There had been a time when I had kissed your hand and a time when I hadn’t; a time when I shivered alone all night, tormented by your absence, and a time I had slept beside you, tormented by your presence. A time when I had felt your mouth on mine, a second’s stolen joy, and a time when I had only dreamed it. The two of us were like a pair of merlins circling overhead, or two dancers in a line; with each pass, we drew a little nearer.
Unless we were actually paper kites on a string, flying only where we were led. Had she somehow manufactured each look we exchanged, each passing touch? “No,” I said, a little too loudly. “I don’t see how you could have—you weren’t even there. You can’t control every tiny choice, every variation—”
“No,” Vivian said comfortably, “but I can control everything that counts. The details don’t concern me.”
I felt selfish relief that, at least those little details—which didn’t count, which didn’t matter at all in the course of history—still belonged to us. “I see. So all the conflicting historical narratives are actually leftovers, relics of each iteration. I bet Ancel really was a hero, once. God, Professor Sawbridge had it right.”
Vivian pulled a face. “Remind me to have that woman arrested.”
“But why make him into a traitor?”
“Because you got too soft, and she got too damn good.” Vivian, still sitting, nodded at your body. Her expression was proud and a little exasperated, like a mother despairing of her precocious child. “She started making it past the Hinterlanders—twelve seasoned soldiers, and she barely broke a sweat. I even gave them archers, but by then you’d decided you loved her more than you loved your country. It’s a shame you’re such a crack shot, but I suppose anyone will pick up a few tricks if they’re sent to war enough times. Even you.”
This last sentence gave me a severe and instantaneous headache. If I had been to war more than once, then when did this story start? How far back did the circle go? I felt like a man holding a snarl of thread, unable to find either the beginning or the end of it.
Vivian continued, casually, “I had a devil of a time getting Ancel to do it. I told him I loved Una best. I petted and kissed her and made him watch. I told him Una was the traitor, planning to kill me—he laughed in my face. In the end I told him the truth: that Una must die, so that Dominion would live. He argued, he raged, he drank—but he did it. Ironic, isn’t it? That my most loyal knight would make the best traitor? But!” She sniffed. “Ancel the Betrayer has proved much more useful than Ancel the Good.”
I didn’t see how Sir Ancel’s character could affect the political ambitions of a woman born nine hundred years after his death, but then I remembered the cartoon in the paper with the radicals labeledSir Ancel’s Heirs.My father’s body slumped over the capitol steps.Every story needs a villain,I thought, and we had all heard this story before.
After a moment I asked, dispassionately, “Did you have the Chancellor killed, or did you do it yourself?”
Viviantsked, then winced and touched her lip with her tongue. “Don’t be unsubtle, Mallory—on any given day,plentyof people want to kill the Chancellor. The chain of causation is really such a delicate thing. You change a few tiny details—a custodian has a date and forgets to lock a door, a guard has a stomachache and leaves his post three minutes early—and you change the entire flow of history. Give me a lonely secretary and a laxative and I can move the world, to coin a phrase.”
I remembered, patchily, the speech she’d given me the last time around.Do you honestly think it waschance?she’d asked, and it wasn’t. It was always and only her. Which meant—“There was never a woman named Yvanne, then.” How had I swallowed that story? “You didn’t conveniently replace her on her deathbed. Youareher.”
Vivian blinked. “I knew the body-double thing was a little much.” She got to her feet, laboriously, and went to your bier. One hand toyed with your hair, idly possessive. “Very well. Yes. I came back much, much earlier in the tale. In the middle of nowhere, in the dead of winter. I was taken captive—I do not recommend traveling alone as a young woman in this or any other era—and Una rescued me.” Her fingers were combing through your hair now, tracing the shell of your ear. “I saw her potential at once. Even that first time, I could tell she was something special. And I knew I could make her something extraordinary.”
Anger rippled somewhere beneath my porcelain shell. You weren’tmade.You simplywere,a giant who strode through the world scarred and shining, strewing legends in her wake.
But: “I invented a lineage for myself. Gave myself a name, a title, a birthright—oh, don’t give me that look, how do you think any king gets his crown?—and made her my champion. She was very good, but I made her better. Each time I sent her back, she was a little faster, a little stronger. Her blows were more precise, her deflections more perfect. The body remembers, you see, even when the mind forgets. The first time Ancel challenged her in the name of the False King, I had to send her back through the book inpieces.By the tenth time, she could disarm Ancel in forty seconds.”
I pictured it: you as a young woman, untried, desperate to prove yourself, falling in your very first duel. But you were not buried and mourned. You were dragged back to the beginning, sent out to die and die again. Youwere not a girl, but iron in the furnace, and Vivian was the hammer that fell over and over. She had not made you, but forged you, and whet you in your own blood.
I asked, thickly, “Why?”
“There is no Dominion without Una Everlasting.”
“No, I meant—why does she have to die?”
“Ah, a much better question.” Vivian looked genuinely pleased—a clockmaker, finally asked how clocks work. “I tried it other ways, of course, but the tragedy is absolutely critical. If there’s something lost, there’s something to restore. If there’s sacrifice, there’s something worth sacrificing for. There are only two kinds of stories worth telling: the ones that send children to sleep, and the ones that send men to war. I needed the second kind.” She added, less grandly, “And it keeps us exceptional, she and I. Alive, Una would be an inspiration to every schoolgirl and housewife. Dead, she’s a warning.”
But I wasn’t really listening. I was feeling my way back along the story of my own life, lingering on the little twists and flourishes that had altered the course of it: the storybook that found its way into the barkeep’s basket when I was nine, the poster that sent me to war when I was twenty-three, the strange luck that kept me alive on the battlefield, that killed Colonel Drayton just before he killed me.
If my throat hadn’t been cut, perhaps you would have heard my warning before Ancel struck; if your eye hadn’t been gouged out, perhaps you would have seen him coming.
The work of fate, I’d thought, or maybe even God. But there was no God in Dominion; there was only Vivian Rolfe, telling a story.
And she wasn’t finished. She was telling it again, tweaking the ending. I said, slowly, “You had the grail and the crown stolen, this time. Why?”
“Because of the prophecy, of course.”
“What prophecy?”
“The one you’ll put in the book. Something like, ‘When the cup and crown return, so, too, will the rightwise queen of Dominion.’ Or perhaps it ought to rhyme—I defer to your judgment.”
A little silence fell. I could see, reluctantly, how it would go: Chancellor Gladwell assassinated, Vivian sworn in on a wave of patriotic verve, the crown and grail discovered, the prophecy fulfilled—the monarchy reinstated. Vivian would win the Last Crusade as she had won the first one:wearing a crown. There was a madness to it, a labyrinthine complexity that suggested a somewhat warped mind, but I thought it would likely succeed. Dominion has always loved its queens best.
And so all of this—my life and your death, and the lives and deaths of every soldier in every crusade—was to put the same woman on the same throne, twice.
