Plenilune

by Jennifer Freitag

  “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 disappear
ed 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.

  “Margaret.” She started at her name. Dammerung was twisted round in his chair, one of Skander’s red pieces in his hand. “You have not turned a page in half an hour.”

  With an angry sigh she shut the book. “Je ne sais quois. I do not know where my mind is this evening. I cannot seem to focus on what he is saying.”

  “Who is it?” asked Skander, frowning in concentration over the board.

  She squinted at the spine. It was growing dark and the light was thinning into a rose-grey. “Marlitos.”

  “He will do that do you.”

  Dammerung set the piece down on the tabletop with a click. “We are almost finished here. Then perhaps you had better go to bed.”

  Go to bed early! Margaret carefully did not meet his gaze, but made another attempt to read. If she could gamble on Skander’s face and Dammerung’s dream-ravaged mind, she could hope they would both be asleep as soon as they hit their beds. She, curiously, did not feel tired. Every nerve was stretched until she felt Dammerung, in a moment of playfulness, could reach out and pluck one like a harp-string if he cared to.

  Skander sucked in a breath and put his elbows on the table, dropping his head into his hands and running his fingers through his hair. “I see it, I see it. There is nothing I can do.”

  “Checkmate.” Dammerung gave an abbreviated salute and leaned back in his chair. “Checkmate, and what was that little ruse you were trying with your queen? I could see right through that.”

  Margaret’s blood ran cold.

  Skander swept the red into the tray and rose, setting back his chair from the table. “I had no great hope, but it was all I had.” Then, voice sharpened with melancholy, he added, “Passing strange that we sit here playing at chess, who have been playing it in greater scenes the past few months.”

  “Passing strange.” Dammerung, too, rose. “But I am glad for the game. I know I do not lose my life if I should lose my ivory crown.” His finger, hard upon the crest of the king, knocked it into the tray. “Good-night.”

  “Good-night. Good-night, Margaret. Rest well.”

  “Thank you—and you.” She got up in the dark, moving with the heavy weight of shadows on her shoulders.

  Skander picked up his empty goblet and turned on his cousin. “I will be up for awhile reading, if you have need of anything.”

  Dammerung’s brows flinched as if a wound had been touched. “I will be wrapped in linen like a dead man and asleep in my bed, if you have need of anything from me—which you are unlike to get if you do.”

  A horse called up from the stables. In the gloam, the last rim of late sunlight catching at his hair and signet-ring, Skander dropped his hand heavily, briefly, on his cousin’s shoulder. They stood a moment so, still, sharing some weight between them that was more hopeless than what Margaret herself bore. It cut at her again; she felt herself bleeding inside and knew that not even Dammerung could fix this wound. It was his wound, Skander’s wound, the great mortal gash plunged into Plenilune’s heart, that she was going to fix herself.

  “Come, you,” she said softly. A moth puttered by, brushing against Dammerung’s face as he turned to her. “You need your sleep.”

  For once he came without any pretence of mockery or playfulness. His feet skimmed the floor wearily; his strong, lean shoulders were bowed beneath the weight Skander had dropped on them. Looking back over her own shoulder, Margaret saw Skander watching them go, his hand moved to the back of his chair as if to support himself.

  It cut her again. And again.

  They went up wordlessly to Margaret’s room. She walked beside Dammerung with a mingled sense of dread and cold excitement that made her feel faint. At every step she wished he would break off, bid her good-night in the way he always did—lightly, carelessly, knowing that tomorrow he would have cause to cheer and tease and worry her again—but she knew he would not do it. He was too keen a man, too honest even in the midst of his little charades, to lie like that. She was more afraid than anything that he would ask her bluntly what was on her mind. He wanted to know, and if he asked she knew she could not deny him. That would be breaking a faith too dear. That would be ruining all.

  Finally they reached her door. She wanted to slip in and bolt the door at once, but she did not dare. She waited with the pretence of normality, a faint smile on her lips, looking through the grim grey agony in his eyes. She smiled, but her soul was bleeding badly now, and he seemed to be watching it bleed, eyes blindly fixed on hers, watching, as it were, some nightmare from which he could not break. She opened her mouth to say good-night, to release him gently and hope her voice went with him into sleep, to charm away the horror of the past few months, but the movement seemed to break him violently from the nightmare. He started, the reckless anger that had driven his chess game leapt into his eyes like fire, and she stiffened with a sudden unreasoning fear. Rupert had hid it from her until the last moment and he had bit her lip, hard, at once angry and triumphant over her. She saw it in Dammerung’s eyes. She had the warning, she had the narrow slip of time in which to turn her head away. But she did not turn her head away. She felt his hands, hard and trembling, entwine in her hair and pull her forward. Her heart was in her throat: could he taste it? His lips were firm against hers, but trembled: did he smell her fear? She tasted salt and did not know from which of them it came. Instinctively she had shut her eyes—had he shut his?—but she could feel no tears tracking down her face. She could feel only the rage of her heart and the rage of fear, and the warm touch on her lips of something that might have been but would never be.

  He drew away; his forehead brushed hers, his fingers still tangled in her hair. She did not remember opening her eyes, but she found herself looking into his, closer than she had ever been before, clearer and bluer and fiercer than they had ever been before. They seemed to stab into her, to probe into the wounds her own resolve had left on her soul. She did not know how long he held her, searching her eyes, gently but relentlessly; all the while the little finger of his left hand moved counter-clockwise, idly, combing the hair at the base of her neck. She held her ground, though it hurt worse than anything she had ever endured before, though she wanted to crumble into his arms and give him what he wanted: the awful thing that was in her mind to do. But she could not give it to him and she had to endure it, and finally his thumb brushed over her lips and he let her go as a man lets go a wild thing he hopes might come back some day.

  “Good-night, Lady Spitcat,” he murmured. There was no reproach in his voice.

  Her hand went out of its own accord and touched the back of his. “Good-night, Dammerung.”

  His hand turned, as if he meant to grasp her hand in his, but he checked himself and drew away. His face plunged into shadow. Already he felt a world away and the shadow that lay between them was the shadow of death. She could feel the warmth of his hands on her neck, the pressure of his lips against hers…

  Swiftly, smoothly, she turned to her door and went in, shutting it
behind her—and shutting out, too, the thing that had happened and could not be. Her room was dark; earth-light fell like petals through the thin patterned curtains, and through its light she moved mechanically, pulling at the tie of her gown, flinging it carelessly away as a man, baring for a fight, flings down his hampering gloves and strips for war. Dammerung had made her hair a wreck. Bending in the thin silver light before the mirror she thrust it back up, pinning it in place, then went to her wardrobe and pulled out a heavy travelling gown. She pulled it on with ruthless vigour, careful not to think, careful only to do what needed to be done. She would need a bath, but she could do that later. She put on her boots and paced the next half-hour away, walking the length of her room over and over, careful not to think, careful not to think…

  When she was sure Aikaterine would have gone to bed she stole out of her room, fingers brushing against the wall to guide her—she dared not light a lamp—until the many winding hallways and staircases of Lookinglass finally brought her to the kitchen. There was a little red light coming from the banked coals of the stove. She found a candle on the huge central table and, kneeling, eased back the door of the stove until she was staring into a phoenix-nest of embers. With the heat beating on her dry face she thrust the candle in among them until the wick caught, then she bore it to the pantry.

  Trusting to her instincts and common sense, she went straight to the back and began hunting among the jars and cans and dusty paraphernalia. She was not disappointed. Though it seemed to take many long minutes, the flame of her candle finally flashed up on the ominous lettering of the can she was looking for. She took it down—it left a telltale dustless mark on the shelf—and tiptoed back to the kitchen sink. Easing the spigot open she refilled the can with water, put the lid back on, and shook it until the powder was sloshing all around inside. Then she blew out her candle and stood, heart hammering, in the red hollow dark.