Plenilune

by Jennifer Freitag

  Skander’s face was heavy and mirthless but there was no flicker of desire to parry her thrust.

  Dammerung’s voice came between them, strangely lazy and almost laughing. “Your lord Rupert would do well to mind his cousin better. He is mistaking him for another man. He is mistaking a falcon on my wrist for a robin in the hedgerow.” He turned his head and smiled wistfully. “Does his eyesight fail him so early in life?”

  Rhea’s eyes flashed a challenge, but she did not speak.

  “No?” Dammerung’s lips jerked upward. “Then go, having said your piece. Go and wait our pleasure—and don’t give anyone the Evil Eye.”

  Aikaterine made a small movement forward to take Rhea away, but Skander, almost imperceptibly—but Margaret caught it, standing just between and behind him and his cousin—gestured her to remain. After a cold, awkward silence, Rhea unpinned herself from under their gazes and swept away softly on silent feet, like a foreboding shadow passing through the room and enfolding itself among the shadows of the passage.

  Margaret jerked her head away to hide her flushed cheeks. The impudent wench! She ought to have taken leave of her betters, had better bowed or curtsied if she could not have found anything polite to say. The impudent, sly, murderous wench—

  Skander swung round and broke up Margaret’s hot, rushing thoughts. “Dammerung!” he said accusingly. “What cloven pine are you sprung from?”

  The fight seemed to blow away from Dammerung like washing off a line in a sunny summer gale. “Nay, not pine—’twas oak, and that mostly scrub. The devil—take—” In a single fluid motion he had set his hand on Margaret’s shoulder, throwing much of his weight on it, and turned up one foot to squint at the pad of it. “—thistles,” he concluded growlingly, “and one particular furze bush.”

  Skander looked unsympathetic. For a brief moment he let Dammerung pinch and prod his sole and seemed to take the time to recover some of his temper before saying levelly, “Rupert’s maid, who smells of black magic and whose sight curdles my belly, is under my roof, and I would not have it so. What do you intend to do?”

  Dammerung looked up from under his brows. “Would you have me kill her?”

  His cousin’s face did not change, neither did he say anything. Margaret felt her blood run from hot to arctic cold…but then the heavy weight on the bareness of her shoulder, which felt hot in contrast to her crawling skin, lightened and the fingers brushed her neck in passing. Somewhere in himself Dammerung was laughing at her, and she knew there would be no killing.

  He let her go and trailed gingerly away into the study. Skander, after an expressive, defeatist gesture, indicated that Margaret should go first. So she trailed after Dammerung and found him sunk down into a chair and the golden gloom, stretched and spread like a heron in flight, with his eyes shut as if she had just come upon him in the middle of a cat-nap.

  “Shoo,” he whistled gustily without opening his eyes. “I am as limp and disagreeable as a wetling.”

  “This is no great change in things,” his cousin spoke up dryly, having come in after Margaret and taken up residence by the astrolabe.

  Dammerung quirked a saucy brow. “Feed me and water me and I shall find my mood again.”

  “And I shall not.” Skander broke his stance long enough to allow Margaret to squeeze by to the sideboard. “Neither shall I let you until Rupert’s girl is gone.”

  “Mm, la, how flatteringly you put it.”

  Margaret, a tumbler of cut crystal in one hand, looked over her shoulder and caught the white dog-teeth showing through Dammerung’s smile. He was playing with Skander—and Skander knew it—as a child plays with golden balls. And as quickly as a child forgets the golden balls, Dammerung’s eyes came open, two shards of flint in his foxy face, and remarked coolly, “Margaret is with us in this also, I think—are you not, Lady Spitcat?” He flung his charming smile up at her as she leaned down to give him the drink, but his voice became gentle. “You had quite the tiff, the two of you, just after Christmastide. If I remember rightly.”

  “You remember rightly,” said Margaret softly, and remembered herself somewhat uncomfortably that ringing thrill of red and the world shrunk down into Rhea’s face and the desire to blot it out.

  Skander’s tone was mild but peeved. “I do not remember just after Christmastide. I seem to recall I was fighting for my life…So, cousin? What do you plan to do?”

  Dammerung put away the drink and heaved himself forward onto the edge of his armchair, elbows on his knees, chin on his interlocked fists. The paleness of his eyes seemed far away as he stared off mutely into the middle distance. Taking pity on Skander, Margaret found a seat close by where she could see the tell-tale changeableness of Dammerung’s face. Skander did not seem to notice: he remained standing, gaze fixed on his cousin’s profile. The room was quiet, save for the sounds of light in the crystal on the sideboard—and somewhere in the nearby spur of the woods a mockingbird was imitating a hare’s scream. Margaret barely suppressed the shiver that ran up her spine as someone, somewhere, trod on her grave.

  At last Dammerung came back to them, pulling in a long, loud breath through his nose as he leaned into the armchair’s comfortable embraces. “I say: let them come.”

  “I would say so also,” replied Skander, “but I am concerned that this may be a trap.”

  The War-wolf looked sidewise and askance. “A trap? Here? In Lookinglass, with perhaps some dozen loyal men at my beck and call? Rupert would be mad to try it. But no—I’ve thought of the trap, and mad or not, I would trust any room Rupert takes me into to be a trap. It would be a pleasant surprise to be found wrong.”

  “Why a meeting at all?” asked Margaret, for the question had been bothering her since Rhea had delivered her message. “Rupert knows the vote is in your favour. When word gets out—if it hasn’t already—of his treatment of you, how many people does he really think would not be willing to stone him on the spot?”

  Dammerung’s mouth was grim, but his eyes were dancing when he looked at her. “Not many; and you may lay their cloaks at my feet…But she is right.” He twisted and regarded his cousin frankly. “The thing occurred to me, too, that in terms of election Rupert is unlikely to stand any chance against me. So why all this argle-bargle? It smells of a trap.”

  “Perhaps he intends to turn you all into mice,” Skander suggested glibly.

  “Mm, perhaps.” With a surge and a wiggle, like a child on Christmas morning, Dammerung readjusted himself in his chair. “But now my blood is up! I ache to know what it is Rupert is playing at. So I say: let them come. Make it as official as you like. Invoke all the sacred laws of the moot: even Rupert is bound by those, and you will be unlikely to be turned into a mouse.”

  Skander’s smile reasserted its dominion over his face. They left the cut crystal and the astrolabe and waited in the sun-room while Aikaterine was sent off to bring Rhea back. They had not long to wait: it seemed Rhea had hung about close by to wait for their answer. If they loathed her presence, it appeared to Margaret that she hated being in Lookinglass still more keenly.

  She had good reason to. Despite the excitement which he had shown in the study, despite his own glib words and attitude of a child playing at a game, an awfulness swept up darkly round Dammerung as Rhea was brought back into the room. Before she was even to the centre of the room, Dammerung had crossed the distance in a single rush and caught her by the wrist. There was a gasp—of pain or fear, or even rage, Margaret did not know—and looks locked like stags’ antlers.

  “Mine own familiar Rhea,” purred the War-wolf. He put forward a foot alongside hers so that he was forcing her back at a precarious angle. “Would that you could dance with me, Rhea. I would put you through your steps quick enough. I heard tell once of a queen, a wicked witch, who was given shoes of red-hot iron and made to dance and dance until she fell down dead.” His lips pulled away from his dog-teeth: Margaret wondered if Death’s smile looked so hungry and charming at once. “Would that I were hot iron
shoes. Would that you could dance.”

  Rhea held that gaze unflinchingly, lips compressed in a thin, red line, contrasting sharply with the bloodless transparency of her cheeks. Her breathing was loud in the quiet room. Finally her lips broke apart, slowly; her tongue touched their dryness before she spoke. “What word do you have for my lord de la Mare?”

  “Tell him we expect him for tea under the first Hare gibbous moon. I would say there’s a good girl—” Dammerung released her somewhat violently “—but then I would be lying.”

  Like a falcon returning to roost Rhea found her countenance again, smoothed and soothed with her hands unfolded at her sides. Her head was up, her eyes two cold black pools of horrible infinite depth. What ugliness lay in those depths, what plotting of revenge and painful triumph did those eyes dream about within? Margaret shivered again and cursed herself wordlessly for it.

  “I go,” said Rhea at last in a faintly strained voice. She drew back but seemed to get caught in Dammerung’s basilisk stare and hung a moment, frozen, until he laughed harshly and turned away.

  What became of Rhea, Margaret never saw. She hesitated, caught between Skander and Dammerung, then followed after Dammerung who had gone up to the study. She had some difficulty with her heavy skirts—for the days were still chilly—on the stairway; when she finally pushed the study doors ajar she found Dammerung standing at the fire, working at the logs with the poker while flames spurted up in unchancy places, a piece of sheet-music in his other hand. He must have felt her enter—she came in silently—for he half-turned, saw her, and smiled, shaking the paper at her.

  “Applying yourself?”

  The terrible man who had come close and dangled death before a maid was gone: the lazy, latent mockery that was his way with her had returned. With a little effort, moving to one side as if the movement would unsnag her from her rage and discomfort and confusion, Margaret found her centre.

  “It was going well—until she came. I liked the song very much.”

  There was a rushing noise and a bang among the logs; sparks swirled around Dammerung like fireflies on a rich summer night. Margaret’s heart caught, but he seemed unperturbed. Throwing the poker into its bin, he waved the errant flames back into the fireplace—was it her imagination, or did they seem attracted to him, and reluctant to be shut back inside the grate? The corner of the sheet-music caught fire, but he quickly plucked the flame off, as if it were a bug, and tossed the bright thing back in amongst its fellows.

  “A melancholy song,” he mused, running an eye over its lines as he came back to her. “A gates-of-horn song…”

  “You’ll find paper, pen, and ink in the desk.”

  Skander had come up behind them, drying his hands on the flanks of his trousers as if he had just washed them. For some time afterward Margaret noticed him making the same unconscious motion, sometimes idly, sometimes fretfully. It was only when she noticed his fretful gestures, as if in vain to wash off the shadow Rhea had cast on them, that she noticed the evanescence of the darkness which had filled her: it had become a shadow for awhile, tempered into form again with the sudden reappearance of de la Mare in Thwitandrake, but now her love and her hatred was a mingled flame of its own on the heart-shaped altar of her life. No darkness now, no shadow: only a pale, moonstone flame that had air with which to breathe.

  Dammerung sat on the corner of the desk and swivelled over, dropping to the back of it, and began rummaging among the drawers for the ink-jar, a fresh pen, and presently a sheaf of clean stationary, each page impressed upon the top in gold with the falcon seal of Capys.

  “Hoity toity!” he said gaily, sitting down in his cousin’s chair. He wet his pen and stopped a moment, forehead cradled in the saddle of his thumb and forefinger. His lips pursed and a few bars of the melancholy, gates-of-horn song came out.

  On an impulse of whim, Margaret asked, “Will they come when you whistle?”

  Dammerung’s head came out of his hand, his eyes, a sudden bright blue, shimmering in a patch of sunlight. Something uncertain was at the corner of his mouth—uncertain, not of them, she thought, but of her temper. She smiled reassuringly—a spasm of laughter jerked inside her—and he smiled back.

  “They’ll come. I’d be lief to see them keep away!”

  “Mark Roy first,” she prompted. “He is furthest afield. Indeed,” she added, throwing up in her mind a dim memory of a cartographer’s view of the Honours, “he should be on his horse the moment he receives the letter.”

  The War-wolf’s hand came down and his brain cast a spider-thin shadow, swirl by loop by dash, across the crisp paper. “My lord Mark Roy of Orzelon-gang,” he quoted aloud, “and my brothers Aikin Ironside and Brand—”

  “—The Hammer,” Skander spoke up.

  “Brand the Hammer?” Dammerung looked around with stark amusement. “So he got a title in the two years I was out of commission. This bodes something ominous.”

  Skander ran his palms down the length of his thighs, caught his own movement, and folded his arms deliberately over his chest, annoyed with himself. “He is a good fellow, quite loyal, but he has a short temper and does not rely so on main wit.”

  “Living in the shadow of his brother,” mused Dammerung. It was an uncomfortable, pregnant comment, and Skander wisely did not meet it. After a moment, Dammerung continued. This time he kept quiet until he had nearly finished it, then he handed it up to her while he began on a new letter. Skander pivoted in his chair toward her; catching his movement, in a quiet voice, she read aloud:

  “And sure you were expecting this letter, sirs: now it has come. I dare not say as yet how the weather-cock turns, but if you would come see for yourselves be on your horses a full three hours before you have taken this missive into your hands and be on your swift way to Lookinglass, Capys. Rupert de la Mare has asked leave of a moot of the Honours, whose grace it is our cousin Skander Rime’s to host, to be held at the first Hare gibbous moon. Of the subject you can have no doubt. If ever I had need of your metal-piece and the Golden Dragon at my back, this is the hour. You know my hand: speed you quickly to us. God rest you and yours.”

  He had signed it, simply, —D.

  When she took her eyes off the page she found Skander seated sideways in his chair, his elbow on the arm of it, chin in the crook of his thumb, frowning thoughtfully at his cousin. But whatever was troubling him he did not say, only, after a moment, he thrust his chin out of his hand and said,

  “Give my regards to Woodbird for me.”

  Dammerung looked up beneath his brows, pen hovering over the paper. Then, recounting the words aloud as he wrote them, he finished with, “Post script: Skander Rime sends his affection to his Ladybird. This duty being discharged, and some faith placed that you will join us upon the date, you may, with good conscience, burn this letter to your heart’s content.”

  “You wrote that,” said Skander reproachfully.

  From her vantage point, Margaret could make out the letters, very cleanly scripted. “He wrote it.”

  Dammerung thrust back from the table. “I’m afraid you can’t escape it now. It is done in ink.”

  “God forbid,” said his cousin crisply, “he should ever elect you scribe of the Book of Life.”

  “It should make for rummy reading if he did,” Dammerung admitted, and moved on to the next letter.

  Afterward, Margaret thought Things must come in threes, as if the trinity had stamped itself creatively over both nature and happenstance. The letters were written and sent out, the weather had held, and Dammerung had got the fidgets well out of his feet when the blue-jay man found them one afternoon a few days later in the garden, announcing the arrival of a curious individual.

  The garden was warm that day, sweetly scented with flaming banks of jonquil and ramson, the faint breeze stirring the barred shadows cast by the single old tamarisk tree that, in its younger days, had done well, but growing older had so encroached on some of the patio stones as to uproot them and cause havoc whenever Skand
er went to push his chair back across the paving. It was a beautiful day. They had managed to forget, a little, the dark uncertainty that was looming before them. Margaret could feel herself coming out of the close dungeon in which Rupert had shut her: Dammerung’s flung sky overhead, vast and blue and full of tempestuous winds, and Skander’s steady kindness, were mediums in which her heart thrived. The hardness was soothed out of her—but not, she realized, turning her head and watching a robin skittering across a few decorative boulders—but not the memories. Those she would always remember, those lessons she would always bear like scars. She knew that, and yet, as Dammerung laughed of a sudden at some wit of his cousin’s and a bit of discoloured skin showed for a moment, silver and puckered, at the base of his jaw, she knew she did not mind. One could live with scars.

  “Ho, Tabby.” Skander flung himself back in his chair, catching on the uneven stones—but his wit had put him in an even greater humour and the sudden upsetting made him laugh again. He righted himself and turned to his manservant. “Yes?”

  “There is a man here to see you,” said the blue-jay man reservedly. His eyebrows fluttered askance; a swift, barely-checked smile of curious amusement started and vanished from the corner of his mouth. “A grand little man, something styled as a gentleman of abiding roots, I fancy. I told him I would bring you at once.”

  Skander got up. Dammerung, rising, helped Margaret to her feet. “Have you taken him into the receiving room?” the master asked, perplexed. “It is a little early that anyone should come…”

  “Oh no,” the blue-jay man assured him. “He is quite a lord of the courtyard and would not stir until I had brought you.”

  “Is he, and will he not?” Skander sounded amused. “We will come along now, I think.”