“Oh, he’s got a cousin, has he? Is
he
married?”
Margaret’s mouth opened in a silent scream. “His cousin is engaged to be married. His brother just died—”
“Oh, and so you’re going to make it to
that
funeral!”
Come to think of it, I would rather miss that too.
“Yes, Mother, in all probability, I will be at that funeral.”
Her mother began climbing the stair behind her. “So you can’t make it to your father’s funeral, but you can go to a complete stranger’s. I like that. Young people these days—!”
The blood, the fire. The wrack and ruin. Brand’s death. Men’s faces twisted in agony. Rupert’s face distorted out of recognition. The great winged man who smelled of death. Dammerung. The Great Blind Dragon.
Margaret turned at head of the stair and stood above her mother, fury trembling in every vein. “Be quiet,” she said imperiously, “and have a little respect for the dead.”
If it had been a dragon-spell, her words could not have stopped up her mother’s mouth better. Mrs. Coventry stood mute, her mouth hanging a little open, and without a backward glance Margaret left her like that and retired to her old, small, creaky-floored room with the single window and the sill that leaked a draft.
She looked condescendingly on the scene and smiled a little. There was nothing, she realized, that she wanted to take. These innocuous articles were the furniture of an old, nasty, tortuous life that lay on the other side of a long death, a long death and a slow, agonized climb to a new life. She went across the room to the window and looked out, looked up.
In the sky she could see the eye of the dragon looking down on her, blind and white. Her fingers brushed the pane.
Stand at the ready. We’re coming back soon.
Dammerung’s reflection bloomed in the window beside hers. His questing fingers worked round her hourglass; turning, she leaned into his embrace.
“Are they rich as kings?” she asked. “Can we leave them and never look back?”
“Probably not. Barker is getting the books down for me. An admirable sort of fellow—all seriousness and fur about the jaws. It took me some time to convince him that I was really permitted to look at the books. He seemed uncertain of my feet. I almost told him I was uncertain of his name, but then I thought better of it.”
“What, Barker? That’s an old name. No one thinks twice about it.”
“Really! What a rummy place this is.”
Down the hall the one tread on the stair went off like a cracker, and presently the sound of hurrying feet came to them. Amy appeared in the doorway, eyes agog as if she had never had a day like this one and was not sure what to make of it, and gasped out,
“Miss Coventry, your muther wants you in the parlour. Tha’ cousin of yours, Miss Firethorne, has come home!”
Margaret stared at her insensible. Firethorne—that little white thing that had run away nearly a year ago?
“And, wha’s more,” Amy added as the climax, “she’s got a burly great man of a husband with her!”
“It’s a rummy, rummy world,” said Dammerung.
About the Author
JENNIFER FREITAG lives with her husband in a house they call Clickitting, with their two cats Minnow and Aquila, and their own fox kit due to be born in early December. Jennifer writes in no particular genre because she never learned how, she is made of sparks like
Boys of Blur
, and if she could grasp the elements, she would bend them like lightning. Until then, she sets words on fire.
Living with her must be excruciating.
Find her online at
The Penslayer
Table of Contents
4 | The Devil’s Hunting Grounds
7 | The Names of the Great Ones
10 | A Flicker-Flame of a Party
12 | Keyholes of Heaven and Hell
14 | The Things That Cannot Be and That Are
16 | The Many-Splendoured Thing
18 | “She Might Not Have Known”
21 | In Little Room Confining Mighty Men
27 | These Wretched Eminent Things