Crossing Over - Anna Kendall [89]
But I didn’t dwell long on Maggie’s tantrum. As I scattered the fire and we returned to trudging along the rough road, my mind roiled with what she had told me. Soulvine Moor, from whatever terrible and fearful belief, killed intruders. To “steal their souls.”
My mother, Aunt Jo said, had died in Soulvine Moor.
Had she been murdered? How?
No. I could not think that. I would go mad, if I thought that. It was nothing but a folktale anyway; no one could gain immortality by taking in the souls of others. Souls could not be taken in. They could only cross over to live on in the country of the Dead, if that could be called “living.” But here, in the land of the living, my Cecilia could be harmed.
“She went toward Soulvine Moor, toward Hygryll, ” the man with the broken teeth had said. “Where else should one like her keeper go?” What keeper? What did I not know about Cecilia? Lady Margaret had said there had “always been something strange about Cecilia.” But to me she was like a small stream, swift and light and clear to the bottom, babbling happily along in its little course. The man with the broken teeth had been lying, or mistaken, or cruel. Mother Chilton had not sent her to Hygryll—“I told her to go into the unclaimed Lands but not to enter Soulvine.” Cecilia was somewhere in the Unclaimed Lands, and I would find her. I would.
And my mother—
Don’t think such thoughts!
But there was only one way to stop the thoughts. I would do what I had intended to do over half a year ago, ever since Aunt Jo told me where my mother died. I would go as close to Soulvine Moor, to Hygryll, as was safe, and I would cross over. I would find my mother in the country of the Dead. Old women often talked to me there. My mother was not old, but she was there, and she would talk to me, her only child. From her, I would finally have answers.
Having a plan cheered me. It was an idiotic cheerfulness, since all difficulties still remained. But I had a plan: Find Cecilia. Enter her service, just to be around her. Then ask for a brief leave, go to the edge of Soulvine Moor, cross over, and find my mother. I could do all that. I had done so much already! And the sun shone warm, the birds trilled in the fair morning, and I was away from the palace and its ruthless, contradictory, passionate, and imprisoned queen. So my imbecilic cheerfulness sang in my blood. I whistled as we walked, something I had not done for months.
Maggie trudged beside me, head down, saying nothing.
Information was not hard to come by in the Unclaimed Lands, not once we had turned away from the sea. Along the coast were the smugglers, the wreckers, the road that carried whatever travelers there were. But as the land rose in wild ravines and desolate moors, there seemed to be only one road, sometimes dwindling to a mere cart track, sometimes lost altogether so that, cursing, I had to search to find it again. The cottages were few and mean, and their inhabitants, once they set aside their initial suspicion of strangers, were glad of travelers to break the monotonous pattern of their days. Goatherds, hunters, farmers trying to survive on a couple of poor upland acres and a fierce independence, they gave us food and shelter in exchange for a few pennies and scraps of news. Nor did they seem surprised at two young “brothers” traveling alone. Boys grew up quickly in this wild land. The food that Maggie and I were offered was scanty and sometimes almost inedible, but not once did we feel menaced as we slept among the ashes of the hearth—unless that place was already occupied by a flock of big-eyed children or by the family pig.
And nearly all of the upland folk had seen, or heard of, Cecilia.
“She be here yestreen a twelveday,” they said, and their accents were the same as Bat’s, the seaman off the Frances Ormund. “A nineday.” “A threeday.” We were drawing closer to her.
“How was the lady traveling?” I asked that first night. “And who was with her? ”
“On a donkey, she come,” an old woman told me. But when I looked closer,