I thought:What’s that awful sound?A pitiful, sniveling whimpering. I took a breath and the sound stopped, and then I thought:Oh.
I looked at my left hand, which I had so far carefully avoided, and saw Vivian’s letter opener—actually a slim, sharp knife—still buried between my second and third knuckles. The pain immediately tripled, as if it had been waiting for my attention.
Unsteadily, praying I didn’t choose this moment to faint for the first time, I braced myself against the tree and used my right hand to draw out theblade. I made a mess of it, of course—my damn hands were shaking again—and was relieved there was no one around to hear the sounds I made.
I leaned against the great trunk of the tree, waiting for the tremors to recede. My thoughts now were loud but inscrutable, like the static between radio stations or the noise of a crowd. It was easier to make sense of my body: My hand hurt. My feet were cold. The skin on the back of my neck was tight and prickling, as if—
As if someone was watching me.
I turned slowly. Something drew a bright, stinging line from the hollow beneath my ear to the column of my throat.
The tip of a sword. It came to rest over the knot of my larynx. I swallowed and felt my flesh part easily, almost eagerly, like the skin of an overripe plum.
My eyes moved up the blade, refusing to make sense of the whole, seeing only scattered details. The long, long edge of the blade, sharpened almost to invisibility; lettering etched into the surface, illegible at this angle; the hilt braced crosswise on a mailed forearm. A cloak the color of a picked scab hanging from a truly vast pair of shoulders, capped in shining, scarred metal.
And, above everything: A face that I knew better than my own.
A face I had seen in penny papers and fine oil paintings, in terrible street theater and political cartoons and every night in my dreams. A face I had feared and coveted and envied since I was nine years old.
Later, I would wonder how I was so sure, because none of those artists had done you justice.
They had shied from the sheer scale of you, narrowing the great sweep of your shoulders, tapering your wrists and waist. They had made your face smooth and poreless, forever youthful, when in truth it was pocked and wind-burnt, with heavy lines carved between the brows. Your hair was not the sulfuric yellow of a Saint of Dominion, but the stark white of a snapped bone. A thick welt of scar fell through your left brow and into the eye beneath it, so that the pupil was misshapen, elongated into a black tear.
You did not look like any kind of angel. Yet still, I knew you.
“Una,” I said, and could not imagine why I’d addressed you so informally. I tried again, voice cracking. “Sir Una Everlasting.”
Your eyes—not blue, never blue, but a dark, resinous gold, like burnt sap—did not flicker. You spoke, but it took several moments for me to parse the words. I’d rarely heard Middle Mothertongue spoken aloud, and I was distracted by the sound of your voice, deep and cool and familiar.
You said, “Drop the knife.” And then, “Drop the damn knife, boy.”
I tried—although privately I thought thirty was a decade past the time when anyone was pleased to be calledboy—but my hand was so far away from my body, and so hard to see through the narrowing tunnel of my vision.
It was only when my cheek hit the earth, the wire of my spectacles biting into the bridge of my nose, that I realized I had—for the first time in my life—fainted.
My last, petulant thought was that my father had been wrong: It was the perfect weather for my service coat, after all.
The next time I opened my eyes, I was somewhere else again. This, I thought, would quickly grow tiresome.
I was indoors now, rather than out, but the line between the two seemed uncomfortably thin. Starlight fell through ragged thatch. One of the walls had sloughed away, revealing bare wattle. Coals hissed on a dirt floor, smoky and sullen.
And crouched across from me, regarding the coals with a vexed expression, was the founding myth of my nation. I’d thought I imagined you.
But you sat as any soldier might on a long night’s watch: straight spined, red-eyed, a little grim. The armor was mostly missing now, except for the pauldrons capping those immense shoulders, the straps crossing over the quilted wool of your chest. Your hair was half loosed, hanging over your collar in a rough white skein. At your temples I could see the faint tarnish of true silver.
It unsettled me greatly, that tiny, pedestrian evidence of your mortality. You had always been ageless and hale in my mind, like one of those creatures preserved perfectly in amber at the peak of its health. Now you looked dangerously exposed, vulnerable to the ordinary violence of time in a way that made my chest constrict.
I looked at your hands instead. Broad and veined, scarred so thickly in some places the skin tugged the fingers at odd angles. I watched the play of firelight over the knots of your knuckles, and all the questions I’d been trying not to ask myself—where was I, when was I, had I gone finally, fantastically mad, et cetera—fell away. I have always liked your hands.
You looked sharply up at me. You were already frowning—a stern, weary expression you’d worn often enough to wear a deep furrow between your brows—but now you scowled.
“Something amuses you?” you asked, which caused me to become aware that I was smiling, somewhat doltishly.
I stopped. “No. My apologies.”
I sat up, discovering that stiff, rank furs had been piled over me, and that my hand had been bound roughly with linen. I flexed it once and sucked air between my teeth.
“Do you write with the sinister hand?” The question suggested concern, but your voice was flat and gray as gunmetal.
