Crossing Over (36 page)

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Authors: Anna Kendall

BOOK: Crossing Over
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“My lady—”
“I think I want to go on now, Roger. Oh, flowers! Are those for me? Oh, you naughty boy—you shouldn’t! But so pretty ...”
She snatched up the bouquet I had picked for her and held them to the sodden bosom of her gown, smiling at me like a desperate child.
A thought came to me, unbidden and unwelcome:
Maggie would have had the courage to face the truth
.
But Maggie had never died, had never gone to that other country. And if Cecilia was a child, she was still as enchanting as ever. It was easy—so easy!—to slip back into being the humble servant I had been with her at the palace. I knelt and said, “The flowers are nowhere near as lovely as you, my lady.”
She laughed. “Oh, you do overstep yourself! What a courtier you are becoming, Roger. . . . I think perhaps I am hungry, after all. What a lovely spot for a picnic, here above that sweet sea!”
I gave her what I had: stale bread and wild strawberries. I spread my cloak for her on the grass. I passed her the water bag. She prattled on, covering the strangeness of the situation with silly chatter, the only defense she had. I saw that she would never speak of what had happened to her on Soulvine Moor, nor of the weirdness of finding herself alone in the far reaches of The Queendom with me. Whatever poverty or hardship we endured, she would laugh and prattle and say nothing and rely on me utterly to take care of her, pretending that this was normal because anything else was too terrible to think about.
A child.
When the lovely spring afternoon faded, I led her—without taking her hand this time—away from the cliff. The sun had dried both our clothes. We slept in the clearing, she wrapped without comment in my cloak, I shivering on the bare ground. The cloak would have held two, but to Cecilia that was not possible. My dreams in that cursed place were terrible, but I didn’t mention them. Not then, not ever. Cecilia would not have known how to comfort me—even if comfort were possible, for one who had done, seen, been such as I.
28
 
IT IS ONE THING
to love a child in a palace, surrounded by comfort. It is another to travel with a child through rough country, trying desperately to think where to go next.
I had three silvers and seventeen pennies left of Mother Chilton’s coins. Maggie’s scheme of renting a cottage for a cookhouse might still be possible if I could earn just a little more money. However, I had trouble visualizing Cecilia as a serving maid. And then I had to spend two silvers on a donkey, because Cecilia could not walk very far or very long. I had to leave her hidden in a grove of trees to find somewhere to buy this donkey, and the balky animal cost me more time and money than I had expected. By the time I returned, Cecilia was curled into a quivering ball of terror in my cloak. It took me hours to soothe her.
Not that she complained. She never did that. But she was so weak, so helpless, that I spent most of my last coins on better food, on a few nights’ lodgings in an inn, on an enameled comb for her hair and on a cup so that she would not have to drink from the water bag. Now there was not enough money left to rent any cottage, anywhere.
We had come to the edge of The Queendom, where the seacoast began to turn flatter and fishing villages appeared. Perhaps I could find work here? But I knew nothing about fishing, and how would I explain Cecilia? If she would just stay quiet, I might have passed her off as my sister, or even my wife. But Cecilia never stayed quiet. A constant, desperate chatter was how she kept memory outside the fortifications of her mind, and her chatter marked her every second as court bred.
“My lady,” I said, “who was Hemfree?”
An expression of complete terror crossed her face, quick as lightning before it vanished. Had I, in fact, seen that expression at all? Her words came too swiftly and too loud. “I don’t remember that name.”
I believed her. Her memory had immediately discarded what she could not bear to remember. I tried something easier.
“When did you first come to the palace?”
“Oh, very young, a little girl! The queen herself sent for me. She knew my mother.” But then something must have threatened to breach her mind, because she threw me a roguish, desperate smile and laughed. “Why, Roger, are you questioning my age? Don’t you know that you must never ask a lady how old she is? Shame on you, naughty fool!”
If she had had a fan, she would have rapped me with it. But I was no longer a fool. I turned away, but then she surprised me.
“I could get work as a lady’s maid, I think,” she said.
I jerked my head around to gaze at her. “A lady’s maid . . . but, my lady, there are no courtiers here!”
“Oh, not here, not in a fishing village!” She laughed. “Somewhere nicer . . . or, at least, I think I could, somewhere there is a need for . . .” A puzzled expression crossed her face. Memory, or at least realization, was very close. She pushed it away.
“Oh, silly me! Of course I couldn’t do that! Really . . . you shouldn’t let me prattle on so, you naughty boy!”
I said quietly, “I am not a boy, Lady Cecilia.”
And she was not a lady. Not here, in this place. I could not take her anywhere that she could be a lady, because Queen Caroline would have her arrested, tortured, killed, even though Lord Solek still held the power at court; I had learned as much from overheard scraps of conversations as I bought Cecilia her comb, her food, her cup, her lodging, her donkey.
Probably Cecilia and I shouldn’t even stay in these remote fishing villages for very long. Fishing villages brought travelers, both by sea and land, and travelers carried news to and fro. Inevitably, someone would notice the presence of a woman as beautiful and out of place as Cecilia. That traveler would mention it elsewhere, and the news would make its slow way to the queen.
So what was I going to do with my lady, my love? How were we going to live?
If we went farther inland, not toward Glory but rather to remote villages where the chance of recognition was less and the old ways were stronger, I could do as Hartah had done. I could sell my services as a visitor to the Dead, bringing false comfort at the summer faires that would soon begin. My flesh writhed at the very idea. However, I could come up with no other. The money was gone, all but a few pennies. We had to eat.
Moodily I walked along the rocky beach, watching the boats set out in the early morning for a day of fishing. I had left Cecilia asleep in the village’s only inn, a snug wooden structure with a taproom below and two tiny bedchambers above, both smelling of fish. Cecilia and I shared one of the chambers, she on the bed and I on the floor. The innkeeper’s wife, who ran the place while he fished, was much younger than he, and frankly curious about Cecilia and me. But she asked nothing, and she ran her little establishment with a tolerant competence that reminded me of Maggie.
The fishing boats disappeared over the horizon. A dazzling yellow sun broke into view. I skipped a few desultory stones over the calm water, then went back to the inn and paid a precious penny for a mug of ale in the taproom. It was too early for ale, but I needed it. The innkeeper’s wife served me and then sat, unbidden, at the trestle table opposite me and rested her rough-skinned elbows on the table.
“Where do ye come from, friend?”
“Many places,” I said wearily. I was in no mood for conversation.
“And where do ye go?”
I didn’t answer.
She studied me. Not pretty, she nonetheless had a healthy vitality, like a strong, young animal. A lively intelligence glittered in her small brown eyes. “I ask because we don’t be having many visitors here, this early in the year. No, not many visitors.”
“I imagine not.”
Go away
.
“I wonder if ye knew the one here but two days ago.”
“No.”
“That’s too bad. I maun return his things to somebody.”
I sipped my ale, looking pointedly away. I had had enough of chattering women.
“Lookee, I show ye.” She jumped up, opened a chest in a corner of the room, and pulled out a pile of rags. On top of them lay a knife with a curved blade and a wooden handle carved like an openmouthed fish.
Bat’s knife.
“Ah, I see ye know him, after all,” the woman said.
“Maybe. What . . . what happened to him?”
She shrugged. “No one knows. He took a room upstairs—the room ye be having now—waiting for the fleet to put back in. Out several days, they was that time. And he din’t come down. I finally unlocked the door and he be gone, with his clothes on the bed and his knife under the pillow.”
“His . . . clothes?”
“Aye. His only clothes, and naught else be stolen. The door was still barred on the
inside
, but he was just gone. Somebody still owes me his reckoning. But—how did he leave all naked, and for where?”
How indeed? All at once the taproom seemed cold, the ale tasteless. My stomach clenched. Bat would not have fitted through the upstairs chamber’s one window. The woman had just said the door was barred from the inside. So how—
If Bat had somehow gone back to the country of the Dead, or had been—what?—snatched back there?—then his clothes and knife would have gone with him. The Dead did not cross over naked.
No, the whole story was a lie, a ruse to get a stranger to pay what Bat owed her. My stomach unknotted and I said, “I knew the man only in passing. I owe you nothing.” But I stood, my ale unfinished, and climbed the stairs to the bedchamber.
Cecilia still lay asleep. I stared at the tiny window, the thick door.
Two days ago
, the woman had said. Bat would then have been back in the land of the living for . . . how many days? I had lost track of time.
Maggie would have known.
But it didn’t really matter. I sat in the chamber’s one chair and watched Cecilia. She had washed her hair last night, a laborsome business involving cans of hot water that I had lugged up the stairs, and now her tresses spilled clean and shining over the rough cotton pillow. The lids of her eyes fluttered, translucent, faintly blue. Her strong young throat lay exposed, and the top of one small breast above her shift. I had never touched that breast, never would touch it. Cecilia looked more beautiful than I had ever seen her, and completely desirable. But I felt no desire.
What am I going to do with you
?
I watched her for a long time. Then I woke her; I had no money to pay for this chamber for another night. I could barely pay for breakfast. She didn’t grumble, but her lovely face was sullen. I went to the stable yard and watered and hitched the donkey, who did grumble. After a silent, meager breakfast, I helped Cecilia mount and we started inland, traveling on a track overgrown with weeds, toward what the innkeeper’s wife said was the nearest farm village, several leagues to the northwest. The village was called Ablington. They were having a faire.
“Roger, you’re not listening to me!”
I was not. But I was thinking of her, and also of Bat. I believed the barmaid had been lying, but her story would not leave my mind. I had crossed over with Cecilia the day after I had brought Bat back. Was that significant? What
had
happened to Bat?
“You’re not listening!”
“I’m sorry, my lady.”
I plodded on, toward the spring faire. Where I would set Cecilia in some cool grove or on a bench on some village green, and I would try to do what I had vowed to never do again. To be what Hartah had made me: a liar and cheater in two countries, here and there.
But Cecilia and I never reached Ablington. We never reached anywhere at all.
 
 
It happened at dusk of the next day, beside a campfire over which I toasted the last of our bread, wishing instead for one of Jee’s rabbits. Cecilia sat combing her hair with the enameled comb I had bought her. The hair rippled and shone in the firelight, glinting in a hundred shades of honey, cinnamon, gold, bronze, amber, copper, chestnut. The dusk deepened her green eyes to the color of emeralds.
“Why are you looking at me that way?” A tiny half smile at the corners of her mouth.
“Because you are the most beautiful thing I have ever seen, Cecilia.”
“You should call me ‘my lady.’ Don’t become so familiar, Roger! ”
She was not teasing. Firelight flickered over the enameled comb that I could not afford, the bread of which I would give her more than half although my stomach rumbled with hunger, my fur-lined cloak that she sat upon. There rose in me an anger I had not known I felt, had not known I could feel. Not toward her.
I said, my voice low and careful, “Perhaps the circumstances justify my familiarity.”
“No,” she said with sweet certainty. “No, that cannot be, Roger. You know that. I am a lady, and you are the queen’s fool.”
“Out here there is no queen, and no fool.”
And you are alive only because of me
. Made alive, kept alive.
“But they exist, nonetheless.” She shook her head at me playfully, and her beautiful hair shimmered and danced.

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