Crossing Over - Anna Kendall [116]
They saw me and fell to their knees. I couldn’t bear to look at them. You will be gone before the full moon.
There were more soldiers at the river’s edge across from the laundries. They, too, fell on their knees to me. I walked past them, dropped the heavy shield and the boot—why was I carrying one boot? When had I picked it up? I couldn’t remember—and unlaced my own boots. These soldiers, so wrongly on their knees to the boy they wrongly perceived as their savior, either were guards or else they could not swim. I could swim. I waded into the wide, placid river and swam toward the palace.
Near the island, I swam through soap, which drifted outward in slow pools, stinging my eyes. Nearer still, and a thin river of red trickled toward me from under the palace wall. I thought at first it was dye, like the red dye on the face of Lord Solek’s singer, or the yellow dye on mine when I had been the queen’s fool. Then the trickle of red spread and widened and I saw that it was blood. I thrashed through the viscous, oily water, which grew redder and soapier when I swam beneath the wall and into the washroom where once, in another life, I had been a laundress. I swam into the laundry through a pool of soap scum and blood.
Joan Campford was there, standing in a corner, three girls cowering behind her. The girls shrieked as I broke the surface of the water, but Joan recognized me, even through a coating of soapy blood.
“Roger! What . . . how . . .”
In six strides I reached her and took her by the shoulders. Around me lay the bodies of Greens and of savage warriors, slumped by the wash pots and dye vats, floating in the water, sprawled by the fire pits. One man had landed, or been thrown, halfway into a pit and the smell of burning flesh reeked through the hot air. “Joan! Where is Maggie?”
It was the only time I ever saw Joan Campford speechless.
“Maggie Hawthorne! The kitchen maid I left the palace with—I know you heard!” Everyone always knows everything, Maggie had said to me once. The servant-gossip spiderweb of information.
Joan said in a low voice—as if we might be overheard by the dead!—“With the queen. The queen keeps her . . .”
Not in the dungeons. Not tortured. Not yet.
I tore from the room, running through the familiar courtyards. Bodies lay everywhere, none of them Blues. All were Greens or savage warriors, and many more savages than Greens. Had many of the Greens turned traitor at the last minute, joined the Blues against the queen? It seemed possible. Many of these men on opposite sides were kin to each other, like Maggie and her late brother, Richard, and none had any love for Lord Solek.
As I neared the queen’s chamber, I came on the last of the fighting. A detachment of warriors stood in the courtyard, blocking the immense, carved wooden door to the presence chamber. Among them was Lord Solek.
“For Queen Eleanor!” cried a captain of the Blues. He and his men, six strong to Solek’s ten, were covered with drying soap scum. They charged forward with drawn swords. The warriors raised their guns and fired. The bullets went through the Blues and rang on the stone walls, a clear hard sound like the toll of a bell. A bullet bounced off the wall and past my ear, and I jumped behind the low wall of an ornamental fountain. Water spouted into the air and down on my head, washing away some of the soapy blood.
The savages fought hard. They fired their guns; their leather shields parried the sword thrusts; in close combat their curved short knives found the bodies of Blues again and again. Each time the knife sank into flesh and came out again, leaving no wound. The Blues grinned or yelled, and the warriors screamed back in