Rissa ’s Reviews > The Everlasting > Status Update

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.