Plenilune (56 page)

The piano had been tuned. For the whole of the morning Margaret had occupied herself with burnishing her skills at it and she had begun to be pleased with herself. She had chosen a light tune from among the dishevelled sheet music, learning the bars of it, and, when Skander had finally gone away and left her to her own amusement, she had begun to sing.

There was a storm in Glassdale-mouth

Only the other day:

The wolf-wind and the torrent rain

Have closed the roads today.

It had been open and bonny

With dap’ling light and shade:

You could almost want to tarry

Where the ford at the water played—

But there was a storm in Glassdale-mouth,

So come by another way.

It reminded her of Skander and the studious letters he wrote to Woodbird, often more than two letters in a week, which never seemed to take time away from his busy schedule and yet seemed like tiny sabbaths for the young man whenever he could break away to write them.

Come in at the garret window—

Left a’latch for you—

Where the curtains billow and bluster

In the last of the evening glow.

I’ll leave them open and bonny,

With candlelight for show:

Sure your heart could never tarry

When I sit in the twilight for you.

So there was a storm in Glassdale-mouth?

Come by the dreaming-way!

As if called the door swung open, startling Margaret’s notes into an abbreviated silence, and Aikaterine stepped in. The look on the maid’s face was familiar, and sent the blood in Margaret’s veins shocking cold back to her heart.

“I have misplaced our lords,” said Aikaterine through tight-set lips, “and Rhea has come to call.”

Margaret sat in complete stillness at the piano, her fingers resting on the silent ivory keys. She could feel her heart beating interminably—
thud-dump, thud-dump, thud-dump
—numberlessly counting out the straining moment. The room seemed to have gone dark, clouded at the edges and sharpened by some hard feeling behind her breastbone. But then it cleared, and she said aloud—though she did not realize until later that she had said it aloud—

“Does the chit want to
die
?”

Aikaterine gestured to the door. “I do not want to leave her long alone and I cannot find either my Lord Skander Rime or the War-wolf.”

Margaret awoke. Rising, she said imperiously, “I will go. It seems there is no one else.”

They went down through the clear sunlight and the breeze that was blowing through the open windows and doorways, Aikaterine after Margaret, until they came out on the passageway above the round sun-room—an open room full of granite slabs and sunlight—and Margaret saw the little figure of the witching-maid waiting for them below. At the sight of her the scarlet rose in Margaret’s blood again: she was not sure she hated even Rupert so desperately as she hated Rhea.

She went down to the landing of the staircase in full view. With a grey flutter Rhea turned at her step; even at that distance Margaret could see the other’s cheeks flame as brightly as her blood.

“The War-wolf is not in seat at present,” Margaret said coldly. “I will speak for him.”

Rhea had to look up—she always had to look up—to see Margaret’s face: there was a momentary flash of something cruel, something pained, but it was over in a moment and the maid seemed to choose wisely not to mock as she had nearly done. The lesson had been bitterly learned.

“I have word for either Capys or the War-wolf alone,” she insisted. “I am not to give it to anyone else.”

“Do you think I am just ‘anyone else’?” Margaret demanded. Her hand upon the balustrade tightened until it was white. “Do me a courtesy, if you even know how: I am not so daft as to turn you over alone to anyone.”

“You think very highly of yourself!” Rhea replied before she could stop herself.

Aikaterine stiffened, white with rage. Before Margaret could do or say anything—she would have liked to have gone down and given the maid a slap in the face—Skander appeared from the inner hallways of the house and stood a moment, frozen in shock, his eyes fixed on Rhea. The maid swung and locked her gaze on the man; her red lips parted a moment, teeth showing, but whether she meant to speak or to sneer Margaret did not know.

“What,” said Skander bluntly. His hand moved to his side as if in search of something sharp.

Margaret came down in a hurry to cut the two apart. “She says she comes with word from Rupert for you or for your cousin. She will not give it to
me
.”

Aikaterine followed and, raising herself up, whispered something in her master’s ear. Skander’s face turned an angry white and his eye, levelled like a blade at Rhea, grew colder and paler amber by the moment. Margaret did not like having her back to the maid; she looked over her shoulder to find the girl had not moved but stood quietly, rigidly, her hands clenched at her sides and her chin downthrust in a bullish, defiant gesture.

“Thank you, Aikaterine,” Skander said abruptly. He broke away and went forward, but not close, to meet Rhea. “I am not used to employing condescending tones to my people so I’ll tell you frankly: I am surprised you dare come here and I give bare a fig for what you have to say to me or to my cousin. You come bold-facedly, wench, and give little deference to a lady and no honour at all to your betters!” He took another step forward. Something flashed a warning in Margaret’s mind—a sick taste of panic surged in her throat:

He’s going to do her damage!

At that moment there was a movement in the sun-room doorway, a flood of light and shadow, and all turned as if a harsh note had been struck in the air—Margaret, too, turned, but not before her gaze chanced to pass across Rhea’s face and saw the hateful whiteness there.

It was Dammerung who stood in the doorway, his head up, his eyes narrowed, his chest expanding and falling from his recent exertions. He saw them all, of that Margaret was sure, but she had the feeling of being swept away by him, of them all being swept away by him save Rhea alone. To her his gaze went, on her his pale blue eyes were fixed.

“Rhea,” he purred at last, a panther-smile curling on his face. “Mine own familiar Rhea, who starved me and took all the light out of my world, what does she here? She knows her cunning and beauty. What need has she of a looking-glass?”

The jest whistled by the maid and Rhea, whose countenance had after that first instant regained its colour, turned her head in scornful deference. “I am come on an errand of words.”

The young lord’s nostrils flared with a horrible mirth. “Sooth!” he exclaimed. “On an errand of words? Does your lord not know in what esteem I hold you, and does he not fear never seeing your comely face again?”

The witching lashes curled upward; the gaze was piercing. “You would kill a woman?”

“I might,” said Dammerung coldly.

She had known him to be mysterious, she had known him to be furious, but never had Margaret heard the blade in Dammerung’s words as she did then, nor the perfect honesty which was like final judgment and lent terrible gravity to his voice. The silence that lingered in the room was awful more than it was awkward.

At last Dammerung spoke again, his tone once more civil, if only barely so. Never for a moment did they all, Margaret was sure, lose the feeling that they were held like shining balls in his hands, to be tossed and caught at will.

“Give to me the words of your errand.”

Rhea shuddered visibly, as if she had been struck, or as if she were resisting against some better judgment. With a red flash her eyes lanced up into his, with no gesture of obedience did she turn her gypsy-queen head. “The words are of my lord Rupert, Prince of the Mares, and the words are this: that he desires a moot of the men of the Honour-lands, and that they assemble here in Capys Lookinglass, for a na�ve man—” her gaze now darted to Skander, and became biting like acid “—and guileless is Skander Rime his cousin.”

Skander’s face was heavy and mirthless but there was no flicker of desire to parry her thrust.

Dammerung’s voice came between them, strangely lazy and almost laughing. “Your lord Rupert would do well to mind his cousin better. He is mistaking him for another man. He is mistaking a falcon on my wrist for a robin in the hedgerow.” He turned his head and smiled wistfully. “Does his eyesight fail him so early in life?”

Rhea’s eyes flashed a challenge, but she did not speak.

“No?” Dammerung’s lips jerked upward. “Then go, having said your piece. Go and wait our pleasure—and don’t give anyone the Evil Eye.”

Aikaterine made a small movement forward to take Rhea away, but Skander, almost imperceptibly—but Margaret caught it, standing just between and behind him and his cousin—gestured her to remain. After a cold, awkward silence, Rhea unpinned herself from under their gazes and swept away softly on silent feet, like a foreboding shadow passing through the room and enfolding itself among the shadows of the passage.

Margaret jerked her head away to hide her flushed cheeks. The impudent wench! She ought to have taken leave of her betters, had better bowed or curtsied if she could not have found anything polite to say. The impudent, sly, murderous wench—

Skander swung round and broke up Margaret’s hot, rushing thoughts. “Dammerung!” he said accusingly. “What cloven pine are you sprung from?”

The fight seemed to blow away from Dammerung like washing off a line in a sunny summer gale. “Nay, not pine—’twas oak, and that mostly scrub. The devil—take—” In a single fluid motion he had set his hand on Margaret’s shoulder, throwing much of his weight on it, and turned up one foot to squint at the pad of it. “—thistles,” he concluded growlingly, “and one particular furze bush.”

Skander looked unsympathetic. For a brief moment he let Dammerung pinch and prod his sole and seemed to take the time to recover some of his temper before saying levelly, “Rupert’s maid, who smells of black magic and whose sight curdles my belly, is under my roof, and I would not have it so. What do you intend to do?”

Dammerung looked up from under his brows. “Would you have me kill her?”

His cousin’s face did not change, neither did he say anything. Margaret felt her blood run from hot to arctic cold…but then the heavy weight on the bareness of her shoulder, which felt hot in contrast to her crawling skin, lightened and the fingers brushed her neck in passing. Somewhere in himself Dammerung was laughing at her, and she knew there would be no killing.

He let her go and trailed gingerly away into the study. Skander, after an expressive, defeatist gesture, indicated that Margaret should go first. So she trailed after Dammerung and found him sunk down into a chair and the golden gloom, stretched and spread like a heron in flight, with his eyes shut as if she had just come upon him in the middle of a cat-nap.

“Shoo,” he whistled gustily without opening his eyes. “I am as limp and disagreeable as a wetling.”

“This is no great change in things,” his cousin spoke up dryly, having come in after Margaret and taken up residence by the astrolabe.

Dammerung quirked a saucy brow. “Feed me and water me and I shall find my mood again.”

“And I shall not.” Skander broke his stance long enough to allow Margaret to squeeze by to the sideboard. “Neither shall I let you until Rupert’s girl is gone.”

“Mm, la, how flatteringly you put it.”

Margaret, a tumbler of cut crystal in one hand, looked over her shoulder and caught the white dog-teeth showing through Dammerung’s smile. He was playing with Skander—and Skander knew it—as a child plays with golden balls. And as quickly as a child forgets the golden balls, Dammerung’s eyes came open, two shards of flint in his foxy face, and remarked coolly, “Margaret is with us in this also, I think—are you not, Lady Spitcat?” He flung his charming smile up at her as she leaned down to give him the drink, but his voice became gentle. “You had quite the tiff, the two of you, just after Christmastide. If I remember rightly.”

“You remember rightly,” said Margaret softly, and remembered herself somewhat uncomfortably that ringing thrill of red and the world shrunk down into Rhea’s face and the desire to blot it out.

Skander’s tone was mild but peeved. “I do not remember just after Christmastide. I seem to recall I was fighting for my life…So, cousin? What do you plan to do?”

Dammerung put away the drink and heaved himself forward onto the edge of his armchair, elbows on his knees, chin on his interlocked fists. The paleness of his eyes seemed far away as he stared off mutely into the middle distance. Taking pity on Skander, Margaret found a seat close by where she could see the tell-tale changeableness of Dammerung’s face. Skander did not seem to notice: he remained standing, gaze fixed on his cousin’s profile. The room was quiet, save for the sounds of light in the crystal on the sideboard—and somewhere in the nearby spur of the woods a mockingbird was imitating a hare’s scream. Margaret barely suppressed the shiver that ran up her spine as someone, somewhere, trod on her grave.

At last Dammerung came back to them, pulling in a long, loud breath through his nose as he leaned into the armchair’s comfortable embraces. “I say: let them come.”

“I would say so also,” replied Skander, “but I am concerned that this may be a trap.”

The War-wolf looked sidewise and askance. “A trap? Here? In Lookinglass, with perhaps some dozen loyal men at my beck and call? Rupert would be mad to try it. But no—I’ve thought of the trap, and mad or not, I would trust any room Rupert takes me into to be a trap. It would be a pleasant surprise to be found wrong.”

“Why a meeting at all?” asked Margaret, for the question had been bothering her since Rhea had delivered her message. “Rupert knows the vote is in your favour. When word gets out—if it hasn’t already—of his treatment of you, how many people does he really think would not be willing to stone him on the spot?”