Chapter 1
SEVERAL YEARS AFTER the war, during the mid-afternoon hour I generally put aside to fantasize about setting fire to my manuscript and disappearing into the countryside to raise goats, I received a book in the post.
This was not, in itself, remarkable; most members of the Cantford College Department of History received so many books in the post that their offices had been overtaken by a series of architecturally unsound towers, which would collapse if anyone exhaled too aggressively in their presence.
But this particular book was different, because this particular book did not—according to every archaeologist, historian, medievalist, linguist, antiquarian, archivist, and even most of the conspiracy theorists I had ever consulted—exist.
True, I may have harbored certain fantasies that I would one day prove them all wrong. I may have pictured myself unlocking a long-lost vault or descending into a catacomb, perhaps holding a torch aloft and whispering, to no one in particular, By Jove, I’ve found it.
But I was not in a vault or a catacomb.
I was sitting at my very ordinary desk in my very ordinary office, which the department had granted me only last term, in the manner of people who have been feeding a stray for so long they might as well name it. Outside the sky was a very ordinary late-summer blue.
And I was holding in my hands the single greatest historical discovery of the century, or possibly the millennium.
I wanted to weep. I wanted to laugh. I wanted most of all to open the book and run the tips of my fingers over the pages, to prove that it was real and so was I.
(I was prevented by a vestigial but powerful fear of the college archivist, who kept thumbscrews in her desk specifically for people who touched old paper without washing their hands first.)
Instead, I whispered, somewhat hysterically, “By Jove, I’ve—”
“Mallory, old boy?”
A moneyed, overloud voice, a tread like a parade march: This could only be Jeremy Harrison, the other lecturer in my subfield.
As was my long custom in every stressful situation, I panicked.
I wrapped the parcel paper back around the book, fumbled with the top drawer of my desk, which always jammed when it was damp, which it always was, and, in the end, stuffed the book down my shirtfront and hunched my shoulders to hide the lump.
This was sheer professional avarice, I’m afraid: There was only one endowed faculty position in Middle Dominion Studies.
Harrison wanted it with the indefatigable passion of someone who thought admiration and wealth were his birthright; I wanted it with the indefatigable passion of someone who had never experienced either and would eat bullets for a taste.
Whoever discovered this book—the book whose corners were presently digging into my ribs—would have more than a taste.
“There you are.” Harrison rounded the corner and slouched against the doorframe, looking as usual like an escapee from a painting of a fox hunt. “How’s the book coming?” He asked this question two or three times a week, because he was at heart a bastard who reveled in the suffering of others.
“Fine. Wonderful.” My voice was a thin rasp, unpleasantly high.
I tried not to resent it; the field surgeon had told me I was lucky I had a voice at all, or, indeed, a pulse.
“But I was just leaving, actually, excuse me.” I stood, still hunched, scuttling around my desk in the manner of an arthritic crab.
“Of course, of course. Far be it from me to stand between a war hero and his duty,” Harrison said, solicitously and hatefully.
The Everlasting Medal of Valor was the only thing I had ever achieved that Harrison hadn’t.
I longed to rub his face in it but, as the whole thing was a complete fucking farce, never quite could.
I produced a hoarse ha, ha and ran for it, like the coward I always was and always would be.
I waited until I was on the train back to my flat—still bent nearly in half, as if I were smuggling an infant or suffering from an intestinal complaint—before extracting the parcel from my shirt.
There was no return address on the wrapping, no stamp of origin.
Just my name, Owen Mallory, and the address of the campus mail room written in an unremarkable hand.
I should have been at least mildly concerned that the entire thing was an elaborate hoax designed by Harrison to embarrass me, but all I felt was a rising, heady relief.
As if the whole of my life up till now had been a sort of dreary, shameful churning, like dog-paddling, which would be redeemed by everything that happened next.
I peeled back the paper.
The book was bound in rich red heartwood, cut against the grain so that the rings of the tree were visible, rippling outward.
The spine was affixed by a series of clever bronze hinges, cerulean with age, and a familiar, circular symbol had been burned deeply into the wood, stained with soot or wineroot. I traced it with one shaking fingertip.
An underfed boy of seven or eight was seated beside me, watching me in the frank, unashamed way that young people watch the unwell. He had an extravagance of eyelashes, which gave him the wistful, sleepy look of someone woken mid-dream.
I found myself opening the book, pointing to the title page. “Can you read this?”
The boy recoiled a little from the sound of my voice. Then, warily, as if I were mad or, worse, intending to teach him something: “No, sir.”
“Don’t worry, few people could.” Middle Mothertongue bore a frustratingly faint resemblance to our modern language, but it had always come easily to me, like a childhood dialect I’d not quite forgotten. I closed the book and tapped the cover. “And what does this look like to you? This symbol?”
He bent to study it obediently. His hair—an unfortunate, Gallish shade of red—was still fine enough to form a babyish snarl at the nape of his neck.
“A lizard,” he declared, eventually. “Or a dragon, maybe, chewing up its own tail.” He spent the rest of the ride offering suggestions for the improvement of the design (blood, teeth, blood dripping from teeth, et cetera), gesturing enthusiastically.
His wrists were spattered with hot pink scars, as from welding sparks or ash.
The munitions factories ran on twenty-four-hour shifts these days, and there weren’t enough grown men and women to work them.
The train dinged. I stood, and the boy nodded amiably at the book. “What’s it called?”
I swayed, teetering on the edge of the thing that would transform me from no one into someone. It felt momentous, fateful, even. As if you had watched over me—haunted me, guided me, saved me thrice over—solely so that I could be here, now, with your name on my tongue.
The boy was waiting with his long dreamer’s lashes tipped up to me.
Would there be another war by the time he was old enough to enlist?
Would it be your story—newly published, perhaps leatherbound, with my name in small print on the title page—that sent him to the front?
Something swelled painfully in my chest at the thought; pride, I decided.
I leaned closer and told the boy the five words he couldn’t read, that I could, as easily as if I’d written them myself: “The Death of Una Everlasting.”
Before I stepped off the train, I dug a coin from my wallet and tossed it to him. He caught it in one small, scarred hand.