Plenilune

by Jennifer Freitag

  “He come wi’is tack,” said old Hobden. “I put it by in the saddle ‘ouse.”

  “Better and better. We shall be presentable, you and I,” added Dammerung, looking to Margaret. “We’ll put our heels on their necks.”

  “Yes.” A flutter of happiness betrayed her melancholy. “But I don’t think the horse will fit at the Green Table.”

  “We will bust out a wall.”

  “You will not.” Skander slapped the horse’s neck appreciatively. “How old is he?”

  Dammerung ran his palm across his lips thoughtfully. After a moment’s silent calculation, he said, “I would say about nine, if not exactly. He looks well for nine, don’t you think?”

  “Considering what you have put him to in those nine years, I should say so.”

  “Ah, well.” The War-wolf put his hands in his pockets and gazed lovingly up at the horse’s raw, handsome face. “We’ve had our enforced sabbatical. Widowmaker and Rubico and I will be ready for you when your borders start heaving like maggoty cheese.”

  “Yes, I—”

  Before Skander could say anything more the blue-jay man was calling him away to rearrange the horses to make room when the guests arrived—they were due any day now—and old Hobden had taken himself off a few yards to toss hay into Rubico’s stall.

  “Are you put back together now?” asked Margaret.

  Dammerung reached up and began pleating Rubico’s ears through his fingers as he had pleated the strands of fire. “I—I am not sure,” he admitted. Surprised, Margaret stepped to one side to see better into his face. He saw her motion and smiled wryly, looking away as if to hide. “You saw.”

  “I saw you when you got Widowmaker back. I saw you just now when you found your horse. You don’t hide yourself as Rupert does. His face is inscrutable.”

  “I did not lie,” he replied, “when I called myself a Fool.”

  “Honesty is the greatest of our misfortunes, and caring second greatest.” She looked into the horse’s unfathomable eye and sorted out thoughts, thoughts which were only partly her own, thoughts which were mostly Dammerung’s. “There aren’t words for your face or what happened to you. You were put back together, that is all I know how to say. You were put back together and it hurt you.”

  His head jerked round, blue eyes almost blackened in the gloom. Was it startlement or fear? She met his gaze levelly, smilingly, confused by the pain and happiness playing a harpist’s duel with her heartstrings. “It did hurt,” he said at last. “It hurt because to get back one piece—two pieces—was to show the empty holes that all the other pieces left behind. I do not feel quite put together. I feel…like a fire roaring for the chimney, trying to fill a hollow place, burning and insubstantial…”

  Clairvoyantly she saw the image of the autumn sky alight with the sun’s last furnace glory and said, “The hollow place, I think, is Plenilune.”

  He looked away and nodded wordlessly, a bit of the fox showing through in his face.

  21 | In Little Room Confining Mighty Men

  Margaret could not find Dammerung anywhere. She had looked in his room, looked in Skander’s study, in the sunroom—it was a cool, sunny morning—she had even cornered the blue-jay man and asked if Rubico had been taken out. Of course he had not. The Green Table was to be convened in an hour, and the men of the Honours were gathered in one of the withdrawing rooms finishing a quiet breakfast. Margaret had not had breakfast; she had felt too sick to eat, and consequently the tight-fitting chinaberry dress had wrapped easily around her belly and settled, sleekly, over her hips. She had meant to show Dammerung beforehand so that he would not say anything during the Green Table—one could not gamble on him holding his tongue—but he seemed to have vanished.

  Damn him! She stomped her foot petulantly in the middle of the intersection of two hallways. They were empty, full of sunlight, quiet…

  “And can you blame me?”

  Her heart jerked to a stop. She knew that voice, rich and purring like a cat that is nettled and is about to revenge itself.

  “…talk to me alone—” Dammerung’s lazy voice answered, and Margaret breathed again “—presumably because we have both grown accustomed to things being that way—only you cannot put your toe between my ribs, so I do not know what you will find to say.”

  Well, I want to know. Margaret stole down the hallway in search of their voices. She did not like the thought of meeting Rupert again ever, but she liked less the idea of leaving Dammerung alone with him—though what she might do to help Dammerung, she honestly could not say. Here, then—as you are merciful, don’t let them fly at each other’s throats.

  It was a poor prayer—she leaned against the wall and slid her eye to the crack in the door—but she felt it would have been poorer still to have left God out of it and presumed the two men could handle things on their own merit.

  They stood in a small conference room, longer than it was wide, with a table in the middle and an empty fireplace on the opposite side. There was a mirror over the fireplace, which Margaret thought providential: she could see both Rupert’s face as he stood before the grate and his brother facing him on the near side of the table, his back to the door. There was a familiar sense of darkness in the air; Rupert’s face had eclipsed the light and Margaret felt again the slow, powerful, black surge of his anger, like a rip-tide under a full moon.

  “I wanted to make sure you were appreciative of the circumstances.” Rupert flicked a hand dismissively. “They are blind, petty, little people, and they cannot see, as you and I can see, what lies beneath the surface of this, nor can they see what is truly at stake.”

  The fingers of Dammerung’s right hand moved a little, as if almost to touch something…“No, you are right. In this one thing you are right. Some of them have an instinctive understanding that you and I are tossing more than a coin of power in the air, but that is only because their souls are of the very bone and marrow of Plenilune. They know it as in the shapes of dreams. But you and I know. We are not a Great World, but we matter, and we know that we matter—as war can turn upon the charge of one small flanking band of Horse, we matter.” He was silent for a moment, withdrawing into his own thoughts. Finally, with a little, angry sigh, he went on. “There was a time when I would have let you come fore.”

  The angry light leapt in Rupert’s eyes, quick, disbelieving, lashing across the bridge-bone of Dammerung’s nose. Margaret felt her spirit clench within her. “That is a pretty thing to say in retrospect,” de la Mare replied cuttingly. “Why did you not say so before?”

  “You might have told me what you were about a bit sooner, but of course with your clap-jaw you never did.” Dammerung’s voice rose a pitch. “I would have helped you, Rupert. The vote rests with the Body Elect, not me, you know that—but I would have helped you. There was no need for this vomit-trail of blood. I would have helped you get the Overlordship.”

  “Why?” growled Rupert.

  Dammerung had taken two impulsive steps forward and was leaning hard into the table so that the edge of it was digging into his hip. He brought his hand down on the table with a bang—Margaret suppressed a jolt. “Because family comes first! Not the Mares, not Plenilune, not anyone—family comes first. But you never comprehended that, did you? You were terrified of Mother, you chafed under Father…What you did to me still lies between us and hardly needs mentioning.”

  Rupert had stepped from the table at Dammerung’s advance, but now he came back, leaning across it with the dark light in his face. “You know why I would not lief come to you?” he asked. “Because you would have done it. You would have made a key with sweet words for the keyholes of men’s hearts—as you always do—and it would have been your work! it would have been you who had done it, not me.”

  For a long moment Dammerung said nothing. He stood still as if cast in stone, his eyes pale and unblinking, lips drawn into a thin line. Margaret’s soul cried out in rage and helplessness; she knew that stillness. Rupert had found a chink in his ar
mour and had cut him badly: to move now would be to redouble the pain. She could feel his soul bleeding, and she could see from the look on his brother’s face that Rupert did not care.

  Finally long habit won Dammerung through. He smiled, dog-teeth showing, his head shaking slightly as if to shake off the pain. “What a rummy sense of honour you have got.”

  “I wish I hadn’t,” Rupert said acidly.

  “Oh, if only wishes were horses! Well, now, what a fool you have been! You could have had it all, with some breed of honour, with a considerable lack of blood—” his voice snagged as if on pain and memory and he savagely tore himself loose. “If you had but unbent a little and asked, instead of wadding your own pride down your own throat, I would have got you what you wanted.”

  Rupert brought his own hand down on the table. “You are the very devil of a liar!”

  “You would not know truth if it struck you in the face!” cried Dammerung. “And it is feeling a good deal like doing so!”

  “You are but talk,” Rupert mocked.

  The War-wolf thrust his finger at the other’s face. “You say it, but you’ll rue the day you believe it.”

  Rupert dropped his gaze to their reflections in the tabletop. Somewhere in the quiet a clock ticked incessantly. Margaret realized she had been clutching the doorframe with white knuckles. Slowly she let it go.

  Finally Rupert said, “We both know how this will be.”

  “By the twelve houses, we all know.”

  Rupert sighed and turned away. Margaret watched him in the long, ancient, mercury-glass mirror: the face was oddly calm, but in the eyes there was a keen discontent that plucked anxiously at her nerves. He put his foot upon the fire-grate; it was empty, swept clean, cold. “Where is she?”

  Her heart stopped again. Dammerung did not move but was quiet for a long time, seeming to weigh how to answer. “She is here.”

  Quickly—too quickly—Rupert turned. “May I see her?”

  Dammerung’s shoulder twitched; his coat of brown corduroy flicked back, revealing Widowmaker’s hilt beneath. “You’re gammoning me.”

  Rupert’s face was motionless.

  Pushing back from the table, the War-wolf laughed once, soundlessly, incredulously, and it was the laughter of pure fury. “You really think I am that much of a fool? Of course you may not see her! You will see her at the Green Table, that is all. Sheer heaven knows you’ve had enough time alone with her. Good—” He bit back a curse and clenched his hands as if to hold his words in check.

  Rupert’s voice slashed out angrily with a shapeless hurt that was almost human. “At the Green Table? That is all?”

  “Yes! That is all! You have done enough damage.”

  “What so galls you!”

  “What galls—what galls me—” The words choked in Dammerung’s throat. He strode forward, hands half-lifted, catching himself only at the last minute from putting his hands around the other’s neck. “What galls me!” he cried. “The thought of you between her legs!”

  Rupert’s face turned white like a sea-storm. “You watch your mouth!”

  Dammerung flung the words and his own better sense aside. “Do not ‘you watch your mouth’ at me! Tell me it has not crossed your mind!”

  “Whose mind hasn’t it crossed?” Rupert hurled back at him.

  Dammerung spun away and slung himself into a chair. His foxy face was drawn in white fury; his put his forehead in his hand and looked up at his brother out of the side of one eye, always watching him, but for the moment too angry to know what to say. Margaret knew she ought to feel mortified—she knew she ought to leave—but the blue angry flame where her heart was supposed to be was riding high and hot and she knew she could not leave Dammerung. She did not know if it was a woman’s sense of loyalty or a man’s, but she knew she could not leave him.

  But it seemed to be over. Rupert seemed spent. The great black grimness of his countenance was turned away, turned down, as if seeing all his glass-coloured dreams shattered under his brother’s bare foot. “We had better go,” he said through his teeth.

  Dammerung rallied his breath. “Yes,” he replied, setting his hands on the arms of the chair. He laughed, bitterly, for no apparent reason. “They will be waiting.”

  Damn the taffeta! Margaret tiptoed away as carefully as possible but she could not reach the end of the hall before they emerged from the little council room. She whirled and walked toward them as if she had always been coming. She stopped, however, at the sight of Rupert. There had been a door and Dammerung between them before: she had not realized what a difference that had made. He came out first and saw her alone in the hallway, alone in a swirl of sunlight and gold chinaberry, and she saw the pain clench in his face. Something betrayed her where her heart was supposed to be and she almost turned back. She did not try to speak but she could feel her voice give way.

  Then Dammerung came, two paces behind, and saw the thing that happened between them. He did not hesitate. Brushing past Rupert, he strode up the hallway for her as if there was no one else about. Somehow she wrenched her eyes off the necromancy of Rupert’s face and latched onto Dammerung’s as if grasping a lifeline. Did it show? She hoped it did not show.

  “What, did you get lost? I was just looking for you.” He slipped her arm in his and pulled her round back the way she had come. “The narrow wicket gate is this way.”

  She knew Rupert would not be watching them go. He did not look as though he could much stand seeing her alone in the hallway of Lookinglass, let alone walking arm in arm with Dammerung. He would be gone…but his shadow was still there.

  “I was looking for you,” she admitted. “I had wanted to show you the dress without anyone else around so that you would not like it too much and carry on in front of strangers.”

  “I never carry on in front of strangers,” he protested absentmindedly. He twisted as they walked, watching the billow of the skirt and the way the light played on the chinaberries. “And you made all this?”

  “Mostly.” A glimmer of pride nestled ember-like at the bottom-most corner of her soul.

  “Tush, sirrah! It looks better on you than folded up in a trunk, that is for certain. And listen to that racket!”

  “Yes, that is the taffeta underskirt. I worried it would give me away.”

  His brow lifted—the very image of a dog’s brow when it hears someone it does not like coming up the walk. Her blood chilled. His eyes pried at her face and she let them: there were not words in any language known to man with which to explain herself. His mouth drew taught like an archer’s string, but they loosed no words. If he thought less of her, he did not say it. He let the knowledge that she had been there and seen and heard lie and did not mention it. Margaret hoped, but did not believe, that he was not angry with her.

  The men were waiting when she and Dammerung arrived. Seeing them—Mark Roy, Aikin Ironside and Brand, Lord Gro FitzDraco, even Sparling with Black Malkin and the other two Thrasymene women, Skander Rime and his friends Ely Jacland and Periot Survance—Margaret confused herself for a moment with the feeling that she was once again a pawn to be fought over until she remembered that it was Plenilune this time that everyone was thinking about, not her.

  Except, perhaps, Rupert and Dammerung.

  Rupert had got there a moment before, following Centurion to a place at the table. Dammerung stalked in, his head up, flinging a glance round on everyone until each face had suffered his bright, feverish eye. With a deft twist he pulled out a chair and stood aside for Margaret to take it. With all eyes on her—except Rupert’s—she sat down, soothed the angry taffeta, and folded her hands in her lap like a good girl who had not just wilfully eavesdropped on the two most important men in the Honours.

  Dammerung seated himself beside her and flung one knee over the other. “Good morning, everyone,” he said jauntily, a smile coming out of one side of his mouth.

  Centurion put his elbows on the table and leaned forward, looking hard at Dammerung as if he could n
ot quite believe his eyes. “I’ll be damned. It is you. I did not disbelieve,” he amended, leaning back, “but you have to admit, the news that you were alive was hard to swallow.”

  The smile froze, but seemed to dance like a gypsy’s knife in the eyes. “It was, wasn’t it? A good joke on you. But what did or did not happen yesterday is not to the point. We’ve come for Plenilune.”

  Skander Rime and Lord Gro—as if Lord Gro knew what foul play had been afoot—looked grim. Woodbird’s head was up, brows arched, and was studiously gazing at the centre of the table so that she would not have to meet anyone’s eye. Margaret’s gaze slid to Brand and she smiled sympathetically: it seemed the young man was under strict orders not to speak, for he was staring hotly but fixedly at his clasped fists on the tabletop before him.

  “Well, Rupert?” Dammerung gave his brother the floor. “You called us and we have come.”

  Rupert drew in a deep, contemplative breath and leaned back from the fist he had been holding against his closed lips. “It is very simple. Great things often are, I find…Which of us is to be Overlord? For no one else,” he spread his hand, “has stepped in to take the office.”

  There was an uneasy silence. Dammerung’s eyes went round from face to face, that awful, fixed smile playing softly on his lips. “In Rupert’s defence,” he put in presently, “you did have his inauguration scheduled. Or so I was told. Of course I wasn’t there myself.”

  Margaret touched his leg smartly with the back of her hand.

  Aikin Ironside frowned, and his mouth shaped Where, but Woodbird flew into the silence to save it. “We did, in lieu of you, sir. I hate to say it, but Rupert de la Mare was our second horse.”

  “And I your dark one,” laughed Dammerung.

  Mark Roy put his elbows on the table and folded his hands together. “If I were to be frank,” he began quietly, as if searching for his words as he went, “I think the decision of the Electoral Body is pre-eminently clear even without taking a vote. But we are not all gathered—I see Bloodburn, at least, was unable to make it, as well as two of my foremost border lords—and the vote would not be fair in that regard, nor in light of the fact that, as the War-wolf has pointed out, we did admit de la Mare to be our Overlord.”