But the scholar rubbed the muscles low in her back and boiled cloths for the blood. His fretting startled the knight—it was only one of those dull bodily tasks, like picking dirt from a wound, or pulling a bad tooth!—but that night she let him curl around her, like human armor, as if she needed protection.
The second time the knight missed her menstrual cycle, they were in thewoods. The scholar kissed her sweetly on the brow, opened the book, and disappeared. He returned two minutes later with his arms full: fresh white cloths, paper sachets of tea, a hot water bottle, and a glass vial of pills.
She rolled the pill between her fingers, hesitating, though she couldn’t say why. It was just that the light was dappling through the cottage door the same way it had when she was a girl. It was just that it was spring, when the whole world quickens, and the forest was littered with pollen and shed teeth and the fragile, speckled shells of hatched eggs.
It was just that she had always known precisely what purpose her body served—bloodshed—and she felt suddenly uncertain.
Ancel had fathered six or seven bastards, who he supported so handsomely that their mothers never made a fuss about their red hair. But Saint Una the Virgin could never be allowed to fall pregnant. Nor could Sir Una the Queen’s Champion—how would her armor fit? Now, though, the knight had no armor to wear or name to uphold; she caught herself wondering what other names she might bear.
And then she wondered ifmotherwas another of those names, likesaintorsir,that built a cage around you. She was through with cages.
She swallowed the pill. It tasted like metal.
The third time the knight missed her cycle, they were still in the woods, and she noticed that the scholar’s hands were shaking when he handed her the glass vial.
She said, stunned into bluntness, ‘Youwantit, don’t you?’
He flushed, guilty as a child caught with his nose pressed to a bakery window. ‘No. I mean, yes, of course, if—but it’s not safe. We couldn’t.’
The knight said, slowly, surprising both of them, ‘We could.’ It felt like biting into a fruit long forbidden to her. The heady taste of it filled her mouth.
The scholar’s eyes went very wide, filling with such obvious, reckless wonder that the knight coughed and looked away.
She said, roughly, ‘Though I’m not—I don’t know how—that is, I don’t know that I’d be everything a mother should.’
The scholar tilted his head at her. ‘I suppose I wouldn’t know—I never had a mother, either. But… I’m not sure you’ve ever been what youshouldbe, love.’ She scowled at him; he smiled his crooked smile. ‘You were a woman who carried a sword. A saint who slept with nuns—don’t pretend you never visited Morvain in the convent! Now you’re a knight without armor, and a wife without a ring. No matter what you are, you’re always…’
‘Bad at it?’
‘Yourself,’ said the scholar, stubbornly. ‘And you’ll remain so. Whatever you become next.’
The knight rolled the pill in her fingers, marveling a little at the certainty in the scholar’s voice when he said the wordnext.
There had never been a next for her, no after. How had she never noticed it? The queen had showered her with praise songs and titles, but never land or tithes. Lovers had been tolerated, but never marriage or children. Men might follow her into battle, but never be sworn to her service. There had never been any provision for her future because she had never been intended to have one.
But now the future hung on the vine, hers for the taking, and she found she was ravenous for it.
She dropped the pill to the earth and ground it dispassionately beneath her heel.
The scholar gasped. ‘But how—we couldn’t raise a baby, the way we live.’ His voice was miserable with want. ‘Wherever we went, she would find us, eventually.’
‘Unless we go where she never was.’ It was an argument they’d had before. But—before—it hadn’t seemed worth winning. ‘Unless we went back further, before all of this.’
Now the scholar’s hands were running frustratedly through his own hair. The knight liked the way his curls looked afterward, startled, harassed. ‘And what if we forget everything again? What if the book doesn’t even go back that far? What if she anticipated us, and she’s waiting, somehow, before you were even born?’
The knight had learned that it was best, at these times, to let the scholar argue both sides against himself. He paced and gestured while she watched. ‘Although… without the book, how would she ever travel to us, even if she suspected where we’d gone? Suppose I tested it, first, just in case—’
Eventually the knight caught his hands in midair and tugged him down into her lap. ‘We could settle here in the woods, long before I was born. Before even my fathers were born, or Yvanne! I could build a fine home for us, you know I could.’ This was true; there were few kinds of work they hadn’t taken, in their years of travel, and even fewer she hadn’t taken to. She looked up at the thatched roof of the cottage and added, musing, ‘Father Theo said he found it standing empty when he first came to the woods. It might be this very house that I build for us. Perhaps I already have.’
Still the scholar hesitated, until the knight took pity on him and said, in the same voice she used to drive men into battle, to make them forget their fears and fight for victory rather than mere survival, ‘Please.’
And he answered, in relief, ‘As you will.’
And so they broke the second rule.
They ran again, further than ever before, to a time when the woods belonged to no one, when Dominion was not even a whisper of a dream, and the yew was so young the sun could fall cleanly through its canopy.
For a moment they stood wondering and disoriented, but then the scholar said, ‘No.’
