I flicked my Lucky Star to the floor and ground it out beneath my boot. Then I said to Vivian Rolfe what I should have said to her the last time, and the time before that: “Go to hell.”
“Probably,” Vivian answered, unoffended, “but may I ask why?”
“Because it isn’t worth it. None of this is worth it.”
She was still stroking your hair. “A whole nation—a safe nation, a peaceful, proud nation—is not worth the life and death of one woman? Are you quite sure of your math, Corporal?”
I wasn’t. I’d been a soldier. I’d gone to war—more than once, apparently—and the whole calculus of war depends on the belief that the nation is more valuable than any one life or death. But I looked at you laid out on your bier, your face stern and harsh even beneath the powder and pink rouge, and found I no longer believed it.
Perhaps this is what happened to my father. Perhaps he went to war and met a Hinterlander girl—my mother—and lost his faith, or found a new one. Perhaps he and I were the same and hating him had been like spitting in a mirror over and over.
I said, again, mulishly, “It’s not worth it.”
An impatienttskof her tongue. “You are not the only one in this room who loves her, Mallory.”
I looked very deliberately at the place where Vivian’s hand still rested on your head. Her fingers had curled into claws, knotting in your hair. “I disagree.”
Vivian’s mouth twisted, the swelling stretching her lips ghoulishly. “If it weren’t for me, she would have died in those woods, alone and forgotten. I’m the reason you even know her name, boy.”
The porcelain shattered. “You’re the reason she’sdead!” Why had I stopped hitting her, once I’d started?
“Nothing that lives lasts forever,” she said, softly. “But her name—that will never die, I swear.” Vivian’s face was ardent, full of conviction. She fumbled something from her skirts and thrust it toward me: an ancient book, bound in wood. “If you loved her at all, Owen—”
“Don’t—”
“You would make them remember her.”
I stood breathing hard, staring at the book. I could not imagine, in that moment, ever touching it again. “I won’t do it.” My voice was so low it caught, like the belly of a truck scraping over gravel.
The urgency went out of her face. It was replaced by the same chilly, pragmatic expression she’d worn just before she plunged the knife into my hand. “You will, actually.”
“Like hell I—”
“Because it’s the only way you’ll get another chance to save her.” Vivian gave a little shrug which suggested she was sorry for my troubles, but that her hands were tied. Then she called two names in Middle Mothertongue and tucked the book back inside her skirts.
I lunged for her, but before my fingers found her throat, there were guardsmen pouring through the door, prying me away. A boot slammed into the back of my leg with a sound like an oyster popping. My knees hit the floor.
Vivian straightened the crumpled collar of her gown. She said, “I’ll give you a little time to reflect, I think,” and swept out.
I struggled—not toward the door, but toward the bier, fighting with a mindless, animal desperation—until one of the men cracked my head, quite hard, against the stone wall. I kept struggling, but my limbs grew weak and disobedient, and one of my eyes refused to focus.
They dragged me up flight after flight of stairs, and I knew by the sudden chill that we were back in that miserable tower room. This time they tore the curtains from the windows and the blankets from the bed. They stripped my service jacket from my limbs and left me shivering in my torn, blood-stained shirtsleeves.
They locked the door behind them. This, I thought distantly, must be why I had never liked locked doors, or the cold; the body remembers.
When they returned, three days later, the bottoms of my feet and the tops of my ears had turned the mottled black of old fruit, and there were blisters in the creases of my fingers. They asked me questions, but my tongue was too swollen to speak.
They went away again. A little while later the queen arrived.
Vivian studied me dispassionately. I closed one eye so that her features came into focus and saw her shake her head. “I told them no head wounds, but these peasants have no respect for the frontal lobe.”
She bade a serving girl to fetch bread and water and light the fire. Istared at the flames in an agony of longing, knowing how badly the heat would hurt and desiring it anyway. It was birchwood, and the flames were the same driven white as your hair.
The serving girl set a stack of vellum and a fresh-cut pen at my elbow, along with my battered spectacles. I slid them carefully over my nose and saw Vivian’s smile splintered and multiplied by the cracked lenses.
She turned away. Over her shoulder, she said, “Make sure you work that prophecy in.”
I did what I was told. I always did, in the end.
