Chapter 18
IF YOU RUN far enough, for long enough, you will catch the rhythm of it. It’s the same thing that drives the swifts south before the frost and rats uphill before the flood: a thrum in the blood, a second pulse that whispers now, now, now.
The knight and the scholar followed that pulse north and south, forward and backward in time.
They went by foot, most often, but they went, too, by ferry and galley, by coach and carriage and even—once the knight could tolerate the stink and noise of them—by automobile.
They traveled along ancient dirt tracks and roads so freshly paved the tar still stuck, hotly, to the soles of their shoes.
They slept in lofts and fallow fields, in boardinghouses and shabby hotels and, once or twice, gaols.
They learned which elements of the world change most quickly and dramatically (hairstyles, fashion, medical advice) and which linger, stubbornly, no matter the decade (filthy words, trade routes, children’s rhymes).
They learned how to ask for work in half a dozen languages, which crossroads would always have inns no matter the century, which streams would never be dammed, and which borders would never be well guarded.
Most of all they learned one another, as few people ever have or will. In the churn and tumult of their lives—where summer did not always follow spring, where even their own names were tricksome and shifting—they were to one another what fixed stars are to sailors: the only way through the dark.
They knew each other’s taste and smell, the sounds they made in the night and the old wounds that turned stiff in the rain.
The scholar knew every scar on the knight’s body and where it came from—save the small, silver circle between her breasts, which she must have gotten as a child, for she couldn’t recall a time when it wasn’t there.
Each knew the other’s face by moonlight and rushlight, candle and gas, and even by the sharp-edged glare of streetlights—though they spent less time in the modern age than in others.
The knight found it overloud and overcrowded, and it found her wrong sized, roughly hewn, almost comical in scale.
The scholar didn’t miss his own time much, save for the cigarettes; the whole of modernity—with its bank accounts and receipts, its leases and cameras and pay stubs—seemed engineered to expose them.
And if they were exposed, she would find them.
She came very close, sometimes. Once when they lingered too long in the same year and town and were heard to call one another by names other than they ones they’d given; once when the knight challenged their landlord to a duel, long after duels had fallen out of fashion; once when the scholar left his spectacles on the table of an inn, long before their invention.
Soon after such blunders they would wake to fists on the door or boots in the street, or perhaps the rumor of a cold-eyed stranger asking if anyone had seen a man and woman traveling together.
Once there were even dogs, great black hounds that cornered them in a narrow alley; the scholar had never liked dogs.
But they were never truly cornered because they had the book.
They tried, though, to use it as little as possible.
Partly because there was always an awkward few days while they adjusted their accents and outfits and overheard enough political gossip to determine whether there was a queen in Dominion, and if her hair was the color of beaten brass; partly because people talk when two strangers vanish from inside a locked room, or when two hungry travelers never return to finish their meal. Even their absence left footprints.
But mostly they avoided the book because there was, to their bafflement, a fourth rule: No matter where they were when they touched the book—no matter how carefully they willed themselves elsewhere—they always found themselves back beneath the yew.
The scholar had a dozen theories. Perhaps the book somehow sensed their secret desire to return to the place they’d both felt most at home.
Perhaps the wicked queen had sent them back to those woods so many times that their souls had left grooves along the path, like penned animals wearing tracks in the grass.
Perhaps the yew was so unspeakably ancient it made a sort of well in time itself, which they fell back into, over and over.
The knight did not care why. There was no place in the world she liked better than those woods, and the queen—who had found them in caves and foreign cities, in the swede fields of the north and the cold deserts of the far south—had never once found them there.
She’d claimed the land for the crown and driven the small folk from it, and seemed to have forgotten it, as if what is conquered will remain so.
Slowly, even the scholar came to trust the woods. They began to loiter there, for days, then weeks, then whole greedy seasons, seeing no one but pig boys and berry pickers, runaway lovers with flushed faces and ragged peasants fleeing the queen’s soldiers.
They began to bury caches there for their future selves to find: rolls of bandaging, tins of fish and beans, arrows, fresh socks, soap, clothes from twenty different decades, furtive cartons of Lucky Star cigarettes.
They shored up the walls of the woodcutter’s cottage with fresh daub and left firewood split and stacked beneath the eaves.
They began to miss it when they were away from it. They began to think of it—guiltily, secretly—as home.
And so they broke the first rule.
The first time the knight missed her menstrual cycle, she cursed, dressed in the dark, and went to visit the nearest brothel.
After a short and practical conversation with a very pretty woman, the knight was given a sachet of sharp-smelling herbs.
She thanked the woman, who blushed a little and encouraged her to return ‘if she was tired of men.’ The knight kissed her hand, gallantly, and apologized; she did not think she would tire of this man.
The tea she brewed with the herbs had a familiar, grassy taste—the queen had kept a supply for such occasions.
Later, when the knight explained to the scholar why she was ill, he turned very white.
He stammered and apologized many times, as if she hadn’t known the risk, as if she hadn’t held him inside her while he thrashed, only because she liked the feel of it, and liked it even better when she took him again later, still slick with it.
But the scholar rubbed the muscles low in her back and boiled cloths for the blood.
His fretting startled the knight—it was only one of those dull bodily tasks, like picking dirt from a wound, or pulling a bad tooth!
—but that night she let him curl around her, like human armor, as if she needed protection.
The second time the knight missed her menstrual cycle, they were in the woods. The scholar kissed her sweetly on the brow, opened the book, and disappeared. He returned two minutes later with his arms full: fresh white cloths, paper sachets of tea, a hot water bottle, and a glass vial of pills.
She rolled the pill between her fingers, hesitating, though she couldn’t say why.
It was just that the light was dappling through the cottage door the same way it had when she was a girl.
It was just that it was spring, when the whole world quickens, and the forest was littered with pollen and shed teeth and the fragile, speckled shells of hatched eggs.
It was just that she had always known precisely what purpose her body served—bloodshed—and she felt suddenly uncertain.
Ancel had fathered six or seven bastards, who he supported so handsomely that their mothers never made a fuss about their red hair.
But Saint Una the Virgin could never be allowed to fall pregnant.
Nor could Sir Una the Queen’s Champion—how would her armor fit?
Now, though, the knight had no armor to wear or name to uphold; she caught herself wondering what other names she might bear.
And then she wondered if mother was another of those names, like saint or sir, that built a cage around you. She was through with cages.
She swallowed the pill. It tasted like metal.
The third time the knight missed her cycle, they were still in the woods, and she noticed that the scholar’s hands were shaking when he handed her the glass vial.
She said, stunned into bluntness, ‘You want it, don’t you?’
He flushed, guilty as a child caught with his nose pressed to a bakery window. ‘No. I mean, yes, of course, if—but it’s not safe. We couldn’t.’
The knight said, slowly, surprising both of them, ‘We could.’ It felt like biting into a fruit long forbidden to her. The heady taste of it filled her mouth.
The scholar’s eyes went very wide, filling with such obvious, reckless wonder that the knight coughed and looked away.
She said, roughly, ‘Though I’m not—I don’t know how—that is, I don’t know that I’d be everything a mother should.’
The scholar tilted his head at her. ‘I suppose I wouldn’t know—I never had a mother, either.
But … I’m not sure you’ve ever been what you should be, love.
’ She scowled at him; he smiled his crooked smile.
‘You were a woman who carried a sword. A saint who slept with nuns—don’t pretend you never visited Morvain in the convent!
Now you’re a knight without armor, and a wife without a ring. No matter what you are, you’re always…’
‘Bad at it?’
‘Yourself,’ said the scholar, stubbornly. ‘And you’ll remain so. Whatever you become next.’
The knight rolled the pill in her fingers, marveling a little at the certainty in the scholar’s voice when he said the word next.