Crossing Over - Anna Kendall [85]
A monstrous thought occurred to me. Appalled at myself, I said, “Maggie, are you a spy for the queen?”
She stared at me, her face a mottled maroon. But she didn’t attack me. She said only, “I told you that you were stupid. Don’t you know how much I hate the queen?”
I hadn’t known. “Why?”
“Because Richard was a Blue who died for his loyalty and bravery.”
So her unaccustomed tears had not been for me, after all, but for her brother. The thought was welcome. I said gently, “You know now for certain that Richard is dead?”
“Yes.” Maggie had control of herself now, “I finally heard. But that’s not the only reason I hate the queen. She beds the savage lord who killed so many of us in The Queendom. She murdered her own mother—everyone says so. And she has treated you like a dog—no, less than a dog. Like a thing. You could have died up there on the tower roof. She is a monster, and I hate her. I cannot stay and serve a monster. Not any longer, now that I know what she really is. Queen Eleanor was right, her daughter is not fit to rule. I was serving the wrong queen.” She took a sip of her ale, her eyes anguished.
I realized then what made Maggie different from most people I had ever known: She could name hard truths. Not even Mother Chilton, with her anguished evasions, had done that. Maggie was domineering, stubborn, and meddlesome, but she could name truth. Like Mistress Conyers. Like—perhaps—Queen Caroline herself.
I made one more attempt. “You have a sister in a village somewhere—you told me once. You could go to her.”
“I also told you that my sister is a miserly, grasping fishwife who screams at everyone, including her husband. I am not going there. I am coming with you.”
An unwelcome suspicion formed in my mind. I was willing to risk everything for Cecilia. Was Maggie then willing to risk everything for me because . . . “Maggie,” I choked out, “do you . . . are you ...” I could not say the words: in love with me.
A long silence spun itself out, fragile as cobwebs.
Maggie finally answered. Her voice held great carefulness. “You are my friend, Roger. My brother is dead, my sister a shrew, and I can no longer serve a queen I despise. If I stay in the palace one night longer, I will go mad. I have nowhere else to go except with you.”
Nowhere else to go. I well understood that! Relief crept through me, warming as the ale. Maggie was my friend, she had nowhere else to go, and it had been deeply vain of me to suspect anything else. I would not entertain such vain thoughts again. Who was I, fool and murderer and homeless wanderer, that anyone should love me?
Still, I made one more attempt to dissuade Maggie from coming with me. “You said in the kitchen that leaving the palace was too dangerous for you to—”
“I meant danger to you, idiot!”
“That’s my concern, not yours!”
“It’s mine now,” she retorted, sounding again like the Maggie I knew: competent and scornful.
“Well, come on, then,” I said ungraciously, and after that neither of us spoke again. We sat, drinking slowly, while the alehouse emptied as the night wore on. I spent sixteen more pennies, the last ten for the serving woman to let us sleep beside the dying brazier. In the early morning we joined the laborers streaming over the east bridge, the men and women who would work for daily hire, planting and weeding the fields, then spend all they earned in the alehouses and cook shops of the city when night came. No one noticed us. We walked to the farthest of the village fields, where a cottage woman sold us as much bread, cheese, and dried meat as we could carry, plus a goatskin water bag, in exchange for a silver. Then we took the southeast road toward the coast.
It was the same road I had ridden with Kit Beale, nearly nine months ago. Then it had been autumn and now it was early summer, and Maggie plodded beside me. Now, as then, I didn’t know what I was going toward, or what would happen to me. But all else was different. I was different. And every step of every mile, Cecilia filled my heart. With worry, with fear, with pain. With love, which was all