Plenilune

by Jennifer Freitag

  She sat still. She did not dare move, lest he make a move for her—not that it would have done any good—and because already the room was growing faded and dark at the edges. There was a curious feeling beginning in her stomach that she did not like.

  At last, with a supreme struggle, the man raised one brow, as if in salute. “You must love him a great deal to do what you have done.”

  With an effort she managed to get up. The scent of the burning sticks was cloying now. “I love Plenilune,” she replied harshly—she had to force the words or else they shook on their way out. “And I cannot stand by and watch you tear her open and raise hell in her midst.”

  The grey eyes were haunted, angry and haunted, but she went on recklessly.

  “That was your mistake, Rupert. You never loved Plenilune. You never loved anything. Except me. That was your mistake. Liking,” she parroted mockingly, “is a small, dear door out which you pass in the night unseen.”

  Resignation stole across his face. “But you saw. By all the gods—!”

  “I saw,” she cut him off. “You never took me seriously. I was only ever a pawn to you. Well.” She lifted her chin against the grey terror encroaching on her vision. “Even a pawn can break a stalemate.”

  The disappointment hardened and became an expression of intense longing. “Oh, Margaret, I hate—. You are not a pawn.” His eyes roved, unfocusing, and he blinked against the grey. “Curse him,” he murmured. “Curse him…Oh, Margaret, what a queen you would have made.”

  Blindly, he took a step toward her, though what he meant to do she did not know—the high sense of panic sang in her ears—when of a sudden his head jerked to the side as if the voice of someone he feared had called him without remorse.

  Without warning there came a sudden uprush from underneath, as if the vaulted fell-country sky had opened at their feet and they were plunging wrong-way-up through it as the falcon, tucking in its wings, plunges for the kill. If she screamed, Margaret could not hear it. Everything was a whirl of white and grey and sudden thunder-tailed streaks of deafening black. The black came faster and faster, thrashing her vision, quenching it, strangling it, until it engulfed everything in a blood-curdling shriek.

  She caught her footing just before she lost her balance completely. She was clutching the stone casement of an immense stone double-doored gate; reeling from the fall, reeling from the shock, her feet slid among what looked like pools of blood that gathered on the wide stone threshold. She thought they were pools of blood until her whirling vision cleared and she saw that they were the petals of wine-dark roses.

  With an effort she pushed off from the casement and looked out of the Gate. The doors opened upon a plane of white, dimensionless, endless, fathomless: the three giant stone steps descending from the threshold stopped abruptly and dropped into a nothingness of white, a nothingness filled only with the eerie tendrils of smoke from a fire she could not see. The scent of burning filled the air.

  One tendril reached out close to her, brushing against her cheek. Cringing, Margaret turned away.

  The sight within was even more appalling than that unbearable nothingness without. There was enough room within the Gate to stand comfortably and not be concerned about falling off the threshold, but within there were no steps. The stone ended with a sharp drop, a drop she could have made but one she felt suddenly loathe to try. Beyond the threshold was a darkness as shifting as the empty white. At times she thought she saw looming shapes, big as the shadowed figures of the fells at night, and at other times it seemed all was a vast floor of obsidian flags, sparking light from fires that she could still not see, catching light and throwing it back in forms like snickering, sneering faces. They were always moving; she snatched only brief, disquieting glances of them.

  She stared at the empty dark for some time before she realized it was not empty. On the stone flags near the base of the threshold knelt a figure, a figure distorted out of familiarity and yet all the while horribly familiar. Margaret stood on the edge looking down at it, watching it drag itself up to its hands and knees, bent over in apparent agony. Water was running off it in incessant streams, dripping from its clothing, from its splayed hands, from its brow. Like one remembering a dream, her mind launched across a year to a wet train-carriage and an impudent young man.

  “Rupert!” she called. She knelt, peering against the strangely tangible darkness. “Rupert! Can you see me?”

  He could hear her. At the sound of her voice he gave a hacking gasp and reared back on his heels, squinting up at her. Pain had dilated his eyes. Staring back at him, even at that distance, she could see the wildness, the terror, the agony in that face. The fingers clawed at the uneven stone floor. With a spasm he bent double again, and with a horrible sound that churned Margaret’s own stomach, he began to vomit. He vomited up streams of fire like some kind of sickened dragon. The liquid flames pooled around his hands and knees, sending up sparks that burned his skin, casting a death-pall glow around him. He came to a coughing end and knelt in shuddering silence; with each breath smoke and the sound of sizzling oil came from his mouth.

  Margaret got up and stepped away. For a moment she felt as one moving in a dream, moving without a body. The things before her vision shifted, as if they were not really there but puppet-shadows conjured up to frighten a child. She was not frightened, and the knowledge of that steadied the otherworldly scene again. She needed to know two things: where was she, and ought she to go down and help Rupert?

  With a despairing gargle, the agonized Rupert began to vomit again.

  Wherever they were, they were dead, and a dead Rupert was a Rupert that needed no help. She looked at the torn wreck of the man, alternately doubled in pain and clawing in a kind of animal fury at the floor until his own blood mingled with his bile. Margaret’s stomach was clenched tight against the scene, but she did not feel fear until it broke in on her that the two of them were not alone.

  A figure stood beside her, wrapped up so dark and close that she had mistaken him for one of the shadows beyond the Gate. As she started involuntarily and looked up, she saw him looking back at her with a gaze so strong it was almost physical. It was a fierce, pale, Scandinavian sort of face into which she looked, a face that turned her blood cold. The beautiful blue eyes seemed to claw across her own face; she could feel them leaving red marks on her skin. And yet she could not quite look away. In that void of darkness, his pale face, his flaxen hair, were a kind of sick candle that shouted out their own sort of light against the black. She could not quite look away…

  A distant scream, piercing and blood-curdling, dragged cold nails down her spine.

  “What are you doing down here?” demanded the tall dark Scandinavian. He took a step closer. He towered over her, swathed in his enfolding darkness, blue eyes stabbing her so that it was with conscious effort that she made herself not flinch. Out of the darkness of his form appeared two hands, unfolding toward her, as if to beckon, almost as if to hold. The movement of them sent cold waves across Margaret’s skin. “You have the blood all over you, but you have been Marked Out.” His hands withdrew into his darkness and the eyes narrowed, switching back and forth, coolly, like a cat. “It is a shame.”

  “What—” In that place, Margaret’s voice sounded in her own ears like a glassful of warm yellow wine. “What is a shame?”

  “The Marks are the most rewarding of quarry,” said the Scandinavian. “But my new posting has just come in, and we are not to be.”

  For one moment, one horrible moment that hung mockingly before her eyes like the dead-moon paleness of his face, she thought he seemed familiar. Was it in Rupert’s own face that she had seen him? Was it in a nightmare? Was it—worst thought of all—in the mirror when she had looked back at her own reflection? But with blissful swiftness the moment was past, broken with the distant but perfect clarity of a lazy summer afternoon calling through the Gate:

  “Damn it all, it’s smoky in here. Someone ought to open a window. Give her up, Ereb
os! A vine of thorns is a bloody thing to make an engagement ring out of.”

  “Little fool of a worm,” said the Scandinavian, and he shook loose his cloak. Only it was not a cloak, but huge wings—more wings than Margaret in that stunned moment could count—shaking and rattling and hissing on the scorching air. With a brutal gesture he flung them wide and with the elbow of one hit Margaret full in the breastbone. Images of graves, worms, skulls with their skin still clinging on despairingly, the pungent tang of rotting flesh, lashed across all her senses and stabbed into her soul. With a choked cry she fell backward across the threshold, down the steps, rolling—skirts whirling against the white and grey—until she lost them altogether and she was falling into nothing.

  The dream-fall gripped her lungs and shoved her heart up into her throat for what seemed like an age until, with a jolt, the spangling white snapped away like a pennon and she was blinking up through the sick blur of her own eyes into Dammerung’s face.

  Two waves of feeling, confusion and relief, crashed over her so close they were nearly one. A moment later she gave a choked cry—her throat was raw and disused—and propelled by an instinctive panic, she launched up and vomited across the carpet. There was not much in her stomach beside wine and the vomit came out stained with it, and the single powerful heave all but emptied her.

  “That’s better,” a familiar voice was saying in her ear. “Get it all out. Dying is a nasty shock. Don’t struggle—! There’s nothing to struggle about. I’ve got you, you idiot. This is a goodly kettle of fish you have fried yourself in…” With one arm and knee behind her to prop her up, Dammerung let her relax into his hold while he wiped her mouth with a handkerchief. “You’ll find water in the pitcher over on the wash-stand,” he told someone. There was a hurried, half-running tread of boots, a shadow that made her shy, and someone was kneeling across from him handing him a glass. It clinked against her teeth as he held it to her. “Get the taste out of your mouth,” he told her. “Nay, it is but water! That’s it—that’s the way of it.”

  She had sense enough to know that she was meant to spit the nasty spoiled water out into the porcelain that someone was holding out to her. Later on she dimly remembered doing so. The third party left—a jangling slash of light broke up on her vision and made her wince.

  “Shh,” said Dammerung, rocking her gently and brushing the hair from her forehead. “Shh, leman, it is only the sun. Lie quiet, you brave, blasted fool.”

  It took her a few attempts at speech before she could make herself understood. “I want—I don’t want—can we go?”

  He pulled the damp hair off her neck and pushed it away. “Not any great distance. We can’t go to Market. Here—” he stripped off his cloak and worked it around her own shoulders. “Tabby, tell your master I’ve taken the reprobate out of doors. You have the floor?”

  “Yes, sir,” said a voice from a long way off. “Very good, sir.”

  He was not quite her height, but he was strong and unusually deft; Dammerung got his arms squarely under her and lifted her in a single fluid motion. Figures seemed to clear from before him to left and right, someone held a door, someone else asked if aught else was needed. He shook his head and said something in sharp jest, something a little unflattering about her, but Margaret could not remember what.

  It seemed like a long way to out of doors. With each bare foot set gingerly, Dammerung walked gently and she began to doze before they had reached the patio. There the wind woke her cruelly. It was unusually cold for the Harvest Moon—one of those rare, inexplicably chilly days with a biting wind off the fell slopes and not a cloud in the whole beryl-coloured sky. The sun was still low—it had not quite got over Glassfell—its shadow and the half-shadow of Seescar drenched the grounds in a glistening purple quiet. Stepping out into that cold, unbroken morning quiet, Margaret felt curiously as though she were just getting over a long illness—an illness from which she and no one else had ever expected her to recover. The wind caught at her and her skin felt paper-thin. There was no warmth anywhere in her body; her gown and cloak hung heavily about her frame. She might have stopped when Dammerung set her down, or doubled back inside, if his hand had not been under her arm to guide her to an old, wide-branching tamarisk tree.

  He put her down with her back against the trunk; with a sigh he sank down beside her and passed a heavy hand across his brow. Seen clearly for the first time in what seemed like a long time in the pale light of the out-of-doors, with the blue of shadow and the silver of the air against his skin, he looked worn and haggard. He looked grey. He looked a little sick.

  “Did I give you a scare?” Her voice was still thin and sickly itself.

  He nodded. The jesting seemed to have been mere pretence: he could not now even pull his lips off his dog-teeth and give her a wan smile.

  She was so used to hearing him laugh about reverent things and fling high matters about like a dog worrying a bit of old cloth that his grimness frightened her. Was he angry? He had never been angry with her before, not like this. He got cross and brooding with other people, but thinking back now she could not remember him being anything other than agreeable with her, as agreeable and comfortable as one would be with one’s own shadow. Now suddenly she felt detached from him, as if the long shadow of death had come between them.

  How strange that that should be the worst thought on her mind—and yet, it was.

  Dammerung shuffled his feet in the tufts of grass and laid his arms over his knees, hands pulling at his hands. Fetching a searching, sidewise glance at her, he said, “You look pale. Do you feel any better or are you still going to be sick?”

  “I am not going to be sick again,” she replied wearily. She seemed to have lost her backbone and was having difficulty keeping from pitching forward. “It is very cold out here.”

  “The wind will clean you out. Our fell winds are good for that.” He put his elbow on his knee and turned his head, laying it in the flat of his upturned palm. “You—do you have an answer for the question I asked you?”

  “The que—oh.” There was salt on her lip. Those images came back to her from a very far off place, clear for all their distance—but the clearest thing of all was the sense she had had then of a treasure she could never possess. And now she could. “Yes.”

  She was not looking at him, she was looking at a shard of black gravel among the pink; but she saw him flutter a moment and look keenly into her face. They were both very quiet for a very long time, listening to their own thoughts—and straining for the thoughts of the other—and the rush of the wind and the hum of bees in the flowers. At last, long past Margaret could take the silence, he prompted, “I think you always knew.”

  He was ridiculously coy about the obvious. Yes, neither of them had mentioned it, or even thought about it so far as she knew, but she imagined they had always known, and so had everyone else.

  He tucked his chilly hands tightly under his arms. “It was difficult waiting and wondering if you already knew. But I did not feel I could tell you until—” his brow contracted in a kind of inner agony “—until yesterday evening when I felt something awful was on your mind. I had hoped you would tell me…But I couldn’t say anything. You would have regretted it.”

  She stared at him in hurt surprise. “I wouldn’t have regretted it!”

  “Not all the time,” he shot back. “But you would have, sometimes, when you were lonely or felt out of place, or Plenilune pinched you like a shoe that is too small.” He rucked up his shoulders defensively and shifted away like a ruffled hen. “It wouldn’t have been right to ask you. You would have felt as if you had just got out of the frying pan only to be asked to jump into the fire. We—we are not so unlike, Rupert and I.”

  So. He had thought about it. And here she had taken things for granted and never really thought the situation through. Of course he had always been there for her: he had been there all along the way, a hand under her arm, a smile for her sadness, a figure in the gap to come to her defence. Had she
been a complete unfeeling fool to nearly throw it all away? Did he hate her for it, even though he had come?

  But she knew that if he had asked her before, or if she had thought it through, things would have been even more confused than ever and she would not have been able to go through with her desperate bid to end things. She would never have understood so clearly how much she loved Plenilune, and Dammerung, and all the people they held in their hands and across the green fell folds of their knees. She would not have been able to see that. She would not have been willing to lay down her life for them. And she had laid down her life for them. It was strange to be able to look at Dammerung’s face, and at the face of the garden and the wood and the fells and tell them she had died for them. Only, she knew she could never say it; and they knew it without her saying so.

  He was not really angry at her. Whatever he was angry at, formlessly and blusteringly, it seemed to slip off his shoulders and blow away from them both in a minute. A weak smile began to grow in the shade of his stubble. “I almost feel sorry for Rupert. He had no idea that when he chose a girl of wit, he got a girl of grit as well.”

  “I was never very witty. I was scared, and I talked with a mouth full of daggers when I was scared, but I was never very witty.” She pulled herself deeper into the panther-skin cloak. “Skander told him I was a force to be reckoned with. I think perhaps he was the only one among us who really believed that.”

  “He did not have the privilege of meeting you in the dead of night in your nightgown with your eyes red from crying and your lip red from bleeding. One forms a different view of a woman when one meets her under such circumstances.”

  The distinct tone of friendly mockery was coming back into his voice and it made her pathetically comfortable. The sharp scarlet warmth of embarrassment crept up her cheeks. “Had I known who you were I would have gone away at once.”