I walked from the station past my father’s house and up into the hills. I went to the place where I first saw you, which was the last place anything had made sense.
But the grove was gone.
During the war the land had finally been cleared, and the entire hilltop given over to pasture. There were a few stumps and thickets left, but of my favorite tree—that great and ancient yew in the heart of the woods—there was nothing at all. Even the roots had been dug out, so that all that remained was an indentation in the earth surrounded by tiny white flowers, like a plundered grave.
For once, I did not weep.
I only knelt for a while in the place where the woods had once been, but were no longer, until I understood what every person understands eventually: that I had left home and could never return to it, and that there would never be a time when I did not miss it.
Yet still, I lingered. You had come to me three times, I thought; why not a fourth?
I whispered your name; nothing answered me but the bitter wet wind, which blew hard across the bare hills.
I picked a fistful of those little white flowers before I left. Then I stood, damp-kneed and dry-eyed, and went down to the tavern. My father wasn’t there, but the barkeep told me she would save the dragonscales for him.
I asked, “The what?”
She nodded at the flowers hanging limply from my hand. “Dragonscales, my mother always called them.”
“Ah,” I said. I looked them up later; they’re also called ulla flowers, which meansmany,in Middle Mothertongue, because they’re so common as to be considered weeds.
I tucked the flowers obediently into a little jam jar and thanked the barkeep, who kissed me on the cheek and told me my father had worried himself sick, which I did not imagine was distinguishable from drinking himself sick.
Then I walked to the village post office, where I mailed a letter to my old adviser apologizing for going to war in the middle of term and begging to be readmitted to the Cantford Department of History.
If you would not come to me, I thought, I would go to you.
Professor Sawbridge’s reply arrived four days later, so heavily redacted that it was mostly prepositions and conjunctions. (Gilda Sawbridge had a low opinion of the government and a high temper, which tended to upset the censors. It also upset the Cantford Board of Fellows, her students, the other faculty, and me, but, as she was the most acclaimed archaeologist of her generation, we all did our best to overlook it.)
Tucked in the envelope alongside the letter was a formal notice of acceptance on school letterhead. At the top, Sawbridge had written:Don’t make me regret it.
I returned to Cantford campus the following week. In our first meeting, I told Professor Sawbridge that I’d chosen a specialization: the folkloric traditions of Middle Dominion.
She propped her glasses on top of her head and gave me her full attention. I’ve never been vivisected, but I imagine it feels very much like receiving Gilda Sawbridge’s full attention.
Eventually she said, without looking away, “Too broad.”
“I intend to focus on the Everlasting Cycle, our founding mythological—”
“It’s played out.”
“It’s patriotic.”
“Please, I’ve just had breakfast,” she said, without inflection.
“I wonder that you, of all people, could fail to appreciate the need for further study of Una Everlasting.” This, I thought, was clever of me: Sawbridge was the only female professor in the whole of Cantford. “Her story tells us that a woman might take up arms as well as a man. That she might fight, even lead—”
“So long as she dies before she starts wondering why she can’t vote, divorce, or open a bank account. Do not patronize me, Mallory.” This, too, was delivered flatly. “Now tell me honestly: Why?”
I answered, softly, “Erxa Dominus,ma’am.”
It was a good line, well delivered, and even a little true. I had failed my country on the field, but still hoped to serve it better on the page. To earn the medal I could hardly stand to look at, to finally become—despite my embarrassing origins and even more embarrassing father—a true son of Dominion. I imagined myself standing proudly behind lecterns and oaken desks, beyond all reproach and suspicion, unassailable at last.
But beneath all that, of course, there was another reason, which I could not say aloud.
Professor Sawbridge looked at me some more. She looked at my hands, which were shaking again, and at my throat, which I kept hidden behind tightly buttoned collars. She looked at my eyes, and perhaps she saw something of that last, unspoken reason there.
She said, on a sigh that made her book towers wobble dangerously, “Good luck.”
