The storm had, if anything, worsened. Lightning flashed over a river racing with evil-smelling rapids. The ground shook so much that it was hard to stand. Rain pelted my face, soaking through my clothing in just a few moments. I had appeared not far from a captain of the Blues, now on this side of the river. He rushed over and cried, “The witch’s captive! You’re back, boy! What news?”
I nodded. It was difficult to hear over the howling wind. Through the rain I saw that the army of dead Blues had swelled to many hundreds. Had Lord Solek killed all those who tried to rebel? It seemed likely, but I had no time to ask.
“The best news,” I shouted, my mouth close to the captain’s ear, “we are going back to The Queendom, to fight and take back our own.”
His face, streaked with rain, lit up. His lips pulled back, baring his teeth, and I almost quailed before the fierce light of hatred in his eyes.
“Aye, and in good time, boy! We have our battle plan at the ready. But something has happened to Witchland.” He waved his arm to indicate the entire landscape: roiling, quaking, stormy, withered, coming apart.
He did not know that what had happened to Witchland was me. I had interfered with the order of life and death. I had convinced large numbers of dead men that they were not really dead, preventing them from lapsing into the serene, waiting trance that was their natural next state. Worse, I had brought back Bat and then Cecilia to the land of the living. A
hisaf
could make that journey, but no one else should. Taking away the subjects of the country of the Dead had torn the very fabric of that sacred place.
And now I was going to rend it far more.
“Captain, bring all your men together in”—I grasped at a military term I had heard from the queen—“in close formation. Here, now. We must act quickly!”
“You have the amulet?”
Amulet? What amulet? Then I remembered: the amulet I had invented to save Cat Starling, the amulets I had told the soldiers to make. The captain’s hung from a string around his neck. Lies upon lies—and all necessary.
“Yes,” I cried over the wind, “I bring you the amulet, and much more besides! Order your men!”
It took only a few shouts before several hundred men lined up in neat rows on the shaking earth. I said, “They must hold onto each other around the waists, all together.”
The captain stared at me. Something flared in his eyes, anger mixed with sudden doubt. “These be soldiers, boy! They can’t fight like that! ”
“Not to fight. To leave Witchland. Or else they must stay here forever.”
He stared at me, and for a moment I thought he would not do it. But then he turned and gave the order. His dumbfounded men glanced at each other, scowled, muttered, glared at me—and one by one, each put his arms around the men closest to him, so that the neat rows became a vast, uncomfortable mass. “You too!” I said to the captain.
“No.”
I shrugged. “Then stay here.”
He swore and grabbed the man closest to him. I clutched at the captain, bit my tongue so hard that blood spurted into my mouth, and willed myself to cross over, with several hundred men fastened to me like weights, or leeches.
The sky shrieked and split open. Something roared out of the rent, something bright and terrible, just as the ground gave way beneath my feet. I was falling, I was being devoured by the bright monstrosity from the sky. . . .
And then I was in the grave, that in-between place of dirt in my mouth and worms in my eyes, of being imprisoned alive in my rotted body. . . . And this time,
I could not get free.
The weight of hundreds of men pulled at me, clawing and dragging. We would all stay here forever, trapped, neither dead nor alive. An eternity of the grave, with worms in my eyes and cold on my bones—
Oh, what had I done?
And still the earth held us, the barrier between the land of the living and the country of the Dead. The grave held my rotting flesh until death—the real thing—would have been welcome. I would just give up, surrender, let myself die—
No. I must save Maggie.
With a last tremendous effort of will, I concentrated upon reaching Maggie again.
Cross over, cross over, cross over for Maggie—
I tumbled onto the grass beside the placid blue river.
Desperately I gasped for air, the soldiers heaving and moaning beside me. Sensation returned: my arms were flesh, not rotting bones; my eyes brought vision, not maggots; my tongue could move, unchoked by fetid dirt. The weight of men no longer dragged at me. Had there been, it seemed to me now, even one more of them, I could not have made that horrendous crossing. Never again!
When I could stand, I looked for Jee, who was not there. He had stayed hidden as I’d instructed. As soon as he recovered, the captain barked orders and soon the army was in battle formation, swords drawn, shield at the ready. He spared me one glance.
“Thank you, boy. Now go.”
A single look can change worlds. Before the captain’s gaze returned to his men, it had gone from gratitude to distaste to dislike. I had brought him out of Witchland, but that meant I was a witch, and witches were to be feared. To be hunted. To be burned. The contradiction was more than the captain wanted to navigate. He wanted me away, so that he would not have to sail those treacherous moral seas.
I faded back into the trees until my back was at the thicket where Jee lay hidden. The Blues began to march toward the river. From below me came a sound. It might have been Jee, breathing “Roger?” It might have been the rustle of a rabbit, or a fox. Or a rat.
All these soldiers would die a second time. Like Bat’s and Cecilia’s, their renewed lives were illusory, temporary. In a fortnight—I had finally worked out in my mind the passage of days—they would disappear, burned horribly out of existence like wood that becomes smoke, dissipating on the very air. You could not make smoke become the oak or maple or cherry wood it had once been. And yet if I had not done this monstrous thing, what would have become of these soldiers in the country of the Dead? They did not inhabit it as the rest of the Dead did, waiting in tranced calmness. Already they were restless, bored, desperate. What would they have become in ten years’ time, twenty years, a century? I had seen Dead dressed in garments much more old-fashioned than that. And meanwhile, the presence of the restless soldiers, neither dead nor alive, would have gone on destroying that peaceful countryside beyond the grave.
My doing, all my doing. But this was no worse than the rest. As the soldiers marched toward the capital, I followed.
Green archers appeared on the ramparts of the city. Then Lord Solek’s warriors, each man with
gun
. I could see them clearly in the soft summer air, looking like tiny toys carved for children.
“Flank right!” the captain of the advancing Blues called. A detachment of soldiers, shields raised, moved off to the right. They would attack from the east, I guessed. The main army marched forward.
Now I could hear the iron gates to the city being lowered, loud scrapings of metal on metal in the winches. How would this army get into Glory? Not even battering rams would budge those gates. And all the soldiers were doing was marching straight forward. The Blues were locked out and outnumbered, both. And here, unlike in the country of the Dead, they could not just fly through the air.
“Boots off!” the captain called.
Boots off?
Each man propped his shield on the ground in front of him and kicked off his boots. The heavy boots, I could see now, had been left unlaced.
The main section of the army broke ranks and ran, following the small section that had deflected to the east. All at once I understood the captain’s plan. The east side of the city was where the laundry rooms and baths were located. These had been built out over the river, to let clean water flow in and out again, carrying soap and dirt downriver toward the sea. This was the first part of the palace I had ever seen, scrubbing myself clean after Kit Beale had brought me here. The attacking soldiers, who were from the palace and knew it as well as they knew their own bodies, would swim under the walls and take the palace from the inside. Solek had positioned his warriors and the queen’s Greens on the walls, for a more conventional attack. It would take them time to reach the laundry and the baths, with their myriad rooms for each rank of palace dweller, the laundries meanwhile defended only by the unarmed women who served there.
A cry of rage from the castle, and the Green archers let fly their arrows. The warriors fired their
guns
. And a silence fell, a silence of profound astonishment, of frightened disbelief. I stopped in the act of picking up a discarded boot, my body crouched, as silent as everyone else. We had all been struck dumb.
The arrows and the
bullets
from the
guns
had all passed through the bodies of the advancing Blues as if those bodies were so much air.
My mind raced. Had Cecilia—had I ever seen her fall, seen her injured, seen her so much as stub her toe on an inn table? No. I had not. I guarded her, hovered over her, kept her safe. Her body had been solid, yes, after I brought her back, but then it had been solid in the country of the Dead, too, as she lay unknowing in my arms. The bodies of the dead Blues had been solid, and of the dead warriors, and I had seen them fight with each other and the weapons pass right through them. But that had been on the other side! Here, the Blues were alive again. . . .
No. They were still dead. They were just dead here, in The Queendom of the living.
A great shout went up from the advancing army, part fear and part amazement. Then a din, a babble. I was too far behind to hear the words, but I could see the waving arms, the spreading grins. I did catch a word, then:
witch
. And half the men turned to where I stood.
Some actually knelt—in the middle of battle, with arrows and
bullets
passing through them!
“The amulet and more,”
I had said to the Blue captain. They thought this was the “more.” I had made them invincible.
Then the moment of silence, of obeisance in the midst of a lethal rain of weapons, was over. The Blues continued their dash toward the island. Some threw away their shields. Greens and warriors disappeared from the walls of the palace, presumably rushing down the stone staircases toward the east wall. I picked up a shield and followed slowly. Unlike the Blues, my body was vulnerable. I could be pierced. I could still die. By the time I reached the river, only a few Blues remained by it, as rear guards. I saw two of them running their swords through each other again and again, in wonderment that each time there was no blood, no pain, no death.
They saw me and fell to their knees. I couldn’t bear to look at them.
You will be gone before the full moon
.
There were more soldiers at the river’s edge across from the laundries. They, too, fell on their knees to me. I walked past them, dropped the heavy shield and the boot—why was I carrying one boot? When had I picked it up? I couldn’t remember—and unlaced my own boots. These soldiers, so wrongly on their knees to the boy they wrongly perceived as their savior, either were guards or else they could not swim. I could swim. I waded into the wide, placid river and swam toward the palace.
Near the island, I swam through soap, which drifted outward in slow pools, stinging my eyes. Nearer still, and a thin river of red trickled toward me from under the palace wall. I thought at first it was dye, like the red dye on the face of Lord Solek’s singer, or the yellow dye on mine when I had been the queen’s fool. Then the trickle of red spread and widened and I saw that it was blood. I thrashed through the viscous, oily water, which grew redder and soapier when I swam beneath the wall and into the washroom where once, in another life, I had been a laundress. I swam into the laundry through a pool of soap scum and blood.
Joan Campford was there, standing in a corner, three girls cowering behind her. The girls shrieked as I broke the surface of the water, but Joan recognized me, even through a coating of soapy blood.
“Roger! What . . . how . . .”
In six strides I reached her and took her by the shoulders. Around me lay the bodies of Greens and of savage warriors, slumped by the wash pots and dye vats, floating in the water, sprawled by the fire pits. One man had landed, or been thrown, halfway into a pit and the smell of burning flesh reeked through the hot air. “Joan! Where is Maggie?”
It was the only time I ever saw Joan Campford speechless.
“Maggie Hawthorne! The kitchen maid I left the palace with—I know you heard!”
Everyone always knows everything
, Maggie had said to me once. The servant-gossip spiderweb of information.
Joan said in a low voice—as if we might be overheard by the dead!—“With the queen. The queen keeps her . . .”
Not in the dungeons. Not tortured. Not yet.
I tore from the room, running through the familiar courtyards. Bodies lay everywhere, none of them Blues. All were Greens or savage warriors, and many more savages than Greens. Had many of the Greens turned traitor at the last minute, joined the Blues against the queen? It seemed possible. Many of these men on opposite sides were kin to each other, like Maggie and her late brother, Richard, and none had any love for Lord Solek.