Plenilune (34 page)

The fox had looked attentive all the while, nodding at each name as though marking them off in his memory. “Oh?” he queried. “How so, interesting?”

For a moment Margaret looked away into the middle distance, re-conjuring the image of the youngest of the Thrasymene women—a woman not much older than herself. Across distance and time the picture seemed fantastic, too fantastic to be true: an upward rush of white feather, a brief golden glance, a piercing of eyes and a scornful, half-sharing jest. It seemed unreal. It seemed like a dream.

“She reminds me of a fairy-tale, of a gypsy-princess enchanted into a swan.”

The fox was smiling when she looked at him. “You have the makings of a Fool yourself,” he remarked. “I don’t clearly recall the last time I laid my eyes on Woodbird Swan-neck. I don’t remember her being very promising, but then people do change…So she is a gypsy-princess now? I wonder if she was jealous of you.”

“Of
me
?” She was taken violently aback. For a moment she did not know whether to be outraged or to laugh. A laugh escaped, harsh and derisive. “Whyever should Woodbird be jealous of
me
?
Is
there aught between her and Skander? I thought I caught something.”

“Did you think so? People do change…I recall there was something between them, and might have come to something save that there is bad blood between the generations just past of Capys and Thrasymene. Skander Rime and Woodbird Swan-neck might have lief forgot the bad blood, but it is in my mind that the lady’s older sisters were not so ready.”

The pretty script that formed Woodbird’s full name shone in the lamplight, magical, running silver in places when the light flowed against it. “Ah. Then I am sorry. Skander, I thought, is still trying. I am not sure about Woodbird. She seems…conflicted.”

“A commonplace malady among Plenilune ladies, it seems.” The fox sat up, throwing out his fluffy white waistcoat. “You don’t think much of Skander Rime?”

Another derisive laugh escaped, this time by way of Margaret’s nose. “I think well of him. If I dared I would marry him to spite Rupert. But I wouldn’t dare. I know what Rupert would do.” How curious it was that marriage continued to be a means of spiting someone else. A horrible ache twisted Margaret’s gut—only for an instant, but the pain was almost unbearable.

The brow-whiskers jigged meaningfully upward. “We do like our women gypsy-wise. I am willing to bet my cosy pillow-bed that there were quite a few bucks at the gala who would have made an eye at you, but didn’t dare for Rupert.”

His words, perfectly sincere beneath their veneer of mockery, warmed Margaret greatly and took the edge off her profound ache. “Do you think so, in spite of all they said?”

“I never said we weren’t suspicious of outsiders, especially outsiders who are lining men up to take the Overlordship. But yes, I rather think so. Why?” He peered up into her face. “Are you afflicted with that feminine disease which causes you to think yourself unfavourable?”

The blush was growing out of hand. “I could hardly help that,” she replied sharply. “And I sometimes wish I wasn’t—favourable. I’m afraid Rupert begins to think me more and more beautiful to his eye, as well as having what he calls ‘wit.’ I was never considered very beautiful at home—”

“What a rummy place you must come from.”

“Fox—”

“You
do
have the gypsy-beauty.”

Lips pursed, thoughts conflicting, Margaret stared down at him, and he stared back, sincerity and mockery warring in his wall-eyes and white teeth. At first she had been pleased and thought that he was flattering her in a friendly, genuine way, but his persistence was making her more and more self-conscious and uneasy, especially on Rupert’s account. For a long moment she struggled with being helplessly angry at the fox. Then it struck her that he was being friendly, quite friendly, as a friend would be: not a mere acquaintance, but a friend. He was being honest.

“What would a fox know of such things?” she asked warily.

He gave her such a look that she wondered if he guessed the half of her thoughts “Not being well acquainted with the specie in general, I couldn’t say—but this fox is generally considered knowledgeable in many things.”

She rubbed at her eye with a knuckle and placed her arms around her knees. She wondered if it would do to tell him that gypsies were not considered beautiful in her world; she decided that it would not do, and she knew without deliberately admitting it that she was glad that he had called her any sort of beautiful. He was only a fox, but he said it without wanting to get anything out of it for himself, as Rupert did, or because he was jealous—he was only a fox—as some other woman might. In the wake of realizing that with the fox she could be her own unmasked person, she caught herself once again on the brink of reaching out to stroke him.

But it was he who reached, gently, with his voice. “You look tired.”

She shut her eyes. “I nearly died yesterday.”

There was hollow quiet beyond her black lids. Then, “Did you indeed?”

She opened her eyes and the book and showed him the place where she had begun the account of the boar-hunt. It was too surreal and at once too painful to tell him aloud. She let him read it as one might read a piece of fiction. Her weary hand held the book tremblingly open, his flashed across the dark script, black brows drawn in thought as the scenes, not the words, played behind the flickering wall-colour. “Well,” he breathed at last, and looked beyond the book into her face, lingering as if to read there what was hidden between the lines on the page.

“They liked me better for it,” Margaret said with hard, cold iron in her voice, “but I think they would have liked it better still if Aikin had not been just in time to save me.”

“Too bad then that Aikin was just in time—but when they know you better still I think they will have still better cause to thank him for his quick thinking.”

“I do not want them to know me better. I am here because of Rupert, and because of me they have had to give him what he asked for.”

But the fox shook his head. “Don’t overburden your shoulders with responsibility—they are too pretty for that weight. They would have given Rupert what he asked for regardless. Who—” a fierce, cutting, angry bitterness came inexplicably into his voice “—who can deny him when he puts out his hand to take a thing?”

“Why,” Margaret asked, “do you keep the light burning down here? Don’t you ever sleep?”

He looked at the lamp as if seeing it for the first time. Then he smiled, the soft mockery diffusing in his voice again. “Perhaps I am afraid of the dark.”

She sighed and rubbed at her weary face again. Her soul was heavy; her eyelids were heavy. “The old woman did.”

“Pardon?”

With an almost physical effort she drew up the will to speak. “The old woman denied him. I have never seen Rupert so frightened by anyone before. I have denied him—no, I have defied him, but I suppose I have always given in one way or another.” Bitterness, wry, angry bitterness twisted in her gut. “But
she
denied him. She flung back all his pride and power in his face and did not even flinch. She laughed at him as none of us could laugh at him.”

“The old among us are free to laugh when life becomes thin and pale under our touch,” the fox observed. “You say she frightened him?”

Margaret smiled wistfully at the memory. It was bitter-sweet in her mouth. “It was like a parable or a story from the Bible. Thrice they met, and each time I felt him winning over his fear with sound anger. The last time it was a struggle for him, for she scared him very badly.”

“And what did she say?”

She took up her book and turned to the hastily scribbled lines, but this time she read them aloud to feel the painful sweetness of the words in her own mouth.

“What is the secret that lies at the heart of the dark star? What has no voice but is screaming to be heard? When will hope wander out of the barrow? When will death come to us all?”

The puzzle had much the same effect on the fox as it had on Rupert. He rose swiftly and backstepped as if from a viper that had been dropped suddenly in his path. It frightened Margaret to see his face unguarded—she had not known how guarded it had been before—and to know she carried a strange power in those riddling words not know what that power could do.

The fox cast about for a thing he could not see, bearings he could not get. She could see his compass-needle swinging wildly. “It is late,” he said finally, roughly. “You should go. It is late and you are tired. Go to bed, Margaret.”

She opened her mouth to speak but no words came. Then, through the blind grey a swift, red-coloured rage crashed over her and she rose, quickly, and turned to go. Her throat was too tight for words; her eyes smarted with hurt tears. Blindly, clutching her book as if she could strangle it, she strode toward the steps.

“Wait!” the fox barked. She stopped. “Wait—no, come back. I am sorry.”

“It is late,” she replied flatly. “I need to get to bed. I’ve had a long day.”

“Get back here and don’t be such a woman,” the fox snapped. “You will only cry yourself to sleep and I—I will know it.”

Margaret turned to look at him. He stood on the rim of the light, small, wearing the fire pricked on each whisker-tip. Had he been Rupert, she thought clearly, he would have come after her and yanked her back by the arm. But he stood still, rigid, the uncanny back-light from the lamp turning his eyes into glowing saucers.

“What do you care?” she asked ungraciously.

“Does anybody else?” he retorted.

She went back, slowly. She had known the moment she stopped at the sound of his imperious voice that she would go back, but she went back slowly, suddenly very tired and very cold and very lonely. As a gesture almost of peace, the fox sat down on the wine crate beside her, touched her knee once, and settled into a brooding silence. She felt that neither of them were thinking about the riddle, but carefully steering away from the words that were upsetting every mind they fell upon, like a ship’s prow churning up the sea. Finally, as the silence drew out and her staying began to seem ridiculous, she tried to redeem it with blind, tired ignorance.

“Fox?”

“Yes?”

“I don’t understand. What is all this—this discontent—about the Overlord? Is he a sort of king, then? And if they do not like Rupert, why can’t they choose someone else?”

“Would that they could!” the fox laughed harshly. “No one wants Rupert, but it isn’t as though anyone actually dares say ‘no’ to him on the matter.”

She recalled the dark, flashing looks that could spring at the least provocation into the man’s eyes, the looks of murder, the looks which reckoned nothing of the worth of human life, only power, only himself. No, no one would want him, but no one would dare say nay. Only she had dared, in her small, petty, ineffectual way: and he had shown her up quick enough and made her obedient.

But the fox had not finished. He seemed to deliberate for a few moments, looking away with the lamplight glassy in his eyes, as if to find the right words. His countenance was unusually doleful. “The Overlord,” he began at last, consideringly, “is more than just a man with a title. He is more than a king or a mere strategist or a high judge presiding over quarrels.” He looked round at her, light breaking up against and throwing itself off the quicksilver mirror of his eyes. His voice was low and urgent, with a shiningness about it that made Margaret’s heart quicken.

“The Overlord is Plenilune itself. He is its heart, he is its soul: he is the dark lodestone that lies at the core of everything.”

“A dark lodestone indeed,” said Margaret after a brief, heavy quiet, “would Rupert be.”

The fox grinned up at her, all his little white teeth showing. “A dark lodestone indeed, which cannot find true north. It is a good joke,” he added, his body jigging to the quickness of his foxy breathing, “don’t you think?”

But the joke rang hollow with Margaret. With renewed vigour the inexplicable pangs in her chest returned, twisting upward into her brain images of the fells and the snow-hushed pine-woods, the glimpses of deep black lakes round the spurs of the hills. She saw the mews full of hawks and the kennels full of hounds. She heard the echo of proud Blue-bottle Glass declaring his power to the world. No, no one would want Rupert. Not even Plenilune.

And her heart ached because of that.

“No,” he said musingly, half to himself. “I see it is no more humorous to you than it is to me.” Suddenly his voice rasped like a sword being drawn. “If only I—the bastard— …Forgive me.”

She put her forehead in her palm. “For what? It is only what I say to myself a thousand times a day. I am n-not myself anymore. My country and its ways have no place among these people. I must find my own way—or learn theirs, as the case seems to be. I do not think I will ever see home again. I do not—I d-do not—I do not know if I
want
to.”

The cool pad of a paw touched her knee again, cold through her gown where the robe had slipped off and the fabric was thin. “I think we have talked too long,” said her companion, “and we are too young to find the humorous transience in things. You had better go to bed or we will be opening one of these bottles and drowning our enormous sorrows and all the sorrows of the Honours together, you and I. I can’t imagine drunkenness becomes you.”

“So we will drown things in sleep?”

He smiled. “For now, and later—did I not say?—we will look for a break in the wall.” He slipped off the crate and walked forward, pulling her after him through the pool of lamplight toward the base of the cellar stair where the dark flowed down and faded away. “You remembered and you came, and I think you will remember and come again. I—” he flashed her an apologetic look over his shoulder. “I get lonesome down here.”

“And I,” she heard herself saying. “I get lonesome up there.”

“It is a rummy world.”

She had hoped, a little, that he would go up with her, but her hope had no real foundation and broke up quickly when he sat down, as he had before, on the dirt floor to watch her go. Somehow that did not matter so much now, nor did she hate him so desperately for his cowardice. She let sleeping foxes lie and went on alone. But at the foot of the stair she turned back for one thing more.