The man gives it only a cursory glance. “I am the original owner of that book.”
“That’s not possible?” Unless—
“I’m sure you’ve put it together by now,” the man says casually.
Emmett just holds his tea, and I do the same, terrified to take a sip. “Put what together?”
“The cost.”
It hits me all at once, this sensation of loathing I’m feeling is the queen’s doing. “You bargained for eternal life, but no one can stand to be near you,” I guess.
He winces, clutching an invisible wound. “That’s a tad harsh. I believe the exact conditions were eternal life, but a life without love.”
“You agreed to that?”
“I was young, what did I know?” the man replies. “I was fresh out of the war. My parents and siblings were long gone. I took a girl every now and then but considered myself a bachelor. What did I need love for? I was a fool. I paid her price.”
Emmett shifts in his seat uncomfortably. “What is your name?”
He takes a sip of his tea, then lets out a slow breath. “It’s been a long time since anyone has asked me that. I was called Eduart Burnhamme.”
Emmett leans forward, his elbows on his knees. “Will you tell us your story?”
Eduart considers us, and even though I know this sick feeling congealing in my chest is the queen’s magic, I still feel nothing but revulsion.
“I fought for the Yorks.” His gaze lands on the fire. “I was there that day on the battlefield when she first appeared. We thought she was an angel. We saw what she did for old Edward, how she cut down the Lancaster army like they were wheat ready for the harvest. She placed the crown on his head like it was nothing. But we all know how that particular story ends. When she took the throne at Eltham, she made an announcement—anyone who wished to make a bargain with her should come and kneel before her throne. I was certain no one would; you’d have to be an absolute fool to trust the old witch after what she’d done. But people lined up by the thousands. Day and night, she made bargain after bargain. I saw paupers become lords, farmers pull gold straight out of the ground like turnips, daft fools marry the most beautiful girls in the village. Fingers and toes and memories went missing, but everyone agreed the price was fair.
“There came a time I could no longer resist. I waited three years to make my bargain. I thought I was very clever back then. I didn’t want land or a wife, I wanted adventure.
“I was greedy for the world, but I was afraid of it too. I’d seen the way the Black Death had taken my mother, father, and sisters, snuffed them out like candles. When I kneeled before her, I asked for eternal life, and she laughed in my face.”
Emmett stares at Eduart, completely enraptured, but I can’t look at him. I dig the sharp corner of my thumbnail into the cuticles ofmy other fingers until my nails are rimmed with blood.
Eduart continues. “‘What is so great about living forever?’ she asked, but I knew she was mocking me. I said, ‘You tell me.’ She smiled that awful smile of hers and said, ‘It’s knowing that nothing truly matters. You’ll outlive the consequences; you’ll outlive meaning itself. All that’s left is entertainment.’ I didn’t know then what I know now. After an eternity, there is only boredom or the lack of it. She asked what I would do with an everlasting life. I said I’d travel the world, see all there was to see, and then see it all again. But I was lying, to her and to myself. I’d seen so much death on the battlefields and at the cruel hand of disease. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw my friends’ guts strewn out over the grass, heard their screams anew. I told the queen I wanted adventure, but the truth is, I was afraid of death. I wanted to live without being afraid.
“She told me she would grant me eternal life, but it would be a life without love. I was a young man,what did I need love for?At the time, I thought it meant I would never take a wife. That sounded all right to me, a wife would only slow me down. I didn’t know the depth of it then, what it would feel like to live so long alone.”
“What did you do?” I whisper, horrified, disgusted.
“At first I did exactly what I told her I’d do. I sailed around the world. France first, then the rest of Europe. I sailed down the coast of Africa, spent a few years in China, then to the Americas. But everywhere I went, it was the same. Inns shut their doors to me, barmaids refused to pour me ale. I would walk into a room and everyone else would walk out. Eventually I came back here, to this house I grew up in, the same house where the last people on earth who ever loved me died.”
“What do you do now?” Emmett asks.
“I sit and I read and I wait for the end of the world,” Eduart answers gravely.
“We can help you. We have a plan,” Emmett says.
At this, Eduart laughs, an upsetting, full-body chuckle that sends tea spilling over his pants. He gestures behind him to a plaster wall caked in decades of dust and dirt. “Sign the wall before you leave,” he says, and though it’s difficult to make out in the low light, I see now that there are dozens, if not hundreds, of names scrawled on it.
“What?” Emmett looks properly angry now.
“That’s the problem with living forever. You have to witness each new generation act like they invented everything. It gets so tedious.” He sighs heavily, like the weight of our cluelessness is pressing on his lungs. “Visitors just like you call once every fifteen years or so, like you’re the very first people who ever thought about unseating her.”
“What do you mean?” I ask uneasily.
“The first group came about a decade into her rule. I was abroad then, but she made examples of them, hung their bodies at the Tower in low tide and invited the town to watch them drown as the river rose. The next ones came about fifty years later. One of the stupider attempts to blow up Apethorpe Palace. They too died at Traitors’ Gate. I actually joined the one in the 1660s for a bit, just to have something to do. There was an attempt to locate the door from which she came. The idea was, if she could not be killed, perhaps she could be returned to her own land. It was a fool’s errand. Every member of the search party died of old age before any evidence was found. Then there was the uprising of 1724. That one got ugly. A bargainer from Penzance locked himself in the throne room withher and meant to starve them both out, his compatriots guarding the door. If a hand could not be raised against her, he would let natural causes take her. The queen just laughed, strolled out of the throne room completely unharmed, and left him to starve to death within.”
“There is no record of any of this,” Emmett says, his whole body tense.
