Plenilune

by Jennifer Freitag

  “No, you wouldn’t,” he laughed at her, and, flinging an arm round her shoulders, switched places with her, his back against the tree, and pulled her back into his lap. “I am just too appealing.”

  He mocked her—he mocked himself, with a face that was still pinched and pale and blue-veined from his scare—but the truth of the matter was that he was right. She shivered nestingly into his arms like a cat into a pile of cloth. Though comparatively small to other arms, his were hard and the muscles bunched and gathered under the fine broadcloth of his sleeve. He rubbed vigorously at her arms and put the back of his free hand to her forehead.

  “Here is hoping the day warms up. This is hardly the sort of harness for a chilly morning.”

  She had completely forgot until he mentioned it that she was still in the shockingly inappropriate purple gown. With an involuntary cry that made him howl she pulled the cloak tight over her chest and his arms.

  “I cannot believe I have come out in this,” she gasped. Several horsemen, whom she did not recognize at that distance, were walking together by the yard and she watched them in horror as if they could see her clearly from where they were.

  “In light of recent events,” Dammerung protested reasonably, “I don’t think it matters much.”

  “In light of even more recent events,” she retorted, “it is becoming increasingly important!”

  He set his chin on her shoulder and did not let her go. His hands, she knew, if she tried to pry them, would prove immobile. His warmth began to seep through her back; her resolve began to waver.

  “At the risk of being grim again,” he said sleepily, jaw jigging on her collar-bone, “I would rather not let you go off again just yet. You—you gave me quite a scare.”

  “I know. I am sorry.”

  “Not enough to take it back?”

  She hesitated. “No…not enough to take it back.”

  “That is just as well.”

  They were quiet for awhile, content in each other’s silence. A door slammed in the house. A bee, swimming by, blundered into a low-growing patch of clover and got lost. Somewhere a dog began to bark. Margaret shut her eyes.

  “Margaret?” said Dammerung sleepily.

  She did not open her eyes. “Yes?”

  “Did…did he touch you?”

  Her eyes opened. She was looking directly at the bumblebee’s head as it emerged, laden with pollen, from the grasses. “He kissed me.”

  Dammerung breathed out heavily, a breath more full of expletives than a scorching desert wind.

  She leaned her cheek into his. “What did you expect? I had to do something. By the twelve houses, the man took it almost without a backward glance. I thought he would have been far more suspicious.”

  The pale eye looked up into hers, askance. “Have you looked at yourself in the mirror, and do you know the heart of man? We don’t overthink the matter when the matter is you.”

  “I would be flattered,” she countered, “if I could be certain that was not man’s way with any girl he fancied.”

  “Well, no, it is the way, that’s a fact. But you can be flattered all the same. Later. When once I have finished feeling sick over the whole ordeal.”

  “Me too,” she admitted, and huddled back still smaller into his arms.

  “Oh, hark! we have company.” With a little deft move he grasped the cloak, which was slipping, and pulled it back over her shoulder as Skander came up, boots crunching in the gravel. “This one is mine,” said Dammerung, squinting up through the sunlight at his cousin’s face. “Go get your own.”

  “I already have one,” said Skander placidly. “You look like a fox that got into the henhouse.”

  “Oh, I haven’t got into any henhouse yet.”

  Skander turned to Margaret. “How are you feeling?”

  “Better,” she admitted. “Still a little peaky, but better; thank you.”

  “Yes,” said Capys wryly. He thrust back the hem of his tunic and put his hands in his pockets. “I imagine dying does that to you…Do you know, Dammerung, we found that bitch of his dead in the washroom? Had her nose broken in and her neck busted in two. It was quite a pretty piece of work.”

  Margaret smiled wistfully into the clover-patch. “You know, I had forgot...”

  It seemed Skander had caught her involuntary expression, for he chuffed and said blithely, “I told you she was a force to be reckoned with,” and jerked his chin indicatively at her. “Nay, that was Rupert that I told.”

  “And he is quite dead.”

  “Oh yes, dead as a doornail. He…looked really very awful once we turned him over. There was a bruise around his neck and his mouth was open—we could look right down it: it was completely burnt out. What did you give him?”

  Black, unpleasant dream-pictures shifted across the warm summer landscape. “Only some sort of rat poison.”

  “These are spirits of a different sort,” said Dammerung. Margaret felt him gather, pushing her forward, and get to his feet behind her. He bent back down to lift her up. “O-oh…! Is there no end to your legs?”

  The ground shifted, slipped, and steadied again. Skander stepped in and put a hand under her other elbow. “Oh, we grow ourselves tall in England,” she explained. “We must, for it is so cloudy, if we want to reach the sun.”

  “Well, you’re closer to the sun now,” said Dammerung, taking complete charge of her. They began walking across the gravel, and he added in a thoughtful undertone, “I forget that you are English…”

  “Hullo!” said Skander, turning and putting a fist on his hip. “Isn’t something—the roses! The roses are in bloom again!”

  The heavy trailing plants swarming over the yard walls were dancing in the early morning wind, and each vine was shouting out a spark of scarlet colour: a perfect Lancaster rose.

  Dammerung looked askance at the shrubs. “I had not taken you for such a romantic sort, coz.”

  “No, don’t you see?” Margaret protested. “No, of course you wouldn’t. Old Hobden told me ever since you died—or disappeared—the roses haven’t bloomed. And now they have blossoms again!”

  The War-wolf’s eyes were dancing as he said, “I can trounce any man in astrology and split a world like a diamond with the old arts, but I am unlearned in the ways of herbology. Come along, Lady Spitcat, before you cause a real scandal.”

  32 | Under a Dragon Moon

  Dressed in something less glamorous and more socially acceptable, Margaret sat in the old familiar way with Dammerung and Skander in the library, eating a scratch breakfast that the blue-jay man had ousted from the kitchens below. The eggs were warm and the milk was fresh; she heard no one complain and she ate as heartily as the men. She had not realized death made one so hungry.

  “Why do you suppose he said, ‘Give her something to eat’?” laughed Dammerung, passing her the bowl of twelve-hour-old biscuits. “Skander, the jam, if you will…”

  Skander, his scarred face rejuvenated with a smile, passed the jar of jam across. “Does it feel good to be ordering the breakfast table about in Marenové House again?”

  “You would not believe. But I can’t stay long. I have letters to write this morning—people will want to know that Rupert is dead—Margaret needs to get her feet back under her, and then we have an old friend to see.”

  Skander frowned, sceptical.

  “And you,” Dammerung tactfully ignored his cousin’s expression, “have a bride to recall and a wedding to plan. Better make it a double one.”

  Wiping excess jam off her fingers, Margaret asked, “Where are we going?”

  “To see your parents,” said Dammerung without looking up.

  A knife clattered to a plate. Margaret was not sure if it was hers or Skander’s. Cold, blank horror swept over her. She wanted to look to Skander, to ask for his help—like a child being dragged away to bed she wanted to grab the nearest thing on Plenilune and hold on tight. But she could not take her eyes off Dammerung’s reserved, demure, down-turned face.
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br />   I would—I would rather go through the agony of last night than go back to England. I can’t go back. I won’t!

  “If I remember what you said correctly,” Dammerung put down his utensils and used his napkin, at the same time pushing his chair away from the table and rising, “your parents will be expecting you back from—what was that place? No matter. They will be anticipating your return within the next few weeks.” He crossed the room, soiled napkin thrust into one pocket, and began rummaging among the dusty old articles in a secretary under one window. “There will be a great scandal and waste of money I am sure if you don’t show up again and make some account of yourself.” He dug something out of a drawer and shut it behind him. “The whole purpose of your being sent away was to get a husband. I never did ask properly. I can’t quite seem to do anything the orthodox way.”

  “Oh, Dammerung—” Her words failed her.

  He upended a little fabric sleeve into his hand: out tumbled three old but shining rings, two simple bands of gold, and one other a ring of gold with a clustering crown of pale green gems.

  “Would you marry me?”

  She swore she would not cry, but the tears came anyway before she could stop them. With a little sob she hid her face behind her hands and nodded—she seemed to have lost all her words.

  Hands gently pried her fingers from her face. She watched through a beautiful heartbreak as Dammerung slid the begemmed ring onto her finger, wiggled it over the knuckle, and settled it into place.

  “There. You and Mother have the same slender hands.” He looked up into her face, smiling. “So you will be Lady of the Mares, after all.”

  Skander leaned on his elbows across the table. “Let’s have a look,” he prompted, and Margaret swung round, so happy she could scream, and thrust the beautiful thing out for him to see. The morning light got into the green jewels and glowed like summer. The crystal dishes paled in comparison.

  “Isn’t it just the loveliest thing?” she demanded. “Oh, Dammerung! And this was your mother’s? Oh, Dammerung!”

  The blue-jay man, stopping nearby to see, spoke up. “If you could see her now, you would not guess she had just saved all of Plenilune not four hours ago in the most self-sacrificial way.”

  “Away with you, brute!” said Dammerung laughingly. “Let the poor girl have her hour. God knows she has had enough sorrow as is.”

  “I’ll go,” she told him. “I’ll go back to England. I want to show Mother—who never believed in me anyway—just what I can do. And won’t she bite her tongue for once!”

  “If the picture of her I have pieced together is anything like the original, I doubt it.”

  “Before you go,” Skander waved toward the big black oak desk, “you need to check your books. There is an army to pay, and you owe me several new doors and a staircase.”

  Margaret stopped turning her ring in the light. “Doors and a staircase? What?”

  Dammerung dropped the rings back into their bag and replaced them in the secretary. “Oh, chances are I have two armies to pay…But the Mares are wealthy. We should be able to manage it. I have letters to write. Drag out the dusty thing and read it to me while I write.”

  He fetched a pen and paper and sat down next to Margaret. She shoved the breakfast things away to make room for him.

  “What staircase?” she repeated. “What doors?”

  “Oh, tush!” said Skander. He sat down with the enormous, ragged ledger. “Only he slammed his door and broke the frame, he tore your door off its hinges, broke several marble treads with his heels, and I am not yet sure what he did to my door. It looked like this.”

  He took one of Dammerung’s papers, while Dammerung protested, balled it up in both hands, and tossed it across the room.

  “Like that.”

  “Then that is probably what he did.”

  “That is in my mind also.”

  Dammerung unscrewed the cap of his pen and fished out a fresh sheet of paper. “You will remember, I was in something of a state. I felt your dragon’s spell when you left, and it may warm you to know it is one of the few I don’t know, but I knew—I guessed—where you had gone, and I knew the amount of time it would take me to get here. I was not fully rational. Who—what? No. I am writing to Mark Roy.”

  He cleared his head and began to make his letters. Margaret was made to sit quietly while the two men talked over domestic matters and the dissolving of the armies. She wrote addresses for a few letters as Dammerung passed them off on her—she put her left hand on each folded, sealed sheet so that she could watch the sunlight in the jewels—but she tired soon of that. She laid her head down on her arm and listened to their talk until she found she had faded quite out for a little while and Dammerung was lifting her up. He walked across the room with her and laid her down on something cool and soft and spread something warm overtop of her. He said something about being close by, and that was all she needed. She fell asleep directly after that.

  “Hullo, sleepyhead,” his voice was saying seemingly a few minutes later. “It’s time for you to get ready. I’ve given you a good hour. Will that do?”

  Margaret blundered sleepily out of an avalanche of pillows. Squinting at the window, she saw the light appeared late. “But it’s almost evening…”

  “Of course. We’re going to go the way you came.”

  She scrubbed the sleep from her eyes. Dammerung had already changed: he had put on a clean white shirt and dark trousers, and he was wearing a dark doublet cut as close to a suit coat as one could get in Plenilune. He would look out of the ordinary, but he would not look bizarre.

  But then, he always looked out of the ordinary.

  Margaret climbed out of bed, brushed out her rumpled clothing, and went back to her own room to find a suitable gown. Dammerung trailed her like a puppy.

  “It’s a shame I don’t have my chinaberry dress,” she remarked, thrusting her head into the closet. “Or my sky dress. Even the red one would have looked well, though perhaps too bold for England. White linens will do. It is summer.”

  She changed and stepped back out for inspection. With a careless air Dammerung turned her about, then, bending her head down, thrust a scarlet rose into her hair.

  “There we go, that will do. And now we’ll go.”

  She glanced toward the door. “Now?”

  “Now. Before anyone interrupts.”

  He took her hands in his and nodded to her. For a moment, captivated by his eyes, she lost the words…but then they came back to her. It grew easier every time.

  The room rolled up on itself like a scroll. Margaret’s candid-coloured skirts flew in the wind. Then the world had snapped back on itself and they were standing on the slope of a hillside that was furry with red fern and turf and tottergrass, a blue evening sky above them, a wood below them thick with foliage and roosting birds which had been empty and silent when Margaret had seen it last.

  “And now thou art finished with thy labours,” said a familiar voice.

  “The labour goes on,” Dammerung said; “but I think we are out of the woods at last.”

  Margaret turned to see the old withered apple-leaf woman standing in the entryway of the mountain. That woman, she thought, was everywhere!

  “Hast come to tell me the good news,” the woman asked, “or to beg a boon of me?”

  “To beg a boon.” Dammerung’s melting smile slashed across his face. “Dost think, perhaps, that I have earned it?”

  The woman tucked her head down and the sunlight around her shimmered white. Whatever my lord has need of, he has but to ask his servant.

  The wind shrieked again and pulled at the woman’s body. It distended into the mountain in a streak of white, paling, translucent, and finally vanished altogether. From within the voice came back to them:

  Come here and meet me in my hall.

  Once again, but not alone, Margaret went down to the Great Blind Dragon’s black-marble lair. She was glad for Dammerung’s company: knowing who lay coiled with
in, she was not sure she could have gone down again. Ignorance, desperation, had made her very bold.

  The creature waited for them as she had first seen it, suspended in the air, coil on coil of its white, shining body wrapped in an endless ring above the floor. Its one good eye watched them as they stepped out of the passageway into its light.

  Once again the sight of it took her breath away.

  Some time I have woven dreams of ye, Lord and Lady of Plenilune: dark dreams full of disaster. I think we have all had such dreams of late.

  “But we have all come to waking together,” said Dammerung.

  The Dragon’s jaws moved from its teeth to form an enormous smile. ’Tis good, O Lord, to hear thy voice among the living and to see thy light again.

  “It was some time coming, old friend. But even now I’m afraid we can’t stay. We are on an errand—and you can’t come.”

  It lifted its head. The Cruciform World?

  Dammerung nodded.

  To Margaret it actually looked wistful. Hast my malformed eye to that world. I shall not be able to see ye.

  “That is as it should be. I have need of you to guard the doorposts of Plenilune while I am gone—’twill not be long. My dear old friend, it is not the Nether World! I have been and come from there! You need not look so mournful.”

  The dragon raised its head and looked into the distance far above it, up to where its light faded and the marble dark closed in. It was very quiet for a very long time, then Dammerung prompted gently,

  “A soldier knows his post, old friend.”

  A sigh ran round the edges of the chamber. A soldier knows his post.

  “You’ll see it one day.” Dammerung took a firmer hold of Margaret’s hand. “Come! your master has need of you. Blow us into the Cruciform World. Blow us down the universe. And stand by to recall us into Plenilune.”

  The dragon roused itself. The chamber shook as it unloosed its folded body; the mountain quaked to its roots.

  With a ready will, my lord.