She turned her head, quizzical in spite of herself.
His eyes fell upon her glass, full of liquid golden light: a tiny, beautiful thing all alone on the table. “I am afraid to put them behind me. Better it would be to have them ever before me, and to take the kingdom by storm, than to throw them back and, in thinking they are gone, be caught up unawares from behind. The harder road is the road that I must take. But I fear for my soul while I take it.”
“Almost I pity you,” Margaret said, strained and cold, “for you are greatly deluded.”
Without looking at her he reached out, set his palm against her cheek, and turned her head away.
She tightened her jaw under the cold pressure of his fingers. “While I am asking you questions that you hate, I might as well ask this: I want Centurion and his siblings to stop here on their way to the University. It is only polite.”
“Is that a question?” Rupert growled.
She turned against the force of his hand. “No. Because I know you will not let me have my way if I ask nicely. And in this I want my way.”
He sighed and seemed suddenly weary, worn out, a huge, sharp-angled shadow: his profile was the grim sketch of all great men. “I forget that you are English.”
She could leave then. Swallowing back the rawness that was still in her throat, she said, “Then I will write a letter, and you will post it: I do not know your addresses here.”
She wrote the letter that afternoon, seated in the dining room where the late light fell in through the western window and flooded her little desk so that it seemed she wrote, not with atrament, but with gold. She made it out to Centurion, and felt almost at once the sense of ignorance hemming her in. Who was he really? What were his titles? She hoped he would forgive her for not knowing; she did not feel brave enough anymore to ask Rupert, though he sat on the other side of the room doing his ‘star-work,’ as Skander had called it. Odd, she thought, how getting one’s way could be so empty in the end. She wrote with delicate politeness, but made it clear that she was serious: this was more than a formality and was not meant to be gently brushed off, refused, and returned. At the end she signed it, which was the hardest thing of all. A horrible confusion welled up at her out of the characters. Her own surname seemed meaningless, detached from herself; she did not want the title ‘de la Mare,’ or even ‘of the Mares.’ To belong to Plenilune was a thing she did not dare assume, nor was she at all sure, even now, if she wanted such a place. She stuck with her thin, brittle English name, whose Saxon overtones and history meant nothing now—but it was all she had.
“Well, no, I don’t really know anything about them, save that they are called the White Ones. Centurion was never very loquacious about them.”
Margaret supposed that was the best she could expect from a fox, but she had been hoping for more. Doggedly, she asked, “Why are they called the White Ones?”
Having finished the scraps of pork-rib and goose-liver which she had managed to sneak down to him, the fox curled up lazily on the floor, shivering as if with a kind of private, sleepy delight. “Presumably because they are. Art not content to wait and see with your own eyes? They will be here soon.”
“No,” retorted Margaret. “I like to know what to expect. I almost did not think Centurion would accept the invitation, though I put my best prose into the letter. Rupert had been very untoward about it at Lookinglass. He talked about them as if they were an embarrassment, and Centurion—well, he wasn’t very loquacious about it, but I had not seen someone get so under his skin as Rupert did.”
The wall-eyes flicked sideways, flashing in the lamplight. “Rupert, I think, makes a special study of getting under people’s skin.”
Listening to what lay between the fox’s words, Margaret’s own skin ran suddenly cold. The fox, too, seemed to hear the shadows of his words and went on quickly.
“I get the impression that a lot of people think the White Ones unlucky in some way, though I’ve never heard of any unluck that came to anyone in conjunction with them. Darkling is still rich and prosperous, last word trickled down to me. Still, I understand that Centurion keeps them well out of people’s way. I am surprised that he is sending them to the University.”
“I don’t believe in luck. But the odd thing is, through the weird, half-shaped images I get of them, I feel akin to them in some way.” She looked into the fox’s eyes and saw a kind of understanding there, as she knew she would: she would never have dared say it to anyone but him. “I suppose that is why I want to meet them. I know what it is like to be thought unlucky, to be shut up and belong nowhere and to no one.”
The sheeny black nostrils flared. “It is in my mind that heaven is fond of those who don’t belong.”
“Then I should be heaven’s favourite!” returned Margaret with helpless agitation.
“Perhaps.”
With a sigh she put her book down on the floor beside her. She had meant to ask the fox about the dragon, but remembering how disturbed he had been by the old woman’s riddle, just as Rupert had, she decided at the last moment not to chance it. She did not think she could bear being hurt by him again. She did not think she could bear hurting him. She said instead,
“It smells like the last of autumn up there. Bonfires, the bare ploughland, geese flying toward Darkling…The barberry is beautiful.”
He nodded, staring blindly at her feet as if he saw, instead of her shoes, the images she conjured up. “Sometimes I smell it, even down here. And I feel it in my bones. Most things grow restless when spring pulls the sap up the trees: I grow restless when the dogwoods curl their leaves with scarlet.”
“You would,” Margaret said impulsively.
The fox looked up at her, quizzical.
“I walked in the autumn wind the other day, all the way down the lane to the road, and it seemed the earth—the landscape—was beaten out of copper like your fur. I thought of you in the back of my mind, as if thinking of the wind and the landscape and the smell of autumn were the same as thinking of you.”
He smiled and looked away. “Funny odd thing, that,” he murmured wistfully.
She realized, too late, that she had hurt him again.
With the softness in his voice that was like gentling a wound or bruise, he said, “When next Centurion comes this way they will be holding the ceremony for the Overlord, won’t they?”
Margaret nodded. His voice, aimless and careful, gentle as though he did not want to jar his own soul, opened a gaping wound in her. She heard Rupert’s words again—
“I am playing the long game”
—and she saw his face, the face of a great man hell-bent upon his purpose. And she knew, keenly, clearly, that no sooner had he got the Overlordship than he would turn with all his force upon the conquest of her heart. She knew, too, just as clearly, that he would crush it before he would win it, but crush it most assuredly he would.
The fox’s voice lay lightly on her ear. “Autumn makes one melancholy, doesn’t it?”
She forced a smile for him. “Yes, I think it must. Though I cannot think why! It is so beautiful.”
The luminescent eyes gazed up at her, softly, mockingly: they seemed to see right into her. “Why, that is the very answer to your riddle. The sharpness of the sharpest beauty lies in the law that such things do not last long. This world quenches them too quickly: we all know that, and that is why they hurt us.”
His words did not help. They sat in silence for several minutes while the melancholy built inside of Margaret until she thought she would break with it. Finding something to lash out at, to alleviate some of the pain, she said fiercely, “I wish it would not happen!”
As a man might put his arms about himself and clench them tight, crushing an inner agony, the fox clenched his little sides, all their bones showing through the fur. She had expected him to offer some comfort, but he said nothing.
“I should go,” she said at last, flatly, aware of the bitterness like silt and brine washing in her words. “We are expecting Centurion tomorrow. I should be ready for this one last triumph of mine.”
“The only one,” the fox murmured before he could think.
She stared at him, furious, but mute because she knew it was the truth. He, too, seemed to hang horrified on his words, though nothing showed in his face. Finally he scrubbed at his muzzle with one forepaw, hard, digging the claws in, and said roughly, “Good-night, Margaret. Thank you for the food. Rhea seems to have forgot that I eat. Again.”
But she seemed rooted to the old upturned wine crate as if the combined, shapeless, immense weight of their sorrow had come down on her shoulders and held her there. To her horror his thoughtless words, all the truer for their thoughtlessness, stung tears at the back of her eyes. She saw Kinloss again—a hateful premonition—and her brief victory over Rupert in the matter of Centurion and the White Ones showed itself to be a mere shadow. No, more worthless than a shadow, for where there are shadows there is light, and Margaret saw no promise of light anywhere. For a long while she sat in the fox’s silence, looking for a way out, looking for a break in the wall, stumbling blindly down the lines of black between the stars, stumbling into nothing but the black.
What good is virtue
, she wondered,
to those who are perishing?
She whispered, “Promise me you will tell me the truth.”
Out of the corner of her eye she saw him turn toward her, hang a moment on the last frayed edge of silence. “Have I ever told you anything else?” he asked.
She broke her blind staring and looked hard into his face, summoning a swift wave of rage to bring the blood back into her voice. “Promise me.”
She felt his eyes digging into her, picking at her thoughts like fingers picking at harp-strings. “I promise.”
Once more she was at the cross-roads, knowing that once she turned the words over on her tongue and let them loose, once the fox had held good to his word, there would be no turning back, no unlearning what he told her. And yet, she had to know.
“Has Rupert ever had a woman before?”
Surprise, so quick it was hardly there, glinted in the fox’s eyes. He made a move as if to get up, as if he were uneasy, but seemed to catch himself before he did and quelled the motion. The movement made her wonder, in a detached way, if he had not grown a little in size, or if it was only a trick of the light cast by the lamp. He said presently, warily, as if stepping gently on all his words lest he break them, “I never saw or heard any evidence that would support suspicion of a liaison. I don’t believe anyone ever roused his interest. He is not exactly,” he lifted one paw rhetorically, “what one would call a philanthropist…Why do you ask?”
She bit back a wince. She knew he would ask but had hoped desperately that he would not. Every inch of her felt exposed and every nerve felt raw and her stomach was a mass of knots and sickness. She almost refused but she knew that somehow he would get it out of her, gently or not, so she threw herself blindly into it. “I just thought that—as if I had a choice—it would be easier knowing that—that I was the first—that I was the
only
—”
“By all the stars—” he cut her off in a choked voice. He looked horrified, far more horrified than even she felt. “Margaret, you can’t—you can’t actually be thinking of marrying him!”
“I don’t know!” she cried. But she did know. She hid her face in her hands to get away from those cold pale eyes. They were like looking into a mirror of her own terror. “I—I am just so tired of fighting him. Nothing I can say or do makes any difference. You said yourself it does no good. Every time I defy him I feel as though I am dashing against a rock. He takes it and does not move, and I am the only one who gets hurt. I thought that if I fought him he would give up on me and let me go home.” She struck her fist on her knee so strongly she felt it bruise. “I do not even know if I
want
to go home. I am confused and tired and…and I cannot bear it any longer.”
She had expected the fox to lash back instantly, full of sharp sentiment against the man who had locked him down in a dark cellar, but her words fell into a hollow, stinging quiet. When she looked at him, the fox was staring off into his own thoughts with the look of one gazing at a nightmare, and when at last he spoke, still staring unblinkingly, his voice was hard but quiet. “You know that if you do it you will regret it every day for the rest of your life.”
She knew that. It was the only thing clear to her, but it made the sickness in her middle worsen to hear him put it to her so frankly.
When she said nothing he looked at her sharply, half-angry and half-afraid. “Margaret,” he said in a husky voice that cut her to the quick. “Please don’t.”
Everything was falling away. Everything was breaking into shards. She knew that if she held that gaze or let that tone hang in her ears she would lose her dark certainty. With a sob she pressed her palms to her eyes and cried hysterically, “I’m just so
tired
, fox! I can’t bear it anymore!”
He laid his paw upon her knee. “Then let me bear it for you.”
His touch was like the fire-glow of the autumn wind, cold, personal, searching in a horrible, painful way, wearing at her defences so that, even as she knew it was hopeless, she wanted desperately to loose herself from earth and fling herself into the grip of that crimson gale.
But how could she, when the creature asking to carry her cross would not even crawl out of his own prison?
“Fox,” she whispered, “I must go.”
“Margaret—” he began softly, then seemed to choke himself off again. “Good-night, Margaret. Come again soon?” It sounded in her ears, as she broke apart her fingers and lowered her hands, like a question, as though he was unsure if he had overstepped the bounds and barred her from him. His voice was gentle, touching her hesitantly as though she, and not he, were the wild animal on the brink of shying away. “It gets damned lonely down here…”
“Good-night, fox.”
She rose and left him, left the golden circle of light, and walked back, alone, into the darkness and into a quiet, quenched despair, the image of Kinloss’ face clear before her tear-blind eyes.