It hadn’t been. You fell among the Hinterlanders like a mad dog cut loose from its leash, like a scythe across dry wheat, like a weapon wearing the skin of a woman.
You did not fight cleanly or prettily; it was nothing like a dance. It was an annihilation, brutal and inexorable, and the only beauty was in the sheer fucking speed of it. You swung Valiance one-handed, quick as a cleaver, and if your enemies did not meet your blade they met the blunt edge of your shield, and when the shield was ripped from your arm, they met your mailed fist. You were Una Everlasting, and there was no surviving you.
I understood then why the villagers feared you, and why you feared yourself. I closed my eyes, like a child, so that I would not fear you, too.
When I opened them again, there was a fine spray of blood on the lenses of my spectacles, and hot, grassy breath on my face. It was Hen, still somehow alive—I supposed it was difficult to kill a cadaver—now nibbling delicately at my hair.
I knew a moment of true terror when I saw his empty saddle—but no.There you were: alone in the awful silence, your hair slicked redly to your armor, still standing.
Still alive.
I thought, with a distant, obligatory panic:Oh God, what have I done,but all I truly felt was giddy, euphoric relief. More than relief—reprieve, as though it was my own life that had been spared.
I rested my head gratefully against Hen’s jawbone. “Well done, old man.” He nuzzled at my curls until he found my ear, which he bit.Glue,I whispered to him, eyes watering.Great vats of it.
By the time my eyes cleared, you were standing above me, one gauntleted hand extended. I took it, as I always did, and you hauled me to my feet.
I swayed a little, looking up at you through smeary glasses. There was a wet gobbet of something stuck to your cheekbone, steaming faintly in the cold. A bruise was blooming at one temple, and you were scowling down at me like the wrath of God. I thought how funny it was, how baffling, that I’d ever thought you unbeautiful.
You snarled, “I told you to run, boy!”
You seemed very upset, but you also seemed very alive, and so I found it impossible to stop smiling. I shrugged and gestured vaguely with my Saint Sinclair, which I was surprised to find still in my hand.
You looked at the revolver and then, eyes narrowing, at the fallen archers. Your face unsnarled, became still. “You killed them. With your—gone.”
“Mygun,a standard-issue Saint Sinclair six-shot, yes.” I nodded, a little sloppily. I’d nearly forgotten this feeling—the drunken, clammy high that comes after battle, after the danger but before the vomiting. “It’s the archers that get you, usually. Almost all the sources agree.”
Your expression didn’t change, but your eyes became a pair of coins, cold and yellow. “You knew, then. What awaited me here.”
Guilt drew me back to earth as surely as an anchor around my ankle. I swallowed hard. “Yes. God, Una—” I experienced a moment of regret: If I’d let the archers get you, at least you wouldn’t be standing there, looking at me like that, and my heart wouldn’t be splitting in my chest. “I’m sorry. I should have told you. Or I shouldn’t have, I don’t know—this is how it ends, how ithasto end. And now it’s all wrong, I suppose, but—”
“You meant me to die.” You said it quietly, almost to yourself. “And yet—you saved me.” You were looking at me now with a kind of furiousambivalence, like a judge who couldn’t decide if a criminal ought to be hanged or merely locked away in the madhouse. You asked, white-lipped, “Why?”
“I just—couldn’t.” I laughed, poorly. “The whole reason I was sent here in the first place—the one real duty I could have done for my country—and I couldn’t do it.” I looked down, spread my hands in another shrug. “Coward.”
“Who first called you that, I wonder? But give me a name, and I will bring you his tongue.” You sounded so annoyed, so alarmingly sincere, that I couldn’t speak, or look up.
Then: the clank of your gauntlets hitting the cobbles. Your gloved hands on either side of my head, unhooking the spectacles carefully from my ears, reaching for the hem of my jacket. You rubbed the lenses in circles on the red wool until the blood flaked and fell away.
When it was done, you touched a knuckle to my chin, tilting my eyes back to yours. “To charge into battle, with neither shield nor mount, against terrible odds—to know the odds, and charge anyway—” You shook your head. You settled the spectacles back on my face, and your features came into sudden focus: the severe line between your brows, the faint flush over the bridge of your nose. “There is a word for someone like that, and it is not coward.”
I suggested, a little thickly, “Traitor?” and wasn’t entirely joking.
“Madman,” you answered, and neither were you.
You turned to Hen, fussing over him as if he were a child with a scraped knee rather than a serial murderer with a saddle. He knocked his head against your chest and pawed fretfully at the ground as you drew the cup from his bags. You turned to face the Keep—and stumbled.
I’d never seen you stumble. It was only then that I remembered the arrows.
One, haft snapped, nestled in your left elbow. Another was buried in the gap between your backplate and chest, right at the bottom of your ribs.
God, what if it hit something vital? What if—even now, after I had overturned all of known history to keep you alive—the story wrenched itself true, and took you away?
“Saints, woman, don’t—just come here.” I took your wrist and hauled your arm across my shoulders, grunting a little under your weight. I expected you to protest, but instead you sagged into me, and shuddered hard.
I aimed us toward the front steps of the Keep, speaking in the same soothing nonsense-voice you used on the damn horse. I said stupid things, embarrassing things, likeYou’re alright, nowandI’ve got you.The shuddersseemed to ease, so I kept going. My babble took us up the steps, through the door, into the shadows of Cavallon Keep.
I should have been fretting about the flow of time and the disruption of our national narrative, my failures as a soldier and historian, et cetera, but I wasn’t.
