Crossing Over - Anna Kendall [126]
In all that vast peaceful landscape, only one figure moved. She rushed toward me, her beautiful face twisted with fury and grief. “Roger! Where am I?”
“You’re dead, Your Grace.”
Memory took her. “Yes. I was . . . I was burned as a witch.”
“Yes.” And then I said the most futile words of my life—the most futile words of anyone’s life, ever—and those words both were and were not true.
“I’m sorry, Your Grace.”
Her fury focused. “You did this. You.”
“Yes.”
“You took my queendom. You burned me—”
“No, Your Grace. I did much, but not those things. You did them to yourself.”
Queen Caroline shrieked and launched herself at me. But she was no soldier, and she carried no weapons. I caught her flailing body in my arms. And then, a moment later, I was back in the secret room overlooking the west drawbridge, sliding into sleep. Mother Chilton had gone. All that remained of my last journey was the feel of Queen Caroline’s body against mine, that body calming, going quiet and still.
“Good-bye, Your Grace,” I had whispered to her just before my return, but I don’t think she even heard me. She had already been claimed by the eerie tranquility of the Dead.
32
WE WERE NOT SEEN, Maggie and I, as we left the palace. Maggie led the way, following instructions she had been given by Mother Chilton. Secret passageways took us to an inner wall, where a low entrance gave way to Mother Chilton’s tent. The tent was completely empty. Gone were the potions, the feathers, the cloth bags of herbs and the poles they had hung upon, the brazier and the single chair. The entrance from palace to tent was so low that Maggie and I had to crawl through on hands and knees. After we did, the stone snapped shut, and nothing we did could open it again.
That must have been how Mother Chilton had helped Cecilia escape from the palace. It must have been, too, how Mother Chilton had come and gone from the palace whenever the queen summoned her. There had been some tie between them, something I did not understand and did not want to understand. “Caroline studied the soul arts but she has no talent,” Mother Chilton had said to me once. Which was why the queen had sought to use my talent.
Maggie and I stayed in the deserted tent a few days, me resting while she went out to gather food and information. The food was not, at first, easy to come by. This was not because we had no money; Mother Chilton had once more left me a pile of coins, silvers and one gold piece. I did not understand why Mother Chilton helped me. She was as much a riddle as the queen, and like the queen, took her own hidden gambles. But there was no food because there was no one to buy it from. The villagers, along with most of the servants, had fled the capital after the Blue soldiers died a second time. Witchcraft! people cried. Sorcery! Run! Run! Save yourselves!
But there was nothing to save themselves from. No more witchery, no more fighting. The remnants of Lord Robert’s ragtag army, plus whatever was left of the queen’s Greens, were all the soldiers that remained. They were not witches and they were not fighting. They also needed to eat. One by one, the shopkeepers returned to the city, found it safe, and told others, who also returned.
Lord Robert had the good sense to take away and quietly bury the queen’s burned body. Few knew where the “witch-queen” lay.
He crowned Princess Stephanie, looking small and frightened in the many-colored jewels of the Crown of Glory. Lord Robert rules as regent until the princess comes of age.
When I could travel again, Maggie and I left the city. I was disguised as a farmer who had drunk too much, but I was so thin and sick, with such a bristly untrimmed beard that had quite suddenly sprouted in place of my former downy fuzz, that no disguise might even have been necessary. I now looked older than my fifteen years. Besides, no one was looking for me. The rumor was that I, who brought the Blue army back from death, had disappeared into oblivion when they did. It is possible Mother Chilton had something to do with such rumors. It is possible she