Crossing Over

by Anna Kendall

  Gracefully she sat down on the grass and stared at a flower. I had lost her. This was one old woman I could not jar into jolly stories of childhood.

  I smacked my fist against my thigh. To have taken this risk for nothing! I must get back, now. I must—

  Two soldiers materialized a short way off. They wore Queen Eleanor’s blue. My body blocked her from their view, but one cried, “The whore’s fool! Seize him!”

  He rushed toward me, sword drawn. The other, not so quick in mind, looked around him dazedly. I stepped aside and pointed. “Your queen!”

  That stopped the attacking soldier. He fell to his knees and bowed his head. “Your Majesty! Are you safe?”

  She, of course, said nothing. Not for a long moment. But then she looked up at me and said simply, “Yes.” A moment later she had relapsed into the calm of the Dead.

  The second soldier came uncertainly toward me. “What is this place? What . . . they said Queen Eleanor was dead. ...”

  I saw it come to him, then. He looked down at his own belly, as if expecting to find it run through with the sword of a Green, and then looked again at me. I couldn’t help but be moved by his bewilderment.

  The kneeling soldier sprang up. “None of your fool’s talk, boy! Where are we? What witchcraft did the whore use on us?”

  Here, then, was my story, handed to me like meat on a golden plate—the same story I had once told Bat. If I could use it to make these soldiers believe I was not Queen Caroline’s ally but her victim, they might not harm me. Swiftly I said, “You have caught me out! Yes, the young queen used her sorcery to bring us all here to Witchland—I saw her do it! She crooked her sixth finger and chanted her spells and . . . and flew through the air and brought us all here! Me, too, for daring to say fool’s rhymes that displeased her . . . And she has ensorcelled Queen Eleanor! Look, the queen breathes and yet cannot speak, cannot see—”

  The soldier cried out in superstitious fear and outraged fury. He waved his drawn sword, but there was no one to run through—until three Green soldiers appeared beside the river.

  There must be fighting in the palace. Men were dying. And now there would be fighting here as well.

  The two Blues rushed toward the Greens, who drew weapons and counterattacked. And I saw what I had not thought possible: the Dead fighting each other to kill. Only it did not, could not happen. One soldier got the advantage and slashed brutally at another’s head. The blade passed right through flesh and skull and bone, and the man stood on his feet still, unharmed.

  That stopped them all.

  I dared not go closer. I could be harmed, even if they could not. From beside the queen I called, “In Witchland, no one can die. Look how many the witch has brought here! And she can summon us back whenever she chooses. . . . It has been done to me before!”

  The Blue soldiers looked wildly around. The three Greens had already retreated out of earshot; soon they would be tranquil and motionless. The Blues didn’t understand, but they believed me. In the face of the senseless, men will seize on any belief that promises sense.

  The less quick of the Blues said uncertainly, “Ye have been here before, fool?”

  “Yes. Come here, to your queen—just you!”

  He came. I said to him, very low, “What happened to her? Did she drink or eat anything, or—”

  “I don’t know. I wasn’t there. But my captain, he said she clutched her belly and cried, ‘Poison! My daughter!’ But ye say it was not poison, it was witchcraft? I don’t know—”

  “It was witchcraft,” I said firmly. “Look at her! She’s not dead, she breathes and sits, you walk and talk. . . . You are banished in Witchland until they summon you back. And so are these others.” Two more Blues had appeared in the river and were staggering, dripping, to shore. “You must tell them! I hope I don’t—” Deliberately I broke off my sentence, bit my tongue hard, and crossed over.

  My tongue bled into my mouth. I writhed on the hearth rug and then all at once I was weeping. But was I weeping from pain, or from knowledge?

  In truth, I had no certain knowledge. The old queen had cried out that she had been poisoned, but she might have cried that even if her death had come from a failure in her heart. She might have clutched her belly anyway, believing her daughter to have poisoned her no matter what the fact. And the “Yes” that the old queen said to me—the last thing she would ever say to anyone—might have meant anything.

  But I believed that Queen Eleanor had been answering my question. Yes. Yes, she had been murdered, and Queen Caroline was what rumor had called her: a poisoner.

  The queen is dead. Long live the queen.

  I don’t know how long I lay on the hearth, my thoughts in chaos. Queen Caroline had always roused in me so many contradictory emotions: Fear. Admiration. Anger . . . Respect. Now my feelings toward the queen reduced to only one: a desire to survive her patronage.

  Eventually I rose and washed the blood from my mouth with cooling water. Eventually Lord Robert’s voice bellowed on the other side of the door. “Fool! Open!”

  I unbarred the door. He and Queen Caroline stood there. Her ladies and courtiers clustered at the other end of the outer chamber, some looking frightened and others triumphant. I fell to my knees as the queen swept through the doorway.

  Lord Robert said, “Only a few moments, Your Majesty. This is urgent.”

  “So is this. Close the door, Robert. Roger, rise. Why is there blood on your chin?”

  “I bit my tongue, Your Grace.” My words came out thick and garbled.

  “Clumsy of you. And on your sleeve?”

  “Drippings from my tongue, Your Grace.”

  She took my face between her hands. I had to force myself to not recoil at her touch. Poison.

  “I need you to go to the Dead. You must find a man called Osprey, the palace locksmith. A short, squint-eyed man who died this evening. He wears the seal of The Queendom on his breast. You must ask him for the location of the key to the iron safe, where the Crown of Glory is kept. I need that key now, Roger, right this moment. I am going to the throne room and I want to be wearing the crown that my grandmothers have worn since time itself was young.”

  I gaped at her. “Your Grace, it’s impossible, the Dead don’t—”

  “Don’t what?” she said sharply, dropping her hands. “Don’t talk to you? You have declared that they do. You have shown me that they do. What is the difficulty?”

  “It’s . . . it’s the country of the Dead!” I said desperately. “It’s vast, and . . . and wild, and to find a specific person is so difficult, I probably wouldn’t come across this Osprey if I searched for days, and you said you need it now, the Crown of Glory, now—” I was babbling from sheer terror.

  She said, “Try.”

  One word, with so many unspoken words behind it. And in her eyes, everything to justify my terror.

  Hartah had told me what instruments of torture look like. What they can do to a helpless body. So for the second time I cut my arm with the queen’s jeweled carving knife, crossed over, and—amazingly—found Osprey. Finding him did me no good. He had been dead too long, and he was not old, and I could not rouse him. I shouted in his ear, I shook his shoulder, I lifted him bodily, dragged him to the river and threw him in. He lurched out, lay on the grass, and gazed at the sky. He would say nothing to me.

  “It’s the queen’s fool again,” a Blue soldier said. “The witch bounces him back and forth.”

  “Aye, and she racks his bones with pain,” said another. “Poor oaf.”

  There were more of them now, the dead soldiers. Some of the Blues stood guarding the unknowing old queen at the edge of the island. Others milled about, talked, kept their swords drawn. They did not know they were dead. They had believed me when I said this was Witchland, and they had repeated that belief to newer arrivals all too ready to believe it. Of course the young queen was a witch—hadn’t that been rumored for years? Of course she had sent them to Witchland! And that belief kept them anima
ted—as alive as they would ever be again.

  What had I done?

  “Don’t come closer, fool,” one soldier said. “I’m sorry, boy, but the witch has you for fair, doesn’t she?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then don’t come near us!”

  I did not. A little ways off, a Green soldier lay tranquil on the ground. The Blue followed my gaze. “You see, fool, how evil is the witch-whore you are forced to serve! She magicks even the corpses of her own to Witchland. She dare not let their relatives find her mark upon their bodies, lest her witchery be plain to all—No, don’t touch him, we do not know if this be a trap of poison, or worse.”

  I did not intend to touch the Green, nor anything else. In despair, I crossed back over and faced Queen Caroline. Blood seeped from my cut arm, sticky on the velvet. “Your Grace, I ... I’m sorry, I couldn’t find Osprey, I . . . It is such a big place! I had no time!”

  She stood with her back to the fire and gazed at me from hard eyes. On the other side of the door, Lord Robert called urgently, “Your Grace!” I was near fainting from fear. To be run through with his blade, or burned alive, or . . . I knew there were deaths even worse. And I had failed her.

  She said softly, “Did you really go there? To the country of the Dead?”

  “Yes!” I stabbed about in my mind for something to convince her. “I saw the old queen!”

  Swiftly she crossed the room and seized my arm. “What did she say?”

  “I . . . nothing that ...”

  “Don’t lie to me, Roger! What did the old hag say?”

  My life balanced on my next words. Only honesty would convince her—she was so good at detecting evasions—might even implying that she had committed murder be construed as treason? Done if I spoke truth, done if I did not. Despairing, I choked out, “She . . . she said you . . . poisoned her. That she felt it in her belly and clutched her belly and died. She cursed you.”

  The queen laughed, a high hysterical peal that, horribly, reminded me of Lady Cecilia. But this was no Cecilia. In half a moment she had herself back in control, and into another of her lightning changes of mood.

  “You were there. I am sorry I doubted you. Those are exactly the lies my mother would utter, the old bitch. There, don’t look so scared, Roger, no one will hurt you. You did your best, I know, and in the future there will be more for you to do, and you will succeed. There now, little fool, it’s all right. Come along, and I shall allow you to see me take back my palace.” She gave my arm a quick caress, smiled at me. Then she opened the door to Lord Robert and forgot me.

  And so, not daring to do anything else, I followed behind the young queen, who was now the only queen, into the part of the palace where lay the power of the living.

  The palace had been secured. There seemed to be more Greens than the queen had commanded formerly, and this puzzled me until I studied their tunics. Some looked very new; others seemed ill-fitting. These soldiers must be former Blues, either recruited secretly ahead of Queen Eleanor’s death or else newly turncoat this afternoon.

  For the first time, I saw the palace throne room. It was no more lavish than Queen Caroline’s former presence chamber, and just as bare. However, it was so much vaster that I wondered how the palace could contain it. This, then, was why the city outside the palace walls had been squeezed into a narrow circle of jammed alleys and temporary tents. This enormous expanse of polished stone floor, vaulted ceiling two stories above us, walls hung with so many candelabra that the windowless room seemed full of light. Despite the change in the weather, the throne room was cold; no fireplaces could take the chill off such a vast space. The only furnishing was a raised dais at one end, holding a carved throne. The queen, a white fur cape thrown over her dress of jeweled green velvet, sat on the throne and received her new subjects.

  Queen Caroline’s ladies watched, wide-eyed and pale, from the left of the throne, her courtiers from the right. One by one, the old queen’s advisors came before her in the huge empty space, knelt, and removed their blue robes. Each said, “I swear fealty to Queen Caroline, and to her alone, unto death.” Then each, shivering with cold, was handed a new robe of green to put on over his undertunic. There were not very many advisors. Those who had refused the oath must have been imprisoned. By tomorrow, I guessed, they would be dead.

  At a gesture from the queen, Lord Robert mounted the dais and knelt. She smiled at him, but her face was very pale, and only I overheard the words she whispered to him. “The army?”

  “No,” he said.

  Her face did not change, by what effort of will I could only imagine. Lord Robert resumed his place and the procession of advisors continued.

  “I swear fealty to Queen Caroline, and to her alone, unto death.”

  No loyalty from the Blue army. I realized what that meant. The word the captain had spoken—poisoner—was what the army believed of Queen Caroline. The Blues did not see her as the natural successor to Eleanor; they saw her as the unnatural murderer of their queen. And they would fight to avenge that murder. The Greens had been able to secure the palace only because the main part of the old queen’s army was housed outside the city. The great gates to both the island and the palace had been shut and bolted and archers set on the ramparts. No one could either enter or leave.

  We were at war, and under siege.

  The procession seemed endless. After the advisors came Queen Eleanor’s ladies and courtiers. These, too, were far fewer than I guessed they had once been. Some seemed to choke on their words. Then the physicians, musicians, stewards, couriers, pages. The boys, some as young as eight, knelt before the queen, who wore on her head only a simple circlet of gold. Tomorrow the safe would be broken open through hours of patient labor and the Crown of Glory claimed, but tonight the oaths went forward without it. Loyalty, like the palace itself, was being secured. And perhaps as precariously.

  “I swear fealty to Queen Caroline, and to her alone, unto death.”

  The serving men, the ladies’ maids, the gardeners. How long could the Green guard hold the capital against the entire Blue army? But for tonight the queen sat on the throne and heard everyone in the palace promise to die with her if necessary.

  “I swear fealty to Queen Caroline, and to her alone, unto death.”

  Last came the cooks, the laundresses, the seamstresses, the stable boys and grooms, the kitchen maids, all kneeling in batches to swear. I saw Joan Campford, her rough red hands swollen with winter chilblains. And later it was Maggie, who sank to her knees with a grace and dignity that might almost have matched the queen’s own. She did not glance at me. I wondered about her brother Richard, soldier of the Blues, but I could tell nothing from Maggie’s face.

  “I swear fealty to Queen Caroline, and to her alone, unto death.”

  And then it was over, and nearly midnight. The queen’s court moved their possessions into the rooms beside the throne room, the rooms that had been the old queen’s. Everything was bustle and confusion. I found Cecilia in tears as she followed the harassed steward to her new chambers.

  “Oh, Roger, it’s all so different! I don’t know what to do! I wish the old queen hadn’t—”

  “Hush,” I said quickly. “It’s all right, my lady.”

  “Why does your voice sound like that?”

  “I bit my tongue.”

  “I can barely understand you. Oh, what will I do now?”

  “You will go where you are told and serve Her Grace as you always have.”

  “Yes.” Her eyes darted wildly around. “I’m to share a room with Jane Sedley. The ladies on . . . on this side of the palace shared, because there were so many. And now we have with us the Blue ladies as well as the Green.”

  “They are all Green now,” I reminded her.

  “Yes, of course. Only it’s so . . . so strange!”

  “My lady,” said Cecilia’s serving woman, the young and timid girl who had replaced Emma Cartwright. Her arms were full of gowns. “Where shall I put these?”

/>   “I don’t care! Roger, what will happen? They say the old queen’s army is outside the gates and they will starve us out! Or worse!”

  “Go to bed, my lady. Her Grace will need you in the morning.”

  “I—”

  “Good night, my lady.”

  “Good night.” She went, and it was only later that I realized I had been giving orders to a lady. I, the queen’s fool.

  No one had thought to assign me a place to sleep. I found the queen’s new presence chamber, which actually looked small after the throne room. I knew the single guard posted in the room. He looked grim and would answer none of my questions, but he admitted me to the deserted outer chamber. No guard here—I guessed they were needed to defend the palace if the Blues should attack. There was no curtained alcove off these rooms, but a great fire had burned in the fireplace at some point during this terrible day, and the embers still gave off a faint warmth. I curled up beside the ashes. My tongue hurt. My arm hurt. My heart hurt.

  It was a long time before I could sleep. When I did, I dreamed I journeyed to Soulvine Moor. It looked exactly like the country of the Dead, and my mother sat there in her lavender dress, silent and unmoving, beside the old, dead queen.

  17

  “WE WILL RUN out of food.”

  “The army has seized all the horses.”

  “They will burn us all at once, in a huge fire, where all the villagers can see.”

  “The servants will hide the food from us.”

  “We will have to eat rats. They did that in the old times during sieges.”

  “They will take the city and burn us as traitors—”

  The ladies and courtiers whispered among themselves. Now there was no dancing, no gaming, no flirting. The Blue army was camped along both banks of the river. Or so I was told by those who had climbed the stairs to the windy ramparts atop the city walls. Below, I attended the queen. She spent all morning with her advisors, and all afternoon moving around the palace.