I stood mute, while time twisted and sloughed around me.
I forgot you were scarred and plain and unchaste. I forgot you cried out sometimes in the night, as I did, and dreamed of a home you could neverreturn to, as I did. I even forgot you were the sort of woman who named her horse Hen.
You were Una Everlasting, the Drawn Blade, the Red Knight, and I was a boy again, choked with that covetous tangle of desire and desire-to-become that had driven me to war and back again, to archives and libraries and finally here, through time itself, to the far side of history. My whole life existed only to bear witness to yours, and God! It was worth it.
Then the light shifted; the halo vanished. When you reached your hand down to me, I could see again the lines and hollows around your eyes, the rucked skin of scars and the freckles gone blurry with years in the sun.
I should have been able to breathe again, but could not.
You made an impatient, extremely human sound. I took your hand again, and we rode down the mountain together.
When the ground leveled, I asked, quietly enough that you could pretend not to have heard me if you chose, “Was it so terrible? The dragon?”
“No,” you said, and then, after a long time, “it was a wild creature, and old—older than anything that ever was, I think, but it was not terrible. None of them ever were. They were”—the cool voice cracked, and I heard the grief running beneath it—“beautiful.”
I clutched the grail hard to my stomach to remind myself that it was worth it, all of it: the cry on the mountain and the hateful faces of the villagers, your nightmares and mine, the blood we spilled and the scars we bore, and even the death of something wild and old and beautiful.
“But we ride now to the Keep,” you said, into my silence. “And there the story ends.” Such yearning in your voice, such relief, that for a moment I couldn’t answer. I felt you stiffen behind me, wary, mistrusting.
So I said, “Yes,” and it felt like sliding a knife between your ribs, or between my own, or as if there were no difference between the two. “The story ends there.”
And this, too, I told myself, was worth it.
8
THE JOURNEY TOCavallon is distorted in my memory.
I recall it—every bitter and aching mile—but it’s like recalling a play I saw once as a young man. My own voice sounds rehearsed, stiff with portent. Your every gesture is an elegy. All the ordinary, unscripted labor of the road—tending the tack, skinning the kill, striking the flint, burying the offal—is lost to me, drowned by the bright lights of the stage.
But I remember the cold. The weather turned as we left the hills, the sky turning the bluish-white of a frostbitten finger. Each night we huddled miserably on either side of the wind-whipped fire, sleeping fitfully and shivering ourselves awake.
At these times I found myself watching you, remembering the heat of your hand around mine, thinking of all the obvious ways two people might drive away the cold.
But I was too much a coward to cross the fire without an invitation, and you did not invite me. You barely even spoke to me. You had drawn subtly away from me since the dragon. There were times I thought I saw something in your eyes—an anger that festered and wept, like a gut wound—but then you would look away, and it would be gone.
Eventually I resorted to blunt provocation.
“She must be truly something. Yvanne, I mean.” I couldn’t see your face as we rode, but I felt you flinch from her name. “Or perhaps the stories have exaggerated, and I’ll be disappointed.”
When you answered, the words came in bloody lumps, as if they’d been chewed and spat out. “She never misspeaks or missteps. She is never afraid, no matter the odds. She is never, ever taken by surprise, no matter how clever her enemy or how slippery her quarry. She is five—ten, a thousand—steps ahead of you or I or anyone I have ever met.” And then, with unmistakable pride, “You won’t be disappointed.”
“Youdolove her.”
You answered softly, with grief, “Always.”
You didn’t speak again until late that night when you said, “It’ll get colder, before dawn. Might even snow.” I nodded, miserably. You went on, “We fought the Hyllmen in winter, you know. At night we stripped bare and slept pressed together.” Then, meeting my eyes, “I barely felt the cold.”
You had a hectic, mean look on your face as you said it. A look that invited me, finally, to come across the fire, but guaranteed no gentle treatment if I did.
And oh, I was tempted. I flushed with heat, hungry to be handled as roughly as I deserved. To have something of you that would linger after your death, even if it were only teethmarks.
But if I touched you, and found only flesh—if I tasted you, and found only the ordinary bittersweetness of a wet cunt—then you would no longer be a legend to me, but only yourself.
I could kill a legend; I didn’t know if I could kill you.
I’d hesitated too long. You’d turned away, wrapped in your cloak. I did not sleep that night, but curled around myself, face tucked into the collar of my jacket so that I could smell my own sour, unspent desire.
In the morning we rose and rode east, into the third act.
