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"Río," I whispered, out of breath, and not from wheezing. "You make me feel like I'm kissing the tides."
"Benigno," he whispered back. "You make me feel like I am holding the moon."

"What if nobody taught me how to keep my heart safe" —my eyes drifted to the dark ribbon of his mouth—"from you?"
"Your heart in my keeping," he whispered, "would always be safe."

But I saw you, Owen Mallory, and swore to serve you by my right arm and my left, by my life and death. And I am not dead yet.

Everlasting, Yvanne called me. But nothing that lives lasts forever. Save, perhaps, this thing between us, which had drawn us together across a thousand years, over and over, and—my breath caught-dragons.

I laid myself down beside you and took your hand carefully in mine. 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.

Your clever black eyes had so often been the last thing I’d seen, looking into mine as if you would follow me to heaven or hell, as if there was nowhere I could go that you would not find me.

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.

In that moment you seemed to be everything at once, a series of contradictions: You were a knight with no master and a mother with no children; a manly woman and a womanly man; a hero whose name would be sung for a thousand years, and an orphan whose name had already been forgotten. You were Sir __, who I had loved long before my birth and long after your death, in the past and the future, and here, now. Always.

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

For you, I would keep living. For me, my children would come running.
For them, I would do anything at all.

When you had fought for your queen, you had conquered Dominion; if you had fought for love, you might have conquered the world.

The scholar looked down at his son and thought: Here, at last, is something worth dying for. The knight looked at the scholar, looking at his son, and thought: Here, at last, is something worth killing for.

I lifted my arms, hesitating still, just a little. But in all the lives that I could remember — and Lord, there were so many— I had never once hurt
you.

I did not ask where or when we were going; it did not matter where we ran, so long as you ran beside me.

I felt myself smile, wide and loose, the way I hadn't smiled since I was a girl. "You came back for me."
I watched you choke with relief, eyes closing as if you could hardly bear the sight of me. "Always," you said, and your voice sounded more like the voice I remembered: fractured, scarred over.

What remained were those trivial, nameless moments which would be swallowed up by the tide of history and forgotten: my father's hand on my hair when I was a boy, ruffling it awkwardly; the brusque press of Sawbridge's lips on my cheek; your eyes on mine at the very end, full of faith, so certain I would come back for you.

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

The word home evoked only the sweet green smell of the woods, long gone, and sometimes another word: Yew, I thought, or perhaps you.

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.

There had been a time when I had kissed your hand and a time when I hadn't; a time when I shivered alone all night, tormented by your absence, and a time I had slept beside you, tormented by your presence. A time when I had felt your mouth on mine, a second's stolen joy, and a time when I had only dreamed it. The two of us were like…two dancers in a line; with each pass, we drew a little nearer.

I was dying, but I had died before, and would die again. We had told this story so many times, you and I, and we would tell it so many more, and it would always end here, like this: with my blood on your hands and your tears on my face.
Call it God or fate, bad luck or good—all I knew is that I would see you again, and it was enough.

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?

Una noooo :(((

And you must have loved me, too, at least a little-but it wasn't me that you needed. It was Una the Everlasting, the Drawn Blade of Dominion, the hero, the saint, the story. For you, I would become her, just once more.

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.

I could not help it. I bent low over the bow of my saddle, took your face in my hands, and covered your mouth with mine.
The first kiss is like the first blow in a fight—a test, an invitation, a wordless question. could not help it. But it seemed to me we already knew all the answers.

I could deny my destiny, and even my queen. I could never deny you.

It had the cadence of a myth or a prayer, mesmerizing in its simplicity. Die, and be redeemed. Die, and be remembered. Die, and live forever. My destiny, and the last request of my queen.

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

:’’’(

Maybe you preferred your women small and soft-bodied, like that pretty baker's daughter.

:(((((