Crossing Over - Anna Kendall [94]
That word again.
The bread tasted wonderful, sweet with honey, studded with dried fruit. The scent from the fire grew stronger as someone threw more herbs onto the coals. Drowsiness took me. Almost I dozed, but then the alert light-headedness was back, and again everything seemed preternaturally sharp and clear. I could have cut myself on the fur hide, the rush torches, the very air. Dimly I realized that there was some drug in whatever had been thrown on the fire. The young men and women left on another blast of cold air.
It was all so strange. And if Cecilia had indeed come from here, how much stranger the court of The Queendom must have seemed to her! I understood a little better now her constant edge of hysteria, that urge always for more excitement, more laughter, more dancing to banish the sense that she would never really belong. I had never really belonged, either, not anywhere. It made a bond between us.
Where was she? Surely they would bring her soon. . . .
The old man rose. “We are an old race, and we have drawn strength from the souls of others. Now we will go with the hisaf to the oldest place.”
Go with me? To the country of the Dead? What did he mean? No one could go there with me, no more than anyone could come back with me. Or did he mean that all these men were going to kill themselves right now?
And me, too?
Fear ran over me, banishing all drowsiness. I half stood. But the old man stood taller than I, and the room was packed with strong men. There was no escape. I had, as always, only my wits. And to my drugged mind, it seemed to me that this was a bargain: Cross over for us, and we will give you what you ask.
I said, “What do you wish me to learn for you in . . . in the oldest place?”
He looked puzzled, as if my question had no meaning. How could that be? Always those who sent me to the country of the Dead wanted me to bring back information. Hartah, all of Hartah’s desperate faire customers, Queen Caroline. But all the old man said was, “Go.”
I nodded. The men closest to me drew back, as if to give me room to fall. They knew, without being told, what would happen. I drew my knife, jabbed it into my thigh, and willed myself to cross over.
Dirt in my mouth—
Worms in my eyes—
Earth imprisoning my fleshless arms and legs—
Then I was over. And not alone.
Never, never had I felt anything like this! There seemed to be a crowd of others with me, invisible but somehow there. They had been with me in that brief moment of death, and they were with me still, pressing like heat all around me. I screamed and ran.
A few steps, and they were gone from around me.
But now I could see them, a faint cloud of gray, like dank fog. The cloud did not move. The men of Soulvine were not present here in body, as I was. A fog could not talk to the Dead, learn from the Dead, instruct the Dead, as I had. But in some sense, the men of Soulvine were here. I had not thought such a thing possible.
But now that I was out from the midst of that fog, I could see the country of the Dead, and I saw more things I would not have thought possible.
The land that lay around me was Soulvine Moor. There were no hillock dwellings, but there was the vast, high plain dotted with outcroppings of rock, with forests and mountains in the distance. But the sky overhead flashed with lightning and crackled with thunder. The springy ground beneath my feet lurched, once so hard that I was nearly knocked over. The boulders jiggled, as if with energy that stone never had. And a hard wind blew, a wind that did not dissipate the patch of living fog.
Amid this chaos