Plenilune (46 page)

She did not understand the dragon, but her heart lifted with a wild surmise like panic when it struck her that she was going back, alive, to see the fox and set him free. With an effort she got back to her feet and stood, feeling at once small and made of wood, fists clenched, and the blood running like fire in her veins.

An answering flame leapt in the dragon’s eye.
Here now are the words of the spell-breaking spell: the dark star has paled with the morning, a voice in the silence is heard; faith will have its fulfilment now that the tomb is endured.

It seemed to rise and gather, to draw into itself all the genius of its awful pearly light. Margaret found she had not known the glory of terror until that moment. It seemed to reach out with the power of its mind and fix upon a place—as one fixes a hand upon the handle of a door—and pull, pull with a mighty sense, and she felt the genius loci of that place come rushing up behind her. She braced, expecting it to hit her and sure that it would hurt; but the Great Blind Dragon, with its one good eye a disk of fire, opened up its airless mouth and seemed to roar, whiskers flying, knocking Margaret over backward—

Determinas loco—come home to me!

Determinas loco—far from the sea!

O hunter, come home from the hill!

—and she found herself falling hard on her back in the wine-cellar of Marenové House, the last white shred of light whisking away from her vision, replaced by the stark staring face of the fox.

For once he had been struck dumb. He came running forward, paw outstretched as if to touch her hand, but he seemed to hesitate—nothing was clear to Margaret in that moment. She tried to rise but the world seemed to tip up under her and fling her back down again with a crushing blow. Her damp, heavy skirts hampered her and suddenly she lost her temper. She wrenched them away from her feet, hearing in the back of her mind the whine of tearing cloth, and struggled upward.

“There is no time,” she gasped. Before he could dodge her she swooped, gathering him into her arms.

“Margaret, are you out of your—”

“I said there is no time!” Blindly, driven by a panic she did not realize she was feeling, she ran toward the steps, all the while saying, as the fox tensed in her arms, the spell-breaking spell of the dragon.

It worked. As her foot touched the tread of the lowest step she saw the air splinter like broken glass; something wrenched at her and the thing in her arms. The fox groaned and shuddered, but then they were through and she was running in the dark, fighting panic and her skirts and the weight of the fox. He was thankfully silent and, after that first startled moment, did not fight her. She slipped once on the stone stairs and fell on her shin rather than crush him, but though she let out a helpless grunt of pain he did not make a sound.

Breathless, wary, they slipped into the kitchen hall. Margaret listened: the house was deadly quiet. That worried her in a way she could not explain.

“The solarium,” she murmured. “It is the shortest way.”

Then the fox spoke. “No, wait, Margaret—”

Before he could warn her the danger was upon them. The hall suddenly blazed with light, blinding them both. and when Margaret could look again there was Rupert in the dining room doorway.

There was murder in his face.

Margaret turned at once and ran, knowing that if she hesitated half a heartbeat all would be lost in that man’s basilisk stare. But she swung right into Livy’s arms and suddenly the fight was for the fox as the manservant tried at once to throw her off and wrench the fox out of her grasp. The fox fought along with her. He snapped and snarled, black lips pulled back into a singsong snarl. Once he bit down on Livy’s hand so deeply that the bone showed.

“Hold her!
Hold her!
“ someone was shouting. There were other hands now, faces she recognized from the grounds, all trying to detach her and the fox from each other. In a panic she doubled over, shielding him with her body, but it was no use. She felt the hand that closed over the back of her neck, hard like a vise; it pulled her back and nearly lifted her off her feet. Exposed, screaming in pain—she did not know she was screaming—she was open to the many hands that wrenched the fox out of her arms. In a spar of light she saw Rupert’s face, sideways and blurred with terror and agony, but sharpened around the eyes with cold and around the mouth with a flash of bared white teeth.

“No!
no!
“ The fox was fighting Livy, slipping in the manservant’s blood. “Let her go, Rupert! Let her go! This was none of her doing!
Let her go!
“

Was it fear that made her hallucinate? Margaret had the sudden vivid image, so clear she thought she could reach out and touch it, of Rupert holding a chess-piece in one hand, a mere pawn of red: he closed his fingers on it and crushed it into powder. “It is not for nothing you are a fox,” he said coldly. His arm went round Margaret and squeezed her ribs until she could hear them creaking low under the shudder of her uneven breathing. He was going to crush her. Crush her like the pawn. “Nothing to do with it, then, when the scent of magic thickens the air and I find you out of spells and her skulking about at night, you in her arms.”

The fox twisted and shot a smile at Rupert. “It’s not a place you are likely to find yourself.”

Margaret heard the swift dark intake of breath in the barrel of chest beside her. She heard it—and heard the eerie quiet that dropped on them afterward which was like the lull that drops before the storm. Everything froze on the scene, caught sharp and pale in the light. She heard the creak of her ribs, she saw the light glint off Rupert’s eye, she saw the flare of the fox’s nostrils as it smelled the scent of death.

With a pained cry Margaret broke the scene. Slouching forward in an attempt to ease the agony in her side she gasped, “Let him go! I’ll do anything you want. Only let him go. He’s only a fox!”

Rupert’s laugh was hard and mirthless, oddly choking in his own throat. With a cruel jerk he put both arms around her breasts and pulled her back a few paces, lengthening the distance between her and the fox. She could see the wild spangling white in the other’s eyes as he stared at her being dragged bodily away. “Only a fox!” he mocked. “Only a thorn in my side, only the gall in my drink. As for
you
—”

She sobbed, gagging, blinded by the jagged purple lightning of pain.

“—clearly I cannot trust you anymore, and I have come to the end of my patience with your foolishness, your ungrateful, unteachable spirit, and now this—!” His arms grew tighter around her ribcage with each word. She could not see clearly anymore. Everything was swimming in blue and purple and white. “I cannot trust you, I—have no further use for you. Better I was rid of you.”

Though his words were cold and there was stark murder in them, his voice tore at the end on the razor of regret. But his voice was quickly drowned out in the fox’s shrill barking.

“No, you fool, you idiot, you bastard! If ever you feared me, you will not lay a hand on her!”

Pain and despair and the sense of indrawn power confused Margaret still further. But she knew that the game was up, that she and the fox were but little, worthless things to be crushed under Rupert’s thumb—and that Rupert loved his purpose still more than he loved her. For a moment the grip on her loosened. She was beyond feeling pain now. Shock numbed her. She saw a narrow tunnel of light and at the end of it the flame-colour of the fox, sparking with rage. He would be the last thing she would see. Her body came out of Rupert’s arms, though something far off hurt like hell. She moved forward across the distance; the surf-sound of all their voices beat against her. The fox saw her coming and gave one last twist like a dolphin slipping out of the grasp of the sea; he pushed against the servant’s chest and nearly got free, but not quite. A flicker of white despair lashed across his eyes. From far off in that place that hurt, Margaret whispered,
Good-bye
, and she wrapped her arms around the fox’s great ruff of ruddy mane. His nose was cold and damp against her lips and tasted of salt. His eyes, wide and wild and pale in the light, met hers with a kind of horror.

Good-bye.

Rupert had her by the throat. The servants were shouting. Someone’s lantern crashed to the floor. It splintered open. Sparks went up in blinding yellow. Her fingers scraped on the stones: she was being hauled away again, almost faster than she could see in the whirling mayhem, but through the last closing gap of sight she could still see the fox, rigid in his captor’s arms, mouth open so that his little teeth shone, a mingled mask of pain and horror on his face.

“Margaret!” he gasped in a reproachful tone. “Oh, damn.”

Of a sudden Livy dropped him. Everyone lunged in to grab him again while the manservant cried, “He’s gone cold as ice and heavy as lead!” Margaret watched, half-seated on the floor, held in Rupert’s grasp. De la Mare watched in a kind of transfixed quiet, not stirring to move, as a man might meet his inevitable death.

The fox struck the floor on his belly, yelping, trying to gather his legs beneath him. Everyone tried to grab him but wrenched away again, clutching smarting hands. With an agonized cry the fox clawed at the floor, trying to drag himself forward as he grew larger and larger, and longer and longer, and his red fur was being burnt up in the glow cast by the ragged shards of light. The cry became a roar, the roar became an almost human scream. One paw swung out to claw at the stone flags: the paw became a hand. A shoulder twisted forward in a spasm of agony: the shoulder was a man’s. Almost before she knew what was happening, Margaret was staring at the sweating wreck of a young man, naked as birth, crouched on the stone floor with his breath shuddering in and out of his lungs as might a warhorse after a day-long fight.

There was a splintering shriek of steel being pulled. She turned and saw Rupert drawing a knife and pulling it back. His hand took hold of a great mass of her hair and wrenched back her head. Pain cracked like lightning up her back and neck, clawing into her brain. If she screamed she did not remember, nor hear it over the roar of panic. Out of the lowest curve of her eye she saw the young man look up, hang for a moment immobile, and then gather himself to spring. The knife sparked in the air. Rupert twisted in an attempt to shield his work from the impact of the young man, but the other’s hand struck his wrist, sending the blow wide. Margaret felt it graze her forehead. She dropped to the ground and rolled away, only distantly aware of the scuffle overhead. She did not see what happened, she only knew that someone was grabbing her and roaring in her ear, “RUN!” and she was doing so.

Through the long looming shadows and flickering earth-light the two of them ran, her hand in his. Desperation drove them on through the peristyle and solarium, diving into the shadows and out again fast as kingfishers, until they had hurled themselves out onto the back lawn. Cold air shivered Margaret’s lungs in bloody rags but she kept doggedly on, driven by the terror of Rupert’s pale, grim face that, in her pain, was nightmarishly changing places with a knife so that the two seemed to be one and the same. The long fine hand in hers was hot with sweat and slippery; she gripped it until she could feel the pain of her hold through the terror.

They ran along the gravel walk and dove into the deep shadows of the bare grape arbour. Somewhere, somewhere too close, a dog began to bark. Margaret caught a swift image of a pale face beside her, hesitating to look behind them for a single instant before plunging on. Down the arbour they raced, down the arbour for the opening beyond and the safety of the woods. A door slammed: the sound of it echoed across the yard. The barking of the dog was sharp and clear and nearly on their heels.

Without check they flung themselves down the stairs and into the grass aisle beyond. Earth-light, cold and betraying, burst around them. Only a moment later they were into the woods, thrashing their way through thick scrub and bramble. Thorns dragged at Margaret’s arms and legs and face. She shut her eyes and ran on.

The sound of the fox’s breathing was her constant companion. She could not hear her own—she was not sure she was breathing anymore. The roar of her own pain drowned out any other sound in her body. But she heard, as they crashed down the side of a narrow glen, grasping at every root and branch to arrest their fall, she heard the fox’s breathing catch and change, and heard when he gasped out, “Can you spell while we run?”

She let go of his hand only long enough to grab an alder root to save herself from pitching headlong into the dark rushy water below. He placed an arm around her waist and steadied her on.

“Margaret!”

They hit a wet rock and slithered to a halt, up to their ankles in a stream. The high walls of the glen rose all around them, the trees higher than that and, farther up and wholly out of reach, there shone the crescent of earth, gleaming fitful silver and blue, shedding light on their upturned faces.

A dog gave tongue in the distance.

“Here,” gasped Margaret. Her hands fumbled with her brooch; after stabbing her own fingers she managed to haul off her tartan. The fox bent shakily and helped her fling it around his shoulders. Then she plunged her arms around his cold thin body, wrenched the mazing pain in two from her brain, and called up the dragon’s spell.

Determinas loco—come home to me—determinas loco—far from the sea. Oh, hunter, come home from the hill!

There was a howl of wind and the flapping of the cloak all around them. The ground was torn from their feet. The breath was torn from their lungs. Into the rage of a roaring airless tunnel they were thrown. In the space of a heartbeat Margaret hung in the balance, feeling nothing but the sense of falling, falling, falling in a dream.

She hit the ground sidelong, thinking all the while that she would fall on her feet. Pain, like a thousand Guy Fawkes fires, splintered through her body. Panic, like some black ravening bird just stretching its wings to fly, reared up inside her. She could not breathe, she could not see. The world beneath her was heaving. She wanted to call out for the fox.