by Anna Kendall
No, the whole story was a lie, a ruse to get a stranger to pay what Bat owed her. My stomach unknotted and I said, “I knew the man only in passing. I owe you nothing.” But I stood, my ale unfinished, and climbed the stairs to the bedchamber.
Cecilia still lay asleep. I stared at the tiny window, the thick door. Two days ago, the woman had said. Bat would then have been back in the land of the living for . . . how many days? I had lost track of time.
Maggie would have known.
But it didn’t really matter. I sat in the chamber’s one chair and watched Cecilia. She had washed her hair last night, a laborsome business involving cans of hot water that I had lugged up the stairs, and now her tresses spilled clean and shining over the rough cotton pillow. The lids of her eyes fluttered, translucent, faintly blue. Her strong young throat lay exposed, and the top of one small breast above her shift. I had never touched that breast, never would touch it. Cecilia looked more beautiful than I had ever seen her, and completely desirable. But I felt no desire.
What am I going to do with you?
I watched her for a long time. Then I woke her; I had no money to pay for this chamber for another night. I could barely pay for breakfast. She didn’t grumble, but her lovely face was sullen. I went to the stable yard and watered and hitched the donkey, who did grumble. After a silent, meager breakfast, I helped Cecilia mount and we started inland, traveling on a track overgrown with weeds, toward what the innkeeper’s wife said was the nearest farm village, several leagues to the northwest. The village was called Ablington. They were having a faire.
“Roger, you’re not listening to me!”
I was not. But I was thinking of her, and also of Bat. I believed the barmaid had been lying, but her story would not leave my mind. I had crossed over with Cecilia the day after I had brought Bat back. Was that significant? What had happened to Bat?
“You’re not listening!”
“I’m sorry, my lady.”
I plodded on, toward the spring faire. Where I would set Cecilia in some cool grove or on a bench on some village green, and I would try to do what I had vowed to never do again. To be what Hartah had made me: a liar and cheater in two countries, here and there.
But Cecilia and I never reached Ablington. We never reached anywhere at all.
It happened at dusk of the next day, beside a campfire over which I toasted the last of our bread, wishing instead for one of Jee’s rabbits. Cecilia sat combing her hair with the enameled comb I had bought her. The hair rippled and shone in the firelight, glinting in a hundred shades of honey, cinnamon, gold, bronze, amber, copper, chestnut. The dusk deepened her green eyes to the color of emeralds.
“Why are you looking at me that way?” A tiny half smile at the corners of her mouth.
“Because you are the most beautiful thing I have ever seen, Cecilia.”
“You should call me ‘my lady.’ Don’t become so familiar, Roger! ”
She was not teasing. Firelight flickered over the enameled comb that I could not afford, the bread of which I would give her more than half although my stomach rumbled with hunger, my fur-lined cloak that she sat upon. There rose in me an anger I had not known I felt, had not known I could feel. Not toward her.
I said, my voice low and careful, “Perhaps the circumstances justify my familiarity.”
“No,” she said with sweet certainty. “No, that cannot be, Roger. You know that. I am a lady, and you are the queen’s fool.”
“Out here there is no queen, and no fool.” And you are alive only because of me. Made alive, kept alive.
“But they exist, nonetheless.” She shook her head at me playfully, and her beautiful hair shimmered and danced.
“But things can change.”
“Why should they? Anyway, that doesn’t change.”
“Why not? Why are differences in rank never to change, when all else has changed in The Queendom, in the world? Why is that one thing the same?”
“It just is.” She smiled at me. The smile of a lady toward a fool. She resumed her combing.
I said, “No.”
“No what?”
“No, Cecilia.”
Her smile disappeared. She said coldly, “You are impertinent, Roger. Apologize at once.”
I got to my feet. Why? I had no idea. But I stood looking down at her in the firelight: Cecilia, beautiful and dirty, exasperating and desired, enchanting and stupid. I said, “I will not apologize.”
Her face began to break up. For the briefest part of a moment I thought my words had caused it, thought that her features were merely sliding into anger. Not so.
“Cecilia!”
The skin softened on her face, even as her mouth opened in a silent scream. Her nose, mouth, cheeks turned black—rotting. Her body slumped sideways as the bones crumbled. A terrible stink rose on the night air. Her eyes melted, staring at me—and then, just like that, nothing remained but a heap of clothing.
“Cecilia! My lady!” I threw myself on the ground, rooting through her cloak and her gown and even her shoes as though I could find some trace of her. There was nothing, not even a strand of her hair. Not even a fingernail. All gone with her—where ?
I howled like an animal but I didn’t hesitate. The fire was nearest; I used the fire. Thrusting my left hand into the embers, still crying her name, I crossed over.
She was not there.
The sky snapped and growled and poured rain in the country of the Dead; the ground shook; the Dead sat tranquilly amid the chaos. But I could not find Cecilia. I roused old women and shook them, demanding information. I tripped over rocks and bushes and bodies, searching in the windy storm. I looked in thickets, in groves, behind boulders, in ravines where the rock walls threatened to tumble down and crush me. She was not there.
Not in the land of the living, not in the country of the Dead.
“He was just gone,” the innkeeper’s wife had said of Bat.
I threw back my head and howled at the stormy sky. I beat my hands on a boulder. To have brought her back, to have come so close to saving her! And now—
You could not cheat death. Not for more than a few weeks, which was no time at all. Death always won.
It was morning in The Queendom when I finally crossed back over, a morning fresh with birdsong and golden dawn. The fire was long since out. I sat beside it, too anguished to tend my burned hand, too anguished even to sob.
Cecilia was gone. She no longer existed, not anywhere, in any form. Whatever the serene Dead were waiting for, there in that other country, Cecilia would never find it. This, then, was why hisafs did not cross over with their beloved Dead. By bringing my lady over, I had killed her more completely than the people of Soulvine Moor ever did. I, Roger Kilbourne, hisaf.
Roger Kilbourne, the fool to end all fools.
29
I HAD NOT KNOWN before that there are fates worse than dying, or places worse than the country of the Dead. I knew it now.
It’s hard for me to remember what I did that morning of despair, or that afternoon, or that evening. I know I didn’t eat, because there was no food. I know I didn’t tend to my burned hand because my charred fingers blackened and blistered. The blisters burst, spilling pus and blood. Did I sit beside the dead fire, numb for all those long hours? Did I scream or cry? I don’t know, and may never know. Those hours are as lost to me as was Cecilia, gone to the same dark place of anguish and utter hopelessness.
I had killed her. I must die for it.
That was the thought that brought me back to life, if life it could be called. I seized on the thought as if it would save me. I could die, and then in the country of the Dead I would come to oblivion. I would be like the rest of the Dead, serene and mindless and free of pain, sitting tranquilly on the tranquil land—
Except that the country of the Dead was no longer tranquil. And not all the Dead waited in mindless serenity. The soldiers of the Blues. Cat Starling. They had not believed they were dead, and so retained their former selves. An
d I, too, knew that death was not final, that it was possible to move and think and live on the far side of the grave. So would I, a hisaf, remain aware—perhaps for all eternity?
An eternity of remembering what I had done to Cecilia. Remembering here, or remembering there. No difference.
Death was not a way out. Not for me.
Nonetheless, I think I might have done it, just to do something, anything, to bring change to the despair that felt unendurable. My bowels and liver crawled in my body, seeking to get away from me. My eyes burned, hating that they must live in my head. My hands, burned and unburned, clenched into fists and yearned to beat my body into unconsciousness. I could not hold together, could not live with myself, could not endure another moment of this horror—
But the moment existed.
Then another moment.
And another—
“Roger! ”
And another—
“Roger! Stop!”
And another. I attacked my enemy, who was myself. I flailed at him, charged him with deadly accuracy—
A kick to my burned hand sent me yowling in pain. My other hand dropped the knife. It was snatched from the ashes of the fire. A smell, another kick, and then a voice, young and high and frightened—
“Roger! Stop! What be ye doing?”
Jee. His skinny form emerged from the evening gloom—how had it become evening again?—at a wary distance. When I went motionless, he crept closer.
“What be ye doing? Stop that!”
“Jee—”
“Aye. I could hear ye a mile off.”
“Jee.”
“Aye! Yer hand—”
All at once my burned hand seemed on fire. The pain was unendurable, and I think it was the pain that brought me back to myself. There was no room for anything but the searing pain, and for what Jee said next.
He squatted beside me, peering into my face, his own in the same anguish as mine. I had not known before that the anguish of others can push away our own. Not completely—never that—but enough to survive. Jee was in that kind of anguish. Had he not been, I doubt he could have reached me at all.
“It be Maggie,” he said. “Soldiers took her.”
“Took her? What soldiers? Took her where?”
“Rough, big soldiers,” the child said, and began to cry. “With green clothes and feathers. They took her.”
The queen’s soldiers.
“They be looking for you,” Jee sobbed. “They asked Maggie about you. They took her to the whore-queen!”
Me. Maggie had been taken because the queen was looking for Roger Kilbourne, or Lord Solek was, but I guessed it was Her Grace. A desperate Queen Caroline had discovered that I had left the capital with Maggie, and the queen needed me back to use in whatever was her latest desperate bid for power. And once the queen decided she needed something, nothing stopped her from getting it. If Maggie didn’t tell the queen where she had last seen me, Queen Caroline would torture it out of her. Even if Maggie did tell, she might be tortured for anything else she might know.
Maggie, in those instruments of pain I had heard existed but had never allowed myself to imagine before. I imagined them now. The rack, the nails, the red-hot pincers . . .
Slowly I sat up. Maggie, who had always been a better friend to me than I deserved. I would not fail yet another person. “Stop crying,” I ordered Jee, more harshly than one should speak to a grieving child. “Stop it right now. We have to go after Maggie.”
The child, raised with a brutal father in the wild Unclaimed Lands, stopped crying at once. His eyes grew huge in his tear-tracked face. “G-go after Maggie? We uns?”
“Yes,” I said grimly. “We uns.” Everything that had happened in the last months shifted in my mind, assuming different shapes. Like stones seen under water, shifting with the changing light.
“H-how? ”
“Leave that to me.”
Jee would not have been Jee if he had done that. “Ye have a plan?”
“Yes,” I said, astonished to realize that yes, I did have a plan. And I was willing to bring down two realms to carry it out.
I washed and bandaged my hand. Jee had brought food, and we ate it for strength. We traveled by night, both of us on Cecilia’s donkey, Jee’s slight body adding nearly nothing to the weight the beast had to carry. Still, the donkey, being a donkey, protested and refused to move. I beat it with a stick, whacking it across the nose so hard that it startled and then trotted forward. I had never beaten an animal before in my life.
We traveled all night. The moon waned, but the stars were clear and high. Because I didn’t know this countryside, I was forced to backtrack to the fishing village where I had heard about Bat and then take the coastal road toward the mouth of the River Thymar. In this flatter, softer countryside, the road was well marked. The donkey plodded on, hour after hour. Jee clung to my waist, saying nothing. Perhaps he was asleep. So long as he did not fall off, I looked no closer.
My burned hand sent shards of pain through me. The pain formed its own rhythm, out of time with the clopping of the donkey, and both a dissonance with the images that flashed through my brain, one at a time, with all the power and brilliance and horror of lightning that strikes and chars living flesh.
Cecilia, combing her hair in the firelight just before—
Maggie, kneading bread and smiling at me in the servants’ kitchen—
My mother in her lavender gown—
Cecilia—
Maggie—
Slowly something happened to my pain. My pain, my grief, my guilt. They stopped sending me images and instead shrank inside me, growing hard and sharp, until they settled in my chest like the spiked metal ball at the end of a soldier’s mace. I knew that spiked ball would be there forever. But the shrinking let me go on, and I had a battle to wage.
We traveled by night, hid and slept by day, pushed the poor donkey to its full protesting endurance. On this well-traveled road we didn’t dare risk a fire, but nights were warmer now. Without Jee, I could not have done this. There was no time to stop and snare rabbits that we couldn’t have cooked anyway, but he knew how to spot buried nuts, spring berries, edible roots. I was always hungry. But finally I was here, in a grove of trees just downriver from the capital. I could see the tower where I had stood with the queen, where I had been locked out all night after my “fit.”
“Maggie be there?” Jee said.
“Yes.”
“In that high place?”
“No.” Maggie would be below, in the dungeons I had never seen, the dungeons where advisors and captains loyal to the old queen had been put to death. Or would Queen Caroline keep Maggie with her in her apartments, trying to beguile her into cooperation, as she had once beguiled me? That’s what I was hoping: that Maggie was still alive, and whole. That if Queen Caroline had tried wiles and sweet promises instead of torture, Maggie would know enough to play along.
Jee slipped his grimy little hand into mine, a thing he had never done before. He must be terrified, to seek such reassurance now. He said, “Ye look and look ...”
He was right. I had been staring at Glory as if truly ensorcelled. Sunrise, just a few minutes ago, had left long fingers of gold and pink in the eastern sky, curving around the horizon toward the island as if to embrace it. The summer morning was soft-aired, filled with fresh flowers and the trills of birds.
“. . . and ye look, but we maun do.”
“You’re right, Jee. We maun do.” I tore my eyes from the tower, knelt, and put both hands on his bony shoulders. “Listen to me. Listen very carefully. I am going to do things that will look strange to you, and frightening. All these things will help save Maggie. No matter what I do, you must stay where I put you. You must not run away, or scream, or do anything but stay very still. Do you understand?”
“To help save Maggie,” Jee said, seizing on the only words that mattered to him.
“You must stay hidden, Jee. And silent.”
“To help save Maggi
e.”
He trusted me utterly—maybe because he had no other choice. I knew how that felt. I put him in a dense nest of bushes half a mile from the river, where he couldn’t be seen. Then I squeezed my burned and bandaged left hand with my right, cried out, and willed myself to cross over.
The storm had, if anything, worsened. Lightning flashed over a river racing with evil-smelling rapids. The ground shook so much that it was hard to stand. Rain pelted my face, soaking through my clothing in just a few moments. I had appeared not far from a captain of the Blues, now on this side of the river. He rushed over and cried, “The witch’s captive! You’re back, boy! What news?”
I nodded. It was difficult to hear over the howling wind. Through the rain I saw that the army of dead Blues had swelled to many hundreds. Had Lord Solek killed all those who tried to rebel? It seemed likely, but I had no time to ask.
“The best news,” I shouted, my mouth close to the captain’s ear, “we are going back to The Queendom, to fight and take back our own.”
His face, streaked with rain, lit up. His lips pulled back, baring his teeth, and I almost quailed before the fierce light of hatred in his eyes.
“Aye, and in good time, boy! We have our battle plan at the ready. But something has happened to Witchland.” He waved his arm to indicate the entire landscape: roiling, quaking, stormy, withered, coming apart.
He did not know that what had happened to Witchland was me. I had interfered with the order of life and death. I had convinced large numbers of dead men that they were not really dead, preventing them from lapsing into the serene, waiting trance that was their natural next state. Worse, I had brought back Bat and then Cecilia to the land of the living. A hisaf could make that journey, but no one else should. Taking away the subjects of the country of the Dead had torn the very fabric of that sacred place.
And now I was going to rend it far more.
“Captain, bring all your men together in”—I grasped at a military term I had heard from the queen—“in close formation. Here, now. We must act quickly!”