Chapter 22 #3
You came closer to me, and I blinked rapidly, like a man staring at the sun.
It was the first time in nine years I’d seen you in your full armor, and the sight of it struck me like a hammer to the skull.
You were a hero stepped straight from myth, shining and true, and you were a mortal woman, scarred and weary, and God forgive me for trying so hard to separate the two.
You bowed your forehead to mine and said, softly, “Do not ask me to risk you, too.” Then, more desperately, “Stay.”
I tilted my face upward, brushing my lips against yours, and whispered, “Make me.”
In the end you made me carry your shield and ordered me to stay six paces behind you. I waited outside the shallow, stinking cavern while you ducked inside. I heard a hissing sound, the thrash of scale against stone, and then nothing. I waited for that awful, keening death cry, but it never came.
You emerged a few seconds later, bleeding freely from a scrape across your brow, grinning like a child with a stolen sweet. You tossed the grail to me, said, “Quickly, now,” and we ran together back down the mountainside.
Later, as we rode away from Cloven Hill, I asked, “Why did she want them all dead, do you think? The dragons, I mean.”
You snorted, cynically. “Because it kept a lot of restless young bastards busy, probably.” You shrugged, plate metal moving against my back.
“Or because it made my story that much grander, if it was the very last one that I killed. Or only because they were—” You hesitated, casting about for the right words.
“Out of her reach, beyond any law or border. To see a dragon in flight was to see something … free.”
I looked back at the hill once, as we made camp that evening. I thought I saw, through the shifting mist, the glint of white scales. A pair of pale wings, which arced briefly into the light and then vanished once more, beyond reach.
The weather turned on the way to Cavallon, as it always did.
The high hills of the north flattened once more into low, wet farmland, the fields veiled now by scant, dirty snow.
The wind slithered and bit as industriously as it ever did, chapping my lips and turning your cheeks a wild, profligate red—but this time we had the sheepskins, and each other.
On the coldest night we slept with the skins pulled over our heads. The air was black and close, and it smelled of sheep piss and sweat and the sharpening tang of arousal.
Our lovemaking had changed over those nine years in the woods, gentling into the easy, half-laughing sex of two people who know there will be a tomorrow and a tomorrow after that. But since we returned here, it had become desperate again, death-haunted, nearly violent.
I slid my hand between your thighs and pushed my fingers into you, not gently.
You pulled my head back by the hair and set your teeth to my throat.
There would be bruises in the morning, and raised marks left by your teeth.
“Touch me,” I said. I tried to make an order of it, but the word left my lips on a gasp.
You bit me, hard. “Do it yourself.” You pulled my hand from between your legs and closed my wet fingers around my cock. You moved my fist up and down, mercilessly, in the rhythm I liked best, until my teeth were gritted from the effort of holding back.
“God, Una,” I breathed, and your hand loosened, just a little. Enough that I could grab your wrist and twist it, forcing you onto your stomach. I had not spent nine years—more, so many more—in the battlefield of our bed without learning a few tricks. Still, I think you let me.
I moved behind you, disarranging the sheepskins and not caring. I kneed your legs apart and pushed inside you. I went slow. Cruelly slow, punishingly slow, so that it might last forever, as nothing did—until you said, with a hitch in your voice, “Please.”
Neither of us lasted long after that. I bowed over your back and worked my hand beneath you and said, “Now, love, yes, that’s right,” and you cried out as you came.
Later, when our breathing had slowed and we were curled face to face beneath the sheepskins once more, I asked, somewhat plaintively, “Did you really sleep naked with your men, for warmth?”
“No.” A huff of laughter against my face. “Only with Ancel and his boy.”
I was jealous enough that I didn’t especially like this answer, but I comforted myself with the memory of his pretty dyed-blond head smacking on the throne room floor. Then I noticed that you had fallen quiet, and that you were breathing carefully, as though to keep back a sob.
I slipped my hand over your bare hip. “You … miss him?”
Slowly, you answered: “When Yvanne found me, I knew nothing of court, or of fine speech, or the tourneys where knights made their names. She taught me some of it, but Ancel taught me the rest. He bullied me and mocked me, but he taught me. How to bow, how to speak, how to flirt, how to fuck.” I flinched, and you said, “He was my brother, Owen, or my brother-in-arms, or something else. I hated him and I loved him, often on the same day. Of course I miss him.”
I pruned the envy ruthlessly from my voice, until all that remained was grief, for your loss. “I’m sorry.”
Your hip moved beneath my hand, restless, agitated. “I still don’t understand it. How he could—that he would—”
“Murder you?” That came out a little too sharply; perhaps a little envy had survived. I imagined stamping it, nobly, beneath my boot. “Vivian—Yvanne—ordered him to do it. Would you have betrayed him, if she asked it of you?”
You were quiet for a long time. “No. I don’t know.
But then, I was her favorite, and had nothing to gain by it.
And … I loved her—even now, the habit of love still catches me sometimes, unawares.
” You exhaled, began again: “I loved the queen, but I never loved her like Ancel did.” You shivered as you said it.
After a while you said, so softly I wasn’t sure if you were speaking to me, or to yourself: “I will spare him this time, if I can.”
The last of my jealousy flaked like ash and drifted away.
I pulled you close to me, so that your face settled between my collar and jaw.
You cried then, in the humid dark. For yourself, I thought, who had been forged like a blade for a master you no longer served, and for Ancel of Ulwin, who served her still.
Cavallon rose on the horizon as it always did: gracefully, regally, so perfectly fulfilling my expectations for a castle that it might have been cut and pasted from the pages of The Legends of Una Everlasting: A Children’s Retelling of the Classic Tragedy!
Which it had been, more or less: It was a castle as built by a woman who had only read about them in books, nine hundred years in the future.
Structurally, it was unsound. It had been constructed too hastily and too grandly, by conscripted prisoners and bewildered masons who’d never heard the words barrel vault in their lives.
You’d told me about the cracks that formed in the mortar almost as soon as it was finished, wide enough to slip your hand inside.
The curtain walls would fall well before Tilda the Younger’s reign, and the cellars would collapse soon after.
By the time of Lysabet I they’d abandon the Keep altogether, in favor of a new capitol in the city.
But it didn’t matter. It only mattered how it had looked: impressive enough that bards had written of it in songs and people had spoken of it in awed whispers, and ministers and chancellors still sometimes described Dominion, poetically, as “the castle upon the hill.”
You sat once more on the low stone by the road, your eyes on the Keep. I had braided your hair this time—stupid, to send you into battle with it loose—and tucked the braid neatly beneath your collar. Already the wind had worked a few tendrils loose from your temples.
I fished in my pocket for my second-to-last cigarette. I held it between my teeth as I drew my Saint Sinclair and flicked the cylinder open against my palm. “You know the signal?”
“I know the signal.”
I checked the chambers carefully, spun the cylinder once and snapped it back into place. “And you’ll listen for it? You’ll come, no matter—”
“I swore to serve you, did I not?” Your eyes were still on the Keep, cold and yellow as the eyes of a lynx. “By my life and death.”
There was such ease in your voice that I said, sharply, “Only by your life, please.”
You didn’t answer. You only pulled yourself back into the saddle and settled your shield on your left arm. It shone a defiant, summer green against the drab winter sky.
You turned Hen to face the gates of Cavallon, and he pawed eagerly at the earth, his hoof digging great gouges into the dirt road.
“Soon, boy,” you said, and you were smiling.