It was a surrender, and a knight does not surrender until she’s told to.
The scholar said, softly, ‘It’s alright. I have you. Come, Una,’ and she did.
He held her afterward, her head on his chest, her leg pulled across his. He stroked her hair, wonderingly, and touched her scars, until the owner of the boardinghouse knocked politely on the attic door and asked them to please leave, as this was a decent establishment, and neither of them wore wedding rings.
Later, the scholar asked the knight if she would like a ring. ‘Or, I don’t know, a proper ceremony, with a priest. Or a certificate from the state, though not under our legal names—’
‘No,’ the knight said, in some alarm. The crown and the church were the reason they were running; why would they seek sanction from their enemies?
‘Oh,’ said the scholar, in a slightly crushed voice.
‘But I hope you do not need a ring to keep you at my side,’ the knight said. Her voice was lower and more serious than she meant it to be. ‘I fear I am a jealous woman, and do not share what is mine.’
‘Oh,’ the scholar said again, in a much happier voice.
When, in the years that followed, the knight and the scholar felt their losses too keenly—if they missed the glory of war or the labor of study or the sounds of their own names—if they felt like cart horses cut loose from their traces, running in no direction save away from the lash—they reached for one another. The knight would put her mouth to the scholar’s collarbone and his pulse would rise under her lips and they would think:We have this.
And it was enough, or would have been.
The knight, who had died many times, had no talent for survival. So the scholar was obliged to lay down certain rules.
The first rule was that they could make no home for themselves for very long, lest word spread of a tall, grim woman and a slim, nearsighted man, or of two strangers who spoke with old-fashioned accents.
The second rule was that they could not travel before the knight’s death or after the scholar’s birth, lest they forget themselves again, and become lost.
The third rule, which the knight resented most of all, and which the scholar was most adamant about, was that they could not interfere.
The wicked queen could not travel in time without her enchanted book, but there were so many versions of her already tangled into the history of Dominion that no era could be truly safe from her. Even if she wasn’t wearing the crown, she was surely lurking nearby it—as a princess, perhaps, or a duke’s wife, an angel or an abbess, a minister or a general—tending her terrible dream as carefully and ruthlessly as a vintner tended his fields.
And now that dream was shriveling like a grape in a drought.
Dominion didn’t die outright. The knight had vanished only at the very end of the queen’s plot, after all. The crown had already been won, the crusades already fought. But the grail had never been found, and the Queen’s Champion had never returned from her grand quest.
There were many endings invented for her story, none of them satisfying. Some claimed they had seen the knight themselves decades later, still miraculously young, and so she must have stolen the grail for herself. Others said no, the dragon must have taken her, for she would never have abandoned her quest. (At this the knight would snort, meanly, and the scholar would contrive to step on her foot.)
But no one disputed what happened next: The first queen had died tragically young and named no heirs. For the next few decades, the throne was traded between squabbling usurpers, like a sweet among children, while the Hyllmen and Galls quietly slipped Dominion’s leash, and the Hinterlands were lost once more.
If the wicked queen ever clawed her way back to the throne, it was not an empire she would rule, but only its remains. Wherever she was, whatever name she used: She was angry, and she was looking for them.
There could be no rumors of a white-haired woman who swung a blade as if it were a stalk of wheat. There could be no whispers of a dark-eyed man who knew too much about the future. There could be no change or break inthe pattern of history, which the queen might follow, like a dropped stitch, back to them.
The scholar had explained all this to the knight many,manytimes, and still she argued with him.
If they found themselves lingering overlong after one of those paganish village festivals that had sprung up as the church lost its hold on the countryside—if they were dizzy with mead and sex and the playful taunt of the lyre in the distance—she might say, softly, ‘There’s a cottage out on the marsh, empty since their last peat cutter died.’ Then, even more softly, ‘She might never find us.’
And the scholar would shake his head and say, ‘Rule one.’
Or, as they dragged a pair of mules over a craggy white mountaintop, she might burst out: ‘What of Hen? He suffered as much as you or I. You said she sent him back like us, over and over. Let me go back before the crusade, when he was a colt—’
‘Rule two,’ the scholar would say, wearily.
‘—and take him with us. You miss him, I know you do—’
‘Rule three, and no I don’t.’ (He did.) (A little.)
Or, worse, when they came upon three soldiers in Dominion red, laughing as they beat a beggar in the streets of Old Cantford, the knight would lunge forward—she carried no sword, but she was weapon enough—and the scholar would catch her wrist.
‘Please,’ he would say.
