Chapter 4
WINTER SUNLIGHT, THIN and crosshatched. Air so fresh it burned in the lungs, like gunpowder. Branches circled all around, bowed low with frost.
I concluded—reluctantly, against all reason—that I was no longer in the office of Vivian Rolfe.
I was in the woods, with one hand pressed tight to the trunk of a tree so huge it seemed built rather than grown, a cathedral of bark and sap.
Despite my cowardly and flinchful nature, I’d never actually fainted, and I did not faint then. But I found that my thoughts were coming slowly and effortfully, as if they were climbing a steep hill.
I thought: It’s summer. But my breath rose in milky clouds and my sweat had chilled to a gelid film beneath my coat. It was cold—the deep, rheumatic cold of midwinter—and I did not like the cold.
I thought: I don’t know where I am. But I did. I knew the muscled shape of the bark beneath my hand and the striations of light that fell between the needles. I knew the brilliance of the berries hanging like red bells from the branches and the weight of the air on my eardrums, hushed and heavy.
This was the grove, my grove, though I’d been miles and miles away from Queenswald. This was the old tree, my tree—the one I had run to as a boy, which had been my castle, my refuge, my only-good-place—though it had been cut down years ago.
I thought: What’s that awful sound? A pitiful, sniveling whimpering. I took a breath and the sound stopped, and then I thought: Oh.
I looked at my left hand, which I had so far carefully avoided, and saw Vivian’s letter opener—actually a slim, sharp knife—still buried between my second and third knuckles. The pain immediately tripled, as if it had been waiting for my attention.
Unsteadily, praying I didn’t choose this moment to faint for the first time, I braced myself against the tree and used my right hand to draw out the blade. I made a mess of it, of course—my damn hands were shaking again—and was relieved there was no one around to hear the sounds I made.
I leaned against the great trunk of the tree, waiting for the tremors to recede.
My thoughts now were loud but inscrutable, like the static between radio stations or the noise of a crowd.
It was easier to make sense of my body: My hand hurt.
My feet were cold. The skin on the back of my neck was tight and prickling, as if—
As if someone was watching me.
I turned slowly. Something drew a bright, stinging line from the hollow beneath my ear to the column of my throat.
The tip of a sword. It came to rest over the knot of my larynx. I swallowed and felt my flesh part easily, almost eagerly, like the skin of an overripe plum.
My eyes moved up the blade, refusing to make sense of the whole, seeing only scattered details.
The long, long edge of the blade, sharpened almost to invisibility; lettering etched into the surface, illegible at this angle; the hilt braced crosswise on a mailed forearm.
A cloak the color of a picked scab hanging from a truly vast pair of shoulders, capped in shining, scarred metal.
And, above everything: A face that I knew better than my own.
A face I had seen in penny papers and fine oil paintings, in terrible street theater and political cartoons and every night in my dreams. A face I had feared and coveted and envied since I was nine years old.
Later, I would wonder how I was so sure, because none of those artists had done you justice.
They had shied from the sheer scale of you, narrowing the great sweep of your shoulders, tapering your wrists and waist. They had made your face smooth and poreless, forever youthful, when in truth it was pocked and wind-burnt, with heavy lines carved between the brows.
Your hair was not the sulfuric yellow of a Saint of Dominion, but the stark white of a snapped bone.
A thick welt of scar fell through your left brow and into the eye beneath it, so that the pupil was misshapen, elongated into a black tear.
You did not look like any kind of angel. Yet still, I knew you.
“Una,” I said, and could not imagine why I’d addressed you so informally. I tried again, voice cracking. “Sir Una Everlasting.”
Your eyes—not blue, never blue, but a dark, resinous gold, like burnt sap—did not flicker. You spoke, but it took several moments for me to parse the words. I’d rarely heard Middle Mothertongue spoken aloud, and I was distracted by the sound of your voice, deep and cool and familiar.
You said, “Drop the knife.” And then, “Drop the damn knife, boy.”
I tried—although privately I thought thirty was a decade past the time when anyone was pleased to be called boy—but my hand was so far away from my body, and so hard to see through the narrowing tunnel of my vision.
It was only when my cheek hit the earth, the wire of my spectacles biting into the bridge of my nose, that I realized I had—for the first time in my life—fainted.
My last, petulant thought was that my father had been wrong: It was the perfect weather for my service coat, after all.
The next time I opened my eyes, I was somewhere else again. This, I thought, would quickly grow tiresome.
I was indoors now, rather than out, but the line between the two seemed uncomfortably thin. Starlight fell through ragged thatch. One of the walls had sloughed away, revealing bare wattle. Coals hissed on a dirt floor, smoky and sullen.
And crouched across from me, regarding the coals with a vexed expression, was the founding myth of my nation. I’d thought I imagined you.
But you sat as any soldier might on a long night’s watch: straight spined, red-eyed, a little grim.
The armor was mostly missing now, except for the pauldrons capping those immense shoulders, the straps crossing over the quilted wool of your chest. Your hair was half loosed, hanging over your collar in a rough white skein.
At your temples I could see the faint tarnish of true silver.
It unsettled me greatly, that tiny, pedestrian evidence of your mortality.
You had always been ageless and hale in my mind, like one of those creatures preserved perfectly in amber at the peak of its health.
Now you looked dangerously exposed, vulnerable to the ordinary violence of time in a way that made my chest constrict.
I looked at your hands instead. Broad and veined, scarred so thickly in some places the skin tugged the fingers at odd angles.
I watched the play of firelight over the knots of your knuckles, and all the questions I’d been trying not to ask myself—where was I, when was I, had I gone finally, fantastically mad, et cetera—fell away. I have always liked your hands.
You looked sharply up at me. You were already frowning—a stern, weary expression you’d worn often enough to wear a deep furrow between your brows—but now you scowled.
“Something amuses you?” you asked, which caused me to become aware that I was smiling, somewhat doltishly.
I stopped. “No. My apologies.”
I sat up, discovering that stiff, rank furs had been piled over me, and that my hand had been bound roughly with linen. I flexed it once and sucked air between my teeth.
“Do you write with the sinister hand?” The question suggested concern, but your voice was flat and gray as gunmetal.
“What? Oh.” I switched to Middle Mothertongue, the words welling up easily. “I’m right-handed. I’ll be fine.”
“A shame,” you said, coldly.
I looked up in time to see you move. It was a fluid, muscular gesture, almost too fast to follow, which resulted in something arcing over the coals toward me. I fumbled the catch and had to scrabble to keep it out of the fire: the book, again.
My hand spasmed around it. The last time I’d touched this book I’d been flattered, then frightened, then stabbed and transported—here. (I was too clever not to know where—and when—here was, but too much of a coward to let myself think the words.)
You were watching me closely with those mismatched eyes.
When you were not moving you were inhumanly still, as if you had been carved rather than born.
“How did you find me? I would swear no one tracked me from Cavallon Keep.” Still that chilly, taut voice.
I had the worrisome impression of a fraying leash.
“No,” I said carefully, “I did not track you from the Keep.”
“You are geweth, then?”
“Pardon?”
“Then how?” Another thread or two snapped in your voice. “How far must I run before I am free of you? When I go to Hell, shall scribes and bards wait at the gates like carrion birds?”
“I’m not a bard or a scribe. If that helps.”
Your brows went flat. You looked pointedly at the book in my arms. “I am no great scholar, boy, but I recognize my own device.”
“Ah.” My hand spasmed again on the cover. I wondered if you had opened the cover, and if you were literate enough to read the title. “I can see how you would think—but it’s not—well, I suppose it is, but—”
“All my life men like you have followed me.” You were dangling now by a single thread. “Hounding me, lapping up the blood and begging for more. You have turned all my graves into glory, all my carnage into pretty songs they sing at court.”
“That’s very … vivid, but I’m telling you I’m not—”
The leash snapped. Suddenly you were on your feet and that enormous bastard of a blade—the most famous sword in the whole of history, the sword every child in Dominion had pretended to wield, swishing sticks at nothing—was back at my throat.
The hilt was long enough for at least one-and-a-half hands, but you held it steadily in one, tendons corded around your wrist. It occurred to me, with a queer shiver, that you must have carried me from the yew to this cottage, and that you wouldn’t have found it difficult at all.
The point of the sword dipped lower, settling in the scarred hollow between my collarbones. And yet, your expression was not angry, after all. It was—lost. Bewildered. Afraid, almost, as if you were a stranger to yourself. I felt I’d seen that look before, though I couldn’t say where.