Crossing Over - Anna Kendall [1]
“Today is the Stonegreen harvest faire,” Hartah said. “You will cross over.” Before he could say more, the inn door opened and four men entered. They were loud, laughing and joking, but no louder than the clamor in my head.
I can’t, I can’t, I can’t, I won’t—
But I knew I would.
“Brought your ram, then, Farlowe?” said one of the men. “Puny beast—no prize for you, I wager!”
“Seventeen stone if he’s a pound!”
“Pound of sagging skin and weak bones!”
Rough male laughter and cries of “Ale! Ale before the faire!”
The innkeeper’s wife came from the kitchen, Aunt Jo trailing meekly behind with Hartah’s breakfast. She didn’t meet my eyes. She knew, then, what Hartah would make me do this day, and how he would make me do it.
“Ale! Ale before the faire!”
“You shall have it, then,” the innkeeper’s wife said, a frothy mug in each hand and two more balanced on her meaty forearms. “And breakfast, too, if you’re with money, you scurrilous lot! Good morrow, Tom, Philip, Jack . . . Henry, where’s that pretty new wife of yours? When I was her age, I was never left alone in bed of a faire morning. Or did you wear her out before dawn?”
The youngest man blushed and looked proud. The others roared and teased him while the woman set down the ale. She was broad, red-faced, merry—everything my aunt was not. Aunt Jo set a wooden trencher of bread and cheese—no meat—in front of Hartah and backed quickly away. So cowed was she that she didn’t even realize he would hardly strike her here, in front of men whom he hoped to be selling to later in the day. Her thin body shuddered.
I felt no pity. Never once had she protected me from him. Never once. And there was no bread and cheese for me. Probably Hartah’s stolen coins were only enough for one.
The oldest of the laughing men glanced at me. Casually he flipped a penny onto the table. “Here, boy, water my horse and his burden, the ones with yellow ribbons, there’s a good lad.”
The penny landed midway between Hartah and me. I saw the muscles of his great shoulders shift, as if he meant to reach for it. But the older man watched us, and so Hartah merely nodded, as if giving permission. As if he were some sort of gracious lord—Hartah! Hatred burned behind my eyes. I snatched the penny and went outside.
The day was soft and clear, traces of the gold-and-orange sunrise still in the sky and the rough grass smelling of last night’s rain. I fetched water from the stable yard well both for the horse and for the ram tethered in the cart, its horns bright with yellow ribbons. More wagons pulled up to the inn, farmers arriving for the faire. Their cartwheels groaned under loads of vegetables, sheep, baskets, children. “The caravan comes! I saw it!” a child shrieked, leaning so far over the side of his wagon that he nearly fell out. “I saw it!”
“Hush your noise,” his young mother said fondly. She wore a lavender dress and lavender ribbons in her hair, and her hand strayed to stroke her little lad’s soft curls.
Bitterness ran through me like vomit.
Hartah would make me do it. He would make me cross over, lying concealed in the back of our worn and faded faire booth. That was why we had come here. And to make it happen, he would beat me first, as he had all the other times.
I was no longer six years old. I was fourteen, and as tall as Hartah. But I was skinny—how could I be otherwise, when I got so little to eat?—and narrow shouldered. Hartah could lift a cask of new ale on each shoulder and not even sweat. But now I had a penny. Could I run away on that? On a single penny and the memory of my dead mother in her lavender dress?
No. I could not. Where would I go?
And yet I dreamed of escape. Sometimes I gazed at Hartah and was frightened by the violence of my desire to do him violence. But Hartah had told me and Aunt Jo of finding the bodies of lone travelers on the roads of The Queendom, set upon by highwaymen, robbed and gutted. After such