Chapter 25
OF THE TWO of us, I was the lucky one. I hadn’t known that, before I watched you cut your own throat.
In all my many lives and deaths, I had never been the one left behind. I’d never been the one who lingered in the world without you, gruesome and a little absurd, like a severed limb. I’d never been the one who had to grieve and go on.
This—this—is what you endured, over and over?
Fuck every single person who ever called you a coward, Owen Mallory. And fuck you, for making me into one, here at the end.
I couldn’t watch. Your clever black eyes had so often been the last thing I’d seen, looking into mine as if you would follow me to heaven or hell, as if there was nowhere I could go that you would not find me.
Now it was my turn, and I couldn’t do it.
I saw that first bright spray of blood—arterial, fatal—and then I closed my eyes.
I, who had watched a city burn without blinking, could not watch you die.
On the backs of my eyelids, I saw your face.
The long arch of your nose, badly bruised by your spectacles.
The fine bones of your cheeks, and the short silver hairs in your beard, which hadn’t been there before.
How old are we, Owen? How many years have we lived?
Our bodies keep track, I think, even if we forget.
When I opened my eyes, all your blood was spent among the laid-over grass, and I was alone once more.
Not anymore, you had told me. Not ever again. Liar.
Your body slumped forward, out of the queen’s grasp. For a moment she stood looking down at you, unmoving. In her right hand was a knife, still wet, and in her left were a few curled black scraps, which fluttered faintly in the wind. Your hair, I realized.
Yvanne stared down at your corpse, unmoving. Then, very slowly, she looked up at me. Her features were raw and unformed, embryonic. I had never seen her so young, or so frightened. I had never seen her do anything she had not done before.
“I can give him back to you,” she said. Her voice was very high. She took a step back, and another. “The children, too, I swear. I can—wait—”
She stopped talking then, because Valiance was leveled at her chest, the tip tucked just below her sternum. Her tongue darted out, wetting chapped lips. “Y-you will be forsworn. You took an oath to serve me—”
“I serve no master, now.” I spoke clearly and evenly, as if I were explaining to our daughter why she mustn’t touch the fire.
Yvanne tried again, a puppeteer tugging desperately on slack strings. “You will be nothing without me. Forgotten. No one will know the name Una Everlasting—”
“That is not my name.”
“You—you will be a monster. Only a monster would slay her own mother.” Her voice was winding tighter and tighter, rising in pitch. She was very afraid, now. “Is that what you want? Is that what he would want?”
My fist tightened around the hilt. Daring of her, I thought, to make mention of you.
But I let the question hang in the air between us. It was your voice that answered: Kneel. You had given me back my sword and bid me to fight again. You had not wanted me by halves.
I’d been quiet long enough that Yvanne mistook it for doubt.
She babbled into the silence, and her voice seemed to waver in and out of frequencies, like one of those wireless devices from your time.
She was gentle, imperious, cold, warm, urgent, soothing, anything she thought I wanted to hear.
“It’s alright, child. We can fix this. Just do as I say. ”
But I never had to do as she said, ever again. This was the gift you had given me, and I would not waste it. “If I told you to leave—to go away from here, to leave the seed and the tree forever, and become no one—would you do it?”
She opened her mouth, but I spoke first. “The truth, please.” My voice came thickly now, shot through with salt. “If you love me, if you ever loved me, in even the smallest measure—answer me truly. Would you stop?”
Her mouth closed. She looked at me as she had never looked at me before: uncertainly, as if I were a stranger to her. I waited.
She said, “No.”
Later, I would wonder if she said it because she didn’t believe I would let her live. Or because she was weary of striving and scheming and killing. Or because some part of her—the part of her that planted her favorite flower over my grave and wore its scent for a thousand years—loved me.
“No,” she said again, “I would not. I never will.”
It was the only gift she’d ever given me. In turn I gave her the only mercy I have ever shown: I killed her quickly.
I slid the blade up beneath her breastbone, cutting her heart into two neat halves, and withdrew it. She made a face of total astonishment, her eyes ringed in white, her mouth comically round. I tried to remember what it had felt like to die for the very first time and could not.
Her lips moved. Air passed between them, the faintest words. If I leaned close, I might have been able to hear them.
I turned away, and never looked at her again.
I knelt then, at your side. It was less hard than I’d thought it would be, to look at you. Even when you slept, your lips had twitched and tilted, your brows lifting and slanting, as if the wheel of your mind was still turning. Your face was motionless, now, and foreign to me.
I shucked my armor, stiff fingered, a little clumsy. I had been quick with this work when I was younger, but for years now it had been your hands—long fingered, ink stained, quick and fragile as wrens—which stripped my armor from me.
When I wore only my own quilted wool, I laid myself down beside you and took your hand carefully in mine.
I thought: Let us lie here forever. Let us be buried as wild things are, by tooth and claw and worm.
Let the grasses grow up through the sockets of our eyes.
Let them find us in seven years or seventy, and let their brows furrow, because they cannot tell my bones from yours.
Everlasting, Yvanne called me. But nothing that lives lasts forever. Save, perhaps, this thing between us, which had drawn us together across a thousand years, over and over, and—my breath caught—dragons.
I turned your hand carefully and opened your fist. It was not hard; your body would not stiffen for hours yet.
The seed fell from your palm to mine, still warm. When I closed my hand around it, I felt, or thought I felt, a faint rhythm, like a distant drumbeat.
I wrapped my limbs around you and pulled you close to me. I kissed you once, hard enough that I could feel the cool shape of your teeth beneath your lips. And then I set my mouth to your ear and whispered:
“I will wait for you. Beneath the yew.”
It took the whole day to bury you.
I might have gone looking for a village or croft and begged the use of a spade, but I was impatient, and I didn’t want to leave you, so I used Valiance to cut the shape of your grave into the grass. It was not a small grave; damn your long legs.
I used the sharp edge of my pauldron to dig. When it hit a stone and buckled, I used the stone, and when the stone broke, I used my hands.
I did not dig a grave for Yvanne the First, Queen of Dominion. I only set my foot to her body and sent it rolling down the hill, out of sight. She would stink for a while, and then she would be bones, and then she would be forgotten entirely.
By the time the hole was dug, it was eventide, and four of my fingernails were missing. I left muddy red smears on your shoulders as I lowered you down into your grave.
It wasn’t very deep, and I had no casket, but I wasn’t worried; I would not leave your grave unguarded.
I unbuttoned your shirt and laid my hand briefly on your chest. I had liked to sleep just so—with your heart beating hot under my palm. It was cold now, but it was exactly what I needed: A heart that had not yet been born.
It had never occurred to Yvanne that she’d caught two people in her trap, misplaced two souls in time. I don’t think she ever truly saw you at all. I was her hero, her champion, her sacrifice, and you were only the string that made me dance.
But I saw you, Owen Mallory, and swore to serve you by my right arm and my left, by my life and death. And I am not dead yet.
I had taken Yvanne’s slim silver knife from her hand, and I slid it now between your ribs. I drove it into the stilled muscle of your heart, twisted it back and forth three times, and slipped it carefully from the hole. It made a slight, suppurating sound, like a boot drawn from mud.
I took the red seed between my finger and thumb and pushed it gently into your chest, nestling it down among the hollow chambers of your heart. I left your shirt unfastened. When the seed sprouted, let it lift straight up to the light, unimpeded.
I buried you, handful by handful.
And then I lay down beside the soft earth of your grave, and I waited.