Crossing Over

by Anna Kendall

  And when I woke in the evening, the rain had stopped. There was a fire. Food cooked over it. The goatskin bag swelled with water. And there was Jee, blowing softly on the whistle I had made for him.

  “He brought the food,” Maggie said before I could say anything, “and the ropes for snares, to catch small game. He told me it was all right to make a fire because Tob has not yet returned from his long hunt.”

  “Jee can’t come with us.”

  “He says he won’t go back.”

  “Maggie . . . consider all the ... no.”

  Jee stared at us both, expressionless, the whistle held halfway to his lips. He cupped his other hand protectively over it.

  Maggie said, all in a low rush, “I lied before, Roger. I didn’t want you to know. His father beats Jee. He beats Jee’s mother, too, and he would have beaten me except that he hoped I would lie with him. He stole the two silvers you left me. I was only going to wait for you another day because that’s how long I thought I could hold him off, and then I was going to go and take Jee with me. He’s too good for that life.” Before I could answer, she raced on. “He says he won’t go back. He says he’ll follow us. He says he’ll do that even if you beat him, too. He says ...”

  “Can’t he say anything for himself?”

  Jee blinked and said something. His voice was so thick, from accent or fear, that I couldn’t understand the words. But they made no difference anyway.

  “Maggie, his father will come after him. Maybe even after you.”

  “I told you, he went on a long hunt yesterday, just before you appeared. Jee says it will be at least three more days before he returns. By that time we’ll be far away, if we move faster. Here, eat this, and you will feel better.”

  If we move faster. The only way we could move faster was if I didn’t spend most of the night moving Cecilia to match our daylight travels. But Cecilia was now a night’s worth of road ahead of us, and if we traveled for two days before I moved her again . . .

  “Eat!” Maggie commanded, and I ate.

  “What would we do with Jee? Later?”

  “What will we do with ourselves?” she said. To which there was no answer. But Maggie was not the girl for no answers. “How much money do you have left?”

  “Why?” I countered.

  “Because we could maybe start a cookshop in some village at the edge of The Queendom, where Solek’s soldiers don’t go. He hasn’t got all that many soldiers, you know, not to post over the whole Queendom. If you have enough money left to rent some poor cottage and buy just a few vegetables to start, I could cook. Jee can hunt the meat, and we could sleep in the cottage at night. Later on, if we save money hard enough, we can add ale. Come on, Roger—eat.”

  I ate. Her plan could work, maybe; we could survive with a small, poor cookshop far on a remote edge of The Queendom. I found I hated the idea. But why?

  I didn’t know. A year ago, running a cookshop in a quiet village—away from Hartah, away from danger, away from having to cross over—would have seemed the best thing that ever happened to me. But not now. Things were different. I was different.

  Different how? I didn’t know the answer to that, either. “You’ve grown, lad. You’re nearly a man,” Mother Chilton had said. But it was not that. All boys became men. All boys—

  “What is the month and day?” I asked Maggie. She was efficiently stripping the rest of the rabbit meat from the bones and wrapping it in a clean cloth. She didn’t even have to ponder in order to answer me.

  “Month of Sacter, tenth day.”

  A month before the summer solstice. Today was my birthday. I was fifteen.

  For two days we walked, camping nights as the moon again waxed toward full. Once, from the crest of a wooded hill, I glimpsed soldiers in the valley below. Looking for Cecilia? They would not find her now. The thought brought no comfort.

  Jee said little, but without him we would have needed to buy food at houses or inns, both giving away our presence and depleting my coins. Jee, the child, was the only one of us who could hunt, and the snares he set each night produced a steady stream of rabbits. They were spring rabbits, without much meat on their bones, but Maggie roasted them with wild roots and newly budded herbs that she picked as we walked, and by the third day, I had strength enough to go back for Cecilia. When the others slept, I crossed over.

  It was a long, weary walk to the windy hilltop where I had left Cecilia. She followed, unresisting, as I led her down the mountains. It was much more difficult here than in the land of the living because the ground shook so. Once it even shifted, an abrupt sideways jerk that threw us from our feet into a thicket of thorns. I rose bleeding and bruised. Cecilia rose with her green gown clean as ever, her creamy skin unscratched, her eyes blank. Above us the wind would not stop blowing, and thunder rumbled in streaky clouds.

  I could not rouse Cecilia but I had roused the country of the Dead, turned it monstrous and deformed. This, too, was my fault.

  The next night, I walked Cecilia past the place where Maggie and Jee lay asleep. Not much farther on, the land abruptly descended. From this point on the track, I could see for miles and miles, even under the gray dimness of these thick clouds. On the horizon lay a deeper gray that, I was fairly certain, was the sea.

  There was no time to lie with Cecilia in my arms, barely time for a quick embrace. I kissed her cold cheek, sat her down, and crossed back over.

  Full sunlight struck my eyes, which had become accustomed to the dimness of that other country. Jee’s whistle played, stopping abruptly as I rose from my bedding. And Maggie stood looking down at me with accusing eyes.

  “So you’re back,” she said.

  “I was asleep—”

  She gave out a single oath, one so filthy that even Hartah had used it only rarely. Jee’s whistling stopped. Maggie said without looking at him, “Go find water, Jee. Now. Fill the bag.”

  The child went, eyes wide with fear.

  Maggie said, “Nothing I did could rouse you. What you . . . what you . . .” All at once her voice dropped to a whisper, and the sudden terror on her face dwarfed Jee’s. “What you told me in the kitchen. It’s true. Isn’t it?”

  I could not see anything to be gained by lying. Not anymore. Besides, she would not believe me. When Maggie made up her mind, not all of Solek’s army could change it.

  “Yes. It’s true.”

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

  “Yes.”

  “You’re a witch.”

  “No,” I said irritably. “There is no such thing as a witch. I am”—I knew only one word for it—“a hisaf.” So it was with your father, the old man’s voice whispered in memory, or you could not be.

  Maggie said, “What’s a ‘hisaf’?”

  “Someone who can cross over. Maggie, I did not choose this. I was born this way. But I am not a witch, and I swear to you on my mother’s soul that I am no threat or danger to you. To anyone.”

  She considered this, her face still twisted with fear, but nonetheless considering. At that moment, fair-haired Maggie reminded me oddly of Queen Caroline, at least in expression.

  “You go to her at night,” she said. “You go to Lady Cecilia. That’s where you went last night, isn’t it? I couldn’t wake you this morning but it was not illness, not even exhaustion, it was as if you . . . weren’t here. Because you were not. You were with her.”

  “Yes.” Relief washed through me. Maggie understood, she accepted. I could stop hiding and running from her, because now at last there existed one human being who knew what I was but—unlike Hartah, unlike the queen—would not seek to use my “gift” for their own ends. Relief lightened my mind and, despite everything, I nearly laughed aloud. We were free of lies, Maggie and I, and everything from this point on would be so much simpler.

  “I hate you!” Maggie screamed, and threw a roasted rabbit at me. Still warm, it burned my cheek and then fell onto the grass, a wet meaty slab. Maggie put her head in
her hands and cried as if she would never stop.

  “Maggie, what—what—”

  “Don’t touch me!” she screamed, although I hadn’t tried to. “You don’t understand anything! You’re the stupidest man I ever met, and the most evil, and the—How can you go to her? She’s dead! Dead, dead, dead, and even when she was alive, she was silly and vain and stupid—even stupider than you are! And I followed you and cooked for you and risked everything for you—don’t touch me!”

  “I’m not! Maggie—”

  “Go! Get away from me! Or stay here with your dead and rotting whore—I don’t care! I’m going!” She ran down the uneven track.

  Even without much sleep, I caught her easily and pinned her arms to her sides as she tried to hit me. Her face was streaked with dirt and tears, she smelled of days of travel, and she bucked in my arms like a captured boar. Then, all at once, the bucking stopped. She threw her body against mine and kissed me hard.

  So at last I knew. The suspicion I had had on the island, the suspicion I had worked so hard to dispel, was true.

  “Maggie,” I gasped, when I could tear my mouth free of hers, “Maggie, no. I—”

  She let me go.

  We stood there for a long time, not looking at each other, under a warm noon sun. I had no idea what to say, what to do. A few moments ago I had held Cecilia in my arms—Cecilia, cool and unresponsive and unliving. Cecilia, my lady and my love. And yet I stood there on the mountain track, the land sloping away from me toward the distant sea and spring blooming all around, and my body responded to Maggie’s nearness. Confusion swaddled me like dense fog.

  Maggie did not seem confused. She never hesitated. Keeping her face turned away from me, she started down the track. When I ran to catch up with her, she pushed me away, hard.

  I caught up with her a third time, grabbed her hand, and pressed into it three of the six silver coins I had left. Again she pushed me away. When I got back to my feet, she had marched ahead. But the coins were not among the weeds on the track; I looked. She had kept them.

  Well, she had earned them.

  I watched her until she was out of sight. But I didn’t follow her. I couldn’t—I was too weary from my night in the country of the Dead. I had to sleep now, to keep my strength up. For Cecilia.

  I found a hidden thicket alive with tender green-yellow leaves, crawled under it, and fell asleep in the sweet warm sunshine.

  When I woke, at dusk, I crossed over again. Jee had not returned to me, either, which did not surprise me. It was Maggie whom the child had followed, Maggie who had shown him the only real kindness the poor little rat had ever known. Maggie, who loved me, and whose love I could not return.

  Why not? something whispered inside me. I silenced it. Then, still in my thicket, I crossed over. But this time, I had a desperate, hopeful, insane plan.

  27

  IT WAS THE PLACE I had left Cecilia that had started me thinking. She was still there, where the mountainside abruptly descended and the land lay spread to the gaze for miles and miles. I had recognized part of that landscape, far below me and above the sea cliffs. It was the clearing where the old queen’s Blues had hung the yellow-haired youth, and the second noose had dangled, awaiting me. Below the cliff at the clearing’s end was the little beach where Hartah and his cohorts had wrecked the Frances Ormund.

  I took Cecilia by the hand and led her toward that distant clearing. Each time I could go no farther, I left her and returned to my tranced body in some thicket or sheltered ditch. I slept, bought food as I could, and grew so haggard and filthy that farmwives began giving me bread, from pity. The moon again passed full and began to wane. Each time, I stayed in the land of the living only until my strength had returned, strength that I used only to walk forward to where I had left Cecilia, cross over, and journey with her again. No moon here, only the gray sky shot with flashes of lightning, the storm that never broke, the rumbling earth. Always Cecilia and I moved lower in the mountains, toward the valley where The Queendom lay.

  What can I say of those days of walking with Cecilia in that country that had no days, nor any nights? The ground trembled, the sky rumbled, and she did not really know I was there. Yet that time held a wild sweetness for me. Each time I took Cecilia’s hand, put my arm around her slim waist, drew her to lie next to me on the withered ground, feelings surged through me, and none of the feelings fit with any other. I could never have held this woman, a lady, in my arms under any other circumstance. I loved her. And in the round stone house on Soulvine Moor they had—

  Whenever that memory assaulted me, I babbled. “Cecilia, I’m so sorry, I didn’t reach you in time, I promised to keep you safe and I failed—I’ll make it right for you, for us, I promise, I promise—” And I pressed her to me, and smelled the light flowery scent of her hair, which never changed, and a kind of despairing joy came over me, gone the next moment in a wash of black guilt.

  And yet what I remember is the joy.

  I don’t know how many days passed this way, but eventually we reached, each in our own country, the cliff above that rocky beach.

  In the land of the living, the cabin still stood, deserted and infested with spiders and mice. The yellow-haired youth’s body had disappeared over the winter and spring, probably eaten by crows, but the frayed remains of the noose still swung from the oak tree. I could see the whole horrific scene as if it were not memory but solid reality before me now: Mistress Conyers in her sodden gown, torn between horror and justice. Enfield, the soldier of the Blues, itching to hang me from the same oak tree. And earlier, Hartah on the beach, his arms waving in the driving rain as the Frances Ormund struck the rocks and the terrified sailors staggered ashore into the wrecker’s knives. My aunt Jo, shouting to me over the storm, her features blurred by flying water: Roger! Go! Go now! The one thing I could not see was myself, the sniveling boy who clutched at the hem of Mistress Conyers’s gown and begged for his life. That boy would not come clear in my eyes, my mind, my muscles. I was no longer him.

  I crossed over.

  It was strange to leave a calm spring afternoon in the land of the living and arrive in storm in the country of the Dead. Always before, it had been the other way around. Now the sky here was as wild, the sea as high, the wind as howling as on the night of the wreck on the other side. The only differences were that no rain fell, and underfoot the ground shook as if it, like the Frances Ormund, were about to come apart.

  Bat remained where I had left him all those months ago, sitting on a tree stump beside the track from cabin to cliff. He jumped up as soon as he saw me. He looked the same: flat head, big nose, greasy hair, slurred voice. A child in the tattered clothing of a shipwrecked sailor, the knife handle carved like an openmouthed fish still in his huge hand.

  “Sir Witch!”

  “Yes, Bat.”

  “Ye come for Bat!”

  “Yes. Are you well?”

  The simple question confused him, not unreasonably. What did “well” mean—either in Witchland or the country of the Dead? Bat said nothing. He eyed me with a mixture of fear, respect, and hope. I had no idea what time had meant to him, waiting here on his stump. Nor did I think too deeply about the matter. I was too busy pushing away pity for what I was about to do to him.

  It was Bat who first showed me that the Dead do not always know they are dead. It was Bat who first showed me that, lacking this essential knowledge, a dead man could will himself to fly up the cliff face. That was what I had later used to save Cat Starling from the Blues intent on burning her. Instead I had sent her to flying away through the air, and so further convincing the soldiers that they were in Witchland. It was with Bat that I had first devised that stratagem, and it was with Bat that I was now going to test a further idea. I could not risk Cecilia for the experiment; she was too precious. First would have to come Bat.

  I said, “Why do you not kneel to me, Bat? I am, after all, a lord of Witchland!”

  Hastily he got down on his knees, muttering apologies I
could not understand.

  “I am going to release you from Witchland,” I said. “Come closer.”

  On his knees the sailor inched toward me, until I could see the flaking white part in his greasy hair. I stepped closer, too, and our bodies touched.

  “Stay completely still, Bat.”

  “Aye, sir.” His voice trembled, but he obeyed.

  I put my hands under his armpits and pulled him to me, like a child or a lover. I held him as close as possible. Then I crossed over.

  Dirt in my mouth—

  Worms in my eyes—

  Earth imprisoning my fleshless arms and legs—

  But this time it went on and on. I was trapped between, buried in the earth forever and ever and the other rotting skeleton buried with me, screaming in my nonexistent mind. . . . It went on and on and ON—

  And then I was through, gasping on the fresh spring grass, and Bat sprawled at my feet, howling and terrified and alive.

  It took me a long time to recover my breathing, and Bat even longer. Gasping, wheezing, the only thing I could think of was Hygryll. The men and women in the round stone room covered with earth, who had followed me—the hisaf—in a gray fog to the country of the Dead. They had existed in the country of the Dead only as wisps, but then, they had not actually been dead. Bat, on the other hand, had been fully in the country of the Dead, and he was now fully here.

  But was he?

  As soon as I had recovered enough breath and wits—dirt in my mouth, worms in my eyes, earth imprisoning my fleshless arms and legs—I examined Bat. He had jumped up and stood gazing wildly around, panting in great sobs, waving his knife as he looked for something to attack. I said imperiously, “It’s all right, Bat. I have brought you back from Witchland. Kneel!”