The Everlasting

by Alix E. Harrow

She wrapped her hands around the hilt of the sword that had waited there for so long that the bark had boiled and knotted around the blade.

a wet, red girl in the center of a wet, red circle, her wrists bent beneath the weight of a blade that had not been borne in a hundred years and a hundred more.

The queen asked, ‘Who are you?’ And the girl answered, ‘No one.’ The queen asked, ‘To whom do you belong?’ And the girl answered, with grief, ‘No one.’

She thought she would not mind being a knife, so long as it was this hand that wielded her.

Harrison wanted it with the indefatigable passion of someone who thought admiration and wealth were his birthright; I wanted it with the indefatigable passion of someone who had never experienced either and would eat bullets for a taste.

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.

It was the look of a coward, a turncoat, someone with a crack running down the center of them, so that all the honor and courage ran out and left nothing but shaky hands and bad dreams behind.

For an animal of his size (prehistoric) and age (also prehistoric), your horse moved very quickly,

I could tell I’d hit some deep-set nerve, some fundamental instinct that caused you to come when you were called, to serve when you were needed. Yet your queen needed you, and here you were, hiding where fate couldn’t find you.

My mouth was full of acid, burning the back of my throat. “Yes,” I said, and—God forgive me—that wasn’t a lie, either. “This is your last quest.”

I had noticed by then the way you held yourself away from me, as if your body was a grenade with the pin half pulled. I wondered when you had last touched someone you did not intend to kill, if you even remembered how.

After a long day spent either clinging grimly to the horse—who was not actually a horse, but a clever device for flaying the insides of one’s thighs—or limping grimly alongside it,

The sky opened like a cold gray sea around us, so vast that I had the dizzy sensation of falling upward into it.

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.

they were not joyous or reverent. They did not greet you with cheers or thrown flowers or babies in need of blessing, as they would a hero. They did not even greet you with a hot meal or a spare bed, as they would a weary stranger. They only watched, as if you were a thing apart from them, neither man nor woman but some third chimerical thing, as likely to break bread with them as a dragon or a lion.

I who rode at the front, who struck first and last, who drew every border in red. Do you know what they call me, in the north? What that man called me before I crippled him?” Your lip curled, and I couldn’t tell if the contempt was directed at them or yourself. “The Knight of Worms. Because I feed them so well.”

I didn’t have to ask which piece came next; my fingers already knew the shape of each greave and gauntlet, each strap and buckle. It fit you well, impossibly well, as if the iron had been poured like candle wax over your skin, and the metal was as fine as anything made in my century.

They were unlike every natural creature—they were not born and never died, but only persisted, a ceaseless hungering that was never sated.

I had still doubted, until then, that you loved her. But despite all your bitter words and bad dreams, all your talk of sin and regret—you looked at her like you would set your own neck in the noose, if she held the rope. It was beyond loyalty, closer to the sort of flayed, mad devotion you find in mistreated dogs.

Did I imagine crawling to your bier and lying down beside you among the flowers, so that a thousand years from now they would find our bones so intermingled it would be impossible to tell which were mine and which were yours, and no one would care, because no one would know our names?

His love withered and blackened on the vine, until all that remained were the bitter seeds.

You moved constantly as you spoke, a ceaseless fidgeting, as if your skin had difficulty containing all the sentences you hadn’t yet said.

stalked toward you, my muscles quivering with the promise of violence, my vision shifting so that I saw you not as a man but as a list of ways you could die: belly, spine, throat, skull.

She had needed me, and I had spent the last two decades becoming whatever she needed: her sword and her shield; her sinner, her servant, her saint; her butcher and her best beloved.

Theirs was a just and pure hatred, which burned straight through the shine of my armor and found the butcher inside it.

will all be wiped clean. Our doubts, our mistakes, will be forgotten.” Oh, how badly I wanted to believe you. “And what of our sins?” “Those, too,” you said, and I could see how badly you wanted to believe yourself.

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 sat in dazed silence, thinking, over and over, for no logical reason: This isn’t how it goes.

abigail pent...

Once, there was a woman who wanted more than she was given. She wanted it so badly that she shattered time itself beneath her heel and pieced it back together in the way that suited her best.

Your voice dragged now like a dull blade, whetting itself against me.

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.

tending her terrible dream as carefully and ruthlessly as a vintner tended his fields.

You went through them like a scythe through late-summer hay. You came bare-handed, unshielded, blood-slicked, and you left only bodies behind you.

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

Your lips were pressed so hard together they formed a white seam, and your eyes were the holes moths leave behind in linen.

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.

“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?”

a huge woman with a white halo of hair and the devil’s own red hands, cup held in one and naked blade in the other, sitting upon a horse like death itself. You did not look like a hero, now, so much as a harbinger.

At the light which turned your armor to gold and your eyes to amber and your hair the piercing, perfect white of distant stars.

Her faith in you was the faith a smith might feel for his favorite hammer, or a hunter for his best hound: pure, without flaw.

Dizzily, sickly, in a long string of metaphors, I saw everything we could make of love: chains, debts, cages, circles. And, too, I saw everything it could make of us: tragedies, traitors, madmen, cowards.

I thought: 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.

When my mother read the first draft of this book, she sent me—by my request, and to my gratitude—six single-spaced pages describing everything I’d gotten wrong about horses.