Chapter 6 #3
The farther north we rode, the grayer and more miserable the villages became, until they did not resemble villages so much as wild outcroppings of huts, sprouting like pale mushrooms between the rocks.
The people were bent and wind wracked, their faces hollowed in a way that made me think of the Hinterlander children who used to steal our empty bean tins in the war, running their fingers around the edges for the last drops of brine.
The whispers grew sharper, more vicious, and the stares grew colder. We did not speak of it, but you began to guide the gelding more often away from the road, along the gorse-eaten slopes and stone ridges.
But we couldn’t avoid every village. In a narrow pass between two peaks, we came upon a place so desperately poor it was difficult to tell if it was a settlement or an encampment.
Several of the structures were nothing but stacked rocks and goatskins, and the smoke that slunk from their roofs smelled of green wood and animal shit.
We had to lead the horse—blindfolded, to reduce civilian casualties—and pick our way through the churned mud between huts.
I’d been planning to trade the fresh hare you’d tied over the saddlebow for some ale and a few more stories, but the expressions of the gathering villagers changed my mind.
They did not whisper at all, but only stared, mute and hostile.
A stooped old man spat deliberately on the ground as we passed.
A bony young woman dumped her wash water so that it slopped over your boots, leaving them filmed with lye and grease.
A boy contrived to knock a cart of shriveled swedes directly into the path, so that the horse stumbled.
The villagers watched you avidly, but you did not scowl or recoil, or even break your stride.
They reminded me of the crowd I’d once seen in a lion-tamer’s tent. The lion had been torpid and rheumatic, and the less dangerous it seemed the more vicious the crowd became, as if they were owed blood, and were determined to get it one way or another.
We were at the very edge of the village when a man approached at your back. He was thin and nearly bald, the flesh of his head covered in slick pink scars, as from fire.
The gelding tossed his head as he approached, nostrils wide, but you did not turn. The man spat something in a guttural language I didn’t know, and I understood that he hated you. They all did.
Then he grabbed a fistful of your hair, and I thought, fervently: You should not have done that.
You stopped walking, chin jerked upward by the tug of your scalp.
There was a tiny pause, during which the reins slipped from your hand, and your expression turned remote, as if you had gone away and left your body behind.
It was the way you looked when you woke from your bad dreams, reaching for my throat, and I knew that very soon there would be a dead man in the street.
Some dark, subterranean part of me—the part of me that saw those dirty knuckles wrapped in the shine of your hair and wanted to put the entire godforsaken village to the torch and salt the ashes—didn’t really mind.
But I thought you might. I should have grabbed your arm—but I hesitated, and then you were moving.
You were so damn fast. You had turned, blade drawn and lifted, already falling downward, by the time I shouted your name. “Una!”
You flinched. Not much, but enough to ruin the perfect arc of the blow. Instead of falling across the man’s neck, Valiance fell at his wrist, with a sound like a hatchet into wet wood.
All of us—you and I, the scarred man, and the straggling villagers behind us—looked for a moment at the neat pink meat where his hand had been. The white stubs of his arm bones sheered cleanly away. Then the flood of red, and the wailing.
You watched, impassive, as he collapsed. The gelding reared, blind but bloodthirsty, and you made no move to catch the reins.
I said your name again, and you looked at me in a way that suggested there might still be a dead man in the street soon. Who was I to you, after all? A lost scribe, a slightly-above-average fortune-teller, a stray you dragged reluctantly along with you.
I didn’t blink or step back. I only held your gaze, and held it, my fists clenched so tightly I felt my palm crack and bleed fresh.
Eventually something flickered in the depths of your eyes.
Valiance hissed back into its sheath. You caught the gelding and quieted him.
A pair of women came running to the man’s side, tears running down their cheeks.
One of them reached toward the hand—now sticking upright in the mud, as if someone were reaching up from under the earth—but drew back.
You watched them weeping with no expression at all. Then you turned your back on the village and walked on.
After a mile or so you paused and dropped to one knee, head bowed, hands cupped in the shape of a stirrup.
I blinked down at you for several seconds before stepping gingerly into your palms. You lifted me into the saddle without effort but did not swing yourself up behind me.
You walked instead, apparently too furious with me to bear my company.
It was a long way before we made camp that night.
Long after dark, after the horse had been rubbed down and fed hot mash, after the fire had worn itself down to shadow and ember, I offered, by way of apology, “Bastard.”
You shrugged without looking at me.
I tried again. “It was—merciful of you. To spare him.”
Your mouth twisted. “You would call it mercy, to take the right hand of the only hale man, in a family already hungry?” You shook your head once, sharply. “The only mercy I have ever shown is that I kill quickly, and I did not even grant him that.”
“He shouldn’t have touched you. None of them should have dared.
” The Drawn Blade of Dominion shouldn’t have to hunch and duck among her countrymen, shrinking herself down to mortal proportions.
I found myself gesticulating, restless and angry.
“They should be grateful. They should be falling to their knees, crawling after you to apologize. They should—”
“Can’t you bind that properly?” You pointed with your chin toward my hand, which was oozing again. “Come here.”
I edged toward you around the fire. You reached out slowly, deliberately, as if giving me time to withdraw. I didn’t.
You turned my wound carefully to the light, the crease deepening between your brows. My hands looked fragile in yours, long boned and ink stained against the cracked callus of your palms. I searched your face for contempt or derision, but found it curiously absent of all expression.
You began to unwind the bandage, with a sound like a boot being drawn out of deep mud. I turned my face hastily away.
I spoke to the low line of hills, their shape visible only by the absence of stars. “They should at least show you respect. They owe it to you, as—as citizens of Dominion.”
“They were not born citizens of Dominion.” You said it mildly, without reproach.
“They were Hyllmen, once, and they did not come eagerly to the queen’s banner.
Even when they knew their cause was lost, they would not open the gates of the Black Bastion.
” I heard the click of your throat as you swallowed.
“Those people lost their sons to the war, their gods to the Savior, their land to the crown. They’ll turn to banditry soon, if they have not already, and then they will be hanged, and their children made into beggars.
” You tossed the soiled bandage into the fire, eyes flashing red.
“The cost of peace, she tells me. Sometimes I wonder whose peace she means.”
You fell silent, dripping cold water into the mess of my palm and dabbing gently at it, wiping away blood and lymph. Your fingers were so thick with scars they were hard to the touch, like hand-shaped stones, and your motions were uncertain, as if you didn’t trust yourself not to hurt me.
There was a prickling, restless sensation growing just beneath my skin. Anger, perhaps, because your speech had sounded very much like one of my father’s, or fear, because it hadn’t sounded untrue.
I took a bracing breath. “Still. Yvanne is the rightful queen. She’s their queen—”
“And I am her drawn blade.” The words came quick and bleak as the fall of an ax.
“It was I who beheaded the False Kings, one by one, though they cried mercy. I who set the crown on her brow, with blood still crusted around the jewels. I who rode at the front, who struck first and last, who drew every border in red. Do you know what they call me, in the north? What that man called me before I crippled him?” Your lip curled, and I couldn’t tell if the contempt was directed at them or yourself.
“The Knight of Worms. Because I feed them so well.”
You tore a strip of fresh linen with your teeth and spat it out. “They should fear me, boy.” You bent over the work, hair falling to one side and baring the pale nape of your neck to me. “And so should you.”
I watched you bind the fresh cloth around my hand—clumsily, gently, frowning hard—and thought maybe I would head back to the village and raze it after all. It was a shame, really, that I only had three shots.
You began to draw your hand away from mine, but I caught and held it instead. You looked up sharply, eyes dark as silt.
“Well,” I said, enunciating very clearly. “I don’t.”
Your lips parted, and I saw again that phantom smile, berries bursting between sharp white teeth. I had never heard you laugh, but I knew then it would be low and rough and wild.
And I knew, too—from the subtle shift in the air between us, from the catch in your breath—that you were not like that army nurse I’d known, after all.
I permitted myself to imagine it, just for a moment.
I would turn your hand palm up, press my lips to the soft, secret center of it.
I would reach up and bury my fingers in your hair, pull you down to me.
You would let me. Then you would let me go to my knees and give you what you wanted, for as long as you wanted it, until your thighs were slick and the line between your brows was finally gone, and afterward you would sleep deeply, without dreaming.
The images arrived with such vivid assurance, such fine-grained detail, that they felt more like memories than fantasies. You met my eyes and I felt myself tilting toward you, the woman I had wanted since before I knew how, the woman I was just now coming to want—
The woman I was leading to her death.
I recoiled.
You saw it. I watched the knowledge of that flinch move across your face like an early frost, killing whatever had been in bloom. It wasn’t pain. It was closer to relief: You had wanted me to be afraid, and I was.
You pulled your hand away from mine and rubbed it hard against your hip. I watched in awful, cowardly silence as you wrapped your cloak around yourself and lay down with your back to me.
I stayed awake most of the night, sick with guilt and want. I smoked three Lucky Stars in a row, heedless of the waste, before I turned to the book.
The words came easily, pouring from the pen in a hot, spiteful rush. It was all lies, but what did I care? If I couldn’t have you or heal you or save you—if I couldn’t love you—then I would make all of Dominion love you, forever and ever.
UNA AND THE GRAIL
When the queen called, Sir Una answered, as she ever had.
She rode out that very night to seek the grail, the holy cup that had resurrected the Savior Himself, that would now pull Yvanne from the very edge of death.
But understand: In that time, the grail was less than a legend, less even than the meanest rumor. Only the most dogged priests spoke of it as any other than a holy gesture, and only the most foolish of men went looking for it. None of them found anything but their own graves.
But see now how God favors Dominion. To all those desperate, greedy grail-seekers, He had said nothing. To Una—whose heart never once faltered, whose faith never once wavered—He said two words: Cloven Hill.
Few people knew that place, then. It was not labeled on any map or mentioned in any myths; it was nothing but a low mountain far in the Northern Fallows, too lonely even for hermits, too barren even for goats.
But the queen’s service had sent Sir Una to every corner of Dominion.
She had walked the storm-bitten coasts and ridden down the white streets of Cavallon, chased her enemies through the north and slept in the cool shade of the western woods.
She had eaten of every orchard and drunk of every beck, so that if you plucked her heart from her chest it would be a perfect map of the country, with blood for rivers and red muscle for mountains.
God no sooner spoke the words than Una saddled her horse. North she rode, as hard and fast as her loyal steed would carry her, stopping only when the falling light risked the horse. Then she wrapped herself in her woolen cloak and slept the deep, untroubled sleep of the faithful.
At dawn she rose with the sun and rode north.
Most often she took the secret ways of hinds and hares, or the dirt tracks of farmers and herdsmen.
Only sometimes did she take to the great roads, veering between merchant carts and mule teams until someone saw the device on her shield, and the cry was taken up: Make way! Make way for the Queen’s Champion!
Wherever she rode, the people of Dominion bowed low as she passed, and wept tears of awe and joy, and told their children and their children’s children about the day the Red Knight rode through their village.
Little girls tossed torn petals wherever she walked, and boys crossed stick-swords, and their mothers and fathers welcomed her into their homes.
For they knew what she had done for them, and they loved her for it.
—Excerpted from The Death of Una Everlasting, translated by Owen Mallory
Six days later, you raised your arm and pointed over my shoulder at the horizon, where the shadow of a mountain now stood. The clouds clung thick and white to the ground, so that the mountain reared up like a broken molar from pale gums.
“There,” you said.
I asked, “Are you sure?”
You did not bother to answer, and I did not bother to ask again. I knew, somehow, that you were right: We had come at last to Cloven Hill, where lay the grail, and the last dragon of Dominion.