Plenilune

by Jennifer Freitag

  Huw Daggerman stopped in the act of slipping away down the line of ornamental hedges that made up the front garden. The brand on his forehead, a ghastly reddish colour in the full light, showed up in plain view of them all, but Dammerung, Margaret was sure, could have seen the brand in the dark.

  “Where do you go?”

  Daggerman put his foot down. “Just—over the next hill to see whatever is on the other side. My lord,” he added, watching the way the wind was blowing Dammerung’s cloak about like death’s wings. Was it the heat or the harsh bruise forming on his face, or Dammerung’s heel on his tail, that made him look so white? Poor chap. Margaret’s hand tightened on Dammerung’s supporting arm.

  The War-wolf jerked his head northward. “Why not that hill, if any hill will do?”

  Daggerman’s eyes slid past the War-wolf to the north, hung there a moment warily, then returned to Dammerung’s face. “What lies beyond that hill, sir?”

  “A war.” The war-lord’s lips curled.

  Still the thief hesitated. Margaret could see him staring at some place on the ground between them; the thumb and forefinger of his left hand were rubbing methodically together. “Do I have a choice, sir?”

  “Yes.”

  Huw Daggerman nodded, first as if to himself, and then as if to Dammerung. “Then I would as lief go over that hill than any other. Best earn a little decent bread—as decent a bread as war can buy.”

  “You have a sir’s way about your speech. Art handy with a weapon?”

  Daggerman smiled. “Oh, fair to middling, my lord, but I can take a blow.”

  Dammerung laughed shortly. “I can see that. It takes training to learn to give a blow, but gut to take one, and I put a higher price on gut.”

  “I had heard you were just and I thought I would find you so, for your reputation precedes you.” Bloodburn spoke up from where he stood not far off, Aikin Ironside’s fist clamped round his arm. “I wonder if they are all wrong.”

  Dammerung swung round on him. “Reputation is like quicksilver in the hand and, like a rumour, a wind in the grass. Rumour had it I was dead. Rumour has it I am just. How true is one or the other, do you think, and by what solid measurement can you weigh me, not having known me?”

  “I know that you have a reputation for being a brutal captain,” replied Bloodburn—fixing, Margaret thought, on the one attribute he could understand. “You are a hard taskmaster, implacable if somewhat inscrutable, and I have heard that you are ruthless with disobedient soldiers: I hear you flog them sometimes, and hang them often.”

  “It’s a hobby of mine,” smiled Dammerung wolfishly. “But I have always found it hard to flog a man after I have hanged him…And you!” he added, coming back out of his own morbid humour. “Who are you to talk—and to talk to me! for I hold you in the hollow of my hand. Out of one side of your mouth you knock me for being merciful, out of the other you besmirch my justice. If I were to let you place your heel on my neck you would blaspheme God for giving man a humble heart.”

  “Do it and have done,” Hol replied, jerking his head toward his hall.

  But Dammerung said awfully, “You are in no position now to give an order to the meanest man, much less his prince. Come, Lady—” he beckoned to the golden-haired woman who had appeared with Brand the Hammer on the steps of the house. “Come! I am about to tear the universe in twain.”

  Lady Kinloss, with her sleeping man-cub in her arms, came down the front steps and walked with practiced tread toward them as if she were always walking on glass and had learned long ago not to cut herself. Her eyes jumped from Dammerung’s face to her husband’s, warring with hope, warring against despair.

  Margaret held out her free hand. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I told you he would come. It is better now.”

  Dammerung slipped her arm from his and stood apart. “The hurt and the heartache has gone on long enough. There will be an end to it. My Lady Kinloss,” there was no mockery in his voice—he spoke very gently— “Bloodburn of Hol has long since broken his pact with you and the bond between you is dissolved. I strip you of him. Of his house and his honour others will strip him: I can leave that work undone for now. For now I bid you: of all this, be free.”

  As the words were coming from his lips, full-blooded and final and curiously tender, Kinloss had been staring at Bloodburn’s face. There was no surprise in her countenance, no regret, but there was not much relief either. When she spoke her voice was thin and grey.

  “I know. I have known for a long time now. You did not think I knew, but I always knew. Once I was sorry, for you had been a fool, but then you were a fool who wanted no enlightenment and I was not sorry for you anymore. For these past few years I have quietly, desperately hated you. My only regret was that I had not courage enough to get free.”

  “Few of us do,” Margaret observed. “We must, many of us, have someone come to get us.”

  “Hmm!” murmured Dammerung. “That is my gift to you, my lady. I only regret I could not have given it sooner. And now for your gift, sirrah! A lord and gentleman must keep his promise.” He stepped out toward the house, interlocking his fingers and swinging them back behind his head until the muscles across his chest crackled. Then he put out his hands as if to grasp something, braced his knees, and cried, “Splinter the cedars of Lebanon!” —and jerked his elbows down.

  The ridge-pole of the hall cracked like the spine of a sacrificial bull. With a groan of timber it reared and buckled, blazing with a corona of sunlight—and struck fire, flames licking pure-white in sheets and swirls and serpentine banks of heat down the support beams and across the shingles. A serving maid somewhere gave a shriek of dismay but no one took a step toward the house. Dammerung passed a hand through the air—the fire leapt skyward at the gesture—then he fitted the saddles of his thumbs into the lean curve of his hips and watched the blaze at work.

  “You bastard!” Huw Daggerman cried of a sudden. Margaret jerked round toward him, but that was her mistake; she did not see that Bloodburn had wrenched out of Aikin’s grasp and had made a lunge, not for Kinloss, but for her. She swung away and had her back exposed to him for a split second. She saw Daggerman sprinting back up the hedges toward her and felt the jolt as Bloodburn swung her up in his arms—the world was a whirl of sky-fire and gravel—and begin to run. She screamed incoherently with rage and fought him like a cat, kicking and clawing, hitting with all the sharpest bones of her body, but the whipcorded old man ran doggedly on, down the hedgerow, through a low arbour—she knocked the back of her head on the wood—and turned in through an alae of trees before she found mind enough to see.

  Daggerman was still hot after them, dodging bushes with the agility of a man half his age, but Dammerung was already matching him with speed—overtaking him—leaving him behind. Through the wrecked streamers of her hair and the jolting of Bloodburn’s gait she could see the rage on the War-wolf’s face.

  You fool! She kicked with her knees at Bloodburn’s stomach. You fool! You are done for!

  Dammerung flung out his hand, fingers spread and stiffened. Bloodburn’s body seemed to come dispossessed of his spirit: he came to an abrupt stop on wrenched knees, his arms locked, his head flung back and the veins in his neck standing out as if he were being throttled. Margaret was hurled to the ground and rolled over and over until a low hawthorn stopped her with a leafy crash. She staggered to her knees and looked back.

  Dammerung came abreast of Bloodburn and wrenched him round by the shoulder. The man’s eyes were bloodshot, filled with an inner agony, but Dammerung was beyond pity. He pressed his fingertips into the man’s shoulder and drove him to his knees.

  “Did you think you could play this game with us?” he rasped, the breath growling in his lungs. “You are no match for my family or the quarrels that may arise among us. If you should die before we meet again, I’ll know you on the Last Day and testify against the blood on your hands. If we should meet again here—” he snapped out a knife and slashed it, two strokes
, down each of Bloodburn’s cheeks. The man shuddered but made no sound. “You’ll bear that mark and I will know you, and I promise I will be your death should fate bring us to the battlefield together. Now get you gone,” he roared, jerking the man to his feet, “before I forget myself and braid up your guts in your belly!”

  He flung the man away. Bloodburn stumbled, blinded by blood and sweat, and was lost down the curve of trees. That was the last Margaret ever saw of him.

  “No—ow!—I am fine.” She shrank away from Huw Daggerman’s attempts to help her up. But then Dammerung was there, reaching down and grabbing her by the forearm to haul her to her feet. His palm was searing hot. “Why is everyone doing that to me?” she demanded irrationally. “I only want to be left in peace!”

  “For some it was a war over Helen, for some it was a war over shipping rights to the Black Sea—” green sparks glinted from between the War-wolf’s teeth as he growled “—and for some there was no difference and God help us all.”

  He stood a moment in silence, watching the blaze of the roof over the tops of the hawthorns; in the distance a mockingbird screamed. Over the building the sky was shivering with heat until the blue seemed to run like water and the clouds flickered like wings. The fire was still white-hot: a quick, consuming fire that did not deign to curl the shattered ends of wood into petals of orange flame, but sent the wood up in flashes of light, gone in an instant, too hot to chew before it swallowed. Her head cold from exhaustion and dizziness, Margaret wished she had the knack of reaching into that fire so that it might warm her.

  “It is good to have you back.”

  She took her eyes off the fire and fixed them on Dammerung’s face; it wavered under a film of weariness before it came into focus again. “I said you would come,” she insisted. She put out her hand for his shoulder, uncertain on her feet. “I said you would come and that you would bring the fire.”

  His fingers locked around her wrist. His eyes, serious and half-laughing at once, flickered like his witching flames across her face. He beckoned Huw Daggerman to go on ahead of them and made to gently lead her back along the alae, but as soon as the thief was out of sight he stopped her, took her jaw in the saddles of his thumbs, and turned her head from one side to the other, a frown gathering between his brows.

  “Bloodburn did this, I take it.”

  The tip of his forefinger touched a bruise and made it smart. A little reproving grunt spasmed in her throat. “Mm, yes. I lost my head—for once.” Briefly, as he caught his tongue between his teeth and worked at the broken skin, she told him what had happened to her since she had come to Bloodburn’s hall. Every now and then his eyes would jump off his work and fix on hers, and there was a high light of laughter in them that made her feel happy.

  “Better?” he asked at length, stepping back.

  She prodded her face. “Yes, I think so. Quite.”

  “And your back?”

  “As good as it was before.”

  They walked side by side up the row of trees, through the mockingbird’s shrieking and the dappling, eastward-streaming shadows that fell across their path.

  “What happened?” Margaret asked. “Did we win the field?”

  Dammerung appeared grave. “We won, but perhaps only because Gro and I shattered their Right Wing and Skander was admirably swift to come in from the rear. The Foot was a mess and the losses on either side comparable.”

  So, that was where Skander had gone. “And the Left Wing?” She hoped, but did not believe, that any good word would be had concerning Rupert.

  Dammerung shook his head. “We gave and sustained heavy losses, but in the end we took the field. Rupert—he and I did not meet. I was…busy with other things.”

  The explosion. The explosion and the landslide. “That was you! I thought Vesuvius had gone off. I don’t know what I thought. I blacked out before anything could make sense.”

  “Of course that was me,” he said, slight offence in his tone. “You told me not to spare a thought for you, but I did and you had better be bloody thankful for it. I nearly killed Gro, though,” he added, with a ruckle in his throat like a horse’s laugh. “I saw only the Red Rose, nothing else, and there was not time to think! In cool, meditative retrospect it would have been better had I not blown the top of the hill out of itself and collapsed a whole side of it, but then I had a battle-axe scratching between my shoulder-blades and a shock of lightning in my face, and I was not thinking very clearly.”

  “Well, I forgive you,” she said placidly.

  “Avaunt!“ he called to the others as they came in view, the humour of her simmering at the edges of his voice. “Avaunt! Sa cy avaunt! There are still acres of daylight hours left. Art done here? Oh, enough!” he added, and swept his hand at the house. With an inhaling roar the fire swept into itself, shook in a circle of crystal light so fierce Margaret could barely look at it, and like the angel of death called abruptly home it rocketed wholesale into the mellow summer sky.

  A soft haze of smoke lay over the building.

  Dammerung turned on Lady Kinloss. “Is there aught I can take you, madam, or would you rather stay here?”

  Kinloss did not turn from watching the empty sky and the film of smoke that lay like the soft murmuring pall of sorrow over something that has died. “No, my lord,” she said at last. “No, I think I will stay.”

  He went to her side; his hand moved as if he meant to place it on her shoulder, companionably, but before the crucial moment he dropped it back by his side. After a quick glance at her face he, too, watched the sky and the images the smoke was sketching on it, and Margaret knew he was saying something gentle with his silence to the shell of Kinloss’s heart.

  Kinloss looked at him finally and something like hope bloomed on her lips. “Good-bye. And thank you.”

  But he shook his head. “Not good-bye, my lady. I never leave my people, though I may go away from them for awhile. Until next time.” And he saluted her.

  She watched them as they went across the lawn to their horses and sorted out their mounts. There was none for Huw Daggerman; he swung up behind Aikaterine—which Aikaterine did not appear to like—and contrived to get the reins from her.

  Rubico bounded from the press. “Send the cub to me when he is of age,” Dammerung called to Kinloss. Digging into his tunic, he withdrew the house key and tossed it underhanded toward her; it fell in the gravel at her feet with a ping of metal light. “I will teach him what it is to be a man.”

  Kinloss raised her hand.

  “I forgot to give her back her dress,” Margaret noted when they had reached the high road and were going at a smart lope through the open pastureland.

  “We will package it and mail it post,” said Dammerung, “just as soon as we rejoin Skander.”

  “Where did you leave him? And where are we?”

  Dammerung stooped to avoid a low-growing branch and murmured something about highway maintenance. “I left him on the bank of the Besor. Mark Roy has gone on ahead to Orzelon-gang: it seems, while we were speeding to Centurion’s aid, Rupert had already taken Bloodburn’s fleet and stationed an army on the coast of Orzelon-gang. Word of the invasion came last night.”

  Margaret’s eye travelled over the pastoral country. It looked a little like Seescardale, but longer, wider, and more green; in the distance she could see a red barn and a herd of white milk-cows huddled under the awning of a long milking bothie. She wanted to curse Rupert—for he deserved it—but she was too tired of cursing. Cursing did no good.

  “You are quiet.”

  The horses’ shoes rang out on the metalled causeway.

  “I am always quiet,” Margaret protested.

  “Yes—” One silvered eye flickered her way. “But it is not your raging silence anymore. It is more like the silence at the eye of a storm.”

  “This is no small wonder.” She twisted her shoulders as if to let the notion slide from her back. “The eye of the storm is where you are.”

  He seemed t
o smile and, setting his teeth on edge, began whistling very prettily as they went along.

  They rode until sunset at a smart pace, but Dammerung told her that they would not reach the camp until tomorrow morning at the earliest. “We came like the whirlwind,” he admitted quietly, lowering his voice so that the others behind would not hear, “in case Bloodburn should have hurt you. But better now we let the horses have a breath. We will need them in Orzelon-gang later.”

  The lights in the countryside were coming out; in the groves whole swarms of fireflies lit up the gloom, and across the swells of pastureland Margaret could see candles set in the windows of the houses, calling the menfolk home to supper. Woodsmoke hung in the air. It did not look like a war-ravaged landscape. Not yet.

  The rattle of their hooves and the jink of their accoutrements sang out silver and telltale menacing in the dark.

  They did not meet anyone until they swept down the low brow of a wooded hill, passed a turn-off for a ford, and moved to continue up the other side of the depression. Of a sudden Rubico shied and leapt into Mausoleum, who put back his ears and grumbled, halting, bumping against the next horse behind.

  “Come on out!” There was sing of metal as Dammerung drew Widowmaker; a pale tongue of silver fire gleamed in the dark. “We all smell you—and my horse is like to rustle you out with his hooves. Stand forth and show yourself like a man.”

  “I do not hide,” came a thin voice withered like an apple-leaf.

  The hair rose on the back of Margaret’s neck.

  Widowmaker lowered. “I see you now,” said Dammerung softly. “Come on out. Come out into the circle of our light.”

  The mean, gnarled little figure of a woman limped into the ring of lanternlight; two translucent eyes, paled with age, turned up against the light and looked back into Dammerung’s face. Margaret saw his lips come apart with a faint, confused surprise, as if he knew her from some place but could not quite place her.

  “Do you wander by habit alone in the dark, old mother?” he asked. “All lands are not safe now, even for you, at night.”