“You let us go.” I felt those nine stolen years contracting around me, shrinking inward. Everything we’d done and everything we hadn’t—the price we’d paid for the freedom that wasn’t even real, for a future that wouldn’t last—bile burned my throat. “You let us think we were safe—I bet you even made sure the sword in the tree had no maker’s mark, just to soothe us.Why?”
“Because you’d remembered yourselves. And after that, no threat orpunishment could make you play your parts willingly. Believe me, I tried.” Had she? Had we been here before? Was I a man or merely a palimpsest, scrubbed clean and rewritten so many times that my oldest memories were obscured entirely?
The bile bubbled, acidly. Vivian continued, “The stick failed me. I needed a carrot.” Her eyes cut to the children. She corrected herself, “Carrots.”
I looked at them—our pretty, clever son; our fierce, stubborn daughter—the sum of all our hopes, the final proof of our freedom. They were the future itself, given form. I loved them as I had never loved anything, save you.
But they were not the future, after all; they were only bait. Another link in Vivian’s long, long chain of cause and effect, action and reaction.
“Oh, don’t give me that look.” Viviantsked. “It’s a very fine offer—a compromise, even. If you will simply return to your correct role and play your part as written, I’ll give you your happy ending. Sir Una will be grievously injured when the grail is stolen. We’ll spirit her away to a tower room and say she succumbed to her wounds,Erxa Dominus,et cetera. And then I’ll let the two of you escape to the woods and play house to your heart’s content. You can have your children back—a boy and a girl, fair-haired and dark. They come out the same, every time.” A pause here, while my pulse rushed in my ears. “Do you hear me, Mallory? All this drama and gore—you made me cripple you, you made me kill hermyself,in cold blood, my own—” Vivian’s voice hitched oddly. In another woman, I might have thought it was a sob. “When all I wanted was to cry truce.”
I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. I became fascinated by the small, sweet sounds of the wood: the soft crackle of needles underfoot, the endless chirp of the beck. There were no birds; the gunshot had sent them winging away.
Our daughter said: “Papa?”
I flinched from the sound of her voice. As soon as I went back through the yew—and I already knew that I would, already felt the jaws of Vivian’s trap snapping neatly shut around me—she would disappear. No: A person had to exist, in order to disappear, and our daughter never would.
Unless I did as Vivian said.
“Well?” she said. “Go to them. Say goodbye.”
I went to them, limping badly, clammy and cold with blood loss. They watched me come with docile, trusting eyes. All of this was frightening, but they hadn’t yet encountered anything so frightening that their parents couldn’t solve it. I said, “I—I have to go away,” and then—only then—did their faith finally break.
Our daughter screamed for you. Our son askedwhy,over and over, his voice rising in pitch until I crushed them to me, desperately. Their bodies felt light in my arms, almost insubstantial, as if they were already fading away.
“We will—hush, listen to me—we will be together again. I swear it.” I ran my hands over the sharp wings of our daughter’s shoulders and the downy nape of our son’s neck.The body remembers.“You’re going to disappear for a little while. It won’t hurt. It’ll be like going to sleep. And one day, when your mother and I find you again, you’ll wake up, and all of this will be a bad dream.”
I laid them down among the roots, where I had lain as a boy. I placed our son’s hand around his sister’s. They curled toward one another, fetal in their fear, forming the uneven shape of a heart—mine, I thought, and yours.
I kissed them. “Wait for us,” I said, and then I stood and faced the yew.
I placed my hand just above Valiance, where the bark was swollen and tumorous around the hilt you hadn’t yet pulled.
Vivian Rolfe stood just behind me. She placed her chin over my shoulder, like a lover, and laid her hand over mine.
I asked, softly, “What did you say? Before you shot her.”
“The truth, only.” Vivian spoke in Middle Mothertongue, her breath ghosting over my cheek. “That I love her, and always have, from the very day I gave birth to her.”
The chain lengthened in my mind, link upon link, receding out of sight.
Then Vivian set the barrel of her revolver against the back of her hand and pulled the trigger.
21
SEVERAL YEARS AFTERthe war—what war?—during the mid-afternoon hour I generally put aside to fantasize about setting fire to my manuscript—what manuscript?—I received a book in the post.
No. It was not the affable, chap-cheeked campus postman who delivered the book. It was a handsome woman who smelled, sickeningly, of summer flowers. She was very tall; how had I never noticed how tall she was?
This time, when I saw the book, I felt no awe or terror or ambition. I felt nothing at all. How could I? I had left my heart beneath the yew.
Vivian Rolfe cleared off a corner of my desk and sat, fishing comfortably through the detritus until she found a stray cigarette and a book of matches. She did not hurry; why would she?
As she shook out the match, she said, “Welcome back to the modern age, Corporal.” Her lips twisted. “More or less.”
I didn’t know what she meant, for a moment. But I soon discovered a brand-new set of memories stacked neatly in my skull, like towels in a guest bathroom. They unfolded all at once, a suffocating mass.
This was not the Dominion I’d left behind. It was not an empire, or even a great power of the world, but merely one fractious, troubled state among many, jostling restlessly against its neighbors. Cantford was not the pinnacle of all learned scholarship, but only a backward little college in a backward little country. There were no munitions plants spewing black smoke into the sky, no grand crusades, no processions of troops in bright Dominion red. We did not have wars, but only petty skirmishes and border disputes.
