“I do!”
A gasp of surprise shocked through the room. Woodbird turned in a flutter of feathers. Margaret, as if struck by a whip, whirled toward the door. It was Dammerung—but she had known from his high, triumphant shout, half-laughing, that it was Dammerung—in black and blowing black, throwing down a stark shadow on the threshold as if he stood on the brink between the living and the dead and was on the verge of crossing over.
Someone in the congregation screamed. Someone nearby—it was a man—swore violently and started up.
“Peace!” cried the shepherd. He put his hands on the shoulders of the bride and groom and thrust them unceremoniously apart, coming down off his little dais a step. There was a tense quiet. Margaret could not hear a single soul breathing. Beside her Skander was tense, his hand flat on the bench as if he were in the act of rising but had somehow, irreparably, checked himself. He sat immobile. His face was angry white.
The shepherd and the young war-lord regarded each other in silence for some time. Margaret could see the latter was faintly amused, the light and the dark of laughter jinking from eye to eye; the former’s face, at first contorted by a horror of disbelief, then recognition, then quiet acceptance, had a grim kind of humour about it too.
“Well, apparition,” he said lightly. “And what is your grievance?”
“Mine, nothing! Or it is not pertinent now what
mine
may be…But I speak of a grievance on another’s behalf and protest that, in all honesty, this wedding cannot go forward.”
From the front of the church Black Malkin rose, looking beautiful in a gown of thunder-purple slashed with gold. Her face was terrible. “I do not know where you are come from,” she said, “from pandemonium or perdition, but you have no right to come in here and arrest the wedding of so high a lady and honourable a gentle—”
“Oh, go saddle your broomstick!” Dammerung cut her off.
Another gasp cracked through the room. Black Malkin stood in rigid indignation; but she did not meet the blow, though she did not sit back down. The shepherd warred in vain to crush a smile.
Seeing that the woman was put in her place, Dammerung turned back to the minister. “Sir, I have but two questions.”
“And we have but hundreds,” the shepherd replied wryly. “Ask away.”
With an acknowledging upward quirk of his lips Dammerung turned to Woodbird. “Madam—” his voice dripped with condescension “—what were your exact words to Skander Rime concerning your separation?”
Woodbird Swan-neck, put more on the spot than ever before, looked rather pale—though whether from anger or anxiety, Margaret could not tell. The woman took her time to remember, then replied in a carefully measured voice, “I believe I said, ‘Skander, I must not see you again.’ “
“Ah?” Dammerung shot back. “You didn’t say anything like, ‘Skander dear, I’ve got to break off this engagement with you’?”
One of Woodbird’s eyelids twitched, as if daring Dammerung to mock her too far. “No.”
“And Skander—where are—oh, there you are. Skander Rime of Capys, etc.,” Dammerung waved a hand. “Did you ever, wittingly or unwittingly, say such words as to break the contract you had with your Ladybird?”
Skander seemed to miss the light mockery altogether. He rose stiffly, faced the shepherd, and said in a husky voice, “As God is my witness, I never did.”
Dammerung cocked a meaningful brow at the shepherd.
But the shepherd had lost his laughter for the moment. He seemed to be deeply considering the matter, and looking from one stark white face before him to the other. But in the horrible quiet full of the dry-leaf scuttling of voices from the far corners of the church, the man who had been meant to be the groom placed his other hand over Woodbird’s, very gently, and held it a moment, then took both his hands away.
Margaret’s throat tightened.
The shepherd saw the gesture. “Well,” he said quietly, “it seems you have a sound case. I must, or go contrary with my conscience, forswear binding this man and woman together.” Then he lifted his head, cleared his throat, and seemed to recover a little of his glibness. “There is no procedure in the books for dispersing a wedding that has not gone through, so I must simply say—I think there is a good dinner waiting for us. We mustn’t let it go to waste.”
Dammerung laughed deprecatingly and, blowing about, vanished from the doorway. The bewildered crowd, as if let loose from an enchantment, began murmuring incessantly until the whole room was throbbing with the soft, worried noise. In the confusion Margaret managed to see Woodbird passed off onto her relatives—Black Malkin was white with fury, but Grane seemed to take it coolly—then she had to attend to Skander, who seemed lost inside himself and took several moments to respond to her insistent calling.
“This does not mean anything,” he said pessimistically as she got him to his feet. “She still went away, and there is still Black Malkin.”
“It means everyone acknowledges your engagement—even Black Malkin must, now!” Margaret took his arm and pulled him through the press, conscious of people looking their way. She hid her hot red cheeks and hoped they would not recognize
her
. There were so many unfamiliar faces…“Man enough to take the challenge?”
They had plunged out into the light and wind. Skander stopped abruptly, roused by her thrust, and a little roughly rearranged her arm in his until it was more comfortable. “Not for want of courage!” he assured her. “Only I did not want to trespass upon her happiness.”
“It seems your cousin has no such qualms. And I think he did it as much for her happiness as for yours.”
“I doubt he cares much a penny for her,” Capys snorted. “But anyway, he is the Overlor—”
He stopped himself, realizing his nearly unconscious mistake. Margaret had been watching a bit of birch twig, still clung about with wrinkled leaves, scuttling down the cobbles. She was careful not to look away from it.
“I would find the devil,” Skander finished.
They found him, after some searching, in the sitting room of their guest quarters, feet flung up on the grate, warming at a deep-set fire. He looked up as they entered with the angry laughter of victory in his eyes.
“You sneaking knave,” said Skander huskily, throwing down his cloak haphazardly. Margaret took it back up to hang it properly. “Miscreant and little meddling boy! Why I ever picked you up off my courtyard cobbles is beyond me.”
Dammerung’s smile twisted and seemed to withdraw. “You did not think I was so cruel as to drag you up here in the cold of early spring to show you the promise of a cold, empty life of a cold, empty bed, did you?”
Skander was silent. He leaned upon the back of a chair, grasping it tightly. His big, firm frame seemed spent.
“You are angry with me.”
“No!” Skander laughed gustily, mirthlessly, and looked away, dragging a hand over his face. “I was terrified, and you are as good a thing as any to vent on.”
“Yes, people seem to feel that about me…” Dammerung took his feet off the grate and, reaching over, pulled close a chair for Margaret. She sat down beside him in the warmth of the fire where she could see both their faces. “I thought Woodbird took it well,” Dammerung went on. “She did not seem too keen on the match herself. Black Malkin took it rather badly, though, I think.”
Skander nodded, but after a moment he shook, suppressed it, and shook again. He had to turn away completely to hide his loss of countenance. “I am not a vindictive man by nature,” he said, laughter breaking out through the chinks in his words, “but ever since Black Malkin sent me off without a warm meal or a warm bed, I’ve wanted somewhat to happen to her. You struck her down most cruelly, coz—most cruelly!”
“’Twas aught she deserved!” Dammerung laughed back. “She asked for it when she put her oar in. No one puts his oar in my business.”
Skander lifted a brow. “And I am your business?”
“You are all my business.”
A heavy quiet hung between them; Skander, poised large and solid just inside the closed doorway, Dammerung flung back in his chair, casual, a half-mirthful smile playing at being real on his lips.
Anyway
, Skander had said, and Margaret heard his words clearly in the silence,
he is the Overlord
. It broke upon her—she stirred, looking away toward the white light coming from the windows—that Dammerung had done a great and awful thing, and yet so simple, so simple as casting aside a cloak on a chair…He had squared off before Black Malkin and Grane, the leaders of Thrasymene, before the leaders of other Honours, held his own, and they had followed his word. They had followed him as gladly as she reckoned men had been wont to follow the fireband Feyfax years before, and in that simple gesture as of turning a row of chessmen on the board, they had let him be the Overlord. It had been small, but it had been great, and as if he were thinking of the little huge victory himself, Dammerung smiled up into his cousin’s face.
He did care a penny about Woodbird, too.
“I hate to rain on your parade, Skander.” Margaret’s voice felt disused from fast and breathless thought. Dammerung turned toward her. “Rupert is here.”
He merely nodded. “I know. I caught the whiff of him, and he of me, but the stars are not aligned and the silver in our blood is not afire. The time is not right. He won’t make a move, not now, not on Thrasymene soil.”
“So—he will make a move,” said Skander practically.
“Oh, surely—softly! gently!” The War-wolf settled more comfortably in his chair and curled his lean pale toes around the warm iron of the grate. “There is the devil to pay and he is a veritable lord of cunning. He won’t come out of the windbreak and the thunderstorm. If anything, he will come surging up through the watertable, insidiously white-livered in that dastardly way no man can ever discount, and he will do it masterfully. And if we are not careful, the man may win.”
Margaret looked at him sharply. His face, downthrust in thought, chin against his chest, brows shadowing his eyes until they were hard to see, caught the light only upon the cheekbones and make it leaner, hungrier—again she saw the furious power of Marenové that was a house of fire, devouring all before it.
“Dammerung,” she said gently, urgently, “we cannot afford to let him win.”
“What of Margaret!” asked Skander hotly.
Dammerung flung up his head, throwing a sharpened look like a dagger at his cousin. “What of—” he began, then broke off and swung back round on her. “Cannot we? What are we, Margaret, in the scheme of the world, in the scheme of time? A little nation under the devil’s heel does not sway God’s inexorable pen. It is God’s own ink the devil writes.”
“But
we
cannot afford it,” she said doggedly. Her body seemed to clench inside her skin. “Don’t think I ever counted myself much, or much worthy of God’s notice. He knows full well what a wanderer I am and what thin milk I was fed on. But it matters to
us
. If anything they say is true, how could I—how could you—if we don’t put up as stiff a fight against Rupert as we can, I should be ashamed of heaven and ashamed of my soul and cringe to hear anyone speak my name after I am gone.”
The purl of quiet rippled loudly in the wake of her words. The half-moon smile on Dammerung’s lips was oddly gentle, oddly bright. “O, for a muse of fire!” he breathed passionately “—that I might light a generation with it in the heart-place. Don’t fret, Lady.” His tone, dropping its richness of emotion, turned flashing upon a blade of mockery. “I am of a purpose now and I know what I am doing. He will have to climb over my dead and untwitching corpse to reach you and the Honours back of you, and he will not get at me so easily this time.”
He was certain, and unquestioningly she trusted him, but her own heart-place was ashen cold and for a few moments she had to keep still lest, with a sudden movement, the pain of fear would catch her under the breastbone. When she could she said, “They are still having the dinner. Woodbird will be there. Skander, are you going?”
Skander had already taken up his cloak again. “I will go. I am now almost sorry for the man Sparling and I want to shake his hand in friendship. It was a noble thing he did, giving her up like that.” He paused a moment at the door, smiling back at her softly—as if he, too, had a pain under the breastbone that might hurt him if he moved too quickly. “I know it is not easy to give that woman up for anything.”
“Go on and see your Ladybird—win her back.”
“You are not coming?” Skander took a step toward his cousin.
Dammerung shook his head and turned in the chair, away from Skander, toward Margaret. “Not this time. I don’t relish being coddled as a souvenir from Hades, as they suppose me to be, nor do I relish meeting Rupert in the crowd; though I think that unlikely, I don’t trust my temper to weigh circumstance against score and grievance. I should lose it, as perhaps should he, and that might be more than poor ruffled Black Malkin could bear.”
“Keep your head low, then,” said Skander. He set his hand on the latch. “If anyone asks, I’ll tell them Margaret is a great witch and conjured you from the dead.”
“You tell them that.”
He left in a flurry of spirits, passing Aikaterine in the hall on his way out; Margaret could hear him telling her where he was going and that he was taking the blue-jay man, but that he would prefer her to stay with Dammerung and see to his needs. Aikaterine answered—her voice was indistinct—but no one came in. The hallway fell quiet, the quiet rippled through and touched the room, shining in the light, gleaming in the silver.
Driven by a sudden impulse, Margaret admitted, “You gave me quite a scare, you know.”
He appeared apologetic. “I was sure I was, especially when I realized Rupert was about, but there was nothing for it and you had Skander’s arm to hang on.”
“I find I did manage.”
“Of course you did,” he said frankly.
She tucked her legs up on the chair cushion, shivering in the thin chill. “What now? Do we slink about in here until it is time to go home, or won’t you give Woodbird a decent salute before you go? You will be family, after a fashion.”
“After a fashion…” His voice grew musing, his eyes distant. She saw him go to that place within, to the huge dreams with which he dreamed of Plenilune; the sharpness of cunning and the tenderness of a master craftsman touched the corners of his mouth. “For now I will lie quietly and be little more than a rumour. Quite apart from getting Woodbird out of her own folly and securing some happiness for Skander, my intention was to startle a flame of hope among them as they have not had, oh, for many years now. Hope is a powerful thing; where it reigns men of even the lowest stature cannot be crushed, and where it has withered into dust whole ships of state run aground and break up on the rocks of corruption and consequence. For now I will be a rumour, a spark of hope, and that will grow to be a stronger thing than Babel in their hearts. Later they will see my face. For now I will go away—and blessed are those who, not seeing, yet believe.”