The jaw came open, throat fathomless in light. The great horns gouged the air and seemed to tear it open. Margaret felt the entryway behind her crumple in on itself and be thrown away, like the piece of paper Skander had thrown, and felt the leagues of starwoven space come roaring up behind her.
Herald the mighty! A Lord and his Lady have come—
In a blink Margaret found herself on a familiar tract of lawn between the rose garden’s brick wall and the glass wall of the hothouse in the back garden of her family’s home. She was looking up at the east wing—a disused part of the house—and a few feet from her, at her back, was the door through the garden wall that let out on the road. She could hear the rattle of a cart going by.
“We seem to have come in at the back of it,” mused Dammerung. “I suppose I must be on my best behaviour and be a front door sort of person today.”
Margaret put her arm in his and they began walking along the path toward the side of the house. “I don’t know that it is of any consequence what you chose to do or not do. I don’t think they will like you. They never liked me.”
“You like me.”
“I like you.”
“Then that is all that matters. It is rather cold underfoot…”
At the front door Dammerung deliberated. Margaret did not remember the doors seeming so small, or so shabby. They had always seemed grim and imposing to her. They seemed pitiful now. “Ought I to knock?” he wondered. “Where do we fit in society? It is in my mind that knocking would be most polite, rather than barging in and saying, ‘Hullo, Mother, I’m home—and look what a stallion I’ve got!’ “
“I can think of many things more polite than that.”
Dammerung knocked dutifully and they stood, awkwardly, on the doorstep, catching each other’s eye while they waited and looking away again. Margaret could not help wondering if one of her relatives would come around the opposite corner of the house just then and catch them. Dammerung began whistling a few bars of Huw Daggerman’s tune.
“Oh, for the love of charity,” she breathed as footsteps came back to her from within the house.
Dammerung muttered, “At least it isn’t raining…”
The door latch clicked and a maid’s face peeped out. With some shuffling of memories, Margaret placed her as Amy.
“Good afternoon,” said Dammerung, nodding magnanimously. “Is the master of the house at home?”
“Oh!” cried Amy, catching sight of Margaret. “Oh, miss! Oh, didnae hear? The missus sent letters.”
“I did not get any letters.” Margaret lifted her skirts over the threshold and moved in past Amy. In her mind’s eye the landscape panned out: her relatives in Naples would receive her mother’s letters addressed to her; puzzled, they would write back that she had never come to them. Her mother would be frantic and outraged. The whole story—which might have been comfortably ignored under the ruse of her mother’s original plans—would come to light and there would be a lot of impossible explaining to do.
“It’s the master, miss.” Amy looked for a coat or hat or stick to take from Dammerung. Having none, he smiled beatifically at her. In consternation she backed away, spotted his shoeless feet, and uttered a small, demure whimper.
“What about the master?” demanded Margaret, although she felt she already knew.
“Good Lord!” a voice echoed down the hallway. Her mother came toward them at a thunderous clip. Margaret had forgot what a sizable woman she was. “Here’s a time to be showing up—just in time to be late for the funeral! I suppose all the trains were tied up. You could not even send a letter?”
So. Father is dead. How strange that Brand’s death should have hurt me more. “I’m sorry, Mother,” she lied gamely. “I didn’t get any letters. What happened?”
Her mother hit the air aside with one hand. “I don’t know. Fit of apoplexy. Stroke. Brain haemorrhage. Barker found him at his desk on Tuesday simply gone. We hadn’t any warning. Lord! how I hate this house. We’ll have to sell it, of course. It’s a crying shame James Firethorne had to go and die. We might have moved in with him. He was a sentimental soul. Had a lot of faults, but he would have stood up for us.”
Margaret’s cheeks burned with shame as her mother rattled on like a train—a train that, never in the whole of time, had been late or tied up or run down. “Mother,” she said, forcing a smile around each letter as the word came belabouredly out of her mouth, “may I introduce you to Dammerung?”
The woman stopped long enough to get a look at the young war-lord standing tall and barefoot in her foyer. There was a little late sun coming in through the door window which made his eyes very pale and cast his shadow from him across Mrs. Coventry’s face. His dogteeth were showing and there was a sly, not altogether pleasant smile slinking across his face.
“Madam. Margaret has spoken to me of you.”
“I should suppose she has! What do you mean, ‘Margaret’? Here—” With a little viper-like jerk she caught Margaret’s left hand and turned it up, revealing the ring. She looked at it critically, then dropped it again. “No wedding ring as yet. It’ll be ‘Miss Coventry’ until then, young man, if you please.”
“I don’t,” said Dammerung ominously.
Mrs. Coventry looked so astonished she could have eaten her own hat. Margaret felt a most horrendous laugh beginning to form in her throat. It was all she could do to hold it back.
“Margaret has led me to believe,” the young man went on, “that you have no sons. Is that correct?”
“I don’t see what business that is of yours!”
“Only, as your son-in-law, married to your eldest daughter—she is, I gather, your eldest—I am de facto sole executor of your late husband’s estate.” He turned to Margaret. “That is how things are done here?”
She swallowed the laugh with some effort. “I don’t know. I never studied law. But it would seem so.”
“Do you know if your husband was in the black?”
Margaret watched her mother’s innate disposition to dislike everyone war with her dawning realization that this impertinent young man might be a way out of her hole. “So far as I know,” she said sullenly.
Dammerung turned and looked up the staircase vault. “It’s a goodly house. It needs more open windows, but so long as it is not a drain on the revenue I don’t see why you should give it up. I’ll have a look over your husband’s books just to see where you stand and where you may need help. Is his room upstairs?”
“Yes, but—well!” Mrs. Coventry added as Dammerung began climbing the stairs, making himself at home.
“Margaret,” he called back down, “if there is anything you need to take, best pack it up. Oh—hullo! You must be Barker…”
“Well!”
If only she would be reduced to that one word for the next five minutes, I might have a little peace. Skirting past her, Margaret, too, began climbing the stair.
Her mother sprang to life. “Just you wait, young missy! Who is this fellow? Where are you going off to? I hope it’s to buy wedding clothes!”
A tread went off underfoot like a shotgun. She had forgot about that. “We’re going back to his estate, Mother. We left his cousin in charge—”
“Oh, he’s got a cousin, has he? Is he married?”
Margaret’s mouth opened in a silent scream. “His cousin is engaged to be married. His brother just died—”
“Oh, and so you’re going to make it to that funeral!”
Come to think of it, I would rather miss that too. “Yes, Mother, in all probability, I will be at that funeral.”
Her mother began climbing the stair behind her. “So you can’t make it to your father’s funeral, but you can go to a complete stranger’s. I like that. Young people these days—!”
The blood, the fire. The wrack and ruin. Brand’s death. Men’s faces twisted in agony. Rupert’s face distorted out of recognition. The great winged man who smelled of death. Dammerung. The Great Blind Dragon.
Margaret turned at head of the
stair and stood above her mother, fury trembling in every vein. “Be quiet,” she said imperiously, “and have a little respect for the dead.”
If it had been a dragon-spell, her words could not have stopped up her mother’s mouth better. Mrs. Coventry stood mute, her mouth hanging a little open, and without a backward glance Margaret left her like that and retired to her old, small, creaky-floored room with the single window and the sill that leaked a draft.
She looked condescendingly on the scene and smiled a little. There was nothing, she realized, that she wanted to take. These innocuous articles were the furniture of an old, nasty, tortuous life that lay on the other side of a long death, a long death and a slow, agonized climb to a new life. She went across the room to the window and looked out, looked up.
In the sky she could see the eye of the dragon looking down on her, blind and white. Her fingers brushed the pane.
Stand at the ready. We’re coming back soon.
Dammerung’s reflection bloomed in the window beside hers. His questing fingers worked round her hourglass; turning, she leaned into his embrace.
“Are they rich as kings?” she asked. “Can we leave them and never look back?”
“Probably not. Barker is getting the books down for me. An admirable sort of fellow—all seriousness and fur about the jaws. It took me some time to convince him that I was really permitted to look at the books. He seemed uncertain of my feet. I almost told him I was uncertain of his name, but then I thought better of it.”
“What, Barker? That’s an old name. No one thinks twice about it.”
“Really! What a rummy place this is.”
Down the hall the one tread on the stair went off like a cracker, and presently the sound of hurrying feet came to them. Amy appeared in the doorway, eyes agog as if she had never had a day like this one and was not sure what to make of it, and gasped out,
“Miss Coventry, your muther wants you in the parlour. Tha’ cousin of yours, Miss Firethorne, has come home!”
Margaret stared at her insensible. Firethorne—that little white thing that had run away nearly a year ago?
“And, wha’s more,” Amy added as the climax, “she’s got a burly great man of a husband with her!”
“It’s a rummy, rummy world,” said Dammerung.
About the Author
JENNIFER FREITAG lives with her husband in a house they call Clickitting, with their two cats Minnow and Aquila, and their own fox kit due to be born in early December. Jennifer writes in no particular genre because she never learned how, she is made of sparks like Boys of Blur, and if she could grasp the elements, she would bend them like lightning. Until then, she sets words on fire.
Living with her must be excruciating.
Find her online at The Penslayer
Table of Contents
Plenilune Map
1 | The Train Carriage
2 | The Englishwoman
3 | Skander Rime
4 | The Devil’s Hunting Grounds
5 | Exile
6 | Lookinglass House
7 | The Names of the Great Ones
8 | The New Ivy Gala
9 | The Red Pawn
10 | A Flicker-Flame of a Party
11 | The Overlord
12 | Keyholes of Heaven and Hell
13 | The White Ones
14 | The Things That Cannot Be and That Are
15 | Nightmare
16 | The Many-Splendoured Thing
17 | The Hollow Quiet
18 | “She Might Not Have Known”
19 | Believed On In the World
20 | Trinity
21 | In Little Room Confining Mighty Men
22 | The Red King
23 | Ampersand
24 | Bloodburn
25 | The Cedars of Lebanon
26 | Gemeren
27 | These Wretched Eminent Things
28 | The Witching Thing
29 | The Pale Ports O’ the Moon
30 | Ouroboros
31 | The Red Queen
32 | Under a Dragon Moon
About the Author
Plenilune Page 72