Crossing Over

by Anna Kendall

  “Where is Lady Cecilia? Did you help her?”

  “I did, lad. But you don’t know why. You know much, even more than you think, but you don’t know what Cecilia is.”

  “What is she? ”

  “A pretty, empty-headed tinderbox that will ignite all.”

  I said with as much dignity as I could manage, “I know she is not a great wit, but she is not empty-headed. And yes, she has ‘ignited’ me, and I am not shamed by that.”

  Mother Chilton did not laugh. She closed her eyes and an expression of great pain crossed her face, as if I had turned a knife in her bowels. I sprang forward to catch her if she fell, but she didn’t so much as sway on her feet. But I think I swayed at her next words.

  “I have sent Cecilia into the Unclaimed Lands. It is the only place the queen cannot reach her. Caroline studied the soul arts but she has no talent. Still, it is why the queen recognized you. I told Cecilia to go into the Unclaimed Lands but not to enter Soulvine Moor, not for any reason. It may be she can find some goatherd or scrub farmer to marry her, pretty little kitten that she is, and keep her safe. But you can’t go after her, lad. I thought once that you came from Soulvine. You do not, and you’ve already caused enough disturbance in the country of the Dead.”

  “You ... you can cross over to the country of the Dead?”

  “No,” she said without explanation.

  I seized on what mattered. “You sent Cecilia south to the Unclaimed Lands alone?”

  “She is not alone.” Mother Chilton put her hand on my arm, and a strange thing happened: my vision blurred. Almost, something formed in front of my eyes, some picture—but no. It was gone. Mother Chilton withdrew her hand.

  “You are not ready,” she said sadly. “Lad, don’t go after that girl. She was born on Soulvine Moor, and although Caroline brought her to Glory as a child, she is still a Soulviner. Do not go after her.”

  “I must,” I said simply.

  “You’re a fool,” she said with equal simplicity, and I didn’t know if she referred to my character, my post with the queen, or both. For a long moment neither of us spoke. The fire crackled in the brazier. Finally Mother Chilton said, “Don’t try to go about in daylight as either a girl or a savage bard. You can’t even sing. Take off that ridiculous nightdress and scrub your face with this cloth. I will give you a cloak.”

  I said sullenly, tired of being ordered like a child when I was on a hero’s mission to rescue my love, “The red dye won’t wash away. It must wear off.”

  She snorted and attacked my face with the cloth. It came away red with dye. She dragged the twigs, not gently, from my hair. I put off the green velvet cloak and pulled Lady Margaret’s nightdress over my head. Mother Chilton slapped a poultice on my wounded arm, yanking back my sleeve to do so. Instantly, cool strength flooded through my arm. She took my court cloak and handed me a thick hooded cloak of brown wool lined with brown rabbit, by far the nicest I had ever owned.

  “I . . . I cannot pay you. ...”

  She said sharply, “Give me that gold piece in your pocket.”

  How had she known? Before I could ask, she added, “And give me Caroline’s ring, too. How stupid are you, to carry markers like those around with you? Give them to me.”

  Markers? I put my hand in my pocket and clutched both my gold piece and the little ring set with tiny emeralds. I had planned to use both to bargain my way to Cecilia. If she took—

  Of its own will, and without mine, my hand drew out of my pocket and laid both ring and gold piece on the table.

  “How did you—”

  “Here, lad.” She gave me a handful of silver pieces; I was too dazed to count them.

  “How did you—”

  “Hush. Go to the alehouse by the east gate and drink there all night. In the morning, when the worthless alehouse louts stagger out of the city to do what they call ‘work’ in the fields, go out with them.”

  “But how—”

  “I said to hush!”

  But I could not, even though I could barely get out my next words. “I never . . . never believed in witches. Are you . . . a witch, mistress?”

  “Get out before I kick you out, lad. Your stupidity shames us all.”

  “But I—”

  “Get out!”

  “Will you tell me just one more thing? How did Cecilia know about you in the first place, for the milady posset I mean, and why are you now helping her to—”

  “Such stupidity will destroy us all yet,” she said despairingly, and then all at once I stood in the dark alley, and the tent door was laced tightly shut behind me. I blinked, and a shudder ran over me. So it was true and I had never known it; witches existed in the world. Or maybe Mother Chilton had merely babbled, and I had walked myself from her tent. Or maybe—

  “Hello, Roger,” said a voice behind me in the darkness. I whirled around. There, wrapped in a gray cloak and somehow sounding scared and furious and determined all at once, stood Maggie.

  23

  “WHAT ARE YOU doing here?” It came out harsh and accusing, my tone born of my own fear, my own unsettling doubts about what I was doing here.

  “I’m going with you,” Maggie said in an un-Maggie voice, humble and beseeching. Nothing was as it should be.

  “You’re not. Go back inside the palace.”

  “I can’t let you go lurching around the countryside alone. You’re too ignorant,” she said, and that sounded more like Maggie. But she was the second woman in two minutes to tell me how stupid I was, and I lost what remained of my temper.

  “I have ‘lurched around the countryside’ since I was six years old! With people you couldn’t imagine, doing things you couldn’t imagine! Damn it all, Maggie, leave me alone!”

  She started to cry.

  Her tears were not like Cecilia’s, stormy and clutching, tears a man could comfort. She stood there in the starlight with her hands hanging limply at her sides, tears sliding silently down her face. Her nose began to run. But she didn’t move, didn’t go back to the palace.

  “Maggie . . . I can’t take you.”

  Finally she said, “You understand nothing.” Which was not true, and certainly didn’t help. She added, “I mean, nothing about me.”

  “What don’t I understand?”

  “Anything!”

  I stalked off, toward the alehouse by the east gate. I could feel Maggie following me. There was a pocket in my new cloak, and I put my hand into it and fingered the coins Mother Chilton had given me. Ten silvers—more than I had ever seen together in my life. Five hundred pennies! I was a little afraid of so much money. Just before we reached the alehouse, I bent over and under cover of my cloak, I slipped nine of the silvers into my boot.

  The alehouse was half tent, half newly constructed wood. A brazier burned brightly in the center, warming all but the farthest corners. Queen Caroline had undone her mother’s edict that tradesmen must leave the city at night, and the two long tables on either side of the brazier were full of people drinking and talking and laughing. Maggie and I took one of the small, cold, corner tables. Keeping my cloak and hood on, I laid my silver coin on the table, and the serving woman looked hungrily at it and so not at us. She brought two mugs of ale, two bronze coins, and seven pennies.

  Maggie said in a low voice, “Where did you get the money, Roger? ”

  “That’s my concern.”

  “Then where do you think Lady Cecilia has gone?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Then how will you—”

  “Maggie, you’ve been very good to me. Helping me, feeding me, nursing me. But I must do this alone.”

  “No,” she said simply.

  “Who are you to—”

  “I’m coming with you. I’m dressed as a boy, Roger, under my cloak. I have cut my hair. I’m coming with you.”

  A monstrous thought occurred to me. Appalled at myself, I said, “Maggie, are you a spy for the queen?”

  She stared at me, her face a mottled mar
oon. But she didn’t attack me. She said only, “I told you that you were stupid. Don’t you know how much I hate the queen?”

  I hadn’t known. “Why?”

  “Because Richard was a Blue who died for his loyalty and bravery.”

  So her unaccustomed tears had not been for me, after all, but for her brother. The thought was welcome. I said gently, “You know now for certain that Richard is dead?”

  “Yes.” Maggie had control of herself now, “I finally heard. But that’s not the only reason I hate the queen. She beds the savage lord who killed so many of us in The Queendom. She murdered her own mother—everyone says so. And she has treated you like a dog—no, less than a dog. Like a thing. You could have died up there on the tower roof. She is a monster, and I hate her. I cannot stay and serve a monster. Not any longer, now that I know what she really is. Queen Eleanor was right, her daughter is not fit to rule. I was serving the wrong queen.” She took a sip of her ale, her eyes anguished.

  I realized then what made Maggie different from most people I had ever known: She could name hard truths. Not even Mother Chilton, with her anguished evasions, had done that. Maggie was domineering, stubborn, and meddlesome, but she could name truth. Like Mistress Conyers. Like—perhaps—Queen Caroline herself.

  I made one more attempt. “You have a sister in a village somewhere—you told me once. You could go to her.”

  “I also told you that my sister is a miserly, grasping fishwife who screams at everyone, including her husband. I am not going there. I am coming with you.”

  An unwelcome suspicion formed in my mind. I was willing to risk everything for Cecilia. Was Maggie then willing to risk everything for me because . . . “Maggie,” I choked out, “do you . . . are you ...” I could not say the words: in love with me.

  A long silence spun itself out, fragile as cobwebs.

  Maggie finally answered. Her voice held great carefulness. “You are my friend, Roger. My brother is dead, my sister a shrew, and I can no longer serve a queen I despise. If I stay in the palace one night longer, I will go mad. I have nowhere else to go except with you.”

  Nowhere else to go. I well understood that! Relief crept through me, warming as the ale. Maggie was my friend, she had nowhere else to go, and it had been deeply vain of me to suspect anything else. I would not entertain such vain thoughts again. Who was I, fool and murderer and homeless wanderer, that anyone should love me?

  Still, I made one more attempt to dissuade Maggie from coming with me. “You said in the kitchen that leaving the palace was too dangerous for you to—”

  “I meant danger to you, idiot!”

  “That’s my concern, not yours!”

  “It’s mine now,” she retorted, sounding again like the Maggie I knew: competent and scornful.

  “Well, come on, then,” I said ungraciously, and after that neither of us spoke again. We sat, drinking slowly, while the alehouse emptied as the night wore on. I spent sixteen more pennies, the last ten for the serving woman to let us sleep beside the dying brazier. In the early morning we joined the laborers streaming over the east bridge, the men and women who would work for daily hire, planting and weeding the fields, then spend all they earned in the alehouses and cook shops of the city when night came. No one noticed us. We walked to the farthest of the village fields, where a cottage woman sold us as much bread, cheese, and dried meat as we could carry, plus a goatskin water bag, in exchange for a silver. Then we took the southeast road toward the coast.

  It was the same road I had ridden with Kit Beale, nearly nine months ago. Then it had been autumn and now it was early summer, and Maggie plodded beside me. Now, as then, I didn’t know what I was going toward, or what would happen to me. But all else was different. I was different. And every step of every mile, Cecilia filled my heart. With worry, with fear, with pain. With love, which was all three.

  My arm hurt only a little. Whatever Mother Chilton had done to it, the gun wound seemed to be healing more rapidly than it had under Lady Margaret’s nursing. I was still weak from my illness, and sometimes I had to stop and rest. Maggie had more strength than I. Still, I rested less than expected, and for that, too, Mother Chilton’s poultice may or may not have been responsible.

  Maggie had said little all that first day. But when we had made our camp in a thicket well off the road, when we had eaten our bread and cheese and meat, she faced me across the glowing coals. It was cold after the sun set, and both of us wrapped our cloaks tight around our bodies. The moon was a thin crescent in the east, barely visible, and the stars shone high and clear.

  “Roger, what will you do if you find Lady Cecilia?”

  I didn’t want to discuss Cecilia, not with Maggie. I said brusquely, “Serve her.”

  “As her fool?”

  “No!”

  “As what?”

  “You cannot ever let anything rest, can you?” I said angrily. “Lady Cecilia is in the Unclaimed Lands. She is not alone, but whoever is with her is only one person. Mother Chilton did not tell me who it is. Cecilia will need servitors, guards, a court.”

  “You are neither a servitor nor a guard,” Maggie said, “and you are certainly not a courtier.” She stared straight into the fire, scowling.

  “She trusts me. And anyway, you’re going to need a home, too, Maggie. You wanted to escape the palace, and you have. But what now? Lady Cecilia could maybe give you a place as her serving woman, or—”

  “Be quiet!” Maggie said with such fierce pain that I was astonished. It did not seem to me a fall in rank to go from cook to lady’s maid, but I questioned her no further. I didn’t want any more arguments. Maggie lay down and rolled herself into a ball with her back to me.

  I dreamed, that night by the fire, that I was back in the laundry at the palace. I was dying cloth green, but then—in the manner of dreams—I was dying people, and not green but yellow. All the people were female, and all of them were naked: the queen, Cecilia, Cat Starling, Maggie. “There,” I said, “now you are all fools.” I woke with such a powerful bodily response that there was nothing to do but creep off into the bushes and hope Maggie did not wake.

  All fools. Including me.

  Maggie and I walked for several days while talking but little. She was sullen, seldom even looking at me. The Queendom was in soft spring, filled with new light and tender green, but the nights were still cold. The moon grew steadily until it was a full round circle, shedding a silvery glow over all beneath. The land around us became wilder, less fertile. Fields of new plantings gave way to pastures for sheep and then, as the ground became rockier and steeper still, to goats. Hills turned to mountains, with deep ravines and abrupt cliffs. Whenever anyone rode down the road from either direction, Maggie and I hid. But I realized that Hartah, with his gruesome stories of highwaymen and robbers and dangers to lone travelers, had lied to me. I saw no corpses gutted and rotting by the road. And each day, fewer and fewer riders appeared. We had reached the edge of the Unclaimed Lands.

  “Our food is almost gone,” Maggie said.

  “There’s an inn up ahead. We can get provisions there, and ask for information.”

  “An inn? How do you know?”

  “I know,” I said. And so we came to the last inn where I had ever stayed with Hartah and Aunt Jo. It looked the same, a rough place for rough people. Somewhere to the east lay the sea, and I noticed, as I had been too naive to notice before, the sheltered creek that would be so convenient for smugglers. Dense woods behind the inn would let a traveler approach or leave unseen from the road. “A good place for information,” Hartah had said. I took another of Mother Chilton’s silvers out of my boot and put it in my pocket.

  “Maggie, you must do exactly as I say while we are inside this inn.”

  She said reasonably, “What are you going to tell me to do?”

  “Say nothing. You can maybe pass for a boy if you keep your hood up, with all that dirt on your face, but not if you speak. And when we take a room upstairs, you must stay there wi
th the door barred until you’re sure the person knocking is me.” I hated that I was giving her the same instructions Hartah had once given me, but there was no help for it. In this, at least, Hartah had been right. This was no place for a woman. Aunt Jo had been old and shriveled, but Maggie was young and, if not exactly pretty—no one was pretty next to Cecilia—would still be in danger. And I, with my small shaving knife, could not defend her.

  Who was defending Cecilia? It should have been me.

  Maggie nodded. She pulled her cloak far over her face. I said, “Part the cloak at the waist so they can see your boots and breeches. They must think we are two boys.” She nodded again and did as I directed—a first.

  Two men sat drinking in the taproom, with another carrying in mugs of ale from a room beyond. They studied us with cold eyes.

  “We need a room for the night,” I said, holding out my palm with a silver coin on it. “My brother has fallen and hurt his leg.”

  Maggie began to limp.

  The innkeeper looked from my coin to my face to my thick, fur-lined cloak. His voice was genial and oily. “Aye, lad. I’ve a fine room for ye, upstairs. My best. And mayhap a bit of supper?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “As ye wish. This way.”

  I followed him upstairs. The same tiny room under the eaves, the same sagging bed. Maggie limped behind me. The innkeeper said, “Thirty pennies for the night.”

  That was outrageous, but I nodded. “Fine. My brother must rest his leg, but I’ll come down with you and have a mug of ale.”

  His greasy smile broadened. “As ye say, sir.”

  Maggie, looking frightened, hobbled into the room. I heard her bolt the door. I followed the innkeeper to the taproom, let him bring me a mug of ale from the back room, let him charge me a ridiculous three pennies. The remaining seventeen lay on the table beside my mug. The other two men sat across from me, saying nothing. They were neither young nor old, dressed in patched brown wool, and neither had washed in a very long time. Their smell would have been even worse, except that the room was cold. Wind off the sea whistled between chinks in the walls, turning the small fire fitful. We all wore cloaks.