The people of Dominion had lived in the fell shadow of that hunger for so many centuries that they no longer even dreamed of a different world. They sought shelter when the wind smelled of sulfur, and never wandered far off the edges of the map.
But Yvanne was not born to tolerate despair. The very day she was crowned she sent knights and armies to purge the land of dragons. They dug the beasts from their caverns and set fire to their forests. She did not make trophies of them, for her own glory, but had the carcasses burned three times, and their blackened bones ground and scattered over the farmlands. Only a few scales she kept, for her mantle.
By the time Sir Una rode north, all the dragons were dead, save one: the canniest and oldest of them, which lurked in the bleak mists of the Cloven Hill. It had taken many lives, over the centuries, including Galawin the Great, who—they said—had carried the grail with him from the Savior’s resurrection.
When the last dragon heard again the clang of armor and the hiss of drawn steel, it rose from its lair like a demon loosed from hell. It smote the air with pale wings so vast they cast a pall over the sun itself.
Sir Una stood beneath it, atop the bones of all the heroes who had fallen before her, and all the simple folk of Dominion who had suffered beneath the dragon’s tyranny for too long. Valiance was in her right hand and death was in her eye.
The dragon blew its brimstone breath down upon her. She caught the flame on her shield and bowed her head against it and, though the metal blistered her arm, though cinders burned her brow, she did not yield.
The fire faded. Una rose like the dawn.
The sight sent the dragon into a frenzy of fearful rage. ‘Think you, a mere mortal, will defeat me?’ it shrieked, and its voice was a torment, which peeled bark from trees and stripped moss from stones.
And then the battle began in earnest.
Three days and three nights they fought, and each dealt bitter wounds to the other. By dusk on the third day the mountain was gray with ash, and the stones were so hot they glowed dull orange. The dragon crawled now, its white wings in tatters. It bled, and where its blood fell it hissed faintly, and poisoned the earth, so that nothing would bloom in those places even a century later.
Una faced the dragon, her lungs choked with ash and sulfur, limping badly. Her armor was scorched black, and her hands were blistered with burns, and yet she smiled.
‘I may be a mere mortal, dragon,’ she said, ‘but Dominion is everlasting.’
It is said that the heart of a dragon is so small—nothing but a bitter red seed hidden deep beneath vast ribs and iron scales—that no arrow may find it and no sword may pierce it.
But they had never seen a sword wielded by the Red Knight. Sir Una struck the great breast of that beast, and she struck true, as she ever had. Valiance pierced the dark heart of the last dragon, and the world was free of them forevermore.
This is how Sir Una received the last of all her names and titles. Everlasting, they called her, for she would be remembered for as long as Dominion lasted, and Dominion would never die.
—Excerpted fromThe Death of Una Everlasting,translated by Owen Mallory
When I finished, I put away the reed pen and the oak-gall ink and the book. I paced. I sat. I waited. I felt slightly nauseous and rebuked myself for it.
Then from up the mountainside came a high, keening cry. It was an awful noise, like the scream of metal on metal, but it went on so long it resolved into a single, pure note. The note burrowed into me, becoming very nearly beautiful, so that when it finally ended, I felt as if something precious had been lost.
Silence followed.
I pelted uphill, breathing harshly, stumbling over stones and roots. I rounded a wiry stand of pine, heading into dense mist—
And slammed into something tall and unyielding, like the face of a cliff.
“Una—” I unpeeled my face from your cuirass and fell back, arms lifting and hovering on either side of your shoulders. “Are you alright?”
“Of course,” you said, and you laughed. It sounded like a jar full of teeth being shaken.
You didlookalright. Your armor was unscratched. There was a shallow scrape across your left temple because you still hadn’t learned to guard your blind side, but the blood was already gummy, half dried.
But—your eyes. They’d been hollowed out, as if someone had broken into your skull and scraped it clean with the edge of a spoon. The echo of that eerie cry seemed to spread between us like a stain.
“And”—damn my wreck of a voice for breaking—“did you find—”
“Of course,” you said again, coolly. You strode by me, shoving something hard into my belly as you passed.
I nearly dropped it, and when I looked at it properly, I nearly dropped it again. It was a small cup of purest gold, set with tiny red jewels: the grail of Dominion. The half-legendary blessed artifact that had resurrected the Savior Himself, that would save Queen Yvanne’s life and the future of the nation itself.
I wriggled out of my coat and wrapped it tightly around the cup, lest the college archivist come charging down the mountainside, thumbscrews in hand.
By the time I caught up, you were already mounted. You waited in a clearing, just where the sun poured through the branches, running over the plates of your armor and pooling in your hair, so that you were haloed in hazy gold light. Your head was bowed as if in prayer, and one hand rested on your hilt.
