It seemed like all of earth’s autumn must have gone by while she walked in that lightless place. Once, with a calm clarity, she thought to herself,
This must be the valley of the shadow of death. This must be the last road of all.
It was strange how muffled all her senses were—her sense of fear, her sense of direction, her sense even of hunger and loneliness. The only sense that was keen was a heady, formless sense of standing with each step on the edge of a cliff, waiting for the empty step, waiting for the fall, and not minding it very much.
A sudden light winked out at her from her left, down amidst the well of the dark. She paused, perplexed, and bent down to stare at it. It took her some time to realize that she was standing at the head of another stairway, and she was gazing down the stairs at a little glow of light. She put her foot on the top step—then stopped.
This would be a nasty place to meet de la Mare. If she had thought the train car difficult, what about now, seemingly miles beneath the ground, cut off from civilization? Her lips burned. She might have hated herself in the kitchen hallway if she had gone back, but some things were not worth the risk run. She turned back, retraced her steps along the endless hallway, and tripped back up the slippery stairs.
At the head of the stairs she stood leaning against the wall, breathing heavily, drowning out the sound of plumbing. “Well, Mother!” she gasped, and shoved away from the wall as she had shoved away from her bedroom in Aylesward. “I hope you’re happy!”
Dizzy with fatigue and hunger, cold, damp, and feeling dirty, Margaret stepped back out into the kitchen hallway, looking both ways, and managed to retrace her way back through the dining room and up into the first story hallway without being spotted. She almost lost herself, having forgot to mark which door was hers. She stepped in on a library and another bedroom before finally opening her own door. She locked it behind herself and fell into a chair, exhausted.
For a while she stared up at the vaulted ceiling, breathing unevenly, listening to the blood drum in her ears. In a few moments she would have to rouse enough energy to step into the bath, but for now she stared unblinkingly upward, breathing, being alive, and thinking. Her body felt beaten and somehow distant, which made thinking easier.
I must not forget earth,
she told herself.
I must get back home somehow. Even Mother and no husband and my cousin running off with some n’er-do-well is not as bad as this. And above all, I will not marry Rupert de la Mare, not even if my queen and country depends upon it. The queen can ask someone else, if it comes to that. And he will not be allowed to kiss me again.
She pulled her arms up, pushed away from the chair with great effort, and limped to the bath.
She had shut and locked the bedroom door; she shut and locked the bathroom door too. Something about de la Mare made her doubt locked doors would prove any difficulty to him, which was discomforting, but she did not know what else to do. She found a robe and put it on while the water ran, pipes shaking and booming and rattling, and heated in the bath. She sat down in the single chair by the tub to wait, breathing in the scent of steam and lavender and something like muffins. At last the bath was ready. She cast a wary glance at the doorway. Giving in to her sense of paranoia she tiptoed over and peeked out. The bedroom was empty. She shut the door again and locked it, and, slipping off the robe, eased her body into the bath.
The hot water, the smell of lavender, were all familiar to her. She lay back, cupped in the buoyant hand of the water, feeling the heat crawl into her tightness and quietly work it loose. Her mind sorted itself as she relaxed. When she was done, she resolved to go down and get something to eat, even if she had to talk to all the servants in the house. She would survive, she would thwart de la Mare, she would get back home. She would not let her resolve waver over a trivial fact such as her inability to conjure up dragons to translate her back to earth. She would find a way, somehow.
Overheated and shaky, Margaret slowly made her way back down from her bath to the dining room. A little bell stood by de la Mare’s chair on the table, and with daring she leaned across and struck it sharp, listening to the sweet peal of it ring through the ground floor rooms.
There was a momentary pause, then the door to the kitchen hallway clicked open and a man stepped through, looking subservient but also surprised. When he saw her he checked, but asked with distant politeness, “May I help you?”
“Please prepare something for me,” said Margaret. “I will take a light meal.”
“Will you take it here?”
She glanced around the room. It was dark and depressing, but she could think of no other place in which to eat. “Yes, I’ll take it here.”
The man nodded and retreated through the door, leaving her to find a seat and wait the agonizing length of time until he returned. She found a pleasant place near the window which overlooked the park. She had nearly forgot about the thing in the sky, but now it was a little less grotesque to her and she could look at it from time to time without flinching. Now that she beheld it at a distance, she realized that it was rather beautiful as a whole, and shone with a silvery-blue radiance in the light of the sun. It was beginning to lose its eastern edges to the turn of night; it was strange to see the empty sky slowly eating up the edges of her planet. And while it was night down there—or was it up there?—it would still be daylight here. How many people were gazing up at her now—or was it down?—not knowing at all what they looked at? How many times had she looked and not known? How many times had she not even looked?
The man appeared at her side without a sound and slipped a tray of coffee, tomato soup, and two wedges of bread and cheese before her. She nodded her gratitude and began to eat once he had gone away. The food was excellent: the bread and cheese filled her, the soup warmed a hollow place in her that was more than her stomach, and the coffee she held close until it was cool. She was more accustomed to drinking cocoa than coffee, and until she took her first sip she had mistaken it for the former. So she held it until it was cool and then put it away on the tray.
There was a sudden gust of wind and a door banged somewhere. She jumped, undone by the suddenness of the sound, and only just recovered before the tall, black, stalking figure came striding into the dining room, head erect, his pale blue eyes searching for her. He came over, stripping off his hawking gloves as he did so. She could see that he was spattered with mud. But when he bent down, presumably to try for another of his impulsive kisses, she jerked her head away.
She could feel how motionless he had gone beside her, still inclined with his cheek at her ear; she could feel his breath against her neck. She could feel, above all, the dark, shifting thundercloud that was brooding inside him. She wondered if her resolve might cost her life: he seemed the sort of man who could kill.
With a rather pale face, but a steady voice, she asked, “Did you have a nice ride?”
“How domestic a question,” he purred, and released himself, drawing back upright. “As a matter of fact, I did. The game was swift, but I gave chase, and I got it in the end. I always do.”
His words sent a shiver to her soul. “Tell me,” she said, turning round and staring him squarely in the eye. “If you always get your quarry in the end, what count am I?”
He smiled mirthlessly down at her. “I hunt many things, both of wood and water and air, but you are the first of your kind for my chasing.”
“Then how can you be sure you will get it?”
“I always catch my quarry,” he said simply, and she found herself believing his words.
Through their reflections in the glass, she gazed across the lawn. The first forerunners of darkness were falling across the grass: a haze of shadow, a purple hue in the air. Looking up she could see the high sun swallowing up her earth in a blaze of white light. The feather-silver planet was blinking out of that colourless sky and the colourless sky was swiftly fading into a sudden night.
“An eclipse,” she said, mostly to herself. Then, with a harsh laugh, “I never thought I would see it from here.”
“A rare, fine sight,” said de la Mare.
She refocused and took in his reflection. He, too, was gazing upward, reflection pale in the glass, his eyes even paler, his dark hair lost in the hawk-plunging dusk of the sky. In a few minutes he would be swallowed up in the twilight of the room, save for his skin which, like her own, was ghastly pale against black clothing. Strangely disembodied by earth-shadow, he seemed even more a figure of dark magic. An uneasy energy hummed in the air.
When she looked again, the darkness outside was complete.
De la Mare let out a long-held breath and turned into the room. With a double snap of his fingers the room sprang alight: every candle in every holder flashed and flared and stretched up its flame to throw its light around the room. A sudden warmth burned away the swift evening chill. “I am sorry you have just eaten,” he said, casting a look at her over his shoulder. “I was hoping you would dine with me tonight.”
“I am sure you were,” said Margaret. She was disquieted by his figure, fair to see and slender as a racehorse, pacing down the room toward the sideboard. He had a strange, compelling handsomeness about him which she loathed.
“You have not touched your coffee.” He unstoppered a flask of gleaming amber-coloured liquid and turned a tumbler out from among its fellows, meticulously filling it. “Would you like something stronger?”
Margaret folded her hands in her lap with a little bird-wing rustle. “I think it would be unwise to trust your vintage.”
He laughed, high and bright. Swinging round with the flask in one hand, the tumbler in the other, the candlelight playing in the depths of both, he said, “What a careful creature you are. I like that.” He shook his head. “There were many pretty girls, but then there was you.
You
will do well. You have wit and gut and cunning, and hell knows I need that by me.”
“Hell would know what you need,” agreed Margaret.
De la Mare set the flask down and leaned back against the sideboard, supporting himself with his legs crossed at the ankles. The light glittered in his glass, swaying a little to his almost imperceptible movement. For a long while he gazed at her, silent, his face inscrutable behind a cool little smile. She felt uncomfortably that his pallid eyes could see right through to her skin and she held up under that gaze only through sheer power of will. She could not bear the thought of caving to him. He wanted her to, and she could not do it.
In time he broke off to take a drink and move away from the sideboard to the wall where there were several hangings. Margaret had not noticed them in detail before, but de la Mare drew up before one and gestured toward it with his glass. “Come here, my dear,” he said. “I want to show you something.”
With a weary incuriousness Margaret got up, smoothed out her skirts, and rustled down to join him before a large faded print. It was a map, framed in heavy wood, supported by wires from the head moulding. The light from the candles cast sharp shadows from it; the pale yellow light danced across its pane. She moved away from the glare and saw the boundary lines on the map, unfamiliar with their unfamiliar names of cities and towns, mountains and valleys, rivers and seas. For a while she gazed at the map, feeling de la Mare’s eyes on her, but saw only the unfamiliarity of a strange place. She shook her head and turned away.
“Very pretty. Did you draw it up yourself?”
“No,” he said lightly. He leaned in, touching her shoulder with two fingers extended while he still clasped the tumbler, his free hand pointing to a mark on the map. “We are here, in Marenové, and this—” he swung his finger over a wide area in which Marenové occupied the western corner “—is Mare.” He took a step back. His fingers still rested on her shoulder. “It is a poor example of power, a tract of land, as if power were somehow measured in acres, a potentate judged by how straight his oxen plough the furrow. There is some truth to that,” he admitted, dropping a heavy gaze on her, “but we strive for better things, you and I.”
“You might at least
try
to be a gentleman,” said Margaret hotly. She jerked away from his touch. Her cheeks burned.
“Might!” said de la Mare in a low, terrible voice which somehow stopped her in her tracks. “Come here, Margaret. I am not finished yet.”
She loathed the man, but turned back and stood rigidly beside him, fixing her unwilling gaze on the hateful piece of map.
He spread his hand over the territory of Mare, encompassing it between thumb and index finger. To the southeast of his palm was what she understood to be ocean. Under the fan of his fingers, north, northeast, and northwest of his thumb and index finger were other territories whose names she leaned in to read: Capys, Thrasymene, Orzelon-gang. Below his palm were the names of Hol and Darkling. She read them and they were senseless to her, and with each word a pang of homesickness, even for her mother, wrenched in her gut. She wanted Leeds and London, Aylesward and the Avon. She wanted the bleak prospect of the Channel running riot under an October sky. This uncanny darkness that pressed against the windows of de la Mare’s house made her ill.
His signet ring, a thick band of engraved gold clasping a fiery topaz, clinked softly against the side of his glass. “Margaret, do you know why I have brought you here?”
She continued to stare at the map, unwilling to meet his gaze. More so than she had felt under her mother’s hand, she felt like a pawn, a piece to be moved about by de la Mare’s hand, a piece to gain power. Her eye roved over the territories with their strange names. And how, precisely, did she fit into this chess game? He wanted her to marry him—to what purpose? To fix for himself an heir? She shuddered.
“I think that I have an inkling why,” she replied.
He said warmly, “That is my girl. Margaret,” he mused, and frowned thoughtfully to himself. “It is a good name—a strong name, respectable, well-fitted to a Queen of the Mares.” He was quiet for a while, presumably listening to his own thoughts which stayed hidden behind the motionlessness of his eyes. Presently he said, in a tone altogether different, “They have set me at a foolish wager, but I will play the game. They cannot be without their Overlord for long, and they will soon see reason. You,” he turned to her, “will help them see reason.”