Crossing Over

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Acknowledgements

  VIKING

  Published by Penguin Group

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  First published in the United States in 2010 by Viking, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Copyright © Anna Kendall, 2010

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  To Jack

  1

  THE FIRST TIME I ever crossed over, it was market day and I was a little boy, barely six years old. I had spilled goat’s milk on the linsey-woolsey that Aunt Jo had spent weeks weaving, the linsey-woolsey that she was going to sell at market. Hartah beat me unconscious, and I crossed over.

  No. That is not true. I must have crossed over earlier, in dreams. There must have been times when my infant self lay asleep, restless and feverish from some childish illness, pain in my head or belly or throat. That’s what is required—letting go, as in sleep, plus pain. Not great pain, but Hartah doesn’t believe that. Or maybe he just likes beating me.

  That first time, eight years ago—the milk staining the bright green wool, my aunt’s gasp, her husband raising his head from the table with that look in his eyes, and I—

  “Roger,” he said now, “you will cross over today.” Again Hartah raised his head, this time looking at me over the rim of his mug of sour ale.

  My neck and spine turned cold.

  It was barely dawn. We sat alone in the taproom of an inn somewhere on the Stonegreen Road. It wasn’t much of an inn. Three trestle tables of rough wood on the cobbled floor, two ladders leading to “rooms” above that were no more than lofts with dirty straw as pallets. The beams overhead were so blackened and ill cared for that soot dropped onto the tables. Still, last night my heart had surged with gladness when our wagon pulled into the stable yard. During the summer we almost never slept indoors. But now the first leaves had begun to turn color and the air smelled of rain. Hartah must have hidden a few pennies, or stolen them, to pay the innkeeper.

  “Today is the Stonegreen harvest faire,” Hartah said. “You will cross over.” Before he could say more, the inn door opened and four men entered. They were loud, laughing and joking, but no louder than the clamor in my head.

  I can’t, I can’t, I can’t, I won’t—

  But I knew I would.

  “Brought your ram, then, Farlowe?” said one of the men. “Puny beast—no prize for you, I wager!”

  “Seventeen stone if he’s a pound!”

  “Pound of sagging skin and weak bones!”

  Rough male laughter and cries of “Ale! Ale before the faire!”

  The innkeeper’s wife came from the kitchen, Aunt Jo trailing meekly behind with Hartah’s breakfast. She didn’t meet my eyes. She knew, then, what Hartah would make me do this day, and how he would make me do it.

  “Ale! Ale before the faire!”

  “You shall have it, then,” the innkeeper’s wife said, a frothy mug in each hand and two more balanced on her meaty forearms. “And breakfast, too, if you’re with money, you scurrilous lot! Good morrow, Tom, Philip, Jack . . . Henry, where’s that pretty new wife of yours? When I was her age, I was never left alone in bed of a faire morning. Or did you wear her out before dawn?”

  The youngest man blushed and looked proud. The others roared and teased him while the woman set down the ale. She was broad, red-faced, merry—everything my aunt was not. Aunt Jo set a wooden trencher of bread and cheese—no meat—in front of Hartah and backed quickly away. So cowed was she that she didn’t even realize he would hardly strike her here, in front of men whom he hoped to be selling to later in the day. Her thin body shuddered.

  I felt no pity. Never once had she protected me from him. Never once. And there was no bread and cheese for me. Probably Hartah’s stolen coins were only enough for one.

  The oldest of the laughing men glanced at me. Casually he flipped a penny onto the table. “Here, boy, water my horse and his burden, the ones with yellow ribbons, there’s a good lad.”

  The penny landed midway between Hartah and me. I saw the muscles of his great shoulders shift, as if he meant to reach for it. But the older man watched us, and so Hartah merely nodded, as if giving permission. As if he were some sort of gracious lord—Hartah! Hatred burned behind my eyes. I snatched the penny and went outside.

  The day was soft and clear, traces of the gold-and-orange sunrise still in the sky and the rough grass smelling of last night’s rain. I fetched water from the stable yard well both for the horse and for the ram tethered in the cart, its horns bright with yellow ribbons. More wagons pulled up to the inn, farmers arriving for the faire. Their cartwheels groaned under loads of vegetables, sheep, baskets, children. “The caravan comes! I saw it!” a child shrieked, leaning so far over the side of his wagon that he nearly fell out. “I saw
it!”

  “Hush your noise,” his young mother said fondly. She wore a lavender dress and lavender ribbons in her hair, and her hand strayed to stroke her little lad’s soft curls.

  Bitterness ran through me like vomit.

  Hartah would make me do it. He would make me cross over, lying concealed in the back of our worn and faded faire booth. That was why we had come here. And to make it happen, he would beat me first, as he had all the other times.

  I was no longer six years old. I was fourteen, and as tall as Hartah. But I was skinny—how could I be otherwise, when I got so little to eat?—and narrow shouldered. Hartah could lift a cask of new ale on each shoulder and not even sweat. But now I had a penny. Could I run away on that? On a single penny and the memory of my dead mother in her lavender dress?

  No. I could not. Where would I go?

  And yet I dreamed of escape. Sometimes I gazed at Hartah and was frightened by the violence of my desire to do him violence. But Hartah had told me and Aunt Jo of finding the bodies of lone travelers on the roads of The Queendom, set upon by highwaymen, robbed and gutted. After such stories, I huddled in my thin blanket and went nowhere.

  My stomach rumbled. I took the penny round back to the kitchen and exchanged it for breakfast, which I gobbled standing up in the stable yard.

  A girl leaned against the well. There were other girls here now, climbing down from wagons or trailing behind their families into the inn. They wore their best outfits, wool skirts dyed green or red or blue, hiked up over striped petticoats, black stomachers laced tight over embroidered white smocks, ribbons in their hair. This one was no prettier, no more bright-eyed, no better dressed than the others, although she wore black lace mitts on her hands. But she watched me. The rest of the girls looked through me, as if I were a patch of air, or else their eyes narrowed and their pink lips turned down in disgust. Dirty. Weak. Homeless.

  But this girl watched me thoughtfully, her heavy bucket of water dangling from one hand and weighing down her shoulder. Something bright and terrifying raced through me. She knew.

  But of course that was nonsense. Nobody knew about me except my aunt and the bastard she had married, and sometimes I think even my aunt doubted. He can do what? Does he merely pretend? But Aunt Jo said so little, serving Hartah in such cringing silence, that it was impossible to tell what she thought except that she wished I had not come to her on her sister’s death. That wish was evident every moment of every day, but even so, she didn’t wish it as fervently as I.

  However, there had been nowhere else for me to go. My mother dead, my father vanished before I had any memory of him. Aunt Jo would never talk of either, no matter how much I begged. And now, all these years later, still nowhere else for me to go.

  The girl nodded at me and walked off with her heavy bucket. Her long black braids swung from side to side. Her pretty figure grew smaller as she walked away from me, so that it almost seemed as if she were disappearing, dissolving into the soft morning light. “There you are,” Hartah’s voice said behind me. “Getting breakfast, are you? Good. You’ll need your strength this afternoon.”

  I turned. He smiled. A mouth full of broken teeth, and eyes full of pleasure at what would come later. Slowly, almost as gentle as a woman, he reached out one thick finger and wiped a crumb of bread from beside my lips.

  2

  BY NOON THE faire was in full whirl. Stonegreen was bigger than I had realized. The inn where we had slept was five miles back down the road, and there was a much better inn beside the village green, along with a blacksmith shop, a cobbler, and the large, moss-covered boulder that gave Stonegreen its name. The boulder reached as high as my shoulder, and someone had planted love-in-a-mist all around it. A placid river, bordered by trees, meandered by half-timbered cottages thatched with straw. The straw, too, had grown green with moss and lichens. Around the cottages grew hollyhocks, delphinium, roses, ivy, cherry and apple trees. Behind were neat herb gardens, well houses, chicken yards, and smokehouses—all the sources of good things that exist when women hold sway over prosperous households. I smelled bread baking and the sweet-sour odor of mulled ale.

  The faire was held in a field at the other end of town from the green. There were booths and tents where local people sold crops, livestock, meat pies, jellies, cloth woven by wives and daughters, ale and ribbons, and carved wooden toys. In other booths, merchants from as far away as Glory, the capital of The Queendom, offered pewter plate, farm tools, buttons. A third group, neither local nor from Glory, had come in a caravan of red-and-blue-painted wagons that traveled all summer to country faires. I had seen the caravans before. There would be a fire-eater, puppet players, jugglers, fiddlers, a show of trained fleas, an illusionist, a wrestler offering to take on all comers. Children ran among the booths, and couples strolled arm in arm. Fiddlers and drummers played, boothmen bawled out their wares, animals for sale bleated or lowed or clucked. I saw no soldiers, which, of course, was a good thing.

  “Here,” said Hartah, and my aunt and I began unloading the tent from his wagon.

  Our booth, unlike most others, was completely closed. The stained and faded canvas displayed only a small group of stars, arranged in the constellation of the Weeping Woman. Sometimes people entered thinking we were some sort of chapel, but Hartah was good at spotting those and sending them away none the wiser. Others, recognizing the ancient pattern of stars and their hidden meaning, entered alone, one by one. They conferred with Hartah and, later, came back for their answer, also alone. Hartah could neither read nor cipher. But he was not stupid, he took care, and it had been a long time since we had been denounced as witches. These were prosperous days in The Queendom, and even I at fourteen knew that prosperity lessens suspicion of witchcraft. People were not desperate. It is the poor and desperate, so accustomed to danger, who most fear what they cannot see.

  Although, of course, we were not even witches.

  As I tugged on the heavy canvas, I thought again about running away. I could do it. Boys my age did it—didn’t they? They found work as farmhands or stable boys or beggars. But I knew nothing of farming, not much about horses, and I was afraid not only of highwaymen but of starvation. And in a few months winter would be here. Where did beggars go in winter?

  The truth is, I was a coward.

  “Look lively, Roger!” Hartah growled. “Your aunt works faster than you!”

  And she did. Aunt Jo scurried around like a scrawny whirl-wind, afraid of Hartah’s fists.

  When the tent was up, he shoved me inside it. A rough table was set in the corner and draped with a rug that fell to the ground. Under this, unseen but hearing all, I would crouch for several hours, as the faire-goers came with their requests. We would not get the happy men, women, and children carrying their fairings, drinking their ale, winning prizes for their seventeen-stone rams. We would get the other people found in every village, every city, in every queendom. The people that the happy ones tried not to notice, lest it ruin their pleasure at the faire. The ones who were beset, grieving, afraid. My people.

  And so it would begin again.

  The first time I ever crossed over, I was six years old. Now I was fourteen and it was the same, ever the same, always the same.

  All morning I lay cramped beneath my table, listening. Then, at noon, when the sun beat hot on the heavy canvas, the tent flap was fastened close and Hartah pulled me out. He smiled. “You ready, boy?”

  “Hartah . . .” I hated that my voice quavered, that I brought my hand feebly to guard my face, hated that I was too frightened of him to fight back. His fist smashed into my belly. All the air left me, and I gasped with pain. He hit me again, in the chest, the groin, all places covered by clothing where my bruises would not show. The sounds of the fiddles and the drums and the shrieking children hid my cries. I was not an infant now, crossing over in an infant’s mindless letting go; I had to choose this. Pain plus choice. I willed it so, and even as my body fell to the ground, it happened.

  Darkness�
��

  Cold—

  Dirt choking my mouth—

  Worms in my eyes—

  Earth imprisoning my fleshless arms and legs—

  But only for a moment. I was not, after all, actually dead. The taste of death lasted only for the brief moment of crossing, the plunge through the barrier that no one else could penetrate, not even the Dead themselves. A heavy barrier, solid and large as Earth itself, and just as impossible to bore all the way through. Except, for reasons I did not understand, for me.

  I tried again to cry out and could not for the dirt clogging my mouth. I tried to flail my arms and could not for the lack of muscle and flesh over my naked bones. Then it was over. The dirt gone, my bones restored, and I had crossed over into the country of the Dead.

  A few of the Dead sat on the ground, doing what the Dead do. I ignored them as I took my bearings. There, in the near distance, the gleam of water . . . It might be the river beside Stonegreen.

  The country of the Dead is like our country, but weirdly stretched out and sometimes distorted. A few steps in Stonegreen might be half a mile here, or two miles, or five. Or it might be the same. Sometimes our rivers and forests and hills exist here, but sometimes not. The country of the Dead is vaster than ours and I think it changes over time, just as ours does, but not in the same way. It is our shadow made solid. Like a shadow, it shrinks and grows, but from some unseen influence that is not the sun. There is no sun here.

  There is light, an even subdued glow, as on a cloudy day. The sky is always a low, featureless gray. The air is quiet, and I could again breathe easily, all hurt gone from my chest. Pain does not follow me when I cross over. It is merely the price of passage.

  In the cool, calm light I walked toward the gleam of water. Before I reached it, I came to the big, moss-covered boulder that on the other side had marked the village green. The boulder looked exactly the same, although without Stonegreen’s surrounding cottages and shops and fields. Without the road, as well. There are no roads here, just untrammeled grass of an everlasting summer. The steps of the Dead leave no marks.