Crossing Over - Anna Kendall [53]
The less quick of the Blues said uncertainly, “Ye have been here before, fool?”
“Yes. Come here, to your queen—just you!”
He came. I said to him, very low, “What happened to her? Did she drink or eat anything, or—”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t there. But my captain, he said she clutched her belly and cried, ‘Poison! My daughter!’ But ye say it was not poison, it was witchcraft? I don’t know—”
“It was witchcraft,” I said firmly. “Look at her! She’s not dead, she breathes and sits, you walk and talk. . . . You are banished in Witchland until they summon you back. And so are these others.” Two more Blues had appeared in the river and were staggering, dripping, to shore. “You must tell them! I hope I don’t—” Deliberately I broke off my sentence, bit my tongue hard, and crossed over.
My tongue bled into my mouth. I writhed on the hearth rug and then all at once I was weeping. But was I weeping from pain, or from knowledge?
In truth, I had no certain knowledge. The old queen had cried out that she had been poisoned, but she might have cried that even if her death had come from a failure in her heart. She might have clutched her belly anyway, believing her daughter to have poisoned her no matter what the fact. And the “Yes” that the old queen said to me—the last thing she would ever say to anyone—might have meant anything.
But I believed that Queen Eleanor had been answering my question. Yes. Yes, she had been murdered, and Queen Caroline was what rumor had called her: a poisoner.
The queen is dead. Long live the queen.
I don’t know how long I lay on the hearth, my thoughts in chaos. Queen Caroline had always roused in me so many contradictory emotions: Fear. Admiration. Anger . . . Respect. Now my feelings toward the queen reduced to only one: a desire to survive her patronage.
Eventually I rose and washed the blood from my mouth with cooling water. Eventually Lord Robert’s voice bellowed on the other side of the door. “Fool! Open!”
I unbarred the door. He and Queen Caroline stood there. Her ladies and courtiers clustered at the other end of the outer chamber, some looking frightened and others triumphant. I fell to my knees as the queen swept through the doorway.
Lord Robert said, “Only a few moments, Your Majesty. This is urgent.”
“So is this. Close the door, Robert. Roger, rise. Why is there blood on your chin?”
“I bit my tongue, Your Grace.” My words came out thick and garbled.
“Clumsy of you. And on your sleeve?”
“Drippings from my tongue, Your Grace.”
She took my face between her hands. I had to force myself to not recoil at her touch. Poison.
“I need you to go to the Dead. You must find a man called Osprey, the palace locksmith. A short, squint-eyed man who died this evening. He wears the seal of The Queendom on his breast. You must ask him for the location of the key to the iron safe, where the Crown of Glory is kept. I need that key now, Roger, right this moment. I am going to the throne room and I want to be wearing the crown that my grandmothers have worn since time itself was young.”
I gaped at her. “Your Grace, it’s impossible, the Dead don’t—”
“Don’t what?” she said sharply, dropping her hands. “Don’t talk to you? You have declared that they do. You have shown me that they do. What is the difficulty?”
“It’s . . . it’s the country of the Dead!” I said desperately. “It’s vast, and . . . and wild, and to find a specific person is so difficult, I probably wouldn’t come across this Osprey if I searched for days, and you said you need it now, the Crown of Glory, now—” I was babbling from sheer terror.
She said, “Try.”
One word, with so many unspoken words behind it. And in her eyes, everything to justify my terror.
Hartah had told me what instruments of torture look like. What they can do to a helpless body. So for the second time I cut my arm with the queen’s jeweled carving knife, crossed over, and—amazingly—found