Eventually she would answer, grinding the words through her teeth, ‘As you will.’
Late on the night they left the beggar to his fate, she said, bitterly: ‘Well done, boy.’ She threw a branch onto the fire, and the sparks wavered in her vision, distorted by tears. ‘You’ve killed Una Everlasting once and for all.’
‘God knows I’m trying,’ the scholar answered, too sharply. Then, with more patience: ‘She has to die, for you to live. Or at least disappear so thoroughly that no one ever, ever finds her.’
‘I know,’ said the knight, and she did. ‘It’s only that I miss her, sometimes. I miss being…’
He said, gently, cruelly, ‘You were never a hero, love.’
She flinched, as he knew she would, because it was not only the beggar she wanted to save; it was the cities she’d burned and the soldiers she’d slain, the villages she’d pillaged and the heretics she’d put to the sword. It was everyone who suffered still under the failing, grasping, lurching powerof Dominion; it was her evil horse; it was her fathers, most of all, who were the first reason she held a sword, and the first people she hadn’t saved.
The scholar rose to his knees at her back. ‘You were only ever a weapon. A tool, fashioned for a purpose.’ He set his lips beneath her ear, so that she shivered. ‘But at least you are no longer hers.’
Then he lay back and pulled her astride him. She took him deeply and not gently, the way he liked best, his wrists pinned, his pulse beating frantic in his throat. She rode him until he arced beneath her and came, shouting her name so loudly against the dark that she knew she had not—not quite, not yet—disappeared.
18
IF YOU RUNfar enough, for long enough, you will catch the rhythm of it. It’s the same thing that drives the swifts south before the frost and rats uphill before the flood: a thrum in the blood, a second pulse that whispersnow, now, now.
The knight and the scholar followed that pulse north and south, forward and backward in time. They went by foot, most often, but they went, too, by ferry and galley, by coach and carriage and even—once the knight could tolerate the stink and noise of them—by automobile. They traveled along ancient dirt tracks and roads so freshly paved the tar still stuck, hotly, to the soles of their shoes. They slept in lofts and fallow fields, in boardinghouses and shabby hotels and, once or twice, gaols.
They learned which elements of the world change most quickly and dramatically (hairstyles, fashion, medical advice) and which linger, stubbornly, no matter the decade (filthy words, trade routes, children’s rhymes). They learned how to ask for work in half a dozen languages, which crossroads would always have inns no matter the century, which streams would never be dammed, and which borders would never be well guarded.
Most of all they learned one another, as few people ever have or will. In the churn and tumult of their lives—where summer did not always follow spring, where even their own names were tricksome and shifting—they were to one another what fixed stars are to sailors: the only way through the dark.
They knew each other’s taste and smell, the sounds they made in the night and the old wounds that turned stiff in the rain. The scholar knew every scar on the knight’s body and where it came from—save the small, silver circle between her breasts, which she must have gotten as a child, for she couldn’t recall a time when it wasn’t there.
Each knew the other’s face by moonlight and rushlight, candle and gas,and even by the sharp-edged glare of streetlights—though they spent less time in the modern age than in others.
The knight found it overloud and overcrowded, and it found her wrong sized, roughly hewn, almost comical in scale. The scholar didn’t miss his own time much, save for the cigarettes; the whole of modernity—with its bank accounts and receipts, its leases and cameras and pay stubs—seemed engineered to expose them.
And if they were exposed, she would find them. She came very close, sometimes. Once when they lingered too long in the same year and town and were heard to call one another by names other than they ones they’d given; once when the knight challenged their landlord to a duel, long after duels had fallen out of fashion; once when the scholar left his spectacles on the table of an inn, long before their invention.
Soon after such blunders they would wake to fists on the door or boots in the street, or perhaps the rumor of a cold-eyed stranger asking if anyone had seen a man and woman traveling together. Once there were even dogs, great black hounds that cornered them in a narrow alley; the scholar had never liked dogs.
But they were never truly cornered because they had the book.
They tried, though, to use it as little as possible. Partly because there was always an awkward few days while they adjusted their accents and outfits and overheard enough political gossip to determine whether there was a queen in Dominion, and if her hair was the color of beaten brass; partly because people talk when two strangers vanish from inside a locked room, or when two hungry travelers never return to finish their meal. Even their absence left footprints.
But mostly they avoided the book because there was, to their bafflement, a fourth rule: No matter where they were when they touched the book—no matter how carefully they willed themselves elsewhere—they always found themselves back beneath the yew.
The scholar had a dozen theories. Perhaps the book somehow sensed their secret desire to return to the place they’d both felt most at home. Perhaps the wicked queen had sent them back to those woods so many times that their souls had left grooves along the path, like penned animals wearing tracks in the grass. Perhaps the yew was so unspeakably ancient it made a sort of well in time itself, which they fell back into, over and over.
The knight did not care why. There was no place in the world she liked better than those woods, and the queen—who had found them in caves andforeign cities, in the swede fields of the north and the cold deserts of the far south—had never once found them there. She’d claimed the land for the crown and driven the small folk from it, and seemed to have forgotten it, as if what is conquered will remain so.
Slowly, even the scholar came to trust the woods. They began to loiter there, for days, then weeks, then whole greedy seasons, seeing no one but pig boys and berry pickers, runaway lovers with flushed faces and ragged peasants fleeing the queen’s soldiers.
They began to bury caches there for their future selves to find: rolls of bandaging, tins of fish and beans, arrows, fresh socks, soap, clothes from twenty different decades, furtive cartons of Lucky Star cigarettes. They shored up the walls of the woodcutter’s cottage with fresh daub and left firewood split and stacked beneath the eaves.
They began to miss it when they were away from it. They began to think of it—guiltily, secretly—as home.
And so they broke the first rule.
The first time the knight missed her menstrual cycle, she cursed, dressed in the dark, and went to visit the nearest brothel. After a short and practical conversation with a very pretty woman, the knight was given a sachet of sharp-smelling herbs. She thanked the woman, who blushed a little and encouraged her to return ‘if she was tired of men.’ The knight kissed her hand, gallantly, and apologized; she did not think she would tire of this man.
The tea she brewed with the herbs had a familiar, grassy taste—the queen had kept a supply for such occasions.
Later, when the knight explained to the scholar why she was ill, he turned very white. He stammered and apologized many times, as if she hadn’t known the risk, as if she hadn’t held him inside her while he thrashed, only because she liked the feel of it, and liked it even better when she took him again later, still slick with it.
