I would have warned you, but my voice—my treacherous, useless voice—snapped and broke beneath the strain, so that when I shouted nothing emerged but a hoarse rush of air. I would have shot him, but my three bullets were spent.
You would have seen the blow coming, but he was on your fucking blind side.
You were turning your gaze back up to the queen when his blade slid neatly, almost surgically, between the plates of your armor, through the great muscle of your body and out the other side.
You did not react, except—as Ancel drew his sword back out of your body with a wet, gristling sound—with a small, polite cough. The cough sprayedblood across the flagstones, painting a delicate arch on the hem of the queen’s robes.
I thought, madly, wearily:Not again.
Someone yelled. Panic rippled through the crowd. They surged in every direction, forming a writhing wall of sweat-sour velvet and clawing hands. I shoved through them, aware that I was yelling your name over and over, my voice too thin and weak to rise above the noise.
Through the thrash of limbs, I saw you rise, unsteadily. I saw you turn. I tripped over someone’s ankle and the next thing I saw was Valiance, bare and bright. You held it with two hands, now, your body bent around the wound, teeth bared.
Ancel faced you with an odd expression on his face, a tired camaraderie, as if the two of you were starting the same shift on the factory floor. Then he drew himself up—shoulders back, hair falling in glossy, angelic waves—and lifted his blade. His lips moved, but I couldn’t make out the words.
You fought, then.
The Knight of Hearts might have been made by the Savior Himself as your opposite: He was light and glancing and lovely, a golden cat that struck and slipped away. Any single movement could have been painted in oil and hung in the hall, and it would have been the portrait of knighthood. It was difficult to imagine anyone defeating him, if only because it would have ruined the painting.
But he could not win against a dead woman. Blood was sheeting down your chin, bubbling pinkly from your nose. I could hear the whistling sound of your lung as it collapsed. You did not bother to protect yourself; you simply strode through the beautiful pattern of his sword work, ignoring the wounds that opened on your jaw, your right wrist, the soft underside of your thigh.
Your fist shattered the beautiful arch of his cheekbone. Your boot bent his knee inward, the angle obscene. Valiance split his clavicle with a sound like a tongue clucking, a damp snap, and lodged in his sternum.
The Knight of Hearts looked at you with chagrin, as if you had beaten him at cards, and as if he wasn’t surprised. He fell, and you followed him.
Ancel hit the stones hard, with a graceless, meaty slap. But your head never touched the ground because I had finally pushed through the crowd.
We landed together in a bloody tangle, my arms clutched around you. “No, not again, not again—” I should have comforted you, told you how well you would be remembered, how long Dominion would love you, butinstead I babbled uselessly over your body, spectacles askew, ruining the dignity of your death.
But you were not dying with dignity. You were not proud or peaceful; you were gasping for air, blue-lipped, wild-eyed, convulsing in my arms. Blood was pumping unevenly from the hole in your back, overfilling my palms.
I was aware, distantly, that people were moving around us. The queen was speaking again, the crowd was calming. History was striding on without us.
I didn’t care.
“Owen,” you said. Your pupils were black, frenzied, as if you were running fast through dark trees. “Come back for me, you have to come back—”
I slid my hands—and oh, they were so red and so wet—around your shoulders until I cradled your face. There were tears sliding toward the fine hair of your temples, running over my thumbs. I couldn’t tell if they were mine or yours.
“Come back,” you said again. “Please.” Your voice cracked on the word.
I didn’t know what to say, but my mouth formed the word without me, easy as aiming a gun. “Always,” I said. “Always.”
Your body slackened. The muddy, clawing panic left your eyes. You said, your voice cool and even now, “Wait for me, beneath the yew tree.”
And then you died.
Your eyes stared, emptily. Your blood turned cool and tacky on my hands.
At first, I felt nothing. Just a distant, disgusted weariness, as if I was back at the front opening another shitty tin of beans.This again.
Then that fault line inside me, the flaw that ran through my character like a vein of coal, split open. It tore right down the middle of me, and then—
I’m sorry. I don’t remember the next part very well; I went away from myself, because it hurt too badly to stay.
It was a woman’s voice that called me back. Not yours, but one I knew. It said, “Enough now, you’ll hurt yourself.” And then, “Just let go of her, there’s a good man.”
There was something incorrect about the voice, but I was still not quite returned to myself and couldn’t place it.
