“Then why—”
“Honestly, it doesn’t matter, because you aren’t going to write it forme.You’ll do it for her.” An insufferable part of me wanted to push my glasses up my nose and correct her verbiage; surely she meanttranslate,notwrite.
But she was already reaching across the desk, sliding the book away from me and opening the cover.
My heart stuttered in my chest, then resumed at twice its usual pace. “The pages are—”
“Yes, yes.” She took my hand in hers and pressed my palm to one of those awful, empty pages. “Now, hold still.”
I didn’t scream when she stabbed the letter opener through the back of my hand. I’m not even sure I felt it. I was already falling into the bright, sharp smell of pine and snow.
“She needs you, Owen.”
Then came the yew, the branches bowed with frost, your sword resting sweetly at my throat. Then the dragon and the grail, the courtyard and the queen, the bier and the book.
God, please, don’t ask me to write it all down again.
It’s your turn to tell it, love.
11
I WAS ALONE,before you came.
The woods of my fathers had grown wild in my absence, the old paths choked with bitterthorn, the copses untended. Their home—our home—was not a house but only the remains of one, a corpse of wattle and thatch.
Of my fathers, there was nothing left at all. They had been shriven and buried in the manner of the woods then: their flesh taken by rooks and flies, their bones dragged down into burrow and den. I didn’t think either of them would mind—Father Theo always said these woods were the only heaven he would see, and Father Foy was fond of animals—but still, I couldn’t bring myself to sleep inside. I didn’t mind the cold, and I liked the sound of Hen’s snoring; it meant I was not quite alone.
As a girl I’d met pig herders and basket weavers in these woods, charcoal burners and wolf hunters. There had even been a boy who met me sometimes beneath the yew, though it was a half-day’s walk to the nearest village. For years he was my shy, gamine shadow, watching me from under lashes as long and dark as a doe’s.
I wondered sometimes if I’d seen his face again, unknowing, years later: If he had been one of those who knelt in the mud of some nameless village and cried mercy, or one of those who refused, and found none. I wondered if some part of me had been hoping, childishly, that I would find him still here, waiting beneath the yew.
But this was the Queen’s Wood, now—where before it had belonged to everyone and no one—and any trespassers would be branded and pilloried.
I told myself I was glad of this because there would be no one to find my remains for years and years—yet, on the day I decided to die, I donned my armor. A lingering streak of vanity, I suppose: Even now, I wanted them to remember my name.
Or perhaps I only wanted Yvanne to get word, one day, and know I had abandoned her of my own free will.
I had loved her, once, as a child loves God. After the Black Bastion, I had hated her with that ardent, blazing hate that is merely love’s other cheek—but lately even the hate had burned away, and left only a weary, ashen regret.
Now, walking toward the yew for the last time in my life, I felt nothing at all. Nostalgia, perhaps, for the woods where I had run free and feral as a lynx, barefoot and berry-stained, a beast among beasts. On summer evenings I would stay out past moonrise; in the winter I would curl like a cub in Father Theo’s lap, and Father Foy would sing soft, silly songs by the firelight, replacing all the animals in the songs with my name.
I don’t remember that name, now.
If I were any other child—if the sword had not come so easily to my hand, if I had not known, somehow, just where to slip the blade between a man’s ribs, how to part one vertebra from the next—I would have died with them that day.
It was right, that my bones would finally join theirs, twenty years too late.
I reached the yew. High as a hill and old as a dragon, with some of a dragon’s secret, wild otherness. Sometimes I thought I saw a stranger’s face in the bark, and sometimes I saw my own.
I drew Valiance from my hip. It shone unblemished, still as perfect as the day I pulled it from the tree.
It was only I who had aged, and cracked, and finally broken. Only I who could no longer serve my purpose.
I would be sorry to die. I would miss the simple, animal joy of being alive in the world: food and sex and sleep, the scour of wind on bare skin, the sting of sweat, the smell of dragonscale flowers in full bloom. I would miss Hen. I would miss Bodrow and Gladwyn and even Ancel. I would miss Yvanne, or at least the way she sometimes looked at me, with a pride so ferocious it burned all my doubts away.
But I could no longer be what they needed me to be. I could not end the story as I should—fêted, beloved, remembered—and so I would end it here, alone.
But then, suddenly, I was not alone anymore.
