Vivian’s smile vanished. “Mallory, look around you. We are standing in the capitol of the most powerful nation on earth. A prosperous, united, peaceful nation, which I have spent a millennium building with my own two hands, my own sweat and blood—”
“Not yours.” My voice dragged across hers, a serrated whisper.
She exhaled, annoyed, then stood. I kept the barrel of the revolver pointed just to the right of her sternum, hardly breathing, but she came no closer. She edged around the bed and leaned on the nearest windowsill, slope shouldered, infinitely weary. She looked like a woman badly in need of a cigarette.
“I was nothing, once,” she said to the window. Her face was so close to the glass that her breath misted over it. “I mean that literally: I came into this world lower than the meanest pig farmer, lower even than his scrawniest sow. But I was smart, and I was hungry, and I would not remain nothing.”
I tried to picture her as a girl, spindly and square jawed, perhaps begging on street corners or scrounging scraps from alleys. But it was like imagining an asp as an egg; it may have been true, but I couldn’t see how it mattered.
“I found my way, eventually, beneath the wing of a great man. A powerful man. One night I told my—teacher, we’ll call him—that I would be great, too, someday. He laughed. He asked me to name a great woman of history. Just one. And then, in the silence, he kissed me on the forehead.” One of her hands drifted upward to rub, hard, at her brow.
When she turned back toward me, the light from the street fell full on her face, and I could see the black gash of her lips, the beaten steel of her jaw. In her eyes I could see what she kept so carefully hidden behind rueful smiles and ugly jokes: a bottomless, terrifying resolve, of the kind that could bend the whole history of the world to its will.
“There were noprecedentsfor what I wanted to become, you see. No stories. So I made my own precedents.” A small, proud smile, here. “I built my own ladder, rung by rung, and climbed it all the way to the top. And now every child on the street could tell you their names, andevery name is mine.” The smile widened, became beatific, so that she looked younger and more alive than I had ever seen her. “Of course it was worth it.”
This part of the speech was, I understood, intended to make her cause more sympathetic to me. To recast the last few centuries of bloodshed as a noble struggle toward justice. But all I could see was your face as you died, over and over. Was it a ladder she had climbed, or a pile of bodies? Was it justice, if it only served one person?
I thought then of the queen’s other guards, who had not looked as I expected them to look. Who had been altered, erased, unsubtly remade in the image of one woman. “What color was Ancel’s hair, before you made him change it to match yours?”
Vivian blinked. “Red.” Her nose wrinkled. “A Gallish grandmother, I believe.”
“How trying,” I said, dryly. “Last question. Once you had your crown—crowns—why did you rule Dominion so…”
“Competently?”
“Ruthlessly. Violently. Every one of your reigns is marked by wars, executions, arrests. The First Crusade, the burning of the heretics, the conquest of the Hinterlands and the occupation after. The indecency laws—my father—” I choked on the word.
“Oh, I see.” Vivian widened her eyes and flapped her lashes with showy, false innocence. “Why didn’t I hold bake sales for the schools? Why didn’t I tax the rich and tie a suffragette sash around my waist? Perhaps at my coronation I could have called for world peace and released a flock of fucking doves.” She stopped flapping her lashes. “I wouldn’t last a month, you sweet, stupid child. Even now, after all myprecedents,there are jackals at my heels. Wealthy men waiting for the slightest sign of weakness, the smallest dip in the polls. I’ve given them contracts, factories, new markets—prestigious appointments for their shitty sons, quick divorces for their inconvenient wives—I’ve given them anempire—and still,still,I am not safe. I cannot be too young or too old, too beautiful or too ugly. I cannot weep or rage. I cannot refuse a man nor fuck him nor marry him—a queen is only powerful if there are no kings or princes nearby.”
In the electric glow of the streetlight, her shoulders rose and fell. Her voice was hoarse and honest, and very tired. “I will not apologize for being powerful, but… it can be a prison, too.”
I thought of the red marks around my father’s wrists. “Spoken like someone who’s never been to prison.”
“I rule as Imust,Mallory,” she snapped. “Because if I don’t—if I falter—they will eat me alive.”
I said, sincerely, “God, I hope so,” and watched her eyes calcify into a pair of small and nasty rocks. I rolled a crick from my neck. “When I take this book back and unwrite it, and unmake your whole house of cards, I hope they forget you so quickly they don’t even know what name to write on your fucking tombstone.”
Her jaw worked briefly. When she spoke, it was not with her radio voice or her sincere appeal voice, but with the flat, disinterested certainty of an oracle. “I will find you. There is no period in history where I am not. If I am not on the throne, I am very near to it, and there is no corner of Dominion, no cave nor hollow nor dreary little village, that is not marked on the maps of Cavallon. I will know what you have done as soon as you do it, and then the hunt will begin.”
She wasn’t looking at me as she spoke. She had turned to a bookshelf and was running the flats of her hands beneath the shelves. “You mighthide, for a time—perhaps even a long time. You might begin to convince each other that you are safe, that I have given up the chase. When you have stopped waiting for me, when the hairs on your neck no longer prickle—then will I find you, and then will you suffer. You will lament, and there will be no end to your lamentation. You will weep, and there will be no end to your weeping.” She had slipped into Middle Mothertongue as she spoke, as easily and naturally as if she had learned it in the womb. “You will wish, with all your shattered heart, that you could return to this moment and walk away. You will beg me for it, before the end. And I will laugh.”
There was a brief moment here, which hung suspended between us, swollen with the weight of unmade choices. And then the moment ended, and all the choices were made, as neatly as dominoes clacking one against the other.
I dropped my left palm to the page.
Vivian Rolfe made a small, satisfied sound, as when a person finds their lost hair pin, and turned back to face me. In her hands was a sword I’d last seen laid atop your bier. She held it awkwardly across her breast, but it was already half drawn.
I didn’t hesitate. I tightened my right index finger that last, fatal centimeter. For you, for us, I would bloody my hands a hundred times over.
There was the familiarboomof the revolver, the kick of the grip in my hand—then a weird, metallicslap,like a hammer on a nail.
Vivian had been thrown back against the bookcase, but she did not look distraught to have been shot. Valiance was still in her hands, but she had moved it four inches to the left, directly over her heart. There was a small, round pock in the blade, just below the hilt, and I realized she had not intended to kill me, after all.
The room was falling away from me. The scent of summer flowers was replaced by the cold, wild smell of winter.
The last thing I saw before I left was Vivian, smiling patiently, as if she had known exactly where my bullet would fly, as if it had all happened just this way, many times.
I was alone, before you came. (You’ll forgive me for telling this part, but it always makes you cry, Owen.)
