless torment of one person. What is it that you have built, exactly?”
Vivian answered, in a kind of bewilderment, “Dominion.”
But the Dominion I’d believed in as a boy—the castle on the hill, the ivory paradise to which I might one day ascend, if I was loyal and docile and good—was obscured to me now.
Instead, I saw a throne teetering atop a stack of bones.
An appetite, unslaked. A nation obsessed with a past that had never existed, in memory of a queen who had never died.
But even if Dominion had been a paradise—I stole a glance back at you, bloodied but still standing, gold limned in the rising dawn—I suspected my answer would have been the same.
“No,” I said, easily. “It’s not worth it.
” I pinched the little red seed between thumb and forefinger.
“And so, I’m afraid … this is it. We’re through.
” This sounded somewhat melodramatic, so I clarified, “I don’t know how to destroy this thing yet, but surely you know we will not let you plant it in your daughter’s heart. ”
“Well, no.” Vivian agreed, so easily that the hairs stood up on my arms. “I gave her a decent burial, this time. I planted my favorite flower over her grave.” This she said proudly, even defiantly. “My teacher says they’re common, but I always loved the smell of them.”
I recalled the sweet summery scent that Vivian wore in every era and felt a sick twist of pity. “Why did you bury her, this time?”
“Because I don’t need her anymore. Because you came.
You always do.” Her eyes lifted from mine and found yours, and there was no doubt in them at all.
Her faith in you was the faith a smith might feel for his favorite hammer, or a hunter for his best hound: pure, without flaw.
“A heart that hasn’t been born. A soul misplaced in time.
Very soon now you’re going to put that sword through your heart, and then I’m going to plant the seed in your body.
And it will grow and grow, watered by your blood, fed by your rot, until one day a woodcutter finds a babe beneath the yew, and it begins again. ”
The words hung for a moment, spectral, prophetic, and then you said, gently, almost wonderingly, “No, I will not.”
Then came the whip of metal through air, followed by a biting crunch. I flinched, but you’d only driven Valiance into the earth. You took your hand from the hilt and stepped back. “I will not be your tragedy or your sacrifice, ever again. I will not die for you.”
It was then—as you stood clear-eyed, shoulders back, like a woman loosed from a long confinement, like a saint who had torn herself down from the church wall and now walked free, among the mortal—that Vivian struck.
Her motions were eerily smooth, inhumanly fast, as though she’d practiced them a thousand times. Maybe she had. Maybe we’d made it here before, over and over, and stood on the very cusp of freedom before she dragged us back down.
Vivian’s foot found the back of my leg, so that I collapsed down to my knees. Her left hand fisted in my hair as I fell, and her right hand held a slim silver blade to my throat.
“I know,” she said to you, conversationally. “But you’ll die for him.”
The knife nipped into my neck, parting the silver knots of my scars, coming to rest against the fragile sheath of my carotid. If her hand twitched, if I turned my head so much as three degrees to the left or right, I would be dead.
You hadn’t moved, but I watched emotions move like seasons over your face: terror into fury into grief into vacant weariness. Had you ever truly believed we’d escaped, or had you been waiting, like a loosed hawk, for the falconer to call you back to her fist?
A trickle of blood pooled in the hollow where my clavicles met. The earth dampened the knees of my trousers. I had been here before, I thought; the body remembers.
In remembering, I discovered that I knew exactly what would happen next.
Very soon you would reach again for your sword.
You would turn it awkwardly in your hands.
The hilt would be too far away even for your long reach, and so you would hold it by the bare blade, pommel slanted down toward the earth.
Then you would fall, and I would watch you, and in a hundred years or a thousand, in my time or in yours, we would meet again beneath the yew.
There was no such thing as fate, but this was ours.
Even if we remembered again—and we would—we would only find ourselves back here, caught in the same endless, unsolvable equation.
It would never stop because Vivian would never be satisfied. She had paid the price herself once, for a king’s ambition. She had killed him, but instead of casting his crown into the mud, she had claimed it for herself. And now she wanted what any king wanted: to stay king, no matter the cost.
And it would be you who paid it, who would never stop paying it. Because you loved me, and in loving me, you would never be free.
Dizzily, sickly, in a long string of metaphors, I saw everything we could make of love: chains, debts, cages, circles. And, too, I saw everything it could make of us: tragedies, traitors, madmen, cowards.
Your hand was closing now around your hilt. Your eyes were the dull yellow of dead pine, and your limbs moved as if they had strings affixed at every joint.
I thought suddenly of my father, and of the mother I’d never met. Of Professor Sawbridge and even of Ancel, at the very end.
Vivian had made a mistake in her calculations, I thought. For sometimes—when we could not run any longer, when all our choices had been whittled down to one—love made heroes of us.
I felt my own hands resting placidly on my thighs. They were not shaking at all, because I wasn’t afraid. I was only relieved, hugely and guiltily, that I wouldn’t have to watch you die again—and I was sorry. For the children.
Let me write their names here, just once. They’re only a dream, now, of the future that will never come to pass, but I won’t have them forgotten.
Marro. Our son, named for the river where my mother died.
Thea. Our daughter, named for one of your fathers.
I smiled up at you, my neck arched unnaturally by Vivian’s clawed grip.
I smiled at the wild bone-white tangle of your hair—God, I would miss your hair—and at the great grim shape of your shoulders.
At the age lines that puckered the corners of your eyes so sweetly, and the scar that bit through your left pupil.
You had survived so much. You would survive this, too.
That deep furrow appeared between your brows. It asked, plainly: What the hell are you doing?
I kept my eyes on yours. I neither blinked nor flinched; I was no coward. Setting you free, love.
Then I turned my head, hard and fast, three degrees to the left.