Crossing Over - Anna Kendall [96]
I snapped, “Everyone dies!”
“No. I drew the strength from other souls.”
All at once she, this dead woman of Soulvine, was everything that had happened to me since I entered both Soulvine Moors, the living and the dead. She was my capture by the men, she was the smoky windowless room covered with earth, as if the feasters were already in a grave. She was whatever drug had been thrown on the fire to alter my mind, sending it between drowsiness and painful sharpness. She was the green-eyed old man who made me cross over, and she was the insane beliefs that had killed Cecilia. I looked at this old woman, and hatred for all of it tore through me, bright and terrible as the lightning flashes splitting the sky. I seized her slight body and shook it like a dog with a rat.
“You ‘drew no strength’ from anything, you evil old woman! There is no strength to be drawn from murdering others, and there is no living forever! You are dead, dead, dead, just like all the others here! You and all the other murderers in Soulvine killed foreigners for nothing! You killed Cecilia, didn’t you? And all for a stupid and pointless ceremony that gained you nothing! Nothing! Nothing! There is no way to gain anything from the souls of the Dead!”
She gazed at me without fear. She said simply, “You be wrong, boy. We can gain the strength. From the souls of the outborn. From the betrayers who left.”
She moved her gaze from me to Cecilia.
“Strength from her.”
26
I HAD THOUGHT I knew what horror was. I was wrong.
The girl with the bowl of food, she of the green eyes, offering me only bread but the others stew—
I couldn’t speak. Revulsion held me. But I could kill, and I beat on the old woman with both my fists, kicked her with my hard-toed boots, slammed her head again and again to the ground. She looked at me with bewilderment and then with anger, but without either pain or fear. I couldn’t hurt her. She felt alive under my hands, but she was not.
“Leave off, boy!” the old woman finally spat at me, got to her feet, and stalked off. A few feet away she sat on a rock and lapsed into the serene trance of the Dead.
“Cecilia,” I said, seizing her hands in mine, “What they did—I didn’t get there in time to save you from—Cecilia—”
She could not hear me.
“They take the souls of the dead” Maggie had said to me, all those months ago, but she had not said how. And I had not believed her anyway. I was a fool. I was a hundred times a fool, and I had failed Cecilia, whom I had vowed to keep safe.
I had to get out of Soulvine Moor. I could not stay to search for my mother, I could not stay for anything, I could not stay one more second. The need to leave, now, was the only thing that saved me. It was something, at any rate. It was action, motion of legs and lungs and back. I grabbed Cecilia’s hand and dragged her forward, both of us stumbling on the quivering ground as the lightning flashed overhead, until I was out of breath. Gasping, panting, I ran on.
But even then, I knew I could not outrun Soulvine Moor.
After I could run no longer, I walked. I walked for long, insane hours. I grew bruised from falls, dirty and sweaty and weak. Cecilia stayed unscratched, clean and unresisting, her hair fragrant as rainwater. She would walk as long as I led her, and not know she was doing it.
I kept trying to rouse her, doing everything I could. I kissed her, I shook her, and once, in frustration too great to bear, I threw her to the ground. She did not rouse. Overhead, the storm continued to threaten without ever breaking. The ground shook without ever shattering. The wind blew without ever bringing rain. And Cecilia and I walked north until I recognized the hollow and the high, sparse waterfall where Jee’s hut stood in the country of the living. The cabin was not there, of course, and the hollow was littered with the usual Dead. But it was across the border. We were out of Soulvine Moor and into the Unclaimed Lands.
Somewhere around here, in the country of the living was Maggie. Unless she had gone