Crossing Over - Anna Kendall [81]
I knew where Cecilia had gone, and where she might still be found.
The mid-morning kitchens bustled as if this were a normal day, a normal year. Stews bubbled in great pots over the fires. Bread baked in brick ovens. Chickens and rabbits turned on spits, dripping fat into the hot embers. No matter who held power, or who imprisoned whom, or who bedded whom, courtiers and soldiers and servants must be fed.
No one looked surprised to see me, who had so often been sent by the queen with orders for where and when food should be served. Only Maggie, trimming vegetables at one end of the long trestle table, raised glad eyes. “Roger! Are you feeling better? You’re wobbling a little.”
“I’m fine. Thank you for nursing me. Lady Margaret said that no true sister could have been more devoted.”
Maggie scowled at me; some people cannot stand praise. She snapped, “You need more yellow dye for your face. It faded while you were sick.”
“All right. Maggie—I need more of your help.” I said it in a whisper, but not the keenest of the queen’s spies, or Lord Solek’s spies, or anybody’s spies could have heard us over the din of the kitchen. “I need to get out of the palace.”
“Out?” She looked blank for a moment, and then began wielding her little peeling knife as if it were a sword and carrots were the direst of enemies. “You’re going after that titled little bitch!”
I was shocked at her language, her look. “Lady Cecilia is not—”
“Everyone knows she disappeared two days ago! Ran off with some man in heat, probably, and you’re going to—oh, why are men so stupid!” And she burst into tears.
Now people were looking at us. I was dumbfounded. Did Maggie, like Lady Margaret, know that Cecilia was the reason Queen Isabelle’s army would not arrive in The Queendom? There was no way Maggie could know that. But she was clearly in distress, and I put my hand on her arm. She shook it off so violently that I, still weak from my illness, staggered against the edge of the table.
“Don’t touch me!”
“All right, I will not, if that’s what you want. But I need to get out of the palace tonight without being seen, and you are my only—”
“No!”
“Maggie—”
“I won’t do it! It’s too dangerous! Go to her if that’s what you want, but leave me out of it!”
All at once anger swept me. No one but me cared that without help Cecilia could be captured, tortured, killed. My lady, so playful and lighthearted and laughing . . . unlike Maggie! I stalked out of the kitchen to the laundry, where amid the clouds of steam from the wash pots I stole a small packet of dye.
In the courtyard outside the ladies’ chambers I pretended to collapse again. Two Greens picked me up, not very gently: “You take his arms and I’ll take his legs—damn but the fool’s grown almost as heavy as a real man!” They dumped me back in Lady Margaret’s chamber, where her serving woman sighed, remade the nest of blankets by the hearth, and sent word to the queen that I was still unwell. I stayed there all day, pretending to sleep.
In the evening, while the ladies were attending the queen and Lord Solek at whatever revels he chose, I painted my face with the red dye I had stolen from the laundry. Into my hair I braided the twigs I had broken from the tree in the courtyard where I collapsed. From Lady Margaret’s chest I took a green velvet cloak lined in fur, and a white nightdress. I put them on, the nightdress fitting over my own fool’s outfit only because it was so billowy. I pulled the cloak tight around me, put up the hood, and made my way through the palace to the west gate. Two Greens guarded the gate. They had been Blues, had sworn the oath of fealty to Queen Caroline, and now served Lord Solek. They were the kind of men who would serve anyone for enough coins and enough ale. Unlike Solek’s savages, who were kept under such strict discipline that no girl of The Queendom had been molested by any of them, these two were avoided by every serving woman in the palace. That’s how I knew about them. Women talk, and ever since the night that Cecilia had sent me to Mother Chilton, I had been listening.