Plenilune (37 page)

She passed Rupert in the hall on the way to her room. He was stepping into his chambers, the light kindling on the curve of his face as on the upraised blade of the executioner’s axe. He stopped and watched her approach. She felt numb to his silvery, searching eye, piercing as the fox’s could be piercing, peeling back her skin and seeing the soft beating heart of her.
Let him. The pit he will find there is of his own making.

“Are you ready for tomorrow?” he asked.

She could not fathom his tone. Shaking herself out of her thoughts, she looked back on the day’s preparations. The guest rooms had been furnished. The room which had become Skander’s now that she had taken up residence in his, would be given to Centurion. The White Ones would be put up in rooms in the north wing. Margaret had seen that the fireplaces were well stocked, as the north face of the house was chilly with bleak shadow in the low light of winter.

“Yes, I think everything is ready.” A sudden panic of responsibility trembled at her heart.

Rupert sighed and brushed at his face as if the curious circles and squares of his work still clung like cobwebs to his eyes. “Much as I dislike the man, I am glad for you, now that I think about it. It is good practice for you. Also he will know, and others presently will know, that you are a woman of standing and can hold your own in society.”

His smile was almost kindly, but when she looked past it to his eyes she saw again the uncanny paleness like silver and the possessiveness of the jet-black pupil, and the smile, though sincere, lost its charm.

“Must everything be a fight?” she asked through her teeth.

His voice lay soft and sharp upon her breast. “No.”

No. She looked away into the shadows, into the cloud-shredded spangles of earth-light falling in through the glass-topped atrium. Through the darkness came some confused sense of light—not a glimpse of it, but a sense of it—and through the crowding blaze and shadow of Plenilune, she remembered that somewhere in her veins was English blood: and if there was one thing her people were good at, it was defying fate to its own face and holding out a sense of hope against the impossible. So she hid a tiny, fragmented sense of hope, too small to feel and broken like a gem someone had smashed under his heel, in the smallest corner of her heart.

The corner was fox-coloured and glowed like a little lamp.

She left Rupert without another word. In her room she disrobed, alone, and climbed wearily into bed. The woman who had forgot to feed the fox had remembered to put bottles of hot water at the foot of her bed; she curled her bare toes around them while her knees froze and her chest went numb from the grip of despair that seemed to bind as with dark magic all her vital organs.

Father God in heaven,
she groaned,
if you have the least scrap of mercy for me in the entirety of your being, do not make me marry Rupert. Anyone—anyone but Rupert.

In the shifting dark, the muted flurry of cloud-shadows and earth-light, she saw her mother’s face, thick-set and haggard, unmerciful, lined with grey. It seemed far away, looking down disapprovingly at Margaret—did she lie in a grave? The images slipped out of conscious thought into shallow dream, from shallow dream to deeper, and all night she shivered in and out of dark dreams that featured her mother and Rupert and the local church at Aylesward. She seemed caught in the middle of a strange ceremony, half-wedding, half-coronation, but it was always broken up by the news of a death somewhere that inexplicably frightened her, a boar appearing suddenly on the church threshold, and the fox’s voice beside her ear saying, very clearly,

“
Damn.”

She opened her eyes to a wide, fox-coloured light. The window-panes were overlaid with spider-fine frost, the patterns cast on the floor by the light coming through the frost looked like footprints left by seraphic visitors. For the first time it felt, not like autumn, but like Christmas.

Margaret crawled out of bed and stood shivering in her shift while the frozen light played on her skin. She peered across the lawn at the thin, argent sky, listening to the creak and coo of the wild agrarian birds. Geese were calling somewhere, hurrying toward Darkling where winter was warmer. They would pass Centurion on the way, she thought.

Rupert was out on the lawn with Talbot and Livy; the two men were watching the dog romp in the hoarfrost, the breath of all three of them smoking in the air. They were too far away for Margaret to hear even the murmur of their voices. Round the end of the stable-wing old Hobden emerged, toting a full bucket of slops in either hand. His ancient, gnarled frame barely seemed to notice the weight and strain put upon it.

I hate this place. Yet I want to belong, desperately. The life of this place calls out to me and I do not know why. Maybe old Hobden is right. Maybe it would have been better if the other man had not died. But I am always losing to Rupert: what could I do for Marenové’s sake even if I should stay?

She pressed her hand against the glass. The cold burned her skin.

What do you want from me?

She turned away from the srcying-glass scene and went into her closet. For a long while she stared at the clothes by the light of a lamp, wondering what would be both warm enough for the bitingly clear winter day, dignified and beautiful, but understated enough not to frighten the shy-sounding White Ones. She found herself thinking of them as little horned creatures the like of which she had seen at Lookinglass.

In the end she chose a gown of pigeon-coloured velvet that purled back in places to let out the silky sheen of the ocean at sunset. With the muted flame of colour she moved across the barred light of the room, paused only to thrust her hair up and hold it in place with pins and sky-fire gems, before stepping out of her room as one stepping out onto a battlefield that has already been lost.

From day to day, Margaret had noticed that Rupert tended to go about his own routine, presumably as he had before he brought her to Marenové House. Only on occasion would he look in on her, drifting by as he went from one place to another. Accustomed to her father living a life separate from the feminine, domestic life she and her mother and sisters had lived, Margaret had not thought much of it. She had been glad to be left alone. But today Rupert seemed to hover closer than usual. When he realized she had emerged from her room he seemed always close by, just in the next room or, when she found a moment to sit down, in an armchair near her reading one of his dolphin-skinned books. She had just finished a battle with Rhea over the silverware she wanted to use and the placement of people at the supper table, and had collapsed on a sofa in the sitting room only to hear a soft expletive muttered nearby and looked round to see Rupert, again, leaning over his work with his elbow on the table, slashing out lines of writing on a page.

“What, you too?”

He looked up, but did not look round at her. “Was Rhea giving you trouble?” he evaded.

He never speaks of that work of his.
Margaret sighed and pressed her fingertips against her forehead. As the hours went by she was growing more and more restless and nervous, her temper shorter and shorter. “I sorted it out. Have you given notice to the stable-hands?”

He frowned into his work again. “I hadn’t. When I am done here I will go take care of that.” He did look up then, swinging round suddenly on her, and hung a moment with a curious, searching look in his eye. “You look very well,” he remarked. Was that a note of surprise in his voice? “That dress becomes you.”

Her stomach clenched. With an effort she rose. “It is certainly more understated than scarlet.”

“The scarlet,” he pointed out, “was your idea.”

She looked down into his pale, hateful eyes. “True. I will see to the stable-hands.”

“Margaret—”

She had turned away. Her heart stopped at the tone of his voice, gripped in emotion. She knew without looking what his countenance would be.
Don’t say it. Don’t say it. Don’t you dare say it.

The silence drew out, falling like snow upon his emotions. At last he seemed to break away, repelled by the stiffness of her shoulders; she heard the nib of his pen scratching softly at the page again. Trembling she walked away, realizing that she had fully expected him to get up and grab her by the arm—or the throat. The fox’s reassurance of his character seemed far away in that moment.

Her nervousness mounted almost to madness by the time evening dropped down Seescarfell and turned the eastern flanks of the Marius Hills to wine-coloured darkness. A low, cold wind moaned in the hawthorn. The stars, shaken out of the folds of the sky, reminded Margaret of Lookinglass, which reminded her of freedom. She had stepped out into the last flicker of dusk on the front stoop to listen for the tell-tale, wind-blown splutter of hooves coming from the road. There was no sound but the wind, and she lingered on the step and watched the stars break out of a ragged dark sky shredded and coloured like an old war-banner, and she found solace in the sight.

She was turning to go back inside when a dog barked down the lane and the wind, changing direction for a moment, brought through the gloam the soft drub of hooves on turf and dirt. There was a momentary jink of light down the hill between hawthorn and wind-swept barberry. It was only for a moment, then it was lost again in the curve of the pasture; but it would reappear shortly at the end of the lane and come steadily toward her, horses emerging like wraiths from the night tide, travel-worn faces awash with the moth-shuttered lantern-light. Margaret waited, feeling the moments ebb away her anxiety little by little so that, by the time the string of muddy, tired horses shambled into the ring of light cast beside the great front doors of Marenové House, she felt perfectly at ease.

“Centurion,” she said, vaguely surprised by the warmth in her own voice. “Surely this is a case of there and back again. How was your journey?”

The man, wrapped up in a wine-coloured cloak ring-streaked with shadow and mud, swung stiffly down from his leggy chestnut mount and retreated toward one of the horses behind him to help a deeply-muffled figure down. His face flashed in the light for a moment as he flung a smile toward Margaret.

“Cold and tiring!” he said. “But it did not rain as I thought it might. I could smell something suspicious coming over the Marius Hills and the sky looked threatening, but nothing came of it.”

Margaret watched the shrouded figure slip into the light, joined by another much its height and almost as thoroughly wrapped. She could not see any faces. “No, that was only the goose that was roasting for supper.”

Centurion laughed heartily, but wearily. As he turned the horses over to the hands of the stable servants and stepped into the full glare of the light, his hood falling back off the crown of his head, she saw the long road up from Darkling-law had left him tired. As his eyes slid past her to Rupert, who had appeared with a soft breath of warm air from inside, she saw in his face the unmistakable look of a man too tired to fight.

“I must thank you again for inviting us. It is better boarding than a way-house, and no mistake.”

Margaret stepped back, gesturing into the hall. “Do not thank me yet until you have tasted the goose and felt the beds. Do come in. Do come in!” she gently urged the two shy creatures that hung about Centurion’s flanks. “Your luggage will be taken up and you will have time to wash and change. Supper is in half an hour. The servants will bring you down.” She shot a warning look at Rhea, who had been placed in charge of Centurion. The maid did not meet her gaze, though Margaret was sure her look had been seen. “Make yourselves at home.”

“Again, thank you.” Centurion shook Rupert’s hand in a weary, obligatory way, then, greetings past, he turned to the two creatures behind him. “Go with the servants. I’ll see you at supper.”

Between the curves of brindled fur Margaret caught sight of a white cheek and a deeply scarlet mouth, but otherwise the two seemed to avert their faces from all eyes with a practiced dexterity. She felt Centurion would have liked to have said more to them, to reassure them out of their shyness, but Rupert’s presence seemed to quench him. They all went wearily after the servants, Centurion treading heavily, the other two slipping soundlessly up the stairs.

“Well!” Margaret breathed.

“I like them even less than Centurion,” said Rupert darkly. He shivered and crossed his arms. “
Shuh!
They smell of uncanny magic.”

Margaret had to admit that they left her feeling uneasy, but she did not say it. Feeling oddly defensive of them, she turned wordlessly away and went into the dining room to wait.

Her anxiety was warring with her again by the time Centurion reappeared. She started from her seat, seeing again the Centurion she knew, polished and fair of face, his mood sturdily restored along with his self-confidence. The servant announced him and he strode into the dining room, flinging a look round to get his bearings before fixing his gaze on her. “Lady Margaret! Please—let me introduce you to my brother and sister. This is Julius and Julianna.”

The two shy, white creatures slipped in behind him. They were stripped now of their fur and seemed to blaze out bare like candles. The girl was dressed in a gown of fire-coloured tabby silk, the boy was dressed in a suit of chocolate-brown corduroy. But what took Margaret by surprise, though she realized it should not have, was that they were both
white
. They were pale, almost translucent, in their whiteness. The boy’s hair was cropped close like his brother’s, but it was silvery white, throwing back the mellow candlelight with subtle hues of pink. The girl’s hair, white as swan’s down, was braided and coiled expertly in a fashion she was coming to recognize as common to the Honours, but surely, Margaret thought, even her cousin’s outlandish hair could be no whiter than this. The lashes on both of them were dyed dark, which made their orchid-coloured eyes stand out in their soft, lean faces with an almost appalling beauty.

No wonder people thought them unlucky!