Pipe clean away the azure blood,
Pipe away the fame;
Pipe away the laddie’s youth
And the beauty of the dame.
Pipe to the old macabre dance—
It’s all a-one to me.
Birth is had with a hefty price
But death we have for free.
Dammerung and Aikin Ironside stamped in, throwing a greeting to the innkeeper, and came over, pulling up chairs to join the circle. Huw began to get up to relinquish his place on the settle to Dammerung, but Dammerung waved him down.
“Lady Margaret told us the way of it,” said Brand. “The four of us bound for Gemeren, and the rest to rejoin Capys at Eastphell.”
“That is the way of it.” Dammerung leaned across the low table and pulled a cup of stout into his grasp. He slung his right ankle over his left knee and leaned back comfortably into the embraces of the rough arrow-backed chair. “We’ll stay the night and take Gro with us in the morning.” He took a stray fork, speared several hunks of chicken and dumplings from Margaret’s bowl with a single thrust, and put them away in his middle. “Are we nearly finished here?”
Everyone murmured assent and hastily drained his cup to prove it. Margaret gamely put away the perry and, lowering the cup, saw Dammerung flash her a laugh over his stout. Huw went away to pay the innkeeper for the meal—which, Margaret could not help thinking, was a test of faith on all their accounts—and the rest of them plunged back out into the warm summer evening to collect their horses from their own brief supper.
They all parted at the gate, Aikin, Brand, Dammerung and herself swinging right and Sparling with the rest swinging left; no other words passed between them. Riding in the rear, she looked back apprehensively over her shoulder to watch them go. Huw Daggerman, however, all roguish and at once courteous, bouncing to his rock-legged horse’s gait, twisted, too, in the saddle, and caught her eye. He lifted his knuckle to his forehead in salute, then a bend in the road cut them off from view of each other. Dammerung set his teeth on edge and began a skirling tune.
...Birth is had with a hefty price,
But death we have for free...
Achy in her limbs, with the beginnings of a headache where the sun was slicing level into her eyes, Margaret urged Mausolem alongside the lean warhorse with the consolation of a full stomach and a warm wash at the end of the road. As reconciled as she could be to plunges in mountain springs and the awkward communal washrooms of way-houses, the manor of a land-owner with its promise of wealth and decent, quiet, domestic familiarities continued to have an almost alarmingly powerful sway over her. But as they went out through the west gate, over the little low thunder-humming bridge onto the road, her interest was tempered by the sudden clear signs of war in the landscape.
The low eastern parts of Tarnjewel had had only a few telltale signs that she could ignore if she looked away. Here in the west she saw whole farms burnt down, woodcutters’ lodges around damp coppices broken down and empty—in a field by the way the turf was pocked and discoloured and she could make out a number of grotesque, twisted figures in the middle ground, heaped into a pile and attended by only the ravens. She looked at them stone-facedly, but her stomach still spasmed with nausea and her heart still ached with a formless, awful pain.
…Birth is had at a hefty price,
But death we have for free…
The sun had gone down and the land was blackened, the sky a swirling disc of pearl-gold and old pearl-grey, when the four of them, riding abreast on the lonely road, passed the stone wayside statue of what might have once been a fox but looked to Margaret more like a badger and entered the outlying meads of Gemeren. As the fireflies began to seep out of some other world into the intense gloom they took the road through the spacious park, down into a little watery dell and out again onto a swell of ground with the house, a shuttered lantern full of lit coals, standing high above them. Brand made some contented sound that Margaret could not quite hear but could sympathize with.
It was Rubico who announced their arrival. They shuffled into the cobbled yard, hooves ringing on the stones; catching the scent of another horse that annoyed him, the warhorse tucked up his chin and squealed angrily.
“A picky, womanish, high-maintenance kind of fellow,” observed Dammerung as he swung out of the saddle, his feet saying “pa-pat!” on the ground as he landed. He reached to help Margaret down.
The door from the house banged open. Her hands on Dammerung’s shoulders, ready to slip off of the saddle, Margaret turned to see a familiar bulk of silhouette in the doorway, the body of a huge dog pressed against its thigh. The figure carried a sword in one hand.
“Good evening, uncle!” said Aikin pacifically. “We’ve come to crash the night with you.” And he strode forward, breaking the tension, to give Lord Gro a kiss on each cheek.
“A pleasant surprise,” Gro said. “Is that you, Brand? I thought you might have stayed in Hol-land a little longer.”
Murmuring something to a stable-boy who had materialized from the shadows, Dammerung took Margaret’s arm and pulled her into the light spilling from the doorway. “No, sir, we left the conflict there in the capable hands of Darkling. Word was that we were needed more sorely here, and so we came.”
“And so you came, as you are always wont to come, when you are most needed.”
Dammerung smiled.
Gro turned to Aikin, who had mounted the step beside him. “Do you have luggage?”
“Only a little. We came lightly—but it rained this morning and we rode through the thick of it, and we are in need of warm baths.”
“Of course,” said Gro, as if all this went without saying and, had anyone save Aikin mentioned it, he might have been offended at the inference that he would not have offered those services without prompting. Much as she liked him, Margaret found herself beginning to be a little afraid of him again, for here he was on his own turf and his own man, and not the drifting, mercurial grey figure he had been at Lookinglass. But then Dammerung was handing her up the step and pushing her on down the little passage ahead of him, and, as she fell under Gro’s eye—and met it inexorably—she saw the cool, unhurried pleasure shift in his eye like the idle shifting of the sea.
“Good evening, Lady Margaret,” he bade her.
“Good evening,” she murmured back, flattered and abashed and flushing angrily at herself for being so unnerved. She slipped past him and followed after Aikin.
“Mind the rise,” Aikin said, gesturing to an old threshold of brick in the floor.
Dammerung’s voice came drifting from behind her. “You have a pleasant place here, sir. I am sorry I could not come before.”
“She gets better with age,” Gro replied. “Better you see her now than two years ago, or better yet two years hence.”
And Dammerung, with a fresh ache in his words, added musingly, “To have this business done, and to see to my own meads again…!”
Margaret passed out of earshot and did not see Dammerung until after her bath. Aikin led her into the kitchen and passed her off on the nearest manservant—a man called Tunner, she gathered—who happily led her to a spare chamber in the guest wing by way of the servants’ stair—she said the shortest way was better and she did not mind which stair she took. Tunner lit a handful of candles, rummaged in the linen chest for fresh towels, and ran the water until she was afraid it would boil her.
“There you are, madam,” he said, standing in the doorway and looking over the tidy, spartan little room. The water in the pipes roared from the narrow washroom. His head nodded like a cat’s when it is taking the calculation of a leap, and he seemed satisfied. His unhandsome face bloomed with a smile in the candlelight. “If you have need of assistance but ring the bell. One of the maids will run up from below.”
“Thank you.” Margaret set her pack on the rough wooden trunk at the end of the bed. “Has the family dined or are we expected to join them, and should I hurry?”
“No, no. No hurry whatsoever, madam.” Tunner’s face appeared almost frightened at the thought that she should hustle. “The family has taken supper already. I am sure a little late repast will be provided, but that can linger until you and the young lords are ready for it.”
She smiled sympathetically. “You are too kind. Thank you.”
He bowed and swung out, setting the door firmly shut behind himself.
You are not the same woman now
, Margaret told herself, her thoughts ranging from the similarities between the tempers of masters and servants, to the places she had been, to the places she had come from, as she stood in the washroom and looked at herself in the single tiny mirror.
You are a most unfashionable nut colour, you are most unfashionably at war, and your language
—the reflection jerked with a smile—
has become most unfashionably to the point. My poor mother
, she added magnanimously, aware that her attitude had turned from bitter and spiteful to gently condescending;
you would so very willingly give me up to some other family just to disconnect me from the Coventry clan. There, I have disgraced you all. I hope you will not take it too much to heart.
In a pleasant state of mind she washed and groomed, taking her time, and finally stepped from the room in a glow of cleanliness and health and a gown of soft brown moleskin.
Dammerung was waiting for her in the hall. In an alcove someone had set a little plush couch, framed in heavy curtains; in the reddish pall of two sconce-lights she saw him stretched out, asleep, one arm flung over his face. He had already washed and had put off his rough mucky travelling clothes for a tunic the colour of red wine. She hated to wake him. For a minute or two she stood beside him, making up her mind to do it, and finally touched his shoulder gingerly in the hollow of it with two stiffened fingers.
He came awake at once, sniffing sharply, and dragged his arm off his warm, sleepy face. He blinked up at her, first both eyes, then each eye at a time, until she seemed to come into focus. “Mmm,” he grunted discontentedly, and rolled over with his back to her.
“I’m sorry,” she said bluntly. “We wouldn’t want to sleep through bedtime. Isn’t Lord Gro waiting for us? The couch is too short,” she added practically. “You look very uncomfortable.”
“I am very comfortable,” he protested, his voice muffled by the cushions. He shifted his long legs for a better position while the lower back half of him teetered dangerously on the edge of the couch. “I have been making a study of cats. They have all the best notions for sleeping in unorthodox places.”
“Oh, I see.” She sat down where the crook in his legs made room. “So, Gro is
not
waiting for us?”
“Mmer-mer-gerd,” he protested with more vehemence; he slapped his hand over his face to hide it.
“I know, I’m tired too.” She sat and stared blindly into space; an enjoyable, creeping sense of sleep was stealing over her and she found she did not mind if it was either genuine weariness or the determined aura of Dammerung to fall back asleep. “Personally, I would as soon fall in myself. I am a little hungry again, but less hungry than I am weary. I have not yet got quite used to this never-ending dashing about the Honours. I think it is often your own indomitable sense of energy that keeps me going when I am too worn out to think beyond anything more sensible than how pretty the candlelight looks.” On a whim she added, quietly, “But even your energy has a limit.”
He turned his head, his hand sliding off, his eyes shining out silver in the weak light. He was very still and silent for a minute. She could feel him probing among thoughts, both his and hers.
“Do you regret coming?”
Startlement awakened her with a rush of adrenaline. “No! Never for an instant! I think I might feel awkward if it were not for Woodbird and her sisters, who are also in the field—even Aikaterine is here. But no, never for an instant. I should hate to have been left behind.”
He smiled, wriggling more deeply into the embraces of the couch. “I should hate to have left you. I could never be sure you were safe, and who would I have to mock? Life would be empty and dull indeed.”
“There would be Skander,” she pointed out, exhibiting her hand, palm upward, as if Skander were in it.
“Mm, well, true,” he conceded; “but you have to catch my cousin in a rare spirit to get him to mock as well back the way you do. No one has the guts to give me back as good as I give forth except you.”
“I think that is because they are a little afraid of you. You can be very terrible.”
The image of Bloodburn, his body twisted in agony, flashed like an icon of judgment between them.
“So, you have learned not to be afraid?”
The image was exchanged for that of Skander’s study, backlit in morning light, tinged like a drinking glass with a rim of bitter salt. “You told me I never had to be,” she explained simply. “Also, I have the privilege of seeing you thus, worn out and jealous of sleep, and quite ambivalent about the fate of the world, as others do not see. You are less human to them than you are to me.”
Instead of becoming melancholy, Dammerung pulled up his legs and swung himself to a sitting position, arms folded against the stony chill of the hallway, a little musing smile on his face. “Yes, even the Son of Man wearied in the way. People
will
forget that.”
“Except that even the foxes of the field had wine-cellars in which to sleep, but
he
had nowhere to lay his head.”
“I am conquered!” he laughed. “Indeed, I am quite overthrown. What a pair of Fools we make, you and I. Oh…” He ran his hands through his hair and yawned. “I feel Calliope is coming back to me. I think we had better go down now before she leaves again.”
Margaret put her hand under Dammerung’s arm and pulled him up, and did not let go, lest he fall and for the mere comfort of the thing, as they walked together down the passage.
“Is Lord Gro really Aikin’s uncle?” she asked.