Crossing Over - Anna Kendall [121]
Don’t think that.
“What is it?” Maggie’s frightened voice said. “For a minute you looked so—does your hand hurt more?”
“No.”
She was silent a long moment. Then she said, “Your look changed when I mentioned the queen. Did you love her so very much?”
“Love the queen?”
“Don’t be stupid,” Maggie said sharply. “The queen is a monster. I meant Lady Cecilia. Did you love her so very much?”
“Yes,” I said. “Once.”
“Once? You don’t love her now?”
“She’s dead.”
“That isn’t what I asked. My mother loved my father long after he died, right up until she went to her own grave. Do you love Cecilia still?”
Maggie was relentless. Moreover, she lacked experience. She didn’t know that love could be overwhelmed by guilt, by anger, by childish selfishness on the part of the beloved—and yet still exist, like embers in an ash box. The embers no longer glow, no longer give off warmth. But they still smolder, and I have known them to eat through the wood of an ash box and set an entire cottage ablaze, destroying it utterly. I had not lied to Maggie. I had loved Cecilia once, and that fire was gone. But neither had I told the entire truth.
Hadn’t told it, couldn’t tell it. Maggie could not understand. There were only two people in the entire world who might understand. One was Mother Chilton. The other, I suspected but could not know, was my mother.
I tried again. “Maggie, I didn’t bring an army here to retake the palace because of Cecilia.”
Her mouth, pink beneath the huge swollen bruise on her face, frowned slightly. “You didn’t?”
“No.”
“I thought you wanted revenge for . . . for her. For Cecilia.”
“No. I came for you. Because Jee told me you’d been taken.”
Maggie went utterly still. For a moment I thought she had ceased to breathe, but then I saw her lashes, downcast, quiver. They cast shadows on the firelit skin of her unbruised cheek. When she opened her eyes, they were blurred under a sheen of tears. She leaned forward and laid her lips on mine.
The kiss was light and sweet, and it stopped time.
But when her lips pressed harder and her hand caressed my hip, I pushed her gently away. “You don’t understand. I have only one hand!”
“So?”
“So,” I said, bitterness rushing back into me, “I am unmanned.”
Maggie gave a low, throaty chuckle, so surprising that I glared at her in indignation. Didn’t she understand what it meant to lose a hand? Was she that insensitive? I was no longer an able-bodied man, no longer whole—
“It’s not your hand I’m interested in, Roger.” She laid her own hand on me, and instantly my body responded. I was shocked by how instantly, just as shocked as I was by her bawdiness—Maggie!
She wasn’t careful about undressing me, or slow. When she pulled her blue gown over her head and undid the strings of her shift, I gasped. She was so beautiful in her nakedness.
The rest of the morning is both a blur and, at the same time, so sharply carved in memory that I can still see every curve of Maggie’s body, can still feel every sensation in my own. We maneuvered around my bandaged stump and her bruised face, tender with each other, full of hesitation and joy. Together we went into that secret dark place of sweetness, and when it was over, we fell asleep in each other’s arms, on the clean straw, in the tiny stone room that smelled of vanished apples.
I woke first. Maggie slept on, the good side of her face hidden in the good side of my arm. The lantern had gone out, but light came through the small, high window. We had slept the entire night; it was way past dawn. Bright sunlight beyond the barred window, and Maggie had said that the queen would burn at noon.
Staring at the stone ceiling above me, I realized what critical piece of information I did not possess.
“Maggie, wake up!”
She murmured and burrowed deeper into my side. For a moment the movement of her against my skin ignited me, but there was no time.
“Maggie! What day is this?