The words came easily, by rote; I’d sworn a version of this same oath when I joined the army, while a bored recruitment officer had tapped my shoulders with a cheap tin sword, and again when I was knighted.
“I swear it.”
I lowered the sword to your other shoulder. “Do you so swear, by your good left arm, to serve with faith and with constancy?”
“I swear it.”
I touched the blade to the back of your skull, so the point rested on your vertebrae. “Do you so swear, by your life and death, to serve no master save—” Here my recruitment officer had saidDominion;you must have saidYvanne,when you were first knighted. I was tempted, for a long and ugly moment, to say my own name. To take you away from Vivian, like a child snatching a toy, and make you finally and fatally mine.
Your shoulders had drawn tight as you waited.
I said, rough voiced, “—to serve no master at all, ever again, save your own heart, and to fight for no cause, save the one you choose?”
I heard the air rush from your lungs, as if the words had struck you across the back. You answered, shakily, with shame, “I cannot.”
A prickling embarrassment began at my scalp and moved down my spine. I felt suddenly very stupid, standing there in the freezing dark, my wrists shaking under the weight of your damn sword—
“I cannot,” you said, and your voice had evened, grown stronger. “Because my heart is not my own. It belongs to you, and to our children.”
My arms stopped shaking, suddenly. Valiance felt light as spun sugar in my hands. “So fight for us.”
“I swear it.”
“Then rise, SirUlla.” Here I called you by your oldest name—the one your fathers had given you, the one I had called you before you were calledanything else, back when you were only a girl running barefoot and beloved through the deep green woods. You do not want it remembered, so I have stricken it from the page.
Your face turned up to mine. You were not smiling, but your eyes were hot and bright as embers.
I held out my hand, and you took it.
We did not linger in the Queen’s Wood, this time, but rode out at first light.
I fretted as we rode. We were several days ahead of schedule—would Vivian be ready? If she wasn’t, would she send us through it all again, like a director whose actors have missed their cues? But you said, flatly, “She shot me in the chest and took my children from me. If she’s not ready, she’s a fool.”
I fretted less, after that, but only watched the countryside shift from forest to scrubby woodland, from wind-scoured heather down to the low, grain-stubbled heartlands. We rode less often on the queen’s roads, this time, keeping to shepherd’s tracks and game trails. When I asked why, you answered, “Because, after dozens and dozens of lives, you’ve finally found your seat in the saddle.” Hen snorted, conspicuously, and you amended, “More or less.”
When, for want of fresh bread or hot baths, we passed through a township, it went differently than I remembered. I no longer pressed the townsfolk for tales of Sir Una, and no longer spent the evenings feverishly writing them down. Instead, I filled Vivian’s flimsy yellow notebook with stories of my own invention. They were brief, odd tales, featuring no heroes and no great deeds, but only a place: a green and secret place, beyond the reach of crowns or gods, under the protection of a nameless knight.
I strewed these stories carefully behind us, like seeds. I knew all this work would be undone, if things went as I planned, but I hoped some sign or sentiment would linger. So I told them to the freckled girl who sold us griddle cakes and to the fishwife who smiled at us without teeth, and to the Hinterlander boys who leapt from riverboat to riverboat, wearing rags for shoes.
These boys liked my story so much they begged for another; I would trade it to them, I said, if they would teach me a few phrases in Shvalic. This they did happily, although the phrases were very specific, and puzzling to them.
It occurred to me as we rode away that I was living like one of my mother’s people: on horseback, telling stories for my bread. This thought produced an anxious, overdue sort of pride in my chest. Perhaps one day, when all of this was done, I would meet a band of geweth and ask to travel with them for a season or two. Perhaps I would learn their language and some of their stories and teach them to my son and daughter.
We made good time, on our journey north. Even when we rode through towns and villages, people did not gawk or gather. They did not seem to recognize you. It was the way you held yourself, I thought: Your spine had loosened, and your face had eased. Your expression shifted easily now: You scowled at overpriced goods and smiled at small children, as anyone would.
Saint Una the Everlasting was a carven image, a figure woven in a tapestry, ageless and changeless. How could you—mobile, visibly human—be her?
It also helped that you had scraped the device from your shield with a sharp stone, leaving a pile of flaked red lacquer beside the fire one night. You would have been content to bear the shield as it was, scratched and bare, but one evening as we passed along the edge of a Gallish temple, I slid from the saddle, untied the shield, and told you to wait.
At the temple I asked after the artist of their painted alcoves and was introduced to a laughing young woman with flecks of color beneath her nails. She listened closely to my instructions, took several heavy coins from your purse, and set to work.
When I showed the device to you—a great white tree, roots and all, on a green field—you touched it once, wonderingly. The paint hadn’t quite dried, so that your fingertips left two marks on the trunk of the tree, almost like the hollows of eyes.
There were still some who recognized you, of course, even with your new colors. When we passed once more through that bitter, mud-slicked village in the far north, I saw the same resentful looks, the same hateful faces. No one forgets the face of their conqueror.
You took their venom as you always did: peacefully, as your due. But this time, when that tall, scarred Hyllman man reached for your hair, you spun and caught his hand in mid-air.
“Don’t,” you advised him, lowly, and he spat full in your face.
