Hen was bleeding now, and favoring his foreleg, but still standing. He was nosing at a body huddled against the well. The body was wearing a red jacket.
He whuffed at you, impatiently, and you lifted your head. You saw me, and the relief in your face was so obvious, so unguarded, that I looked away.
You rested your head against Hen’s jaw, and he nuzzled your hair. You said something to him too soft to hear but—I swear—there were tears in your eyes. I knew you loved him, despite all your complaining.
I lurched across the courtyard toward you, wading through carnage. I reached my hand down to you before it occurred to me that you might not want to touch me—my hair was clotted to my armor, and I smelled like a slaughterhouse. But you took my hand and kept it even after I’d pulled you to your feet.
Your spectacles were spattered with gore. Your skin had the patchy, greenish cast of bad fruit, and you were scowling up at me with perfect, angelic fury. “I told you to run, woman!”
I shrugged, and you made a frustrated gesture with that strange silver-and-black relic you carried. I recalled the odd booming sounds, and the archers falling from the ramparts. It seemed you were not so fragile as I had feared; the thought warmed me strangely.
You were still upset. “You knew. Youknewwhat was waiting for you, but you didn’t run. Why?”
I shrugged again. “I just… could not.” I found it easier to answer if I looked away from your accusing, red-flecked gaze. “It was the whole reason you were sent here in the first place. You wanted a grand story, a fitting end to your book. And I wanted… to be what you wanted.” Was that not howyou loved someone? By hammering your body into whatever shape they liked best, and handing yourself to them like a hilt?
Apparently it was not, for you whipped your glasses from your face and began to scrub them roughly against your coat. Your hands were shaking so badly that I took them away and cleaned them for you.
As I settled the lenses back over your eyes, you said, tiredly, “To charge into battle, against terrible odds—to know the odds, and charge anyway—there is a word for someone like that, and it is not ‘grand.’”
“Hero?” I suggested, not entirely in jest.
“Dead,” you answered, and your voice wobbled a little on the word.
I took your hands carefully in mine. They trembled like a pair of caged doves. “Owen,” I said, “I am not dead.”
You exhaled harshly, only half soothed. “You aren’t deadyet.It’s the Betrayer who kills you in most versions, although some of the older iterations have you shot full of arrows.” You cast an edgy, shadowed look up at the ramparts. “Let’s get inside.”
I tended to Hen first, which you didn’t like, and then I might have stumbled a little, which you liked even less. You swore and fussed and hauled my arm across your shoulders. I grunted a little as the arrowheads shifted in my flesh.
It was slow going. Perhaps I’d lost more blood than I’d thought. I was dizzy and sluggish, and my vision kept doubling or tripling, so that I saw the same courtyard repeated over and over with minor variations. The corpses arranged differently. The sun higher or lower. I leaned too heavily on you, but you bore it well. You even spoke to me, softly coaxing, as if I were a lover, or a mule.
We passed into the shadow of the Keep. Through the great doors. Through the gawping, chittering court. I tilted my head toward the throne room. “There. She’ll be waiting.”
Yvanne was always wherever she would look the most holy and beautiful, as if she weren’t a woman but only a series of staged portraits. And yet I could feel my heart hitting the back of my ribs as we approached, my breath catching in my throat.
There was the throne. There was the veiled woman in the dragonscale mantle, and there was the crown I had set on her brow with my own hands, when I was still young enough to believe she deserved it.
And there was that weary, hateful hunger rising in me again, as predictably as the sun. I had stopped loving her a long time ago, but I had never stopped wanting her love.
You hissed something in my ear. I didn’t hear it. You asked again, urgently, “Where’s Ancel?”
“Why?” I couldn’t help the slight sullenness in my tone; it had never seemed fair, that I won every battle and Ancel won every heart. “You know his hair isn’t even naturally yellow. He dyes it.”
You looked at me blankly. Blinked twice. “Of course, you don’t know. It’s him. Ancel is the Betrayer.”
“No, he isn’t.” The answer came easily, with certainty.
“Remind me which of us has seen the future?”
But it wasn’t a matter of knowing the future. It was a matter of knowing Ancel of Ulwin. Ancel had been my brother, my comrade, my rival—even my lover, sometimes. After the Crusade he had been the only man I thought could stop me, or at least slow me down, if I tried to kill him. He had listened to my reasoning in silence, shaken his head, and said, “Oh, Una, you flatter me.” He had not visited my chambers again.
I did not like him very much, but I loved him, and I knew him. He was spiteful and vain and viciously jealous; he was charming and brave and he would pluck his own eyes from his face before he betrayed Yvanne.
I opened my mouth to explain, but another voice called out—a thin, plangent voice that closed like fingers around my jaw and turned my head back to the throne. “Sir Una,” said the queen, and the crowd parted like skin beneath the knife.
I flinched upright, away from you. Yvanne had never liked me to look weak.
You pressed the grail into my palm and whispered, “Take care.”
