Plenilune (43 page)

She turned toward the window. Sunlight clinked off the swinging amber drops hanging from her ears. “He is on the lawn. He takes Curoi and Talbot out of a morning when the weather is not too thick.”

Skander crossed to the window and stood by her, looking out on the scene. Through the heavy grey light and wind-surf noise came back the sound of dogs barking. The hawthorns were bare, the barberry wind-stripped; clouds lay thick in the lower parts of Seescardale and obscured the view within a few miles.

“It is thick enough this morning. Is that thunder I hear? There will be a storm in Glassdale for sure.”

Margaret looked at her hands clenched in her lap. “It would be useless, I suppose, and cruel to ask if you would stay another day.”

He did not turn. The hollow winter light paled his face; the gleam of the windowpanes chilled his eyes. “I cannot stay another day. I am sorry.”

“Better eat your eggs,” she told him with an attempt at glibness. “There is nothing so distasteful to the civilised world as cold eggs.”

Rupert came in presently, his shoulders sheeny with mizzle. He saw Margaret first and his face brightened; then he saw his cousin and something checked, closed and quenched, crept into his features.

“Good morning. I see that you are back on your feet.”

Leaning back, Skander hitched his ankle up over his opposite knee, his cup of coffee steaming in his hand. He, too, had a wariness in his face, weighing his cousin’s mind in the tension of the air. “We are men to bound back quickly. What does the weather do?”

As Rupert sat down Livy entered and poured his master his own cup of coffee. “It will rain here but the main of it has come over Seescarfell already. It should pass on by tonight and leave us with bonny skies.” There was a pause, thoughtful on both sides, then Rupert added, “ ’Tis but a bare fortnight.”

Skander nodded. “Not even—just shy of.” His gaze, for a moment, slid to Margaret before passing on to the window again; and it was all Margaret could do in that moment to suppress the quick, raging twist of panic that began beneath her breastbone.

The odd thing was that Rupert and Skander parted in a kind of quietness, not at all friendly, but as two men who have a mutual respect, though given grudgingly, silently acknowledged. Margaret could not help but feel, as she stood on the stable yard threshold wrapped against the cold, that the parting gestures they gave each other were like two men saluting with duelling swords. But when Skander went away and Rupert rejoined her, she felt he was angry.

Was it her imagination, or did his eyes, brushing past her face, seem to say, “You are next”?

“The gown?” he asked as they went back into the atrium.

“It is nearly finished. As are we all, it would seem.”

He shot her a burning look, eyes flint-coloured in the muted light. She felt the anger turn into something else, something that frightened her with its surge of possessive rage, but she stood her ground and the tide ebbed. Rupert wrestled himself under a pretence of patience again. “Yes, the time is nearly upon us. It is truly time for Plenilune to be taken up and shaken by the four corners. It has grown old and dusty and set in its shackled ways.”

“I saw it quite otherwise,” Margaret protested. “It seemed to me the very heart of a fire in its blaze; never more alive a people have I seen before.”

He smiled condescendingly. “Would that you had seen her in the old days, when our blood ran with gold and the blood of our enemies ran like wine. Men were men in those days and walked the hills like giants. I long to cast back upon those days.”

His face grew thoughtful, introspective, and he seemed far off. She did not know why she drew him back, but she found herself saying gently, as much to herself as to him, “Could anyone, no matter his power, turn back the inexorable flow of time?”

Instead of taking his hand off the rein of his anger—as she had expected him to—and giving it its head, he smiled a little as if to himself and, turning, set his hand against her cheek. His palm was cold. “Like stones in the ploughland you set yourself crosswise with me, and like stones I pull you up and make a border of you about me. Could a man, no matter his power, turn back the flow of time…? He could not. You and I know that. But, for all that, he might try for the sake of all he holds dear, to make a stand and to make a difference. For would we find those olden days so very golden if we were allowed to go back to them?”

Margaret moved out of his embrace. “Probably not,” she replied flatly. “Only have a care, Rupert—I have said it before: what you and I hold dear set us crosswise against each other.”

Again the flint, striking sparks against the iron of her words, gleamed in his eye. He set his hand on her shoulder—it was a heavy hand—and turned her about, saying, “Go finish that dress. We will see, presently, about the other things.”

She put in her heels and resisted him until he went away without a backward glance; his footsteps on the stairs receded, passing to the north wing of the house, fading into wooden silence. Just this once she did not feel the chill of the open threat, nor the looming shadow of fate. She went quietly, numbly, back to her sewing. She had only an hour’s worth of chinaberry clusters left to sew—not much, when she looked the whole thing over and spread it grandly out on her knee, not much at all.

It was a fine dress after all, very grand but also very beautiful. As she threaded her needle and bent her back to the work—the familiar ache beginning in her neck—Margaret wished she could model it for the fox. He would like it in his frank way of appreciating beauty, and tell her just how outrageous it was. She stopped her work to stretch her back, looking up through the frosted windowpanes. It was hard enough to sneak down any day, let alone in a full-blown gala gown. He would have to be content with a description.

Margaret leaned back over the skirt.

It would be a very detailed description.

The night she tried on the gown, it was only three days until the new year. The thought was alarming, but not so alarming as being twisted and thrust and fitted into the gown in the cold of her room, flood-lit in firelight and the backlash of jewel-glitter. It was Lilith who attended her: she had seen Rhea on the outskirts from day to day, a sullen, silent figure, oddly cowed into obedience, but she had never crossed paths with Margaret again. Margaret was glad, especially at this moment in which she was sure she would have slung another punch at the maid’s face, torn out of the dress, and fled to the companionable misery of the cellar. Rupert would have had to drag her from the fox’s dungeon or lock her up there with him. As it was, being pulled on all sides until the few pounds she had gained seemed to squeeze out of her again, it was all she could do to keep a handle on her simmering panic.

It helped when Rupert came to inspect. He came in silently; she did not know he was there until she saw his reflection beside hers in the mirror looking, not at her reflection, but at her real self. There was a sincere tenderness in his face at that one unguarded moment that made her hate him even more, for it was a look that should have conjured pity. She felt a pang of guilt pinch hard at the right side of her heart—she could feel it bleeding—but the hate won over. Hate was a strong weapon, she found, stronger even than his love—

And she was glad it had won over, for the moment his eyes sprang off her figure to the mock figure in the mirror, there was a hardness to his eyes, a preoccupied darkness that bespoke him elsewhere turning the pieces of the world to his own design as a man might turn the pieces on a chessboard.

Lilith finished the last adjustment to the torso and drew back, hands folded, head bowed. “Well?” Margaret asked Rupert’s reflection. She did not bother to conceal the blade in her voice. “Does it suit its p-purpose?”

He smiled—she did not like the smile. “In retrospect I fear we have outdone ourselves. What will we do for a wedding gown?”

“Nothing.”

He laughed, short and hard. “Suitable, but unfitting if we mean to have guests attendant.”

Margaret schooled her anger—a task which required all her strength. She turned her shoulders as Lilith stepped back in to begin the long unbuttoning of the bodice at her back. She was raised on an ottoman and had to look down into Rupert’s absent, angry eyes. “I think as far as many see,” she remarked, “the wedding would be a moot point.”

“You mean that little mistake of Darkling’s?” Scorn sharpened the black spindles of his eyes. “They are all quick to think so—they like to be mean-spirited.” He added in a low, musing tone, “They would not be wrong, had you unbent a little.”

“I do not unbend. I must be broken.”

It was gratifying to see the look of pain pull like hard wine at the corner of his jaw. The moment stretched like a violin-hair, waiting to be played upon…but they did not play upon it. Rupert nodded curtly, almost by way of a salute, and went out, throwing a shadow up the wall in a huge, unconscious parting gesture.

The shadow was cold on her soul.

It was ten o’clock when Margaret was finally alone, rid of the gown, rid of Lilith—Rupert’s door had banged shut and not cracked open again—and, staring unseeingly at the clock face, she felt now was her chance to see the fox again. He would be the fox again by now. The moon’s face would be small, as small as the little lick of firelight reflecting in the glass front of the timepiece.
Go now
.
Go now: don’t think that this is the last time you will see him as you are, buffeted and caged, but free at heart. Don’t think about three days hence. Don’t think that in three days you will be as chained as he. Just go.

The house was quiet as she stole through it. She had learned by now to walk with confidence, knew which stairs creaked and where the chairs and tables were put so that she would not bump against them. The door to the kitchen hall had an oddly placed handle, higher than most, but she had learned just where to reach for it. Outside the world was deathly silent: the first real snow, huge and soft, was coming down. As happens in snow-weather, she did not notice the cold. She slipped silently down the cellar stairs, and because of her silence she heard, long before she reached the wine-cellar, the sound of men talking down below. She stopped once in surprise, her heart suddenly in her throat. The voices were indistinct. She stole onward, carefully, the voices becoming clearer, sharper, cut even on every edge like diamonds, until she stood against the wall at the head of the wine-cellar stairs.

“ ‘Twas none of my design!” Rupert’s voice surged like an oily black sea, growling, heaving with all his pent-up anger. “You would be the fool to think I was so short-sighted as to that. But the danger is past, thanks to you. Does it gall you to know you saved me by a hair’s breadth from censure on all sides? Does it gall you?”

“Does not gall me that a good man was spared an early grave!” The fox’s voice was high and mocking and cut like a knife. “You know that at Plenilune I am at my strongest.
You
were a fool—a
fool
—” the word came out spittingly “to think I would sit by—canst even twiddle thumbs!—while a man’s life is in the balance and I at the height of my power! You set your hand once to my thigh and broke me. I guard it better now.”

Margaret leaned around the corner but the lintel of the stairway blocked her view. She hid again, low in the dark corner of the wall, not knowing if she ought to come out or stay where she was and listen. She could hear Rupert pacing; his heavy tread crossed the width of the wine-cellar, measured and awful, and she knew he was furious beyond all bounds of fury. The fox probably knew it, too, but he was in a reckless, blazing mood and would not be quenched.

“And Rhea?” asked the fox. “How is she? Black-eyed and frothing at the mouth? I’d keep that chit on a leash if I were you—you’re so damned good at making them. Her mistaken sense of loyalty nearly ruined everything for you.”

Rupert growled, “I wouldn’t talk about a woman that way if I were you.”

“Says the man who bites them!” the fox barked back viciously.

There was a hissing noise and a thump. The fox gave an abbreviated squeal from the other side of the cellar. Margaret started up in horror and only just held herself back.

“Ah!” The fox groaned. “That’s right, kick a fellow while he’s down! That’s sporting of you.”

“Do you know your fault?” retorted Rupert. His voice was growing farther away and Margaret could hear a scamper of paws as the fox attempted to dodge him. He was not quick enough: there came another thump and squeal. She clapped a hand over her mouth to keep from sobbing. “Do you? You always were a prattling fool. You
talk!
And by my Lord Adam, I am sick of your talking! I will break your jaw to quiet you!”

It sounded as if Rupert had succeeded. There was a crack, a blur of shadow against the stairs, and the fox let out a single choked cry of agony. There was another blow—a crate went over.

“Where is your mockery now, red worm?”

Another blow.

Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, make him stop!

“If I cannot kill you, I will yet take you past the brink of desire for it!”
Thump! thump! thump!
He was hammering the little thing. Margaret’s stomach heaved. “You would wrestle with angels?”
Thump! crack! crash!
“Guard against corporeal blows, half-wit!” There was a pause, a panting breath, a low canine moan. “Well, physician? Can you heal yourself?”

For a long time the fox could not answer. With a silent shrieking that nearly tore her apart, Margaret begged him to answer, to be able to say something.
God, for the love of charity—!

A rattling gasp—half a laugh choked off by pain. “Give me a moment. I’ll…conjure…bit of bandage…”

“Shuh!” replied Rupert scornfully. There was a flicker of shadow on the stair again and Margaret was afraid he was coming back, but it seemed he had only bent over or stood up. “Lie there awhile in the ruin of your own making. You know me for a patient man, but I will hold grudges until hell frosts and my patience is not everlasting. And between the throbs of your headache mind this: I
will
brew a drink of death for you, no matter how hard you struggle against the chalice.”