Crossing Over - Anna Kendall [103]
Maggie did not seem confused. She never hesitated. Keeping her face turned away from me, she started down the track. When I ran to catch up with her, she pushed me away, hard.
I caught up with her a third time, grabbed her hand, and pressed into it three of the six silver coins I had left. Again she pushed me away. When I got back to my feet, she had marched ahead. But the coins were not among the weeds on the track; I looked. She had kept them.
Well, she had earned them.
I watched her until she was out of sight. But I didn’t follow her. I couldn’t—I was too weary from my night in the country of the Dead. I had to sleep now, to keep my strength up. For Cecilia.
I found a hidden thicket alive with tender green-yellow leaves, crawled under it, and fell asleep in the sweet warm sunshine.
When I woke, at dusk, I crossed over again. Jee had not returned to me, either, which did not surprise me. It was Maggie whom the child had followed, Maggie who had shown him the only real kindness the poor little rat had ever known. Maggie, who loved me, and whose love I could not return.
Why not? something whispered inside me. I silenced it. Then, still in my thicket, I crossed over. But this time, I had a desperate, hopeful, insane plan.
27
IT WAS THE PLACE I had left Cecilia that had started me thinking. She was still there, where the mountainside abruptly descended and the land lay spread to the gaze for miles and miles. I had recognized part of that landscape, far below me and above the sea cliffs. It was the clearing where the old queen’s Blues had hung the yellow-haired youth, and the second noose had dangled, awaiting me. Below the cliff at the clearing’s end was the little beach where Hartah and his cohorts had wrecked the Frances Ormund.
I took Cecilia by the hand and led her toward that distant clearing. Each time I could go no farther, I left her and returned to my tranced body in some thicket or sheltered ditch. I slept, bought food as I could, and grew so haggard and filthy that farmwives began giving me bread, from pity. The moon again passed full and began to wane. Each time, I stayed in the land of the living only until my strength had returned, strength that I used only to walk forward to where I had left Cecilia, cross over, and journey with her again. No moon here, only the gray sky shot with flashes of lightning, the storm that never broke, the rumbling earth. Always Cecilia and I moved lower in the mountains, toward the valley where The Queendom lay.
What can I say of those days of walking with Cecilia in that country that had no days, nor any nights? The ground trembled, the sky rumbled, and she did not really know I was there. Yet that time held a wild sweetness for me. Each time I took Cecilia’s hand, put my arm around her slim waist, drew her to lie next to me on the withered ground, feelings surged through me, and none of the feelings fit with any other. I could never have held this woman, a lady, in my arms under any other circumstance. I loved her. And in the round stone house on Soulvine Moor they had—
Whenever that memory assaulted me, I babbled. “Cecilia, I’m so sorry, I didn’t reach you in time, I promised to keep you safe and I failed—I’ll make it right for you, for us, I promise, I promise—” And I pressed her to me, and smelled the light flowery scent of her hair, which never changed, and a kind of despairing joy came over me, gone the next moment in a wash of black guilt.
And yet what I remember is the joy.
I don’t know how many days passed this way, but eventually we reached, each in our own country, the cliff above that rocky beach.
In the land of the living, the cabin still stood, deserted and infested with spiders and mice. The yellow-haired youth’s body had disappeared