Chapter 20 #3
Our daughter’s body untensed, but her brother turned his head slowly toward the cottage.
There was blood seeping from under our door, thick and dark as motor oil.
I turned his face back to my shirt. “Don’t look.
” I said it sternly, without quarter, one soldier giving orders to another.
I had never wanted my son to take orders from anyone.
Vivian said, patiently, “Up, please,” and I stood, sweating hard, feeling the bullet move like a hot tooth in my leg. Then, less patiently, “Move out, Corporal.”
“To where?”
“To the yew, of course.” Vivian tipped her head, quizzical. “Where else? You first, then the children.”
It wasn’t far to the yew, but it seemed to take years and years, epochs, whole ages of the earth.
There was time for the flesh to swell and weep around the shattered bone of my knee, until my leg dragged behind me, a sausage casing stuffed with glass.
There was time to listen to the sweet patter of our children’s feet and wish, as I had wished my whole life, that I were someone else, someone like you: strong and brave enough to save them.
There was time to think of the yew, and the girl I’d played with once beneath its branches, and the book that took us—always, over and over—back to it.
A strange chance, I’d thought, that the pages of The Death of Una Everlasting had been milled from wood pulp, rather than the vellum or parchment that would have been more common, in this era.
But there was no such thing as chance, in Dominion.
Hope hit me like a second bullet, straight to the heart.
I stumbled to a halt, breathing hard. The yew stood before me, a thousand years younger than I’d known it as a boy, and still older than the Savior Himself.
It struck me suddenly as the only true miracle I’d ever seen, a slow and green magic that defied time itself.
You’d told me once that you thought even dragons had no true sorcery in them, save their long, long lives.
But the yew hadn’t lived forever. I had come home for the war—so many times, I’d come home from the war—and walked up the rise and found nothing but stumps and rotten roots where the grove had once stood. Of the yew, there had been nothing left at all.
I said, belatedly, “It was you.”
“Most of the time, yes,” Vivian answered, from behind me. “You’ll need to be more specific.”
“You had the tree taken down.” I swallowed, remembering the sharp pine-needle smell of the book as it burned.
“And you had the wood made into paper.” How had I ever believed that she’d simply found a book like that?
She was a woman who engineered all of history, who made her own fate.
I could almost hear Professor Sawbridge: Everything that is, was made, and everything that was made, was made for a reason.
“Well, you can see how an entire tree is something of a logistical challenge, as an instrument of time travel.” I had forgotten how eager she was to discuss her schemes; it must be lonely work.
“Every time I wanted to make some small adjustment I had to hike back to these damned woods. You cannot believe,” she added, sincerely, “how much I hate it here.”
High above us, the wind tousled the tops of the yew branches, so that the needles whispered against one another. When our children played here, they pretended it was the sound of the sea.
“So,” Vivian continued, “eventually I had it milled and pulped. It wasn’t easy—the wood ruined a dozen sawblades, and the first crew quit before they’d even limbed it properly.
Claimed it gave them gray hairs, and arthritis.
” I heard the shrug in her voice. “But it was only a tree, in the end. I had the book bound, and I burned what remained. No sense taking—ow, you little shit!”
I tried to whip around and lost my balance, staggering back to one knee.
Our daughter crouched like a fox kit between me and Vivian, snarling.
Her brother stepped in front of her—your son, surely, not mine—as Vivian swore, shaking her hand.
There was a bright red ring on her wrist, in the shape of small teeth.
“Una didn’t make much of a mother, did she?
” She switched smoothly to Middle Mothertongue.
“Sit down, little savages—no, farther away—and be still.”
They didn’t move until I asked them to. They sat, their eyes fixed on me with awful, unwavering trust, as if I hadn’t already failed them. I looked away, to the ground beneath my knees. Blood had soaked through the legs of my trousers, trickling among the roots of the yew.
I remembered, for no reason, the very first time I’d gone to the grove as a child.
I’d been lonely and hungry, chased by that hollow feeling that sometimes came over me, as if I’d lost something very precious but couldn’t recall what it was.
I’d tripped over the tangled roots of the yew and scraped both knees bloody.
When I’d looked up, there she was: the girl, bright-haired and bold, my first and only friend. Her eyes, I remembered suddenly, were the color of spring sap, and her name was Ulla. Like the flowers.
The realization arrived without fanfare or shock. I’d always known it was you, but I didn’t understand how it could be you, and so I’d let myself pretend I’d made her up. But now I knew: It wasn’t the book that first brought us together, or even Vivian Rolfe. It was the yew.
And it was the yew that could take me back to you, now. You were not lost to me forever. This was only one death among many, a brief and bloody pause in the endless circle of our lives. I felt myself falling toward you, slipping out of time—already I smelled frost, clean and sharp—
“Not just yet, Corporal.” For the second time that day, I opened my eyes to the sound of a gun cocking. This time, it was pointed at our children.
“No—please, don’t hurt them, don’t.” I was pleading now, beyond pride or shame. “Just let me go to her. Let me find her, and fix this—”
Vivian laughed at me. You will beg me for it, before the end, she’d said once. And I will laugh. A prophecy I’d outrun for nine years.
But how? If she’d known we would return to the yew every time we disappeared, how had we eluded her for so long? Unless—
“You let us go.” I felt those nine stolen years contracting around me, shrinking inward.
Everything we’d done and everything we hadn’t—the price we’d paid for the freedom that wasn’t even real, for a future that wouldn’t last—bile burned my throat.
“You let us think we were safe—I bet you even made sure the sword in the tree had no maker’s mark, just to soothe us. Why?”
“Because you’d remembered yourselves. And after that, no threat or punishment could make you play your parts willingly.
Believe me, I tried.” Had she? Had we been here before?
Was I a man or merely a palimpsest, scrubbed clean and rewritten so many times that my oldest memories were obscured entirely?
The bile bubbled, acidly. Vivian continued, “The stick failed me. I needed a carrot.” Her eyes cut to the children. She corrected herself, “Carrots.”
I looked at them—our pretty, clever son; our fierce, stubborn daughter—the sum of all our hopes, the final proof of our freedom. They were the future itself, given form. I loved them as I had never loved anything, save you.
But they were not the future, after all; they were only bait. Another link in Vivian’s long, long chain of cause and effect, action and reaction.
“Oh, don’t give me that look.” Vivian tsked.
“It’s a very fine offer—a compromise, even.
If you will simply return to your correct role and play your part as written, I’ll give you your happy ending.
Sir Una will be grievously injured when the grail is stolen.
We’ll spirit her away to a tower room and say she succumbed to her wounds, Erxa Dominus, et cetera.
And then I’ll let the two of you escape to the woods and play house to your heart’s content.
You can have your children back—a boy and a girl, fair-haired and dark.
They come out the same, every time.” A pause here, while my pulse rushed in my ears.
“Do you hear me, Mallory? All this drama and gore—you made me cripple you, you made me kill her myself, in cold blood, my own—” Vivian’s voice hitched oddly.
In another woman, I might have thought it was a sob. “When all I wanted was to cry truce.”
I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. I became fascinated by the small, sweet sounds of the wood: the soft crackle of needles underfoot, the endless chirp of the beck. There were no birds; the gunshot had sent them winging away.
Our daughter said: “Papa?”
I flinched from the sound of her voice. As soon as I went back through the yew—and I already knew that I would, already felt the jaws of Vivian’s trap snapping neatly shut around me—she would disappear. No: A person had to exist, in order to disappear, and our daughter never would.
Unless I did as Vivian said.
“Well?” she said. “Go to them. Say goodbye.”
I went to them, limping badly, clammy and cold with blood loss.
They watched me come with docile, trusting eyes.
All of this was frightening, but they hadn’t yet encountered anything so frightening that their parents couldn’t solve it.
I said, “I—I have to go away,” and then—only then—did their faith finally break.
Our daughter screamed for you. Our son asked why, over and over, his voice rising in pitch until I crushed them to me, desperately. Their bodies felt light in my arms, almost insubstantial, as if they were already fading away.
“We will—hush, listen to me—we will be together again. I swear it.” I ran my hands over the sharp wings of our daughter’s shoulders and the downy nape of our son’s neck.
The body remembers. “You’re going to disappear for a little while.
It won’t hurt. It’ll be like going to sleep.
And one day, when your mother and I find you again, you’ll wake up, and all of this will be a bad dream. ”
I laid them down among the roots, where I had lain as a boy. I placed our son’s hand around his sister’s. They curled toward one another, fetal in their fear, forming the uneven shape of a heart—mine, I thought, and yours.
I kissed them. “Wait for us,” I said, and then I stood and faced the yew.
I placed my hand just above Valiance, where the bark was swollen and tumorous around the hilt you hadn’t yet pulled.
Vivian Rolfe stood just behind me. She placed her chin over my shoulder, like a lover, and laid her hand over mine.
I asked, softly, “What did you say? Before you shot her.”
“The truth, only.” Vivian spoke in Middle Mothertongue, her breath ghosting over my cheek. “That I love her, and always have, from the very day I gave birth to her.”
The chain lengthened in my mind, link upon link, receding out of sight.
Then Vivian set the barrel of her revolver against the back of her hand and pulled the trigger.