Skander had turned back to the window. He leaned heavily on the sill, his forehead pressed against the cool glass. “Damn,” he whispered. Margaret laid her fingers on the warm ivories and shut her eyes—as if contact with the instrument would lend harmony to the world. There was a long, uneasy, creaking silence…then: “
Damn
.”
“Yes, it is,” Dammerung snapped back. Margaret’s eyes jumped open in time to see him pivot toward Skander. “When you told me about the situation,” he asked with merciless deliberation, “did you tell me everything?”
Skander pushed off the window. “Yes!” he cried. His voice was audibly shaking and Margaret realized with horror that he, Skander Rime, was actually on the brink of tears. The man turned away and pressed his fist to his lips, hard, trying to get a hold of himself. It was a moment before he could continue. “We pledged ourselves as children. We were dedicated to each other—she was too,” he added defensively. “But when my father died and I inherited Capys, and I brought the matter up formally, there was an enormous outcry. I had known of, but had not agreed with my father siding with Feyfax—and I thought that would count for something! But no,” Skander laughed scornfully. “The iniquity of the fathers is revisited to the third and fourth generation!” He was quiet for a while, still staring off across the lawn. Dammerung waited, hands on hips; his brows were hard, his lips narrowed into an uncompromising line, but his flint-pale eyes had softened and bore a look of agony.
“Black Malkin opposed me,” Skander went on at last. “Black Malkin opposed me, and of course Grane backed her up. Well I knew then that I had no chance. Woodbird was the youngest, and though strong-minded she knows what it is like to have one’s family torn apart by dissension. She was…persuaded to see me no more.”
Suddenly he swung back round, anger clouding his fair face. “She might have let it be! Black Malkin forgets nothing done by friend or foe. She might have let it be, well knowing the grief this would cause me.”
“She might not have known you are a man, and prone to pain in these matters,” said Dammerung in a dead-level tone. His cousin swore softly and turned away. With a heavy sigh Dammerung swooped down and caught up the letter, crushing it in one hand and, at the same time, extending the other to lift Margaret out of her stupor. “You had better see Aikaterine about looking through Aunt Mairwen’s trunks,” he told her. “You’ll need a serviceable gown.”
“What?” barked Skander.
Dammerung ran a hand through his hair and looked about him as if he expected the gown to be produced out of the air. “Well,” he mused. “It’s a rummy long way to Thwitandrake…Anyone got a horse?”
19 | Believed On In the World
“You said there was bad blood between the houses. How did that come about?”
Skander was ahead of them in the train, well out of earshot. Margaret and Dammerung rode side by side down the sparsely wooded road among the northern foothills of the fell country, the plain of Thrasymene before them. It was a bright, bitterly cold day, brighter and colder than any thus far in their journey. Margaret was bundled up in a white stallion-skin against the harsh wind, and Dammerung, save for his bare feet slung idly by his stirrups, was dressed in a thick black doublet scored over with blood-coloured patterns which Margaret could never quite make out, and wrapped against the wind in a panther-skin. They were well furnished and well fed; the ride had been easy and the weather, though often overcast, had held fair. But it was still winter, and it was still cold, and Margaret was looking forward to the heated wine and spiced meat that Dammerung told her would be waiting for them at the end of the road.
He dropped the reins on his horse’s neck and tucked his hands under his arms. “Do you know the Carmarthen?”
“I have heard of them in passing, yes.” Margaret ducked to avoid a low-hanging beech limb.
Dammerung pointed wide, over the far-flung knees of the fells, over the vale and woods, over the rivers blurring in the evening spring light. “The Carmarthen live on the steppes to the northeast. Thrasymene territory abuts their land—if you can call it
their
land, for they are nomadic and own nothing but what travels with them—away north, though you cannot see, where the fells end and those woods begin. Thrasymene, we must all admit, has never been a great Honour. They are great seamen but their land is poorer than that of the other Honours, their resources less, their voice smaller among the voices of the other landed men; so they know not to pick fights if they can possibly help it. Unfortunately the grandfather of the three ravens fell afoul of a nomad band of Carmarthen when his hunting led him over his border across what they believe is ‘holy ground.’ “
“They are not Christian, I take it.”
“Shao! Had they been a little more coherent in their culture they might have invented crucifixion themselves.”
He left off a moment as they reached the low sloping edge of a stream and waded through the churning, chilly surf to the other side. Skander was still mutely at the head of their train, head up, eyes ahead. Margaret, following Dammerung’s eye to his cousin, felt her heart flinch: the man had spoken little and had not smiled since the day the letter had come. Dammerung had made a bold effort to soothe Skander and had tried, with the other hand, to pull away some of the worry so that Skander would not be burdened with it. But in this the War-wolf had not prevailed. His cousin had remained steadfastly stony, internalizing, nursing a hatch-egg of agony where his heart had been.
“Where was I?”
Margaret came back to their horses with a start. “Some kind of holy place and the grandfather hunting.”
“And the grandfather hunting. The Carmarthen killed him without warning—how swift man is to quash all blasphemies!—and gave his body back to the crows of Thrasymene. He had left behind a wife, two sons, and three granddaughters. He had a third son, an elder one, by whom the three ravens were fathered, but he had died some years before along with their mother and had left the girls in the care of the old Lady. Richard de la Mare, my own father, told me once that she was a very great woman, quiet and full of steel, and she might have taken her husband’s death well and soldiered on to make something good of Thrasymene for her husband’s sake and for the sake of her people. But her two surviving sons fell out over the matter. The second eldest, Feyfax, was a man disused to patience and had fire where blood ought to run. He might have been a great man himself—certainly he was a formidable warrior and ever such a one as men will follow gladly—had his father lived longer and kept a hand upon his reins. Feyfax wanted vengeance. Feyfax wanted remuneration by blood.”
Margaret smiled to hide the pain of someone else’s memory. “Can you much blame him?”
And Dammerung, too, smiled, as if to hide the same pain. “Not much. But his brother Ring had a point when he opposed him, for their father had worked hard at making something great of Thrasymene, and a wholesale war upon the Carmarthen would have damaged their Honour badly. Poor Ring. He was a quiet young man, promising, as like to Hector as his brother was like Achilles. They were each other’s downfall, for Ring would not let Feyfax go on, and Feyfax would go on only over his brother’s dead body. In the end, through sheer desperation, Ring gave up the ties of kinship and took his own brother down, himself down too, all to save his precious Honour. And he did save it, though, as you can see, at a bitter, bitter cost.”
He seemed to conjure a wind, cold and smelling faintly of salt, which whirled around them and lifted panther and horse-skin alike, black and white like a lapwing’s plumage.
Would any of us die
, Skander had asked,
to keep what looms before us from happening?
Odd, thought Margaret, that people were willing to die for what they considered worth living for. How curious a creature man was! how full of light and darkness and paradox, the heart as of a devil and the power in his crafting hands of some sort of god. Level westward sunlight sparked on the gemmed headstall of Dammerung’s mount and flung out notes of light on the dun-coloured air. How odd…
“Skander’s father, in all other things a worthy man, backed Feyfax once in a kind of desperate council, unofficial, and cobbled together by well-meaning neighbours. I remember that my father went and said nothing and saw all, and came back with a sore heart. Black Malkin, who is the eldest of the three ravens, was old enough then to understand, the three of them shrewd enough to realize, that their family was being torn apart from the inside. They had to watch that, and watch their guardian grandmother break under the strain as her two surviving sons killed each other. They grew up quickly in those harsh, forbidding circumstances, and Black Malkin, whose temper is prone to bitterness, has never forgot that Capys sided with Feyfax and not Ring. Though I sometimes wonder if she would have hated Skander all the same had his father chosen her uncle Ring instead. Women are very fickle.”
Margaret almost reminded him that
she
was a woman, but for no clear reason she was glad he had not lumped her in with the rest of her capricious sex. It was an off-hand, almost unconscious thing, but she was glad.
They reached Thwitandrake by sundown and found they were not the first merrymakers to arrive for the wedding which was scheduled for the morrow. In the huge wooden-stockade compound of the house, dark and as implacable as a boar, torches burned in the brown shadows, throwing up great smudges of black smoke against the burnished rose-gold sky of evening. The stables were full and smelled heavily of warm horse bodies. Margaret had a confused impression of people everywhere, everyone chatty and happy, everywhere a purl of wine-dark cloak or jink of yellow light off an earring as someone turned her head to see who the newcomers were. Hid inside her panther-skin, a small purr of courage reverberating under her breastbone, Margaret passed them by, breaking her horse off from the rest of the train to come alongside Skander’s and Dammerung’s. Skander was so much occupied with his own thoughts that he slung down and went on at once, leaving the two of them behind. Sympathetic, but stung, Margaret frowned after him as he mounted the house steps and was swallowed up in the light coming through the open doorway.
“I dare swear the holy of holies is more accessible than he,” grunted Dammerung as he shed his hooves and reached up to lift Margaret down. From under the shadow of his hood his eyes gleamed out like moonstones. “Best let him be for now.” He looked for Aikaterine and the blue-jay man and, seeing neither of them, mused, “It appears we must shift for ourselves. I am for supper and a bath and bed. And you?”
She looked over her shoulder at the many people gathered in the dark, torch-shot cold of the yard. “I am not in the mood to be sociable just now. I like your programme.”
“Simple pleasures. Canst walk!” he added laughingly as, trying to go with him, her muscles cried out in agony and her knees buckled.
“It has been awhile since I rode so great a distance,” she said defensively. “Oh, for a bit of spiced wine!”
They evaded the crowded central hall and were soon directed to the guest quarters at the rear of the complex. When Margaret told the servants that Skander Rime was in their party they were given a suite with a cosy little sitting room between the bedchambers, a fire, and news that a warm supper would be brought in to them as soon as the message could be delivered to the kitchen.
“And as soon as the kitchen can spare time,” added Dammerung when the servant had gone and left them alone. “I have grown used to eating regular meals. Lookinglass is quite spoiling me.”
He pulled off his cloak and took his things into the adjoining bedroom to unpack. “Spencer!” he called back. “Would you bring a light? It is black as pitch in here.”
Hesitating in the dark doorway of her own little room, Margaret looked back: in the shadows of the other room she could see Dammerung moving about—a great distance off, it seemed just then—and suddenly she hurt for him and could not move, for to move would make the pain only worse.
But then, “Nay, never mind. There is a candle here.” And a light sprang up with a snap, fanning the room with a thin yellow light so that Margaret could see the pack slung on a little, heavily-carved kist, and two low buckskin beds. Dammerung’s shadow arched across the wall. With a shaky sigh she turned away.
“Bring a light in here when you are done,” she said, stepping into the dark. “I cannot see my hand in front of my face.”
“Can any of us?”
He appeared in her doorway after a moment, breaking up the fire’s glow with a black, red-winged figure. By use of her shin she had found the low bed and had put down her own pack on it; straightening, she squinted back into his blurred face. He was quiet and still. Had he caught his mistake? Did he hold still to keep it from hurting too much? But no, without warning he laughed, shortly, and said, “There, I have got it now.” He put out his hand toward one corner of the room.
At the same instant a light sprang up high from a candle which, in the dark, Margaret had not been able to see. It had been sitting before a mirror, and the reflection-candle flung back the light with more potency than the real thing.
“Moreover these whom he predestined, them he also glorified. This is a cosy little setting,” he added, looking around.
It was true. By the candle and candle’s reflection, Margaret looked round on her little chamber. There were two low beds and a cramped bath—but the bath had hot water—a low vanity and stool, a clothes-chest and changing screen, and on the wall next to the door was the portrait of a peacock done up in gold paint. Dammerung studied the peacock with approval.
“We have a stag in ours,” he said.
Margaret bent to unpack. “Too bad,” she said. “A peacock would have suited you better.”
He leaned jauntily against the doorframe, arms folded across his chest, pointedly idle as she worked. “An’ sure it would… You could have used a wardrobe,” he added as she unpacked the gown she meant to wear tomorrow and shook out its folds.