I nodded, because I had an awful certainty that if I spoke my voice would be choked with tears.
“I knew you were.” The warmth in her voice, the absolute certainty—as if she was not at all surprised by my answer—sent a flush of pleasure through me.
“It was you, wasn’t it?” I sounded boyish, overeager. “Who discovered the book.”
She dipped her head in grave approval. “We’ve been excavating the ruins of Cavallon Keep for years now. A few weeks ago, we found a vault, and in the vault was a locked chest, and inside the chest… Well.” I hoped the archaeologist had gotten to sayBy Joveat least once. Vivian continued, “Can you imagine? People have been searching for centuries, scouring every crypt and castle, and only now—in Dominion’s darkest hour!—does it reveal itself. It’s providence. Fate. The hand of the Savior Himself, I sometimes think.”
“And then you… mailed it to me?”
Her expression turned indulgent. “Forgive my little test. If you had gone to the press, or tried to sell it—but you didn’t. You kept it secret, treasured it, labored over it. That’s how I knew you were the right man to tell Una’s story.”
A new and delicious sense of my own significance filled me. I’d neverbeen picked first for anything in my life, and now the Minister of War—or at least, the former Minister of War—had chosen me to translate the greatest historical artifact in Dominion’s history. Visions of honorary degrees and book tours danced in my head; becoming the Middle Dominion Faculty Fellow; Harrison combusting from pure envy; my father clapping me on the back and saying,You’ve changed my mind about everything, I’m so sorry for my decades of embarrassing radicalism.
“I—I’ll try, ma’am.”
“Excellent! Go ahead then, no time like the present. Get in touch when you finish your translation.” Vivian ground her cigarette into the tray and reached for a letter opener, as if our conversation was over.
I stood clumsily, dizzy with awe. “Yes, ma’am.” My hands shook as badly as they had in the war, as if they were approaching a battlefield instead of a book.
The cover was cool and smooth as stone. I felt Vivian’s eyes on me again, perhaps wondering why I lingered. But a strange anxiety gripped me, a sense that some trick was being pulled. I opened the book carefully, praying the college archivist never found out.
And then I went very still. I wet my lips twice before I could speak. “The pages.” I cringed from the hoarse whistle of my voice. “The pages are—”
“Blank? Yes.” Vivian spoke lightly, with humor, twirling the letter opener in her fingers. The point glinted.
I had the sudden, inexplicable urge to hit her. For a moment I saw it so clearly in my mind—saw my knuckles splitting against her perfect white canine, blood overfilling her mouth and sheeting down her chin—that I recoiled from myself.
“Why,” I asked, swallowing, “are they blank?”
She leaned over the desk, smiling peacefully. Beneath the tang of cigarette smoke, I smelled something sweet and a little familiar, like summer flowers. “Because you haven’t written them yet,” she said, and then she stabbed the letter opener through the back of my left hand.
I did not scream. My vocal cords were too knotted and scarred to produce anything louder than an eerie, breathy howl, like the keen of a dog. I tugged dumbly at my hand, but the letter opener had sunk into the pages below, pinning it there.
Vivian leaned closer. Her expression was still peaceful, perhaps even sympathetic. “Your country needs you, Corporal.”
I watched with a sense of unreality as my blood spread over the emptypaper like a red map, an empire in bloom. I looked quickly away, but something had gone wrong with my vision.
Everything in the room felt translucent, impermanent, as if the paint of the world was fading and peeling away in great strips.
I closed my eyes. I smelled pine and snow, now, instead of flowers.
Vivian’s voice came to me from very far away, softly urgent. “She needs you, Owen.”
4
WINTER SUNLIGHT, THINand crosshatched. Air so fresh it burned in the lungs, like gunpowder. Branches circled all around, bowed low with frost.
I concluded—reluctantly, against all reason—that I was no longer in the office of Vivian Rolfe.
I was in the woods, with one hand pressed tight to the trunk of a tree so huge it seemed built rather than grown, a cathedral of bark and sap.
Despite my cowardly and flinchful nature, I’d never actually fainted, and I did not faint then. But I found that my thoughts were coming slowly and effortfully, as if they were climbing a steep hill.
I thought:It’s summer.But my breath rose in milky clouds and my sweat had chilled to a gelid film beneath my coat. It was cold—the deep, rheumatic cold of midwinter—and I did not like the cold.
I thought:I don’t know where I am.But I did. I knew the muscled shape of the bark beneath my hand and the striations of light that fell between the needles. I knew the brilliance of the berries hanging like red bells from the branches and the weight of the air on my eardrums, hushed and heavy.
This was the grove,mygrove, though I’d been miles and miles away from Queenswald. This was the old tree,mytree—the one I had run to as a boy, which had been my castle, my refuge, my only-good-place—though it had been cut down years ago.
