When I opened them, our positions had reversed, so that I was lying across your lap and your face was hovering above mine, full of grief. Feet were running around us. The queen was wailing, “The crown! The grail! They’ve taken them!”
You were saying my name, over and over, and you were crying. You always cried, at the end.
I babbled and writhed, trapped inside a body that no longer obeyed me. “Come back for me, you have to come back—please—”
“Always,” you answered, and I knew suddenly that it was true, and that you had said it many times before. I remembered, and in remembering came a great peace.
I was dying, but I had died before, and would die again. We had told this story so many times, you and I, and we would tell it so many more, and it would always end here, like this: with my blood on your hands and your tears on my face.
Call it God or fate, bad luck or good—all I knew is that I would see you again, and it was enough.
I lifted my arm, feeling the muscles of my back rip like poorly sewn seams. I touched your face, knuckles scraping the stubble of your jaw, thumb resting on the bow of your lips.
“Wait for me,” I told you, with the very last of my breath, “beneath the yew tree.”
You went entirely still. You met my eyes, and I knew by the sudden weight of years in your gaze that you, too, had remembered, at least a little.
That time, I died smiling.
You’ll have to tell the rest of it.
14
THIS TIME, WHENyou died in my arms, I did not go mad. This time, when they pulled your corpse from my lap, I let them take you.
I hadn’t remembered everything—it was like remembering someone else’s dream, or a play you’d heard described but never seen yourself—but I had remembered enough to know this was not truly the end, but only the turning of a great wheel. I knew one day I would stand again beneath the yew, and one day you would find me there.
They led me up to that high, cold room. I went placidly. I sat without speaking while the blood clotted and congealed, itchily, on my chest. The cut truly wasn’t deep; the bruise around it, already blackening, would take longer to heal. Odd, that a traitor would hesitate to kill a bystander.
Had I been hurt, the last time? No—I’d been too slow, and Ancel’s sword had run you through. He had been alone, before, but this time there had been a shadowy swarm of cloaks and daggers. My memories were hazy and out-of-focus, but I felt the truth of them in my skin, as if my body remembered what my brain could not.
Eventually the queen arrived. I did not bow or kneel. I only said, evenly, “I’d like to see her.”
She—who was the queen, who was Vivian Rolfe—opened her mouth, then closed it. She nodded once.
I let her lead me down into the catacombs, though my feet knew the way. The air grew stale and greasy, the scent so familiar that I hardly flinched when I saw you laid out on your bier. I remembered the ulla flowers gathered around your corpse, the perfect white fall of your hair, the mesmeric gold light of the candles. In another life, Vivian Rolfe might have made a very fine photographer, or perhaps a stage director.
My hands were steady as I lit a cigarette. I did not offer one to Vivian.
Eventually she said, “I know none of this is easy, Mallory, but I need you to understand why we’re here, whyyou’rehere, particularly.”
This was the opening line of what proved to be a long and fairly compelling speech. She spoke of fate and God, of Dominion and Una Everlasting, of a woman who had broken time itself to serve her country. There were little pauses after certain lines, as if she anticipated questions or objections, but I said nothing at all.
“In order to have a future worth fighting for,” she said, “you must have a past worth remembering.”
A more significant pause followed, and I realized this was her closing argument. I took a long drag from the cigarette and asked, “How many times?”
“Pardon?”
“How many times has this happened before? How many times has she died?” My calmness was a porcelain shell over my skin, encasing me. I might have been asking if she had any plans for the holiday weekend.
Vivian’s expression underwent several rapid changes, the muscles of her face twitching too quickly to seem quite sane. She settled on a look of mild chagrin, as if she’d been caught in an accounting error. “Do you know, I’ve lost track,” she said, and I punched her as hard as I could, full in the face.
The knuckle of my index finger split. Vivian fell back against the stone wall and slid down it, landing cross-legged on the floor. She rolled her jaw several times, said “shit,” and spat a sticky stream of blood to the floor. Something wet and white shone in the blood: the point of a canine.
She tongued the blood from her teeth, thoughtfully. “Answer me this, Mallory—does it matter? No, no,think”—she held up both hands, palm out—“I’ve told you what this story means, how much depends on it. Does it truly matter how many times it takes to get it right?” Her lips were swelling fast, so that the edges of the words were slightly slurred.
I was looking down at my own hand, pinching the skin of the knuckle back together, experimentally. “I don’t understand why you would need to repeat it at all—ah.” I shook my head. “You’re not repeating it, are you? You’re altering it, changing the story to suit. That’s why I remember—different versions of events.”
