Plenilune

by Jennifer Freitag

  At length Margaret became aware of the foam against her arms being cold—more like ice than foam now, and the green sea had turned dark. With an effort she pushed upward to waking once more, past the numbness, past the fear, past the thing-in-the-dark which waited for her and, blinking, found that the light had turned to deep amber-colour and the corners of the room were thick with shadows. The balcony doors were still open, and though the grounds below were drenched in the shadow cast by the bulk of the building, the sky upward and beyond was a pale flaming hue, yellow like wine and as thin, with curdled pink clouds scuttling across its face. It was evening at last. It took a full minute for it to occur to her, and with that thought, oddly enough, went the terror. A sense of quiet resignation took its place.

  Some time afterward she heard a growing noise of feet in a corridor outside her door. She did not know whether to look asleep or remain alert, but she did not have time to choose for the knob clicked and the door swung open, letting in Skander and Dammerung, and then the blue-jay man with the little shaky figure of the physic. Margaret was dimly aware of Aikaterine being there as well, but the room seemed overfull to her now, and it was hard to focus.

  With extreme and unruffled care the blue-jay man guided the ancient physic to the bedside and then, being sure the man would not lose his balance, withdrew a respectable distance into the background where the shadows had thickened. Looking up through the scant light at the physic’s face, Margaret saw he had not changed. He still trembled, his bird-thin bones all seeming to rattle together under the sheer weight of his years, and his pale, watery eyes were still trained upward as if he expected any moment to see the sky rent back by Heaven’s coming. There was a moment, as he stretched out one claw of a hand for Margaret’s forehead, when the singsong whine of terror began crawling up her throat again—somehow she kept it in—and when the palm touched her skin it was not as bad as she had expected. The skin of the physic’s hand was light, like a dried autumn leaf, yet there was a sense of being spoken to through it, soothingly, comfortingly, all the while searchingly, which stopped up Margaret’s whine with surprise. Strangely enough, the hand did not shake once it had touched her. With both hands he felt her, and seemed to talk to her, and soothed her in a way which afterward she could never quite describe.

  Finally Melchior let out a rattling sigh and withdrew his hands. “Some lamplight, I think,” he said to the ceiling. “She would like some light. Children are afraid of the dark.”

  In the darkness of the background Skander gestured, and with a soft flutter of blue stained indigo by the shadows, the blue-jay man went away to fetch a light.

  Melchior nodded shudderingly at the ceiling. “When we have a light for her I will take a look and see what damage has been done.”

  Almost Margaret touched her tongue to her dry lips, but she caught herself. Between the white hangings of the bed—which were grey now in their troughs and pink where the sky-light touched them—and the darkness beyond she saw Dammerung’s face looking down to her own, and thought with a sense of puzzlement that there was something drawn and pinched about his mouth.

  Skander’s man returned with the light and soon a candelabra was lit, shedding a fan of warm yellow light through the room. The balcony doors were shut, cutting off the cold air and, with a nod from Melchior, Aikaterine turned back the coverlet.

  “Should we go?” asked Skander. His voice was big and bold-sounding in the hollow silence of the room.

  The physic put up both hands, shaking them vigorously. “Nay, I do not need ye to take off her sleeping gown for me to see. I can see well enough. Now, lass, little babe,” he turned to Margaret, and for the first time she saw that his eyes, looking directly at her, were the soft colour of chicory-bloom. “This may hurt ye a trifle.”

  Before she could brace, Dammerung cut in quietly, levelly. “It will not hurt her, Master Doctor. I have seen to that.”

  They all looked to him, starkly cut in golden light and black shadow, his face like the face of new-chiselled stone, but no one spoke another word. The trembling, blue-veined hands that spoke without words fumbled and grew sure against Margaret’s torso, and the numbness, rather than withdrawing like a sea-anemone when it is touched, grew only deeper. She began to have a curious feeling of floating, or being dispossessed of her body, and she thought that if she was not careful she might begin to laugh. She kept her eyes on Dammerung’s face, though he did not look back at her, and somehow the stark grimness of his countenance helped.

  At length Melchior finished his searching and drew back, and a sigh ran through the room—it was only then that Margaret realized none of them had been breathing. “Ye were right,” the physic wheezed to Dammerung. His hands were trembling again. “Two of her ribs are broken on her left side, cleanly and not wholly, and all of them are bruised.”

  “What—can you do?” asked Skander, rather quickly as if he did not trust his own voice anymore.

  Melchior turned to him, tottered, and regained his balance. “Why, nothing! If she bides quietly they will fain heal themselves. Naught to be done for broken ribs but let them lie and let the healing come in its time.”

  “But will she be fain to lie quietly?” retorted Skander, and Margaret felt sorry for the ancient bird-like physic who was taking the brunt of Skander’s helpless thrust of words.

  “She will have to!” Dammerung, in a new, lighter tone, took hold of the white hangings—which were gold now, and no longer white, with the glow of the candelabra—and pulled them down the length of the bed to make a sort of wall on her right hand. He padded delicately past the end of her bed and joined his cousin and the physic. “There is nothing more the Healing Hands can do. Her ribs are in her own hands now.”

  He had said that there were still men who would come when he whistled, but it did not seem to Margaret that he whistled at all. Of course, she was working hard at not thinking just then, and so was not much aware of what he did, only that somehow he swept the others out, talking all the while about what Aikaterine must bring up, and where Skander could find him, and generally making much of the ancient bird-like physic. Then they were gone and the door was shut, and Dammerung was coming back to the bedside with his curious careful padding as if walking too hard hurt him. He drew the chair close to the one open side of the bed and sat in it, and for a long moment they looked at each other with oddly open faces, saying nothing at all.

  Finally he prompted, jerking his head upward a little, “Did you know what it was when I left you this morning?”

  Now she could touch her tongue to her lips, but now her tongue had gone dry as well. “No. I knew that it was bad, but I did not know what it was.” She almost added that had made the circumstances worse, but for the same reason she had been glad that Dammerung had not been there to see her shiver, she did not say it. Instead she said, “I don’t understand. I feel nothing, yet I thought broken ribs hurt a great deal.”

  “So they do!” Dammerung’s laughter was barking and harsh. Then he quieted, for laughter and grimness seemed like light and shadow blowing on the fellsides with him, chasing each other. He seemed uncertain, and made as if to speak, then with an impatient gesture pushed the words away. “Nay, it is nothing. You will mend, that is all.”

  “That is not all,” snapped Margaret—snapped, for she was beginning to feel afraid again. “And it is something. What is wrong with me that I cannot feel my own pain!”

  His eyes were uncanny and terrible in the yellow light, for they lost all of their blue colour and became pale gold like flecks of tansy-blossom, pale gold like an eagle’s eye. “There is nothing wrong with you,” he said in a gentle tone. Then, with an edge aimed for himself, he added, “There is something wrong with me, for…for I am taking the pain for you.”

  It was some moments afterward that Margaret realized she was gaping at him, and then she shut her mouth slowly, opened it again in another attempt to dampen her lips, and then pressed her lips shut once more. He was not lying, for though he did not
always tell her the whole truth, he did not lie. She saw the truth in the greyness at the corners of his mouth and the way he had both hands clenched on the arms of his chair. He was in agony, but when she looked with incredulity—not really stopping to wonder how he did it—into his eyes, she saw the dancing mockery there which was the same as ever, and she knew that he did not mind.

  “How long will I take to heal?” she asked quietly.

  “Too long for either of us. The time it takes the earth to flick its shadow over the Blind Dragon’s back and away again, I think.”

  “It will be a long month.”

  “Aye…”

  For some time they were silent, and the only sound in the room was the fizzle and splat of hot wax dripping from the candelabra in the corner. There was almost always a sound of wind in the background, rushing this way or that against a corner of the house. Margaret hardly noticed it, having become used to it, but now it broke through the chinks in her careful not-thinking; but instead of being long and hollow and desolate, as she was afraid when she first became aware of it that it would be, the wind seemed rather to make the room more comfortable and less like a prison. It put the blowy, dark, unfriendly world outside, and the face of friendliness on the candlelit room within.

  At last she broke the silence. “It feels late. Will you be going soon?”

  He jigged his head as he had done in the days on the other side of the long sleep. “No, I do not think so. You stayed with me, you see, when Rupert had kicked me into a mazelin on the cellar floor. Now Rupert has broken two of your ribs, and bruised the others, and I will stay with you.”

  She stared at him carefully between the light-laced edge of the curtain and the amber-coloured background of the room, stared into his harlequin face, half in light, half in shadow…and somehow she knew that it was not merely to settle a score that he chose to stay. She had stayed then because they had both been something like exiles, and so something like friends, and now that the exiling was over the friendship had remained. So he stayed, and she knew why, and without another word, but deliberate care, she turned her head on the pillow and dropped asleep.

  Margaret slept often during the first fortnight in Lookinglass: a thick, heavy sleep in which there were no dreams and hardly even a recollection of herself. But there was always a sense that she was not alone, and when she woke blearily, briefly, she would always see Dammerung nearby. Sometimes he, too, would be asleep. Skander would often be there too, but she saw him less, or cared less. After three weeks—not quite a full month—Dammerung said he was fit enough, and she was out of pain enough, for him to finish the job himself. His hands had not shaken as Melchior’s had done—nor had Melchior’s, like Dammerung’s, seemed to flash with a sense of indrawn light as they hovered a second over Margaret’s ribs. She had tensed, but there had been nothing to fear: the pressure was steady, almost pleasant, as one pressing a sore muscle, and the fingers working their way over each uneasy rib felt to her like a hand passing over the back of a great bird, soft brown and stroking smooth, putting each worried feather back into place. And that had been all. The thing had been done.

  For a moment unguarded, cast up in the stark light of an evening lamp, Dammerung’s face had looked pleased.

  Though she was well enough to get up and even walk about if she chose, after the first failed attempt she fell back on her elbow, out of breath and shaking, fighting waves of black as they washed over her vision. A dark sleep clawed at her brain.

  “I can’t—I can’t seem to—” The sudden danger of vomiting cut off her words.

  Dammerung’s hands found her in her dark. “No fuss. You have been abed too long, that is all. We will patch you back together. But come, we must go down and sit an hour with Skander or else I am liable to go out of my head. Take my arm.”

  Margaret obediently took his arm—a lean, hard-corded thing that was like holding warm amber—and soon found herself taken to a shuttered sitting room that was full of the warm yellow light of a huge fire. She was almost passing out of consciousness from the mere effort of coming down—had she dressed? what did she wear?—so Dammerung put her down before the blaze on a thick sheepskin, leaving her to her own sleepy devices, while he and his cousin, seated in the background, cast huge brown falcon-shadows on the walls.

  Margaret lay with her face pressed into the warm, animal-smelling skin, watching the feuillemort colour of the fire weaving mysterious patterns inside itself. She had begun to feel again and care again, and in the pleasant seashell quiet she listened to the music that the fire was making and wondered, as one wonders back over many, many years, how Julius and Julianna were getting on at the University.

  Skander’s voice drew her attention. In a quiet, hesitant tone, as though he had not dared to ask before, he demanded of Dammerung to know what had happened.

  “You have been dead,” he added, by way of justification, “for two years.”

  The falcon-shadow made a blurred movement on the wall. A range of mercury-glass dishes on the sideboard, huge and beautiful, flashed out in light and were quenched. Margaret was aware of an acute pain that lay like an abyss, like the cut of a knife, across something, somewhere, or someone, but that seemed a long way off to her…Finally Dammerung said,

  “Do you remember the winter we went to take Brand boar-hunting with us?”

  “Well I remember it. It was on that hunt that you—I remember it.”

  “We were on our way to pick up Brand and had spotted a sow in the woods. We thought it would make a fair gift for Mark Roy and Romage—she was a big brute, none too lean for winter, either—so we went out of our way to track her down and kill her. We took her on the edge of Thrasymene territory and stopped an hour to unmake her.”

  Dammerung’s voice trailed away into the abyss again. Margaret had shut her eyes; from behind her closed lids she searched for his voice. Both men were silent. The gaping wound’s edges grew sharper and more painful.

  “You remember Spencer?” the War-wolf said at last, softly so that his words were nearly lost in the black.

  Skander laughed shortly, huskily. “Of course. You were nearly inseparable. A better sword-brother I could never hope to—look here,” he finished sharply.

  The shadow, when she opened her eyes to it, had folded in its wings and become small. Dammerung’s voice was muffled. “I did not see it coming. I felt nothing in the wind. I was coming up the bank to the meadow again, having—I had just washed the boar-blood off my hands. It was as though I was in a dream, a dream of looking up and seeing Rupert on one side of the meadow and Spencer on the other, and feeling too late the murder in the air. Spencer must have felt it. He started up and turned around to Rupert and—and the look on his face I’ll never forget. It was as if he had known, had always known, and had only been waiting for it to happen. The next thing I knew there was a cracking sound like thunder, but no lightning, and Spencer—Spencer—” The voice was growing confused and strangled-sounding, as if the tears at the back of Dammerung’s throat were choking him. “He was flung forward like a rag-doll, insides on the outside. He was dead instantly.”

  Margaret wanted desperately to get up. She was staring into the heart of the fire, the heat of it smarting in her eyes, the crawling, serrated agony cutting in her chest. She wanted to get up and go to Dammerung, and put her hand upon his shoulder and say, “You took my pain. Let me take yours.” But she knew as clear as the light on the mercury-glass that this was a pain no one but Dammerung himself could bear.

  “At least he did not suffer,” said Skander quietly—and he meant it.

  Dammerung’s voice hardened bitterly. “Yes. I tell myself that too.” There was another long stretch of quiet. Something warm and wet fell in Margaret’s ear; she could faintly smell salt. “I almost died that day. Rupert meant for me to die that day. A part of me did, I think, with Spencer, with the House of Marenové.”

  “It is a true saying that our hope died that day, and the light of Plenilune went out.”


  “I am not in the mood for dragon-riddles.”

  “I do not riddle you. I said I speak the truth.”

  Dammerung sighed heavily. “I know, and I cry you mercy. My temper seems short at present, for two years is not long and my memory is yet all too clear.”

  Skander turned the subject as one might turn a chess-piece on the board. “Why did you not die that day? Had it been me, I might have. Can a man live without his heart and soul?”

  “And I had mine torn out and flung on the ground like a rag-doll,” said Dammerung bitterly. “Spencer was my heart and soul, my Jonathan. I bare remember a time without him…But I did not die because…because of the look on Spencer’s face. But how do I describe it? It was a thing between him and me which has no words.”

  “Nay, but I think I understand. The winning would have been Rupert’s else—that was the surface of it.”

  “That was the surface of it…The rest I thought of later, when I was of a sounder mind, and it was simply that the instinct in me to live was very great—far greater than even I had ever imagined. And somehow that tasted of cowardice to me.”