You mounted. For the first time, you did not reach your hand down to me.
I walked alongside you some of the way, one hand on the stirrup. Hen nipped me once, nastily and for no reason, and I let him. None of the stories said whether your horse outlived you.
We approached the gates, where no guard called out to us, no watchmen cried greeting—did you not wonder why?—and I fell back.
I watched you ride toward the bloody end of your story alone, as you always were, as you must be.
You passed beneath the stone arch and paused. You turned your face back to me. I caught the wry lift of your lips, that smile that was not a smile but only the premonition of one.
And that old weakness came over me, the fault line that had cracked wide during the war and healed poorly. A tremor began at the base of my spine and shivered through my limbs. My teeth clacked together.
For crown and country,I thought, numbly.
And then I thought:It is not worth it.
“Una!” I shouted, and God, let my voice not be too weak—let me not be too late—“’Ware the archers!”
I knew before the words formed on my lips that I was too late. I heard the taut thrum of bowstrings, the whistle of fletching in the air, and knew no one could move fast enough.
But you could.
There was a sound like bullets hitting a tin can and then there were two arrows sprouting from your shield, held high to guard your face. The third arrow was lodged just above your left elbow, nestled in the slit between two plates of metal.
You didn’t seem to notice. You swung low in the saddle, shield still raised, as the second volley found you. Hen screamed. Someone shouted orders. Boots clanged on stone.
I knew who they were: Hinterlanders, come to pay their respects to the fresh-made queen of Dominion. But instead of finding a monarch in the fullness of her power, they had found a dying woman and a worried court. They had waited and watched, drinking the queen’s wine and eating the queen’s bread, until someone had whispered to them that the famed Red Knight was gone away on a fool’s quest.
The temptation had proved too great. The Hinterlanders had called for toast after toast—to the queen’s health! to Dominion!—and waited till even the Queen’s Guard was laughing and stupid with drink. It had been easy to take the Keep, then, and easy to lie in wait for the Red Knight’s return.
Their plot would fail, of course. Valiance would cut them down, every one, and their corpses would be hung from the gates for the crows to pick clean, and their treachery would be remembered for a thousand years. When the Hinterlanders sued for peace during the war, Vivian Rolfe had laughed in their faces. Her answer had become famous, printed on posters and shouted in battle:Dominion does not forget.
Dominion would survive this. But you would not.
You would kneel before the queen one last time, pierced by a dozen arrows. You would lift the grail in one bloodied hand, head bowed, and the queen would touch your hair and say,Rest now, my Red Knight.
And the Drawn Blade of Dominion would die with a smile on her lips.
I was not aware of making a decision. But I found my feet moving, my hand reaching for the service revolver that rested warm and heavy against my breast. I crouched behind the low wall of the courtyard well, finger already hooked around the trigger.
You shouted, angrily, “Run, boy! Are you not a coward?”
I was. A brave man would have stood at the gates and let the past take its course, for the sake of the future. But I was too much a coward to watch you die, Una.
The archers were already notching arrows again on the curtain wall, taking aim. I counted three of them.
And for a moment I felt sure that the whole machine of the world, every birth and every death, every tick of every clock, had been designed to bring me here, now: with three bullets in my revolver and the best eye in the 2nd Battalion.
I looked at my hands and found them perfectly steady.
I aimed—except I never had to aim, I only had to fall away from myself and let my body move without me, like giving a horse its head. I fell into alignment, eye to arm to barrel, and all I had to do was pull the trigger.
Three shots, one after the other. Three bodies bursting on the stones of the courtyard, one after the other.
An odd silence, as if the entire Keep had been suspended in amber. The Hinterlander soldiers looked at the broken shapes of their archers. They looked at you, mounted upright once more, another arrow now sprouting from your back.
Then the Red Knight drew her blade, whose name was known before their mothers’ mothers were born, and the silence was replaced by screaming.
It was the first time I’d seen you truly fight. I suppose I had grown used to the disappointing gap between myth and reality; I suppose I thought your skill had been embellished by time, exaggerated as all legends are.
