Free Plenilune by Jennifer Freitag Page B

protuberance of the lock and twisted it until it clicked sweetly into place. A door slammed somewhere in the house. A dale wind boomed suddenly round the house, rattling the shutters, then all dropped back into that familiar eerie silence.
    “…a force to the reckoned with.”

    She switched her gaze to the clock. Six past eleven. If she was to go hunting in the morning—and she hoped Rupert owned no hell-hounds to accompany them—she had better get to bed at once. She slipped the figure that Rhea had called excellent out of her dressing gown and approached her bed, but with her clustered the ghosts of looks and words and something like the way light played bright and dark within Rupert’s brandy. Pawn and mouse! mouse and pawn! She flung back the covers with a vicious flick and crawled in under them, pulling them up close as if to shut off thereby the thoughts that jostled about her head. But she was no longer a child, and the coverlet did not shut off the thoughts that jostled about her head. She lay in the darkness of the lowering candles and stared up at her thoughts that shifted like dark water on her vision. She knew only two things with certainty: firstly that she hated Rupert, and secondly that she was glad for Skander’s words in her defence, for without them she would not have felt like a force to be reckoned with at all, but a pawn and a mouse between Rupert’s hands.
    She turned on her side and closed her eyes against the ghostly sights. She would teach his panther-smugness! Her cheek lay against one of the many velvet pillows and her fingers traced the embroidery of a fine white rose. I am English , she thought with a similar white fierceness. I am English, and I will not be moved by him .
    In the pearly dark of the morning, clad in a riding habit of scarlet which seemed to shout out through the mists, Margaret stood in the great semicircle of the stable yard, adjusting her gloves while the stable hands brought out the horses. Rupert, too, wore scarlet: a fine coat of it with tails like a cardinal’s fluttering behind his legs. He stood at some distance from her, fondling the ears of an enormous chequered alaunt and talking in low undertones to Skander. Skander seemed oddly sullen-quiet, and stood stooped a little over his own bulky frame, wrapped up birdwise in his sullen red cloak, Thairm perched and hooded on his fist. Rupert was incongruously in a good mood, which worried Margaret.
    Through the stable doors stepped the first of the horses. It was the Master of Marenové’s, as was fitting: a beautiful amber champagne creature with loose white feathering about the fetlocks and the soft mizzle striking white sparks off the copperiness of its hair. It shouldered in and stood by quietly as Rupert swung up, suddenly very high and very far away, etched in darkness and scarlet against the mucky sky.
    Next came Margaret’s own horse, a darcy-coloured grey palfrey that seemed, emerging from the dark interior of the building, to emerge from the otherworld itself. It was unnerving at first, but as her fingers closed about the familiar roughness of the reins and the stable-hand was holding the stirrup-cup steady for her, the solid mortality of the creature warmed her with reassurance. She heaved herself up and settled her skirts as Skander’s hunter was brought out.
    When all was ready the three horses and the alaunt, joined by a shaggy, lithe grey creature that melted into the mists as much as Margaret’s horse did, struck out through the stable yard gates and turned down the lane, moving at an easy lope under the dripping autumn boughs of the damson trees. And Margaret, quite against her will, found it enjoyable. The warm body of the palfrey pulsed under her, rocking with the curious but water-smooth gait of its breed; the shuffing of its breath boomed quietly around her, mingling with the knife-edged whistle of the wind through which they moved. And all around her was a jinking silveriness of grey early