Chapter 21 #3
He scratched at his cheek, which never quite managed to be clean-shaven or bearded. “I suppose I wanted to see the world. What small-town boy doesn’t?” I hadn’t. The woods had been world enough, for me. “I was all signed up to work a freighter, when I was drafted.”
The beer was thin and flat. I wondered if the barkeep watered my father’s drinks specially. “Why didn’t you, after?”
“Oh, I thought about it, God knows. But … my leg, you know.” His voice roughened. “And a ship is no place for a baby.”
What happiness my father might have had, he’d sacrificed for me. As Sawbridge had sacrificed her principles for Mistress Shaw. As you had sacrificed yourself, over and over, for your queen.
I thought, despairingly, that love didn’t make cowards of us, after all; it made heroes, and heroes usually didn’t survive.
But I was no hero. I’d run from the war and I’d run from Vivian Rolfe and I was going to run again, no matter the cost. I would let the Hinterlands be invaded, twice over; I would let the Black Bastion burn.
I would let my father be beaten on the steps of the capitol and my favorite professor be thrown in jail.
I would hand the whole future of the world to a woman who had murdered you—more than once!
—so long as I got to see my own children again.
I wasn’t myopic; I was heartless.
My father was watching me, concerned. “I didn’t regret it,” he assured me. “Never once.”
I sucked watery beer through my teeth. “Just—as an experiment. If I told you to run, now—if I told you things were about to get much worse in Dominion, very soon—would you run?”
His face creased. “Without you?”
God, he would break the heart I didn’t have. “Imagine I was somewhere safe. Far away.”
“Maybe,” he said, not looking at me. “Sure I would.”
“Really?”
He snorted. “No.” He set his pint on the table. There was nothing left but yellowish foam, sliding down the glass. “If I told you everything, then you know I did something—awful, once. Something unforgivable. I think maybe I owe—”
“You did your best by me,” I said, sharply. “You don’t owe me penance, Dad.”
“Not you. Her. Your…” I shouldn’t have bought him that beer.
Dampness was beginning to gather, inevitably, at the corners of his eyes.
He sniffed, mightily. “And there’s Melly and Bill—they’re good to me, Owen, I don’t care if you disapprove.
And what about my Veterans for Peace boys?
Half of them are class traitors, I’ll grant you, but then, none of us came back right, from the war. I—I couldn’t leave them behind.”
He would stand and fight, then, like Gilda. Like everyone else who couldn’t run.
This, I thought, was the reason Vivian needed the book so badly. Because no throne is held easily, or for long; because a nation is a story we tell about ourselves, and stories change, if you let them. Because where there is power, someone will oppose it.
She would wear the crown again—but she would have a hell of a time keeping it.
I sat with my father until the tavern was nearly empty and his words were slurring into a senseless rise-and-fall rhythm, familiar as a lullaby.
I listened and thought. About heroes and cowards and the fine line between them.
About you, and our son’s yewberry birthmark.
About freedom, which seemed to me now a lonely, foreign thing. Who is free, who loves another?
Eventually the barkeep and her husband came to collect my father, each of them pulling one of his arms over their shoulders, laughing a little, fond and exasperated.
The barkeep caught my eye, her smile fading.
“He misses you,” she observed, pointedly.
I said I was sorry, and thanked her for taking care of him, and of me, when I was a child.
She blushed. “Oh, we don’t mind, do we, Bill? ” Bill agreed that they did not.
I kissed my father’s forehead and told him that I loved him. He said, “There’s my boy,” and I knew: I couldn’t run, either.
The address on the card did not take me to the capitol building this time, but to a weedy dirt track at the very edge of the city.
The cabbie leaned one elbow out of his window, frowning. His conscience appeared to be troubling him. “You sure this is the place?”
“Yes,” I told him, and he almost didn’t flinch from the sound of my voice. “I know where I am.”
I even thought I recognized the stone by the road, though it was surrounded now by tall, slim trees. You had sat there while I combed your hair around your shoulders. I could feel it now, a white-hot brand across my palms.
It was a steep walk, and the day was already hot. I didn’t mind; soon I would be very cold, and I didn’t have my red service jacket anymore.
I crested the final rise and paused. I had seen Cavallon Keep in its glory, and I’d visited its graveside, nine centuries later. But I’d never seen it forgotten entirely.
There were no buses of schoolchildren or velvet ropes for visitors to form queues. There were no explanatory plaques or chattering tour guides or excavation sites. There were only the stones, tumbled and moss eaten, and the wet, warm wind, running over them.
I stood looking down at the city below me, at the shiny beads of automobiles and the zippered teeth of the train tracks.
The poor downtrodden folk of Dominion, Vivian had called them, but they didn’t strike me as victims. I had seen them send their sons cheerfully to war; I had seen them beaten bloody for protesting it.
They had put a medal around my neck for something I hadn’t done, and spit on my boots simply for being born.
And they hadn’t been tricked or forced into any of it—they had chosen, over and over, cruelly or kindly, selfishly or bravely.
There was a strange comfort in this, I found. Just as there was no such thing as total freedom, there was no such thing as its total absence.
I turned away from the city and into the jagged green shadows of the Keep.
None of the roofs had survived, and few of the walls. Ash and linden trees had taken root in the old halls, spindly and tall, chasing the light, so that it looked as if someone had tried to cage a forest.
It wasn’t hard to find Vivian; I knew where she would be. She had never really wanted to be anywhere else.
The throne had long since rotted away, but there was still a stone plinth where it had stood. Someone had hacked through the moss and swept the leaves away, so that it shone a shocking white, like bone through skin.
Vivian waited for me there, the book in her lap, head tilted peacefully up to the light. A branch cracked beneath my shoe, and she smiled without looking at me.
“Ready, Corporal?”
“Yes,” I said. There was little else to say. I was through with begging; she was through with speech-making. There would be no more squirming, looping arguments, no more grasping justifications. I would do as I was told because I had to. Because, she supposed, I had no other choice.
She handed me a spiral-bound notebook, of the kind used by court stenographers and journalists. “You’ll need to make your notes here, this time, for transcription later.” She tapped the wooden cover of the book in her lap. “I’ll be holding on to this, for obvious reasons.”
“I understand.”
She handed me a holstered Saint Sinclair Mark III service revolver, three bullets, and her slim silver knife, hilt first. I took it with a hand that was perfectly steady.
Vivian said, comfortingly, “It’s almost done, Owen. One last time, and it will be over forever.” She was lying.
I said, “Yes, this will be the last time,” and I wasn’t.
I pushed the point of the knife into the pad of my finger and touched it to the page she held open. The cold, clean smell of winter came to me, and the world fell away, and then I was home.