He smiled shyly, dropping his eyes, curiously abashed by her fixed gaze. Julianna laid her hand over his arm. In the dark, in the confusion, as the webs of her whirling thoughts closed over her eyes, they seemed to Margaret to be one thing, a shining light just out of reach. But they were a cold, dispassionate light. Keenly, like a child, she wanted the warm red light of the fox.
“Thank you for the book,” she said huskily, as if a few moments before she had not spoken her own doom. “I will read it—and find the pattern, if I can. Good-night, both of you.”
The pale candlefire parted and darkened in the doorways. Margaret swept past the shards of light, down the throat of the dark hall, listening, as if from far off, to the creak of floorboards under her shoes.
She almost looked at the book before she went to bed. All was silent in the house. Centurion had gone to bed and only a faint flicker of light leaked from under Rupert’s door. It was late, night was settling on its haunches around the house. It was the eerie witching hour when anything might happen, so Margaret turned deliberately away from the book and left it on top of Songmartin, hid in a drawer of her dressing table where Rhea would not find it. She shut the curtains on another day, another bloodied battlefield of hopes and lost causes, shut out the wedding-favour streamers of cloud that licked round the arm of earth, shut out the green glow that washed the northern night sky, shut out the cold, star-flecked blue, and shut in the empty black.
Her sleep was plagued again by dreams, curious, detached dreams that tried to make sense of her curious, detached life. Skander had been arguing with her mother about Woodbird, who had mysteriously disappeared. The fox had been reading her books, complaining shrilly and ruthlessly about the syntax and the belief in the existence of dragons. She had woken from all her dreams with a start, frightened out of sleep by Rupert throttling her for the splendour of God.
14 | The Things That Cannot Be and That Are
She surfaced quietly, her heart in her throat. Once again morning was breaking through the kinks in her curtains with a blazing winter clarity: once again it felt like Christmas. But Margaret did not care. She felt cold and tired and, above all things, old. In the broken light she pushed up from her pillows and pulled her hair into her hands. It was still brown, dishevelled and sleep-tossed, but brown. It came as a surprise to her that it had not been blasted grey.
Her mind slid to the White Ones. They were leaving this morning and she was meant to see them off. In a flurry, seeming to leave her blood behind, she launched herself from the bed, cursing Rhea out loud for not having woke her at an earlier hour. Rhea seemed to have a knack for forgetting duties she did not like for people she despised. Margaret had left her grey velvet dress on a chair and, as it was not badly wrinkled, and smelled of wind-blown barberry and woodsmoke, she swept back into it, jewelled herself, and plunged back out into the house.
Everyone was at breakfast when she arrived. Julius and Julianna were seated in a window, facing each other over a little table of coffees and steaming morning pasties. Centurion was at the table on the end nearest them, his face to the doorway. He was the first to see her enter. Putting down his utensils he rose, flung aside his napkin, and bowed handsomely to her. She saw the memory of his mistake from the previous evening in all the wryness of his smile.
“Lady Margaret,” he said warmly. “Good morning. I trust you slept well.”
It was untrue that she had, and it was the sort of thing that brought Rupert’s eyes hard and suspicious over the top of his morning book to fix like a hawk’s on Centurion’s face. Centurion did not seem to notice. Margaret brushed it aside with a genuine smile.
“I slept passing fair. ’Tis cold these nights! To think,” she diverted his attention, “it is almost Christmas.”
Rupert returned to his reading. She realized, belatedly, that Christmas would annoy him too. She could count on him throttling her awake tomorrow morning for mentioning it.
Pulling out a chair for her, Centurion mused, “This year has seemed to drag by. I thought Christmas would never come. Now I almost—” he caught himself, looking up at Rupert; Rupert did not return the glance. Margaret finished Centurion’s thought:
Now we almost wish the new year would linger out of reach forever. But it won’t. Time is inexorable and heartless that way.
She took the proffered chair and breakfast plate, wishing she could ask him about the Honours’ customs surrounding Christmas, but the stony, impersonal face of her suitor prevented her. Centurion, she quickly noticed, was polite but sought to avoid her eye. If she liked him less she might have been resentful for last night’s mistake, but she did like him and she could hardly blame him: was it not what everyone thought of her? The sore muscles of her stomach clenched—angry, grieved—and crushed the breakfast she was trying to put in it. A dull ache, the sort which promised to stay with her all day, began in her middle. As she dug her knife into the steamy, peppery sausages, willing herself to put it into her mouth, she wished keenly that she might slip away and stay with the fox. At least in the cellar, cut off from the world, she might be alone to the company of her misery. But there was no chance for it.
There was not a chance for it at all that day. After breakfast the horses were sent for, the pack-beasts loaded up, and Margaret bade a fond and shy farewell to Centurion and the White Ones. Rupert was coldly polite, Centurion no less so. She watched them on the front stoop, emblazoned by a clear sun and hard wind, shake hands and hold the grip a moment longer than necessary, their eyes meeting in a kind of silent challenge.
“Until next time,” said Centurion quietly.
Rupert nodded and stepped back up on the threshold, his hand settling heavily on Margaret’s shoulder. The young lord of Darkling did not miss the possessive gesture, but he swung away without expression in his eyes to help his sister onto her mare. The wind had not let up. It flung their cloaks about and caught Julianna’s hair, which was undone, and spread it out like a swan’s wing against the shimmering thin blue sky. Margaret felt the tug in her heart to be off with them, wherever they were going, only to get away from Rupert…
…But Rupert’s hand lay warm and heavy on her shoulder and she knew there was no chance of escape. Wherever she might go, he would come for her. There was no hole deep enough, no heaven high enough, that would hide her from his pursuit.
They may have to live with him as Overlord,
she considered
, but they do not have to live with him for a husband. They are the lucky ones. And yet, I pity them…
No more words were exchanged. With an upward flutter of cloth and heave of leather and shadow, a glint of sunny steel, Centurion sprang aloft onto his horse. Under his sudden movement, the animal churned forward with a squeal, champing its bit for the open road. With a backwards twist the young lord of Darkling looked round, meeting Margaret’s eye, and saluted her, swiftly, smartly, with the wind in his face and in his eyes a look of apology, of understanding, which seemed to reach across the distance and lie on her other shoulder with a more familiar, friendly touch. Her stomach tightened. Her hands, clenched in her skirts, remained at her sides.
They left in a flurrying canter, plume-tails floating on the wind, the drum of hooves rolling back to Margaret like the staccato beat of life itself. For as long as she could hear the hoofbeats her desire to run after them mounted, churned, spurned the earth—it was almost unbearable by the time the wind snatched the sounds away entirely and left her and Rupert in a hollow shell of booming wind-surf noise, watching the dwindling horses and their riders swing on to the road and disappear among the barberry.
Always I am left. There is no one to come to my rescue, as happens in the stories. No one for me, no one for Plenilune.
She turned and looked at Rupert’s profile, etched darkly against the backdrop of the roiling rose-wall of the stable-yard, against the lift of the north pasture, against the mirror-curve of the winter sky. She hated that face, those eyes that seemed to look beyond the barberry and were watching Centurion still, but at the same time she felt an awful pity for him, which she hated, too. If it had not been for the books and the little broom flowers, she considered, she might have learned to love him one day, when they had come to understand each other. But the ashen books were an imprint of his heart, the crumbled broom-blossoms a figure of her own, and she knew they must both go down together, ashen and unloved, into a ruin of perdition.
There was a hollow lull in the wind of a sudden, and a sudden bloom of warmth in the sunshine that surprised Margaret into squinting up at it.
“Now I am of a purpose,” said Rupert darkly. “Are you,” he added presently, “resolved to yours?”
“Have I any choice?”
There was a pang in his face when he looked at her, but only for a moment: the look was swift, glancing at her eyes and off again as if he had touched on a pain he would rather avoid.
So you, too, have a heart that bleeds
.
“I must needs you come and look at dress designs again,” he continued after a moment. The wind had picked back up again, howling over the softly rolling valley of Seescardale, yet they both seemed reluctant to go back inside. “The new year is fast approaching.”
“The red dress is not good enough for your ordination?”
He looked her levelly in the face, a slight smile tugging at his features. He seemed to watch the ecclesiastical word hang on her lips a moment with amusement. “You have blood blue-coloured enough to know that you cannot wear the same dress twice.”
So she had no chance to go down to see the fox, though as the hours went by and turned into days, the wind grew colder and Rupert’s presence ever more enfolding about her. The doom of everything loomed more solid on the horizon, and she found herself wishing stronger and stronger to steal away even for half an hour to sit on the rough upturned wine-crate in the cold light of the lamp to have the little rummy creature mock her gently in her distress. One day, looking up from her needle-work on her elaborate New Year dress, the longing caught her powerfully by the throat and she wondered why.
Why
. Why did she so desperately want to sit with the oddest creature in God’s creation, who could do her no good, who had a white feather where his heart ought to be? The strength of her longing surprised her, the feeling of being cast adrift when she looked over the familiar dining room in its wash of pale winter light alarmed her. Light glinted off the glasses on the sideboard: she saw the fox’s eyes uplifted to hers, reserved, guarded, gently mocking. Her elbow pressing into her knee reminded her of the fox’s hesitant touch, as of one reaching across a great distance to something that might turn upon him in an instant. She wanted that familiar fear, that comradeship of misery, the shared, unspoken friendship of exiles.
It was something of a relief when Livy entered, bowed to her, and announced that Skander Rime had just arrived.
He came breezing in, stripping off his massive gloves, the ruddy colour of cold riding in his cheeks. Margaret rose to receive him, flustered and at once gladdened by his appearance. But she was taken aback when, bending a little, he kissed her on the cheek by way of greeting.
“Good afternoon, Margaret!” he said gustily, rubbing his chilly hands together. “What—what do you do there?” He looked at the enormous pile of electrum-coloured fabric that lay all about her chair.
“Good afternoon! I had not expected you.” Glancing beyond Skander to the kitchen doorway she spied Rhea, who seemed to have just stepped out and had seen the greeting exchanged. There was a look of thunder in the maid’s eyes which alarmed Margaret. “Rhea, mulled wine for his lordship.”
The maid hesitated a moment, her head lowered like a horse’s which has no intention of obeying and is weighing the moment to break…but at last she dipped her knees and vanished back the way she had come.
“Mulled wine is just the thing I am wanting,” Skander approved with an easy attempt at cheeriness.
“It is the dress—” Turning, Margaret stooped and began bundling the massive lengths of cloth back up into something like a tidy heap. A spool of golden thread took a tumble off her chair and a cup of tiny glass buttons began sliding down a trough of cloth, but the latter Skander managed, with a kingfisher-like plunge, to catch before it sprayed everywhere.
“This is the dress…for the ceremony?” he queried, looking quizzically into the little cup.
She took it from him and set it on the table out of elbow-range. “Yes, that dress. I have been working through the days on it, from cock-light to sun-down, in order to get it done on time.” She turned her head away lest he see the involuntary grimace of her mouth, as if she had bit into something sour. “Rhea has been helping, but it was more than she could manage in the amount of time we have so I, too, have been stabbing my fingers with needles.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
His voice, coming from behind her, was low and genuine. She remembered him as she had last seen him, earnest in the lamplight of his kitchen, regretful and yet incapable of reaching across the impossible distance to help her, though he stood but an arm’s length away.
She smiled at him and gestured to a chair, seating herself as she did so. “What brings you down?” she asked politely. “You are a little early.”
He folded himself up in the chair, making it look small and unwieldy; she had a sudden fear that it might break under him. Folding his arms across his chest, fluttering his shoulders, he said simply, “Cooped-up-ness! I’ve been to see Survance and Jacland—you remember Survance?—but we’ve had a flurry of snow in Glassdale, particularly down from Thrasymene—they always give us the damndest weather—and truth to tell, my own fireside was feeling a little bare. Aikaterine does what she can. She’s a good girl. But honestly I just got lonely.”
Margaret fingered the rich, smooth folds of her half-made gown. “You must be very desperate for company,” she mused, “to come all the way down here for it.”