Crossing Over - Anna Kendall [119]
“Sometimes none of us knows where we are. Or who.”
“You’ve already caused enough disturbance in the country of the Dead.”
“You know much, even more than you think, but you don’t know what Cecilia truly is . . . a pretty, empty-headed tinderbox that will ignite all.”
And so Cecilia had, and then had died for it. Twice. I stared at the stump of my wrist, and I waited for Maggie, and when she did not come, I went on staring at my maimed arm and silently, as quiet as instructed, I wept.
When Maggie did come, hours later, I had done weeping. Mother Chilton’s drugs, whatever they were, had begun to wear off. The stump that was my wrist had begun to throb, not yet a great deal but with promise of real pain to come. I was hungry, and I needed to piss. Carefully I got myself to my feet and used a corner of the room in near darkness, covering the wetness with a little straw. The last of the light faded. I sat in complete darkness, back against the stone wall, cradling my bandaged stump in my good right hand. Finally, a lifetime later, the lock rattled. The door opened.
“Roger? ”
Maggie came in with a lantern and a small sack. The lantern threw shadows on the stone wall, on the wooden door, on her. She wore a clean gown of rough blue wool. Blue. I had never seen her in anything but green. Her fair hair, short from its cutting when she pretended to be my brother, curled around her face. A huge bruise, turning all the colors of vegetables, swelled the left side of her face and closed her left eye.
“You’re hurt!” I said, the first thing that came to me. “Were you—”
“Tortured? No. This is nothing.” She set the lantern on the floor and sat beside my straw. The one gray eye that I could see studied me anxiously. “Does your hand hurt?”
“No,” I said bitterly. “It can’t hurt because it’s not there anymore.”
“Then does your wrist hurt?”
“Yes.”
“I brought you some more medicine from Mother Chilton. And some food.” She opened her sack.
I knocked it away, impatient with her stupidity. “I don’t care about food! What happened? That cursed witch cut off my hand—”
“She’s not a witch,” Maggie said levelly. “Only you are.”
That stopped me. Maggie stared at me with all her old disapproving severity, now decorated with fear—for this I had brought back an army from the country of the Dead? To rescue this girl, so that she could call me a witch?
“I’m not a witch. I’m a hisaf.”
She didn’t know the word, of course. The fear of me was still on her, but she continued. “Mother Chilton saved your life.”
“Maybe I wish she hadn’t.”
“Don’ttalklikethat.Didyou...Roger, was it you who...?”
I said simply, “Yes. To all of it.”
She twisted her hands—her two good hands—together tightly in her lap, and forced herself to go on. “You brought the Blues back from Witchland? That’s what the soldiers are saying. ‘Witchland,’ where the queen had sent them, when she made it look as if they had died. What we buried—the bodies—they were all false, sorcerous illusion. But not Richard. He was not among the Blues who returned from . . . from there.” Her voice broke. “The soldiers say the queen is a witch and you are, too. But I . . .”
“You what?” I was not going to make this easy for her. She was not making it easy for me.
The hands on her lap tightened until all blood left them. “I . . . I don’t think you brought them back from Witchland. I think you . . . you told me once in the kitchen, that you can . . . I think you brought them all back from the country of the Dead.”
There. She had said it. I peered at her in the uneven lantern light. Bright light one place, deep shadows a few inches over. The unbruised half of Maggie’s face had gone as bloodless as her hands. But she had said it. Disapproval, yes, but also courage.