The wind came again up the knoll, and great gray flakes of ash lifted from the book and drifted upward, away. The fire burned hotter. Into thevery center of it, where the flames were tipped with blue and white, I tossed the seed.
You watched it warily, almost fearfully, breathing hard. “When it’s gone, when it’s done, none of it will have happened.” You were holding yourself back from the very edge of hope, unwilling to feel it again. “The Black Bastion. Ancel.My fathers—”
I set my hand over yours, pressing silently. We would be stuck here forever. We would never see our fathers again, or anyone we had ever known. But it was worth it.
“I don’t think it will burn.”
I startled again. I’d forgotten the girl was standing there, watching us.
She laughed. “It would be a great jest if it did. Imagine a dragon’s heart, burning!”
You said, so calmly that the question flattened into a statement, “A what.”
The girl bent down and plucked the seed from the ashes. You swore. I tried, too late, to stop her.
The girl ignored us both, rolling the seed fearlessly in her palm before handing it back to me. “See? It’s not even hot.”
I flinched as it touched my hand, but the girl was right: It was merely warm against my skin. “How… did you know?” I asked. And then again, more urgently, a nameless terror clamoring in my skull, “Who are you?”
“No one, I already told you.” The girl shrugged, and the wind carried her perfume to me. A sweet, summery smell, which I knew and refused to name. “And it was my—teacher, who taught me about dragons.”
“Your…” I’d heard someone hesitate in just that way before they said the wordteacher.I remembered who it had been, and in remembering, I suddenly knew what her perfume smelled like, what it had always smelled like: ulla flowers.
I grabbed you by the pauldron and hauled you abruptly backward, away from the girl. “How did you do it? How thehelldid you—shit.” I was searching for the silver knife, not finding it. Must have dropped it in the throne room. God, to have made it this far—to have the seed in my grasp andstillnot be free of her—
Your head whipped back and forth, looking for a threat. “Owen, what—”
“It’s her,” I spat. “Look.”
The girl stood watching us both with mild interest, hands still behind her back. She smiled at you—a good smile, friendly and white—and I felt a stillness fall over you. “No,” you said.
But it was obvious, now that I knew. Her hair was a little lighter, but would darken eventually to metal yellow. Her jaw was hidden by baby fat, but would one day harden into a perfect right angle. Only her eyes were unchanged: zealous, relentless, entirely devoid of doubt.
The girl smiled at me. “Hello, Cor-por-al.” She pronounced the word carefully, as if it were foreign to her.
My fist seized around the seed. “Hello, Vivian.”
The girl—who was not yet Vivian Rolfe, but would be one day—scrunched up her nose at the sound of her name. “I suppose so. I wish I will choose a better name, but I know I don’t.” She paused while her verb tenses slithered and bivouacked in my mind. “I remember it all, I do, but it’s a little… blurred. I’ve done it all so many times, and haven’t done it yet—well,youknow.”
I did. Every time I returned to that day in my office—to my own natural lifespan—it grew worse. The memories multiplied, piling one atop the other until every voice was an echo and every gesture was familiar. The had-been and will-be converged, swallowing the present, leaving nothing but confusion.
But Vivian had never once seemed confused. I looked at her again, more sharply. She stood so comfortably in the rough-woven dress, and those odd, archaic vowels came so easily to her tongue. She was younger by far than I’d ever seen her.
“You’re not from my era at all, are you? Originally, I mean.” It shouldn’t have taken me so long to suspect it. Vivian hadn’t suffered from the same circling amnesia because she’d so rarely returned to her own lifespan. I imagined Professor Sawbridge making a pained noise at my slowness. “You’re from here, fromnow.”
I’d promised you we would go back to the beginning, but where was the beginning of a circle? I felt that circle tightening now around my throat, like a noose.
“Yes,” said not-yet-Vivian. “Well, nothere—I was born miles and miles away, one and twenty years past.” She was older than I’d thought, then. I had been misled by the softness of her face and belly, which slumped oddly beneath her dress. She looked over my shoulder and her eyes softened. “Wilt thou kill me, then, daughter?”
I turned and discovered that your sword was braced across your forearm,the point aimed precisely toward the girl’s throat—but you weren’t moving. Your eyes cut once to me, and I saw turmoil in them. Here was the architect of all your misery: a sweet-faced child, defenseless and unarmed. Here was your worst enemy, before she had committed any crime against you. Here was the egg, soft and pale, that came before the asp.
You waited, and I realized you were hoping I would make an order of it and absolve you—but I wouldn’t.
When you’d knelt in the woods and handed your heart to me hilt first, as if you were nothing but a weapon, I’d made an oath of my own: never to wield you like one.
Into the silence, not-yet-Vivian said, “Look at you. So grand, with your silver sword and your silver armor. And tall—even taller than me!” She laughed, but hiccuped halfway through. “Do they sing songs about you? They do, I know they do, for I made it so.” There was a sudden, disconcerting sheen to her eyes.
The point of your sword wavered. “Tell it all to me, first. Tell me how—I came to be.” You were buying time, perhaps. Or perhaps not—what would I ask my own mother, if I could speak to her? “I don’t even know your name.”
