Chapter 7
I HAD READ and re-read every version of your battle with the last dragon. I could—and had, on several regrettable social occasions—recite Montmer’s account in the original Middle Mothertongue.
It began: It was there, in that burnt and barren place, where Una met the dragon, last of his kind.
Cloven Hill was, to Montmer’s credit, fairly barren. There were no towns or villages here, or even the lonely camps of shepherds or hunters. There was nothing but bare stone and wind-stunted pines, and the shifting clouds that kept the peaks partly obscured, like poorly kept secrets.
And yet: The earth was not scorched. The air was not sulfurous.
An aura of dread did not blacken the skies.
There were still slim gray foxes and white hares among the stones, and colorful bursts of lichen and juniper berries.
It reminded me, inexplicably, of the Queen’s Wood.
It was the sheer wildness of the place, maybe, the sense that no mapmaker had ever written down its name, and no army had ever driven a flag into its dirt.
When the land turned steep, you made one of your subtle gestures to the horse and we halted beneath an alder. You dismounted and I slithered ungracefully after you. You caught me as you always did, hands braced patiently around my waist until I found my feet.
You spoke to the bay for a while, in that soft, private voice that made me wonder if you were lying about not naming him, before you loosed the bindings on the packs.
I didn’t understand what you were doing until I caught the mirror gleam of metal.
You laid a vambrace against your left forearm and pulled the strap tight with your teeth. Knights were supposed to have fleets of servants to assist them, but it was clear you’d learned to manage alone.
I fished the second vambrace from the pile and held it ready.
After a sharp, inscrutable look, you set your arm carefully against the metal and permitted me to wrap the leather straps around it.
I didn’t have to ask which piece came next; my fingers already knew the shape of each greave and gauntlet, each strap and buckle.
It fit you well, impossibly well, as if the iron had been poured like candle wax over your skin, and the metal was as fine as anything made in my century.
(If I ever saw Sawbridge again, I would tell her plate armor had been worn much earlier than she claimed.)
Piece by piece I transmuted you from mortal to myth, from flesh into blinding, blue-white steel. If you wondered where I’d learned to play squire, you did not ask, and I was grateful; I had no good answer.
“Shield?” I asked, hefting it.
“Won’t need it.”
“Helm?”
“Don’t have one.” It was true that you were always bareheaded in the paintings and plays, but I found this suddenly and unbearably stupid. A single stray arrow, a lucky blow—
“The belt, boy,” you said.
I had to reach both arms around your waist to fasten the belt, flushing slightly when my knuckles brushed the small of your back. I fumbled for Valiance, drawing it clumsily from its battered leather sheath. The light caught the blade and my breath stopped.
I’d never held it before. It took both hands, and the tip still bobbed and wobbled. I knew it was old—knew it had been in the yew for centuries before you drew it—but it looked fresh from the forge.
I ran my thumb up the flat of the blade. “Not so much as a dent or chip. Has it never failed you?”
Your answered evenly, without inflection, “Every tool fails, used hard enough.”
“But—is it true—” I felt like a boy asking his priest if angels were real. “The damage disappears?”
You looked away, squinting up the mountainside.
“I took a hammer to it once, after—” You stopped.
Coughed. “Broke it into ten pieces and threw the shards into the sea.” Your throat moved as you swallowed.
“When I woke the next day, the hilt was in my hand, and the blade was whole and pure as the day I drew it from the yew.”
You had been granted a true miracle—an unbreakable sword!—yet you would cast it away if you could. Your fate was laid out before you like a shining path, a tale so perfect it must have been written by the hand of God Himself, yet you would turn away from it.
If I let you.
I thrust the sword toward you, and you sheathed it at your hip, a quick iron whisper. You reached for your hair, twisting it carelessly into your collar, and I found myself saying, “Here, sit down.”
You sat, strangely pliant. I knew as soon as I touched your hair that I’d made a mistake. The weight and texture of it—heavy and slick and tangled, like a thicket of silk—struck me as the sort of thing that might haunt a person, lingering like a wound and aching years later.
I braided it hastily, leaving long tendrils falling around your face and down across the metal of your shoulders.
With your back still turned to me, I said, “You’ll win.” I swept a wisp from your neck, tucking it into the braid. “Just—so you know, you will kill the dragon and find the grail. I’ve read all the stories.”
A slight pause before you asked, “Then why do your hands shake?”
“Oh.” My laugh was unconvincing, rusty sounding. I stepped away, trapping my treacherous hands beneath my elbows. “Because I’m an awful coward. Ask anyone.”
You stood and gestured to your horrible horse. “There’s grain for three days more. If he misbehaves”—you appeared to struggle briefly—“his name is Hen.”
“I knew you were lying! But—Hen? Well, perhaps some things ought to be lost to history.” Only then did I follow the implications of the instructions. My chest contracted. “You’re leaving me here?”
Your brows crimped, bemused. “Yes.”
“You can’t slay a dragon alone!”
“Everything I have done, I have done alone.” You said it without emotion, as a statement of fact. “I thought you’d read all the stories.”
“But what if—look, just let me come with you. Please.”
Your expression moved from bafflement to some harsh, taut emotion that made the muscles of your jaw roll. Eventually you said, roughly, “You make a poor coward, boy.” You turned away and said, “Stay,” as if I were a poorly trained puppy, worrying at your heels.
I watched you disappear into the clouds with something flailing behind my breastbone, a mad desire to shout after you: Wait! Come back! It is not worth it!
Instead, I wedged myself against a crag and opened the book in my lap. There are blotches on that page where the ink dripped and dried before I could think of anything to write.
Eventually I simply stole Montmer’s opening line on the grounds that, technically, Montmer would be plagiarizing from me.
UNA AND THE LAST DRAGON
It was there, in that burnt and barren place, where Una met the dragon, last of his kind.
At one time, dragons had been the plague of Dominion.
They lurked in deep woods and sea caves, on lonely mountaintops and beneath ancient keeps, sleeping among the bones of stray cattle and lost children.
They were unlike every natural creature—they were not born and never died, but only persisted, a ceaseless hungering that was never sated.
The people of Dominion had lived in the fell shadow of that hunger for so many centuries that they no longer even dreamed of a different world. They sought shelter when the wind smelled of sulfur, and never wandered far off the edges of the map.
But Yvanne was not born to tolerate despair.
The very day she was crowned she sent knights and armies to purge the land of dragons.
They dug the beasts from their caverns and set fire to their forests.
She did not make trophies of them, for her own glory, but had the carcasses burned three times, and their blackened bones ground and scattered over the farmlands.
Only a few scales she kept, for her mantle.
By the time Sir Una rode north, all the dragons were dead, save one: the canniest and oldest of them, which lurked in the bleak mists of the Cloven Hill.
It had taken many lives, over the centuries, including Galawin the Great, who—they said—had carried the grail with him from the Savior’s resurrection.
When the last dragon heard again the clang of armor and the hiss of drawn steel, it rose from its lair like a demon loosed from hell. It smote the air with pale wings so vast they cast a pall over the sun itself.
Sir Una stood beneath it, atop the bones of all the heroes who had fallen before her, and all the simple folk of Dominion who had suffered beneath the dragon’s tyranny for too long. Valiance was in her right hand and death was in her eye.
The dragon blew its brimstone breath down upon her. She caught the flame on her shield and bowed her head against it and, though the metal blistered her arm, though cinders burned her brow, she did not yield.
The fire faded. Una rose like the dawn.
The sight sent the dragon into a frenzy of fearful rage. ‘Think you, a mere mortal, will defeat me?’ it shrieked, and its voice was a torment, which peeled bark from trees and stripped moss from stones.
And then the battle began in earnest.
Three days and three nights they fought, and each dealt bitter wounds to the other.
By dusk on the third day the mountain was gray with ash, and the stones were so hot they glowed dull orange.
The dragon crawled now, its white wings in tatters.
It bled, and where its blood fell it hissed faintly, and poisoned the earth, so that nothing would bloom in those places even a century later.
Una faced the dragon, her lungs choked with ash and sulfur, limping badly. Her armor was scorched black, and her hands were blistered with burns, and yet she smiled.
‘I may be a mere mortal, dragon,’ she said, ‘but Dominion is everlasting.’
It is said that the heart of a dragon is so small—nothing but a bitter red seed hidden deep beneath vast ribs and iron scales—that no arrow may find it and no sword may pierce it.
But they had never seen a sword wielded by the Red Knight. Sir Una struck the great breast of that beast, and she struck true, as she ever had. Valiance pierced the dark heart of the last dragon, and the world was free of them forevermore.
This is how Sir Una received the last of all her names and titles. Everlasting, they called her, for she would be remembered for as long as Dominion lasted, and Dominion would never die.
—Excerpted from The Death of Una Everlasting, translated by Owen Mallory
When I finished, I put away the reed pen and the oak-gall ink and the book. I paced. I sat. I waited. I felt slightly nauseous and rebuked myself for it.
Then from up the mountainside came a high, keening cry.
It was an awful noise, like the scream of metal on metal, but it went on so long it resolved into a single, pure note.
The note burrowed into me, becoming very nearly beautiful, so that when it finally ended, I felt as if something precious had been lost.
Silence followed.
I pelted uphill, breathing harshly, stumbling over stones and roots. I rounded a wiry stand of pine, heading into dense mist—
And slammed into something tall and unyielding, like the face of a cliff.
“Una—” I unpeeled my face from your cuirass and fell back, arms lifting and hovering on either side of your shoulders. “Are you alright?”
“Of course,” you said, and you laughed. It sounded like a jar full of teeth being shaken.
You did look alright. Your armor was unscratched. There was a shallow scrape across your left temple because you still hadn’t learned to guard your blind side, but the blood was already gummy, half dried.
But—your eyes. They’d been hollowed out, as if someone had broken into your skull and scraped it clean with the edge of a spoon. The echo of that eerie cry seemed to spread between us like a stain.
“And”—damn my wreck of a voice for breaking—“did you find—”
“Of course,” you said again, coolly. You strode by me, shoving something hard into my belly as you passed.
I nearly dropped it, and when I looked at it properly, I nearly dropped it again.
It was a small cup of purest gold, set with tiny red jewels: the grail of Dominion.
The half-legendary blessed artifact that had resurrected the Savior Himself, that would save Queen Yvanne’s life and the future of the nation itself.
I wriggled out of my coat and wrapped it tightly around the cup, lest the college archivist come charging down the mountainside, thumbscrews in hand.
By the time I caught up, you were already mounted.
You waited in a clearing, just where the sun poured through the branches, running over the plates of your armor and pooling in your hair, so that you were haloed in hazy gold light.
Your head was bowed as if in prayer, and one hand rested on your hilt.
I stood mute, while time twisted and sloughed around me.
I forgot you were scarred and plain and unchaste. I forgot you cried out sometimes in the night, as I did, and dreamed of a home you could never return to, as I did. I even forgot you were the sort of woman who named her horse Hen.
You were Una Everlasting, the Drawn Blade, the Red Knight, and I was a boy again, choked with that covetous tangle of desire and desire-to-become that had driven me to war and back again, to archives and libraries and finally here, through time itself, to the far side of history.
My whole life existed only to bear witness to yours, and God! It was worth it.
Then the light shifted; the halo vanished. When you reached your hand down to me, I could see again the lines and hollows around your eyes, the rucked skin of scars and the freckles gone blurry with years in the sun.
I should have been able to breathe again, but could not.
You made an impatient, extremely human sound. I took your hand again, and we rode down the mountain together.
When the ground leveled, I asked, quietly enough that you could pretend not to have heard me if you chose, “Was it so terrible? The dragon?”
“No,” you said, and then, after a long time, “it was a wild creature, and old—older than anything that ever was, I think, but it was not terrible. None of them ever were. They were”—the cool voice cracked, and I heard the grief running beneath it—“beautiful.”
I clutched the grail hard to my stomach to remind myself that it was worth it, all of it: the cry on the mountain and the hateful faces of the villagers, your nightmares and mine, the blood we spilled and the scars we bore, and even the death of something wild and old and beautiful.
“But we ride now to the Keep,” you said, into my silence. “And there the story ends.” Such yearning in your voice, such relief, that for a moment I couldn’t answer. I felt you stiffen behind me, wary, mistrusting.
So I said, “Yes,” and it felt like sliding a knife between your ribs, or between my own, or as if there were no difference between the two. “The story ends there.”
And this, too, I told myself, was worth it.