Plenilune

by Jennifer Freitag

  “Yes, and probably better fare than you had.”

  “Pssht.” He waved a dismissive hand. “My stomach isn’t a lady’s purse. It can handle the oddest of meals. The farmer’s sausage was genuine and fine, if a little spicy. It seems to be settling well.” He ground his teeth on a yawn.

  She passed an eye over his clothing. He was rumpled and dogged by sleep, and had very much the look of a man who has passed a night without a bed, but, save for his bare feet, he was remarkably clean and warmly clad. As the day warmed he would need to shed some layers; if she could contrive it, she would persuade him to exchange his unpressed clothing for something fresh from his bag. She mentioned it, and he murmured something into his palm about it being a sensible idea, but he made no move to fetch his pack.

  “I’ll ring,” she said, striding to the bell. “No need to bestir yourself.”

  “Mm.”

  Tunner appeared in the doorway as she was bending to her own pack to remove her riding gear. He, too, was pale and looked ill-used—his left hand was in a bandage—but his brows spoke an eagerness to serve.

  “Madam called?”

  “Would you be so good as to fetch the War-wolf’s bag from his room?”

  “I am already there.” The man’s figure disappeared around the doorframe and his voice came back to her from halfway down the hallway.

  She left the door to the room ajar and slipped into the narrow washroom. With some difficulty—her skirts were voluminous and the room was confining—she put off her surcoat and nightgown and put on a dress of some white, transparent light stuff with the moleskin dress, its sleeves detached, overtop. She put on her boots, folded up her discarded clothing, and knelt to cram the unwieldy fabric back into the oblong canvas bulk that was her bag. To her surprise and satisfaction she was not wholly out of breath when she was finished.

  Tunner had been and gone when she emerged, fighting in the washroom doorway to get both herself and the bag through the frame. Dammerung’s pack had been left on the floor at the head of the bed; Dammerung himself, unceremoniously, had pitched over the length of the mattress and appeared to be sound asleep.

  Either that, or he’s a damn good faker. She dropped the bag on the floor with a thump. Dammerung did not stir. She had been in the washroom, dressing and preening and putting things away—and making the room look as nearly as it had when she found it—for nearly fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes would have to do. She poked him, got no response, prodded him to no avail, and felt a sudden pang of terror at the blankness of his face. Gripping the front of his tunic in both hands, steeling the muscles of her back, she jerked him upright, calling his name.

  He came awake with a quick movement of his hands, wrenching free her grip and thrusting her back a step, and jerked, instinctively, to the side so that he smacked his head into the wall. “Oh!” he grunted, and sat a moment in perfect stillness with his head in his hand.

  “You wouldn’t wake,” Margaret said accusingly. “I was really quite worried about you.”

  “I was waking up,” he protested. “I had a dream inside my dream. When you called me I woke out of the one dream into the next and you were angry with me for some reason.” He swung his legs over the side of the bed. “You said I had tracked blood all over the place and oughtn’t I to be ashamed of myself and who was going to mop it up but yourself?”

  “Don’t be silly.” She stooped and hauled at the resisting strap of his bag. Did he keep bricks in it...? “Tunner would clean it up. Now change or iron yourself, one or the other. We should be going soon.”

  With a languid, fluid motion he slipped the bag onto his lap and began unbuttoning it, teeth on edge, a whistle fluttering between them.

  ...Birth is had at a hefty price,

  But death we have for free...

  “The blue one, do you think?” His hands twisted free a bit of sky-blue silk and the wing-tip of a gold embroidered peacock. “I think I mended the tear under the arm.”

  “No, I mended it, but you were there. Do wear it—it makes your eyes less pale and unchancy—but be sure not to sling into it so violently as you did before. By the twelve houses,” she added, turning away. “You would think you were wrestling Rupert to the ground the way you haul the jackets on.”

  “He is less easily torn,” Dammerung remarked, rising and passing on into the washroom.

  But Margaret was left standing, stunned, in the middle of the floor; in that unguarded remark she found herself facing the vivid scene of her last night in Marenové with its whirl of lanternlight and Rupert’s face, forever fixed before her in a kind of wretched, golden horror, looking back at her with the expression of one riven to the heart.

  How sorely I hurt him, she thought without any trace of fury. I did not even know the choice I was making, to run with the War-wolf or to live as the submissive shadow of de la Mare. He knew, and he knew I did not know, which could only make it the more bitter to him. He lost me. He lost me good and soundly, and I think—I think, in his way, he actually did love me.

  But then she remembered what way that was, that stark, cruel, selfish way, and the blood rushed bolstering into her cheek. Very busily she repacked the bags and had them by the door, waiting for Dammerung to shoulder them, when he emerged from the washroom. The fifteen minutes of sleep seemed to have revived him; there was a brighter spark in his eye, a yearning in the twitch of his nose for the scent of the road and blood and glory, and with the wrinkled, mud-splattered clothing exchanged for clean broadcloth and silk, he looked,

  “Quite the war-lord,” Margaret noted. “That is the idea, I think.”

  “If I can fool you, I can fool anyone.” He stooped, silk rustling, to swing the bags under his arms.

  “Oh, I don’t know...” Leaning into the movement, Margaret stepped after him into the hallway and swung the door shut—shut and finished—behind them. “Do we lie when we are only human, and not gods, and bear ourselves up on a thrill of greatness? And what are humans, after all? Should we consider ourselves thoroughly cheated if we happen to find a little of the fool among the gold?”

  Dammerung laughed under his breath and a strain of longing edged his voice. “To have time to answer all those questions with you—well, it has taken the life-span of more than one great man for men to work at an answer for each of those questions, and the answers, I think, are not complete.”

  “I know. And death, for all of them, is the last and hardest question mark.”

  “So it is. So it is...”

  In a blaze of golden hour Margaret rode out alongside the man who had come out of the barrow and brought death upon many of them, toward the northeastern horizon and the myriad of question marks that waited for them there. She thought of that, for a mere moment, then the level yellow rays of the sun—which was drawing on close to Midsummer—and the flash of gossamer in the breeze swept the grimness of war away and she jigged gaily to the jig of her horse while someone among Gro’s few retainers sang—jauntily and raggedly, for they were all going at a smart trot—a hymn that he must have learned in church. The gardens around Gemeren were lost in a bend of the road; over two hills and a long stretch of pastureland, the upper ramparts of the house were swallowed up from view.

  “Gro,” said Dammerung, breaking out of a conversation with Margaret the way a kingfisher breaks out of the woodshore, “the land around here is something half park, half pastureland. This is not like the Mares.”

  Riding behind and between them, Gro replied, “You are not often in Orzelon-gang?”

  “Not for two or three years, certainly, and Orzelon-gang is a peaceful, quiet Honour. I am not needed here very often.”

  Gro went on as if there had been no interrupting question. “South Tarnjewel is wholly agrarian, but here in the midlands we fly our hawks and run our hounds, and my friend the king spends time here, when he can spare the time, on long weekends hunting. So you see a little pasture and tended parkland, for my people both tend the soil and attend to the upkeep of our lord�
��s deer.”

  “Oh, you are a hartman for Mark Roy?” asked Margaret. She checked on Dammerung’s face to be sure she was not stepping out of bounds. “I did not realize land-owners held that position.”

  “An’ sure,” said Dammerung. “To be a steward of the king’s land and of the meat of his board is one of the greatest honours a man can bear. After all—what is man?” he added in a sidelong murmur to her. “What...what is man...” And his voice trailed off, his eyes, narrowed suddenly, fixed on something ahead and beside her.

  Mausoleum ruckled anxiously as her hand tightened on the reins. They were coming to the convergence of two roads in a wood; through the tangled undergrowth, on the other side of the way, Margaret could see a movement of horses’ legs and a long low trail of dust.

  Rubico bounded ahead of her, head tucked in, legs flashing out and coming in with exaggerated show. Dammerung had flung back his black cloak so that it purled and billowed away from the hilt of his sword, and in magnificent state he reached the crossroads before the conjoining caravan and halted, horse’s legs spread wide. Coming up behind him, Margaret’s heart spasmed like a hare in a wire when she saw why.

  In a slant of sunlight, poised uncertain at the sudden appearance of another stallion, the familiar sheeny figure of Witching Hour stood in the way, the armed, helmed figure of his master in the saddle.

  Dammerung set his fist on his hip and twisted askance in the saddle, one brow cocked. After a pause, Rupert reached up and jerked the chin-strap free on his helm and slung it off to rest it on his knee; his face, now bared, was at once grim and handsome; his brow was silvered and sanguine where the rim of his helm had left a weal and the sweat had pooled in the depression.

  “And you are?” he asked.

  Dammerung jerked up his chin defiantly. “Numbering some eight, if you count the lady—and she has proven nigh as good a man at this game.”

  “I am not surprised.”

  “And you?”

  “Sixteen.”

  “Oh! Should be fair even, then.”

  “Something like that... What are you about?”

  Dammerung thrust a thumb over his shoulder in a vague way. Rubico, feeling his master’s movement, snuffled and sidled and appeared uneasy. “These are the king’s parks. We have found some curious game in these thickets.”

  The emotive brow—as famous, Margaret thought, as the All Hallows’ smile—slashed upward in a sudden daring humour. “You don’t say? I, too, have been about a hunting business: a few hounds, it seems, had gone white about the mouth and needed tending to. But here is a pretty quarry: two war-lords and a war-lord’s cubs, some hounds-at-leash and a woman who is almost as good—” his tone turned iron “—as a man.”

  Dammerung’s voice, too, sang softly like drawn steel. “Best not kick over this bee-skep, sirrah.”

  “And do else what?” the other demanded. He put his helm down more firmly on his knee in a gesture both mocking and askance. “’Tis either that, or gang on together—and we know we cannot do that.”

  Dammerung was silent for a moment, thinking. Margaret knew he was thinking very seriously along the thin, magical, almost imperceptible lines of cause and effect, chance and circumstance, that this small, important moment could produce; over against that, she could not help thinking simply what an unhappy piece of providence it was.

  At last Dammerung seemed to rouse and gestured to the open road. “Oh, go you onward. We will come quietly on behind and go, when the parting of the roads comes, on our own bloody way. Unless,” he added, turning his head in a way reminiscent of his ruddy familiar, “you suspect me of duplicity.”

  De la Mare’s nostrils flared with contempt. “There is a simple code of honour in the little mind of a fool. Of duplicity, it is the lady I would suspect.”

  Margaret heard and felt the tear and gash of bitterness rake through the man’s words, but it came to her as a relief, out of the simmering danger of the moment, that she did not even feel the need to suppress a flinch. His words flew wide of her, but they hit Dammerung square. She felt the War-wolf’s anger, which had been half-mocking and almost mere annoyance before, become an awesome, terrible thing—she felt it, not in his look or in his aura, but in the little fox-coloured search-light that had fallen down inside of her months before and had burned steadily there; she felt it flare in a burst of angry light, bare its teeth in an airless roar, and almost—almost—pull back to strike.

  To stave them off she interposed bluntly, “I have often found, sir, that it takes one to know one.”

  Rupert struggled mightily—it could not be seen, but she could feel it—and overwon his worse sense; after a moment, he lifted his helm off his knee in a kind of salutary gesture, the black horse-tail plume of it spraying in the wind. “Perhaps I speak out of place in the presence of two who know me so well.”

  There was an embittered truthfulness in his tone, but there was an acid regret in his eye and a hardness, a fierceness like fangs, that shaped his lips. Margaret took the green branch of his honesty and tossed it aside. “What do we know of each other, save that, for good or ill, by heaven and hell, we will always, the three of us, be set at odds with each other? That is enough to know. That is enough to judge by.”

  “I would give but this one piece of advice,” he retorted.

  She arched her brow. “Advice? For us? Why?”

  His haggard face darkened like a sun eclipsed. “Because I am honest, and it can do me no harm.”

  The soft breeze purled and thumped in Dammerung’s cloak; out of the movement of it Margaret heard the many times it had been said the War-wolf had died, innocently, on a boar-hunt, and felt the gall of the lie in her belly. But aloud she said only, “Honesty is the greatest of our misfortunes, and caring second greatest. Think a moment longer: you may regret your advice.”

  They had gone beyond swords now. The flare of search-light had been the true measure of the soul at war, and Margaret watched the dark heart of the war-lord clench and harden, muscles rolling with power, sick with bitterness, hungry for revenge. In another moment he would decide against it and hold his tongue. Hold it, she willed him furiously. Hold it! I want neither praise nor censure from you, only silence. Only silence.

  But the moment did not come. Before it could be too late he said, quickly and angrily, “This is my advice to you: to know that I have the one advantage that I know the human heart, for I am a master of it. It is full of power and cruelty, and will dominate, for that is the destiny of man. You speak of goodness and of heaven, but in that you only cheat yourselves. There is a heaven—surely I know! for it ever lives to make life hard for me and mine—but who are you to think there is not a chink in your pretty armour, a chink of human will and self and blind ambition for power that I will not find, that I will not use to get a hold of you and bend you or break you? You are born of the stuff of my lords, like clay in their hands, and I will always—I will always rule you, for you are of the same spirit and flesh and blood, and when the time comes for the last reckoning and war you will roll your dice with me and lie buried under my fields.”

  “Rupert?” Dammerung called softly, questioningly. Rupert turned his head, an apocalyptic shining in his eye. “Is Plenilune a hollow cup for you, with which to hold your wine?”

  “Which vine shall we plant here, you and I,” Rupert flashed back, “and whose vintage shall we drink?”

  “As the Lord lives, not yours!” said Dammerung. “An’ sure it tastes of vinegar and blood.”

  “You would know that.”

  Margaret was afraid the fight would break out afresh, and she was not sure what she would do to overset the balance of the chessboard in their favour again—was it ever in their favour, or did God’s little soldiers go singing in the dark to their deaths, she wondered?—when Dammerung did a sudden, awful thing. He flicked his hand through the air, turned a swift little gust of wind that sang with light on its razor-sharp edges, and said in a low voice that rumbled in the stones at their feet
—

  “Go.”

  It could have been Plenilune herself which spoke—it could have been the Dragon. It was so small a word, so simply spoken, but even Margaret felt the weight of it—A word of power—and Rupert, with his head uplifted, though she knew his spirit bowed, gave his jewelled spurs a jink against his horse’s flanks and shouldered on, wordless, the dark light of murder flashing sidelong in the corner of his eye.

  When at last he was gone, and the bend in the road had hidden the last horse-tail in his train, she shuddered as if someone had trod on her grave.

  He actually did love me.

  Staring after them, Gro said, “I feel in my bones that great history is made between you in our midst.”

  But Dammerung’s lips curled in a foxy, feral snarl. “Aye, and with great history comes always great losses. Step up, Rubico!”

  They rode into a hectic camp in the midst of a thick scarlet dusk. They had left Rupert somewhere along the road and had never seen him, save for his tracks, until a parting of the ways; then they had climbed northeast into the hill country until the ruddy, shadowed bulk of empty Aloisse-gang was the only thing etched against the golden twilight and the haze of the campfires hung low in the sudden drops and glens of the land.

  “It seems we have come in the wake of a battle,” remarked Dammerung, sniffing at the blood in the air. Margaret smelled only wood-smoke and horse-sweat—most of the latter came from Mausoleum and drenched her gown. But despite whatever had gone forward that afternoon among the steep runs of the glens and the rolling scrub-and-turf around the ancient castle, a weary cheer went up on all sides as they rode in. Men stood up, leaning on their swords, to salute them; war-hounds bayed and signed greetings in the air with their forepaws as they reared up against the strain of their leads. Jewelled fires winked out of the dusk; the scent of roasting meat brought the warm sweet water to Margaret’s mouth and she realized that all day she had lost her appetite and was only just now getting it back with a ravenous ferocity.