Plenilune

by Jennifer Freitag

  There was a soft cracking sound behind her. Glancing surreptitiously over her shoulder, Margaret found Lord Gro had drawn his lips in a wide thin line which seemed to be his best pantomime of a smile.

  The light began to blow around them as the high fell winds tossed the trees about. Light raced across Margaret’s face and hands and made tawny-coloured Twiti turn gold. Gro’s cloak caught the wind and bellied out like raven’s wings. His hand slipped out, the hand with the pale aquamarine ring, and clasped one end of the fabric to keep it from being snatched away altogether.

  “We do not often have fatalities, even in boar-hunts,” Gro said presently, having wrestled the cloak under control. Surprised, Margaret turned in her seat and looked up into his face. She had not expected him to offer conversation, but after the first moment’s surprise she heard old Hobden’s voice:

  “All I knowed was they brought ’im ’ome one day like a fish what’s been gutted. Boar, mus likely.”

  And she shivered again in her middle in the wake of a wretched cold wave of fear.

  Gro saw the look on her face. “So.” His iron-grey brows flickered and a strange softness superimposed itself over the hardness of his face. “You have been told. You are one, I suppose, to know that we are not all mask and gala here. I am sorry.”

  She put her arms around herself and rose—he was still taller than she—and turned to watch with him as Brand and Gabriel began digging a fire-pit. He had not liked her, Mark Roy’s youngest son, but then it had been his right to mistrust her. Now his fair young face, roughened by the winter wind, shining in the light, turned up and caught her eye. He frowned a moment—then suddenly smiled, his teeth showing with a strange kind of companionable fierceness. Beside her, Gro made a dismissive gesture with one hand and, mimicking it, Brand returned to his work.

  “Yes,” said Margaret quietly. “I am sorry too.”

  The boy was not allowed to stay. Survance made mention of taking him back up to Lookinglass and having Melchior look at him, but Skander rose up in a flurry of tawny buckskin and ermine and hushed him up, sending the blue-jay man instead with the boy slung at an awkward angle on the horse’s rump.

  “You cannot go,” said Skander roundly, hands on his hips, “when you have only just come. The leg will mend and the cub will get about with naught but a fledgling limp and a pretty scar. Let Tabby take him. Sit down, Periot.”

  Periot sat down hurriedly next to Bloodburn and the matter was put aside. Margaret watched from her side of the ring about the fire as the blue-jay man disappeared into the cold wood, the low noon sun blending his hair into the golden mists. The last crackle of the horse fighting with the undergrowth died away. Skander returned from seeing his man off and, stamping the snow from his boots, sat down on his own up-turned log between Periot and Aikin, and an awkward silence fell over the group. All eyes wandered to the rump roast sizzling over the fire. It was a rich, heavy piece of meat that would take some time to cook. The dogs lay on the outskirts of the ring, quieted now into soft worrying snarls as they finished their own meal of boar-blood and bread. The horses shifted; Witching Hour, getting too close to another horse, squealed and swung away on his lead. Margaret stole a careful look around the circle. What was it that hung over them, that kept their eyes carefully on the centre of things and away from other faces? Brand had a slight, impatient smile on his face which might have been for the food or might have been annoyance toward another quarter. Margaret did not know. Aikin turned aside once to Woodbird, who was his left-hand neighbour, and murmured something; she shook her head quickly. Almost at the same instant Skander leaned forward and turned the roast, and said aloud,

  “Well, we are all here. Is it too solemn a thing to discuss now and shall we save it for after the pudding?”

  Brand looked squarely at Margaret, a little of the old dislike in his eye; she felt her skin turn cold. But Rupert, folding his arms across his chest and leaning back against the black split trunk of a pine, replied, “I think it would curdle your food either way, coz. Best leave it?”

  “I think it had better wait,” said Mark Roy peaceably, and glanced from Margaret to Woodbird meaningfully.

  Periot shifted forward on his log, hitched up his trousers at the knees, and turned his head to Skander. “I beg your grace, my lord. Is there aught I should be abreast of?”

  Everyone’s head was up and all eyes were on Skander and poor Periot, save Rupert’s—he lounged panther-like on his log, staring into the heart of the fire: a smile slunk across his face. She did not know why she did it—the blood rang so loudly in her ears that she could barely hear herself and she had the feeling of being disconnected from herself by a sharp blade of terror. Before Skander could answer—he had his mouth open—she said,

  “It is for the Overlordship. It seems Rupert de la Mare has met the requirements imposed.”

  Now all eyes were on her—save Rupert again, who only turned his head to look at her hands clasped whitely on her knees. The faces of Malbrey and Bloodburn she could not read; Skander looked angry; Mark Roy and his sons seemed half-quizzical, half-wary, as if trying to scent where her allegiance really lay in her remark. Lord Gro, among all of them, looked sorry.

  Periot’s face was careful, a polite, meaningless smile on his lips. “Ah yes,” he said softly. “I must have missed that, as it was not to be found in the history books in which I habitually bury my nose. Thank you.”

  Quite quickly the colour rushed back into her cheeks; she forced a smile and looked away, suddenly overwhelmingly sick in her stomach. For once, can the world hold a little steady and let me get my bearings? So this is what my foot tastes like! But Rupert did not seem displeased; on the contrary, he seemed well amused, and that made her feel sicker than ever to think she had played into his whims even as she had meant, in a confused way, to put him on the spot. Why did I ever pity you, when you are so hateful to us all?

  As the conversation could grow no more awkward, it broke up into shards of talk between twos and threes. Margaret felt sorry for herself and Woodbird, who carried the awkwardness on beyond the men. Periot leaned forward, arms on his knees, and fell into a discussion with Lord Gro; Mark Roy and Malbrey talked amicably, if gingerly, while Brand listened in. Aikin, with unnatural deftness, had to play at mediator between Skander and Woodbird—and Woodbird clearly did not appreciate his efforts—and Margaret was trapped between Rupert and Bloodburn.

  “How are things in Hol?” Rupert began politely.

  “I saw the slaughtering beginning as we came out and I will go back, finding it done, and all things prepared for winter.”

  “By then, too,” added Rupert, “there will be more things done with than the harvest.”

  “That, too, is in my mind.”

  Margaret watched Bloodburn’s hands interlock themselves: long, old, vein-raised hands that were mottled by the sun, hands that were silver with scars and still strong. She shivered and wished she did not have to sit next to him, nor with her back to the open wood.

  Rupert went on. “I am told by my folk that it will be a mild winter, and so an early spring, and I think that bodes well for us.”

  Bloodburn looked sidelong from under his grizzled brows. “Malbrey was telling me about the star you saw. And sure that we are friends, but I do not put much stock in stars.”

  “Do you think I quell at a mere blink of light?”

  “No…But then, is it not a mere blink of light? Yet Malbrey was insistent upon your trepidation.”

  Rupert’s face was sharp and scornful, upreared, the lips pulled off the teeth in an unconscious snarl. “Trust me, or trust nothing, to know what I am about. When the time comes, can I so count on you?”

  Bloodburn turned his head away and there was in his voice a careful gentleness which belied a sullenness beneath. “The Overlord knows that he can count on me.”

  “Yes,” Rupert said more kindly after a moment. “The Overlord knows.”

  When the meat was finally cooked they ate, much more relax
ed with warm food before them, under a clear faience-blue noon sky with the wind in the tops of the pine-trees and the sound of water falling somewhere far off, echoing in the quiet. To Margaret it was a strange, shining experience, at once awful and enjoyable, for the cold sharpened her senses and the quick, flashing wit of her companions, like kingfishers, darted by her and seemed to weave the circle of their hunting party with brilliance. At times she hated, keenly, why she was there—and the boar-meat, cooked fresh and unsalted, was gamey to her taste—but beneath the prickling hatred she knew, very clearly, that she would have given anything, anything—even the familiarity of her own home in Aylesward—to be sitting among these people on this snowy November day. Whatever else came, she knew she would remember the hunting party for the rest of her life.

  But Plenilune was not done surprising her. As with Songmartin’s suddenness, flashing out of nowhere and startling her with a quick scene of beauty and truth and goodness, as with the shepherd’s panpipe playing in the windy clearness of the fells, Plenilune flung round silver balls of shocking splendour at her again. The little party was getting up to go—someone was packing up what was left of the boar-meat and someone else was kicking snow over the fire—when they realized that Twiti the lymer had gone missing.

  “So like him to go wandering,” said Skander. “He got all the wanderlust of the litter. Shee hee! here, boy!”

  They broke up, leaving some to close up the camp while others moved through the wood, calling for the errant dog. Having nothing better to do, Margaret flung the heavy length of her skirts over one arm and waded through the snow and bracken with them, Latimer tagging along behind her. She felt oddly responsible for the dog, a strange kinship for the moment when it had tried to save her life from the boar.

  He cannot have gone far, she reasoned as she slid ungracefully over a log and dropped into a deep, ugly, messy depression in the earth. Latimer fell in after her. And we are not so far from home that he can be in danger. But what a naughty dog! that he does not come when we are all calling for him.

  “Margaret!” Rupert’s voice carried faintly through the woods. Stopping a moment, she frowned, elected against going back, and pushed on, as much now to get away for a few minutes as to find the lymer.

  A bit of cloud had scuttled away from the low winter sun when she came stumblingly through a low hawthorn thicket, pushing aside branches and stepping on twigs as she went. Latimer whined softly. Margaret had a brief, confused sense of coming out into a small clearing before the world became a riot of gold and jewel-black and an upward rush of white and surf-sound. Goldfinches burst upward from the uncut turf in a whirling cloud, circling and chittering, filling the air with a thin, fine filigree of splendour. They finally settled in the trees just as Margaret was getting her breath back, and she got a clear view of the white thing that had lain in their midst.

  Even as she stared at it, her hand clenched white about Latimer’s collar, and it stared back at her, she could not quite believe her eyes. It was a unicorn, full grown but only the size of a colt, with grey on its muzzle and ears and knees. It did not look much like the horses she was used to: it seemed to have wandered out of an old orient, far off in time. Its eyes were larger and longer than most equines Margaret had seen, its ears longer too, and it wore Pharaoh’s beard on its chin with such a supercilious nature that she could feel herself suddenly blushing with fear.

  For a long breathless moment she and the beautiful, weird thing watched each other unblinkingly—she realized that it had enormously long, black lashes—while the goldfinches flickered by overhead. Neither of them seemed to know what to do. Margaret was not sure if she could leave quietly and respectfully, or if she did not dare move; she could see the unicorn was trying to decide if she was a threat or an annoyance. It swivelled its ears and turned its head—the light sang sharply on its horn-point—and then, suddenly, with a sighing heave of its flanks, it turned away, disinterested, high-stepping through the sodden grass with the late dew gleaming on its hide. Its soft, grey-plumed tail was the last thing she saw, glinting among the black pines, swallowed up by trees and undergrowth and the sharp pale winter sunlight.

  The goldfinches swept up in a gold cloud and flew away south.

  When the silence descended again—thick, smothering silence—Margaret put out her hand against the nearest tree-trunk to support herself for a moment. Then, “Come along, Latimer,” she said, and turned back the way she had come.

  They had found Twiti, who had wandered off with another dog, by the time she returned. No one save Rupert seemed to have noticed that Margaret had wandered off too—Skander glanced her way once from scolding Twiti, but she could not read his expression. Latimer broke away from her and ran to join his fellow lymer, and Rupert, disengaging himself from Malbrey’s company, came to fetch her. With a swift upward rush of panic she schooled her face, inexplicably afraid that he would see in her eyes the thing she had seen, and that seemed to her, though she could not explain it, a breach of faith with something greater and more solemn and more brittle than herself.

  “So. You have not run off, then,” said Rupert quietly.

  She said with tired mockery, for it had been a long day, “To whom should I go? Winter woods are unforgiving companions.”

  “Has the snow got into your boots?”

  “No.”

  It was only after noon by two hours and already the light was looking westerly, the sun swinging in a low arc on the fell horizon, striking on the southern crown of Seescarfell and breaking up on the lower wooded slopes that touched Marenové’s back door. Waiting as Rupert brought up her horse, Margaret felt that they stood on the threshold of winter, that autumn was a mere blink of fire-colour behind them; and squinting up the long level afternoon rays, she felt the winter would be long, long and empty with Rupert for company, and something in her middle wrenched with strong self-pity.

  They were a rambling party on the homeward journey. No one kept to single file and everyone talked as much as he liked, though quietly, pleasantly. Riding along behind Rupert, the wood flooded with tarnished gold light, Margaret watched the strong, ephemeral images of her companions—Woodbird in a silvery, feathery splendour; Aikin Ironside with a rich, reddish aurora about him—and after the self-pity, as she always felt after self-pity, she knew again that she was glad she had come. The afternoon light held back the bleak prospect of the lonely winter in Marenové for a while longer and she held the pine-wood close, the company closer, knowing all the while that they looked at her askance as one might look at a hangman’s noose. But she knew that if she thought too hard about the closed and closeted winter she would despair. She could not think of that.

  A jewel-blink caught her eye. Skander’s roan sidled close, his hand flicked out, eyes soft alight, and he saluted her privately, admiringly; and suddenly she smiled, sharply, so keenly that it hurt.

  Sleepily, gladly spent by the day’s exertions, with the rich, clean splendour of the golden light running in their veins, they wound back up above Ryland and passed through the curtain walls into Lookinglass. Margaret was sore and cold and glad to be helped down, even by Rupert, and to wade through the milling pack of warm hound-bodies. She flung the reins of her mare over its head and passed them off on a stable-boy.

  “Well, vixen?” asked Rupert. “Did you, after all, enjoy yourself? You did very well.”

  She rubbed her chilled arms. “At times. I am not yet used to Plenilune. It is very alien and—dangerous. I do not know that I enjoy anything. I am always on my toes.”

  He looked over his shoulder at her from where he saw to the loosening of his horse’s bridle. “You and I. We need not speak of it now, but I am very proud of you for the thing you did.”

  “You ought not to be,” she replied tersely. “I did not do it for you.”

  The dogs began barking happily as they were led off to their kennels round the back of the stables. Blue-bottle Glass, rid of his mount and clipped with a lead, was prancing and kicking across t
he yard as if he had not just been taken out on a boar-hunt: his piercing squeal rang down through the terraces. She heard Skander calling out, “Take care, Periot! I’ll see you on the morrow. Give my best to Ely!”

  “Thank you, sir, I will—God keep you!”

  “And you, sir!”

  Their voices faded off into the thin winter twilight, drowned in the bustle and murmur and animal noises of the dispersing party. Feeling detached, Margaret turned from Rupert to watch the distant figure of the shepherd stalking down the damp stone stairs to the foot of the kitchen garden where he would rejoin the walking path and descend to his own village. He was a sturdy, friendly image, and Margaret liked him with an empty, desperate liking that felt like the hatred of despair. She said, without looking round,

  “Would it be futile to ask you if I might go to church tomorrow too?”

  She heard the chink as Rupert, having cinched the straps, let the stirrup fall to its length.

  “It would.”

  She turned to him then, eyes reddened from the cold and stinging so that she had to squint them, and all she could see was his lean, handsome, hawkish face looking past her shoulder with a cold stare at the back of the receding shepherd. The look in his own narrow eyes was angry and hungry.

  “You are spiteful.”

  He switched his gaze quickly to her. “Maybe—but are you not, also? But I am a disciple of verities, and I will not submit you to the womanish tradition of their assemblies and their council of lies. They wallow in their lies—returning every seven days to the same falsehoods, washing themselves in the same filth of their minds, and all the while believing they are coming clean. It is unmanly. It is despicable. Cast it from your mind at once.”

  “And if I will not?” she challenged in a small, hard voice. Like adamant, the pounding blows of his words only drove her into a smaller, harder, more brightly-furious lump, and she dared defy him for one moment, for Skander’s sake and for Periot’s, and for Ely Jacland’s, and for one small shard of a child’s prayer that she had clung to in her most tormented moments.