Crossing Over

by Anna Kendall

  “There is no meat left in the kitchens,” the people whispered to each other.

  “The servants are hoarding the food somewhere.”

  “My mother will be desperate for news of me; she’s all alone in the country house—”

  “My father—”

  “My son and his family—”

  “Burn us alive—”

  “No fruit left—”

  Only the queen remained serene. She did not ration the food left in the larders, the wheat stores, the cellars. No barges came to the kitchen docks, and in spring food always ran low, consumed over the winter. By the fifth day of the siege, we ate bread and cheese and ale, but we ate fully. No one understood this, least of all me. Why didn’t the queen count and ration the remaining food? We would run out soon enough, because of course the servants must be hiding some of it against starvation. I would have. I hoped Maggie was.

  This was when I saw the cellars for the first time, along with everywhere else in the palace. I accompanied her every afternoon. “Keep your eyes open, Roger,” the Queen told me. “Remember everything. I don’t know what I may need you to do in the future.” She had dropped all requirements that I act the fool, or that I make witty comments. This was good, because all wit had deserted me.

  Everywhere we went, the queen, magnificently dressed and accompanied by a guard of tall, handsome Greens, smiled at her new subjects and studied them and let them wordlessly know that she ruled here now. To the stillrooms. The laundries. The kitchens. The guardrooms and stables and servants’ halls, of which there were more than I had known. The courtiers’ chambers. Despite the siege, masons had been set to work in the palace, tearing up the blue tiles in the royal courtyards and replacing them with green. When they ran low on green tiles, they interspersed them with white or cream, creating intricate patterns. In the laundries, blue cloth was dyed green: bed hangings, table linen, livery, cushions, saddle blankets. Seamstresses worked feverishly to create enough emerald-colored tunics, gowns, doublets. In the royal dining hall, even the blue glass plates, imported from some distant land, had been packed away in straw, replaced by delicate white plates decorated with graceful green vines. The queen, gracious and smiling and tireless, oversaw it all, and I went with her.

  We also went to the royal nursery, where for the first time I saw the queen’s heir, three-year-old Princess Stephanie, with her six-year-old brother. The queen’s older son, Prince Percy, had been sent away over the winter to be a page in the house of a Green noble, as was the custom. The little princess was thin and pale; she did not look strong. A grave, gray-eyed child without her mother’s beauty, she had her grandmother’s long face and wide jaw. In fact, she looked so much like a sickly, miniature version of the dead queen that I was startled. What did Queen Caroline think of that? I couldn’t tell. She kissed her children, held them, played with them, and I could not tell if it was genuine mother love, or the regard of a master chess player for her pawns.

  I could not tell anything the queen might be thinking. She was as contradictory as ever: serene in the face of civil war, of siege, of starvation. Calculation in her eyes as she assessed her new realm. Kind to everyone in the palace, all those terrified servitors sinking into deep and reverential bows even as they believed, probably, that she had poisoned their monarch. The one place I did not go with Queen Caroline was the dungeons, if they existed. And if they did not, then where were all the advisors and soldiers who had refused to take the oath of fealty? Were they already in the country of the Dead?

  No, I did not understand the queen. Beautiful, cruel, kind, ambitious—and most of all, unruffled. Even as the food ran out and the Blue army lined both banks of the river and the ladies-in-waiting whispered in terror.

  “Starve us out—”

  “Burn us all—”

  “What is she doing?”

  Then, on the sixth day, Lord Robert found us as we made our afternoon tour. We were crossing an exquisite courtyard, larger than most, with three circular flower beds. Tiny green shoots pushed up through the black soil of the beds. The air was soft and sweet. The queen had left off her furs and I my hooded cloak. My face had been freshly dyed yellow just that morning; my wit was no longer required, but my appearance as the queen’s fool still was. Lord Robert was in full armor.

  He knelt, straightened, and said simply, “They’re here.”

  She said sharply, “Where?”

  “Within sight of the palace, obviously, since the lookout on the tower saw them. How else would I know?”

  “Don’t speak to me in that tone, my lord!”

  “I beg Your Grace’s pardon.”

  Tension crackled between them like heat.

  He said, “Your Grace, may I—”

  “No. You may not. I need you here.”

  “Your Grace, I am commander of the army! My place is out there, leading!”

  “No one can be ‘out there’ until the siege is lifted—you know that. And your place is beside me. Go observe from the tower, and bring me report of the battle.”

  Battle? What battle? What was happening?

  Lord Robert bowed stiffly and stalked off.

  “Come, Roger,” the queen said. “We return to my rooms.”

  “Your Grace—”

  “Yes? What is it?” She walked so swiftly that those we passed barely had time to fall to their knees, collapsing like so much scythed grain.

  “You said ‘report of the battle’—who is fighting outside the palace?”

  She spared me a glance, never breaking stride. “Who do you think is fighting?”

  I had begun this conversation; I must finish it. “Not our Greens against the Blues; we have not enough soldiers. So—”

  “Yes?” We entered the outer chamber and the queen’s ladies sank to the floor in puddles of green silk.

  “—so we must have allies to fight with us?”

  “You are waking up, Roger. Lucy! Catherine! I want you!”

  The ladies of the bedchamber shot to their feet and followed the queen into her privy chamber. As soon as the door closed, the rest of the women seized upon me. Cecilia cried, “Roger! What’s happening?”

  “There is a battle being fought,” I said.

  “Is the palace being attacked? ” Cecilia’s green eyes were so big there seemed no room in her face for anything else. She looked drawn, even gaunt, and the clutch of her little hand on mine was icy cold.

  “Not yet, my lady.”

  “Cecilia,” Lady Margaret said, “come at once. This fool can tell us nothing, and we have our orders.”

  I said, “What—”

  “We are to get dressed in our best gowns and go to the throne room,” Cecilia told me as Lady Margaret turned stern with the other young ladies. “A page ran to tell us so but he did not say why. Is the queen going to surrender? Will we all be taken prisoners by the Blues?”

  “No, my lady.” Would we?

  “Cecilia! Come!”

  They bustled away. The outer chamber was empty, except for two Green guards who looked as uneasy as I. I waited, as I had done so often before. Sometimes my whole life in the palace seemed to consist of either waiting or fear. Or both together.

  If the queen did indeed have allies arriving, it could only be the army of her sister-in-law, Queen Isabelle. Isabelle’s mother had died shortly after the wedding, and Isabelle had been crowned. How many soldiers would she send? If the Blues defeated them and took the palace, what would happen to me—would they think it worthwhile to hang a fool? And what would they do to the queen? They could murder her and put Princess Stephanie on the throne, with a loyal Blue advisor to rule for the child. If there were any loyal Blue advisors left alive. And what would happen to Lady Cecilia? Surely soldiers wouldn’t press charges of treason against a girl as foolish, as innocent, as lovable as my lady. . . . It would be like killing a kitten.

  People killed unwanted kittens all the time.

  The privy chamber opened. The queen wore the green-jeweled gow
n she had worn six nights ago to receive the oaths of fealty. But this time she had on her head the Crown of Glory, broken out of Osprey’s iron keeping-box. Heavy beaten gold, the crown was set with jewels of every hue, a rainbow of the colors of every queen who had ruled The Queendom. Emeralds, sapphires, rubies, amethysts, diamonds. Onyx, beryl, opal, topaz. Jewels I could not name, neither the stone nor the color. How could the queen’s slender neck even hold up such heaviness? But it did, and she swept past me, her ladies scrambling to hold up her long velvet train, her guard falling into step before and after her. She looked as if neither defeat nor surrender could ever be possible.

  “Come, Roger,” she threw at me over her shoulder. “It won’t be long now.”

  We waited in the throne room, and from the faces it was clear who knew what we waited for, and who only conjectured.

  The advisors knew. They stood in their long green robes to the right of the throne, a group of old men with carefully blank faces and apprehensive eyes. The courtiers and ladies did not know. Grouped at the left, the young men and women in all their finery looked like a flock of alert peacocks. Loveliest among them was Cecilia, in a robe of green silk that exposed most of her small firm breasts. She shivered, but not with cold. The vast throne room was chill as ever, but braziers must have been lit under the dais. Heat radiated from the throne as if the queen herself had fire within her. She sat straight-backed, head held high, and waited.

  And waited.

  And waited.

  I grew stiff, crouched on the dais steps. Cecilia’s gown rustled and swayed; she was shifting from one small foot to the other. Finally the door was flung open and Lord Robert, in full armor, strode into the room. The armor, like Lord Robert himself, looked clean and unused, not at all as if he had been fighting a battle. It seemed to take him forever to cross that vast floor. His boots rang on the stone, the only sound. Queen Caroline half rose, then lowered herself again to her throne, regal and imperious. Lord Robert knelt.

  “Rise.”

  “Your Grace . . . it is as you predicted. The countryside around the island is ours. The Blues gave way with only a brief fight, and the others stand at the west bridge.”

  She didn’t move or speak, but something flashed from her, like unseen lightning.

  “It is my duty as commander,” Lord Robert continued, “to tell you that this Blue retreat is only temporary. Their army is startled and confused, and they lost soldiers in skirmishes at the bridges. But the main portion of the Blue army was not there, and they will regroup and continue the siege. To bring the others inside—”

  “Bring them in,” she said. “Open the west gates to the city and the palace.”

  Lord Robert snapped his fingers. A courier set off at an all-out run—running from a throne room, with his back to the queen! She said nothing, however, and her eyes gleamed as bright as her crown. Lord Robert moved to stand with the advisors. He looked odd there, an armored soldier in the strength of his prime amid the old men in their green robes. I saw his big, hard hands clench into fists.

  I was confused—the west gate? Queen Isabelle’s army would have marched down from the north. To the west lay only inland villages rising to high, jagged mountains. If there were queendoms beyond those mountains, I had never so much as heard their names. But I remembered all the strangers that had come and gone from Queen Caroline’s former rooms, in the long weeks before the old queen died. They’d all had the look of hard riding, even though a few—clearly couriers—had been barely more than boys. . . .

  It was a boy who first entered the throne room.

  No older than I, he walked alone across that vast expanse of floor, his head held high. No one spoke or moved or, it seemed, even breathed, and the only sound was the boy’s boots ringing on the stone. Heavy boots, with strange metal caps on the toes. He wore no coat—unless he had left it outside the room—but only tunic and breeches of rough brown cloth and, on his head, a wreath of dead twigs, like the mockery of the flower wreath a girl might wear at midsummer. No sword or other weapon. As he approached the throne, we could all see that his forehead bore strange markings of red dye.

  He came right to the foot of the throne steps, and did not kneel.

  A murmur ran over the courtiers, like wind in a field. The boy turned toward them. Lady Cecilia, standing closest to him, shrank back, and I felt my muscles tense, ready to spring if he touched her. But instead he turned, walked to the left of the dais, and faced away from the throne. He began to sing.

  His voice filled the entire chamber. Powerful, sweet and yet guttural, the song seemed to swell to the vaulted ceiling with strange words:Ay-la ay-la mechel ah!

  Ay-la ay-la mechel ah!

  Bee-la kor-so tarel ah!

  Ay-la ay-la mechel ah!

  Now two more figures appeared in the doorway, and these were not boys but men. Warriors. They wore tunics of some shaggy fur, metal-capped boots, and helmets topped with twigs. Each man carried a cudgel, thick around as my leg, and each had a strange metal stick slung across his shoulder. Knives at their leather belts, but no swords. The pair advanced, singing along with the boy in deep, unmusical voices, and beating their cudgels upon the floor as they advanced.

  Ay-la ay-la mechel ah!

  Ay-la ay-la mechel ah!

  Bee-la kor-so tarel ah!

  Ay-la ay-la mechel ah!

  Halfway down the room, the two warriors parted and one marched to and along the left wall, the other the right, stopping several feet from the dais. Two more marched behind them, and two more behind those, and yet two more. All of them sang the guttural song, and pounded their cudgels upon the floor, and stood to line the walls. And still they came, more and more and more, until the entire length of the huge room was lined with warriors. And still more came.

  And more.

  And more.

  They formed double lines down the room, triple lines, four abreast. The noise was deafening. The queen’s advisors glanced sideways at each other. And still they came.

  Ay-la ay-la mechel ah!

  Ay-la ay-la mechel ah!

  Bee-la kor-so tarel ah!

  Ay-la ay-la mechel ah!

  Now the room was full of men pounding their cudgels on the floor, singing their wild rough song. Only an aisle remained, stretching from throne to door, and down it came six more boys with crowns of twigs and red-tattooed foreheads. Three beat drums and three played string instruments that sounded like cats being strangled. Behind them walked more men, two abreast, with short capes made of gray feathers. These wore their knives in elaborately beaded belts, with more beads braided into their long hair. The musicians—if you could call them that—joined the singer beside the queen’s courtiers, and the warrior captains parted to join their men. The singing grew in intensity, the cat-strangling lutes were plucked faster, the cudgels beat in double time on the stone.

  Ay-la ay-la mechel ah!

  Ay-la ay-la mechel ah!

  Sol-ek see-ma taryn ah!

  Ay-la ay-la mechel ah!

  A single figure appeared in the doorway and walked toward the throne. As he advanced, the warriors fell to one knee before him, as they had not knelt to the queen. Lord Robert’s face darkened and his hand moved toward his sword. The chieftain was huge, a giant with sun-leathered skin and dark hair going gray, his braids twined with beads. His cape was made of feathers of every possible bird, of all possible colors. At the exact moment that the chieftain reached the dais, all noise stopped.

  He gazed at the queen and went down on one knee. But he did not bow his head, and his gaze met hers with a proud vitality. He had the bluest eyes I had ever seen, as if pieces of sky had been beaded into his head. I couldn’t look away from that fierce blue, and for a long moment, neither could she. Whole rivers flowed between them.

  Then he had risen and was saying something in his guttural language. A man stepped from behind the throne. I recognized him: the small, sour-faced man in black velvet that had come to the queen all those weeks ago. He was no less sou
r-faced now. He knelt, rose, and said, “Your Grace, Solek, son of Taryn, comes to your court, as agreed, to offer the services of his army, for the payment agreed.”

  Queen Caroline said, “Tell him he is welcome to the court of The Queendom.”

  The small man translated.

  She continued, “Lord Solek is—”

  “They do not use that title, Your Grace,” the small man said.

  He had interrupted the queen. One never interrupted the queen. But she let it pass, her eyes still locked with the stranger’s. “He is in my queendom now, with the title I choose to give him. Tell him that I will have rooms prepared for him and his captains in the palace, but that I deeply regret we are unable to house his entire army.”

  After the translation, the stranger gave a great shout of laughter, as startling in that formal room as a rampaging bear, followed by a short speech.

  The translator said, “The Chieftain says that, of course, his men will camp beyond the island, and he with them.”

  I thought of the villages that surrounded the island, each with its own neat cottages, its little green, its sheep and chickens and pretty girls. These savage warriors—so many of them! and perhaps even more outside—were the roughest-looking men I had ever seen. They scarcely looked like men at all, with their shaggy fur tunics, huge cudgels pounding like hoofs on the floor, feathered capes, and twig-topped helmets. And what were those metal sticks each man wore on his shoulder?

  The queen said, her voice now lowered so that even I, closer than anyone except Lord Robert, had to strain to hear. “Eammons . . . is there a polite way to tell him that the village cottages—and the village women—are not available to his men?”

  “No,” Eammons said sourly. “There is no way. It would be a gross insult.”

  Lord Robert said to the translator, “These savages will be of no use to us if they defeat the Blues but turn the queen’s own subjects against us!” His voice held a strange satisfaction, which in turn angered the queen.