The smith had set his sons and their sons to guard it against the day a true champion would come to claim it.
At the time Una came to the isle, there were three brothers remaining. They had spent the whole of their lives training together, and the beach was pocked white with the bones of their enemies.
Una buried the brothers side by side in the sandy soil.
When she returned to Cavallon, Yvanne bent her head, and Una placed upon it the Crown of Dominion: a golden circlet, set with three rubies red as pigeon’s blood. It fit her brow as if the Saint of Smiths had crafted it for her alone.
When Yvanne rose, Una said again, ‘Tell me what else I may win you, my lady.’
And the queen answered, ‘A kingdom worthy of this crown.’
The following morning, Sir Una rode out with Valiance in her hand and an army at her back, and made war on the world.
Later, they would name those bloody years the First Crusade. Historians would call it the beginning of Dominion, when the people were freed from the rule of petty lords and tyrants and united under one flag at last. The bards would sing of glorious battles against insurmountable odds, of desperate victories and tragic defeats and always, endlessly, of her: Sir Una, the Drawn Blade of Dominion, who fought so well and so long that her enemies ran from the meanest glimpse of her red-painted shield, the merest rumor of a pale-haired woman upon a blood-bay steed.
It was during that time that people began to believe she was not a woman at all, but a demon or an angel. They said no mortal could fight as she fought—perfectly, without pause, as if she knew the arc of each blow before it fell—or survive what she survived. More than once she was carried from the field, her sword shattered, her shield split; more than once the queen kept vigil at her champion’s bedside. But always, Una rose again: her wounds healed, her blade whole and unmarked.
I cannot say the whole truth of it because she will not speak of those times, even to me. But I have seen the scars that run over every part of her, biting deep into muscle and tendon, and I can tell you with certainty that she is mortal.
And I can tell you what any map would: Una swept across the continent like a scouring wind. She took the salt marshes of the south from the Nornish heathens; she slew the Lords of Gall and had their idols defaced, the mark of the Savior scratched into their stone brows; she fought the Hyllmen last, those stubborn, savage kings of the Northern Fallows. She drove them behind the high walls of their Black Bastion, which had never before fallen to any invader. Una took it in only three days.
And when the battle was over, the dream of Dominion was true: one God, one flag, one nation.
Una returned to Cavallon in triumph, showered in rose petals and songs. And—though she was older now, and some of her wounds were the kind that never quite healed—she knelt again before the queen.
She said, ‘Tell me what else I may win you, lady.’
The queen stroked her hair as if she were a girl again, and the Drawn Blade of Dominion closed her eyes, overcome with love. ‘Rest now,’ said the queen, and Una did as she was bade.
For a year and a day, she lived peacefully, giving herself to prayer and silence. The kingdom flourished and the joints of her armor grew stiff with rust.
Until the time came when the queen fell desperately ill. Yvanne, a woman of God, did not fear death—but she feared for Dominion, for the dream she had brought into the world. And so she called out—ah, so weakly!—for her champion.
There was one thing still left to be won.
—Excerpted fromThe Death of Una Everlasting,translated by Owen Mallory
I chewed at the splintered end of my pen. “Could you describe the scene for me, when Yvanne’s messengers came to you?”
You paused in the act of adding wood to the fire. “I thought you knew everything that had ever happened to me.”
“Well, I knowversionsof it. Your story has been—will be, I suppose—written down a dozen different ways, by a dozen different authors. Lazamon is the most complete and popular version, but it’s also the most recent. My old adviser—uh, that’s sort of like a liege lord, except instead of beheading you she can make you rewrite your thesis chapter—says the material evidence is even more contradictory and varied.” I adjusted my spectacles, which had developed a tendency to list to the left. “Personally, I always liked the one where they find you at prayer, and you break your vow of silence to answer the summons. ‘I would deny God before I deny my queen,’ you say, and then—”
“I told them to fuck themselves.” You settled the log on the coals and added, almost chattily, by your standards, “I was drunk as a dog, when they found me.”
“…Oh.” I chewed my pen some more, and then wrote:When the queen called, Sir Una answered, as she ever had.There was no need, I thought, to burden the reader with unnecessary detail.
I wrapped the book carefully in a scrap of hide and burrowed under the furs, watching you. You sat very upright, but there were bruised hollows beneath your eyes, as if someone had pressed their thumbs hard into your face.
“Do you ever sleep?”
You shrugged. “Fire needs tending.” I’d noticed by then that you wereuneasy around the fire, approaching it reluctantly and feeding it warily, as if it were a dog that had bitten you once before.
But I didn’t think it was the reason you never slept. “You don’t want to dream, do you.”
Another tectonic shrug, as if the earth itself rested on the bend of your shoulders.
I watched you for another few minutes. I thought of simply telling you where the dragon’s bones were found, but I didn’t think you would believe me. And even if you did—I had decided to believe in God as a very young man, mostly to annoy my father; I was not so faithful that I could turn down the chance for proof.
