Crossing Over - Anna Kendall [111]
You could not cheat death. Not for more than a few weeks, which was no time at all. Death always won.
It was morning in The Queendom when I finally crossed back over, a morning fresh with birdsong and golden dawn. The fire was long since out. I sat beside it, too anguished to tend my burned hand, too anguished even to sob.
Cecilia was gone. She no longer existed, not anywhere, in any form. Whatever the serene Dead were waiting for, there in that other country, Cecilia would never find it. This, then, was why hisafs did not cross over with their beloved Dead. By bringing my lady over, I had killed her more completely than the people of Soulvine Moor ever did. I, Roger Kilbourne, hisaf.
Roger Kilbourne, the fool to end all fools.
29
I HAD NOT KNOWN before that there are fates worse than dying, or places worse than the country of the Dead. I knew it now.
It’s hard for me to remember what I did that morning of despair, or that afternoon, or that evening. I know I didn’t eat, because there was no food. I know I didn’t tend to my burned hand because my charred fingers blackened and blistered. The blisters burst, spilling pus and blood. Did I sit beside the dead fire, numb for all those long hours? Did I scream or cry? I don’t know, and may never know. Those hours are as lost to me as was Cecilia, gone to the same dark place of anguish and utter hopelessness.
I had killed her. I must die for it.
That was the thought that brought me back to life, if life it could be called. I seized on the thought as if it would save me. I could die, and then in the country of the Dead I would come to oblivion. I would be like the rest of the Dead, serene and mindless and free of pain, sitting tranquilly on the tranquil land—
Except that the country of the Dead was no longer tranquil. And not all the Dead waited in mindless serenity. The soldiers of the Blues. Cat Starling. They had not believed they were dead, and so retained their former selves. And I, too, knew that death was not final, that it was possible to move and think and live on the far side of the grave. So would I, a hisaf, remain aware—perhaps for all eternity?
An eternity of remembering what I had done to Cecilia. Remembering here, or remembering there. No difference.
Death was not a way out. Not for me.
Nonetheless, I think I might have done it, just to do something, anything, to bring change to the despair that felt unendurable. My bowels and liver crawled in my body, seeking to get away from me. My eyes burned, hating that they must live in my head. My hands, burned and unburned, clenched into fists and yearned to beat my body into unconsciousness. I could not hold together, could not live with myself, could not endure another moment of this horror—
But the moment existed.
Then another moment.
And another—
“Roger! ”
And another—
“Roger! Stop!”
And another. I attacked my enemy, who was myself. I flailed at him, charged him with deadly accuracy—
A kick to my burned hand sent me yowling in pain. My other hand dropped the knife. It was snatched from the ashes of the fire. A smell, another kick, and then a voice, young and high and frightened—
“Roger! Stop! What be ye doing?”
Jee. His skinny form emerged from the evening gloom—how had it become evening again?—at a wary distance. When I went motionless, he crept closer.
“What be ye doing? Stop that!”
“Jee—”
“Aye. I could hear ye a mile off.”
“Jee.”
“Aye! Yer hand—”
All at once my burned hand seemed on fire. The pain was unendurable, and I think it was the pain that brought me back to myself. There was no room for anything but the searing pain, and for what Jee said next.
He squatted beside me, peering into my face, his own in the same anguish as mine. I had not known before that the anguish of others can push away our own. Not completely—never that—but enough to survive. Jee was in that kind of anguish. Had he not been, I doubt he could have reached me at all.
“It be Maggie,” he said. “Soldiers took her.”
“Took her? What