Plenilune (83 page)

That’s not so bad
, she thought when she got a level-headed look at the wound.
A bit of broken bone and torn muscle, but Dammerung can mend that. It is the splinters that are the trouble. And the time lost.

Dammerung sniffed and put up one hand to rub the crook of his wrist against his nose—that was all: he went back to work, digging his long fingers into the running mess, fiddling for every last splinter. Margaret glanced up, half expecting him to speak, and when he went back to work her gaze lingered a moment on his blood-streaked face. She realized for the first time that he had freckles, myriads of tiny, dark freckles all over his face; but one was so captivated by the clear, fierce eyes, darkened now with concentration, that one did not notice the freckles at first, if at all. Her mind wandered off, wondering if Skander had noticed, if Skander had known.

Or Rupert…

“Who-o-o…” With a gusty sigh Dammerung dropped his forehead against his cousin’s thigh.

Margaret sat up. With the sudden movement her back and legs cried out in cramped agony. “Oh—is that it? Is that all?”

He drew back. His face was as bloody as before. “I think so. I don’t think we have to worry about ill humours—I think he has bled them out by now. I may or may not have picked a bit of bone out with the splinters.
C’est la vie.
We’ll make good shift of a bad job. Oh, I’m done with the light.”

Too readily she dropped the light on the floor. It rocked and nearly upturned into the carpet, but righted itself at the last moment and the wick, after fumbling with the flame, caught it again and held it tight. She did not care. She hefted herself up by the edge of the couch and looked into Skander’s face for any sign of relief. It was deathly still but death had not yet stolen over it. Dammerung was speaking softly, and ever afterward she was not sure what language he was using.

“We’re not out of the woods yet, sir, but we’ve come to a clearing. The halloo is quiet for a moment. There is a fountain. A unicorn. Softly—don’t startle the animal spirit. It is stirring the water and there is scarlet coming from its horn. The halloo again—”

His hands lay flat against the wound, flat, then clenching, drawing the lips of skin together.

“—The summons to go on. We’re going upward, sir.
Swef
, my heart, my bold, my brave. The arbour is behind. The sphere of Mars is calling…”

It was the simplest thing. She had never been one on the outside looking in. She had been the one under the knife, under the questing, healing hand. This time she paused, half-stooped over Skander’s brow, and looked back to see the War-wolf, master of death, pass his hands over destruction’s handiwork and bind the severed flesh together again. The simplest thing.

Dammerung smiled.

Margaret laid her hand on Skander’s brow. It was damp and warm, but still. The eyelids were motionless.

“Poor brute,” she murmured. “A third time will do him for sure.”

“Nay, not him.” Dammerung twisted back and forth to get the kinks out of his spine. “Fortune favours the bold.
Sa cy avaunt
.” He waved toward the tent-flap.

Out of the darkness the blue-jay man rose, ducking back in with eyes curiously bright in a pale, drawn face. Neither he nor Dammerung spoke; one look between them seemed sufficient. Margaret was almost pathetically glad to get out of the manservant’s way and follow after Dammerung into the windy dark. The air on her face was cool, but the horror of the whole day, which she had not realized she had been holding in check, whelmed up at her out of the blackness. She went doggedly after the sound of Dammerung’s feet, but she knew the game was up. The warm water welled in her mouth; her stomach, punching round against her diaphragm, stopped her breath and clogged up her throat. She made it nearly to the entryway of Dammerung’s tent before, with a little cry of warning, she doubled over and vomited. She did not know what was coming out of her mouth, only that it tasted like shame.

He was there with an arm round her hourglass, one hand bunching back her hair out of her face. He was saying something softly, soothingly, which made her cheeks burn hotter with shame, but she could not hear him until the last heave subsided and she was bent panting, empty, shaking—and by then he had fallen silent.

“I’m sorry,” she gasped.

“Come in-by,” was all he said. “You need some wine. You’re all peaky.”

The stuff in her mouth screwed her lips into a grimace. Looking up through the lamplight at his face, with his hand still hauling back the tangled mass of her hair, she saw the same sort of twist to his own mouth and wondered if
he
was going to be ill.

“What about you?” she blurted.

He let down her hair and held out his hand. In the light she could see it was shaking.

A laugh stuttered out of her throat.

29 | The Pale Ports O’ the Moon

“Well, if that doesn’t take the salt out of you…”

The War-wolf folded up the missive and tossed it aside, but he did not try to stop Skander Rime from hefting himself up on the couch and reaching, stiffly, for his boots.

“Not a moment’s peace,” Skander went on grumblingly. “Not a bit of land but he has to rouse the Wild Hunt on it.”

Dammerung got up and whistled shortly, shrilly, and the blue-jay man was gone at once, ducking out into the grey-and-gold welter of an overcast dawn—to see to Skander’s horse, Margaret presumed.

Dammerung turned back and put a hand under his cousin’s elbow to help him up. “Well, not that, else
I
should be going in your stead. You had better take Woodbird with you, if her sisters will spare her.”

Skander spoke through clenched teeth as he wrenched his harness of leather over his head: “They had
better
spare her…”

Moving aside, Margaret’s curious, questing fingers picked up the letter. It was only a little weather-stained: the letter-head bore a date antepenultimate to the day. She recognized Periot Survance’s hand from the notes he had made in Songmartin’s book.

“
The border defences are falling
,” she read, mouthing the words, feeling again the quickness of the blood roiling in the cauldron of her heart. “
Rupert has raised the Carmathen against us. The border defences are falling. Come, lord—come soon.
“

Sha-ang!
Gram sang home into the sheath. Margaret looked over the crumpled edge of the letter to see Skander, leaning to the side to get his weight off his weakened leg, standing in the doorway of the tent, Dammerung beside him, the pre-storm tempest of the morning winging them with a shadowy glory.

“I can’t come,” Dammerung was saying frankly. “I can’t come—not yet.”

“No,” mused his cousin. “Your way lies through the plains of Orzelon-gang.”

A brief silence.

“There is a storm coming.”

“I can hear the ravens on the wind of it.”

Skander looked to Dammerung. Withdrawn on the outskirts, Margaret watched his face become a strange thing, a foreign thing, grimly carved and pale. “You hear them too?”

Dammerung stared out across the landscape, his face to the lifting wind. “The names they are calling? Yes, I hear them.”

She, too, listened, but she heard only the rushing of the wind and the growing drum of hoofbeats drawing nearer. The two men moved apart as a flea-bitten mare charged into the entryway and Woodbird’s voice, imperious, called down,

“I came as soon as I heard. Skander, I am coming with you. Also Ewing and Aelfhorn and their men come.”

“Nay, now I am jealous.” The mockery had warmed the embers of Dammerung’s voice. “You will not miss me!”

Within half an hour the columns were assembled and on the move, salutes flung across the intervening spaces, and Margaret, who had long ago grown used to how quickly camps were packed and unpacked, stood beside Dammerung watching Skander’s blue banner dwindle into the purple thunder of the air on the shore of Holywood, a small panic under her heart which she was trying desperately to crush as one crushes out the life of a small broken bird for whom death is the only mercy.

“It is Orzelon-gang for us,” said the War-wolf, “and the relief of the Dragon-lord of the North. And do not tell anyone,” he added, “but there is not a worse hour for me to lose Skander Rime, the Fighting Dog of Plenilune.”

She set her hand on his shoulder and pressed hard with her fingers until his leather harness cut her; his face gashed sideways with a smile. That was all: they turned together to pack their own things and fill their faces with the familiar dust of the open road and the ominous glare of summer thunder on the horizon which was the colour of hard crimson, the colour of the hour.

Out from under her foreboding rose the latent curiosity, born in her months ago, to see Orzelon-gang’s mighty palace. The storm did not break. It hung in a heavy tabby-skin of purple and gold and scarlet overhead, racing across the sky with gale winds but never dispersed, and under its rich gloom, having crossed nearly every Honour in Plenilune, Margaret saw Mark Roy’s palace.

It was a city in itself, settled in a little lift of a valley at the bend of a wide, navigable river. With the angry golden sunset-sky behind it, it was a dream-silhouette of black spires and shadowed towers, gilt-edged banners and sable walls: a piece of imagery that had got lost and wandered from the old medieval poetry Margaret had once known on the other side of many bright, black turnings in life. For a moment, on the lift of the track where there were no trees and only wind and the sudden, stinging glory of the landscape, she caught Plenilune off guard—or did it catch her?—and she saw the life that beat beneath all small, mundane things sketched for that instant in the indomitable blackness of Orzelon-gang’s walls—awful, half-checked, unreckoned, unreal.

“
He
stands directly in our way.”

Aikin’s bitter voice broke through her swimming agony. She tore her gaze from the city and saw the haze of many cooking-fires lying over the valley; between them and the stronghold, all across the way, were Rupert’s forces. On the riverbank she could just make out the glint of the Standards all in array: the tent nearest them would be Rupert’s.

“He has been busy,” she said coldly, “in the time that Skander has been mending.”

“A week and a half, little more,” said Dammerung. “In war, time is of the very essence of victory.”

Aikin Ironside’s face was hammered out of bronze in the late light. “Do we go down now, sir?”

“At once. Margaret, keep by me—you have your steel? That is good—”

He spoke something more to Aikin and the others behind him; with a great show of heels and sun-shot spear-points, flowing crests and rush of muscle they dispersed along the line. But Margaret did not notice them. She felt them move as she felt Mausoleum shift and clench beneath her, but she did not see them. She was listening in shame to the singing in her ears and wishing she felt angry at Rupert and not so white and cold. Dammerung caught her eye.

“Me?” she asked, for that was all she needed to ask.

He smiled sympathetically. “There is not a safer place in Plenilune. I daren’t leave you behind. And look—Grane and Black Malkin go out in battle-array. Come along, renegade heart. Fly under my shadow and you’ll do fine today.

“Huw,” he added to the man on his left, “give me a loud halloo on the horn to wake them.”

The moon-curve of the horn went up; the man drew in a powerful breath. In that thick twilight Margaret could almost see the sound swelling, an enormous golden belling, brazen, turning scarlet; the ripples of it went out and came back to them over the land.

A momentary silence. Then, from the lower lands, another sound went up in answer: a yelping in defiance, once, twice. The challenge had been accepted.

Dammerung snapped his fingers. The horn was dropped and the swords sang out. Margaret felt clammy inside her own leather harness, but she gamely rolled back the folds of her teal-stained cloak and laid her own sword bare in her hand. It was not much more than a short sword, and not very effective for cavalry work, but it would be heavy by the time she was done wielding it and it would be enough, she hoped, to poke a hole in the life of anyone who came near her.

The War-wolf, barefoot, bareheaded, put his gauntleted hands over his mouth and screamed like a falcon in the dive so that even Margaret felt the blood rush into her face and the hair on her neck stand on end…

…Dammerung struck her cheek with the flat of his hand, jolting her upright. His eyes were dancing in a bloodied face. “Are you still with me?”

She caught the words by watching his lips. Beside them a horse was going down in a welter of blood and muck, screaming like a child. She staggered forward and yanked her messy blade out of a dead soldier’s body where she had put it a minute, two minutes before.

Three war-lords, two of whom she vaguely recognized—the rank of the last she knew only from the sight of his spurs—broke at them from the rest of the press. Her shoulder collided with Dammerung’s. Side by side, blades pulled back at full, they careened recklessly into the steel embrace waiting for them. Margaret felt the shock and bone-tingle as her sword sheared along metal. The war-lord’s sword sketched a martyr’s ring above her, bisected briefly, in a streak of black blood, by the flying head of the next war-lord as Dammerung cut it cleanly from the neck. With a wrenching twist she got her sword free of the other’s hilt and ran it up into the craggy, concentrated face. Something bit her in the shoulder—not bad, not enough to sway her, but enough to make her curious—but at that moment her foot was slipping on a patch of blood, and she had to fling herself mightily forward into the plunge and she bore the body over without any grace, her sword pulling out of her hands as it fell.

A hand—Dammerung’s hand—collared her and flung her to the ground nearly up to her elbows in the muck.
Not a safer place in Plenilune?
she thought with irony. With one mucky hand she pushed back her hair and looked up through a haze of glorying sunset as Dammerung and Aikin—where had he come from?—cleared a space around them. They were nearly under the doors of the palace. Looking over her shoulder, Margaret could see them rising above her, doors fist to fist, the squared shoulders of the rampart towers set firmly against the besieging army.