Her father’s face darkened. “How did you come to contrive that?”
Aikin, spreading his hands and appearing himself all deference and sly smoothness, protested, “She said please, and marked that we did not know when we would be next in Gemeren.”
In a cool tone of triumph Dammerung said, “I did tell you, Gro: you must needs keep an eye on that one.”
Gro seemed to hesitate, but Margaret, seated and twisted in her chair to see the grey, grim lord’s face, saw his greyness and his grimness crumble before his daughter. Hast conquered him! she thought grandly. There is great kindliness and heart beneath that mask, after all.
“Very well,” he relented. “But make it quick, and no deliberating over the voices of the characters. Whatever comes first will do.” He turned to Dammerung. “Please excuse me. I will not be long.”
“Nonsense, sir. We are trespassing into your world. Take all the time you need with no thought to us. We can shift very well for ourselves.”
He meant it, and Gro saw that he meant it. With his brief, straight-lipped smile he left them, turning to duck out after Brand, who was the next last to go; the clatter of their shoes came back to Margaret for a few moments before the heavy weight of stone swallowed it up.
Dammerung sat back down and refilled his glass and hers in a companionable silence. For awhile Margaret sat with the cool cut glass held suspended between her fingers, the light of it playing red on the long curve of her hand, the warmth and richness like the sweetness of life itself singing through her veins as the blood chased the wine through her body. There was a little clock-face shining at them from the top of a tall wine-rack; the high penny-tick of it echoed against the stone.
“You seem much taken with the little girl Ella,” she ventured.
Dammerung seemed to wake from distant thoughts. A smile flickered like a gull on his face. “Do I? And you, in your way of reservation, I think.”
“A little. But I’ve never had fond memories of little girls—not even of myself as a little girl. Ella doesn’t seem like such a bad young lady, though.”
Dammerung appeared surprised. “All children are mischievous, girls and boys alike.”
“True, but I know from personal experience that little girls can be wicked creatures, all politeness on the outside and dressed in clean frocks—you would not guess that the same creature had just put her heel through the porcelain face of your best doll not five minutes ago in the nursery.”
“And that tidy, brushed boy was only a moment ago rubbing the face of the next tidy, brushed boy in the mud.”
She looked levelly across at him, the bitterness of that porcelain doll pulling down one corner of her mouth, the light of remembered victory on his face turning the other corner of her mouth upward. “Poor Rupert.”
“Yes, well, at the time I don’t suppose he deserved it. He has grown into the gift now.”
“Children are such prophets, dolling out justice long before the crime is conceived.”
“The Psalmist, I think—” he passed the flat of his hand across the back of his neck, “—wrote a thing or two about that.”
“Which one?”
“I—och, I don’t remember!”
There was a single thump at the door. Dammerung looked up, puzzled, but as she was closest Margaret pushed back her chair with a sigh and climbed wearily to her feet. “I am coming,” she called, and hauled back the door-latch.
She felt the blow in her chest before he landed it. In a physical state of shock she found herself staring up into the brute, bloodied, hounded face of an armed stranger. A sound came out of her mouth, a kind of sharp, scared scream—Dammerung’s chair went over—and the man made a dive for her, arms around her hourglass, before she could dodge him. The air was knocked out of her and the room swept up past her in a blur. The man took three running steps and flung her on the top of the drinks-cabinet—she felt something tear on the inside of her thigh and saw sickening sparks as her head collided with the stone wall. She could not see him, only smell the closeness of blood and unwashed body; she kicked out wildly, angrily, feeling her leg scream in a blood-coloured agony, and felt the pressure of a knife dig into the soft small area of her pelvis.
It all happened in a moment, a bare moment of horror, then Dammerung was there with a bound, his foot catching purchase on the man’s belt, himself mounted on the man’s back like an angry polecat; he twisted his hands to get around the man’s skull and jaw. He almost managed to make the jerk that would snap the man’s neck, but, realizing what was happening, the man pitched himself backward, stumbling into the narrow of the open door. Dammerung dropped from the man and sprang back, hands before him, fingers tight together, his bare feet clenching and unclenching the stone flags beneath. The man made a jab; Dammerung wiggled away of range. The man, half-blind with blood and weariness, lurched forward, hands open to grab Dammerung, and Dammerung impishly slapped him away, batting at the rough, clawing hands and giving the grimy face a stinging blow with the flat back of his hand. The man staggered back in surprise and Dammerung swung up his leg: the crack of his bare heel hitting the man’s temple sounded loud in the room.
“Guh!” the man grunted, stumbling back, recovering, and blinking through his own surprise and pain.
Dammerung put his foot down, balled his fists, and trembled all through with pain. “Damn.”
The knife flashed in the man’s hand. Dammerung’s hand flashed with his ring. The man came down heavy with the knife; before he could recover Dammerung put his elbow hard in the man’s neck, which buckled him and set him to one knee. Dammerung brought up his own knee into the man’s face, doubling him over backward—the knife went skittering across the flags under the table—and Dammerung brought the heel of his left hand down, hard, a high, fierce look on his face and his lips pulled back in a snarl, into the man’s nose. There was a sudden liquid grunt and the man’s body spasmed, flexed, and fell limp.
Dammerung dropped the body and stumbled over it toward her. She had been in pain before but the pain had not reached her through the muffling shock and stunned appraisal of Dammerung’s fighting. Now, as his hand closed over hers and he tried to pull her off the cabinet, angry flame-coloured streaks of pain flashed up her leg and into her stomach, clenching it so that she heaved.
“Ah—Dammerung—my leg!” she cried, throwing her weight away and supporting herself on his shoulders.
He swore beautifully. He was in a hurry, she could see the hurry in his eyes, but with a certain deliberation he flung her hands on his left shoulder, giving himself room to work, and shoved up the heavy moleskin of her skirt to the thigh. He got a hand under her left leg, gripped it where the cabinet had bruised it, and felt the tear in the muscle. Margaret bit down hard on her lip as the pain became a constant pulsing sea that threatened to blot out her vision. She was not aware of digging her nails into his shoulder.
And then suddenly it was over. There was one last pinch where his ring snagged on the fabric and then the last red wave of pain coiled away into she did not know where, and it was over. She could feel the rightness of the leg and gingerly brought her thighs together, half expecting the pain to reawaken, but felt only a cool soundness that she could not recall feeling before.
“Come along, moon-face,” said Dammerung, lifting her off the cabinet. “And keep beside me.”
She took two steps after him, a hand in his, and stopped again as a slimy warmth rubbed against her skin. “Wait, Dammerung! I think I am bleeding.”
He took a firmer hold on her. “Nay, it is his, not yours. It came off my hand. Now come, for heaven’s sake, woman, or there will be nothing left to go to.”
“I come! But let me have a piece of steel for I left mine behind.”
He pulled her through the wine-cellar doorway, raging thickly under his breath a curse upon all wine-cellars the whole world over until a shimmer of reddish heat was wavering around him. He passed a dirk into her hand—it was still warm and stained on the pocked wooden h
andle with old blood—yanked out the silver pinion of Widowmaker and dashed up the stairs toward the muffled sounds of a fight.
Margaret was a few strides behind him, hampered by her skirt and something that was either extreme fear or extreme anger—she was never afterward sure—so when she came out into the low back hall off the kitchen wing she was able to get a clear view of what went on. The invaders, rough, country soldiers that had been demoralized and shaved off in the dark on the run to Oaksgate, ran amok through Gemeren, crazed with survival, cornered like wild animals.
And if anyone knew the danger of a cornered wild animal, Margaret thought, it would be herself.
Brand came through a near doorway swinging a war-hammer. It sang close to Margaret’s head and crashed through the unlucky head of a rage-blind White infantryman. The blood and brains of him splattered in a wide arc across the floor.
“Yo-o!” Dammerung howled like a hunting dog. “Cover for me!” And together he and Brand plunged into the unorganized mess of armed servants and infantrymen.
Between the intent, reeling bodies, on the other side of the hall, Margaret saw the white, gold-crowned figure of Ella FitzDraco appear in a doorway, startled but erect, lured out by the sounds of turmoil. This is my first taste of a fight, thought Margaret, and she plunged under the metallic spray of a broken sword and wormed her way toward the girl.
But it was not a fair fight. The White soldiers, most of them infantrymen, a few of them cavalry officers who had lost their horses and their honour in their hunted run through enemy territory, were fighting like blind, rabid things, out of strength but charged with rage; and Dammerung, cheated out of half a night’s sleep, was angry. Someone broke glass—the sound sang sharp and sweetly over the din—and with a sweep of his hand he had turned it into a silver storm, wracked by lightning, and was cutting an uneven swath with it through the faces and exposed arms of the surprised soldiers. Lord Gro, Aikin and Brand, and many of Gro’s menservants, were excellent fighters, but Dammerung fought with the full abandon of his power and the slight pettiness of a man who had been banking on sleep and has been robbed of it.
Margaret dodged a parabola of fire, feeling the closeness of the thing draw up the hairs and sweat on her forehead, and flung herself at Ella’s side. She came so quickly, she had only a brief image of the girl’s face, white with wide eyes, looking up into her own face, before recognition snagged in the grey eyes and her arms had closed around the lean little body. There was no wisdom in running, still less in staying out in the open. With a whirl Margaret flung aside a curtain and dropped with Ella on her lap into the little chair she found in the alcove there. The darkness enclosed them like bats’ wings. The noise of the fight, disembodied, horrible, full of the sounds of the agonized dying, beat at Margaret’s heart until she could feel it bleeding, running like a shot hare through a wire fence in an attempt to simply escape the hellish screams. She clapped her hands to Ella’s ears and hid the child’s face in her chest.
Then the silence came. It dropped like darkness over Egypt, sudden, deafening, profound. Not a body stirred, not a soul breathed—if there were any left to breathe, and Margaret, stirring forward with her fingers twisted in the fabric of the curtain, did not know. Her hand closed on the curtain.
It jerked out of her grip. A huge silhouetted body loomed over her, hands reaching for Ella.
“Nay!” Margaret cried reflexively, spasming backward into the wall. “An’ sure I have got her!”
“There they are! I thought I saw a light in the dark.” Dammerung was there, pressing in beside Gro, reaching for Margaret as Gro took Ella. Dammerung’s face was white, but he seemed unscathed. “Fast work,” he noted, gesturing toward the chair.
Her head reeled a moment longer before she began to recover her wits. She pressed her hand to her forehead and breathed until the hammer of her heart had stopped dinting her ribs. Everyone was making much of Ella; for the moment she and Dammerung were a little apart and alone. She looked at him through the spread of her fingers, saw his white face, felt the whiteness of her own, and laughed suddenly, softly, very unsteadily, and admitted,
“I said you were like angels in church windows. What a fool I was not to realize angels all come with swords.”
His smile twisted apologetically. “Yes, you look a bit peaky. Sit a moment—there—and put your head between your knees. It will pass shortly.”
She sat down again in the darkness, Dammerung’s outstretched hand resting lightly on her shoulder; she did not stick her head between her knees—for, one, she wore skirts, and two, it seemed beyond ladylike. Dammerung’s closeness, his hand on her shoulder, and his two commending words “Fast work!” would do well enough, presently, to sort out the appalling sickness in her middle.
By thunder, I wish I were a man! she thought angrily, and shoved the back of her sleeve across her damp eyelids.
Someone asked sharply, “How many—and did any get away?”
“I counted two dozen,” Dammerung spoke up, his voice echoing grandly in the little stone alcove. “But sure there are more—the ground is throbbing with them. They will have gone on and left their dead fellows. Gro, are your folk all armed?”
“And told to kill,” said FitzDraco bluntly.
“Good show! And here I was afraid the past decade of peace had made some of us soft…I want to go to Hannibal.” His hand flexed; he moved inward a little until his palm touched her shoulder reassuringly. “Your man Summerlin should have the soonest word of this, and my horse makes good speed.”
“Sir—”
The War-wolf pivoted, picking Brand out of the press. “Your bay beast has a pretty pair of heels, I think. Wouldst ride with me?”
Brand’s young, serious face lit up for a moment but, having learned the knack of silence, he merely nodded.
“Then get our mounts ready. I will be at the mounting block in three.”
Yanking a cloak off his brother’s shoulders, Brand turned and thrust his way to the outskirts of the gathering; a door banged behind him.
Dammerung turned back to Margaret; as if they were some kind of puppet, she reflected, her head came up to meet his face as he turned toward her. She knew what was coming and she steeled herself adequately against it.
“I cannot take you this time, Lady Spitcat,” he said. “Will you be well enough here?”
She got up. “I must be. And anyway,” she added, meeting his eye with equanimity, “I will get a little sleep, which you will not be able to do.”
“Depend upon it,” he replied with grave resentfulness.
“Well, I shan’t lose any sleep over you. I dare swear you can manage on your own.”
“And you! When men are not hurling you over drinks-cabinets, you put up a pretty fight. I should not want to kidnap you.”
But she was aware, even as they made light of it and even as they were both truthful—why should one fear for the life of a man who could take the world at both ends and wring it dry?—that the ugly bloodiness of war, the seriousness of it, the grotesqueness of it, lay conspicuous between them. And it was nice to know, she thought, that even after all these years a man like Dammerung could look so white and feel something regretful in his heart after he had had to kill.
For Plenilune, I suppose, and all the families left behind with an empty place at the table, and the schism and the blood and the heartache. He feels that keenly—more keenly than most, I imagine.
He went off with Brand without a backward glance; Margaret found a window at the front of the house and listened as the horses’ hooves rumbled in the quiet night and faded, at last, into the thick mothy silence.
27 | These Wretched Eminent Things
In the cobweb-grey of dawn, seated in the same bow-window, her nerves put back together after a few hours of sleep, Margaret listened to the frank, weary voice of the War-wolf as he told the land-owner of Gemeren what had become of his High Sheriff.
“As the report has it, he went out with his night time Long Patrol and
met what must have been an off-shoot of our deserter band by the river Tanjou. I regret to inform you that he was killed. In the dark a man must have ducked to avoid a patrolman’s sword and the blade caught Summerlin in the throat. I am told it was a clean blow and death was swift. For what it is worth,” the War-wolf’s mouth, stiffened, speaking almost mechanically, jerked with a wry smile, “the patrolman missed his footing in the dark along the bank and fell, splitting his skull open on a rock. So that is settled as heaven settles.”
Brand dragged his fingers over his blind-weary eyes. “I should not have wanted to have been that patrolman and lived, with that weighing on me.”
“Sha!” Dammerung said half-laughingly through his teeth. “We left the High Sheriff with his people. They will bury him soon. But we must take you, Gro,” he added, a single vein of apology warming his cool imperious voice. “Your king—and I—have need of you.”
“And I am willing to go,” said Gro. He set his hand over his wife’s, which was laid across his shoulder.
“Then give me the better part of an hour and we will be gone. My health to you, my lady.” The War-wolf bowed to Herluin.
Herluin curtsied in reply but Margaret got up then to intervene, for Dammerung, making the forward movement, betrayed a slight check in his body and she knew that she must get him out at once to relieve him of the strain. He would manage. She slipped her arm in his and turned him to the door. But why torment him?
When they were out of earshot he laughed gustily at her, once, without explanation, and let her drag him up to her room where he sat down hard on the bed and stared at a crack in the floorboards.
“Have you eaten?” she asked.
He nodded. “Brand and I got a bite from a street-side stand on our way out of town. We did not know if anything else might come up to delay us so—”
“Better to have taken the chance at some food while you could.”
He nodded again. He leaned to the side, his elbow slipping on his knee, and placed the side of his face in his hand. “Have you?” he asked, squinting up at her.
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