Crossing Over (18 page)
Authors: Anna Kendall
“Yes, Your Grace.”
“Open the door, Lord Robert.”
He did, and he trailed her out, and now I could hear the great bells in the tower begin to toll, as slow and stately as the court dances required by the old queen, sending the news to The Queendom of death, and change, and triumph.
I didn’t know how much time I had.
If the Green soldiers could not secure the palace, would the queen return to her privy chamber or wait in her presence chamber? Might she bring her ladies in here for safety, if guards brought them to her? Most important of all, how long had the old queen been dead?
If I was going to do this at all, it must be now. Before I could change my mind, I seized a carving knife from the table and jabbed at my arm. Pain sprang along my nerves, making me drop the knife. I willed myself to cross over.
This time I was close by the river, almost in the water. A large group of soldiers sat together on the grass, all dressed in the same leather armor and crude sandals, as if they had died together. Like the rest of the Dead, they bore no injuries or maiming. The whole group ignored me. From their old-fashioned garb I guessed that they had been there a long time. For all I knew, they might be there forever.
The western mountains had disappeared altogether, as if the valley now stretched larger than in my previous visit, and the river seemed even wider and slower. I was still on the island, however. Running along its banks, in and out of groves of trees, I searched for the old queen. Circles of the Dead, more Dead lying on the grass or gazing at rocks—
where was she?
where was she?
I found her wading ashore from the river, sputtering and angry. Water dripped from her blue silk gown and from her crown, the simple silver circlet she favored on her white hair. Even wet, Queen Eleanor had a terrifying dignity. Even furious. Even dead.
I dropped to one knee. “Your Grace!”
“Who are you? Where am I?” And then, a moment later, “I am dead.”
No use lying, not to this woman. “Yes, Your Grace.”
“And you are . . . you are my daughter’s fool! With the stupid yellow dye on your face!”
“Yes, Your Grace.”
“What happened, boy? Are you dead, too?”
I thought quickly. “Yes, Your Grace.”
“And this is the country of the Dead.” She turned thoughtful, then, and I saw it begin: the contemplative remoteness of the Dead. In a few moments I might not be able to reach her at all.
Desperately I said, “Were you poisoned, Your Grace?”
That caught her attention. “What?”
“Were you poisoned by your daughter, Queen Caroline? Did any messenger visit you last night or this morning, was there any strange person in your chambers, did anything happen that might have been poisoning? ” I did not know what I was looking for.
“Caroline,” she said vaguely, as if trying to remember the name. It was happening, right before my eyes. She was detaching from the living. She was no longer subject to those loves, those hatreds, those ties.
“Your daughter, the new queen! Who may have poisoned you and now has your queendom! Your Grace!”
Gracefully she sat down on the grass and stared at a flower. I had lost her. This was one old woman I could not jar into jolly stories of childhood.
I smacked my fist against my thigh. To have taken this risk for nothing! I must get back, now. I must—
Two soldiers materialized a short way off. They wore Queen Eleanor’s blue. My body blocked her from their view, but one cried, “The whore’s fool! Seize him!”
He rushed toward me, sword drawn. The other, not so quick in mind, looked around him dazedly. I stepped aside and pointed. “Your queen!”
That stopped the attacking soldier. He fell to his knees and bowed his head. “Your Majesty! Are you safe?”
She, of course, said nothing. Not for a long moment. But then she looked up at me and said simply, “Yes.” A moment later she had relapsed into the calm of the Dead.
The second soldier came uncertainly toward me. “What is this place? What . . . they said Queen Eleanor was dead. ...”
I saw it come to him, then. He looked down at his own belly, as if expecting to find it run through with the sword of a Green, and then looked again at me. I couldn’t help but be moved by his bewilderment.
The kneeling soldier sprang up. “None of your fool’s talk, boy! Where are we? What witchcraft did the whore use on us?”
Here, then, was my story, handed to me like meat on a golden plate—the same story I had once told Bat. If I could use it to make these soldiers believe I was not Queen Caroline’s ally but her victim, they might not harm me. Swiftly I said, “You have caught me out! Yes, the young queen used her sorcery to bring us all here to Witchland—I saw her do it! She crooked her sixth finger and chanted her spells and . . . and flew through the air and brought us all here! Me, too, for daring to say fool’s rhymes that displeased her . . . And she has ensorcelled Queen Eleanor! Look, the queen breathes and yet cannot speak, cannot see—”
The soldier cried out in superstitious fear and outraged fury. He waved his drawn sword, but there was no one to run through—until three Green soldiers appeared beside the river.
There must be fighting in the palace. Men were dying. And now there would be fighting here as well.
The two Blues rushed toward the Greens, who drew weapons and counterattacked. And I saw what I had not thought possible: the Dead fighting each other to kill. Only it did not, could not happen. One soldier got the advantage and slashed brutally at another’s head. The blade passed right through flesh and skull and bone, and the man stood on his feet still, unharmed.
That stopped them all.
I dared not go closer. I could be harmed, even if they could not. From beside the queen I called, “In Witchland, no one can die. Look how many the witch has brought here! And she can summon us back whenever she chooses. . . . It has been done to me before!”
The Blue soldiers looked wildly around. The three Greens had already retreated out of earshot; soon they would be tranquil and motionless. The Blues didn’t understand, but they believed me. In the face of the senseless, men will seize on any belief that promises sense.
The less quick of the Blues said uncertainly, “Ye have been here before, fool?”
“Yes. Come here, to your queen—just you!”
He came. I said to him, very low, “What happened to her? Did she drink or eat anything, or—”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t there. But my captain, he said she clutched her belly and cried, ‘Poison! My daughter!’ But ye say it was not poison, it was witchcraft? I don’t know—”
“It was witchcraft,” I said firmly. “Look at her! She’s not dead, she breathes and sits, you walk and talk. . . . You are banished in Witchland until they summon you back. And so are these others.” Two more Blues had appeared in the river and were staggering, dripping, to shore. “You must tell them! I hope I don’t—” Deliberately I broke off my sentence, bit my tongue hard, and crossed over.
My tongue bled into my mouth. I writhed on the hearth rug and then all at once I was weeping. But was I weeping from pain, or from knowledge?
In truth, I had no certain knowledge. The old queen had cried out that she had been poisoned, but she might have cried that even if her death had come from a failure in her heart. She might have clutched her belly anyway, believing her daughter to have poisoned her no matter what the fact. And the “Yes” that the old queen said to me—the last thing she would ever say to anyone—might have meant anything.
But I believed that Queen Eleanor had been answering my question.
Yes
. Yes, she had been murdered, and Queen Caroline was what rumor had called her: a poisoner.
Yes
. Yes, she had been murdered, and Queen Caroline was what rumor had called her: a poisoner.
The queen is dead. Long live the queen.
I don’t know how long I lay on the hearth, my thoughts in chaos. Queen Caroline had always roused in me so many contradictory emotions: Fear. Admiration. Anger . . . Respect. Now my feelings toward the queen reduced to only one: a desire to survive her patronage.
Eventually I rose and washed the blood from my mouth with cooling water. Eventually Lord Robert’s voice bellowed on the other side of the door. “Fool! Open!”
I unbarred the door. He and Queen Caroline stood there. Her ladies and courtiers clustered at the other end of the outer chamber, some looking frightened and others triumphant. I fell to my knees as the queen swept through the doorway.
Lord Robert said, “Only a few moments, Your Majesty. This is urgent.”
“So is this. Close the door, Robert. Roger, rise. Why is there blood on your chin?”
“I bit my tongue, Your Grace.” My words came out thick and garbled.
“Clumsy of you. And on your sleeve?”
“Drippings from my tongue, Your Grace.”
She took my face between her hands. I had to force myself to not recoil at her touch.
Poison
.
Poison
.
“I need you to go to the Dead. You must find a man called Osprey, the palace locksmith. A short, squint-eyed man who died this evening. He wears the seal of The Queendom on his breast. You must ask him for the location of the key to the iron safe, where the Crown of Glory is kept. I need that key now, Roger, right this moment. I am going to the throne room and I want to be wearing the crown that my grandmothers have worn since time itself was young.”
I gaped at her. “Your Grace, it’s impossible, the Dead don’t—”
“Don’t what?” she said sharply, dropping her hands. “Don’t talk to you? You have declared that they do. You have shown me that they do. What is the difficulty?”
“It’s . . . it’s the
country
of the Dead!” I said desperately. “It’s vast, and . . . and wild, and to find a specific person is so difficult, I probably wouldn’t come across this Osprey if I searched for days, and you said you need it now, the Crown of Glory, now—” I was babbling from sheer terror.
country
of the Dead!” I said desperately. “It’s vast, and . . . and wild, and to find a specific person is so difficult, I probably wouldn’t come across this Osprey if I searched for days, and you said you need it now, the Crown of Glory, now—” I was babbling from sheer terror.
She said, “Try.”
One word, with so many unspoken words behind it. And in her eyes, everything to justify my terror.
Hartah had told me what instruments of torture look like. What they can do to a helpless body. So for the second time I cut my arm with the queen’s jeweled carving knife, crossed over, and—amazingly—found Osprey. Finding him did me no good. He had been dead too long, and he was not old, and I could not rouse him. I shouted in his ear, I shook his shoulder, I lifted him bodily, dragged him to the river and threw him in. He lurched out, lay on the grass, and gazed at the sky. He would say nothing to me.
“It’s the queen’s fool again,” a Blue soldier said. “The witch bounces him back and forth.”
“Aye, and she racks his bones with pain,” said another. “Poor oaf.”
There were more of them now, the dead soldiers. Some of the Blues stood guarding the unknowing old queen at the edge of the island. Others milled about, talked, kept their swords drawn. They did not know they were dead. They had believed me when I said this was Witchland, and they had repeated that belief to newer arrivals all too ready to believe it. Of course the young queen was a witch—hadn’t that been rumored for years? Of course she had sent them to Witchland! And that belief kept them animated—as alive as they would ever be again.
What had I done?
“Don’t come closer, fool,” one soldier said. “I’m sorry, boy, but the witch has you for fair, doesn’t she?”
“Yes.”
“Then don’t come near us!”
I did not. A little ways off, a Green soldier lay tranquil on the ground. The Blue followed my gaze. “You see, fool, how evil is the witch-whore you are forced to serve! She magicks even the corpses of her own to Witchland. She dare not let their relatives find her mark upon their bodies, lest her witchery be plain to all—No, don’t touch him, we do not know if this be a trap of poison, or worse.”
I did not intend to touch the Green, nor anything else. In despair, I crossed back over and faced Queen Caroline. Blood seeped from my cut arm, sticky on the velvet. “Your Grace, I ... I’m sorry, I couldn’t find Osprey, I . . . It is such a big place! I had no time!”
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