Chapter 13
YOU TOLD ME I should wear my armor, before I rode through the gates of Cavallon, because “It’s how it looks in all the paintings.” You must have thought I was a fool.
Perhaps I was, because I did not run, or demand to know what waited for me beyond those gates, but only stood like a doll and let you dress me for battle.
You took your time with it, fastening and refastening each tie and buckle, adjusting what did not need to be adjusted.
There was such grief in your face when you looked at me, as if you were already picking flowers for my grave, that I felt a certain degree of insult.
You might have seen my future, but you hadn’t yet seen me go to war.
You combed my hair. I shouldn’t have let you—the expression you wore when you touched my hair was indecent, nearly heretical—but my time was running short, and I was greedy.
As you worked you asked, innocently, why I had worn armor on the day I met you.
I told you the truth, which made your lips go very thin and white.
I found your anger a little tedious—why were you allowed to decide the time and place of my death, and not me?
—but then you unbuttoned your collar again.
You told me that you, too, were a deserter, and my heart broke for the boy you had been.
You picked up my hand and set it on the slick, gnarled surface of your scars. “When you ride through those gates, bearing the grail you won from the last dragon—it will all be wiped clean. Our doubts, our mistakes, will be forgotten.”
Oh, how badly I wanted to believe you. “And what of our sins?”
“Those, too,” you said, and I could see how badly you wanted to believe yourself.
An urge rose in me, ugly and irresistible, to wrest that belief away from you. “You don’t know the whole of it. You don’t know what I’ve done.”
You didn’t want to know. I could tell by the bob of your throat under my palm, the tacky sheen of sweat. You were clinging by the barest tips of your fingers to your idea of me—to Una the hero, Una the good and golden—and you knew whatever I had to say would sully her beyond saving.
But you said, in your gallows-bird voice, “Tell it to me,” so I did.
“The Black Bastion was not always black. Did you know that? The walls were pure limestone, white as gulls.” It had been winter when we reached the Bastion, after a long autumn spent chewing our way across the Fallows, and some of the men had mistaken the walls for the snowy cap of a mountain.
“We laid siege. Dull work, but we had all the grain and cattle the Hyllmen had left behind them as they fled. It was only a matter of time. Another fortnight, another month, and they would have opened the gates themselves, I swear they would—”
It was only when I felt your thumb rubbing soothingly over my knuckles that I realized I’d made a fist against your collar.
I opened my hand, pressing the palm flat against the hot glass of your scar.
“But Yvanne was impatient. She said a swift victory would serve Dominion best. I said there were too many innocents behind those walls, and she said if they were innocent, they would have no need of walls. I said it would cost us too many men, and she said No, it won’t.
And she was right.” I felt my mouth wracking itself into an awful smile. “Fire is fast.”
I should’ve stopped there—I could tell by your sudden stillness that you knew what I’d done next—but I couldn’t.
I wondered if this was how confession felt, like bad humors leaving a wound.
“I don’t know how long she’d been planning it.
She had these silver casks of golden oil, so foul smelling they made your eyes run.
We wrapped hemp and linen around our arrows and painted them with that oil, and they burned like nothing I’ve seen before or since.
” The flames had been an uncanny blue, shining coldly in the wets of our eyes.
“The only soldier we lost was a boy who spilled a cask down his front. I killed him before his screaming could give us away. And there were those few—those brave few, like you”—a slight hitch in your breathing, there—“who threw down their weapons. They were dead before their bows hit the ground. Fire is fast, but Ancel is faster.”
The wind rose around us, tangling my hair before my face so that I looked at you through a shroud of white.
“You wanted the tale of my greatest victory? Take it, then. Drink it down. I stood on a hill in the dark and watched a castle burn. I put wax in the ears of my men, so the sound of it would not torment them. I drank a cup of wine and cast it up again, but quietly, so the queen wouldn’t hear.
” My throat had grown thorns, and the words came out ragged.
“By dawn, we had won the Crusade, and the walls of the Bastion were not white any longer.”
The wind blew harder, whipping hair across my cheeks. You tucked it carefully back behind my ear, one knuckle grazing lightly across my scarred brow. “And this?” you asked, softly. “If there was no battle, then—”
“After. A girl, hiding in the ruins.” I’d gone half mad by then, or half sane.
It was the smell that had undone me—not the battlefield reek of offal and spoiled flesh, but the disquieting, homey smell of charred wood and cooked meat.
“She came for me with nothing but a piece of sharp stone in one hand, and I … let her.” I had knelt in the street so she could better reach my throat.
It should have been easy; Yvanne had never let me wear a helm or gorget.
“But Ancel was with me. He cut her down before she could get more than my eye.”
I had thanked him later, after I’d stopped swearing and weeping, and he’d said, lightly, I could hardly let a peasant best the knight who bested me. Think of my reputation. But his smile had been thin, and he had not liked to leave me alone for a long time after.
A little silence fell between us, broken by the dry click of your throat as you swallowed. “Th-there are always casualties, in war.” The words had an echoing quality, as if you were quoting someone else. “But, for Dominion, it’s worth—”
“The queen stitched the wound herself.” My voice was a blade scraping from a scabbard.
“She spoke as she worked. She told me—everything I wanted to hear. How proud she was. How well she loved me.” Colder now, and sharper, a flash of naked steel: “How glad she was that it would be spring when we returned to Cavallon, so there would be fresh flower petals for the court to strew before us.” Now, the killing blow: “And I knew then why she’d been so impatient for the Bastion to fall.
So there would be flowers for our victory march. ”
I had looked up into the queen’s face—the face I had loved since the day she found me in the woods—and felt the tipping of a scale in my chest. The next morning I went to the smith’s tent and shattered my sword on his anvil.
Your voice, nearly frantic now: “It doesn’t matter.
I won’t let it matter. Una, please—don’t cry—” I hadn’t known I was crying, but I could feel my shoulders heaving, my spine rounding.
It was only your hands holding me upright.
Your palm found the nape of my neck, fingers cupping the curve of my skull.
“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—” Your voice split. “Just do this last thing.”
It had the cadence of a myth or a prayer, mesmerizing in its simplicity. Die, and be redeemed. Die, and be remembered. Die, and live forever. My destiny, and the last request of my queen.
I looked up into your face, made fractal by tears but still so familiar, too familiar. I knew those glasses, perched lopsidedly on the arch of your nose. The fine angle of your jaw, scruffed now with the beginning of a beard. The wide black pools of your eyes, full of guilt and want.
I could deny my destiny, and even my queen. I could never deny you.
I closed my eyes. “As you will.” You made a small, strange sound, as if the words wounded you in some way, but your hand left my nape.
I did not look at you as I swung into the saddle and rode toward the gates. You walked beside me, unspeaking, even when Hen nipped you affectionately on the arm.
The shadow of the wall came over us. This was where you ought to fall back and send me on alone—I was always alone, at the end—but you didn’t.
You clutched at my stirrup instead, breath heaving in and out of your lungs.
Another of your fits, I thought, and wished keenly that I could hold you one last time.
But you said, wonderingly, in a voice that did not shake at all, “I can’t. I can’t do it.” And then, “Fuck.”
Your head tilted up, and I knew that face.
It was the face of someone whose scale had tipped, who was about to break every oath and bond.
“You have to run, now. There are twelve Hinterlander traitors waiting for you. They’ve taken Cavallon.
” You wet your lips. “If you ride through those gates, you die. Your story, Una—it’s a tragedy. ”
I think you kept talking—you so rarely stopped—but I wasn’t listening.
A heady warmth was spreading through my limbs, settling in my stomach, like strong wine.
You were trading away everything you cared about—your book, your future, your country’s future—for my sake.
Because you wanted me, more than you wanted the legend I would leave behind.
My fathers had loved me like that, just for being alive. Later, Yvanne had taught me that love was a thing received in trade, for the purpose I served. My survival did not serve your purposes at all—and yet there you stood, begging me to run.
I could not help it. I bent low over the bow of my saddle, took your face in my hands, and covered your mouth with mine.