Read Crossing Over Online

Authors: Anna Kendall

Crossing Over (32 page)

For what seemed like hours, I walked the plain of Soulvine Moor, struggling to stay upright on the shaking ground, ignoring the churning skies, stooping to study face after face until my knees hurt and my back ached. Still I looked. I saw old men and women, some dressed in weird clothing from long, long ago. A few of the old women looked as if they might talk to me if I roused them, but I moved on. I saw young men and women, many of the men in armor from different ages. I saw children and babies. I saw the Dead, none of whom bore signs of violence or illness, although they must have died from violence or sickness or accident or childbirth. But not, anywhere, my mother.
And then my heart stopped. I saw Cecilia.
She sat quietly, more quietly than I had ever seen her in life, amid a patch of waist-high purple flowers. Most of the flowers had withered. The wind whipped their stems and brown petals against her skin, but she didn’t notice. Cecilia stared calmly at the rumbling ground.
“Cecilia! ”
I stumbled over to her. She didn’t look up, not even when I grabbed her, pulled her to her feet, and crushed her to me. She didn’t seem to notice.
“Cecilia—no!
No
!”
I kissed her lips, as I had longed to do for so many months. I kissed her eyes, her breast, her fragrant hair. Nothing roused her. She stood docilely, unresisting even when, in anguish and despair, I shook her hard enough to make her hair whip around her quiet face. It made no difference. She was dead.
I had failed to find her, to protect her, to keep her safe as I had once promised. Sobbing into her neck, I clutched her as she stood unknowing, all life and joy and playfulness gone. But when I finally led her forward by the hand, she walked after me, looking at nothing, or else looking at whatever the Dead see in their long trance. “Cecilia . . . I will find a way to rouse you. I
will!
”
She said nothing.
“I’m going to take you to . . . to somewhere else. Maybe once you’re away from Soulvine—!”
That made no sense. The Dead of Soulvine were the same as the Dead of everywhere else. But I was beyond sense. The only thing I could think to do was to get Cecilia away from here, back to the Unclaimed Lands, back to The Queendom, where I had known her before. It was a stupid, insane idea, but because it was the only thing I could think of to do, I started to do it. I led Cecilia forward, by her limp hand.
We threaded our way among the uncaring Dead, over the quivering ground, against the strong and unearthly wind. Her hair blew loose in wild tendrils. I stumbled, and when I stumbled, Cecilia went down, too. Then I hauled her up and we kept going.
The border was not far; I had walked it just last night, with the men of Soulvine. Just before I reached it, I tripped over another stone and fell heavily on top of one of the Dead.
“Alghhh! Leave me be!”
It was an old woman. I had roused her with a sharp elbow jab to her chest. She glared at me with indignation and fury.
“I’m sorry—”
She looked closer. “What be you doing, boy? Oh! You be ... Oh! A
hisaf
!”
She knew what I was.
The next moment she looked around. Her old face, already a mass of deep wrinkles, wrinkled even more. “I ... be dead?”
“Yes,” I said. I had scrambled off her and now sat on the ground, Cecilia standing docilely above us, gazing at nothing. The old woman said, “But I cannot die.”
I snapped, “Everyone dies!”
“No. I drew the strength from other souls.”
All at once she, this dead woman of Soulvine, was everything that had happened to me since I entered both Soulvine Moors, the living and the dead. She was my capture by the men, she was the smoky windowless room covered with earth, as if the feasters were already in a grave. She was whatever drug had been thrown on the fire to alter my mind, sending it between drowsiness and painful sharpness. She was the green-eyed old man who made me cross over, and she was the insane beliefs that had killed Cecilia. I looked at this old woman, and hatred for all of it tore through me, bright and terrible as the lightning flashes splitting the sky. I seized her slight body and shook it like a dog with a rat.
“You ‘drew no strength’ from anything, you evil old woman! There is no strength to be drawn from murdering others, and there is no living forever! You are dead, dead, dead, just like all the others here! You and all the other murderers in Soulvine killed foreigners for nothing! You killed Cecilia, didn’t you? And all for a stupid and pointless ceremony that gained you nothing! Nothing! Nothing! There is no way to gain anything from the souls of the Dead!”
She gazed at me without fear. She said simply, “You be wrong, boy. We can gain the strength. From the souls of the outborn. From the betrayers who left.”
She moved her gaze from me to Cecilia.
“Strength from her.”
26
 
I HAD THOUGHT
I knew what horror was. I was wrong.
The girl with the bowl of food, she of the green eyes, offering me only bread but the others stew—
I couldn’t speak. Revulsion held me. But I could kill, and I beat on the old woman with both my fists, kicked her with my hard-toed boots, slammed her head again and again to the ground. She looked at me with bewilderment and then with anger, but without either pain or fear. I couldn’t hurt her. She felt alive under my hands, but she was not.
“Leave off, boy!” the old woman finally spat at me, got to her feet, and stalked off. A few feet away she sat on a rock and lapsed into the serene trance of the Dead.
“Cecilia,” I said, seizing her hands in mine, “What they did—I didn’t get there in time to save you from—
Cecilia
—”
She could not hear me.
“They take the souls of the dead”
Maggie had said to me, all those months ago, but she had not said how. And I had not believed her anyway. I was a fool. I was a hundred times a fool, and I had failed Cecilia, whom I had vowed to keep safe.
I had to get out of Soulvine Moor. I could not stay to search for my mother, I could not stay for anything, I could not stay one more second. The need to leave,
now
, was the only thing that saved me. It was something, at any rate. It was action, motion of legs and lungs and back. I grabbed Cecilia’s hand and dragged her forward, both of us stumbling on the quivering ground as the lightning flashed overhead, until I was out of breath. Gasping, panting, I ran on.
But even then, I knew I could not outrun Soulvine Moor.
 
 
After I could run no longer, I walked. I walked for long, insane hours. I grew bruised from falls, dirty and sweaty and weak. Cecilia stayed unscratched, clean and unresisting, her hair fragrant as rainwater. She would walk as long as I led her, and not know she was doing it.
I kept trying to rouse her, doing everything I could. I kissed her, I shook her, and once, in frustration too great to bear, I threw her to the ground. She did not rouse. Overhead, the storm continued to threaten without ever breaking. The ground shook without ever shattering. The wind blew without ever bringing rain. And Cecilia and I walked north until I recognized the hollow and the high, sparse waterfall where Jee’s hut stood in the country of the living. The cabin was not there, of course, and the hollow was littered with the usual Dead. But it was across the border. We were out of Soulvine Moor and into the Unclaimed Lands.
Somewhere around here, in the country of the living was Maggie. Unless she had gone back to The Queendom.
I’d had an insane hope that once off Soulvine Moor, Cecilia might rouse. She did not. I was so exhausted I could barely see her. “My lady, I must sleep.”
No answer.
I found us shelter from the wind beneath a stand of pine trees. Cecilia sat where I placed her. I lay on the cold and shaking ground and slept, something I had never done before in the country of the Dead. As I slipped into darkness, I was afraid that I would not wake. If you slept while here, did you die? Was the little death of sleep a passageway to the final sleep?
Almost I hoped it was. If I died, I would become like the Dead, unremembering of what had happened in Soulvine. I saw then what I had not seen before: that the lack of memory among the Dead might not be a curse but a blessing.
However, sleep didn’t kill me. Eventually I woke, crying out and clutching for Cecilia. She was where I had left her. I was dizzy when I stood up.
I needed more than rest. My body here was a real body, and so was my body there. Days might have passed since I crossed over. Never had I stayed here so long, and I was weak from lack of food. The body I had left in the round, windowless room on Soulvine Moor—how long could it last without food or water? What might the men and women of Soulvine do to it if I did not return soon?
I could not rouse Cecilia, but I could talk to her, desperate talk for a desperate situation. “My lady, I have a plan.”
She stared at the ground, her face expressionless.
“I am going to take you back to The Queendom. We will find a place, somewhere beautiful and far away from here. By the river, maybe, or the sea. Somewhere peaceful and sweet.”
But was there anyplace like that, in this changed country of the Dead that I myself had caused to change? So much I had done wrong, so much I had failed at. But there must be someplace less damaged than the rest, some peaceful haven somewhere, and I would find it for Cecilia.
“But first,” I told her, “I must leave you here and cross back over. I’m getting weak, here and there. After I cross over, I’ll be back at . . . at ...” I couldn’t say it aloud:
Soulvine Moor
. “Back
there
. But as soon as I can, I will leave, go to where I have left you, and cross back again. And then—”
And then what? Cecilia would still be dead. But I couldn’t think about that, any more than I could think, after my sleep, about what had been done in Hygryll. There are things the mind refuses. I understood now why Maggie and the other servants would not even name Soulvine Moor.
Cecilia stared calmly at the bed of pine needles beneath us.
I couldn’t leave her, not yet. So I stayed for hours more in that same mountain hollow by the little waterfall, within sight of Jee’s family’s Dead. I was too weak to walk. I pulled Cecilia down to me and lay with her in my arms, and I talked to her. I sang to her. I fed the pathetic illusion that she knew I was there. If I hadn’t done those things, I don’t think I could have gone on at all.
Finally I kissed her unresponsive lips, bit hard on my tongue, and found myself in the stone room in Hygryll.
 
All the men and women remained in the stone hut. For a crazy moment I thought they had all died: They sat in the unresisting trance of the Dead. But as I struggled to sit up, my head spinning, people stirred. I remembered, then, the gray fog of not-persons that had crossed over with me, and that had remained in that other Hygryll when I had fled. These monstrous people had somehow, in some thin and weird form, crossed over with me. Now they were returning to themselves, even as I was.
I loathed them. If I could have, I would have murdered them all, tortured them as Queen Caroline had once threatened to torture me.
The old man said humbly, “Thank you,
hisaf
.”
It took every ounce of strength I had left, but I staggered to my feet, made my way among the weary bodies, and pushed aside the door flap.
Spring afternoon on the moor. Sunshine washed the air with gold. The small purple flowers bloomed and birds sang and the moss was springy—and not shaking—beneath my feet. I sat, too weak to go farther, and ordered myself to not cry.
No tears
.
A girl, the same girl with green eyes and brown hair, brought me a goatskin of water and another loaf of bread. I ate it all. Then I lay facedown on the peat and slept.
For the rest of the day and all the next day, plus two nights, I did not move. The girl brought me food and water. At night someone tucked furs around me. No one tried to talk to me. The nights were sharp and cold, and someone built a fire beside me and tended it all night. I slept, and I ate, and it was the great mercy of my life—its only mercy, it seemed to me—that I did not dream.

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