The Everlasting

by Alix E. Harrow

I didn’t even have to aim. I only lifted my arm and pulled the trigger and my enemies fell like bottles at a carnival game, and later I would vomit until I couldn’t anymore.

I couldn’t see, suddenly, how it could possibly be worth it. How lowering, after all this marching, to discover I was still my father’s son.

I only knelt for a while in the place where the woods had once been, but were no longer, until I understood what every person understands eventually: that I had left home and could never return to it, and that there would never be a time when I did not miss it.

You had always been ageless and hale in my mind, like one of those creatures preserved perfectly in amber at the peak of its health. Now you looked dangerously exposed, vulnerable to the ordinary violence of time in a way that made my chest constrict.

“How far is it to the Northern Fallows?” “Far.” “How far to the edge of the wood?” “Less far.”

You hardly seemed to notice the cold or the terrain or the long days in the saddle. It didn’t strike me as toughness so much as an odd divide between you and your own flesh. As if your body was merely something you owned, like a sharp knife or a good pair of boots, which you might use hard and tend only when it showed signs of weakening.

I am not sure which I prefer: To be taken for something I am not, or to fail at being what I am.”

“The cost of peace, she tells me. Sometimes I wonder whose peace she means.”

If I couldn’t have you or heal you or save you—if I couldn’t love you—then I would make all of Dominion love you, forever and ever.

Your fate was laid out before you like a shining path, a tale so perfect it must have been written by the hand of God Himself, yet you would turn away from it. If I let you.

You didn’t seem to hear me. You staggered on like a figure in a cuckoo clock, propelled by hidden gears to tell the same story over and over.

SEVERAL YEARS AFTER the war, during the mid-afternoon hour I generally put aside to fantasize about setting fire to my manuscript and disappearing into the countryside to raise goats, I received a book in the post.

God, please, don’t ask me to write it all down again. It’s your turn to tell it, love.

You talked and talked that night, and I let you; I have always liked the sound of your voice.

I did not always let you go as quickly as I should have, afterward. Forgive me—a monster so rarely feels wanted.

But it was not for the queen that I lifted my blade, nor even for Dominion. It was for you, with your rook’s voice and your doe’s eyes and your long, fine fingers. You, who waited down the mountainside, a pen held in shaking hands, for the hero of his story to return.

And, Savior save me, I wanted. Not with tenderness, but with a kind of fury: When you dressed for my funeral, I wanted you to see the marks I’d left on your skin; when you raised your cup in my name, I wanted the wine to sting your lips.

It had the cadence of a myth or a prayer, mesmerizing in its simplicity. Die, and be redeemed. Die, and be remembered. Die, and live forever. My destiny, and the last request of my queen.

I loved you by then, or would soon, or always had. It was inevitable, foretold: When I look up, I will see the sky; when I fight, I will win; when I meet Owen Mallory, I will love him.

Do not ask me to recount the battle. Every battle is the same, anyway: There is a beginning, and there is an end, and between them there’s nothing but butchery.

Was that not how you loved someone? By hammering your body into whatever shape they liked best, and handing yourself to them like a hilt?

I was dying, but I had died before, and would die again. We had told this story so many times, you and I, and we would tell it so many more, and it would always end here, like this: with my blood on your hands and your tears on my face.

And I understood finally that a nation is a house with no windows or doors at all. That no matter what I did—no matter how much blood I spilled in its defense or ink I spent in its praise—it would never, ever be my home.

I knew I had lost something in exchange for all of this, and I knew it had been precious to me, though I could no longer quite recall what it was.

You know that history is mostly happenstance. Accidents piled on top of mistakes, a series of dice rolled in dim rooms by careless hands. It is not a lesson, until we learn it. It is not a story, until we tell it. And every story serves someone.”

That’s not history—that’s a story, designed to teach us who to hate and who to obey, what god to worship and what flag to fight for and what color eyes are the most beautiful.

I remembered hearing those words, over and over, in your voice. I remembered holding your face with my bloody hands. And then I remembered everything.

“And because I loved you, but before I loved you—before I even knew you existed—I’d hurt you badly. And there was no fixing it. No going back.”

What remained were those trivial, nameless moments which would be swallowed up by the tide of history and forgotten: my father’s hand on my hair when I was a boy, ruffling it awkwardly; the brusque press of Sawbridge’s lips on my cheek; your eyes on mine at the very end, full of faith, so certain I would come back for you. If I serve anything, let it be that. If I die for anything, let it be you.

There was a brief moment here, which hung suspended between us, swollen with the weight of unmade choices. And then the moment ended, and all the choices were made, as neatly as dominoes clacking one against the other.

I know you want to write the whole of it, every detail, so that we’ll never forget again, but Owen, have mercy: Don’t make me remember too well. Don’t make me lose them again.

‘We all belong to someone,’ she said, gently. The whole of her world was a system of allegiances, long chains of bent knees and bowed necks that ran from sinner to pulpit, from peasant to throne. It disoriented her even to imagine herself outside of it; no link could be removed from the chain unbroken. ‘We all serve someone. We all command someone. But who…’ She caught his eyes with hers. ‘That choice, at least, is now ours.’

‘Who is free, who loves another?’

If a throne was a kind of weapon, by which the world was cut into two halves: the dead and the kneeling.

Both of them had tried to cut the honor out of her and leave only what served them best, and both of them had failed, for here she stood: so full of honor even a child could feel the heat of it and run to her for help.

The scholar watched her, softened by moonlight, and knew Una Everlasting had died another death at his hands.

Was I a man or merely a palimpsest, scrubbed clean and rewritten so many times that my oldest memories were obscured entirely?

“Yes. I understand.” I thought there was probably no one on earth who understood better. “Love makes cowards of us all.”

I thought, despairingly, that love didn’t make cowards of us, after all; it made heroes, and heroes usually didn’t survive.

Because no throne is held easily, or for long; because a nation is a story we tell about ourselves, and stories change, if you let them. Because where there is power, someone will oppose it.

There was a strange comfort in this, I found. Just as there was no such thing as total freedom, there was no such thing as its total absence.

What is the point of me if I can’t protect them? What is the point of any of this?”

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?

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.

“She was sacrificed before she was born. It’s what she’s for.”

Can you look at what I’ve made, Owen Mallory, and say truly that it was not worth the death of one woman?”

And it would be you who paid it, who would never stop paying it. Because you loved me, and in loving me, you would never be free.

Let us lie here forever. Let us be buried as wild things are, by tooth and claw and worm. Let the grasses grow up through the sockets of our eyes. Let them find us in seven years or seventy, and let their brows furrow, because they cannot tell my bones from yours.

But I saw you, Owen Mallory, and swore to serve you by my right arm and my left, by my life and death. And I am not dead yet.