Crossing Over

by Anna Kendall

  He did, looking glad to have a clear order. Orders were something he could understand. Nothing else was. On his knees, he raised his face to mine. “Bat be saved from Witchland?”

  “Yes. Yes.”

  What convinced me was his smell, so strong that I had to back away. In the country of the Dead, odors were not strong. I’d had to hold Cecilia in my arms before I could catch the fragrance of her hair. But now Bat reeked of sweat, of piss, of dirt, of the sea salt dried on his tattered clothes. He was solidly here, embodied in the land of the living. He was alive, and he stunk to the sky.

  All at once my legs gave way and I had to sit on the ground. Bat was alive. And I had done this. I, Roger, the hisaf.

  “So it is with a hisaf. So it was with your father. Or you could not be.”

  Could my father have done this? Perhaps this was what Soulviners meant by “living forever”—that the Dead could be brought back to life. If my father had not left us before she died, could he have brought back my mother? And if he could have done so, and had chosen not to . . .

  Hatred exploded in me for this unknown man, and it was the hatred that finished me. Too much, too fast. Maggie, Bat, Cecilia . . . I burst into uncontrollable tears. Shamed, I rolled over, hid my face, and sobbed like the six-year-old I had been when my mother died. I cried and I could not stop crying.

  Bat tended me. Murmuring nonwords, he covered me with my own cloak. He found water somewhere and fetched me a few drops in a young leaf. He sat beside me, a huge and stinking man, and patted my shoulder until the paroxysm passed.

  “All right, Bat. All right. I am fine.”

  “Sir Witch,” he slurred. “Ye fine?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Ye fine?”

  “I’m fine. Thank you, Bat.” Now another problem occurred to me—what was I going to do with him? “Do you know where you are?”

  He gestured toward the beach and said simply, “Sea.”

  Of course. He was a sailor. Wherever the sea was, Bat was at home. He would accompany me to where the coastline flattened, find a ship to sign on to, and resume the life that Hartah had stolen from him—and all without ever realizing that same life had ever been extinguished. If he spoke of Witchland, mumbled of it in his feebleminded slur, no one would believe him.

  Suddenly I wanted him gone. I wanted to be alone, to cross over and bring back Cecilia. Nothing else mattered, nothing else filled my mind. . . .

  Why did hisafs not always bring back their beloved Dead?

  The question needled me, and would not go away. One possible answer: Perhaps they did. But if so, why had my father not retrieved my mother? That brought me back to my oldest questions: Why had he left her in the first place, and what had happened in Hygryll to cause her death? If I had found her in the country of the Dead on Soulvine Moor, I could have asked her these questions. But I had not found her, and I was not returning to Soulvine Moor just now. I had to bring Cecilia back over.

  But first I had to rest. Everything in me had gone weak, used up with unnatural effort. From my pocket I fished out six pennies and gave them to Bat. “Here, find a cottage—or someplace—and buy bread and cheese. Bring it here.” Almost before the words were out, I was asleep, lying there on the track between the cliff and the clearing where the yellow-haired youth had died kicking the empty air. I must have slept around the clock, because when I woke, it was once again afternoon, the sun blazing through the half-unfurled leaves, and Bat was gone.

  A loaf of bread, already crawling with ants, lay on the ground beside me. The goatskin water bag was full. Bat had thought of my needs before running away from Sir Witch, who might at any moment send him back to Witchland. I didn’t blame him. I brushed the ants off the bread and ate half, forcing myself to save the rest.

  Next I found a stream, bathed, and washed my clothes, longing for the strong soap in Joan Campford’s laundry. The stream, racing down from the mountains, was so cold that I yelled when I first ducked into it and the icy water hit my privates. Nonetheless, I scrubbed myself with gravel until my skin was red. I wanted to be clean for Cecilia.

  When I and my clothes had been dried by the bright sun, I ran my fingers through my hair to comb it and shaved my face with my little knife, a business that resulted in blood I then had to stanch. When all this was done, I picked a bouquet of spring flowers and a clutch of wild strawberries, made my way back to the cabin in the clearing, and crossed over.

  For a long, terrible moment, I thought I was back at the wreck of the Frances Ormund.

  Rain lashed my face, so hard and thick that I could barely see. Rain, in the country of the Dead! The storm blew me sideways, off my feet. I picked myself up and groped my way across the clearing, calling, “Cecilia! Cecilia!”

  A tree crashed to the ground, barely missing me. I couldn’t find her. The howling wind whipped my cries away as soon as I uttered them—and why was I calling her anyway? She could not hear me, could not respond. . . . Where was she? What if the country had stretched, as it so often did, so that the clearing was not here but miles away . . . in all this pelting rain. . . . Crack! Lightning hit the ground a league away, deafening me.

  But this storm, like those on the other side, waxed and waned. During a lull, when the wind and rain abated a little and the lightning moved off, I could see better. The Dead were still here, sitting or lying on the trembling ground, serene amid the chaos. I stumbled over an old man, who roused enough to snap something at me in an unknown tongue before returning to his eerie calm. There, ahead . . . But no, it was another girl in green, sitting beside a small child. . . .

  Then I saw her.

  Cecilia sat tranquilly at the very edge of the cliff above the sea. She could not have moved, so the cliff must have. Her green dress was as sodden as Mistress Conyers’s had once been, as sodden as if Cecilia herself had been in a shipwreck. Her rich hair whipped in the wind, long tendrils writhing like snakes. I lurched forward and snatched her back from the cliff edge.

  The sea below boiled. The rocks were hidden by surf and spray and rain. If there were figures on the beach below— Hartah, Captain James Conyers, my aunt Jo—I could not see them. I did not want to see them. I clamped my teeth hard enough on my tongue to bring blood, and with Cecilia in my arms, I crossed back over.

  Another crossing that seemed to go on and on, with dirt filling my mouth and the sockets of my eyes, so that I could not see the soft body I clung to so ferociously. But it was not soft, it had turned as skeletal and bony as my own, both of us were trapped here forever in the grave—

  Then I was over, and she was with me.

  We lay at the top of the cliff above the beach, in a tangle of spring weeds. Cecilia went very still in my arms. Her green eyes blinked: once, twice. A puzzled expression settled on her features like mist on glass. Then she jumped up, looked around, and began to scream.

  “Cecilia, no! It’s all right, it’s all right! Cecilia!”

  She stopped screaming but backed away from me, clutching her wet skirts, her eyes wide and terrified. “Roger! Where am I? What have you done?”

  And then I saw the moment that memory returned in full. What was she seeing? The round stone house in Hygryll—or had her murder happened somewhere else? How had they killed her? Had she—

  Cecilia’s eyes rolled back in her head and she crumpled to the ground.

  I wasn’t in time to catch her. She fell facedown, and for a long terrible moment I thought I had lost her again. But she breathed. I rolled her over, laid her head on my lap, and rubbed her cheeks. She opened her eyes.

  “Roger? ” she said, so softly that I barely heard her. And then, “I died.”

  I couldn’t bear the look in her eyes. Pain, bewilderment—she was like a small animal that cruel boys had hurt for sport, a kitten mewling and beseeching Make it stop, oh please make it stop. . . .

  I lied to her. “It was a dream, my lady. You had a bad dream.”

  For just a moment some hardness flashed over her face, some
glint of a Cecilia I had never seen. Then she seized what I had offered her.

  “Yes, of course, a dream! A silly, bad dream—silly me! And we’re here because we . . . because we . . .” Frantically she glanced around the clearing. “A picnic! Yes, of course, I remember now, a picnic—a bad dream—really, Roger, what are you doing? You must not hold me like that! Bad Roger!” She sprang up and took a few steps away from me, hysteria and flirtation mixed horribly on her face.

  “Cecilia—”

  “You must remember who you are!” She wagged a finger at me, stopped the gesture halfway. Again panic twisted her face, and again she drove it away. With coquettishness, with silliness, with sheer granite will. “You must remember who I am! Even on a picnic, it is not fit for you to touch me, you know!”

  An enchanting smile, covering terror.

  “My lady—”

  “I think I want to go on now, Roger. Oh, flowers! Are those for me? Oh, you naughty boy—you shouldn’t! But so pretty ...”

  She snatched up the bouquet I had picked for her and held them to the sodden bosom of her gown, smiling at me like a desperate child.

  A thought came to me, unbidden and unwelcome: Maggie would have had the courage to face the truth.

  But Maggie had never died, had never gone to that other country. And if Cecilia was a child, she was still as enchanting as ever. It was easy—so easy!—to slip back into being the humble servant I had been with her at the palace. I knelt and said, “The flowers are nowhere near as lovely as you, my lady.”

  She laughed. “Oh, you do overstep yourself! What a courtier you are becoming, Roger. . . . I think perhaps I am hungry, after all. What a lovely spot for a picnic, here above that sweet sea!”

  I gave her what I had: stale bread and wild strawberries. I spread my cloak for her on the grass. I passed her the water bag. She prattled on, covering the strangeness of the situation with silly chatter, the only defense she had. I saw that she would never speak of what had happened to her on Soulvine Moor, nor of the weirdness of finding herself alone in the far reaches of The Queendom with me. Whatever poverty or hardship we endured, she would laugh and prattle and say nothing and rely on me utterly to take care of her, pretending that this was normal because anything else was too terrible to think about.

  A child.

  When the lovely spring afternoon faded, I led her—without taking her hand this time—away from the cliff. The sun had dried both our clothes. We slept in the clearing, she wrapped without comment in my cloak, I shivering on the bare ground. The cloak would have held two, but to Cecilia that was not possible. My dreams in that cursed place were terrible, but I didn’t mention them. Not then, not ever. Cecilia would not have known how to comfort me—even if comfort were possible, for one who had done, seen, been such as I.

  28

  IT IS ONE THING to love a child in a palace, surrounded by comfort. It is another to travel with a child through rough country, trying desperately to think where to go next.

  I had three silvers and seventeen pennies left of Mother Chilton’s coins. Maggie’s scheme of renting a cottage for a cookhouse might still be possible if I could earn just a little more money. However, I had trouble visualizing Cecilia as a serving maid. And then I had to spend two silvers on a donkey, because Cecilia could not walk very far or very long. I had to leave her hidden in a grove of trees to find somewhere to buy this donkey, and the balky animal cost me more time and money than I had expected. By the time I returned, Cecilia was curled into a quivering ball of terror in my cloak. It took me hours to soothe her.

  Not that she complained. She never did that. But she was so weak, so helpless, that I spent most of my last coins on better food, on a few nights’ lodgings in an inn, on an enameled comb for her hair and on a cup so that she would not have to drink from the water bag. Now there was not enough money left to rent any cottage, anywhere.

  We had come to the edge of The Queendom, where the seacoast began to turn flatter and fishing villages appeared. Perhaps I could find work here? But I knew nothing about fishing, and how would I explain Cecilia? If she would just stay quiet, I might have passed her off as my sister, or even my wife. But Cecilia never stayed quiet. A constant, desperate chatter was how she kept memory outside the fortifications of her mind, and her chatter marked her every second as court bred.

  “My lady,” I said, “who was Hemfree?”

  An expression of complete terror crossed her face, quick as lightning before it vanished. Had I, in fact, seen that expression at all? Her words came too swiftly and too loud. “I don’t remember that name.”

  I believed her. Her memory had immediately discarded what she could not bear to remember. I tried something easier.

  “When did you first come to the palace?”

  “Oh, very young, a little girl! The queen herself sent for me. She knew my mother.” But then something must have threatened to breach her mind, because she threw me a roguish, desperate smile and laughed. “Why, Roger, are you questioning my age? Don’t you know that you must never ask a lady how old she is? Shame on you, naughty fool!”

  If she had had a fan, she would have rapped me with it. But I was no longer a fool. I turned away, but then she surprised me.

  “I could get work as a lady’s maid, I think,” she said.

  I jerked my head around to gaze at her. “A lady’s maid . . . but, my lady, there are no courtiers here!”

  “Oh, not here, not in a fishing village!” She laughed. “Somewhere nicer . . . or, at least, I think I could, somewhere there is a need for . . .” A puzzled expression crossed her face. Memory, or at least realization, was very close. She pushed it away.

  “Oh, silly me! Of course I couldn’t do that! Really . . . you shouldn’t let me prattle on so, you naughty boy!”

  I said quietly, “I am not a boy, Lady Cecilia.”

  And she was not a lady. Not here, in this place. I could not take her anywhere that she could be a lady, because Queen Caroline would have her arrested, tortured, killed, even though Lord Solek still held the power at court; I had learned as much from overheard scraps of conversations as I bought Cecilia her comb, her food, her cup, her lodging, her donkey.

  Probably Cecilia and I shouldn’t even stay in these remote fishing villages for very long. Fishing villages brought travelers, both by sea and land, and travelers carried news to and fro. Inevitably, someone would notice the presence of a woman as beautiful and out of place as Cecilia. That traveler would mention it elsewhere, and the news would make its slow way to the queen.

  So what was I going to do with my lady, my love? How were we going to live?

  If we went farther inland, not toward Glory but rather to remote villages where the chance of recognition was less and the old ways were stronger, I could do as Hartah had done. I could sell my services as a visitor to the Dead, bringing false comfort at the summer faires that would soon begin. My flesh writhed at the very idea. However, I could come up with no other. The money was gone, all but a few pennies. We had to eat.

  Moodily I walked along the rocky beach, watching the boats set out in the early morning for a day of fishing. I had left Cecilia asleep in the village’s only inn, a snug wooden structure with a taproom below and two tiny bedchambers above, both smelling of fish. Cecilia and I shared one of the chambers, she on the bed and I on the floor. The innkeeper’s wife, who ran the place while he fished, was much younger than he, and frankly curious about Cecilia and me. But she asked nothing, and she ran her little establishment with a tolerant competence that reminded me of Maggie.

  The fishing boats disappeared over the horizon. A dazzling yellow sun broke into view. I skipped a few desultory stones over the calm water, then went back to the inn and paid a precious penny for a mug of ale in the taproom. It was too early for ale, but I needed it. The innkeeper’s wife served me and then sat, unbidden, at the trestle table opposite me and rested her rough-skinned elbows on the table.

  “Where do ye come from, friend?”
/>   “Many places,” I said wearily. I was in no mood for conversation.

  “And where do ye go?”

  I didn’t answer.

  She studied me. Not pretty, she nonetheless had a healthy vitality, like a strong, young animal. A lively intelligence glittered in her small brown eyes. “I ask because we don’t be having many visitors here, this early in the year. No, not many visitors.”

  “I imagine not.” Go away.

  “I wonder if ye knew the one here but two days ago.”

  “No.”

  “That’s too bad. I maun return his things to somebody.”

  I sipped my ale, looking pointedly away. I had had enough of chattering women.

  “Lookee, I show ye.” She jumped up, opened a chest in a corner of the room, and pulled out a pile of rags. On top of them lay a knife with a curved blade and a wooden handle carved like an openmouthed fish.

  Bat’s knife.

  “Ah, I see ye know him, after all,” the woman said.

  “Maybe. What . . . what happened to him?”

  She shrugged. “No one knows. He took a room upstairs—the room ye be having now—waiting for the fleet to put back in. Out several days, they was that time. And he din’t come down. I finally unlocked the door and he be gone, with his clothes on the bed and his knife under the pillow.”

  “His . . . clothes?”

  “Aye. His only clothes, and naught else be stolen. The door was still barred on the inside, but he was just gone. Somebody still owes me his reckoning. But—how did he leave all naked, and for where?”

  How indeed? All at once the taproom seemed cold, the ale tasteless. My stomach clenched. Bat would not have fitted through the upstairs chamber’s one window. The woman had just said the door was barred from the inside. So how—

  If Bat had somehow gone back to the country of the Dead, or had been—what?—snatched back there?—then his clothes and knife would have gone with him. The Dead did not cross over naked.