Skander’s shadow mounted on the wall. “For the past two years? All this time we have thought you dead and you were there all along—”
“Right under your noses, I’m afraid. There is a certain delicious irony in it…”
“Seen from
this
side of things, perhaps.”
“Oh, by the stars, we’re hardly out of the woods yet, sir.”
Glass sang against the wood. “Sooth. And now? How is that you are here, and man again, and not a fox locked up at Marenové House?”
Dammerung’s chair creaked. The shadow wavered. Margaret felt a hand on her white doeskin coverlet, pulling it to arrange it over her shoulders. A sudden deep contentment washed over her.
“Margaret came. Could you have known, when you dared Rupert to find a woman to be his wife, that he would find, instead, his match not in marriage but in temper and intent. She was as keen to have me live as he was keen to have me die. And so she, who has no art nor inclination to art, nor any blood-tie to this land, found a spell that set me free. And nearly,” his voice turned, as a knife turns and catches the light and shows its blade, “and nearly lost her own life doing it.”
Skander said gently, “You inspire that in people.”
“I would fain be an inspiring spirit for Plenilune but we are not yet out of the woods, and now that I am back there is an awkward decision ahead of us still.”
“I should like to be there—” Skander’s voice broke with groaning and his shadow grew taller and taller “—when you make it.”
“Going?”
“I am not a nursemaid, not by trade. I have other duties attendant on me. I’ll come back presently, if you have not wandered off.”
“We will be here, Margaret and I. We are dependable that way.”
When the door shut behind the young Lord of Capys, Dammerung got stiffly out of his chair and folded up on the sheepskin beside Margaret. She rolled sleepily over until she could see Dammerung’s face. She hardly knew why she asked, but the words were out of her mouth before she could stop them.
“Did you ever tell him that you saved his life?”
“No!” Dammerung shook his head hastily. “ ’Twould be an awkward admission.”
“Yes, that is what I thought too.”
They were both silent for a moment; then, on an impulse, he reached across her into the fire and drew some of the flame out into his hand. Startled, but curious, Margaret watched him suspend it in his palm above her, the light full on his hard-cut, aristocratic face. Then, idly, he began drawing the flame through his fingers as one might draw the notes of a song through one’s mind, and he smiled. The smile gave to his face a softness it had lacked. He continued to pull it through, strand after shimmering strand, each changing colour from scarlet to pearl-white—something in Margaret began to sing to its tune, keenly, painfully—until he seemed to tire of it and began to braid the strands, scarlets and blues and whites all together, until it shone like a sunbeam at golden hour.
To ease the pain in her heart Margaret remarked, “You do that as well as a girl.”
Poised forward, seated tailor-fashion, Dammerung looked up from his work, jerking a smile from one corner of his mouth. “My mother taught me. I used to braid her hair.”
Until then she realized that she had never thought of Rupert having a mother. It seemed still stranger to think of Dammerung having one. And to think that woman was mother to them both! What did the two men bear of her stamp, of hard pride or sudden soft, smiling beauty, as unexpected as it was pleasant? Margaret looked hard into Dammerung’s face, picking out the likeness of his brother and his cousin, of the de la Mare breed. What of that other breed, that stock from whence his mother came, was there in that concentrated, down-turned face?
He looked at her from his work again, caught her frown, and frowned back. “Is something amiss?”
She shook off the search. “I was merely thinking how strange it seems that you should have a mother.”
The pale blue of his eyes looked into the firelight and turned to mercury-glass. “I did not come out from under a wine-crate. I am sorry you could not have met her. She was as fair to mock the fairness of Romage of Orzelon-gang, who is accounted the most beautiful woman in the Honours. By some.”
“Indeed?” A pleasant regret filled the aching place inside Margaret’s heart. “I am sorry I could not have known her. What was she like?”
“She was mad.”
The moment, crushed, lay scattered in little bright pieces among the sheepskin. Dammerung continued to braid the fire, turning it deftly between his fingers, while the warmth and firelight played on his cheeks and the backs of her hands, shining off her nails, shining off the smoothness of the doeskin…Finally he sighed and grew tired of his work. Closing it up into a little ball in one hand, he blew on it, sending the sparks of it back into the grate. “Now, then, it wasn’t as bad as that.” He smiled wistfully into some memory. “My mother was a pale, honey-coloured beauty, and very strong beneath her long, fine limbs. She was a bit more austere in her beauty than most of our women—a bit like you, but even you have the gypsy prettiness about you. But the poor thing didn’t get the acclaim of the Honours for long. When I was ten years old she contracted brain fever and never quite recovered. She was mostly harmless, and always perfectly serious in her silliness. She thought she was a bird—usually a different bird from one day to the next, depending on the weather: in fine weather she was often a mockingbird, and would keep to the gardens and sing in her beautiful, unmarred voice. On wet days she would keep in and think she was a wood-pigeon, and would coo quietly to me while we went about our work. She was still breathtakingly beautiful, if a little silly, and I was still magnificently proud of her. I was, after all, only ten years old, and much too young to realize what other adults must think of her.”
He fell broodingly silent for a space of time, a little wry smile at one corner of his mouth. What songs, what pretty poses and fair, far-off images must he be reliving? At length he went on. “But she was not always harmless. On very bad days, which were rare, she would fly into a passion and think she was a hawk, and come at me and my brother so that our menservants would have to rush us away and my father would have to shut my mother up until the spell passed. I always came to her afterward and found her crying, and would do my best to make her sing mockingbird songs again, which always cheered her. Poor thing. And she was so beautiful.”
“I
am
sorry.” Margaret was quite subdued and not a little awkward, rather wishing, despite the madness, that she could have met the woman. The irrevocable madness of the mother seemed to explain, a little, the casual madness of the son. “They say time heals wounds, but I have never believed them.”
“Nor I.”
Turning gingerly back upon her side, face to the fire, she thought of all the other people she had met who bore long scars and open wounds that had never healed. She thought of the long scar over Plenilune that the death of a young lord of the Mares had left, the taste of hopelessness, the shadow of a headstone at a grave. “More than ever,” she mused, half to herself, “the people I have known here have been in pain, like a people walking in darkness with no hope of light or betterment.”
Dammerung’s voice was quiet and grim. “All people are in pain, and many walk in the dark. That is the purpose of the Overlord, that someone, somewhere, might be brave enough to light a candle, to bear the pain, to jar a pulse into the life-weary body. What is strength but the will to go on? What is bravery but a hatred for that which defies you? What is courage but a love for that which you defend?”
“And that,” she said, “is why you did not die that day, though you did not feel like telling Skander so.”
There was a pause, a heavy quiet. Then she heard him smile. “I did not feel like telling Skander so, and that is why I did not die that day. But—God—it was like dying!”
“Yes…But we found a break in the wall, you and I.” She turned her head and looked up at him, smiling half-heartedly and hoping that it did not look half-hearted. “We’ll get out of the woods somehow.”
His smile, too, was half-hearted. “I had thought you had dozed off for that…I do not know, Margaret. I am not a man of sums—I can do them, but sure I have never
liked
them—but the equation under my pen has no pretty answer. I know I must balance it, but the R variable has but one other variable with which to cancel it out.”
She saw half-formed memories which did not belong to her against the pearl-pink wash of firelight, images of honour and betrayal and a crescent moon adrift in a gold cloud-spun sky. “He tried to balance it.”
Dammerung’s smile widened with a jerk, winging mocking laughter at the corners of his eyes, but the corners of his mouth were telltale bitter. “He tried—he was ever a quiet, studious boy—but I fudge all mathematics, and I fudged his as well.”
“But for now—what?”
“For now—” he arranged the doeskin where it had slipped from her shoulders, and rose in a single fluid motion to his feet, uplit by the fire, bent over her with his palm on the mantelpiece. “Now we grow better, you and I, and we grow stronger, and Rupert and I stand well off from each other to watch and see what the other might do. The playing field is set in a new shape, and perhaps neither of us fully knows how the game will go forward.”
He said it blithely, with the light of his blitheness casting a great shadow behind all his stark words, but Margaret saw in the shadow a sense of expectancy in the young man, as though he knew, though he decried his skill with mathematics, how this game between him and his great brother would go forward. Looking up into his face she saw every inch of him was of the red-blooded Marenové stock: grim and, caught in stillness, almost impersonal, every bit of him a match for Rupert. Though she had learned that Dammerung could laugh and be gentle, and Rupert never had quite got the skill of that, Margaret knew in that moment that Dammerung could be as terrible as Rupert if he chose to, that beneath the sleet-storm eyes was a mind so keen it had to sheath itself in laughter lest it cut unwittingly the souls around it. The awfulness touched her, stroking cold down her spine. She shivered but could not look away.
But he saw she had shivered, and smiled companionably. “Also it is winter,” he added in an off-hand manner, “and it is too cold to do anything. The only sensible thing is to stay put and wiggle our toes before the fire.”
“Pad away for some chestnuts,” said Margaret, recovering with some effort. “I missed Christmas and I want it to feel like the holidays again.”
“I promised Skander I would not wander off. This place is somewhat bigger than a cellar.”
Margaret pulled the doeskin close and rolled toward the fire’s beckoning flames. “Ring a bell,” she told him, “or whistle. Someone is sure to come if you whistle.”
There was a pregnant silence above and behind her. The fire crackled softly. The wind, pressing its back against the castle walls, hummed a low, sea-surf tune. Dammerung caught his breath a moment, then, before he could say whatever was first on his mind, amended aloud, “But no, I don’t need to ask you that.”
Odd how he conjured up the old Bible narratives and gave them a flesh they never had before. Laughing softly, self-deprecatingly, more comfortable and at peace and at a loss than ever before, Margaret murmured, “To whom
would
I go…?” And she fell asleep before there could be any chestnuts at all.
18 | “She Might Not Have Known”
When she woke the next morning, feeling stronger and more alive, Margaret was startled to find herself alone. There had been a snow in the night, but the sun was already well into the morning house of heaven and the air outside her window was full of a smoky golden light as the sun on the snow burned it back into the sky. But Dammerung’s chair was empty, and the weather did not matter so long as Dammerung’s chair was full.
After some fighting Margaret got herself disentangled from her bedsheets and put herself out in the cold, leaning haphazardly on the mattress to keep herself from falling. A sick singing began in her ears.
Maybe
—she shook her head to clear it—
maybe he has gone to breakfast. But he always has his breakfast here.
She was just pulling herself together to walk to the door when, to her relief, Aikaterine stepped in. The quiet white-clad maid had come and gone in the three weeks Margaret had been at Lookinglass, but she had never truly noticed the maid until now. It was such a relief to see the maid, and to realize that in Aikaterine she could place her perfect trust and be at ease, that the singing in her ears stopped at once.
“Oh my—” said Aikaterine when she saw Margaret out of bed. “What curious verities of my Lord of the Mares.”
“Where is Dammerung?” Margaret demanded. “And what verities?”
The maid shut the door and went directly to the wardrobe. “I had just brought in their breakfast when my Lord’s cousin sent me up to you, telling me—and I quote—‘the horse would be trying to get out the barn doors’ if I was not speedy.”
“I have been called a vixen, a m-mouse, and a precocious chit,” gingerly, on shaky foal-like legs, Margaret followed the maid toward the dressing table, “but never a horse.”
Aikaterine soothed her fingers through Margaret’s hair and smiled at the reflection in the mirror. “There are worse things to be called.”
Margaret sat and Aikaterine worked awhile in silence. It had been a long time since a comb had been coaxed through Margaret’s tangled hair, a long time since she had had a proper soak in a tub, or had slid with any kind of independence into a clean, starched set of clothes. It felt oddly like being reborn. Her body and feelings were no less tremulous when, groomed and clothed, she went out on Aikaterine’s arm to join the gentlemen for breakfast. The morning sun was splitting in shear white splendour all over the Lookinglass halls, breaking up on glass and marble and diving this way and that in a confusion of brilliance. She could not remember the place looking so like its namesake, and wondered—had Dammerung done this?