Chapter 22
I HAD BEEN afraid you wouldn’t remember me, but of course you did. We’ve done this too many times to forget, you and me.
I stood with my hand against the yew, breath misting in the cold, heart stuttering. I waited without turning for the metal slither of sword leaving sheath, the kiss of steel against my nape.
It never came. Dry needles snapped beneath your boots as you approached.
Your footsteps—always so swift and sure—were clumsy now, shuffling through the frost. At my back you paused, close enough that I could feel the heat of you.
Your breath ghosted against the back of my neck, and I knew an instant of desperate, keening lust. Because you were warm and alive and with me, and they were not; because everything had been taken from us, save one another.
Then your arms came around my waist, carefully, as if you were new to your own body, unsure of its strength.
You buried your face in my hair, inhaled once, raggedly, and wept.
I pressed my hands over yours and held you to me until it passed, until your body slackened against mine and we stood quiet in the hasty blue twilight of midwinter.
I led you to the cottage by the hand. I wasn’t sure you could find the way on your own—your steps were still uncertain, your gaze opaque.
A whuffing sound greeted us in the clearing, and the stamp of a hoof. I had the sudden, implausible fear that Hen had been left waiting here for nine years, desiccating steadily, so that there would be nothing but a bad-tempered skeleton left to greet us.
But only a few minutes had passed since his master walked alone to the yew, from his perspective. He still looked exactly as I remembered him (a bad-tempered skeleton with hair).
He put his head to your chest as you approached, and you stood for a while with your cheek against his forelock. When you straightened, you looked a little less lost.
I tried to scratch beneath the point above Hen’s withers, in gratitude, and he knocked his jaw so hard into mine that I bit my tongue. Dog meat, I whispered to him. Leather gloves.
By the time I’d spat the blood from my mouth and cleaned my teeth, you were standing with your back to the cottage. Your lips were pressed so hard together they formed a white seam, and your eyes were the holes moths leave behind in linen. “I can’t,” you said.
“That’s alright. We’ll sleep outside.”
“It’s cold.” This you stated as something you observed, clinically, rather than something you felt.
I lifted one shoulder. “I’m used to it.”
We didn’t speak again for several hours.
We only sat, feeding the fire, remembering and forgetting.
In other lives, I’d talked until my throat was sore, explaining and arguing, circling, urging you to take up the quest you had abandoned.
But you had not abandoned your quest this time, because you couldn’t.
Eventually, you said, in a voice nearly as awful as mine, “It won’t last.” I was sitting with my back to your chest, a half-rotted fur wrapped around both our shoulders.
Your words hummed down my spine. “Even if she keeps her word and lets us live—even if she lets us return here—it will only be for some little while. Eventually her reign will falter, and she will need this story told again, adjusted to suit some new strategy.” Your voice lowered, a bitter rumble.
“She’ll need a different enemy to conspire against the crown.
Or perhaps it’s God she’ll need, and Ancel will have to play his part dressed in a devil’s horns and rags.
Perhaps I will survive Cavallon and die in pursuit of some other damned false trinket, so she can discover it a thousand years later. ”
“It would be difficult.” I spoke idly, without conviction. “We remember ourselves, now, and wouldn’t willingly do her bidding.”
“Then perhaps she will find herself a new scribe! One I don’t know or can’t remember.
Perhaps she will make infants of us again, and have us live a dozen lives apart, until we forget each other.
Perhaps she already has. Even if we get ten years, Owen, or twenty—” You choked, and when you spoke again it was less than a whisper.
“It’s not freedom, if it can be taken away. ”
I said, “No.”
“Yet—we can’t run.”
“No.” There was no freedom in running, either, if you knew one day you would be caught.
“And so, I am hers, after all.” A sickly calm came into your voice as you said it, as if it comforted you. You had never liked holding the reins. “I am her weapon, her tragedy, forever.”
It took so many tragedies, to make a nation.
I listed them in my head like the names of the dead the papers used to print: the False Kings and their followers, the heathens and rebels; my mother, who took a bullet in the back, and my father, who put another in his own leg; the idiot boys who marched with me in the war and went home in boxes; the children who packed our shells with powder and the children we orphaned on the battlefield and our own children, who were never born.
There was not enough red paint in the world to write their names on the wall, but I supposed it didn’t matter; their blood had been mixed into the mortar.
In the silence, your laugh rang too sudden and too loud. “Well, and what else could I have been? It’s why I was born, after all.”
“Horseshit,” I said, calmly.
“Owen.” You didn’t want to tell me. You imagined that I would care. “Before I died, that last time, she told me—”
“She lied.”
“Don’t be so—we even look alike! She arranged every second of my life. Is it really so unlikely that she gave it to me in the first place?”
There was guilt in your voice, which puzzled me. Had you wished, in your starving, orphaned heart, that the queen was your own true mother, returned to you? Did you imagine it was your fault that your wish had come true?
I turned in your arms to face you, but you wouldn’t look at me. You averted your face so that all I could see was your blind left eye. I had missed the shape of it, the way the pupil spilled like ink into the iris. “Yes,” I said, “Vivian Rolfe gave birth to you.”
You looked at me sharply. I lifted my eyebrows the way Professor Sawbridge did just before she suckered an undergraduate into saying something very stupid.
“Tell me. Does that make her your mother?” You knew me well enough to suspect a trap, and stayed quiet.
“Was it childbirth that made you their mother, or everything that came after? And our children—were they yours, to dispose of as you liked? Or were they yours to protect? Yours to raise, yours to hold, yours to love—”
“Stop.” You closed your eyes. A pair of tears tracked down your cheeks and met at the end of your chin.
More gently, I said, “Both of my parents took bullets for me. You did the same, for your children. Whatever Vivian Rolfe is to you, it is not a mother.”
The tears came faster then, and your lashes gathered into sharp white points. “Did—did they see me, Owen? Did they find my body on the cottage floor, as I found—”
“No, I swear they didn’t.”
“But they might, the next time! What is the point of me if I can’t protect them? What is the point of any of this?”
“I don’t know.” I pulled myself gently away from you.
The fire had blinded me, so that I had to crouch and run my hands over the frozen ground to find what I needed now.
“You were right, though. We can’t run.” Boiled leather beneath my fingers, and the cold steel of a pommel. “What do you do, when you can’t run?”
I drew the sword from its sheath, and your body moved before you even opened your eyes, snapping upright.
I held Valiance in two hands, back braced against the weight of it.
God, you were strong. “I should never have taken this from you. If I hadn’t—if you’d been armed, when she found us—” I stopped, swallowing salt.
“I’m sorry. I was scared, and I thought if I took away your sword and your courage, if I made you small and ordinary enough, I could keep you safe. ”
I had thought the same about myself. I thought if I told no more stories and asked no more questions, if I poured grease in the bright brass gears of my mind, I would survive, even if my dreams did not.
Vivian must have laughed and laughed, like a general watching her enemies saw off their own limbs.
I lifted Valiance high, so that the blade caught the firelight and shone a hectic gold. “But it’s not an ordinary woman that I need, now. I need a hero, Una. I need you to fight again.” I met your eyes around the blade and found them huge and hungering. “But not for her.”
“Owen—”
“Kneel, love.” This was purest pageantry.
Sawbridge had doubted whether such rituals of knighthood were ever truly practiced, or whether they were the invention of romantic poets and playwrights.
But the whole of Dominion’s history was an invention, a theater production which we had made real by the strength of our belief.
Still, I half expected you to laugh in my face.
You didn’t laugh. Instead, the line between your brows smoothed suddenly away. You looked at me with a kind of bewildered surrender, of the kind I’d only seen before during sex, when you were very near to the edge but couldn’t quite fall. You never could, until I told you to.
It didn’t feel like pageantry when your knee hit the earth, or when your head bowed, so that your hair fell like dove’s wings over your shoulders. Your chest was rising and falling fast, as if you didn’t know whether you knelt before your executioner or your savior.
I brought Valiance down as slowly as I could, but the flat of the blade still smacked hard on your shoulder. “Do you so swear, by your good right arm, to serve with honor and with valor?”
The words came easily, by rote; I’d sworn a version of this same oath when I joined the army, while a bored recruitment officer had tapped my shoulders with a cheap tin sword, and again when I was knighted.
“I swear it.”