Plenilune

by Jennifer Freitag

  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.”

  The fox had looked attentive all the while, nodding at each name as though marking them off in his memory. “Oh?” he queried. “How so, interesting?”

  For a moment Margaret looked away into the middle distance, re-conjuring the image of the youngest of the Thrasymene women—a woman not much older than herself. Across distance and time the picture seemed fantastic, too fantastic to be true: an upward rus
h of white feather, a brief golden glance, a piercing of eyes and a scornful, half-sharing jest. It seemed unreal. It seemed like a dream.

  “She reminds me of a fairy-tale, of a gypsy-princess enchanted into a swan.”

  The fox was smiling when she looked at him. “You have the makings of a Fool yourself,” he remarked. “I don’t clearly recall the last time I laid my eyes on Woodbird Swan-neck. I don’t remember her being very promising, but then people do change…So she is a gypsy-princess now? I wonder if she was jealous of you.”

  “Of me?” She was taken violently aback. For a moment she did not know whether to be outraged or to laugh. A laugh escaped, harsh and derisive. “Whyever should Woodbird be jealous of me? Is there aught between her and Skander? I thought I caught something.”

  “Did you think so? People do change…I recall there was something between them, and might have come to something save that there is bad blood between the generations just past of Capys and Thrasymene. Skander Rime and Woodbird Swan-neck might have lief forgot the bad blood, but it is in my mind that the lady’s older sisters were not so ready.”

  The pretty script that formed Woodbird’s full name shone in the lamplight, magical, running silver in places when the light flowed against it. “Ah. Then I am sorry. Skander, I thought, is still trying. I am not sure about Woodbird. She seems…conflicted.”

  “A commonplace malady among Plenilune ladies, it seems.” The fox sat up, throwing out his fluffy white waistcoat. “You don’t think much of Skander Rime?”

  Another derisive laugh escaped, this time by way of Margaret’s nose. “I think well of him. If I dared I would marry him to spite Rupert. But I wouldn’t dare. I know what Rupert would do.” How curious it was that marriage continued to be a means of spiting someone else. A horrible ache twisted Margaret’s gut—only for an instant, but the pain was almost unbearable.

  The brow-whiskers jigged meaningfully upward. “We do like our women gypsy-wise. I am willing to bet my cosy pillow-bed that there were quite a few bucks at the gala who would have made an eye at you, but didn’t dare for Rupert.”

  His words, perfectly sincere beneath their veneer of mockery, warmed Margaret greatly and took the edge off her profound ache. “Do you think so, in spite of all they said?”

  “I never said we weren’t suspicious of outsiders, especially outsiders who are lining men up to take the Overlordship. But yes, I rather think so. Why?” He peered up into her face. “Are you afflicted with that feminine disease which causes you to think yourself unfavourable?”

  The blush was growing out of hand. “I could hardly help that,” she replied sharply. “And I sometimes wish I wasn’t—favourable. I’m afraid Rupert begins to think me more and more beautiful to his eye, as well as having what he calls ‘wit.’ I was never considered very beautiful at home—”

  “What a rummy place you must come from.”

  “Fox—”

  “You do have the gypsy-beauty.”

  Lips pursed, thoughts conflicting, Margaret stared down at him, and he stared back, sincerity and mockery warring in his wall-eyes and white teeth. At first she had been pleased and thought that he was flattering her in a friendly, genuine way, but his persistence was making her more and more self-conscious and uneasy, especially on Rupert’s account. For a long moment she struggled with being helplessly angry at the fox. Then it struck her that he was being friendly, quite friendly, as a friend would be: not a mere acquaintance, but a friend. He was being honest.

  “What would a fox know of such things?” she asked warily.

  He gave her such a look that she wondered if he guessed the half of her thoughts “Not being well acquainted with the specie in general, I couldn’t say—but this fox is generally considered knowledgeable in many things.”

  She rubbed at her eye with a knuckle and placed her arms around her knees. She wondered if it would do to tell him that gypsies were not considered beautiful in her world; she decided that it would not do, and she knew without deliberately admitting it that she was glad that he had called her any sort of beautiful. He was only a fox, but he said it without wanting to get anything out of it for himself, as Rupert did, or because he was jealous—he was only a fox—as some other woman might. In the wake of realizing that with the fox she could be her own unmasked person, she caught herself once again on the brink of reaching out to stroke him.

  But it was he who reached, gently, with his voice. “You look tired.”

  She shut her eyes. “I nearly died yesterday.”

  There was hollow quiet beyond her black lids. Then, “Did you indeed?”

  She opened her eyes and the book and showed him the place where she had begun the account of the boar-hunt. It was too surreal and at once too painful to tell him aloud. She let him read it as one might read a piece of fiction. Her weary hand held the book tremblingly open, his flashed across the dark script, black brows drawn in thought as the scenes, not the words, played behind the flickering wall-colour. “Well,” he breathed at last, and looked beyond the book into her face, lingering as if to read there what was hidden between the lines on the page.

  “They liked me better for it,” Margaret said with hard, cold iron in her voice, “but I think they would have liked it better still if Aikin had not been just in time to save me.”

  “Too bad then that Aikin was just in time—but when they know you better still I think they will have still better cause to thank him for his quick thinking.”

  “I do not want them to know me better. I am here because of Rupert, and because of me they have had to give him what he asked for.”

  But the fox shook his head. “Don’t overburden your shoulders with responsibility—they are too pretty for that weight. They would have given Rupert what he asked for regardless. Who—” a fierce, cutting, angry bitterness came inexplicably into his voice “—who can deny him when he puts out his hand to take a thing?”

  “Why,” Margaret asked, “do you keep the light burning down here? Don’t you ever sleep?”

  He looked at the lamp as if seeing it for the first time. Then he smiled, the soft mockery diffusing in his voice again. “Perhaps I am afraid of the dark.”

  She sighed and rubbed at her weary face again. Her soul was heavy; her eyelids were heavy. “The old woman did.”

  “Pardon?”

  With an almost physical effort she drew up the will to speak. “The old woman denied him. I have never seen Rupert so frightened by anyone before. I have denied him—no, I have defied him, but I suppose I have always given in one way or another.” Bitterness, wry, angry bitterness twisted in her gut. “But she denied him. She flung back all his pride and power in his face and did not even flinch. She laughed at him as none of us could laugh at him.”

  “The old among us are free to laugh when life becomes thin and pale under our touch,” the fox observed. “You say she frightened him?”

  Margaret smiled wistfully at the memory. It was bitter-sweet in her mouth. “It was like a parable or a story from the Bible. Thrice they met, and each time I felt him winning over his fear with sound anger. The last time it was a struggle for him, for she scared him very badly.”

  “And what did she say?”

  She took up her book and turned to the hastily scribbled lines, but this time she read them aloud to feel the painful sweetness of the words in her own mouth.

  “What is the secret that lies at the heart of the dark star? 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?”

  The puzzle had much the same effect on the fox as it had on Rupert. He rose swiftly and backstepped as if from a viper that had been dropped suddenly in his path. It frightened Margaret to see his face unguarded—she had not known how guarded it had been before—and to know she carried a strange power in those riddling words not know what that power could do.

  The fox cast about for a thing he could not see, bearings he could not get. She could see his compass-ne
edle swinging wildly. “It is late,” he said finally, roughly. “You should go. It is late and you are tired. Go to bed, Margaret.”

  She opened her mouth to speak but no words came. Then, through the blind grey a swift, red-coloured rage crashed over her and she rose, quickly, and turned to go. Her throat was too tight for words; her eyes smarted with hurt tears. Blindly, clutching her book as if she could strangle it, she strode toward the steps.

  “Wait!” the fox barked. She stopped. “Wait—no, come back. I am sorry.”

  “It is late,” she replied flatly. “I need to get to bed. I’ve had a long day.”

  “Get back here and don’t be such a woman,” the fox snapped. “You will only cry yourself to sleep and I—I will know it.”

  Margaret turned to look at him. He stood on the rim of the light, small, wearing the fire pricked on each whisker-tip. Had he been Rupert, she thought clearly, he would have come after her and yanked her back by the arm. But he stood still, rigid, the uncanny back-light from the lamp turning his eyes into glowing saucers.

  “What do you care?” she asked ungraciously.

  “Does anybody else?” he retorted.

  She went back, slowly. She had known the moment she stopped at the sound of his imperious voice that she would go back, but she went back slowly, suddenly very tired and very cold and very lonely. As a gesture almost of peace, the fox sat down on the wine crate beside her, touched her knee once, and settled into a brooding silence. She felt that neither of them were thinking about the riddle, but carefully steering away from the words that were upsetting every mind they fell upon, like a ship’s prow churning up the sea. Finally, as the silence drew out and her staying began to seem ridiculous, she tried to redeem it with blind, tired ignorance.