Dora’s Reviews > The Everlasting > Status Update

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 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.
Everlasting, Yvanne called me. But nothing that lives lasts forever.

When I wore only my quilted wool, 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 sockets of our eyes. Let them find us in seven years or seventy, over and over, and...

It took many tragadies to make a nation. I listed them in my head like the names of the dead the papers used to print: the False Kings and their followers, the heathens and the rebels, my mother who took a bullet in her back, my father who put another in his leg, the idiot boys who marched with me to war and went home in boxes, the children who packed our shells with powder and the children we orphaned on the battl-

He would stand and fight then, like Gilda. Like everyone else who could not run.
This, I thought, was the reason Vivian needed the book so badly. Because no throne is held easily, or for long. Because a nation is a story we tell about ourselves and stories change, if you let them. Because where there is power, someone will oppose it.

He had told her once that she was no hero - what a lie. The queen had tried for years to make a mere weapon of her,a blade that killed coldly and without hesitation.The scholar had tried for years to make a coward out of her, a woman who lived selfishly,without risk. Both of them had tried to cut the honour out of her and leave only what served them best, and both of them had failed.For here she was, so full of honor

I don't know that Id be everything a mother should."
He tilted his head at her. "I suppose I wouldnt know. I never had a mother either.But.. Im not sure youve ever been what you should be,love." She scoweld at him, and he smiled his crooked smile. "You were a woman who carried a sword,a saint who slept nuns.Now you're a knight without armor and a wife without a ring.No matter what,youre always-
"Bad at it?
"Yourself"

I buried my hands in your hair, wrapped them in the boyish extravagance of your curls, as I never had, as I had done many times, as I would do many more. I felt time unweaving between us, the beginnings and endings lost in reckless tangle, and I tightened my fists in your hair, holding fast to this one moment. You made a small and lovely sound, deep in your throat, and pressed your brow hard to mine.

It came to me suddenly, the remembering, like a spring storm, and took me to the ground. You were there with me, kneeling in the snow. Your hands were cradling my jaw, and you were saying my name over and over,in a kind of terror.
I felt myself smile,wide and loose; the way I had not smiled since I was a girl. "You came back for me."
Always" Your voice sounded more like the voice I remembered. Fractured,scarred over

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

💔

Everything I had believed and fought for - crown and country,the flag and the church,even the past itself - had proved false. 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, 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