With long, unhurried strides the two men met in the middle of the ring. Light broke out jaggedly from their sabres as they gave each other a bitterly proper salute. Then they retired a little space, to give themselves room to manoeuvre, and suddenly the life of the fight came into the panther and the fox. The tension in the air, as though withdrawn by a black star, swallowed itself up into the bodies of the two men, poised, prepared to become kinetic. Their bodies were perfectly situated, at one with their weapons, etched in brilliant, masculine splendour against the blurred backdrop. Rupert stood like a warhorse; Dammerung’s sword was circling slightly, counter-clockwise—Margaret could tell by the way the sunlight was coming off the point in little bursts.
If she had blinked she would have missed it, the thing happened so quickly. One moment the two were standing at slightly bent and painfully alert attention, the next there was a growling crack that seemed to split the air overhead in two and Dammerung was catapulting backward across the grass, his sword flung from his hand, his hands round his collar-bones as if to wrench something’s grip from his throat. A single collective cry of confused rage lanced through the crowd. Margaret was in midstep before she felt the sharp backward jerk of Skander’s restraining hand.
If looks could kill she would have stabbed him mortally with her glance.
When she looked back Dammerung was rolling off his shoulders, gaining a purchase on the ground with his knees, rising all the while and yanking at the air around his throat. He was white, white like a ghost, but at last, as though tearing open the jaws of Leviathan, his hands wrenched apart, sending serpentine coils of red-and-white light away, hurling them back across the grass. Snatching a glance at Rupert, Margaret saw his face was ashen grey, as if the backwash of his own magic made him ill. All the same, she noted—perhaps she alone noted, with all eyes on the War-wolf—there was no hint of remorse in that pitiless face.
It took Dammerung a moment to recover. He had turned away so that she could no longer see his face, but she saw that his hands were scored, the nape of his neck pierced as though by teeth. He stood, if possible, more grandly than ever, legs a little apart as if to show that the turf beneath him was his. The tilt and whirl of Plenilune had steadied. He looked to his opponent; the wind was in his face, and his face in profile was terrible.
It was strange and unnerving and uncanny: Margaret could have sworn she had seen him so before. Somewhere in a book, a long time ago…
How long that horrible moment lasted, she could not have said. No one dared move. No one dared speak a word. Even Black Malkin, hands pressed together before her, stood her ground and would not enter this fray. But at last that terrible countenance on the face of the young man whose mocking white-feather jacket was turning red in the back became almost tender, and still more mocking, and the light went in and out of his eyes again. He put out a hand, much as a man might who meant to dance, and said,
“Come to me.”
There was no sound, only the eerie flicker of light along the sabre’s blade as it dislodged itself from the grass and spun end over end through the crackling air. The only sound was the soft leather kiss it made as it clapped into Dammerung’s palm. He raised it defiantly before his face, eyes on Rupert, and with a fanciful jerk thrust it aside in salute. Rupert raised his arms like an orchestral conductor, head poised half askance, but Dammerung only nodded. Something was spoken between them in the windy quiet, something awful and shining and red-coloured like the War-wolf’s back, and the atmosphere took on a more severe and thunder-powered feel.
They opened in a blaze of glory. There was a crack and a shock and an arc of light—from which, Margaret could not tell—and the two were at it with a passion, hurling spells and casting spells aside to left and right, filling the air with windblown sparks. The grassy space in which they battled swelled with a shimmering feeling, and the swelling kept pushing outward until Margaret’s skin felt uncomfortably hot and the little hairs on her arms kept sizzling with magic. But it was better this way—she wrenched out of Skander’s iron grip and stood her ground, staring fixedly at the match—it was better that the two should fight this way for Plenilune. Plenilune deserved it. Maybe Rupert himself had known that: she realized that he had not meant to kill Dammerung with his first blow. He had thrown down a gauntlet Dammerung could not now refuse. In a gesture of the rightness of things perhaps more characteristic of his family’s heritage than his own soul, Rupert de la Mare had forced Dammerung’s hand into a high and mighty duel the likes of which Margaret wondered if Plenilune had ever seen.
They were fantastic and terrible, and not altogether safe, to watch. The elements and the full fire of wrath whirled from their hands with the deftness of a juggler whirling his golden balls, but the backwash could be blinding and sometimes blows were cast wide. Once, like Jove, Rupert sent a jagged tail of lightning at his brother’s head, which would have blown the fine-boned skull to bits had Dammerung not caught it at the last second on a bank of energy and sent it skyward and over into an innocent pine. Oddly fitting, thought Margaret as the sound of shivered timber was drowned in the crack of magic.
And indeed, there was hardly anything else that could be heard above the whip-crack and thunder-clap of spells being loosed off and breaking up on other spells. Margaret’s ears were ringing with the noise. Rupert and Dammerung fought almost wordlessly, though once Rupert gave a grinding cry of exertion as he cast off a dark, heavy spell, and once, vengefully, Dammerung shouted “
Spencer!
” as he hurled a blood-coloured spell that hit Rupert and broke open his shoulder to the bone.
There was a flicker of blue movement behind and beside Margaret that compromised her attention. Exasperated, half-paranoid, she glanced around in time to see the blue-jay man worm through the crowd—she could not remember seeing him leave—and arrest Skander’s ear. A word was given; Margaret watched Skander’s face draw tight and his lips formed a silent invective. He turned back with his manservant and the two plunged back into the crowd, out of sight. She followed them as long as she could, snatching glances at the fight, divided: did she follow, or did she stay? But then she lost them, and she felt rooted in her place.
The bowling green was a wreck. With his fist to the shivered earth, Rupert cracked open the ground at Dammerung’s feet, nearly pitching his brother into a grave. Dirt flew in a storm. The air had drained of red and gold; it was blue now, bright, heavenly blue with the sun cutting it evenly in argent slivers. Dammerung put out his hands and stopped the reeling earth, lit it with Chinese fire, and drew it back toward him; at the same time the blue was closing around him, a whirlwind of silver and pale chicory colour, faster and faster with tawny streaks of earth thrown in. He was being lost in it. It was taking shape, taking a lifelikeness of its own, poised in contiguous motion around the young man with his uplifted, imperious arms.
Was it just her, or did it look like a dragon?
Rupert cried out. His words were lost in the overwhelming thunder of the magic Dammerung was pooling to himself, but the sound of it frightened Margaret. To her sizzling ears it was as though some deep dark thing to which the man held allegiance was calling across to Dammerung, defiant and terrible, ancient, powerful: a roar of primeval rage that took the world in its hands and stood to tear it in two. The blue-whirling thing and the man inside it braced. The darkened, devilish figure sparked with red and put up one hand, ready to strike.
The blows never fell. At that moment, through a crack in the miasma of colour and fear, Margaret saw Skander break away at that moment from Black Malkin’s ear. It was too great a distance to see the woman’s face, but the set of the chin was unmistakable and Margaret almost loved her for what she did. Taking a spear from a nearby retainer she strode out unflinchingly into the battle, her head up, her cloak rushing like wings around her body, stone-stern like Athena, shrouded in black and gold. She whirled the spear above her head, savagely, gracefully, shouting a single, wordless cry.
The blue dragon whirled into the air and vanished like a blade dropped into the sheath. The horrible black spell sank back like hackles soothed on a dog’s neck.
Black Malkin put her spear butt-down into the earth and looked levelly from one man to the other. “Ordinarily,” she said acidly, “I would not have interfered, but our host Skander Rime informs me that urgent news has come and he demands the War-wolf’s presence in the tent. In case you have need to know there is no foul play,” she lifted her lip at Rupert, “you may come too.”
But Rupert only slid in his sword at his side and folded his arms, content to stand and wait. With a jerk of his chin he told his brother off. Dammerung seemed to shrug and, raising his hand to Black Malkin, swept past her toward the tent’s awning.
“Oh!” Margaret said, as if she had been stung. As if loosed from an enchantment she pushed her way through the crowd; some recognized her and gave way; some took one look at her face and recoiled from her path. In a few minutes she had circumnavigated the bowling green and was bending, thrusting back the heavy tent-flap, to straighten in the intense gloom within.
It took a moment for her eyes to adjust. There was a flicker of silver light as Dammerung, hearing her enter, turned toward her. His eyes seemed to glow blue. “There you are,” he said frankly. Then, turning back toward someone else, “Well?”
Margaret saw a strange figure gather at the imperious voice. As the darkness swam in her eyes and settled into a rosy grey with little drifting sparks of orange on her vision, she saw him more clearly: a dusty, sweating figure, ashen-faced, out of place between the trim, clean bulk of Capys and the rich, red-lashed form that was the War-wolf.
“News, my lords,” the panting messenger said shortly. “The border lords of Darkling send an appeal: Hol-land has attacked without provocation. Master has fallen; Castel-arreiol is besieged: de Montfort holds it yet, and he swears to hold it until his lord Darkling can come to him.” The man looked from one face to the other. Something spasmed in his own; he swallowed as if about to be ill. “My lords…it is war.”
Margaret put out her hand and found something—a chair, perhaps—on which to lean for support. The world felt ragged and sharp at the edges, and coming apart in fraying pieces. She could not see Skander’s face—he was turned from her—but she could see Dammerung’s, downturned, thoughtful, but not, she realized, very surprised.
“So this is his game,” he mused at length. “Well played, Rupert. Well played.” Then, to the messenger, “Your lord Darkling is among the crowd. Fetch him in and give him news. And stamp it with my name at the end of it.”
A flicker of hope, even a sort of loving smile, wavered for a moment on the man’s face. He saluted Dammerung and Skander and slipped out into the blaze of morning. For a moment, save for the blue-jay man in the shadows, the three of them were alone.
Skander let out a long, careful breath. “I could take his head between my hands and crush his skull,” he said quietly, matter-of-factly.
“I had not looked for
this
,” Dammerung admitted. “I had looked for a knife in my back, not a knife in Plenilune.” Suddenly his face darkened, pained, and his hand spread as if he were about to fall and meant to catch himself. “War! He would unravel us, just to spite me! I never knew—I knew he hated me, but I never knew—good God, my Plenilune…” And he put up the hand over his face.
He was close. He had seemed far away and now, as he covered his terrible face, Margaret realized how close he stood to her in the interior of the tent. She put out her other hand—a long pianist’s hand that had held him once when he was small—and clutched his shoulder, hard, shaking it a little…until she felt the purpose gather in the muscles under her palm, gather like a horse’s flanks as it prepares to make the jump. He put down his hand a moment later, the angry brightness in his eyes as he met her gaze. But he seemed to see her for only a second or two, then to see something beyond her, through her, and gently he took himself out of her grip and pressed by her through the wind-shivered tent-flap. Inexorably pulled after him, Margaret stood at his shoulder in the opening, looking out on the scene of uneasy, murmuring folk and the distant blue haze of Seescarfell. She saw Rupert turn as if someone had called his name; across the distance she felt the two brothers lock eyes a moment, then Dammerung pointed, viciously, and slid his first two fingers down before his eyes in a morbid gesture.
You’re dead
.
Centurion came swiftly, never quite running, but eating up the ground with long strides; the crowd gave hurried way before him.
“What is this?” he demanded as he came up to Dammerung. “I am told Bloodburn has invaded Darkling.”
“It’s true,” said Dammerung lightly. “Would someone—Tabby, would you inform Black Malkin that the duel is over, and why, and tell anyone who is anyone to come, if they have the stomach for it, to Capys and myself, for we mean to stand by Darkling.”
Centurion set his hand on the blue-jay man’s shoulder before he could go. The blue-jay man took one look at the lord’s face, his own face darkened and disapproving, and deftly extricated himself from the beautiful hand. “Listen to me, Dammerung,” said Centurion. “For your alliance and aid I am grateful, but I can handle my own. Let you handle this here. If this be left unfinished, what I do in Darkling will have no weight.”
“You don’t understand,” said Skander flatly. “This
is
Rupert.”
The fair face of Darkling’s lord grew still, for a moment disbelieving, and then a black light of rage overswept it. He opened his mouth once as if to speak, and shut it again, teeth clicking, biting off his thoughts. It was a moment before he could say, quietly in lieu of the rage he could not vent,
“Then it is I who should lay my head at your feet and offer you my sword.”
Dammerung shook his head slightly. “If in your hearts I am the Overlord—as I believe I must be—then Widowmaker and I are at your service and at the service of the lords of the Honours. Get you home and save your general. We will come to you shortly.”