Julie d'Aubigny

Saber returns late to the apartment that Kirsikka has adopted as her base; there is a sudden breeze, a shimmer of golden light, and then she sits perched on the arm of Kirsikka's chair. "Any news of the war?" she asks, as casual as though she isn't contemplating where Rider will land his first blow.

Saber returns from the library with her head swimming with stories--noble soldiers and wise strategists and villainous bandits, archers and swordsmen and murderers of renown. She sifts those stories carefully as she returns to Kirsikka's lodgings, seeking a match for Rider and Lancer and Archer.

Archer, I think I know, she decides, swinging in with a song humming through her and her eyes mirth-bright. "I'm home," she calls, like a husband returning to his surly bride. "I'm home, and I've learned all kinds of things--"

She does not dream, for she does not sleep after the manner of men--she does not dream, but for a moment her mind is idle, and in its idleness it fixes on something near to hand. A bolster, stuffed with down until even down is firm; a hand loosely curled upon the patterned silk as though inviting her to take it.

"It means nothing," she tells herself, striving to fix her unseeing eyes on a star, a ship, a tree swaying in the fresh breeze off the sea.

"Julie," says her husband, while she lies back against the bolster and sweats until each bead of sweat feels cool and solid as a hailstone. "Julie, take my hand--"

In the mullion-veined sunlight, she thinks, This is how it ends, then. The darling of the Paris Opera House. The menace of the streets. The terror of noble popinjays and the downfall of cloistered sisters, the woman who could ride and fight and laugh until the world burst open in applause--

She cannot make her hand close on his. She tries to raise it from her side, but her pulse is thready and her muscles are fever-slack.

This is how it ends: Alone, with her husband at her bedside, not yet forty, not yet finished living.

As often and as diligently as Julie d'Aubigny has combed the history books, as carefully as she has scanned the novels of Dumas and de Laclos and Diderot, the only Julie they care about is Rousseau's insipid heroine. Julie d'Aubigny has passed beyond recalling. Her life has gone unremembered, her death unremarked.

In the remnant of the most mortal and ordinary part of her, the part that once dreamed at night, Julie turns her eyes away from the bolster and fixes them on the distant horizon.

"Mine will be an immortal legend," she whispers, while Fuyuki drowses on.