Plenilune

by Jennifer Freitag

The tall octagonal tower cut off the view to the north; all clear views of the sky showed up bee-black and star-spangled. Margaret tried pulling in a deep breath to get the tell-tale scent of snow, but she tasted nothing. The cold wind cut deeply into her lungs, nothing more. Colder still and hungry now, in addition to being weary, she huddled bewilderedly next to Rupert’s unbending figure, waiting for someone to light the fires.

  Someone brushed by her in the dark. Shying into Rupert’s elbow, she peered into the deep-green gloom—a gloom slashed with velvet black and studded with silver stars—and saw that it was Mark Roy, backlit by the light from the House, accompanied by two young men. The smaller of the two, the one most like Mark Roy, was one she recognized: he had called Lord Gro away earlier, and had given her a disapproving look. The second was taller, thinner, and in the dim light of the House Margaret saw his mane of hair was streaked with red. It reminded her of someone, or perhaps of several people, but she did not quite know who.

  As if feeling her glance, the tall young man with the red-lined hair flung a look back at her. Her own face was hidden in shadow, but she saw a bemused flicker of geniality pass over the other’s features.

  “Who was that?” she asked when they had passed on.

  Rupert was looking off another way. His voice came muffledly: “You know Mark Roy. Those were Aikin Ironside and Brand, his sons. Aikin is much like Centurion in temperament—I do not trust him, though his blade is quick to bite deep. Brand—” Rupert looked round and peered, too, into the gloom after them to where they stood in the ring that was forming round the piles of wood. “Brand has high sentiment and a short temper. He knows how to be violent. He may make a good friend.”

  She could almost see Rupert’s malicious will undermining the three standing in the dark distance. “And what if I don’t like him as a friend?”

  “You will not much like any of my friends.”

  “No,” she said helplessly, after a brief and futile struggle with something in herself. “No, I suppose not.”

  Aikin Ironside. She said the name to herself several times until she had looked and felt all round it. Aikin Ironside. A strong name. Him I should like to be my friend.

  It was odd how something so simple—the name of a stranger—could remind her with a debilitating pang that she was only a young lady, little more than a girl.

  From the other side of the lawn, leftward along a long line of spectators, Margaret’s eye caught the feeble leap and splutter of a newly-lit torch. Her attention was drawn to it, off Mark Roy and Aikin Ironside, Brand and Rupert: the light took and strengthened, and seemed to send its flame walking down the line with a flick of a fiery wrist, pulling out from among the crowd a jink of gold here, an upsweep of blue plume there, the darkness of a cloak in another place into which the light ran and hid and put itself out. All down the line figures haloed in thin angry lines of candlelight from the House windows had a sudden light and shadow on their faces. How terrible they all looked, Margaret thought with a shudder. How awful, like transfixed gods the world thought it had killed long ago. Like Puck, with a gleeful prancing, the light came out from among them, casting a chancy glow every which way on the grass. Margaret never saw who held the torch; the curious thing was, the person did not seem to matter. The light was going out to wake them, to thrust a fire back into the heart of them, and this great ring of silent, wax-work gods would soon spring to life again.

  The ballroom, the dancing, the heat and noise, seemed far behind them.

  As though playing coy, the torchlight cavorted round all three wood-piles, then dodged in and out between them, leaving a corkscrew of blue smoke on the air behind it. The wind stirred the blue, fanning it out, feathering it softly; the rich scent of it woke something in Margaret which scared her.

  “And—now!” breathed Rupert quickly. With an upthrust of his hand, like a magician conjuring, he made a sudden gesture that made her start, and the smudge and sharp outline of fire in the dark darted into the farthest of the pyres. The light sank like a gigantic newly-lit candle, wondered if it meant to be serious or not, and in a few heartbeats the light sprang aloft, roaring richly with the scent of cedar and pine through the timber tangle. Margaret’s stomach tightened as the fire crawled and jumped upward, etching clear-cut silhouettes of branches against the ilex darkness, branches that looked like fingers trying to drag heaven down to a burning end.

  Bee-bright the torch zoomed to the middle pyre and stung its heap: the air was roaring with burning and the light hurt Margaret’s eyes. By the time the last pyre was lit, and the crowd of wax-work gods came to life with a joyous explosion of cheers and applause, she had to turn her head away from the brightness, though instinctively she clapped with the crowd.

  But Margaret could not help feeling that she had missed the import of the bonfires. The firelit ring of faces, all laughing easily, breaking bronze with skin and ivory with flashing teeth, those features seemed to understand, she thought, looking round on them all. They understood it instinctively as a thing they had been raised with. To them the bonfires meant something, something perhaps symbolic and sacral, something ancient and comfortable that honoured time. But as Rupert moved away to talk with someone, Margaret lingered behind, once again feeling adrift from the colourful menagerie of people. She lingered because the awful crawling feeling had not dissipated, but had worsened, because the bonfires flung open an inner door to her and lost their happy, comfortable feeling. As an outsider, which she felt keenly, they could never have that feeling for her: instead they turned her a frank, open, honest face, and they told her what they really were. Was it primeval? She hurried on from the thought of pagan, because she did not like it and she knew it did not fit. She did not know what the fires said—their language was starkly different from her own—but she knew it was awful and real and Plenilune.

  Yes, it was Plenilune.

  “Margaret?”

  She jumped violently at Skander’s voice in her ear. She had been staring narrowly into the fire and her eyes came away sparking red, smudging his down-turned face. If he looked concerned—which he sounded—she could not see him clearly enough to tell. “I thought you had gone away to be busy,” she said, blinking hard and trying to be light-hearted.

  “I am sorry I have been too busy to attend to you.” He held out an arm and pulled her in Rupert’s direction. “I know there are few familiar faces in this crowd.”

  There, I have offended him! In an attempt to smooth her rough words over, she purred casually, “Oh no, nothing of the sort. People have been very friendly, if they are strangers.” She peered at the bonfires again: the pillars of fire were high now, throwing up sparks into the empty gash of night, but the heat was low and the wind that stirred the ilex was biting cold. Almost she dared to mention the comitissa—the words were on her lips—when she killed them hastily and gave instead a little choked noise that she tried to cover up by saying, “This cold makes one hungry!”

  “Doesn’t it? We will go in, presently, and have a bite to eat. Ah, here is my cousin…”

  He said they would “have a bite to eat,” and Margaret had rather crestfallenly expected titbits and finger-foods such as she had eaten all her life at tea-parties and fine social gatherings. She had not expected the banquet wing which awaited them, nor the tables groaning with their burdens of food. Such a mixture of spices, colours, sweets and savouries mingled in the air as to baffle her senses. For the first fifteen minutes of the meal, positioned—not unlike the sardines in front of her—between Rupert de la Mare and the enormous Earl of the Ritts of Trammel, she was too overwhelmed to have any appetite. But as the sights and sounds and smells settled and became distinct, like a moth about a flame, and her weariness resurfaced along with her gnawing hunger, she gingerly began to feast with the rest.

  It was a culinary experience to rival any she had ever witnessed, full of all the pomp of red royal feasting, but it would have been dull for her had it not been for one small, disturbing instance. Rupert was talkin
g with someone down the table just out of her reach, someone she did not recognize, and her enormous neighbour was so busy making delicate cuts in a titanic pork loin that she was cut off from him, too, and felt awkward trying to strike up a conversation with his agonized face. The two women across the table seemed suspiciously careful not to catch her eye. But she had wanted to eat, she told herself, wrestling with grim disappointment and fury at the snub, so she was here to eat.

  It was the drabness that caught her eye. To her left, on the extreme corner of her vision so that it was almost like catching a glimpse of an old dream rather than seeing anything real, she became aware of an anomaly in this rich tapestry of colour. With another start she looked its way and lost it a moment among a yellow plume and a slashed burgundy sleeve. Had she dreamed—no, there it was, breaking out of the press. It was a small, stooped figure, with the frailness and colouring of a withered apple-leaf. At that distance Margaret was not sure if it was a man or a woman, but it was not supposed to be there, of that she was certain. It looked round slowly on the crowd, but it did not have the wide-eyed startled attitude of the very old. Quite the opposite: it seemed to be horribly deliberate, like death, casting lingeringly over the crowd until it chose its victim.

  “Ru—” Margaret began, then choked herself off. Her curiosity overwon her formless fear. She had some confused notion, too, that she was breaking faith with something if she spoke up against the withered apple-leaf figure. She felt that strongly, though she had no idea why, so she was not surprised when the slow swing of the figure’s perusal came to light and fixed upon Rupert beside her.

  “Ah-h-h!”

  The screech of discovery it gave knocked the bell of happy sound from the atmosphere: Margaret saw it shatter on the floor of their consciousness as every head whipped round, every mouth open either for food or speech, every mouth empty, every face full of surprise—every face save her own. She felt like a spectator watching a play.

  “Ah-h!” The crone—it was a woman—stepped forward with her hand upraised toward Rupert. Her movements were fluid for one so old, her voice blue-veined and thin, but certain. “Thou marks it, young man, and ‘twas a death-knell in thy soul for omen! Thou marks the star Frezen blinked out, like a snuffer put on thy hope! Let not Hell hope! Let not Hell hope! Aye! aye!” she laughed with both hands clutching the air before her, as if shaking something in their faces. “ ’Tis an omen! ’Tis an omen! It may yet go ill with the evil lords! He is the God not of the dead but of the living! Aye, thy omening star goes out and he sits in Heaven and laughs at thee! Uncovered are thy wickednesses! Unhappy are thy auguries! Ill will it go with thee! Treble confusion on thee! The death of thy enemies is wormwood and gall in thy bowels!”

  Margaret did not remember rising. She stood at the side of the table, twisted round to stare at the old apple-leaf woman, her hand whitely clutching her napkin. They were all staring, some having risen, some still seated. For some time not one of them moved, though Margaret was aware of Rupert’s hand, which had been very tense upon the stem of his wineglass, slowly relaxing its hold and flushing with blood once more. But before he could do anything, if he was meaning to, Skander broke away from the rest and came gently toward the softly laughing old woman.

  “Come you away, old mother,” he said kindly. “It is cold: warm yourself in my kitchens.”

  She deftly avoided his hand, though her iron-coloured, sparking eyes laughed kindly back up into his face. “Let me be, young man, or I’ll vanish before thy eyes.”

  “Well I believe it.” Skander’s tone was somewhere between laughter and vexation. Somehow he turned the old apple-leaf woman over into the care of two askance men and one of the head maids of the banquet hall, and with a lack of ceremony which troubled Margaret, the four passed from the room.

  There was a breathless silence, a rush of taffeta and a sigh, and then the low, subdued murmur of talk and clinking of glasses. Rupert’s face, when Margaret dared to look at it, was oddly light and distant, as if he were careful to let the whole nightmarish matter slip from his shoulders like an old cloak. But she knew him better than that and was shocked to realize that he was quite shaken. He carefully finished his wine and carefully replaced the glass exactly upon the table, and under the hum of talk said to her,

  “There has been enough excitement for you. I think it would be best if you retired to bed.”

  “And if I am not tired?” she asked, arching a brow. She kept her head primly cocked to one side, so that if anyone looked their way she would appear aloof and no one would know how her heart pounded. “What then?”

  “But you are, so do you go.” And the smile he turned to her, shocked out of its granite mockery, was actually soft and genuine when it lighted on her face. “I danced you hard tonight, and you did me justice. Go to bed now, Margaret.”

  With all eyes on them, as she knew they were, she thought it best not to test him and risk ruining his good humour. She put her napkin in a tell-tale gesture on the table, hesitated, and, clenching her stomach, leaned close by Rupert’s cheek as though to peck it. No one could see: only he and she knew she did not actually touch him. He was laughing at her softly, coldly, when she drew away and rose. It was a light, awful, piercing sort of laughter. Walking away from the table and the soft surf-sound of talk, walking in the swish and swirl of her red dress, she felt like a red pawn on his chessboard.

  Oh yes, she had played very well for him tonight.

  Wave after wave of weariness broke over her as she mounted the stairs and made her way to her room. Her red dress and the knowledge of it seemed to grow heavier with each step she took. And there was no relief for her when she reached the high little garret for Rhea was there, rising silently from turning back the bedcover. Margaret stopped in the doorway and stared coldly and blearily, almost blindly, at the maid; the maid stared back, but Margaret was too tired and bewildered by formless thoughts to mind the look on the other’s face.

  “Where is Aikaterine?” she asked bluntly.

  “Does my lady’s lady know?” replied Rhea.

  Margaret’s temper flared, clearing away the haze for a moment. “Ring for her,” she snapped. “And then lay out my nightgown. Aikaterine will dress me.”

  Rhea’s face was closed and careful as she crossed the room and pulled the bell. While the maid opened the trunk at the foot of the bed to fetch out the nightgown, Margaret sat down before the mirror and began removing her jewellery. She kept a close eye on Rhea’s reflection, but she suspected that the maid was aware of that: her face never unfolded from its cool, careful expression.

  There was a soft knock on the door and Margaret called to admit Aikaterine. The maid was dressed in white still, but there was a thin silver chain with a single diamond pendant around her neck, and a small clear gemstone in either ear. If she had not known that she was a maidservant, Margaret would have called her beautiful.

  There was a brief moment when Aikaterine looked wide and saw Rhea, and Rhea saw her, but the looks were exchanged almost too fast for Margaret to mark them. “You called?” Aikaterine purred, and turned from Rhea without another glance.

  “Yes.” Margaret rose and stepped away from the dressing table.

  Gently the scarlet gown was peeled off and put over the manikin in the corner. Balling her fists to stave off her shivering, Margaret swam into the folds of her nightgown and stood with her chin up and her head to one side as Aikaterine deftly buttoned the clasps at the throat. Margaret kept an eye on Rhea, who was placing hot water-bottles in the bedsheets, to make sure the maid did not puncture them: but even Margaret thought such a joke rather below Rhea.

  “Is there anything more that you need?” asked Aikaterine.

  Margaret looked around on the sparse, clean room. In her weary state she was past thinking. She almost asked Aikaterine if she could inquire after the curious old crone—but even that was becoming distant, as though it had happened only in a dream, as though she had wandered into one of Rupert’s nightmares and watche
d what happened there. “No-o…” she replied slowly. She blinked hard. “No, I think that will be all. You may leave me, and tell Rupert I have gone to bed.”

  Aikaterine looked at Rhea, as if to pass this duty off on her, and then moved to the doorway. Margaret saw that Aikaterine was careful to let Rhea go first. With a shudder, Margaret thought of having that evil-eyed cat stalking through the dark after her. Then they were gone, silently, taking one of the lamps with them so that her room was lit by only a low fat candle on the bedside table.

  Margaret bent wearily over the flame and snuffed it out before climbing into bed. The sheets were stiff with cold but her feet were soon toasty from wrapping themselves around the water-bottles. She lay in the dark and the musty scent of blown-out candle, shivering from the cold, listening to the moan of the wind around the castle. The wind was loud tonight, loud and desolate, and it kept her awake when she should have fallen instantly asleep. Too soon the water-bottles went cool, and then cold, and she kicked them out from under the covers and fell to shivering, mournfully alone in her cold sheets. Her nightgown seemed too thin, her blankets inadequate, to keep her warm. For a quarter of an hour she told herself she ought to get up and put on the red dress for warmth—surely the red colour would be warming—and in a fitful, dozing state dreamed over and over that she had done so, only to reawaken and realize that she was still in her white nightgown, and still cold.

  If I married Rupert, she thought once, I would not be cold. I wonder—do they keep separate rooms here in Plenilune or do couples sleep together?

  In the morning she knew she would scoff at such a mercenary idea, but in the high garret among the roar of the wind, anything to get warm seemed permissible.

  There was nothing to mark the time. Not the earth’s light, for the night was growing thickly overcast, nor even the distant chime of a hall clock; so Margaret did not know how late it was when it finally occurred to her that she had left her fan behind in the ballroom. She sighed and tried once more to find a warm, comfortable position in which to rest her aching, cold limbs, but she knew she would not be able to rest until she had gone down and fetched it. She could always yank the bell-pull to have a servant fetch it for her, but if she went downstairs herself, where there had been warmth and even some jollification—which was not to be found up here—she might feel better. Surely it was late enough that everyone had gone to bed: it did not seem likely that she would run into anyone worse than a servant.