Chapter 11
I WAS ALONE, before you came.
The woods of my fathers had grown wild in my absence, the old paths choked with bitterthorn, the copses untended. Their home—our home—was not a house but only the remains of one, a corpse of wattle and thatch.
Of my fathers, there was nothing left at all.
They had been shriven and buried in the manner of the woods then: their flesh taken by rooks and flies, their bones dragged down into burrow and den.
I didn’t think either of them would mind—Father Theo always said these woods were the only heaven he would see, and Father Foy was fond of animals—but still, I couldn’t bring myself to sleep inside.
I didn’t mind the cold, and I liked the sound of Hen’s snoring; it meant I was not quite alone.
As a girl I’d met pig herders and basket weavers in these woods, charcoal burners and wolf hunters.
There had even been a boy who met me sometimes beneath the yew, though it was a half-day’s walk to the nearest village.
For years he was my shy, gamine shadow, watching me from under lashes as long and dark as a doe’s.
I wondered sometimes if I’d seen his face again, unknowing, years later: If he had been one of those who knelt in the mud of some nameless village and cried mercy, or one of those who refused, and found none.
I wondered if some part of me had been hoping, childishly, that I would find him still here, waiting beneath the yew.
But this was the Queen’s Wood, now—where before it had belonged to everyone and no one—and any trespassers would be branded and pilloried.
I told myself I was glad of this because there would be no one to find my remains for years and years—yet, on the day I decided to die, I donned my armor. A lingering streak of vanity, I suppose: Even now, I wanted them to remember my name.
Or perhaps I only wanted Yvanne to get word, one day, and know I had abandoned her of my own free will.
I had loved her, once, as a child loves God. After the Black Bastion, I had hated her with that ardent, blazing hate that is merely love’s other cheek—but lately even the hate had burned away, and left only a weary, ashen regret.
Now, walking toward the yew for the last time in my life, I felt nothing at all.
Nostalgia, perhaps, for the woods where I had run free and feral as a lynx, barefoot and berry-stained, a beast among beasts.
On summer evenings I would stay out past moonrise; in the winter I would curl like a cub in Father Theo’s lap, and Father Foy would sing soft, silly songs by the firelight, replacing all the animals in the songs with my name.
I don’t remember that name, now.
If I were any other child—if the sword had not come so easily to my hand, if I had not known, somehow, just where to slip the blade between a man’s ribs, how to part one vertebra from the next—I would have died with them that day.
It was right, that my bones would finally join theirs, twenty years too late.
I reached the yew. High as a hill and old as a dragon, with some of a dragon’s secret, wild otherness. Sometimes I thought I saw a stranger’s face in the bark, and sometimes I saw my own.
I drew Valiance from my hip. It shone unblemished, still as perfect as the day I pulled it from the tree.
It was only I who had aged, and cracked, and finally broken. Only I who could no longer serve my purpose.
I would be sorry to die. I would miss the simple, animal joy of being alive in the world: food and sex and sleep, the scour of wind on bare skin, the sting of sweat, the smell of dragonscale flowers in full bloom.
I would miss Hen. I would miss Bodrow and Gladwyn and even Ancel.
I would miss Yvanne, or at least the way she sometimes looked at me, with a pride so ferocious it burned all my doubts away.
But I could no longer be what they needed me to be. I could not end the story as I should—fêted, beloved, remembered—and so I would end it here, alone.
But then, suddenly, I was not alone anymore.
I found you on the other side of the yew. You were standing very still, as if you were waiting for me, as if we’d agreed to meet here long ago and I’d somehow forgotten.
Your back was turned. All I could see of you was the black of your curls and the bowed line of your shoulders beneath that strangely cut coat. Yet I thought, with joy but not surprise: You came back for me.
Then I saw the little knife in your hand, slicked red, and before either of us drew another breath I had Valiance braced at the nape of your neck.
It took you far too long to turn around. My God, Owen, even a field mouse knows when a hawk is watching it! But you only stood, quivering and panting, until Valiance skimmed the fine hairs of your neck.
You turned slowly.
Your face was long and thin and sad. I thought you might have been beautiful once—fragile things are always a little beautiful—but somewhere along the way you’d been broken badly and poorly mended.
Now your skin hung like old laundry from the sharp bones of your cheeks, and your jaw was roughly stubbled.
It was the face of an ascetic or a madman—who else would wear tiny panes of glass beneath their brows, like the windows of a fairy’s church?—but your eyes were black and lucid.
I waited for those eyes to fill with terror, but they didn’t. (They never did.)
Instead, you looked up at me like a condemned man who had been granted his last request. Like you would climb the gallows tomorrow with a smile on your face. Your lips parted, and I saw that you were still quite beautiful after all.
For a moment I couldn’t speak. When my voice returned it was roughened, as if it had traveled far over hard ground. I told you to drop the knife.
Instead, you fainted.
I caught you before your head hit the earth. It seemed a shame to damage those tiny panes of glass.
I tried to be gentle with you, but I was not made for it.
My hands felt awkward, overlarge, the gauntlets catching and pinching your coat.
Your head knocked against the plate of my cuirass, and your legs—great gangling things, much longer than I expected—thudded sometimes into trees and low branches.
On the threshold of my fathers’ house, I hesitated. But night was falling, and a bitter wind was rising, and your body was cold in my arms. Blood dripped gently from your sinister hand and left dark holes in the frost.
I ducked below the lintel. I hadn’t needed to duck, the last time I walked through this door.
I kicked the leaf litter and mouse nests from my old pallet and laid hides over you while I fixed a fire. I made myself think only of flint and tinder, rather than the flames themselves.
Your injury I tended less gently than I might have.
By then I’d seen the book you carried, and the symbol carved into the cover, and knew these were the hands of a bard or a scribe: finely wrought, fragile, uncallused but for the slight dent where the quill rested.
The sight of those hands sent a bitter heat through me, a kind of resentment that anything so soft, so unspoiled, should have been left in my care.
I wiped the blood away and wrapped the wound as quickly as I could, then moved across the fire, away from you.
You roused a little while later. You ought to have quaked when you saw me, but you smiled instead. A lover’s smile, slow and hazy, which caused my mouth to bend in answer.
I tamped it flat. “Something amuses you?”
You said, “No. My apologies.” I knew as soon as you spoke that you were no bard: Your voice might have been stolen from a jackdaw, high and rough and unlovely.
Yet it was familiar to me. As was everything about you: the angle of your chin, the black of your eyes; the way you slid those glass panes back up the long arch of your nose.
I had seen you before, though I couldn’t say where.
One of the geweth, then, chasing stories, or a court scribe sent by Yvanne. It wasn’t enough that I return to Cavallon with a miracle; I must also bring another legend in my wake, another tale of Dominion’s hero.
I had liked being a hero when I was younger.
I liked the songs they sang about me; I liked falling on my enemies, fast and fey.
And if sometimes those enemies seemed too young or too old—if they fought with stones and scythes more often than steel—it was surely worth it.
In Dominion, there would be no more good men slaughtered in their homes, no more monsters with black hearts and bloody hands.
But then had come the Black Bastion. Afterward, I had seen myself reflected in the eyes of a young girl—a giant in ash-stained armor, blackhearted, bloody handed—and understood there would always be at least one monster left, while I lived.
I could not abide the songs, after that.
I asked how you found me. You prevaricated. I may have raised my voice.
Then, of course, you told me you’d been sent from the far future to save Dominion, and I was ashamed for berating a madman.
You talked and talked that night, and I let you; I have always liked the sound of your voice.
I left the cottage before dawn. I wore no armor, this time, because this time I intended to return. I couldn’t say why, except that your face was hollowed in the way of a man who has missed too many meals, and it seemed uncivil to disappear without at least feeding you first.
When I returned, Hen was canted toward the cottage, lips peeled up in the way that meant he’d met a new person and was hoping to kill them soon. “Be easy,” I told him, firmly. “He’s harmless.”
You said, “I’m sure,” and stood blinking stupidly in the doorway, unaware that your life had been spared.
I slung my kill—a tierce of hares—over a downed log to skin and dress them. You began talking again almost immediately.