In a small voice, into the hollow quiet, Margaret murmured, “I am sorry I hated you.”
He flashed her a smile, quick and kingfisherly, and rather irreverent of her remorse. “I think you have not hated me for a while now. I have held that close and warmed my heart with it on cold, empty nights.”
He was the only person whom she would let mock her, whose mockery she could take with equanimity, because his mockery held no biting edge of hatred. She sat down on the wine-crate and pulled her feet off the cold dirt floor.
“I will go grey,” she said in a pitiful, half-laughing voice. The laughter was unsteady and threatened to get the better of her.
“Maybe we had better open one of those bottles after all,” said the fox sympathetically.
“Maybe we better had.” Margaret brushed the back of her hand over her eyes. “I got a glass of brandy for Skander, but didn’t think to pour any for myself. That was an oversight.” Again they were quiet, rather shy of each other, Margaret thought. She still felt chills just looking at him and he, seeming aware of that, had curled up on the floor in an attempt to make himself look smaller. The blue blaze and green-flaking fire had gone out of him. Had she been daft, she would have thought he was no more than a huge black dog.
But she was not daft.
“What was it that you did?” she asked at last.
He had been looking elsewhere—the shadow of his head turned and loomed on the wall as he moved to meet her uncertain gaze. “Have you ever heard of the Danse Macabre?” he countered.
The chill, as if in mimicry, skittered on her flesh. “Yes. It is a gruesome piece of artistry.”
“Oh, is it art now…? I got in its way as it was going upstairs and messed up its footwork, that is all.”
She frowned. “You make so light of it.”
“To laugh,” he replied, “is the blithest weapon of those who live in the dark.”
She picked a shard of masonry off the floor and began to roll its roughness between her thumb and forefinger. “He came down because he was lonely. Poor thing, up there in Lookinglass all by himself. So he comes down here, to the last place in Plenilune he would really
want
to go, to just sit and talk with me—and
this
happens.”
“Do you fancy him?”
“
Fancy
has nothing to do with it,” she replied, her voice sharpening. “He is a good sort of man, and good sort of men don’t do well in this house. It quenches them…”
The hollow quiet stretched and grew until it became almost painful; then the fox broke it of a sudden, rushing to his feet and turning away with a heavy intake of breath. The light and shadow licked around his enormous body as he paced away and, turning at the end of his prison, came pacing back. Margaret watched him sadly, recognizing, though she was sure he did not, the gesture of a caged animal.
“You are lucky down here,” she said impulsively.
He swung round and stared at her; his wall-eyes wavered with an eerie blue light.
“You are lucky down here,” she repeated. “There is no sun and there is no air, but at least there is no Rupert and there is no Rhea and there is no—there is no—” Her voice cracked.
The fox said grimly, “The dead in Sheol are silent of the praise of the Lord.”
“I want to go to the back of the wind.” She put her head in her hand. Her forehead throbbed, and against her pressed eyelids she saw the scenes of Skander in his death-throes, struggling even to the last to maintain his dignity. “I want a lee to hide in. I do not know how much of this madness I can take.” She looked into his face, which had turned soft under her words. “Your shoulders can spark green fire and hold off death, but whose shoulders can bear up the huge cross I see being put up for Plenilune?”
“But I think that you know the answer to that.”
“I know. I
know
. But he is otherwise silent while we all cry out for the sake of Plenilune. You have said yourself that no one is equal to contending with Rupert. Must we be our own heroes?”
The fox was silent for awhile, as if listening to the sound of God’s own silence and weighing it. But whatever he thought of it, if he had any hope or any despair, his face did not belie it.
“Who knows, Margaret? But I have often observed that it is out of people like you that heroes are made.”
She stood up. “Then God help the heroes,” she replied definitely. After a pause she added, “I wish God would hear me in this place. It would be a joke on Rupert worthy of even you, fox.”
He smiled a little.
“I should go back up to Skander now. I locked the door to keep anyone out and I am the only one with a key.”
The fox got up and walked with her to the foot of the stairs. Standing so close to him, Margaret could feel the dark ripple of power shimmering around him. His huge shadow plunged the wine-cellar into a deeper gloom and, for just a moment, it seemed to her to be the dark mantle of death trailing after him, trailing after him and touching her…
He was speaking to her. “Try to mind yourself. Every time you come down here some new awful thing has happened. I can only do so much,” he added apologetically.
Why did she feel as if this were their last meeting? All at once she wanted to reach across and touch him, though everything in her recoiled at the thought, just to prove to herself that the nightmarish feeling was a fraud. “Don’t be so serious. If you are serious I cannot bear life.
You
must laugh, or I have no hope at all.”
He smiled, but the smile was mirthless. “Better go now.” He looked up and away as if to hide his inscrutable face. “Skander will be waiting—how we all wait for your step at the door…! I may be smaller when next you can come.”
“Yes. I thought of that.”
He looked at her. “You do not mind?”
She did mind, because it unnerved her, but for the same reason she kept coming down to the cellar, for the same reason she wanted to reach across and grab him as the only security in her life, she did not mind too much. She left him in the big black splendour of death’s shadow, blue eyes shining like two gashes of heaven, and she did not mind too much.
Skander was still asleep when she looked in on him. He had shifted, flung an arm over his head, and turned a little to one side. Margaret smiled kindly on the natural pose, wishing, like some magician, she could conjure up Aikaterine, who would best know Skander’s habits, likes, and dislikes. She fetched her books, Songmartin’s and the little atlas Julianna had given her, and sat down in a chair drawn close to Skander’s head. It occurred to her as she settled that she ought to have fetched her dress but she felt too emotionally flogged to entertain for more than one flinching instant the idea of bending back over that accursed gown. In the mystical half-light and shadows of Skander’s room, the stitching of that gown seemed like the methodical movement of time toward Rupert’s installation as Overlord. She could not bear to bring it closer.
One leg crossed over the other, settled in the chair, she picked up the atlas and opened to the beginning. She was startled to see the brown plates, not of Earth, but of Plenilune; but the surprise was momentary, and then she was seeing names she recognized—Talus Perry in the west of the Mares, the road through Glassdale up to Lookinglass—and as she fanned through the pages in the soft silence of the rustling fire, the formlessness of Plenilune began to take shape. She saw where the seas were, where the rivers ran, how small was Thrasymene and how vast the steppes. Darkling in the south, bordered by the swirls of warm moving sea-water, seemed a kind of sepia-toned paradise—she caught a note about rich wine-country there, and smiled.
She lingered unwillingly, out of a perverse sense of curiosity, over a detailed map of the Mares. The roads, woods, and lot-lines were clearly demarcated; she saw the ancient estates with their beautiful, foreign names—Marenové House set among them like the crown jewel of a diadem—and her heart hurt.
Over all this I might be a kind of queen, and if it were not for Rupert I should not mind it.
Her eyesight blurred. For a moment she sat in total silence, seeing nothing but a confusion of images inside her mind—her mother, her suitor, Skander, the fox, old Hobden who seemed like the steadiness of the ground he toiled over—then, with an effort, she came back to herself as an illustration alongside the Marius Hills drew her attention.
It was a dragon.
15 | Nightmare
Skander was reserved when he woke. Margaret saw from the clearness of his eyes that he was master of himself once more, but he looked at her wordlessly, and wordlessly looked away, a slumbering anger between his brows. The thing which had happened lay unspoken between them, but he was thinking on it, keenly, furiously, in full awareness of what had become of him after the witching maid had brought his drink. He had felt the knife in the dark skim too close between his shoulder-blades. That was apt to change a man, and all at once Margaret was afraid of him.
He broke the silence at last, looking away into the fire. “Where are my things?”
“They are here.” She got up in a rustle of taffeta—the light worried on the fabric, sending flickers into the shadows—and moved to the end of the bed where she had put his pack. “Do you think to rise? You are well enough.”
If he did, he did not tell her. He lay awhile longer staring into the fire, looking at his own tempestuous thoughts.
“Rupert was in to see you,” she offered by way of peacemaking, “but you were asleep. He was a little relieved to know you would not die, but sorry,” she added truthfully, “that I kept watch for you.”
Skander looked at her then, the fierceness of his mother’s line shaping his face with hard edges. “You stayed? Methought it was Aikaterine sometimes, but then I was confused with sleep.”
“No, it was me.” Margaret returned to the chair, though now she felt unwelcome. She fidgeted, but the heaviness of her skirts complained and she bid herself sit still lest Skander become aware of her awkwardness.
His hand clenched the counterpane. “He need not fear anything from me,” he said gruffly.
She tightened her own hands into fists.
Of a sudden he looked at her, the silk of his pillows rustling like the fire with his movement. “You are sorry, I think, that Rupert has nothing to worry about from my quarter.”
Hang the man!—tears smarted behind her eyes and it was almost all she could do to control them. “It is no matter.”
“It is a matter,” he sighed, and put up one hand over his face. “I wish I could be sorry—truly I do—”
Anger overcame her wretched sorrow. “By the twelve houses, your heart lies elsewhere and I get on—we all get on. Please do me a courtesy and spare me no pity. I cannot abide pity.”
He seemed to forget himself and the knife in the dark and the long fight against poison, and stared at her, surprise and confusion and respect warring in his face. At last, with some effort, he put them away and settled back. “It is that obvious,” he asked, “even to you?”
“What, Woodbird?” She, too, settled back. She was still angry, formlessly, helplessly, but she did her best to master herself. “I have no occupation but to observe. I observed a lot—as you well know.” She smiled grimly.
He, too, was remembering the night in the cellar and he, too, smiled. They were silent for some time, staring each at their own thoughts. Margaret, listening to the crackle of the fire, found her mind wandering to the dress—the thought was never far away—and realized how alarmingly close it was to being done, how alarmingly close the day was on which Rupert would bring down the top-stone on the Honours’ tomb. There was a bit of thunder in the air, and the muffled sound of it made her start.
Skander began speaking again. At the sound of his voice Margaret turned toward him: he was staring off into the middle distance, unblinking, detached. “I forget that you are not native to the Honours. You say no pity, and I hear a woman of the Honours speaking—one of the old line: valiant, hard as adamant, unbending...”
Margaret gently drew him back. “It is a harsh portrait you paint. I fear I, like the images of the women of old, have lost the skill of love.”
He shook his head but did not break his staring gaze. “Nay, ’tis but a harder, more enduring kind of love, is all. You say no pity, but ’tis a pity we have lost the knack of that sort of charity. I knew a man who had that knack. I do not know him, now.”
Again the chill, the sense of foreboding brushing the cold up the backs of her arms.
“Would any of us die,” Skander mused, his face darkened by an inner thought, “to keep what looms before us from happening?”
Would any of us die?
Before she could speak, before she could break past the awful dare that seemed, though he had not meant it, to be levelled at
her
, he shifted and pushed himself upward, letting loose a breath like a swimmer breaking the surface. “How we are poets and idealists! and have been for too long. I will get up and have a bit of breakfast. I think I should go before I overstay my welcome any further.”
Margaret got up, shying away from the macabre thought. “I will personally see to your breakfast.”
He looked up at her as he swung his legs over the side of the bed, brown eyes standing out sharply in a bar of firelight. Thunder rumbled in the distance. “Yes…I would be obliged if you did that for me.”
Margaret took that wary, secretive look with her when she left. As she passed through the dining room and into the kitchen hall, she paused involuntarily by the cellar door. Her hand almost touched the knob, her mind going ahead down the stairs to the big black creature who, as the days passed, would be growing smaller and ruddier as his invisible chains tightened about him…A clatter from the kitchen disturbed her thoughts and she went on, blushing inexplicably. She told Livy, who she thought could be trusted, to make ready Skander’s hunter, and was glad to see that Rhea was nowhere in sight near the kitchen. She oversaw Skander’s meal in peace and had her own brought in with his to the dining room.
“Any sign of Rupert this morning?” he asked as he joined her.
His face, she noted when she looked up, had changed and was more haggard; the liveliness had gone out of his form also, and that discouraged her. But she roused her spirits as best she could. Even if he was incapable of helping her, he would always be a friend to her—though no one, she thought with some faint curiosity, would be a friend to her as the fox was.