Plenilune

by Jennifer Freitag

  “Not as such,” she said briskly. “Lord Rupert’s handmaid sees to most of my needs, but I don’t have a maid of my own.”

  “That’s a shame,” purred Aikaterine soothingly. “And she has the Evil Eye.”

  Margaret burst out in a peal of honest laughter. “Doesn’t she, though?” And suddenly the laughter, which was completely unexpected and relieving, broke and threatened to turn into something else. At the last minute she caught herself and resumed her still position before the mirror while Aikaterine drew a damp cloth over her hands and neck and gently applied perfume. A low, golden, elusive scent of roses threaded through the air as she left the table to put on her gown.

  It was a pretty but simple gown, the sort of simple prettiness she thought best suited her English complexion: it was a fawn-brown colour, pale and unassertive—and, like a fawn’s coat, it had paler speckles of varying size ascending from the hem which, on closer inspection, proved to be dog-wood blossoms. It went on over a long white under-gown, and a simple string of pearls was added to the ensemble. In a few moments Margaret was bending to look into the mirror and take in the effect of it before heading down to supper.

  “It becomes you very well,” Aikaterine remarked. “Your shoes, madam, and I will take you to join my master.”

  Margaret sat a moment with her feet on a little ottoman while the maid put soft indoor shoes of doeskin on her. Then, somewhat stiffly for the room was chilly and, after a long ride, the time sitting had turned her muscles to unresponsive iron, she got up and followed white Aikaterine out of the room. They went back down the hallway and across the high width of the nave, down the impressive staircase and along the nave aisle toward the east end. There they passed through a stone-capped archway, through a high atrium, and, ducking into a low doorway in one corner, began to ascend a heady flight of stairs. They passed a number of doors on their way up, and numerous narrow windows all sporting a stained-glass falcon in red at the top. Neither lady nor maid said anything about the climb, but Margaret’s limbs were screaming in agony by the time they were halfway up, and Aikaterine mercifully went at a leisurely pace.

  Pausing for a fraction of a second to rest, Margaret chanced a look out of one of windows. It was a good pane, unwrinkled by time, and she was afforded an eagle’s view of the countryside. Lookinglass was perched on the brow of a cliff, and this tower in whose bowels she climbed rose higher even than that: the mighty fells were below her now, drenched in Tyrian purple and darker greens than jade or emerald could ever be. The horizon in the south distance was a mingled pale sea-colour where it seemed Plenilune faded into the fabric of the sky; in the high quiet of the tower, Margaret could hear the uncanny surf-sound of the wind murmuring all around them.

  At last they reached the top of the stairs, the very last landing, the very last door. It broke on Margaret then that she was going to supper, again, with Rupert—that all interludes of peace without him were but passing and brief. She balked at the last moment and felt her already chilly veins go frozen-cold.

  Aikaterine knocked pre-emptively and, with a little bang, pushed down the old latch. She open the door and announced,

  “Lady Margaret Coventry, my lords.”

  It was pure instinct that pushed Margaret into the doorway. It was pure pride, a moment later, that found her cool, proper mask and allowed her to look around the enclosure.

  It was a low, round room with all its narrow windows shuttered; the floor was of dark-stained wood, the limed walls were white. In the light of the candelabras and braziers, Margaret felt as though she stood in that curious circle-place where light and dark divided. Likewise, the room gave her an impression of paradoxical Spartan features and rich comfort. A small circular table, obviously meant for private meals, stood in the middle of the room, attended by a number of richly carved, straight-backed chairs, each with a red velvet cushion on its seat. Along one side of the room was set up a sideboard; against the opposite curve of the room were two braziers, sparking warmth, and two low Roman couches. It was simple, yet comfortable.

  Margaret allowed herself the time to take in the room before letting her eye fall, unfocused and dilated, on the two young men at the table. Her heart was pounding horribly in her chest, especially at the light, scrutinous gaze Rupert was giving her new gown, but she dared not show emotion. She wanted, above all, to sit down.

  There was a brief scuffle among the two men which, in her tired, uncertain state, made her almost sadistically amused. Skander, as the host, half-rose in his chair to assist her, but at the same time Rupert, lancing a deadly look across the table at him, stopped him mid-rise. Rupert slid gracefully out of his chair and came toward her, his right by being escort. She turned her head away to one side as he took her arm.

  “Did you find all you needed?” he asked, drawing her forward. She saw him glance over his shoulder at Aikaterine, who still stood waiting at the door.

  “I did.”

  “Aikaterine,” said Skander—he crooked a finger.

  The white-clad maid swept in on silent feet, skirting Rupert, sailing over to the table to arrange Margaret’s place at the table. There was a sparkle of pewter-ware and tiger-striped travertine, the flash of a crisp white napkin, and the languid glimmer of wine as it was poured into a cup. More deliberately Rupert took her over, his hand a little heavy on hers, though otherwise perfectly attentive, and lowered her into her seat. She found herself breathless and hoped that the mellow light of the room was enough to obscure the hot spots on her cheeks.

  She smiled at Skander as Rupert resumed his seat on her left. “Thank you for giving me Aikaterine for the evening. I’ve never known a better maid.”

  The young man turned in his chair to regard the maid frankly, a smile on his lips. “Really, do you think? I think so too. I could not get on without her—or Tabby. I dare swear they are my two hands together.”

  Aikaterine quite properly said nothing, but stealing a coy glance at her, Margaret saw the flush of pride on her cheeks.

  Rupert reached out as languidly as the flow of wine and slid his hand around the neck of his glass. Margaret watched his hand, long, powerful, the gem of his ring sparking fire with his movement. It gave her an inexplicably uneasy feeling. “Anyone can find a servant,” he purred, “not everyone can find a good one. They are indispensable, and something to be thankful for.”

  His eyes were on his glass, his voice purring and pensive, as if he were talking to himself. Skander opened his mouth as if to speak, seemed to think better of it, and shut his mouth again. The brief quiet that followed was only saved from being awkward by Aikaterine setting the dish of venison before Skander and handing him the carving utensils. Margaret had never had venison before; she watched curious as the warm ruddy meat curled away beneath the even movement of Skander’s knife. The heady scent of the meat filled the room and made her mouth water.

  When he laid a few slabs on her plate, she said, to make conversation, “This is a very well situated room here. I like what you have done with it.” She glanced around. “It is very cosy and unpretentious. It is very you.”

  “Do you think so?” he said, this time with a grim, self-deprecating kind of cheer. “This is my hide-away where I will not be bothered. You can see it would be not at all advantageous to stuff a great many people in here. I like it that way.”

  Margaret stole one last look around. I wish I had a hide-away like this. The most I have is a cold cellar and a coward fox—and not even that, now.

  In the two heartbeats that followed, while they picked up their utensils to begin on the food, Margaret caught Skander throwing her an unveiled look of iron, scrutinizing her in that bare instant before asking, with all pleasance of tone, “I haven’t seen you in a month, Miss Margaret. How have you—two—been? Are you finding Plenilune to your liking?”

  She knew Rupert was watching her, and that made it only worse. It was a hard question Skander put to her, and for a moment she stared with a thoughtful darkness between her brows, searchi
ng for an answer among the raw tempest of her soul. “I—” she began, stopped, and tried again. “When it has not been rainy, Rupert has been b-busy and I have been about the grounds. Plenilune—Marenové—is very lovely,” she admitted, then added regretfully, “but it is nearly winter now.”

  The young lord of Capys nodded sympathetically. “We had a head of sleet-storm through here just last night.”

  “Truth to tell?” interposed Rupert, glancing up under his brows. He shifted his forearm forward on the edge of the table, hand poised with his forefinger in the small of his fork’s back. “We had fair weather down our way.” He looked into the fire as one might look at a clock. “I dare say they will be finishing the last of the day’s slaughter down there about now.”

  Skander opened his mouth to speak, seemed to think better of it yet again, and shut it once more. Instead he rounded back on Margaret and said gaily, “I promised you a look at the ballroom and our acclaimed falcon. Would you care to trot around that way after supper?”

  With warm, wholesome food going into her empty belly and the braziers throwing up mellow light and a close, smoky atmosphere, Margaret wanted chiefly to retire to bed and sleep. But she could not very well say that, and poor Skander was doing a magnificent job being civil—she hated to leave his gesture unrequited. She struck a coy pose with her head. “Just you show me this falcon of yours. Every way I turn Plenilune has some new outlandish feature.”

  Skander looked surprised. “Do you not have falcons where—where you come from?”

  Rupert laughed, short and scornful. “Of course they have falcons. Go the whole world over and you will find a falcon peering at you on the wing.”

  “True,” said Margaret, slowly, easing herself into the waters of memory so that it would not hurt too much. “Even in town, though we lived on the outskirts of it, we would see the occasional falcon. They are very magnificent creatures,” she added, glancing sideways at Rupert.

  Skander leaned back in his chair, glass poised in his hand. “Dodgy and temperamental, forsooth,” he protested. “And I should know. Oh, I like them, and if you can win one’s heart she will stand by you as my Thairm does; but birds of prey are calculating, cold-blooded things. They make themselves ill allies.”

  For no reason she could apprehend, Margaret looked up at that moment and caught Aikaterine’s eye. The maid’s face was white, her cheeks two spots of colour... But two agonizing heartbeats later Rupert, too, stretched languidly in his chair and said,

  “I wonder that you keep them. Hounds are so much more temperate.”

  Skander said gently, “To learn one’s enemy, I suspect.”

  Margaret got through the courses of the meal by habit and instinct, going through the motions in a daze, a daze that became sharp where Rupert and Skander sat, or wherever their words fell.

  The fire had gone down to the colour of red morse-ivory, and the room had become a hollow of tinselly quiet broken only by the chink of silverware and glass when Margaret, starting violently at the movement, realized that Rupert was climbing to his feet. “Aikaterine,” Skander said at the same instant, also getting to his feet, “we are ready for the pudding. We will take it along with us now.”

  With a deftness and quietness of motion which Aikaterine shared with Rhea, the maid turned aside into the shadows and fetched three platters from the sideboard. She distributed them and Skander said meaningly, “Thank you, Aikaterine,” and the maid took three steps back, hands folded before her, head up at attention. In the red light of the braziers she reminded Margaret of the watercolours of Japanese cranes.

  Skander held out his hand. “If you’ll come along now,” he said, “I will show you the ballroom.”

  Margaret could think of nothing to say so she nodded, and with Skander before her and Rupert behind, one hand holding her pudding and the other pressed against the chill stone wall, she found herself descending the stair-well. She knew now why it was called a stair-well, her house in Aylesward having no such: the steps went down and down in a rigid spiral, down into the inky black. She had to remind herself with force that she was on the top of a fell, not descending into the lowest heart of the earth.

  She imaged the heart of the earth would be a bit warmer.

  With a relieved, shaky breath she came out of the door at the bottom, blinking in the sudden light of torches. Skander snatched a look at her over his shoulder before continuing on. She felt dizzy but kept on doggedly. Halfway across the atrium Rupert stepped up alongside her and slid his hand under her elbow, sending a thrill of horror down her spine. She wished to shake him off but she did not dare.

  They left the atrium and turned into the north transept. They went across a series of galleries, walked the length of one, and at last approached two tall, narrow, panelled doors of white and gilding. The Lord of Capys, with another quick look over his shoulders, depressed the two knobs and gave the doors a sharp thrust, swinging them open together.

  With an effort to steady her hand and keep her spoon from rattling in the cup, Margaret lifted her saucer like a lamp and stepped forward into the thick cold black of the room. A single bar of light pierced in with them through the doorway, but it barely drove back the immense gloom that surrounded them. She could feel that it was a large room, long and high, perhaps as much so as the nave, but her eyes were so tired and the darkness so complete that she could discern nothing.

  “It is very dark in here,” purred Rupert. His voice seemed one with the dark. After a moment’s expectant pause he said, “Let’s have a little light, then, for the lady.” And with a harsh snap as of two fingers together, there sprang out from above them and along the walls hundreds of points of light. Margaret drew in a sharp take of breath but managed to hold her ground.

  Skander pulled on the front of his tunic. “A pretty trick,” he sniffed wryly.

  “Yes.” Rupert put his hands into his pockets and turned about, looking at the chandeliers which were now blazing with light. “Prometheus started that one. There is nothing to it.”

  While Rupert’s back was turned, Margaret caught the wary, searching look his cousin gave him, but as soon as Skander’s eye fell on her face his features unfurled into a genial smile. “You wanted to see our falcon. Well, there it is.”

  He gestured expansively across the length of the ballroom and she, following his gesture, saw, with a step back to take in the immensity of it, the Byzantine-work of an enormous falcon under their feet. It was done in shards of polished marble, travertine, and glass, each piece coloured and matched to perfection so that, from a height, it must have looked like a painting and not a construction of tiny, individual parts. She had expected it to be heraldic, like the glass falcons in the windows, but this one was depicted at an angle, hanging in that single moment when the bird turns from the climb into the killing dive, wings tucking, beak half-open, eye gleaming with the scent of its triumph. It was so life-like, so terrible, so fierce and proud and enormous, that Margaret feared Rupert’s foot upon it, lest by his dark arts he somehow bring the thing to life.

  They were standing now at the south end of the ballroom, just on the talons—beautiful gilt talons that took the candlelight and burned with the fury of the war-god star. To their right was the beak: a larger kind of talon and also gilt-angry. The jet and vermilion eye seemed almost to follow Margaret as she moved, hesitantly, across the floor. Everywhere the barred and tabbied feathers of the bird chinked with light; she kept expecting it to move, or the semi-precious stones of the feathers to lift and rustle with the sound of the high wind outside.

  Skander’s voice was warm and muffled with pride. “Is she not very fair? She is easier to see, so, without a hundred skirts obscuring her.”

  “She is very fair,” Margaret agreed. “And so very smooth! I would not be even a little afraid of tripping on it.”

  The young man smiled and looked at the stones beneath his feet. His trim, bulky figure seemed a little withdrawn, pleasantly so, almost coy—but in the heraldic figure of h
is House there was no such coyness: under Margaret’s feet was a picture of the pureness of his prowess, the sheer splendour of his thinly veiled power.

  If only I could stay here! she thought longingly. I would do well in this place. But no, only over Rupert’s dead body, and such an eventuality seems unlikely.

  She turned away from her thoughts so quickly that she nearly lost her spoon from her cup. Rupert, who seemed to have been watching her all this while, raised an inquiring but not unfriendly brow. The sight of him sent a chill through her veins.

  “This room is very well lit,” she went on, listening to the hollow sound of her own voice, “for being so large. And we will be in here tomorrow?”

  “And all over the House between whiles,” replied Skander with a cheerful wryness.

  She smiled apologetically. “Will there be many people coming?”

  He drew his hands from his pockets and seemed to consider his fingers, as if counting. “Quite a number. I have not roused myself to memorize the guest-list. I know most of them by face, anyway, and that suffices, most times.”

  “Hol will be here?” inquired Rupert.

  Skander flung up his head, gazing past Margaret at his cousin. A sleepy, cool light flashed in the young man’s eyes. “In all likelihood…” he said slowly. He seemed about to add more when a chime from a long way off disturbed him, and he amended himself: “There, that is the clock in the Red Gallery. I have kept you long enough.” Bending, he reached out and took Margaret’s hand. “I trust you will sleep well. If you have need of anything only call Aikaterine. I put her at your disposal.”

  As if summoned by magic, there was a soft clearing of the throat in the doorway and the maid herself was standing there, ready to take Margaret away. She looked from the maid to the master.

  “Good New Ivy, Miss Coventry.” Skander smiled downward at her.

  Catching her skirts in one hand, Margaret bobbed politely. “Good New Ivy to you, sir. Thank you for everything.” She turned, fetched another look at Rupert to be sure he was not following, and at the last moment attempted: “G-g-good night, Rupert.”