It was harder, this time. My blisters kept bursting and oozing, and my head hurt badly. At least two pages were blotched by tears, which ran down my face in a continual seep, like a spring from a mountainside.
But I finished your story, as I had before, and would again. I changed only the final few paragraphs. Ancel betrays you, and while the two of you duel—I could not bring myself to cheat future generations of a good fight scene—his wicked accomplices make off with the crown and grail. It struck me as a clumsy addition, inserted without foreshadowing or gravity, but perhaps Ancel’s treachery once felt similarly abrupt. Perhaps there’s no story we won’t swallow, so long as we’ve heard it before.
I crammed the prophecy into the last lines:
But the queen cared not for her stolen treasure. She knelt on the floor, humble as a peasant, and took Una’s head into her lap. Gently she touched her face and wept with love for the first and best of her knights.
But Sir Una did not weep. She spoke, and though her voice was weak, it rang out so that every corner of the court heard the words and remembered them after. She said, “Whoso finds the crown and cup once more is rightwise queen born of all Dominion.”
And as the last of her heart’s blood stained the stones of Cavallon, she smiled up at the queen, for she knew one day, in Dominion’s darkest hour, the cup and crown would return.
Two words left her lips before she died:Erxa Dominus.
I stared for a long time at those two final words, the last, tiny lie in a whole book of them. Then I flipped back through the pages and addedtwenty-six grammatically incorrect punctuation marks, spaced very deliberately throughout the text. It didn’t take me long; I learned this trick when I was ten.
I slept for a little time after that, and dreamed ofUlla, the girl I used to visit beneath the yew, who never existed. It’s summer in the dream, when the shadows are deep blue, and the shafts of sun are so bright they seem almost solid, like poured gold.Ullais sprawled like a great cat beneath one of these, her face tipped up to the light. Her hair is so bright it’s difficult to look at her, but I do.
I have always liked to look at you.
When I woke, Vivian was standing over the desk withThe Death of Una Everlastingin her hands. My new pages had been sewn hastily into the back, the edges sticking out from the binding like wagging tongues.
Vivian was smiling down at the book, shaking her head in admiration. “I know I’ve said it before, but truly: Well done, Owen. I choked up at the end, and I love what you did with the prophecy. There are perhaps more grammatical errors than I’m used to seeing from you”—they were not errors—“but I think we can chalk that up to frostbite and a mild concussion.”
She set the book on the desk, and beside the book she set a slim silver knife. “Thought you might like to do the honors yourself, this time.”
I picked up the knife, turning it clumsily in my crusted, numbed hands. It was small, but sharp; I might have slit her throat quite neatly, if my fingers could’ve closed properly around the hilt, if my feet could’ve borne my weight, if both my eyes could focus properly. I wondered if this, too, had been accounted for, arranged just so.
I asked, “Why do I forget? When I go back.”
I expected obfuscation or reprimand, but she answered promptly, “Because you’re going back to your native lifespan.”
I considered this. I didn’t think it would’ve made sense even without the concussion. “Pardon?”
“There’s only ever one of you, in the course of time. You cannot travel back and have tea with your younger self—if I sent you to your childhood, you would be a child again, and know only what you knew in that moment. You cannot remember what hasn’t happened to you yet.”
I considered this, too. Then I said, “But I do, or at least I’ve begun to. How?”
“How do birds know where to migrate?” A dismissive flick of her chin. “Sheer repetition, I imagine.”
I slid the tip of the knife into the barely healed wound in the center of my left palm. The pain was familiar to me, almost intimate, as if my flesh recalled every time this blade had cut me before.The body remembers,she’d said.
But if the body remembered pain, it surely remembered pleasure, too. Perhaps your lips remembered mine, and my hands recalled the shape of yours; perhaps each time you touched me it left a subtle mark, so that my skin had become a map drawn in invisible ink, which might lead me back to you.
Perhaps those little details mattered more than Vivian thought.
I dug the knife in deeper, making it hurt, thinking of the redXon a child’s treasure map.
As I laid my hand on the book, I met Vivian’s eyes. “Next time, I’ll remember more. Next time, I’ll save her.”
She nodded. “I agree,” she answered, as the world fell away. “That’s why there won’t be a next time.”
15
SEVERAL YEARS AFTERthe war, during the mid-afternoon hour I generally put aside to fantasize about setting fire to my manuscript and disappearing into the countryside to raise goats, I received a book in the post.
I was aware, as I unwrapped it, that I ought to be filled with awe or terror, or at least the simple thrill of discovery. But all I felt was an odd ache in my chest, and a sudden, sharp pain in my left hand. I flexed it twice, but the ache remained.
I tucked the book under my arm and left my office immediately. I knocked hard into Harrison as I rounded the corner, not even pausing to apologize.
