Crossing Over - Anna Kendall [86]
My arm hurt only a little. Whatever Mother Chilton had done to it, the gun wound seemed to be healing more rapidly than it had under Lady Margaret’s nursing. I was still weak from my illness, and sometimes I had to stop and rest. Maggie had more strength than I. Still, I rested less than expected, and for that, too, Mother Chilton’s poultice may or may not have been responsible.
Maggie had said little all that first day. But when we had made our camp in a thicket well off the road, when we had eaten our bread and cheese and meat, she faced me across the glowing coals. It was cold after the sun set, and both of us wrapped our cloaks tight around our bodies. The moon was a thin crescent in the east, barely visible, and the stars shone high and clear.
“Roger, what will you do if you find Lady Cecilia?”
I didn’t want to discuss Cecilia, not with Maggie. I said brusquely, “Serve her.”
“As her fool?”
“No!”
“As what?”
“You cannot ever let anything rest, can you?” I said angrily. “Lady Cecilia is in the Unclaimed Lands. She is not alone, but whoever is with her is only one person. Mother Chilton did not tell me who it is. Cecilia will need servitors, guards, a court.”
“You are neither a servitor nor a guard,” Maggie said, “and you are certainly not a courtier.” She stared straight into the fire, scowling.
“She trusts me. And anyway, you’re going to need a home, too, Maggie. You wanted to escape the palace, and you have. But what now? Lady Cecilia could maybe give you a place as her serving woman, or—”
“Be quiet!” Maggie said with such fierce pain that I was astonished. It did not seem to me a fall in rank to go from cook to lady’s maid, but I questioned her no further. I didn’t want any more arguments. Maggie lay down and rolled herself into a ball with her back to me.
I dreamed, that night by the fire, that I was back in the laundry at the palace. I was dying cloth green, but then—in the manner of dreams—I was dying people, and not green but yellow. All the people were female, and all of them were naked: the queen, Cecilia, Cat Starling, Maggie. “There,” I said, “now you are all fools.” I woke with such a powerful bodily response that there was nothing to do but creep off into the bushes and hope Maggie did not wake.
All fools. Including me.
Maggie and I walked for several days while talking but little. She was sullen, seldom even looking at me. The Queendom was in soft spring, filled with new light and tender green, but the nights were still cold. The moon grew steadily until it was a full round circle, shedding a silvery glow over all beneath. The land around us became wilder, less fertile. Fields of new plantings gave way to pastures for sheep and then, as the ground became rockier and steeper still, to goats. Hills turned to mountains, with deep ravines and abrupt cliffs. Whenever anyone rode down the road from either direction, Maggie and I hid. But I realized that Hartah, with his gruesome stories of highwaymen and robbers and dangers to lone travelers, had lied to me. I saw no corpses gutted and rotting by the road. And each day, fewer and fewer riders appeared. We had reached the edge of the Unclaimed Lands.
“Our food is almost gone,” Maggie said.
“There’s an inn up ahead. We can get provisions there, and ask for information.”
“An inn? How do you know?”
“I know,” I said. And so we came to the last inn where I had ever stayed with Hartah and Aunt Jo. It looked the same, a rough place for rough people. Somewhere to the east lay the sea, and I noticed, as I had been too naive to notice before, the sheltered creek that would be so convenient for smugglers. Dense woods behind the inn would let a traveler approach or leave unseen from the road. “A good place for information,” Hartah had said. I took another of Mother Chilton’s silvers out of my boot and put it in my pocket.
“Maggie, you must do exactly as I say while we are inside this inn.”
She said reasonably, “What are you going to tell me to do?”
“Say nothing. You can maybe pass for a boy if you keep your hood up, with all that dirt on your