His words were like rods of iron heated in the furnace: hard and glowing they barred across Margaret’s heart, and though they shut out the flashing, feathered world, she felt safe behind them. “Half of us is legend,” she said, “and the rest is pain.”
He smiled mirthlessly and nodded.
“And Woodbird?”
He roused a little. “I will have Skander bring her by and give her a peck on the cheek, if she will let me. Sooth, I would like to see if the maid has become something worth fighting for, as my cousin seems to think.”
“I like her,” Margaret confessed, “though I little know her. I cannot say she was so very kind to me, but she was like a challenge that I could rise to. I was glad for that.”
“You and I,” laughed Dammerung; “we do better with a beating: it gets our blood up.”
“We look less pretty, though.”
“Prettiness is imperative.”
They spent the morning lounging in the thin yellow sunshine under the windows, reading what books they could scrounge from the rooms; Margaret took out her diary and jotted down the journey of the past few days and the events of the morning. They were briefly interrupted a little after noon by Aikaterine bringing in a luncheon of spiced apples, maple-cured ham, and wine. They ate and settled back into a sleepy daze of sunshine and warm food. Dammerung turned his book upside down on his thigh and slung back in his chair, eyes shut against the sun, his chest rising and falling steadily in a shallow doze while Margaret, feeling she should continue writing, sat perfectly still for a long time, too contented and too tired to do anything.
Dammerung stirred suddenly with a jolt, startling her; a moment later there was a metallic rattle at the door and Skander swung it open, stepping aside to let another figure come in before him. It was Woodbird, still decked in her wedding finery, a little more at peace in every line of her body—though there was a fulgurant gleam in her eye when, looking beyond Margaret, she saw the War-wolf sweeping up from his chair to receive her.
“So!” she said, stopping just inside the door. She looked him over, from his bare feet to his sly, drooping eyelids. “It is you.”
“If you cut me,” he said quietly, “I will bleed.”
“That is good to know,” she replied archly. Then, as archly, though more gently, she added, “I think I must owe you a debt.”
But Dammerung shook his head. “The lady owes me nothing. I prefer to not be holden to any man—or woman. It is only cumbersome.”
Skander shut the door. Moving further into the room, Woodbird, with her eyes owlish and golden in the striking shafts of light, turned her head so that, no matter where she went, she was always looking at Dammerung’s face. “You won’t take this receipt of debt even in accord with the dues of honour?”
“Oh, honour be hanged! That, too, is cumbersome. Wilt name a child after me? It will only confuse the annals of history if you do. Let us say, if it will soothe your feathers, that I did it for Skander alone—or, to soothe you both, that I did it as my own whimsy led me. Try to pay back a debt to heaven and see how well you do. Heaven does not care.”
She seemed to think a moment, seriously, then, with so small a gesture of her head as was almost imperceptible—save that Margaret saw a spark of light come suddenly off her earring—she seemed to let the matter go. Imperiously, she sat down.
“You have eaten; do you care for a little wine? It tastes of Darkling and is quite good.”
Margaret’s eye fell on Woodbird’s hands draped languidly over the arms of her chair. They were long, beautiful hands, but about the hard knuckles and spread of the fingers she read that they were accustomed to harsh things—to horse-reins and sword-hilts, perhaps—as well as the handle of a mother-of-pearl looking-glass and the polished bannister of a lord’s staircase.
“We add our own spices, but Darkling, I will admit, makes the best wine. A glass, please, Skander…”
Two new glasses were filled. Margaret’s was filled a second time. Dammerung got up, as if it was his own room, and played host with softly padding care and suppressed delight. Fishscale light scattered across the face of the dark-wood table they drew up between them.
Margaret turned to Skander, who was seated around the table on her right. “Did anyone ask about Dammerung?”
“Did anyone!” He laughed. “I have never seen people hedge so beautifully trying to ask a question while not seeming to mean anything. For some I was too busy to reply, with others I had to say—though I feel I said it too candidly—that you were a witch and had raised Dammerung from the dead. To be honest,” he added with a quick flare of suspicion, “even
I
do not fully know how you came back. You were most cryptic about it.”
Woodbird frowned at Dammerung. “Yes. Skander could not tell me adequately. We all assumed you dead, sir. What
did
happen?”
Dammerung, caught between them, seemed to hesitate between a blithe lie and the heavy truth. But his eye wandered to Margaret’s and hovered there, and he came down on truth. “My brother Rupert de la Mare tried to kill me to remove me from the running as Overlord.” Woodbird’s face, careful and still, grew white. “Only he was not skilled enough to kill me, so he locked me in our cellar—where I have been for the past two years—and studied the old arts to murder me. But Margaret went to the Great Blind Dragon, got a spell-breaking spell, and set me free. I have been living at Lookinglass with Skander Rime since. That was a little over a month ago.”
Both Skander and Woodbird fixed their surprised and appraising gazes on Margaret. She felt her cheeks burn, suddenly the centre of their attention, but there was nowhere to hide and nothing to say.
“You went to the Dragon?” breathed Skander. He shifted as if he meant to rise, but caught himself. An appreciative curse, which somehow warmed Margaret further, broke through his lips. “There are many things of wood and water and air that I should face, but at heaven and hell I should balk. And you went, lady, just like that?”
She lifted one shoulder. “There was nothing else to be done,” she said simply.
“By heaven!” Woodbird exploded. “The man a murderer, a sneak-thief and a rogue? How is it that we countenance his presence among us? I wonder!”
“Because the man is more than a match for any of you,” Dammerung said levelly. “I have already said as much to the Lady Margaret: would you say
nay
to the man?”
The woman’s eyes sparked, but a touch as of remembered pain greyed the hollows of her cheeks and she said nothing. When she could speak, it was in a low whisper. “I have always hated him and never known quite why. Now I have a reason to hate, but no means. If anything galls me, it is that.”
Dammerung flicked a supercilious brow at her which spoke volumes to Margaret, but thankfully Woodbird was intent upon some thought in the middle distance and did not see. But he did say, after he had drained his glass and let her think a moment in silence, “I would be grateful if you would keep that knowledge to yourself until such time as I give you leave to disclose it.”
She turned upon him, eyes flashing scorn. “You may find me a paragon of discretion. If anyone asks, that Lady Margaret is a witch seems sound enough. She is largely unknown, and what is known is that she has cause to hold a grudge against de la Mare. Your secret is safe with me.”
Dammerung took her words between his teeth and bit them with a smile.
Drawing back from his countenance, Woodbird turned to her beau. “And now, sir?” Her voice was still sharp; her eye, inexorably drawn, flicked back to Dammerung before darting away again. “And now? Do you not mean to expose him?”
“As soon kick over a hornets’ nest when you wear no shoes,” Skander replied levelly. He avoided his cousin’s gaze and looked steadily upon the carpet between their feet, brows furrowed. “The devil is pre-eminently a gentleman: it would not do to strike him in cold blood.”
Woodbird looked hard at Dammerung, her lips pressed into a thin line. He sat with his elbow on the arm of his chair, chin in his palm, and smiled back at her coyly, playfully, as if he knew what was warring behind her uncanny eyes. She sucked in her breath. “I see what you mean by honour being cumbersome.”
“Don’t you?” His head jigged with the movement of his jaw. “But Capys is right: I won’t trod on the bastard’s head, for sure he should bite my heel. We are gentlemen, he and I—”
“Ha!” Margaret pressed her hand to her lips a moment too late.
“—and play a bloody and delicate game.” He slid a smile at her out of the corner of his mouth, though his eyes did not move from Woodbird’s face. “Surely you realize what is at stake is more than my life and my honour, a matter more than a criminal brought to justice. This is for Plenilune, and dear God in heaven I should sooner do this gently than upstir the lives of so many innocents and bury them under good Plenilune dirt—as
would
happen,” he added, “if I were to step out of that door right now and point my finger at Rupert and let slip to all what he did to me. You see that, Ladybird? You see how all in a moment the hot blood is churned and how quickly a man’s sense is blinked out by airlessness? Man has blood enough to power his brain or his brawn, not often both at once.”
Margaret watched the colour spring to Woodbird’s cheek, angry but quiet. “I, of all people,” she said softly, “should know that lesson well.”
There was a pause—then Dammerung leaned across the distance and set his hand over Woodbird’s a moment before drawing away again. She was still, looking at the hand he had touched…then she closed it, drew in a breath, and seemed to wake from a distant, uneasy sleep.
“I still have guests,” she said, “for whatever it is worth. I should not leave them unattended long.”
Since Aikaterine had gone away Margaret leaned forward to collect the glasses. “Oh yes,” she said blithely. “You mustn’t deny them the honour of not knowing whether to congratulate you or offer sympathy. The awkwardness makes one so superior.”
Woodbird flung round her head with a sharp, genuine laugh, shedding a cluster of soft candid feathers from her headdress. They fluttered after her as she rose and went out on Skander’s arm, settling like late snow on the dark braided carpet.
Margaret stooped and picked them up. The room was quiet; presently Aikaterine would come back to replenish the fire, but for now she and Dammerung stood silently, listening to the words they had said. Her fingers ran over the feathers: she did not know what sort of bird they had come from, only that they were white and one had a suggestion of grey, and that the course of the day had broken open some of their barbs.
“Odd,” she murmured, half to herself. “I had thought they would be red.”
“Shuh!” Dammerung rocked with his mirthless laugh. He pushed up the hem of his tunic and thrust his hands into his pockets. “Fie for a sceptic! She turned out bonny.” He cocked a smile at her. “I dare swear the lady is worth fighting for, after all.”
Margaret shook her head with wry disapproval. “You
are
one to gamble before you have tested the mint.”
“It is only what I should want someone to do for me,” he protested. “
You
did.”
She had not thought of it that way. To be frank with herself, she had to admit that she had not thought of it at all. When she had stood before the Dragon, empty of thought and full of determination, she had counted no cost but gambled upon a single life—his own—with a single life—her own—and she had not known the mint of either. Of a sudden she shied, embarrassed by the attention. “Tush! I should break my tooth trying to bite into your metal.”
His eyes danced. “Am I that hard to swallow?”
“Sooth!” she retorted, “and taste of fire and iron!”
Her words fluffed up his fur and he purred to himself. But he, too, seemed to have had enough attention. He returned to his book and was quiet, thoughtful, and had a pleasant spirit for the rest of the afternoon. In the morning they would begin the trip back to Lookinglass, but until then Dammerung did not want to stir out of their suite. He and Margaret sat out the afternoon in companionable silence, each at their own work—and yet Margaret could not help feeling that they were both talking to each other in their silence.
That night, in the small, crocus-coloured light of the candleflame, Margaret stayed up a moment after Aikaterine, seated at the little table with her diary open under her hand. She checked the face of the sleeping maid once more to be sure she was asleep, then put her pen to the page for one last line:
“I ask myself: do you know what pain sounds like? It sounds like the looks in their eyes.”
20 | Trinity
Margaret had expected something sudden, like a clap of thunder or a thief in the night, or something inexplicable like poison; but when Rupert, as they all knew he would, undertook to make his move, it was the last move she had anticipated.
The winter had whiled out quietly in Lookinglass. On returning from Thwitandrake, the weather had closed in bitterly cold and had kept them cooped up worse than before. Dammerung had borne it quietly for a spell, then he had paced, vainly trying to amuse himself with books, games, and philosophy. Philosophy had held him best—to hear him and his cousin talk had been as much a diversion and a source of interest for Margaret as for Dammerung—but Skander could not always be on hand for his cousin to sharpen his wits on as iron against iron, and Dammerung, at the end of his patience, stood for long spells at the window willing the weather to let up so that he might stretch his legs.
At last the weather had turned. March, which Dammerung had called the Alder Moon, had raged in more like a dragon than a lion, roaring in the empty woods like the passage of a train, and then torn away at the end of the month into a soft ragged streamer of white clouds in a sky as pale as Dammerung’s eyes, teased by high winds that the fell country could barely feel. Even Margaret felt the blood stir inside her as the world took on a fresh yellow colour of sunlight and the woods, full of rising red sap and tawny buds, swelled with renewed birdsong. At the first bunting’s cry of “devil! devil! dinna touch me-e!” Dammerung had flung himself out of the house and gone off no one knew where at a running pace, and Margaret could not blame him.