Chapter 8 #3
When it was done, you touched a knuckle to my chin, tilting my eyes back to yours.
“To charge into battle, with neither shield nor mount, against terrible odds—to know the odds, and charge anyway—” You shook your head.
You settled the spectacles back on my face, and your features came into sudden focus: the severe line between your brows, the faint flush over the bridge of your nose.
“There is a word for someone like that, and it is not coward.”
I suggested, a little thickly, “Traitor?” and wasn’t entirely joking.
“Madman,” you answered, and neither were you.
You turned to Hen, fussing over him as if he were a child with a scraped knee rather than a serial murderer with a saddle. He knocked his head against your chest and pawed fretfully at the ground as you drew the cup from his bags. You turned to face the Keep—and stumbled.
I’d never seen you stumble. It was only then that I remembered the arrows.
One, haft snapped, nestled in your left elbow. Another was buried in the gap between your backplate and chest, right at the bottom of your ribs.
God, what if it hit something vital? What if—even now, after I had overturned all of known history to keep you alive—the story wrenched itself true, and took you away?
“Saints, woman, don’t—just come here.” I took your wrist and hauled your arm across my shoulders, grunting a little under your weight. I expected you to protest, but instead you sagged into me, and shuddered hard.
I aimed us toward the front steps of the Keep, speaking in the same soothing nonsense-voice you used on the damn horse.
I said stupid things, embarrassing things, like You’re alright, now and I’ve got you.
The shudders seemed to ease, so I kept going.
My babble took us up the steps, through the door, into the shadows of Cavallon Keep.
I should have been fretting about the flow of time and the disruption of our national narrative, my failures as a soldier and historian, et cetera, but I wasn’t.
Instead, I was listening to the sound of your breath moving in and out of your chest, over and over, as if it might go on forever, and thinking: It was worth it.
The Keep hummed and rattled as we passed through it, like an engine sputtering to life. Doors were unbarred. Bells were rung. Serving boys and soldiers ran past, calling to one another, and fine lords and ladies crept fearfully out of hiding, rushlights trembling in their hands.
In the time it took for my sight to adjust, there was a crowd gathered, and all of them were staring up at you with slack jaws. A few of them approached, their voices merging into a low, worshipful susurrus. You shook them off, as an injured lion would shake away flies.
You gestured wearily through an arched entranceway. The cup was in your hand, glinting richly. “There,” you said. “She’ll be waiting.”
“Then she can keep waiting. You need a surgeon”—I recalled one of Sawbridge’s lectures on medieval medical instruments and rates of infection—“or a place to lie down, maybe.”
You didn’t seem to hear me. You staggered on like a figure in a cuckoo clock, propelled by hidden gears to tell the same story over and over.
Through the archway was a high, vaulted hall, and at the end of the hall was a throne, and on the throne was a woman.
Even across the long hall, it was impossible to mistake the queen for anything but a dying woman.
Her face was veiled, but the cloth was so fine it was possible to see the fragile bones of her face beneath it, the sunken pit of her mouth when she drew breath.
Her hands lay like a pair of felled doves in her lap.
Yet she held herself upright on the throne, chin high.
A vast dragonscale mantle flowed over her shoulders, the same eerie, irradiant white as your hair.
A heavy crown sat on her brow, pinning the veil in place.
I’d seen the Crown of Dominion before, in the Royal Museum.
There, displayed on a fussy velvet pillow, it had looked gaudy, almost childish, like a piece of costume jewelry.
But here, in the shadowed hall, with the pigeon’s blood rubies gleaming like eyes in the torchlight, it did not look childish. It looked like a legend, a thing forged by the Saint of Smiths and won by the Red Knight, which would be worn by every queen until the rise of the republic.
There were knights gathered on either side of the throne like iron wings.
It took me a long beat to recognize them as the Queen’s Guard—heroes, all of them, with ballads and legends of their own.
But none of my comics or adventure novels had mentioned that Bodrow the Giant had Hinterlander blood, obvious even at this distance.
And that must be Sir Gladwyn, beside him, with the winged lynx on his shield—but no portrait had ever given him silky black hair, or skin the color of oiled leather.
It was with relief that my eyes landed on the man at the right of the throne: his hair a perfect, pure gold, his face so handsome it might have been cast from plaster.
Ancel, the Knight of Hearts, the only swordsman whose skill rivaled yours.
You didn’t seem to notice any of them. Every inch of you, the whole weight of your gaze, was for the woman on the throne.
I had still doubted, until then, that you loved her.
But despite all your bitter words and bad dreams, all your talk of sin and regret—you looked at her like you would set your own neck in the noose, if she held the rope.
It was beyond loyalty, closer to the sort of flayed, mad devotion you find in mistreated dogs.
Yvanne, First Queen of Dominion, said, “Sir Una,” and the gathering crowd fell quiet, although her voice had been thin and weak.
You pulled away from me so quickly it was almost a flinch. I watched you stride toward the throne as if reeled in on a line, heedless of your wounds, heedless of the eyes on you. The hall was wholly silent now, but for the occasional, faint drip of your blood.
The crowd, which had parted before you, closed ranks in your wake, so that I had to shoulder my way through. If anyone took offense, I didn’t see it; I couldn’t look away from you.
You knelt when you reached the throne, ignoring the arrow still lodged in your rib cage. Your hair was a sticky red curtain, obscuring your face.
“And so,” the queen said, in that deathbed voice, “you have returned to me at last.”
“Yes, my queen.” You said it to the flagstones.
“And you have slain the last dragon of Dominion.”
“Yes, my queen.”
“And you have brought me the lost grail, which they say restores all that time takes from us.”
“Yes, my queen,” you said, and raised the golden cup, face lifting for the first time, gazing up at your queen with that awful, doglike love. Yvanne reached out to stroke your brow with trembling fingers, and you closed your eyes, as a child would.
She took the grail. “Wine,” she said, and a serving girl brought wine. “Pour,” she said, and the girl poured.
Then the First Queen of Dominion lifted her veil just enough to reveal her mouth and bent her head to sip from the lost grail.
There was no heavenly choir, no blinding light, and yet: Yvanne’s spine unbowed.
Her chin lifted. She stood—smoothly, easily, as a person in the prime of life—and lifted her arms to her people.
In a bold and ringing voice she said, “So long I have prayed for one thing and one thing only. And now, by the grace of God and Sir Una, I am given it: time.”
She lifted her veil fully back from her face. The crowd gasped, but I wasn’t looking at the queen. I was looking at you, still kneeling, still breathing. You had survived the end of your own story.
Perhaps now you could rest. Slip away to the woods where you were raised and bury your sword beneath the yew. For a moment I could see you laughing, unarmored, lips stained with summer berries. You were watching someone, and you loved them—God, how you loved them—
But then, from the courtyard: an animal scream. Your shoulders jerked. The queen said, quietly but with feeling, “I hate that fucking horse.”
And the Knight of Hearts drew his sword.
I would have warned you, but my voice—my treacherous, useless voice—snapped and broke beneath the strain, so that when I shouted nothing emerged but a hoarse rush of air. I would have shot him, but my three bullets were spent.
You would have seen the blow coming, but he was on your fucking blind side.
You were turning your gaze back up to the queen when his blade slid neatly, almost surgically, between the plates of your armor, through the great muscle of your body and out the other side.
You did not react, except—as Ancel drew his sword back out of your body with a wet, gristling sound—with a small, polite cough. The cough sprayed blood across the flagstones, painting a delicate arch on the hem of the queen’s robes.
I thought, madly, wearily: Not again.
Someone yelled. Panic rippled through the crowd. They surged in every direction, forming a writhing wall of sweat-sour velvet and clawing hands. I shoved through them, aware that I was yelling your name over and over, my voice too thin and weak to rise above the noise.
Through the thrash of limbs, I saw you rise, unsteadily. I saw you turn. I tripped over someone’s ankle and the next thing I saw was Valiance, bare and bright. You held it with two hands, now, your body bent around the wound, teeth bared.
Ancel faced you with an odd expression on his face, a tired camaraderie, as if the two of you were starting the same shift on the factory floor. Then he drew himself up—shoulders back, hair falling in glossy, angelic waves—and lifted his blade. His lips moved, but I couldn’t make out the words.
You fought, then.
The Knight of Hearts might have been made by the Savior Himself as your opposite: He was light and glancing and lovely, a golden cat that struck and slipped away.
Any single movement could have been painted in oil and hung in the hall, and it would have been the portrait of knighthood.
It was difficult to imagine anyone defeating him, if only because it would have ruined the painting.
But he could not win against a dead woman.
Blood was sheeting down your chin, bubbling pinkly from your nose.
I could hear the whistling sound of your lung as it collapsed.
You did not bother to protect yourself; you simply strode through the beautiful pattern of his sword work, ignoring the wounds that opened on your jaw, your right wrist, the soft underside of your thigh.
Your fist shattered the beautiful arch of his cheekbone. Your boot bent his knee inward, the angle obscene. Valiance split his clavicle with a sound like a tongue clucking, a damp snap, and lodged in his sternum.
The Knight of Hearts looked at you with chagrin, as if you had beaten him at cards, and as if he wasn’t surprised. He fell, and you followed him.
Ancel hit the stones hard, with a graceless, meaty slap. But your head never touched the ground because I had finally pushed through the crowd.
We landed together in a bloody tangle, my arms clutched around you.
“No, not again, not again—” I should have comforted you, told you how well you would be remembered, how long Dominion would love you, but instead I babbled uselessly over your body, spectacles askew, ruining the dignity of your death.
But you were not dying with dignity. You were not proud or peaceful; you were gasping for air, blue-lipped, wild-eyed, convulsing in my arms. Blood was pumping unevenly from the hole in your back, overfilling my palms.
I was aware, distantly, that people were moving around us. The queen was speaking again, the crowd was calming. History was striding on without us.
I didn’t care.
“Owen,” you said. Your pupils were black, frenzied, as if you were running fast through dark trees. “Come back for me, you have to come back—”
I slid my hands—and oh, they were so red and so wet—around your shoulders until I cradled your face. There were tears sliding toward the fine hair of your temples, running over my thumbs. I couldn’t tell if they were mine or yours.
“Come back,” you said again. “Please.” Your voice cracked on the word.
I didn’t know what to say, but my mouth formed the word without me, easy as aiming a gun. “Always,” I said. “Always.”
Your body slackened. The muddy, clawing panic left your eyes. You said, your voice cool and even now, “Wait for me, beneath the yew tree.”
And then you died.
Your eyes stared, emptily. Your blood turned cool and tacky on my hands.
At first, I felt nothing. Just a distant, disgusted weariness, as if I was back at the front opening another shitty tin of beans. This again.
Then that fault line inside me, the flaw that ran through my character like a vein of coal, split open. It tore right down the middle of me, and then—
I’m sorry. I don’t remember the next part very well; I went away from myself, because it hurt too badly to stay.
It was a woman’s voice that called me back. Not yours, but one I knew. It said, “Enough now, you’ll hurt yourself.” And then, “Just let go of her, there’s a good man.”
There was something incorrect about the voice, but I was still not quite returned to myself and couldn’t place it.
“Get the body out of his sight—there, now. That’s better, isn’t it?”
I blinked, and found myself crouched on the stones, my arms empty. Three of my fingernails had been ripped away, leaving nothing but pink pulp. Perhaps that’s why my hands were shaking so badly; perhaps that’s where all the blood had come from.
Fine white skirts brushed my knees. Gentle fingers touched my face, tilting it upward, and I was sufficiently returned to myself to feel shame, that Queen Yvanne the First would see my coward’s face covered in snot and tears.
She did not look ill anymore. Her veil was pulled back over her crown, and her cheeks were flushed, her skin taut.
She smiled down at me, and for a tilted, dizzy moment I was standing again in a dark-paneled office with a white card clutched in my hand. The back of my hand throbbed sharply, in memory.
I realized then what had been wrong about the voice: It had not spoken in Middle Mothertongue.
“Well done, Corporal Mallory,” said Vivian Rolfe.