Chapter 20
IT HAPPENED SO quickly: We were dreaming, and then we were awake. We were safe, and then we weren’t. We were nameless, forgotten, hidden away in time, and then I was Corporal Owen Mallory again, and you were—
“Sir Una,” said the voice. You flinched from the sound of your own name. The line between your brows returned, harshly drawn. The voice said, more softly, “It’s been too long.”
It sounded as if she meant it. As if she’d missed you, these nine years, and longed to look at you. You kept your eyes resolutely, almost desperately, on mine; it occurred to me that you’d run away from her without ever once facing her.
A sigh, from above us. “Up, now—carefully. I’ve told these boys you’re witches, and heavily implied cannibalism. They’re jumpy.”
I got slowly to my feet, arms half raised. The ulla flower slipped out from behind my ear and fell to the earth.
Vivian Rolfe greeted us with the warm, delighted smile of someone who has run into old friends unexpectedly.
She was in one of her more modern incarnations: short hair, crisp martial clothing.
But the men behind her—six or seven of them—surely belonged to this era.
They wore boiled leather armor and carried short, brutish blades.
I glanced sideways at you and found your gaze judging the reach of their arms, calculating the force of each blow. Your face was very remote, as if you were watching your body from a distance.
Your eyes skipped over Vivian—you still hadn’t looked directly at her—and met mine, eerily flat: Now?
I lowered my lashes: Not yet.
“So,” I said, in modern Mothertongue, loud enough that it might carry to the glassberry thicket where the children were playing.
“You’ve found us.” I’d taught them enough of my native language to recognize it if they heard it, and if they heard it, I’d taught them to hide.
The rustling, scuffling sounds from the thicket fell suddenly still.
“I did warn you I would. Don’t tell me you forgot my little monologue.” Vivian looked very slightly put out. “It was a good one.”
You will lament, she had said, and there will be no end to your lamentation.
“No.” My throat was dry, the words rattling from it like dice from a cup. “I didn’t forget.” But I had. I’d stopped running, and she’d come for us, just as she’d said she would.
“Good, then we’re all working from the same script. Now, what have you done with my book?”
“This way.” I turned sharply and led them to the cottage, the only place in all of history that had ever felt like home.
I could hear your steps behind me, a steady pulse: Now?
I jerked my head: Not yet.
Say you killed her. Say you killed all of them. Say you survived it, even—would you? unarmed, nine years out of practice?—Vivian had found us once, somehow. What would prevent her from doing it again? I felt like a rat caught in a mill, watching the stone roll inexorably toward me.
The cottage was too small for a group of this size.
Vivian’s men pressed against the walls, trampling furs, overturning baskets.
I wondered if any of them would notice the doll fashioned from sacking and twine, the too-small pairs of shoes, the crib our daughter had learned to escape before she could walk.
Vivian snapped her fingers. “The book, if you please.”
It was too late in the year for a fire, but the children had wanted porridge for lunch, and the last log was still crackling in the pit. The air was close and warm as a gullet. It smelled, sickly, of flowers.
Beside me, you inhaled: Now?
I touched my shoulder to yours: Not yet.
But I felt the slab of your muscle through your shirt, tense as coiled wire, and knew I didn’t have long. I should have kept my fucking revolver; you should have kept your sword. We should have known we couldn’t hide forever.
I took the book from its high shelf. Unwrapped it, clumsily. My hands hadn’t shaken like this since our son was born.
Vivian said, “Open it.”
I opened it. The pages stared blankly up at me, still empty. I’d thought they might remain that way, but now it seemed our story would be written again and again, no matter how far we ran or how thoroughly we disappeared.
The log popped brightly. The coals were a fresh, hot yellow. I thought, distantly, that the only way the rat could escape the mill is if it burned to the ground.
There was no one standing between me and the firepit.
Perhaps Vivian thought a Cantford-trained historian would balk at the burning of a book, lest the archivist somehow got wind of it.
Or perhaps she thought I loved the book more than I loved you.
She had convincing evidence; how many times had I let you die, so that your story would survive?
But not another. In a single, easy motion, without hesitating, I threw The Death of Una Everlasting to the flames.
I didn’t wait for it to catch, but spun, half crouched, ready to fend off Vivian’s men.
A few lifted their blades, uncertainly. At my side I felt you loosening, uncoiling, rising to meet them—
But Vivian raised her hand and said, in Middle Mothertongue, “Hold.”
A tenuous silence fell, as smoke gathered thickly at the eaves, seeping through the thatch. It was bluish and sweet smelling, like burning pine.
Vivian observed the smoke with no particular expression. I wondered if she was truly unsurprised, or if the muscles of her face had simply forgotten how to form the necessary shapes.
“It’s done.” I said, willing it to be true. “We are finished.” At my back, the pages caught with a faint rush of air.
The sudden flames cast garish shadows up the walls, dancing madly in Vivian’s eyes. She closed them. “No,” she corrected, “we are annoyed.” Her eyes opened, and the mad light was gone. “I had forgotten how much you love a grand gesture, Corporal. Now if you’ll both come with me—”
“Why?” My voice was pitched too high. “We are stuck here, all of us, a hundred years before your sick little play begins. You can’t send us anywhere, ever again.”
Vivian opened her mouth, but another voice interrupted her.
It took me a moment to recognize it as yours.
You had never sounded so young, so uncertain.
“Even if you could, it would do you no good.” You were looking Vivian dead in the eye, finally, but the tendons in your neck were tight with the strain of it.
Some part of you still wanted to bow before her, to fall to your knees and beg her favor.
“I am no longer what you made me. I will not fight for you again. I will not”—your voice shook, then steadied—“die for you.”
Vivian smiled, not without sympathy. “You will, though. Do you want to know why?”
“There is no reason you could give that would—”
But Vivian held a finger to her lips, and you were so accustomed to obeying her that you fell quiet. Through the silence, which stank of sweat and pine and flowers and the bitter copper promise of violence, came the distant cry of children’s voices. Mama? Papa?
Vivian took her finger from her lips, pointing over her shoulder, toward the woods, where our son and daughter were calling for us. “That’s why.”
You made no answer, but only turned your body very slowly so that you and I stood back-to-back, our shoulder blades brushing. Now?
I whispered, “Now.”
It was like pulling the pin from a grenade.
You didn’t move so much as detonate. Your shoulders left mine, heaving forward, as if there weren’t four naked blades facing you.
It was how you’d always fought—unfeeling, heedless, as if even your death wouldn’t stop you.
It had been true, before. But I’d burned the book, and made you suddenly, horribly mortal.
From behind me came a yell, cut short. The muffled snap of a bone breaking. The wet slap of viscera on bare dirt.
The men facing me started forward and I kicked the fire at them, scattering coals, sending a rush of sparks between us. They blinked, blinded, and by the time they opened their eyes you were there.
For nine years, I’d tried to make you forget yourself. I’d taken away your sword, your story, your armor, your honor, your name. I’d wanted you to disappear, and for my sake, you’d tried.
I should have known: If you couldn’t kill Una Everlasting, then what chance did those poor bastards have?
You went through them like a scythe through late-summer hay.
You came bare-handed, unshielded, blood-slicked, and you left only bodies behind you.
A sword arced downward; you caught the hilt and thrust it through another man’s throat.
A hand reached for your ankle; you stamped it with a sound like dropped porcelain.
The last man—a little older than the others, clever enough to know what his own death looked like when it came for him—did not even try to strike at you. Instead, he struck at me.
I watched his sword drive toward my chest, aimed just to the left of my sternum, where the blade wouldn’t get caught in the bone. I minded less than I thought I would; I had sworn never to watch you die again, and now I wouldn’t have to.
But the blade never arrived. You caught it, inches from my breast, in your bare hands.
I watched the blood well up from your fists and knew a moment of sick vanity. When you had fought for your queen, you had conquered Dominion; if you had fought for love, you might have conquered the world.
You ripped the sword away from the soldier, lips peeling back in an animal snarl.
You turned the blade—still holding it by the naked edge—and drove it into his belly.
The only mercy you had in you was that you killed quickly, but you had none for him: You twisted the sword, burrowing cruelly into his bowels, before you drew it out.