Crossing Over - Anna Kendall [92]
25
A DAY’S WALK, and the land smoothed out. It didn’t drop, but the ravines and hollows and mountains flattened to a vast upland plain. Nothing marked the border, but I knew I had crossed it. This was a moor, Soulvine Moor.
Almost treeless, the moor nonetheless had its own beauty. I don’t know what I had expected—bare and blasted heath, maybe—but the ground was spongy, covered with moss between clumps of low, deep purple flowers. Occasionally huge outcroppings of rock thrust up from the springy peat. These outcroppings bore green moss, reminding me of the boulder in the village of Stonegreen. But there were no villages here, no cattle grazing on rich grass, no chickens or harvest faires or pretty, doomed girls like Cat Starling.
Something caught my eyes: a bit of cloth snagged on a gorse bush. I seized it. Embroidered green silk. She had been here! I broke into a run.
A shape grew in the far distance. At first I thought it was a trick of the clear, high light. But as I drew closer, I saw it was a low hill, far off, and that smoke rose up from it. It could be a town. It could be Hygryll.
But dusk was falling, and the smoke was still far off. A cool wind began to rise. Running had exhausted me, and I could go no farther without rest. I built a small fire, to keep away beasts, in the shelter of an outcropping of stone. The peat burned with its own peculiar smoke, acrid and earthy. There was no moon, and a million stars blazed in a black sky. I had no food, but a little water was left in my water bag. I drank it, wrapped myself in my fur-lined cloak, and fell asleep.
I dreamed of my mother. She sat in her lavender gown with a child on her lap. I was both the watcher and the child, safe and warm in my mother’s arms. She sang to me softly, a tune that I heard at first without words. Then the words became clear, and Roger the Watcher’s blood froze: “Die, my baby, die die, my little one, die die ...” But Roger the child listened to the monstrous song and nestled closer, a smile on his small face and the pretty tune in his ears. “Die, my baby, die die, my little one, die die ...”
Hands jerked me away from her. But they were real hands, neither in the country of dreams nor the country of the Dead, and they were pulling me away from the safe warmth of the campfire. Torches sputtered and flared in the night. Men surrounded me, pulling me with rough hands, turning my face to the flickering light.
Someone gasped.
I thought it was me, so terrible did the men look. And yet there was nothing inhuman about them. They were just men, heavily bearded, dressed in tunics and boots of tanned leather. They carried small knives with handles of carved wood. And the gasp had not come from me. It came from the man holding my arm, when he gazed deep into my eyes.
“Another one!” he said. His accent was like the householders in the Unclaimed Lands, like Bat’s.
“Let me see,” said another voice. I struggled to be free, but the first man slipped deftly behind me and closed his arm across my neck, while twisting mine up behind me. I could not move.
“Who are you?” I said. “Do you have Lady Cecilia?”
No one answered. A much older man came forward. Between his white beard and horned hat, only his eyes showed. They were green, the startling green of new leaves. As green as Cecilia’s. He studied my face for a long time, and under his gaze, strange sensations flowed through me. Not thoughts, not even emotions. It was as if a current moved in a hidden river in my mind, and all at once I remembered something nonsensical: Mrs. Humphries, in the country of the Dead, totally absorbed in watching the white stones shift shape under the flowing water of the slow river.
Finally the old man said, “No. Not another one. He has never been here before.”
“But he is—”
“Yes,” the old man said. “Oh, yes.”
The first man let me go. And then, there in the eerie light on the ground of peat and stone, the men of Soulvine knelt to me, Roger the Fool, and bowed their heads.
The Dead can sit insensible for days, years, centuries. Not so the