Plenilune (61 page)

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, ancient 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.

“What, the All Hallows smile? Oh yes, we’re famous for it. Well, angry and regretful, is he? He is always angry. God knows he will have cause to eat regret for ages to come.”

“A cold, unsettling last meal,” murmured Skander.

Dammerung said nothing. His hand moved to Margaret’s shoulder. She put up her own and took it, and he lifted her out of her chair. Skander left the breakfast dishes to be forgotten and followed after them down to the garden and out through a narrow path onto the bowling lawn.

The sun was coming up, lancing in high, angled beams across the lowlands beyond Glassfell, whose names Margaret did not know. The air was red and golden; someone had set up a tent on the east side of the lawn and the light was picking out its metal pieces with such bright precision that Margaret could not look at it without thinking, ominously, of the coiled brilliance of the Dragon. And such a crowd! Wine-dark like stones in the
mare nostrum
, clustered round an oval of beaten grass, she saw people from as near as Ryland and as far flung as Darkling. Passing down the line on Dammerung’s arm, the dawn wind rushing and whirling in her pearl-silk skirts, she happened to look aside and see a lean young man, hardly more than a boy, with large, girlish eyes the colour of verdigris copper looking at her out of the shadow of the horse he held, an expression of stark horror and wonder in his face. Her heart hurt keenly through the careful dullness: through no more than existing she had broke the poor boy’s heart.

Dammerung stopped by Skander to leave Margaret in his care and to limber up. He wore no cloak. Twisting, white fabric purling on his shoulder, he looked back at Rupert who stood on the opposite side of the rutted green, the blaze of sunrise behind him, alone, foreboding. Dammerung set his teeth and whistled softly.

Margaret shifted his sword-belt buckle to dead centre. Her hands shook, the pit of her stomach was cold, but she did not feel afraid. Or was this a new kind of fear that was so primal it had no name? “Don’t lose your head,” she warned Dammerung.

He met her eyes, stark and glassy and feverish, and a bright smile swept up on his face like the swift uprush of a bird. “Too late,” he whispered. And, setting his hand hard upon her shoulder, shaking it like a man’s, he broke off, swinging out into the open lawn, Plenilune tipping on its axis under his feet.

Into the level grassy space he stepped, easily, head up and eyes flashing like a falcon’s, his naked sabre lying lightly in his hands. With more grimness, but just as magnificently—if not more so in appearance—Rupert stepped in from the opposing side, his own sabre throwing back the light from its bare blade. The two swords shook with sky-fire: great beams and swells and halos of golden light broke off the blades as if they were cutting through the secret nature of energy itself. The air was turning golden; the red was draining away.

Somewhere far away Margaret’s heart began to beat dully, sickeningly. Her head felt cold.

How alike they looked, she thought. Rupert was the taller, but Dammerung by far the taller seeming. The cool pride was in their faces, the sharp-featured faces of the Marenové line. They bore themselves almost identically: easy, sure, a curious, serious sable-sense edging all their faintly mocking gestures. Old Hobden, who knew what he knew, had once said they were as different as the dark and light sides of the moon, and Margaret had always felt that difference keenly. Yet now, as their similarities seemed to mingle between them in their stark countenances and determination, the differences seemed to stand out in even clearer relief. The light ran up and down the swords.

Black Malkin—who seemed to have little love for either—in her black lace gown, her gold-leaf cloak billowing and snapping angrily around her, stationed herself between the two young men and raised both arms.

“I will here reiterate the terms agreed upon by both parties,” she began in her husky, regal tones. “The facts are these: that Plenilune must have an Overlord, and that she, as is customary, seeks an Overlord from Marenové. Marenové has put forward both Rupert de la Mare and Dammerung War-wolf. The contest is this: that one of them must best the other in single combat to attain the position of Overlord of Plenilune. The stakes: all the lands of Marenové, its Honour, its manors, its cantrefs, etc., as well as federal headship over all the united Honours of Plenilune. Ladies and gentlemen, combatants—” here she turned a slow, withering look on both young men “—this contest is in all seriousness and will be carried out to the death.”

Margaret clenched her fists until the nails dug into her palm. Beside her, she saw Skander’s profile close its eyes and press them painfully shut.

With unhurried step Black Malkin returned to the sidelines, positioning herself like a Valkyrie on the between-edge of everything, watching the two young men like a hawk. As was everyone else. A hush fell over the grassy tableland; only the wind, and the sounding of the wind through numerous articles of fabric, made a noise among them—and it was a dismal noise. The silence was so complete, the air so crackling with tension, that Margaret could feel all her insides coiling up in agony.