You were standing between us, looking up at me through the fine glass windows of your spectacles. Your fingers were tight around my wrist, as if you thought you could stop me. As if it had never crossed your mind that I might cut you down to reach him.
I was tempted, for a long red moment, to teach you better.
Then I felt something trickle warmly down my wrist, slipping between my knuckles, and I realized you were holding me hard enough that your wound had opened afresh.
I sheathed the sword with a quick metal slither and let go the hilt. I have never liked to see you bleed.
I looked up at the villager, now swaying with a strange, sick expression on his face, as if he knew how close his own death had flown by him andwas not wholly relieved that it had missed. Half his hair had been burned away, replaced by slick pink scars.
“Run,” I told him. He ran, and the others—his daughters or sisters, grim-faced Hyll women who could not afford the indulgence of dying—ran after him.
At the edge of the village, I knelt and linked my fingers together. After a pause, you stepped carefully in my cupped hands and let me lift you into the saddle. I walked; you surely would not want to touch me, now that you knew what I was.
We traveled miles before we made camp that night, and for once you had nothing to say. The silence was less welcome than I thought it would be, after so many days of your jackdaw chattering.
Eventually you said, “Bastard.”
I shrugged. I had been called worse that day.
Then you said, “He shouldn’t have touched you. None of them should have dared,” and I realized that it was not me you were angry with. I watched a faint flush spread across the bridge of your nose as you paced and ranted. You gestured violently with your injured hand; a fleck of blood hissed in the fire.
“Come here,” I said, and you did.
The wound was deep, still oozing, the bandages crusted yellow and pink. I ought to have tended to it sooner, but I had been reluctant to hold your hands in mine. It was sinful enough, the way I looked at them.
I spoke while I worked, to distract myself. I tried to make you understand why they hated and feared me, and why they were wise to do so. You argued with me until I snapped—no one else provokes me so—“Theyshouldfear me, boy. And so should you.”
I tied the bandage and drew away, but you caught my hand in yours. “Well,” you said, your voice high and hoarse, “I don’t.”
And this time when you looked at me, I knew you did not see the Una Everlasting you wrote about in your book, pure and true and beautiful. You saw me as I was: old and scarred and brutal, a monster that would turn on even a harmless villager.
You had seen the truth of me and yet you were still here, holding my hand, and I couldn’t seem to pull away.
I watched, feeling both drunk and dead sober, as you turned my hand gently in yours. You studied it for a moment, running your thumb over the hard planes of callus, then bent and touched your lips to my open palm.
A shudder wracked me from skull to spine, and I knew suddenly how it would be with you. Most of my lovers—camp followers and soldiers, crofters’ daughters and the idle sons of lords—had wanted only to take or be taken; they came to me warily or arrogantly, shy or swaggering, as to a caged wolf. But you—oh, you would come to me on your knees, as to a king, and you would give and give.
I was leaning down to you, ready to let you, when you looked up from my palm. You met my eyes—and flinched.
So you were afraid, after all. Good.
I pulled my hand sharply from yours and strode back to my side of the fire. I felt your eyes follow me, huge and dark. “Una, I—”
“Don’t.” The word was harshly hewn. “Don’t.” For once, you listened; for once, I wished you hadn’t.
I fell asleep with my fist clenched around my own palm, as if your kiss were a dove or a lark, which would fly from me unless I held it fast.
Six days later, we climbed Cloven Hill.
You were nervy and overtalkative the whole way up. You dressed me well for battle—had you squired in your youth? had armor changed so little, in nine hundred years?—but your hands shook badly. I should have told you how many dragons I had slain, but I didn’t; it was such a novelty, to be fussed over.
It had been one of Yvanne’s very first decrees as queen, that Dominion should be rid of dragons. They were the devil’s own creatures, she said, for they lived on and on, undying, and only the Savior was deathless.
There was some opposition at first, especially in the north, where dragons were still carved into lintels and coffin lids for luck. And there were the stories told by the Roving Folk: that a drop of dragon’s blood could heal any wound or cure any sickness; that a dragon’s heart might be planted, like a seed, and the tree that grew from it would live forever.
But these, the queen said, were pagan superstitions, which would not be tolerated in Dominion. If a person was pious and loyal, he would report all dragon sightings to the crown, and after the dragon was slain, he would burn the carcass three times over, and scatter the ashes.
I had slain nearly a score myself, and hated it every time.
