Neither dog barked, though it took Curoi, the alaunt, some time to be broken off the scent of a polecat and placed back alongside the greyhound. Margaret lingered a moment on the overlook, looking down toward that farm-stead in the lee of the Marius Hills. It was strangely beautiful, with antiquity and durability running through the thorn-hedge veins of it; and she felt herself hating it, because unlike all other things she knew it was beautiful as a thing ought to be beautiful, and it was an impossible distance away.
“Margaret!” Rupert’s voice was tell-tale sharp.
“Step up!” she snapped to the horse, and turned its head about on the bit. It gave a little furious squeal and plunged into the fellside wood after the champagne.
Presently they settled down to a gentle walk, letting the dogs cast about, moving steadily through the woods that were flung down the slopes and valley of Seescardale. Sometimes, when they moved up higher and the trees thinned a little, Margaret could look back and see Marenové House beneath them, a splendid block of house and rambling garth couched in its bezel of green. It was mid-October, the air thin and chill and the colours of the landscape brilliant on Margaret’s vision. They rode through thickets of hawthorn and hazel, all entwined together with berry-laden bryony. The squirrels were at the hazelnuts, their little russet-grey bodies flickering in and out of sunlight and shadows, anxiously trying to strip off the half-green nuts. It was with some difficulty that Curoi was kept off hunting them.
For the most part, rather incongruously, Skander led the way. Once or twice he seemed to hang on the bit as if meaning to let his mount drop back alongside Margaret, but Rupert rode tenaciously on her near side, never straying out of hearing. No matter what they rode through, wood or stream, Rupert was always there; she could feel him watching her constantly, paying only half-mind to the dogs, and his gaze was like a cold shadow gone widdershins around her, always touching her skin. He took all the splendour out of the morning, all the light out of the sun, and she hated him for that, too, because otherwise she might truly have enjoyed herself. She could feel his eyes as strongly as if they were a hand clamped over her arm.
Strangely, it was a relief when he spoke. They slipped into a narrow glen, fighting with blackthorn and hawthorn and sudden purl of water all the way. As they began mounting the other side, riding up through the tangled red embrace of mountain ash, he slipped in closer and murmured,
“It is an ill thing for me that you look so like the Huntress—unless I be Orion.”
The palfrey heaved itself up onto the turf-and-rocky level and for a moment Margaret was looking down with a rampant brow on Rupert. “Orion died.”
The beautiful russet-and-grey bulk of the hunter heaved up after her, skittering, churning, throwing its head around against the tightness with which Rupert held it. Shadows and the shadows of shadows flickered swiftly across the man’s face and it was more than just the October air that chilled Margaret’s skin. But then a wind brushed up the boughs overhead and a shaft of light came though, and it seemed to dissipate the tempest on Rupert’s brow. “Then mayhap we will rewrite the story, you and I,” he said, “and Orion will not die.”
She pursed her lips, thinking it unlikely, but she knew better than to tell him so. With hooded eyes she looked away, urging her mount on after Skander Rime.
The land was almost always sloping, but after another half-hour of riding it began to level out a little, and it was then that Curoi first caught the scent of something worthwhile. His great whiplash tail stuck out straight behind him as he stepped stiffly through the curling ferns, Talbot’s lean, shaggy body thrust in beside him. Skander’s falcon began to bate wildly again, bells jingling thinly and clearly in the woodland quiet.
“Best let her go,” said Rupert, hastily adjusting reins and stirrups. “
Swef
,
swef
, you fool Curoi!”
With another more vicious jingle, Skander pulled aside and uncovered the magnificent hawk. One fierce golden eye flashed out, looking like murder; the dark wings beat, the thrush-speckled breast lifted with fury. She hung so for a moment, then Skander cast her off, up into the air, wings thrashing, silent but for the frantic tinkling of her bells. She grabbed at the air and gained a height above the trees. There she began circling slowly, upward and upward, while on the forest floor the two dogs were still following the scent.
Margaret watched the hawk, a hand shielding her eyes, and wished that she could fly as well.
They began to move again, following hounds and hawk, moving at a low loping pace through the steadily widening aisles of hornbeam and oak. The grass here was patchy and short, the ground firm and level—excellent country for riding. The steady drum-throb of hoofbeats rolled around them as they turned down light-and-shadow alleys of trees, one eye on the falcon, one eye on the dogs. With the smothered thunder-sound of the horses’ hooves rose the drum of Margaret’s heart, for it was coming home to her that this was a hunt, a reckless chase through scrub and open to catch and kill a creature. She did not much mind the death, but as her palfrey took a liquid leap over a fallen oak-bough and she had to keep her seat, she began to be a little afraid of this pace.
But the pace was nothing to that which they set when, without warning, Thairm suddenly tucked in her wings and plummeted. Skander, in the lead and his cloak a snapping red flame behind him, rose up in the stirrups, doubled over his hunter’s neck, and cried encouragement to the hounds. Rupert burst in beside him and the three horses and the two hounds were eating up the ground, hurling headlong through the wood. The high, throaty, blood-curdling cry of a hound on the scent suddenly issued from Curoi’s mouth.
“
Avaunt! avaunt! Sa cy avaunt!
“
It was hard to breathe, moving at that reckless pace, whipping up through a sudden lift of land, crashing through low-hanging hornbeam, plunging through blackthorn, skirting sudden mucky streams. Margaret’s hair pulled itself out of the neatness into which Rhea had tamed it; her cheeks were flushed, her hands sweaty in her gloves. Through snatches of stinging boughs she was thankful for the palfrey, whose gait was otherwise gentle, even at this swiftness.
It was in a dog-leg of glen that she first spotted the quarry. They tore round a wooded bend, the drum of hooves dulled by a thick blanket of grass, and between the low-hanging, thick bodies of yew she caught sight of a ruddy flash, like light in amber, broken up by the wing-beat of speckled brown that was Thairm. They swung about and came up the glen, the hounds in the lead, and Margaret saw the quarry.
It was a fox, large and leggy with the colour of flames in its coat. Thairm had backed it into the bottleneck of the rock-sided glen where it was fighting for its life, springing and dashing and snapping at the big bird that dropped on it like a brick, slashing with talons and beak. Scarlet mingled with the fire-colour of its fur.
“Harry!” cried Rupert in an awful voice. “Harry him! Harry him!”
Margaret yanked on the reins, bringing her palfrey to a sitting halt. If there was an unruly thickness in Curoi’s head, he at least understood his master’s last command. Thairm broke away with a jingle of bells and an angry shriek as the enormous dog hurtled in, its sharkish mouth open like the mouth to hell. She saw the fox turn in that single, bright, feather-hanging moment; she saw the look that passed across its snarling face as it saw its mottled black-and-white death coming.
“
Harry him…!
“
Curoi hit the fox with a thump. There was a squeal, a snap, a jerking, writhing movement, and the fox hung from the alaunt’s mouth, its head at a painful, lifeless angle. But the alaunt, in its own animal rage, began worrying the body of the fox this way and that, a sick, high whine of joy coming through its nose. Talbot lunged in, lips curled back, snapping at the hind legs of the fox. Suddenly it was a fight, the fox’s body in between. The beautiful flame-coloured coat was torn, bloodied, useless.
And Margaret saw, as she looked hard and coldly up into Rupert’s face, saw as Skander did not see—who was tending to Thairm—the swift soft expression of satisfaction pass over the young man’s face.
When the fight was beginning to turn ugly, Rupert broke in, thrashing at both until they backed snarling off the fox’s carcase. While he was busy with them, Skander found a moment in which to sidle close, Thairm once more leashed and hooded on his fist.
“Are you unwell?” he asked in a gentle undertone.
She would not look at him, for his gentleness rankled and she could not quite bring herself to be as cross with him as she presently felt. “No, I am not unwell.”
Out of the corner of her eye she saw him turn and look toward the dead fox, and she realized he was as sorry as she was, if less angry.
“Is he always like this?” she demanded of a sudden.
He looked back at her, sharply, and hung a moment as if in thought. She could not meet his gaze; she suffered not knowing what particular look was on his face. But Rupert was finishing with the hounds and would be back soon, so Skander said, in an oddly desperate, quiet voice, “I would be lying if I said yes.”
She looked then at him, and he looked back, his expression as pitying and tender as hers was cold and hard. Her gaze did not waver, but she saw, too, the brown-shadow figure of Thairm on his hand.
If you could unhood me, and take off my leashes, I would fly too.
I wonder—whence would I fly?
With a darkly jovial spirit Rupert plunged back in among them, driving his horse up between theirs. With the red collar of his jacket turned up and the wind having got in his hair, he was like some giddy cardinal-bird. There was a fierce and laughing smile on his face which reminded Margaret more than ever of some type of devil.
“Not bad, Curoi,” he said warmly, bending down to rough the alaunt’s ears. “Not bad, you old fool!”
The hounds pressed in close around Rupert, fawning around him, and she and Skander were driven apart. They did not speak again until they had broken their casual hunting expedition and were coming down the long low slopes toward the House. The sun was high in the afternoon quarter, and the earth’s enormous sliver was but a seraph’s feather in the sky above them as they skirted a little stream and crossed it, coming down into the stable paddock. The high sun and thin air made Margaret warm under her scarlet habit and she was heartily glad to leave behind the bee skeps on the slopes and wind through the elm-shaded lawn of the paddock. The robins were in the elms, twittering their notes as thin as the dale air—as thin and as electrum-coloured—and from somewhere back toward the more unruly woods came the liquid notes of a single thrush.
Skander put down the hurdle at the mouth of the stable yard and let them through, closing it after them. It was strange how different the yard looked, bathed in yellow sunshine, when that dim morning it had been an otherworldly hollow of mists and cold. The sounds of the horses’ shoes, which had sounded as hollow and as lifeless that morning, rang out sweetly on the cobbles.
The stableboys and one particularly wizened old stable-hand came to fetch their horses. Margaret unhitched her leg from the fixed pommel and dismounted a little gracelessly under her own power—but she could not bear to have Rupert help her, and she did not dare to let Skander step in lest he make Rupert angry. Rupert, if he caught her gesture of defiance, did not mention it, but stood back from his own mount as the boy took the reins and gave its gold-flaming hindquarters a hearty slap in passing.
“It conjures up an appetite, doesn’t it,” he asked her, “being out on the chase all morning?”
It was uncanny how the shadows of the stable door made the amber champagne’s coat flare to foxy colour as it passed through.
“Yes,” said Margaret, and it was only half a lie for she was hungry and put off at the same time.
He stripped off one glove and, before she could resist, grabbed her hand in his free one with such a crushing grip that she could not pull away, though her instinct was to jerk back. He was smiling, so that at a distance he looked pleasant, but thrusting a sharp, hateful glance at him Margaret saw the tell-tale hardness that lay like a veil behind his eyes.
“You’re a game girl,” he said. “Now let’s go get you washed up, you little vixen.”
“I may be game,” she said in an undertone as he pulled her away from the stable yard, “but I am
not
a vixen.”
“No?” A quizzical smile played on his face. “You have fangs enough.”
Yes, and she wanted to bite him, and for a moment the sullen Saxon blood nearly overpowered the cooler Norman judgment. But only for a moment, and then she said quietly as they passed through the long north corridor toward the atrium, with a cutting that she relished, “That may be, but it is an ill thing for me if I am a vixen for I have seen how you deal with the fox.”
He stopped her then and there, his hand suddenly gone to her upper arm—she could feel the powerful thumb pressing, pressing, pressing into the tender softness of her vein—and there was a high, dark, horrible power in his face as he stared at her. She could almost feel the tingling rasp of their iron gazes sliding against each other like blades.
“Yes,” he murmured, half-laughing, wholly in earnest. “And the vixen would do well to remember that.”
Margaret slowly clenched a length of her skirt in one hand, dissipating through it the pain in her arm and the unnerving shiver caused by the realization that Rupert’s face, divided sharply by shadow and light, crowned by a raven’s darkness, was more handsome than any face she had ever seen. Angular, powerful, keen—like a hawk.
“It’s very rude to stare, you know,” she said.
A mirthless smile flashed up on his features. With a cruelly painful jerk he turned her about, thrusting her on before him. Her toe skimmed the floor, barely missing tripping her up, but somehow she held her head high and kept her shoulders square though the pressure of Rupert’s fingers was like talons and the sudden twisting movement, added to the morning of riding, sent screams of pain up and down her back.