“It was Ancel who told them my champion was away, who had the wine served unwatered, who urged me to accept their envoy in the first place. I suppose he had grown tired of his part in the story, and wanted more, and didn’t care what it cost.” She added, fretfully, almost maternally, “He always was jealous of her.”
I shrugged again. My attention kept sliding off the surface of the conversation, falling into some lightless place.
Vivian studied me, sidelong. In a gentler voice, she asked, “Would you like to see her?”
I could not speak; I nodded.
There were vaults beneath the Keep, carved deep into the bedrock, where the air was still and cool. Normally I think they kept wine and meat down there, but now the chamber was empty but for a few stinking tallow candles, a stone table—and you.
In death, you looked more like your posters and paintings than you ever had in life. Your hair had been carefully washed and combed until it fell in long white sheets over the edge of the bier. Your armor had been scrubbed and polished so brightly that I could see my own face in the curve of your pauldron, bony and bespectacled. Your face had been caked with chalk, so that all the crags and scars were smoothed away. There were clownish pink circles drawn on both your cheeks, and tiny white ulla flowers tucked all around your corpse. They had a sweet, green scent, like spring.
I wanted, quite badly, to rip the flowers away from you. To rub my thumb between your brows until I found the knotted lines beneath the chalk—except I wouldn’t want to touch you with these hands.
I fumbled for a cigarette instead. I dropped the match twice before Vivian plucked the cigarette from my shaking fingers and held it to a candle flame. She took a second one for herself.
We smoked for a time in silence. The candles spat. The air turned sickly fragrant, like meat and perfume.
Vivian said, “I know none of this is easy, Mallory, but I need you to understand why we’re here, whyyou’rehere, particularly.” Her tone had a clipped efficiency I associated with military commanders, or librarians. “The first time around, we lost the war.”
A pause. I waited obediently for my brain to arrange the verbs and tenses in a way that made sense. When it didn’t, I said, “Pardon?”
“I know you like a good story, so listen: Once upon a time there was a shitty little backwater country whose name everyone forgot on their geography quizzes. It wasn’t so much a country, really, as a border drawn around a group of strangers, united by nothing more than a tax code. They had a noble history, but they had forgotten it. They had myths and legends, butthey had buried them. So when war came—as it always does—they lost it. Badly.”
She put the cigarette back between her lips. Her cheeks hollowed as she inhaled.
“Now, in this shitty country, there was a woman—yes, I’m talking about myself in third person, see what monarchy does to a person—who wanted better for her people. She listened to the stories they barely told anymore, of heroes and crowns and enchanted swords and so forth, and she went digging. She was looking for a weapon; she found a book.”
From the heavy drape of her skirts, Vivian produced a book bound in polished wood, the hinges like moss creeping around the spine, your sigil burnt deep: a dragon, eating its own tail.
For the first time since it had arrived on my desk, I had forgotten the book existed. I supposed some unlucky servant had been sent to retrieve it from Hen’s saddlebags. I wondered how many fingers it had cost them.
Vivian was rubbing her thumb over the cover. “I don’t know who first made this, or when, so don’t bother asking. But it’s old, and it has an old magic to it, of the kind that died out before the dragons. I opened it and cut my finger on the page. I suppose you know what happened then.”
I did.
“It’s quite a shock, isn’t it? I was in my study, and then I was here. Well, nothere,but several floors above us, at the bedside of a dying woman.” She tapped a little shower of ash to the floor. “She was beautiful, Mallory. Even on her deathbed, Yvanne was something to behold.”
I felt a weird surge of relief at the sound of the name. A part of me had begun to fear it was all some terrible pantomime, that the oldest and most vital story of Dominion was nothing but sleight of hand. But Yvanne had truly lived, and so had you. I dragged again at my Lucky Star, trying not to let my fingers touch my lips.
Vivian went on, musingly, “She thought I was an angel, at first. And then, when I explained, she decided I was something better: a second chance. A way to outlive herself.”
I had begun to see, unwillingly, where this monologue was headed, but my thoughts were slow, smoke swaddled.
“She could hardly draw breath, but she presented her case efficiently. She said there was too much left undone, that Dominion would not survive her passing. She said it wasn’t her the people needed, but only the idea of her, and anyway we looked enough alike that her clothes would fit me.” Viviansmiled fondly. “I refused, of course. I knew my history, even if no one else did: The grail was never found. Sir Una never returned. Yvanne’s dream died with her.”
“That’s not—ah.” In the stories I knew, you slew the dragon and saved the queen. But perhaps they’d been told differently, once. Perhaps there was a version where you’d lain down beneath the yew, after all, because I’d never arrived to stop you.
You’d said it yourself:Had I been alone…And then:As you will.
I swayed a little, suddenly dizzy; Vivian didn’t notice. “But then I thought: What if the first queen had lived? What if Dominion had a stronger foundation, a better history? What ifthiswas what I had been searching for?” She gestured at herself, the heavy drape of her skirts, the yellow gleam of her crown. “In order to have a future worth fighting for, you must have a past worth remembering.”
It was a good line; the heartless scholar in me tucked it quietly away for the conclusion of my next article.
“It was easier than you’d think, to take her place. I carried her body up to the tower roof—her idea—and let the birds have their way with it. By the time her attendants returned, I was wearing her gown and veil, laying where she had lain. We really do look very much alike.” Vivian had taken off the crown and was turning it in her hands, cigarette crooked expertly between two fingers. In the low candlelight the gold seemed sinuous, nearly alive. “I kept thinking someone would catch me, doubt me, demand I remove the veil—but no one did.” A crooked smile, which revealed the point of her canine. “It’s not bad, being queen.”
I blinked smoke from my eyes. “But you looked so ill. When I saw you, in the throne room—”
“You see what you expect to see.” She sounded apologetic, as if she were explaining to a child that the actors in the film were just pretending. “Even now, the court is convincing themselves that they misremembered my features over the long months of my sickness, or that the miracle of the grail changed them. As if a cup of wine could cure cancer.”
