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. Get started with the prologue and chapter 1 below, and find additional excerpts here.
Sir Una Everlasting was Dominion’s greatest hero: the orphaned girl who became a knight, who died for queen and country. Her legend lives on in songs and stories, in children’s books and recruiting posters—but her life as it truly happened has been forgotten.
Centuries later, Owen Mallory—failed soldier, struggling scholar—falls in love with the tale of Una Everlasting. Her story takes him to war, to the archives—and then into the past itself. Una and Owen are tangled together in time, bound to retell the same story over and over again, no matter what it costs.
But that story always ends the same way. If they want to rewrite Una’s legend—if they want to tell a different story—they’ll have to rewrite history itself.
Una and the Yew
It begins where it ends: beneath the yew tree.
The yew stands in the wood like a great queen grown old, limbs wracked with age, head bowed by the weight of her crown. In the gnarled grain of her trunk there is a woman’s face, with weeping cankers for eyes, and in her heartwood there is a sword driven so deep that only the hilt is still visible. You already know the name of that sword, I think; who doesn’t?
They say time runs strangely, beneath the yew. They say many things are lost there, among the tangled roots: years, hearts, lives. But they say, too, that some things are found: fates and fortunes, beginnings and endings.
And, once, a child. You know her name, too, or at least one of them.
She was still pink and toothless when the woodcutter found her, and he fretted. He needn’t have; she grew quickly and well, as wild things do.
As a child she was all mischief, her fingertips stained with yew-berries, her hair light and fey as dandelion down. As a girl she turned solemn, studying the woods as a saint would study the word. From them, she learned everything.
She learned to run as the stag runs and to be still as the goshawk is still; to stalk and to swim, to wrestle and to whistle; to vanish so thoroughly her own father could not find her and to kill so cleanly she left nothing but a tuft of fur, the metal scent of entrails.
She was strong, and arrogant in her strength. She was a young lion, a child-king, a lord of the wild woods.
And yet, she was no one at all. She was nothing, daughter of nothing, heir to nothing. Just another of the numberless, featureless small folk of Dominion, whose name would not be forgotten only because no one ever learned it in the first place. She would die a heathen death, unchristened and unshriven, so that even God would not remember her.
But then came her twelfth winter, and the Brigand Prince.
She was away when it happened. Perhaps she was stealing feathers for her fletching or pulling the hide from a hare. What matters is that she was far enough from her father’s cottage that she did not hear the ring of iron-shod hooves, or the screams.
When she returned to the cottage the fire was cold, and her father was dead.
They had taken everything—the sow, the salt box, the pair of axes her father kept above the hearth—so she went to the yew.
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.
There were whispers about that sword, even then, but she hadn’t heard them. She hadn’t heard the tales of an ancient blade that neither dulled nor shattered nor rusted but remained whole and shining. She hadn’t heard the prophecy that said it would be drawn only in the country’s darkest hour, by her rightwise champion.
She only knew that her father was dead, and that the hilt in her hand felt like the clasp of an old friend.
And so—full of grief and fresh-born fury—she drew the sword from the yew.
She overtook the Brigand Prince and his men that very night, tracking them through new-fallen snow, and found them while they sat sated and dozing around their fire, beards shining with pig fat. She might have slit their throats in silence—she had learned to be silent as the fox is silent—but she was arrogant, and she was angry, so she called out to them first. She allowed them to scrabble blades from sheaths, spears from saddles.
And then she fell among them: a wolf now, a shrike, a terrible reaping.
When she was through, and the woods were quiet, the snow was no longer white.
That is how the queen—who was not yet the queen but only a king’s daughter taken captive by the Brigand Prince—first saw her: 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-who-was-not-yet-queen rose and went to her, and the girl trembled, because the woman was so beautiful and gentle, and because the girl had killed those men so easily, almost joyfully. Her own body felt sharp and unwieldy, like a knife without a hilt.
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.’
The queen knelt low. She stroked the girl’s hair, heedless of the stain it left on her palm, and the girl felt her terror washed away beneath that touch. She thought she would not mind being a knife, so long as it was this hand that wielded her.
‘Then,’ said the queen-who-was-not-yet-queen, ‘will you be mine?’
‘Yes,’ the girl whispered, and meant it with all her young and shattered heart.
So the woman—who would be queen very soon, for what is a queen but an ambition pursued—took the sword from the girl’s hand and bid her kneel. She asked the girl if she would swear by her good right arm, and by her left, and by her life and death to serve no master save her queen, and she touched the blade once to each of the girl’s shoulders and to the back of her bowed head.
The girl said, three times, ‘I swear it.’
‘Then rise, Sir Una,’ said the queen, because the name meant only, and already she could tell there would never be another like her.
Over the years Una gathered more names. She became the Queen’s Champion, the Red Knight, the Virgin Saint, the Drawn Blade of Dominion. She became Sir Una Everlasting, hero and paragon, arcing through history like a bright-tailed comet.
She became a legend.
Most legends are lies, pretty stories meant to keep the children quiet on long winter evenings. But I, who rode so many miles at her side and slept so many nights at her feet—I, who was her shadow while she lived and her echo ever after—am no liar.
I will not waste too much time with those stories that have already been told and retold, traded like coins in every hall and tavern. Everyone has heard the tale of Una and the False Kings, and the Winning of the Crown, and the First Crusade, which brought all of Dominion into the light of the Savior. Everyone knows how her legend began, beneath the yew.
But gather close, all true hearts of Dominion—
And I will tell you how it ends.
—Excerpted from The Death of Una Everlasting,
translated by Owen Mallory
Received 8–17
Attn: Prof Owen Mallory
WOULD BE THE FIND OF THE CENTURY WERE IT NOT A CROCK OF SHIT WHICH OF COURSE IT IS
Prof Gilda Sawbridge
* * *
Sent 8–17
Attn: Prof Gilda Sawbridge
ANALYSIS SUGGESTS IT IS AT LEAST A VERY OLD CROCK OF SHIT MAAM
Owen Mallory
* * *
Received 8–17
Attn: Prof Owen Mallory
DONT MAAM ME YOU [REDACTED] I PAID A PENNY FOR THAT WORD THE [REDACTED] FASCISTS BETTER NOT CENSOR IT MEET ME AT THE STATION TOMORROW
Prof Gilda Sawbridge
* * *
Received 8–18
Attn: Prof Owen Mallory
WHERE THE [REDACTED] ARE YOU MALLORY? IF IT WAS MY COMMENT ABOUT THE FASCISTS I WAS ONLY JOKING GOD SAVE OUR BOYS IN RED ETC
Prof Gilda Sawbridge
* * *
Received 8–17
Attn: Mallory
WELL GOOD LUCK OUT THERE BOY TAKE GOOD NOTES FOR ME DONT KNOW WHERE YOUVE GONE OR WHY BUT I KNOW YOULL COME BACK EVENTUALLY AS YOU HAVE SIX OVERDUE BOOKS
Gil
Chapter 1
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.
This was not, in itself, remarkable; most members of the Cantford College Department of History received so many books in the post that their offices had been overtaken by a series of architecturally unsound towers, which would collapse if anyone exhaled too aggressively in their presence.
But this particular book was different, because this particular book did not—according to every archaeologist, historian, medievalist, linguist, antiquarian, archivist, and even most of the conspiracy theorists I had ever consulted—exist.
True, I may have harbored certain fantasies that I would one day prove them all wrong. I may have pictured myself unlocking a long-lost vault or descending into a catacomb, perhaps holding a torch aloft and whispering, to no one in particular, By Jove, I’ve found it.
But I was not in a vault or a catacomb.
I was sitting at my very ordinary desk in my very ordinary office, which the department had granted me only last term, in the manner of people who have been feeding a stray for so long they might as well name it. Outside the sky was a very ordinary late-summer blue.
And I was holding in my hands the single greatest historical discovery of the century, or possibly the millennium.
I wanted to weep. I wanted to laugh. I wanted most of all to open the book and run the tips of my fingers over the pages, to prove that it was real and so was I. (I was prevented by a vestigial but powerful fear of the college archivist, who kept thumbscrews in her desk specifically for people who touched old paper without washing their hands first.)
Instead, I whispered, somewhat hysterically, “By Jove, I’ve—”
“Mallory, old boy?”
A moneyed, overloud voice, a tread like a parade march: This could only be Jeremy Harrison, the other lecturer in my subfield.
As was my long custom in every stressful situation, I panicked. I wrapped the parcel paper back around the book, fumbled with the top drawer of my desk, which always jammed when it was damp, which it always was, and, in the end, stuffed the book down my shirtfront and hunched my shoulders to hide the lump.
This was sheer professional avarice, I’m afraid: There was only one endowed faculty position in Middle Dominion Studies. 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.
Whoever discovered this book—the book whose corners were presently digging into my ribs—would have more than a taste.
“There you are.” Harrison rounded the corner and slouched against the doorframe, looking as usual like an escapee from a painting of a fox hunt. “How’s the book coming?” He asked this question two or three times a week, because he was at heart a bastard who reveled in the suffering of others.
“Fine. Wonderful.” My voice was a thin rasp, unpleasantly high. I tried not to resent it; the field surgeon had told me I was lucky I had a voice at all, or, indeed, a pulse. “But I was just leaving, actually, excuse me.” I stood, still hunched, scuttling around my desk in the manner of an arthritic crab.
“Of course, of course. Far be it from me to stand between a war hero and his duty,” Harrison said, solicitously and hatefully. The Everlasting Medal of Valor was the only thing I had ever achieved that Harrison hadn’t. I longed to rub his face in it but, as the whole thing was a complete fucking farce, never quite could.
I produced a hoarse ha, ha and ran for it, like the coward I always was and always would be.
I waited until I was on the train back to my flat—still bent nearly in half, as if I were smuggling an infant or suffering from an intestinal complaint— before extracting the parcel from my shirt.
There was no return address on the wrapping, no stamp of origin. Just my name, Owen Mallory, and the address of the campus mail room written in an unremarkable hand. I should have been at least mildly concerned that the entire thing was an elaborate hoax designed by Harrison to embarrass me, but all I felt was a rising, heady relief. As if the whole of my life up till now had been a sort of dreary, shameful churning, like dog-paddling, which would be redeemed by everything that happened next.
I peeled back the paper.
The book was bound in rich red heartwood, cut against the grain so that the rings of the tree were visible, rippling outward. The spine was affixed by a series of clever bronze hinges, cerulean with age, and a familiar, circular symbol had been burned deeply into the wood, stained with soot or wine-root. I traced it with one shaking fingertip.
An underfed boy of seven or eight was seated beside me, watching me in the frank, unashamed way that young people watch the unwell. He had an extravagance of eyelashes, which gave him the wistful, sleepy look of someone woken mid-dream.
I found myself opening the book, pointing to the title page. “Can you read this?”
The boy recoiled a little from the sound of my voice. Then, warily, as if I were mad or, worse, intending to teach him something: “No, sir.”
“Don’t worry, few people could.” Middle Mothertongue bore a frustratingly faint resemblance to our modern language, but it had always come easily to me, like a childhood dialect I’d not quite forgotten. I closed the book and tapped the cover. “And what does this look like to you? This symbol?”
He bent to study it obediently. His hair—an unfortunate, Gallish shade of red—was still fine enough to form a babyish snarl at the nape of his neck.
“A lizard,” he declared, eventually. “Or a dragon, maybe, chewing up its own tail.” He spent the rest of the ride offering suggestions for the improvement of the design (blood, teeth, blood dripping from teeth, et cetera), gesturing enthusiastically. His wrists were spattered with hot pink scars, as from welding sparks or ash. The munitions factories ran on twenty-four-hour shifts these days, and there weren’t enough grown men and women to work them.
The train dinged. I stood, and the boy nodded amiably at the book. “What’s it called?”
I swayed, teetering on the edge of the thing that would transform me from no one into someone. It felt momentous, fateful, even. As if you had watched over me—haunted me, guided me, saved me thrice over—solely so that I could be here, now, with your name on my tongue.
The boy was waiting with his long dreamer’s lashes tipped up to me. Would there be another war by the time he was old enough to enlist? Would it be your story—newly published, perhaps leatherbound, with my name in small print on the title page—that sent him to the front? Something swelled painfully in my chest at the thought; pride, I decided.
I leaned closer and told the boy the five words he couldn’t read, that I could, as easily as if I’d written them myself: “The Death of Una Everlasting.”
Before I stepped off the train, I dug a coin from my wallet and tossed it to him. He caught it in one small, scarred hand.
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The Everlasting
Excerpted from The Everlasting, copyright © 2025 by Alix E. Harrow.
