A year passes, and another, and another. It’s summer again.
Their son is hiding from his sister in the woods, flashing from tree to tree like quicksilver, and she is chasing stubbornly after him on legs that are still bowed and dimpled with babyhood. She does not cry, when she falls; she reminds her father of the girl he used to meet beneath the yew.
The knight, who is no longer a knight, is lying on the warm earth beside the scholar, who is no longer a scholar. They are sharing a basket of berries so fat and ripe they catch the sun, like fine jewels, and there are tiny white flowers blooming all around them, between and beneath them.
The knight picks one of these and tucks it behind the scholar’s ear. He hasn’t cut his hair in a long time, and the fragile petals are nearly lost in his wild black curls.
‘They’re called dragonscales, in my time, or ulla flowers,’ the scholar tells her, and the knight’s eyes open very wide, as if she’s just found something she thought was lost forever.
Then she is laughing, head thrown back, and there is berry juice runningover her chin, down her throat. The scholar wipes it away with his thumb and puts his thumb to his own lips. He has had this dream before, he thinks, but no dream ever tasted this sweet.
Like home; like heaven.
He knows what it cost to get here. Sometimes in the night he sees their faces: the Hinterlanders he killed in the war and the Dominion boys who died beside him, their blood made invisible by the red of their coats; the soldiers who fell to the knight’s sword in the First Crusade and the heretics who went to the flames; the crofter’s son who still turns his face away when they visit, in memory of the brother they didn’t save; everyone who will still suffer under the queen’s faltering, grasping rule, and everyone they will turn away, lest they draw her eye.
He doesn’t know if it was worth it. But he knows he would pay the same price all over again, if only he could find himself here, on this stolen summer evening, with the taste of berries in his mouth.
It’s then—just then, when he has begun to believe in his own happily ever after—that he hears it: Branches snapping, boots approaching, and a voice he hasn’t heard in nine years. Nine long, good, golden years.
The voice says, in a language that won’t be spoken for another millennium: ‘Hello, Corporal.’
He should have known, of course: Heaven is only a fairy tale.
The devil is real.
THE
FOURTH DEATH
OF
UNA
EVERLASTING
20
IT HAPPENED SOquickly: We were dreaming, and then we were awake. We were safe, and then we weren’t. We were nameless, forgotten, hidden away in time, and then I was Corporal Owen Mallory again, and you were—
“Sir Una,” said the voice. You flinched from the sound of your own name. The line between your brows returned, harshly drawn. The voice said, more softly, “It’s been too long.”
It sounded as if she meant it. As if she’d missed you, these nine years, and longed to look at you. You kept your eyes resolutely, almost desperately, on mine; it occurred to me that you’d run away from her without ever once facing her.
A sigh, from above us. “Up, now—carefully. I’ve told these boys you’re witches, and heavily implied cannibalism. They’re jumpy.”
I got slowly to my feet, arms half raised. The ulla flower slipped out from behind my ear and fell to the earth.
Vivian Rolfe greeted us with the warm, delighted smile of someone who has run into old friends unexpectedly. She was in one of her more modern incarnations: short hair, crisp martial clothing. But the men behind her—six or seven of them—surely belonged to this era. They wore boiled leather armor and carried short, brutish blades.
I glanced sideways at you and found your gaze judging the reach of their arms, calculating the force of each blow. Your face was very remote, as if you were watching your body from a distance.
Your eyes skipped over Vivian—you still hadn’t looked directly at her—and met mine, eerily flat:Now?
I lowered my lashes:Not yet.
“So,” I said, in modern Mothertongue, loud enough that it might carry to the glassberry thicket where the children were playing. “You’ve found us.” I’d taught them enough of my native language to recognize it if theyheard it, and if they heard it, I’d taught them to hide. The rustling, scuffling sounds from the thicket fell suddenly still.
“Ididwarn you I would. Don’t tell me you forgot my little monologue.” Vivian looked very slightly put out. “It was a good one.”
