The knight turned and saw it buried in the bark of the yew: the hilt of a sword. The sword she would pull from the tree as a young girl, a century from now, which had been placed there like a stage prop by the wicked queen. The wood had already swelled around the metal, like an unlanced boil.
‘But if it’shere,this far back—then Yvanne must have been here before us. We’re not safe, we’ll never be—’ the scholar broke off, swearing.
But the knight studied the hilt carefully. Then she drew a knife from her hip and cut the rotted leather wrapping away. ‘Look,’ she said. ‘No mark.’
The scholar looked and saw that it was true; the tang of the sword was perfectly smooth. His brows arced and furrowed as he thought. ‘If it’s not a Saint Sinclair… then it’s not one of hers. Perhaps there really was a sword in a tree—the stories about Valiance certainly predate yours—and she merely made copies, later. Perhaps she never came this far back.’
The scholar chewed at his lips, fretfully. The knight put her knuckle beneath his chin and tipped his face up. ‘Even if she did, she cannot return here without the book, and she will not have any reason to try, because she will never hear of us.’ The scholar swallowed, wanting badly to be convinced. The knight said, ‘There is no crown and no country here. There are no legends about a lady knight. We are safe, the two of us—three, I suppose.’
At this, the scholar buried his face in the soft hollow of the knight’s throat and wept.
The knight stroked his back, soothingly, and did not look at the sword.
Eventually the scholar took her hand and pulled her away from the yew, toward the clearing where they would build their home. She told him aboutthe fen where she would dig the clay for their walls, the hazel copse where she would cut the wattle, the distant farmstead where she might find wheat for their thatch. They would be simple folk of the forest, and such people had no need of swords.
The cottage was finished well before the cold came, and they’d only cheated a little. If it rained, they traveled a few days later, when it was dry. If the wheat was too green, they took it with them a few months back, and left it to cure. The scholar made a single, furtive trip into the early modern age, returning to the yew with a bow saw and mallet, an ax, and a good sharp augur.
He also brought a cheap mirror, which he hung by the wash bucket for shaving. The knight found herself moving carefully around it, keeping her back turned, until one day her own reflection caught her unawares. She was still herself—big and rough, badly scarred—and yet different. Changed. The line of her jaw had softened with fat. Her hips had widened, and her belly and breasts pushed against the rough wool of her dress. She had always been a woman, she supposed—but she’d never looked like one.
She didn’t mind it, really. She had found ordinary skirts much easier to manage than court dresses, and she and the scholar both liked to run their hands over her belly like cartographers surveying a brand-new country. And yet—she felt something like grief, that her child would never see her in full armor. He would only ever know her in hiding, half disguised.
The scholar came home then and found her looking at her reflection as if it were a stranger in their home. He took the mirror down without saying anything, and neither of them mentioned it in the months that followed.
It was midwinter when the knight felt the first ripple of labor. She looked out at the bare gray branches and decided that she wanted her child to meet the world when it was warm, and the sun was shining. So they traveled to spring, as other people might travel to the sea or the market, and their son was born, sudden and pink and slick, beneath the yew.
His hair was thick and curling, but so pale it could be mistaken for a caul. He had very fine fingers, long and delicate as willow branches, and a round birthmark, red as a yewberry, on his left foot.
The scholar looked down at his son and thought: Here, at last, is something worth dying for. The knight looked at the scholar, looking at his son, and thought: Here, at last, is something worth killing for.
They named him—but no. You asked for mercy. I will not make you remember his name.
19
THE KNIGHT, WHOhad killed a thousand men a thousand times, had no talent for keeping anything alive.
Her calluses caught and pulled the threads of her son’s soft blankets. The only songs she knew were either dirty or bloody or both; her hands, so natural with a blade, were clumsy with an infant. It seemed best to leave him in his father’s care; surely the Red Knight ought never to be entrusted with anything so small, so desperately fragile.
When the baby fussed in the night, it was the scholar who went to him. When the larder grew low, it was the knight who went out hunting. When she returned, she often found her son sleeping on the scholar’s chest, lashes lying soft and white as moonlight on his cheek.
But most of the time the scholar was only feigning sleep, because when he slept, he dreamed of his own father. He saw him marching across the Hinterlands with an infant tied to his chest, then crippled and drunk in Queenswald with a toddler to care for. He saw him fumbling, striving, often failing; he saw the townspeople shaking their heads, averting their eyes. They’d thought him a poor father, and the scholar had mostly agreed—but now he was unsure what a good one ought to look like.
In Dominion a good father was any man with a decent living who produced a child with his wife—a woman he had married in a church, who had been trained to be a mother from the time she was a child herself. He need not be sober, affectionate, or even present very often; he needn’t know how to soothe his son to sleep, or how to tie his diapers so they didn’t leak.
And yet: The scholar’s father had learned those things. He must have. He must have sat sometimes in the night, just like this, worried and tired, feigning sleep. The scholar wished, suddenly, that he could speak with his father. Or at least ask him how to tie the damn diapers.
The knight saw her husband smile, wistfully, crookedly, and cup his hand around their son’s head. She backed carefully away from the two ofthem, thinking of the yew, and of the hilt that waited still for her hand. Thinking: Nothing this precious could go undefended for long.
This is why, when a knock came at the cottage door some five or six months after their son’s birth, the scholar was shocked and frightened, but the knight felt almost peaceful. Here was the danger, finally; here was her fate, caught up with her at last.
But it was only a young man, shaking from a long run in the near-dark, stinking of fear. He was the son of the crofter whose wheat had thatched their roof. The knight brought his family game, sometimes, or honey, in trade for butter and salt. She knew this boy to be a laughing, mischievous middle son.
He was not laughing now. ‘Raiders,’ he said, and what else was there to say?
This was Dominion before the wicked queen: A series of small kings and lords who took turns scribbling new lines across the map, dividing the land into what was theirs and what was theirs to take, until their thrones were stolen in turn, and the lines drawn anew. None of them lasted long; the scholar thought they should meet Vivian Rolfe and see how a real empire was made.
And so violence still swept sometimes across the land, like a swarm of locusts. It nibbled at the woods: ash was taken for the hafts of spears; cedar for arrows; oak for the hulls of boats. Exiles and hungry peasants hid among the trees, and their gaunt faces made the knight wonder if it was truly the queen who was wicked, or the crown itself. If a throne was a kind of weapon, by which the world was cut into two halves: the dead and the kneeling.
But the knight had not interfered. She and the scholar wanted no word of a light-haired woman who fought off soldiers and raiders, who protected the small folk and lived deep in the wood with her dark-eyed husband. What if the queen heard such tales, decades or centuries in the future? What if she somehow clawed her way back to them? They didn’t know where the book had come from, after all; better by far to disappear.
