In my own era, Cavallon Keep was a ruin: a haunted tumble of stones gathered on the hill above the capitol, admired only by historians and bloodthirsty schoolchildren. Even I had only visited once, and hadn’t lingered. The wind had whistled mournfully through the walls, and my hands had shaken too violently to take notes.
But here in the youth of the world—looking up at it from horseback, in the early dusk of winter—the Keep was a wonder. It seemed less a castle than a child’s drawing of one: a perfectly symmetrical assemblage of turrets and towers. Curtain walls that met at ninety-degree angles. Battlements like the teeth of a zipper. And the size of it—ten times taller than even the great yew in the grove, a hundred times taller than any village church, built in less than a decade. It was said that any man who died in the quarry or on the scaffolding had his blood mixed into the mortar, and that it was counted a great honor. I wondered, a little queasily, how many men had been honored so.
At my back, I felt the muscles of your stomach tense. “The queen’s colors are still raised,” you said. “She yet lives.” There was no inflection in your voice.
Indeed, the bright flag of Dominion snapped smartly in the wind. It wasthe only sound in the whole valley: No voices drifted down from the Keep, no figures walked the walls. The great gates stood open and waiting, like the gullet of a wolf.
And suddenly I could hardly breathe, suffocated by a grief that was both premature and a thousand years too late.
“Your armor,” I said, buying time, knowing it wouldn’t matter. “You should ride in full armor through the gates. It’s—how it looks in all the paintings.”
I expected you to scorn such vanity, but instead your muscles loosened at my back. “As you say.”
My hands shook as I drew the straps of your armor tight. You sat on a low stone without being asked, offering me the tangle of your hair, and I closed my eyes as I drew my fingers through it. I would not braid it this time, but let it run loose and heavy down your back. I was picturing you as you’re painted in Goletti’sSir Una and the Grail,or perhaps I was picturing you somewhere else, running young and barefoot between the trees—
“This will truly heal her, then?” I opened my eyes to find you studying the grail. It looked gaudy and absurd in your hand, like a stage prop.
I cleared my throat. “It will. She reigns for another thirty years and brings peace and prosperity to all of Dominion. And even centuries afterward, during our darkest times, it’s that golden age that we remember, that we fight for.” I clung childishly to my own words, trying to see you for what you were: a necessary tragedy, a single red knot in the grand tapestry of history.
You made a small, musing sound in your throat. “When she first fell ill, I thought: Perhaps there is a God, after all. Perhaps every sin is counted and gathered on a great scale. Perhaps everyone gets what they deserve.”
I tried hard not to flinch. Who knew better than I how war could warp the mind, until you hated what you ought to love?
Somewhat at random, flailing for a distraction, I said, “I never asked—why were you armored, that first time I saw you in the woods? Must have had a devil of a time doing the buckles in the back.”
You shrugged one shoulder, eyes slitted as if you did not mind the feel of my hands in your hair. Drowsily you answered, “So they would know me when they found me. I suppose even there, at the end of reason, I did not want to be forgotten.”
My fingers stilled. There was a metallic ringing in my ears, like bullet casings on stone. “Pardon?”
You shrugged again, more forcefully. “I could see no other way out. I could not bear to serve her any longer, and I could not bear to let her die. I loved her too well, even then, even still. So I thought, I have taken so many lives. What’s one more?”
I did flinch, then. Another of those lurid visions arrived, awful in its clarity: you, lying flat on the forest floor. Dead needles in your hair, dirt under your nails. Valiance growing from your sternum like a silver sapling.
I shoved my hands beneath my elbows to stop their shaking. “But you couldn’t do it. You wouldn’t have.”
You turned slowly around on the stone, looking up at me with eyes gone oddly gentle. “I know what you want me to be. What you have made me, in your book. But you should know what I truly am.” You closed your eyes then. The wind rose, lifting your hair, so that you spoke through a tangled white veil. “Had I been alone—had you not come when you did”—you were whispering now—“I would have done it.”
I stood looking down at you, while the ringing went on and on in my ears.
Then, clumsily, numb fingered, I folded down the collar of my service jacket for the second time, baring the pink whorls of scar to the cold. Your eyes were still shut, so I took your hand carefully in mine—your eyes snapped open, hot and yellow—and brought it to my throat. I could feel nothing but a faint, faraway heat, like winter sun; the nerves there had been boiled away by the infection.
“I didn’t get this from the enemy,” I said, and for once my voice did not break. “The Hinterlanders had retreated to the southern beach. They couldn’t win, but it was going to be—well. I couldn’t face it. Threw down my rifle and turned around. My own commanding officer slit my throat.”
Oh, the change that had come over Colonel Drayton’s face as I dropped my rifle, as I transformed from one of his boys to one of his enemies. The bite of his knife into my neck. The clean black hole that appeared in his temple, by purest happenstance, by fate, and saved my life.
I lowered my voice, felt it thrum against your palm. “We are both of us deserters. Cowards, maybe. But when you ride through those gates, bearing the grail you won from the last dragon—it will all be wiped clean. Our doubts, our mistakes, will be forgotten.”
You watched me closely, hungrily. “And what of our sins?”
They came to me one after the other: the Hinterlanders and their thrown-stone eyes; the Hyllman’s hand standing upright in the mud; the cry of the last dragon as it died. And on and on—every soldier I’d shot,every enemy you’d fed to the worms—until the earth beneath my boots felt soft and foul, like grave dirt.
“Those, too,” I said, desperately.
“You don’t know the whole of it.” Your pupils had eaten up the gold of your eyes, and some awful confession swam in the black. “You don’t know what I’ve done. At the end, at the Black Bastion—”
“It doesn’t matter.” Weeks of pestering and wheedling, and suddenly I was begging you not to tell me anything more. “In a thousand years, they will sing your name in the streets. They will raise their children on stories of brave Sir Una Everlasting, the Red Knight, who fought for crown and country. You may not have lived as a hero, but I swear: You will die as one. Just—” My voice split and bled. “Just do this last thing.”
Your eyes fell closed again. “As you will,” you said, and I let go of your wrist. There were thin pink bands where my fingers had been.
