Chapter 24
SOMETIMES, WHEN WE passed through time, it reminded me of climbing the yew with you when we were children.
I felt, or imagined I felt, ghostly branches against my palms, forking and dividing and rejoining endlessly.
My brain’s puny attempt to make sense of the great tangle of history, I’d thought, by using a metaphor drawn from my own memory.
But it was not a metaphor. The book was the yew was time itself, and now I followed those branches down to the trunk, and then the roots, and then farther still, until I found the tiny, hard seed where everything began.
When we opened our eyes, we were not standing beneath the yew, because there was no yew. There were not even any woods, yet. It was just after daybreak, and the light poured eagerly, almost lavishly, over our faces, unobstructed.
We were lying together, face to face, upon a high, grassy knoll.
The shape of the land was different—sharper, unsoftened by time—but I had walked these hills in too many centuries to fail to recognize them.
In your era, they would be hidden beneath a thick green rime of trees.
In mine, they would be shaved bare, sewn together by the neat stitches of railroad tracks.
Here, in the beginning of everything, there was only the long grass, rippling whitely in the wind, and the lavish yellow light, and the two of us.
I settled my head back into the pillow of the grass and looked at you.
At the light which turned your armor to gold and your eyes to amber and your hair the piercing, perfect white of distant stars.
In that moment you seemed to be everything at once, a series of contradictions: You were a knight with no master and a mother with no children; a manly woman and a womanly man; a hero whose name would be sung for a thousand years, and an orphan whose name had already been forgotten.
You were Sir Ulla, who I had loved long before my birth and long after your death, in the past and the future, and here, now. Always.
Your fingers tightened around mine, and I discovered that we were holding hands, and that our hands were dug strangely into the soil. Pressed between our palms was something small and smooth and wet, like a pearl.
I drew our tangled fingers from the earth and held the pearl up to the light. You gasped, softly, beside me. It was not a pearl, of course, but the thing we had come all this way to find, and to destroy: A seed, which would grow one day into the yew.
Every night of our journey north we had discussed it. How we might not only escape the endless wheel of our story but shatter it beyond repair. How we might survive its shattering, and what it might cost us.
In the end, we had come to this. We would find the fragile beginning of the yew tree and tear it out before it could take root. We would burn the book and the seed and strand ourselves forever in the ancient past.
The seed was a strange thing: glassy and red, like a jewel. It splintered the light and threw bloody shards over our faces.
A shadow fell across us. “That’s pretty.”
Both of us startled. We scrambled upright, spinning to face the figure. I grabbed for the book, which had been lying between us, and you went for Valiance.
But it was only a young woman—a girl, really, tall and fleshy, with a roughly spun dress and cheeks the ruddy pink of nail beds. She regarded us without alarm, hands clasped politely behind her back.
Your grip eased on your hilt, but I said, sharply, “Who are you?”
“No one and nothing.” The girl answered easily, her accent so odd to my ear it was difficult to understand the words.
Then she frowned, as if remembering a dream she’d once had.
“Though I think—I think I will become someone, one day. It’s only that I haven’t yet.
” Her eyes fell to my fist, where I held the red seed of the yew. “What are you going to do with it?”
“Burn it,” I said, shortly. Every second it existed in the world was a second Vivian Rolfe might contrive to return to. I fumbled for a match and drew the head against the heel of my boot. The girl gasped a little as the flame caught, like a child watching a street magician.
I set the book on the tousled grass and lifted a single page. I set it carefully alight, and then another, and another, until the book was lost behind a yellow bloom of flames. It was the second time I’d burned this damn book, and I meant it to be the last.
The wind came again up the knoll, and great gray flakes of ash lifted from the book and drifted upward, away. The fire burned hotter. Into the very center of it, where the flames were tipped with blue and white, I tossed the seed.
You watched it warily, almost fearfully, breathing hard. “When it’s gone, when it’s done, none of it will have happened.” You were holding yourself back from the very edge of hope, unwilling to feel it again. “The Black Bastion. Ancel. My fathers—”
I set my hand over yours, pressing silently. We would be stuck here forever. We would never see our fathers again, or anyone we had ever known. But it was worth it.
“I don’t think it will burn.”
I startled again. I’d forgotten the girl was standing there, watching us.
She laughed. “It would be a great jest if it did. Imagine a dragon’s heart, burning!”
You said, so calmly that the question flattened into a statement, “A what.”
The girl bent down and plucked the seed from the ashes. You swore. I tried, too late, to stop her.
The girl ignored us both, rolling the seed fearlessly in her palm before handing it back to me. “See? It’s not even hot.”
I flinched as it touched my hand, but the girl was right: It was merely warm against my skin. “How … did you know?” I asked. And then again, more urgently, a nameless terror clamoring in my skull, “Who are you?”
“No one, I already told you.” The girl shrugged, and the wind carried her perfume to me. A sweet, summery smell, which I knew and refused to name. “And it was my—teacher, who taught me about dragons.”
“Your…” I’d heard someone hesitate in just that way before they said the word teacher. I remembered who it had been, and in remembering, I suddenly knew what her perfume smelled like, what it had always smelled like: ulla flowers.
I grabbed you by the pauldron and hauled you abruptly backward, away from the girl.
“How did you do it? How the hell did you—shit.” I was searching for the silver knife, not finding it.
Must have dropped it in the throne room.
God, to have made it this far—to have the seed in my grasp and still not be free of her—
Your head whipped back and forth, looking for a threat. “Owen, what—”
“It’s her,” I spat. “Look.”
The girl stood watching us both with mild interest, hands still behind her back. She smiled at you—a good smile, friendly and white—and I felt a stillness fall over you. “No,” you said.
But it was obvious, now that I knew. Her hair was a little lighter, but would darken eventually to metal yellow. Her jaw was hidden by baby fat, but would one day harden into a perfect right angle. Only her eyes were unchanged: zealous, relentless, entirely devoid of doubt.
The girl smiled at me. “Hello, Cor-por-al.” She pronounced the word carefully, as if it were foreign to her.
My fist seized around the seed. “Hello, Vivian.”
The girl—who was not yet Vivian Rolfe, but would be one day—scrunched up her nose at the sound of her name.
“I suppose so. I wish I will choose a better name, but I know I don’t.
” She paused while her verb tenses slithered and bivouacked in my mind.
“I remember it all, I do, but it’s a little …
blurred. I’ve done it all so many times, and haven’t done it yet—well, you know. ”
I did. Every time I returned to that day in my office—to my own natural lifespan—it grew worse. The memories multiplied, piling one atop the other until every voice was an echo and every gesture was familiar. The had-been and will-be converged, swallowing the present, leaving nothing but confusion.
But Vivian had never once seemed confused. I looked at her again, more sharply. She stood so comfortably in the rough-woven dress, and those odd, archaic vowels came so easily to her tongue. She was younger by far than I’d ever seen her.
“You’re not from my era at all, are you?
Originally, I mean.” It shouldn’t have taken me so long to suspect it.
Vivian hadn’t suffered from the same circling amnesia because she’d so rarely returned to her own lifespan.
I imagined Professor Sawbridge making a pained noise at my slowness. “You’re from here, from now.”
I’d promised you we would go back to the beginning, but where was the beginning of a circle? I felt that circle tightening now around my throat, like a noose.
“Yes,” said not-yet-Vivian. “Well, not here—I was born miles and miles away, one and twenty years past.” She was older than I’d thought, then.
I had been misled by the softness of her face and belly, which slumped oddly beneath her dress.
She looked over my shoulder and her eyes softened. “Wilt thou kill me, then, daughter?”
I turned and discovered that your sword was braced across your forearm, the point aimed precisely toward the girl’s throat—but you weren’t moving.
Your eyes cut once to me, and I saw turmoil in them.
Here was the architect of all your misery: a sweet-faced child, defenseless and unarmed.
Here was your worst enemy, before she had committed any crime against you.
Here was the egg, soft and pale, that came before the asp.
You waited, and I realized you were hoping I would make an order of it and absolve you—but I wouldn’t.
When you’d knelt in the woods and handed your heart to me hilt first, as if you were nothing but a weapon, I’d made an oath of my own: never to wield you like one.