I didn’t remember everything, not then.
But I knew, finally, for certain, that there was something I could not remember—and once I knew that, it was only a matter of time. Sawbridge used to say that a good historian tells us what’s in the records, and a great historian tells us what isn’t. And I had been a great historian, once.
I tucked the cigarette butt in my coat pocket, gathered up the remains of Sawbridge’s papers, and went to work.
I barely left my office for the rest of the summer. It was restful, in a way; I declined every invitation and engagement. I asked—loudly, in several crowded faculty meetings—to be excused from teaching duties, as I was busy working on my new monograph. A history of the First Crusade, I said, intended for a popular audience. My colleagues recoiled—if I would stoop to popular history, what depravity might be next? fiction?—but I had the somewhat paranoid idea that one of them might send a discreet telegram to the Chancellor, and that the Chancellor might decide she had nothing to worry about from me.
I worked methodically, without rushing; it seemed to me I had all the time in the world.
I began with the earlier fragments of the Everlasting Cycle, moving steadily up through Lazamon and Montmer, guided by Sawbridge’s private notes. I’d read it all before, of course, but this time I tried to see it as a story told over and over, rather than historical fact, and to wonder who it served.
A pattern emerged, hazily, like one of those pictures that doesn’t come clear until you unfocus your eyes. I don’t want to bore you, but consider:
In Lazamon’s compilation of legends—the earliest complete version of your story—it isn’t the Hinterlanders who betray Yvanne, but the Norns. This legend was recorded just before the Nornish Plot, which resulted in the death of a king of Dominion and all his heirs. The only survivor was the wife of his youngest son: Tilda the Younger.
Several centuries later, de Meulan composed her Everlasting Psalms—based, she claimed, onThe Death of Una Everlasting,which had been given to her by an angel. Lazamon had mentioned God only in passing, but de Meulan spent long verses on your piety and chastity. It was the first time you were referred to as a saint.
The psalms were written during the reign of Lysabet I. She was under pressure from her archbishop to marry and give the throne to her husband or son, but she refused—in the name of Saint Una the Virgin. The archbishop was found to be a heretic and burned, as part of the spiritual cleansing of the country. It was during Lysabet’s reign that the last of the Gallish temples were destroyed, and the Roving Folk were driven south.
It was Montmer’sDominion Historica,in the early modern period, which first named the Hinterlanders as your killers. When a Dominion ship was sunk, shortly after, everyone knew it must have been the Hinterlanders: They were, after all, Dominion’s oldest enemies. Our first war with the Hinterlands began shortly thereafter.
Do you see, now, what Sawbridge did? That’s nothistory—that’s a story, designed to teach us who to hate and who to obey, what god to worship and what flag to fight for and what color eyes are the most beautiful. It’s a story that made a continent into a kingdom into an empire, that put a woman on the throne—more than once, I suspected—and was about to do so again.
Shortly after Professor Sawbridge fled the country, the ministers had voted to restore the monarchy. Vivian Rolfe would be crowned before winter. She would take the name Yvanne the Second, she said, reverting to the Middle Mothertongue version of her name. Dominion would have a queen once more.
I looked at her face in the paper and imagined a crown on her brow. It was very, very easy to imagine.
I decided abruptly to copy all my notes into code, in case she had spies going through my office. It was a quick and simple cipher—one simply made a great number of punctuation errors in a given text. If there were an even number of errors, you wrote down the first letter following the mistake; if there were an odd number, you wrote the second. I hadn’t used it since I was a child.
But, as I made the first false comma on the page, I thought:Yes, I have.
I considered this thought carefully, turning it like a stone in my hands. I considered the Lucky Star cigarette in your tomb. I considered my dreams, which were still, always, of you.
Then I unlocked the bottom drawer of my desk and withdrew the thick folder where I kept the photographed pages ofThe Death of Una Everlasting.They were the property of the state, technically, but I hadn’t been able to bear leaving them behind.
It didn’t take me long, now that I knew what I was looking for. I counted twenty-six false punctuation marks. An even number. I copied out the first letter past each mark.
W a i t
F o r
m E
My hands were not shaking at all. I wrote the rest of it quickly, easily, barely even pausing to look up each letter, and when it was finished, I said the whole of it aloud.
“Wait for me, beneath the yew tree.”
I remembered hearing those words, over and over, in your voice. I remembered holding your face with my bloody hands.
And then I remembered everything.
I became aware, after some little while, that I was on the floor, with my cheek resting on the thick carpeting and the contents of the folder scattered around me. My head hurt, as if my skull was too small for all the memories inside it.
I stood, somewhat unsteadily. “I’m coming,” I said, and my voice was smooth and sweet because—this time—my throat had never been cut. Because, this time, it hadn’t needed to be. “Oh, Una. I’m coming.”
Following my conversation with Professor Sawbridge, I’d sent letters and telegrams to every government office I could think of. In response I had received a truly masterful range of administrative stonewalling, including outright denial, waffling, misdirection, subtle threats, unsubtle threats, lies, and envelopes markedRETURN TO SENDER.No one would tell me the whereabouts or health of my father, or even admit to his existence.
It took me far too long to realize I could not only afford a solicitor, but a good solicitor. I had immediately engaged the services of an openly unethical young man who did not seem to blink with normal human frequency, and who had produced, just the previous day, an obsequious letter from the Ministry of War, apologizing for the confusion and inviting me to visit my father and ascertain for myself his physical health.
