“What? Oh.” I switched to Middle Mothertongue, the words welling up easily. “I’m right-handed. I’ll be fine.”
“A shame,” you said, coldly.
I looked up in time to see you move. It was a fluid, muscular gesture, almost too fast to follow, which resulted in something arcing over the coals toward me. I fumbled the catch and had to scrabble to keep it out of the fire: the book, again.
My hand spasmed around it. The last time I’d touched this book I’d been flattered, then frightened, then stabbed and transported—here. (I was too clever not to know where—and when—herewas, but too much of a coward to let myself think the words.)
You were watching me closely with those mismatched eyes. When you were not moving you were inhumanly still, as if you had been carved rather than born. “How did you find me? I would swear no one tracked me from Cavallon Keep.” Still that chilly, taut voice. I had the worrisome impression of a fraying leash.
“No,” I said carefully, “I did not track you from the Keep.”
“You are geweth, then?”
“Pardon?”
“Thenhow?” Another thread or two snapped in your voice. “How far must I run before I am free of you? When I go to Hell, shall scribes and bards wait at the gates like carrion birds?”
“I’m not a bard or a scribe. If that helps.”
Your brows went flat. You looked pointedly at the book in my arms. “I am no great scholar, boy, but I recognize my own device.”
“Ah.” My hand spasmed again on the cover. I wondered if you had opened the cover, and if you were literate enough to read the title. “I can see how you would think—but it’s not—well, I suppose itis,but—”
“All my life men like you have followed me.” You were dangling now by a single thread. “Hounding me, lapping up the blood and begging for more. You have turned all my graves into glory, all my carnage into pretty songs they sing at court.”
“That’s very… vivid, but I’m telling you I’m not—”
The leash snapped. Suddenly you were on your feet and that enormous bastard of a blade—the most famous sword in the whole of history, the sword every child in Dominion had pretended to wield, swishing sticks at nothing—was back at my throat. The hilt was long enough for at least one-and-a-half hands, but you held it steadily in one, tendons corded around your wrist. It occurred to me, with a queer shiver, that you must have carried me from the yew to this cottage, and that you wouldn’t have found it difficult at all.
The point of the sword dipped lower, settling in the scarred hollow between my collarbones. And yet, your expression was not angry, after all. It was—lost. Bewildered. Afraid, almost, as if you were a stranger to yourself. I felt I’d seen that look before, though I couldn’t say where.
“Liar,” you said. “I know your face. I know your voice. I’ve seen you at court, or the tourneys, watching me—but no more. I’m finished.” There was a sheen over the sap of your eyes, and I thought you would probably kill me rather than let me see you cry.
I should have been terrified, reaching for the revolver at my hip—but I wasn’t. I was perfectly calm, as if I’d seen this play before and already knew my character survived.
I resettled my spectacles. They were bent slightly out of shape. “Listen to me. I am not a bard or a scribe. I am Lance Corporal Owen Mallory of the 2nd Battalion, a shit soldier and a decent historian. I was sent here from”—I paused there, lingering in this last moment of sanity and order—“the distant future, to record your story and—somewhat indirectly, I suppose—save Dominion.”
“Oh,” you said, after a pause. You sounded strangely contrite. “I beg pardon. You are mad.”
You sheathed your sword with another of those inhumanly quick gestures and did not speak to me the rest of the night, no matter what I said or did.
The next time I woke the fire was dead and the sky was pale. I wasn’t sure whether the sun ever properly rose here, or if it merely slunk, catlike, between the branches.
There was frost in my hair and on the lenses of my spectacles. My throat was raw. I’d talked and talked to you, while the coals rusted into ash andthe stars brightened, and you had ignored me politely, as you would ignore a drunk or a street-corner preacher. Sometime in the blue hours before dawn I’d given up, tucking myself sullenly back under the bad-smelling furs. I had fallen asleep watching your face, baffled and irritated and strangely, childishly content.
I was alone, now.
I scrabbled out from under the furs and ducked beneath the sagging lintel. I was no longer within sight of the yew but in a nearby clearing that—in my boyhood—had contained nothing but brambles and goosegrass. Now there was the cottage behind me, which already had one foot firmly in the grave, and an enormous blood-bay gelding, which had at least three.
He reminded me of the skeletons they displayed in the Royal Museum, or a tarp draped over a stack of chairs. His spine protruded tumorously from his back, and his muzzle was the color of dust, or dull knives.
He fixed me with a rheumy eye and peeled back both lips, revealing teeth so long and yellow they might have been whittled from pine.
A voice said: “Be easy.”
It was you, ducking beneath the horse’s neck and running a palm over the ladder of his rib cage. You wore no armor now, but only plain wool beneath that scabrous cloak, which ought to have been a proud Dominion red, but was actually a middling, stained brown. “He’s harmless.”
“I’m sure,” I said, and understood from your expression that you had not been speaking to me.
