Vivian watched them come without surprise, or even much interest. Iwondered if people were merely systems of levers and buttons to her, predictable and dull as engines: For you, I would keep living. For me, my children would come running.
For them, I would do anything at all.
I caught them both in my arms, half kneeling, and pressed their small and perfect heads to my chest. “It’s alright, I’m alright,” I lied. My knee snarled and gibbered with pain, a rabid animal more than a limb, and Vivian’s revolver was pointed between my eyes. As I watched, the barrel wavered between our children, weighing their worth. It settled on our son’s quicksilver hair. My arm around him tightened.
“Where’s Mama?” That was our daughter, though I hardly recognized her voice. She had so rarely been afraid.
“She.” My voice flailed to a full stop. I tried again. “She got away. She’s well.”
Our daughter’s body untensed, but her brother turned his head slowly toward the cottage. There was blood seeping from under our door, thick and dark as motor oil. I turned his face back to my shirt. “Don’t look.” I said it sternly, without quarter, one soldier giving orders to another. I had never wanted my son to take orders from anyone.
Vivian said, patiently, “Up, please,” and I stood, sweating hard, feeling the bullet move like a hot tooth in my leg. Then, less patiently, “Move out, Corporal.”
“To where?”
“To the yew, of course.” Vivian tipped her head, quizzical. “Where else? You first, then the children.”
It wasn’t far to the yew, but it seemed to take years and years, epochs, whole ages of the earth. There was time for the flesh to swell and weep around the shattered bone of my knee, until my leg dragged behind me, a sausage casing stuffed with glass. There was time to listen to the sweet patter of our children’s feet and wish, as I had wished my whole life, that I were someone else, someone like you: strong and brave enough to save them.
There was time to think of the yew, and the girl I’d played with once beneath its branches, and the book that took us—always, over and over—back to it. A strange chance, I’d thought, that the pages ofThe Death of Una Everlastinghad been milled from wood pulp, rather than the vellum or parchment that would have been more common, in this era.
But there was no such thing as chance, in Dominion.
Hope hit me like a second bullet, straight to the heart. I stumbled to ahalt, breathing hard. The yew stood before me, a thousand years younger than I’d known it as a boy, and still older than the Savior Himself. It struck me suddenly as the only true miracle I’d ever seen, a slow and green magic that defied time itself. You’d told me once that you thought even dragons had no true sorcery in them, save their long, long lives.
But the yew hadn’t lived forever. I had come home for the war—so many times, I’d come home from the war—and walked up the rise and found nothing but stumps and rotten roots where the grove had once stood. Of the yew, there had been nothing left at all.
I said, belatedly, “It was you.”
“Most of the time, yes,” Vivian answered, from behind me. “You’ll need to be more specific.”
“You had the tree taken down.” I swallowed, remembering the sharp pine-needle smell of the book as it burned. “And you had the wood made into paper.” How had I ever believed that she’d simplyfounda book like that? She was a woman who engineered all of history, who made her own fate. I could almost hear Professor Sawbridge:Everything that is, was made, and everything that was made, was made for a reason.
“Well, you can see how an entire tree is something of a logistical challenge, as an instrument of time travel.” I had forgotten how eager she was to discuss her schemes; it must be lonely work. “Every time I wanted to make some small adjustment I had to hike back to these damned woods. You cannot believe,” she added, sincerely, “how much I hate it here.”
High above us, the wind tousled the tops of the yew branches, so that the needles whispered against one another. When our children played here, they pretended it was the sound of the sea.
“So,” Vivian continued, “eventually I had it milled and pulped. It wasn’t easy—the wood ruined a dozen sawblades, and the first crew quit before they’d even limbed it properly. Claimed it gave them gray hairs, and arthritis.” I heard the shrug in her voice. “But it was only a tree, in the end. I had the book bound, and I burned what remained. No sense taking—ow,you little shit!”
I tried to whip around and lost my balance, staggering back to one knee. Our daughter crouched like a fox kit between me and Vivian, snarling. Her brother stepped in front of her—your son, surely, not mine—as Vivian swore, shaking her hand. There was a bright red ring on her wrist, in the shape of small teeth. “Una didn’t make much of a mother, did she?” Sheswitched smoothly to Middle Mothertongue. “Sit down, little savages—no, farther away—and be still.”
They didn’t move until I asked them to. They sat, their eyes fixed on me with awful, unwavering trust, as if I hadn’t already failed them. I looked away, to the ground beneath my knees. Blood had soaked through the legs of my trousers, trickling among the roots of the yew.
I remembered, for no reason, the very first time I’d gone to the grove as a child. I’d been lonely and hungry, chased by that hollow feeling that sometimes came over me, as if I’d lost something very precious but couldn’t recall what it was. I’d tripped over the tangled roots of the yew and scraped both knees bloody.
When I’d looked up, there she was: the girl, bright-haired and bold, my first and only friend. Her eyes, I remembered suddenly, were the color of spring sap, and her name wasUlla. Like the flowers.
The realization arrived without fanfare or shock. I’d always known it was you, but I didn’t understandhowit could be you, and so I’d let myself pretend I’d made her up. But now I knew: It wasn’t the book that first brought us together, or even Vivian Rolfe. It was the yew.
And it was the yew that could take me back to you, now. You were not lost to me forever. This was only one death among many, a brief and bloody pause in the endless circle of our lives. I felt myself falling toward you, slipping out of time—already I smelled frost, clean and sharp—
“Not just yet, Corporal.” For the second time that day, I opened my eyes to the sound of a gun cocking. This time, it was pointed at our children.
“No—please, don’t hurt them, don’t.” I was pleading now, beyond pride or shame. “Just let me go to her. Let me find her, and fix this—”
Vivian laughed at me.You will beg me for it, before the end,she’d said once.And I will laugh.A prophecy I’d outrun for nine years.
But how? If she’d known we would return to the yew every time we disappeared, how had we eluded her for so long? Unless—
