Crossing Over by Kendall Anna

Author:Kendall, Anna [Kendall, Anna]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Viking Children's
Published: 2010-10-13T16:00:00+00:00

19

AS EVER, THE DEAD still sat, or lay, gazing at nothing. But the ground was wrong. I was used to the way the country of the Dead stretched or shrank, so that what was close by in the land of the living might here be miles off. But always the ground was the same, covered with low, dense grass. Always the sky was an even, featureless gray. Always the river meandered placidly, flat and slow.

Not now. The grass stood in uneven patches: some places high weeds, some low grass, some bare ground. The river had rocks in it and the water, flowing faster, eddied around the rocks in tiny bursts of white foam. The sky seemed darker. And beneath my feet, the ground rumbled softly. What was happening in this place, where nothing ever happened?

Dazed, I began walking along the river. I saw no one I recognized. After a while the trees grew denser, making small groves and then patches of woods. The land grew wilder and I had to veer away from the water. I could not find the two dead savage warriors, and even if I had, they would have been sitting tranquilly, as unreachable as the rest of the Dead. In the land of the living, the queen waited for my answer. What was I going to do?

All at once, a man jumped out at me from behind a thicket of bushes. I hit out at him and he hit back, his blow landing on my jaw, not hard enough to break it but hard enough to knock me down. It was a Blue soldier. As I lay panting for breath, he grabbed me by the arm and hauled me over to another soldier, who recognized me.

“Boy! Did the witch-queen, that whore, send you back here again?”

It was the same soldier I’d spoken to on my last crossing. I stammered, “Y-yes. She told me . . . she told me to see how all goes in Witchland, until she herself can return.”

He spat, and his saliva made a little wet spot in the dirt. Had the Dead always been able to do that? But clearly this man still did not believe he was dead. The country of the Dead was filling up with people who, like Bat, did not believe they inhabited it. And the landscape began to turn stormy when the Blue soldiers did not behave like the Dead. The rumbling of the ground, the wind and lightning and darkening of the sky—all increased as the number of Blue soldiers increased from battle on the other side. I had caused this. I, Roger Kilbourne, with the lies I had told about “Witchland.”

“All here goes slow,” the Blue captain said to me. “We have found no way to go back to The Queendom. Queen Eleanor remains under a spell, not eating nor sleeping nor talking. But there are more of us now, sent by the magic fire-sticks.”

“Fire-sticks? ”

“Weapons that belched fire along with their magic, wielded by an army of male witches chanting foul spells.

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