The current Chancellor was a zealous, sallow young man, who talked often of God and destiny and the days when Dominion’s borders had reached from one sea to the other. I’d heard his speeches on the wireless; they werefamiliar. I suspected now—observing the woman sitting comfortably on my desk, looking out at the mossy green steeples of Cantford—that he hadn’t written them himself.
Dominion was much diminished, but it still belonged to Vivian Rolfe.
“How did you—” I stopped. In nine years, I’d grown used to my voice, even a little vain of it: It was sweet and resonant, like a struck bell. I had sung our children to sleep with that voice, and later, in the dark, I’d used it to whisper in your ear.
Now it was my old voice that emerged, ragged as a broken fingernail. I touched my throat and found slick, puckered scars. Another memory unfolded: a burglary when I was nineteen, followed by a long fever. Random, as nothing in Dominion truly was.
I frowned, tiredly, at Vivian. “Was this really necessary?”
“No, but it was prudent. It will be easier for you if everything is as it was, before.”
I swallowed, feeling the foreign-familiar pull of scar tissue, and tried again. “How did you accomplish all this? Without the book, without Una—”
“Honestly, did you think you’d dealt Dominion a death blow?” Vivian blew a neat stream of smoke from the corner of her mouth. “I still had three-quarters of a national mythology and several centuries of hard, careful work. What kind of mastermind would I be if I let the whole of my strategy rest on a pair of pawns?”
She tapped her cigarette twice on the rim of my teacup. The tea inside had long since evaporated, leaving brown stains behind like the rings of a tree. “But—and I want you to think about this, really—if it weren’t me, it would be someone else. I did not single-handedly invent the crown, or the chancellorship. Where there is power, someone will wield it. Is it really so intolerable that it would be me?”
“Yes,” I said, instantly. I could still hear our son’s voice askingwhy,over and over.
“Oh, don’t be somyopic.Look around!” Vivian gestured out the window. “Did you save the poor downtrodden folk of Dominion from the wicked queen—or did you ruin their favorite bedtime story? Did you strike a blow for freedom, or did you just steal a little bit for yourselves?”
I didn’t know. There were too many versions of history in my head, too many chains of cause and effect—and I wasn’t sure I cared about any of them, really, or if I only cared about you, and a pair of children who no longer existed.
“Well, it hardly matters.” Vivian ground her cigarette into the bottom of the teacup and slid from the desk. “You’ll play your part, whether you go marching or dancing. I don’t think there’s any need for speeches or set-dressing this time, so if you’ll open the book, I can send you on your wa—”
“There you are.” Harrison rounded the corner and began his usual performative slouch against the doorframe. But, as soon as he saw Vivian Rolfe, his body jerked strangely, like a puppet whose strings have gotten tangled.
“Oh,” he said, and then, a little too loudly, “Jeremy Harrison, Professor of History.” He extended his hand woodenly.
Vivian took it. “What an honor,” she said, with the false sobriety of an adult humoring a child’s game of pretend. “But I’m afraid Professor Mallory and I are rather in the middle of something.”
“Of course, of course.” His eyes found the book in my hands—unwrapped, your device perfectly visible—and his features twisted with pure, unadulterated avarice. But he looked back at Vivian, who gave him the faint smile of someone very important who wonders why their time is being wasted, and ducked his head. “Far be it from me to stand between a historian and his duty,” he sneered, recovering his old-money unction, and scuttled away.
I waited for his steps to retreat down the hall before I observed, calmly, “He knows you.”
“I should hope so. I’m the one who paid for every single cent of his education, and all those silly jackets with patches on the elbows.” She took another contemplative drag. “His family are swede farmers, you know. He’d have been nothing, without me.”
I thought of Harrison’s pure and hateful condescension, almost comforting in its constancy. Of his desperate zeal to prove himself socially, intellectually, and sartorially superior. The product of inherited wealth, I’d thought—but actually the product of its absence.
I asked, “Why?”
“Because the only people you truly own are the ones you make. I made him—fromnothing,from filth and obscurity—and so he’s mine. Well, notliterallymine.” A sly, sidelong look here. “I was only a mother the one time.”
It was bait; I declined to take it.
Vivian reeled her line back in, disappointed. “Anyway. The Harrison boy failed to fill your role, obviously, but he keeps an eye on you and your father for me, and that spiteful old woman.” Sawbridge? “And there’s nothing likea good sibling rivalry to keep you sharp. Una fought twice as hard once I made Ancel for her to compete with.”
I thought of Ancel’s face as he died, the rueful, weary expression of a man whose whole life had been spent merely to further the plot of someone else’s story. I swallowed sudden sympathy. “Let Harrison translate the book, when I finish it for you.” Let him have the glory and the big desk, the money and the reputation so unassailable that no one would ever inquire after his family again. “He deserves… something.”
“Why not?” Vivian answered easily, but she had paused slightly before she said it. That pause bothered me very much, I found.
She opened the book, the wooden cover clacking hard against my desk, and drew a familiar silver knife from her hip pocket. “Your hand, Corporal.”
“Wait.” I kept my voice carefully innocent, unshaded by suspicion. “May I say my goodbyes?”
Vivian frowned a little. She was—and this, too, bothered me—genuinely baffled.
“To my father, and my friends, I mean.” I shrugged to disguise the sudden tremor of my hands. “Since I won’t be returning to this time again.”
