The Everlasting

by Alix E. Harrow

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.

I sat there beneath the yew and read your story for the first time. It was not, I would realize only when I was much older, a particularly good adaptation. The author had sprinkled thous and forsooths with a criminal disregard for syntax, and the illustrator had an unwholesome fascination with decapitation.

I looked at you for so long and so well that I felt something inside me shifting, irrevocably. It was like dying or being born, or being hit very hard on the head. It was like falling in love.

She propped her glasses on top of her head and gave me her full attention. I’ve never been vivisected, but I imagine it feels very much like receiving Gilda Sawbridge’s full attention.

I had never flourished in a crisis. I was one of God’s natural ditherers, much given to the wringing of hands and the writing of unhelpful lists.

“What’s all this?” “Ah,” he scoffed, “some friends of mine. Just a little gathering.” “A gathering with slogans is called a protest, Dad.”

He didn’t seem to understand that a man like me would never be wholly beyond suspicion, no matter how ardently loyal, while a man like him would never be wholly condemned, no matter how faithless. That I had always hated him, just a little, for the privilege of his deviance.

“Listen to me. I am not a bard or a scribe. I am Lance Corporal Owen Mallory of the 2nd Battalion, a shit soldier and a decent historian. I was sent here from”—I paused there, lingering in this last moment of sanity and order—“the distant future, to record your story and—somewhat indirectly, I suppose—save Dominion.” “Oh,” you said, after a pause. You sounded strangely contrite. “I beg pardon. You are mad.”

That lost, fearful expression had returned to your face, as if you had been walking for a long time in a country you did not know under stars you could not name. As if you had forgotten where you had meant to go in the first place, and no longer believed it was worth it.

“Personally, I always liked the one where they find you at prayer, and you break your vow of silence to answer the summons. ‘I would deny God before I deny my queen,’ you say, and then—” “I told them to fuck themselves.” You settled the log on the coals and added, almost chattily, by your standards, “I was drunk as a dog, when they found me.”

My whole life existed only to bear witness to yours, and God! It was worth it.

I know what they say about Valiance, and God knows it’s an uncanny blade, but my body has always been my first and best weapon. It is a goshawk kept tightly tethered, a mad horse on a short lead.

Yvanne had looked at me like that, the first time she saw me. 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. I couldn’t do it any longer, not for her.

You were trading away everything you cared about—your book, your future, your country’s future—for my sake. Because you wanted me, more than you wanted the legend I would leave behind.

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?

Then she was gone, leaving me with nothing but a faint heat against my cheek, as if she had kissed it before she left, and a cigarette I’d smoked a thousand years ago.

“Wait for me, beneath the yew tree.” 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.

“Like hell you did. You always said the worst circle of hell was for sympathizers and squealers.” “And centrists.”

If I serve anything, let it be that. If I die for anything, let it be you.

“But of course, what I needed most was the person she was willing to die for. I was that person, once, at the beginning.” A look of such longing crossed her face that I understood, against my will, that she really had loved you, and perhaps still did.

That fucking horse killed him, the first time around. Make a note—if you’re trying to engineer the perfect warhorse, you can only send them back in time about twenty times before they get absolutely demented.”

In her eyes I could see what she kept so carefully hidden behind rueful smiles and ugly jokes: a bottomless, terrifying resolve, of the kind that could bend the whole history of the world to its will.

I’ve given them an empire—and still, still, I am not safe. I cannot be too young or too old, too beautiful or too ugly. I cannot weep or rage. I cannot refuse a man nor fuck him nor marry him—a queen is only powerful if there are no kings or princes nearby.”

If it was a tragedy Yvanne wanted, I would make her weep; if it was blood she wanted, I would drown her in it.

“You want to run.” “I told you I was a coward.” I heard the flinch in your voice. “You want to run, and leave her alive.” “I want to run and leave you alive, you ass.”

In all my many lives and deaths, I had never been the one left behind. I’d never been the one who lingered in the world without you, gruesome and a little absurd, like a severed limb. I’d never been the one who had to grieve and go on.