Crossing Over - Anna Kendall [101]
“Can’t he say anything for himself?”
Jee blinked and said something. His voice was so thick, from accent or fear, that I couldn’t understand the words. But they made no difference anyway.
“Maggie, his father will come after him. Maybe even after you.”
“I told you, he went on a long hunt yesterday, just before you appeared. Jee says it will be at least three more days before he returns. By that time we’ll be far away, if we move faster. Here, eat this, and you will feel better.”
If we move faster. The only way we could move faster was if I didn’t spend most of the night moving Cecilia to match our daylight travels. But Cecilia was now a night’s worth of road ahead of us, and if we traveled for two days before I moved her again . . .
“Eat!” Maggie commanded, and I ate.
“What would we do with Jee? Later?”
“What will we do with ourselves?” she said. To which there was no answer. But Maggie was not the girl for no answers. “How much money do you have left?”
“Why?” I countered.
“Because we could maybe start a cookshop in some village at the edge of The Queendom, where Solek’s soldiers don’t go. He hasn’t got all that many soldiers, you know, not to post over the whole Queendom. If you have enough money left to rent some poor cottage and buy just a few vegetables to start, I could cook. Jee can hunt the meat, and we could sleep in the cottage at night. Later on, if we save money hard enough, we can add ale. Come on, Roger—eat.”
I ate. Her plan could work, maybe; we could survive with a small, poor cookshop far on a remote edge of The Queendom. I found I hated the idea. But why?
I didn’t know. A year ago, running a cookshop in a quiet village—away from Hartah, away from danger, away from having to cross over—would have seemed the best thing that ever happened to me. But not now. Things were different. I was different.
Different how? I didn’t know the answer to that, either. “You’ve grown, lad. You’re nearly a man,” Mother Chilton had said. But it was not that. All boys became men. All boys—
“What is the month and day?” I asked Maggie. She was efficiently stripping the rest of the rabbit meat from the bones and wrapping it in a clean cloth. She didn’t even have to ponder in order to answer me.
“Month of Sacter, tenth day.”
A month before the summer solstice. Today was my birthday. I was fifteen.
For two days we walked, camping nights as the moon again waxed toward full. Once, from the crest of a wooded hill, I glimpsed soldiers in the valley below. Looking for Cecilia? They would not find her now. The thought brought no comfort.
Jee said little, but without him we would have needed to buy food at houses or inns, both giving away our presence and depleting my coins. Jee, the child, was the only one of us who could hunt, and the snares he set each night produced a steady stream of rabbits. They were spring rabbits, without much meat on their bones, but Maggie roasted them with wild roots and newly budded herbs that she picked as we walked, and by the third day, I had strength enough to go back for Cecilia. When the others slept, I crossed over.
It was a long, weary walk to the windy hilltop where I had left Cecilia. She followed, unresisting, as I led her down the mountains. It was much more difficult here than in the land of the living because the ground shook so. Once it even shifted, an abrupt sideways jerk that threw us from our feet into a thicket of thorns. I rose bleeding and bruised. Cecilia rose with her green gown clean as ever, her creamy skin unscratched, her eyes blank. Above us the wind would not stop blowing, and thunder rumbled in streaky clouds.
I could not rouse Cecilia but I had roused the country of the Dead, turned it monstrous and deformed. This, too, was my fault.
The next night, I walked Cecilia past the place where Maggie and Jee lay asleep. Not much farther