At length Melchior finished his searching and drew back, and a sigh ran through the room—it was only then that Margaret realized none of them had been breathing. “Ye were right,” the physic wheezed to Dammerung. His hands were trembling again. “Two of her ribs are broken on her left side, cleanly and not wholly, and all of them are bruised.”
“What—can you do?” asked Skander, rather quickly as if he did not trust his own voice anymore.
Melchior turned to him, tottered, and regained his balance. “Why, nothing! If she bides quietly they will fain heal themselves. Naught to be done for broken ribs but let them lie and let the healing come in its time.”
“But will she be fain to lie quietly?” retorted Skander, and Margaret felt sorry for the ancient bird-like physic who was taking the brunt of Skander’s helpless thrust of words.
“She will have to!” Dammerung, in a new, lighter tone, took hold of the white hangings—which were gold now, and no longer white, with the glow of the candelabra—and pulled them down the length of the bed to make a sort of wall on her right hand. He padded delicately past the end of her bed and joined his cousin and the physic. “There is nothing more the Healing Hands can do. Her ribs are in her own hands now.”
He had said that there were still men who would come when he whistled, but it did not seem to Margaret that he whistled at all. Of course, she was working hard at not thinking just then, and so was not much aware of what he did, only that somehow he swept the others out, talking all the while about what Aikaterine must bring up, and where Skander could find him, and generally making much of the ancient bird-like physic. Then they were gone and the door was shut, and Dammerung was coming back to the bedside with his curious careful padding as if walking too hard hurt him. He drew the chair close to the one open side of the bed and sat in it, and for a long moment they looked at each other with oddly open faces, saying nothing at all.
Finally he prompted, jerking his head upward a little, “Did you know what it was when I left you this morning?”
Now she could touch her tongue to her lips, but now her tongue had gone dry as well. “No. I knew that it was bad, but I did not know what it was.” She almost added that had made the circumstances worse, but for the same reason she had been glad that Dammerung had not been there to see her shiver, she did not say it. Instead she said, “I don’t understand. I feel nothing, yet I thought broken ribs hurt a great deal.”
“So they do!” Dammerung’s laughter was barking and harsh. Then he quieted, for laughter and grimness seemed like light and shadow blowing on the fellsides with him, chasing each other. He seemed uncertain, and made as if to speak, then with an impatient gesture pushed the words away. “Nay, it is nothing. You will mend, that is all.”
“That is not all,” snapped Margaret—snapped, for she was beginning to feel afraid again. “And it
is
something. What is wrong with me that I cannot feel my own pain!”
His eyes were uncanny and terrible in the yellow light, for they lost all of their blue colour and became pale gold like flecks of tansy-blossom, pale gold like an eagle’s eye. “There is nothing wrong with
you
,” he said in a gentle tone. Then, with an edge aimed for himself, he added, “There is something wrong with
me
, for…for I am taking the pain for you.”
It was some moments afterward that Margaret realized she was gaping at him, and then she shut her mouth slowly, opened it again in another attempt to dampen her lips, and then pressed her lips shut once more. He was not lying, for though he did not always tell her the whole truth, he did not lie. She saw the truth in the greyness at the corners of his mouth and the way he had both hands clenched on the arms of his chair. He was in agony, but when she looked with incredulity—not really stopping to wonder how he did it—into his eyes, she saw the dancing mockery there which was the same as ever, and she knew that he did not mind.
“How long will I take to heal?” she asked quietly.
“Too long for either of us. The time it takes the earth to flick its shadow over the Blind Dragon’s back and away again, I think.”
“It will be a long month.”
“Aye…”
For some time they were silent, and the only sound in the room was the fizzle and splat of hot wax dripping from the candelabra in the corner. There was almost always a sound of wind in the background, rushing this way or that against a corner of the house. Margaret hardly noticed it, having become used to it, but now it broke through the chinks in her careful not-thinking; but instead of being long and hollow and desolate, as she was afraid when she first became aware of it that it would be, the wind seemed rather to make the room more comfortable and less like a prison. It put the blowy, dark, unfriendly world outside, and the face of friendliness on the candlelit room within.
At last she broke the silence. “It feels late. Will you be going soon?”
He jigged his head as he had done in the days on the other side of the long sleep. “No, I do not think so. You stayed with me, you see, when Rupert had kicked me into a mazelin on the cellar floor. Now Rupert has broken two of your ribs, and bruised the others, and I will stay with you.”
She stared at him carefully between the light-laced edge of the curtain and the amber-coloured background of the room, stared into his harlequin face, half in light, half in shadow…and somehow she knew that it was not merely to settle a score that he chose to stay. She had stayed then because they had both been something like exiles, and so something like friends, and now that the exiling was over the friendship had remained. So he stayed, and she knew why, and without another word, but deliberate care, she turned her head on the pillow and dropped asleep.
Margaret slept often during the first fortnight in Lookinglass: a thick, heavy sleep in which there were no dreams and hardly even a recollection of herself. But there was always a sense that she was not alone, and when she woke blearily, briefly, she would always see Dammerung nearby. Sometimes he, too, would be asleep. Skander would often be there too, but she saw him less, or cared less. After three weeks—not quite a full month—Dammerung said he was fit enough, and she was out of pain enough, for him to finish the job himself. His hands had not shaken as Melchior’s had done—nor had Melchior’s, like Dammerung’s, seemed to flash with a sense of indrawn light as they hovered a second over Margaret’s ribs. She had tensed, but there had been nothing to fear: the pressure was steady, almost pleasant, as one pressing a sore muscle, and the fingers working their way over each uneasy rib felt to her like a hand passing over the back of a great bird, soft brown and stroking smooth, putting each worried feather back into place. And that had been all. The thing had been done.
For a moment unguarded, cast up in the stark light of an evening lamp, Dammerung’s face had looked pleased.
Though she was well enough to get up and even walk about if she chose, after the first failed attempt she fell back on her elbow, out of breath and shaking, fighting waves of black as they washed over her vision. A dark sleep clawed at her brain.
“I can’t—I can’t seem to—” The sudden danger of vomiting cut off her words.
Dammerung’s hands found her in her dark. “No fuss. You have been abed too long, that is all. We will patch you back together. But come, we must go down and sit an hour with Skander or else I am liable to go out of my head. Take my arm.”
Margaret obediently took his arm—a lean, hard-corded thing that was like holding warm amber—and soon found herself taken to a shuttered sitting room that was full of the warm yellow light of a huge fire. She was almost passing out of consciousness from the mere effort of coming down—had she dressed? what did she wear?—so Dammerung put her down before the blaze on a thick sheepskin, leaving her to her own sleepy devices, while he and his cousin, seated in the background, cast huge brown falcon-shadows on the walls.
Margaret lay with her face pressed into the warm, animal-smelling skin, watching the feuillemort colour of the fire weaving mysterious patterns inside itself. She had begun to feel again and care again, and in the pleasant seashell quiet she listened to the music that the fire was making and wondered, as one wonders back over many, many years, how Julius and Julianna were getting on at the University.
Skander’s voice drew her attention. In a quiet, hesitant tone, as though he had not dared to ask before, he demanded of Dammerung to know what had happened.
“You have been dead,” he added, by way of justification, “for two years.”
The falcon-shadow made a blurred movement on the wall. A range of mercury-glass dishes on the sideboard, huge and beautiful, flashed out in light and were quenched. Margaret was aware of an acute pain that lay like an abyss, like the cut of a knife, across something, somewhere, or someone, but that seemed a long way off to her…Finally Dammerung said,
“Do you remember the winter we went to take Brand boar-hunting with us?”
“Well I remember it. It was on that hunt that you—I remember it.”
“We were on our way to pick up Brand and had spotted a sow in the woods. We thought it would make a fair gift for Mark Roy and Romage—she was a big brute, none too lean for winter, either—so we went out of our way to track her down and kill her. We took her on the edge of Thrasymene territory and stopped an hour to unmake her.”
Dammerung’s voice trailed away into the abyss again. Margaret had shut her eyes; from behind her closed lids she searched for his voice. Both men were silent. The gaping wound’s edges grew sharper and more painful.
“You remember Spencer?” the War-wolf said at last, softly so that his words were nearly lost in the black.
Skander laughed shortly, huskily. “Of course. You were nearly inseparable. A better sword-brother I could never hope to—look here,” he finished sharply.
The shadow, when she opened her eyes to it, had folded in its wings and become small. Dammerung’s voice was muffled. “I did not see it coming. I felt nothing in the wind. I was coming up the bank to the meadow again, having—I had just washed the boar-blood off my hands. It was as though I was in a dream, a dream of looking up and seeing Rupert on one side of the meadow and Spencer on the other, and feeling too late the murder in the air. Spencer must have felt it. He started up and turned around to Rupert and—and the look on his face I’ll never forget. It was as if he had known, had always known, and had only been waiting for it to happen. The next thing I knew there was a cracking sound like thunder, but no lightning, and Spencer—Spencer—” The voice was growing confused and strangled-sounding, as if the tears at the back of Dammerung’s throat were choking him. “He was flung forward like a rag-doll, insides on the outside. He was dead instantly.”
Margaret wanted desperately to get up. She was staring into the heart of the fire, the heat of it smarting in her eyes, the crawling, serrated agony cutting in her chest. She wanted to get up and go to Dammerung, and put her hand upon his shoulder and say, “You took my pain. Let me take yours.” But she knew as clear as the light on the mercury-glass that this was a pain no one but Dammerung himself could bear.
“At least he did not suffer,” said Skander quietly—and he meant it.
Dammerung’s voice hardened bitterly. “Yes. I tell myself that too.” There was another long stretch of quiet. Something warm and wet fell in Margaret’s ear; she could faintly smell salt. “I almost died that day. Rupert meant for me to die that day. A part of me did, I think, with Spencer, with the House of Marenové.”
“It is a true saying that our hope died that day, and the light of Plenilune went out.”
“I am not in the mood for dragon-riddles.”
“I do not riddle you. I said I speak the truth.”
Dammerung sighed heavily. “I know, and I cry you mercy. My temper seems short at present, for two years is not long and my memory is yet all too clear.”
Skander turned the subject as one might turn a chess-piece on the board. “Why did you not die that day? Had it been me, I might have. Can a man live without his heart and soul?”
“And I had mine torn out and flung on the ground like a rag-doll,” said Dammerung bitterly. “Spencer was my heart and soul, my Jonathan. I bare remember a time without him…But I did not die because…because of the look on Spencer’s face. But how do I describe it? It was a thing between him and me which has no words.”
“Nay, but I think I understand. The winning would have been Rupert’s else—that was the surface of it.”
“That was the surface of it…The rest I thought of later, when I was of a sounder mind, and it was simply that the instinct in me to live was very great—far greater than even I had ever imagined. And somehow that tasted of cowardice to me.”
“Taste as it would,” Skander replied heavily, frankly, “I have never known the merest shadow of cowardice in your character.”
Margaret heard the quiet, mocking smile in Dammerung’s voice. “What would you know of me?”
There was a long and easy silence between them. She could hear them both thinking melancholy thoughts until at last Dammerung broke the quiet, picking up his story again. There was a clink as of a wine-glass on a tabletop.
“Rupert meant to kill me and he tried, but while ever he had to study the old arts, they came naturally to me. And I was ever quicker on my feet than he, so that I had those two advantages over him. He cast a killing spell—it tasted of all the bitterness of vinegar, as my Lord would know the taste!—and I caught it on the rim of me before it could sink deep and I turned it into a transformation spell. So rather than a corpse I became a fox.”
“A fox?”
The smile broke through the words. “It seemed a fitting form. Poor Rupert!” added Dammerung. “I was somewhat mazed by what had happened and what I had done, so catching me was no great difficulty. But killing spells are hard to break, even if you have intent to break them—and he did not at the time he cast it—nor had he, or I, any notion of what strictures were needed to break the transformation. He could not further try to kill me without undoing the other spells, else he should bring his own spell down upon his own head. So for the past two years he has been stuck with me, trying by the books of art to find a way to undo our mess.”