It was all over in a moment. Margaret saw it happen clearly, everything etched with sharp edges in red: the brief struggle between the dogs and the boar, the boar’s triumph, and the boar’s enraged burst for freedom through the ranks. Then everything went odd to Margaret, as if things were longer than they ought to have been, and shorter by half at once. She was aware of the two lymers, Latimer and Twiti, jumping up beside her, eager to join in the fight, and she, possibly out of her mind, letting go of her horse in a panic to grab a collar in each hand.
“No!” she cried above the clamour of boar and dogs and huntsmen. “No, you idiots—you fools! Let it to the bigger dogs!”
She dug the heels of her riding boots into the muck and clung on; she was hauled forward a step, but thankfully Skander’s hounds seemed better trained than Rupert’s Curoi. They stopped obediently, but nothing else did. When she could look up again Margaret saw the boar coming through the last line of hounds, hurling a hunting-boy aside with something spitting and nasty where his knee should have been, and come charging. The distance between her and it seemed impossibly long. It was more like looking down time than looking down several yards of old streambed. But at the same time it seemed the boar was only a moment from her. It did not occur to her that it was bearing straight for her—for boars, Rupert had said, have no use for dodging and foxy play as harts do—she only knew it instinctively, as if she had always known it, as if it were a dream, as if this were the perfectly natural way of things.
Her hands sprang open. What happened to the dogs after that, she did not know. There was a horse beside her which belonged to she knew not whom, and she reached for the first thing among its tack which looked serviceable. It was the
fourchée
, as long as any spear, and hooked like the devil’s fork. There was a scream which she thought was her own as she turned and braced her feet into the gravel and mud—it was only the scared horse—and almost at the same instant the boar was on her. The world became brute force, the sense of being knocked off the edge of Plenilune into the empty black, the rot-reek of boar breath, a squeal of rage and a savage cry. The jar nearly wrenched the
fourchée
out of her hands but somehow she clung on, which was stupid, she realized later. But what saved her by a hair’s breath was Aikin Ironside, who had sprung in with his own boar-spear. His was the savage, wordless cry of brute force to match the boar’s. His was the weight which threw the boar’s off just a fraction—just enough to save Margaret’s chest from being gouged open by the beast’s fangs.
The whole scene dived off the end of Plenilune into the black, turned on end over Margaret’s head, and seemed to fall on without her. The world stopped whirling and she found herself on her side with her face raw and the raw places filled with gravel. Her hands were blistered and torn, and stung as she pressed them into the leaves to heft herself up. She had bit her lip again, just where it had been broken before: through the confusion and swimming feeling in her head, that was what she noticed chiefly, and it annoyed her.
People rushed to her side. Aikin, who was closest, was there first, with an experienced but bloodied hand under her elbow to hold her until she found her balance. The world swam a moment with brown and tawny and pale light until it became a November wood again, and she looked down and over to see the huge body of the boar scrabbling and heaving, still alive, but only barely, with her make-shift weapon and Aikin Ironside’s spear in its chest.
“Someone kill it, please,” a man called, half-laughing in an uncertain, shaky way. “She’s all right, only tumbled a bit.”
Through the ringing in her ears Margaret realized it was Aikin Ironside himself who was speaking, his dark auburn hair a mess with leaves and his face rather pale so that, looking up, she realized he had two stark brown freckles on his left cheekbone. But the tawny of his eyes was laughing, and his smile flashed white with a companionable triumph which made Margaret warm where the boar’s tusk would have hit her.
Rupert was there on her other side, then, slipping an arm around her hourglass to support her—her legs did not feel certain just then—and Skander was looking from her to the boar’s killing and back again, seeming bemused. “I take it back, Rupert,” he said slowly. “You were right.”
“Someone see to Charlock’s cub!” someone yelled. “It took a chunk out of his knee!”
Margaret was momentarily forgotten as several people scrambled to help the silent, pale-faced boy sitting in a crevice on the ground, holding onto his own leg and trying gamely—and doing well—not to cry. Rupert took her out of the way and quietly put her on a log with his own cloak about her shoulders and a flask of brandy to sip from clasped whitely in her hands.
“Sit there quietly,” he told her. His fingers brushed her cheek. In a still more gentle voice he added, “You have done better than all, brave heart.”
His words came to her through an odd, muffling blanket of emotion and it was not until he had gone away himself to help with the task of unmaking the boar that she really heard him. She shuddered at the memory of his touch. It was uncanny and wretched how that was the clearest feeling of all: not the cuts on her hands or the roughness of her cheek, or even the sickening backwash of fear, but the warm, gentle, rough touch of his hand on her face. Impulsively she shoved the back of her hand across her cheek and took a sip of the brandy to drown the shock.
The unmaking was a smelly, disgusting business. The boar was killed thoroughly and turned over to be systematically, almost ceremoniously, taken apart. No one said much to her, but the odd thing was that their faces were rather different now: they were much more open and accepting whenever they happened to drop their gaze on her sitting alone with Twiti, who had slunk fawningly up, lounging on her feet. As the shock began to wear off, she could not quite think why. It was Aikin Ironside who had really done it. If it had not been for his thrust she would have been maimed, if not killed, and she had a cold, sober appreciation for the young man’s skill and quick thinking.
“Put your head between your knees,” a voice said above and behind her. “It will get the blood back into your brain.”
She looked round to find Lord Gro had joined her, quietly though the ground was strewn with sticks and pebbles. His appearance had not changed since she had last spoken with him, but after the first awkward moment of finding him looming over her, Margaret thought she caught the merest glimmer of respect in his frank, cold eyes. She remembered what he had said to the others behind the closed lattice—and remembered also that he did not know she had overheard. Unavoidably she coloured and looked hurriedly away.
“I am all right, thank you,” she said, trying not to sound too blunt, and failing, for her voice was not quite certain in her throat. It seemed to her less lady-like to stick one’s head between one’s knees than it was to have met a boar head-on with an oversized fork.
The wind gusted and tugged at their cloaks. Margaret huddled deeper into hers while Lord Gro’s danced wildly about his shoulders. Ears blowing in the wind, Twiti scrambled to his feet and wedged himself in the folds of Margaret’s skirt between her knees. Risking one hand to venture out into the cold, she fondled the dog’s ears, drawing the purling softness through her fingers. The fleshy underside of the ear was warm and pulsed faintly beneath her pressure: she held onto it as onto a life-line, for the stark reality of her close shave was as cold as the wind to her belly, and as biting sharp. She watched, blindly, from a distance as Periot Survance squatted at the dog-boy’s feet and began poking gently at the wound. The boy lay with his head in Woodbird’s lap and did not say a word, but stared in a fixed, horrified way at the wood canopy, face as white as fainting. Margaret took a deep, shaking breath and pulled herself together.
“To think,” she remarked in her old familiar, steady voice, “I was concerned that there might be wolf-hunts in these parts.”
There was a soft cracking sound behind her. Glancing surreptitiously over her shoulder, Margaret found Lord Gro had drawn his lips in a wide thin line which seemed to be his best pantomime of a smile.
The light began to blow around them as the high fell winds tossed the trees about. Light raced across Margaret’s face and hands and made tawny-coloured Twiti turn gold. Gro’s cloak caught the wind and bellied out like raven’s wings. His hand slipped out, the hand with the pale aquamarine ring, and clasped one end of the fabric to keep it from being snatched away altogether.
“We do not often have fatalities, even in boar-hunts,” Gro said presently, having wrestled the cloak under control. Surprised, Margaret turned in her seat and looked up into his face. She had not expected him to offer conversation, but after the first moment’s surprise she heard old Hobden’s voice:
“All I knowed was they brought ’im ’ome one day like a fish what’s been gutted. Boar, mus likely.”
And she shivered again in her middle in the wake of a wretched cold wave of fear.
Gro saw the look on her face. “So.” His iron-grey brows flickered and a strange softness superimposed itself over the hardness of his face. “You have been told. You are one, I suppose, to know that we are not all mask and gala here. I am sorry.”
She put her arms around herself and rose—he was still taller than she—and turned to watch with him as Brand and Gabriel began digging a fire-pit. He had not liked her, Mark Roy’s youngest son, but then it had been his right to mistrust her. Now his fair young face, roughened by the winter wind, shining in the light, turned up and caught her eye. He frowned a moment—then suddenly smiled, his teeth showing with a strange kind of companionable fierceness. Beside her, Gro made a dismissive gesture with one hand and, mimicking it, Brand returned to his work.
“Yes,” said Margaret quietly. “I am sorry too.”
The boy was not allowed to stay. Survance made mention of taking him back up to Lookinglass and having Melchior look at him, but Skander rose up in a flurry of tawny buckskin and ermine and hushed him up, sending the blue-jay man instead with the boy slung at an awkward angle on the horse’s rump.
“You cannot go,” said Skander roundly, hands on his hips, “when you have only just come. The leg will mend and the cub will get about with naught but a fledgling limp and a pretty scar. Let Tabby take him. Sit down, Periot.”
Periot sat down hurriedly next to Bloodburn and the matter was put aside. Margaret watched from her side of the ring about the fire as the blue-jay man disappeared into the cold wood, the low noon sun blending his hair into the golden mists. The last crackle of the horse fighting with the undergrowth died away. Skander returned from seeing his man off and, stamping the snow from his boots, sat down on his own up-turned log between Periot and Aikin, and an awkward silence fell over the group. All eyes wandered to the rump roast sizzling over the fire. It was a rich, heavy piece of meat that would take some time to cook. The dogs lay on the outskirts of the ring, quieted now into soft worrying snarls as they finished their own meal of boar-blood and bread. The horses shifted; Witching Hour, getting too close to another horse, squealed and swung away on his lead. Margaret stole a careful look around the circle. What was it that hung over them, that kept their eyes carefully on the centre of things and away from other faces? Brand had a slight, impatient smile on his face which might have been for the food or might have been annoyance toward another quarter. Margaret did not know. Aikin turned aside once to Woodbird, who was his left-hand neighbour, and murmured something; she shook her head quickly. Almost at the same instant Skander leaned forward and turned the roast, and said aloud,
“Well, we are all here. Is it too solemn a thing to discuss now and shall we save it for after the pudding?”
Brand looked squarely at Margaret, a little of the old dislike in his eye; she felt her skin turn cold. But Rupert, folding his arms across his chest and leaning back against the black split trunk of a pine, replied, “I think it would curdle your food either way, coz. Best leave it?”
“I think it had better wait,” said Mark Roy peaceably, and glanced from Margaret to Woodbird meaningfully.
Periot shifted forward on his log, hitched up his trousers at the knees, and turned his head to Skander. “I beg your grace, my lord. Is there aught I should be abreast of?”
Everyone’s head was up and all eyes were on Skander and poor Periot, save Rupert’s—he lounged panther-like on his log, staring into the heart of the fire: a smile slunk across his face. She did not know why she did it—the blood rang so loudly in her ears that she could barely hear herself and she had the feeling of being disconnected from herself by a sharp blade of terror. Before Skander could answer—he had his mouth open—she said,
“It is for the Overlordship. It seems Rupert de la Mare has met the requirements imposed.”
Now all eyes were on her—save Rupert again, who only turned his head to look at her hands clasped whitely on her knees. The faces of Malbrey and Bloodburn she could not read; Skander looked angry; Mark Roy and his sons seemed half-quizzical, half-wary, as if trying to scent where her allegiance really lay in her remark. Lord Gro, among all of them, looked sorry.
Periot’s face was careful, a polite, meaningless smile on his lips. “Ah yes,” he said softly. “I must have missed that, as it was not to be found in the history books in which I habitually bury my nose. Thank you.”
Quite quickly the colour rushed back into her cheeks; she forced a smile and looked away, suddenly overwhelmingly sick in her stomach.
For once, can the world hold a little steady and let me get my bearings? So this is what my foot tastes like!
But Rupert did not seem displeased; on the contrary, he seemed well amused, and that made her feel sicker than ever to think she had played into his whims even as she had meant, in a confused way, to put him on the spot.
Why did I ever pity you, when you are so hateful to us all?
As the conversation could grow no more awkward, it broke up into shards of talk between twos and threes. Margaret felt sorry for herself and Woodbird, who carried the awkwardness on beyond the men. Periot leaned forward, arms on his knees, and fell into a discussion with Lord Gro; Mark Roy and Malbrey talked amicably, if gingerly, while Brand listened in. Aikin, with unnatural deftness, had to play at mediator between Skander and Woodbird—and Woodbird clearly did not appreciate his efforts—and Margaret was trapped between Rupert and Bloodburn.