As I neared the queen’s chamber, I came on the last of the fighting. A detachment of warriors stood in the courtyard, blocking the immense, carved wooden door to the presence chamber. Among them was Lord Solek.
“For Queen Eleanor!” cried a captain of the Blues. He and his men, six strong to Solek’s ten, were covered with drying soap scum. They charged forward with drawn swords. The warriors raised their
guns
and fired. The
bullets
went through the Blues and rang on the stone walls, a clear hard sound like the toll of a bell. A
bullet
bounced off the wall and past my ear, and I jumped behind the low wall of an ornamental fountain. Water spouted into the air and down on my head, washing away some of the soapy blood.
The savages fought hard. They fired their
guns
; their leather shields parried the sword thrusts; in close combat their curved short knives found the bodies of Blues again and again. Each time the knife sank into flesh and came out again, leaving no wound. The Blues grinned or yelled, and the warriors screamed back in their guttural language. The warriors landed more fatal blows, but “fatal” no longer had the same meaning. All meaning had been altered, as if the universe were no more than a tunic or gown that hadn’t fit properly. One by one the savage warriors fell, pierced by a sword in the belly or eyes or neck. A Blue clubbed a twitching warrior with the butt of the man’s own
gun
. Finally only Lord Solek was left alive, and I realized that the Blue captain must have planned it this way, giving his men orders to neither maim nor kill the usurper.
“My lord,” the captain sneered. His six men, all uninjured, stood grouped to one side. From the rest of the palace came shouts as the invincible soldiers cut down the rest of the savage army.
Lord Solek ignored the captain. The chieftain’s eyes found me, half hidden by the fountain wall. I stood. I would not cower under that contemptuous gaze.
Solek said something in his own language. Then, shockingly, he laughed. He said, “Boy . . . you win, yes? You win. Boy.” Again that laugh. Quicker than the eye could follow, he raised his short knife and hurled it, without the usual spin or change in stance. The knife flew threw the air.
I had raised my right arm—why? To ward off his gaze? To strike him from a distance of twenty feet away? There was sense to the action, but my arm was already coming up as he made his quick throw, and the knife found its mark on the wrist of my right hand. My blood spurted red onto the green tiles of the queen’s courtyard.
Dirt in my mouth, worms in my eyes . . .
I was crossing over
. Without will, without planning—that had not happened since my infancy. Was my mind, then, slipping backward—was I dying?
No no no no
some part of my mind shrieked. I did not want to die, not now, it was not time . . . Maggie! I wanted Maggie. More than anything in my life, I wanted to live long enough to rescue Maggie. That was my only hope for redemption.
I braced myself to land, dying, amid the shaking ground and stormy sky that I had created in the country of the Dead. Instead, I found myself in a landscape as tranquil and calm as the first time I had seen it. No storms, no earthquakes, no sky rent open by a terrible golden light that devoured . . . what? Nothing here was devoured; all was serene and unchanging, populated by the serene and unchanging Dead. The poison had been expelled from this place, the wrongness made right when the Blue army had taken away their unbelief, their in-between state of being dead without accepting death. Tranquility restored when I no longer meddled.
Why? How?
On the grass a little way from me, I saw Queen Eleanor, hands folded on her lap, sitting peacefully in the place where her throne room had been. Her blank eyes didn’t see me, or anything.
Then I was back in the courtyard of the palace, falling onto the tiles even as I saw Lord Solek’s body slashed to bloody ribbons by six swords at once, his blood flowing out toward the queen’s door.
The Blues pounded on the door. It did not give, but the intricate green tiles with which it was decorated shattered and fell in shards. Two more Blues entered the courtyard, dragging a man I recognized: the palace steward. His keys hung from his belt.
A sword at his throat, the steward fumbled with his keys. Then his silhouette dissolved, he vanished, and I stood in the tranquil country of the Dead, but only for a moment. Again I lay in the courtyard, unable to will myself to move.
Unable to will
. The savage knives, Lady Margaret had once said, were tipped with poison. Some poisons affected the mind as well as the body. Was that why I had twice been flung without volition into the country of the Dead? Even as this, my last coherent thought, came to me, my vision wavered again. Cleared, wavered, cleared one last moment.
The steward had found his key. But even before he could insert it into the lock, the door was flung open from within. Queen Caroline walked out of the chamber, her head held high. She wore the Crown of Glory, and in every line of her proud bearing was her refusal to be dragged into captivity but rather a choice to walk toward it. As she stepped over Lord Solek’s body, the jewels of her great crown caught the sunlight and blazed.
And from behind her rushed Maggie, unharmed, the last thing I saw before all went dark.
30
I WOKE IN
the last place I expected to be. Not in the bloody courtyard, not in the country of the Dead, not in a dungeon, not with Maggie. I woke in a small stone room I had never seen before. I was lying on a bed of straw. I was alone.
After all the killing and screaming, silence.
After dazzling spring sunlight and the bright flash of swords, pale gray light from a single tiny window in the wooden door.
After blood and torn flesh, some of it mine, poultices lay wrapped around my right hand. No pain there, only a soothing coolness. The stone room smelled of medicinal herbs and apples.
I struggled to sit up, but this was a mistake because it sent sharp pain stinging through my arm, worse when I gasped aloud. Slowly I lowered myself back onto the straw, surveying the room with only gentle, cautious turnings of my head.
The chamber was even smaller than I had thought, barely long enough for me to lie full-length, and even narrower in width. The stone floor was clean, and so was the straw I rested on, although fresh rat droppings lay against the opposite wall. The wall beside me felt cool and faintly damp; I was underground. There were no apples.
“Hello?” I called, but no one answered. I wasn’t sure I wanted anyone to answer. Was this a dungeon? I decided not. Dungeons must smell of piss, of blood, of despair. These stone walls bore no stains and no marks scratched by desperate men. So, not a dungeon.
I held my left hand, the one I had burned in the campfire, close to my face and studied it. The burn was nearly healed. A patch of new skin grew pinkly amid the rougher skin around it. However, my veins and bones stood out sharply, and my wrist looked thin and weak. I had lain here for quite a while—but then why wasn’t I hungry or thirsty? And where was I?
Time passed. Once or twice I called out again, but no one came.
Finally, for something to do, I unwrapped the bandages and poultices from my right hand, to see how much damage had been done by the knife Lord Solek had thrown in the last moments of his life. Poison on the blade had affected my will, I remembered that well enough, but my mind seemed all right now. What of my hand? The last of the bandages pulled free.
My hand was gone.
I stared at the stump of my wrist, where the skin had been wrapped and sewed as if I were not a man but a bolt of cloth. At the seam, my flesh puffed red and swollen, but without the black-green rot that kills. I had no fingers. No fingers, no fingernails, no palm, nothing to grasp a knife or a cup or a woman’s breast,
nothing—
I screamed, and kept on screaming until the door opened and a voice said severely, “Hush, Roger. Stop that right now.”
It was Mother Chilton.
She stood filling the doorway, blocking the sudden increase of light, until she knelt beside me. The door remained open. Her young-old face bent above me, her colorless eyes reflecting all light. “You must stay quiet.”
“My hand—”
“I know. I am sorry. If I hadn’t cut it off, you would have died.”
“
You
cut it off? But—”
“It was necessary. The black rot had set in. Lord Solek’s knife was tipped with poison.”
“But—my
hand
!” It came out a wail, like a six-year-old, and she frowned.
“It was only a hand,” she said severely. “You have another.”
The callousness and indifference of this shocked me into silence.
Only a hand
?
“Think what else you are, Roger. Now be quiet. I must go.” She rose.
“No, wait! Where am I? What is happening? Maggie—”
Her face softened. “Good. You can think about someone else. I’ll send Maggie to you. But be quiet until then.”
“Wait!”
But she did not. Instead she said something that made no sense: “You must never seek your mother.” The door closed, and I heard a key turn in the lock.
My mother? What did the witch know of my mother?
Witch. The word had come unbidden to my mind. But yes, of course, Mother Chilton was that thing I had never thought really existed: a witch. She did not have to be a witch to make a milady posset, or perhaps even to cut off my hand and drug me so that I felt no pain, but to know about my mother? And other things she had said to me, half forgotten but surely they had shown more knowledge than a natural person should possess?
“Sometimes none of us knows where we are. Or who.”
“You’ve already caused enough disturbance in the country of the Dead.”
“You know much, even more than you think, but you don’t know what Cecilia truly is . . . a pretty, empty-headed tinderbox that will ignite all.”
And so Cecilia had, and then had died for it. Twice. I stared at the stump of my wrist, and I waited for Maggie, and when she did not come, I went on staring at my maimed arm and silently, as quiet as instructed, I wept.
When Maggie did come, hours later, I had done weeping. Mother Chilton’s drugs, whatever they were, had begun to wear off. The stump that was my wrist had begun to throb, not yet a great deal but with promise of real pain to come. I was hungry, and I needed to piss. Carefully I got myself to my feet and used a corner of the room in near darkness, covering the wetness with a little straw. The last of the light faded. I sat in complete darkness, back against the stone wall, cradling my bandaged stump in my good right hand. Finally, a lifetime later, the lock rattled. The door opened.
“Roger? ”
Maggie came in with a lantern and a small sack. The lantern threw shadows on the stone wall, on the wooden door, on her. She wore a clean gown of rough blue wool.
Blue
. I had never seen her in anything but green. Her fair hair, short from its cutting when she pretended to be my brother, curled around her face. A huge bruise, turning all the colors of vegetables, swelled the left side of her face and closed her left eye.
“You’re hurt!” I said, the first thing that came to me. “Were you—”
“Tortured? No. This is nothing.” She set the lantern on the floor and sat beside my straw. The one gray eye that I could see studied me anxiously. “Does your hand hurt?”
“No,” I said bitterly. “It can’t hurt because it’s not there anymore.”
“Then does your wrist hurt?”
“Yes.”
“I brought you some more medicine from Mother Chilton. And some food.” She opened her sack.
I knocked it away, impatient with her stupidity. “I don’t care about food! What happened? That cursed witch cut off my hand—”
“She’s not a witch,” Maggie said levelly. “Only you are.”
That stopped me. Maggie stared at me with all her old disapproving severity, now decorated with fear—for this I had brought back an army from the country of the Dead? To rescue this girl, so that she could call me a witch?
“I’m not a witch. I’m a
hisaf
.”
She didn’t know the word, of course. The fear of me was still on her, but she continued. “Mother Chilton saved your life.”
“Maybe I wish she hadn’t.”
“Don’ttalklikethat.Didyou...Roger, was it you who...?”
I said simply, “Yes. To all of it.”
She twisted her hands—her two good hands—together tightly in her lap, and forced herself to go on. “You brought the Blues back from Witchland? That’s what the soldiers are saying. ‘Witchland,’ where the queen had sent them, when she made it look as if they had died. What we buried—the bodies—they were all false, sorcerous illusion. But not Richard. He was not among the Blues who returned from . . . from there.” Her voice broke. “The soldiers say the queen is a witch and you are, too. But I . . .”