“No! no!“ The fox was fighting Livy, slipping in the manservant’s blood. “Let her go, Rupert! Let her go! This was none of her doing! Let her go!“
Was it fear that made her hallucinate? Margaret had the sudden vivid image, so clear she thought she could reach out and touch it, of Rupert holding a chess-piece in one hand, a mere pawn of red: he closed his fingers on it and crushed it into powder. “It is not for nothing you are a fox,” he said coldly. His arm went round Margaret and squeezed her ribs until she could hear them creaking low under the shudder of her uneven breathing. He was going to crush her. Crush her like the pawn. “Nothing to do with it, then, when the scent of magic thickens the air and I find you out of spells and her skulking about at night, you in her arms.”
The fox twisted and shot a smile at Rupert. “It’s not a place you are likely to find yourself.”
Margaret heard the swift dark intake of breath in the barrel of chest beside her. She heard it—and heard the eerie quiet that dropped on them afterward which was like the lull that drops before the storm. Everything froze on the scene, caught sharp and pale in the light. She heard the creak of her ribs, she saw the light glint off Rupert’s eye, she saw the flare of the fox’s nostrils as it smelled the scent of death.
With a pained cry Margaret broke the scene. Slouching forward in an attempt to ease the agony in her side she gasped, “Let him go! I’ll do anything you want. Only let him go. He’s only a fox!”
Rupert’s laugh was hard and mirthless, oddly choking in his own throat. With a cruel jerk he put both arms around her breasts and pulled her back a few paces, lengthening the distance between her and the fox. She could see the wild spangling white in the other’s eyes as he stared at her being dragged bodily away. “Only a fox!” he mocked. “Only a thorn in my side, only the gall in my drink. As for you—”
She sobbed, gagging, blinded by the jagged purple lightning of pain.
“—clearly I cannot trust you anymore, and I have come to the end of my patience with your foolishness, your ungrateful, unteachable spirit, and now this—!” His arms grew tighter around her ribcage with each word. She could not see clearly anymore. Everything was swimming in blue and purple and white. “I cannot trust you, I—have no further use for you. Better I was rid of you.”
Though his words were cold and there was stark murder in them, his voice tore at the end on the razor of regret. But his voice was quickly drowned out in the fox’s shrill barking.
“No, you fool, you idiot, you bastard! If ever you feared me, you will not lay a hand on her!”
Pain and despair and the sense of indrawn power confused Margaret still further. But she knew that the game was up, that she and the fox were but little, worthless things to be crushed under Rupert’s thumb—and that Rupert loved his purpose still more than he loved her. For a moment the grip on her loosened. She was beyond feeling pain now. Shock numbed her. She saw a narrow tunnel of light and at the end of it the flame-colour of the fox, sparking with rage. He would be the last thing she would see. Her body came out of Rupert’s arms, though something far off hurt like hell. She moved forward across the distance; the surf-sound of all their voices beat against her. The fox saw her coming and gave one last twist like a dolphin slipping out of the grasp of the sea; he pushed against the servant’s chest and nearly got free, but not quite. A flicker of white despair lashed across his eyes. From far off in that place that hurt, Margaret whispered, Good-bye, and she wrapped her arms around the fox’s great ruff of ruddy mane. His nose was cold and damp against her lips and tasted of salt. His eyes, wide and wild and pale in the light, met hers with a kind of horror.
Good-bye.
Rupert had her by the throat. The servants were shouting. Someone’s lantern crashed to the floor. It splintered open. Sparks went up in blinding yellow. Her fingers scraped on the stones: she was being hauled away again, almost faster than she could see in the whirling mayhem, but through the last closing gap of sight she could still see the fox, rigid in his captor’s arms, mouth open so that his little teeth shone, a mingled mask of pain and horror on his face.
“Margaret!” he gasped in a reproachful tone. “Oh, damn.”
Of a sudden Livy dropped him. Everyone lunged in to grab him again while the manservant cried, “He’s gone cold as ice and heavy as lead!” Margaret watched, half-seated on the floor, held in Rupert’s grasp. De la Mare watched in a kind of transfixed quiet, not stirring to move, as a man might meet his inevitable death.
The fox struck the floor on his belly, yelping, trying to gather his legs beneath him. Everyone tried to grab him but wrenched away again, clutching smarting hands. With an agonized cry the fox clawed at the floor, trying to drag himself forward as he grew larger and larger, and longer and longer, and his red fur was being burnt up in the glow cast by the ragged shards of light. The cry became a roar, the roar became an almost human scream. One paw swung out to claw at the stone flags: the paw became a hand. A shoulder twisted forward in a spasm of agony: the shoulder was a man’s. Almost before she knew what was happening, Margaret was staring at the sweating wreck of a young man, naked as birth, crouched on the stone floor with his breath shuddering in and out of his lungs as might a warhorse after a day-long fight.
There was a splintering shriek of steel being pulled. She turned and saw Rupert drawing a knife and pulling it back. His hand took hold of a great mass of her hair and wrenched back her head. Pain cracked like lightning up her back and neck, clawing into her brain. If she screamed she did not remember, nor hear it over the roar of panic. Out of the lowest curve of her eye she saw the young man look up, hang for a moment immobile, and then gather himself to spring. The knife sparked in the air. Rupert twisted in an attempt to shield his work from the impact of the young man, but the other’s hand struck his wrist, sending the blow wide. Margaret felt it graze her forehead. She dropped to the ground and rolled away, only distantly aware of the scuffle overhead. She did not see what happened, she only knew that someone was grabbing her and roaring in her ear, “RUN!” and she was doing so.
Through the long looming shadows and flickering earth-light the two of them ran, her hand in his. Desperation drove them on through the peristyle and solarium, diving into the shadows and out again fast as kingfishers, until they had hurled themselves out onto the back lawn. Cold air shivered Margaret’s lungs in bloody rags but she kept doggedly on, driven by the terror of Rupert’s pale, grim face that, in her pain, was nightmarishly changing places with a knife so that the two seemed to be one and the same. The long fine hand in hers was hot with sweat and slippery; she gripped it until she could feel the pain of her hold through the terror.
They ran along the gravel walk and dove into the deep shadows of the bare grape arbour. Somewhere, somewhere too close, a dog began to bark. Margaret caught a swift image of a pale face beside her, hesitating to look behind them for a single instant before plunging on. Down the arbour they raced, down the arbour for the opening beyond and the safety of the woods. A door slammed: the sound of it echoed across the yard. The barking of the dog was sharp and clear and nearly on their heels.
Without check they flung themselves down the stairs and into the grass aisle beyond. Earth-light, cold and betraying, burst around them. Only a moment later they were into the woods, thrashing their way through thick scrub and bramble. Thorns dragged at Margaret’s arms and legs and face. She shut her eyes and ran on.
The sound of the fox’s breathing was her constant companion. She could not hear her own—she was not sure she was breathing anymore. The roar of her own pain drowned out any other sound in her body. But she heard, as they crashed down the side of a narrow glen, grasping at every root and branch to arrest their fall, she heard the fox’s breathing catch and change, and heard when he gasped out, “Can you spell while we run?”
She let go of his hand only long enough to grab an alder root to save herself from pitching headlong into the dark rushy water below. He placed an arm around her waist and steadied
her on.
“Margaret!”
They hit a wet rock and slithered to a halt, up to their ankles in a stream. The high walls of the glen rose all around them, the trees higher than that and, farther up and wholly out of reach, there shone the crescent of earth, gleaming fitful silver and blue, shedding light on their upturned faces.
A dog gave tongue in the distance.
“Here,” gasped Margaret. Her hands fumbled with her brooch; after stabbing her own fingers she managed to haul off her tartan. The fox bent shakily and helped her fling it around his shoulders. Then she plunged her arms around his cold thin body, wrenched the mazing pain in two from her brain, and called up the dragon’s spell.
Determinas loco—come home to me—determinas loco—far from the sea. Oh, hunter, come home from the hill!
There was a howl of wind and the flapping of the cloak all around them. The ground was torn from their feet. The breath was torn from their lungs. Into the rage of a roaring airless tunnel they were thrown. In the space of a heartbeat Margaret hung in the balance, feeling nothing but the sense of falling, falling, falling in a dream.
She hit the ground sidelong, thinking all the while that she would fall on her feet. Pain, like a thousand Guy Fawkes fires, splintered through her body. Panic, like some black ravening bird just stretching its wings to fly, reared up inside her. She could not breathe, she could not see. The world beneath her was heaving. She wanted to call out for the fox.
Struggling against the pain and panic, she groped forward. There was a fire in her body as though someone were taking each rib and sharpening it on a grinding stone. Finally her fingers closed over fabric; they brushed against skin. The fox was there, somewhere, beyond the red-spangled black that throttled her vision.
“Rupert?” She heard a voice from far away and far up. Steps like shod hooves rattled against her ears. “Rupert? Dammerung!“
“I’m—hale enough. Look—look to the lady. I’m afraid he crushed her rather badly. Careful, you thumbs-all!”
Margaret choked on a scream as someone tried to put arms around her. Someone was cursing, soft and low and beautifully; someone was whispering in her ear, “Best go to sleep now. It will be better that way.”
The blurred outline of a man’s face appeared above her in the fluttering, feathered light of a lantern. Odd thing, that: he always seemed to manage a halo of light, always in that careless, unaffected manner. He always had that shining about him. Odd, that…
A long, fine hand pressed over her forehead. “Go to sleep.”
As though driven in by lunar tides, washing swift and gentle through her brain, a deep and painless sleep overcame her.
17 | The Hollow Quiet
On the other side of the sleep Margaret expected pain. She surfaced—it was like surfacing from the bottom of a lake—with her limbs braced against the hot impact, and she was surprised some moments later to find that no pain came. A long shudder ran through her, and to her disgust she realized through the lightness in her head that she was shivering from fear. With an effort she pried her eyes open, squinting against the stab of white light, and tried to see where she was and to remember, between the stabbing light and sick taste of fear, what had happened.
She was in a Lookinglass bed. Not her own bed in the high, narrow garret overlooking the south-west grounds, but a lower room, lit by the morning sun, spacious and well furnished. Everything was light and delicate. To her eyes, still gummed with sleep, there was the impression of being in a birch wood with the wind carrying the light rushing and roaring overhead. And there was a wind, and light, for they were blowing in through some opening, fluttering the white hangings about her bed until they sparked with silver.
After getting her bearings Margaret noticed, among the light and racing, a great winged shadow on the floor and, looking up with rather less interest than usual at the body that cast it, got her first clear view, since that night of flurrying horror, of the fox.
He was standing in the open balcony doorway where the cold wind and frozen light were coming in, moth-wing grey with the light at his shoulders and velvet bee-black in the small of his back where the shadow was deepest. He was clad in a black tunic with fantastically long sleeves and trousers which fit tightly but were too long, the cuffs rumpled and bunched about the tops of his bare feet.
No doubt he felt her gaze, for presently he turned on one bare heel, very smoothly and like a dancer, and caught her eyes with his—the hypnotic sort, she thought with another panicked flutter where her heart was: so pale blue they were nearly silver. For a moment his face was only eyes, those witching-blue, hypnotic eyes, and then, suddenly, he smiled—a gash of a smile across the lower part of his face, that was like a spate of rain and a spate of sun at once, a mirthless sort of humour. About his eyes, when she looked back at them, there were thin, deep wing-lines that were like grief and laughter both at once, so that she could not decide if the light look of mockery was in earnest or only from long habit.
For some time they looked at each other, he smiling in his faintly mocking way which was the same with a fox’s face or a man’s, and she with rather less interest than usual, but at last he, with a little upward tilt of his head, broke the silence saying,
“There are many and various dull things one says to a patient newly awake. Perhaps you have heard them all by now. So I will say rather that I think I owe you the truth, which I withheld from you before.”
“You mean that you—” her tongue was oddly heavy and not quite its right size in her mouth “—are Dammerung, and that Dammerung never did die in a hunting accident?”
His brows fluttered rampant, but otherwise he seemed unmoved. “No, it was not Dammerung who died in a hunting accident…” Then his light gaze became heavy on her, searching the way Rhea used to search down into her inside self. “Did you know that I am Dammerung when you went to get the Blind Dragon’s spell to set me free, or was it mere womanish whim?”
She attempted a mirthless, brittle smile. “It was mere womanish whim. I knew you because—because when you turned there was the likeness of Rupert in your face.”
“And there the likeness ends?” His tone and rhetoric seemed unoffended, and almost absentminded. He came a little stiffly to the side of the bed and sat in a walnut-wood chair, his legs with a bare foot on the end of each tucked up under the seat. Leaning forward, he put a hand on Margaret’s temple and felt a moment for heat, and for pulse at her throat. His hand was as long and fine and sure as she remembered the fox’s paws being, but even that did not seem of much interest to her.
“How do you feel?”
She thought about that carefully, for she found she had to think about it carefully or it slipped in the wake of a sense of panic out of her mind altogether. “I do not seem to feel much of anything,” she admitted at length.
“Indeed?” He put his hand once more to her forehead. “That is well, then. You will not eat just yet, for I think you are not hungry and hunger will come soon enough later. Though heaven knows you are thin enough—” his tone became condescending “—you should not fast long before you waste away.”
“Truly?” She looked at him witheringly. “I mistook you for your shadow when I first saw you, you are so thin.”
His smile, a gash at the right side of his face, had no laughter in it. “I am going away now to eat, as to that, so that Skander does not worry more about me than he already has. What a hen that bulk can be! And you will go back to sleep presently as all good patients do—or so I am told.”
She did feel sleepy and not at all clear in the head on several scores, and she had an odd, muffled sense of detachment. She watched Dammerung rise and put away the chair, looking very like Hamlet but with his hair dark and trimmed—he must have had it cut since coming to Lookinglass, for she had some vague impression of it having been longer before.
But that was on the other side of the long sleep and she could not remember that time very well…
Dammerung paused in the act of t
urning away. A frown pulled at his brows, a shadow dropped for a moment over his eyes. “We have sent down to Melchior our physic to come up from Cheshunt so that he may look over you. He should be here before sundown.”
She stared at him bluntly. Melchior? The physic? She had a confused recollection of a watery-eyed old man shaking with age, a man so old his years had mazed him. “Why does he come?” she asked, appalled to find that she had to speak carefully to keep her voice from breaking.
Dammerung smiled, but again the laughter was not in it, though companionship was. “He comes because I bid him come, and there are yet men who come when I whistle for them. Do you bide quietly now and we will all come up again to see you this evening and fuss and make much of you. Sleep, now.”
His last words had no mockery in them, but a low sort of desperation, and with a nod of deference that seemed more of habit than conscious courtesy he withdrew, shutting the door behind him without another look back.
The room was strangely more empty than his going should have made it. The blowing light seemed hollow, the white and paleness of the colours unfriendly, and there was nothing to stand between Margaret and the loathsome panic in her middle. She lay rigidly under the blankets, staring up at the ceiling where the light was making dancing spear-head patterns on the stucco. She was glad, in a small, deep part of her that could still feel a sense of gladness, that Dammerung had gone: she did not want him to see her trembling as she was trembling with a formless horror of the numbness and disinterestedness which swaddled her. She could move her toes and she could move her fingers. She was not paralyzed. Yet there was something definitely wrong and it made her afraid, horribly afraid, and she was glad Dammerung had not stayed to see it.
That day was the worst Margaret could remember. It had been morning when she had awoken—she could tell by the weight and colour of the light, and, without thinking of it, by how the wind smelled just a certain way. Dammerung said she would sleep presently, as all good patients were wont to sleep, but for a long time she lay awake, crawling through the minutes, pulling herself each moment from the brink of utter panic. Self-loathing helped a little, for she loathed herself badly during those long hours, and some sense of Providence helped a little more, but the times when she managed to doze helped the most. The blurred sense of dreaming, which was never far off, mingled with the light and birchleaf-shaped patterns on the ceiling: when she dozed and really dreamed, she seemed adrift on a green north sea with the roar of the sea in her ears and the cream of foam the coolness of the wind on her skin. It might have been a pleasant sort of dreaming, and at times it almost was, but whenever she surfaced near waking, the wolf-crouched figure of fear loomed just on the periphery of her mind like something in the dark water below her, or behind her, always circling her and waiting until she should be too tired to struggle…
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