She had never been in to Skander’s study. It was spacious and well-furnished, full of light and books and a cheery fire in the fireplace. Skander, she saw as soon as she was led in, was seated behind his desk—an old, worn, formidable battlement of wood and iron—and Dammerung was ensconced in a sofa by the fire, entrenched in a mountain of books, searching, seemingly in vain, for something to arrest his interest. He was in the act of passing a book off on another precarious stack, having been jilted by its uninteresting contents, when he caught sight of her standing in the doorway.
“Margaret!” Skander had seen her at the same moment and was rising from his chair. He was in the middle of breakfast and was at a momentary loss as to how to dispose of his napkin.
“Oh, don’t stir out of your toast,” she implored him before he could put the napkin down. “I am so ravenous myself, my good-mornings would be weak-hearted.”
He put the napkin down all the same and emerged from behind the desk; his boots, she saw, were damp and a little muddy. “You haven’t eaten a decent meal since you came. Can you manage toast?”
Margaret left Aikaterine and slipped her arm in Skander’s. It was better still to be able to lean upon such a strength and not worry that she might pull her partner down. “Toast,” she agreed—the word brought the soft warm water to her mouth, “and eggs, though sausages or bacon might be a little much.”
“Make room!” said Dammerung, and pushed over an entire stack of books, clearing the little table between the couches. As Skander deposited her onto the second sofa the War-wolf disentangled himself from his own, shrugged off his enormous black cloak which could have passed for a blanket over a bed of two, and bundled it around her shoulders. His feet, she saw, were bare, but blue-tinted and grimy, with the veins carved like marble down the crest of each lean appendage.
“You have been out,” she noted as the black cocoon encased her.
Dammerung shifted and turned over one foot like a pigeon. “They are a bit grubby, aren’t they…? Skander hauled me out into the mews this morning. It is warmer there,” he added, turning with the poker to the fireplace, “than it is in here.”
Aikaterine came back with a fresh tray of breakfast for Margaret. Skander took it from her and placed it on the little table, sending a pretty pattern of silver light jigging across the wood. “Your coffee is in no danger of freezing over. If you would put on stockings and a pair of boots your blood might be less chilly.”
Dammerung flung the poker back into its bucket with a clang and folded back up on the couch, wooing a steaming cup of coffee with a beatific smile. “La, ice-water runs in our veins. A pair of stockings seems unlikely to change that. And anyway, I did try a pair of your horseshoes, but apparently your father comes from draught stock and they were too big for me. Also, I have got so used to padding about on my paws that, fit or no fit, I simply didn’t like it.”
Skander picked up the poker and brandished it like a baton. “And we are all thankful,” he said condescendingly upon his cousin, “that you found clothing was still to your taste.”
“You wouldn’t say that…”
Skander turned away to soothe the fire and Dammerung, after watching the bright, broken network of sparks going up in the grate, turned back to Margaret, leaning forward to pour her a cup of tea.
“Are you sure you do not want something stronger? There is still a bit of white peakiness about your cheeks.”
She took the cup and listened, alarmed, to the rattle it made in its saucer. “Oh, no, no. I am so tired, you could knock me over with a feather. Brandy would put me to sleep at once.”
Dammerung stretched himself out toward the blaze—was it her imagination or did the fire leap at his advance?—and tucked his hands comfortably under his arms. “It is a cosy day. An’ sure I like this better than a wine-cellar.”
Skander had gone back to his desk but he had not yet sat down. Looking up from shuffling papers he asked bluntly, “Do you intend to go back to Marenové House?”
Margaret was in the act of raising the cup to her lips. She stopped—the sheeny liquid trembled in the light—and looked at Dammerung. The War-wolf had turned his head slowly toward his cousin, the mockery and lightheartedness for a moment pulled back, and the long dark wrestling with thought and sentiment and circumstance stark on the lean de la Mare face. But only for a moment, and then it was gone again, and Dammerung was laughing.
“What a shuffling of cards there would be. Rupert to Talus Perey again—it is too small for him, and he feels the pinch. Malbrey to—he is a little better than a hovel. I could give him an outlying tower from the days when our borders were a little less certain. But I should feel sorry for the gypsies I would be ousting from the tower.”
The equation. Margaret replaced her cup on its saucer and thought of the awful equation. How light Dammerung made of it—how he laughed in the dark! Yet she felt they all three knew how very dark it was.
“I should like to go back to Marenové House,” Dammerung said after a silence of indeterminate length.
“So would I like you. You are restless in my quiet halls and make me feel uneasy. And, anyway, it would be nice to trust the neighbour at one’s back, as I have not been able to do for years.”
Dammerung smiled wistfully into the fire. “How hard it has gone with you, coz.” There was gentle mockery in his voice again. He looked up searchingly into Skander’s face. “Well I am sorry that I left you all in the middle of the game. Your smile has a little of the strain about it, as it never had before. Did you learn to fight with Rupert in my absence?”
“No.” To Margaret it seemed her words came from far off. She, too, was staring into the fire, but she saw Dammerung look at her out of the corner of her eye. “We learned to parry and to dig in our heels, but none us were matched to fight him.”
There was a soft crackly silence. Something heavy clunked on wood as Skander set it down, then Dammerung asked gently, “
Were
none of you?” And Margaret, suddenly confused, broke off her stare to meet his eye and wonder where she had gone to and what had she meant. He held her a moment, looking into her eyes with a sense of wandering through her and etching her mind on the glassiness of his eyes…then he smiled—or had he been smiling all along?—and the question slid away as he looked away, slid like a handful of sparks back into the fire.
But she kept watching, for though her body was tired and disused to work, she found the chill edge of the room and the sweep of white light, the familiar tang of tea and rustle of the fire, had sharpened her senses. They had sharpened her senses to many things, to the softness of Aikaterine’s passing, like some benevolent spirit always in the rear ground of the scene, to the little iron twist at the edge of a smile that ruined the full amiability of Skander’s countenance. But more than that they sharpened her senses to Dammerung. In the cellar, as the fox, he had always been a small, wing-shadowed sort of thing, a sad story in a children’s book in which the tales were grim, sometimes awful, but always only stories. In the white light of Skander’s study, the bare, branching view of Glassdale flung wide across the windows beyond him, Dammerung seemed a bigger, keener thing, less awful than he had seemed in the firelight of last night—there was laughter in him today which had been quenched by the scars of yesteryear last night. As he sat staring into the flames and she sat staring at him, she knew he was thinking this morning, not of Spencer, but of Skander and Centurion and Mark Roy, of men he had known on the other side of the dark, men he had left in the game. He was thinking of the game—a game now, not an equation, which was a more promising thought—and playing with huge things in his head as a child plays with magical worlds.
And are we not
, she wondered
, in some kind of magic world?
She frowned a little at him.
Are you the child that dreams of us? And I had always thought the Overlord awful and grim—a man like Rupert. I had not thought the Overlord might laugh. But—God!—what a world it would be that had not a laughing pulse in it anymore!
Her eyes wandered off the amber-black crown of Dammerung’s hair to the view outside the windows. For the first time she saw the splendour of Plenilune and felt it would not kill her. For the first time she felt she would not kill the splendour. It was sitting next to her, freed from a melancholy dark, and in the moment that hung in the balance, it had reached across to her and taken her by the hand to save her. For the first time, as she gazed at that white winter beauty until her eyes swam with light and something more painful, she felt she understood what Skander had said of the women of old and how, in their hardness, in their adamantine glory, they had known the beating blood of love.
“Skander,” said Plenilune lightly, glibly, “I think we had better wrestle.”
Skander had been looking for something in the piano bench; he dropped the lid shut with a bang.
Dammerung twisted in his sofa at the sound. “I am two years and a body out of play. What a sorry state I am in!”
As if he meant to commence then and there, his cousin dropped the sheaf of papers—they slipped sidewise on the air and fluttered to the edge of a low table—and, putting his hand to his sleeve, shoved it upward, baring the corded arm beneath. That brought Margaret out of her reverie with more of a start than the bang.
“I’ll give you no quarter,” warned Skander.
“You had better not!”
The blue-jay man, who had replaced Aikaterine, bent forward and saved the papers from floating to the floor. “I suggest to my lords,” he said, straightening, “that the garden would be an advantageous place to wrestle. It is cold but the grass has dried, and—” he cleared his throat “—no furniture will be broken.”
“It is not too cold for the Lady Margaret?” his master inquired, but his voice had fallen out of her notice. She turned back on Dammerung, puzzled, and not a little uneasy. With a heave he extricated himself from the deep cushions of the couch and, reaching out to help her, caught her quizzical look. He turned his head away, fixing her with a single eye, quizzical in return.
“What,” she murmured, “you have not been beaten about enough?”
He flashed a smile at her, a smile all teeth and fighting dare—but in his eyes she saw a faintly veiled wince of remembered pain. “I seem to have grown used and fond of getting my skull kicked in.”
“Have you yet learned to duck?”
Skander turned back from talking with the blue-jay man. “All right, coz. The lawn by the patio will do. There is some sun there and Lady Margaret will—I presume—like a little sunshine on her bones.”
Dammerung got a hand under her elbow and helped her up. “Bring a chair, Tabby,” he called. “She won’t want to stand like a referee.”
“I am there before you,” murmured the blue-jay man, and sailed out of the room.
They went out onto the patio, into a slight breeze and a clean smell of spring; the wind was in the cherry and the plumes of white were tossing about like sea-foam. There was a sweet tang of woodsmoke in the air. She felt wind-starved, and from where she sat in a pool of sunlight she pulled in breath after delicious breath of high fell country air. Oh, to be free at last! and to breathe the air of freedom! Through sun-squinted eyes she watched Dammerung step into the cold, shimmery turf and strip off his braces, tossing them onto the stone kerb of the patio, and pull his shirt out of his trousers. The linen tails fluttered in the wind. He was still thin—as thin as she felt and, if turned to the light, might prove to be transparent—but he set his hands on his hips in a defiant, cocksure pose and seemed to be the very pleasure of life embodied.
“Were you after precision or strength?” asked Skander as he, too, stripped down to his shirtsleeves.
“Both, I imagine.”
Seeing his bare feet, Skander added, “Would you rather I take off my boots for this?”
Dammerung swung a foot up on his knee and tested his heel with the hard of his thumb. “Don’t give me any quarter! I am of a mind to go barefoot but I think it unlikely anyone else will. You won’t crush my beautiful toes. I’ll make sure of that.”
“P’uh!” laughed Skander, and flung down his belt.
They took up their positions in the grass and Margaret, forgetting the wind and the sunshine, which threatened to blow her off like a golden plover feather, leaned forward to watch them. Even the blue-jay man, who most assuredly had other things to do, lingered in the brown-shadowed doorway. The two men took a few moments to stretch, their shoulders nearly starting out of their shirts with the strain, and then with nodded consent they were ready. There was no pause. Almost at once Skander sprang, beautifully, like a wild cat, blocking and throwing a blow at the same time. But Dammerung seemed to have turned into a top and whirled, bringing his foot up at the same time into the side of his cousin’s head. Margaret cried out in surprise: she had never seen a man bring his leg up so high. She could not remember seeing a man bring his knee up above his waist.
Skander reeled and spun back, crouching, aiming a blow at Dammerung’s knee. He almost landed the blow, too, but at the last moment Dammerung swung and straddled the outflung arm and seemed to drop at the same time, twisting as he fell, so that Skander’s arm was tangled up in his interlocking legs. Skander was pitched over onto his back with a resounding thud, Dammerung’s elbow in the hollow of his throat.
Margaret staggered to her feet almost before she knew what she was doing, but Skander was laughing and Dammerung was yelling, “I’ve still got it! This tiger has still got it!” With a gasp she sank back down into her chair. Unperturbed, the blue-jay man padded past her and went to assist his master off the turf.
“Shao! That smarts!” Skander poked at his temple.
Dammerung had to help himself to his own feet. “Did I break anything?”
“Only my reputation in the lady’s eyes, I’m sure, but nothing more.”
“Why, did he have that?” Dammerung called up to Margaret.
She leaned forward. The wind had picked up, and she had to shout into it to be heard. “’Twas not
wrestling
! What do you do?”