Plenilune

by Jennifer Freitag

  One leg crossed over the other, settled in the chair, she picked up the atlas and opened to the beginning. She was startled to see the brown plates, not of Earth, but of Plenilune; but the surprise was momentary, and then she was seeing names she recognized—Talus Perry in the west of the Mares, the road through Glassdale up to Lookinglass—and as she fanned through the pages in the soft silence of the rustling fire, the formlessness of Plenilune began to take shape. She saw where the seas were, where the rivers ran, how small was Thrasymene and how vast the steppes. Darkling in the south, bordered by the swirls of warm moving sea-water, seemed a kind of sepia-toned paradise—she caught a note about rich wine-country there, and smiled.

  She lingered unwillingly, out of a perverse sense of curiosity, over a detailed map of the Mares. The roads, woods, and lot-lines were clearly demarcated; she saw the ancient estates with their beautiful, foreign names—Marenové House set among them like the crown jewel of a diadem—and her heart hurt.

  Over all this I might be a kind of queen, and if it were not for Rupert I should not mind it.

  Her eyesight blurred. For a moment she sat in total silence, seeing nothing but a confusion of images inside her mind—her mother, her suitor, Skander, the fox, old Hobden who seemed like the steadiness of the ground he toiled over—then, with an effort, she came back to herself as an illustration alongside the Marius Hills drew her attention.

  It was a dragon.

  15 | Nightmare

  Skander was reserved when he woke. Margaret saw from the clearness of his eyes that he was master of himself once more, but he looked at her wordlessly, and wordlessly looked away, a slumbering anger between his brows. The thing which had happened lay unspoken between them, but he was thinking on it, keenly, furiously, in full awareness of what had become of him after the witching maid had brought his drink. He had felt the knife in the dark skim too close between his shoulder-blades. That was apt to change a man, and all at once Margaret was afraid of him.

  He broke the silence at last, looking away into the fire. “Where are my things?”

  “They are here.” She got up in a rustle of taffeta—the light worried on the fabric, sending flickers into the shadows—and moved to the end of the bed where she had put his pack. “Do you think to rise? You are well enough.”

  If he did, he did not tell her. He lay awhile longer staring into the fire, looking at his own tempestuous thoughts.

  “Rupert was in to see you,” she offered by way of peacemaking, “but you were asleep. He was a little relieved to know you would not die, but sorry,” she added truthfully, “that I kept watch for you.”

  Skander looked at her then, the fierceness of his mother’s line shaping his face with hard edges. “You stayed? Methought it was Aikaterine sometimes, but then I was confused with sleep.”

  “No, it was me.” Margaret returned to the chair, though now she felt unwelcome. She fidgeted, but the heaviness of her skirts complained and she bid herself sit still lest Skander become aware of her awkwardness.

  His hand clenched the counterpane. “He need not fear anything from me,” he said gruffly.

  She tightened her own hands into fists.

  Of a sudden he looked at her, the silk of his pillows rustling like the fire with his movement. “You are sorry, I think, that Rupert has nothing to worry about from my quarter.”

  Hang the man!—tears smarted behind her eyes and it was almost all she could do to control them. “It is no matter.”

  “It is a matter,” he sighed, and put up one hand over his face. “I wish I could be sorry—truly I do—”

  Anger overcame her wretched sorrow. “By the twelve houses, your heart lies elsewhere and I get on—we all get on. Please do me a courtesy and spare me no pity. I cannot abide pity.”

  He seemed to forget himself and the knife in the dark and the long fight against poison, and stared at her, surprise and confusion and respect warring in his face. At last, with some effort, he put them away and settled back. “It is that obvious,” he asked, “even to you?”

  “What, Woodbird?” She, too, settled back. She was still angry, formlessly, helplessly, but she did her best to master herself. “I have no occupation but to observe. I observed a lot—as you well know.” She smiled grimly.

  He, too, was remembering the night in the cellar and he, too, smiled. They were silent for some time, staring each at their own thoughts. Margaret, listening to the crackle of the fire, found her mind wandering to the dress—the thought was never far away—and realized how alarmingly close it was to being done, how alarmingly close the day was on which Rupert would bring down the top-stone on the Honours’ tomb. There was a bit of thunder in the air, and the muffled sound of it made her start.

  Skander began speaking again. At the sound of his voice Margaret turned toward him: he was staring off into the middle distance, unblinking, detached. “I forget that you are not native to the Honours. You say no pity, and I hear a woman of the Honours speaking—one of the old line: valiant, hard as adamant, unbending...”

  Margaret gently drew him back. “It is a harsh portrait you paint. I fear I, like the images of the women of old, have lost the skill of love.”

  He shook his head but did not break his staring gaze. “Nay, ’tis but a harder, more enduring kind of love, is all. You say no pity, but ’tis a pity we have lost the knack of that sort of charity. I knew a man who had that knack. I do not know him, now.”

  Again the chill, the sense of foreboding brushing the cold up the backs of her arms.

  “Would any of us die,” Skander mused, his face darkened by an inner thought, “to keep what looms before us from happening?”

  Would any of us die?

  Before she could speak, before she could break past the awful dare that seemed, though he had not meant it, to be levelled at her, he shifted and pushed himself upward, letting loose a breath like a swimmer breaking the surface. “How we are poets and idealists! and have been for too long. I will get up and have a bit of breakfast. I think I should go before I overstay my welcome any further.”

  Margaret got up, shying away from the macabre thought. “I will personally see to your breakfast.”

  He looked up at her as he swung his legs over the side of the bed, brown eyes standing out sharply in a bar of firelight. Thunder rumbled in the distance. “Yes…I would be obliged if you did that for me.”

  Margaret took that wary, secretive look with her when she left. As she passed through the dining room and into the kitchen hall, she paused involuntarily by the cellar door. Her hand almost touched the knob, her mind going ahead down the stairs to the big black creature who, as the days passed, would be growing smaller and ruddier as his invisible chains tightened about him…A clatter from the kitchen disturbed her thoughts and she went on, blushing inexplicably. She told Livy, who she thought could be trusted, to make ready Skander’s hunter, and was glad to see that Rhea was nowhere in sight near the kitchen. She oversaw Skander’s meal in peace and had her own brought in with his to the dining room.

  “Any sign of Rupert this morning?” he asked as he joined her.

  His face, she noted when she looked up, had changed and was more haggard; the liveliness had gone out of his form also, and that discouraged her. But she roused her spirits as best she could. Even if he was incapable of helping her, he would always be a friend to her—though no one, she thought with some faint curiosity, would be a friend to her as the fox was.

  She turned toward the window. Sunlight clinked off the swinging amber drops hanging from her ears. “He is on the lawn. He takes Curoi and Talbot out of a morning when the weather is not too thick.”

  Skander crossed to the window and stood by her, looking out on the scene. Through the heavy grey light and wind-surf noise came back the sound of dogs barking. The hawthorns were bare, the barberry wind-stripped; clouds lay thick in the lower parts of Seescardale and obscured the view within a few miles.

  “It is thick enough this morning. Is that thunder
I hear? There will be a storm in Glassdale for sure.”

  Margaret looked at her hands clenched in her lap. “It would be useless, I suppose, and cruel to ask if you would stay another day.”

  He did not turn. The hollow winter light paled his face; the gleam of the windowpanes chilled his eyes. “I cannot stay another day. I am sorry.”

  “Better eat your eggs,” she told him with an attempt at glibness. “There is nothing so distasteful to the civilised world as cold eggs.”

  Rupert came in presently, his shoulders sheeny with mizzle. He saw Margaret first and his face brightened; then he saw his cousin and something checked, closed and quenched, crept into his features.

  “Good morning. I see that you are back on your feet.”

  Leaning back, Skander hitched his ankle up over his opposite knee, his cup of coffee steaming in his hand. He, too, had a wariness in his face, weighing his cousin’s mind in the tension of the air. “We are men to bound back quickly. What does the weather do?”

  As Rupert sat down Livy entered and poured his master his own cup of coffee. “It will rain here but the main of it has come over Seescarfell already. It should pass on by tonight and leave us with bonny skies.” There was a pause, thoughtful on both sides, then Rupert added, “ ’Tis but a bare fortnight.”

  Skander nodded. “Not even—just shy of.” His gaze, for a moment, slid to Margaret before passing on to the window again; and it was all Margaret could do in that moment to suppress the quick, raging twist of panic that began beneath her breastbone.

  The odd thing was that Rupert and Skander parted in a kind of quietness, not at all friendly, but as two men who have a mutual respect, though given grudgingly, silently acknowledged. Margaret could not help but feel, as she stood on the stable yard threshold wrapped against the cold, that the parting gestures they gave each other were like two men saluting with duelling swords. But when Skander went away and Rupert rejoined her, she felt he was angry.

  Was it her imagination, or did his eyes, brushing past her face, seem to say, “You are next”?

  “The gown?” he asked as they went back into the atrium.

  “It is nearly finished. As are we all, it would seem.”

  He shot her a burning look, eyes flint-coloured in the muted light. She felt the anger turn into something else, something that frightened her with its surge of possessive rage, but she stood her ground and the tide ebbed. Rupert wrestled himself under a pretence of patience again. “Yes, the time is nearly upon us. It is truly time for Plenilune to be taken up and shaken by the four corners. It has grown old and dusty and set in its shackled ways.”

  “I saw it quite otherwise,” Margaret protested. “It seemed to me the very heart of a fire in its blaze; never more alive a people have I seen before.”

  He smiled condescendingly. “Would that you had seen her in the old days, when our blood ran with gold and the blood of our enemies ran like wine. Men were men in those days and walked the hills like giants. I long to cast back upon those days.”

  His face grew thoughtful, introspective, and he seemed far off. She did not know why she drew him back, but she found herself saying gently, as much to herself as to him, “Could anyone, no matter his power, turn back the inexorable flow of time?”

  Instead of taking his hand off the rein of his anger—as she had expected him to—and giving it its head, he smiled a little as if to himself and, turning, set his hand against her cheek. His palm was cold. “Like stones in the ploughland you set yourself crosswise with me, and like stones I pull you up and make a border of you about me. Could a man, no matter his power, turn back the flow of time…? He could not. You and I know that. But, for all that, he might try for the sake of all he holds dear, to make a stand and to make a difference. For would we find those olden days so very golden if we were allowed to go back to them?”

  Margaret moved out of his embrace. “Probably not,” she replied flatly. “Only have a care, Rupert—I have said it before: what you and I hold dear set us crosswise against each other.”

  Again the flint, striking sparks against the iron of her words, gleamed in his eye. He set his hand on her shoulder—it was a heavy hand—and turned her about, saying, “Go finish that dress. We will see, presently, about the other things.”

  She put in her heels and resisted him until he went away without a backward glance; his footsteps on the stairs receded, passing to the north wing of the house, fading into wooden silence. Just this once she did not feel the chill of the open threat, nor the looming shadow of fate. She went quietly, numbly, back to her sewing. She had only an hour’s worth of chinaberry clusters left to sew—not much, when she looked the whole thing over and spread it grandly out on her knee, not much at all.

  It was a fine dress after all, very grand but also very beautiful. As she threaded her needle and bent her back to the work—the familiar ache beginning in her neck—Margaret wished she could model it for the fox. He would like it in his frank way of appreciating beauty, and tell her just how outrageous it was. She stopped her work to stretch her back, looking up through the frosted windowpanes. It was hard enough to sneak down any day, let alone in a full-blown gala gown. He would have to be content with a description.

  Margaret leaned back over the skirt.

  It would be a very detailed description.

  The night she tried on the gown, it was only three days until the new year. The thought was alarming, but not so alarming as being twisted and thrust and fitted into the gown in the cold of her room, flood-lit in firelight and the backlash of jewel-glitter. It was Lilith who attended her: she had seen Rhea on the outskirts from day to day, a sullen, silent figure, oddly cowed into obedience, but she had never crossed paths with Margaret again. Margaret was glad, especially at this moment in which she was sure she would have slung another punch at the maid’s face, torn out of the dress, and fled to the companionable misery of the cellar. Rupert would have had to drag her from the fox’s dungeon or lock her up there with him. As it was, being pulled on all sides until the few pounds she had gained seemed to squeeze out of her again, it was all she could do to keep a handle on her simmering panic.

  It helped when Rupert came to inspect. He came in silently; she did not know he was there until she saw his reflection beside hers in the mirror looking, not at her reflection, but at her real self. There was a sincere tenderness in his face at that one unguarded moment that made her hate him even more, for it was a look that should have conjured pity. She felt a pang of guilt pinch hard at the right side of her heart—she could feel it bleeding—but the hate won over. Hate was a strong weapon, she found, stronger even than his love—

  And she was glad it had won over, for the moment his eyes sprang off her figure to the mock figure in the mirror, there was a hardness to his eyes, a preoccupied darkness that bespoke him elsewhere turning the pieces of the world to his own design as a man might turn the pieces on a chessboard.

  Lilith finished the last adjustment to the torso and drew back, hands folded, head bowed. “Well?” Margaret asked Rupert’s reflection. She did not bother to conceal the blade in her voice. “Does it suit its p-purpose?”

  He smiled—she did not like the smile. “In retrospect I fear we have outdone ourselves. What will we do for a wedding gown?”

  “Nothing.”

  He laughed, short and hard. “Suitable, but unfitting if we mean to have guests attendant.”

  Margaret schooled her anger—a task which required all her strength. She turned her shoulders as Lilith stepped back in to begin the long unbuttoning of the bodice at her back. She was raised on an ottoman and had to look down into Rupert’s absent, angry eyes. “I think as far as many see,” she remarked, “the wedding would be a moot point.”

  “You mean that little mistake of Darkling’s?” Scorn sharpened the black spindles of his eyes. “They are all quick to think so—they like to be mean-spirited.” He added in a low, musing tone, “They would not be wrong, had you unbent a little.”


  “I do not unbend. I must be broken.”

  It was gratifying to see the look of pain pull like hard wine at the corner of his jaw. The moment stretched like a violin-hair, waiting to be played upon…but they did not play upon it. Rupert nodded curtly, almost by way of a salute, and went out, throwing a shadow up the wall in a huge, unconscious parting gesture.

  The shadow was cold on her soul.

  It was ten o’clock when Margaret was finally alone, rid of the gown, rid of Lilith—Rupert’s door had banged shut and not cracked open again—and, staring unseeingly at the clock face, she felt now was her chance to see the fox again. He would be the fox again by now. The moon’s face would be small, as small as the little lick of firelight reflecting in the glass front of the timepiece. Go now. Go now: don’t think that this is the last time you will see him as you are, buffeted and caged, but free at heart. Don’t think about three days hence. Don’t think that in three days you will be as chained as he. Just go.

  The house was quiet as she stole through it. She had learned by now to walk with confidence, knew which stairs creaked and where the chairs and tables were put so that she would not bump against them. The door to the kitchen hall had an oddly placed handle, higher than most, but she had learned just where to reach for it. Outside the world was deathly silent: the first real snow, huge and soft, was coming down. As happens in snow-weather, she did not notice the cold. She slipped silently down the cellar stairs, and because of her silence she heard, long before she reached the wine-cellar, the sound of men talking down below. She stopped once in surprise, her heart suddenly in her throat. The voices were indistinct. She stole onward, carefully, the voices becoming clearer, sharper, cut even on every edge like diamonds, until she stood against the wall at the head of the wine-cellar stairs.