Crossing Over - Anna Kendall [112]
“Rough, big soldiers,” the child said, and began to cry. “With green clothes and feathers. They took her.”
The queen’s soldiers.
“They be looking for you,” Jee sobbed. “They asked Maggie about you. They took her to the whore-queen!”
Me. Maggie had been taken because the queen was looking for Roger Kilbourne, or Lord Solek was, but I guessed it was Her Grace. A desperate Queen Caroline had discovered that I had left the capital with Maggie, and the queen needed me back to use in whatever was her latest desperate bid for power. And once the queen decided she needed something, nothing stopped her from getting it. If Maggie didn’t tell the queen where she had last seen me, Queen Caroline would torture it out of her. Even if Maggie did tell, she might be tortured for anything else she might know.
Maggie, in those instruments of pain I had heard existed but had never allowed myself to imagine before. I imagined them now. The rack, the nails, the red-hot pincers . . .
Slowly I sat up. Maggie, who had always been a better friend to me than I deserved. I would not fail yet another person. “Stop crying,” I ordered Jee, more harshly than one should speak to a grieving child. “Stop it right now. We have to go after Maggie.”
The child, raised with a brutal father in the wild Unclaimed Lands, stopped crying at once. His eyes grew huge in his tear-tracked face. “G-go after Maggie? We uns?”
“Yes,” I said grimly. “We uns.” Everything that had happened in the last months shifted in my mind, assuming different shapes. Like stones seen under water, shifting with the changing light.
“H-how? ”
“Leave that to me.”
Jee would not have been Jee if he had done that. “Ye have a plan?”
“Yes,” I said, astonished to realize that yes, I did have a plan. And I was willing to bring down two realms to carry it out.
I washed and bandaged my hand. Jee had brought food, and we ate it for strength. We traveled by night, both of us on Cecilia’s donkey, Jee’s slight body adding nearly nothing to the weight the beast had to carry. Still, the donkey, being a donkey, protested and refused to move. I beat it with a stick, whacking it across the nose so hard that it startled and then trotted forward. I had never beaten an animal before in my life.
We traveled all night. The moon waned, but the stars were clear and high. Because I didn’t know this countryside, I was forced to backtrack to the fishing village where I had heard about Bat and then take the coastal road toward the mouth of the River Thymar. In this flatter, softer countryside, the road was well marked. The donkey plodded on, hour after hour. Jee clung to my waist, saying nothing. Perhaps he was asleep. So long as he did not fall off, I looked no closer.
My burned hand sent shards of pain through me. The pain formed its own rhythm, out of time with the clopping of the donkey, and both a dissonance with the images that flashed through my brain, one at a time, with all the power and brilliance and horror of lightning that strikes and chars living flesh.
Cecilia, combing her hair in the firelight just before—
Maggie, kneading bread and smiling at me in the servants’ kitchen—
My mother in her lavender gown—
Cecilia—
Maggie—
Slowly something happened to my pain. My pain, my grief, my guilt. They stopped sending me images and instead shrank inside me, growing hard and sharp, until they settled in my chest like the spiked metal ball at the end of a soldier’s mace. I knew that spiked ball would be there forever. But the shrinking let me go on, and I had a battle to wage.
We traveled by night, hid and slept by day, pushed the poor donkey to its full protesting endurance. On this well-traveled road we didn’t dare risk a fire, but nights were warmer now. Without Jee, I could not have done this. There was no time to stop and snare rabbits that we couldn’t have cooked anyway, but he knew how to spot buried nuts, spring berries, edible roots. I was always hungry. But finally I was here, in a grove of trees just downriver from the capital. I could see the tower where