Plenilune

by Jennifer Freitag

  She walked away, purposing not to move hastily, her cheeks burning but her head held high, feeling the two men looking after her—or the one looking after her, and the other looking at the one.

  Aikaterine’s face was carefully closed when Margaret came abreast of her. With a small deferential movement and gesture, the maid led the way again back through the galleries toward the central nave of the House and from there up, up the stairs and along the passages to Margaret’s bedroom. The hallways had grown darker and more in-drawn since she had passed. Though there were no windows in the halls, she could feel the high night pressing in all around them. The air outside must be thin indeed, she thought, treading lightly behind the soft-footed servant, for the genius of night to wrap so close about their garrets.

  “Here we are, my lady,” said Aikaterine at the door of the bedroom, as much to hear her own voice, Margaret thought, as to reintroduce her room. “Will I see you to bed?”

  Stopping in the middle of the room and seeming to come to herself, Margaret looked around on the sparse, close, pale-walled room and felt a sudden stab of desolation. Her heart, floundering under the blow, jerked and spasmed in her breast. Breathing hurt. “No,” she said gently, “I think I will manage tonight, thank you. Only take away the pudding cup and leave the light, and I will be fine.”

  Aikaterine’s face, uplit by the lamp as she bent to set it on the dressing-table, opened for a single moment, searching, comprehending. She knew Margaret was not well, but with no more than a little curl of an understanding smile, she took the pudding cup and withdrew, murmuring only, “Good night, Lady Coventry. Sleep well.”

  Lady Coventry. Tall-standing in the middle of the room, Margaret stared blindly at the shut door, listening to the silence of the maid’s footsteps in the hall. Lady Coventry. To her desolate pain was added a twist of ruthless irony. Her mother had always wanted her to be something, to make a name for the family. Here she was at last, miles, thoughts, dreams from home, an alien on the moon—and here at last she was a lady.

  Her long white hands slowly clenched. I hope you are proud of me, Mother.

  With a deliberate gesture, Margaret pulled the pins from her hair and dropped them on the dressing-table-top, and with some four steps crossed the room to stand by the little window, looking out on the swimming star-shot dark of the dale country below. Overhead was the bulk of earth, dark in its massiveness, the crest of it ablaze with blue light like some enormous frightened cat on All Hallows’ Eve, stiffened and hackled in the heavens. And beyond earth’s arched figure, beyond the long rays of light that broke off its back, stair-stepped the stars of heaven—upward and deeper—so that to Margaret, who had not bothered before to look beyond the inner ring of earth, it was like looking into a pool that went on infinitely until the end of time where eternity hung its veil so that little people like herself might not look in and die. Looking at earth, she had always felt small and angry and defensive. Looking at the stars beyond it she felt small again, but somehow right in her smallness.

  Her cheeks cooled, the tempest of her soul stilled to a soft feathering, Margaret turned at last from the window and sat on the edge of the bed to undress. She could still see a little of the landscape through the window: a pale, ghostly thumbnail of a picture, a gash of upland cut level and coloured like the impassive face of a diamond. The wind moaned desolately, and seemed to get in through the chinks in her skin and blow about desolately in her soul. Down in the dale an owl hooted, which, as her fingers fumbled in the weak light of her lamp with her dress, reminded her of the hunt, and subsequently of the fox in Rupert’s cellar. He would be sitting in a light much like this one, alone much like she was, looking out at the dark like herself. Was the little red-coated coward thinking of her as she thought of him?

  She slipped off her shoes and put them aside at the foot of the bed.

  Before she had been angry at him for being a coward, but now she pitied him. Who was she to despise him? She knew what it was like to be an alien, alone, lost, chained to a place which was not her own, unable to go where she belonged. She had heard the mockery of the panpipes playing the song of captivity. Who was she, unlovely Margaret, to despise the little brute?

  Passing a hand across her forehead, she thought, I have just enough hatred for Rupert. I cannot hate everything without breaking myself, no matter that everything hates me.

  Feeling small and cold and strangely calm, she climbed into the narrow bed and lay in the dark and silver of the Lookinglass night, listening to the Lookinglass owls, waiting for the Lookinglass morning that would bring countless strangers to her and to Lookinglass House.

  7 | The Names of the Great Ones

  The following day was a world apart from anything Margaret had witnessed yet on Plenilune. Life at Marenové House, though every moment taut with stress, was quiet compared to the fluttering, wild, uprushing flight of activity that greeted Margaret in Lookinglass House. She ate breakfast in her room, dressed, and dismissed both Rhea and Aikaterine so that she might have the morning alone. Rupert did not come for her, so she wandered through the House, down the hallways she knew and several that were new to her, careful not to be buffeted by the many servants that were coming and going and getting things ready for the arrival of the guests, guests that were too many for their host to count. She moved among everyone like a fawn-coloured leaf on a sun-white stream, quiet and unheeded, until she washed up at last on the front porch of the House in the open wind of a clear, cold November morning.

  She was the only one on the foreporch, alone and uplifted with the wind swelling white-embroidered all around her so that the ends of her shawl lifted like wings, and the colourful movement of the House and its terraced levels spread below her. She had not seen it from this vantage point; she had been too full of fear and pain yesterday evening to look back—Like a coward—at the twilit view she might have spied from such a height. But now she looked, alone and struck-still to her core by the sheer clear beauty of Capys. The fells were amber-crowned, the Earth above them faded to a feather in the sky. Far away over the pine-woods hung a single star and from the woods, as she looked their way, sprang the gurgling, spangled notes of a cowbird. She spread her fingers and grasped the ends of her shawl to keep it from being torn away by the wind, and it seemed to her as if the whole of Plenilune was knit together by the silver of that wind. Small wonder it seemed to her that Plenilune looked so silver from Earth.

  How peacefully I am killed by you, she told the landscape. How quietly you break me into pieces.

  Aikaterine had thought it best that she wear her fawn-coloured dress and her boots for the day, which would be better wear for wandering, and change in the evening when it was time to come out for the gala. The clicking of her boots was a hollow noise in Margaret’s ear as she descended the stairs, hollow and reserved from the rush of wind and the organic throb of the courtyard.

  The sounds of activity in the young lord’s personal stables had been going on since before daybreak. The head groom seemed to be ordering the horses all over again to make room for the horses of important heads of Honours. As Margaret stepped into the courtyard and to one side, Skander’s courser—a big-boned blue dun with a mind of its own—was being brought out of its stall and was making a fuss about its handler and the presence of a lean yellow dog. The dog began to bark, the blue dun went up in a twisting rear on its hindquarters—nearly wrenching free of the stableboy’s hand—and there was an enormous flutter of bodies as people ran to put out the fire that was about to blaze up between the horse, the dog, and the boy. Margaret watched from a distance, twisting her shoulders to avoid the press of people rushing past her, feeling detached from everything, aloof and empty and, somewhere in the back of her mind, wishing for the horse’s freedom.

  From a rampart high on the House came three bull-blasting notes on a trumpet, as if it were a call to order, belling over the shouting and squealing and barking. Margaret started and looked up, but could not see the trumpeter. The notes alone
were enough, tearing through the chaos, calling out a warning. The warning was put into words when she heard the head groom call out,

  ”Just put him back, just put him back! It’s too late, the guests are arriving already. Mark Roy is just going to have to put his brute up someplace else. And get that dog out of here before it gets a hoof through its skull.” The head groom, looking thunderous and preoccupied, turned and walked past her, muttering to himself, ”Though it would serve it bloody well right…”

  He did not notice her, nor, it seemed, did anyone else. He was busy, they were busy. Everyone was busy. Everything swirled around her like the upland wind, and everything seemed to have meaning and purpose save herself. With a kind of bitter, self-deprecating melancholy she stood alone and out of the way. She watched the horse fought with and put away; she watched the dog shooed away, slinking off with its yellow tail between its yellow hind legs. She stood in the sun but the air was cold, and she shivered, drawing up and in on herself as if to withdraw completely from the bright, clear-edged scene before her.

  Of a sudden she saw a movement on the periphery of her vision, and she turned with a fresh jolt of flurried blood to find someone at her shoulder: a young man in a loose blue shirt and long jay-wing sleeves. After a disconcerted moment she recognized him as Skander Rime’s man. He was tall and thin, taller even than she, and had to bend a little to speak to her, his hands clasped behind his back so that more than ever he had the look of a blue-jay.

  ”Your lord and mine are busy,” he said, not offering to introduce himself with anything more than a musing sort of smile, ”and there will not be time enough for it later, but if my lady will come up with me on the guardhouse parapet I will name to her the names of the great ones as they pass by.”

  She frowned slantwise up at him. His eyes, of a hazel colour, were owlish in the shadow that was cast by his bent head and forelock of thick fair hair. ”Did Skander Rime send you?”

  He grinned coyly.

  With a forgiving sigh Margaret gathered up her shawl, and with a little hand-spread gesture let him lead her onward. With a smooth heron-like stride he towed her after him across the teeming courtyard—the working folk seemed to part like water around him—under the long shadow of the curtain wall, and up a flight of alarmingly narrow stone stairs to the rampart above. There, more than ever, Margaret felt as though she was on top of the world with alarmingly little between her and the sky, and a great deal of a fall between her and the ground below. Her stomach clenched and her spirit, detaching itself from her instinctive fear of heights, soared at the prospect.

  She could see much of the dale below, its river and streams and ploughlands empty after the harvest. She could see the pine-woods in their green abundance and the smoky trail of blue that was rising out of its heart where a wood-cutter must live. Wind and sounds on the wind rolled up to her, buffeting her with their mingled confusion and clarity.

  ”Indeed!” she said loudly over the wind. ”I can see why your master lives here. He is a man who loves the falcon, and the falcon must love a place like this.”

  The blue-jay man was looking over the wall, his head up and his eyes steadfast on the distance, but he smiled acknowledgingly and seemed to share her sentiments.

  The top of the parapet was cold under Margaret’s hand, so cold it almost felt damp, but she clung on with one hand, the other holding onto her shawl and held up to keep the wind-teased tendrils of hair out of her eyes, as she followed the line of the manservant’s gaze. She tried not to look down too directly because, once she did, she could no longer feel the grip in which she held the stone wall and her vision would blur.

  ”From the tower,” the blue-jay man said presently without seeming to raise his voice, ”they will be able to see for miles, and have given us good warning. In a minute or two now we will see them, there, coming out of the beech that grows beyond the fall.”

  The direction, thankfully, was southerly, and facing a little westward. Margaret had only to switch her shawl to her left hand and hold it up beside her cheek, gripping the parapet with her right, to shield her eyes from the fringes of the level east-rising sun. Between the snapping tassels of the shawl’s end she watched the beeches for any sign of movement. Her heart began to beat uncomfortably strong in her chest and she was not sure why.

  The blue-jay man raised his arm and pointed wordlessly at the same instant Margaret caught the first flicker of movement down among the bare trees. At first it was formless, a mere suggestion of moving shadows that were dun and grey coloured, and then the sun hit a piece of metal and flashed like a shout, and after it came a backwash of purple hue, like the shadow that follows after a single harp-note. She saw a horse come out, a big chestnut with a long, easy stride, caparisoned in purple and gold with an almost savage head-dress obscuring much of its face. She almost mistook it for some kind of elk, for the head-dress was adorned with a pair of gold antlers, a scarlet tassel on the end of every tine; but as it emerged from the beech-woods and came toward the bridge and the thunder of the fall, it danced wildly to one side, bounding on all fours, jerking at the bit in a way that was wholly equine. Its rider, whom she took to be a man, gentled it back under control and steered it toward the bridge, his train, no less gaily arrayed, following after.

  The blue-jay man’s mellow tone held obvious amusement. ”Blue-bottle Glass has the victory today, it would seem. He may keep his box stall, and Mark Roy’s Altai-tek must needs find a lowlier board—and he is one of the finest horses in Plenilune, too.”

  ”Mark Roy.” Margaret ran the name off her tongue. ”Where is he from?”

  ”He holds the Honour of Orzelon-gang, sitting southerly of Carmarthe.” He sniffed and shifted his weight from foot to foot, bird-like. ”Consequently that is where he got his horse. They breed long-legged, barbaric horses on the steppes of Carmarthe.”

  Recalling Skander’s mention of these people, and feeling suddenly smaller than ever in a strange place, she asked, ”Have you been there, to the steppes where Mark Roy’s horse comes from?”

  The blue-jay man jerked his head up higher, looking at her almost as one might look down on a child, smilingly. ”In spring, when the Murklestrath is in full spate and the nomadic blood of the Carmarthen is too, then perhaps I go with my lord when my lord goes out to defend our borders. I am my lord’s man, and I go with him wherever he goes.”

  She said, ”They are over the bridge now.”

  In silence they watched the head of the long cavalcade make its way over the bridge and pass out of sight among the lower levels of Lookinglass. The cavalcade continued trailing out of the beech-woods and over the bridge. Margaret saw one horse shy wildly as a gust of wind, wedged down hard along the side of the fell, sent a long spray of water out from the fall across the arm of bridge stonework. She held her breath but the rider got his mount under control, nothing was upset, and no one was sent over the edge.

  ”It will take more than water to wash Gro FitzDraco off a horse’s back,” said the blue-jay man. ”Three riders there are in all Plenilune no other man born of woman can match—”

  Flicking a look upward, Margaret found the blue-jay man gazing down at her again, as though she were a child, as though he were at any moment expecting her to give back the answer to some question he had asked.

  ”—Lord Gro FitzDraco of Orzelon-gang, my own Lord Skander Rime, and Dammerung War-wolf.”

  Something swift and bright and awful passed across the manservant’s face, something which at once chilled her and fired her blood. ”Will we meet the third here come this evening?” she asked.

  The look passed—clouded by thought or shadow, she could not tell—as the blue-jay man turned away. ”Nay, my lady, unless you have passage through the gates of horn.” He was silent a moment longer, while she stared bewilderedly at him. ”The War-wolf has run his last. He runs no longer.”

  And it did seem as if a shadow had passed over them, for the fire went out of her blood and the wind seemed chill, chillier than ev
er; she pulled her shawl close, but what good was a shawl when one’s spirit was suddenly benighted?

  With an upward flutter, as if to rouse her and himself from gloomy thoughts, the blue-jay man raised both arms, one out to nearly rest a hand on her shoulder, the other pointing away over the garden and lower curtain walls.

  ”I see a neighbour of yours. Sure as I am that is Malbrey.”

  Margaret leaned over the wall. ”He, there? The one on the cream-gold horse?”

  The blue-jay man nodded.

  She watched the distant individual that was coming out of the beech-wood and following after Mark Roy’s train across the bridge. From that height and distance she could not possibly discern his face, nor make out much of the features of his clothing save that he seemed to be wearing armour, but she had a vested interest in him ever since Rupert had mentioned his old Manor. She had liked the Manor with a liking that hated, and while the liking-hatred still wrestled inside her she wanted the man who held the place to be a good sort of man. She felt intuitively that the odds were not in the Manor’s favour.

  ”Is it that you know the man?”

  She jerked back from the edge, realizing how close she was to the drop. Skander’s manservant was looking at her expectantly.

  ”No?” he queried gently. ”It is just the wind, then, that brings the angry colour to your cheeks.”

  ”Yes,” she murmured, turning away. ”It is only the wind.”

  Malbrey passed out of sight and after him came two other neighbours, landowners from the south of Marenové House whom Margaret had never heard of before, and whose names she promptly forgot. But she was interested when a rider in red livery came through, quite fast, and the blue-jay man grew disdainfully quiet for a few moments, watching him. Margaret watched him too, as he skirted the metalled road and tore past the other caravans, plunged in through a flock of sheep, and disappeared out of sight in the lowest terrace.