You knew what I was doing, of course. You were quite clever, for a madman.
Eventually you said, “Let me tend the fire tonight.”
I let you take the stick from my hand, and then—forgive me, I was so tired, and you did not pull away—I let my head fall to your shoulder. You went very still, and then you tucked your jaw against the crown of my head. I let myself sleep.
When I woke, I knew where to find the last dragon.
Your voice had spoken in my dream as clear and harsh as a rook, and even in the dream I had felt a great, wistful sadness. I would have stayed with you in those woods forever if I could.
I roused you roughly. You answered my questions with your usual excess—save the last one. I asked you if this was truly my last quest.
You looked me dead in the eye and said, “Yes,” though your voice cracked on the word. “This is your last quest.”
And for the first time since the queen’s messengers had dragged me from my cups and slung me at her feet, I allowed myself to believe it, or at least to imagine that I believed it. That I would return in triumph with the grail and my kingdom would prosper forevermore. That my queen would be healed, and in her grace and gratitude, she would release me from her service.
I could go anywhere, then—even return here. I could spend a whole spring sleeping in those little white flowers, and a whole summer drying wheat for my fathers’ roof. I could still disappear, but gently, in my own time, with my name untarnished. I could go to my grave knowing that all of it—the blood and the bad dreams, the endless carnage—had been worth it, in the end.
Still, I think I would have refused—except you were watching me, and God, the way you watched me: with a pure and piercing beseechment, as if you needed me more than you had ever needed anything else.
Yvanne had looked at me like that, the first time she saw me. She had needed me, and I had spent the last two decades becoming whatever she needed: her sword and her shield; her sinner, her servant, her saint; her butcher and her best beloved.
I couldn’t do it any longer, not for her. But for you—I would be a hero. One last time.
12
THE NIGHTMARES FOUNDme the first night after we left the wood.
It was the smoke that did it, I think; I’d built a fire rather than listen to your teeth clack, and the wood was green and sullen. The fire had smoldered in the night, and the smoke had fallen thickly into my mouth and nose. I can tolerate the smell during the day, but at night it brings the worst kind of dreams: memories.
I woke panting, half mad, with your face hovering above mine. You were very still, your eyes dark and yielding. I stared into them until I returned to myself, piece by piece. The cold. The faltering fire.
My fist around your throat.
I unclenched my fingers, swearing, but kept my hand at your neck in warning. “I told you not to come near to me, boy,” I spat, ashamed and aggrieved by the shame. “I could have killed you.”
You swallowed, and I felt the movement against my palm, the slight scrape of stubble, the slickness where the scar began. “You’ve called out twice in your sleep already tonight.” You shrugged, demonstrating an upsetting disregard for your own survival. “You haven’t killed me yet.”
“I still might.” I pushed my thumb back into the vein of your throat, shaking you a little.
But your pulse beat evenly beneath my touch, and the corner of your mouth lifted in that wry twist. “You won’t,” you said, and a hot surge of something—let us call it annoyance—made it briefly impossible to speak.
I looked at you—at the single curl hanging loose over your brow, at the fine, high bones of your cheeks and the red marks your spectacles left on either side of your nose—until I felt your skin warming beneath my hand. I released you suddenly, as if burnt.
It was bad enough, the way I’d touched you earlier. You’d been seized by terror, shaking and stuttering, as some soldiers do, and I’d held you until it passed. But then the bone of your hip had felt so good against my palm thatI’d kept it there, and entertained thoughts of such astonishing lechery that I’d had to dismount and walk to clear my head.
Now you returned to your own side of the fire in silence. Eventually I offered, with ill grace, “Forgive me. I dream often of things I would rather forget. Old battles. Old wounds.”
It was not untrue; sometimes I even dreamed of battles I’d never fought, or hadn’t yet fought, so that when I met my enemies on the field their faces were familiar to me. (I’d confessed this to Yvanne once. She’d told me they were visions from God, and stroked my cheek softly, over and over, until I quieted.)
But it wasn’t battle I’d been dreaming of, this time, or even the Bastion. It was you. Your face, looking down at me with awful, endless grief, as if you were watching the world end, and as if you’d seen it before. There had been fine flecks of blood on your spectacles.
God knew what I’d been saying in my sleep. I tightened the cloak around my shoulders. “Many soldiers suffer so.”
“So I’ve heard,” you said, very dryly, and I was chastened, remembering your shaking, and your scars.
You lay back beneath the furs with that damn book as your pillow. The sight of it soured me, a reminder that you were here with me not as a companion but as a chronicler.
I asked, nastily, “Will you write that the great Sir Una cries out in her sleep, like a babe?”
