Crossing Over - Anna Kendall [110]
“You’re not listening!”
“I’m sorry, my lady.”
I plodded on, toward the spring faire. Where I would set Cecilia in some cool grove or on a bench on some village green, and I would try to do what I had vowed to never do again. To be what Hartah had made me: a liar and cheater in two countries, here and there.
But Cecilia and I never reached Ablington. We never reached anywhere at all.
It happened at dusk of the next day, beside a campfire over which I toasted the last of our bread, wishing instead for one of Jee’s rabbits. Cecilia sat combing her hair with the enameled comb I had bought her. The hair rippled and shone in the firelight, glinting in a hundred shades of honey, cinnamon, gold, bronze, amber, copper, chestnut. The dusk deepened her green eyes to the color of emeralds.
“Why are you looking at me that way?” A tiny half smile at the corners of her mouth.
“Because you are the most beautiful thing I have ever seen, Cecilia.”
“You should call me ‘my lady.’ Don’t become so familiar, Roger! ”
She was not teasing. Firelight flickered over the enameled comb that I could not afford, the bread of which I would give her more than half although my stomach rumbled with hunger, my fur-lined cloak that she sat upon. There rose in me an anger I had not known I felt, had not known I could feel. Not toward her.
I said, my voice low and careful, “Perhaps the circumstances justify my familiarity.”
“No,” she said with sweet certainty. “No, that cannot be, Roger. You know that. I am a lady, and you are the queen’s fool.”
“Out here there is no queen, and no fool.” And you are alive only because of me. Made alive, kept alive.
“But they exist, nonetheless.” She shook her head at me playfully, and her beautiful hair shimmered and danced.
“But things can change.”
“Why should they? Anyway, that doesn’t change.”
“Why not? Why are differences in rank never to change, when all else has changed in The Queendom, in the world? Why is that one thing the same?”
“It just is.” She smiled at me. The smile of a lady toward a fool. She resumed her combing.
I said, “No.”
“No what?”
“No, Cecilia.”
Her smile disappeared. She said coldly, “You are impertinent, Roger. Apologize at once.”
I got to my feet. Why? I had no idea. But I stood looking down at her in the firelight: Cecilia, beautiful and dirty, exasperating and desired, enchanting and stupid. I said, “I will not apologize.”
Her face began to break up. For the briefest part of a moment I thought my words had caused it, thought that her features were merely sliding into anger. Not so.
“Cecilia!”
The skin softened on her face, even as her mouth opened in a silent scream. Her nose, mouth, cheeks turned black—rotting. Her body slumped sideways as the bones crumbled. A terrible stink rose on the night air. Her eyes melted, staring at me—and then, just like that, nothing remained but a heap of clothing.
“Cecilia! My lady!” I threw myself on the ground, rooting through her cloak and her gown and even her shoes as though I could find some trace of her. There was nothing, not even a strand of her hair. Not even a fingernail. All gone with her—where ?
I howled like an animal but I didn’t hesitate. The fire was nearest; I used the fire. Thrusting my left hand into the embers, still crying her name, I crossed over.
She was not there.
The sky snapped and growled and poured rain in the country of the Dead; the ground shook; the Dead sat tranquilly amid the chaos. But I could not find Cecilia. I roused old women and shook them, demanding information. I tripped over rocks and bushes and bodies, searching in the windy storm. I looked in thickets, in groves, behind boulders, in ravines where the rock walls threatened to tumble down and crush me. She was not there.
Not in the land of the living, not in the country of the Dead.
“He was just gone,” the innkeeper’s wife had said of Bat.
I threw back my head and howled at the stormy sky. I beat my hands on a boulder.