Chapter 8 #2
“It doesn’t matter.” Weeks of pestering and wheedling, and suddenly I was begging you not to tell me anything more.
“In a thousand years, they will sing your name in the streets. They will raise their children on stories of brave Sir Una Everlasting, the Red Knight, who fought for crown and country. You may not have lived as a hero, but I swear: You will die as one. Just—” My voice split and bled. “Just do this last thing.”
Your eyes fell closed again. “As you will,” you said, and I let go of your wrist. There were thin pink bands where my fingers had been.
You mounted. For the first time, you did not reach your hand down to me.
I walked alongside you some of the way, one hand on the stirrup. Hen nipped me once, nastily and for no reason, and I let him. None of the stories said whether your horse outlived you.
We approached the gates, where no guard called out to us, no watchmen cried greeting—did you not wonder why?—and I fell back.
I watched you ride toward the bloody end of your story alone, as you always were, as you must be.
You passed beneath the stone arch and paused. You turned your face back to me. I caught the wry lift of your lips, that smile that was not a smile but only the premonition of one.
And that old weakness came over me, the fault line that had cracked wide during the war and healed poorly. A tremor began at the base of my spine and shivered through my limbs. My teeth clacked together.
For crown and country, I thought, numbly.
And then I thought: It is not worth it.
“Una!” I shouted, and God, let my voice not be too weak—let me not be too late—“’Ware the archers!”
I knew before the words formed on my lips that I was too late. I heard the taut thrum of bowstrings, the whistle of fletching in the air, and knew no one could move fast enough.
But you could.
There was a sound like bullets hitting a tin can and then there were two arrows sprouting from your shield, held high to guard your face. The third arrow was lodged just above your left elbow, nestled in the slit between two plates of metal.
You didn’t seem to notice. You swung low in the saddle, shield still raised, as the second volley found you. Hen screamed. Someone shouted orders. Boots clanged on stone.
I knew who they were: Hinterlanders, come to pay their respects to the fresh-made queen of Dominion.
But instead of finding a monarch in the fullness of her power, they had found a dying woman and a worried court.
They had waited and watched, drinking the queen’s wine and eating the queen’s bread, until someone had whispered to them that the famed Red Knight was gone away on a fool’s quest.
The temptation had proved too great. The Hinterlanders had called for toast after toast—to the queen’s health! to Dominion!—and waited till even the Queen’s Guard was laughing and stupid with drink. It had been easy to take the Keep, then, and easy to lie in wait for the Red Knight’s return.
Their plot would fail, of course. Valiance would cut them down, every one, and their corpses would be hung from the gates for the crows to pick clean, and their treachery would be remembered for a thousand years.
When the Hinterlanders sued for peace during the war, Vivian Rolfe had laughed in their faces.
Her answer had become famous, printed on posters and shouted in battle: Dominion does not forget.
Dominion would survive this. But you would not.
You would kneel before the queen one last time, pierced by a dozen arrows. You would lift the grail in one bloodied hand, head bowed, and the queen would touch your hair and say, Rest now, my Red Knight.
And the Drawn Blade of Dominion would die with a smile on her lips.
I was not aware of making a decision. But I found my feet moving, my hand reaching for the service revolver that rested warm and heavy against my breast. I crouched behind the low wall of the courtyard well, finger already hooked around the trigger.
You shouted, angrily, “Run, boy! Are you not a coward?”
I was. A brave man would have stood at the gates and let the past take its course, for the sake of the future. But I was too much a coward to watch you die, Una.
The archers were already notching arrows again on the curtain wall, taking aim. I counted three of them.
And for a moment I felt sure that the whole machine of the world, every birth and every death, every tick of every clock, had been designed to bring me here, now: with three bullets in my revolver and the best eye in the 2nd Battalion.
I looked at my hands and found them perfectly steady.
I aimed—except I never had to aim, I only had to fall away from myself and let my body move without me, like giving a horse its head. I fell into alignment, eye to arm to barrel, and all I had to do was pull the trigger.
Three shots, one after the other. Three bodies bursting on the stones of the courtyard, one after the other.
An odd silence, as if the entire Keep had been suspended in amber. The Hinterlander soldiers looked at the broken shapes of their archers. They looked at you, mounted upright once more, another arrow now sprouting from your back.
Then the Red Knight drew her blade, whose name was known before their mothers’ mothers were born, and the silence was replaced by screaming.
It was the first time I’d seen you truly fight. I suppose I had grown used to the disappointing gap between myth and reality; I suppose I thought your skill had been embellished by time, exaggerated as all legends are.
It hadn’t been. You fell among the Hinterlanders like a mad dog cut loose from its leash, like a scythe across dry wheat, like a weapon wearing the skin of a woman.
You did not fight cleanly or prettily; it was nothing like a dance.
It was an annihilation, brutal and inexorable, and the only beauty was in the sheer fucking speed of it.
You swung Valiance one-handed, quick as a cleaver, and if your enemies did not meet your blade they met the blunt edge of your shield, and when the shield was ripped from your arm, they met your mailed fist. You were Una Everlasting, and there was no surviving you.
I understood then why the villagers feared you, and why you feared yourself. I closed my eyes, like a child, so that I would not fear you, too.
When I opened them again, there was a fine spray of blood on the lenses of my spectacles, and hot, grassy breath on my face. It was Hen, still somehow alive—I supposed it was difficult to kill a cadaver—now nibbling delicately at my hair.
I knew a moment of true terror when I saw his empty saddle—but no. There you were: alone in the awful silence, your hair slicked redly to your armor, still standing.
Still alive.
I thought, with a distant, obligatory panic: Oh God, what have I done, but all I truly felt was giddy, euphoric relief. More than relief—reprieve, as though it was my own life that had been spared.
I rested my head gratefully against Hen’s jawbone. “Well done, old man.” He nuzzled at my curls until he found my ear, which he bit. Glue, I whispered to him, eyes watering. Great vats of it.
By the time my eyes cleared, you were standing above me, one gauntleted hand extended. I took it, as I always did, and you hauled me to my feet.
I swayed a little, looking up at you through smeary glasses.
There was a wet gobbet of something stuck to your cheekbone, steaming faintly in the cold.
A bruise was blooming at one temple, and you were scowling down at me like the wrath of God.
I thought how funny it was, how baffling, that I’d ever thought you unbeautiful.
You snarled, “I told you to run, boy!”
You seemed very upset, but you also seemed very alive, and so I found it impossible to stop smiling. I shrugged and gestured vaguely with my Saint Sinclair, which I was surprised to find still in my hand.
You looked at the revolver and then, eyes narrowing, at the fallen archers. Your face unsnarled, became still. “You killed them. With your—gone.”
“My gun, a standard-issue Saint Sinclair six-shot, yes.” I nodded, a little sloppily. I’d nearly forgotten this feeling—the drunken, clammy high that comes after battle, after the danger but before the vomiting. “It’s the archers that get you, usually. Almost all the sources agree.”
Your expression didn’t change, but your eyes became a pair of coins, cold and yellow. “You knew, then. What awaited me here.”
Guilt drew me back to earth as surely as an anchor around my ankle.
I swallowed hard. “Yes. God, Una—” I experienced a moment of regret: If I’d let the archers get you, at least you wouldn’t be standing there, looking at me like that, and my heart wouldn’t be splitting in my chest. “I’m sorry.
I should have told you. Or I shouldn’t have, I don’t know—this is how it ends, how it has to end.
And now it’s all wrong, I suppose, but—”
“You meant me to die.” You said it quietly, almost to yourself. “And yet—you saved me.” You were looking at me now with a kind of furious ambivalence, like a judge who couldn’t decide if a criminal ought to be hanged or merely locked away in the madhouse. You asked, white-lipped, “Why?”
“I just—couldn’t.” I laughed, poorly. “The whole reason I was sent here in the first place—the one real duty I could have done for my country—and I couldn’t do it.” I looked down, spread my hands in another shrug. “Coward.”
“Who first called you that, I wonder? But give me a name, and I will bring you his tongue.” You sounded so annoyed, so alarmingly sincere, that I couldn’t speak, or look up.
Then: the clank of your gauntlets hitting the cobbles. Your gloved hands on either side of my head, unhooking the spectacles carefully from my ears, reaching for the hem of my jacket. You rubbed the lenses in circles on the red wool until the blood flaked and fell away.