I swayed, teetering on the edge of the thing that would transform me fromno oneintosomeone.It felt momentous, fateful, even. As if you had watched over me—haunted me, guided me, saved me thrice over—solely so that I could be here, now, with your name on my tongue.
The boy was waiting with his long dreamer’s lashes tipped up to me. Would there be another war by the time he was old enough to enlist? Wouldit be your story—newly published, perhaps leatherbound, with my name in small print on the title page—that sent him to the front? Something swelled painfully in my chest at the thought; pride, I decided.
I leaned closer and told the boy the five words he couldn’t read, that I could, as easily as if I’d written them myself: “The Death of Una Everlasting.”
Before I stepped off the train, I dug a coin from my wallet and tossed it to him. He caught it in one small, scarred hand.
2
I WAS BORNnot quite ten centuries after your death; the first time you saved my life, I was nine.
It was between the wars, when my father and I lived in a narrow gray row house in the narrow gray village of Queenswald, in the part of the country that had once been a fathomless green wood but was now nothing but bald hills and pit mines.
I woke that morning and listened, as I did every morning, for the gentle engine of my father’s snoring. The house was silent, so I laced up my boots and slipped out the door.
It wasn’t far to the tavern, but it was dark and cold, and I did not like the dark or the cold. I also did not like locked doors, large dogs, the sound of gunfire, or the sight of blood. I was aware that these were girlish, humiliating tendencies that made the other boys laugh at me, but they would have laughed anyway, I think. Partly it was my looks—my hair and eyes were nearly black, and my skin had a suspiciously Hinterlander undercurrent, beery gold even in winter—and partly it was everything else about me.
I had slim shoulders, thick spectacles, a fine singing voice, neat handwriting, a subscription to the lending library, and the best marks in class; my shins were always a little too long for my trousers and I cried easily, sometimes for no reason. I was a walking flinch. An open invitation for other boys—bolder, louder boys, with ruddy pink cheeks and trousers that fit—to knock their shoulders purposefully against mine as they passed.
But those boys were still sleeping at this hour. Everyone was, save the barkeep, and she was inexplicably fond of my father and me. By the time I knocked she was wiping down tables with her youngest daughter propped on one hip.
“By the fire,” she said, and I nodded.
My father was slumped over the hearth like laundry that had fallen from the drying rack. It took several minutes to get him conscious, and anotherseveral to get him vertical. He mumbled things to me as we navigated the empty chairs, nice things, likethere’s my boyandthank youandsorry, sorry.I knew my father often behaved shamefully—knew he drank too much and said too much and refused to sing the anthem on national holidays—but he was never unkind, so I’d decided I didn’t mind the rest.
The barkeep set a basket on the counter as we passed. She was always slipping me things, leftover pies and hand-me-down sweaters. I knew this, too, was shameful, but her pies were very good and my father was always between jobs or about to be, so I’d decided it was another thing I didn’t mind.
I took the basket. My father stumbled.
The barkeep’s daughter looked at him with her big blue eyes and her perfect yellow curls—like an advertisement for Dominion’s Own soap, like my exact opposite—and said, with the eerie mimicry of a child repeating words they’ve heard but don’t understand, “Fucking coward.”
I’d heard it before, along with words liketurncoat, traitor,and sometimesdeserter,although Queenswald was awfully far from the desert.
But that morning I felt my father cringe away from the word and understood for the first time that it was true. That my father was something even more shameful than being a drunk or a radical, something so awful that the stink of it followed him everywhere and sank into everything he loved, including—and this I saw in the mute pity of the barkeep’s face, the way she scolded her daughter—me.
And so I left my father there in the tavern, still drunk, still saying nice things, and ran away.
It still wasn’t fully light, and the muddy streets had frozen overnight into alien figurations, which reached for my ankles and twisted. I tripped and crashed into a woman wearing a fine wool coat. She was very nice about it, bending to help gather the scattered contents of the barkeep’s basket while I fumbled for my spectacles. She smelled like summer, sweet and flowery.
“Poor thing,” she said, as she handed me back the basket, and I thanked her, hot-faced with shame.
Running away, I decided, was more of a spiritual state than a specific speed, so I walked. I walked until the hunched shoulders of the houses gave way to sheepfolds and frostbitten hills, and the street became a narrow track that became nothing at all.
I walked until I reached the grove.
No one much liked the grove. Later I would learn that it was the last remnant of the Queen’s Wood, the great green shroud that had once runall the way to the sea. But most of the trees had been turned into ships a century ago, the last time we’d gone to war against the Hinterlands, and now all that remained were a few ghostly acres.
It seemed larger, to me. The air beneath the trees was very still, and the branches seemed to catch all the ordinary sounds of Queenswald—the coal trains and carts, the lambs and schoolchildren and the bitter wet wind that blew all winter—and turn them away, so that stepping into the woods was like slipping under the surface of a lake.
Every now and then someone would announce that it was high time they cleared the land, and the young men would be hassled outside with axes and saws. They only ever made it through the slender new growth at the edges; any farther and the men would begin to complain that their blades, freshly sharpened, were going dull, and their good ash handles were turning spongy with rot. They would return home, defeated, and no one would mention the woods again for a year or two.
For this, I was grateful. Everywhere I went I was plagued by the sweaty sense that I was in the way or underfoot, unwanted, ill-fitting, missish—but not here. Here, I was neither my father’s son nor a foreigner but only myself.
The only other person I’d ever met in the woods was a girl a little older than me, a proud and feral creature I’d met one day after I’d fallen and scraped both knees bloody. She was my superior in every subject that mattered—climbing, running, spitting, rock-throwing, fighting with sticks—but I didn’t mind. She liked to win, and I liked to watch her, and afterward I liked to lie next to her among the tiny white flowers that covered the grove every summer.
Last winter she’d stopped coming. I asked after her everywhere, but no one seemed to know where she’d gone, or even to have heard of a girl by the name ofUlla, and eventually I had concluded, with a new and grown-up sadness, that I’d made her up.
I headed now to the very middle of the woods. She used to wait for me there, beneath an old yew so vast and so misshapen it no longer looked much like a tree, but like some secret organ of the earth itself, exposed. We liked to find patterns in the grain of the trunk: a dragon, a crown, a woman’s tortured face. In spring the sap would run from her eyes like tears.
