Chapter 6
I MADE A dismaying discovery that day: A journey which takes only a few paragraphs in a book takes considerably longer on horseback.
Especially if the horse is old enough to draw a pension, and the woods are thick enough that there are no straight or obvious routes, but only slim game trails that weave and curl among the trees.
After a long day spent either clinging grimly to the horse—who was not actually a horse, but a clever device for flaying the insides of one’s thighs—or limping grimly alongside it, we had not even reached the edge of the Queen’s Wood.
I lay on my back that night, shivering and aching beneath my bad-smelling fur, trying not to whimper every time I moved my legs.
You reached out your hand. I took it. We rode on.
You seemed content to pass the hours in knightly silence, speaking only to suggest one of us walk for a while, but I found myself fidgeting after the first quarter hour. Eventually I gestured down at the gelding. “What’s his name?”
Perhaps I would write it down in the book; perhaps with a little patriotic editing he could be transformed from what he was (a mean fossil) into what he ought to have been (a proud warhorse).
“He’s no pet,” you answered, as if you didn’t feed him grain from your palm every evening. And then, in gruff apology, “He doesn’t mean any real harm.”
“Truly?” I could already feel my left foot ballooning gruesomely in my boot. “I have convincing evidence to the contrary.”
“As do I.” I made a doubtful noise, and felt you shrug behind me. “You’re still breathing.”
“Oh,” I said.
Another hour or two passed. My vertebrae jostled against one another. The trees repeated themselves. I had the slightly hysterical thought that you might be riding in circles, just to torment me.
“How far is it to the Northern Fallows?”
“Far.”
“How far to the edge of the wood?”
“Less far.”
Was it blasphemous, I wondered, to swear at a saint? What if they hadn’t been sainted yet? Instead, I observed, with forced cheer, “I’ve never seen anyone with hair quite like yours. That strange color—where does it come from?”
I felt you stiffen at my back. “Where does your hair come from, madman?”
I flushed. I knew my appearance must be odd to you—this was the old Dominion of Vivian Rolfe’s speeches, free of foreigners—but I’d been hoping you didn’t know what it meant. My answer was a weary one, learned by rote. “My father was born and raised in Dominion, I assure you.”
There followed a somewhat baffled silence. Then: “I meant no offense. The geweth make their homes where they will.”
“The—what?” It was the second time you’d used that word in reference to me.
Your bafflement deepened. “Geweth. Are there no Roving Folk in the future, save you?”
“Oh. No. Or yes, but they keep to the Hinterlands. And I’m not—that is, I suppose my mother may have been, but I never knew—”
You interrupted, mercifully, “I never knew my birth mother, either. And my fathers thought my hair—strange, as well.” God, I was an ass. “Little Dragon, Father Foy called me.”
“What else were you called? Before the queen found you, I mean.”
“I don’t remember,” you answered, coolly, and would answer nothing else the rest of the day.
I spoke to myself, instead, and to your awful horse.
I prophesied to him, speaking of the rosy future when everyone would ride streetcars and automobiles instead of horses, and all the nasty oversized nags would be turned into canned meat and boots.
Do you know what a knacker is? I asked, and his ears swiveled back and forth, as if I were a gnat.
We left the Queen’s Wood on the third morning.
The sky opened like a cold gray sea around us, so vast that I had the dizzy sensation of falling upward into it.
I found myself clutching at the horse’s mane, fighting the sudden conviction that we should turn back.
That we should remain forever in the shadow of the wood, safe and secret, rather than take a single step forward.
“Easy,” you said, at my ear, and it was only then that I realized I was breathing in uneven, absurd gusts, that my muscles were seized and shivering. God, I thought, not now.
I said, “S-sorry. It’ll pass.” But if you answered, I couldn’t hear it. My pulse was rushing in my ears as if I were back at the front, as if there were something terrible waiting just over the horizon.
I became aware, distantly, that you had dropped the reins.
You bent yourself around me, your arms hard across my chest and ribs, your chin notched over my shoulder, your touch firm but careful, as if I were a cracked glass in danger of shattering.
I could feel your heart against my spine.
It beat steadily, sanely, a simple lesson mine couldn’t seem to learn.
Another ragged breath, and another, and my muscles began to slacken.
Shame arrived, then. That I had disgraced myself so thoroughly before the Drawn Blade of Dominion—that the Virgin Saint had been obliged to hold me so intimately and improperly—even now your left hand was wrapped around my hip, low enough that my pulse picked up for an entirely different and more sordid reason.
Your thumb began to move in a manner you must have imagined was soothing.
I flinched upright, flushed and ashamed. “Sorry,” I said.
Perhaps you’d spent enough time at war to see every kind of malady and madness, because you asked no questions. You only cleared your throat and said, “No need,” in a strangely rough voice.
I spent the rest of the morning ridding myself of impious thoughts. It was difficult; in your innocence, you had not realized that your left hand was still on my hip.
It was colder, beyond the trees.
The wind rushed freely over the heather, landing like an open palm on my cheeks. My blisters wept and froze against my thighs.
You hardly seemed to notice the cold or the terrain or the long days in the saddle.
It didn’t strike me as toughness so much as an odd divide between you and your own flesh.
As if your body was merely something you owned, like a sharp knife or a good pair of boots, which you might use hard and tend only when it showed signs of weakening.
You commented, irritably, that I was shivering, and I said, “Well, so are you.” After a brief, surprised pause, you wrapped your matted brown cloak around both of us.
That night you made a fire, though the only fuel was willowy green brush. I fell asleep curled around the coals.
I was awoken by your voice. The fire had smoldered down to ash and smoke, and you were visible only by the lunar glow of your hair. You were twitching and thrashing, but I was sure you were still sleeping; awake, you would never have let me hear you weep.
I called your name, softly. You settled.
The second time you woke me, I had to shout before you fell quiet.
The third time, I crawled to your side. Your expression was desperate, so twisted with grief I felt my eyes sting in sympathy.
“Una,” I said, softly.
Your eyes snapped open, wild, unseeing. Before I could say anything else, before I could blink or flinch, your hand was at my throat, thumb pressed into the hollow beneath my jaw, fingers wrapped around my neck.
I went still and oddly slack, as prey animals do in the mouths of wolves. I waited patiently as reason leaked back into your eyes, and your expression soured from grief into guilt, and then bitter fury.
Your hand spasmed away from my skin. You shoved yourself backward, away from me, clutching the cloak to your chest. “I told you not to come near me, boy,” you said, roughly. “I could have killed you.”
I rolled my jaw. I suspected you could have ripped out my trachea bare-handed, but you hadn’t even applied enough pressure to bruise. “You’ve called out twice in your sleep already tonight,” I observed. “You haven’t killed me yet.”
“I still might,” you said, with such sincerity that I retreated to my own side of the fire. Your shoulders unknotted, fractionally.
After a long silence, you said, with effort, “Forgive me. I dream often of things I would rather forget. Old battles. Old wounds.” Then, a little defensively, “Many soldiers suffer so.”
It hadn’t been battle you were dreaming of, I was nearly certain. You hadn’t yelled or cursed or screamed in terror. You had begged, in a voice like two halves of a heart scraping together.
But I said, as lightly as I could, “So I’ve heard,” and resettled beneath the furs, head propped on the book.
You looked as if you might say something else, but your eyes fell to the book, and the scars pulled taut across your face. You said, harshly, “Keep to your own side of the fire,” and turned your back to me.
I did as I was bade.
When you called out again—that night and on the nights that followed—I did not go to you. Sometimes I pressed my palms flat to my ears, so that I could not hear the words you said, over and over, in that funeral of a voice: Please, you begged, come back.
On the sixth day, we passed through our first township.
There had been a few sad clusters of cottages near the edge of the woods, occupied by nothing now but rooks and field mice.
When I’d asked, you told me there had once been people who made their livelihood from the forest. Huntsmen and furriers, poor crofters who set their pigs loose in the loam, weavers who gathered woad and rue for their dyes.
Even the Roving Folk sometimes summered there, when they were not wandering, trading horses and telling stories.
“But no one lives in the wood now?” I’d asked.
You’d answered, neutrally, “It’s the Queen’s Wood, now, and no one else’s.”
The homes ahead of us were not abandoned. Clean, white woodsmoke unfurled from every chimney, and the hum of human voices buzzed in my ears. I braced myself for gawking and muttering, perhaps worse—