Crossing Over - Anna Kendall [56]
“Hush,” I said quickly. “It’s all right, my lady.”
“Why does your voice sound like that?”
“I bit my tongue.”
“I can barely understand you. Oh, what will I do now?”
“You will go where you are told and serve Her Grace as you always have.”
“Yes.” Her eyes darted wildly around. “I’m to share a room with Jane Sedley. The ladies on . . . on this side of the palace shared, because there were so many. And now we have with us the Blue ladies as well as the Green.”
“They are all Green now,” I reminded her.
“Yes, of course. Only it’s so . . . so strange!”
“My lady,” said Cecilia’s serving woman, the young and timid girl who had replaced Emma Cartwright. Her arms were full of gowns. “Where shall I put these?”
“I don’t care! Roger, what will happen? They say the old queen’s army is outside the gates and they will starve us out! Or worse!”
“Go to bed, my lady. Her Grace will need you in the morning.”
“I—”
“Good night, my lady.”
“Good night.” She went, and it was only later that I realized I had been giving orders to a lady. I, the queen’s fool.
No one had thought to assign me a place to sleep. I found the queen’s new presence chamber, which actually looked small after the throne room. I knew the single guard posted in the room. He looked grim and would answer none of my questions, but he admitted me to the deserted outer chamber. No guard here—I guessed they were needed to defend the palace if the Blues should attack. There was no curtained alcove off these rooms, but a great fire had burned in the fireplace at some point during this terrible day, and the embers still gave off a faint warmth. I curled up beside the ashes. My tongue hurt. My arm hurt. My heart hurt.
It was a long time before I could sleep. When I did, I dreamed I journeyed to Soulvine Moor. It looked exactly like the country of the Dead, and my mother sat there in her lavender dress, silent and unmoving, beside the old, dead queen.
17
“WE WILL RUN out of food.”
“The army has seized all the horses.”
“They will burn us all at once, in a huge fire, where all the villagers can see.”
“The servants will hide the food from us.”
“We will have to eat rats. They did that in the old times during sieges.”
“They will take the city and burn us as traitors—”
The ladies and courtiers whispered among themselves. Now there was no dancing, no gaming, no flirting. The Blue army was camped along both banks of the river. Or so I was told by those who had climbed the stairs to the windy ramparts atop the city walls. Below, I attended the queen. She spent all morning with her advisors, and all afternoon moving around the palace.
“There is no meat left in the kitchens,” the people whispered to each other.
“The servants are hoarding the food somewhere.”
“My mother will be desperate for news of me; she’s all alone in the country house—”
“My father—”
“My son and his family—”
“Burn us alive—”
“No fruit left—”
Only the queen remained serene. She did not ration the food left in the larders, the wheat stores, the cellars. No barges came to the kitchen docks, and in spring food always ran low, consumed over the winter. By the fifth day of the siege, we ate bread and cheese and ale, but we ate fully. No one understood this, least of all me. Why didn’t the queen count and ration the remaining food? We would run out soon enough, because of course the servants must be hiding some of it against starvation. I would have. I hoped Maggie was.
This was when I saw the cellars for the first time, along with everywhere else in the palace. I accompanied her every afternoon. “Keep your eyes open, Roger,” the Queen told me. “Remember everything. I don’t know what I may need you to do in the future.” She had dropped all requirements that I act the fool, or that I make witty comments. This was good, because all wit had deserted me.
Everywhere we went, the queen, magnificently dressed and accompanied by a guard of tall, handsome Greens, smiled at her new subjects and studied them and let them wordlessly