I hadn’t known, until that moment, that there was still a stubborn cinder of hope somewhere in the banked hearth of my chest. I wet my lips twice before I spoke. “So it’s not—it isn’t real. The grail can’t—heal anyone.”
The apology in her face turned to awful, stinging sympathy. “The cup is real enough. I’m sure it’s the very same grail that Galawin carried three hundred years ago. But no one can cheat death, Mallory.”
I imagined a boot stamping out that last, pitiful coal, leaving nothing but bitter ash. It filled my mouth, acrid and foul, so that when I spoke it all came pouring out. “It’s all a lie, then. She killed the dragon and brought you the grail for nothing. Shediedfor—” I bit my own tongue until I tasted salt.
Vivian held my gaze evenly. “No. I swear to you. Without her sacrifice—without the tragedy of Una Everlasting—none of this will matter. It won’t do a damn thing for Dominion.”
“What the hell do you—” But then, in a rush of cold certainty, I knew. “You’ve done this before. Differently.”
A ripple across the surface of Vivian’s face, as if something dark had swum close to the surface but not broken it. “It’s true. The first time I came back, I didn’t bother with all the… pageantry.”
All those hard, cold miles we rode together. The scream of the dragon as it died. Your blood filling my palms, staining them, ruining them.Pageantry.My vision pulsed, redly.
Vivian continued, unconcerned, “No quest, no grail, no miracles. The queen was sick. The queen got better. What could be simpler? I uninvited the Hinterlanders, foiled a few assassination attempts, and ruled well in Yvanne’s stead. I made treaties and trade agreements, held the borders, wrote charters, made speeches. I thought it would be enough.” That dark thing swam up in her eyes again. “But it’s never enough, simply to be competent. I was overthrown in less than three years, and Dominion fell with me. When I returned to my own era, I found a Dominion that was still divided, disillusioned,weak.For a king to hold the throne it takes skill, lucky genetics, good timing, and hard work; for a queen, it takes a fucking miracle.” She strode closer to your bier. “It takes astory.And every story needs a hero.”
I watched, with a hot spike of jealousy, as she leaned over you and stroked the hair tenderly from your brow. She traced your jawline with one fingernail, her expression odd, almost desirous. “She must have loved Yvanne very much, don’t you think? As a mother, maybe. Make sure you put that in the book. And crucify Ancel for me, would you.”
“Thebook?” Anger swelled like a tumor in my stomach, fatal, full of bile. “You want to turn this, turnher,into a fucking campaign ad? A tragedy you can tell on the radio?”
Vivian clucked her tongue. “This from the man who led her to the gallows in the name of—what? A byline? An endowed position?” She fistedher hand in your hair and gave your head a small shake. Your body had stiffened in death, so that your neck and shoulders moved together, like the joints of a cheap puppet. “Tell me. Was it worth it?”
Oh, I deserved that: I had buckled your armor myself. I had sent you through those gates, knowing what was waiting, though I could not now remember why.
I discovered I was kneeling again, panting hard, choking with guilt and grief and cancerous fury. My cigarette had fallen from my fingers. “Send me back again,” I said, and for once my wreck of a voice suited me perfectly. “Let me change it. I won’t let her go alone, this time. I’ll slit Ancel’s throat. Just let me try again.”
“You think I hold the power here, but I don’t.” Vivian settled you back on the bier and arranged your hair, fussily. “You and I are serving something higher than ourselves, now. Neither of us chose where that book sent us. It took me to the queen just before she died, and it took you to Una just before she failed. Do you honestly think it waschance? Call it fate, call it the hand of God—this is how the story goes, and this is our part in it.”
A little of that old, childish hunger—to be chosen, to matter, to earn my place in a country that didn’t want me—rose up in me. I closed my eyes against it.
In the dark, I heard the approach of slippered feet. Vivian spoke in a near-whisper now, poisonous, inexorable, like one of those harpies who drove men mad with prophecy. “She dies, and they forget her. I’ve seen it. She becomes a footnote, a piece of trivia. And she wanted so badly to be remembered.”
She pressed something heavy into my hands. “This is why you’re here, Mallory. Dominion is nothing without Una Everlasting, and she is nothing without you.”
I opened my eyes, blinking down at the book I’d always dreamed of finding. At my hands holding it, and the blood crusting in the beds of my nails.
“I don’t—I don’t understand,” I said. “If we forgot her, then why do I remember her? If her story was never written down, how do I already know it? And why did I have to watch her—to know her—”
A vexed expression crossed Vivian’s face, familiar to me from professors who did not appreciate interruptions to their lectures. “Because time travel is very fucking complicated, Corporal.” She exhaled carefully, as if counting to five. “Because you were born a thousand years after all of this happened, in the aftermath of a choice you’d already made. Because the past becomesthe present which becomes the past.” A small, wry smile. “Her device was no accident, I think.”
I traced the design on the cover of the book, my thumb circling the dragon over and over.
Vivian knelt before me and covered my hand with hers. Her fingers were very cold. “Understand me. Her death is worth nothing. It is meaningless. It is awaste—unless you make it matter.”
I couldn’t think of anything to say.
Eventually she stood. Her cigarette butt landed beside mine, and she ground it beneath one delicate toe. Her voice echoed back to me as she left, clear and hard as a rung bell: “If you loved her at all, Owen—make them remember her.”
I lingered for a time in the vault, knees stiffening on the stone. I didn’t weep or yell or tear my hair, but only watched the candlelight chase over your corpse.
I imagined this was how a saint must feel after a holy vision: as if a great curtain had been pulled aside, and the secret engine of the world revealed in all its vastness and cruelty. I didn’t understand most of what Vivian had told me—the story looped and doubled back in my mind, cause and effect hopelessly tangled—but I understood that you and I were a pair of gears turning together in the belly of that engine.
You had to die, and I had to watch you, and then I had to wipe your blood from my hands and make sure it had been worth it.
Did I consider refusing? Did I imagine crawling to your bier and lying down beside you among the flowers, so that a thousand years from now they would find our bones so intermingled it would be impossible to tell which were mine and which were yours, and no one would care, because no one would know our names?
Of course. But I had sworn to you that your name would be remembered, and though I was a coward and a deserter, though I had broken every trust and faith, I found I could not break yours.
I pressed my lips to your brow before I left. Your skin was the same temperature as the air, so that I felt nothing but a slight pressure against my mouth.
