Then Dammerung came, two paces behind, and saw the thing that happened between them. He did not hesitate. Brushing past Rupert, he strode up the hallway for her as if there was no one else about. Somehow she wrenched her eyes off the necromancy of Rupert’s face and latched onto Dammerung’s as if grasping a lifeline. Did it show? She hoped it did not show.
“What, did you get lost? I was just looking for you.” He slipped her arm in his and pulled her round back the way she had come. “The narrow wicket gate is this way.”
She knew Rupert would not be watching them go. He did not look as though he could much stand seeing her alone in the hallway of Lookinglass, let alone walking arm in arm with Dammerung. He would be gone…but his shadow was still there.
“I was looking for
you
,” she admitted. “I had wanted to show you the dress without anyone else around so that you would not like it too much and carry on in front of strangers.”
“I never carry on in front of strangers,” he protested absentmindedly. He twisted as they walked, watching the billow of the skirt and the way the light played on the chinaberries. “And you made all this?”
“Mostly.” A glimmer of pride nestled ember-like at the bottom-most corner of her soul.
“Tush, sirrah! It looks better on you than folded up in a trunk, that is for certain. And listen to that racket!”
“Yes, that is the taffeta underskirt. I worried it would give me away.”
His brow lifted—the very image of a dog’s brow when it hears someone it does not like coming up the walk. Her blood chilled. His eyes pried at her face and she let them: there were not words in any language known to man with which to explain herself. His mouth drew taught like an archer’s string, but they loosed no words. If he thought less of her, he did not say it. He let the knowledge that she had been there and seen and heard lie and did not mention it. Margaret hoped, but did not believe, that he was not angry with her.
The men were waiting when she and Dammerung arrived. Seeing them—Mark Roy, Aikin Ironside and Brand, Lord Gro FitzDraco, even Sparling with Black Malkin and the other two Thrasymene women, Skander Rime and his friends Ely Jacland and Periot Survance—Margaret confused herself for a moment with the feeling that she was once again a pawn to be fought over until she remembered that it was Plenilune this time that everyone was thinking about, not her.
Except, perhaps, Rupert and Dammerung.
Rupert had got there a moment before, following Centurion to a place at the table. Dammerung stalked in, his head up, flinging a glance round on everyone until each face had suffered his bright, feverish eye. With a deft twist he pulled out a chair and stood aside for Margaret to take it. With all eyes on her—except Rupert’s—she sat down, soothed the angry taffeta, and folded her hands in her lap like a good girl who had not just wilfully eavesdropped on the two most important men in the Honours.
Dammerung seated himself beside her and flung one knee over the other. “Good morning, everyone,” he said jauntily, a smile coming out of one side of his mouth.
Centurion put his elbows on the table and leaned forward, looking hard at Dammerung as if he could not quite believe his eyes. “I’ll be damned. It is you. I did not disbelieve,” he amended, leaning back, “but you have to admit, the news that you were alive was hard to swallow.”
The smile froze, but seemed to dance like a gypsy’s knife in the eyes. “It was, wasn’t it? A good joke on you. But what did or did not happen yesterday is not to the point. We’ve come for Plenilune.”
Skander Rime and Lord Gro—as if Lord Gro knew what foul play had been afoot—looked grim. Woodbird’s head was up, brows arched, and was studiously gazing at the centre of the table so that she would not have to meet anyone’s eye. Margaret’s gaze slid to Brand and she smiled sympathetically: it seemed the young man was under strict orders not to speak, for he was staring hotly but fixedly at his clasped fists on the tabletop before him.
“Well, Rupert?” Dammerung gave his brother the floor. “You called us and we have come.”
Rupert drew in a deep, contemplative breath and leaned back from the fist he had been holding against his closed lips. “It is very simple. Great things often are, I find…Which of us is to be Overlord? For no one else,” he spread his hand, “has stepped in to take the office.”
There was an uneasy silence. Dammerung’s eyes went round from face to face, that awful, fixed smile playing softly on his lips. “In Rupert’s defence,” he put in presently, “you
did
have his inauguration scheduled. Or so I was told. Of course I wasn’t there myself.”
Margaret touched his leg smartly with the back of her hand.
Aikin Ironside frowned, and his mouth shaped
Where
, but Woodbird flew into the silence to save it. “We did, in lieu of
you
, sir. I hate to say it, but Rupert de la Mare was our second horse.”
“And I your dark one,” laughed Dammerung.
Mark Roy put his elbows on the table and folded his hands together. “If I were to be frank,” he began quietly, as if searching for his words as he went, “I think the decision of the Electoral Body is pre-eminently clear even without taking a vote. But we are not all gathered—I see Bloodburn, at least, was unable to make it, as well as two of my foremost border lords—and the vote would not be fair in that regard, nor in light of the fact that, as the War-wolf has pointed out, we
did
admit de la Mare to be our Overlord.”
In lieu of his brother,
thought Margaret spitefully.
Sparling spoke up. He had a pleasant, assured voice, perfectly polite, though it had none of the personality she had come to know in Dammerung. “If de la Mare and my lords will forgive me for saying so—” Rupert’s eyes, cutting across the gathering, narrowed onto the Thrasymene lord’s face with a pointedness that could kill “—we did admit it, but we did not slip on the ring.”
Dammerung’s jaw came open, but Lord Gro beat him to the mark. “Does that really matter?” the man asked gently, the ghost of a smile on his lips. “To what part of the law do we adhere, the letter or the spirit?”
But when the spirit is Rupert’s—!
Margaret looked to Dammerung, hoping he would protest, but to her dismay she found him looking sadly at the hand he draped across his knee, his head moving with a faint nod of agreement.
“And your proposition?” asked Rupert coldly, stiffly. “For I am come for your propositions,” he added with a spasm of painful mockery.
His brother’s head came up and back, teeth showing through a smile. “Oh, how like heaven you deign to ask us what
we
think.”
Rupert’s face turned white and Margaret felt the air grow thin. Had he been any other man, he might have brushed the mockery off—had it been any other mockery, he would have. But one thing that Margaret could say for Rupert was that he took his love and hatred seriously and did not cover them in laughter. She could almost hear the sheath of his patience clatter to the floor as he removed it.
“By his Infernal Majesty and my Lord Adam,” he breathed—the glass pane behind him splintered with a hundred spider-fine cracks— “take back your words or I’ll
put
them back.”
Dammerung’s eyes began to dance, lightly, daringly, like the sunlight on a knife blade as a man spins its point on a tabletop.
“You are a step away from a step too far,” Rupert warned him.
The War-wolf’s eye dropped a moment to Rupert’s hand, then back to Rupert’s face. “Oh? I am insatiably curious. What comes after the next step?”
“Clearly you have never known sanity.”
“I do not know perdition as
you
do.”
The step beyond the next step was taken. Margaret was aware of Lord Gro quietly and deliberately moving his chair back from the table. She could not see anyone else’s face. As in a dream they were all distorted, grey, present but unimportant. She saw only Rupert’s face, white with fury and what might have been fear. He, too, put back his chair, but he rose, folded back his coat, and, removing a leather glove from an inner pocket, flung it down onto the table.
“Then I will teach it to you.”
In the back of her mind Margaret heard a distinct click, so clearly she thought for a moment that it was real, as though someone had put a puzzle-piece in place, interlocked with the others. In the beautiful, terrible scene caught frozen before her—she felt detached from it, like a ghost—with the sunlight breaking up in the glass behind Rupert’s upflung head and Dammerung, beside her, his head up too, gazing down smilingly on the gage, she was aware—as if she were in a dream—of Brand unfolding quietly, lifting his head and looking around with a satisfied smile on his face. The moment was broken for Margaret gently when Periot Survance, seeing Brand’s reaction, happened to look her way and shared a laughing, half-checked smile with her at the young man’s expense.
With a liquid movement Dammerung put back his chair and got up, raising darkness with him; the air seemed to crackle and shimmer around him. “Your hands are bigger than mine,” he said lightly: “consider the glove taken.”
“The duel is formally accepted,” said Skander. He, too, got to his feet, looking remarkably less grim and rather more worried. “We will all gather tomorrow morning at dawn on the bowling lawn. Six o’clock should do it. You’re neither to meet nor talk until that time,” he added, thrusting a finger from man to man.
Dammerung cheekily pressed his hands together and offered his cousin a bow. Rupert nodded curtly. Margaret lifted a brow archly at the private thought:
I wonder if Skander could have given them a stricture they would have been more willing to obey.
Then, as he was closest to the door, Dammerung was giving her his hand, the coolness quite gone from him toward her, and she was able to put her back on the room at last. Her taffeta purred with her movement. It had all been done cleanly, she thought: the hammer and tongs had been got out beforehand. The two had only to place the puzzle-pieces, to move their chessmen, and the thing had been done. Tomorrow would settle it.
At the door Margaret felt Dammerung’s hand pull. She paused: he had turned back a moment. A pool of concentration gathering darkness at the corner of his mouth, he put up his free hand, passing it through a shimmer of air, and the cracks in the pane disappeared. That was all. Transferring her hand to his arm, he took her out into the passage.
“You baited him,” she said matter-of-factly when they had holed up in Skander’s study. No one would disturb them there.
“It did look that way, didn’t it…”
“An’ sure it did,” Margaret protested. “That was not feigned anger on Rupert’s part. I know his anger.”
Dammerung smiled sympathetically. “Oh yes, that was real. Perhaps it was rude of me to touch him in that tender spot, but then I wanted it to be convincing.” He twisted like a cat on the couch, watching his cousin, who was stealing a few minutes away from his guests, come in and stalk toward his desk. “We both of us knew there was no good in summoning the Electoral Body. Oh, we needed them. Before them the Overlord will stand or fall—and stand he will! But it is between the two of us to decide which will be Overlord. Plenilune is not large enough for the two of us.”
There was a long moment of complete silence in the study. Even the fire seemed to have fallen quiet. No one moved. Margaret stared into the fire, stared blindly into Dammerung’s words. For a minute or so she was full of a fierce gladness over the bruise he had given Rupert—it had been awful to see the pane of glass break and to hear the man swear on his anger, but she had been glad to see Dammerung dig his toe between Rupert’s ribs. But the gladness was soon checked. Without moving them herself, the little puzzle-pieces of Dammerung’s words shifted, colourfully, and fell into their proper place…and seemed to fall suddenly away into a pit of emptiness.
Plenilune is not large enough to the two of us…The duel is formally accepted…Some breed of honour…You’re gammoning me…We both know how this will be…
Would any of us die to keep what looms before us from happening?
One of them was going to die.
“Oh, God,” she groaned under her breath, and crushed her hand over her mouth so that no one would hear.
Skander leaned on the back of the sofa over his cousin’s shoulder. “Well, bully for you, you’ve done it,” he said bluntly. “And leave us to pick up the bloody pieces in the end. Fie upon it! It was a noble gesture, and very smartly acted. I’ve been pawing through my brains this past half-hour hunting for a better way out, but heaven knows I’ve thought of none. Still,” his cool brown eyes darkened—his fingers, clutching the wooden spine of the sofa, turned telltale white, “when you stand down there tomorrow, you and your brother, who will mediate between you? What man—what woman? You are too much for us and none of us are your match.”
Dammerung had had his fingers in his hair and it was pushed wildly awry. Looking up through a shock of hair that was like a horse’s forelock, he caught Margaret’s eye a moment, seemed to plumb her cold, acute pain, and touched it with a tender, knowing smile. “No, Skander,” he admitted, “none of you is a match for us, and no man is man enough to lay his hands upon our shoulders. It is for that very reason that either of us would be Overlord at all.”
Skander was quiet a minute, watching his cousin’s words fall into place as Margaret had; then—”True”—and he dropped his hand momentarily on Dammerung’s lean shoulder before leaving them to return to his hospitable duties.
It was a companionable silence that fell on Margaret and Dammerung afterward, but for Margaret the silence ached. She tasted iron in her mouth and wondered if she had bit down on her cheek. She could not tell. Her hands were immobile in her lap: she could not reach up to check. What was Dammerung thinking? His reflection in a piece of glass was far away, thin and pensive, muted in a cloudy darkness.
What did she want? she asked herself with a sudden unkind fierceness. To tidy the place like a nursery, free of any sharp objects that might hurt someone, to be sure of a happy outcome like a little girl reading a fairytale? Was it not the naked-sabre danger of them that had at first repulsed her from these people, and what had eventually drawn her? With their thin skins, quick to take offence and to defend their bantam plumage, these were men who lived among danger and swords and blood and put a great price on honour. They had not turned their world into a nursery. They loved their world fiercely and their world loved them still more fiercely back…