Crossing Over - Anna Kendall [98]
A girl, the same girl with green eyes and brown hair, brought me a goatskin of water and another loaf of bread. I ate it all. Then I lay facedown on the peat and slept.
For the rest of the day and all the next day, plus two nights, I did not move. The girl brought me food and water. At night someone tucked furs around me. No one tried to talk to me. The nights were sharp and cold, and someone built a fire beside me and tended it all night. I slept, and I ate, and it was the great mercy of my life—its only mercy, it seemed to me—that I did not dream.
On the third day, at dawn, I sat up, stiff in my limbs. The fire burned brightly. Beside it the old man sat on a rug of fur. He said simply, “You go now.”
“Yes.” I could barely get out the syllable, so great was my hatred.
“Thank you, hisaf.”
I swore an oath I had learned from Lord Solek, in the language I knew that the old man could not understand. Even in that, I was a coward. Was he going to try to stop me from going?
He was not. He watched as I gathered up the latest offering of bread, took the water bag, shook out my fur-lined cloak and hung it over my arm.
He said, “So it is with a hisaf. So it was with your father.”
I whirled around so fast my boot heels tore the sod. “What do you know of my father?”
“Nothing. But he be hisaf. Or you could not be.”
My aunt Jo had never spoken of my father. For this inhuman monster to do so was obscene. I raised my arm, but some part of my mind whispered, If you kill him, they may not let you go. And it looks now as if they will.
I stalked off, and no one tried to stop me. No one stopped me. I was a hisaf, and apparently a law unto myself.
Hah!
I trudged to the border, and over it, and through a day’s walk north until in late afternoon I came again to the cabin in the hollow by the waterfall, where Cecilia waited in the country of the Dead.
And Maggie in the country of the living, furious as only Maggie could be.
“You’re still here,” I said stupidly.
“Where should I go?” She straightened from her task, digging spring flunter roots in a patch of sunshine, and glared at me. Jee’s cabin lay beyond, looking deserted except for a thin rope of smoke coiling up against the sky. Maggie looked thinner, dirtier, but somehow less a boy in her trousers and tunic. It was her hair; it had begun to grow back in springy fair curls around her face. That face changed as she looked at me, from fury to something like fear.
“Roger?”
“Did they take you in here, then? Are you well treated?”
“Yes. Roger—what happened?”
I could only shake my head. My legs gave way suddenly and I sat abruptly on the ground. Instantly Maggie knelt beside me. “Oh—are you hurt? Wounded again? Sick?”
Wounded in my soul, sick at my heart. I could not say so. Maggie’s hand on my forehead was gritty with dirt, cool of skin. She said, “You have no fever.”
“No.”
A long silence. Then she said, in her kind-Maggie voice, “Tell me what happened. Did you . . . did you find Cecilia?”
I heard how hard it was for her to ask that, but I had no compassion to spare for Maggie. Nor could I bring myself to tell her what had happened. I said only (and that hard enough to say), “Cecilia is dead.”
“Oh!”
She was too honest to say she was sorry, and again we sat in prolonged silence. I forced myself to go on. “She was from . . . from Soulvine Moor originally—or her kin were, or something. She returned there and they killed her.”
Maggie put her arms around me. I let her, but there was no comfort in her embrace. There would be no comfort for me ever again.
She seemed to know that I had said all I would say, or could. She began to talk in a low, soothing voice of earthly things, and slowly I felt her matter-of-fact voice pull me back to this world and ground me here. Did she know what she was doing? It didn’t matter; the effect was the same.
“The family here took me in, yes, but as a servant rather than a guest. I help gather food, care for the babies, cook, and—I was going to say ‘clean’ but there is no cleaning