You will lament,she had said,and there will be no end to your lamentation.
“No.” My throat was dry, the words rattling from it like dice from a cup. “I didn’t forget.” But I had. I’d stopped running, and she’d come for us, just as she’d said she would.
“Good, then we’re all working from the same script. Now, what have you done with my book?”
“This way.” I turned sharply and led them to the cottage, the only place in all of history that had ever felt like home.
I could hear your steps behind me, a steady pulse:Now?
I jerked my head:Not yet.
Say you killed her. Say you killed all of them. Say you survived it, even—would you? unarmed, nine years out of practice?—Vivian had found us once, somehow. What would prevent her from doing it again? I felt like a rat caught in a mill, watching the stone roll inexorably toward me.
The cottage was too small for a group of this size. Vivian’s men pressed against the walls, trampling furs, overturning baskets. I wondered if any of them would notice the doll fashioned from sacking and twine, the too-small pairs of shoes, the crib our daughter had learned to escape before she could walk.
Vivian snapped her fingers. “The book, if you please.”
It was too late in the year for a fire, but the children had wanted porridge for lunch, and the last log was still crackling in the pit. The air was close and warm as a gullet. It smelled, sickly, of flowers.
Beside me, you inhaled:Now?
I touched my shoulder to yours:Not yet.
But I felt the slab of your muscle through your shirt, tense as coiled wire, and knew I didn’t have long. I should have kept my fucking revolver; you should have kept your sword. We should have known we couldn’t hide forever.
I took the book from its high shelf. Unwrapped it, clumsily. My hands hadn’t shaken like this since our son was born.
Vivian said, “Open it.”
I opened it. The pages stared blankly up at me, still empty. I’d thought they might remain that way, but now it seemed our story would be writtenagain and again, no matter how far we ran or how thoroughly we disappeared.
The log popped brightly. The coals were a fresh, hot yellow. I thought, distantly, that the only way the rat could escape the mill is if it burned to the ground.
There was no one standing between me and the firepit. Perhaps Vivian thought a Cantford-trained historian would balk at the burning of a book, lest the archivist somehow got wind of it. Or perhaps she thought I loved the book more than I loved you. She had convincing evidence; how many times had I let you die, so that your story would survive?
But not another. In a single, easy motion, without hesitating, I threwThe Death of Una Everlastingto the flames. I didn’t wait for it to catch, but spun, half crouched, ready to fend off Vivian’s men. A few lifted their blades, uncertainly. At my side I felt you loosening, uncoiling, rising to meet them—
But Vivian raised her hand and said, in Middle Mothertongue, “Hold.”
A tenuous silence fell, as smoke gathered thickly at the eaves, seeping through the thatch. It was bluish and sweet smelling, like burning pine.
Vivian observed the smoke with no particular expression. I wondered if she was truly unsurprised, or if the muscles of her face had simply forgotten how to form the necessary shapes.
“It’s done.” I said, willing it to be true. “We are finished.” At my back, the pages caught with a faint rush of air.
The sudden flames cast garish shadows up the walls, dancing madly in Vivian’s eyes. She closed them. “No,” she corrected, “we areannoyed.” Her eyes opened, and the mad light was gone. “I had forgotten how much you love a grand gesture, Corporal. Now if you’ll both come with me—”
“Why?” My voice was pitched too high. “We arestuckhere, all of us, a hundred years before your sick little play begins. You can’t send us anywhere, ever again.”
Vivian opened her mouth, but another voice interrupted her. It took me a moment to recognize it as yours. You had never sounded so young, so uncertain. “Even if you could, it would do you no good.” You were looking Vivian dead in the eye, finally, but the tendons in your neck were tight with the strain of it. Some part of you still wanted to bow before her, to fall to your knees and beg her favor. “I am no longer what you made me. I will not fight for you again. I will not”—your voice shook, then steadied—“die for you.”
Vivian smiled, not without sympathy. “You will, though. Do you want to know why?”
“There is no reason you could give that would—”
But Vivian held a finger to her lips, and you were so accustomed to obeying her that you fell quiet. Through the silence, which stank of sweat and pine and flowers and the bitter copper promise of violence, came the distant cry of children’s voices.Mama? Papa?
Vivian took her finger from her lips, pointing over her shoulder, toward the woods, where our son and daughter were calling for us. “That’s why.”
