I might have gone looking for a village or croft and begged the use of a spade, but I was impatient, and I didn’t want to leave you, so I used Valiance to cut the shape of your grave into the grass. It was not a small grave; damn your long legs.
I used the sharp edge of my pauldron to dig. When it hit a stone and buckled, I used the stone, and when the stone broke, I used my hands.
I did not dig a grave for Yvanne the First, Queen of Dominion. I only set my foot to her body and sent it rolling down the hill, out of sight. She would stink for a while, and then she would be bones, and then she would be forgotten entirely.
By the time the hole was dug, it was eventide, and four of my fingernails were missing. I left muddy red smears on your shoulders as I lowered you down into your grave.
It wasn’t very deep, and I had no casket, but I wasn’t worried; I would not leave your grave unguarded.
I unbuttoned your shirt and laid my hand briefly on your chest. I had liked to sleep just so—with your heart beating hot under my palm. It was cold now, but it was exactly what I needed: A heart that had not yet been born.
It had never occurred to Yvanne that she’d caught two people in her trap, misplaced two souls in time. I don’t think she ever truly saw you at all. I was her hero, her champion, her sacrifice, and you were only the string that made me dance.
But I saw you, Owen Mallory, and swore to serve you by my right arm and my left, by my life and death. And I am not dead yet.
I had taken Yvanne’s slim silver knife from her hand, and I slid it now between your ribs. I drove it into the stilled muscle of your heart, twisted it back and forth three times, and slipped it carefully from the hole. It made a slight, suppurating sound, like a boot drawn from mud.
I took the red seed between my finger and thumb and pushed it gently into your chest, nestling it down among the hollow chambers of your heart.I left your shirt unfastened. When the seed sprouted, let it lift straight up to the light, unimpeded.
I buried you, handful by handful.
And then I lay down beside the soft earth of your grave, and I waited.
26
I DON’T KNOWhow long I waited.
You would have accounted for every day, but I let them run through my fingers like water. I didn’t want to know how long we’d been apart.
I know it was spring when the sapling first pushed its shoulders up through the earth, head bowed over the pale stem, like a sleeping swan. I fell asleep that night with my cheek pressed to the soil, watching it, and when I woke the first needles were outstretched, tilted toward the dawn.
I know it was summer, that year or the one after, when the first berry budded, hard and green. I touched it with my smallest finger. I thought of our son.
I know it was spring again when a storm blew in from the north, driving the swifts and small animals ahead of it. I curled my body around the yew while lightning struck so near it raised the hairs on my arms and left the taste of metal in my mouth.
I went away from the hill only when I had to, driven by thirst or hunger, and while I was away, I thought only of calamities: a stray hoof, a careless boot, a hard freeze, a hungry fawn, too young to know the needles would sting her mouth. The sapling was growing fast—strangely fast, I thought sometimes—but it was still so fragile, so small.
But I had to hunt. I had to drink at the beck. And when my red cloak finally grew so thin and rotten that it came apart in my hands, like old lace, I had to walk all the way down to Queenswald.
It was not Queenswald yet, of course, but only a handful of cob huts that had gathered like cattle in the valley below. I found the smith and traded the remains of my armor for a rough woolen blanket, a tin pot, flint and steel, and a bag of dry field peas. Then I turned back and bartered for a second blanket; it might be winter when you returned, and you hated the cold.
The smith did not protest. His eyes moved often to the hilt of Valiance, which I wore always at my hip, and which I refused to trade for any price.
Fight for us,you had said to me, and I will.
Yvanne might be gone, but a crown is a circle, too. The queen is dead, long live the queen. There will be borders drawn and redrawn, wars fought and lost. There will be strangers who come to our wood in search of rebels or deserters, timber for their warships or coal for their engines. They will find us, instead—and they will not find us undefended.
I heard whispers as I left the village. I was not surprised: I was over-tall and badly scarred, rawboned from too many seasons of game and gathered berries. I was a woman, yet I carried a sword. I carried a sword, and yet I served no lord and bore no colors, save the green grass stains on my shirt.
Perhaps she is not a woman or a knight,they whispered,but something else, which dwells in the wastes and wild places.
They began to leave things at the foot of the hills sometimes. A white goat kid, freshly slain. A pair of fine beeswax candles. A cup of wine, full to the brim. Offerings, I finally realized, as you might offer to a spirit or a heathen god.
I tried to repay them, feeling sorry and fraudulent. If a lamb was lost in those hills, it was found penned with the others in the morning. If a band of thieves or brigands passed nearby, they passed quickly onward, without troubling Queenswald. If a woman was chased from the village in the night, her pursuer vanished, and was not heard from again.
They were grateful, I thought, but wary. They did not till the land to the north of the village anymore or let their animals graze in the hills. Already saplings had begun to sprout among the grasses, growing tall and well.
But not as well as the yew. It seemed to bound through the seasons like a hind. Already the earth beneath it was riddled with roots, and the sky was obscured by the green tangle of branches and needles. The trunk was sturdy enough that I might lean my back against it, sometimes, and close my eyes.
