Plenilune

by Jennifer Freitag

  Dammerung flung the poker back into its bucket with a clang and folded back up on the couch, wooing a steaming cup of coffee with a beatific smile. “La, ice-water runs in our veins. A pair of stockings seems unlikely to change that. And anyway, I did try a pair of your horseshoes, but apparently your father comes from draught stock and they were too big for me. Also, I have got so used to padding about on my paws that, fit or no fit, I simply didn’t like it.”

  Skander picked up the poker and brandished it like a baton. “And we are all thankful,” he said condescendingly upon his cousin, “that you found clothing was still to your taste.”

  “You wouldn’t say that…”

  Skander turned away to soothe the fire and Dammerung, after watching the bright, broken network of sparks going up in the grate, turned back to Margaret, leaning forward to pour her a cup of tea.

  “Are you sure you do not want something stronger? There is still a bit of white peakiness about your cheeks.”

  She took the cup and listened, alarmed, to the rattle it made in its saucer. “Oh, no, no. I am so tired, you could knock me over with a feather. Brandy would put me to sleep at once.”

  Dammerung stretched himself out toward the blaze—was it her imagination or did the fire leap at his advance?—and tucked his hands comfortably under his arms. “It is a cosy day. An’ sure I like this better than a wine-cellar.”

  Skander had gone back to his desk but he had not yet sat down. Looking up from shuffling papers he asked bluntly, “Do you intend to go back to Marenové House?”

  Margaret was in the act of raising the cup to her lips. She stopped—the sheeny liquid trembled in the light—and looked at Dammerung. The War-wolf had turned his head slowly toward his cousin, the mockery and lightheartedness for a moment pulled back, and the long dark wrestling with thought and sentiment and circumstance stark on the lean de la Mare face. But only for a moment, and then it was gone again, and Dammerung was laughing.

  “What a shuffling of cards there would be. Rupert to Talus Perey again—it is too small for him, and he feels the pinch. Malbrey to—he is a little better than a hovel. I could give him an outlying tower from the days when our borders were a little less certain. But I should feel sorry for the gypsies I would be ousting from the tower.”

  The equation. Margaret replaced her cup on its saucer and thought of the awful equation. How light Dammerung made of it—how he laughed in the dark! Yet she felt they all three knew how very dark it was.

  “I should like to go back to Marenové House,” Dammerung said after a silence of indeterminate length.

  “So would I like you. You are restless in my quiet halls and make me feel uneasy. And, anyway, it would be nice to trust the neighbour at one’s back, as I have not been able to do for years.”

  Dammerung smiled wistfully into the fire. “How hard it has gone with you, coz.” There was gentle mockery in his voice again. He looked up searchingly into Skander’s face. “Well I am sorry that I left you all in the middle of the game. Your smile has a little of the strain about it, as it never had before. Did you learn to fight with Rupert in my absence?”

  “No.” To Margaret it seemed her words came from far off. She, too, was staring into the fire, but she saw Dammerung look at her out of the corner of her eye. “We learned to parry and to dig in our heels, but none us were matched to fight him.”

  There was a soft crackly silence. Something heavy clunked on wood as Skander set it down, then Dammerung asked gently, “Were none of you?” And Margaret, suddenly confused, broke off her stare to meet his eye and wonder where she had gone to and what had she meant. He held her a moment, looking into her eyes with a sense of wandering through her and etching her mind on the glassiness of his eyes…then he smiled—or had he been smiling all along?—and the question slid away as he looked away, slid like a handful of sparks back into the fire.

  But she kept watching, for though her body was tired and disused to work, she found the chill edge of the room and the sweep of white light, the familiar tang of tea and rustle of the fire, had sharpened her senses. They had sharpened her senses to many things, to the softness of Aikaterine’s passing, like some benevolent spirit always in the rear ground of the scene, to the little iron twist at the edge of a smile that ruined the full amiability of Skander’s countenance. But more than that they sharpened her senses to Dammerung. In the cellar, as the fox, he had always been a small, wing-shadowed sort of thing, a sad story in a children’s book in which the tales were grim, sometimes awful, but always only stories. In the white light of Skander’s study, the bare, branching view of Glassdale flung wide across the windows beyond him, Dammerung seemed a bigger, keener thing, less awful than he had seemed in the firelight of last night—there was laughter in him today which had been quenched by the scars of yesteryear last night. As he sat staring into the flames and she sat staring at him, she knew he was thinking this morning, not of Spencer, but of Skander and Centurion and Mark Roy, of men he had known on the other side of the dark, men he had left in the game. He was thinking of the game—a game now, not an equation, which was a more promising thought—and playing with huge things in his head as a child plays with magical worlds.

  And are we not, she wondered, in some kind of magic world? She frowned a little at him. Are you the child that dreams of us? And I had always thought the Overlord awful and grim—a man like Rupert. I had not thought the Overlord might laugh. But—God!—what a world it would be that had not a laughing pulse in it anymore!

  Her eyes wandered off the amber-black crown of Dammerung’s hair to the view outside the windows. For the first time she saw the splendour of Plenilune and felt it would not kill her. For the first time she felt she would not kill the splendour. It was sitting next to her, freed from a melancholy dark, and in the moment that hung in the balance, it had reached across to her and taken her by the hand to save her. For the first time, as she gazed at that white winter beauty until her eyes swam with light and something more painful, she felt she understood what Skander had said of the women of old and how, in their hardness, in their adamantine glory, they had known the beating blood of love.

  “Skander,” said Plenilune lightly, glibly, “I think we had better wrestle.”

  Skander had been looking for something in the piano bench; he dropped the lid shut with a bang.

  Dammerung twisted in his sofa at the sound. “I am two years and a body out of play. What a sorry state I am in!”

  As if he meant to commence then and there, his cousin dropped the sheaf of papers—they slipped sidewise on the air and fluttered to the edge of a low table—and, putting his hand to his sleeve, shoved it upward, baring the corded arm beneath. That brought Margaret out of her reverie with more of a start than the bang.

  “I’ll give you no quarter,” warned Skander.

  “You had better not!”

  The blue-jay man, who had replaced Aikaterine, bent forward and saved the papers from floating to the floor. “I suggest to my lords,” he said, straightening, “that the garden would be an advantageous place to wrestle. It is cold but the grass has dried, and—” he cleared his throat “—no furniture will be broken.”

  “It is not too cold for the Lady Margaret?” his master inquired, but his voice had fallen out of her notice. She turned back on Dammerung, puzzled, and not a little uneasy. With a heave he extricated himself from the deep cushions of the couch and, reaching out to help her, caught her quizzical look. He turned his head away, fixing her with a single eye, quizzical in return.

  “What,” she murmured, “you have not been beaten about enough?”

  He flashed a smile at her, a smile all teeth and fighting dare—but in his eyes she saw a faintly veiled wince of remembered pain. “I seem to have grown used and fond of getting my skull kicked in.”

  “Have you yet learned to duck?”

  Skander turned back from talking with the blue-jay man. “All right, coz. The lawn by the patio will do. There is some sun there and Lady Ma
rgaret will—I presume—like a little sunshine on her bones.”

  Dammerung got a hand under her elbow and helped her up. “Bring a chair, Tabby,” he called. “She won’t want to stand like a referee.”

  “I am there before you,” murmured the blue-jay man, and sailed out of the room.

  They went out onto the patio, into a slight breeze and a clean smell of spring; the wind was in the cherry and the plumes of white were tossing about like sea-foam. There was a sweet tang of woodsmoke in the air. She felt wind-starved, and from where she sat in a pool of sunlight she pulled in breath after delicious breath of high fell country air. Oh, to be free at last! and to breathe the air of freedom! Through sun-squinted eyes she watched Dammerung step into the cold, shimmery turf and strip off his braces, tossing them onto the stone kerb of the patio, and pull his shirt out of his trousers. The linen tails fluttered in the wind. He was still thin—as thin as she felt and, if turned to the light, might prove to be transparent—but he set his hands on his hips in a defiant, cocksure pose and seemed to be the very pleasure of life embodied.

  “Were you after precision or strength?” asked Skander as he, too, stripped down to his shirtsleeves.

  “Both, I imagine.”

  Seeing his bare feet, Skander added, “Would you rather I take off my boots for this?”

  Dammerung swung a foot up on his knee and tested his heel with the hard of his thumb. “Don’t give me any quarter! I am of a mind to go barefoot but I think it unlikely anyone else will. You won’t crush my beautiful toes. I’ll make sure of that.”

  “P’uh!” laughed Skander, and flung down his belt.

  They took up their positions in the grass and Margaret, forgetting the wind and the sunshine, which threatened to blow her off like a golden plover feather, leaned forward to watch them. Even the blue-jay man, who most assuredly had other things to do, lingered in the brown-shadowed doorway. The two men took a few moments to stretch, their shoulders nearly starting out of their shirts with the strain, and then with nodded consent they were ready. There was no pause. Almost at once Skander sprang, beautifully, like a wild cat, blocking and throwing a blow at the same time. But Dammerung seemed to have turned into a top and whirled, bringing his foot up at the same time into the side of his cousin’s head. Margaret cried out in surprise: she had never seen a man bring his leg up so high. She could not remember seeing a man bring his knee up above his waist.

  Skander reeled and spun back, crouching, aiming a blow at Dammerung’s knee. He almost landed the blow, too, but at the last moment Dammerung swung and straddled the outflung arm and seemed to drop at the same time, twisting as he fell, so that Skander’s arm was tangled up in his interlocking legs. Skander was pitched over onto his back with a resounding thud, Dammerung’s elbow in the hollow of his throat.

  Margaret staggered to her feet almost before she knew what she was doing, but Skander was laughing and Dammerung was yelling, “I’ve still got it! This tiger has still got it!” With a gasp she sank back down into her chair. Unperturbed, the blue-jay man padded past her and went to assist his master off the turf.

  “Shao! That smarts!” Skander poked at his temple.

  Dammerung had to help himself to his own feet. “Did I break anything?”

  “Only my reputation in the lady’s eyes, I’m sure, but nothing more.”

  “Why, did he have that?” Dammerung called up to Margaret.

  She leaned forward. The wind had picked up, and she had to shout into it to be heard. “’Twas not wrestling! What do you do?”

  “It is a better sort of wrestling than other kinds you might see, for it better suits our purpose.” Dammerung cast about under the bare cherry-verge a moment before returning with a thick branch roughly the length of his arm. His cousin watched him warily. “In brief: our business, that is, the business of war, is more like to our kind of wrestling than two bulls pitting their shoulders together and groaning into the earth.” As though the branch were a sword he spun it, and spun with it, his bare, agile feet skimming the short turf. It was a strange series of movements and yet Margaret had to admit that they were beautiful, and if the branch were a real sword the blue-jay man would have been dead.

  Skander brought up his arm and blocked a blow from the stick. Margaret thought it was a casual block, but he followed it up with two quick jabs at Dammerung’s head—one of which Dammerung avoided with a neat dodge, one of which he dodged right in to. She heard the crack of contact and stifled another gasp. Dammerung spun with the blow, his back to Skander, and leapt, turning over backward until his legs locked around his cousin’s neck.

  “Damn!” cried Skander, and the two went down again while the blue-jay man, too close to the scuffle, side-stepped to avoid being pulled in by his master’s right hook.

  Dammerung rolled off Skander’s back, staggering, his head tilted and his hand pressed under his nose. “Oh, that can’t be good,” he said as blood spurted between his fingers.

  “Did I not tell you to learn to duck!” Margaret cried. But she could see Dammerung was enjoying himself—possibly all the more for the sudden blood-letting. His fire was up, the wind rushing round him like a roaring mantle of his own wild aura. “The storm is up!” he cried, shaking himself like a dog and flinging blood left and right, “and all is on the hazard!”

  The two went at it anew, giving and taking and avoiding blows with a precision and power which surprised Margaret. And she was suddenly intensely sorry that she was a woman and not a man. It was not until they finished, by common consent or by some rule she was not privy to, and had stepped away, saluting each other with broken laugh and bloodied nose, that she realized she had risen and had watched the whole thing on her feet. As Dammerung came striding wearily back up to her, she felt a crying ache in her body and had to put her hand on the tabletop and lean her weight upon it.

  “What do you think?” he asked her mockingly. “Do I fit this body well again?”

  She dug into her pocket and pulled out her handkerchief, handing it to him. “You are all manner of full of yourself, Dammerung. You outfit any body.”

  “There, you have conquered me.” Then, more seriously, “Are you hurting?”

  She shook her head. “I am tired. I think I pushed myself too far today. No, don’t—”

  He reached out to her and she was afraid that he would try to take the pain for her. She was sure she could manage, and he was hot and breath-spent and his face was bloodied.

  “Nay, do not get your fur awrong.” He took her elbow. “We will go to the sitting room and be wealthy and lackadaisical now that I have pummelled my cousin and you have fretted on my account.”

  Skander buttoned his braces and slid them back over his shoulders. “I will put you to quarter-staves this evening. Margaret should like that.”

  “What are we for,” said Dammerung with a sly and martyrly look, “but to make sport for the ladies.”

  “Tabby, with me.” Skander turned away. “I’ll see you two inside. Don’t bleed on my couches.”

  Margaret and Dammerung went back inside; she was not sure which led and supported the other. Dammerung was still stiff and recovering his breath, but he seemed otherwise in good spirits. He put her down on a couch in the sitting room and collapsed beside her, his head leaned back, her handkerchief pressed to his nose. “I wonder if Aikaterine could be prevailed upon,” he yawned after a moment of quiet, “to bring us something to drink.”

  “Something warm would be nice,” Margaret agreed sleepily. She rubbed at her eye and was surprised by how cold her knuckle was on her wind-blasted cheeks.

  But neither of them made a move to call the girl in. The couch’s embrace, half pillows and half sheepskin, was luxuriously sweet. A golden clock with a corona of bright, blurred light was ticking on the mantelpiece and, with each hard tick, shook itself and its little spangles of light across the upswept face of the white marble chimney. Dammerung, his head thrown back on the wooden curve of the sofa, handkerchief clamped over his no
se, seemed to be almost asleep. It was not until that moment that she saw how tired he was, languid and in shadow, scarred like the thing in the black marble cave which had set him free, still gathering the strength which had been scattered as with a blow upon the water. She wondered what he would look like when he was quite himself again.

  He took the handkerchief away and gingerly ran a finger under his nose: it came away dry. With a sigh he crumpled it up and stuffed it into his trouser pocket and rose, aimlessly, and wandered toward the tall, thin, four-legged instrument set up under the windows. After a moment’s inquisitive pause, running his hand along the side of it and patting its arched neck, velvety-smooth like a stallion, he propped up the lid, turned up the cover, and sat down at the keyboard.

  It was no good sitting alone. Margaret had taken up a pillow and had been holding it warmly in her lap; with a sigh of her own she put it away and got shakily to her feet to join him. He looked up over the sheet-music he was shuffling through and scooted to the end of the bench to leave her room.

  “Can you play?” he asked, holding out a paper for her to see.

  The notes were done up oddly—in circles, yes, but circles that were more suggestive of curlicues and Chinese script than of the musical written language she was accustomed to. She stared at it a moment before the sense began to bleed through the unfamiliar style.

  “I can play better than my sisters,” she admitted, “but then, I applied myself better.”

  “You strike me as the sort who would.” He set the sheet up on the piano. “Handle the accompaniment: it is less difficult. Has Skander tuned this…?”

  He crooked his long fingers and set them on the keys. A sweet cord trembled up from the long range of strings in the body of the instrument, but it played weakly, as if its voice were coming from a long way off. Dammerung grimaced but continued. With an inexplicable flutter of panic Margaret hurried to join in.

  The sly beast! As she played, catching the rhythm of the notes as she went, she knew he was deliberately getting her mind off her own tiredness. In a way, she realized as she left off to turn his page for him, she saw he had not done putting himself back into shape. He had pitted his body against his cousin’s stalwart shoulder. As his fingers moved deftly along the ivory keys she watched his attention fix on the whirl of notes and tiny, indicative dots, fix upon the woven fabric of sound emanating from the bed of strings. He had made Skander pluck his biggest, heaviest string to bring it back into tune: like his fingers on the keys, his mind was playing delicately on his finer nerves, matching them against the tuning fork of so intricate a task as playing a piano. It was but a small thing, a simple thing, but the strength was in the details.