The Foot was nearly finished. The mounted archers had left off with the bows and had pulled into a tight knot around the lozenge-shaped mass of soldiers with their swords and horses’ bodies put to the gruelling work of giving the Foot a little breathing space to recover. But though they were still a goodly-sized force, the ground was so strewn with bodies that they could hardly gain purchase, and with the enemy Horse crushing them on either side they were being squeezed like a wet pebble between the fingers back up the valley, back over ground that they had won, back over the bodies of their comrades who had died to win it for them. They were a pin-drop away from being shattered under the hammer of Rupert’s attack.
Ta-a-an tan-tan-tan-tan! ta-a-an tan-tan-tan-tan!
Dammerung’s Horse had recalled and regrouped, and with the familiar hunting call to rally ringing in the air they swept down upon the Foot, driving hard into the white so that, like a shield, they held off the enemy wave from drenching the sable Foot in red. The shock of their drive took them nearly to the forefront of the enemy Horse; the blue banners wavered over the heads of the riders, pitching at each other, struggling to reach each other. Hands cupped over her eyes to shield them from the glare, Margaret painstakingly made out Dammerung in the whirling mass, and Rupert to one side, under the Hound, cutting his way through the press to meet his brother. The swords flickered in red defiance. The horses wheeled and churned and plunged and dove. It seemed everything was crushing in toward the middle of the field, driving the two together like a black star pulling in denser and denser upon itself.
Light arced between the two swords, blue and white like lightning. At the same instant came the thunder that seemed to split the air and the hills and Margaret’s head. The backwash was so powerful that it flung her several yards away, face down into the turf. Ears ringing, head splitting, bones jarred from the fall, she could feel the blue shimmer of magic crawling up every hair on her body. With the world reeling in amazement she struggled up, staggered, and smacked the magic out of her arms as though it were fire. She looked round against the light that spangled her vision, but the shock had thrown her so far that she could no longer see over the lip of the hill into the valley below. Her feet fought the ground as if it were a pitching deck, but she ran back to see how the battle went forward. Every second counted.
She never got to see how that battle ended.
The soldiers under the Red Rose were a wreck, lost among Lifoy, flogged mercilessly by Lord Gro on their heels. Margaret looked down at a rout and, after a moment of numbness, taking it in, a surge of panic filled her mouth: some ten riders or more, clumped together for safety, were tearing out of the mess, the scarlet banner wrapped and stowed among them, and eating up the hillside as they ran. To her left, but too far away, Gro was swinging round, checked a moment, looking back to see what was afoot. He saw, and, cornet shrilling to gather and follow, plunged after the Hol-land soldiers to cut them off. But he was too far away. He would not get to her in time. That she knew clearly, perfectly clearly. Her blood and her brain felt cold, but she did the most sensible thing which came to her in the split second she had.
She ran. She whirled and ran, her knife in her hand, toward the thick pine-woods which would offer her some shelter and foil the panicking horses. If she could gain them she would be safe: she was encumbered by skirts, but the Hol horses would surely be flagging after an hour in the field and, with Gro hard on their heels, who would stop for her?
Hooves drummed behind her, louder and closer. The sweetness of life sang in her ears as she dodged a rock, a swift, upward rush of crow startled from its hiding, and ducked under the overhang of the first lone standing pine. She would make it—
A horse’s knee flashed beside her; something struck her hard in the small of her back and sent her flying, tumbling like a thrown stone across the littered earth. Pain splintered in her back. She tried at once to rise, but the tiger had got its claws in her back and seemed to be tearing her ribs out one by one.
I’ve broken!
she thought despairingly. She looked up through her torn, bedraggled hair, through the sob of pain. Four horses were bearing down on her; someone was stooping, stooping to grab her; in the distance, his grim, stony face contorted by fury and determination, Gro bore across the level hilltop toward her, the flicker of his cornet making a halo of light behind him. A hand snagged her leather bodice—it made a good handle—and lifted her off the ground. The sound of her pain tore out of her mouth. The world turned a vivid vermilion—
—and erupted in a landslide of earth and thunder. She was tumbling again, running and stumbling on a four-legged thing; trees were whirling like matchsticks around her, earth was caving in and rising up. Gro was lost. She struggled with her knife, with her vision which was being caught in pain like a fly in amber. Somehow her hand opened and the knife fell, slowly, shiningly, lost in a soft float of stone-shards the colour of a child’s marbles. It fell into a black place that had no bottom. With a jerk and a lurch, the world spinning suddenly with a feverish speed, Margaret lost her hold on herself and followed her knife into the dark.
24 | Bloodburn
“If you manhandle me, or mistreat me in any way, he will wench you.”
Bloodburn looked down passively into her face—a somewhat less lovely face than it had been before, after bruising and roughing in the dirt, a private cry that had completely ruined the last of her make-up, and now the pallor of light that was shimmering behind Caesar’s impressive bulk at the casement of an eastern window. Her heart thumped hard with fear for she did not know the man nor what he was capable of, but what stung her most in that moment was Bloodburn’s apparently total lack of interest: that was an insult almost beyond bearing.
“You had much better have run and let me be,” she went on coldly. How she wanted to call him a coward—he
had
run; it had been a rout—but she did not dare touch that word. Life was yet sweet to her. “Much better you had died at Ampersand. You are meddling with the wrong man.”
“Spare me.” His tone was dull, emotionless. “I am a man more than twice your age and have been around the countryside a time or two. Furthermore, I have long had dealings with Rupert de la Mare. I do not think I need a little girl to lecture me on whom I choose to meddle with and whom I choose to let be.”
The man was a stone. She looked up into his face, into his washed-out old eyes, past his words: the veil of rage parted a moment and she could see that it was no use to argue with him or even to warn him of the tempest he was pulling down on his own head. She let out a long breath through her nose until something unknotted in her middle. Perhaps it was sleeplessness. Perhaps it was the dull throb of pain in her back which had sunk down but never gone out. She stared for a few minutes at Bloodburn’s knees, thinking ranging, disconnected thoughts about medical attention and Rupert and whether Lord Gro had survived the landslide, about the battle and about Plenilune herself.
“So you are using me as a bargaining chip?” She tilted her head back with some effort, squinting up into the lord’s face. A smile spasmed across her mouth. “I want to be here to see this. I
should
be here to see this. You have the two most powerful men in Plenilune on either side of me, both of them for me and each of them against the other, and you think to pluck me out from between them and expect to get something out of it. Who will thank you?” An uneasy laugh turned over and fluttered like a caged and angry bird in her mouth. “The War-wolf, who will laugh at you as he takes you between his teeth and grinds you into small stone pieces—art made of stone, I think? Or de la Mare, who trusts no one and is slow to give anyone thanks, is jealous of the least attention another man gives me and would not let me have a friend, much less a lover, save himself? You think—” she got out of her chair, balling her fists to keep herself from falling “—you think to bargain with the likes of these? I thought you a grim, impressive fellow before. Now I think you are only a fool dreaming of his prime.”
She was expecting the blow, and she took it manfully across the face, crashing back down into the chair with her head backflung, teeth on edge as the blood pooled in her mouth where her teeth had cut the inside of her cheek.
Softly, softly. You are losing your head.
“Did the little girl touch close to the sore spot?” she asked quietly, mockingly.
But he said, “You appear to be of that old style of woman: too independently-minded and free of tongue. There is an easy remedy for spirits like yours.”
“I am sure,” she replied spitefully. “You do but break them: a very easy remedy, though inconvenient for the spirit.” She got back out of her chair—the world swam in darkness a moment, then shredded with blinding light as the morning sun pried away the black again. “You would have found me a more temperate guest,” she went on, “had you been less heavy-handed. The fault of the oppressed is often that of the oppressor.”
What am I going on about?
She pressed her hand to her head, careful not to shake it for fear everything would shake loose.
Margaret, you need to sit down. You need to—damn, there is the floor.
The drop shocked up through her legs and into her back as her knees struck the ground. A grunt of pain, which was all she would allow herself as she knelt before Caesar, ground between her teeth.
“If my honourable host—” somehow her mouth kept moving, filling with a reckless sense of glibness that she did not feel was quite her own “—if my honourable host has not immediate need of me—and I think it would be better if he had not—I would like to be taken to my room now.”
“Perhaps it should be one with bars on the windows.”
“An’ sure it will, but if you want me to outlast your pitiful little scheme, it had better have a good bed too. Ah—ah!” she added as someone put an arm around her and dragged her to her feet. Her feet tangled with someone else’s. Bloodburn was speaking, his voice dwindling away—it was being lost in a mounting roar of noises which Margaret recognized as the imminence of the dark. In a moment it would overwhelm her and for a little while she would be free of this confusing world of stone passages and tapestries and sudden banks of hot silver light. They took a corner; she stumbled on an uneven stone and blacked out.
I was hoping the guard would be Dammerung
, she thought resignedly when she woke in her new bed. The door had just shut and the lock had clicked, leaving her alone in a lush little chamber with a bed and chairs full of cushions, a rich window seat, curtains to hide the stonework of the walls, and a carpet so thick—she rolled gingerly over and peered over the side of the bed—that she could sink her feet into it.
Not a bad prison, but it loses none of its odiousness for being so plush.
She tried to sit up, but only made it to an awkward seal position before she had to stop and gulp back a heave. Slowly, like an injured dog, she inched her legs under her and got onto all fours.
I must have a fever. Everything is swimming. Where am I? How far am I from Ampersand? Will Bloodburn send Dammerung news of me, or does he mean to return me to Rupert? Oh, I should be terrified of that thought but I must have a fever—I am going to laugh. I am going to—I should not laugh. This is really too serious to laugh at. These sheets are silk—!
Her knee lost purchase and nearly flung her to the ground as the slippery bedclothes shunted off the mattress onto the floor. For a minute she knelt on the floor, her face pressed into the mattress, and laughed until she cried, and she cried for awhile dismally without any shade of humour. When that was spent she lifted her pounding head from the rakish sheets, stared into the light splintering through the barred windows, and tried to sort out her kitten-skitterish thoughts.
I should have some sort of horehound tea
, was her first clear thought.
And then perhaps a boiled egg. What did I eat last…? That is too far back to remember
. With care, touching and gripping the floor firmly with each foot, she got up and made her way slowly through the mess of chairs and tables and sudden inexplicably placed ottomans toward the little dressing table on the opposite side of the room.
It would be on the opposite side of the room. A lamp. Are there any matches to go with it?
She pressed her hand on the cold marble lip of the table and bent down to open one of the drawers, rooting past a jumble of brushes and pins until she discovered a little shut tin that rattled woodenly and with the sound of promise. She produced a match, struck it lit, and shakily set it to the wick in the lamp. It was appalling how badly she was trembling—from latent fear or hunger or sickness, she was not sure—but she screwed up her lip in her teeth and steadied herself as best she could until the fire took, then she flung out the match and set the shade back down.
“Oh!” she cried, startled by the ghastly apparition that glared back at her out of the mirror. Laughter warbled up her weak spine.
Small wonder Bloodburn was so disinterested.
I
should be disinterested!
She settled her torn, scarlet-and-gold flaming gown into the backless chair—she did not realize at first there was no back and nearly lost her balance over the side. Her feverish mind could almost feel Dammerung’s hands on her shoulders pushing her upright, could almost hear his sharp, mocking laughter as Lady Spitcat nearly tumbled on the floor. Patiently, finding her centre in the golden, gloomy chamber, she drew a comb through her dishevelled hair. She was too tired to put it up: a combing would do, taming the unruly locks until they fluffed into an aurora of ruddy gold about her worn face. They were soft, comforting, purring with sparks as the light ran up and down each strand.
Better now?
she asked Lady Spitcat.
He will be here soon, and when he comes he will bring the fire. Not long. He won’t leave me. Unless—
Her eyes travelled to the casement, barred and backlit with midmorning light. More surely than she knew anything, she knew he would not leave her, but it had been a desperate fight at Ampersand. While the Red Rose had been routed, had the Right won ground against Rupert? How had the day gone? Would he come quickly, or would he be tied up digging his heels into Ampersand and making sure of victory? She did not even know if it had been victory.