It was even quieter than usual, beneath the yew. So quiet I thought maybe I wouldn’t run away, after all. Maybe I would just tuck myself down among the roots, cradled by dead needles and worms, and disappear.
They wouldn’t look for me for very long. My father would want to, but he wouldn’t go this far into the grove, being a fucking coward, and in a fewmonths those little white flowers would cover me over, and the name Owen Mallory would be wiped clean from the world, as if it had never been.
That sounded rather grand and tragic, so I settled myself between the roots and waited to disappear.
It was hungry work, I found. By the time the sun had fully risen I’d decided maybe I ought to eat whatever the barkeep had slipped me, as a last meal. I opened the basket.
That’s when I first saw the book.
Notthebook, of course, butabook: thin pages, already brittle; a cloth cover, moth-chewed; illustrations printed so cheaply the colors didn’t line up properly with the drawings, so that each figure appeared to be haunted by his own merry ghost. None of the barkeep’s baskets had ever included a book before.
The title was written in an elaborate, curlicued font that was supposed to look medieval:The Legend of Una Everlasting.And then, in smaller serif print:A Children’s Retelling of the Classic Tragedy!And, even smaller:Look inside for a complete listing of titles in the Little Soldiers National Heritage Series.
I sat there beneath the yew and read your story for the first time.
It was not, I would realize only when I was much older, a particularly good adaptation. The author had sprinkledthous andforsooths with a criminal disregard for syntax, and the illustrator had an unwholesome fascination with decapitation. All the messy loose ends of the Everlasting Cycle—the result of centuries of iterations and variations—had been pruned away in favor of a morality tale with all the subtlety and nuance of a nursery rhyme.
But the story itself shone through the prose like sunlight: a nameless child who became a knight; a knight who went to war and became a champion; a champion who slew the last dragon and found the lost grail and became a legend. It was a story of chivalry and courage, where good and evil were neatly labeled, and one always vanquished the other.
And when I turned the final page, there you were: Sir Una Everlasting.
They’d laid you out in full armor but for a helm, mailed fists still curled around your hilt, as if you kept some vigil even in death. Your hair was a startling, fluorescent yellow, which spilled like melted butter over the edge of your bier, and your face was the pure white of the page beneath. There were flowers tucked all around you: tiny, colorless roses, I thought, though the artist had no particular botanical skill.
I thought you were the saddest and most beautiful thing I had ever seen,like a dead angel. I looked for a long time at the bright line of the sword along your sternum, at the solemn shape of your mouth.
I looked at you for so long and so well that I felt something inside me shifting, irrevocably. It was like dying or being born, or being hit very hard on the head. It was like falling in love. (This was another thing I would only realize when I was much older.)
The longer I looked, the more ashamed I felt.
Sir Una Everlasting—you—had never run from anything. You hadn’t disappeared from the world—you had burned your name into its surface, carved it so deeply into the stone of history that it was still legible a thousand years later. You had died, yes, but only because you had found something worth dying for. You had been born poor, but no one had ever called you apoor thing.
If I turned the book sideways, I could read the letters inscribed on your blade:Erxa Dominus.
For Dominion.
Perhaps if my father had read your stories as a boy, he would not have grown up to be a traitor and a turncoat; perhaps he would have served with honor and come home with a pension instead of just a bad hip and a motherless child.
And perhaps—despite my reservations about gunfire and bloodshed—it was not too late for me.
Here I was visited by a somewhat confused daydream of myself returning to Queenswald in triumph—being swept up, adored, admired. The ruddy-cheeked boys would clap me on the back and my father would sober up andyouwould be there, somehow, glowing faintly with holy light. You would take my hand and guide me down to lie beside you on your bier.
I repacked the basket, fingers clumsy with cold, and went straight home.
My father didn’t even look up when the door closed behind me. He behaved, in fact, as if no time had passed at all, as if the whole world had held its breath while I sat beneath the yew in the heart of the grove that was all that was left of the deep wild woods.
I lingered, wanting him to ask where I’d gone and why I’d come back. If he had, I would have answered, somewhat theatrically:For Dominion.
But I would have meant:For you.
The second time you saved me, I was twenty-three, and we were losing the war.
The Sunday papers printed fresh maps each week, with squiggly red lines to show how far our troops had retreated, how much territory was still held by the Hinterlanders. They used to list the casualties by name over the wireless, but they’d stopped after a group of dissidents broke into Chancellor Gladwell’s bedroom and wrote the names of the dead on his walls in gory red paint (I’d told myself the red spatters on my father’s cuffs were coincidental).
Now the evening radio hour was reserved for the Minister of War. Every night she addressed the nation, begging every concerned citizen to tighten their belts, every able hand to take up arms. She recalled our past triumphs against worse odds: Were we not the sons and daughters of Queen Yvanne the First, who united the whole of Dominion and brought the Savior’s light to every hollow and dale? Had we not stood against the Hinterlands for centuries, bloodied but never beaten? Surely our nerve would not fail now, on the very cusp of peace?
There had been murmurs and jokes and a run of extremely nasty cartoons when the Chancellor had named a woman as Minister of War, but her speeches were very good, and they left me restless and guilty.
Now, as I walked toward campus, I caught edged looks and suspicious glances, blond heads bent together, muttering. People wondered, perhaps, where I had gotten my dark eyes and hair, and why I hadn’t been detained with the other enemy aliens and foreign suspects. Or perhaps they only wondered why a healthy young man was walking down the street with library books tucked under one arm while their own sons were bleeding or killing or rotting in the Hinterlands.
