Chapter 20 #2
You stood watching him choke and whimper, your chest heaving like a great bellows.
You held the blade one-handed now, the edge biting so deep into your palm that blood coursed down the blade and dripped from the point.
The man fell to his knees, hands full of his own guts, and still you watched him.
I said, gently, “Una.”
You didn’t look at me, but your grip eased on the sword. You drew it cleanly across the man’s throat—his eyes closed in awful gratitude—and let it fall.
I went to you then, stumbling over sprawled limbs. You turned to face me, and I reached for your hands—God, your hands—
I stopped myself just before I touched them, in case my shaking hurt you worse.
“I’m sorry,” you said, earnestly. Your pupils were huge and black. “I know you wanted me to be other than I am, and I tried, I swear I tried. But…” You looked vaguely around at the scattered corpses. A shudder moved over you, and your voice went low and raw. “Have you learned to fear me yet, boy?”
I touched my palms very carefully to the backs of your hands. “Never.”
You exhaled, shakily. “Madman.”
“Yes, but I’m your madman.” You snorted, then hissed as your hands jostled. You looked down at them as if surprised to find them still attached to your wrists.
“We’ve still got some iodine, let me—”
But when you lifted your face again, you were smiling. A summertime smile, sweet and easy, as if we were still eating berries in the woods, or would be soon.
You lifted both your mangled hands high, a pagan priest blessing his flock. Blood ran down your wrists and several of your fingers flopped obscenely. The blade had cut through tendon, straight to the bone. I’d spent enough time in field hospitals to know you would never hold a sword again.
You looked over my shoulder and said, still smiling, “I’m no good to you now.”
I wondered, briefly, who you were speaking to; it simply didn’t occur to me that you would have spared her.
But you had. Vivian answered easily, calmly, as if she wasn’t standing among her butchered men, “But you’re still mine.”
You shook your head. “Not anymore. Not ever again,” you said, and stepped around me. Our floor—packed earth, swept clean—had turned to black, brackish mud. Your feet sank slightly into it as you crossed the cottage to face Vivian Rolfe.
You placed your ruined hands carefully, almost respectfully, around her neck. She didn’t flinch or blink. She tucked her own hands in her trouser pockets, showily indifferent. Well, perhaps she was right: You had refused her, and you had run from her, but you could barely meet her eyes.
She smiled fondly up at you. I imagined the scene as a painted portrait: two women standing face to face, both bright-haired, both tall, both unbending. You might have been sisters, if it weren’t for the blood seeping from your palms to stain her collar.
“You’ll always be mine, love,” Vivian said. Then she stood on tiptoe and laid her cheek along yours. She whispered something in your ear.
And you—faltered. Your lips parted soundlessly. Your hands lifted away from her collarbones. They trembled slightly.
I like to imagine you would have recovered, given another second.
You would have remembered everything she’d done to you and everything you’d done for her, and you would have killed her.
We wouldn’t have been free of her—if she’d found us once, then some iteration of her would find us again, and now we didn’t even have the book to help us run—but we might have had another year.
Another decade, even. It wouldn’t have been enough—a lifetime with you wouldn’t be enough, my love—but it would have been sweet.
In that second of hesitation, Vivian Rolfe drew a revolver from her pocket, put it to your breast, and pulled the trigger.
Of all the times I’d held you as you died, that was the worst.
That time you wore no cloak or armor, so I could feel the heat of your skin through your shirt.
I could feel the weight and shape of your shoulders in my arms, which I’d held every night for nine years.
I could feel, too, the soft pulp where the bullet left your body.
I pressed my hand over it, knowing it wouldn’t save you.
That time, too, I could hear the voices of our children, coming nearer.
It seemed impossible that they hadn’t reached the cottage yet, but it had only been a handful of minutes since we’d arrived.
And perhaps the alien boom of the gun had startled them; perhaps they were hesitating at the edge of the clearing, wondering whether they should run.
That time it was a bullet that killed you, and it killed you too quickly. You had only moments. You touched my face once, clumsily, with torn and stiffening fingers, and spoke the names of our children.
I said, “I know, I will, I promise.”
Then you said, “Wait for me,” and that was all.
I had to finish it for you, pressing your face to my chest and whispering it into the curve of your ear, still warm against my lips: “Beneath the yew tree.” My hands seized around you, fisting in the sodden fabric of your shirt, tangling redly in your hair. “Always.”
But—that time, for the first time—I was lying. Because the book was nothing but ash and char, and I would never again meet you beneath the yew.
“Oh, get up.” From above me came the metal ratchet of a hammer drawing back. “And stop making that noise.”
I looked up to discover that Vivian Rolfe’s good-humored mask had finally fallen away.
There was no madness or passion beneath it, after all, but only the grim irritation of a woman doing the work no one else would do: whipping a horse, or a digging a grave.
Her eyes and cheeks were reddened, as if she’d scrubbed them hard, but she held her revolver in perfect military form—two hands on the grip, feet spread, barrel pointed steadily at my skull.
The sight of it sent relief rushing over me, so sweet and fast I was nearly dizzy with it.
She knew I wanted to kill her, and she knew I could—anyone will pick up a few tricks if they’re sent to war enough times—but she also knew I was a coward.
She thought a bullet would stop me because she thought I was afraid to die.
I almost laughed. The only thing I wanted more than my own death was hers; if I moved quickly enough, I might have both.
I gathered myself, loosing my fingers from your hair, setting your head gently on the churned earth. Your eyes were the dead, transparent yellow of old sap. They bored into mine, mutely accusing. Even in death, I understood you: You promised.
I closed my eyes in supplication. I can’t. Don’t ask me to.
But I felt your endless, unblinking stare pressing like thumbs into my eyelids.
I imagined our children finding us dead together in the cottage, as you had found your fathers.
I imagined them running barefoot and tear streaked through the woods, as you had.
If there was no hell waiting for us in the afterlife, I imagined you would build one with your bare hands, just for me.
I thought: As you will.
I opened my eyes. Climbed slowly, drunkenly, to my feet, a condemned man granted mercy he didn’t want.
Vivian sniffed. “Good man. Now out we go.” She stepped carefully backward through the door. I followed her over the threshold, stunned by the soft light of summer. It ought to be cold, I thought. It was always cold, when you died. “And call the child out from wherever it’s hiding.”
I must have twitched or blinked, because Vivian laughed, a little of her unsettling cheer returning. “Don’t tell me you had more than one? I turn my back for five minutes, and you turn my great hero into a housewife.” She shook her head. “Call them both, then.”
I shouted, in modern Mothertongue: “Come out, children! Right now!”
Not a single sound came from the woods, not a creak or a rustle or a drawn breath. Oh, Una, they were so clever, our children. Bright as comets, and just as fleeting.
I turned back to Vivian, smiling, helplessly proud, “They must have run off, I’m afrai—” I began, but she put a bullet through my left knee before I could finish. The knee folded under me like wet paper, and I went down hard. I stared up at her, alight with pain, lips sewn shut over a scream.
She gave me a look of extreme fatigue. She said, neutrally, “The problem with playing the hero is that someone will have to play the villain,” and then she kicked my left knee, hard. I screamed.
Vivian lifted her voice, addressing the trees. “I’ve hurt your father very badly. Come out now, or I’ll hurt him worse.”
I yelled “No!” but it was too late. Our son burst out from behind a tree, his eyes black with terror, his knuckles white around his sister’s fingers.
Vivian watched them come without surprise, or even much interest. I wondered if people were merely systems of levers and buttons to her, predictable and dull as engines: For you, I would keep living. For me, my children would come running.
For them, I would do anything at all.
I caught them both in my arms, half kneeling, and pressed their small and perfect heads to my chest. “It’s alright, I’m alright,” I lied.
My knee snarled and gibbered with pain, a rabid animal more than a limb, and Vivian’s revolver was pointed between my eyes.
As I watched, the barrel wavered between our children, weighing their worth.
It settled on our son’s quicksilver hair. My arm around him tightened.
“Where’s Mama?” That was our daughter, though I hardly recognized her voice. She had so rarely been afraid.
“She.” My voice flailed to a full stop. I tried again. “She got away. She’s well.”