Chapter 16 #6
“Oh, I see.” Vivian widened her eyes and flapped her lashes with showy, false innocence.
“Why didn’t I hold bake sales for the schools?
Why didn’t I tax the rich and tie a suffragette sash around my waist?
Perhaps at my coronation I could have called for world peace and released a flock of fucking doves.
” She stopped flapping her lashes. “I wouldn’t last a month, you sweet, stupid child.
Even now, after all my precedents, there are jackals at my heels.
Wealthy men waiting for the slightest sign of weakness, the smallest dip in the polls.
I’ve given them contracts, factories, new markets—prestigious appointments for their shitty sons, quick divorces for their inconvenient wives—I’ve given them an empire—and still, still, I am not safe.
I cannot be too young or too old, too beautiful or too ugly.
I cannot weep or rage. I cannot refuse a man nor fuck him nor marry him—a queen is only powerful if there are no kings or princes nearby. ”
In the electric glow of the streetlight, her shoulders rose and fell. Her voice was hoarse and honest, and very tired. “I will not apologize for being powerful, but … it can be a prison, too.”
I thought of the red marks around my father’s wrists. “Spoken like someone who’s never been to prison.”
“I rule as I must, Mallory,” she snapped. “Because if I don’t—if I falter—they will eat me alive.”
I said, sincerely, “God, I hope so,” and watched her eyes calcify into a pair of small and nasty rocks.
I rolled a crick from my neck. “When I take this book back and unwrite it, and unmake your whole house of cards, I hope they forget you so quickly they don’t even know what name to write on your fucking tombstone. ”
Her jaw worked briefly. When she spoke, it was not with her radio voice or her sincere appeal voice, but with the flat, disinterested certainty of an oracle.
“I will find you. There is no period in history where I am not. If I am not on the throne, I am very near to it, and there is no corner of Dominion, no cave nor hollow nor dreary little village, that is not marked on the maps of Cavallon. I will know what you have done as soon as you do it, and then the hunt will begin.”
She wasn’t looking at me as she spoke. She had turned to a bookshelf and was running the flats of her hands beneath the shelves.
“You might hide, for a time—perhaps even a long time. You might begin to convince each other that you are safe, that I have given up the chase. When you have stopped waiting for me, when the hairs on your neck no longer prickle—then will I find you, and then will you suffer. You will lament, and there will be no end to your lamentation. You will weep, and there will be no end to your weeping.” She had slipped into Middle Mothertongue as she spoke, as easily and naturally as if she had learned it in the womb.
“You will wish, with all your shattered heart, that you could return to this moment and walk away. You will beg me for it, before the end. And I will laugh.”
There was a brief moment here, which hung suspended between us, swollen with the weight of unmade choices. And then the moment ended, and all the choices were made, as neatly as dominoes clacking one against the other.
I dropped my left palm to the page.
Vivian Rolfe made a small, satisfied sound, as when a person finds their lost hair pin, and turned back to face me. In her hands was a sword I’d last seen laid atop your bier. She held it awkwardly across her breast, but it was already half drawn.
I didn’t hesitate. I tightened my right index finger that last, fatal centimeter. For you, for us, I would bloody my hands a hundred times over.
There was the familiar boom of the revolver, the kick of the grip in my hand—then a weird, metallic slap, like a hammer on a nail.
Vivian had been thrown back against the bookcase, but she did not look distraught to have been shot.
Valiance was still in her hands, but she had moved it four inches to the left, directly over her heart.
There was a small, round pock in the blade, just below the hilt, and I realized she had not intended to kill me, after all.
The room was falling away from me. The scent of summer flowers was replaced by the cold, wild smell of winter.
The last thing I saw before I left was Vivian, smiling patiently, as if she had known exactly where my bullet would fly, as if it had all happened just this way, many times.
I was alone, before you came. (You’ll forgive me for telling this part, but it always makes you cry, Owen.)
The woods of my fathers had grown wild in my absence, the old paths choked with bitterthorn, the old cottage covered over with bracken. It occurred to me that they would not find my remains for years and years, if they ever did, and the thought did not distress me as much as it once would have.
I did not even wear my armor, on the day I went to the yew. Let them think me a lost herdswoman, an unwise traveler, and let them bury me with only a plain stone for a marker, if indeed there is anything left to bury.
Yet, as I approached the yew, there was no peace in my chest, no resignation. I felt instead a sudden, sharp joy, like the snap of a harrier’s wings at the very bottom of the dive. I walked faster, and still faster, till the bare branches struck my cheeks.
There was a man waiting for me beneath the yew. His back was turned, so that I saw only the battered red of his coat, the careless profligacy of his hair.
One hand was pressed hard to the bark of the yew, and the other was holding a lumpen iron ornament. (A gun, I thought, and did not know where the thought had come from.)
I drew my sword. The blade whispered against the sheath.
He turned, and it was—you. Of course it was you.
You smiled at me, and I remembered that smile. A little crooked, a little wry, as if you were trying to make up for the ardency of your eyes.
You said my name, and I remembered your voice, though I remembered it lower, harsher, like a frayed rope.
You stumbled over the roots until you were near enough to reach out—foolishly! trustingly!—and touch two long fingers to the back of my hand.
I did not pull away. I looked down, saw the ink that stained the beds of your nails, admired the delicate callus where your pen rested. I have always liked your hands.
I turned my palm slowly, wonderingly, until it met yours, until we stood hand in hand beneath the yew.
And then I remembered everything.
It came on me suddenly, the remembering, like a spring storm, and took me to the ground. You were there with me, kneeling in the snow. Your hands were cradling my jaw, and you were saying my name over and over, in a kind of terror.
I felt myself smile, wide and loose, the way I hadn’t smiled since I was a girl. “You came back for me.”
I watched you choke with relief, eyes closing as if you could hardly bear the sight of me. “Always,” you said, and your voice sounded more like the voice I remembered: fractured, scarred over.
I lifted my arms, hesitating still, just a little. But in all the lives that I could remember—and Lord, there were so many—I had never once hurt you.
I buried my hands in your hair, wrapped them in the boyish extravagance of your curls, as I never had, as I had done many times, as I would do many more.
I felt time unweaving between us, the beginnings and endings lost in a reckless tangle, and I tightened my fists in your hair, holding fast to this one moment.
You made a small and lovely sound, deep in your throat, and pressed your brow hard to mine.
We remained like that for a time, clinging to one another like children, our breath mingling and rising, riming our lashes with silvery frost.
You spoke first. “She’s coming. She knew I would run, I think, and she knows where we are—or at least, when we are—”
I pulled my face back from yours, just a little, so that I could see the lovely loam-black of your eyes. “Who is coming?”
You didn’t want to tell me. You stretched the moment out like a gift, letting me linger a little longer in a world where I didn’t know what you knew.
There was only one name you could say that would hurt me. I felt my fingers sag and fall from your hair. I closed my eyes and said, without any real conviction, “No.”
Your hands caught mine, thumbs circling soft as moth wings over the cracked stone of my palms. “I’m sorry,” you said. “She’s not who she says she is. She’s—her name isn’t even Yvanne.”
I did not answer. I did not open my eyes. I only listened, while you told me the story of the queen-who-was-not-the-queen, who was every queen. You told it well, of course; you had been telling stories for more lifetimes than either of us could remember.
Once, there was a woman who wanted more than she was given.
She wanted it so badly that she shattered time itself beneath her heel and pieced it back together in the way that suited her best. History no longer simply happened, like an accident; it was told, like a story. And the queen told it many times.
The story of Dominion had many villains over the years, shifting along with the borders of her empire, and many storytellers. But it only ever had one hero, and her name was Una Everlasting.
Una the dragon-slayer, Una the queen-maker, Una the tragedy.
Una, who died and was resurrected a hundred times, until she fought as no mortal could fight, with the memory of every battle burned into her very bones.
(There was awe in your voice, even now—but surely a dog might learn any trick, given a thousand years of practice.)
I was not alone, in your story. I was trailed always by a cowardly historian, a man chosen by the queen to lead me to my death, like a farmer driving a balking animal to the butcher.
And so—here your voice turned bitter as burnt hair—the historian buried the hero, over and over, and wrote her tale in the queen’s book.