“Then perhaps she will find herself a new scribe! One I don’t know or can’t remember. Perhaps she will make infants of us again, and have us live a dozen lives apart, until we forget each other. Perhaps she already has. Even if we get ten years, Owen, or twenty—” You choked, and when you spoke again it was less than a whisper. “It’s not freedom, if it can be taken away.”
I said, “No.”
“Yet—we can’t run.”
“No.” There was no freedom in running, either, if you knew one day you would be caught.
“And so, I am hers, after all.” A sickly calm came into your voice as you said it, as if it comforted you. You had never liked holding the reins. “I am her weapon, her tragedy, forever.”
It took so many tragedies, to make a nation. I listed them in my head like the names of the dead the papers used to print: the False Kings and their followers, the heathens and rebels; my mother, who took a bullet in the back, and my father, who put another in his own leg; the idiot boys who marched with me in the war and went home in boxes; the children who packed our shells with powder and the children we orphaned on the battlefield and our own children, who were never born.
There was not enough red paint in the world to write their names on the wall, but I supposed it didn’t matter; their blood had been mixed into the mortar.
In the silence, your laugh rang too sudden and too loud. “Well, and what else could I have been? It’s why I was born, after all.”
“Horseshit,” I said, calmly.
“Owen.” You didn’t want to tell me. You imagined that I would care. “Before I died, that last time, she told me—”
“She lied.”
“Don’t be so—we even look alike! She arranged every second of my life. Is it really so unlikely that she gave it to me in the first place?”
There was guilt in your voice, which puzzled me. Had you wished, in your starving, orphaned heart, that the queen was your own true mother, returned to you? Did you imagine it was your fault that your wish had come true?
I turned in your arms to face you, but you wouldn’t look at me. You averted your face so that all I could see was your blind left eye. I had missed the shape of it, the way the pupil spilled like ink into the iris. “Yes,” I said, “Vivian Rolfe gave birth to you.”
You looked at me sharply. I lifted my eyebrows the way Professor Sawbridge did just before she suckered an undergraduate into saying something very stupid. “Tell me. Does that make her your mother?” You knew me well enough to suspect a trap, and stayed quiet. “Was it childbirth that made you their mother, or everything that came after? And our children—were theyyours,to dispose of as you liked? Or were they yours to protect? Yours to raise, yours to hold, yours to love—”
“Stop.” You closed your eyes. A pair of tears tracked down your cheeks and met at the end of your chin.
More gently, I said, “Both of my parents took bullets for me. You did the same, for your children. Whatever Vivian Rolfe is to you, it is not a mother.”
The tears came faster then, and your lashes gathered into sharp white points. “Did—did they see me, Owen? Did they find my body on the cottage floor, as I found—”
“No, I swear they didn’t.”
“But they might, the next time! What is the point of me if I can’t protect them? What is the point of any of this?”
“I don’t know.” I pulled myself gently away from you. The fire had blinded me, so that I had to crouch and run my hands over the frozen ground to find what I needed now. “You were right, though. We can’t run.” Boiled leather beneath my fingers, and the cold steel of a pommel. “What do you do, when you can’t run?”
I drew the sword from its sheath, and your body moved before you even opened your eyes, snapping upright. I held Valiance in two hands, back braced against the weight of it. God, you were strong. “I should never have taken this from you. If I hadn’t—if you’d been armed, when she found us—” I stopped, swallowing salt. “I’m sorry. I was scared, and I thought if I took away your sword and your courage, if I made you small and ordinary enough, I could keep you safe.”
I had thought the same about myself. I thought if I told no more stories and asked no more questions, if I poured grease in the bright brass gears of my mind, I would survive, even if my dreams did not. Vivian must have laughed and laughed, like a general watching her enemies saw off their own limbs.
I lifted Valiance high, so that the blade caught the firelight and shone a hectic gold. “But it’s not an ordinary woman that I need, now. I need a hero, Una. I need you to fight again.” I met your eyes around the blade and found them huge and hungering. “But not for her.”
“Owen—”
“Kneel, love.” This was purest pageantry. Sawbridge had doubted whether such rituals of knighthood were ever truly practiced, or whether they were the invention of romantic poets and playwrights. But the whole of Dominion’s history was an invention, a theater production which we had made real by the strength of our belief.
Still, I half expected you to laugh in my face.
You didn’t laugh. Instead, the line between your brows smoothedsuddenly away. You looked at me with a kind of bewildered surrender, of the kind I’d only seen before during sex, when you were very near to the edge but couldn’t quite fall. You never could, until I told you to.
It didn’t feel like pageantry when your knee hit the earth, or when your head bowed, so that your hair fell like dove’s wings over your shoulders. Your chest was rising and falling fast, as if you didn’t know whether you knelt before your executioner or your savior.
I brought Valiance down as slowly as I could, but the flat of the blade still smacked hard on your shoulder. “Do you so swear, by your good right arm, to serve with honor and with valor?”
