“Heigh-o, here we are—”
Rubico swung to the right, cutting Mausoleum off, and trotted the last uneven bit of turf to the bald patch before the conspicuous blue tent of Capys. Skander was out front, limned with blood and tattered, a weariness about his shoulders; he was just taking a letter from a post-rider when the shadow of Dammerung’s horse loomed over him. With a little sickened start Margaret watched him look up: his face was haggard and grey and his upper and lower lip, in a perfect diagonal, had been slashed and then stitched together again.
“Whoa!” cried Dammerung, to his horse and his cousin at once. “That’s a pretty piece of work. Rum luck for Woodbird.”
“Joo you know,” said Skander through ground teeth, “I shot the very shame t’ing when Lock’ear gave it to ’e.”
“I hope you gave him back as good as he gave you.” Dammerung swung his leg over Rubico’s neck and jumped to the ground; he passed the horse off and Margaret twisted as he reached for her, his hands closing about her waist to lift her off. “I’ll have a look at it before supper. It is all sort of unfun trying to eat with two busted lips.” His eyes fell on the letter. “News?”
Skander broke the seal, opened it, and ran a hasty eye over the contents. His hand wavered inconsequentially. “Shurvance. Jus’ an update: all’sh well at home.” The h seemed to have given him pain, for his cheek convulsed and he folded the letter away. “You?”
Margaret looked over her shoulder to find Lord Gro and Mark Roy’s sons had drifted silently away, falling in among the other lords and land-owners. The cousins and she herself—whatever she was—were left alone.
We walk alone.
“Among other things,” murmured Dammerung, slipping her arm in his and turning to the back-flung tent-flap of the blue booth, “we met with Rupert on the road today.”
Skander’s head turned a fraction, too quickly, and he stopped it before he could meet Dammerung’s eye. He said nothing. At the entryway to the tent Dammerung pushed Margaret forward and she went in ahead of them, ducking into the familiar lamp-washed interior of the war-lord’s war-room. Gold pricked out from every surface and where the gold was not growling, the deep purr of dark-stained wood was thrumming. On an impulse she smiled; the heart-thing in her chest unwound and relaxed.
Dammerung put his cousin in a chair, turned him into the light, and stood with his knees bent a little before him, thumbs and forefingers playing with the gashes and stitching on Skander’s lips. Skander took it gamely; he watched out of the corners of his eyes as Margaret helped them all to glasses of wine; she did not feel quite up to watching Dammerung at his work.
While he worked, Dammerung sketched a brief overview of the past twenty-four hours. She thought he played up his annoyance over the intrusion at Gemeren rather much, and downplayed his encounter with Rupert significantly. Leaving a chalice of wine in Skander’s hand, Margaret’s eyes met his and they shared a little understanding between them while Dammerung went on, soothing angry red skin and slipping loose cat-gut. You and I, thought Margaret, know him too well to miss when he is hurt and nettled.
“You can talk now,” said Dammerung, giving Skander’s rough, unshaven cheek a smart clap with the flat of his hand. “Now is your turn. Thank you—” He took his own glass from Margaret.
“We saw Rupert too—the man gets about.” Skander tested his lips. They still sported angry red lines, which would turn later into silver scars, but the skin had closed. Cutting her eyes aside to Dammerung’s lean, lithe figure thrown casually against a battered table, the sparking red-speaking wine-glass clasped lightly in the long fingers, Margaret wondered how much of the War-wolf was good flesh and how much was, like Plenilune’s own scars, silvered tissue from past wounds.
The foxy head twisted at Skander’s words; a brow arched.
“We had the better part of Locklear’s forces against us—quite the flower of Rupert’s army, I reckon from experience. I swear no sooner did I get here, coming up from Helming Side, then I was entrenched in a glen-war. Locklear better knows glens than I. I think, providence aside, that it was sheer determination on our part that saw us through. I did give the man back as good as he gave me, and more, I imagine.” He gestured out toward the limned night where the Tarnjewel sky was lighting the tapers in honour of the dying day. “Five glens down, between a nasty burl, a few rocks, and a drop into a stream, he cut me across the face—a masterful stroke, too, though it wasn’t enough to kill me, which is what he wanted—and of a sudden I saw red. I gave him a neat, clean clip across the waist-band, enough to sever his leather and trousers and even felt a bit of bone come too. I nearly wenched him, and the blow sent him into the water. I was too busy to go after him. I don’t know what became of him, but I doubt he met his end there.”
“You said you saw Rupert,” Margaret reminded him.
He shifted in his chair toward her. “Only at the end. He came up by way of the post-road and went west along the outskirts of us. The battle was over thirty minutes after that. That was all I saw of him.”
Dammerung, too, looked toward the twilight glory of the west, and though he did not speak, Margaret could hear his thoughts move in the narrow seaway of his eyes:
You are out there, watching me.
Aloud he said, presently, “I wish this were over.”
And Skander murmured, “Not for awhile yet, coz.”
Margaret put down the little silver tureen full, not of soup, but of meat pasties. What fickle things appetites were: she had lost hers again. “Not to sound callous and cold-hearted,” she broke in: “is there a place where I might bathe?”
Dammerung came off the table. Skander leaned forward and took a pasty and eased it into his mouth. “There is a secluded bit of glen with a fall and pool just down the slope back of the house—tent,” he amended. Grimly, stiffly, he shouldered out of his chair and moved toward the tent opening. “I am going on the rounds. I lost my lieutenant Scilay a week ago and until I can replace him the rounds are mine to do alone. Do you come?” he asked hopefully, turning back to his cousin.
But Dammerung smiled wearily, foxily. “God rest his soul. No, sorry. A lonely, introspective walk it is for you.”
The man murmured something under his breath about Woodbird, something which Margaret could not quite catch, and then he was gone.
Dammerung leaned back against the table, one foot crossed beside the other.
“He called it a house,” she remarked, looking over the tent.
There was a mirror on the far side of the interior; in it, she could see Dammerung nod once. “Months of campaign will do that to you. But tell me you did not feel a little stirring as of feathers in a nest when you came in here.”
She nodded her admittance, found her pack, and dug in it for a clean shift. Beside her, upreared in shadow at odd angles with everything, Dammerung looked down and watched her. A pent-up feeling simmered under the form of him; when she had found her comb and had gone looking further into her bag for her second pair of earrings—which always fell to the bottom corner and seemed to get lost—she said,
“Whatever it is, you had better say it or your hair will catch fire.”
He laughed gustily and small sparks crackled around his dog-teeth. “I wanted to ask if you would be bull-set against me accompanying you.”
Sitting back on her heels, she frowned up at him. His head was bent into shadow, but his eyes were oddly illumined. What a truly callous, thoughtless creature I have become! she half-laughed to herself. “Truth to tell,” she admitted aloud, “I had always counted on you coming. It isn’t safe, anyway, for me to go alone.”
“Had you?” He put out his hand and shoved it through the crest of her hair, hard, as one might rough the head of a favourite hound. She unbalanced and landed on her buttocks. “My main thought was that you had assumed—but God help a man who assumes upon a lady’s favour!”
“Tush!” she said, and grasped after his hand to haul her to her feet. “You could use a rinse too.”
He went to a trunk and rummaged for some clothing. “I know,” his muffled voice came back. “The grit and grime and shadow of Rupert is loathsome even to me. I come. Après vous…”
There was still a little light on the horizon when they went out but not enough to light the way. Dammerung, canny in the dark, stepped up beside her and together they wound their way down the little half-worn path to the sound of running water. Presently Margaret found herself on the sloping drop of a rocky bank looking down into a rocky pool with a fall a little more than a man high. With care she crouched, steadied herself with her hands, and extended her legs onto the narrow shore below. Dammerung stepped down beside her.
“You could really believe,” he murmured, glancing round, “that a place like this was magic. It has a warm and pleasant genius.”
“The water is cold,” said Margaret, testing it.
With a flick of his wrist Dammerung found a stag’s-crown of branchwork that had got caught in the rocky wall of the tiny glen; a few dozen points of light sprang out of the dark from each twig-tip, casting a yellow pall of light over them and sending down little waving flecks of light to play in the deep dimension of the water. Margaret felt them dance inside her.
Her companion sat down on a low stone and began rolling up the hem of his trousers. Crouching, she untied her moleskin overdress—which the water would have ruined—and slid, one leg first and then the other, sucking in a startled breath as she did so, into the frothing water.
“O-o-oh…!” she cried.
Dammerung looked up from a blind fiddling with his shirt buttons. “Very cold?”
She swept up to her shoulders in the black water. “The air was warm and this is cold!”
“Sets the blood tingling!”
He knelt like a dog at the water’s edge and thrust his head into the stream. With steady scrubbing he pulled and tousled the pliant ends of his hair through his fingers. Doing the same, Margaret noted that he would need a pair of scissors presently and wondered if the blue-jay man was also good at that sort of thing.
“I forget how hair grows,” he said into his knees. “I never had this problem when I was a fox…”
Her own hair had grown in the past nine months: a mermaid’s net of darkness spread across the surface of the water all around her, flickering gold with firelight, flickering white where the crescent of the earth shot down a few spare rays of light and lit the wet dark around her. The ends were caught in the bubbling torrent; her feet, rolling and catching at rounded stones below, were buffeted in a forceful, watery dance. She felt submerged in Plenilune and the warm loam-scent of dusk swelled in the light and the dark into her nostrils. She shut her eyes and breathed.
She was half done, and Dammerung all finished, when suddenly he said, “What does Lord Gro do here?” and he rose, spinning on one heel. Margaret looked up, surprised and a little blushing; against the heirloom-blue of nightfall moved the staid figure of the Gemeren land-owner, the silk-moving grey figure of his dog at his side.
“Capys said I would find you here,” he said, stopping on the rocky overhang of the bank.
“And so you do,” replied Dammerung levelly. She felt him reaching, feeling, testing the air. “What is amiss?”
But Gro put up his chin indicatively toward Skander’s tent and said, “He asks that you come.”
“Then I come.” The War-wolf stooped and swept up his fresh shirt, white and shining in the dark, and pulled it on. “Of your courtesy, would you leave Snati with Margaret?”
Gro said nothing, but clapped his hands once and pointed to a bit of level ground on the bank. Obedient, Snati dropped onto his hindquarters and gazed down brightly, knowingly, at Margaret. She sank a little deeper into the water.
Dammerung cast her one last assuring glance before going back up the hillside with Gro, but Margaret did not feel assured. She finished her bath and climbed out under the golden gaze of the big wolf-thing who, with the jerky canine movements of its eyes, watched her kneel over the water to wring out her hair and bend, grimacing, to peel off her soaked underdress to exchange it for a fresh one. Worn and breathless, but clean and newly clothed, she stood pantingly, looking back at Snati’s inscrutable face.
“You are but a dog,” she told him. “What do you care?”
He seemed not to; his face, though intelligent, was not the fox’s: he seemed only to understand and care that she was not in danger.
Margaret bent, cupping her hand, and scooping up a handful of water to fling on the flaming branches. The water hissed and burst into steam, but the flames, cowed a moment, rose again. Pursing her lips, she flung another handful of water and hit the greater part of the flames; they would not go out.
Very well, be that way! she thought petulantly. But as she stooped to wrap up her bundle of soiled clothing she was touched by a cold sense of being watched, as if by eyes, by all those points of flame.
But she had other things to think about as she toiled, limbs chilled and gently aching, up the slope toward the tent. Two sentries stood at hand, faces to the southwest, and they watched her intently as she and the dog walked up to them. They saluted promptly—which was nothing out of the ordinary: the men were always quick and eager to show her deference; but there was something curious in the way the two moved aside for her and the one said,
“I trust thou hast not gone far, my lady.”
She stopped, surprised by his forwardness in speech. “No,” she said slowly. “Only to the little glen. I had the War-wolf’s permission,” she added, though she could not fathom why she should be defending herself to a soldier.
One tentatively patted Snati’s brow. “Thou hast a fair watchdog to heel. That is well.”
She went on, prickling with disturbance and curiosity; she could feel the two soldiers watching her as she went.
It was when she reached the level of Skander’s knoll that she became aware of the tension in the air. It was like moving through a band of dark electricity. Her hair, heavy with the damp, rose even so with the surge of power all around her. Bristling like a witch’s familiar, tensed, wary, she stepped up to the down-flung tent-flap and pushed it aside.
The energy struck her in the face.
Almost upon the instant she stepped in, though few heads turned, all eyes were on her. Skander and Brand and Aikin Ironside were there, grim-faced, standing in a little ring about Dammerung where he sat in a low-slung chair. He had not put on any more than his mud-spattered trousers and his clean starched shirt, but he was wrapped in a sense of fire and spice and danger so thick Margaret feared that if she stepped in any more she might prick the bubble and let loose a hurricane. They all looked at her, sharply—the same looks the soldiers had given her; Margaret had the sense of being pulled into some protective ring by their glances as Dammerung might pull her clear of physical danger with an arm around her hourglass. Frightened now, she looked to the figure they had under guard in their midst.
The man stood between Huw and Gro, arms bound at his back. He had the familiar look of a soldier who has just come through a day-long fight and has had time only to put up his horse and drag his mucky harness over his head. He had several days’ growth of beard on his dirty face, and one cheek had been laid open raggedly, as though by a blow from someone’s signet-ring. He was stripped of armour; his rough shirt had been dragged back on his shoulders so that the collar rose high and uncomfortably under his chin, baring his shoulder-blades at the back. He was a brute-handsome devil, and as the chill night wind blew in past her he, too, looked round, catching her eye with a searching glance unlike that of the others’. She coloured and felt her stomach cringe.
Swiftly, smoothly, Skander stepped out of the ring and raised his naked sword to rest the point on the man’s unbroken cheek. “Put down your eyes, dog,” he said, “or I’ll put them down for you.”
The man switched his eyes from Margaret to Skander; the lips twitched with a sour, involuntary tic, and then the eyes obediently dropped. At the same time Damme
rung’s hand, which had been resting stiff and white on the arm of his chair, turned over, beckoning for Margaret with a single sharp gesture.
She could move then. Head uplifted, the hot blood coursing in her throat, she swept past them. Brand stepped back to make a place for her behind and beside Dammerung. Skander, satisfied, left the soldier to be pinned under the War-wolf’s eye and went out of the ring of war-lords to fetch Margaret’s surcoat from her trunk. She did not look round but she felt the comfortable warmth of it drop about her shoulders and the man’s familiar, big, rough hand settle a moment reassuringly on the curve of her upper arm.
An awful silence, which she had disturbed, fell over the tent again. The soldier and the War-wolf regarded each other in a hot-blooded quiet. Whatever the soldier was thinking it was angry, sullen, but forcibly self-assured; the War-wolf seemed to be listening at once to his own thoughts and to the thoughts of the man he held under the silvered point of his gaze.
As last the latter tipped up his chin, rousing from his silence. “Lord Gro, what has been done with the woman’s body?”
The lord deftly turned his head, deferring to Huw—who, mimicking the War-wolf’s upward thrust of the head, said, “No one claimed her, sir. She was given burial alongside the soldiers of the day.”
Gro added, “A little inquiry revealed she came from a small village whose orchards border the land which was fought over today.”
“All alone,” said the War-world with a sudden savagery.
In a more careful voice Huw continued as if on report. “I think she must have got caught in a sortie, sir. I was coming down to collect the dead and saw her lying dead, too, among the apple trees; and saw him,” he nodded his head toward the prisoner, “just stepping up to take a dance with her.”
Dammerung put up one heel on the rung of his chair and draped his forearm across his knee. For now Margaret chose not too look at the prisoner’s face, but watched Dammerung’s from a high angle—and saw, not the fox this time, but the wolfishness of him staring out from under the sharp-edged, dark brows of the de la Mare face as a wolf peers out from under its native bush. She saw the lips part a little and reveal the hungry dog-teeth. He leaned a little forward to meet the motion of his leg, chin upthrust to look into the prisoner’s face.
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