Plenilune Read Online Free PDF Page B

prayers solely for the sake of their being old and familiar, but somehow they were too earth-like, too far away, too unattainable and, somehow, hopeless. She thrust them aside and turned over, hiding a face which was suddenly damp in a velvet pillow.
    It was still dark, though that meant nothing to her, when Margaret was brought up with a start out of a twisted dream. She had been standing on the Leeds train station platform, watching a dragon-coloured train coming in with the rain falling all around. Instead of her carpet-bag she carried a falcon, and it kept turning about and digging its claws into her arm while she struggled to keep the umbrella over it. The train came in, shrieking and growling and howling until her ears throbbed. Then, with a jerk, the howling separated from the dream and pulled her to waking.
    The pictures on the walls were rattling as though a real train were coming through. Something was howling, the howl echoing round and round the house until the whole building seemed to shake. Margaret clapped her hands to her ears and stumbled out of bed, staggering against the moonquake-shudder of the floor. It was like a cannon going off, off and off and never ending. The roar went on until her head seemed ready to split with the noise. Reeling through the dark she crashed against the door and fumbled with the lock, one hand over her ear, the other ear pressed into the upward crook of her shoulder.
    She had got the door unlocked when she hesitated. It was still dark, she was in her nightgown, and God knew what that howling was. Did she really dare to go out and investigate? For all she knew it could be Rupert himself. For all she knew it was some hell-hound he kept in his possession with which to go hunting.
    Margaret wrenched the lock back into place and stumbled into bed. The blankets welcomed her with their residual warmth and there she lay for some time, ears blocked but still hearing the tide-rising surge of howling. The sounds roved about the house like ghosts looking for something, desolate, anxious, lost. She knew that feeling, and though she loathed the unknown, wretched noises, they called up something deep within her, and she knew that feeling.
    At last the howling died away, a door slammed far off, and she managed to go back to sleep.

3 | Skander Rime
    She ventured into the garden the next day. The sun was shining and the ever-present earth loomed gleaming overhead. There was a flutter in her chest as she stepped off the rear threshold and stood under that vast naked sky. It was so clear that she felt nothing was stopping the earth from plummeting and crushing her out of life forever. But the earth did not plummet, a bird struck up a pretty tune from somewhere down the path, and Margaret walked out across the porphyry gravel with a slight wind tugging at the thin white fabric she had draped over her head. Ginger-coloured flowers danced in the beds, stoked up to a fierce burning by the wind and sunlight so that she felt she could warm her hands at them. She followed their glow down the path and into the long grape-vine arbour where the wind was chill and the shadows were deep. She moved among them as one of them, dressed in another black gown.
    In one place the arbour crossed a stream by way of a bridge, and there she paused, looking out through the leaves at the estate of Marenové. She could see the hills and their fur of trees; she could see the gentle slope of the land as it made a shallow valley for the stream; she could see what appeared to be farms in the distance. I must be looking east, she told herself. Marenové is in the extreme west of Mare.
    She lingered only a while longer, noting the muted blues in the distance and the way the farthest horizon was limned with orange as if it were a cat’s eye, catching the light and throwing it back in fantastic angel-hues. She went on until she reached the end of the arbour, and there stood at the head of a little timber stair, looking down on a long