“My father,” I echoed, faintly. “My father is—detained? And he said—”
“Well, no, actually he said something like ‘The boy—tell him I—never mind.’ Eloquence must run in the family. I chose to communicate the spirit of his remarks.”
I thought of all the headlines I’d ignored for the last year, the raids and protests and mass arrests. I thought of my father as I’d last seen him, furious and sorry and old. I thought of the blood I’d seen congealing on the capitol steps—his, I was sure of it, though I couldn’t say why.
Had I been lecturing on my stupid little tour, while the only two people I cared about were imprisoned? Had Vivian known, when she clinked her glass against mine, that my father was shackled in some windowless basement?
I looked at my own hands, and found they were shaking badly. I couldn’t tell if it was another of my fits, or simple rage. “I’m sorry. I should have looked for you.” I swallowed, hard. “If you are in need of legal or financial assistance, I am in a position to help.”
Sawbridge was attempting to close her traveling trunk, apparently under the impression that books might shrink themselves if glared at with sufficient force. “Thank you, dear,” she said, “but Sylvie and I have decided not to wait around for the next arrest. We’re going abroad—tonight, if I can get thisdamnthing—to shut—”
I crossed to the desk and added my weight to the trunk lid. There were several worrying pops from the hinges. “You’re fleeing the country? That doesn’t strike you as a little… premature?”
“Speaking as a recent guest of the government: It strikes me as post-mature, flirting with postmortem.”
The latch clicked. Sawbridge hauled the trunk around her desk, marching for the door with her chin high, as if it didn’t bother her in the least to leave behind her research and notes, the desk where she had worked for so many years, the place she had carved for herself in a college where nine-tenths of her students still assumed she was a secretary on the first day of class.
I touched her arm, lightly, as she passed. “Why did you do it? Why would you destroy the grail?”
She made an amused sound in her throat. “I would set fire to the national archives myself if I thought Vivian Rolfe wanted them.” She sobered, looking up at me with an expression I didn’t recognize on her face. I’d never seen her uncertain. “There’s something wrong with it, Owen, with the structure of it all. I’ve spent my whole life chasing it and have nothing to show except bad eyes and back problems. But it’s not right, Iknowit’s not.”
“What’s not right?” I was careful to keep my voice neutral.
Her lips thinned anyway. “You are a great historian, Mallory, or you could have been. You know that history is mostly happenstance. Accidents piled on top of mistakes, a series of dice rolled in dim rooms by careless hands. It is not a lesson, until we learn it. It is not a story, until we tell it. And every story serves someone.” This was an abbreviated version of the lecture she gave in every class she ever taught. I nodded, somewhat warily. “It’s why I listen more to material evidence than the written word. Words lie, but—”
“Bones don’t,” I finished for her.
She very nearly smiled at me. “But this—it’s all so neat. The book, suddenly resurfacing. The cup and crown discovered. The prophecy fulfilled after a thousand years. I’m surprised Sir Una herself hasn’t popped out of her grave, Valiance in one hand and the flag in the other.”
A chill crawled down my spine, settling like swallowed ice in my stomach. “What are you suggesting?”
“I am suggesting that someone istellingthis story because it serves them. I was given my little part to play and—Savior save me—I played it.” That jagged bitterness had returned to her voice. “Just as you played yours.”
“If you are referring to my translation ofThe Death of Una Everlasting,a perfectly legitimate contribution to—”
“You know I’m not. Or do you?” Her eyes moved over my face, and I had the old sense of being professionally vivisected. More quietly, she said, “You haven’t asked me where I found them. The cup and crown.”
“Where did you find them?”
“In the tomb of Una Everlasting,” Sawbridge said, and I wasn’t surprised, not at all. For a moment I could picture it so clearly that the cluttered office fell away, replaced by cold limestone and the fresh green smell of ulla flowers. In my ears I heard the snap and pop of tallow candles.
Sawbridge’s voice turned musing. “If anyone had asked me, I would have told them the Everlasting was just a myth, an amalgamation of heroic traditions stuffed into a single character.” She had, in fact, said this often, to anyone nearby, without provocation. “But then we unsealed the chamber, and there she was. There was her armor, and there was her sword—though if that damn thing was forged in the ancient age, I’ll eat my left boot—and there were her bones.”
The tremor in my hands was worsening. My head hurt, suddenly and badly, and my lungs no longer seemed to be the correct size. I took sharp, shallow breaths.
“And beside her—placed there long after her death, judging by the sediment deposits—were the grail and the crown. Don’t ask me how they got there. The Chancellor’s pet priest has produced a letter from the Church archives claiming that Sir Ancel repented on his deathbed and had the items secretly returned, but I’d swear it’s a fake. Anyway, the grail and crown were only thesecond- andthird-biggest mysteries in that tomb.” Sawbridge fished a twist of grubby paper from her pocket and handed it to me. “Thiswas the first.”
I unfolded the paper clumsily, and a single cigarette butt rolled into my palm. It had been smoked down to the last pinch of paper and tobacco, then ground flat beneath a boot heel, but I could still make out the crumpled edge of a tiny silver star.
I stared and stared at it, remembering the taste of cheap tobacco in my mouth.
Sawbridge said, softly, “I don’t know anyone else who smokes those damn things. And I’m telling you, that tomb had been bricked up for hundreds of years. I don’t…” She shook her head once, sharply. “I don’t know how or why any of this is happening, but I sure as hell know who it serves.”
I couldn’t seem to reply. My blood was rushing in my ears, and the walls around me felt tenuous and unconvincing, like cheap stage props.
I heard Sawbridge say, dryly, “Enjoy the coronation.” Then, softer, “And take care, Mallory.”
Then she was gone, leaving me with nothing but a faint heat against my cheek, as if she had kissed it before she left, and a cigarette I’d smoked a thousand years ago.
