The Everlasting

by Alix E. Harrow

she grew quickly and well, as wild things do.

She was strong, and arrogant in her strength. She was a young lion, a child-king, a lord of the wild woods.

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

Running away, I decided, was more of a spiritual state than a specific speed, so I walked.

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.

I concluded—reluctantly, against all reason—that I was no longer in the office of Vivian Rolfe.

My last, petulant thought was that my father had been wrong: It was the perfect weather for my service coat, after all.

“Oh,” you said, after a pause. You sounded strangely contrite. “I beg pardon. You are mad.”

“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.”

I MADE A dismaying discovery that day: A journey which takes only a few paragraphs in a book takes considerably longer on horseback. Especially if the horse is old enough to draw a pension,

“But no one lives in the wood now?” I’d asked. You’d answered, neutrally, “It’s the Queen’s Wood, now, and no one else’s.”

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

Professor Sawbridge’s dictum that if the history you were reading wasn’t filthy then someone had censored the good bits.

Line by line I made you—shattered and silent, half blind—into Sir Una Everlasting, hero of Dominion. I could almost see her sometimes, a shining, heroic figure transposed over you. One day, I knew, she would replace you entirely, so that there would be no trace of you left at all.

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

The images arrived with such vivid assurance, such fine-grained detail, that they felt more like memories than fantasies.

The words came easily, pouring from the pen in a hot, spiteful rush. It was all lies, but what did I care? 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.

And oh, I was tempted. I flushed with heat, hungry to be handled as roughly as I deserved. To have something of you that would linger after your death, even if it were only teethmarks. But if I touched you, and found only flesh—if I tasted you, and found only the ordinary bittersweetness of a wet cunt—then you would no longer be a legend to me, but only yourself. I could kill a legend; I didn’t know if I could kill you.

And suddenly I could hardly breathe, suffocated by a grief that was both premature and a thousand years too late.

I clung childishly to my own words, trying to see you for what you were: a necessary tragedy, a single red knot in the grand tapestry of history.

“When she first fell ill, I thought: Perhaps there is a God, after all. Perhaps every sin is counted and gathered on a great scale. Perhaps everyone gets what they deserve.” I tried hard not to flinch. Who knew better than I how war could warp the mind, until you hated what you ought to love?

“I know what you want me to be. What you have made me, in your book. But you should know what I truly am.” You closed your eyes then. The wind rose, lifting your hair, so that you spoke through a tangled white veil. “Had I been alone—had you not come when you did”—you were whispering now—“I would have done it.”

I thought how funny it was, how baffling, that I’d ever thought you unbeautiful.

You turned to Hen, fussing over him as if he were a child with a scraped knee rather than a serial murderer with a saddle.

“In order to have a future worth fighting for, you must have a past worth remembering.”

For a king to hold the throne it takes skill, lucky genetics, good timing, and hard work; for a queen, it takes a fucking miracle.” She strode closer to your bier. “It takes a story. And every story needs a hero.”

I concluded he was a fellow coward and could not forgive either of us.

Or perhaps I only wanted Yvanne to get word, one day, and know I had abandoned her of my own free will.

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

I did not fear God. My fathers hadn’t raised me to believe in anything higher than the sky or lower than the earth, and Yvanne’s efforts to teach me piety had not survived my first battle.

I couldn’t do it any longer, not for her. But for you—I would be a hero. One last time.

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

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.

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 had stopped loving her a long time ago, but I had never stopped wanting her love.

I felt selfish relief that, at least those little details—which didn’t count, which didn’t matter at all in the course of history—still belonged to us.

You were not a girl, but iron in the furnace, and Vivian was the hammer that fell over and over. She had not made you, but forged you, and whet you in your own blood.

And so all of this—my life and your death, and the lives and deaths of every soldier in every crusade—was to put the same woman on the same throne, twice.

Perhaps this is what happened to my father. Perhaps he went to war and met a Hinterlander girl—my mother—and lost his faith, or found a new one. Perhaps he and I were the same and hating him had been like spitting in a mirror over and over.

I had the sense that it had once been a very good speech, but that it had been delivered too many times, and gone stale.

I tried to believe her. But when I thought of God, all that came to mind was a wide smile with a chipped, graying tooth.

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’re fleeing the country? That doesn’t strike you as a little … premature?” “Speaking as a recent guest of the government: It strikes me as post-mature, flirting with postmortem.”

he was the kind of man who would wink at the executioner as he walked up the scaffold. It had embarrassed me once, his flippancy, his refusal to worry, but now I wondered if it was a species of bravery.

And now, finally, we might write our own ending.

she caught herself wondering what other names she might bear. And then she wondered if mother was another of those names, like saint or sir, that built a cage around you. She was through with cages. She swallowed the pill. It tasted like metal.

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

‘Maybe the next one will come with teeth,’

I had forgotten how eager she was to discuss her schemes; it must be lonely work.