Chapter 14
THIS TIME, WHEN you died in my arms, I did not go mad. This time, when they pulled your corpse from my lap, I let them take you.
I hadn’t remembered everything—it was like remembering someone else’s dream, or a play you’d heard described but never seen yourself—but I had remembered enough to know this was not truly the end, but only the turning of a great wheel.
I knew one day I would stand again beneath the yew, and one day you would find me there.
They led me up to that high, cold room. I went placidly. I sat without speaking while the blood clotted and congealed, itchily, on my chest. The cut truly wasn’t deep; the bruise around it, already blackening, would take longer to heal. Odd, that a traitor would hesitate to kill a bystander.
Had I been hurt, the last time? No—I’d been too slow, and Ancel’s sword had run you through.
He had been alone, before, but this time there had been a shadowy swarm of cloaks and daggers.
My memories were hazy and out-of-focus, but I felt the truth of them in my skin, as if my body remembered what my brain could not.
Eventually the queen arrived. I did not bow or kneel. I only said, evenly, “I’d like to see her.”
She—who was the queen, who was Vivian Rolfe—opened her mouth, then closed it. She nodded once.
I let her lead me down into the catacombs, though my feet knew the way.
The air grew stale and greasy, the scent so familiar that I hardly flinched when I saw you laid out on your bier.
I remembered the ulla flowers gathered around your corpse, the perfect white fall of your hair, the mesmeric gold light of the candles.
In another life, Vivian Rolfe might have made a very fine photographer, or perhaps a stage director.
My hands were steady as I lit a cigarette. I did not offer one to Vivian.
Eventually she said, “I know none of this is easy, Mallory, but I need you to understand why we’re here, why you’re here, particularly.”
This was the opening line of what proved to be a long and fairly compelling speech.
She spoke of fate and God, of Dominion and Una Everlasting, of a woman who had broken time itself to serve her country.
There were little pauses after certain lines, as if she anticipated questions or objections, but I said nothing at all.
“In order to have a future worth fighting for,” she said, “you must have a past worth remembering.”
A more significant pause followed, and I realized this was her closing argument. I took a long drag from the cigarette and asked, “How many times?”
“Pardon?”
“How many times has this happened before? How many times has she died?” My calmness was a porcelain shell over my skin, encasing me. I might have been asking if she had any plans for the holiday weekend.
Vivian’s expression underwent several rapid changes, the muscles of her face twitching too quickly to seem quite sane.
She settled on a look of mild chagrin, as if she’d been caught in an accounting error.
“Do you know, I’ve lost track,” she said, and I punched her as hard as I could, full in the face.
The knuckle of my index finger split. Vivian fell back against the stone wall and slid down it, landing cross-legged on the floor. She rolled her jaw several times, said “shit,” and spat a sticky stream of blood to the floor. Something wet and white shone in the blood: the point of a canine.
She tongued the blood from her teeth, thoughtfully.
“Answer me this, Mallory—does it matter? No, no, think”—she held up both hands, palm out—“I’ve told you what this story means, how much depends on it.
Does it truly matter how many times it takes to get it right?
” Her lips were swelling fast, so that the edges of the words were slightly slurred.
I was looking down at my own hand, pinching the skin of the knuckle back together, experimentally.
“I don’t understand why you would need to repeat it at all—ah.
” I shook my head. “You’re not repeating it, are you?
You’re altering it, changing the story to suit.
That’s why I remember—different versions of events. ”
There had been a time when I had kissed your hand and a time when I hadn’t; a time when I shivered alone all night, tormented by your absence, and a time I had slept beside you, tormented by your presence.
A time when I had felt your mouth on mine, a second’s stolen joy, and a time when I had only dreamed it.
The two of us were like a pair of merlins circling overhead, or two dancers in a line; with each pass, we drew a little nearer.
Unless we were actually paper kites on a string, flying only where we were led. Had she somehow manufactured each look we exchanged, each passing touch? “No,” I said, a little too loudly. “I don’t see how you could have—you weren’t even there. You can’t control every tiny choice, every variation—”
“No,” Vivian said comfortably, “but I can control everything that counts. The details don’t concern me.”
I felt selfish relief that, at least those little details—which didn’t count, which didn’t matter at all in the course of history—still belonged to us.
“I see. So all the conflicting historical narratives are actually leftovers, relics of each iteration. I bet Ancel really was a hero, once. God, Professor Sawbridge had it right.”
Vivian pulled a face. “Remind me to have that woman arrested.”
“But why make him into a traitor?”
“Because you got too soft, and she got too damn good.” Vivian, still sitting, nodded at your body.
Her expression was proud and a little exasperated, like a mother despairing of her precocious child.
“She started making it past the Hinterlanders—twelve seasoned soldiers, and she barely broke a sweat. I even gave them archers, but by then you’d decided you loved her more than you loved your country.
It’s a shame you’re such a crack shot, but I suppose anyone will pick up a few tricks if they’re sent to war enough times. Even you.”
This last sentence gave me a severe and instantaneous headache. If I had been to war more than once, then when did this story start? How far back did the circle go? I felt like a man holding a snarl of thread, unable to find either the beginning or the end of it.
Vivian continued, casually, “I had a devil of a time getting Ancel to do it. I told him I loved Una best. I petted and kissed her and made him watch. I told him Una was the traitor, planning to kill me—he laughed in my face. In the end I told him the truth: that Una must die, so that Dominion would live. He argued, he raged, he drank—but he did it. Ironic, isn’t it?
That my most loyal knight would make the best traitor?
But!” She sniffed. “Ancel the Betrayer has proved much more useful than Ancel the Good.”
I didn’t see how Sir Ancel’s character could affect the political ambitions of a woman born nine hundred years after his death, but then I remembered the cartoon in the paper with the radicals labeled Sir Ancel’s Heirs.
My father’s body slumped over the capitol steps.
Every story needs a villain, I thought, and we had all heard this story before.
After a moment I asked, dispassionately, “Did you have the Chancellor killed, or did you do it yourself?”
Vivian tsked, then winced and touched her lip with her tongue.
“Don’t be unsubtle, Mallory—on any given day, plenty of people want to kill the Chancellor.
The chain of causation is really such a delicate thing.
You change a few tiny details—a custodian has a date and forgets to lock a door, a guard has a stomachache and leaves his post three minutes early—and you change the entire flow of history.
Give me a lonely secretary and a laxative and I can move the world, to coin a phrase. ”
I remembered, patchily, the speech she’d given me the last time around.
Do you honestly think it was chance? she’d asked, and it wasn’t.
It was always and only her. Which meant—“There was never a woman named Yvanne, then.” How had I swallowed that story?
“You didn’t conveniently replace her on her deathbed. You are her.”
Vivian blinked. “I knew the body-double thing was a little much.” She got to her feet, laboriously, and went to your bier.
One hand toyed with your hair, idly possessive.
“Very well. Yes. I came back much, much earlier in the tale. In the middle of nowhere, in the dead of winter. I was taken captive—I do not recommend traveling alone as a young woman in this or any other era—and Una rescued me.” Her fingers were combing through your hair now, tracing the shell of your ear.
“I saw her potential at once. Even that first time, I could tell she was something special. And I knew I could make her something extraordinary.”
Anger rippled somewhere beneath my porcelain shell. You weren’t made. You simply were, a giant who strode through the world scarred and shining, strewing legends in her wake.
But: “I invented a lineage for myself. Gave myself a name, a title, a birthright—oh, don’t give me that look, how do you think any king gets his crown?
—and made her my champion. She was very good, but I made her better.
Each time I sent her back, she was a little faster, a little stronger.
Her blows were more precise, her deflections more perfect.
The body remembers, you see, even when the mind forgets.
The first time Ancel challenged her in the name of the False King, I had to send her back through the book in pieces.
By the tenth time, she could disarm Ancel in forty seconds. ”