Crossing Over

by Anna Kendall

  She gazed at me without fear. She said simply, “You be wrong, boy. We can gain the strength. From the souls of the outborn. From the betrayers who left.”

  She moved her gaze from me to Cecilia.

  “Strength from her.”

  26

  I HAD THOUGHT I knew what horror was. I was wrong.

  The girl with the bowl of food, she of the green eyes, offering me only bread but the others stew—

  I couldn’t speak. Revulsion held me. But I could kill, and I beat on the old woman with both my fists, kicked her with my hard-toed boots, slammed her head again and again to the ground. She looked at me with bewilderment and then with anger, but without either pain or fear. I couldn’t hurt her. She felt alive under my hands, but she was not.

  “Leave off, boy!” the old woman finally spat at me, got to her feet, and stalked off. A few feet away she sat on a rock and lapsed into the serene trance of the Dead.

  “Cecilia,” I said, seizing her hands in mine, “What they did—I didn’t get there in time to save you from—Cecilia—”

  She could not hear me.

  “They take the souls of the dead” Maggie had said to me, all those months ago, but she had not said how. And I had not believed her anyway. I was a fool. I was a hundred times a fool, and I had failed Cecilia, whom I had vowed to keep safe.

  I had to get out of Soulvine Moor. I could not stay to search for my mother, I could not stay for anything, I could not stay one more second. The need to leave, now, was the only thing that saved me. It was something, at any rate. It was action, motion of legs and lungs and back. I grabbed Cecilia’s hand and dragged her forward, both of us stumbling on the quivering ground as the lightning flashed overhead, until I was out of breath. Gasping, panting, I ran on.

  But even then, I knew I could not outrun Soulvine Moor.

  After I could run no longer, I walked. I walked for long, insane hours. I grew bruised from falls, dirty and sweaty and weak. Cecilia stayed unscratched, clean and unresisting, her hair fragrant as rainwater. She would walk as long as I led her, and not know she was doing it.

  I kept trying to rouse her, doing everything I could. I kissed her, I shook her, and once, in frustration too great to bear, I threw her to the ground. She did not rouse. Overhead, the storm continued to threaten without ever breaking. The ground shook without ever shattering. The wind blew without ever bringing rain. And Cecilia and I walked north until I recognized the hollow and the high, sparse waterfall where Jee’s hut stood in the country of the living. The cabin was not there, of course, and the hollow was littered with the usual Dead. But it was across the border. We were out of Soulvine Moor and into the Unclaimed Lands.

  Somewhere around here, in the country of the living was Maggie. Unless she had gone back to The Queendom.

  I’d had an insane hope that once off Soulvine Moor, Cecilia might rouse. She did not. I was so exhausted I could barely see her. “My lady, I must sleep.”

  No answer.

  I found us shelter from the wind beneath a stand of pine trees. Cecilia sat where I placed her. I lay on the cold and shaking ground and slept, something I had never done before in the country of the Dead. As I slipped into darkness, I was afraid that I would not wake. If you slept while here, did you die? Was the little death of sleep a passageway to the final sleep?

  Almost I hoped it was. If I died, I would become like the Dead, unremembering of what had happened in Soulvine. I saw then what I had not seen before: that the lack of memory among the Dead might not be a curse but a blessing.

  However, sleep didn’t kill me. Eventually I woke, crying out and clutching for Cecilia. She was where I had left her. I was dizzy when I stood up.

  I needed more than rest. My body here was a real body, and so was my body there. Days might have passed since I crossed over. Never had I stayed here so long, and I was weak from lack of food. The body I had left in the round, windowless room on Soulvine Moor—how long could it last without food or water? What might the men and women of Soulvine do to it if I did not return soon?

  I could not rouse Cecilia, but I could talk to her, desperate talk for a desperate situation. “My lady, I have a plan.”

  She stared at the ground, her face expressionless.

  “I am going to take you back to The Queendom. We will find a place, somewhere beautiful and far away from here. By the river, maybe, or the sea. Somewhere peaceful and sweet.”

  But was there anyplace like that, in this changed country of the Dead that I myself had caused to change? So much I had done wrong, so much I had failed at. But there must be someplace less damaged than the rest, some peaceful haven somewhere, and I would find it for Cecilia.

  “But first,” I told her, “I must leave you here and cross back over. I’m getting weak, here and there. After I cross over, I’ll be back at . . . at ...” I couldn’t say it aloud: Soulvine Moor. “Back there. But as soon as I can, I will leave, go to where I have left you, and cross back again. And then—”

  And then what? Cecilia would still be dead. But I couldn’t think about that, any more than I could think, after my sleep, about what had been done in Hygryll. There are things the mind refuses. I understood now why Maggie and the other servants would not even name Soulvine Moor.

  Cecilia stared calmly at the bed of pine needles beneath us.

  I couldn’t leave her, not yet. So I stayed for hours more in that same mountain hollow by the little waterfall, within sight of Jee’s family’s Dead. I was too weak to walk. I pulled Cecilia down to me and lay with her in my arms, and I talked to her. I sang to her. I fed the pathetic illusion that she knew I was there. If I hadn’t done those things, I don’t think I could have gone on at all.

  Finally I kissed her unresponsive lips, bit hard on my tongue, and found myself in the stone room in Hygryll.

  All the men and women remained in the stone hut. For a crazy moment I thought they had all died: They sat in the unresisting trance of the Dead. But as I struggled to sit up, my head spinning, people stirred. I remembered, then, the gray fog of not-persons that had crossed over with me, and that had remained in that other Hygryll when I had fled. These monstrous people had somehow, in some thin and weird form, crossed over with me. Now they were returning to themselves, even as I was.

  I loathed them. If I could have, I would have murdered them all, tortured them as Queen Caroline had once threatened to torture me.

  The old man said humbly, “Thank you, hisaf.”

  It took every ounce of strength I had left, but I staggered to my feet, made my way among the weary bodies, and pushed aside the door flap.

  Spring afternoon on the moor. Sunshine washed the air with gold. The small purple flowers bloomed and birds sang and the moss was springy—and not shaking—beneath my feet. I sat, too weak to go farther, and ordered myself to not cry. No tears.

  A girl, the same girl with green eyes and brown hair, brought me a goatskin of water and another loaf of bread. I ate it all. Then I lay facedown on the peat and slept.

  For the rest of the day and all the next day, plus two nights, I did not move. The girl brought me food and water. At night someone tucked furs around me. No one tried to talk to me. The nights were sharp and cold, and someone built a fire beside me and tended it all night. I slept, and I ate, and it was the great mercy of my life—its only mercy, it seemed to me—that I did not dream.

  On the third day, at dawn, I sat up, stiff in my limbs. The fire burned brightly. Beside it the old man sat on a rug of fur. He said simply, “You go now.”

  “Yes.” I could barely get out the syllable, so great was my hatred.

  “Thank you, hisaf.”

  I swore an oath I had learned from Lord Solek, in the language I knew that the old man could not understand. Even in that, I was a coward. Was he going to try to stop me from going?

  He was not. He watched as I gathered up the latest offering of bread, took the water bag, shook out my fur-lined cloak and hung it over my arm.

  He sa
id, “So it is with a hisaf. So it was with your father.”

  I whirled around so fast my boot heels tore the sod. “What do you know of my father?”

  “Nothing. But he be hisaf. Or you could not be.”

  My aunt Jo had never spoken of my father. For this inhuman monster to do so was obscene. I raised my arm, but some part of my mind whispered, If you kill him, they may not let you go. And it looks now as if they will.

  I stalked off, and no one tried to stop me. No one stopped me. I was a hisaf, and apparently a law unto myself.

  Hah!

  I trudged to the border, and over it, and through a day’s walk north until in late afternoon I came again to the cabin in the hollow by the waterfall, where Cecilia waited in the country of the Dead.

  And Maggie in the country of the living, furious as only Maggie could be.

  “You’re still here,” I said stupidly.

  “Where should I go?” She straightened from her task, digging spring flunter roots in a patch of sunshine, and glared at me. Jee’s cabin lay beyond, looking deserted except for a thin rope of smoke coiling up against the sky. Maggie looked thinner, dirtier, but somehow less a boy in her trousers and tunic. It was her hair; it had begun to grow back in springy fair curls around her face. That face changed as she looked at me, from fury to something like fear.

  “Roger?”

  “Did they take you in here, then? Are you well treated?”

  “Yes. Roger—what happened?”

  I could only shake my head. My legs gave way suddenly and I sat abruptly on the ground. Instantly Maggie knelt beside me. “Oh—are you hurt? Wounded again? Sick?”

  Wounded in my soul, sick at my heart. I could not say so. Maggie’s hand on my forehead was gritty with dirt, cool of skin. She said, “You have no fever.”

  “No.”

  A long silence. Then she said, in her kind-Maggie voice, “Tell me what happened. Did you . . . did you find Cecilia?”

  I heard how hard it was for her to ask that, but I had no compassion to spare for Maggie. Nor could I bring myself to tell her what had happened. I said only (and that hard enough to say), “Cecilia is dead.”

  “Oh!”

  She was too honest to say she was sorry, and again we sat in prolonged silence. I forced myself to go on. “She was from . . . from Soulvine Moor originally—or her kin were, or something. She returned there and they killed her.”

  Maggie put her arms around me. I let her, but there was no comfort in her embrace. There would be no comfort for me ever again.

  She seemed to know that I had said all I would say, or could. She began to talk in a low, soothing voice of earthly things, and slowly I felt her matter-of-fact voice pull me back to this world and ground me here. Did she know what she was doing? It didn’t matter; the effect was the same.

  “The family here took me in, yes, but as a servant rather than a guest. I help gather food, care for the babies, cook, and—I was going to say ‘clean’ but there is no cleaning here. Still, there’s more food than you might imagine, since Tob is a good hunter. Yesterday he brought home two rabbits, and today he hunts again, hoping for a deer. Of course, in The Queendom it’s illegal to shoot deer while they are in fawn, but here the law does not exist. They don’t say much, any of them, and they work me much harder than is right, but I can’t say they are unkind. Jee is the best of them, a curious little boy, and he will ask me questions if no one else is around. He has learned to play the willow whistle you made him, and wonderfully well. If you are hungry right now, Roger, I can bring you some of the rabbit I made today. It’s flavored with wild onion and there’s not much in it except rabbit and flunter, but it’s hearty. There’s no ale, but the water is clean and cold.”

  “Thank you. Rabbit would be good.”

  She brought it from the cabin, and Jee came back with her. He squatted on his haunches and stared at me from wary eyes. The willow whistle hung on a strip of cloth around his neck. Some sort of paste covered the fungus on his foot—Maggie’s doing, perhaps.

  Jee said, “Ye went into Soulvine, despite. And saw.”

  “Get him away!” I screamed. “Get him away from me!”

  “Jee, go into the house. Now!”

  The child obeyed her, although sulkily. All at once I didn’t want Maggie talking to him again. I didn’t want her learning what Jee meant, didn’t want her knowing what had happened to Cecilia. Let her know only that Cecilia was dead. I couldn’t bear her knowing the rest.

  “We’re going, Maggie. Now.”

  “Going? Where?”

  “Back to The Queendom. Or . . . or somewhere. Come.” I stood, unsteady but determined, and took her hand. She must not talk to Jee, not even a word. Suddenly that seemed the most important thing in the world. In this world.

  Maggie said, “I must get my cloak and the water bag.”

  “Leave it. The weather’s warming. You can share my cloak.”

  Pleasure flushed her face pink, but Maggie was Maggie. “No, I should have mine. I’ll just be a moment.”

  “No! I’ll get it!” I stalked off.

  The hut was dim and reeking; too many unwashed bodies had dwelt here too long. The woman sat on a rough-hewn chair, her gown open to give a baby the breast. Two smaller children played in a corner with some sticks and pebbles. Jee sat moodily poking the fire; he did not look at me as I snatched Maggie’s cloak and our water bag from a hook on the wall. The cloak, too, smelled bad, and I doubted that she had been the one sleeping in it. No one spoke. I took the cloak back to Maggie, who stood uncertainly, flunter roots in her hand.

  “Leave those,” I said. “I have some coins left.” And Maggie, too, must have the two silvers I had left her.

  But it was not in Maggie’s nature to leave behind anything useful, and she tucked the flunter roots into her cloak. We started back toward the cabin, and then down the rough track that seemed to be the Unclaimed Land’s only road. Under the pine trees by the little waterfall, I halted.

  “Roger—why, you’re trembling!” Maggie said.

  Cecilia was here. I couldn’t sense her, but she was here, in the country of the Dead that lay invisible all around us. A deep shudder ran through me. This time, however, when I felt Maggie’s hand on me, I shook it off.

  “I’m all right, Maggie. Just weak. We’ll go another few miles and make camp, off the trail. Can you sleep without a fire tonight?”

  “Of course,” she said. “I have my cloak.”

  Maggie was never one to let pass a chance to be right.

  We walked until dusk, then found a hidden thicket to stay the night. There was nothing to eat; the flunter roots could not be boiled without a fire. Stomachs alive with hunger, we rolled early into our cloaks. When I heard Maggie breathe deep and even, I crept from our thicket and made my way back up the track to the pine grove by the waterfall. There was a waxing moon and the stars shone bright in a clear sky.

  In the deep shadows under the pines, I cut my arm with my little knife, and crossed over.

  Cecilia sat where I had left her, gazing serenely at the same half-withered flower, oblivious of the ground shaking under her, the lightning flashing above, the stinging wind. I took her in my arms. “Cecilia, my love.”

  She neither resisted nor responded. A faint smile curved her rosy lips, but it was not for me. It was for whatever unknowable thoughts—if they were thoughts at all—lit the minds of the Dead. I sat there, holding my lost love, for too long. Then I stood, pulled her up with me, and began to walk.

  Wherever I went in the land of the living, Cecilia must be led along the same route in the country of the Dead. That was the only way I could be sure of not losing her. I had to keep her with me, separated from me by only the dirt-and-grave-clogged passageway between my two worlds. I had to do that. I had to.

  I’m not sure I was quite sane.

  We walked for long hours through the hills and around the steep ravines of the country of the Dead, over the shaking ground and under the stormy sky. I l
eft her in a place I would be sure to recognize even in this trackless place where countryside stretched and distorted; it was on a hilltop, beside a swift-running mountain stream. There were other Dead there, men and women dressed in strange clothing, in stranger armor, a whole crowd of motionless Dead. Once, much must have happened in the counterpart of the hilltop, on the other side. All of the Dead sat or stood or lay peacefully, and there would be no difficulty in recognizing them when I returned.

  I crossed back. Then I plodded uphill, short of breath, weak with hunger, and fell asleep beside Maggie just as the sky began to lighten into dawn.

  “Roger. Roger. We should be going.”

  I could not move. “Sleep,” I muttered. “More sleep.”

  “You can’t,” Maggie’s voice said. I hated that voice. “Someone might come after me. Or after you. We have to go.”

  “Can’t.”

  “What’s wrong? Are you sick?”

  “Tired.”

  She said nothing. I opened one eye to her bleak face, and it was that bleakness that gave me strength to sit, to stand. I had brought Maggie into this. I had to get her out.

  None of that was true. Maggie had brought herself into this, and I had been willing enough to abandon her to go onto Soulvine Moor, looking for Cecilia. Yet it was also true that I now felt responsible for her. Or was it? I didn’t know what was true anymore. I stumbled forward.

  I don’t know how I kept going that morning, on no food and almost no sleep. But there came a moment when I could go no farther. The strength built up in the two days of eating outside the Soulviners’ round ceremony chamber—all that strength was already gone. I sat down on the track, and I could not move.

  “Roger?” Maggie said.

  “I . . . can’t.”

  “It’s all right. Lean on me. Just a little farther, there you go, just get off the track into these trees . . . See, we’re almost there. ...” Encouraging, cajoling, patting me with her free hand, Maggie got me into a little copse and laid me onto the weedy ground. All morning it had been clouding, and now a light drizzle began to fall. I was glad of the rain; it hid my tears. I was at the very end of my strength and wits, the latter never much to start with. Exhausted in body and spirit, I fell asleep.