Crossing Over

by Anna Kendall

  Time passed. Once or twice I called out again, but no one came.

  Finally, for something to do, I unwrapped the bandages and poultices from my right hand, to see how much damage had been done by the knife Lord Solek had thrown in the last moments of his life. Poison on the blade had affected my will, I remembered that well enough, but my mind seemed all right now. What of my hand? The last of the bandages pulled free.

  My hand was gone.

  I stared at the stump of my wrist, where the skin had been wrapped and sewed as if I were not a man but a bolt of cloth. At the seam, my flesh puffed red and swollen, but without the black-green rot that kills. I had no fingers. No fingers, no fingernails, no palm, nothing to grasp a knife or a cup or a woman’s breast, nothing—

  I screamed, and kept on screaming until the door opened and a voice said severely, “Hush, Roger. Stop that right now.”

  It was Mother Chilton.

  She stood filling the doorway, blocking the sudden increase of light, until she knelt beside me. The door remained open. Her young-old face bent above me, her colorless eyes reflecting all light. “You must stay quiet.”

  “My hand—”

  “I know. I am sorry. If I hadn’t cut it off, you would have died.”

  “You cut it off? But—”

  “It was necessary. The black rot had set in. Lord Solek’s knife was tipped with poison.”

  “But—my hand!” It came out a wail, like a six-year-old, and she frowned.

  “It was only a hand,” she said severely. “You have another.”

  The callousness and indifference of this shocked me into silence. Only a hand?

  “Think what else you are, Roger. Now be quiet. I must go.” She rose.

  “No, wait! Where am I? What is happening? Maggie—”

  Her face softened. “Good. You can think about someone else. I’ll send Maggie to you. But be quiet until then.”

  “Wait!”

  But she did not. Instead she said something that made no sense: “You must never seek your mother.” The door closed, and I heard a key turn in the lock.

  My mother? What did the witch know of my mother?

  Witch. The word had come unbidden to my mind. But yes, of course, Mother Chilton was that thing I had never thought really existed: a witch. She did not have to be a witch to make a milady posset, or perhaps even to cut off my hand and drug me so that I felt no pain, but to know about my mother? And other things she had said to me, half forgotten but surely they had shown more knowledge than a natural person should possess?

  “Sometimes none of us knows where we are. Or who.”

  “You’ve already caused enough disturbance in the country of the Dead.”

  “You know much, even more than you think, but you don’t know what Cecilia truly is . . . a pretty, empty-headed tinderbox that will ignite all.”

  And so Cecilia had, and then had died for it. Twice. I stared at the stump of my wrist, and I waited for Maggie, and when she did not come, I went on staring at my maimed arm and silently, as quiet as instructed, I wept.

  When Maggie did come, hours later, I had done weeping. Mother Chilton’s drugs, whatever they were, had begun to wear off. The stump that was my wrist had begun to throb, not yet a great deal but with promise of real pain to come. I was hungry, and I needed to piss. Carefully I got myself to my feet and used a corner of the room in near darkness, covering the wetness with a little straw. The last of the light faded. I sat in complete darkness, back against the stone wall, cradling my bandaged stump in my good right hand. Finally, a lifetime later, the lock rattled. The door opened.

  “Roger? ”

  Maggie came in with a lantern and a small sack. The lantern threw shadows on the stone wall, on the wooden door, on her. She wore a clean gown of rough blue wool. Blue. I had never seen her in anything but green. Her fair hair, short from its cutting when she pretended to be my brother, curled around her face. A huge bruise, turning all the colors of vegetables, swelled the left side of her face and closed her left eye.

  “You’re hurt!” I said, the first thing that came to me. “Were you—”

  “Tortured? No. This is nothing.” She set the lantern on the floor and sat beside my straw. The one gray eye that I could see studied me anxiously. “Does your hand hurt?”

  “No,” I said bitterly. “It can’t hurt because it’s not there anymore.”

  “Then does your wrist hurt?”

  “Yes.”

  “I brought you some more medicine from Mother Chilton. And some food.” She opened her sack.

  I knocked it away, impatient with her stupidity. “I don’t care about food! What happened? That cursed witch cut off my hand—”

  “She’s not a witch,” Maggie said levelly. “Only you are.”

  That stopped me. Maggie stared at me with all her old disapproving severity, now decorated with fear—for this I had brought back an army from the country of the Dead? To rescue this girl, so that she could call me a witch?

  “I’m not a witch. I’m a hisaf.”

  She didn’t know the word, of course. The fear of me was still on her, but she continued. “Mother Chilton saved your life.”

  “Maybe I wish she hadn’t.”

  “Don’ttalklikethat.Didyou...Roger, was it you who...?”

  I said simply, “Yes. To all of it.”

  She twisted her hands—her two good hands—together tightly in her lap, and forced herself to go on. “You brought the Blues back from Witchland? That’s what the soldiers are saying. ‘Witchland,’ where the queen had sent them, when she made it look as if they had died. What we buried—the bodies—they were all false, sorcerous illusion. But not Richard. He was not among the Blues who returned from . . . from there.” Her voice broke. “The soldiers say the queen is a witch and you are, too. But I . . .”

  “You what?” I was not going to make this easy for her. She was not making it easy for me.

  The hands on her lap tightened until all blood left them. “I . . . I don’t think you brought them back from Witchland. I think you . . . you told me once in the kitchen, that you can . . . I think you brought them all back from the country of the Dead.”

  There. She had said it. I peered at her in the uneven lantern light. Bright light one place, deep shadows a few inches over. The unbruised half of Maggie’s face had gone as bloodless as her hands. But she had said it. Disapproval, yes, but also courage. Maggie had always had enough courage for an entire troop of soldiers.

  “Yes,” I said. “I brought the Blues back from the country of the Dead.”

  “And . . . and Cecilia, too?”

  “No.” I would never tell anyone what had happened to Cecilia. The spiked metal ball twisted in my chest. Those spikes were ones that no Mother Chilton could ever cut out.

  Maggie looked away from me. Abruptly she said, “Jee is safe.”

  I had forgotten Jee. “You can think about someone else,” Mother Chilton had said, but I had not thought of Jee.

  Maggie continued, “He’s with me in the kitchen. He sleeps under the trestle table where you used to sleep.”

  I said, “It was Jee who told me that the soldiers had taken you. They were looking for me?”

  “Yes. The queen wanted you. I don’t know why, but if you are . . . that thing that you said, the thing that can travel to the country of the Dead ...”

  “I am, yes. But I am not a witch.”

  She nodded, not looking at me. Her hands loosened a little in her lap. I said, “How did you get that bruise on your face?”

  “A Green hit me when I tried to escape. They had orders to bring me back to the palace if they couldn’t find you. The queen knew that we left together. I told her that you had left to find your mother—”

  “My mother! ”

  “You called out for her in your sleep, several times, when we were traveling to the Unclaimed Lands.”

  Calling out in troubled sleep—my old problem, the thing that had brought me to Queen Caroline’s
attention in the first place. But that answered one question: how Mother Chilton had heard of my mother. Maggie must have told her. I wanted to believe that, just as I wanted to believe that Mother Chilton was no more than a skilled healer. I was determined to believe those things.

  Maggie continued, “The queen kept me with her, trying to make me an ally. When she saw that wasn’t going to succeed, she threatened me with torture, but she hadn’t yet sent me to the dungeon when your Blues arrived. I think she still had hopes of bribing me with silk dresses and green jewels.” Maggie’s voice turned scornful.

  “Does your face hurt?”

  “Not anymore. It just looks terrible.” She tried to smile, and failed.

  “Where is the queen now?”

  “In the dungeon. The Blues hold the castle.” She touched her blue gown. I saw now that it had been hastily and imperfectly dyed. Green streaks showed at the hem and neckline.

  I said, “When I woke here, I thought maybe I was in a dungeon.”

  She did smile then. “You’re in the dried apple cellar, Roger.”

  “I don’t see any apples.”

  “It’s early summer. The apples were all eaten over the winter. That’s what you do with dried apples.”

  “How did I get here?”

  “Joan Campford and I brought you.”

  “Joan? The laundress? She was there?”

  “She followed you from the laundry. She and I dragged you away. Your hand . . . There was so much blood . . . anyway. A Blue captain told us to take you away and hide you. I didn’t understand—I still don’t. You brought back the Blues, and yet there was such hatred for you on his face!”

  I understood. In a soldier, fear comes out as hatred, and debt as permission to escape.

  Maggie went on. “You were covered with blood and soap. Everything was chaos, with fighting in the palace and killing and shouting. . . .” She shuddered. “Anyway, Joan and I dragged you by your feet, with my petticoat wrapped bloody around your hand, to the kitchens, and then to this apple cellar. I ran for Mother Chilton.”

  “And the queen? They will . . .” But I already knew the answer.

  “They will burn her as a witch.”

  “When?”

  “Tomorrow at noon. Roger—is she a witch?”

  “I don’t know. The queen recognized . . . she could tell . . . Do you think Mother Chilton a witch?”

  “No!” Maggie looked shocked. “She’s a healer, is all. And she’s a good person. Not like the queen!”

  The queen was not a good person. She had poisoned her mother, murdered her enemies, threatened helpless servants like Maggie and me with torture. But I also remembered the queen’s small and unnecessary kindnesses to me, remembered her desperation to protect The Queendom for little Princess Stephanie, remembered the way her dramatic beauty glowed in candlelight. She would end her life as she lived it, a riddle to all. At noon tomorrow that beauty would blacken in the fire as Cecilia had—

  Don’t think that.

  “What is it?” Maggie’s frightened voice said. “For a minute you looked so—does your hand hurt more?”

  “No.”

  She was silent a long moment. Then she said, “Your look changed when I mentioned the queen. Did you love her so very much?”

  “Love the queen?”

  “Don’t be stupid,” Maggie said sharply. “The queen is a monster. I meant Lady Cecilia. Did you love her so very much?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Once.”

  “Once? You don’t love her now?”

  “She’s dead.”

  “That isn’t what I asked. My mother loved my father long after he died, right up until she went to her own grave. Do you love Cecilia still?”

  Maggie was relentless. Moreover, she lacked experience. She didn’t know that love could be overwhelmed by guilt, by anger, by childish selfishness on the part of the beloved—and yet still exist, like embers in an ash box. The embers no longer glow, no longer give off warmth. But they still smolder, and I have known them to eat through the wood of an ash box and set an entire cottage ablaze, destroying it utterly. I had not lied to Maggie. I had loved Cecilia once, and that fire was gone. But neither had I told the entire truth.

  Hadn’t told it, couldn’t tell it. Maggie could not understand. There were only two people in the entire world who might understand. One was Mother Chilton. The other, I suspected but could not know, was my mother.

  I tried again. “Maggie, I didn’t bring an army here to retake the palace because of Cecilia.”

  Her mouth, pink beneath the huge swollen bruise on her face, frowned slightly. “You didn’t?”

  “No.”

  “I thought you wanted revenge for . . . for her. For Cecilia.”

  “No. I came for you. Because Jee told me you’d been taken.”

  Maggie went utterly still. For a moment I thought she had ceased to breathe, but then I saw her lashes, downcast, quiver. They cast shadows on the firelit skin of her unbruised cheek. When she opened her eyes, they were blurred under a sheen of tears. She leaned forward and laid her lips on mine.

  The kiss was light and sweet, and it stopped time.

  But when her lips pressed harder and her hand caressed my hip, I pushed her gently away. “You don’t understand. I have only one hand!”

  “So?”

  “So,” I said, bitterness rushing back into me, “I am unmanned.”

  Maggie gave a low, throaty chuckle, so surprising that I glared at her in indignation. Didn’t she understand what it meant to lose a hand? Was she that insensitive? I was no longer an able-bodied man, no longer whole—

  “It’s not your hand I’m interested in, Roger.” She laid her own hand on me, and instantly my body responded. I was shocked by how instantly, just as shocked as I was by her bawdiness—Maggie!

  She wasn’t careful about undressing me, or slow. When she pulled her blue gown over her head and undid the strings of her shift, I gasped. She was so beautiful in her nakedness.

  The rest of the morning is both a blur and, at the same time, so sharply carved in memory that I can still see every curve of Maggie’s body, can still feel every sensation in my own. We maneuvered around my bandaged stump and her bruised face, tender with each other, full of hesitation and joy. Together we went into that secret dark place of sweetness, and when it was over, we fell asleep in each other’s arms, on the clean straw, in the tiny stone room that smelled of vanished apples.

  I woke first. Maggie slept on, the good side of her face hidden in the good side of my arm. The lantern had gone out, but light came through the small, high window. We had slept the entire night; it was way past dawn. Bright sunlight beyond the barred window, and Maggie had said that the queen would burn at noon.

  Staring at the stone ceiling above me, I realized what critical piece of information I did not possess.

  “Maggie, wake up!”

  She murmured and burrowed deeper into my side. For a moment the movement of her against my skin ignited me, but there was no time.

  “Maggie! What day is this?”

  Her head rose from the straw, eyes bleary, silky curls tousled on her forehead. “Day?”

  “Yes! What day? How long have I been in this apple cellar?”

  She looked bewildered, then affronted. “Why?”

  “How long?”

  “A fortnight. Mother Chilton gave you drugs, and I fed you while you raved. All nonsense syllables but it was terrible to listen to. A horrible song: ‘Die, my baby. Die, die, my little one—’”

  A fortnight. And I had brought the Blues back over in mid-morning. So now—

  “Why was she allowed to live so long?” All those enraged soldiers I had brought back from death, eager for Her Grace’s blood—

  Maggie’s lip curled. “The captain held her alive. He tried to force her to bring the old queen back from Witchland. But she would not, or so I was told. And then—”

  “Get dressed. Right away. And help me!” I was fumbling at my tuni
c, my trousers. With every motion, pain throbbed in the stump of my severed wrist. My face must have frightened Maggie.

  “Why? Roger—what is it?”

  “Something is going to happen. Listen to me—those Greens who have rejoined the Blue army, are some of them secretly still loyal to the queen?”

  Her lip curled. “Of course. Not all men are for sale, bend as they will to temporary power.”

  “We have to leave the palace. Leave Glory entirely, right now! ”

  “But . . . but why? You aren’t strong enough to leave anything!”

  That seemed true. The lovemaking, on top of amputation and drugs, had weakened me. It was difficult to even tug on my trousers with my good hand. But I did it.

  Maggie said, “Nobody knows you’re here. The fighting is over. Later, when you’re stronger and the queen is dead, Joan and I can—”

  “The fighting is not over! ”

  She stared at me, half dressed and, for Maggie, unusually slow of wits. Perhaps our love-making had affected her, too.

  “The fighting is not over,” I repeated. “We have only a few hours to escape. When the Greens take back the throne, they will tear down every stone in the palace looking for me, who led the army that killed their queen.”

  “Greens take back the throne? Very soon the queen will be dead—”

  “But Princess Stephanie will not. The Greens will seek to put her on the throne and rule through her. They—”

  “Roger, the Greens left alive are not enough to defeat the Blues you brought back over!”

  “I don’t have time to explain—help me, Maggie! Get dressed! We must leave now, while everyone will be watching the queen’s death.”

  “You’re not making sense! The Blue army can’t be defeated, can’t be . . . they’re . . . if what you told me ...”

  I stood shakily, my good hand braced against the wall. The ceiling of the apple cellar was so low that I had to duck my head, although Maggie, shorter than I, could stand upright. “Believe me about this, Maggie! Where in the palace are we? Below the kitchens?”

  For a long moment she chewed her bottom lip, and then gave way. “We’re not below the kitchens. The river comes too close there to dig underground storage rooms. We’re farther inside the palace, under liveried servants’ quarters. There’s a passage with a door into the couriers’ quarters.”