Plenilune

by Jennifer Freitag

And Rupert, who had not moved at all under the Hammer’s burning eye, smiled—the way that made Margaret’s flesh crawl—and asked gently, “And you have the guts to it?”

  Brand seemed to be weighing his brother’s words and de la Mare’s, and though it was a tough struggle, he seemed suddenly to choose his brother over Rupert. “Adder’s tongue,” he said, stepping away. “I’ll heed the pack of them before I heed whatever comes out of your mouth.”

  Aikin let him go, though he watched him warily; Brand slunk wolf-like into the deeper shadows until Margaret could not see him anymore. Aikin turned to Rupert and looked as if it was in his mind to say something, but Rupert was carefully looking levelly at his cousin and Aikin could not draw his eye. With a lift of his shoulders, Mark Roy’s son turned away.

  Skander must have felt Rupert’s eye but he did not look up. He only said, grimly, through his teeth, “Let’s put it to the vote.”

  There was a hesitation. For ‘nay’ no one moved, though the will to move was strong; for ‘yea’ Bloodburn’s and Malbrey’s hands were up first, followed reluctantly by the rest. In form it was unanimous. Aikaterine—Margaret had almost forgot about her—slid her hand to her mouth and turned her head away.

  “And there you have it, gentlemen.”

  Rupert got up, stretched, and leaned his elbow on the mantle. His body obscured the firelight, plunging much of the room into total shadow. The chill of the cellar hallway passed over Margaret as if it were his shadow falling over all Plenilune in that moment. “Should we hold the installation at the full of the Rowan Moon? At least then Centurion, who is most far afield, will be in the neighbourhood, as he will be taking the two White Ones to the University around Christmas.”

  Centurion’s face flashed round into the light. “And how are you knowing that,” he demanded, “as it is a private matter?”

  Rupert smiled coolly. “The same way I am knowing many things.”

  Centurion shivered—from rage or cold or a cold sense of dread, Margaret did not know—and lingered a moment looking from eye to eye on Rupert’s face, weighing something, but finally he let it go, still suspicious, and took a seat at the table. Skander, perhaps feeling that there had been too many close shaves, pushed away and rose, saying,

  “I am going to see to the carafe. I’ll only be a moment.”

  He took the light, empty beer-carafe off the table and wove his way through the warm, dark press. With a catch of her breath Aikaterine stood up, grabbing Margaret’s hand, but it was too late. The latch shot back and Skander flung open the door, stepping into the hallway.

  He froze on the instant, seeing them at an angle with the faintest orange light on their cheeks. His face was in darkness; Margaret could not see what he was doing, or what he was thinking in his eyes. But before he had paused too long, before Rupert could look his way, curious, he thrust the doors shut and plunged the hallway and their eyes into darkness. His big, black form moved against the background. He made no noise save the dull, deep thud of his boots on the stonework, but Margaret felt Aikaterine tugging her forward after him. Her feet struck the stone risers and she had to catch herself and walk blindly up the stairs, groping for the railing, groping for some light.

  Skander struck a light in the kitchen and spun round on her.

  “What are you doing?” he asked Aikaterine in a low, growling voice.

  “I made her take me down,” Margaret defended the maid, though her heart was in her throat and she was suddenly afraid of the rugged, light-shot, masculine face bending toward her.

  “No one makes my people do anything other than my will. Go back to bed, both of you. We will all be in trouble if Rupert discovers you were here.”

  Margaret looked back at the yawning mouth of the cellar doorway. Aikaterine murmured something to Skander; Skander, relaxing his shoulders, murmured something back. What if Rupert should come up now, through that awful dark? Did it really go to the cellar, she wondered, or if she went back down now would she find it went down to hell?

  “I will go,” she said. “I found out what I wanted to know, anyway.”

  Skander’s face softened toward her. “I think we knew it all along, you and I…I am sorry.”

  She nodded. A thick, strangling feeling was beginning in her throat, a painful stabbing of tears behind her eyes. She pitied herself, she pitied Plenilune, but she also pitied Skander for he must be thinking poignantly that he was responsible for what was to become of her. For his sake she tried valiantly to fight past the coarseness in her throat.

  “Good-night, Skander. Don’t forget the beer. And…” Her eyes fell on the rigid, silent maid. “Be merciful. No one else will be.”

  His hand dropped gently on Aikaterine’s shoulder. Her lashes trembled but she did not look up. It seemed the touch was word enough for her, and Skander turned back to Margaret. “I will be. And remember, Lady Margaret: you will always have a friend here at Lookinglass.”

  12 | Keyholes of Heaven and Hell

  Margaret never got to say good-bye to Skander. They left early in the morning under a pale golden sky, amid the morning bustle of the yard. She heard his voice as she was mounting up, calling up from the garden, but she did not see him.

  “Nay, the book Periot gave me yesterday—I put it on my desk yesterday evening. You did not move it? Fie! I am so hare-brained! We will look for it after luncheon.”

  With Malbrey ahead riding alongside Rupert, Rhea and Margaret behind, they went out through the highest curtain wall and descended the levels to the rough, cleared road and the icy bridge. Yesterday morning had been snow-still and even warm in places; today the winds were up again, purling sloe-coloured clouds along the horizon, diffusing the sheeny clear gold light over the sky. The chiff-chaffs, the late birds of the aging year, were rocketing in a thin webbing of wings from the forest, their shrill whispering piercing through the low rumble of the waterfall. Margaret squinted against the fanning light, watching them go, getting the heavy mass of her hair in her eyes—she had to let loose the reins with one hand and lock her fingers in her hair, shoving the mass back, to keep it from stinging her face. She had not had time to put it up after washing it, and the damp coldness of it took the wind and felt like ice on her neck. She sniffed: behind a curl of wood-smoke was the scent of winter.

  Malbrey’s horse, a heavy-set old palomino he called Chrysostom, was beginning to stoop in front of her, starting the sharp, winding descent toward Glassdale. Her own leggy grey, moving like an ill-omened shadow among the uncertain pine-light, felt like a rock under her: every jump and jar and skitter on the steep road, barely cushioned by saddle and muscle, made her pelvic bones jangle as if she had dropped them on a shingly shoreline. She took down her hand as they plunged into the wood and gripped the horse, wondering how many hours it would be before the level road of the dale stretched before them. Rupert and Malbrey chatted quietly together, easy in each other’s company; the maid and manservant retained a stony silence. Feeling more than ever alone, cold in the wide freedom of Capys’ steep fell country that seemed to mock her fiercely like the flash of the fox’s white teeth, Margaret tugged her surcoat close at the throat and turned her face toward the overlook where, through the pine trunks, through the heavy silver mists and latent banks of snow, through the flicker of crow-wing, she could see Glassdale below. For a moment she became confused, her mare jostling her thoughts out of order: as if she were stumbling out of waking into a brief dream she thought she was seeing, not Glassdale, but a fresh waking view of the Cumbrian fells that knelt their knees down to the earth by Aylesward in England.

  Mother…Father…

  Then a blue-jay screamed overhead and the dream ripped away like cobwebs and it was Glassdale again. The memory of England was darkened by the ugly shadow of dissension and strife that still hung around her memory of her family. Glassdale, bright as an emerald and crystal-fire, was the thing that left her aching under her breastbone.

  Would it not be a fine thing to have a box of paints and to paint
that?

  The thought reminded her of her notebook. She veered gladly away from England—appalled, and trying not to feel appalled, to find that she was glad not to think of England—toward the notes she had made. She had made very little, she was surprised to find. With the enormity of everything that had been thrown at her, she had expected to find, when she could pull out her notebook and looked at it, that she had written much more. She had little more than a list of names and rough, scratched out, re-written places to which the names belonged, a sketch of the boar-hunt, and Mark Roy’s beautiful account of his home which still made her ache to read it.

  If I am not too tired this evening, she thought, folding the book back up into her coat, I will write some more down and show it to the fox when I have a chance. Perhaps he can help me make sense of things.

  She was drawn out of her reverie by an arrest in the downward train. Rupert’s horse squealed and skidded, nearly bumping into the golden horse who stumbled to the side before it could be recovered. In the gap between the horses, at the end of the lane where the road took a sharp turn downward, mingling with the shadows, stood the old withered woman.

  As before, it seemed to Margaret, when they had all calmed their mounts, that for Rupert and the old woman there was no one else in the world who mattered. There was an aching, trembling silence like white-iron harp-thread that has been plucked and will not be still. The shrivelled face was bent down, the sloe-berry eyes quick with life glittering up at Rupert coyly, slyly, savagely. Rupert, etched as with stone, head upflung, put back his lips and showed her his teeth as if he could feel her between them and, like a wild animal, was savouring the moment before he ground her in his jaws.

  “Get out of my way, woman,” he said presently, softly. There was no real pleasure in the panther’s voice now, only the low growl of a threat. “You know I will put you out of it if you will not get out yourself.”

  An old apple-leaf hand flickered at the downward road. “I be not in thy way. Thy way—as thou hast always made it—be clear to thee.”

  “Art in my way!” Rupert barked. “Play no black marble, dragon games with me, old mother, for I am in no mood to be gentle.”

  For a moment the sloe-berry eyes jumped, lightly, but meaningfully to Margaret’s face. The woman had never looked at her before: it felt strangely like a physical touch and Margaret’s stomach recoiled, her shoulders flinched, unsure at first if it was a kindly touch or an unwelcome one. Almost at once the woman looked to Rupert again.

  “ ’Tis a game of black marble and dragon riddles itself that thou callest me old mother, that it be sharp in thy mouth as it is sweet in the mouths of all others. Thy eyes are all twisted in thy head. But I have one word left to give thee, old as thy fears and the very shadow of them.”

  Witching Hour screamed and jerked his head.

  “What is the secret that lies at the heart of the dark star?” asked the woman, her hands unfolding as if she held something awful and powerful between them. “What has no voice but is screaming to be heard? When will hope wander out of the barrow? When will death come to us all?”

  Her words filled Margaret with dread and a rush of blood like the scent of the last victory. She was not aware that she was not breathing. She was aware of Rupert’s face, cold, white, fixed, as close to a kind of horror as he would let himself appear with Malbrey beside him. He parted his lips—he had clenched them—then tucked them together again, resisting the urge to touch his tongue to them. His hand lifted from the reins and stole out, silently, purposefully. The thing in his face, in his eyes, surfacing like a nightmare Margaret had pressed beneath pillows and suffocated, was clear and awful and chilling. But the woman was unmoved. She looked back into that face and smiled, an odd, dark softness in her ancient eyes. For a moment, wrapped in shadow and sunlight and a cloak flecked with the colours of a grouse’s wing, she looked purely beautiful.

  Rupert dropped his hand at his side. “You are beneath me,” he said scornfully. “Your blood is not worth mixing in the mortar of my walls.”

  “And is hers?” The hand came out from the grouse’s wing, sure, thin, veins standing clear in the mottled skin. It, too, seemed to touch Margaret across the distance.

  “You would do well to leave her out of it.”

  “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.