Plenilune (44 page)

“You would…miss me if you did,” said the fox with a touch of his old languid humour.

The shadow wavered. “As soon miss a thorn in my foot.”

He was coming back. Nearly tripping over her skirts Margaret retreated into the darkness, huddled down into as small and black a shape as possible. Her stomach was heaving and twisting and trying desperately to squeeze up through her hands, but she did not dare let it. She did not dare breathe. The lamplight broke up into a man’s figure and Rupert emerged from the head of the stairwell, bent with fury, his fists clenched at his sides. She was horribly afraid that his uncanny sensing would find her, but he seemed too distracted to take stock of the dark chamber. He went on at once, melting into the darkness; she listened to the rattle of his footsteps up the stone stair and heard, with a sickening sense of relief, the door at the top crash shut.

With a hiccupping gag she lurched to her feet, caught her skirt under her shoe and stumbled, sobbing, reeling against the wall. “Oh God, oh fox—” Half falling she made it to the head of the stair and ran down, blinking through a blur of tears and a blur of nausea. “Fox!” she called. “Oh, fox! I’m here!”

There was a bit of white movement behind an overturned crate. She ran toward it. Blindly she hauled wine-crates aside, shedding broken hunks of bottles and spraying wine about the floor.

“Oh—oh dear God—no,” choked the fox when he stared up through black-rimmed eyes to see her. “Go away. Rupert will look for you—”

“You idiot!” she cried, kneeling in the wreckage of wood and wine and pulling the battered head into her lap. She was sobbing so hard that her words came out in a broken rush. “You idiot! You stupid—st-stupid idiot! How could you have done this? You are all I have! Are you broken? Oh God, you’re bleeding!”

He was trying desperately to worm out of her hold and she was desperately trying to hold him. He kept gasping out that she needed to go and she, in full hysteria, kept crying at him to hold still and to be hushed and to lie quietly and how
could
he have provoked Rupert so horribly? At last he seemed to decide that the only way to calm her and keep her sobs from bringing Rupert back down on them was to oblige her by lying, like a baby, on his back in the cradle of her arms. His face was drawn in agony, all his little teeth showing through a fixed snarl of pain, but he kept still. After awhile Margaret could look at his busted brow and bleeding gums without feeling heaves.

“You idiot,” she hiccupped. “Oh, I hate you! Is anything broken?”

“I always make mistakes with Rupert,” he replied in a voice of shadow. “I always—ah!—I always lose my mind…A few ribs, maybe. It doesn’t matter. I can’t see.” A drop of blood ran into his right eye and he shuddered at the sting of it, squinting to get it out.

Manoeuvring him carefully Margaret wrenched at the lace collar of her nightgown and tore off a heavy piece. “Oh!—ah!” he protested as she sponged at his eye. “Wait, you need—grr!” His black lips curled off his teeth as she bound the bloodied strip around his head. A stain of red continued to spread across it—lace was not meant to soak up blood—but it kept the blood out of his eyes.

“Please lie still.” She put her arms around him and wormed her way over to his pile of blankets and propped herself against the wall. He was larger than she had expected him to be: his body was as long as a beagle’s and his limbs, slender and lengthy, did not seem to have any comfortable place to be put. With extreme delicacy he curled his back legs in and turned his tail up over the white flash of his belly. He did not seem able to move his forelegs: they hung down his length in a listless fashion, twitching now and then with pain. She managed to keep one arm under his hindquarters and one arm under his head and shoulders and let his body rest on her narrow lap. She shifted him closer, carefully, trying to get him comfortable.

“You really oughtn’t—it isn’t—” He kept trying to speak but every time he opened his mouth a trickle of blood leaked out.

“You’re a fine one to tell me oughtn’t and isn’t,” she replied cuttingly. She found she was not quite done crying. A tear dashed onto his fur and hung there, a bead of diamond-blaze against the stained darkness of his coat. “Now please lie q-quietly.”

He turned his head against her forearm and stared silently out through a swollen slit of eye. He looked mournful and pensive, but he did not look angry anymore. The fight seemed to have gone out of him. She sat on the uneven bedding with his long weight in her arms. She wanted to rock him, gently, because that seemed natural. He was big and soft and warm and in pain, and it was all she could do to keep from moving him gently back and forth in a rhythmic pattern to try to soothe him. If she did she was sure it would hurt him, and if it did not make his bones grind and his torn muscles scream, it would hurt his pride. He looked a little hurt now.

“H-h—” He licked his bloodied teeth. “How long are…are you staying?” he asked after a long quiet.

Her arms were falling asleep and one foot was already past hope, but she made no move.

He turned his head quickly, staring up at her out of one barely serviceable eye. “You can’t stay here all night. I forbid it.”

“I can and I will,” she snapped.

He tried moving, but to no avail. The long space in stillness had cast his limbs in iron. “I can’t have you holding me all night like a baby. You must go. By the twelve houses, woman, I’m not accustomed to not getting my way!”

“Pity for you!”

“Margaret!—
ah!
“

He choked off in mingled fury and pain and stared woundedly up at her. It was rather awful how pointed his glare could be even when it was coming out of only one eye. But he was right: she could not hold him that way all night long. She gingerly picked him off her lap, her limbs screaming in protest, and carefully laid him down on the bedding. She found a bit of blanket and put it over him, found another bit of blanket and wrapped herself up in it, and tried to get comfortable on the uneven pile beside him. It was unbelievable how painful a bit of rolled-up blanket could be: a length was cutting into her hip and no amount of shifting would right it.

The fox tried to move to his feet, got tangled in his own blanket, seemed to swim against a wave of nausea, and crashed down again, panting, defeated. He gave no more protest. He lay with his head on his forelegs, eyes shut tight against the throbbing, his little flanks heaving under the blanket.

“May I get you some water?” asked Margaret, feeling helpless.

He shook his head.

Without thinking she reached out and began stroking his head. The fur was smooth and warm; the long ears pulsed with blood as she drew them gently through her fingers. He stiffened and moved his mouth as if to say something, but gave it up. His brows relaxed. His ears bent easily under the passing of her hand. His breathing was still laboured, but the lines of his body seemed to have given in to the dark pressure of exhaustion. If only he would go to sleep, she thought, at least then he would be free of the pain.

A little brokenly, a little shyly, she recalled Lady Kinloss’ lullaby. It had been a long time since she had seen the golden-shell woman, alone in the dark which was her only friend, vainly trying to sing her baby to sleep. Her own mother seemed petty now, like the minor annoyance of a small lap-dog after one has met the unfettered fury of a stallion. Her hand rose and fell over the fox’s lean skull. Was there no peace anywhere? Was there no comfort or goodness or justice? Must they all be crushed, she under her mother’s jibes and Rupert’s steady pressure, the fox by blow, Lady Kinloss by neglect? How many souls cried out like the bare rosebushes of Marenové? How many…

Sleep, sleep, my baby.

The fox’s right ear twitched. Her hand rose and fell over it, bringing the faint white hairs to light.

Sleep, sleep, my baby.

And when you wake

I’ll give you a little black pony

With a coat of night

And eyes of dragon-fire.

Sleep, sleep, my baby.

Sleep, sleep, my baby…

She sang it twice through, dropping a register halfway and fighting two stammers which came inexplicably out of her dry, unsteady mouth. The fox’s breathing slowly evened and her eyesight slowly blurred. She did not remember dropping off to sleep. Her hand grew heavier and slower and his breathing grew softer and quieter. Confused images of picking the fox up and running away played in Margaret’s mind until she thought she was doing so until she lost the dreams in one high wave of sleep that bore her off beyond imagination.

16 | The Many-Splendoured Thing

A warm touch on her cheek roused her from a stiff, black sleep. She came unwillingly awake, confused by pain and soreness, confused by the darkness of the room until her eyes focused on the fox and she remembered with a jolt what had happened. She sat up, scrubbing at her eyes with the heel of her hand.

The fox was sitting up, washed, carrying himself gingerly, a little subdued in his demeanour, but otherwise he seemed much his usual self. “There now,” he said. “Birds have their nests and the foxes have their dens, but a wine-cellar is no place for a lady’s bunk. Did you sleep at all?”

“I slept. So did you.” Once her eyes had cleared she looked him over. Blood still crusted his flaming cheek-fur and spattered on his white waistcoat; one eye was still drooping. “You seem better for it.”

“I mend quickly.
You
look ghastly. Margaret, what possessed you—”

She pressed her lips into a thin, uncompromising line; he saw the look and cut himself off. He shook his head pensively and winced when the movement reminded him that Rupert had nearly kicked his skull in. “Even a Fool,” he said, “who has nothing to do but look and listen, forgets the sheer bull-headedness of a woman in a rage. I cry you mercy. Thank you for staying. It was nice to wake up in the wee hours when the lamp had sunk and hear someone else’s breathing in the dark. One forgets those little things that make life beautiful: someone else breathing, blue sky overhead, a cheeky little robin in the lane…”

She pulled her legs up under her. The wine-cellar was bitingly cold. What hour was it? “Are you sure you are mended, just like that? I think Rupert kicked you harder than you realize.”

The eyelid drooped; the shadows swam over the mirror-eye. “Nay, ‘tis not the hardest he has kicked me ever. I mend.”

Margaret felt her finger had fallen upon a sore and she was suddenly loathe to rough it. “Should I bring you a cheeky robin to keep you company?” she asked, not really listening to her own words.

But he heard her, and seemed to withdraw further into himself. “I would not wish this on the gloomiest of robins.”

Looking at him, he seemed a world away. It hurt how far away he seemed to be, further down than a wine-cellar, cut off by more than servants and stairs and doors. He seemed cut off by stones and death. She wanted to reach out to him again, but the moment for that had passed. She blushed to think how she had stroked him last night, like a child, like a pet. His distance hurt, and yet she was tired of going away hurt. It was he who was hurt, perhaps more than she: caged, battered, bleeding on the inside and perhaps wondering, as she did, if the shrouds by which Rupert held them held in their prayers as well.

“Will you be all right if I go now?” she asked, touching him gently with her voice to bring him back.

He came back slowly, surfacing out of some black inner misery that was unlike him. Did he carry this with him always, and laugh to spite it so that she would never know? She stared into his wall-coloured eyes but it was like staring at her own reflection: she could not see into him. Suddenly he smiled, white and fanged, in lieu of laughter. “Do not pity me, Margaret. I mend. Not everyone can boast of that. Go on, before Rupert comes down to see the wreck of me and finds you here. I give you my word upon his confused honour—I dare not vouch for his temper.”

She hesitated, half-gathered to rise, loathe to leave him; but she saw the guardedness had come back into his face, the edge of mockery at the corner of his eye, and she knew that, for now, he would manage on his own. He had managed before her.

But what of Rupert’s threat? Margaret knew him well enough to know that it was not empty. Rupert was a man who would get what he wanted, reckoning nothing of the cost. The fox stared back along the blade of her unblinking gaze—he looked puzzled as the moment drew out. Was she willing to defy Rupert as the old apple-leaf woman had?

Was she willing to die?

“I’ll come again, fox,” she murmured, “as soon as I can.”

He smiled, but there was in his smile a distant sadness—of premonition or memory, she did not know—and she knew he did not believe her.

Livy found her with some surprise in the dining room. She went up quietly, moving in a cold greyness, a careful thoughtlessness, for thinking hurt like walking on shards of glass. She came to herself when Livy entered and turned from the window at the sound of his step.

“My Lady Margaret?”

She saw a flush of red in his dark cheeks and jewel-dark spots on the shoulders of his jacket. He had been out of doors and there had been rain. Odd—she looked back out the window, feeling she had been staring out it for some moments—odd that she had not noticed it was raining.

She asked without turning back round, “Where is your master?”

“He has gone across to Talus Perey. If my lady will come away from the window, I will send for Lilith to attend her.”

Do not think. There is not time for thinking. God, what a window! Don’t look. Don’t count the cost. There is not time. We have dared. Now we must do.

“Livy, do not trouble her. She has duties elsewhere and I am in no humour nor inclination for assistance. You may,” she added in the wake of the manservant’s displeased demeanour, “ring her to a light breakfast for me.”

“To be taken here, my lady?”

“To be taken here. Meanwhile saddle Hanging Tree.”

“It is raining, my lady.”