Crossing Over - Anna Kendall [106]
Next I found a stream, bathed, and washed my clothes, longing for the strong soap in Joan Campford’s laundry. The stream, racing down from the mountains, was so cold that I yelled when I first ducked into it and the icy water hit my privates. Nonetheless, I scrubbed myself with gravel until my skin was red. I wanted to be clean for Cecilia.
When I and my clothes had been dried by the bright sun, I ran my fingers through my hair to comb it and shaved my face with my little knife, a business that resulted in blood I then had to stanch. When all this was done, I picked a bouquet of spring flowers and a clutch of wild strawberries, made my way back to the cabin in the clearing, and crossed over.
For a long, terrible moment, I thought I was back at the wreck of the Frances Ormund.
Rain lashed my face, so hard and thick that I could barely see. Rain, in the country of the Dead! The storm blew me sideways, off my feet. I picked myself up and groped my way across the clearing, calling, “Cecilia! Cecilia!”
A tree crashed to the ground, barely missing me. I couldn’t find her. The howling wind whipped my cries away as soon as I uttered them—and why was I calling her anyway? She could not hear me, could not respond. . . . Where was she? What if the country had stretched, as it so often did, so that the clearing was not here but miles away . . . in all this pelting rain. . . . Crack! Lightning hit the ground a league away, deafening me.
But this storm, like those on the other side, waxed and waned. During a lull, when the wind and rain abated a little and the lightning moved off, I could see better. The Dead were still here, sitting or lying on the trembling ground, serene amid the chaos. I stumbled over an old man, who roused enough to snap something at me in an unknown tongue before returning to his eerie calm. There, ahead . . . But no, it was another girl in green, sitting beside a small child. . . .
Then I saw her.
Cecilia sat tranquilly at the very edge of the cliff above the sea. She could not have moved, so the cliff must have. Her green dress was as sodden as Mistress Conyers’s had once been, as sodden as if Cecilia herself had been in a shipwreck. Her rich hair whipped in the wind, long tendrils writhing like snakes. I lurched forward and snatched her back from the cliff edge.
The sea below boiled. The rocks were hidden by surf and spray and rain. If there were figures on the beach below— Hartah, Captain James Conyers, my aunt Jo—I could not see them. I did not want to see them. I clamped my teeth hard enough on my tongue to bring blood, and with Cecilia in my arms, I crossed back over.
Another crossing that seemed to go on and on, with dirt filling my mouth and the sockets of my eyes, so that I could not see the soft body I clung to so ferociously. But it was not soft, it had turned as skeletal and bony as my own, both of us were trapped here forever in the grave—
Then I was over, and she was with me.
We lay at the top of the cliff above the beach, in a tangle of spring weeds. Cecilia went very still in my arms. Her green eyes blinked: once, twice. A puzzled expression settled on her features like mist on glass. Then she jumped up, looked around, and began to scream.
“Cecilia, no! It’s all right, it’s all right! Cecilia!”
She stopped screaming but backed away from me, clutching her wet skirts, her eyes wide and terrified. “Roger! Where am I? What have you done?”
And then I saw the moment that memory returned in full. What was she seeing? The round stone house in Hygryll—or had her murder happened somewhere else? How had they killed her? Had she—
Cecilia’s eyes rolled back in her head and she crumpled to the ground.
I wasn’t in time to catch her. She fell facedown, and for a long terrible moment I thought I had lost her again. But she breathed. I rolled her over, laid her head on my lap, and