The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow: Chapters 2 and 3 - Reactor

Una and Owen are tangled together in time, bound to retell the same story over and over again, no matter what it costs…

Join us every Tuesday through October 28th for an extended preview of The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow, a moving and genre-defying quest about the lady-knight whose legend built a nation, and the cowardly historian sent back through time to make sure she plays her part—even if it breaks his heart. The Everlasting publishes on October 28th with Tor Books. Find additional excerpts here.

Chapter 2

I was born not quite ten centuries after your death; the first time you saved my life, I was nine.

It was between the wars, when my father and I lived in a narrow gray row house in the narrow gray village of Queenswald, in the part of the country that had once been a fathomless green wood but was now nothing but bald hills and pit mines.

I woke that morning and listened, as I did every morning, for the gentle engine of my father’s snoring. The house was silent, so I laced up my boots and slipped out the door.

It wasn’t far to the tavern, but it was dark and cold, and I did not like the dark or the cold. I also did not like locked doors, large dogs, the sound of gunfire, or the sight of blood. I was aware that these were girlish, humiliating tendencies that made the other boys laugh at me, but they would have laughed anyway, I think. Partly it was my looks—my hair and eyes were nearly black, and my skin had a suspiciously Hinterlander undercurrent, beery gold even in winter—and partly it was everything else about me.

I had slim shoulders, thick spectacles, a fine singing voice, neat handwriting, a subscription to the lending library, and the best marks in class; my shins were always a little too long for my trousers and I cried easily, sometimes for no reason. I was a walking flinch. An open invitation for other boys—bolder, louder boys, with ruddy pink cheeks and trousers that fit—to knock their shoulders purposefully against mine as they passed.

But those boys were still sleeping at this hour. Everyone was, save the barkeep, and she was inexplicably fond of my father and me. By the time I knocked she was wiping down tables with her youngest daughter propped on one hip.

“By the fire,” she said, and I nodded.

My father was slumped over the hearth like laundry that had fallen from the drying rack. It took several minutes to get him conscious, and another several to get him vertical. He mumbled things to me as we navigated the empty chairs, nice things, like there’s my boy and thank you and sorry, sorry. I knew my father often behaved shamefully—knew he drank too much and said too much and refused to sing the anthem on national holidays—but he was never unkind, so I’d decided I didn’t mind the rest.

The barkeep set a basket on the counter as we passed. She was always slipping me things, leftover pies and hand-me-down sweaters. I knew this, too, was shameful, but her pies were very good and my father was always between jobs or about to be, so I’d decided it was another thing I didn’t mind.

I took the basket. My father stumbled.

The barkeep’s daughter looked at him with her big blue eyes and her perfect yellow curls—like an advertisement for Dominion’s Own soap, like my exact opposite—and said, with the eerie mimicry of a child repeating words they’ve heard but don’t understand, “Fucking coward.”

I’d heard it before, along with words like turncoat, traitor, and sometimes deserter, although Queenswald was awfully far from the desert.

But that morning I felt my father cringe away from the word and understood for the first time that it was true. That my father was something even more shameful than being a drunk or a radical, something so awful that the stink of it followed him everywhere and sank into everything he loved, including—and this I saw in the mute pity of the barkeep’s face, the way she scolded her daughter—me.

And so I left my father there in the tavern, still drunk, still saying nice things, and ran away.

It still wasn’t fully light, and the muddy streets had frozen overnight into alien figurations, which reached for my ankles and twisted. I tripped and crashed into a woman wearing a fine wool coat. She was very nice about it, bending to help gather the scattered contents of the barkeep’s basket while I fumbled for my spectacles. She smelled like summer, sweet and flowery.

“Poor thing,” she said, as she handed me back the basket, and I thanked her, hot-faced with shame.

Running away, I decided, was more of a spiritual state than a specific speed, so I walked. I walked until the hunched shoulders of the houses gave way to sheepfolds and frostbitten hills, and the street became a narrow track that became nothing at all.

I walked until I reached the grove.

No one much liked the grove. Later I would learn that it was the last remnant of the Queen’s Wood, the great green shroud that had once run all the way to the sea. But most of the trees had been turned into ships a century ago, the last time we’d gone to war against the Hinterlands, and now all that remained were a few ghostly acres.

It seemed larger, to me. The air beneath the trees was very still, and the branches seemed to catch all the ordinary sounds of Queenswald—the coal trains and carts, the lambs and schoolchildren and the bitter wet wind that blew all winter—and turn them away, so that stepping into the woods was like slipping under the surface of a lake.

Every now and then someone would announce that it was high time they cleared the land, and the young men would be hassled outside with axes and saws. They only ever made it through the slender new growth at the edges; any farther and the men would begin to complain that their blades, freshly sharpened, were going dull, and their good ash handles were turning spongy with rot. They would return home, defeated, and no one would mention the woods again for a year or two.

For this, I was grateful. Everywhere I went I was plagued by the sweaty sense that I was in the way or underfoot, unwanted, ill-fitting, missish—but not here. Here, I was neither my father’s son nor a foreigner but only myself.

The only other person I’d ever met in the woods was a girl a little older than me, a proud and feral creature I’d met one day after I’d fallen and scraped both knees bloody. She was my superior in every subject that mattered—climbing, running, spitting, rock-throwing, fighting with sticks—but I didn’t mind. She liked to win, and I liked to watch her, and afterward I liked to lie next to her among the tiny white flowers that covered the grove every summer.

Last winter she’d stopped coming. I asked after her everywhere, but no one seemed to know where she’d gone, or even to have heard of a girl by the name of [REDACTED] and eventually I had concluded, with a new and grown-up sadness, that I’d made her up.

I headed now to the very middle of the woods. She used to wait for me there, beneath an old yew so vast and so misshapen it no longer looked much like a tree, but like some secret organ of the earth itself, exposed. We liked to find patterns in the grain of the trunk: a dragon, a crown, a woman’s tortured face. In spring the sap would run from her eyes like tears.

It was even quieter than usual, beneath the yew. So quiet I thought maybe I wouldn’t run away, after all. Maybe I would just tuck myself down among the roots, cradled by dead needles and worms, and disappear.

They wouldn’t look for me for very long. My father would want to, but he wouldn’t go this far into the grove, being a fucking coward, and in a few months those little white flowers would cover me over, and the name Owen Mallory would be wiped clean from the world, as if it had never been.

That sounded rather grand and tragic, so I settled myself between the roots and waited to disappear.

It was hungry work, I found. By the time the sun had fully risen I’d decided maybe I ought to eat whatever the barkeep had slipped me, as a last meal. I opened the basket.

That’s when I first saw the book.

Not the book, of course, but a book: thin pages, already brittle; a cloth cover, moth-chewed; illustrations printed so cheaply the colors didn’t line up properly with the drawings, so that each figure appeared to be haunted by his own merry ghost. None of the barkeep’s baskets had ever included a book before.

The title was written in an elaborate, curlicued font that was supposed to look medieval: The Legend of Una Everlasting. And then, in smaller serif print: A Children’s Retelling of the Classic Tragedy! And, even smaller: Look inside for a complete listing of titles in the Little Soldiers National Heritage Series.

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. All the messy loose ends of the Everlasting Cycle—the result of centuries of iterations and variations—had been pruned away in favor of a morality tale with all the subtlety and nuance of a nursery rhyme.

But the story itself shone through the prose like sunlight: a nameless child who became a knight; a knight who went to war and became a champion; a champion who slew the last dragon and found the lost grail and became a legend. It was a story of chivalry and courage, where good and evil were neatly labeled, and one always vanquished the other.

And when I turned the final page, there you were: Sir Una Everlasting.

They’d laid you out in full armor but for a helm, mailed fists still curled around your hilt, as if you kept some vigil even in death. Your hair was a startling, fluorescent yellow, which spilled like melted butter over the edge of your bier, and your face was the pure white of the page beneath. There were flowers tucked all around you: tiny, colorless roses, I thought, though the artist had no particular botanical skill.

I thought you were the saddest and most beautiful thing I had ever seen, like a dead angel. I looked for a long time at the bright line of the sword along your sternum, at the solemn shape of your mouth.

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. (This was another thing I would only realize when I was much older.)

The longer I looked, the more ashamed I felt.

Sir Una Everlasting—you—had never run from anything. You hadn’t disappeared from the world—you had burned your name into its surface, carved it so deeply into the stone of history that it was still legible a thousand years later. You had died, yes, but only because you had found something worth dying for. You had been born poor, but no one had ever called you a poor thing.

If I turned the book sideways, I could read the letters inscribed on your blade: Erxa Dominus.

For Dominion.

Perhaps if my father had read your stories as a boy, he would not have grown up to be a traitor and a turncoat; perhaps he would have served with honor and come home with a pension instead of just a bad hip and a motherless child.

And perhaps—despite my reservations about gunfire and bloodshed—it was not too late for me.

Here I was visited by a somewhat confused daydream of myself returning to Queenswald in triumph—being swept up, adored, admired. The ruddy-cheeked boys would clap me on the back and my father would sober up and you would be there, somehow, glowing faintly with holy light. You would take my hand and guide me down to lie beside you on your bier.

I repacked the basket, fingers clumsy with cold, and went straight home.

My father didn’t even look up when the door closed behind me. He behaved, in fact, as if no time had passed at all, as if the whole world had held its breath while I sat beneath the yew in the heart of the grove that was all that was left of the deep wild woods.

I lingered, wanting him to ask where I’d gone and why I’d come back. If he had, I would have answered, somewhat theatrically: For Dominion.

But I would have meant: For you.

* * *

The second time you saved me, I was twenty-three, and we were losing the war.

The Sunday papers printed fresh maps each week, with squiggly red lines to show how far our troops had retreated, how much territory was still held by the Hinterlanders. They used to list the casualties by name over the wireless, but they’d stopped after a group of dissidents broke into Chancellor Gladwell’s bedroom and wrote the names of the dead on his walls in gory red paint (I’d told myself the red spatters on my father’s cuffs were coincidental).

Now the evening radio hour was reserved for the Minister of War. Every night she addressed the nation, begging every concerned citizen to tighten their belts, every able hand to take up arms. She recalled our past triumphs against worse odds: Were we not the sons and daughters of Queen Yvanne the First, who united the whole of Dominion and brought the Savior’s light to every hollow and dale? Had we not stood against the Hinterlands for centuries, bloodied but never beaten? Surely our nerve would not fail now, on the very cusp of peace?

There had been murmurs and jokes and a run of extremely nasty cartoons when the Chancellor had named a woman as Minister of War, but her speeches were very good, and they left me restless and guilty.

Now, as I walked toward campus, I caught edged looks and suspicious glances, blond heads bent together, muttering. People wondered, perhaps, where I had gotten my dark eyes and hair, and why I hadn’t been detained with the other enemy aliens and foreign suspects. Or perhaps they only wondered why a healthy young man was walking down the street with library books tucked under one arm while their own sons were bleeding or killing or rotting in the Hinterlands.

I wanted to point at my spectacles, which were so thick the lenses had to be specially ordered; I wanted to tell them I was from Queenswald, actually, and did not have to register as an alien; I wanted to wave my transcript at them, which had earned me a fellowship at Cantford College and an exemption from the draft; I wanted, with a dispassionate sincerity I hadn’t felt since I was nine years old, to disappear.

I turned down an alley, hunched with loathing—and there you were again.

For one wild moment I felt everything shift around me, the city street dissolving into moss, the chill gray light going softly green. My mouth was full of the clean taste of winter and my heart was, for some reason, breaking.

Then I blinked and discovered that I was staring at a poster pasted to the alley wall.

The poster version of you was similar to the one in The Legend of Una Everlasting. You were still armored, and your hair was still an unlikely, over-saturated yellow. But you were alive now, caught mid-battle, an angel gone to war. Valiance—the sword you pulled from the yew, the blade that built Dominion—was held dead level in your hands, pointing straight out at my chest. Behind you, legions of Hinterlanders skulked in the shadows. Their faces—leering, animal-like, with eyes so dark they appeared to have no sclera at all—bore no resemblance to my own, or to any human face I have ever seen.

Neither did you, really: Your features were perfectly symmetrical, your cheeks marked by two circles of maidenly pink. Your cloak swirled Dominion-red behind you, and there was a faint halo around your head.

Only your eyes seemed real. The expression in them was exactly right, I thought: grave and proud, faintly contemptuous, as if you were asking for help but very much expecting to do everything yourself. Just their color, a floral and frivolous blue, was incorrect.

The caption read: DOMINION NEEDS YOU!

I looked at the poster for a long time. At you, who were everything I wasn’t and everything I wanted.

Then I turned around and walked straight to the recruitment office. I cheated on the eye exam, lied baldly about my exercise regimen, signed several forms, shook two hands, and then I was an enlisted man.

Three weeks later I was at the front. I’d had to return my library books by mail, at a cost I didn’t like to contemplate.

* * *

The third time you saved me, I was twenty-six, and we were winning the war.

It was harder to tell the difference between winning and losing, from the front. I had found that both states involved an enormous amount of marching and suffering, endless days spent eating shitty tins of beans, and endless nights spent praying to God you got to eat one more shitty tin of beans and wishing you’d said a proper goodbye to your father.

I hadn’t even spoken to him before I shipped out. I’d posted a brief, slightly nasty letter explaining that my country called in her hour of need and that I, unlike certain others, was not afraid to do my duty (I was). In reply I had received a single telegram which read, when decoded: WOULD PREFER TO DISOWN YOU IN PERSON SO DONT DIE LOVE DAD.

I hadn’t died.

True, the first time we charged enemy lines I had puked from sheer terror, and when it was over, I had wept, helplessly and hard, like a child—

But I hadn’t died.

After the weeping had subsided to irregular hiccups, Colonel Drayton had taken me aside. “It’s like swimming,” he’d said, with the pride of someone delivering a line they’ve written themselves. “You drown, the first time. But the next one will be easier.”

The next one had not been easier.

It had in fact been infinitely harder because I knew then how a bullet sounds when it hits bone, how intestines feel beneath a boot, how desperately and cravenly I did not want to die, no matter how noble the cause.

I had begun to cry before the order was even given, that time, and survived only because I turned out to be—to the bafflement of my commanding officers, myself, and everyone who’d ever met me—the best shot in the 2nd Battalion.

There was no rational explanation for it. My vision was terrible and my reflexes were worse; at school I had been chosen for teams only when every other option was exhausted, including younger siblings and girls.

And yet: The rifle settled so sweetly to my shoulder, and the revolver lay so tenderly in my palm. The motions of loading, firing, reloading—the fall of the hammer and the kick as the bullet left the barrel—all of it was like a clapping game I’d learned as a child. I’d forgotten the words, but my muscles remembered the rhythm.

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 was not well-liked in the battalion. There had been a rash of ugly jokes early on, which Colonel Drayton quashed, somewhat clumsily. (Drayton was a liberal, which meant he thought boys of every race and class ought to be allowed to die for their country.) Then there had been an awkward encounter on sentry duty, where I’d been obliged to tell another private, politely, that I didn’t fuck men, and he’d said neither do I! with confusing venom. The others had pointedly ignored me, since then.

But after that second battle they regarded me with sullen hostility, as if they suspected me of playing an elaborate trick on them. After the fourth battle, when it was clear the shaking and crying were not an act, they accepted me. Not as a fellow soldier or even, really, a fellow man—but as a sort of embarrassing lucky charm, like an unwashed sock or the foot of a dead animal, which they carried along against their better judgment.

They carried me far—across the whole of the Hinterlands. We waded through waist-deep fields of grain, which we left trampled and soiled, and crossed rivers whose names we changed to make them easier to pronounce. In the papers, the maps turned triumphal red in our wake.

Colonel Drayton’s speeches grew longer and more florid. He discovered at some point that I’d studied history and badgered me for poignant details.

“Boys,” he would begin, and several of the men would pull out their pencils, because there were running bets on the number of times he would address us as boys, my boys, lads, sonny Jims, and buckos.

“Let me tell you of the dark days before Queen Yvanne, back when Dominion was nothing but a hilly backwater ruled by petty kings and squabbling tribes. The Norns of the southern marsh, the savage Hyllmen, the Gallish with their heathen temples all painted up like fast women. All of them mired in filth and darkness, beset by famine and pestilence—even dragons! That’s right, sonny Jims!” (Pencils would scratch.) “The devil’s own creatures, pale as ghosts, huge as houses!

“Yes, nasty business all around, lads.” (More scratching; some soft cursing.) “Until a young girl pulled a sword from a tree. Until a queen rose to power and sent her champion out to bring peace and prosperity to the land. And then there was only one crown, one God, and one nation. And that nation was called Dominion.”

Here he would smile with a sort of rugged paternal pride. “For a thousand years, we’ve held fast. Despite treachery and idolatry, despite foreigners and radicals worrying at our heels. Despite even these damned Hinterlanders— who slew the Virgin Saint herself, who despise our very way of life!” He shook his head, dolefully. “How many times have we gone to war with them, and settled for sniveling treaties, slick promises from soft-handed diplomats? Not this time, buckos! This time let us have victory or death! Let us, gathered here”—I could never tell if he was faking it, or if he was genuinely choking with tears—“Let us be the Last Crusade, my boys! For crown and country!” (There was a separate tally for this phrase, which the Colonel deployed at least once a day despite the fact that no one had actually worn the crown for a century or so, as Dominion was now a republic.)

A beat or two would pass while everyone ran the numbers, followed by perfunctory applause and furtive shuffling, as a great deal of cigarettes and pornography changed hands.

Then we would string up flags and pose for photographs in front of whatever little village we’d liberated for crown and country.

I had formed the idea, from the little newsreels that played before films at the theater, that the new citizens of Dominion would applaud as we passed, weeping with gratitude and tossing fistfuls of poppy petals, but they only watched us, silently, with eyes like thrown stones.

Every now and then they approached me, speaking rapidly in one of the many languages of the Hinterlands: Shvalic in the east or Merrish in the south, or the musical, gapless speech of the Roving Folk, who lived everywhere, on horseback. But I would shake my head—only the Mothertongue was taught in Dominion schools—and they would recoil, as from a stick that had turned out to be a snake.

I wondered if I really looked so much like them. If the mother my father never mentioned had been one of them, some nameless Hinterlander girl he met during the last campaign. If she was even now standing in the crowd, watching me through the gaps between rifles.

I tried not to look at the townspeople, after that.

My sleep suffered. My dreams became torturous circles, looping back over the same battles again and again, with slight, disquieting variations, interrupted only by the anxious grinding of my own molars. In the morning my hands shook so badly that I struggled to tie my own laces or button my own coat, although they were always perfectly steady when I raised my revolver. I thought often of my father, not with my usual pity or disgust, but with a treacherous, wormy sympathy.

“Think of your girl back home,” Colonel Drayton advised, cliché-ly. I thought of flaxen hair, of mailed fists, and eyes like judgment day. My breathing eased.

Drayton clapped me on the back very hard and said, “See, lad? It’s all worth it.”

I found myself repeating those words like a prayer. I believed them, or at least believed that I believed them—until we reached the southern coast.

Our enemies had fallen back and back until there was nowhere else to fall back to. The ones who would surrender had surrendered; what remained were the ones who never would. Who no longer hoped for victory or mercy, but only blood.

They were dug in now among the dunes, waiting for us. We might have starved them out or waited for the fleet to fire on them from the seaward side. But the public was tiring of the war, and Colonel Drayton had been asked to provide a decisive victory. So there we were in the pale dawn: running the leather straps of our holsters over our shoulders, affixing our service knives to our belts, laughing in the urgent, overloud way of young men who can taste their own deaths in the backs of their mouths.

I snapped my revolver into its holster—a Saint Sinclair Mark III, finest product of the finest army in the world, accurate to thirty paces—and looked out at the shadowed figures waiting for us in the dunes. Within an hour or two they’d all be dead, along with most of the men beside me.

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.

They found me six hours later with my throat half cut, so that my breath bubbled obscenely through my trachea. Poor Colonel Drayton lay beside me, service knife still gripped in one cold hand, and a neat black hole burrowed directly between his eyes.

The following week was a grim haze of needles and stitches and medics with distant, resigned expressions. Someone turned on a wireless so we could hear Minister Rolfe’s speech, thanking us for our noble and worthy sacrifices in the name of crown and country. I laughed, and it was such an unpleasant sound that they sedated me. The fever set in some time that night, and I thought, with no small amount of irony, that I might die for my country after all.

And then I dreamed of you.

I’d dreamed of you many times, as a boy and after, but you were always two-dimensional, a character from a storybook rather than a person.

Now you were so real I could see the lines tanned into the corners of your eyes, hear the wet rattle of your breath. Your teeth were filmed with blood.

“Owen,” you said, and your voice was deep and cool as still water, “come back to me.”

Then you said, “Please,” and that cool voice caught and hung on the word, and I thought I would do anything at all—live or die or burn in hell—if you asked it of me.

In the dream, I answered you. The medics told me later it was the first word I’d spoken since the dunes, the first time any of them thought I might live.

I said, “Always.”

* * *

The fever burned out within a week, but the dreams lingered.

They were almost always of you, though you did not speak again. I saw you kneeling, head bowed so that your hair parted in two bright wings around the back of your neck. I saw you astride a rangy blood bay, the two of you moving in eerie, perfect synchrony, like a single animal. I saw you by firelight and leaf-light, moonlight and sunlight and, once, bizarrely, by the spectral, electric blue of a searchlight.

Sometimes, of course, my dreams were merely the senseless, anxious dreams of a coward: looking for my father and not finding him; trying to hold a pen with curled, blackened fingers; calling out the names of two children I’d never met and knowing they wouldn’t answer.

Sometimes, too, I dreamed of home: the long gray summers of Queenswald, when mold bloomed overnight and moss burst green between every cobblestone; the quiet winter evenings with my father, both of us reading, nearly content; those eager spring mornings in the grove, waiting for [REDACTED] beneath the yew.

That’s where I went when they finally let me out of the hospital. I took the train straight from Cavallon to Queenswald. An elderly, jowly man offered me his seat, which puzzled me until I recalled that I was still wearing my red service jacket, with the Everlasting Medal of Honor gleaming dishonestly on my chest. Other passengers regarded me with fond, vaguely paternal expressions, rather like the ones in my childhood vision. I found they made me a little sick, now.

I walked from the station past my father’s house and up into the hills. I went to the place where I first saw you, which was the last place anything had made sense.

But the grove was gone.

During the war the land had finally been cleared, and the entire hilltop given over to pasture. There were a few stumps and thickets left, but of my favorite tree—that great and ancient yew in the heart of the woods— there was nothing at all. Even the roots had been dug out, so that all that remained was an indentation in the earth surrounded by tiny white flowers, like a plundered grave.

For once, I did not weep.

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.

Yet still, I lingered. You had come to me three times, I thought; why not a fourth?

I whispered your name; nothing answered me but the bitter wet wind, which blew hard across the bare hills.

I picked a fistful of those little white flowers before I left. Then I stood, damp-kneed and dry-eyed, and went down to the tavern. My father wasn’t there, but the barkeep told me she would save the dragonscales for him.

I asked, “The what?”

She nodded at the flowers hanging limply from my hand. “Dragonscales, my mother always called them.”

“Ah,” I said. I looked them up later; they’re also called ulla flowers, which means many, in Middle Mothertongue, because they’re so common as to be considered weeds.

I tucked the flowers obediently into a little jam jar and thanked the barkeep, who kissed me on the cheek and told me my father had worried himself sick, which I did not imagine was distinguishable from drinking himself sick.

Then I walked to the village post office, where I mailed a letter to my old adviser apologizing for going to war in the middle of term and begging to be readmitted to the Cantford Department of History.

If you would not come to me, I thought, I would go to you.

* * *

Professor Sawbridge’s reply arrived four days later, so heavily redacted that it was mostly prepositions and conjunctions. (Gilda Sawbridge had a low opinion of the government and a high temper, which tended to upset the censors. It also upset the Cantford Board of Fellows, her students, the other faculty, and me, but, as she was the most acclaimed archaeologist of her generation, we all did our best to overlook it.)

Tucked in the envelope alongside the letter was a formal notice of acceptance on school letterhead. At the top, Sawbridge had written: Don’t make me regret it.

I returned to Cantford campus the following week. In our first meeting, I told Professor Sawbridge that I’d chosen a specialization: the folkloric traditions of Middle Dominion.

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.

Eventually she said, without looking away, “Too broad.”

“I intend to focus on the Everlasting Cycle, our founding mythological—”

“It’s played out.”

“It’s patriotic.”

“Please, I’ve just had breakfast,” she said, without inflection.

“I wonder that you, of all people, could fail to appreciate the need for further study of Una Everlasting.” This, I thought, was clever of me: Sawbridge was the only female professor in the whole of Cantford. “Her story tells us that a woman might take up arms as well as a man. That she might fight, even lead—”

“So long as she dies before she starts wondering why she can’t vote, divorce, or open a bank account. Do not patronize me, Mallory.” This, too, was delivered flatly. “Now tell me honestly: Why?”

I answered, softly, “Erxa Dominus, ma’am.”

It was a good line, well delivered, and even a little true. I had failed my country on the field, but still hoped to serve it better on the page. To earn the medal I could hardly stand to look at, to finally become—despite my embarrassing origins and even more embarrassing father—a true son of Dominion. I imagined myself standing proudly behind lecterns and oaken desks, beyond all reproach and suspicion, unassailable at last.

But beneath all that, of course, there was another reason, which I could not say aloud.

Professor Sawbridge looked at me some more. She looked at my hands, which were shaking again, and at my throat, which I kept hidden behind tightly buttoned collars. She looked at my eyes, and perhaps she saw something of that last, unspoken reason there.

She said, on a sigh that made her book towers wobble dangerously, “Good luck.”

I left the office that day feeling like a hound let off the leash, permitted at last to give chase.

In the years that followed, there was nothing but the hunt. I ignored the papers and wireless speeches and my father’s pamphlets. I ignored everything— save you.

You led me into archives and private collections, libraries and museums, ancient ruins and family vaults. I excelled at the chase—I had a better-than-average memory and an eye for detail, and a mind that clicked obediently along like a series of bright brass gears. But it was like hunting in a hall of mirrors; I caught glimpses of bright armor or pale hair, but when I reached out, I touched nothing but glass.

I read and re-read every accounting of your story—Lazamon’s shambling anthology of legends, Marie de Meulan’s romantic verses, Montmer’s Historica—but all of them were third- or fourth-hand, history watered down into mere hearsay. Most of the authors claimed to have based their versions on The Death of Una Everlasting—a true accounting of your adventures as written by an anonymous traveling companion—but, as there was no evidence that such a text had ever existed, most modern historians saw this as a bid for legitimacy rather than a fact.

My undergraduate work was therefore little more than an echo’s echo. My papers were all reinterpretations of reinterpretations, dissections of lines that had already been dissected a hundred times before. It was received well enough—I graduated with the second-highest marks in the history of the department, after Sawbridge herself, and my article on the grail as a metonym for nationhood had been quoted in the Times—but Professor Sawbridge was not fooled. (“You are clever enough to convince the swine that you are giving them pearls,” she observed, idly. “Alas, alack! I am not a pig.”)

My current manuscript—An Everlasting Legacy: A Survey of Modern Translations—was supposed to earn me the Middle Dominion Faculty Fellow title, the respect of my peers, and a living wage. But it was so anemic and derivative that even the swine (the other faculty) were beginning to entertain doubts. They muttered often about the benefits of fresh air, and more than once I’d heard the words extended leave floating ghoulishly down the hall. Though I had nowhere else to go—I wasn’t even sure I could crawl back home, after the things my father and I had said to one another during our last fight—I was on the verge of agreeing with them.

Until I received that book in the post, and you saved me for the fourth time.

Chapter 3

I barely touched the book, that first day.

I simply crouched in my flat above the butcher shop and smoked an entire pack of Lucky Stars, lighting each cigarette from the butt of the last. It was a habit I’d picked up during the war and continued on doctor’s orders for my weak disposition, and also because it was the only way to overpower the meaty, battlefield smell of the butcher shop below.

I moved the book from my bedside to the desk and back again. I performed a series of tests—not on the book, but on myself: writing out my whereabouts for the last three days to ensure there were no odd gaps, reciting every monarch of Dominion from Yvanne up to the republic, pinching myself quite hard, et cetera. I had suffered some little disturbances after the war—forgetting things that had happened only the day before, or remembering things which had never happened, or confusing dreams for memories—but my mind seemed to be in perfect order now.

I went to bed early and lay tense and unsleeping for several hours.

At two or three in the morning I said, aloud, “God, enough,” slipped on a pair of cotton gloves, and opened the book. I translated the first sentence:

It begins where it ends: beneath the yew tree.

A surprising peace moved through me as I wrote the words, an almost mechanical satisfaction, as of a key turning smoothly in a lock. I returned to bed and slept well. I dreamed, and my dreams were all of you.

The second and third days I spent examining the book as an archaeological object, striving for some semblance of objectivity.

It was not at all uncommon for unscrupulous or excitable persons to “discover” artifacts related to Una Everlasting. Every old tree in every old village was the one from which you first pulled Valiance; every rusted shield was the one you wore on your left arm, a white dragon upon a red field. Just last week Professor Sawbridge had been called away to investigate a vault beneath the ruins of Cavallon Keep, which might have been your final resting place.

I extracted tiny samples of ink and studied the grain of the wood beneath my strongest magnifying glass. I took meticulous, if inconclusive, notes. Ink is oak gall, hand-lettered—rate of decay indicates early period. Pages are wood pulp. Parchment or vellum would have been more typical.

On the fourth day I opened the book again and worked through the first six pages, and forgot all my fussy, doubtful notes. Yes, the paper was anachronistic. Yes, the binding was unusual, perhaps even unique. But the words themselves rang in my head like church bells, and I came to believe that whoever had written them had truly known you, not only as a hero or a saint, but as a living woman.

It was the way he described you, the casual familiarity of it, and the way he sometimes forgot the grander quest in favor of odd, quiet moments of intimacy. But most of all it was the way he mourned you. Grief rose from every page like turpentine, burning the back of my throat.

On the fifth day I made copies of my translated pages and mailed them to Professor Sawbridge, who was still away supervising the excavation of the burial vault.

On the sixth day Professor Sawbridge and I exchanged a series of telegrams, in which she called me a rude name, committed light treason, and cast aspersions on the veracity of the text. I knew she was at least intrigued, however, because she was taking the early train back to campus, and the only thing she hated more than her country was getting out of bed before ten o’clock.

On the seventh day, I went out for cigarettes and milk. The sun was far too hot and the air was far too fresh, moving around me in great unsettling billows, tugging at my sleeves.

When I returned, with relief, to the stale dark of my flat, the book was gone.

In its place there was a crisp white card, bearing no name, but only an address.

* * *

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. Since the war, I had added fits of weeping and melancholic stupors, and every now and then a wave of confused and violent memory that left me curled in a corner, shaking.

I did not dither now, though, nor wring my hands. I did compose a brief and unhelpful list (1. Report the theft of a nonexistent book to the police; 2. Search the room for clues, as they are always doing in novels; 3. Weeping fit??), but I did not even bother to write it down. My body was already moving, as if it had decided on a course of action without me.

I donned my old red service coat, then—after a moment’s sweaty uncertainty—removed the coat, strapped my holstered Sinclair service revolver over my shoulder, and slipped the coat back over it. I tucked two packs of cigarettes into the breast pocket and left the flat with the white card clutched so tightly in my hand that the edges cut into my palm.

I showed the card to the cab driver, who read the address twice, gave me a suspicious, flinty look, then drove in silence to the very heart of Cavallon and deposited me on the steps of a building I’d never seen, but recognized nonetheless, because it was stamped on the back of every coin in the country: the capitol.

I exited the cab clumsily, blinded by the sheer volume of white marble. The air was thick and hot, as if it had been panted from a dog’s mouth; I couldn’t imagine, suddenly, why I’d worn my service jacket.

“Traitors, the lot of you.” It was my driver, leaning one elbow out the window and enunciating very clearly, as if he’d been rehearsing during the drive.

I was not surprised by this statement. The war was over, but the occupation was proving messy and expensive, and there were plenty of people who were thrilled to find someone with brown eyes to blame for it. I also happened to be, by literal and legal definition, a traitor.

But then I saw the crowd gathered at the steps of the capitol, signs and banners waving, and felt a surge of embarrassment instead.

“Oh, no—I’m not with—” But the driver had already slipped back into traffic.

I turned quickly away from the crowd, hunching my shoulders. I comforted myself that treasonous chanting was probably quite diverting, and there was no reason any of them should notice a panicky scholar lurking nearby. And anyway, they might not even be affiliated with my father. Those radical organizations were always dividing and sub-dividing, as if their true purpose was not the downfall of tyranny but the invention of new acronyms.

“Owen? That you?”

I flinched, feeling like a boy caught sneaking out of the house, except that my father had never much cared where I went or when I came back.

I turned, sweating hard, and saw him limping gamely through the crowd, one arm raised.

“Well, if it isn’t my favorite propagandist,” my father said, and smiled at me.

It was such a good smile—sincere but a little roguish, the bags beneath his eyes folding up like merry accordions, as if our last fight had never happened or wasn’t worth remembering—that I muttered, “Hello, Dad.” And then, more stiffly, “What’s all this?”

“Ah,” he scoffed, “some friends of mine. Just a little gathering.”

“A gathering with slogans is called a protest, Dad.”

The smile faded. Without it, my father looked more like what he was: old and tired and hungover, probably in a great deal of pain. He’d always been thin, but now he resembled the scraps one might save for a stray, all bone and gristle.

“That bloodthirsty tyrant—”

“Her title is Minister Rolfe, and as our first female Minister of War I think she deserves a certain degree of respect—”

“Oh-ho, does she show respect for the women who’ve died in her munitions factories—which she refuses to investigate, because they’re owned by her nasty industrialist friends?” I often imagined my father would have made a good solicitor, if he hadn’t taken up anarchy instead. “The union girls invited her to speak at one of their meetings and do you know what she called them? Poison!” My father shook his head. “She wants to be Chancellor, if you ask me. Thinks we’ll all just go quietly along with it.”

He added a scornful ha!, but the truth was that I’d spent the last several years going quietly along with it. It wasn’t hard; I simply never read the papers or listened to the wireless or voted. I declined every invitation to veterans clubs and kept my Medal of Valor in my loose change jar. If it wasn’t for the dreams and the shaking fits, I might have been able to pretend I’d had my throat slit in a terrible archival accident.

My father was still talking. “But I can tell you our pamphlet circulation is up two hundred percent! Not everyone wants to see their tax dollars support an illegal occupation. Not everyone was happy to waste their sons on a ridiculous war—”

“Some of us shed a lot of blood for that ridiculous war,” I interrupted, in that especially priggish tone I seemed to reserve solely for my father. “Some of us fought for crown and country—”

“A country with colonies is called an empire, son.”

We regarded one another unhappily for a little while. The chanting continued shamelessly on. The sun shone heartlessly down. I was very conscious of the strap of the holster beneath my coat, and the sheer insanity of bringing a weapon to the capitol of Dominion.

Eventually, my father offered, with gruff resignation, “There’s extra signs, if you’d care to join us.” Behind him two men were unrolling a long banner that read: Veterans against War!

“I thought you were the Veterans for Peace.”

“Don’t you mention the VFP in my presence. Class traitors and sycophants, all of them.” My father softened, leaning close. His breath rose in fumes between us. “What do you say, son?”

I looked at him, with his pinkish-white complexion and his hair the color of underbaked bread, and marveled that he had never truly noticed the difference between us. 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.

I answered, in my coldest Cantford drawl, “No, thank you.”

My father would have said something else—I had never in my life gotten the last word—but someone touched my right elbow and said, “This way, sir,” with the professional unobtrusiveness that I associated with spies or very good waiters.

“Excuse me,” I said to my father, and turned away with profound relief.

His voice followed us into the building, asking why I wasn’t angry and how I slept at night, and finally, plaintively, as we approached a nondescript door, “And why the hell are you wearing that coat? It’s hot as the devil out.”

* * *

The spy/waiter led me through the door, where I was handed off to an even more unobtrusive person, who took me through a series of hallways that ended in another door, which was attended by someone so masterfully unobtrusive they seemed to blend into the plaster.

They turned the knob and announced, deferentially, “Corporal Owen Mallory, ma’am.”

I had a fleeting impression of wealth—velvet drapes, waxed parquet— before my eyes landed on a heavy desk and, sitting behind it, a woman.

I’d never seen her before in my life, but I had the brief, disorienting sense that I knew her. I knew the sleek brass of her hair, styled so perfectly it might have been strapped on, like a helmet. I knew the clear blue of her eyes and I knew—I knew—that voice: “Thank you for coming, Corporal Mallory.”

It was the thank you that did it. Suddenly I was back in the field hospital after the dunes, listening to that voice thank me for my sacrifice to crown and country.

I froze two steps across the parquet, contorting into a panicked gesture somewhere between a salute and a bow. “Oh my God, ma’am—Minister Rolfe—”

A low laugh, which managed not to be mocking. “Call me Vivian. Sit down.”

I settled myself, carefully not imagining what my father would say if he knew his son was on first-name terms with Vivian Rolfe.

She regarded me across the polished expanse of her desk. She was always perfectly composed in her speeches and appearances, no matter what the opposition said or did.

But now she looked a little harried. Two of her nails had been badly chewed, and the starch had gone out of her collar, so that it lay limp against her collarbones.

She set a slim cigarette between her lips and leaned minutely forward. An awkward beat passed before I fumbled the matchbook from my coat pocket and cupped a flame between us. The light settled in the hollows of her face, finding the skull beneath her skin. I couldn’t tell how old she was.

She exhaled a long white plume and said, pensively, “You’d think it would have been enough. There were losses, to be sure, but we won. Our oldest enemy, thrown down! If I were a man, he’d be crowning me by now.”

“Ma’am?” I offered, intelligently.

She cut me a wry, pitying look. “Chancellor Gladwell has asked for my resignation. I made that boy—does he think he would have been reelected without a war?—but now they’re whining about the budget and the cost of reconstruction, and they’ve found just the woman to blame.”

“Oh,” I said. In the silence, the faint sound of chanting could be heard from the window.

Vivian rubbed her temples. “And those bastards simply refuse to shut up.” I tried not to blink, because I’d read somewhere that blinking was a sign of guilt. She added, wistfully, “I’d have them rounded up like cattle, if I could.”

The dispassion in her voice sent a chill over my scalp. My father had so far suffered no worse than a ritualistic series of arrests and fines, but suddenly I could imagine his body splayed on the capitol steps, the butt of a rifle raised above him. I made a mental note to remind him to start using a more difficult cipher for his letters and pamphlets.

Vivian tapped her cigarette twice on the lip of an ashtray. “But nothing is ever handed to us, is it, Corporal Mallory? This country may not believe in me anymore”—a self-deprecating laugh, only slightly bitter—“but I’ll be damned if I stop believing in it.”

“Ma’am?” I said again.

Vivian rolled her neck from side to side, and when she looked at me again a subtle transformation had taken place. Her spine had stiffened and her shoulders moved back, so that the points of her jacket drew a perfect line in the air. All the irony and weariness had leached from her face and left behind a quiet, earnest zeal. She looked both younger and much older.

When she spoke again, it was in the flowing, modulated voice I heard on the radio. “Our country is at a crossroads. Finally, after centuries of strife, we stand as Yvanne imagined us: a nation united, at peace. But peace is a fragile, fleeting thing. It must be protected, fought for, defended against all threats, native and foreign alike—and I fear we have grown weak.”

I felt I ought to nod, so I did.

“I don’t refer only to the obvious dissidents—at least they care, in their misguided way, about the future of the nation. It’s the disinterested, the doubtful. It’s the empty pews in our churches and the apathy in our schools. The young people who don’t know where we came from or what we fought for. We’ve forgotten—as a nation, as a people—who we are.”

All of these were lines from her speeches, which left me with the sweaty, trapped feeling that I was the only person in the audience of a one-woman play. I wished, passionately, that I’d taken off my coat.

But then Vivian pulled something heavy from a drawer and set in on the desk between us with the muted clack of wood on wood, and I forgot about my coat.

A book. The book. I leaned toward it, pulled by whatever secret gravity had sent it to me in the first place.

“I read your article about the grail. Brilliant work.” (When Professor Sawbridge had read that article, she’d sighed for a long time and said: You may be a patriot or a historian, Mallory, but not both.) “You argued that a nation is not a boundary on a map or a flag on a pole, but only a story we tell about ourselves.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“It’s a hell of a story, isn’t it?” One of Vivian’s fingers, long and delicate, touched the cover. It was not a reverent or thrilled touch, but the casual, possessive gesture of a reader to her favorite book. “Honor. Courage. Tragedy. The villains cast down, the hero triumphant, the rightful queen restored. And yet, it fades. The people forget. It’s time we remind them.”

She traced the circle of the device on the cover and then, abruptly, slid the book several inches toward me. “You have served your country well, Owen Mallory.” She met my eyes and her voice fell nearly to a whisper. “Are you the man who will save it?”

Some latent desire in me—to kneel, to surrender myself to some grander purpose—to erase the ignominy of my origins and earn my place at last in the grand tradition of Dominion—unfurled inside me. Vivian Rolfe looked at me so steadily and for so long that I felt the light contract around us, so that I imagined the shadow of a crown on her brow, felt the phantom weight of a blade on my shoulders.

I nodded, because I had an awful certainty that if I spoke my voice would be choked with tears.

“I knew you were.” The warmth in her voice, the absolute certainty—as if she was not at all surprised by my answer—sent a flush of pleasure through me.

“It was you, wasn’t it?” I sounded boyish, overeager. “Who discovered the book.”

She dipped her head in grave approval. “We’ve been excavating the ruins of Cavallon Keep for years now. A few weeks ago, we found a vault, and in the vault was a locked chest, and inside the chest… Well.” I hoped the archaeologist had gotten to say By Jove at least once. Vivian continued, “Can you imagine? People have been searching for centuries, scouring every crypt and castle, and only now—in Dominion’s darkest hour!—does it reveal itself. It’s providence. Fate. The hand of the Savior Himself, I sometimes think.”

“And then you… mailed it to me?”

Her expression turned indulgent. “Forgive my little test. If you had gone to the press, or tried to sell it—but you didn’t. You kept it secret, treasured it, labored over it. That’s how I knew you were the right man to tell Una’s story.”

A new and delicious sense of my own significance filled me. I’d never been picked first for anything in my life, and now the Minister of War—or at least, the former Minister of War—had chosen me to translate the greatest historical artifact in Dominion’s history. Visions of honorary degrees and book tours danced in my head; becoming the Middle Dominion Faculty Fellow; Harrison combusting from pure envy; my father clapping me on the back and saying, You’ve changed my mind about everything, I’m so sorry for my decades of embarrassing radicalism.

“I—I’ll try, ma’am.”

“Excellent! Go ahead then, no time like the present. Get in touch when you finish your translation.” Vivian ground her cigarette into the tray and reached for a letter opener, as if our conversation was over.

I stood clumsily, dizzy with awe. “Yes, ma’am.” My hands shook as badly as they had in the war, as if they were approaching a battlefield instead of a book.

The cover was cool and smooth as stone. I felt Vivian’s eyes on me again, perhaps wondering why I lingered. But a strange anxiety gripped me, a sense that some trick was being pulled. I opened the book carefully, praying the college archivist never found out.

And then I went very still. I wet my lips twice before I could speak. “The pages.” I cringed from the hoarse whistle of my voice. “The pages are—”

“Blank? Yes.” Vivian spoke lightly, with humor, twirling the letter opener in her fingers. The point glinted.

I had the sudden, inexplicable urge to hit her. For a moment I saw it so clearly in my mind—saw my knuckles splitting against her perfect white canine, blood overfilling her mouth and sheeting down her chin—that I recoiled from myself.

“Why,” I asked, swallowing, “are they blank?”

She leaned over the desk, smiling peacefully. Beneath the tang of cigarette smoke, I smelled something sweet and a little familiar, like summer flowers. “Because you haven’t written them yet,” she said, and then she stabbed the letter opener through the back of my left hand.

I did not scream. My vocal cords were too knotted and scarred to produce anything louder than an eerie, breathy howl, like the keen of a dog. I tugged dumbly at my hand, but the letter opener had sunk into the pages below, pinning it there.

Vivian leaned closer. Her expression was still peaceful, perhaps even sympathetic. “Your country needs you, Corporal.”

I watched with a sense of unreality as my blood spread over the empty paper like a red map, an empire in bloom. I looked quickly away, but something had gone wrong with my vision.

Everything in the room felt translucent, impermanent, as if the paint of the world was fading and peeling away in great strips.

I closed my eyes. I smelled pine and snow, now, instead of flowers.

Vivian’s voice came to me from very far away, softly urgent. “She needs you, Owen.”

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The Everlasting

Alix E. Harrow

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The Everlasting

Alix E. Harrow

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Excerpted from The Everlasting, copyright © 2025 by Alix E. Harrow.