The pain, unexpected and swift, closed her throat.
“—come soon. We commit ourselves to your hand.”
Mark Roy seated himself and the dishes of fruits and white meats began to pass. There were no servants, Margaret noticed, looking round: every man served himself and passed the dish on to his neighbour.
Dammerung crossed one knee over the other and twisted imperiously in his chair, elbow on the table, a fluted glass of red wine in his hand. “Well, Centurion?” he prompted. “Whom all have we sent out of life today?”
Centurion hurriedly spooned summer fruits into the little bronze bowl before him and shoved the cut crystal dish off on Aikin. “Among ourselves,” he said, clearing his throat, “we have lost Sparling—” he glanced up at Black Malkin, but the lady only shook her head sadly and said nothing “—Zealon of Tarnjewel, the border lords and brothers Mirran and Kahmeny of Orzelon-gang, I believe; Howl of the Wastes I saw go down with my own eyes in a blaze of glory and many enemy dead. You would have been proud to have seen him, my Lord Dammerung.”
The War-wolf’s face wore an appreciative smile, but to Margaret’s eye it seemed distant and she felt his deeper darkness move restlessly beneath them.
Many names followed she did not know. Theran of Darkling. De Montfort of Darkling. Hama of Thrasymene. Birch of the Wastes. The steppe-lords from Drakeskar in the north. Jermaine, Lady of the Tribute. Bri Hearthstone. Chevalier of Darkling. Spyridon of Capys…
Lord Gro spoke up after awhile. “It makes the food tasteless, do you not think so?”
“Sometimes it makes it taste even better,” said Dammerung—or the body of Dammerung that his thoughts had left behind. “At least
you
may still eat.”
Margaret swallowed the soft, seasoned turkey meat and felt callous for how sweet and warm it tasted. “I am sorry for Spyridon. We must needs send a letter to Skander and let him know.”
Dammerung finished his wine and made short work of his turkey. Twisting the cap off a huge red strawberry, he prompted Centurion again. “What of the enemy? How many of them did we encairn?”
“
In toto
I do not know—I left the count at three hundred and it was still going.”
Mark Roy’s knife scraped against his plate. “We were close on one hundred seventy-five, I believe, as far as our counts went.”
“
Shee!
“ whistled Dammerung under his breath. “A red day.”
Centurion had attended to his list again. “Among those of note of the enemy dead are Malbrey of Talus Perey, Sebastian Leswey, Charles Fin—an ironic last name—and Hector of the Academy, the Fabii men of Ethandune—”
“All of them?” asked Mark Roy with some surprise.
Centurion’s head nodded in a circle as he tipped the paper toward the light. “All six of them.”
Out of the corner of her eye Margaret watched Lord Gro carefully pick up his napkin, use it, and replace it on his knee.
You sly thing. I warrant you did it single-handed, too
. But she chose, for his sake, not to call him out on his achievement.
“Forswear!” laughed the War-wolf. He refilled his own glass. “We run the risk of shorting Plenilune of her men.”
Centurion said, “Well, we can always institute polygamy…Hugh, Baron of Hemmin-law—”
“For a moment I thought you meant
me
,” interjected Daggerman.
“Tist! no, sirrah.” Darkling shook out the paper.
Dammerung remarked without looking up from his plate, “You may have Hemmin-law if this all pans out the way we should like it to.”
Huw’s face in the half-gloom was a brindled moon of surprise, but then he smiled and said, “Well, if your lordship cannot find a better man to take it…”
“By the time Darkling reaches the end of his list, I will probably need to restock all the manors and great houses of the Mares. You’re welcome to it.”
The ex-thief and thorough rogue stumbled over a few words, discarded each one of them, and finally gave up altogether. Ducking his head, he touched his knuckle to his brow in salute.
It was a simple meal. Finished, Margaret laid down her fork and knife and set her elbows on the edge of the table, one hand over the other, and settled her lips against the curve of her forefinger. Out of the corners of both eyes, constantly, she caught the elusive glint of her jewels moving as she did.
“One thing I cannot fathom,” Dammerung went on, half-humoured, half-puzzled, “I could have sworn I spotted Hol’s banner among the spears, yet when I looked for it with my sword, it was not there. Sure I know he is a fool, but I was hoping he was less the dastard.”
Centurion looked up from his letter. “Speak well of the dead!” he laughed. “It was Brand the Hammer who fished out Hol’s guts with a battleaxe. You won’t see the Rose among the Colours anymore.” Then his face went all wrong when he saw Dammerung’s countenance. Jerking her head around, Margaret saw Dammerung was staring at him as if he would eat the other alive, face so cold white with fury that, in the lull of her arrested heart, she expected Centurion to crack like ice and die. Then the great man turned his head ever so slightly and found Brand. No words passed between them, but she felt that she and Aikin, who was looking intently into the depths of his glass, were the only ones who understood what Dammerung was saying. She saw Brand’s jaw move, as if he was going to swallow and had decided not to.
“I dare swear.” The War-wolf’s voice was carefully light. “How late it grows. Thank you for the supper, my lord. I will see you in the morning.”
He rose, pushing back his chair, bowed stiffly to Romage, and turned into the shadows. Margaret did not wait. She knew that if she waited the awkwardness would grow unbearable and she would not be able to move. She flung her napkin onto her soiled plate and swung after Dammerung, jewels rioting white light; she wondered, as she ran on soft feet through the dark, how long the others at the table could see the winking fire of her gown until the dark and the turn of the hall finally swallowed it up.
“Dammerung!” she hissed.
There was no answer. She could feel him, a dark tide ebbing away in front of her, and she knew that he heard her call after him, but he did not stop and he did not speak. Angrily, she clenched up her skirts and ran faster through the dark, bumping into a doorway here, tripping down a flight of stairs somewhere else, losing all sense of direction until she came out into a breath of air and the fabric her gown had been cut from blazed above her.
A silhouette of shoulders broke up the sky.
“Dammerung, by the twelve houses—” She ran forward to stand beside him. She opened her mouth to say more, but words failed her and she shut her jaws with a clack she knew he heard. He did not turn. He stood with his shoulders set square against the world, arms folded, staring out across the dark and other things that were just as dark as the night, and the rawness of his wounds were tangible even to her.
Finally she found her breath. “You ought not have done that to Brand. He did not know, Dammerung.
He did not know!
He was a man doing his duty. You can’t pick and choose men on the battlefield to kill like children picking and choosing dolls to play with! He did what he had to do. It was not providence’s design that you should have killed Bloodburn.”
“I promised.” The voice was low, like the voice of the ground. “I swore before Heaven and Plenilune that his death would be mine. It was against me that he lifted his hand, and by me he should have been destroyed.”
“I know. I
know
. But you could not have killed him then. It would not have been a fair thing. Bloodburn was guilty of being a foolish man, old of life and withered within. He had cut himself off from all that might have done him good. The fault was not yours for giving him that mercy, in letting him live a little longer to see another red dawn. The fault was not Brand’s for killing him in battle.”
“I
promised
.”
“Thou stubborn old thing!” she cried, and grasped him by the shoulder. The hardened muscles resisted her pressure. “I hear you! But you must hear me now. We swear, and we swear meaningfully, but what are we before the might of Heaven’s oath? What are our words but little things when God speaks? It was not to be. Don’t begrudge the boy a little honour, thou proud, proud son of the Mares!”
He turned and there was a sudden light—from where she did not know—and she could see his face. He appeared startled, taken aback, but he had whipped the anger behind his back as if ashamed of it.
“Old?” he parroted. “Boy? What are you, Artemis—ageless?”
“It is an ill thing for me that you look so like the Huntress—unless I be Orion.”
A cold wave of premonition stopped her full-blooded heat. “I do not mean old. I borrowed the agelessness from you. But compared to some of you, Brand is just a boy. He was only going to come out, after all, two years ago when this all began.”
“I do not know…How easily one forgets age when one is all of Plenilune at once.”
Without realizing what she was saying, Margaret murmured, “Even Plenilune must come to an end some day.”
Dammerung was quiet.
“I think I should go to Skander tomorrow,” he said presently. “My gut says to go home.”
A single fleck of light skittered across the sky and vanished on the horizon.
“Are things coming to an end, then?” she asked.
She heard the wry smile in his voice. “Am I a prophet, that I should know such a thing? But yes. One way or another, I feel, the end is coming.”
30 | Ouroboros
“You are looking rather better. Where is Woodbird?” Margaret twisted her head so that Skander, bending, could kiss her cheek.
“You have just missed her!” he said remorsefully. “She and my huntsman just left to rejoin the border troops.”
Dammerung did not turn from surveying his men, hands on hips, as they moved like shuttles through each other, weaving a camp on the slopes below Lookinglass. “And you?”
Skander Rime hitched at the thick belt about his waist from which hung the ominous hunk of metal that was Gram. “There has been a shadow growing in my mind,” he admitted. “The Carmarthen are a threat, a seen threat. Yet ever I have that sense of eyes on the back of my neck whenever I turn to face the steppes. I do not trust de la Mare. I do not like to turn my back to him.”
“No, I know what you mean…”
The day was hot. Nothing could be seen for a great distance; the horizon swam with gold. But Margaret cupped her hand over her brow and squinted south and southwest toward the lower knees of Seescarfell. News among Skander’s scouts was that Rupert had swept through in the night like an angel of death, soundless, leaving nothing alive behind him that had put up a fight, and had entrenched himself in Marenové House—following, skirting, Dammerung’s own movements.
I wonder if they are not a little afraid of each other. Or, if not afraid, wary of what they will awake in the other. If they are not careful, they might split Plenilune in half between them and destroy everything they sought to hold.
“Will he come?” Skander asked bluntly.
Dammerung’s head turned—but he was only following the progress of the picket-lines. “What, out of Egypt? He would do well to stay within the stronghold for a little while. I have drowned his mighty men in a sea of blood.”
“Will others come to him, do you think?” asked Margaret.
“There are not many left. From a realm beneath the Earth, perhaps—we have kept the gateways open for the past few months, always feeding souls through to the dark: who knows what archon he might invite home to bolster his ranks?”
Skander shivered and shifted as if to hide it. “Don’t talk as such! The man is flesh and blood, same as you, no matter what else he can do.”
The War-wolf’s brow cocked back at his cousin. “Yes…but what
else
we can do!”
There was something wrong with Skander’s face, Margaret thought, as the two looked at each other wordlessly for a moment, but she could not place the errancy. No one spoke a word—that seemed beyond any of them for the moment—when it grew on Margaret’s awareness that a clinking of metal accoutrements was coming toward them. Turning, she saw the blue-jay man coming up a flight of stone steps set into the slope, ducking under a spray of pine-scrub. He had something in his hand.
“News, sir,” he said, drawing up before the two war-lords. “From Orzelon-gang, I believe.”
Dammerung waved a hand and Skander took the letter. With a snapping sound he broke the wax seal, sending a shower of scarlet shards to the ground, and pried open the thick writing-paper. Grimly he scanned the words inside.
“It is in Aikin Ironside’s hand.
‘The news will spread quick enough, but I would rather be the first to tell you. Brand of Orzelon-gang, surnamed the Hammer, second son of his majesty Mark Roy my father, is dead.’
”
It was quiet for a long time. A curlew called on the hillside. A warm wind puttered in the blue-jay man’s long sleeves.
Skander folded back the note. “That is all.”
Without a word, Dammerung turned and left them, crossed the courtyard without looking right or left, and disappeared inside the house.
A kind of horror of everything nearly choked Margaret out of words. The world seemed to have shrunk, as if she were looking at it out of the wrong end of a telescope. “What—what do you mean, that is all?” she demanded of Skander. “How did he die? Doesn’t it say?”
“Truly, Margaret,” he protested, abashed by the news, by Dammerung’s response, and by her vehemence, “it says no more. Look—see for yourself!”
He tried to hand her the letter, but to her mind it came at her like the mouth of a viper. She recoiled, saying something that she could not hear in her own ears about going to see Dammerung, and retreated blindly toward the house, deaf to any sound but the pounding of her heart, insensible to anything but the chill that was coursing up and down her limbs.
Dead. Brand—dead.
How many more? How many more until it is over?
How many, Rupert?
How many!