Plenilune

by Jennifer Freitag

  “You don’t understand,” said Skander flatly. “This is Rupert.”

  The fair face of Darkling’s lord grew still, for a moment disbelieving, and then a black light of rage overswept it. He opened his mouth once as if to speak, and shut it again, teeth clicking, biting off his thoughts. It was a moment before he could say, quietly in lieu of the rage he could not vent,

  “Then it is I who should lay my head at your feet and offer you my sword.”

  Dammerung shook his head slightly. “If in your hearts I am the Overlord—as I believe I must be—then Widowmaker and I are at your service and at the service of the lords of the Honours. Get you home and save your general. We will come to you shortly.”

  Centurion flew to the salute, the wind in his reddened sleeves, and was gone from them like a hawk from the hand. The wind felt cold on Margaret’s bare skin; she tucked her arms around herself in an effort to keep warm, but it was a coldness, she realized, too deep for a superficial remedy.

  “To think,” said Skander in the quiet, “the Honours were once hailed as the fatherland of peace.”

  Dammerung smiled mirthlessly at his cousin, and in so doing his gaze fell on Margaret shivering with the taste of fear in her mouth. “I am sweaty and bloody and in no fit state to receive anyone,” he said. “Give me a moment for a plunge and splash about and time to slip into a new set of clothing. I will see you all again—”

  “The study will do.”

  “—In the study. Margaret?”

  She gathered up her whirling skirts. “I am coming.”

  They walked back toward the garden. Margaret could feel the eyes of scores of people on the back of her neck and she felt the overwhelming urge to run, to run and hide. An inexplicable pall fell across her. Like a little girl she felt the need to cry and she hated herself for that. Dammerung’s face beside her was oddly serene—unhappy, but serene. Why can I not face this that way? she asked herself angrily. How many are there of us against Rupert? He cannot hope to win. This is foolishness.

  But he is so serious about it. Perhaps it is not foolishness. What do I know? My world was beginning to be something clear, something steady. I had air and I could burn brightly. Why did providence have to come and kick my embers? Is that kind? Is that merciful? Is that just?

  I should not say such things. What do I know?

  God, I just want to crawl into a small place and hide.

  It was the cowardice of the notion that she hated so much. It was the slip of white feather, silent and softly blown, that had settled where her heart ought to be, that she hated so much. She had once despised a little fox for that same notion. Even with Rupert, she realized, looking back, life had been certain: dismal, but certain. Now the brightness of her life lay scattered and sizzling out, and the dark loomed fathomless before her. There was only Dammerung, and even he—she looked at him, and a sudden panic prompted her to say,

  “The wind has blown me. I will go up and tidy while you wash.”

  The sound of her voice seemed to recall him from his thoughts. He turned toward her at the foot of the sunroom stairs. She had not got a clear glimpse of the right of his face until now: the brow had been broken open and a great winging of blood swept back into his hair and pooled in the contours of his ear. It was a ghastly visage and sent a shudder through her nerves.

  “Oh, of course,” he said, unaware of how horrible he looked. “Your hair looks as if something has tried to nest in it. Keep the dress?”

  “I—” She hesitated. “It seems a little garish for the occasion now, don’t you think?”

  “Well, if you can find anyone to help you out of it, the more power to you. A bit of sun, however, would not go amiss in this hour, is my opinion.”

  It would be easier to let it lie—and to look like Black Malkin in all her funereal black would be to wear her heart upon her sleeve. The English in her refused to be so transparent. She left him, not realizing until later that she had not said another word. She heard his single step, as if to come after her, but that was all. She found her room and slipped inside, lost in the eastern blow of wind and light and shadow, feeling the wind and light and shadow blow about inside of her. Staring at the neatly arranged bedstead and prim white dressing table washed in a delicate rose light, the core of her hardened bitterly.

  I was wrong. We are more than half pain and the legends die so quickly.

  Knowing she was succumbing to a nihilistic attitude, knowing she ought to be happy Dammerung was alive, she moved numbly through the motions of combing her hair and putting it to rights. Aikaterine was absent; after a tussle with pins, which would not obey, and the wind that was coming through the open lattice-work window, she finally gave up and left her hair was it was, curled and flowing and a richer brown than it had been before. It would do. She did not like it, but it would do.

  With a sigh she fixed a string of golden pearls about her neck, wondering if perhaps she had left the space too open before, and matched it with earrings. Small-seeming and dark-hearted, but unable to keep away, she left her room and went in search of Dammerung.

  She found him alone in the study. She had meant to join him—when was she herself with anyone else?—but when she stepped into the doorway and saw him, she was struck by a paralyzing uncertainty. He was seated at the desk, the light falling on his back, working studiously at a letter. He seemed oblivious to the world. He seemed, in that brief instant, normal; and that normality slapped her in the face like mockery. For the first time she felt shy of him, and after the shyness came a powerful wave of fear. She remembered that he had been a fox, a talking fox—that had turned her world on end—and she remembered the unexpectedness of it, the horror she had felt, completely unprepared, when she had discovered he had turned into a wolf. He had turned into a man again and that, too, had startled her. Vividly over the present picture she saw him stripped for a duel, shining white, hurtling the blades of his heart and soul like sky-fire through the air. What might he do next, she wondered, and might there come a time when he so changed that she would no longer know him at all?

  With a cold shock of blood she realized he had turned and was looking at her, and had been for at least a full minute. She did not want to meet that pale, worried gaze, those eyes which had seen her unguarded fear, but she found she could not look away.

  “Why, Margaret,” he said softly after an uneasy quiet, “I am still not dead. You need not look at me as if I were a ghost.”

  “Oh,” she groaned, almost inaudibly. She could look away then, and she dropped her gaze to the floor. She felt trapped and she wanted to run, but she did not know where to go—to whom would she go?—and she wanted him to do the impossible: to tell her nothing had happened and that the world was all the same.

  His voice touched her gently. Was that a trick of his too, that he could turn his voice as if it were his hand, and touch hard or lightly as he chose?

  “Tell me what is troubling you.”

  The thoughts bunched and clotted in her throat, all of them struggling to come out at once, none of them coming at all. Her hands had clenched into fists: she could feel the nails biting into her palms which were still sore from the tension of the duel. Finally she said, desperately, the smallest, truest thing she felt:

  “I am afraid of you.”

  His hand dropped the pen and pushed the paper aside—it smeared, but he did not notice. His chair turned toward her. He was on the edge of it, poised as if to rise, but he stayed where he was, hanging in the balance. His hand moved as if to take something from her. She was afraid of him, but more than that she was afraid she had made him angry. A part of her mind warred with her, telling her that it was stupid to be afraid of him: when had he ever given her cause to fear him? Yet beneath the sun-browned skin, behind those wall-pale eyes, she had seen a power that seemed able to crack Plenilune itself in two.

  There was no anger in his voice when he finally spoke. She had expected him to protest at once, but for a long while he sat in complete silen
ce. When he spoke his voice was gentle but firm, as if he were arranging some small, precious object toward which he was tender, something which, once it was set, no power could remove.

  “There is no spell or word of power in the smallest crevice of my soul,” he said, “that could do you any harm.”

  She shuddered; her eyes crushed out a single tear, and as she felt it slide down her cheek she whispered, “Damn,” because she wished it had not got out.

  His thumb brushed roughly across her cheek. Startled, she opened her eyes to find he had crossed the room and, frowning, was flicking the bead-bright tear off his finger. “Do not you fall apart now,” he admonished. “They are due here any minute.”

  “I am not falling apart,” she protested. “I feel sick, that is all.”

  “Don’t we all.”

  Sniffing, brushing her hand across her face, she noticed for the first time that his face was clean and the bust in the brow was noticeably missing. “What happened to you? Your face was all over blood a moment ago.”

  He evaded deftly. “I told you I heal quickly. Hark! their tread in the hall.”

  Turning quickly, Margaret could hear the hard step of boots on the stair and the tile pavers of the hallway. She smoothed her cheeks and her skirts and ran back to Dammerung’s side as he stole Skander’s seat at the desk. He laughed at her, briefly, then settled back into the chair like a raja.

  Except for Aikin Ironside, who looked unruffled and almost pleasant, the faces of the men who came in behind Skander were grim to a fault. Surely even Rupert, thought Margaret, if he could have seen them so, would have balked at the thought of meeting them head on in a pitched battle. But, looking past Aikin Ironside’s face to his father’s, she heard the man’s words ring black in her ears:

  “De la Mare is a man who will dare all things.”

  “This is not as you had expected,” said Mark Roy’s eldest son. He slipped off his heavily embroidered cloak and let it fall on the back of a chair.

  Dammerung rose instinctively as the three Thrasymene ladies—Woodbird drifting close to Skander’s side—came into view. “No,” he said, “not quite. Have you all been brought abreast of the events?”

  “That Hol-land has unfairly invaded a brother Honour while that lord was away from home? We have been brought abreast of that.” Mark Roy folded himself up in a sense of thunder and spice like the dragons threaded into his cloak. “It has been three generations and one since the Honours were in the habit of warring among themselves. The scars of those years are silvered almost to nothing. And Rupert? Is he behind this? I would have taken it on intuition had you not stopped the duel altogether.”

  “Are you very surprised?” Dammerung smiled.

  The dragon-lord shook his head. “Nay, not so.”

  His eldest son interrupted him gently. Smiling sidelong and tenderly at his sire, he added, “Not so. An’ you would stand—just so—over the balcony, over Orzelon-gang bathed in sunset, and wonder aloud, half to yourself, half, perhaps, to heaven, how long would the scars have to lie silver before they were opened red again?”

  Mark Roy’s brow flickered. “I had hoped they would lie silvered beyond my lifetime.”

  “But you did not really believe it,” prompted the War-wolf.

  “But I did not really believe it.”

  Margaret, speaking impulsively, added, “They have been red, I think, for awhile now.”

  They all looked at her save Dammerung, who had his hand flat upon the desk and was looking at the paleness of the knuckles—but even he, with his mind, was looking at her: she felt it. She felt with sudden keenness her foreign birth and her stomach clenched, willing them to accept her, to not look at her as they were looking, with the shadow of Rupert’s attention fallen across her face.

  It was Dammerung who saved her. Without raising his head he said, clearly, “So they have…Did any of you really think, when I appeared in Thwitandrake, that I had sprung back from the grave?” He lifted his head and looked them each in the eye, hard, with eyes like bared and snarling teeth. “I am whole. I bleed: I am no ghost. It was a great and bitter lie you were made to swallow when the world was told I died the day I was going to fetch young Brand the Hammer to hunt. I did not die. It was the day Rupert cut open the first of Plenilune’s old scars.”

  There was a terrible stillness and silence among them. They were all listening to his words and to the fanciful illusions of horror in their minds. But Lord Gro—who seemed, of them all, to have least to do with illusions—said presently, “What did he do, and where did you go?”

  “He made to kill me with a spell, and I made to live with another one,” said Dammerung simply. Interest and indignation, but no real shock, Margaret noted, kindled in their faces. “These past two years and more I have whiled away in my own wine-cellar, bound by Rupert’s variously compiled enchantments—while he studied to kill me good and soundly—until Lady Margaret came and sprang me free.” He looked round on her with a smile, a smile with a touch of bitterness and remembered pain at the edges that she knew only she would understand. “Seems fitting, don’t you think, that he and I should lie at the centre of all these newly-opened wounds?”

  Margaret looked down at the tabletop. “Yes, Dammerung. I hope that warms his heart at night, knowing that.”

  “Shuh!” he laughed. “And now you know,” he told the rest, “what is really going on at the heart of all this, and why I called off the duel when I did, and why it is so serious a thing that we should rally to our brother Honour’s aid. Against Hol-land, Darkling will have need of you. Against Rupert,” he spread his hands, “you will have need of me.”

  “I foresee this being an unruly war,” said Mark Roy, staring off into the middle distance. Margaret glanced at him: whatever he saw there seemed to disturb him.

  Skander moved toward the desk as if he meant to displace his cousin. “I will call together my lords and arms. We should be assembled at Ryland within three days—two, perhaps, for I think I should leave someone on the border in case the Carmarthen choose to poke a finger in my defences. Dammerung, do you have any insight into getting us all to Darkling? Rupert and the greater bulk of Hol stands squarely in our way.”

  “By main force and ride-by-night,” replied the War-wolf. “It is indeed an unruly position. But if we meet Black Malkin—madam—at Wossen and push from there into Hol, I think we will do passably. Centurion was right: he can handle Bloodburn, though it will be a messy, dragged-out business I should as lief avoid. If we can hard press Bloodburn’s northern defences so that he must relieve them with troops from his invading army, we may even the balance in Centurion’s favour.”

  “And Rupert?” asked Skander.

  Dammerung looked at the sheet of paper under his hand. “Rupert will be wherever I am: a strange, dualistic fate we share, he and I…”

  “And Margaret?”

  Me? She looked up from the fine, flecked hand on the desk. With a pang of fear she realized for the first time what she should have always known: as a woman she was not expected to go, but to wait patiently at Lookinglass until news came back from the lines. Good or ill, she would have to wait for it, and the terror of being left behind—of Dammerung leaving her behind—dried her mouth to cotton.

  But Dammerung suddenly pushed off from the desk and stood aside for his cousin. “What, Lady Spitcat? She is my shoulder-to-shoulder man.” He whirled, wing-sleeves fluttering, and strode toward the door as if all were over, calling back as he did so, “She comes with me.”

  He disappeared. The bare padding faded away and Margaret was left blushing furiously, still sick from fear, under the awkward scrutiny of the assembly. For a long while it was quiet, then someone shifted and Mark Roy, clearing his throat, said graciously,

  “Capys, we should see to a horse and mule for Lady—Margaret.”

  Skander smiled apologetically at her. “Tabby, see to Mausoleum’s tack and ask Jacland if I cannot have the loan of his mule. His is pretty well tempered, isn’t it
?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Aikin Ironside spoke up. “I mean no disrespect to her ladyship,” he said in a level, lazy voice, “but I don’t consider a battle-field a suitable place for a woman with no military training, on various accounts. Furthermore—” his warm, half-laughing eyes fixed on hers with a stark, shared memory “—ought she to be roughing it?”

  Before Margaret could form an equally respectful defence—because the young man was right in all his objections—Skander cut into the gap with a mirthless laugh that was characteristic of his family and retorted,

  “She has been roughing it with de la Mare this past autumn. She is old hat at this.”

  Like one saluting, graciously admitting defeat, Aikin Ironside put up his brows and bent his head to her. “Yes, I see that, when you put it that way. Your pardon, Lady Margaret. You are a veteran among us. And for whatever it is worth—for you have the War-wolf as your guardian shadow—please accept my allegiance. It may be I am good for more than boar-hunting—it may be not.”

  The others smiled approvingly, as if they, too, were offering her the same words. The sweetness of it, the open-handed acceptance they were offering her without a backward glance or sting of misgiving—for which, if they had any, she would not have blamed them—touched her heart so sharply she felt it bleed. Dammerung was not here to laugh her out of it. Swallowing, she took hold of her skirts and bent her knee until it was brushing the carpet. She could not meet their gazes.

  “These are your Honours and your war, my lords. If anyone is to offer allegiance, I should offer you mine—for what it is worth. I only hope to be worthy of your approval.”

  In the quiet she could hear Dammerung down below—walking, by the sound of it—singing a Te Deum as he went, and singing it remarkably well.