Plenilune (33 page)

“She cannot be left out of it. She is heart and soul with it,” the woman replied, scorn in her own voice now. “It seems, therefore, that her blood is pertinent.”

Rupert jigged the reins, gathering up their slack. His calves tightened and Witching Hour, uneasy but responsive, began to shrug forward. “I am done with you. Do not let me—ever—see your face again.”

Either by design or by animal impulse Witching Hour suddenly sprang forward, kicking out with his hind legs. The woman did not seem to mind. She stood placidly on the edge of wood and lane, wrapped and bent in her gold-flecked clothes, watching them ride by. Margaret, riding two abreast in the lane beside Rhea, had to brush right past the old woman. She looked down, conscious that it would have been rude not to, feeling the eerie prickling all along her arms even as she made herself do so, and touched gazes with her. She felt a ripple of power reach out from the woman, a sense of presence superior to her apple-withered frame, but the strange thing was that it felt like a salute. In a horrible rush Centurion’s half-laughing words came back to her, and at the woman’s salute a weight she did not want, but a weight she knew someone must carry, settled on her shoulders.

She was almost glad to arrive home that evening. The plum-coloured dusk was thick around them, rich with the sounds of cold rushing water and the rattle of the wind in the bare trees. The horses shuffled at an iron-shod trot up the drive, whickering to themselves contentedly as the numerous golden lights shone out at them from the house windows. Margaret felt the expectation of warmth on her skin. In the yard they left their horses with the crooked, shadowy figure of old Hobden, who grunted and said nothing, and with the maid and manservant carrying their luggage they crowded into the candlelit hallway that opened on the yard. Margaret could feel the blue smell of wood-smoke richly, warmly in her nose. Something in her middle relaxed.

That worried her.

Rupert turned to her. “The baron and I have things to discuss. I will have your supper sent up to your room. Doubtless,” he added quietly, mockingly, “you would prefer it that way.”

Malbrey exchanged places with Livy and loomed up behind him them, dark in the shadows and flecked gold with the light where his hair and beard were silver-coloured. Feeling him so close, so huge, Margaret’s tired senses jangled with panic. She stepped away, then remembered to say good-night—Malbrey rumbled something equally polite—trying like a blind juggler to show neither her panic nor how glad she felt to be rid of them. Stiff from riding, her book clutched in her hand, she retraced the familiar yet surreal hallways and staircase until the knob of her own door, cold from the winter and disuse, sent a single silver bar of consciousness into her mind.

She clicked the latch back and went into her room. The lights were burning; someone had set a fire in the hearth and it was blazing merrily, casting a hollow, dancing glow of red over the long room. She felt it play like feathers on her face, and it was a kind, welcoming, relieving sort of feeling. The long three days at Lookinglass were behind her, much as she liked Lookinglass, and she was alone again without a need to smile and say the right thing or prove herself to anyone. Aching and hollow and brittle as the fire, she put her book down on a table full in the light, fetched a pen, and sat down before the open pages.

She was busily writing when Rhea came in with her bags. The maid said something coolly, reservedly, and Margaret promptly dismissed her without bothering to look up. After a few minutes the room was as it had been, empty but for the darkness and thin light, silent but for the crackle of the fire and the scratch of the scroll-worked iron nib across the page. She wrote with a chill running up the backs of her arms, for she wrote about the old woman.

When it was done and her mind had been emptied onto the page, she sat back with a heavy sigh, holding her right wrist, rubbing it between her fingers, staring into the deep blue heart of the fire until her eyes stung and she had to look away. She looked at the clock but it was too deeply in shadow for her to see. Surely it was late. She would dress and go down to the fox and sleep away the lost hours in the morning—for who would need her tomorrow? She pulled her stiffened body out of the chair and crossed to her bags.

It is Sunday
, she thought as her hands yanked at the buckles,
and I got no rest today
.

She reached in for her heavy dressing robe, plunging past folded articles of clothing, and jarred her fingers violently against something long and flat and hard as her bruised bones. With a backward start she drew out her hand, hesitating, looking warily into the black depths of her bag. Her heart knocked hard at her ribcage. Then, in a single fluid motion, driven by curiosity, she swept up a candle from the table and knelt back down, holding the light aloft, driving the dark deeper, smaller, into the bottom of the bag. The light awoke gems from twisted hemlines and the flush of velvet from crumpled fabric—and the rose-red glint of leather binding. Even as she reached to pull it out, she heard Skander’s voice in her mind and she knew what it was.

The title flashed out in gold, sweeping, flowing with the red light of the candle. But it was the author’s name, though worn, glimmering only here and there in the embossing with gold, that pulled like magic at Margaret’s eye: Songmartin. The blood shocked back to her heart. Strangely she saw Skander’s face, the old woman’s, Centurion’s—stranger still, Brand’s, fierce and tawny in the brown shadows and yellow firelight, played wildly across with the glint of light off a blade…Carefully she put it back in the bag, thrusting it to the bottom, and pulled out her dressing robe. Then, slinging the bag under her bed and slinging the robe around her shoulders, she took up her notebook, paused at the door to listen and, hearing nothing, passed out into the dark hallway.

It was a different woman who went down the hall and stairs and moved silently through the dining room toward the kitchen passageway. There was no fierce, defiant tempest, no will to die. But was there will to live? she wondered. A vaguely disquieting peace hounded her footsteps: the peace, she knew, of despair. Before her in the dark was a little fox-coloured flame, blue at its search-light heart, but the flame gave her no hope. It was a pleasant little blaze, confined as she was, at which she could warm her hands, but she had few illusions that it would do her any good. The long shadow of Rupert’s game fell across even that and quenched it without mercy.

The lamp was burning, just as she remembered it. At the sound of her slipper-clad foot on the floor there was a flurry of red in the shadows, and the fox uncurled, springing up from his bed. The light shattered yellow on his eyes a moment, filling his face with an ominous glow, before he jogged forward and put the lamp behind him.

“Ding dong dell, kitty’s in the well!” he cried. He came close and stood, tail swaying from side to side. A light awkwardness settled for a moment as they stared at one another—Margaret no longer knew quite what to say to the mocking coward at her feet—when the fox at last prompted, “So, you haven’t forgotten me, after all…Was it as bad as you had anticipated?”

“No,” she admitted. Then, after a struggle of emotions, she added, “And yes.”

The sable-tipped ears twitched backward as a man might twitch a brow. “And yes? A’come: what went amiss for the belle of the ball?”

She sat down on an upturned crate, gathering her robe and the shadow of despair around her. The fox, too, sat. She met his gaze levelly, quietly, feeling the yawning hole of despair open wider in her soul—its edges were sharp, its darkness soft and inviting—but the despair seemed oddly easier to face down here with the white feather of a fox than it ever was up above. The fox might be a coward, a perfect dastard, but at least he understood misery. He could not do anything about it, but at least he understood. Even Skander could not do that.

“Everything went amiss. I feel dirty, and for Plenilune—they m-made up their minds about Rupert. There was nothing I could do.”

The fox looked toward the cellar steps but he did not seem to be seeing anything. “Were they kind to you?” he asked at length.

“They.” She laughed shortly, mirthlessly. “There were so many of them, like glass angels in church windows…They did not hate me as I thought they would, but neither did they really like me. I—I overheard them talking the first evening, talking about me. I shouldn’t have eavesdropped, but I had to know what they thought.”

The fox, having turned his head to her, looked quizzical.

“I suppose it was as I expected. Some of them were pitying, some of them were disquieted. One or two of them outright distrusted me.”

“Do you trust you?”

To Margaret’s surprise she went looking for the mockery in his tone and could not find it. “There was a man called Lord Gro FitzDraco,” she went stumblingly on after an awkward interval. “He was kind, I think. It…it was hard to tell
what
he was.”

The fox barked merrily, a vicious, playful twinkle in his eye. “Gro? He sallied out of Gemeren for such a societal occasion as the New Ivy gala? Well, he would do it—for Capys’ sake. He’s got good marrow in his uncompromising bones, Lord Gro.” The fox settled comfortably into a red loaf of body on the cellar floor. “He was kind to you?”

“I suppose so. He unnerved me a little. I could have managed him better had he been a bad man. I faced up to Malbrey tolerably, but only because I don’t like him. Lord Gro was all manner of contradictory. He never wanted to talk, but he would always stand so close that conversation could not be avoided. I have a dreadful feeling he singled me out on several occasions because—because—because I look hunted.”

She had not known what to expect from the fox when she made the confession—it galled her to say it—but she had certainly not expected the angry pale flash of the eyes nor the black backward curl of lips from the small, sharp teeth. What she found most frightening was that she saw in his face her own helpless anger, spiteful and sudden, lashing out against powers neither of them could hope to sway.

“I did not hear him say so,” she hurried on before the fox could say anything in her defence. She did not want a coward coming to her defence just then. “I overheard Skander Rime telling it to Rupert. Lord Gro had spoken to Skander about me.”

The fox skimmed over this remarkable outspokenness on the taciturn nobleman’s part and noticed instead: “You seem to have done an awful lot of eavesdropping.”

“There was a lot to drop eaves on,” Margaret retorted. “I don’t understand the problem with eavesdropping, anyway. If people don’t want others to be offended, they oughtn’t say cruel things at all.”

“True,” said the fox. “When you find a place like that, I’ll go there too.” A little more considerately he asked, “Was it very difficult, having everyone looking at you and talking about you?”

“Sometimes. Some people were kind: a few people I could converse with and not remember that I am from Earth and that I have come here under discomforting circumstances. Some people were genuinely kind. Lord Gro, in his way, was one of those. I am not used to him yet, but I think I begin to like him a little.”

“And others?”

Mentioning Lord Gro dredged up the memory of the cold log in the wood and the strangely sweet, sharp-edged moment of companionship she had shared and the awful confused ache for things she could neither envision nor understand. She felt dirty and cold and lonesome, and knew she would never again share such a moment with another soul, so clean and level, so simple: merely two souls bound together in a moment of melancholy.
It is the melancholy of this place which calls out to me,
she thought,
for that is what binds us all in this life.

When the fox repeated himself she came back out of her miserable thoughts with a start. “The others? I hardly know. I did not really get to
know
any of them. I did not like any of Rupert’s friends, but then, I never expected to.”

The fox looked interested. “Who was there? Do you remember?”

Margaret unfolded and picked up her notebook. “I kept a list here. Malbrey from Talus Perey was there. He is here now, actually; he came back with us on his way to his home.”

“Malbrey is here? I thought I smelled a rat.”

“Yes…And that awful Lord Bloodburn from Hol was there as well.”

“By the twelve houses!” the fox cried, getting impulsively to his feet. “You met Bloodburn? Would that I had been there. I am sorry you met him alone.”

There was no mockery in his tone, nor even cowardice, and it made Margaret’s brief inclination to self-pity even harder to fight against. The face of Bloodburn returned to her, pale, weathered, scarred, and grey, like stone, like Caesar: a thrill of cold horror raced along her skin. Compared to that wretched Hol, Lord Gro looked beatific. With a desperate diving motion of the mind she swerved away. “You know Bloodburn?”

“Yes, I’ve seen him.” Realizing he had risen, the fox bewilderedly found his seat again. “I have probably seen almost everyone you met at the gala. Name to me some others. Test my memory.”

Margaret turned her book to the light, in which her fine script flashed up spidery-jet on the warm crisp pages. “To the best of my knowledge I have put them together by county—or House. I think you call them Houses here.”

“Nay, Honours,” the fox corrected her. “The Houses are the families which oversee them. You call them ‘Counties’ in your world?”

“Oh—well—perhaps—not quite.” Margaret coloured with confusion and rushed on from the compromising subject of England. “I have grouped people according to their Honours. Of course there was Skander Rime.” She peered at the script: the lamp was not very adequate. “FitzDraco was there, and Malbrey from Marenové—I mean, the Mares. Bloodburn and his wife and their son came up from Hol-land, and Centurion was there from Darkling-law. I am sure I have misspelled this name: Orzelon-gang. Mark Roy and Romage and their sons Aikin and Brand were there. From Thrasymene were Black Malkin—I like not
her
looks: she curdles my stomach—and Grane and Woodbird. Woodbird was…interesting.”