“You could really believe,” he murmured, glancing round, “that a place like this was magic. It has a warm and pleasant genius.”
“The water is cold,” said Margaret, testing it.
With a flick of his wrist Dammerung found a stag’s-crown of branchwork that had got caught in the rocky wall of the tiny glen; a few dozen points of light sprang out of the dark from each twig-tip, casting a yellow pall of light over them and sending down little waving flecks of light to play in the deep dimension of the water. Margaret felt them dance inside her.
Her companion sat down on a low stone and began rolling up the hem of his trousers. Crouching, she untied her moleskin overdress—which the water would have ruined—and slid, one leg first and then the other, sucking in a startled breath as she did so, into the frothing water.
“O-o-oh…!” she cried.
Dammerung looked up from a blind fiddling with his shirt buttons. “Very cold?”
She swept up to her shoulders in the black water. “The air was warm and this is cold!”
“Sets the blood tingling!”
He knelt like a dog at the water’s edge and thrust his head into the stream. With steady scrubbing he pulled and tousled the pliant ends of his hair through his fingers. Doing the same, Margaret noted that he would need a pair of scissors presently and wondered if the blue-jay man was also good at that sort of thing.
“I forget how hair grows,” he said into his knees. “I never had this problem when I was a fox…”
Her own hair had grown in the past nine months: a mermaid’s net of darkness spread across the surface of the water all around her, flickering gold with firelight, flickering white where the crescent of the earth shot down a few spare rays of light and lit the wet dark around her. The ends were caught in the bubbling torrent; her feet, rolling and catching at rounded stones below, were buffeted in a forceful, watery dance. She felt submerged in Plenilune and the warm loam-scent of dusk swelled in the light and the dark into her nostrils. She shut her eyes and breathed.
She was half done, and Dammerung all finished, when suddenly he said, “What does Lord Gro do here?” and he rose, spinning on one heel. Margaret looked up, surprised and a little blushing; against the heirloom-blue of nightfall moved the staid figure of the Gemeren land-owner, the silk-moving grey figure of his dog at his side.
“Capys said I would find you here,” he said, stopping on the rocky overhang of the bank.
“And so you do,” replied Dammerung levelly. She felt him reaching, feeling, testing the air. “What is amiss?”
But Gro put up his chin indicatively toward Skander’s tent and said, “He asks that you come.”
“Then I come.” The War-wolf stooped and swept up his fresh shirt, white and shining in the dark, and pulled it on. “Of your courtesy, would you leave Snati with Margaret?”
Gro said nothing, but clapped his hands once and pointed to a bit of level ground on the bank. Obedient, Snati dropped onto his hindquarters and gazed down brightly, knowingly, at Margaret. She sank a little deeper into the water.
Dammerung cast her one last assuring glance before going back up the hillside with Gro, but Margaret did not feel assured. She finished her bath and climbed out under the golden gaze of the big wolf-thing who, with the jerky canine movements of its eyes, watched her kneel over the water to wring out her hair and bend, grimacing, to peel off her soaked underdress to exchange it for a fresh one. Worn and breathless, but clean and newly clothed, she stood pantingly, looking back at Snati’s inscrutable face.
“You are but a dog,” she told him. “What do
you
care?”
He seemed not to; his face, though intelligent, was not the fox’s: he seemed only to understand and care that she was not in danger.
Margaret bent, cupping her hand, and scooping up a handful of water to fling on the flaming branches. The water hissed and burst into steam, but the flames, cowed a moment, rose again. Pursing her lips, she flung another handful of water and hit the greater part of the flames; they would not go out.
Very well, be that way!
she thought petulantly. But as she stooped to wrap up her bundle of soiled clothing she was touched by a cold sense of being watched, as if by eyes, by all those points of flame.
But she had other things to think about as she toiled, limbs chilled and gently aching, up the slope toward the tent. Two sentries stood at hand, faces to the southwest, and they watched her intently as she and the dog walked up to them. They saluted promptly—which was nothing out of the ordinary: the men were always quick and eager to show her deference; but there was something curious in the way the two moved aside for her and the one said,
“I trust thou hast not gone far, my lady.”
She stopped, surprised by his forwardness in speech. “No,” she said slowly. “Only to the little glen. I had the War-wolf’s permission,” she added, though she could not fathom why she should be defending herself to a soldier.
One tentatively patted Snati’s brow. “Thou hast a fair watchdog to heel. That is well.”
She went on, prickling with disturbance and curiosity; she could feel the two soldiers watching her as she went.
It was when she reached the level of Skander’s knoll that she became aware of the tension in the air. It was like moving through a band of dark electricity. Her hair, heavy with the damp, rose even so with the surge of power all around her. Bristling like a witch’s familiar, tensed, wary, she stepped up to the down-flung tent-flap and pushed it aside.
The energy struck her in the face.
Almost upon the instant she stepped in, though few heads turned, all eyes were on her. Skander and Brand and Aikin Ironside were there, grim-faced, standing in a little ring about Dammerung where he sat in a low-slung chair. He had not put on any more than his mud-spattered trousers and his clean starched shirt, but he was wrapped in a sense of fire and spice and danger so thick Margaret feared that if she stepped in any more she might prick the bubble and let loose a hurricane. They all looked at her, sharply—the same looks the soldiers had given her; Margaret had the sense of being pulled into some protective ring by their glances as Dammerung might pull her clear of physical danger with an arm around her hourglass. Frightened now, she looked to the figure they had under guard in their midst.
The man stood between Huw and Gro, arms bound at his back. He had the familiar look of a soldier who has just come through a day-long fight and has had time only to put up his horse and drag his mucky harness over his head. He had several days’ growth of beard on his dirty face, and one cheek had been laid open raggedly, as though by a blow from someone’s signet-ring. He was stripped of armour; his rough shirt had been dragged back on his shoulders so that the collar rose high and uncomfortably under his chin, baring his shoulder-blades at the back. He was a brute-handsome devil, and as the chill night wind blew in past her he, too, looked round, catching her eye with a searching glance unlike that of the others’. She coloured and felt her stomach cringe.
Swiftly, smoothly, Skander stepped out of the ring and raised his naked sword to rest the point on the man’s unbroken cheek. “Put down your eyes, dog,” he said, “or I’ll put them down for you.”
The man switched his eyes from Margaret to Skander; the lips twitched with a sour, involuntary tic, and then the eyes obediently dropped. At the same time Dammerung’s hand, which had been resting stiff and white on the arm of his chair, turned over, beckoning for Margaret with a single sharp gesture.
She could move then. Head uplifted, the hot blood coursing in her throat, she swept past them. Brand stepped back to make a place for her behind and beside Dammerung. Skander, satisfied, left the soldier to be pinned under the War-wolf’s eye and went out of the ring of war-lords to fetch Margaret’s surcoat from her trunk. She did not look round but she felt the comfortable warmth of it drop about her shoulders and the man’s familiar, big, rough hand settle a moment reassuringly on the curve of her upper arm.
An awful silence, which she had disturbed, fell over the tent again. The soldier and the War-wolf regarded each other in a hot-blooded quiet. Whatever the soldier was thinking it was angry, sullen, but forcibly self-assured; the War-wolf seemed to be listening at once to his own thoughts and to the thoughts of the man he held under the silvered point of his gaze.
As last the latter tipped up his chin, rousing from his silence. “Lord Gro, what has been done with the woman’s body?”
The lord deftly turned his head, deferring to Huw—who, mimicking the War-wolf’s upward thrust of the head, said, “No one claimed her, sir. She was given burial alongside the soldiers of the day.”
Gro added, “A little inquiry revealed she came from a small village whose orchards border the land which was fought over today.”
“All alone,” said the War-world with a sudden savagery.
In a more careful voice Huw continued as if on report. “I think she must have got caught in a sortie, sir. I was coming down to collect the dead and saw her lying dead, too, among the apple trees; and saw him,” he nodded his head toward the prisoner, “just stepping up to take a dance with her.”
Dammerung put up one heel on the rung of his chair and draped his forearm across his knee. For now Margaret chose not too look at the prisoner’s face, but watched Dammerung’s from a high angle—and saw, not the fox this time, but the wolfishness of him staring out from under the sharp-edged, dark brows of the de la Mare face as a wolf peers out from under its native bush. She saw the lips part a little and reveal the hungry dog-teeth. He leaned a little forward to meet the motion of his leg, chin upthrust to look into the prisoner’s face.
What must it be like for the prisoner, she wondered with a shudder, to have to stare back into that violent disapproval?
“What is your name?”
“Púka,” the man said stiffly. His lip did not appear to work very well on one side. “Bazel Púka.”
“You are native to Orzelon-gang, then.”
The man did not speak, but his face affirmed.
The hand lifted, tightening into a fist; Dammerung rested his chin on his knuckle. “It appears that you have an appetite for corpses.”
Púka twisted one imprisoned shoulder carelessly. “It could be worse.”
“Truly?” the War-wolf’s throat growled. “Truly, I am not so sure. The living have a say and might strike back—hast got a woman’s claws across your cheek before?—but the dead are silent and motionless, and depend wholly on Christian charity for decency.”
With a little look round, Púka asked back, “Hast
thou
ever, sir?”
Every body in the tent chamber stiffened except Dammerung’s. Huw made a visible movement which looked like a flinch away from the prisoner, as though expecting Dammerung’s lightning to strike the man at any moment and he did not want to be too close. Margaret flushed with angry surprise and wondered if the man Púka knew to whom and to what he was speaking.
His eye momentarily straying among the heavily-clad feet of the men, the War-wolf murmured rhythmically, “How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot! The world forgetting, by the world forgot…Do you know—” he seemed to come back out of himself “—what I do with men like you?”
The breath of mortality chilled the soldier’s cheek. His throat involuntarily clenched as if it could already feel the noose about it.
“I was answered that once, by a man who thought I was altogether such a one as himself.” The War-wolf got up, tall-seeming and cloaked in dread. The reflection of him glinted back out of the sudden swell of black in Púka’s eye. “You will hang, and you will hang high, and you will hang long, and the crows will come and pick your flesh—and you, like all the dead, will not be able to stop them.”
The eyes, blackened by the promise of a swift drop into death, tore off the War-wolf’s face and found Margaret’s. She felt him call across to her, proudly, stiffly, yet desperately. But if he thought to find some solace and womanly compassion in her, he was sorely mistaken. Dammerung’s words had laid hot bars across her heart and she was impenetrable.
“Nay, sirrah,” she spoke lowly, huskily. “Do not look to
us
for mercy. Our hearts are iron-clad.”
“Nor have you any right to ask a lady for her kerchief,” said Dammerung acidly. He thrust his hand, fingers spread, toward the tent opening. “Get him out of my sight and bind him: let him be, but bind him.” He stepped away, dragging his dark aura after him, but swung back at the last moment. “You wanted a cold companion,” he said. Púka’s cheeks paled. “You’ll find death’s kiss very cold indeed.”
“Hie with you,” snapped Huw, and jerked the man about. They went, with a little more prodding from Huw than was strictly necessary, Margaret thought, but then the ex-thief was probably glad for the excuse to strut a little.
Skander said something level and appreciative to the others and they, too, left—Margaret heard Aikin say in passing to Brand that he had better follow along after Huw and be of help. Finally they were all gone—Gro, unlike himself, doubled back and bade them good-night at the tent-flap—and it was only Skander and Dammerung and herself in the soft haze of lamp-smoke and the feeling that her bath had been in vain.
Dammerung was staring at things he could not look away from, though she could see from the whiteness of his eyes that he wished to. His shadow seemed to move of its own accord and sang a little along the edges with a brief marshlight flame.
“Dammerung,” she called quietly. “Come back out of the cellar now.”
“A moment...” he said without moving. Then, with a deep breath, he seemed to break out of the spell of his own thoughts.
Her brows quirked with a spasm of sympathy. “Is it very hard being you?”
“Sometimes.”
“Aikaterine,” said Skander as the maid stepped in out of the dark, “I would rather you slept in here tonight. You can bed by Lady Margaret—if she does not herself object.”
“Of course not.” Margaret met the maid’s surprised, questioning eye. “I should not feel easy myself if she were elsewhere. Oh, Dammerung,” she added as the blue-jay man followed hard on Aikaterine’s heels, “you need a haircut. Would Skander’s man do?”