Crossing Over - Anna Kendall [14]
Eventually the kicking stopped.
Enfield drew his knife and cut my bonds. He shoved me to the ground, where I lay looking up at him.
“Now go,” he said. “Run. It is her right.”
But the dead man had had the right to a priest, and they had hung him without any priest. Looking at Enfield’s face, I knew I would not get twenty feet into the woods before he, or one of the others, spitted me on a sword. Or worse. Mistress Conyers would never know.
Her gown, bedraggled and drenched and torn though it was, had been made of richly embroidered velvet.
She had been the wife of a ship’s captain.
Enfield obeyed her, as long as he was in her sight.
I got to my feet. But instead of running into the woods or toward the track from the clearing, I ran back into the cabin and threw myself again at Mistress Conyers’s feet.
“My lady! Please—if I go, the soldiers will kill me! Take me with you!”
Outrage finally brought some color to her face. “How dare you—my husband—”
I said, “I can bring you news of him from the country of the Dead!”
“Guards! Guards!”
I did the only thing I could. I threw myself against the corner of the table, hard, aiming so that the corner would hit my forehead. Pain shot through me like fire, great sharp lightning bolts of pain piercing my head, and the room went dark.
I crossed over.
6
I STOOD IN the same clearing, although the cabin was gone. Nine of the Dead sat cross-legged in a circle, holding hands, and I had appeared in the middle of their circle. They ignored me, or didn’t see me, or didn’t care. I stepped over them and started through the clearing toward the track down to the beach.
There was no track.
The sea lay below me, calm and gray beneath the eternally calm sky. I stood at the top of a steep cliff, much steeper than it had been in the land of the living. There was no way down. Far below, tiny figures moved on the rocky beach, although there was no sign of a ship, either afloat or wrecked on rocks.
Was one of those figures Hartah? Was another Aunt Jo?
I pushed the thought aside; otherwise I could not act. I had to get down to the beach soon. Always the newly Dead had a period of disorientation when they could be talked to and would answer—but that period was very brief. I had to get to the beach while the Dead from the Frances Ormund were still bewildered, still not reconciled to their new home. Otherwise there was no chance that any of them—who were young sailors, not gossipy old women—would notice me at all. Frantically I thrashed my way through the woods at the edge of the cliff. No paths down. The beach disappeared from my view, and I stumbled back to the clearing.
The hanging tree stood before me, its leaves unmoving in the quiet air. I shuddered. “Where is the track down?” I screamed at the circle of Dead. None of them as much as glanced up.
I ran back to the cliff edge. Two of the newly Dead had waded out to rocks and sat cross-legged on them, quietly contemplating the water.
Time was running short. If I threw myself off the cliff, I would surely die—that is, if I could die here! But if I didn’t get down there soon, Enfield would just as surely kill me in the land of the living.
I cried out, a great echoing howl of despair. One of the tiny figures on the beach looked up, shading his face with his hand. The next moment he flew through the air to stand beside me at the top of the cliff.
I don’t know who was more surprised, he or I. A rough sailor, he wore a brown jerkin with a leather belt and torn pantaloons. Salt water dripped from his clothing, his untrimmed beard, his greasy hair. He screamed, drew a knife from his belt, and charged toward me.
“Stop!” I shouted, before I knew I was going to say anything. And he did.
“How did ye do that? How did you bring me to ye?” he sputtered. “And where be I?”
He didn’t yet realize that he was dead. Was that why he had been able to soar through the air and up the cliffside? I had never seen any other Dead do anything like that—what else could they do?
My mind raced faster than