Crossing Over - Anna Kendall [117]
“My lord,” the captain sneered. His six men, all uninjured, stood grouped to one side. From the rest of the palace came shouts as the invincible soldiers cut down the rest of the savage army.
Lord Solek ignored the captain. The chieftain’s eyes found me, half hidden by the fountain wall. I stood. I would not cower under that contemptuous gaze.
Solek said something in his own language. Then, shockingly, he laughed. He said, “Boy . . . you win, yes? You win. Boy.” Again that laugh. Quicker than the eye could follow, he raised his short knife and hurled it, without the usual spin or change in stance. The knife flew threw the air.
I had raised my right arm—why? To ward off his gaze? To strike him from a distance of twenty feet away? There was sense to the action, but my arm was already coming up as he made his quick throw, and the knife found its mark on the wrist of my right hand. My blood spurted red onto the green tiles of the queen’s courtyard.
Dirt in my mouth, worms in my eyes . . . I was crossing over. Without will, without planning—that had not happened since my infancy. Was my mind, then, slipping backward—was I dying? No no no no some part of my mind shrieked. I did not want to die, not now, it was not time . . . Maggie! I wanted Maggie. More than anything in my life, I wanted to live long enough to rescue Maggie. That was my only hope for redemption.
I braced myself to land, dying, amid the shaking ground and stormy sky that I had created in the country of the Dead. Instead, I found myself in a landscape as tranquil and calm as the first time I had seen it. No storms, no earthquakes, no sky rent open by a terrible golden light that devoured . . . what? Nothing here was devoured; all was serene and unchanging, populated by the serene and unchanging Dead. The poison had been expelled from this place, the wrongness made right when the Blue army had taken away their unbelief, their in-between state of being dead without accepting death. Tranquility restored when I no longer meddled.
Why? How?
On the grass a little way from me, I saw Queen Eleanor, hands folded on her lap, sitting peacefully in the place where her throne room had been. Her blank eyes didn’t see me, or anything.
Then I was back in the courtyard of the palace, falling onto the tiles even as I saw Lord Solek’s body slashed to bloody ribbons by six swords at once, his blood flowing out toward the queen’s door.
The Blues pounded on the door. It did not give, but the intricate green tiles with which it was decorated shattered and fell in shards. Two more Blues entered the courtyard, dragging a man I recognized: the palace steward. His keys hung from his belt.
A sword at his throat, the steward fumbled with his keys. Then his silhouette dissolved, he vanished, and I stood in the tranquil country of the Dead, but only for a moment. Again I lay in the courtyard, unable to will myself to move.
Unable to will. The savage knives, Lady Margaret had once said, were tipped with poison. Some poisons affected the mind as well as the body. Was that why I had twice been flung without volition into the country of the Dead? Even as this, my last coherent thought, came to me, my vision wavered again. Cleared, wavered, cleared one last moment.
The steward had found his key. But even before he could insert it into the lock, the door was flung open from within. Queen Caroline walked out of the chamber, her head held high. She wore the Crown of Glory, and in every line of her proud bearing was her refusal to be dragged into captivity