“And Rupert?” asked Skander.
Dammerung looked at the sheet of paper under his hand. “Rupert will be wherever I am: a strange, dualistic fate we share, he and I…”
“And Margaret?”
Me?
She looked up from the fine, flecked hand on the desk. With a pang of fear she realized for the first time what she should have always known: as a woman she was not expected to go, but to wait patiently at Lookinglass until news came back from the lines. Good or ill, she would have to wait for it, and the terror of being left behind—of Dammerung leaving her behind—dried her mouth to cotton.
But Dammerung suddenly pushed off from the desk and stood aside for his cousin. “What, Lady Spitcat? She is my shoulder-to-shoulder man.” He whirled, wing-sleeves fluttering, and strode toward the door as if all were over, calling back as he did so, “She comes with me.”
He disappeared. The bare padding faded away and Margaret was left blushing furiously, still sick from fear, under the awkward scrutiny of the assembly. For a long while it was quiet, then someone shifted and Mark Roy, clearing his throat, said graciously,
“Capys, we should see to a horse and mule for Lady—Margaret.”
Skander smiled apologetically at her. “Tabby, see to Mausoleum’s tack and ask Jacland if I cannot have the loan of his mule. His is pretty well tempered, isn’t it?”
“Yes, sir.”
Aikin Ironside spoke up. “I mean no disrespect to her ladyship,” he said in a level, lazy voice, “but I don’t consider a battle-field a suitable place for a woman with no military training, on various accounts. Furthermore—” his warm, half-laughing eyes fixed on hers with a stark, shared memory “—ought she to be roughing it?”
Before Margaret could form an equally respectful defence—because the young man was right in all his objections—Skander cut into the gap with a mirthless laugh that was characteristic of his family and retorted,
“
She
has been roughing it with de la Mare this past autumn. She is old hat at this.”
Like one saluting, graciously admitting defeat, Aikin Ironside put up his brows and bent his head to her. “Yes, I see that, when you put it that way. Your pardon, Lady Margaret. You are a veteran among us. And for whatever it is worth—for you have the War-wolf as your guardian shadow—please accept my allegiance. It may be I am good for more than boar-hunting—it may be not.”
The others smiled approvingly, as if they, too, were offering her the same words. The sweetness of it, the open-handed acceptance they were offering her without a backward glance or sting of misgiving—for which, if they had any, she would not have blamed them—touched her heart so sharply she felt it bleed. Dammerung was not here to laugh her out of it. Swallowing, she took hold of her skirts and bent her knee until it was brushing the carpet. She could not meet their gazes.
“These are your Honours and your war, my lords. If anyone is to offer allegiance, I should offer you mine—for what it is worth. I only hope to be worthy of your approval.”
In the quiet she could hear Dammerung down below—walking, by the sound of it—singing a Te Deum as he went, and singing it remarkably well.
23 | Ampersand
Rain was going to break. The rolling hill country and valley-land of Ampersand, which wedged itself between Hol-land and Thrasymene at the pinch-point of the fells and sea, was overshadowed by a furious tiger sky, brindled and heavy with fire and clouds. There was salt in the air, but the sea, which Margaret had not seen, lay beyond the next range of hills. What must it look like, she wondered, under the wings of this seraphic sky? Her mind wandered back to the summers of Aylesward when the sky at night was a long twilight, and the ocean a rolling expanse of living mercury-glass. How much more beautiful would it look here!
She shivered with the cool breeze that was coming on with evening and comfortably folded her arms around herself, achy in body but glad to be off her horse at last and pitching a more permanent tent. That tomorrow the Honour-lords meant to wet their swords on Bloodburn’s first northern defence did not yet concern her. In the little wood on the western side of the valley a nightingale was tuning up, and the cooking-fires of the whole camp sent up a blue haze of warmth and thin tranquillity over the roaring sky.
Without warning Dammerung tore past her in a flutter of massive black cloak and intent face, soundless on his bare feet but for the soft, muffled booming of thrown-about fabric. She watched him sprint across the grass for Rubico: in one fluid bound he was astride the horse, and the horse must have seen him coming for it was in motion almost before Dammerung left the ground. The effect was a confused, dark, water-smooth image of kinetic bodies that was both beautiful and oddly awful. Dammerung bolted from the makeshift green and disappeared among the pine-gloom and gold blaze of sunset. A moment or two longer the splutter of hoofbeats came back to Margaret, then the pine-wood hush fell in again as though it had never been disturbed.
“Three riders there are in all Plenilune none other man born of woman can match…”
Margaret turned and ducked into the tent, but paused in the entryway. Skander was there at the table, his broad frame fitted gingerly into a camp chair which was long past its prime. A lamp was burning at his elbow, but it was not quite dark enough for it.
“Where has Dammerung gone?” she asked.
“He has gone scouting.”
She frowned. “Do you not have Scouting Masters for that kind of thing?”
“Yes,” admitted Skander absentmindedly. He searched among the papers for something. “And Dammerung has colourful words for them.” He left off searching, somewhat exasperatedly, and met her eye. “He’s a man who likes to see things with his own eyes.”
A dreadful moodiness settled over her, partly because she felt out of place without Dammerung and partly because—though she hated to admit it—she wished she had gone too. So, petulantly, she refrained from pointing out to Skander that Dammerung was a man who seemed able to see things without his eyes. She watched for some time in silence as he continued to paw among the littered table until, unable to bear it any longer, she strode across, snatched a wax-stick from the inside of a tumbler, and handed it to him.
“Ah.” He took it from her. “Much obliged.”
Dinner that evening was roast venison and roast potatoes and roast onions, and a sweet yellow wine—which Margaret liked and Skander did not—and Dammerung did not come back until after it. There was a soft splutter of hooves in the distance—which was nothing unusual, as horses and horsemen had been going about ever since they had set up camp—and silence. A moment later Dammerung came flying through the tent flap, shedding his muddied cloak as he came, and flung himself down in a chair. It rocked violently onto its hind legs before thumping back to ground again. Margaret was sharpening a knife, because it was something useful to do and because the
si-i-ing si-i-ing
of the blade gave her a fierce, blood-coloured feeling, but she looked up as Dammerung’s poor chair creaked to stillness. There was mud splattered on Dammerung’s cheek and a streak up the back of his head, and his feet were black with pine-muck. He looked as though he had ridden far and hard, but he seemed cheerful enough.
“Have you eaten?” she asked.
Sing! sing! sing!
said the knife.
“Eh?” He turned a languid, rampant brow her way.
“I wondered if you had broke your fast.”
“Shoo!” He heaved himself upright by his elbows and the arms of his chair. “No. Is there aught else to eat? I smell the ghost of supper gone but see no apparition of it.”
She said “Hm!” and put aside the knife and whetstone. She had enjoined the blue-jay man to set aside some roast against Dammerung’s return and she fetched it from the board. He smiled beatifically at her and the plate as she set it down before him—but she saw in the eyes behind the smile that he was tired.
“Do you want red wine or white?”
“Red! Naturally.”
As she fetched and poured the wine, she wondered what he would think of her for liking the sweet yellow vintage. She poured herself her own glass of red—it was an awkward business, she thought, sitting and watching someone eat without anything to eat for oneself—and joined him with the glasses. He raised his to her, then for a long time the only sounds in the tent were the tinselly crackle of the apple-wood fire—more for light and the comfort of the thing than for necessary warmth—and the clink of glass and silverware. A horse screamed angrily on the fellside: the sharp sound echoed in the hollow of the night. A horn sang out and Margaret jumped, but Dammerung said,
“’Tis only the change of watch.”
He finished his supper and they finished their wine. The dishes they left for the blue-jay man to see to, and while Dammerung retired to one side of the tent to wash the flying muck off his face, Margaret moved her chair to the tent opening and sat on the rim of the firelight, looking out on the night from the golden, feathery comfort of the enclosure.
Night had fallen low over the land. It seemed to have heaped up so heavily in the sky, rolling in off the sea, that it was sinking under its own weight, groaning lower and lower over the fells. She sat wrapped in a fine surcoat of doeskin and ermine, for the summer night was growing chill and the hushing rush of wind in the rowan-wood bore portents of rain, and watched the dark moth-wing dusk gather about them and the firefly-lights spring out of the black. The nightingale was still calling across the camp, sweetly and bewilderedly, and in the southwest there was a lingering primrose-glow of earthlight which would soon burn away to black with the turn of the world.
My world
, thought Margaret, and she dug her toes in her boots as if to grip the grass under foot.
There was a soft step beside her and Dammerung was there, clean, cast in gold and black, looking out, as she did, over the firelit dalescape. His hand dropped on her shoulder, heavy and still, sinking down through the ermine collar to rest against the soft warmth of her skin: his fingers felt cold. She looked up into his face once, but he was looking in a far-off way over all, far off enough to see into tomorrow—had she not meant to tell Skander such?—so she settled in under his hand and continued to watch the way the lights lay scattered like kicked embers down the valley. The sounds of shadows blew fitfully around them. The southwest was quenched: the mounting storm clouds lay black and close above them.
“There is rain in the wind tonight,” said Margaret presently.
“Yes.”
She turned her head toward him but did not look up. From where she sat she could see down the Prime Horse picket-line, long faces and warm bodies all in a row, ruddy and alabaster in the torchlight. “Will there be rain in the morning?”
He stirred, then, and sighed, as if wherever his thoughts had taken him had too little air. “No; we’ll have a storm-song tonight and a sword-song tomorrow. This should be fair blown over by dawn.”
“It seems fair big to me,” Margaret replied with an involuntary shiver.
His thumb and middle finger tightened their grip. “They are all monsters, our fell country storms, but this is only a mad cat which will yowl and spit and run away soon.” He was quiet for a moment and in the silence the wind swelled with silvery noise.
“Keep your chin up,
leman
. Not long now.”
He did not say it condescendingly: he meant it, and somehow it was more comforting than even her soft doeskin surcoat. But she felt compelled to say, honestly, “I am not afraid, Dammerung.”
“Have you come past that, then?”
His voice was suddenly sharp with bitterness. She started at the sudden change of tone—but then he changed his tone faster than a woman changed her mind: it would be gone in a moment. “Are
you
afraid?” she countered.
He turned to her, eyebrows flyaway as if with surprise. The bitterness was gone again and the firelight was turning his eyes silver-pale. “Afraid? Of pain?”
“I suppose that is what I mean. What is death? It is pain, not death, that we have to live with.”
His mouth quirked. “Nay, then, I am not afraid. It takes a braver man than I to fear pain.
I
am just a fool.”
There was the bitterness again, the veil parting slightly to let past grievances peep through. How these men were defined by their glories and their insults! She looked away and sighed as a pigeon sighs at the start of a long wet evening. “Dammerung, sometimes you laugh and there is no laughter in it.”
His hand upon her shoulder had been heavy and companionable, as it might lie on Skander’s, but unexpectedly it left and took hold of her chin, turning her to face him. The pale eyes, so pale as almost to be clear, gazed hard and laughingly, mockingly, into her own. She had learned to meet that gaze lightly and even tried to read what was in his face.
“Yes,” he said at last, and gently let her go. “I see why he chose you.”
He did not wait for her answer: he went back into the tent and she rose, puzzled, turning away from the flickering vision of the north where the lightning was beginning to break up in the clouds to see what Dammerung was about to do. One always knew when he was about to do something: he gathered a brooding aura about himself like a cloak—and in it there was always a bit of fierce laughter that was like mockery—and she felt that aura about him now.
He got down on one knee before a trunk and flung back the lid of it. There was little light in that corner of the tent and he rummaged for some time seemingly by feel, until at last he unearthed what looked, in the light, to be a bodice made of moulded leather, quite hard and plain, which he held out to her. “Of your courtesy,” he said, “I would be obliged if you would wear this tomorrow.”
“You do not expect me to fight,” she said, staring at the thing with a real thrill of horror that, for some bizarre reason, he did.
“No; on my honour, I would not have you fight. ’Twould not be sporting fair not to give the foe an even chance.” He hefted the bodice closer toward her. “Yet I have some notion that you ought to wear it, and I have learned not to deny my intuitions.”