Instead, I was listening to the sound of your breath moving in and out of your chest, over and over, as if it might go on forever, and thinking:It was worth it.
The Keep hummed and rattled as we passed through it, like an engine sputtering to life. Doors were unbarred. Bells were rung. Serving boys and soldiers ran past, calling to one another, and fine lords and ladies crept fearfully out of hiding, rushlights trembling in their hands.
In the time it took for my sight to adjust, there was a crowd gathered, and all of them were staring up at you with slack jaws. A few of them approached, their voices merging into a low, worshipful susurrus. You shook them off, as an injured lion would shake away flies.
You gestured wearily through an arched entranceway. The cup was in your hand, glinting richly. “There,” you said. “She’ll be waiting.”
“Then she can keep waiting. You need a surgeon”—I recalled one of Sawbridge’s lectures on medieval medical instruments and rates of infection—“or a place to lie down, maybe.”
You didn’t seem to hear me. You staggered on like a figure in a cuckoo clock, propelled by hidden gears to tell the same story over and over.
Through the archway was a high, vaulted hall, and at the end of the hall was a throne, and on the throne was a woman.
Even across the long hall, it was impossible to mistake the queen for anything but a dying woman. Her face was veiled, but the cloth was so fine it was possible to see the fragile bones of her face beneath it, the sunken pit of her mouth when she drew breath. Her hands lay like a pair of felled doves in her lap.
Yet she held herself upright on the throne, chin high. A vast dragonscale mantle flowed over her shoulders, the same eerie, irradiant white as your hair. A heavy crown sat on her brow, pinning the veil in place. I’d seen the Crown of Dominion before, in the Royal Museum. There, displayed on a fussy velvet pillow, it had looked gaudy, almost childish, like a piece of costume jewelry.
But here, in the shadowed hall, with the pigeon’s blood rubies gleaming like eyes in the torchlight, it did not look childish. It looked like a legend, a thing forged by the Saint of Smiths and won by the Red Knight, which would be worn by every queen until the rise of the republic.
There were knights gathered on either side of the throne like iron wings. It took me a long beat to recognize them as the Queen’s Guard—heroes, all of them, with ballads and legends of their own. But none of my comics or adventure novels had mentioned that Bodrow the Giant had Hinterlander blood, obvious even at this distance. And that must be Sir Gladwyn, beside him, with the winged lynx on his shield—but no portrait had ever given him silky black hair, or skin the color of oiled leather. It was with relief that my eyes landed on the man at the right of the throne: his hair a perfect, pure gold, his face so handsome it might have been cast from plaster. Ancel, the Knight of Hearts, the only swordsman whose skill rivaled yours.
You didn’t seem to notice any of them. Every inch of you, the whole weight of your gaze, was for the woman on the throne.
I had still doubted, until then, that you loved her. But despite all your bitter words and bad dreams, all your talk of sin and regret—you looked at her like you would set your own neck in the noose, if she held the rope. It was beyond loyalty, closer to the sort of flayed, mad devotion you find in mistreated dogs.
Yvanne, First Queen of Dominion, said, “Sir Una,” and the gathering crowd fell quiet, although her voice had been thin and weak.
You pulled away from me so quickly it was almost a flinch. I watched you stride toward the throne as if reeled in on a line, heedless of your wounds, heedless of the eyes on you. The hall was wholly silent now, but for the occasional, faint drip of your blood.
The crowd, which had parted before you, closed ranks in your wake, so that I had to shoulder my way through. If anyone took offense, I didn’t see it; I couldn’t look away from you.
You knelt when you reached the throne, ignoring the arrow still lodged in your rib cage. Your hair was a sticky red curtain, obscuring your face.
“And so,” the queen said, in that deathbed voice, “you have returned to me at last.”
“Yes, my queen.” You said it to the flagstones.
“And you have slain the last dragon of Dominion.”
“Yes, my queen.”
“And you have brought me the lost grail, which they say restores all that time takes from us.”
“Yes, my queen,” you said, and raised the golden cup, face lifting for the first time, gazing up at your queen with that awful, doglike love. Yvanne reached out to stroke your brow with trembling fingers, and you closed your eyes, as a child would.
She took the grail. “Wine,” she said, and a serving girl brought wine. “Pour,” she said, and the girl poured.
Then the First Queen of Dominion lifted her veil just enough to reveal her mouth and bent her head to sip from the lost grail.
There was no heavenly choir, no blinding light, and yet: Yvanne’s spine unbowed. Her chin lifted. She stood—smoothly, easily, as a person in the prime of life—and lifted her arms to her people. In a bold and ringing voice she said, “So long I have prayed for one thing and one thing only. And now, by the grace of God and Sir Una, I am given it:time.”
She lifted her veil fully back from her face. The crowd gasped, but I wasn’t looking at the queen. I was looking at you, still kneeling, still breathing. You had survived the end of your own story.
Perhaps now you could rest. Slip away to the woods where you were raised and bury your sword beneath the yew. For a moment I could see you laughing, unarmored, lips stained with summer berries. You were watching someone, and you loved them—God, how you loved them—
But then, from the courtyard: an animal scream. Your shoulders jerked. The queen said, quietly but with feeling, “I hate that fucking horse.”
And the Knight of Hearts drew his sword.
