Authors: Anna Kendall
Maggie did not know what I planned. I was sure of it. And if I travelled this fortnight with a kind of steady easiness that rose almost to light-heartedness, I was glad to deceive her. For although I was not light-hearted, I did feel a kind of pleasure, which brought its own kind of guilt. The pleasure was at escaping the inn at Applebridge and the life which went with it. The guilt was because I had wanted that kind of peaceful life, and had built it along with Maggie, and it seemed terrible to me that I wanted it no longer while she still did.
She had said we would find work as labourers ‘until we can start again'. And I had no doubt that she
would
start again. Within two years of choosing some village, Maggie would again run an inn, or a cookshop or a barter house. She would learn a cobbler's trade or a cooper's or an apothecary's. She could learn and do anything, anything at all, and she would not let me do what I wanted, which was what I had always wanted: go to Soulvine Moor, cross over, and find my mother in the Country of the Dead. Only from my mother could I learn who was my father, who was the crowned woman in my terrible dreams, who I was myself.
‘You will seek your mother. Despite anything I would tell you,' Mother Chilton had said two years ago. But I had not. Now the chance had come, and I would not rest until I found my mother and she told me what I must know.
So I walked with Maggie as we moved south-east and the countryside grew steeper, more wooded, less peopled. I joked with her, slept at night across a banked campfire from her, and said nothing about my plans. And so we came to Haryllbury.
In mid-afternoon we stood on a high rise, looking down at a village beside a small lake. It was larger than most hill settlements, perhaps because of the lake. A small river fed it, tumbling down from the mountains and winding like a slim swift snake among the steep hills and through the sudden ravines. Farm plots, tiny and irregularly laid out, but nonetheless under cultivation.
I didn't know if we still stood in The Queendom or over the border in the Unclaimed Lands, and later, when I came to learn the village's name, I still didn't know. ‘Haryll' sounded like the latter, ‘bury' like the former. The place was a cross-breed, and so likely to belong to neither.
‘It's big enough to afford us work,' Maggie said. ‘But small enough to be unnoticed.'
‘Yes, I agree. Jee, take Shadow and buy some bread.' I gave him a penny.
Jee started down the hillside, Shadow bounding alongside. Maggie and I sat on the thick grass, grateful for the chance to rest our legs. She began to pull up daisies and braid them together into a chain. Bees hummed around us, drinking of the red clover, and a rabbit leaped by.
Lucky for it that both Jee and Shadow had gone.
Maggie said quietly, ‘Don't go, Peter.'
She knew. Perhaps she had always known. I couldn't look at her.
‘Don't leave us. You were going to slip away at night, weren't you? Make sure we had work and a place to sleep, and then set out alone. Leaving me. Again.'
Once before I had tried to leave her behind, when I had forsaken the palace and gone to search for Cecilia. That time she had insisted on following. I sensed that it would be different now. She would not follow a second time. Maggie had her pride, and it had suffered enough where I was concerned. She wouldn't insist on coming with me, but she would do everything she could to prevent me from going.
She said, not without dignity, ‘Please don't lie to me. You are planning on going to Soulvine Moor, aren't you? To search for your mother over ... over there. Please don't lie. to me!'
‘
Ye will seek your mother. Despite anything I would tell ye
.'
‘Yes,' I said, so softly that she bent her head towards me to hear, ‘I'm going. I must go, Maggie.'
‘No,' she said simply, ‘you choose to go.'
And to that there was no answer. She didn't rage, she didn't argue, she didn't even cry, and I found myself thinking that I would rather any of those things than this quiet hurt, deep as the sea. The chain of daisies lay in her lap. Her head bowed over them, and her fair springy curls fell forward to hide her face. She stayed still, so still that except for the tension in her neck, she might have been dead. Might have been one of those motionless Dead on the other side, eternally sitting in their tranquil circles.
The thought chilled me. I couldn't stand seeing her like this – Maggie, who was all bustle and energy and plans.
I couldn't stand it.
‘Maggie ...' I reached out my one good hand and laid it on her shoulder.
So swiftly that she startled me, Maggie turned to face me. No tears, but she put her arms around me and hung on like a drowning woman to a raft. Her mouth breathed hot near mine.
‘Then if you're really going, you cannot deny me this.
One last time, Peter. I may never see you again. You can't deny me this. You can't, oh you
can't
...'
And I could not. Her anguish touched me to my soul. Her body was warm and soft next to mine. The sun shone hotly on us both, the heavy drone of the bees brought its own trance, the fragrant grasses rustled in a sweet breeze. We were seventeen, and my member throbbed with life. I laid Maggie gently on the wildflowers and raised the skirt of her gown.
Afterwards, she slept. Jee and Shadow had not yet returned. Quietly I took the least I needed from our packs and left her there, asleep on the sunny hillside. I turned my steps south, climbing alone into the Unclaimed Lands.
An hour slid by while the stars came out and the moon rose, full and round and yellow as a good cheese. Until this journey, it had been over two years since I had slept without a roof over my head. The night sky brought up all sorts of feelings, all sorts of memories. Myself as a child and youth, travelling with Aunt Jo and the brute she married, Hartah. What Hartah had forced me to do at summer faires to earn a few coins from grieving and susceptible countrywomen. Hidden in our tent, I had listened to their tales of lost mothers, children, husbands. Then I had crossed over, roused some old woman to tell me details about the family, and returned with false messages of love and happiness beyond the grave. Even now, remembering these lies, I burned with shame and humiliation.
But what Hartah had made me do was nothing compared to what I had, as Queen Caroline's court fool, done for her. And to her.
So many Dead I had roused! All of them old, for only the old can be roused from their deep trance; perhaps only they live long enough to retain memories of life. The Dead are waiting, I think, but neither I nor anyone else knows for what. And I could be wrong. Perhaps they are not waiting at all. Perhaps this unmoving tranquillity is what they have lived in order to attain.
I would like to think that. It would mean that I had not deprived Cecilia of so very much after all. Cecilia and all the others I had brought back to life from the far country, only to ensure that now they existed in neither place, and never would again. That was the unceasing anguish in my mind. Not that Cecilia had died, but that because of me she was not among the Dead. But if death was no more than this rigid stillness, I had not taken from her anything worth having.
It was Maggie that I had robbed of everything she wanted.
But to bring Maggie with me would have been to endanger yet another woman. I was right to leave Maggie behind. But she did not think so, and even to me the thought was cold comfort. I wanted more than that, and only my mother could give it to me. I remembered her in her lavender gown, holding me on her knees and singing to me. Lavender ribbons in her hair. I remembered her scent and her bright eyes and her gentle touch
‘Eleven years dead.'
No. The woman in my monstrous dream was not my mother. My mother had not worn a crown, had not been queen of anything. And the voice in my dream was lighter than my mother's, higher in pitch. Nor was it the voice of Queen Caroline, who had anyway been dead for only two and a half years, and whom I had last seen quiet and motionless in the Country of the Dead. No, this woman was only a bad dream, an insubstantial thing fashioned of air and anguished memory, not real in this land nor that other. Merely a dream.
Finally, I slept. It seemed only a few minutes later that I was wakened by a kick in the ribs. Thrashing to turn over, tangled in my blanket and blinking against the morning sunlight, I woke to two warriors standing above me, short knives drawn and pointed downward at my throat.
‘
Aleyk ta nodree!
'
‘
Hent!'
I struggled, but it did me little good. One savage hauled me to my feet and pinned my arms from behind. The other peered into my face, as if trying to decide who I was. I had no idea who he was, except that he was a soldier in the Young Chieftain's army. He wore their shaggy fur tunic with leather belt and metal-capped boots. His long hair, braided away from his sunburned face, sported no feathers and he wore no short feathered cape, so he was not an officer. Some sort of scout, perhaps. Like most of them, his eyes were blue, not the brilliant piece-of-sky blue that Solek's had been, but rather a dull blue-grey. In the palace I had learned some of their guttural language, but not the words they'd uttered so far. But I understood the next exchange.
‘
Mit?
' Him?
‘
Tento
.' I don't know.
‘
Jun fee kal
.'
That last I did not understand. However, it took no language to understand the hands that went roughly over my body and through my pack. They took my big hunting blade but left the tiny shaving knife in my boot. They pushed me forward and we began walking, off the meadow and down the mountain.
I was a prisoner. But so far I had not been hurt in any way. And the savages were not sure who I was. In two and a half years I had changed: filled out in the body, gone gaunt and sunburned in the face, grown a beard, lost a hand.
They were not sure who I was
. Desperately I clung to that, because there was little else to cling to. The savages were big men, in the prime of their strength and manhood, and the larger outweighed me by at least three stone. Running from them would only get me hurt.
How had they found me? Had they already captured Maggie and forced her to talk? Maggie, whom I had left peacefully asleep on the hillside fragrant with clover. She wouldn't betray me unless they forced her. But under torture, anyone will betray anything. And Jee, with his thin small bones ...
I stumbled, going down heavily, unable to catch myself with only one hand. The savages halted and waited for me to get up. They did not touch me. I staggered upright and we carried on down the steep slope. As we descended, the mountain rose behind us, blocking out the morning sun, so that it seemed as if it were setting instead of rising.
We were heading north, back to The Queendom. Towards Haryllbury? Fear for Maggie and Jee rumbled through me like summer thunder.
After several hours, the savages paused for food. They let me drink from my water bag and pull cheese from my pack. My throat was so parched it was difficult to swallow. The savages, who said little even to each other, seemed to feel no fatigue from the half-day's hard march over rough terrain. I had thought myself hardy from long hours of labour at the inn, but tending sheep and nailing boards could not compare with whatever training these men had. Nor could what now seemed the leisurely pace with which Maggie, Jee, and I had come from Applebridge. Ten minutes to eat and to fill the water bags at a swift stream, and we were off again.
‘
Alt!
' one savage said, whipped his
gun
off his shoulder and fired. Twenty feet away, a deer that had burst from cover was cast into the air and then fell back to earth.
It was the first time I had seen a
gun
fire up close. The terrific noise echoed off the mountains. The deer was dead, its head bloody. This was the weapon that had given Lord Solek's army control of The Queendom once before, and apparently was doing so again, for these soldiers were taking no trouble to conceal their presence from any nearby farms. My ears were still deafened from the
gun
. Swords were no match for this.
The savage skinned and butchered the deer with his short knife. This was useful information: Unlike Lord Solek's knife that had taken my hand, this one was not tipped with poison. The savage wielded it even more swiftly than Maggie skinning rabbits. The venison was cut, salted and stored in his pack in less time that I would have thought possible.
Even such a short rest was welcome. But then we were off again, and by now I had another piece of information. The sun was setting in the west, and it dyed the sky behind us, not ahead. We were marching north-east, towards the sea. I had climbed into the Unclaimed Lands heading south-east. So we were not headed towards the village where I had left Maggie and Jee, but to some point further east. Of course, the savages could still have captured them and brought them east, but why would they do that instead of bringing me to them? So I hoped that Maggie was safe, that the savages did not recognize me, that I might be let go.