“Your country needs you, Corporal…”
Owen Mallory first fell in love with Sir Una Everlasting when he was nine years old. The centuries-old story of the Hero of Dominion comforted him when he was a lonely, shunned child with a broken alcoholic father. Her legend inspired him to join the army and go off to war before he could be labeled Dominion’s version of a draft-dodger. And a vision of her saintly form pleading for him to stay alive kept him from dying when he was wounded in battle.
Corporal Owen devoted his post-war academic career to researching all the legends he could find surrounding Una. It’s a thankless job, until one day he’s selected by Dominion leadership as the perfect person to preserve Una’s story. He thinks that means he’s going to be translating an ancient text about the Virgin Saint’s life, so he’s very surprised when he’s thrown back in time to watch it happening. And to make sure it all happens the way it’s supposed to.
“In order to have a future worth fighting for, you must have a past worth remembering.”
Owen is even more surprised to meet the legend herself and find a battle-scarred, battle-weary Una who’s actually considering not completing her latest quest, and who at first thinks Owen is a harmless madman. She’s short-tempered, wary of anything and everything including having someone try to touch her when she’s not expecting it. Owen. She’s all on her own apart from her murderous horse, she’s ostracized if not outright spat at by any villagers they encounter, and the stories she grudgingly starts telling Owen about her adventures make her as far from the Virgin Saint as you can imagine, which means he guiltily starts omitting details in his notes.
I decided I would not mention any of this in the book. (An acerbic voice in my head noted that I was accumulating quite a list of things I was not mentioning…)
There are scribes who write down events as they’re happening (omitting any inconvenient details) and historians who compile written events from their research (leaving out anything that doesn’t fit the narrative). Somehow Owen has become both of those, and he’s also the person who really sees Una. He sees her gruffness, her dutiful apologies for terrifying Owen at least four times when her obvious PTSD causes her to be terrifying, her love of her awful horse, her continuing grief for her fathers who were killed by raiders when she was a child and started her path to becoming the unkillable warrior for Dominion, and it’s all making Owen very uncomfortable. It’s one thing to know that a hero’s tragic death becomes the inspiration for an entire nation. It’s quite another for Owen to walk Una to the place where history says she died, lying to her about why this is her final quest, and coming to the realization that he can’t let it happen because the beautifully flawed human being is worth more to him than all of Dominion.
Then Una dies. It’s not for the last time. The story is retold but this time from Una’s perspective instead of Owen’s, and this is the point where things get really complicated.
“Wait for me…”
My favorite time travel stories are the ones that get into the unsettling details about what people experience when history is changing around them. It’s a tricky thing to do, because if you use too much logic you can run into a situation where altering something in the past means that the story you’ve just read could never have happened. Every time travel story has its own set of rules to get around the paradoxes, and I don’t think I’ve seen rules set up quite the way Alix E. Harrow has here. It’s a story told with a really appealing dry humor, terrifying battles, dragon-killing, and a lush, dreamlike trip through the past, which then occasionally turns into wartime propaganda masquerading as a children’s tale.
“There are only two kinds of stories worth telling: the ones that send children to sleep, and the ones that send men to war.”
We’ve all seen how governments try to sanitize history in order to justify everything that’s done to preserve a country’s future, and everyone’s familiar with ruling powers deciding what “acceptable losses” are (and “necessary atrocities” as well). Throw in the ability to actually go back in time and make historical events follow a script and you’ve got something truly frightening. The rules of time travel here have a particular effect, and it’s something that gets progressively worse, and more and more interesting as you to try to wrap your brain around what’s happening. You’ve also got the unreliable narrators of people who are lying (or being lied to), people who are remembering events differently, hidden family history, and all those ways that we try to justify ourselves to ourselves. The scale of the situation, and the scale of betrayal, just keeps expanding.
The thread that weaves all of this together is the completely improbable love story; the bookish self-proclaimed coward Owen and the lady knight who never really had a choice about becoming a hero, chasing each other through time. Each of their chapters are in second-person, because they’re not just narrating what happens, they’re telling their own story to each other, phrases echoing back and forth as they both come to terms with being a monster or a coward. The romance gets very steamy in places, but also tragic and at times truly harrowing, both because of things that are done to them, and the knowledge that any kind of happiness they find is one more thing that can be taken away, or used to hold them hostage. And then deciding to chase that happiness anyway. There’s a lot of questions about bravery versus cowardice in this book, like whether it’s more cowardly to desert the battlefield because you can’t stand it anymore, or more monstrous to stay and commit war crimes because you’re too scared of the consequences of running. And I love the idea that love is another kind of cowardice and bravery all at the same time.