Chapter 2
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.
I also did not like locked doors, large dogs, the sound of gunfire, or the sight of blood.
I was aware that these were girlish, humiliating tendencies that made the other boys laugh at me, but they would have laughed anyway, I think.
Partly it was my looks—my hair and eyes were nearly black, and my skin had a suspiciously Hinterlander undercurrent, beery gold even in winter—and partly it was everything else about me.
I had slim shoulders, thick spectacles, a fine singing voice, neat handwriting, a subscription to the lending library, and the best marks in class; my shins were always a little too long for my trousers and I cried easily, sometimes for no reason.
I was a walking flinch. An open invitation for other boys—bolder, louder boys, with ruddy pink cheeks and trousers that fit—to knock their shoulders purposefully against mine as they passed.
But those boys were still sleeping at this hour. Everyone was, save the barkeep, and she was inexplicably fond of my father and me. By the time I knocked she was wiping down tables with her youngest daughter propped on one hip.
“By the fire,” she said, and I nodded.
My father was slumped over the hearth like laundry that had fallen from the drying rack.
It took several minutes to get him conscious, and another several to get him vertical.
He mumbled things to me as we navigated the empty chairs, nice things, like there’s my boy and thank you and sorry, sorry.
I knew my father often behaved shamefully—knew he drank too much and said too much and refused to sing the anthem on national holidays—but he was never unkind, so I’d decided I didn’t mind the rest.
The barkeep set a basket on the counter as we passed. She was always slipping me things, leftover pies and hand-me-down sweaters. I knew this, too, was shameful, but her pies were very good and my father was always between jobs or about to be, so I’d decided it was another thing I didn’t mind.
I took the basket. My father stumbled.
The barkeep’s daughter looked at him with her big blue eyes and her perfect yellow curls—like an advertisement for Dominion’s Own soap, like my exact opposite—and said, with the eerie mimicry of a child repeating words they’ve heard but don’t understand, “Fucking coward.”
I’d heard it before, along with words like turncoat, traitor, and sometimes deserter, although Queenswald was awfully far from the desert.
But that morning I felt my father cringe away from the word and understood for the first time that it was true.
That my father was something even more shameful than being a drunk or a radical, something so awful that the stink of it followed him everywhere and sank into everything he loved, including—and this I saw in the mute pity of the barkeep’s face, the way she scolded her daughter—me.
And so I left my father there in the tavern, still drunk, still saying nice things, and ran away.
It still wasn’t fully light, and the muddy streets had frozen overnight into alien figurations, which reached for my ankles and twisted.
I tripped and crashed into a woman wearing a fine wool coat.
She was very nice about it, bending to help gather the scattered contents of the barkeep’s basket while I fumbled for my spectacles.
She smelled like summer, sweet and flowery.
“Poor thing,” she said, as she handed me back the basket, and I thanked her, hot-faced with shame.
Running away, I decided, was more of a spiritual state than a specific speed, so I walked. I walked until the hunched shoulders of the houses gave way to sheepfolds and frostbitten hills, and the street became a narrow track that became nothing at all.
I walked until I reached the grove.
No one much liked the grove. Later I would learn that it was the last remnant of the Queen’s Wood, the great green shroud that had once run all the way to the sea.
But most of the trees had been turned into ships a century ago, the last time we’d gone to war against the Hinterlands, and now all that remained were a few ghostly acres.
It seemed larger, to me. The air beneath the trees was very still, and the branches seemed to catch all the ordinary sounds of Queenswald—the coal trains and carts, the lambs and schoolchildren and the bitter wet wind that blew all winter—and turn them away, so that stepping into the woods was like slipping under the surface of a lake.
Every now and then someone would announce that it was high time they cleared the land, and the young men would be hassled outside with axes and saws.
They only ever made it through the slender new growth at the edges; any farther and the men would begin to complain that their blades, freshly sharpened, were going dull, and their good ash handles were turning spongy with rot.
They would return home, defeated, and no one would mention the woods again for a year or two.
For this, I was grateful. Everywhere I went I was plagued by the sweaty sense that I was in the way or underfoot, unwanted, ill-fitting, missish—but not here. Here, I was neither my father’s son nor a foreigner but only myself.
The only other person I’d ever met in the woods was a girl a little older than me, a proud and feral creature I’d met one day after I’d fallen and scraped both knees bloody.
She was my superior in every subject that mattered—climbing, running, spitting, rock-throwing, fighting with sticks—but I didn’t mind.
She liked to win, and I liked to watch her, and afterward I liked to lie next to her among the tiny white flowers that covered the grove every summer.
Last winter she’d stopped coming. I asked after her everywhere, but no one seemed to know where she’d gone, or even to have heard of a girl by the name of Ulla, and eventually I had concluded, with a new and grown-up sadness, that I’d made her up.
I headed now to the very middle of the woods.
She used to wait for me there, beneath an old yew so vast and so misshapen it no longer looked much like a tree, but like some secret organ of the earth itself, exposed.
We liked to find patterns in the grain of the trunk: a dragon, a crown, a woman’s tortured face.
In spring the sap would run from her eyes like tears.
It was even quieter than usual, beneath the yew. So quiet I thought maybe I wouldn’t run away, after all. Maybe I would just tuck myself down among the roots, cradled by dead needles and worms, and disappear.
They wouldn’t look for me for very long. My father would want to, but he wouldn’t go this far into the grove, being a fucking coward, and in a few months those little white flowers would cover me over, and the name Owen Mallory would be wiped clean from the world, as if it had never been.
That sounded rather grand and tragic, so I settled myself between the roots and waited to disappear.
It was hungry work, I found. By the time the sun had fully risen I’d decided maybe I ought to eat whatever the barkeep had slipped me, as a last meal. I opened the basket.
That’s when I first saw the book.
Not the book, of course, but a book: thin pages, already brittle; a cloth cover, moth-chewed; illustrations printed so cheaply the colors didn’t line up properly with the drawings, so that each figure appeared to be haunted by his own merry ghost. None of the barkeep’s baskets had ever included a book before.
The title was written in an elaborate, curlicued font that was supposed to look medieval: The Legend of Una Everlasting.
And then, in smaller serif print: A Children’s Retelling of the Classic Tragedy!
And, even smaller: Look inside for a complete listing of titles in the Little Soldiers National Heritage Series.
I sat there beneath the yew and read your story for the first time.
It was not, I would realize only when I was much older, a particularly good adaptation.
The author had sprinkled thous and forsooths with a criminal disregard for syntax, and the illustrator had an unwholesome fascination with decapitation.
All the messy loose ends of the Everlasting Cycle—the result of centuries of iterations and variations—had been pruned away in favor of a morality tale with all the subtlety and nuance of a nursery rhyme.
But the story itself shone through the prose like sunlight: a nameless child who became a knight; a knight who went to war and became a champion; a champion who slew the last dragon and found the lost grail and became a legend.
It was a story of chivalry and courage, where good and evil were neatly labeled, and one always vanquished the other.
And when I turned the final page, there you were: Sir Una Everlasting.
They’d laid you out in full armor but for a helm, mailed fists still curled around your hilt, as if you kept some vigil even in death.
Your hair was a startling, fluorescent yellow, which spilled like melted butter over the edge of your bier, and your face was the pure white of the page beneath.
There were flowers tucked all around you: tiny, colorless roses, I thought, though the artist had no particular botanical skill.