Plenilune (87 page)

She ran to her room, never stopping to look for Dammerung. For the first time in months—long, half-happy, golden months—she flung herself across the length of her bed and cried. She clutched the bedsheets and screamed into them—for Brand, for Dammerung’s broken heart, for the broken heart of Plenilune. Like hot gold poured into the crucible they fell into her, filled her up, and shattered her clay frame.

How much longer can we stand this! We are all dying. There will be none left!

The immanence, the inevitability, of extinction fell like a shadow over her.

What if Gro died?
She began a macabre spiral of thoughts.
Who would be there for Herluin and Ella? What if Skander died? What would Woodbird have to live for? What would happen to Julius and Julianna if Centurion were killed?

Julius and Julianna!

She sat up, blinded by a gold welter of tears and sunlight. There, in white and uncanny purple eyes, was the small, soft, beating heart of Plenilune. All things precious were like them. And if the iron armour of Plenilune were smashed in, if the mighty men went down, it would not take much to squeeze the soft liveliness of Plenilune to death.

How fiercely we fight,
she thought with an odd calm in the wake of her torment,
for that which must die one day.

She pushed away from her bed, suddenly loathing herself, and sat in her chair in the sunlight where the breeze could reach her. The summer birds sang in a riot; the tree insects rattled incessantly, swelling to the breaking point, dropping away again, swelling, dropping away…The light wind teased her swollen eyes until they felt stiff and dried, and, in a detached way, she knew they had ceased to look puffy and telltale.

But the pain was still there.

I am losing hope
, she realized quietly. She watched the wind move the hem of her skirt about the floor.
God, we have tried. But I fear that, like Arthur, we must die with our foe and become nothing more than legend after all.

The faces of the dead and the old morbid hopelessness of Arthur—what good was there in the legend that the man would come back, when he had not?—passed in colourful panels before her mind’s eye, as if they were playing cards that she slid one after the other on a tabletop before her. She played with them and lost, and a soft knock at the door some hours later found her entertaining the thought of burning them in a candle, one after the other.

She did not turn her head. “Come in.”

Aikaterine put her head in. “Supper is ready, my lady. My Lord Skander waits for you and my Lord Dammerung on the portico out back.”

This news roused her a little; turning, frowning, feeling as if she were just waking, she asked the maid, “Oh—where is Lord Dammerung?”

“My Lord Skander told me he had gone to his room and that you were likely to go wake him. We thought it best if you did it.”

It was comforting to know that she was not the only one who had felt fear of the War-wolf.

“I come,” she said, getting stiffly out of her chair. How empty she felt! She went on light indoor slippers after Aikaterine with the feeling of being made out of thistledown. And still the long shadow of mortality came after her.

Aikaterine left her at Dammerung’s hall. There was no one else about, only a long curve of hallway and light and the softness of the carpet underfoot. The door to his room was shut when she came to it. Her knock, sharp and light, clacked down the hall and back again, but seemed to lose itself beyond the door and did not return. She waited a moment, listening to the silence. As it dragged on unbroken, the image of the dragon’s hall crept into her mind, huge and black, and—in her imagination—inexplicably empty. Her hand clutched the knob and twisted: it turned.

The room was dark within. The curtains had been pulled tight; only a few fish-scaled shards of light slipped through the chinks, twinkling to the floor, running up and down her skirt as she passed through them. In the gloom she could see Dammerung stretched out on his couch, stripped down to his shirt-sleeves, asleep. But it was an uneasy sleep she caught him in. Before she had quite reached his side she could feel the angry heat emanating from him, and in the thin slivers of light she could see, through his open collar, the sheen of sweat pooled in the hollow of his throat. He was shivering in his sleep like a horse that smells fire. The fear raging behind his eyelids was so strong that even Margaret could taste it in the back of her throat. Holding back the taste, holding back the sudden lurch in her middle, she reached out and gripped his arm, hard, and called his name.

He snapped out sleep as if he were a glass mirror and her hand, her voice, were a fist she had put through him. With a surfacing gasp like a sob, he reached across and grabbed her ribs under her left breast, fingers grinding until the pain turned the gloom red.

“Dammerung!” She struggled to keep the pain out of her voice. “Dammerung, wert dreaming.”

He stared up at her with sleep-blind eyes. They worked her face, dazed at first, then with a mounting panic as he struggled to place her in his memory. Then suddenly he seemed to remember, and just as suddenly, though he did not let go, the pain went out of her side.

“Sha…!” He gasped and fell back off his elbow. He let her go and dragged his hand over his damp face. While he tried to swallow the pounding of his heart, Margaret took a handkerchief off a nearby table and pressed it to his throat; the sweat seeped into the fabric and made her fingers slippery. His skin was cold, his eyes, when he looked at her, were distant and glassy and seemed to call across a gulf of pain to her. She knew what he had been dreaming.

“You startled me.”

She arched a brow. “You were already startled. Truth to tell, I expected you to try harder when you woke. It would have taken nothing to overpower me.”

A grey smile pulled at Dammerung’s mouth. She had handed him the opening move to his favourite game—flattering and making jokes at her expense in turn—and he grasped the first piece as naturally as a fish grasps the water. “Oh, really, Lady Spitcat? Whose face makes Helen of Troy look like Bardolph? Who steps on Honourmen like a child walking across daisies?” He frowned. “That was the one that broke.”

She looked down and touched her side gingerly. “One of them…It is sound now. No harm done.”

But he knew how easily he could have done damage, and he pushed himself up—his shirt stuck to him at all points, heavy with sweat—bare feet flat on the cold stone flags. “What did you wake me for?” he asked, rubbing the heel of his hand into his eye.

“It is time to go down to supper.” She followed him with her eyes as he rose, blindly, still scrubbing the nasty clinging sleep from his face. With his other hand out before him he found his way to his clothes chest and flung back the lid, digging in the black interior for a fresh shirt. He tugged at the slippery buttons of his soiled garment, but she was distracted by the dampness on the cushion under her own hand. She had expected it to be blood: it was only sweat. The cushion was soaked with it. Dammerung’s shirt was soaked with it. This whole house was soaked with it. Glassdale, Ampersand, Tarnjewel…They were all soaked with Dammerung’s sweat. If she looked in his eyes she knew she would see them, spread out in rolling blue-green splendour, but melancholy under the grey haze of war. They were drowning under the sheer strain of his labour. They were not going to make it. The balance was too keen, too perfect. They would drown in their own sweat before victory was struck.

Dammerung thrust his shirt-tails into his trousers and turned, hauling his braces over each shoulder. With a heavy sigh he ran his fingers roughly through his hair; still thick with sweat, the effect was wild and rakish and desperate. It was almost chilling how easily the idea came to her then, quietly, smoothly, full-formed like Athena. The slyness of it was almost galling, but the idea itself, once it had sunk in, froze the marrow in her bones.

“Margaret?”

She looked up at his face—she had been staring at the button of his right brace—and yanked the curtain closed behind her eyes in the same moment.

He looked concerned. “Are you sure it is sound? I will have a look…”

“It is sound,” she assured him, “but you may look if you like.”

“No…” He frowned at her and grew still like an animal, watching her, eye flickering to eye, crisscrossing her face. Breathing was beginning to grow difficult. If he should see—but she could not afford to let him see, of that she was perfectly certain. So she held her ground, knowing that everything depended on it. She held her ground, and at length he said, “No, I trust you. But tell me if it hurts again. They are so little and brittle.” His hands curved in the air, then flung wide, dissipating the image.

“I know you trust me, Dammerung.” The words tasted like ash in her mouth. With a great effort she rose, shoving down her own shivering fear, crushing it beneath his own, beneath the harlequin images of war-ravaged landscapes, hunger, blood, and death.

It is time we put an end to all this
.
It is time we laid down our swords
.

He sensed her anxiety. She could feel him reaching out with his mind, touching it, running, as it were, his hand over it to get the feel and shape and texture of it. But he did not question her. She put her hand in the palm he held out for her and felt the lean, strong fingers interlock with hers: the simple gesture sent the blood shocking back to her heart, and she had to swallow back the sudden sharp sweetness of life before it could prick the tears out at the corners of her eyes.

They met Skander on the portico overlooking the garden. Dusk was only just falling; the earth hung huge and wide like an eagle’s feather in the Harvest Moon sky and round it burned, like the aftermath of the summer, the rich red clouds of evening dissipating in enormous columns until they faded into the deep, pale blue. The blue was so deep, the red so rich, Margaret could almost feel them whispering over her skin. She breathed them in, feeling them flicker like fire in her veins. The woods, burning with the backwash of evening light, were the colour of damsons, and somewhere, clearly, like the white soul of falling water, a thrush was singing.

Skander looked up as they approached. For the first time Margaret noted how haggard he looked. He seemed to have aged years in the past few months; there was a tell-tale darkness around his eyes which was only lost when he looked directly level with the sun’s evening rays, and even then the spark which had always been in his eye did not kindle to fire again. His broad, strong frame seemed weary in its chair; his hand, big and scarred, clutched his goblet in a hold that was too tense, as if he were waiting for the alarm to blare in the lower terraces at any moment.

Not here. Not here at Lookinglass
.

“There you are.” He let go of the goblet and rose as Margaret came to her seat.

Dammerung pushed her chair in. “I was asleep. She had to knock me about the head to wake me.”

Skander looked up quizzically under his brows as he sat back down. “I am sorry. Were you sleeping deeply?”

Dammerung, too, sat down. “When you plumb sleep and gradate it for me, I’ll be able to tell you how deeply I was sleeping.”

As they bent their heads to say grace, Margaret stole a look at Skander’s face and saw that his cousin’s evasion had not worked: Skander knew how lightly and uneasily he had been sleeping and it made the harsh, worried lines on his face gouge deeper with concern.

“Any word from Centurion?” Dammerung asked when they had begun eating.

“No, none yet.” Skander’s knife flashed in the light, peeling back the soft, white sides of his fish. “But word came down from the Marches that the borders are holding.”

Swallowing fish and something even harder, something that stuck worse than bone, Margaret said, “You beat them hard. They will remember that, for a while.”

Skander smiled at her wistfully. It struck her that he was oddly flattered by her remark, and listening to her own words and the words that lay unspoken between the lines, she felt the last tie to England snap loose and drift away.

“Have you got any word from Woodbird?” she asked.

Dammerung looked up from reaching for a fig, a brief smile flashing up on his face. “None for
us
…How does she?”

“Well. She sent a note this evening saying they had reached Mucklestrath in one piece. Black Malkin even unbent enough to send a greeting herself from Holywood and to ask how I was doing. She did not ask about you.”

“What a wet cat. It will be a long time before she forgives me.”

“If she ever forgives you. I am thinking it would be a sorry thing and tempting fate to have you lead her behind us down the aisle.”

Something passed across Dammerung’s face, something shadowed and pained, as if Spencer had been mentioned. “I don’t think you will have that problem,” he said quietly, ominously. Margaret looked to Skander, but Skander was suddenly interested in his plate.

After a pause Skander went on. “Anyway, I do not much care either way and I confess I have very little warm, familial sentiment in my heart toward her, but if she is going to be kin you might try rubbing her hair the wrong way less. I do not want her…casting hexes on my children or giving them the Evil Eye.”

Margaret looked beside his chair and tried to imagine a smaller version of him clinging to his braces and digging a pudgy fist into his pocket for a sweet. He would do well as a father, she thought sadly. This whole place needed youngsters running over it, upsetting the firm routine of Aikaterine’s and the blue-jay man’s lives. And Woodbird, too, would like it here—she followed the upward flight of a pair of barn swallows, black and arrow-shaped in the golden air, until they disappeared under the stable eaves—here where the world was small and brightly coloured at their feet, here where the winds were cleanest and sharpest. She would live well at Lookinglass.

The thought of it stabbed like a knife under her breastbone.

They ate quietly, talking in fits and spurts; was it just her, or did the shadow of her resolution lie across them all, and what if they could make out the shape of it? Margaret had trouble meeting their eyes. Skander did not seem to notice her evasions: the tired melancholy ached in all his lines. Dammerung seemed preoccupied with his own thoughts. When supper was over and the blue-jay man brought out the chessboard at Skander’s behest, Dammerung played a reckless, terrible game with seemingly only half his mind, and at the end only won because he seemed to wake to the realization that, if he lost, Skander would know for certain something was wrong. Margaret tried to read one of Skander’s books but she could not keep her mind on the words. Her eyes skimmed the lines, blindly, until she realized she had failed to read them and she had to start afresh.