The beginning of all tragedies
The first thing he noticed was the smell.
Not wet grass. Not the cold earth of the field below St. Aurelle, or the rain, or the young ginkgo at the head of her grave. It was coffee, gone cold in a cup at his elbow, and leather, and the paper dust of a king's desk.
Keith Jacobson opened his eyes.
He was sitting in his own chair, in his own study, slumped forward over a spread of papers as if he had fallen asleep at his work. Morning light came through the tall windows. Somewhere below, a car door closed, and a gardener's radio played faintly across the lawns.
Why am I here?
He sat up slowly.
He had been in the field. He remembered it with perfect clarity: the long drive home in the rain beside Henry, the willows bending over the seven stones, the name cut into the one he had come for. VIVIAN, BORN LEE, QUEEN OF DRACONIA. He remembered lying down on the grass before it like a soldier at the end of a long march, the cold coming up through his coat, and being glad of it.
He had closed his eyes there meaning never to open them again.
He had ended his life in front of Vivi's grave.
So why was he here?
He looked down at his hands.
They were not an old man's hands. The knuckles were not swollen. The skin was not thin and spotted. There was no white scar across the back of the right one, where the laundress's knife had slid before he turned it.
His breath stopped.
He rose, too fast, and the chair went back against the shelves. The washroom off the study had a mirror above the basin. He did not remember crossing the floor to it.
The face in the glass was not the face he had carried to the field.
The hair was blonde again.
Not white. Not the dull iron-grey that thirty years of darkness had bleached into him. It was the old Jacobson gold, thick and bright in the morning light, a little too long at the collar. The jaw was sharp. The eyes were clear. The deep lines that rage had cut beside his mouth, year after year, were simply not there.
He was perhaps thirty-one.
He touched his own face, and the man in the mirror touched his.
"No," said Keith quietly. "This is not possible."
His voice was young.
He went back to the desk with his heart going like a cavalry charge.
The calendar lay open beside the cold coffee, his secretary's leather diary, the day's page marked with a ribbon. Out of habit, the habit of a man who had read ten thousand such pages, his eyes went to the date at the top.
And the floor seemed to drop away beneath him.
He knew that date.
He had known it every day for thirty years. In Ravensgate Tower he had said it aloud to the walls on full moon nights, the way other men say a prayer. He would have known it in his grave.
Below it, in his secretary's careful hand, was a single line.
Announcement: Lady Charlene to enter the palace as concubine to His Majesty.
Keith put both hands flat on the desk so they would not shake.
It was today.
The day he announced that Charlene would be his concubine. The day Vivian believed he had betrayed her.
The day she left him.
He remembered all of it.
Charlene, coming into the palace with Liam's child already inside her and a lie already on her lips. His half-brother's smile. He had seen through the plot almost at once, and he had said nothing. He had told himself that silence would protect his wife. He had told himself he would explain it all to her later, when it was safe.
He had never once asked Vivian what she wanted.
And Vivian had said it to him long ago, on their wedding evening, with the earth from her ginkgo still on her hands: If you ever betray me, I will leave.
She had kept her word, as she always did.
There had been a car on a mountain road, and a closed coffin, and a state funeral in the rain, and five children in black. Keith had believed her dead. For thirty years he had believed it, and the darkness in his blood had eaten him alive. If he could not be happy, then no one in Draconia would be.
So he had made sure of it.
Jeanne's brakes. Benedict in a dark room, talking to a wife who could not hear him. A boy of nine kneeling all night in the rain because his grandfather told him a king must be lonely. A pharmacist's girl with blood on her lips in the Ginkgo Walk.
And when at last a wheelchair came through the ballroom doors, and he knew that his Vivi had never died at all, that she had only left him, it was already too late. Too late for her health. Too late for their sons. Too late for everyone.
A laundress among the ginkgo trees. A knife. A face melting like wax in a fire.
Keith. I love you. I don't blame you.
Then seven graves in a row, and a field, and lying down in it.
He looked at the calendar again. Then at the phone on the desk, its screen lit with the same date.
No message from her. Not yet.
She had not left. Her car had not gone off the mountain road. There was no coffin, no funeral, no darkness. Not yet.
Keith Jacobson sat down very slowly in his chair, because his knees would not hold him.
He was not dead. He was not dreaming.
He was reborn.
Not to a boyhood, where everything was still clean. He had been sent back to this morning, the first stone of the avalanche, while it still rested in his hand.
The beginning of all the tragedies.
He thought of a boy of sixteen in a hard chair beside his dying father, saying into the dark that he would defy God. He had believed it then. Then he had let one lie stand, and lost her, and spent thirty years proving God right.
Somewhere, perhaps, God had heard his great-grandson weeping at a glass coffin and asking why. And this was the answer. Not an explanation. Only a second chance, and nothing more.
It would be enough. He would make it enough.
Keith rose, straightened his collar with hands that had stopped shaking, and went to the window. Below him the ginkgo trees he had planted for her stood in full green leaf, whole, untouched, every one of them still alive.
"Not this time," said the King of Draconia. "Not one of them. Not this time."
