Chapter 5 #2
The smith had set his sons and their sons to guard it against the day a true champion would come to claim it.
At the time Una came to the isle, there were three brothers remaining. They had spent the whole of their lives training together, and the beach was pocked white with the bones of their enemies.
Una buried the brothers side by side in the sandy soil.
When she returned to Cavallon, Yvanne bent her head, and Una placed upon it the Crown of Dominion: a golden circlet, set with three rubies red as pigeon’s blood. It fit her brow as if the Saint of Smiths had crafted it for her alone.
When Yvanne rose, Una said again, ‘Tell me what else I may win you, my lady.’
And the queen answered, ‘A kingdom worthy of this crown.’
The following morning, Sir Una rode out with Valiance in her hand and an army at her back, and made war on the world.
Later, they would name those bloody years the First Crusade.
Historians would call it the beginning of Dominion, when the people were freed from the rule of petty lords and tyrants and united under one flag at last. The bards would sing of glorious battles against insurmountable odds, of desperate victories and tragic defeats and always, endlessly, of her: Sir Una, the Drawn Blade of Dominion, who fought so well and so long that her enemies ran from the meanest glimpse of her red-painted shield, the merest rumor of a pale-haired woman upon a blood-bay steed.
It was during that time that people began to believe she was not a woman at all, but a demon or an angel.
They said no mortal could fight as she fought—perfectly, without pause, as if she knew the arc of each blow before it fell—or survive what she survived.
More than once she was carried from the field, her sword shattered, her shield split; more than once the queen kept vigil at her champion’s bedside.
But always, Una rose again: her wounds healed, her blade whole and unmarked.
I cannot say the whole truth of it because she will not speak of those times, even to me. But I have seen the scars that run over every part of her, biting deep into muscle and tendon, and I can tell you with certainty that she is mortal.
And I can tell you what any map would: Una swept across the continent like a scouring wind.
She took the salt marshes of the south from the Nornish heathens; she slew the Lords of Gall and had their idols defaced, the mark of the Savior scratched into their stone brows; she fought the Hyllmen last, those stubborn, savage kings of the Northern Fallows.
She drove them behind the high walls of their Black Bastion, which had never before fallen to any invader. Una took it in only three days.
And when the battle was over, the dream of Dominion was true: one God, one flag, one nation.
Una returned to Cavallon in triumph, showered in rose petals and songs. And—though she was older now, and some of her wounds were the kind that never quite healed—she knelt again before the queen.
She said, ‘Tell me what else I may win you, lady.’
The queen stroked her hair as if she were a girl again, and the Drawn Blade of Dominion closed her eyes, overcome with love. ‘Rest now,’ said the queen, and Una did as she was bade.
For a year and a day, she lived peacefully, giving herself to prayer and silence. The kingdom flourished and the joints of her armor grew stiff with rust.
Until the time came when the queen fell desperately ill. Yvanne, a woman of God, did not fear death—but she feared for Dominion, for the dream she had brought into the world. And so she called out—ah, so weakly!—for her champion.
There was one thing still left to be won.
—Excerpted from The Death of Una Everlasting, translated by Owen Mallory
I chewed at the splintered end of my pen. “Could you describe the scene for me, when Yvanne’s messengers came to you?”
You paused in the act of adding wood to the fire. “I thought you knew everything that had ever happened to me.”
“Well, I know versions of it. Your story has been—will be, I suppose—written down a dozen different ways, by a dozen different authors. Lazamon is the most complete and popular version, but it’s also the most recent.
My old adviser—uh, that’s sort of like a liege lord, except instead of beheading you she can make you rewrite your thesis chapter—says the material evidence is even more contradictory and varied.
” I adjusted my spectacles, which had developed a tendency to list to the left.
“Personally, I always liked the one where they find you at prayer, and you break your vow of silence to answer the summons. ‘I would deny God before I deny my queen,’ you say, and then—”
“I told them to fuck themselves.” You settled the log on the coals and added, almost chattily, by your standards, “I was drunk as a dog, when they found me.”
“… Oh.” I chewed my pen some more, and then wrote: When the queen called, Sir Una answered, as she ever had. There was no need, I thought, to burden the reader with unnecessary detail.
I wrapped the book carefully in a scrap of hide and burrowed under the furs, watching you. You sat very upright, but there were bruised hollows beneath your eyes, as if someone had pressed their thumbs hard into your face.
“Do you ever sleep?”
You shrugged. “Fire needs tending.” I’d noticed by then that you were uneasy around the fire, approaching it reluctantly and feeding it warily, as if it were a dog that had bitten you once before.
But I didn’t think it was the reason you never slept. “You don’t want to dream, do you.”
Another tectonic shrug, as if the earth itself rested on the bend of your shoulders.
I watched you for another few minutes. I thought of simply telling you where the dragon’s bones were found, but I didn’t think you would believe me.
And even if you did—I had decided to believe in God as a very young man, mostly to annoy my father; I was not so faithful that I could turn down the chance for proof.
I crawled out from under the furs and crouched by the coals. “Let me mind the fire tonight.”
Your eyes flicked to me, then back to the flames, uncertain.
I reached—very slowly—for the stick you used as a poker, taking it from your hand without touching your skin.
“Look, if you collapse from exhaustion, I will starve almost instantly. Or be murdered by brigands or, more likely, your horse. Surely even a madman deserves better.”
I could tell I’d hit some deep-set nerve, some fundamental instinct that caused you to come when you were called, to serve when you were needed. Yet your queen needed you, and here you were, hiding where fate couldn’t find you.
You didn’t lie down, but you unbent enough to lean against the mud wall, swaddled in the muddy folds of your should-be-red cloak. Your eyes narrowed to dark gold slits.
You slept, eventually, brows low and knotted, as if you dreamed and did not like it.
I pulled the furs over you with a tenderness that was almost an apology, although I didn’t know what I was sorry for.
Fate always finds you, in the end.
“How did you know?” Your voice woke me, trembling with some great emotion.
I tried to jerk upright in answer, but I’d fallen asleep in an awkward huddle beside the ashes of the fire, and my muscles had fossilized overnight. I made a feeble flopping motion instead. “Know what?” My voice sounded like two knives scraping together.
“The dream.” You were breathing hard, air rushing through the bellows of your chest. “Last night I saw the dragon, dead before me. I saw the cup. And I heard a voice—a terrible voice. It said—”
“Cloven Hill.” I had achieved an approximation of sitting up, but my neck seemed to have several extra angles in it. “The remains were discovered there by a shepherd’s son who was looking for a lost lamb, apparently. The papers loved it. The skeleton hangs in the Royal Museum now, of course.”
I managed to turn my head the five degrees necessary to look at you.
Your face was so pale that the scars were a garish pink.
That misshapen pupil was huge and black, almost spilling the bounds of your iris.
“It’s true, then.” Nearly a whisper, full of awe.
“You knew what would happen before it came to pass. You’ve come from … the future.”
“I did mention it.” I was rubbing my neck with one palm, to no effect at all, resisting the urge to whoop with awe and triumph only because I thought it might leave me permanently crippled.
You glanced at the corner of the hut where you kept your kit. A bright flash of silver winked beneath the leathers. I hadn’t seen you fully armored since the day I arrived; it struck me now as strange that you’d been wearing it at all.
You said, “Tell me how it happens, then.”
I wished I’d thought to rehearse in all these long, silent days.
I wet my lips. “You follow God’s voice north.
You find the last dragon in its lair. The battle is long and bitter, but you prevail, and in the dragon’s horde you find the grail.
You carry it in triumph to your queen. And then…
” The final twist, the heroic last stand. The tragedy.
In my undergraduate courses, I’d taught your death as a narrative tool, an elegant equation about honor and valor and the cost of nationhood. Now, looking into the burnt sap of your eyes, close enough to see the ordinary imperfections of your skin, it did not seem much like an equation.
But you had already strayed far from the path of your story; if I told you how it ended, you would never return to it.
You would never slay the dragon or fetch the grail.
The country would lose its first queen and its greatest hero, and I didn’t think Dominion—fragile, freshly born—would survive the loss.
Your country needs you. Had Vivian Rolfe seen that version of the future, somehow? Was that what drove her, what gave her such a burning, unbending air of purpose—the terror of a world without you?
“And then?” you prompted, and I found that—though I was a coward and a deserter—I was not yet a traitor. I would not trade the past and future of an entire nation for one woman.
“And then,” I said, “the queen is healed, and the kingdom prospers forevermore.” It wasn’t a lie.
You did not look comforted. “And afterward?” you pressed. “Does she—Yvanne said this was my last quest. Did she speak the truth?”
My mouth was full of acid, burning the back of my throat. “Yes,” I said, and—God forgive me—that wasn’t a lie, either. “This is your last quest.”
For a moment, you didn’t react at all. Your face was so perfectly still it might have been a painting or a sculpture, the symbol of a person rather than the thing itself.
But your features softened suddenly, animating into an expression I’d never seen you wear.
Not joy, but the hope of joy, like a lost sailor who hasn’t yet seen land, but believes for the first time that he might.
The sight of it did something odd to my vision.
For a moment I could see the way joy would look on your face when it finally arrived.
I could see you laughing, head thrown back, throat long and unguarded.
I could see a ripe berry popping between your teeth—juice running clear down your chin—my own hand reaching to wipe it away—
“Gather your things,” you said, sharply. “We leave before noon.”
My head jerked back, causing my neck to make a sound like a guitar string snapping.
“Oh, thank God.” And then, after a pause: “We?” I’d anticipated a lot of wheedling and pleading before you permitted me to come with you.
I had several very compelling speeches worked up, including one on bended knee and one in verse.
But you were ignoring me, already bent over your work. I hurried to gather my few things before you changed your mind.
When the camp was cleared and the gelding saddled, you mounted with fluid certainty, as if you’d been mounting this same horse for ten thousand years and would do it for another ten thousand.
In the softened light of morning, I could almost imagine him as a noble steed, rather than a bad-tempered mummy. He pranced a little, as if he, too, felt the threads of the story pulling taut around us.
I was backing awkwardly out of the way, wondering grimly how many miles my shoes would survive, when your hand appeared in my vision. It remained there, cracked and callused, red knuckled in the cold, until I realized you were waiting for me to take it.
I had noticed by then the way you held yourself away from me, as if your body was a grenade with the pin half pulled. I wondered when you had last touched someone you did not intend to kill, if you even remembered how.
Yet still: There was your hand, waiting.
I eyed it. “Are you sure you—”
“Yes.”
I eyed the gelding, who was rolling the bit in his jaw with a sound like bones in a meat grinder. “And you’re sure he—”
“Yes.”
“Why? I thought you despised bards and scribes. ‘Carrion birds,’ I think you called them.”
You did not answer. Your hand did not waver.
I took it. I set one foot in the stirrup, and you hauled me up as if I weighed nothing at all.
You settled me in the saddle in front of you, where one of the furs had been folded over the low pommel, so that my thighs lay over yours, my back against your chest. Your arms reached easily around me for the reins, which you hardly seemed to need.
The long muscles of your legs tensed in some secret language spoken only between you and the gelding, and he turned northward.
And for the first time since I had lost the book, everything felt right. It was like an out-of-tune instrument finally ringing true, a poorly told tale finally making sense.
I was so overcome by it all—by the wild, fresh smell of the air and the heat of your body around mine, by the implausible fact that I was riding out on the last quest of Sir Una Everlasting, the Red Knight, in the name of Yvanne the First—that I almost didn’t hear you when you finally answered my question.
“Because it was not God’s voice I heard in my dream, boy,” you said, and I felt your breath on the fine hairs at the back of my neck. “It was yours.”