I turned away from the city and into the jagged green shadows of the Keep.
None of the roofs had survived, and few of the walls. Ash and linden trees had taken root in the old halls, spindly and tall, chasing the light, so that it looked as if someone had tried to cage a forest.
It wasn’t hard to find Vivian; I knew where she would be. She had never really wanted to be anywhere else.
The throne had long since rotted away, but there was still a stone plinth where it had stood. Someone had hacked through the moss and swept the leaves away, so that it shone a shocking white, like bone through skin.
Vivian waited for me there, the book in her lap, head tilted peacefully up to the light. A branch cracked beneath my shoe, and she smiled without looking at me.
“Ready, Corporal?”
“Yes,” I said. There was little else to say. I was through with begging; she was through with speech-making. There would be no more squirming, looping arguments, no more grasping justifications. I would do as I was told because I had to. Because, she supposed, I had no other choice.
She handed me a spiral-bound notebook, of the kind used by court stenographers and journalists. “You’ll need to make your notes here, this time, for transcription later.” She tapped the wooden cover of the book in her lap. “I’ll be holding on to this, for obvious reasons.”
“I understand.”
She handed me a holstered Saint Sinclair Mark III service revolver, three bullets, and her slim silver knife, hilt first. I took it with a hand that was perfectly steady.
Vivian said, comfortingly, “It’s almost done, Owen. One last time, and it will be over forever.” She was lying.
I said, “Yes, this will be the last time,” and I wasn’t.
I pushed the point of the knife into the pad of my finger and touched it to the page she held open. The cold, clean smell of winter came to me, and the world fell away, and then I was home.
22
I HAD BEENafraid you wouldn’t remember me, but of course you did. We’ve done this too many times to forget, you and me.
I stood with my hand against the yew, breath misting in the cold, heart stuttering. I waited without turning for the metal slither of sword leaving sheath, the kiss of steel against my nape.
It never came. Dry needles snapped beneath your boots as you approached. Your footsteps—always so swift and sure—were clumsy now, shuffling through the frost. At my back you paused, close enough that I could feel the heat of you. Your breath ghosted against the back of my neck, and I knew an instant of desperate, keening lust. Because you were warm and alive and with me, and they were not; because everything had been taken from us, save one another.
Then your arms came around my waist, carefully, as if you were new to your own body, unsure of its strength. You buried your face in my hair, inhaled once, raggedly, and wept. I pressed my hands over yours and held you to me until it passed, until your body slackened against mine and we stood quiet in the hasty blue twilight of midwinter.
I led you to the cottage by the hand. I wasn’t sure you could find the way on your own—your steps were still uncertain, your gaze opaque.
Awhuffing sound greeted us in the clearing, and the stamp of a hoof. I had the sudden, implausible fear that Hen had been left waiting here for nine years, desiccating steadily, so that there would be nothing but a bad-tempered skeleton left to greet us.
But only a few minutes had passed since his master walked alone to the yew, from his perspective. He still looked exactly as I remembered him (a bad-tempered skeleton with hair).
He put his head to your chest as you approached, and you stood for a while with your cheek against his forelock. When you straightened, you looked a little less lost.
I tried to scratch beneath the point above Hen’s withers, in gratitude, and he knocked his jaw so hard into mine that I bit my tongue.Dog meat,I whispered to him.Leather gloves.
By the time I’d spat the blood from my mouth and cleaned my teeth, you were standing with your back to the cottage. Your lips were pressed so hard together they formed a white seam, and your eyes were the holes moths leave behind in linen. “I can’t,” you said.
“That’s alright. We’ll sleep outside.”
“It’s cold.” This you stated as something you observed, clinically, rather than something you felt.
I lifted one shoulder. “I’m used to it.”
We didn’t speak again for several hours. We only sat, feeding the fire, remembering and forgetting. In other lives, I’d talked until my throat was sore, explaining and arguing, circling, urging you to take up the quest you had abandoned. But you had not abandoned your quest this time, because you couldn’t.
Eventually, you said, in a voice nearly as awful as mine, “It won’t last.” I was sitting with my back to your chest, a half-rotted fur wrapped around both our shoulders. Your words hummed down my spine. “Even if she keeps her word and lets us live—even if she lets us return here—it will only be for some little while. Eventually her reign will falter, and she will need this story told again, adjusted to suit some new strategy.” Your voice lowered, a bitter rumble. “She’ll need a different enemy to conspire against the crown. Or perhaps it’s God she’ll need, and Ancel will have to play his part dressed in a devil’s horns and rags. Perhaps I will survive Cavallon and die in pursuit of some other damned false trinket, so she can discover it a thousand years later.”
“It would be difficult.” I spoke idly, without conviction. “We remember ourselves, now, and wouldn’t willingly do her bidding.”
