Mother Chilton sat in the same chair. It was as if she had not moved in all these long weeks since I came here last. The same fire burned in the brazier in the center of the tent, sending its smoke through the hole in the roof and its light flickering on the canvas walls. The same poles hung with the same bottles, plants, feathers, hides, bits of wood, cloth bags.
This time, Mother Chilton rose as I entered. My disguise did not deceive her for a moment; she did not even comment on it.
“You’ve grown, lad. You’re nearly a man.”
“I’ve come for—”
“I know why you’ve come.” She moved closer to me, and it seemed that as she moved, all the objects hanging from the poles moved too, yearning toward her. In her eyes swam strange colors, lights. “You seek the Lady Cecilia, who sent you here before.”
“Yes. Is she safe? Is she here?”
“She was here. Here and gone. And she will never be safe.”
My breath stopped in my throat. “Never? Why? And where has she gone? Did you help her escape from the capital?”
Mother Chilton did not answer me directly. Seen up close, her face was smooth cheeks, wrinkled forehead, and those eyes that were no color at all. She said, “So they are not yet ready in Soulvine.”
Once before she had mentioned Soulvine to me—“
Do you come from Soulvine Moor? Are they ready, then?
” That visit, I had been shocked that she would connect me with what no one else would even name. This time, I didn’t care. I cared only about finding Cecilia and protecting her.
“Where is Lady Cecilia? Did you help her?”
“I did, lad. But you don’t know why. You know much, even more than you think, but you don’t know what Cecilia is.”
“What is she? ”
“A pretty, empty-headed tinderbox that will ignite all.”
I said with as much dignity as I could manage, “I know she is not a great wit, but she is not empty-headed. And yes, she has ‘ignited’ me, and I am not shamed by that.”
Mother Chilton did not laugh. She closed her eyes and an expression of great pain crossed her face, as if I had turned a knife in her bowels. I sprang forward to catch her if she fell, but she didn’t so much as sway on her feet. But I think I swayed at her next words.
“I have sent Cecilia into the Unclaimed Lands. It is the only place the queen cannot reach her. Caroline studied the soul arts but she has no talent. Still, it is why the queen recognized
you
. I told Cecilia to go into the Unclaimed Lands but not to enter Soulvine Moor, not for any reason. It may be she can find some goatherd or scrub farmer to marry her, pretty little kitten that she is, and keep her safe. But you can’t go after her, lad. I thought once that you came from Soulvine. You do not, and you’ve already caused enough disturbance in the country of the Dead.”
“You ...
you
can cross over to the country of the Dead?”
“No,” she said without explanation.
I seized on what mattered. “You sent Cecilia south to the Unclaimed Lands
alone
?”
“She is not alone.” Mother Chilton put her hand on my arm, and a strange thing happened: my vision blurred. Almost, something formed in front of my eyes, some picture—but no. It was gone. Mother Chilton withdrew her hand.
“You are not ready,” she said sadly. “Lad, don’t go after that girl. She was born on Soulvine Moor, and although Caroline brought her to Glory as a child, she is still a Soulviner. Do not go after her.”
“I must,” I said simply.
“You’re a fool,” she said with equal simplicity, and I didn’t know if she referred to my character, my post with the queen, or both. For a long moment neither of us spoke. The fire crackled in the brazier. Finally Mother Chilton said, “Don’t try to go about in daylight as either a girl or a savage bard. You can’t even sing. Take off that ridiculous nightdress and scrub your face with this cloth. I will give you a cloak.”
I said sullenly, tired of being ordered like a child when I was on a hero’s mission to rescue my love, “The red dye won’t wash away. It must wear off.”
She snorted and attacked my face with the cloth. It came away red with dye. She dragged the twigs, not gently, from my hair. I put off the green velvet cloak and pulled Lady Margaret’s nightdress over my head. Mother Chilton slapped a poultice on my wounded arm, yanking back my sleeve to do so. Instantly, cool strength flooded through my arm. She took my court cloak and handed me a thick hooded cloak of brown wool lined with brown rabbit, by far the nicest I had ever owned.
“I . . . I cannot pay you. ...”
She said sharply, “Give me that gold piece in your pocket.”
How had she known? Before I could ask, she added, “And give me Caroline’s ring, too. How stupid are you, to carry markers like those around with you? Give them to me.”
Markers? I put my hand in my pocket and clutched both my gold piece and the little ring set with tiny emeralds. I had planned to use both to bargain my way to Cecilia. If she took—
Of its own will, and without mine, my hand drew out of my pocket and laid both ring and gold piece on the table.
“How did you—”
“Here, lad.” She gave me a handful of silver pieces; I was too dazed to count them.
“How did you—”
“Hush. Go to the alehouse by the east gate and drink there all night. In the morning, when the worthless alehouse louts stagger out of the city to do what they call ‘work’ in the fields, go out with them.”
“But how—”
“I said to hush!”
But I could not, even though I could barely get out my next words. “I never . . . never believed in witches. Are you . . . a witch, mistress?”
“Get out before I kick you out, lad. Your stupidity shames us all.”
“But I—”
“Get out!”
“Will you tell me just one more thing? How did Cecilia know about you in the first place, for the milady posset I mean, and why are you now helping her to—”
“Such stupidity will destroy us all yet,” she said despairingly, and then all at once I stood in the dark alley, and the tent door was laced tightly shut behind me. I blinked, and a shudder ran over me. So it was true and I had never known it; witches existed in the world. Or maybe Mother Chilton had merely babbled, and I had walked myself from her tent. Or maybe—
“Hello, Roger,” said a voice behind me in the darkness. I whirled around. There, wrapped in a gray cloak and somehow sounding scared and furious and determined all at once, stood Maggie.
23
“WHAT ARE
YOU
doing here?” It came out harsh and accusing, my tone born of my own fear, my own unsettling doubts about what I was doing here.
“I’m going with you,” Maggie said in an un-Maggie voice, humble and beseeching. Nothing was as it should be.
“You’re not. Go back inside the palace.”
“I can’t let you go lurching around the countryside alone. You’re too ignorant,” she said, and
that
sounded more like Maggie. But she was the second woman in two minutes to tell me how stupid I was, and I lost what remained of my temper.
“I have ‘lurched around the countryside’ since I was six years old! With people you couldn’t imagine, doing things you couldn’t imagine! Damn it all, Maggie, leave me alone!”
She started to cry.
Her tears were not like Cecilia’s, stormy and clutching, tears a man could comfort. She stood there in the starlight with her hands hanging limply at her sides, tears sliding silently down her face. Her nose began to run. But she didn’t move, didn’t go back to the palace.
“Maggie . . . I can’t take you.”
Finally she said, “You understand nothing.” Which was not true, and certainly didn’t help. She added, “I mean, nothing about me.”
“What don’t I understand?”
“Anything!”
I stalked off, toward the alehouse by the east gate. I could feel Maggie following me. There was a pocket in my new cloak, and I put my hand into it and fingered the coins Mother Chilton had given me. Ten silvers—more than I had ever seen together in my life. Five hundred pennies! I was a little afraid of so much money. Just before we reached the alehouse, I bent over and under cover of my cloak, I slipped nine of the silvers into my boot.
The alehouse was half tent, half newly constructed wood. A brazier burned brightly in the center, warming all but the farthest corners. Queen Caroline had undone her mother’s edict that tradesmen must leave the city at night, and the two long tables on either side of the brazier were full of people drinking and talking and laughing. Maggie and I took one of the small, cold, corner tables. Keeping my cloak and hood on, I laid my silver coin on the table, and the serving woman looked hungrily at it and so not at us. She brought two mugs of ale, two bronze coins, and seven pennies.
Maggie said in a low voice, “Where did you get the money, Roger? ”
“That’s my concern.”
“Then where do you think Lady Cecilia has gone?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then how will you—”
“Maggie, you’ve been very good to me. Helping me, feeding me, nursing me. But I must do this alone.”
“No,” she said simply.
“Who are you to—”
“I’m coming with you. I’m dressed as a boy, Roger, under my cloak. I have cut my hair. I’m coming with you.”
A monstrous thought occurred to me. Appalled at myself, I said, “Maggie, are you a spy for the queen?”
She stared at me, her face a mottled maroon. But she didn’t attack me. She said only, “I told you that you were stupid. Don’t you know how much I hate the queen?”
I hadn’t known. “Why?”
“Because Richard was a Blue who died for his loyalty and bravery.”
So her unaccustomed tears had not been for me, after all, but for her brother. The thought was welcome. I said gently, “You know now for certain that Richard is dead?”
“Yes.” Maggie had control of herself now, “I finally heard. But that’s not the only reason I hate the queen. She beds the savage lord who killed so many of us in The Queendom. She murdered her own mother—everyone says so. And she has treated you like a dog—no, less than a dog. Like a
thing
. You could have died up there on the tower roof. She is a monster, and I hate her. I cannot stay and serve a monster. Not any longer, now that I know what she really is. Queen Eleanor was right, her daughter is not fit to rule. I was serving the wrong queen.” She took a sip of her ale, her eyes anguished.
I realized then what made Maggie different from most people I had ever known: She could name hard truths. Not even Mother Chilton, with her anguished evasions, had done that. Maggie was domineering, stubborn, and meddlesome, but she could name truth. Like Mistress Conyers. Like—perhaps—Queen Caroline herself.
I made one more attempt. “You have a sister in a village somewhere—you told me once. You could go to her.”
“I also told you that my sister is a miserly, grasping fishwife who screams at everyone, including her husband. I am not going there. I am coming with you.”
An unwelcome suspicion formed in my mind. I was willing to risk everything for Cecilia. Was Maggie then willing to risk everything for me because . . . “Maggie,” I choked out, “do you . . . are you ...” I could not say the words:
in love with me
.
A long silence spun itself out, fragile as cobwebs.
Maggie finally answered. Her voice held great carefulness. “You are my friend, Roger. My brother is dead, my sister a shrew, and I can no longer serve a queen I despise. If I stay in the palace one night longer, I will go mad. I have nowhere else to go except with you.”
Nowhere else to go
. I well understood that! Relief crept through me, warming as the ale. Maggie was my friend, she had nowhere else to go, and it had been deeply vain of me to suspect anything else. I would not entertain such vain thoughts again. Who was I, fool and murderer and homeless wanderer, that anyone should love me?
Still, I made one more attempt to dissuade Maggie from coming with me. “You said in the kitchen that leaving the palace was too dangerous for you to—”
“I meant danger to
you
, idiot!”
“That’s my concern, not yours!”
“It’s mine now,” she retorted, sounding again like the Maggie I knew: competent and scornful.
“Well, come on, then,” I said ungraciously, and after that neither of us spoke again. We sat, drinking slowly, while the alehouse emptied as the night wore on. I spent sixteen more pennies, the last ten for the serving woman to let us sleep beside the dying brazier. In the early morning we joined the laborers streaming over the east bridge, the men and women who would work for daily hire, planting and weeding the fields, then spend all they earned in the alehouses and cook shops of the city when night came. No one noticed us. We walked to the farthest of the village fields, where a cottage woman sold us as much bread, cheese, and dried meat as we could carry, plus a goatskin water bag, in exchange for a silver. Then we took the southeast road toward the coast.