Chapter 26
I DON’T KNOW how long I waited.
You would have accounted for every day, but I let them run through my fingers like water. I didn’t want to know how long we’d been apart.
I know it was spring when the sapling first pushed its shoulders up through the earth, head bowed over the pale stem, like a sleeping swan. I fell asleep that night with my cheek pressed to the soil, watching it, and when I woke the first needles were outstretched, tilted toward the dawn.
I know it was summer, that year or the one after, when the first berry budded, hard and green. I touched it with my smallest finger. I thought of our son.
I know it was spring again when a storm blew in from the north, driving the swifts and small animals ahead of it. I curled my body around the yew while lightning struck so near it raised the hairs on my arms and left the taste of metal in my mouth.
I went away from the hill only when I had to, driven by thirst or hunger, and while I was away, I thought only of calamities: a stray hoof, a careless boot, a hard freeze, a hungry fawn, too young to know the needles would sting her mouth.
The sapling was growing fast—strangely fast, I thought sometimes—but it was still so fragile, so small.
But I had to hunt. I had to drink at the beck. And when my red cloak finally grew so thin and rotten that it came apart in my hands, like old lace, I had to walk all the way down to Queenswald.
It was not Queenswald yet, of course, but only a handful of cob huts that had gathered like cattle in the valley below.
I found the smith and traded the remains of my armor for a rough woolen blanket, a tin pot, flint and steel, and a bag of dry field peas.
Then I turned back and bartered for a second blanket; it might be winter when you returned, and you hated the cold.
The smith did not protest. His eyes moved often to the hilt of Valiance, which I wore always at my hip, and which I refused to trade for any price.
Fight for us, you had said to me, and I will.
Yvanne might be gone, but a crown is a circle, too.
The queen is dead, long live the queen. There will be borders drawn and redrawn, wars fought and lost. There will be strangers who come to our wood in search of rebels or deserters, timber for their warships or coal for their engines.
They will find us, instead—and they will not find us undefended.
I heard whispers as I left the village. I was not surprised: I was over-tall and badly scarred, rawboned from too many seasons of game and gathered berries. I was a woman, yet I carried a sword. I carried a sword, and yet I served no lord and bore no colors, save the green grass stains on my shirt.
Perhaps she is not a woman or a knight, they whispered, but something else, which dwells in the wastes and wild places.
They began to leave things at the foot of the hills sometimes. A white goat kid, freshly slain. A pair of fine beeswax candles. A cup of wine, full to the brim. Offerings, I finally realized, as you might offer to a spirit or a heathen god.
I tried to repay them, feeling sorry and fraudulent.
If a lamb was lost in those hills, it was found penned with the others in the morning.
If a band of thieves or brigands passed nearby, they passed quickly onward, without troubling Queenswald.
If a woman was chased from the village in the night, her pursuer vanished, and was not heard from again.
They were grateful, I thought, but wary. They did not till the land to the north of the village anymore or let their animals graze in the hills. Already saplings had begun to sprout among the grasses, growing tall and well.
But not as well as the yew. It seemed to bound through the seasons like a hind. Already the earth beneath it was riddled with roots, and the sky was obscured by the green tangle of branches and needles. The trunk was sturdy enough that I might lean my back against it, sometimes, and close my eyes.
Perhaps it was the magic of the yew that made it grow at five times the pace of a natural tree.
Or perhaps more time was passing than I reckoned.
Perhaps some nights I lay down beneath the yew and woke seven years later.
It was true that sometimes when I went down into the village, I did not recognize their faces.
My own face, when I saw it reflected in still water, had not changed.
I suppose time moves strangely, beneath the yew. I did not worry overmuch about it. I only waited, as I had promised I would.
Soon the yew was tall enough to cast a broad circle of shade, and the bark was furrowed and gnarled enough that I could imagine I saw shapes in the grain.
There was a place halfway up the trunk that looked like a face, with a twist of wood like a long, arched nose and two knots like black eyes.
I liked to put my back against the yew and rest my skull just below the face.
One day in early autumn I fell asleep there—for an hour, for a century—and when I woke, it was summer. The ulla flowers were in bloom again.
And I was not alone anymore.
I sat for a moment listening to the sound of your breath, as familiar to me as my own pulse. I had waited for a hundred lives, a thousand years—what was another few seconds?
Then I stood and circled the tree. You sat against the other side, your back to the bark, eyes closed. You were whole and alive, just as I remembered you—or nearly so.
Your hair was still curled and tousled, as if you’d just run your fingers through it, but it had turned a pure, unnatural white, like bleached bone. Like mine. We had both of us been born from the yew, as dragons are, and we were both changed by it.
Your shirt was still unfastened, as I’d left it, but on your bare chest there was now a small, silver scar, just like mine. The scar rose and fell lightly with your breath.
I looked at your face and for a moment I couldn’t tell how old you were. Every version of you seemed to exist at once, overlapping.
You were the lonely, scrape-kneed boy who had found me in the green shadows between centuries.
You were the scholar who had written nothing but lies and the soldier who had fled the field of battle; the bravest coward and the cleverest madman and the traitor with the truest heart; the man who had led me to my death and the man who had died for me.
You were the bastard who had left me here alone, all these years, and you were my best beloved, who always, always came back to me.
Most often I met you with a sword to your throat. This time I knelt over your sprawled legs and touched the tip of my knuckle to the hollow beneath your jaw.
Your long white lashes lifted. You looked up at me as you always did when we met beneath the yew: hungrily, wistfully, as if you didn’t believe I was real but badly wished I was. But your eyes were different, this time: a dark, tawny amber, like winter honey, or spring sap.
And this time when you said my name, it was not Una Everlasting. It was the humble name of a woodcutter’s daughter, the name I have stricken from these pages so that it will be known only by those who knew me.
“Ulla,” you said, and I took your face in both my hands and kissed you, fiercely and furiously, for a long time.
When I let you go, there was blood on both our lips, and I couldn’t say if it was yours or mine.
I traced the fine bones of your cheeks with my thumbs, buried my fingers in your pale, pale curls.
“You remember, then? Everything?” I had lain awake for so many nights, wondering what you had lost down under the earth, among the roots and worms.
“I—I don’t know. Some.” There was a haziness in your voice, as if you were recalling dreams you’d had as a child. You added, a little desperately, “I remember you.”
“That is enough,” I said, and it was.
What you have forgotten, I will tell to you; what I have forgotten, you will tell to me. We will tell our story to one another, not for crown or country, but only for ourselves.
We might even write it all down—you would like that, I think, and why shouldn’t we?
We have time.