Plenilune

by Jennifer Freitag

  In lieu of his brother, thought Margaret spitefully.

  Sparling spoke up. He had a pleasant, assured voice, perfectly polite, though it had none of the personality she had come to know in Dammerung. “If de la Mare and my lords will forgive me for saying so—” Rupert’s eyes, cutting across the gathering, narrowed onto the Thrasymene lord’s face with a pointedness that could kill “—we did admit it, but we did not slip on the ring.”

  Dammerung’s jaw came open, but Lord Gro beat him to the mark. “Does that really matter?” the man asked gently, the ghost of a smile on his lips. “To what part of the law do we adhere, the letter or the spirit?”

  But when the spirit is Rupert’s—! Margaret looked to Dammerung, hoping he would protest, but to her dismay she found him looking sadly at the hand he draped across his knee, his head moving with a faint nod of agreement.

  “And your proposition?” asked Rupert coldly, stiffly. “For I am come for your propositions,” he added with a spasm of painful mockery.

  His brother’s head came up and back, teeth showing through a smile. “Oh, how like heaven you deign to ask us what we think.”

  Rupert’s face turned white and Margaret felt the air grow thin. Had he been any other man, he might have brushed the mockery off—had it been any other mockery, he would have. But one thing that Margaret could say for Rupert was that he took his love and hatred seriously and did not cover them in laughter. She could almost hear the sheath of his patience clatter to the floor as he removed it.

  “By his Infernal Majesty and my Lord Adam,” he breathed—the glass pane behind him splintered with a hundred spider-fine cracks— “take back your words or I’ll put them back.”

  Dammerung’s eyes began to dance, lightly, daringly, like the sunlight on a knife blade as a man spins its point on a tabletop.

  “You are a step away from a step too far,” Rupert warned him.

  The War-wolf’s eye dropped a moment to Rupert’s hand, then back to Rupert’s face. “Oh? I am insatiably curious. What comes after the next step?”

  “Clearly you have never known sanity.”

  “I do not know perdition as you do.”

  The step beyond the next step was taken. Margaret was aware of Lord Gro quietly and deliberately moving his chair back from the table. She could not see anyone else’s face. As in a dream they were all distorted, grey, present but unimportant. She saw only Rupert’s face, white with fury and what might have been fear. He, too, put back his chair, but he rose, folded back his coat, and, removing a leather glove from an inner pocket, flung it down onto the table.

  “Then I will teach it to you.”

  In the back of her mind Margaret heard a distinct click, so clearly she thought for a moment that it was real, as though someone had put a puzzle-piece in place, interlocked with the others. In the beautiful, terrible scene caught frozen before her—she felt detached from it, like a ghost—with the sunlight breaking up in the glass behind Rupert’s upflung head and Dammerung, beside her, his head up too, gazing down smilingly on the gage, she was aware—as if she were in a dream—of Brand unfolding quietly, lifting his head and looking around with a satisfied smile on his face. The moment was broken for Margaret gently when Periot Survance, seeing Brand’s reaction, happened to look her way and shared a laughing, half-checked smile with her at the young man’s expense.

  With a liquid movement Dammerung put back his chair and got up, raising darkness with him; the air seemed to crackle and shimmer around him. “Your hands are bigger than mine,” he said lightly: “consider the glove taken.”

  “The duel is formally accepted,” said Skander. He, too, got to his feet, looking remarkably less grim and rather more worried. “We will all gather tomorrow morning at dawn on the bowling lawn. Six o’clock should do it. You’re neither to meet nor talk until that time,” he added, thrusting a finger from man to man.

  Dammerung cheekily pressed his hands together and offered his cousin a bow. Rupert nodded curtly. Margaret lifted a brow archly at the private thought: I wonder if Skander could have given them a stricture they would have been more willing to obey. Then, as he was closest to the door, Dammerung was giving her his hand, the coolness quite gone from him toward her, and she was able to put her back on the room at last. Her taffeta purred with her movement. It had all been done cleanly, she thought: the hammer and tongs had been got out beforehand. The two had only to place the puzzle-pieces, to move their chessmen, and the thing had been done. Tomorrow would settle it.

  At the door Margaret felt Dammerung’s hand pull. She paused: he had turned back a moment. A pool of concentration gathering darkness at the corner of his mouth, he put up his free hand, passing it through a shimmer of air, and the cracks in the pane disappeared. That was all. Transferring her hand to his arm, he took her out into the passage.

  “You baited him,” she said matter-of-factly when they had holed up in Skander’s study. No one would disturb them there.

  “It did look that way, didn’t it…”

  “An’ sure it did,” Margaret protested. “That was not feigned anger on Rupert’s part. I know his anger.”

  Dammerung smiled sympathetically. “Oh yes, that was real. Perhaps it was rude of me to touch him in that tender spot, but then I wanted it to be convincing.” He twisted like a cat on the couch, watching his cousin, who was stealing a few minutes away from his guests, come in and stalk toward his desk. “We both of us knew there was no good in summoning the Electoral Body. Oh, we needed them. Before them the Overlord will stand or fall—and stand he will! But it is between the two of us to decide which will be Overlord. Plenilune is not large enough for the two of us.”

  There was a long moment of complete silence in the study. Even the fire seemed to have fallen quiet. No one moved. Margaret stared into the fire, stared blindly into Dammerung’s words. For a minute or so she was full of a fierce gladness over the bruise he had given Rupert—it had been awful to see the pane of glass break and to hear the man swear on his anger, but she had been glad to see Dammerung dig his toe between Rupert’s ribs. But the gladness was soon checked. Without moving them herself, the little puzzle-pieces of Dammerung’s words shifted, colourfully, and fell into their proper place…and seemed to fall suddenly away into a pit of emptiness. Plenilune is not large enough to the two of us…The duel is formally accepted…Some breed of honour…You’re gammoning me…We both know how this will be…

  Would any of us die to keep what looms before us from happening?

  One of them was going to die.

  “Oh, God,” she groaned under her breath, and crushed her hand over her mouth so that no one would hear.

  Skander leaned on the back of the sofa over his cousin’s shoulder. “Well, bully for you, you’ve done it,” he said bluntly. “And leave us to pick up the bloody pieces in the end. Fie upon it! It was a noble gesture, and very smartly acted. I’ve been pawing through my brains this past half-hour hunting for a better way out, but heaven knows I’ve thought of none. Still,” his cool brown eyes darkened—his fingers, clutching the wooden spine of the sofa, turned telltale white, “when you stand down there tomorrow, you and your brother, who will mediate between you? What man—what woman? You are too much for us and none of us are your match.”

  Dammerung had had his fingers in his hair and it was pushed wildly awry. Looking up through a shock of hair that was like a horse’s forelock, he caught Margaret’s eye a moment, seemed to plumb her cold, acute pain, and touched it with a tender, knowing smile. “No, Skander,” he admitted, “none of you is a match for us, and no man is man enough to lay his hands upon our shoulders. It is for that very reason that either of us would be Overlord at all.”

  Skander was quiet a minute, watching his cousin’s words fall into place as Margaret had; then—”True”—and he dropped his hand momentarily on Dammerung’s lean shoulder before leaving them to return to his hospitable duties.

  It was a companionable silence that fell on Margaret and Dammerung
afterward, but for Margaret the silence ached. She tasted iron in her mouth and wondered if she had bit down on her cheek. She could not tell. Her hands were immobile in her lap: she could not reach up to check. What was Dammerung thinking? His reflection in a piece of glass was far away, thin and pensive, muted in a cloudy darkness.

  What did she want? she asked herself with a sudden unkind fierceness. To tidy the place like a nursery, free of any sharp objects that might hurt someone, to be sure of a happy outcome like a little girl reading a fairytale? Was it not the naked-sabre danger of them that had at first repulsed her from these people, and what had eventually drawn her? With their thin skins, quick to take offence and to defend their bantam plumage, these were men who lived among danger and swords and blood and put a great price on honour. They had not turned their world into a nursery. They loved their world fiercely and their world loved them still more fiercely back…

  The high winds of the fells rushed at that moment around Lookinglass, thrumming ominously in the walls.

  Margaret looked at the reflection again, keenly. She wanted him to live, for all their sakes, but was it doing him justice to wish him safety? She remembered how restless he had been, like Blue-bottle Glass, when spring had been creeping into the world, how he had bolted out into the huge rushy danger of it at the merest sliver of a chance. He throve on challenge. He met the headwinds and the high waters of life and seemed to laugh at them even as he plunged shoulders-foremost into their jaws. As though someone had thrust a sword into the ground the sharp-edged shadow of the duel lay long between them, ill-omened and uncertain, but she knew Dammerung’s blood was happy for it.

  A faint, forced smile crawled at the corner of her mouth.

  “Won’t you play something?” he broke the silence. “It is, perhaps, too quiet.”

  To play? Doe-startled she looked toward the instrument. To smile was a trial; to play a tune was asking much just now. “The notes are all broken,” she protested, but even as she protested she got to her feet.

  “I know, but behold, I have seen a son of Jesse the Bethlehemite who is a skilful musician…I’ll come turn the pages for you.”

  With some effort Margaret squeezed her skirts between the bench and the instrument. With some effort, Dammerung found enough bench to sit on without crushing her skirts.

  “If I were less skilful,” she pointed out, “I might annoy him with my playing and send him away.”

  He shuffled through sheet-music. “Do you think so? But I’m afraid this is a problem that will not go away with the shooing of it.”

  She took “The Riven Knight” out of his hand and set it on the piano. “Sometimes it is annoying how right you always are.”

  His teeth flashed in a kill-devil smile and he leaned his elbow forward, chin in his palm, waiting for the turn as she played. She had not finished the second sheet, when there was a movement over the top of the paper in the study doorway and she was aware through the notes—which seemed suddenly to break again—of a dark-shrouded, feathery figure waiting for her to stop. She reached the best place and broke off, looking up.

  It was Woodbird. Her head was tilted like a blackbird’s, her golden eyes on some distant place where the notes were making shapes and colours for her. But when the music stopped she seemed to return.

  Dammerung got to his feet. “Hullo! Skander is not about. I should have thought him with you, to be honest.”

  “Oh, no,” replied Woodbird. “I have just come from him. Black Malkin sent me to tell you, among other things, that she had better be referee between you and Rupert de la Mare tomorrow, if no one objected.”

  “I cannot think of a less partial judge,” said Dammerung, the cool laughter sparking in his eyes. “Tell her it is a good plan and she shall have the marshal position—and that there will be no foul play for we shall both be quaking in our boots.”

  Woodbird said archly, “I’m sure she’ll like the sound of that. Pardon me for the interruption.”

  Margaret shook her head and murmured something appropriate—those sorts of things always seemed inconsequential and she could never remember them afterward. Woodbird vanished, trailing bits of gold-leaf and black feather behind her, and Dammerung sat down again on the chinaberries, turning the page with an idle pass of his hand through the air.

  “And still I like her better! She has none of Black Malkin’s bitterness—though perhaps the good woman cannot be wholly blamed for that—and she has a sense of wit. I like a sense of wit.”

  “I wonder that you like me, then.” Margaret looked at her long fingers resting on the ivories.

  He did not miss a beat. “You give occasion for my sense of wit to be employed. I like that in you.”

  “You like that in you,” she amended, and took up the song more vigorously than the music demanded.

  “Heaven hath been found out!” he cried, and banged the keys in accompaniment.

  They played for the better part of an hour, until Margaret’s fingers were tired and Dammerung said he was hungry and had best improve his mind a little with some reading. Aikaterine brought them lunch and news that Skander had taken advantage of the fine day, and the mention of the bowling lawn, and was playing bocce with their lordships Aikin Ironside and Brand the Hammer while Mark Roy and Lord Gro looked placidly on. The others she could not wholly account for, save that Centurion of Darkling and Lord Sparling had gone off for a ride. Of Rupert de la Mare she had no news, save that he had not brought Rhea.

  “I feel like a little boy grounded for some misdeed,” complained Dammerung when the maid had gone again. “I should like to play bocce. Do you play?”

  “I might, if someone took the trouble of teaching me.” It did not escape her that, had things gone according to her mother’s plan, she might be in Italy at this moment, poised beside some swarthy, moustachioed native, listening to the incessant warble of the peninsular language while he tried to teach her the game. “Is it hard?”

  “No. Have you got a strong arm?”

  She looked askance at him.

  “Ah,” he said, chastened. “Well, it isn’t hard, so long as you have a decent sense of aim. I think you have that—you got Rhea square in the eye, if I remember.”

  “Yes, I think I have a decent sense of aim.”

  “It eats at me that I was not there. What I missed when I was stuck in that damnable cellar!”

  They ate lunch alone, and for the few hours that they were not wholly stir-crazy Dammerung read aloud from a biographical piece not unlike Caesar’s Gallic Wars. It was colourfully and engagingly written, full of foreign names and a bright sense of loyalty juxtaposed to lawless tribes from places that did not stick in her mind. Someone—an Auxoris, who seemed to be a famous general from somewhere in the south—had pushed the borders of the Honours farther north than ever before, held the line, and set up steady garrisons and government there. When his time came to leave the military, the province was annexed to him and became what lay under Mark Roy’s foot as Orzelon-gang.

  “Hmm!” said Margaret, when she learned that.

  Dammerung looked up. “Hmm what?”

  “What nothing, only that it interested me to learn how Orzelon-gang came to be. She seems less foreign now. She has history. And I know a little of it.”

  She felt she was rambling and silly, and faltered, wishing he would get back to his reading, but he smiled comprehendingly. “You’ve touched upon an old notion, that to know the secret name of something is to know and hold power over it. Now you know a little more about our neighbour Orzelon-gang, and you can put your hand on her and she seems tame to you.”

  Tame is not the word I should have used. He went on, picking up with a recount of a battle in some place called Ampersand and how the ground had been confining and difficult and that it had been a nasty, wet spring that year, but she was not attending. She was watching his face, brows rampant as the words formed in his mind and his mouth, his eyes alight with pleasant interest. You say it so idly, as if it were a silly, a
ncient fairytale, but you know the secret names of things, don’t you?

  I wonder: what is mine?

  22 | The Red King

  The War-wolf appeared the next morning, not in grim costume to reflect the fate of Plenilune laid out of the blade of a sword, but in a jacket of sparkling white, pristine, supple, comfortable, and stitched with bravado. The smell that came from him—or was it a sense?—was of mingled thunderstorm and spice which made the senses and smells and colours around him pale in comparison. Margaret had gamely eaten breakfast but it had been tasteless to her. Skander, otherwise unruffled, looked up from his toast to see his cousin standing with the early sun aflame around him in the doorway.

  “’Morning. You look game.”

  Dammerung strode in, Widowmaker flickering like a metal tail behind him. “What—” he stopped by her side and looked down at her, his long hand resting on the back of her chair. “Chinaberries again?”

  “It seemed fitting,” she explained. Why did her throat feel so lumpy and grey? Her chest inside the constricting silk and whale-bone seemed not to have enough room to move. Her arms and chest were cold and seemed abnormally pale; the three freckles beneath her left collar-bone stood out more starkly than ever.

  “It does. I was only worried I had smushed them.” He turned back to his cousin. “The game’s afoot!” he replied as if he had not interrupted. “I can feel all their thoughts like veins, and they are all on fire as if with wine. Quarter to the hour, coz. It grows golden by the minute. Have you seen Rupert?”

  “I’ve been down to the lawn and back. Yes, I saw him: sitting on the patio looking out over Glassdale without seeming to see anything at all. He looked angry and regretful, but when he saw me he smiled.”

  “I kn-know that smile.” Margaret shivered.