Already music could be heard playing, a little roughly, as though the band in the ballroom was just tuning up. It grew harder and harder with each step to manage the panic that was putting itself vise-like around her heart, and with each step Margaret suspected her countenance, too, grew harder. They went through the galleries and she could hear the thunder of talk being replaced by the thunder of blood in her ears. The galleries were ill-lit, or rather, lit like the mysterious insides of ceremonial caverns in the hollow primeval days, slumbering dark and glinting with point on point of gold and silver and rich humane red. And like motley, happy, reverent worshippers the elite of Plenilune passed through, Margaret among them as a detached alien creature and feeling much like the sacrificial victim who was to go beyond the rich darkness and flare of candlelight, beyond to where the worshippers themselves could not go.
For no reason she could discern, the panpipe sound came to her just then, not among the instruments calling from the ballroom, but from the high memory of the fellside. As the two enormous doors loomed before her she felt as though she, Margaret Coventry, would pass through alone and come face to face with Plenilune itself.
The doors were opened—she did not see by whom—and like a colourful wave the whole crowd went through, laughing and taking hands and partners, wading through the sudden surf of light. Cold air gushed out with the light, making Margaret flinch, but before she could resist or do anything rash, she was pulled in by Rupert and they were striding out into the middle of the room while the crowd and music whirled like compass-needles around them. And in that moment Rupert was very handsome, handsome and terrible, with a high laughing light in his eyes, his head up, his hand upraised, the aurora of Apollo splintering behind his head. She saw one of his eyes trained on her, dilated and fiercely blue. There was a brief check in the music, three distinct heart-beats that Margaret felt like drums, and then, like a bird, like an angel, like a god, he stepped in and the music and the dance and the whole terrible power of it rushed in with him, in and up and thundered like unthinkable wings over her. She had expected the dance to be stately and demure; instead he whirled her, and she whirled with him, in a kind of red-and-black crane-dance, as earnest as it was wild—and the fierceness of it helped to rouse the iron in her will. Let her mother, she thought as she spun in the midst of her flaming-poppy skirts, see her now! Light and scarlet flew from her, defying the empty black figure that danced across from her. Music grabbed at her feet and hands—she stamped and clapped, not like an Englishwoman, but a Tartar’s girl.
She did not know if it was the magic of the music or the witchcraft of the warlock, but it seemed almost wrong to think of herself now as an Englishwoman. The terrible dance into which she was swept, more wild and alive than any dance she had stepped through before, seemed more akin to the pounding of the life-blood in her ears than anything else and, by virtue of that, more true. Here the stars were closer, the colours brighter, the goods and evils starker, than they were on earth. She could not remember England very well, though that might have been because her vision was running riot with whirling colours, peacocks’ feathers, light, movement, and music. All she could remember was a broken sense of hoary discontentment, a sense of living drudgery, of fighting against small, insignificant shadows of things—when here in Plenilune lived and walked the sharp-edged things of a higher plane: the gods and demons in their palaces, dancing together on the eve of winter.
With an executioner’s abruptness, the first dance had ended and she was curtsying diagonally to someone by Rupert, he bowing to a lady by her. She was panting, her blood was up, her ears were ringing with exertion and the crashing echo of the orchestra. The aching hollow of noiselessness lasted only a few moments before it was punctuated by a gentle albeit persistent thrumming jerk of a violin’s strings. There seemed to be a rearrangement of bodies, quickly and lightly as if they were only leaves that an autumn wind was picking up and kicking about. Rupert snatched a glance at her before he was replaced by Centurion.
Margaret had almost forgot he meant to dance with her. For the moment she was more ill at ease with him than she was with Rupert. But his brown eyes were dancing even before their feet started, and he was smiling at her with the utter abandon of the utmost encouragement. The orchestra began a high, whining song in a minor key, an eerie tune, and the two bowed languidly to one another before stepping in side by side, right hand to right hand at shoulder height, moving counter-clockwise with the other couples. He had changed his brown travelling gear for a coat of thick velvet-work, a ruddy-colour slashed and picked out with gold and beige and subtle points of red like a grouse’s coat. In his wild plumage he looked very well.
“My lady!” he said in a laughing, accusatory tone, “I think you told a falsehood. You danced very well just now.”
She was too flushed with the dance to blush at his words. “Perhaps!” she gasped a little laughingly, a little mockingly. “But it seems like a fever, which one catches quickly and loses one’s mind to. I did not know what my feet were doing—” she passed round him in a skipping gesture, imitating the movements of the other women with their partners “—half the time.”
He laughed, shiningly, soundlessly. Yet as she snatched a glance over and upward at his face, there was something that was not laughing and not shining, and not quite soundless about his face. But he said aloud, “I heard second-hand and round-aboutly that your name is Lady Margaret.”
“Coventry,” she corrected him. “Margaret Coventry.
Lady
was given to me out of politeness, I think. And you are Centurion—” she took his hand, fingers interlocked, and backstepped clockwise “—of Darkling-law, I am told.”
The young man passed out of the orbital movement and clapped twice with the other men before taking her hand once more. “Your knowledge is better than mine, then. You say it so assuredly, as if you have always known, whereas I wake up every morning, look about me, and say, ‘Well, old boy, I suppose you really are master of this dene!’”
“It is odd, isn’t it,” she replied, “how for granted and as infallible we take the word of textbooks?”
Centurion barely missed treading on her skirt, and looked apologetic. “And how quickly we doubt our own natural reason, though perhaps we have good cause to.”
“Perhaps.”
For several minutes more there was silence and music between them, and she was sure he was as painfully conscious of getting through the dance gracefully as she was. She caught sight once of Rupert, and once of Mark Roy—though it took her a moment to place him—but the fact of the matter was that Centurion, though by far more agreeable, was much less splendid than the prince of the Mares, and she was caught up, not in the shining splendour of the movements, but in the individual steps that she must make without tripping or falling behind. She was just feeling as if she had got into the rhythm of the thing when, to her surprise, it was over. She was bowing, and so was Centurion, and she felt hotter than ever.
Instinctively the man reached out to take her hand, but seemed almost to hesitate in the after-act. Her eyes flickered to his but there was no look of hesitation in his face.
“Very well footed,” he said warmly. He blew out, cheeks swollen, and glanced about the room as if looking for something. “Do you have a partner for this next dance?”
A wave of weariness blinded her for a moment. After the heat of the dance the weariness was cold as fainting in her brain. “Not to my knowledge,” she replied honestly. “If it is all the same to everyone, I think I will sit this next dance out.”
The grip on her hand became stronger. With a jagged stab of apprehension in her breast she looked to the gloved hand holding hers. “Of course!” she heard Darkling say. “Allow me to escort you to a chair.”
With a flamboyant, bird-like rustle he tucked her at his side and threaded the way through the milling press toward the inner side of the room. With a backward glance, she wished she could have sat under the windows where it was more likely to be cool and the fell-land dark, like a black sea which had overwhelmed the citadel of Lookinglass, was washing purple and indigo against the pale fractalled panes. But it was under the gilt peacock panels of the east wall that Centurion placed her, having walked a distance in search of an empty chair and, failing that, having ousted a younger fellow from his repose.
Centurion put her down and straightened; from her low seat, Margaret looked up into the blinding aura of his face, framed in amber and gold by the high light of a chandelier. She could not see his features. His voice, when he spoke, was eerily detached and grimmer than she had known it before.
“You will be well enough on your own, madam? May I get you any refreshment?”
He did not mean to, but the erasure of his face and the alien nature of his accent cut fiercely into her. “No,” she said, more harshly than she meant. “No, I thank you. I am well here alone.”
Again he hesitated, and this time she was sure he hesitated to a purpose. But whatever he weighed in his mind, whatever he thought, she never knew for he did not speak again, but bowed fluidly and withdrew, leaving her alone in a room full of people.
At least the worst was over. Another gentle song began, thrumming from the upper end of the room. Colour like an edenic sea washed back and forth across Margaret’s weary, disinterested vision. The hollow dark of the galleries, which had been like walking down something’s throat, seemed a long time gone now, a long way off. Sitting on the other side of it, she felt as hollow as the dark and fragile at the edges, like a shell.
You are tired, that is all. You are fighting all the time. You are just tired. You can rest for a minute now. Dear God in heaven—
she let her eyes fold shut—
let me rest for a minute.
It was a minute, she reflected later, a perfect minute, after which she was joined at her right hand by another woman who had left the dance. Margaret did not recognize her; underneath the plumage of white feathering and chiffon and masque of black velvet and swan’s-down, she did not think she would have recognized the woman if she had been her own mother. She swooped close, paused a moment like a bird stalling in mid-flight, and finally alighted soundlessly in the next chair. Two pale gold, owlish eyes blinked at her out of the masque. Margaret’s face felt naked under that stare without a masque of its own.
“I don’t believe we’ve met,” said the woman in a cool but not unfriendly voice. It was the sort of voice, Margaret thought, the most perfect mother would have.
“No, madam,” she replied, uncertain whether to be cool herself and not unfriendly, or to hold the stranger at a distance. “I don’t believe so either.”
The woman turned her head inward: the light caught her eye and made it spark yellow. In the shadow cast by the black velvet, the spark was very uncanny indeed.
“Comitissa Woodbird, of Thrasymene.”
“Thrasymene.” Margaret smiled lightly, triumphantly. “I have heard of you.”
The owlish eyes flickered over her. “I see, yes. You are chatelaine of Marenové, I think.”
Like a pigeon struck out of the sky by the brute force of the peregrine’s dive, Margaret’s smile took the cold blow. For one moment she almost lied, for one moment she almost said nothing, but she knew more strongly than anything that she would have loathed herself afterward if she had. “I do not have the keys.”
The comitissa moved her head in a kind of mirthless amusement. Perhaps the blow was not meant, for her voice was friendly as ever, if ever as cool. “I see, yes…I did not attend to your name when you were announced.”
With some effort she recovered her faintly mocking smile. “It is Margaret Coventry. Is it as strange to you,” she dared to add in a surge of reckless testing, “as your name is to me?”
Up went the swan’s head. Fiercely flashed the owlish eye. But the lips, which struck Margaret then as being deeply red, smiled genuinely. “Maybe it is and maybe it is not. It has the sound of the moon-witch about it. Is it that you are a moon-witch?”
“I do not think I am any sort of witch.”
The smile twinkled on the comitissa’s lips.
With a heavy sigh, Margaret said, “What is it about my name, Comitissa, that makes you think of a witch—whether of the moon or of anything else?”
But the other only shook her head. “I could tell you if you could come in and see the dreams of my mind’s eye. It is not an image for which there are any words.”
A month ago Margaret knew she would have laughed cuttingly and had some biting remark for a reply. Instead, at this moment on the near side of a month gone by, she passed her hand through the air as if to dismiss something and said, “Yes. I know those sorts of thoughts.”
“Hm!” said Comitissa Woodbird in such a tone that made Margaret start, and she looked up to see the lady had left off her thoughts altogether and was rising, rather quickly, as if to get away. At that instant Margaret started again, more violently, when a familiar voice said,
“Why, Comitissa Woodbird! I do not scare you off, do I?”
Margaret stoodin a hurry as Rupert joined them, such a look on his face as of a man who is being amused by being cruel. Out of the white feathering and black velvet of the masque, Comitissa Woodbird glared at him, the lights like cat’s-fire in her eyes.
“Hm!” she said again, which, Margaret thought, was the safest answer to Rupert. “Your cousin had promised me a dance. Do you know where he is, Lord Marenové?”
“Am I my cousin’s keeper?” rejoined Rupert laughingly. He waved a hand in the direction of the orchestra. “You might try him over there. And was that all he promised you?”
Confused, Margaret looked to the comitissa’s face and saw some kind of barb had stung there. With an odd breathy, hissing sort of sound the woman pushed Rupert’s words aside with one hand and retorted, “No, I think not, if you could not be your brother’s.”
What light, laughing atmosphere had lain over Rupert was gone upon the instant and what dark titan remained might have, if his necromancy had allowed him, set the swan-white woman alight on the spot. Wordlessly Rupert bowed her stiffly off, and the comitissa had nothing more to say and left.