Chapter 19
THE KNIGHT, WHO had killed a thousand men a thousand times, had no talent for keeping anything alive.
Her calluses caught and pulled the threads of her son’s soft blankets.
The only songs she knew were either dirty or bloody or both; her hands, so natural with a blade, were clumsy with an infant.
It seemed best to leave him in his father’s care; surely the Red Knight ought never to be entrusted with anything so small, so desperately fragile.
When the baby fussed in the night, it was the scholar who went to him. When the larder grew low, it was the knight who went out hunting. When she returned, she often found her son sleeping on the scholar’s chest, lashes lying soft and white as moonlight on his cheek.
But most of the time the scholar was only feigning sleep, because when he slept, he dreamed of his own father.
He saw him marching across the Hinterlands with an infant tied to his chest, then crippled and drunk in Queenswald with a toddler to care for.
He saw him fumbling, striving, often failing; he saw the townspeople shaking their heads, averting their eyes.
They’d thought him a poor father, and the scholar had mostly agreed—but now he was unsure what a good one ought to look like.
In Dominion a good father was any man with a decent living who produced a child with his wife—a woman he had married in a church, who had been trained to be a mother from the time she was a child herself.
He need not be sober, affectionate, or even present very often; he needn’t know how to soothe his son to sleep, or how to tie his diapers so they didn’t leak.
And yet: The scholar’s father had learned those things. He must have. He must have sat sometimes in the night, just like this, worried and tired, feigning sleep. The scholar wished, suddenly, that he could speak with his father. Or at least ask him how to tie the damn diapers.
The knight saw her husband smile, wistfully, crookedly, and cup his hand around their son’s head. She backed carefully away from the two of them, thinking of the yew, and of the hilt that waited still for her hand. Thinking: Nothing this precious could go undefended for long.
This is why, when a knock came at the cottage door some five or six months after their son’s birth, the scholar was shocked and frightened, but the knight felt almost peaceful. Here was the danger, finally; here was her fate, caught up with her at last.
But it was only a young man, shaking from a long run in the near-dark, stinking of fear.
He was the son of the crofter whose wheat had thatched their roof.
The knight brought his family game, sometimes, or honey, in trade for butter and salt.
She knew this boy to be a laughing, mischievous middle son.
He was not laughing now. ‘Raiders,’ he said, and what else was there to say?
This was Dominion before the wicked queen: A series of small kings and lords who took turns scribbling new lines across the map, dividing the land into what was theirs and what was theirs to take, until their thrones were stolen in turn, and the lines drawn anew.
None of them lasted long; the scholar thought they should meet Vivian Rolfe and see how a real empire was made.
And so violence still swept sometimes across the land, like a swarm of locusts.
It nibbled at the woods: ash was taken for the hafts of spears; cedar for arrows; oak for the hulls of boats.
Exiles and hungry peasants hid among the trees, and their gaunt faces made the knight wonder if it was truly the queen who was wicked, or the crown itself.
If a throne was a kind of weapon, by which the world was cut into two halves: the dead and the kneeling.
But the knight had not interfered. She and the scholar wanted no word of a light-haired woman who fought off soldiers and raiders, who protected the small folk and lived deep in the wood with her dark-eyed husband.
What if the queen heard such tales, decades or centuries in the future?
What if she somehow clawed her way back to them?
They didn’t know where the book had come from, after all; better by far to disappear.
But now one of those small folk had come to her door, and the knight felt the old battle tide rising in her, clean and righteous as a prayer.
The scholar, who had placed himself between the cradle and the door, said sharply, ‘Why did you come running to us? What makes you think we could help you?’
The boy looked baffled. He glanced, speakingly, at the knight, who understood that her disguise was not so perfect as she had thought.
It was the size of her, maybe, that gave her away, or simply the way she moved.
What simple woodswoman sometimes forgot herself and swung her ax one-handed, as if it were a sword?
What good wife or mother strode through the world so boldly, without smiling or ducking her head?
She was still, as the scholar had promised, herself.
‘Please,’ the boy said. Then, trembling and trying not to, ‘My brother. He—they—’ He said no more; what else was there to say?
The scholar gestured gruffly to the floor by the fire. ‘Sit. Eat something.’
The boy sat, cracking nuts and digging out the meat with the thoughtless, jerky motions of a clockwork toy. Over his head, the knight and the scholar spoke to one another in the way of old couples who had met very young: in silence, by look and gesture.
The knight met the scholar’s eyes squarely: Will we let them die, then? Will we send him home without aid, to whatever remains of his family?
A muscle moved in the scholar’s jaw: Will you risk ours, for theirs?
The knight looked away, and the scholar watched her face with a familiar, leaden guilt.
He’d told her once that she was no hero—what a lie.
The queen had tried for years to make a mere weapon of her, a blade that killed coldly, without hesitation; the scholar had tried for years to make a coward of her, a woman who lived selfishly, without risk.
Both of them had tried to cut the honor out of her and leave only what served them best, and both of them had failed, for here she stood: so full of honor even a child could feel the heat of it and run to her for help.
The scholar was suddenly sick with himself, with the gory work of carving away what he loved best. He touched the knight’s elbow with two fingers. ‘We have already broken two rules,’ he said. What’s one more? said his eyes.
Her lips parted. She looked at him, and then at the crofter’s son, and then at her own son, just beginning to frown in his sleep.
Soon he would begin the mysterious squirming, flailing motions by which he escaped his swaddling.
Already his left foot had worked free. In the dark, his birthmark looked like a wound.
The knight left the cottage without speaking, and the scholar watched her go without weeping. She walked in the dark to the yew. She did not stumble; she had walked this path many times.
Beneath the tree her hand found Valiance. Her fingers wrapped around the hilt, and it felt good. It had been too large for her hands when she was a girl, but now it fit her palm perfectly.
She imagined drawing it from the wood, stalking to the near edge of the woods, slaughtering the raiders, saving the farm, righting this one small wrong.
She imagined washing the blood from her hands before she returned to her son.
There would be some left in the beds of her nails or the crease of her elbow; there always was.
She imagined the queen discovering that the sword had been drawn too early from the yew and realizing, at last, where they’d hidden themselves.
Slowly, knuckle by knuckle, the knight took her hand from the hilt.
She returned to the cottage and knelt, empty-handed, before the crofter’s son. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, and the words were grave dirt in her mouth. ‘We cannot help you.’
Later in the night, when the baby fussed, it was the knight who went to his cradle. She held him tenderly, uncertainly, with hands that would never again hold a sword. Already her calluses had changed, adjusting to the simple labor of living.
The scholar watched her, softened by moonlight, and knew Una Everlasting had died another death at his hands.
We are coming now to the end of their fairy tale, and every fairy tale ends the same way: happily ever after.
This was theirs, and Lord, it was sweet. I know you don’t like to remember it, but try, for me.
Remember the book tucked away on a high shelf, nearly forgotten, gathering dust, because they were no longer on the run. Remember the seasons returning to their proper order, coming one after the other.
Winter. The yewberries are covered in frost, chiming softly, and their son is beginning to talk.
Ma ma ma, he calls the knight, a pattern more than a word.
She meant to choose a new name for herself, but never quite did.
She answers now only to whatever her son and the scholar call her—mother, wife, beloved, mine—and when she dies it is only by those names she will be remembered. She decides it is enough.
Summer. The honey tastes of dog rose and their son’s hair is long enough to make a slim white braid.
His father tells him stories as he braids it, of dragons and crowns and swords.
The boy says one day he will be a knight, and the scholar says, too sharply, ‘No.’ He tells no more tales, after that, and eventually his son stops asking for them.
It occurs to the scholar that he has slowly become his own opposite.
As a historian he chased stories—collected them, cherished them, pressed them tenderly between the pages of books so that the whole world could read them.
Now he stamps them out, frantically, and buries the remains.
He misses his work; he misses the university library even more.
But if the knight can put away her sword, then he can put away his pen. He no longer fears the cold, and the knight no longer flinches from the fire. Surely, it’s enough.
Spring again. The thrushes are singing and their second child is born. Her hair is a wet black cap and her eyes are the lucent brown of acorns in the sun. Her brother, upon meeting her, comforts his parents. ‘Maybe the next one will come with teeth,’ he says, patting his mother’s knee.
It’s a funny story, and the scholar finds himself wishing, guiltily, that he had someone to tell it to.
Professor Sawbridge, maybe—she didn’t like children, as a genre, but she would like his.
Or his father—he was forever pulling faces at babies in their prams, laughing his loose drunkard’s laugh.
Perhaps he would do a little better as a grandfather than he had as a father.
But no: Their children can have no grandparents or aunts, no uncles or cousins or teachers or scuff-kneed neighbor children.
They have no lineage and no inheritance.
No past, and an uncertain future. Will they leave the wood and go out into the wide, cruel world?
Will their sweet son one day go to war? Will their loud daughter sit silent in the pew, head bowed?
All the children have is now, hidden away. It will have to be enough.
A year passes, and another, and another. It’s summer again.
Their son is hiding from his sister in the woods, flashing from tree to tree like quicksilver, and she is chasing stubbornly after him on legs that are still bowed and dimpled with babyhood. She does not cry, when she falls; she reminds her father of the girl he used to meet beneath the yew.
The knight, who is no longer a knight, is lying on the warm earth beside the scholar, who is no longer a scholar. They are sharing a basket of berries so fat and ripe they catch the sun, like fine jewels, and there are tiny white flowers blooming all around them, between and beneath them.
The knight picks one of these and tucks it behind the scholar’s ear. He hasn’t cut his hair in a long time, and the fragile petals are nearly lost in his wild black curls.
‘They’re called dragonscales, in my time, or ulla flowers,’ the scholar tells her, and the knight’s eyes open very wide, as if she’s just found something she thought was lost forever.
Then she is laughing, head thrown back, and there is berry juice running over her chin, down her throat. The scholar wipes it away with his thumb and puts his thumb to his own lips. He has had this dream before, he thinks, but no dream ever tasted this sweet.
Like home; like heaven.
He knows what it cost to get here. Sometimes in the night he sees their faces: the Hinterlanders he killed in the war and the Dominion boys who died beside him, their blood made invisible by the red of their coats; the soldiers who fell to the knight’s sword in the First Crusade and the heretics who went to the flames; the crofter’s son who still turns his face away when they visit, in memory of the brother they didn’t save; everyone who will still suffer under the queen’s faltering, grasping rule, and everyone they will turn away, lest they draw her eye.
He doesn’t know if it was worth it. But he knows he would pay the same price all over again, if only he could find himself here, on this stolen summer evening, with the taste of berries in his mouth.
It’s then—just then, when he has begun to believe in his own happily ever after—that he hears it: Branches snapping, boots approaching, and a voice he hasn’t heard in nine years. Nine long, good, golden years.
The voice says, in a language that won’t be spoken for another millennium: ‘Hello, Corporal.’
He should have known, of course: Heaven is only a fairy tale.
The devil is real.