Vivian smiled sweetly back. “I know, dear boy.” She held out her hand for the book.
Ancel’s expression turned wry. It was the expression, I thought, of a man who has discovered he has one choice yet remaining to him, and almost wishes he didn’t.
“Save me a kiss in hell, then,” he said, and tossed the book—not to Vivian—but to me.
I fumbled, not expecting it, and Ancel said into that last hushed second: “Get her out of here, Owen.”
Then the queen was screaming orders and I was diving sideways toward you and your arms were opening to catch me—
The book was crushed between us, the pages crumpling, sliding against your blood-soaked armor—
Ten arrows were flying from ten bows, whistling toward us—
I was grasping back through time, further back than I’d ever reached before, and the world was peeling away like old paint—
Sharp steel arrowheads were burrowing into me, lancing into my back, my right shoulder, my left ear—
And then they were passing painlessly through the air where we used to be, but no longer were—
Because we had gone away, back to the very beginning.
24
SOMETIMES, WHEN WEpassed through time, it reminded me of climbing the yew with you when we were children. I felt, or imagined I felt, ghostly branches against my palms, forking and dividing and rejoining endlessly. My brain’s puny attempt to make sense of the great tangle of history, I’d thought, by using a metaphor drawn from my own memory.
But it was not a metaphor. The book was the yew was time itself, and now I followed those branches down to the trunk, and then the roots, and then farther still, until I found the tiny, hard seed where everything began.
When we opened our eyes, we were not standing beneath the yew, because there was no yew. There were not even any woods, yet. It was just after daybreak, and the light poured eagerly, almost lavishly, over our faces, unobstructed.
We were lying together, face to face, upon a high, grassy knoll. The shape of the land was different—sharper, unsoftened by time—but I had walked these hills in too many centuries to fail to recognize them. In your era, they would be hidden beneath a thick green rime of trees. In mine, they would be shaved bare, sewn together by the neat stitches of railroad tracks.
Here, in the beginning of everything, there was only the long grass, rippling whitely in the wind, and the lavish yellow light, and the two of us.
I settled my head back into the pillow of the grass and looked at you. At the light which turned your armor to gold and your eyes to amber and your hair the piercing, perfect white of distant stars. In that moment you seemed to be everything at once, a series of contradictions: You were a knight with no master and a mother with no children; a manly woman and a womanly man; a hero whose name would be sung for a thousand years, and an orphan whose name had already been forgotten. You were SirUlla, who I had loved long before my birth and long after your death, in the past and the future, and here, now. Always.
Your fingers tightened around mine, and I discovered that we were holding hands, and that our hands were dug strangely into the soil. Pressed between our palms was something small and smooth and wet, like a pearl.
I drew our tangled fingers from the earth and held the pearl up to the light. You gasped, softly, beside me. It was not a pearl, of course, but the thing we had come all this way to find, and to destroy: A seed, which would grow one day into the yew.
Every night of our journey north we had discussed it. How we might not only escape the endless wheel of our story but shatter it beyond repair. How we might survive its shattering, and what it might cost us.
In the end, we had come to this. We would find the fragile beginning of the yew tree and tear it out before it could take root. We would burn the book and the seed and strand ourselves forever in the ancient past.
The seed was a strange thing: glassy and red, like a jewel. It splintered the light and threw bloody shards over our faces.
A shadow fell across us. “That’s pretty.”
Both of us startled. We scrambled upright, spinning to face the figure. I grabbed for the book, which had been lying between us, and you went for Valiance.
But it was only a young woman—a girl, really, tall and fleshy, with a roughly spun dress and cheeks the ruddy pink of nail beds. She regarded us without alarm, hands clasped politely behind her back.
Your grip eased on your hilt, but I said, sharply, “Who are you?”
“No one and nothing.” The girl answered easily, her accent so odd to my ear it was difficult to understand the words. Then she frowned, as if remembering a dream she’d once had. “Though I think—I think I will become someone, one day. It’s only that I haven’t yet.” Her eyes fell to my fist, where I held the red seed of the yew. “What are you going to do with it?”
“Burn it,” I said, shortly. Every second it existed in the world was a second Vivian Rolfe might contrive to return to. I fumbled for a match and drew the head against the heel of my boot. The girl gasped a little as the flame caught, like a child watching a street magician.
I set the book on the tousled grass and lifted a single page. I set it carefully alight, and then another, and another, until the book was lost behind a yellow bloom of flames. It was the second time I’d burned this damn book, and I meant it to be the last.
