by Anna Kendall
Maggie said, ‘It's from ... from ...'
‘Yes. Jee, were you outside when this stone fell down the chimney?'
‘Yes.'
‘What did you see?'
‘Naught.' The boy touched each of his eyes and squeezed them shut, the country folks' charm against witches. And yet he knew what I was.
‘Nothing?' I said. ‘Think hard, Jee!'
‘Naught. Except ...'
‘What?'
‘There be a hawk, circling high up.'
I hefted the stone – too heavy for a hawk to carry, especially ‘high up'.
Maggie had recovered from her shakiness. She had always respected Mother Chilton, the ‘great apothecary', and now her fear of Mother Chilton's message catapulted Maggie into what was most natural to her, getting things done.
‘We can leave within the hour, Peter. I'll pack food. Jee, fill that old water bag from the cupboard under the stairs, and mind that you rinse it out three times first. Then roll up our winter cloaks as tight as you can and bind them with the string from the peg in the kitchen. Peter, you should— Oh, what about the animals? I don't think we can take them with us, although maybe if you kill a chicken – no, two – I'm sure there's time ...'
I put my one hand on her shoulder and turned her to face me. No avoiding this battle. As Jee ran off to do Maggie's bidding, I took a deep breath.
But she was there first. ‘No, Roger,' she said quietly, using my true name. ‘You can't leave me behind. Nor Jee, either. There are savages in that army who will recognize me. They captured me once before in order to get to you, remember? If the Young Chieftain is as smart as you say he is, then he will use those men again. I am in as much danger as you. And so is Jee. You can't leave us behind, even though—' and being Maggie, she could not leave off the last phrase ‘—even though you want to.'
Yet last night she had argued that none of us would be recognized. Still, she was right on both of today's points. The Young Chieftain would use her, as his father had, to get to me. And I wanted to leave her and Jee behind.
Her face had the crumpled, defiant look it got whenever we alluded to our living arrangements. Not for the first time, I wished that Maggie did not feel so compelled to name hard truths. I capitulated – for now.
‘Maggie, you said yourself that we have little time. We are all three going, and within the hour. Pack the food and I'll kill the chickens. We must be away before anyone comes to the inn.'
She nodded vigorously and sped into the kitchen, where I could hear the rattle of pots and slamming of keeping-box covers. I strode outside, caught two chickens, killed and blooded them. All I could do for the sheep was open the door to their shed and hope that they would wander to pasture and into some farmer's flock, or that an inn patron would find us all gone and take them, along with the rest of the chickens.
Within the half-hour we had left the inn, slipping into the wooded slope behind the cottage. Shadow followed. When we were deep enough into the woods to not be seen, Jee stopped and said, ‘Where be we going?'
A reasonable question. The child looked at me expectantly, and with some pride. Jee, snarer of rabbits and gatherer of nuts and berries, knew the countryside for miles around. Wherever I said we were going, Jee knew he could guide us there.
I hoped that Maggie had exhausted her week's supply of hurt outrage. But I doubted it. I said, ‘We head towards the capital, Jee. But not along the river.' Along the river ran roads, villages, armies.
Maggie said, ‘Towards Glory? But that's where the savage army will go, to claim the princess!'
‘We're not going into Glory, Maggie. Just near it.'
‘Now she was suspicious. ‘Near it where?'
There was no help for it. I wouldn't lie to her. ‘Tanwell.'
‘You ... you want to leave me and Jee with my sister.'
I said nothing.
‘My miserable piss pot of a sister, who will use me like a slavey and Jee like a dog.'
At the word dog, Shadow wagged his tail.
‘No,' Maggie said.
Despite myself, I was impressed. No arguing, no crumpled face, no hurt tears. Just a simple no, smooth and hard as the stone that had inexplicably fallen down my chimney. I said nothing.
‘We can travel south, staying in hills and woods,' Maggie said, ‘and still reach the Unclaimed Lands by a longer route. Settle in some rough farming village on the border between The Queendom and the Unclaimed Lands – that would be safest. We can get work as labourers until we can start over. Jee, lead on.'
Jee looked from Maggie to me and back again. Silently he picked up his pack and led off. Maggie followed him, I followed her, and Shadow followed me. For now.
Travel in early summer. Long days of walking under the hot sun, short nights of sleeping off exhaustion. We avoided villages unless we needed supplies, and then we sent Jee to buy them, accompanied by Shadow. But we needed to purchase very little. Jee set rabbit snares each evening. Shadow too hunted small game and, surprisingly, laid it untouched at my feet. This endeared him to Maggie, who could pluck a wild partridge faster than anyone in Applebridge. Once Shadow even brought a suckling pig, stolen from some farmer's wallow. Maggie scolded him, but I think even a dog could tell that her heart wasn't in it. She roasted the pig and we ate it, the rich juices filling our bellies and the skin crackling and crisp in our mouths. Swift clear streams kept the water bag full. We slept wrapped in our cloaks, or upon them, under bright summer stars.
We spoke only of the journey, never of the reason for it. When Jee went into a village to buy bread and cheese, he brought back little news. These remote villages heard even less than Applebridge, which at least had travellers along the river. No one mentioned an army of savages invading The Queendom, and neither did we talk of it among ourselves. It was almost as if that fortnight was detached from the rest of the world, holding the three of us in a moving bubble, transparent and softly coloured as the soap bubbles a child will make on wash day. There was no rain, no high winds, no storms. The nights were clear and warm, scented with wild thyme and woodland flowers. I did not dream. We had, however falsely, a kind of gentle peace.
The Queendom is a vast plain, circled to north, west and south by mountains and to the east by the sea. The northern mountains are little more than hills; beyond them lies the queendom of Isabella, kin by marriage to little Princess Stephanie. The Western Mountains are high and jagged. To the south lay neither hills nor mountains but a wild country all its own: high plateaux and deep ravines and tiny valleys, rough and infertile, inhabited only by hard-scrabble farmers and hunters who barely wrested a living from the grudging earth. The Unclaimed Lands. Jee had been born there.
And beyond the Unclaimed Lands lay Soulvine Moor.
Maggie did not know what I planned. I was sure of it. And if I travelled this fortnight with a kind of steady easiness that rose almost to light-heartedness, I was glad to deceive her. For although I was not light-hearted, I did feel a kind of pleasure, which brought its own kind of guilt. The pleasure was at escaping the inn at Applebridge and the life which went with it. The guilt was because I had wanted that kind of peaceful life, and had built it along with Maggie, and it seemed terrible to me that I wanted it no longer while she still did.
She had said we would find work as labourers ‘until we can start again'. And I had no doubt that she would start again. Within two years of choosing some village, Maggie would again run an inn, or a cookshop or a barter house. She would learn a cobbler's trade or a cooper's or an apothecary's. She could learn and do anything, anything at all, and she would not let me do what I wanted, which was what I had always wanted: go to Soulvine Moor, cross over, and find my mother in the Country of the Dead. Only from my mother could I learn who was my father, who was the crowned woman in my terrible dreams, who I was myself.
‘You will seek your mother. Despite anything I would tell you,' Mother Chilton had said two years ago. But I had not. Now the chance had come, and I would not rest until I found
my mother and she told me what I must know.
So I walked with Maggie as we moved south-east and the countryside grew steeper, more wooded, less peopled. I joked with her, slept at night across a banked campfire from her, and said nothing about my plans. And so we came to Haryllbury.
‘This is the place,' Maggie said.
In mid-afternoon we stood on a high rise, looking down at a village beside a small lake. It was larger than most hill settlements, perhaps because of the lake. A small river fed it, tumbling down from the mountains and winding like a slim swift snake among the steep hills and through the sudden ravines. Farm plots, tiny and irregularly laid out, but nonetheless under cultivation.
I didn't know if we still stood in The Queendom or over the border in the Unclaimed Lands, and later, when I came to learn the village's name, I still didn't know. ‘Haryll' sounded like the latter, ‘bury' like the former. The place was a cross-breed, and so likely to belong to neither.
‘It's big enough to afford us work,' Maggie said. ‘But small enough to be unnoticed.'
‘Yes, I agree. Jee, take Shadow and buy some bread.' I gave him a penny.
Jee started down the hillside, Shadow bounding alongside. Maggie and I sat on the thick grass, grateful for the chance to rest our legs. She began to pull up daisies and braid them together into a chain. Bees hummed around us, drinking of the red clover, and a rabbit leaped by.
Lucky for it that both Jee and Shadow had gone.
Maggie said quietly, ‘Don't go, Peter.'
She knew. Perhaps she had always known. I couldn't look at her.
‘Don't leave us. You were going to slip away at night, weren't you? Make sure we had work and a place to sleep, and then set out alone. Leaving me. Again.'
Once before I had tried to leave her behind, when I had forsaken the palace and gone to search for Cecilia. That time she had insisted on following. I sensed that it would be different now. She would not follow a second time. Maggie had her pride, and it had suffered enough where I was concerned. She wouldn't insist on coming with me, but she would do everything she could to prevent me from going.
She said, not without dignity, ‘Please don't lie to me. You are planning on going to Soulvine Moor, aren't you? To search for your mother over ... over there. Please don't lie. to me!'
‘Ye will seek your mother. Despite anything I would tell ye.'
‘Yes,' I said, so softly that she bent her head towards me to hear, ‘I'm going. I must go, Maggie.'
‘No,' she said simply, ‘you choose to go.'
And to that there was no answer. She didn't rage, she didn't argue, she didn't even cry, and I found myself thinking that I would rather any of those things than this quiet hurt, deep as the sea. The chain of daisies lay in her lap. Her head bowed over them, and her fair springy curls fell forward to hide her face. She stayed still, so still that except for the tension in her neck, she might have been dead. Might have been one of those motionless Dead on the other side, eternally sitting in their tranquil circles.
The thought chilled me. I couldn't stand seeing her like this – Maggie, who was all bustle and energy and plans.
I couldn't stand it.
‘Maggie ...' I reached out my one good hand and laid it on her shoulder.
So swiftly that she startled me, Maggie turned to face me. No tears, but she put her arms around me and hung on like a drowning woman to a raft. Her mouth breathed hot near mine.
‘Then if you're really going, you cannot deny me this.
One last time, Peter. I may never see you again. You can't deny me this. You can't, oh you can't ...'
And I could not. Her anguish touched me to my soul. Her body was warm and soft next to mine. The sun shone hotly on us both, the heavy drone of the bees brought its own trance, the fragrant grasses rustled in a sweet breeze. We were seventeen, and my member throbbed with life. I laid Maggie gently on the wildflowers and raised the skirt of her gown.
Afterwards, she slept. Jee and Shadow had not yet returned. Quietly I took the least I needed from our packs and left her there, asleep on the sunny hillside. I turned my steps south, climbing alone into the Unclaimed Lands.
7
By evening I had reached an upland meadow, a tiny flat grassland amid steep wooded slopes and jutting boulders. The last time I had travelled through this wild countryside, I had had two hands. I was finding it much more difficult with one, even leaning on a stout oak branch as a walking staff. As darkness fell, exhaustion took me. I made a fire, ate some bread and cold mutton, and rolled loosely in my cloak to sleep. Shadow was a warm dark bulk beside me, and with the fire on my other side, I thought I would sleep easy. I was wrong.
An hour slid by while the stars came out and the moon rose, full and round and yellow as a good cheese. Until this journey, it had been over two years since I had slept without a roof over my head. The night sky brought up all sorts of feelings, all sorts of memories. Myself as a child and youth, travelling with Aunt Jo and the brute she married, Hartah. What Hartah had forced me to do at summer faires to earn a few coins from grieving and susceptible countrywomen. Hidden in our tent, I had listened to their tales of lost mothers, children, husbands. Then I had crossed over, roused some old woman to tell me details about the family, and returned with false messages of love and happiness beyond the grave. Even now, remembering these lies, I burned with shame and humiliation.
But what Hartah had made me do was nothing compared to what I had, as Queen Caroline's court fool, done for her. And to her.
So many Dead I had roused! All of them old, for only the old can be roused from their deep trance; perhaps only they live long enough to retain memories of life. The Dead are waiting, I think, but neither I nor anyone else knows for what. And I could be wrong. Perhaps they are not waiting at all. Perhaps this unmoving tranquillity is what they have lived in order to attain.
I would like to think that. It would mean that I had not deprived Cecilia of so very much after all. Cecilia and all the others I had brought back to life from the far country, only to ensure that now they existed in neither place, and never would again. That was the unceasing anguish in my mind. Not that Cecilia had died, but that because of me she was not among the Dead. But if death was no more than this rigid stillness, I had not taken from her anything worth having.
It was Maggie that I had robbed of everything she wanted.
But to bring Maggie with me would have been to endanger yet another woman. I was right to leave Maggie behind. But she did not think so, and even to me the thought was cold comfort. I wanted more than that, and only my mother could give it to me. I remembered her in her lavender gown, holding me on her knees and singing to me. Lavender ribbons in her hair. I remembered her scent and her bright eyes and her gentle touch
‘Eleven years dead.'
No. The woman in my monstrous dream was not my mother. My mother had not worn a crown, had not been queen of anything. And the voice in my dream was lighter than my mother's, higher in pitch. Nor was it the voice of Queen Caroline, who had anyway been dead for only two and a half years, and whom I had last seen quiet and motionless in the Country of the Dead. No, this woman was only a bad dream, an insubstantial thing fashioned of air and anguished memory, not real in this land nor that other. Merely a dream.
Finally, I slept. It seemed only a few minutes later that I was wakened by a kick in the ribs. Thrashing to turn over, tangled in my blanket and blinking against the morning sunlight, I woke to two warriors standing above me, short knives drawn and pointed downward at my throat.
‘ Aleyk ta nodree! '
‘ Hent!'
I struggled, but it did me little good. One savage hauled me to my feet and pinned my arms from behind. The other peered into my face, as if trying to decide who I was. I had no idea who he was, except that he was a soldier in the Young Chieftain's army. He wore their shaggy fur tunic with leather belt and metal-capped boots. His long hair, braided away from his sunburned face, sported no feathers and he wore no short
feathered cape, so he was not an officer. Some sort of scout, perhaps. Like most of them, his eyes were blue, not the brilliant piece-of-sky blue that Solek's had been, but rather a dull blue-grey. In the palace I had learned some of their guttural language, but not the words they'd uttered so far. But I understood the next exchange.
‘ Mit? ' Him?
‘ Tento.' I don't know.
‘ Jun fee kal.'
That last I did not understand. However, it took no language to understand the hands that went roughly over my body and through my pack. They took my big hunting blade but left the tiny shaving knife in my boot. They pushed me forward and we began walking, off the meadow and down the mountain.
I was a prisoner. But so far I had not been hurt in any way. And the savages were not sure who I was. In two and a half years I had changed: filled out in the body, gone gaunt and sunburned in the face, grown a beard, lost a hand. They were not sure who I was. Desperately I clung to that, because there was little else to cling to. The savages were big men, in the prime of their strength and manhood, and the larger outweighed me by at least three stone. Running from them would only get me hurt.
How had they found me? Had they already captured Maggie and forced her to talk? Maggie, whom I had left peacefully asleep on the hillside fragrant with clover. She wouldn't betray me unless they forced her. But under torture, anyone will betray anything. And Jee, with his thin small bones ...
I stumbled, going down heavily, unable to catch myself with only one hand. The savages halted and waited for me to get up. They did not touch me. I staggered upright and we carried on down the steep slope. As we descended, the mountain rose behind us, blocking out the morning sun, so that it seemed as if it were setting instead of rising.
We were heading north, back to The Queendom. Towards Haryllbury? Fear for Maggie and Jee rumbled through me like summer thunder.
After several hours, the savages paused for food. They let me drink from my water bag and pull cheese from my pack. My throat was so parched it was difficult to swallow. The savages, who said little even to each other, seemed to feel no fatigue from the half-day's hard march over rough terrain. I had thought myself hardy from long hours of labour at the inn, but tending sheep and nailing boards could not compare with whatever training these men had. Nor could what now seemed the leisurely pace with which Maggie, Jee, and I had come from Applebridge. Ten minutes to eat and to fill the water bags at a swift stream, and we were off again.