Perhaps it was the magic of the yew that made it grow at five times the pace of a natural tree. Or perhaps more time was passing than I reckoned. Perhaps some nights I lay down beneath the yew and woke seven years later. It was true that sometimes when I went down into the village, I did not recognize their faces. My own face, when I saw it reflected in still water, had not changed.
I suppose time moves strangely, beneath the yew. I did not worry overmuch about it. I only waited, as I had promised I would.
Soon the yew was tall enough to cast a broad circle of shade, and the bark was furrowed and gnarled enough that I could imagine I saw shapes in thegrain. There was a place halfway up the trunk that looked like a face, with a twist of wood like a long, arched nose and two knots like black eyes. I liked to put my back against the yew and rest my skull just below the face.
One day in early autumn I fell asleep there—for an hour, for a century—and when I woke, it was summer. The ulla flowers were in bloom again.
And I was not alone anymore.
I sat for a moment listening to the sound of your breath, as familiar to me as my own pulse. I had waited for a hundred lives, a thousand years—what was another few seconds?
Then I stood and circled the tree. You sat against the other side, your back to the bark, eyes closed. You were whole and alive, just as I remembered you—or nearly so.
Your hair was still curled and tousled, as if you’d just run your fingers through it, but it had turned a pure, unnatural white, like bleached bone. Like mine. We had both of us been born from the yew, as dragons are, and we were both changed by it.
Your shirt was still unfastened, as I’d left it, but on your bare chest there was now a small, silver scar, just like mine. The scar rose and fell lightly with your breath.
I looked at your face and for a moment I couldn’t tell how old you were. Every version of you seemed to exist at once, overlapping.
You were the lonely, scrape-kneed boy who had found me in the green shadows between centuries. You were the scholar who had written nothing but lies and the soldier who had fled the field of battle; the bravest coward and the cleverest madman and the traitor with the truest heart; the man who had led me to my death and the man who had died for me.
You were the bastard who had left me here alone, all these years, and you were my best beloved, who always, always came back to me.
Most often I met you with a sword to your throat. This time I knelt over your sprawled legs and touched the tip of my knuckle to the hollow beneath your jaw.
Your long white lashes lifted. You looked up at me as you always did when we met beneath the yew: hungrily, wistfully, as if you didn’t believe I was real but badly wished I was. But your eyes were different, this time: a dark, tawny amber, like winter honey, or spring sap.
And this time when you said my name, it was not Una Everlasting. It was the humble name of a woodcutter’s daughter, the name I have stricken from these pages so that it will be known only by those who knew me.
“Ulla,” you said, and I took your face in both my hands and kissed you, fiercely and furiously, for a long time.
When I let you go, there was blood on both our lips, and I couldn’t say if it was yours or mine. I traced the fine bones of your cheeks with my thumbs, buried my fingers in your pale, pale curls. “You remember, then? Everything?” I had lain awake for so many nights, wondering what you had lost down under the earth, among the roots and worms.
“I—I don’t know. Some.” There was a haziness in your voice, as if you were recalling dreams you’d had as a child. You added, a little desperately, “I remember you.”
“That is enough,” I said, and it was.
What you have forgotten, I will tell to you; what I have forgotten, you will tell to me. We will tell our story to one another, not for crown or country, but only for ourselves.
We might even write it all down—you would like that, I think, and why shouldn’t we?
We have time.
