Crossing Over - Anna Kendall [118]
And from behind her rushed Maggie, unharmed, the last thing I saw before all went dark.
30
I WOKE IN the last place I expected to be. Not in the bloody courtyard, not in the country of the Dead, not in a dungeon, not with Maggie. I woke in a small stone room I had never seen before. I was lying on a bed of straw. I was alone.
After all the killing and screaming, silence.
After dazzling spring sunlight and the bright flash of swords, pale gray light from a single tiny window in the wooden door.
After blood and torn flesh, some of it mine, poultices lay wrapped around my right hand. No pain there, only a soothing coolness. The stone room smelled of medicinal herbs and apples.
I struggled to sit up, but this was a mistake because it sent sharp pain stinging through my arm, worse when I gasped aloud. Slowly I lowered myself back onto the straw, surveying the room with only gentle, cautious turnings of my head.
The chamber was even smaller than I had thought, barely long enough for me to lie full-length, and even narrower in width. The stone floor was clean, and so was the straw I rested on, although fresh rat droppings lay against the opposite wall. The wall beside me felt cool and faintly damp; I was underground. There were no apples.
“Hello?” I called, but no one answered. I wasn’t sure I wanted anyone to answer. Was this a dungeon? I decided not. Dungeons must smell of piss, of blood, of despair. These stone walls bore no stains and no marks scratched by desperate men. So, not a dungeon.
I held my left hand, the one I had burned in the campfire, close to my face and studied it. The burn was nearly healed. A patch of new skin grew pinkly amid the rougher skin around it. However, my veins and bones stood out sharply, and my wrist looked thin and weak. I had lain here for quite a while—but then why wasn’t I hungry or thirsty? And where was I?
Time passed. Once or twice I called out again, but no one came.
Finally, for something to do, I unwrapped the bandages and poultices from my right hand, to see how much damage had been done by the knife Lord Solek had thrown in the last moments of his life. Poison on the blade had affected my will, I remembered that well enough, but my mind seemed all right now. What of my hand? The last of the bandages pulled free.
My hand was gone.
I stared at the stump of my wrist, where the skin had been wrapped and sewed as if I were not a man but a bolt of cloth. At the seam, my flesh puffed red and swollen, but without the black-green rot that kills. I had no fingers. No fingers, no fingernails, no palm, nothing to grasp a knife or a cup or a woman’s breast, nothing—
I screamed, and kept on screaming until the door opened and a voice said severely, “Hush, Roger. Stop that right now.”
It was Mother Chilton.
She stood filling the doorway, blocking the sudden increase of light, until she knelt beside me. The door remained open. Her young-old face bent above me, her colorless eyes reflecting all light. “You must stay quiet.”
“My hand—”
“I know. I am sorry. If I hadn’t cut it off, you would have died.”
“You cut it off? But—”
“It was necessary. The black rot had set in. Lord Solek’s knife was tipped with poison.”
“But—my hand!” It came out a wail, like a six-year-old, and she frowned.
“It was only a hand,” she said severely. “You have another.”
The callousness and indifference of this shocked me into silence. Only a hand?
“Think what else you are, Roger. Now be quiet. I must go.” She rose.
“No, wait! Where am I? What is happening? Maggie—”
Her face softened. “Good. You can think about someone else. I’ll send Maggie to you. But be quiet until then.”
“Wait!”
But she did not. Instead she said something that made no sense: “You must never seek your mother.” The door closed, and I heard a key turn in the lock.
My mother? What did the witch know of my mother?
Witch. The word had come unbidden to my mind. But yes, of course, Mother Chilton