Dragonsbane
Barbara Hambly
A rich and breath-taking fantasy classic full of whirlwind adventure, magic and dragons – Dragonsbane is the first book in Barbara Hambly’s landmark epic quartet, The Winterlands. When the Black Dragon seizes the capital of Bel, the young noble, Gareth, must journey into the decaying Northlands to find John Aversin, Dragonsbane – the only living man ever to slay a dragon. Upon arrival, Gareth also meets Jenny Waynest the half-taught sorceress and mother of Aversin's sons. A bargain is struck: witch and dragonkiller agree to rid the city of its monster in return for the king’s aid in their wintry home which is beset by bandits. But when they reach court, nothing is as they expected. For Gareth is no mere noble, and the king is in the thrall of a deeply evil power that seeks total control over the land. The kingdom crumbles. Perhaps the dragon that Jenny and John have been brought to slay is the least of their enemies…A rich and breath-taking fantasy classic full of whirlwind adventure, magic and dragons – Dragonsbane is the first book in Barbara Hambly’s landmark epic quartet, The Winterlands.
DRAGONSBANE
BOOK ONE OF THE WINTERLANDS QUARTET
Barbara Hambly
Copyright (#udea137e0-1f14-5297-a8f6-9bbca04d4d54)
HarperVoyager
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published by Del Rey 1985
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1988
Copyright © Barbara Hambly 1985
Map © Shelly Shapiro
Cover illustration © Nakonechnyi Jaroslav
Cover design by Andrew Davis © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019
Barbara Hambly asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008374181
Ebook Edition © October 2019 ISBN: 9780008374198
Version: 2019-10-14
Dedication (#udea137e0-1f14-5297-a8f6-9bbca04d4d54)
For Allan
Contents
Cover (#u81b9c923-e79c-5de8-8d32-a731530ac773)
Title Page (#u3a3584a5-318d-547c-bb9e-28d4604f9b58)
Copyright
Dedication
Maps
Chapter One (#u5487bcda-ed38-5cea-9279-95d37c4f71f0)
Chapter Two (#u9da9de72-3628-5ce7-b889-c8c0d4c7e15b)
Chapter Three (#u51eede61-ae2b-5951-8a40-d3a00ea45650)
Chapter Four (#ubad7c855-4347-521c-8fdf-6181cb8a70fb)
Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author
Also by Barbara Hambly
About the Publisher
Maps (#udea137e0-1f14-5297-a8f6-9bbca04d4d54)
ONE (#ulink_184edb00-224f-5263-9be7-713f434e39c9)
BANDITS OFTEN LAY in wait in the ruins of the old town at the fourways—Jenny Waynest thought there were three of them this morning.
She was not sure any more whether it was magic which told her this, or simply the woodcraftiness and instinct for the presence of danger that anyone developed who had survived to adulthood in the Winterlands. But as she drew rein short of the first broken walls, where she knew she would still be concealed by the combination of autumn fog and early morning gloom beneath the thicker trees of the forest, she noted automatically that the horse droppings in the sunken clay of the roadbed were fresh, untouched by the frost that edged the leaves around them. She noted, too, the silence in the ruins ahead; no coney’s foot rustled the yellow spill of broomsedge cloaking the hill slope where the old church had been, the church sacred to the Twelve Gods beloved of the old Kings. She thought she smelled the smoke of a concealed fire near the remains of what had been a crossroads inn, but honest men would have gone there straight and left a track in the nets of dew that covered the weeds all around. Jenny’s white mare Moon Horse pricked her long ears at the scent of other beasts, and Jenny wind-whispered to her for silence, smoothing the raggedy mane against the long neck. But she had been looking for all those signs before she saw them.
She settled into stillness in the protective cloak of fog and shadow, like a partridge blending with the brown of the woods. She was a little like a partridge herself, dark and small and nearly invisible in the dull, random plaids of the northlands; a thin, compactly built woman, tough as the roots of moorland heather. After a moment of silence, she wove her magic into a rope of mist and cast it along the road toward the nameless ruins of the town.
It was something she had done even as a child, before the old wander-mage Caerdinn had taught her the ways of power. All her thirty-seven years, she had lived in the Winterlands—she knew the smells of danger. The late-lingering birds of autumn, thrushes and blackbirds, should have been waking in the twisted brown mats of ivy that half-hid the old inn’s walls—they were silent. After a moment, she caught the scent of horses, and the ranker, dirtier stench of men.
One bandit would be in the stumpy ruin of the old tower that commanded the south and eastward roads, part of the defenses of the ruined town left from when the prosperity of the King’s law had given it anything to defend. They always hid there. A second, she guessed, was behind the walls of the old inn. After a moment she sensed the third, watching the crossroads from a yellow thicket of seedy tamarack. Her magic brought the stink of their souls to her, old greeds and the carrion-bone memories of some cherished rape or murder that had given a momentary glow of power to lives largely divided between the giving and receiving of physical pain. Having lived all her life in the Winterlands, she knew that these men could scarcely help being what they were; she had to put aside both her hatred of them, and her pity for them, before she could braid the spells that she laid upon their minds.
Her concentration deepened further. She stirred judiciously at that compost of memories, whispering to their blunted minds of the bored sleepiness of men who have watched too long. Unless every illusion and Limitation was wrought correctly, they would see her when she moved. Then she loosened her halberd in its holster upon her saddle-tree, settled her sheepskin jacket a little more closely about her shoulders and, with scarcely breath or movement, urged Moon Horse forward toward the ruins.
The man in the tower she never saw at all, from first to last. Through the browning red leaves of a screen of hawthorn, she glimpsed two horses tethered behind a ruined wall near the inn, their breath making plumes of white in the dawn cold; a moment later she saw the bandit crouching behind the crumbling wall, a husky man in greasy old leathers. He had been watching the road, but started suddenly and cursed; looking down, he began scratching his crotch with vigor and annoyance but no particular surprise. He did not see Jenny as she ghosted past. The third bandit, sitting his rawboned black horse between a broken corner of a wall and a spinney of raggedy birches, simply stared out ahead of him, lost in the daydreams she had sent.
She was directly in front of him when a boy’s voice shouted from down the southward road, “LOOK OUT!”
Jenny whipped her halberd clear of its rest as the bandit woke with a start. He saw her and roared a curse. Peripherally Jenny was aware of hooves pounding up the road toward her; the other traveler, she thought with grim annoyance, whose well-meant warning had snapped the man from his trance. As the bandit bore down upon her, she got a glimpse of a young man riding out of the mist full-pelt, clearly intent upon rescue.
The bandit was armed with a short sword, but swung at her with the flat of it, intending to unhorse her without damaging her too badly to rape later. She feinted with the halberd to bring his weapon up, then dipped the long blade on the pole’s end down under his guard. Her legs clinched to Moon Horse’s sides to take the shock as the weapon knifed through the man’s belly. The leather was tough, but there was no metal underneath. She ripped the blade clear as the man doubled up around it, screaming and clawing; both horses danced and veered with the smell of the hot, spraying blood. Before the man hit the muddy bed of the road, Jenny had wheeled her horse and was riding to the aid of her prospective knight-errant, who was engaged in a sloppy, desperate battle with the bandit who had been concealed behind the ruined outer wall.
Her rescuer was hampered by his long cloak of ruby red velvet, which had got entangled with the basketwork hilt of his jeweled longsword. His horse was evidently better trained and more used to battle than he was: the maneuverings of the big liver-bay gelding were the only reason the boy hadn’t been killed outright. The bandit, who had gotten himself mounted at the boy’s first cry of warning, had driven them back into the hazel thickets that grew along the tumbled stones of the inn wall, and, as Jenny kicked Moon Horse into the fray, the boy’s trailing cloak hung itself up on the low branches and jerked its wearer ignominiously out of the saddle with the horse’s next swerve.
Using her right hand as the fulcrum of a swing, Jenny swept the halberd’s blade at the bandit’s sword arm. The man veered his horse to face her; she got a glimpse of piggy, close-set eyes under the rim of a dirty iron cap. Behind her she could hear her previous assailant still screaming. Evidently her current opponent could as well, for he ducked the first slash and swiped at Moon Horse’s face to cause the mare to shy, then spurred past Jenny and away up the road, willing neither to face a weapon that so outreached his own, nor to stop for his comrade who had done so.
There was a brief crashing in the thickets of briar as the man who had been concealed in the tower fled into the raw mists, then silence, save for the dying bandit’s hoarse, bubbling sobs.
Jenny dropped lightly from Moon Horse’s back. Her young rescuer was still thrashing in the bushes like a stoat in a sack, half-strangled on his bejeweled cloak strap. She used the hook on the back of the halberd’s blade to twist the long court-sword from his hand, then stepped in to pull the muffling folds of velvet aside. He struck at her with his hands, like a man swatting at wasps. Then he seemed to see her for the first time and stopped, staring up at her with wide, myopic gray eyes.
After a long moment of surprised stillness, he cleared his throat and unfastened the chain of gold and rubies that held the cloak under his chin. “Er—thank you, my lady,” he gasped in a slightly winded voice, and got to his feet. Though Jenny was used to people being taller than she, this young man was even more so than most. “I—uh—” His skin was as fine-textured and fair as his hair, which was already, despite his youth, beginning to thin away toward early baldness. He couldn’t have been more than eighteen, with a natural awkwardness increased tenfold by the difficult task of thanking the intended object of a gallant defense for saving his life.
“My profoundest gratitude,” he said, and performed a supremely graceful Dying Swan, the like of which had not been seen in the Winterlands since the nobles of the Kings had departed in the wake of the retreating royal armies. “I am Gareth of Magloshaldon, a traveler upon errantry in these lands, and I wish to extend my humblest expressions of …”
Jenny shook her head and stilled him with an upraised hand. “Wait here,” she said, and turned away.
Puzzled, the boy followed her.
The first bandit who had attacked her still lay in the clay muck of the roadbed. The soaking blood had turned it into a mess of heel gouges, strewn with severed entrails; the stink was appalling. The man was still groaning weakly. Against the matte pallor of the foggy morning, the scarlet of the blood stood out shockingly bright.
Jenny sighed, feeling suddenly cold and weary and unclean, looking upon what she had done and knowing what it was up to her yet to do. She knelt beside the dying man, drawing the stillness of her magic around her again. She was aware of Gareth’s approach, his boots threshing through the dew-soaked bindweed in a hurried rhythm that broke when he tripped on his sword. She felt a tired stirring of anger at him for having made this necessary. Had he not cried out, both she and this poor, vicious, dying brute would each have gone their ways …
… And he would doubtless have killed Gareth after she passed. And other travelers besides.
She had long since given up trying to unpick wrong from right, present should from future if. If there was a pattern to all things, she had given up thinking that it was simple enough to lie within her comprehension. Still, her soul felt filthy within her as she put her hands to the dying man’s clammy, greasy temples, tracing the proper runes while she whispered the death-spells. She felt the life go out of him and tasted the bile of self-loathing in her mouth.
Behind her, Gareth whispered, “You—he’s—he’s dead.”
She got to her feet, shaking the bloody dirt from her skirts. “I could not leave him for the weasels and foxes,” she replied, starting to walk away. She could hear the small carrion-beasts already, gathering at the top of the bank above the misty slot of the road, drawn to the blood-smell and waiting impatiently for the killer to abandon her prey. Her voice was brusque—she had always hated the death-spells. Having grown up in a land without law, she had killed her first man when she was fourteen, and six since, not counting the dying she had helped from life as the only midwife and healer from the Gray Mountains to the sea. It never got easier.
She wanted to be gone from the place, but the boy Gareth put a staying hand on her arm, looking from her to the corpse in a kind of nauseated fascination. He had never seen death, she thought. At least, not in its raw form. The pea green velvet of his travel-stained doublet, the gold stampwork of his boots, the tucked embroidery of his ruffled lawn shirt, and the elaborate, feathered crestings of his green-tipped hair all proclaimed him for a courtier. All things, even death, were doubtless done with a certain amount of style where he came from.
He gulped. “You’re—you’re a witch!”
One corner of her mouth moved slightly; she said, “So I am.”
He stepped back from her in fear, then staggered, clutching at a nearby sapling for support. She saw then that among the decorative slashings of his doublet sleeve was an uglier opening, the shirt visible through it dark and wet. “I’ll be fine,” he protested faintly, as she moved to support him. “I just need …” He made a fumbling effort to shake free of her hand and walk, his myopic gray eyes peering at the ankle-deep drifts of moldering leaves that lined the road.
“What you need is to sit down.” She led him away to a broken boundary stone and forced him to do so and unbuttoned the diamond studs that held the sleeve to the body of the doublet. The wound did not look deep, but it was bleeding badly. She pulled loose the leather thongs that bound the wood-black knots of her hair and used them as a tourniquet above the wound. He winced and gasped and tried to loosen it as she tore a strip from the hem of her shift for a bandage, so that she slapped at his fingers like a child’s. Then, a moment later, he tried to get up again. “I have to find …”
“I’ll find them,” Jenny said firmly, knowing what it was that he sought. She finished binding his wound and walked back to the tangle of hazel bushes where Gareth and the bandit had struggled. The frosty daylight glinted on a sharp reflection among the leaves. The spectacles she found there were bent and twisted out of shape, the bottom of one round lens decorated by a star-fracture. Flicking the dirt and wetness from them, she carried them back.
“Now,” she said, as Gareth fumbled them on with hands shaking from weakness and shock. “You need that arm looked to. I can take you …”
“My lady, I’ve no time.” He looked up at her, squinting a little against the increasing brightness of the sky behind her head. “I’m on a quest, a quest of terrible importance.”
“Important enough to risk losing your arm if the wound turns rotten?”
As if such things could not happen to him, did she only have the wits to realize it, he went on earnestly, “I’ll be all right, I tell you. I am seeking Lord Aversin the Dragonsbane, Thane of Alyn Hold and Lord of Wyr, the greatest knight ever to have ridden the Winterlands. Have you heard of him hereabouts? Tall as an angel, handsome as song … His fame has spread through the southlands the way the floodwaters spread in the spring, the noblest of chevaliers … I must find Alyn Hold, before it is too late.”
Jenny sighed, exasperated. “So you must,” she said. “It is to Alyn Hold that I am going to take you.”
The squinting eyes got round as the boy’s mouth fell open. “To—to Alyn Hold? Really? It’s near here?”
“It’s the nearest place where we can get your arm seen to,” she said. “Can you ride?”
Had he been dying, she thought, amused, he would still have sprung to his feet as he did. “Yes, of course; I—do you know Lord Aversin, then?”
Jenny was silent for a moment. Then, softly, she said, “Yes. Yes, I know him.”
She whistled up the horses, the tall white Moon Horse and the big liver-bay gelding, whose name, Gareth said, was Battlehammer. In spite of his exhaustion and the pain of his roughly bound wound, Gareth made a move to offer her totally unnecessary assistance in mounting. As they reined up over the ragged stone slopes to avoid the corpse in its rank-smelling puddles of mud, Gareth asked, “If—if you’re a witch, my lady, why couldn’t you have fought them with magic instead of with a weapon? Thrown fire at them, or turned them into frogs, or struck them blind …”
She had struck them blind, in a sense, she thought wryly—at least until he shouted.
But she only said, “Because I cannot.”
“For reasons of honor?” he asked dubiously. “Because there are some situations in which honor cannot apply …”
“No.” She glanced sidelong at him through the astonishing curtains of her loosened hair. “It is just that my magic is not that strong.”
And she nudged her horse into a quicker walk, passing into the vaporous shadows of the forest’s bare, over-hanging boughs.
Even after all these years of knowing it, she found the admission still stuck in her throat. She had come to terms with her lack of beauty, but never with her lack of genius in the single thing she had ever wanted. The most she had ever been able to do was to pretend that she accepted it, as she pretended now.
Ground fog curled around the feet of the horses; through the clammy vapors, tree roots thrust from the roadbanks like the arms of half-buried corpses. The air here felt dense and smelled of mold, and now and then, from the woods above them, came the furtive crackle of dead leaves, as if the trees plotted among themselves in the fog.
“Did you—did you see him slay the dragon?” Gareth asked, after they had ridden in silence for some minutes. “Would you tell me about it? Aversin is the only living Dragonsbane—the only man who has slain a dragon. There are ballads about him everywhere, about his courage and his noble deeds … That’s my hobby. Ballads, I mean, the ballads of Dragonsbanes, like Selkythar the White back in the reign of Ennyta the Good and Antara Warlady and her brother, during the Kinwars. They say her brother slew …” By the way he caught himself up Jenny guessed he could have gone on about the great Dragonsbanes of the past for hours, only someone had told him not to bore people with the subject. “I’ve always wanted to see such a thing—a true Dragonsbane—a glorious combat. His renown must cover him like a golden mantle.”
And, rather to her surprise, he broke into a light, wavery tenor:
Riding up the hillside gleaming,
Like flame in the golden sunlight streaming;
Sword of steel strong in hand,
Wind-swift hooves spurning land,
Tall as an angel, stallion-strong,
Stern as a god, bright as song …
In the dragon’s shadow the maidens wept,
Fair as lilies in darkness kept.
‘I know him afar, so tall is he,
His plumes as bright as the rage of the sea,’
Spake she to her sister, ‘fear no ill …’
Jenny looked away, feeling something twist inside her at the memory of the Golden Dragon of Wyr.
She remembered as if it were yesterday instead of ten years ago the high-up flash of gold in the wan northern sky, the plunge of fire and shadow, the boys and girls screaming on the dancing floor at Great Toby. They were memories she knew should have been tinted only with horror; she was aware that she should have felt only gladness at the dragon’s death. But stronger than the horror, the taste of nameless grief and desolation came back to her from those times, with the metallic stench of the dragon’s blood and the singing that seemed to shiver the searing air …
Her heart felt sick within her. Coolly, she said, “For one thing, of the two children who were taken by the dragon, John only managed to get the boy out alive. I think the girl had been killed by the fumes in the dragon’s lair. It was hard to tell from the state of the body. And if she hadn’t been dead, I still doubt they’d have been in much condition to make speeches about how John looked, even if he had come riding straight up the hill—which of course he didn’t.”
“He didn’t?” She could almost hear the shattering of some image, nursed in the boy’s mind.
“Of course not. If he had, he would have been killed immediately.”
“Then how …”
“The only way he could think of to deal with something that big and that heavily armored. He had me brew the most powerful poison that I knew of, and he dipped his harpoons in that.”
“Poison?” Such foulness clearly pierced him to the heart. “Harpoons? Not a sword at all?”
Jenny shook her head, not knowing whether to feel amusement at the boy’s disappointed expression, exasperation at the way he spoke of what had been for her and hundreds of others a time of sleepless, nightmare horror, or only a kind of elder-sisterly compassion for the naïveté that would consider taking a three-foot steel blade against twenty-five feet of spiked and flaming death. “No,” she only said, “John came at it from the overhang of the gully in which it was laired—it wasn’t a cave, by the way; there are no caves that large in these hills. He slashed its wings first, so that it couldn’t take to the air and fall on him from above. He used poisoned harpoons to slow it down, but he finished it off with an ax.”
“An ax?!” Gareth cried, utterly aghast. “That’s—that’s the most horrible thing I’ve ever heard! Where is the glory in that? Where is the honor? It’s like hamstringing your opponent in a duel! It’s cheating!”
“He wasn’t fighting a duel,” Jenny pointed out. “If a dragon gets into the air, the man fighting it is lost.”
“But it’s dishonorable!” the boy insisted passionately, as if that were some kind of clinching argument.
“It might have been, had he been fighting a man who had honorably challenged him—something John has never been known to do in his life. Even fighting bandits, it pays to strike from behind when one is outnumbered. As the only representative of the King’s law in these lands, John generally is outnumbered. A dragon is upward of twenty feet long and can kill a man with a single blow of its tail. You said yourself,” she added with a smile, “that there are situations in which honor does not apply.”
“But that’s different!” the boy said miserably and lapsed into disillusioned silence.
The ground beneath the horses’ feet was rising; the vague walls of the misty tunnel through which they rode were ending. Beyond, the silvery shapes of the round-backed hills could be dimly seen. As they came clear of the trees, the winds fell upon them, clearing the mists and nipping their clothes and faces like ill-trained dogs. Shaking the blowing handfuls of her hair out of her eyes, Jenny got a look at Gareth’s face as he gazed about him at the moors. It wore a look of shock, disappointment, and puzzlement, as if he had never thought to find his hero in this bleak and trackless world of moss, water, and stone.
As for Jenny, this barren world stirred her strangely. The moors stretched nearly a hundred miles, north to the ice-locked shores of the ocean; she knew every break in the granite landscape, every black peat-beck and every hollow where the heather grew thick in the short highlands summers; she had traced the tracks of hare and fox and kitmouse in three decades of winter snows. Old Caerdinn, half-mad through poring over books and legends of the days of the Kings, could remember the time when the Kings had withdrawn their troops and their protection from the Winterlands to fight the wars for the lordship of the south; he had grown angry with her when she had spoken of the beauty she found in those wild, silvery fastnesses of rock and wind. But sometimes his bitterness stirred in Jenny, when she worked to save the life of an ailing village child whose illness lay beyond her small skills and there was nothing in any book she had read that might tell her how to save that life; or when the Iceriders came raiding down over the floe-ice in the brutal winters, burning the barns that cost such labor to raise, and slaughtering the cattle that could only be bred up from such meager stock. However, her own lack of power had taught her a curious appreciation for small joys and hard beauties and for the simple, changeless patterns of life and death. It was nothing she could have explained; not to Caerdinn, nor to this boy, nor to anyone else.
At length she said softly, “John would never have gone after the dragon, Gareth, had he not been forced to it. But as Thane of Alyn Hold, as Lord of Wyr, he is the only man in the Winterlands trained to and living by the arts of war. It is for this that he is the lord. He fought the dragon as he would have fought a wolf, as a vermin which was harming his people. He had no choice.”
“But a dragon isn’t vermin!” Gareth protested. “It is the most honorable and greatest of challenges to the manhood of a true knight. You must be wrong! He couldn’t have fought it simply—simply out of duty. He can’t have!”
There was a desperation to believe in his voice that made Jenny glance over at him curiously. “No,” she agreed. “A dragon isn’t vermin. And this one was truly beautiful.” Her voice softened at the recollection, even through the horror-haze of death and fear, of its angular, alien splendor. “Not golden, as your song calls it, but a sort of amber, grading to brownish smoke along its back and ivory upon its belly. The patterns of the scales on its sides were like the beadwork on a pair of slippers, like woven irises, all shades of purple and blue. Its head was like a flower, too; its eyes and maw were surrounded with scales like colored ribbons, with purple horns and tufts of white and black fur, and with antennae like a crayfish’s tipped with bobs of gems. It was butcher’s work to slay it.”
They rounded the shoulder of a tor. Below them, like a break in the cold granite landscape, spread a broken line of brown fields where the mists lay like stringers of dirty wool among the stubble of harvest. A little further along the track lay a hamlet, disordered and trashy under a bluish smear of woodsmoke, and the stench of the place rose on the whipping ice-winds: the lye-sting of soap being boiled; an almost-visible murk of human and animal waste; the rotted, nauseating sweetness of brewing beer. The barking of dogs rose to them like churchbells in the air. In the midst of it all a stumpy tower stood, the tumble-down remnant of some larger fortification.
“No,” said Jenny softly, “the dragon was a beautiful creature, Gareth. But so was the girl it carried away to its lair and killed. She was fifteen—John wouldn’t let her parents see the remains.”
She touched her heels to Moon Horse’s sides and led the way down the damp clay of the track.
“Is this village where you live?” Gareth asked, as they drew near the walls.
Jenny shook her head, drawing her mind back from the bitter and confusing tangle of the memories of the slaying of the dragon. “I have my own house about six miles from here, on Frost Fell—I live there alone. My magic is not great; it needs silence and solitude for its study.” She added wryly, “Though I don’t have much of either. I am midwife and healer for all of Lord Aversin’s lands.”
“Will—will we reach his lands soon?”
His voice sounded unsteady, and Jenny, regarding him worriedly, saw how white he looked and how, in spite of the cold, sweat ran down his hollow cheeks with their faint fuzz of gold. A little surprised at his question, she said, “These are Lord Aversin’s lands.”
He raised his head to look at her, shocked. “These?” He stared around him at the muddy fields, the peasants shouting to one another as they shocked up the last of the corn, the ice-scummed waters of the moat that girdled the rubble fill and fieldstone patches of the shabby wall. “Then—that is one of Lord Aversin’s villages?”
“That,” Jenny said matter-of-factly as the hooves of their horses rumbled hollowly on the wood of the draw-bridge, “is Alyn Hold.”
The town huddled within the curtain wall—a wall built by the present lord’s grandfather, old James Standfast, as a temporary measure and now hoary with fifty winters—was squalid beyond description. Through the archway beneath the squat gatehouse untidy houses were visible, clustered around the wall of the Hold itself as if the larger building had seeded them, low-built of stone and rubble upon the foundations of older walls, thatched with river reed-straw and grubby with age. From the window-turret of the gatehouse old Peg the gatekeeper stuck her head out, her long, gray-streaked brown braids hanging down like bights of half-unraveled rope, and she called out to Jenny, “You’re in luck,” in the glottal lilt of the north-country speech. “Me lord got in last night from ridin’ the bounds. He’ll be about.”
“She wasn’t—was she talking about Lord Aversin?” Gareth whispered, scandalized.
Jenny’s crescent-shaped eyebrows quirked upward. “He’s the only lord we have.”
“Oh.” He blinked, making another mental readjustment. “‘Riding the bounds’?”
“The bounds of his lands. He patrols them, most days of the month, he and militia volunteers.” Seeing Gareth’s face fall, she added gently, “That is what it is to be a lord.”
“It isn’t, you know,” Gareth said. “It is chivalry, and honor, and …” But she had already ridden past him, out of the slaty darkness of the gatehouse passage and into the heatless sunlight of the square.
With all its noise and gossipy squalor, Jenny had always liked the village of Alyn. It had been the home of her childhood; the stone cottage in which she had been born and in which her sister and brother-in-law still lived—though her sister’s husband discouraged mention of the relationship—still stood down the lane, against the curtain wall. They might regard her with awe, these hard-working people with their small lives circumscribed by the work of the seasons, but she knew their lives only a little less intimately than she knew her own. There was not a house in the village where she had not delivered a child, or tended the sick, or fought death in one of the myriad forms that it took in the Winterlands; she was familiar with them, and with the long-spun, intricate patterns of their griefs and joys. As the horses sloshed through mud and standing water to the center of the square, she saw Gareth looking about him with carefully concealed dismay at the pigs and chickens that shared the fetid lanes so amicably with flocks of shrieking children. A gust of wind blew the smoke of the forge over them, and with it a faint wash of heat and a snatch of Muffle the smith’s bawdy song; in one lane laundry flapped, and in another, Deshy Werville, whose baby Jenny had delivered three months ago, was milking one of her beloved cows half-in, half-out of her cottage door. Jenny saw how Gareth’s disapproving gaze lingered upon the shabby Temple, with its lumpish, crudely carved images of the Twelve Gods, barely distinguishable from one another in the gloom, and then went to the circled cross of Earth and Sky that was wrought into the stones of so many village chimneys. His back got a little stiffer at this evidence of paganism, and his upper lip appeared to lengthen as he regarded the pigpen built out from the Temple’s side and the pair of yokels in scruffy leather and plaids who leaned against the railings, gossiping.
“Course, pigs see the weather,” one of them was saying, reaching with a stick across the low palings to scratch the back of the enormous black sow who reposed within. “That’s in Clivy’s On Farming, but I’ve seen them do it. And they’re gie clever, cleverer than dogs. My aunt Mary—you remember Aunt Mary?—used to train them as piglets and she had one, a white one, who’d fetch her shoes for her.”
“Aye?” the second yokel said, scratching his head as Jenny drew rein near them, with Gareth fidgeting impatiently at her side.
“Aye.” The taller man made kissing sounds to the sow, who raised her head in response with a slurping grunt of deepest affection. “It says in Polyborus’ Analects that the Old Cults used to worship the pig, and not as a devil, either, as Father Hiero would have it, but as the Moon Goddess.” He pushed his steel-rimmed spectacles a little higher on the bridge of his long nose, a curiously professorial gesture for a man ankle-deep in pig-muck.
“That a fact, now?” the second yokel said with interest. “Now you come to speak on it, this old girl—when she were young and flighty, that is—had it figured to a T how to get the pen gate open, and would be after … Oh!” He bowed hastily, seeing Jenny and the fuming Gareth sitting their horses quietly.
The taller of the two men turned. As the brown eyes behind the thick spectacle lenses met Jenny’s, they lost their habitual guarded expression and melted abruptly into an impish brightness. Middle-sized, unprepossessing, shaggy and unshaven in his scruffy dark leather clothing, his old wolfskin doublet patched with bits of metal and scraps of chain mail to protect his joints—after ten years, she wondered, what was there about him that still filled her with such absurd joy?
“Jen.” He smiled and held out his hands to her.
Taking them, she slid from the white mare’s saddle into his arms, while Gareth looked on in disapproving impatience to get on with his quest. “John,” she said, and turned back to the boy. “Gareth of Magloshaldon—this is Lord John Aversin, the Dragonsbane of Alyn Hold.”
For one instant, Gareth was shocked absolutely speechless. He sat for a moment, staring, stunned as if struck over the head; then he dismounted so hastily that he clutched his hurt arm with a gasp. It was as if, Jenny thought, in all his ballad-fed fantasies of meeting the Dragonsbane, it had never occurred to him that his hero would be afoot, not to say ankle-deep in mud beside the local pigsty. In his face was plain evidence that, though he himself was over six-foot-three, and must be taller than anyone else he knew, he had never connected this with the fact that, unless his hero was a giant, he would perforce be shorter also. Neither, she supposed, had any ballad mentioned spectacles.
Still Gareth had not spoken. Aversin, interpreting his silence and the look on his face with his usual fiendish accuracy, said, “I’d show you my dragon-slaying scars to prove it, but they’re placed where I can’t exhibit ’em in public.”
It said worlds for Gareth’s courtly breeding—and, Jenny supposed, the peculiar stoicism of courtiers—that, even laboring under the shock of his life and the pain of a wounded arm, he swept into a very creditable salaam of greeting. When he straightened up again, he adjusted the set of his cloak with a kind of sorry hauteur, pushed his bent spectacles a little more firmly up onto the bridge of his nose, and said in a voice that was shaky but oddly determined, “My lord Dragonsbane, I have ridden here on errantry from the south, with a message for you from the King, Uriens of Belmarie.” He seemed to gather strength from these words, settling into the heraldic sonority of his ballad-snatch of golden swords and bright plumes in spite of the smell of the pigsty and the thin, cold rain that had begun to patter down.
“My lord Aversin, I have been sent to bring you south. A dragon has come and laid waste the city of the gnomes in the Deep of Ylferdun; it lairs there now, fifteen miles from the King’s city of Bel. The King begs that you come to slay it ere the whole countryside is destroyed.”
The boy drew himself up, having delivered himself of his quest, a look of noble and martyred serenity on his face, very like, Jenny thought, someone out of a ballad himself. Then, like all good messengers in ballads, he collapsed and slid to the soupy mud and cowpies in a dead faint.
Scale and Structure of a Dragon
(From John Aversin’s notes)
1 Mane structure and spikes at joints are thicker than shown. A bone “shield” extends from the back of the skull beneath the mane to protect the nape of the neck.
2 Golden Dragon of Wyr measured approx. 27’ of which 12’ was tail; there are rumors of dragons longer than 50’.
TWO (#ulink_8ea86a8a-dc1a-5fab-a933-a15c0d6a2483)
RAIN DRUMMED STEADILY, drearily, on the walls of Alyn Hold’s broken-down tower. The Hold’s single guest room was never very bright; and, though it was only mid-afternoon, Jenny had summoned a dim ball of bluish witchfire to illuminate the table on which she had spread the contents of her medicine satchel; the rest of the little cubbyhole was curtained in shadow.
In the bed, Gareth dozed restlessly. The air was sweet with the ghosts of the long-dried fragrances of crushed herbs; the witchlight threw fine, close-grained shadows around the desiccated mummies of root and pod where they lay in the circles Jenny had traced. Slowly, rune by rune, she worked the healing spells over them, each with its own Limitation to prevent a too-quick healing that might harm the body as a whole, her fingers patiently tracing the signs, her mind calling down the qualities of the universe particular to each, like separate threads of unheard music. It was said that the great mages could see the power of the runes they wrought glowing like cold fire in the air above the healing powders and sense the touch of it like plasmic light drawn from the fingertips. After long years of solitary meditation, Jenny had come to accept that, for her, magic was a depth and a stillness rather than the moving brilliance that it was for the great. It was something she would never quite become reconciled to, but at least it kept her from the resentment that would block what powers she did have. Within her narrow bounds, she knew she worked well.
The key to magic is magic, Caerdinn had said. To be a mage, you must be a mage. There is no time for anything else, if you will come to the fullness of your power.
So she had remained in the stone house on Frost Fell after Caerdinn had died, studying his books and measuring the stars, meditating in the crumbling circle of ancient standing stones that stood on the hillcrest above. Through the slow years her powers had grown with meditation and study, though never to what his had been. It was a life that had contented her. She had looked no further than the patient striving to increase her powers, while she healed others where she could and observed the turning of the seasons.
Then John had come.
The spells circled to their conclusion. For a time silence hung on the air, as if every hearth brick and rafter shadow, the fragrance of the applewood fire and the guttural trickle of the rain, had been preserved in amber for a thousand years. Jenny swept the spelled powders together into a bowl and raised her eyes. Gareth was watching her fearfully from the darkness of the curtained bed.
She got to her feet. As she moved toward him, he recoiled, his white face drawn with accusation and loathing. “You are his mistress!”
Jenny stopped, hearing the hatred in that weak voice. She said, “Yes. But it has nothing to do with you.”
He turned his face away, fretful and still half-dreaming. “You are just like her,” he muttered faintly. “Just like Zyerne …”
She stepped forward again, not certain she had heard clearly. “Who?”
“You’ve snared him with your spells—brought him down into the mud,” the boy whispered and broke off with a feverish sob. Disregarding his repulsion, she came worriedly to his side, feeling his face and hands; after a moment, he ceased his feeble resistance, already sinking back to sleep. His flesh felt neither hot nor overly chilled; his pulse was steady and strong. But still he tossed and murmured, “Never—I never will. Spells—you have laid spells on him—made him love you with your witcheries …” His eyelids slipped closed.
Jenny sighed and straightened up, looking down into the flushed, troubled face. “If only I had laid spells on him,” she murmured. “Then I could release us both—had I the courage.”
She dusted her hands on her skirt and descended the narrow darkness of the turret stair.
She found John in his study—what would have been a fair-sized room, had it not been jammed to overflowing with books. For the most part, these were ancient volumes, left at the Hold by the departing armies or scavenged from the cellars of the burned-out garrison towns of the south; rat-chewed, black with mildew, unreadable with waterstains, they crammed every shelf of the labyrinth of planks that filled two walls and they spilled off to litter the long oak table and heaped the floor in the corners. Sheets of notes were interleaved among their pages and between their covers, copied out by John in the winter evenings. Among and between them were jumbled at random the tools of a scribe—prickers and quills, knives and inkpots, pumice stones—and stranger things besides: metal tubes and tongs, plumb-bobs and levels, burning-glasses and pendulums, magnets, the blown shells of eggs, chips of rock, dried flowers, and a half-disassembled clock. A vast spiderweb of hoists and pulleys occupied the rafters in one corner, and battalions of guttered and decaying candles angled along the edges of every shelf and sill. The room was a magpie-nest of picked-at knowledge, the lair of a tinkerer to whom the universe was one vast toyshop of intriguing side issues. Above the hearth, like a giant iron pinecone, hung the tail-knob of the dragon of Wyr—fifteen inches long and nine through, covered with stumpy, broken spikes.
John himself stood beside the window, gazing through the thick glass of its much-mended casement out over the barren lands to the north, where they merged with the bruised and tumbled sky. His hand was pressed to his side, where the rain throbbed in the ribs that the tail-knob had cracked.
Though the soft buckskin of her boots made no sound on the rutted stone of the floor, he looked up as she came in. His eyes smiled greeting into hers, but she only leaned her shoulder against the stone of the doorpost and asked, “Well?”
He glanced ceilingward where Gareth would be lying. “What, our little hero and his dragon?” A smile flicked the corners of his thin, sensitive mouth, then vanished like the swift sunlight of a cloudy day. “I’ve slain one dragon, Jen, and it bloody near finished me. Tempting as the promise is of getting more fine ballads written of my deeds, I think I’ll pass this chance.”
Relief and the sudden recollection of Gareth’s ballad made Jenny giggle as she came into the room.
The whitish light of the windows caught in every crease of John’s leather sleeves as he stepped forward to meet her and bent to kiss her lips.
“Our hero never rode all the way north by himself, surely?”
Jenny shook her head. “He told me he took a ship from the south to Eldsbouch and rode east from there.”
“He’s gie lucky he made it that far,” John remarked, and kissed her again, his hands warm against her sides. “The pigs have been restless all day, carrying bits of straw about in their mouths—I turned back yesterday even from riding the bounds because of the way the crows were acting out on the Whin Hills. It’s two weeks early for them, but it’s in my mind this’ll be the first of the winter storms. The rocks at Eldsbouch are shipeaters. You know, Dotys says in Volume Three of his Histories—or is it in that part of Volume Five we found at Ember?—or is it in Clivy?—that there used to be a mole or breakwater across the harbor there, back in the days of the Kings. It was one of the Wonders of the World, Dotys—or Clivy—says, but nowhere can I find any mention of the engineering of it. One of these days I’m minded to take a boat out there and see what I can find underwater at the harbor mouth …”
Jenny shuddered, knowing John to be perfectly capable of undertaking such an investigation. She had still not forgotten the stone house he had blown up, after reading in some moldering account about the gnomes using blasting powder to tunnel in their Deeps, nor his experiments with water pipes.
Sudden commotion sounded in the dark of the turret stair, treble voices arguing, “She is, too!” and “Let go!” A muted scuffle ensued, and a moment later a red-haired, sturdy urchin of four or so exploded into the room in a swirl of grubby sheepskin and plaids, followed immediately by a slender, dark-haired boy of eight. Jenny smiled and held out her arms to them both. They flung themselves against her; small, filthy hands clutched delightedly at her hair, her skirt, and the sleeves of her shift, and she felt again the surge of ridiculous and illogical delight at being in their presence.
“And how are my little barbarians?” she asked in her coolest voice, which fooled neither of them.
“Good—we been good, Mama,” the older boy said, clinging to the faded blue cloth of her skirt. “I been good—Adric hasn’t.”
“Have, too,” retorted the younger one, whom John had lifted into his arms. “Papa had to whip Ian.”
“Did he, now?” She smiled down into her older son’s eyes, heavy-lidded and tip-tilted like John’s, but as summer blue as her own. “He doubtless deserved it.”
“With a big whip,” Adric amplified, carried away with his tale. “A hundred cuts.”
“Really?” She looked over at John with matter-of-fact inquiry in her expression. “All at one session, or did you rest in between?”
“One session,” John replied serenely. “And he never begged for mercy even once.”
“Good boy.” She ruffled Ian’s coarse black hair, and he twisted and giggled with pleasure at the solemn make-believe.
The boys had long ago accepted the fact that Jenny did not live at the Hold, as other boys’ mothers lived with their fathers; the Lord of the Hold and the Witch of Frost Fell did not have to behave like other adults. Like puppies who tolerate a kennelkeeper’s superintendence, the boys displayed a dutiful affection toward John’s stout Aunt Jane, who cared for them and, she believed, kept them out of trouble while John was away looking after the lands in his charge and Jenny lived apart in her own house on the Fell, pursuing the solitudes of her art. But it was their father they recognized as their master, and their mother as their love.
They started to tell her, in an excited and not very coherent duet, about a fox they had trapped, when a sound in the doorway made them turn. Gareth stood there, looking pale and tired, but dressed in his own clothes again, bandages making an ungainly lump under the sleeve of his spare shirt. He’d dug an unbroken pair of spectacles from his baggage as well; behind the thick lenses, his eyes were filled with sour distaste and bitter disillusion as he looked at her and her sons. It was as if the fact that John and she had become lovers—that she had borne John’s sons—had not only cheapened his erstwhile hero in his eyes, but had made her responsible for all those other disappointments that he had encountered in the Winterlands as well.
The boys sensed at once his disapprobation. Adric’s pugnacious little jaw began to come forward in a miniature version of John’s. But Ian, more sensitive, only signaled to his brother with his eyes, and the two took their silent leave. John watched them go; then his gaze returned, speculative, to Gareth. But all he said was, “So you lived, then?”
Rather shakily, Gareth replied, “Yes. Thank you—” He turned to Jenny, with a forced politeness that no amount of animosity could uproot from his courtier’s soul. “Thank you for helping me.” He took a step into the room and stopped again, staring blankly about him as he saw the place for the first time. Not something from a ballad, Jenny thought, amused in spite of herself. But then, no ballad could ever prepare anyone for John.
“Bit crowded,” John confessed. “My dad used to keep the books that had been left at the Hold in the storeroom with the corn, and the rats had accounted for most of ’em before I’d learned to read. I thought they’d be safer here.”
“Er …” Gareth said, at a loss. “I—I suppose …”
“He was a stiff-necked old villain, my dad,” John went on conversationally, coming to stand beside the hearth and extend his hands to the fire. “If it hadn’t been for old Caerdinn, who was about the Hold on and off when I was a lad, I’d never have got past the alphabet. Dad hadn’t much use for written things—I found half an act of Luciard’s Firegiver pasted over the cracks in the walls of the cupboard my granddad used to store winter clothes in. I could have gone out and thrown rocks at his grave, I was that furious, because of course there’s none of the play to be found now. God knows what they did with the rest of it—kindled the kitchen stoves, I expect. What we’ve managed to save isn’t much—Volumes Three and Four of Dotys’ Histories; most of Polyborus’ Analects and his Jurisprudence; the Elucidus Lapidarus; Clivy’s On Farming—in its entirety, for all that’s worth, though it’s pretty useless. I don’t think Clivy was much of a farmer, or even bothered to talk to farmers. He says that you can tell the coming of storms by taking measurements of the clouds and their shadows, but the grannies round the villages say you can tell just watching the bees. And when he talks about the mating habits of pigs …”
“I warn you, Gareth,” Jenny said with a smile, “that John is a walking encyclopedia of old wives’ tales, granny-rhymes, snippets of every classical writer he can lay hands upon, and trivia gleaned from the far corners of the hollow earth—encourage him at your peril. He also can’t cook.”
“I can, though,” John shot back at her with a grin.
Gareth, still gazing around him in mystification at the cluttered room, said nothing, but his narrow face was a study of mental gymnastics as he strove to adjust the ballads’ conventionalized catalog of perfections with the reality of a bespectacled amateur engineer who collected lore about pigs.
“So, then,” John went on in a friendly voice, “tell us of this dragon of yours, Gareth of Magloshaldon, and why the King sent a boy of your years to carry his message, when he’s got warriors and knights that could do the job as well.”
“Er …” Gareth looked completely taken aback for a moment—messengers in ballads never being asked for their credentials. “That is—but that’s just it. He hasn’t got warriors and knights, not that can be spared. And I came because I knew where to look for you, from the ballads.”
He fished from the pouch at his belt a gold signet ring, whose bezel flashed in a spurt of yellow hearthlight—Jenny glimpsed a crowned king upon it, seated beneath twelve stars. John looked in silence at it for a moment, then bent his head and drew the ring to his lips with archaic reverence.
Jenny watched his action in silence. The King was the King, she thought. It was nearly a hundred years since he withdrew his troops from the north, leaving that to the barbarians and the chaos of lands without law. Yet John still regarded himself as the subject of the King.
It was something she herself had never understood—either John’s loyalty to the King whose laws he still fought to uphold, or Caerdinn’s sense of bitter and personal betrayal by those same Kings. To Jenny, the King was the ruler of another land, another time—she herself was a citizen only of the Winterlands.
Bright and small, the gold oval of the ring flashed as Gareth laid it upon the table, like a witness to all that was said. “He gave that to me when he sent me to seek you,” he told them. “The King’s champions all rode out against the dragon, and none of them returned. No one in the Realm has ever slain a dragon—nor even seen one up close to know how to attack it, really. And there is nothing to tell us. I know, I’ve looked, because it was the one useful thing that I could do. I know I’m not a knight, or a champion …” His voice stammered a little on the admission, breaking the armor of his formality. “I know I’m no good at sports. But I’ve studied all the ballads and all their variants, and no ballad really tells that much about the actual how-to of killing a dragon. We need a Dragonsbane,” he concluded helplessly. “We need someone who knows what he’s doing. We need your help.”
“And we need yours.” The light timbre of Aversin’s smoky voice suddenly hardened to flint. “We’ve needed your help for a hundred years, while this part of the Realm, from the River Wildspae north, was being laid waste by bandits and Iceriders and wolves and worse things, things we haven’t the knowledge anymore to deal with: marshdevils and Whisperers and the evils that haunt the night woods, evils that steal the blood and souls of the living. Has your King thought of that? It’s a bit late in the day for him to be asking favors of us.”
The boy stared at him, stunned. “But the dragon …”
“Pox blister your dragon! Your King has a hundred knights and my people have only me.” The light slid across the lenses of his specs in a flash of gold as he leaned his broad shoulders against the blackened stones of the chimney-breast, the spikes of the dragon’s tail-knob gleaming evilly beside his head. “Gnomes never have just one entrance to their Deeps. Couldn’t your King’s knights have gotten the surviving gnomes to guide them through a secondary entrance to take the thing from behind?”
“Uh …” Visibly nonplussed by the unheroic practicality of the suggestion, Gareth floundered. “I don’t think they could have. The rear entrance of the Deep is in the fortress of Halnath. The Master of Halnath—Polycarp, the King’s nephew—rose in revolt against the King not long before the dragon’s coming. The Citadel is under siege.”
Silent in the corner of the hearth to which she had retreated, Jenny heard the sudden shift in the boy’s voice, like the sound of a weakened foundation giving under strain. Looking up, she saw his too-prominent Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed.
There was some wound there, she guessed to herself, some memory still tender to the touch.
“That’s—that’s one reason so few of the King’s champions could be spared. It isn’t only the dragon, you see.” He leaned forward pleadingly. “The whole Realm is in danger from the rebels as well as the dragon. The Deep tunnels into the face of Nast Wall, the great mountain-ridge that divides the lowlands of Belmarie from the northeastern Marches. The Citadel of Halnath stands on a cliff on the other side of the mountain from the main gates of the Deep, with the town and the University below it. The gnomes of Ylferdun were our allies against the rebels, but now most of them have gone over to the Halnath side. The whole Realm is split. You must come! As long as the dragon is in Ylferdun we can’t keep the roads from the mountains properly guarded against the rebels, or send supplies to the besiegers of the Citadel. The King’s champions went out …” He swallowed again, his voice tightening with the memory. “The men who brought back the bodies said that most of them never even got a chance to draw their swords.”
“Gah!” Aversin looked away, anger and pity twisting his sensitive mouth. “Any fool who’d take a sword after a dragon in the first place …”
“But they didn’t know! All they had to go on were the songs!”
Aversin said nothing to this; but, judging by his compressed lips and the flare of his nostrils, his thoughts were not pleasant ones. Gazing into the fire, Jenny heard his silence, and something like the chill shadow of a wind-driven cloud passed across her heart.
Half against her will, she saw images form in the molten amber of the fire’s heart. She recognized the winter-colored sky above the gully, the charred and brittle spears of poisoned grass fine as needle-scratches against it, John standing poised on the gully’s rim, the barbed steel rod of a harpoon in one gloved hand, an ax gleaming in his belt. Something rippled in the gully, a living carpet of golden knives.
Clearer than the sharp, small ghosts of the past that she saw was the shiv-twist memory of fear as she saw him jump.
They had been lovers then for less than a year, still burningly conscious of one another’s bodies. When he had sought the dragon’s lair, more than anything else Jenny had been aware of the fragility of flesh and bone when it was pitted against steel and fire.
She shut her eyes; when she opened them again, the silken pictures were gone from the flame. She pressed her lips taut, forcing herself to listen without speaking, knowing it was and could be none of her affair. She could no more have told him not to go—not then, not now—than he could have told her to leave the stone house on Frost Fell and give up her seeking, to come to the Hold to cook his meals and raise his sons.
John was saying, “Tell me about this drake.”
“You mean you’ll come?” The forlorn eagerness in Gareth’s voice made Jenny want to get up and box his ears.
“I mean I want to hear about it.” The Dragonsbane came around the table and slouched into one of the room’s big carved chairs, sliding the other in Gareth’s direction with a shove of his booted foot. “How long ago did it strike?”
“It came by night, two weeks ago. I took ship three days later, from Claekith Harbor below the city of Bel. The ship is waiting for us at Eldsbouch.”
“I doubt that.” John scratched the side of his long nose with one scarred forefinger. “If your mariners were smart they’ll have turned and run for a safe port two days ago. The storms are coming. Eldsbouch will be no protection to them.”
“But they said they’d stay!” Gareth protested indignantly. “I paid them!”
“Gold will do them no good weighting their bones to the bottom of the cove,” John pointed out.
Gareth sank back into his chair, shocked and cut to the heart by this final betrayal. “They can’t have gone …”
There was a moment’s silence, while John looked down at his hands. Without lifting her eyes from the heart of the fire, Jenny said softly, “They are not there, Gareth. I see the sea, and it is black with storms; I see the old harbor at Eldsbouch, the gray river running through the broken houses there; I see the fisher-folk making fast their little boats to the ruins of the old piers and all the stones shining under the rain. There is no ship there, Gareth.”
“You’re wrong,” he said hopelessly. “You have to be wrong.” He turned back to John. “It’ll take us weeks to get back, traveling overland …”
“Us?” John said softly, and Gareth blushed and looked as frightened as if he had uttered mortal insult. After a moment John went on, “How big is this dragon of yours?”
Gareth swallowed again and drew his breath in a shaky sigh. “Huge,” he said dully. “How huge?”
Gareth hesitated. Like most people, he had no eye for relative size. “It must have been a hundred feet long. They say the shadow of its wings covered the whole of Deeping Vale.”
“Who says?” John inquired, shifting his weight side-ways in the chair and hooking a knee over the fornicating sea-lions that made up the left-hand arm. “I thought it came at night, and munched up anyone close enough to see it by day.”
“Well …” He floundered in a sea of third-hand rumor.
“Ever see it on the ground?”
Gareth blushed and shook his head.
“It’s gie hard to judge things in the air,” John said kindly, pushing up his specs again. “The drake I slew here looked about a hundred feet long in the air, when I first saw it descending on the village of Great Toby. Turned out to be twenty-seven feet from beak to tail.” Again his quick grin illuminated his usually expressionless face. “It comes of being a naturalist. The first thing we did, Jenny and I, when I was on my feet again after killing it, was to go out there with cleavers and see how the thing was put together, what there was left of it.”
“It could be bigger, though, couldn’t it?” Gareth asked. He sounded a little worried, as if, Jenny thought dryly, he considered a twenty-seven foot dragon somewhat paltry. “I mean, in the Greenhythe variant of the Lay of Selkythar Dragonsbane and the Worm of the Imperteng Wood, they say that the Worm was sixty feet long, with wings that would cover a battalion.”
“Anybody measure it?”
“Well, they must have. Except—now that I come to think of it, according to that variant, when Selkythar had wounded it unto death the dragon fell into the River Wildspae; and in a later Belmarie version it says it fell into the sea. So I don’t see how anyone could have.”
“So a sixty-foot dragon is just somebody’s measure of how great Selkythar was.” He leaned back in his chair, his hands absentmindedly tracing over the lunatic carvings—the mingled shapes of all the creatures of the Book of Beasts. The worn gilding still caught in the chinks flickered with a dull sheen in the stray glints of the fire. “Twenty-seven feet doesn’t sound like a lot, ’til it’s there spitting fire at you. You know their flesh will decompose almost as soon as they die? It’s as if their own fire consumes them, as it does everything else.”
“Spitting fire?” Gareth frowned. “All the songs say they breathe it.”
Aversin shook his head. “They sort of spit it—it’s liquid fire, and nearly anything it touches’ll catch. That’s the trick in fighting a dragon, you see—to stay close enough to its body that it won’t spit fire at you for fear of burning itself, and not get rolled on or cut to pieces with its scales whilst you’re about it. They can raise the scales along their sides like a blowfish bristling, and they’re edged like razors.”
“I never knew that,” Gareth breathed. Wonder and curiosity lessened, for a moment, the shell of his offended dignity and pride.
“Well, the pity of it is, probably the King’s champions didn’t either. God knows, I didn’t when I went after the dragon in the gorge. There was nothing about it in any book I could find—Dotys and Clivy and them. Only a few old granny-rhymes that mention dragons—or drakes or worms, they’re called—and they weren’t much help. Things like:
“Cock by its feet, horse by its hame,
Snake by its head, drake by its name.
“Or what Polyborus had in his Analects about certain villages believing that if you plant loveseed—those creeper-things with the purple trumpet-flowers on them—around your house, dragons won’t come near. Jen and I used bits of that kind of lore—Jen brewed a poison from the loveseed to put on my harpoons, because it was obvious on the face of it that no fiddling little sword was going to cut through those scales. And the poison did slow the thing down. But I don’t know near as much about them as I’d like.”
“No.” Jenny turned her eyes at last from the fire’s throbbing core and, resting her cheek upon her hand where it lay on her up-drawn knees, regarded the two men on either side of the book-cluttered table. She spoke softly, half to herself. “We know not where they come from, nor where they breed; why of all the beasts of the earth they have six limbs instead of four …”
“‘Maggots from meat,’” quoted John, “‘weevils from rye, dragons from stars in an empty sky.’ That’s in Terens’ Of Ghosts. Or Caerdinn’s ‘Save a dragon, slave a dragon.’ Or why they say you should never look into a dragon’s eyes—and I’ll tell you, Gar, I was gie careful not to do that. We don’t even know simple things, like why magic and illusion won’t work on them; why Jen couldn’t call the dragon’s image in that jewel of hers, or use a cloaking-spell against his notice—nothing.”
“Nothing,” Jenny said softly, “save how they died, slain by men as ignorant of them as we.”
John must have heard the strange sorrow that underlay her voice, for she felt his glance, worried and questioning. But she turned her eyes away, not knowing the answer to what he asked.
After a moment, John sighed and said to Gareth, “It’s all knowledge that’s been lost over the years, like Luciard’s Firegiver and how they managed to build a breakwater across the harbor mouth at Eldsbouch—knowledge that’s been lost and may never be recovered.”
He got to his feet and began to pace restlessly, the flat, whitish gray reflections from the window winking on spike and mail-scrap and the brass of dagger-hilt and buckle. “We’re living in a decaying world, Gar; things slipping away day by day. Even you, down south in Bel—you’re losing the Realm a piece at a time, with the Winterlands tearing off in one direction and the rebels pulling away the Marches in another. You’re losing what you had and don’t even know it, and all that while knowledge is leaking out the seams, like meal from a ripped bag, because there isn’t time or leisure to save it.”
“I would never have slain the dragon, Gar—slay it, when we know nothing about it? And it was beautiful in itself, maybe the most beautiful thing I’ve ever laid eyes on, every color of it perfect as sunset, like a barley field in certain lights you get on summer evenings.”
“But you must—you have to slay ours!” There was sudden agony in Gareth’s voice.
“Fighting it and slaying it are two different things.” John turned back from the window, his head tipped slightly to one side, regarding the boy’s anxious face. “And I haven’t yet said I’d undertake the one, let alone accomplish the other.”
“But you have to.” The boy’s voice was a forlorn whisper of despair. “You’re our only hope.”
“Am I?” the Dragonsbane asked gently. “I’m the only hope of all these villagers, through the coming winter, against wolves and bandits. It was because I was their only hope that I slew the most perfect creature I’d ever seen, slew it dirtily, filthily, chopping it to pieces with an ax—it was because I was their only hope that I fought it at all and near had my flesh shredded from my bones by it. I’m only a man, Gareth.”
“No!” the boy insisted desperately. “You’re the Dragonsbane—the only Dragonsbane!” He rose to his feet, some inner struggle plain upon his thin features, his breathing fast as if forcing himself to some exertion. “The King …” He swallowed hard. “The King told me to make whatever terms I could, to bring you south. If you come …” With an effort he made his voice steady. “If you come, we will send troops again to protect the northlands, to defend them against the Iceriders; we will send books, and scholars, to bring knowledge to the people again. I swear it.” He took up the King’s seal and held it out in his trembling palm, and the cold daylight flashed palely across its face. “In the King’s name I swear it.”
But Jenny, watching the boy’s white face as he spoke, saw that he did not meet John’s eyes.
As night came on the rain increased, the wind throwing it like sea-breakers against the walls of the Hold. John’s Aunt Jane brought up a cold supper of meat, cheese, and beer, which Gareth picked at with the air of one doing his duty. Jenny, sitting cross-legged in the corner of the hearth, unwrapped her harp and experimented with its tuning pegs while the men spoke of the roads that led south, and of the slaying of the Golden Dragon of Wyr.
“That’s another thing that wasn’t like the songs,” Gareth said, resting his bony elbows amid the careless scatter of John’s notes on the table. “In the songs the dragons are all gay-colored, gaudy. But this one is black, dead-black all over save for the silver lamps of its eyes.”
“Black,” repeated John quietly, and looked over at Jenny. “You had an old list, didn’t you, love?”
She nodded, her hands resting in the delicate maneuverings of the harp pegs. “Caerdinn had me memorize many old lists,” she explained to Gareth. “Some of them he told me the meaning of—this one he never did. Perhaps he didn’t know himself. It was names, and colors …” She closed her eyes and repeated the list, her voice falling into the old man’s singsong chant, the echo of dozens of voices, back through the length of years. “Teltrevir heliotrope; Centhwevir is blue knotted with gold; Astirith is primrose and black; Morkeleb alone, black as night … The list goes on—there were dozens of names, if names they are.” She shrugged and linked her fingers over the curve of the harp’s back. “But John tells me that the old dragon that was supposed to haunt the shores of the lake of Wevir in the east was said to have been blue as the waters, marked all over his back with patterns of gold so that he could lie beneath the surface of the lake in summer and steal sheep from the banks.”
“Yes!” Gareth almost bounced out of his chair with enthusiasm as he recognized the familiar tale. “And the Worm of Wevir was slain by Antara Warlady and her brother Darthis Dragonsbane in the last part of the reign of Yvain the Well-Beloved, who was …” He caught himself up again, suddenly embarrassed. “It’s a popular tale,” he concluded, red-faced.
Jenny hid her smile at the abrupt checking of his ebullience. “There were notes for the harp as well—not tunes, really. He whistled them to me, over and over, until I got them right.”
She put her harp to her shoulder, a small instrument that had also been Caerdinn’s, though he had not played it; the wood was darkened almost black with age. By daylight it appeared perfectly unadorned, but when firelight glanced across it, as it did now, the circles of the air and sea were sometimes visible, traced upon it in faded gold. Carefully, she picked out those strange, sweet knots of sound, sometimes two or three notes only, sometimes a string of them like a truncated air. They were individual in the turns of their timing, hauntingly half-familiar, like things remembered from childhood; and as she played she repeated the names: Teltrevir heliotrope, Centhwevir is blue knotted with gold … It was part of the lost knowledge, like that from John’s scatterbrained, jackdaw quest in the small portion of his time not taken up with the brutal demands of the Winterlands. Notes and words were meaningless now, like a line from a lost ballad, or a few torn pages from the tragedy of an exiled god, pasted to keep wind from a crack—the echoes of songs that would not be heard again.
From them her hands moved on, random as her passing thoughts. She sketched vagrant airs, or snatches of jigs and reels, slowed and touched with the shadow of an inevitable grief that waited in the hidden darkness of future time. Through them she moved to the ancient tunes that held the timeless pull of the ocean in their cadences; sorrows that drew the heart from the body, or joys that called the soul like the distant glitter of Stardust banners in the summer night. In time John took from its place in a hole by the hearth a tin penny whistle, such as children played in the streets, and joined its thin, bright music to hers, dancing around the shadowed beauty of the harp like a thousand-year-old child.
Music answered music, joining into a spell circle that banished, for a time, the strange tangle of fear and grief and dragonfire in Jenny’s heart. Whatever would come to pass, this was what they were and had now. She tossed back the cloudy streams of her hair and caught the bright flicker of Aversin’s eyes behind his thick spectacles, the pennywhistle luring the harp out of its sadness and into dance airs wild as hay-harvest winds. As the evening deepened, the Hold folk drifted up to the study to join them, sitting where they could on the floor or the hearth or in the deep embrasures of the windows: John’s Aunt Jane and Cousin Dilly and others of the vast tribe of his female relatives who lived at the Hold; Ian and Adric; the fat, jovial smith Muffle; all part of the pattern of the life of the Winterlands that was so dull-seeming at first, but was in truth close-woven and complex as its random plaids. And among them Gareth sat, ill at ease as a bright southern parrot in a rookery. He kept looking about him with puzzled distaste in the leaping restlessness of the red firelight that threw into momentary brightness the moldery rummage of decaying books, of rocks and chemical experiments, and that glowed in the children’s eyes and made amber mirrors of the dogs’—wondering, Jenny thought, how a quest as glorious as his could possibly have ended in such a place.
And every now and then, she noticed, his eyes returned to John. There was in them not only anxiety, but a kind of nervous dread, as if he were haunted by a gnawing guilt for something he had done, or something he knew he must yet do.
“Will you go?” Jenny asked softly, much later in the night, lying in the warm nest of bearskins and patchwork with her dark hair scattered like sea-wrack over John’s breast and arm.
“If I slay his dragon for him, the King will have to listen to me,” John said reasonably. “If I come at his calling, I must be his subject, and if I am—we are—his subjects, as King he owes us the protection of his troops. If I’m not his subject …” He paused, as he thought over what his next words would mean about the Law of the Realm for which he had so long fought. He sighed and let the thought go.
For a time the silence was broken only by the groan of wind in the tower overhead and the drumming of the rain on the walls. But even had she not been able to see, catlike, in the dark, Jenny knew John did not sleep. There was a tension in all his muscles, and the uneasy knowledge of how narrow had been the margin between living and dying, when he had fought the Golden Dragon of Wyr. Her hand under his back could still feel the rucked, hard ridges of scar.
“Jenny,” he said at last, “my father told me that his dad used to be able to raise four and five hundred of militia when the Iceriders came. They fought pitched battles on the edge of the northern ocean and marched in force to break the strongholds of the bandit-kings that used to cover the eastward roads. When that band of brigands attacked Far West Riding the year before last, do you remember how many men we could come up with, the mayor of Riding, the mayor of Toby, and myself among us? Less than a hundred, and twelve of those we lost in that fight.”
As he moved his head, the banked glow of the hearth on the other side of the small sanctum of their bedchamber caught a thread of carnelian from the shoulder-length mop of his hair. “Jen, we can’t go on like this. You know we can’t. We’re weakening all the time. The lands of the King’s law, the law that keeps the stronger from enslaving the weaker, are shrinking away. Every time a farm is wiped out by wolves or brigands or Iceriders, it’s one less shield in the wall. Every time some family ups and goes south to indenture themselves as serfs there, always provided they make it that far, it weakens those of us that are left. And the law itself is waning, as fewer and fewer people even know why there is law. Do you realize that because I’ve read a handful of volumes of Dotys and whatever pages of Polyborus’ Jurisprudence I could find stuck in the cracks of the tower I’m accounted a scholar? We need the help of the King, Jen, if we’re not to be feeding on one another within a generation. I can buy them that help.”
“With what?” asked Jenny softly. “The flesh off your bones? If you are killed by the dragon, what of your people then?”
Beneath her cheek she felt his shoulder move. “I could be killed by wolves or bandits next week—come to that, I could fall off old Osprey and break my neck.” And when she chuckled, unexpectedly amused at that, he added in an aggrieved voice, “It’s exactly what my father did.”
“Your father knew no better than to ride drunk.” She smiled a little in spite of herself. “I wonder what he would have made of our young hero?”
John laughed in the darkness. “Gaw, he’d have eaten him for breakfast.” Seventeen years, ten of which had been spent knowing Jenny, had finally given him a tolerance of the man he had grown up hating. Then he drew her closer and kissed her hair. When he spoke again, his voice was quiet. “I have to do it, Jen. I won’t be gone long.”
A particularly fierce gust of wind shivered in the tower’s ancient bones, and Jenny drew the worn softness of quilts and furs up over her bare shoulders. A month, perhaps, she calculated; maybe a little more. It would give her a chance to catch up on her neglected meditations, to pursue the studies that she too often put aside these days, to come to the Hold to be with him and their sons.
To be a mage you must be a mage, Caerdinn had said. Magic is the only key to magic. She knew that she was not the mage that he had been, even when she had known him first, when he was in his eighties and she a skinny, wretched, ugly girl of fourteen. She sometimes wondered whether it was because he had been so old, at the end of his strength, when he came to teach her, the last of his pupils, or because she was simply not very good. Lying awake in the darkness, listening to the wind or to the terrible greatness of the moor silence which was worse, she sometimes admitted the truth to herself—that what she gave to John, what she found herself more and more giving to those two little boys snuggled together like puppies upstairs, she took from the strength of her power.
All that she had, to divide between her magic and her love, was time. In a few years she would be forty. For ten years she had scattered her time, sowing it broadcast like a farmer in summer sunshine, instead of hoarding it and pouring it back into meditation and magic. She moved her head on John’s shoulder, and the warmth of their long friendship was in the tightening of his arm around her. Had she forgone this, she wondered, would she be as powerful as Caerdinn had once been? As powerful as she sometimes felt she could be, when she meditated among the stones on her lonely hill?
She would have that time, with her mind undistracted, time to work and strive and study. The snow would be deep by the time John returned.
If he returned.
The shadow of the dragon of Wyr seemed to cover her again, blotting the sky as it swooped down like a hawk over the autumn dance floor at Great Toby. The sickening jam of her heart in her throat came back to her, as John ran forward under that descending shadow, trying to reach the terrified gaggle of children cowering in the center of the floor. The metallic stink of spat fire seemed to burn again in her nostrils, the screams echoing in her ears …
Twenty-seven feet, John had said. What it meant was that from the top of the dragon’s shoulder to the ground was the height of a man’s shoulder, and half again that to the top of its tall haunches, backed by all that weight and strength and speed.
And for no good reason she could think of, she remembered the sudden shift of the boy Gareth’s eyes.
After a long time of silence she said, “John?”
“Aye, love?”
“I want to go with you, when you ride south.”
She felt the hardening of the muscles of his body. It was nearly a full minute before he answered her, and she could hear in his voice the struggle between what he wanted and what he thought might be best. “You’ve said yourself it’ll be a bad winter, love. I’m thinking one or the other of us should be here.”
He was right, and she knew it. Even the coats of her cats were thick this fall. A month ago she had been troubled to see how the birds were departing, early and swiftly, anxious to be gone. The signs pointed to famine and sleet, and on the heels of those would come barbarian raids from across the ice-locked northern sea.
And yet, she thought … and yet … Was this the weakness of a woman who does not want to be parted from the man she loves, or was it something else? Caerdinn would have said that love clouded the instincts of a mage.
“I think I should go with you.”
“You think I can’t handle the dragon myself?” His voice was filled with mock indignation.
“Yes,” Jenny said bluntly, and felt the ribs vibrate under her hand with his laughter. “I don’t know under what circumstances you’ll be meeting it,” she went on. “And there’s more than that.”
His voice was thoughtful in the darkness, but not surprised. “It strikes you that way too, does it?”
That was something people tended not to notice about John. Behind his facade of amiable barbarism, behind his frivolous fascination with hog-lore, granny-rhymes, and how clocks were made lurked an agile mind and an almost feminine sensitivity to nuances of situations and relationships. There was not much that he missed.
“Our hero has spoken of rebellion and treachery in the south,” she said. “If the dragon has come, it will ruin the harvest, and rising bread-prices will make the situation worse. I think you’ll need someone there whom you can trust.”
“I’ve been thinking it, too,” he replied softly. “Now, what makes you think I won’t be able to trust our Gar? I doubt he’d betray me out of pique that the goods aren’t as advertised.”
Jenny rolled up onto her elbows, her dark hair hanging in a torrent down over his breast. “No,” she said slowly, and tried to put her finger on what it was that troubled her about that thin, earnest boy she had rescued in the ruins of the old town. At length, she said, “My instincts tell me he can be trusted, at heart. But he’s lying about something, I don’t know what. I think I should go with you to the south.”
John smiled and drew her down to him again. “The last time I went against your instincts, I was that sorry,” he said. “Myself, I’m torn, for I can smell there’s going to be danger here later in the winter. But I think you’re right. I don’t understand why the King would have given his word and his seal into the keeping of the likes of our young hero, who by the sound of it has never done more than collect ballads in all his life, and not to some proven warrior. But if the King’s pledged his word to aid us, then I’d be a fool not to take the chance to pledge mine. Just the fact that there’s only the two of us, Jen, shows how close to the edge of darkness all this land lies. Besides,” he added, sudden worry in his voice, “you’ve got to come.”
Her thoughts preoccupied by her nameless forebodings, Jenny turned her head quickly. “What is it?
Why?”
“We’ll need someone to do the cooking.”
With a cat-swift move she was on top of him, smothering his face under a pillow, but she was laughing too much to hold him. They tussled, giggling, their struggles blending into lovemaking. Later, as they drifted in the warm aftermath, Jenny murmured, “You make me laugh at the strangest times.”
He kissed her then and slept, but Jenny sank no further than the uneasy borderlands of half-dreams. She found herself standing once again on the lip of the gully, the heat from below beating at her face, the poisons scouring her lungs. In the drifting vapors below, the great shape was still writhing, heaving its shredded wings or clawing ineffectually with the stumps of its forelegs at the small figure braced like an exhausted woodcutter over its neck, a dripping ax in his blistered hands. She saw John moving mechanically, half-asphyxiated with the fumes and swaying from the loss of the blood that gleamed stickily on his armor. The small stream in the gully was clotted and red with the dragon’s blood; gobbets of flesh choked it; the stones were blackened with the dragon’s fire. The dragon kept raising its dripping head, trying to snap at John; even in her dream, Jenny felt the air weighted with the strange sensation of singing, vibrant with a music beyond the grasp of her ears and mind.
The singing grew stronger as she slid deeper into sleep. She saw against the darkness of a velvet sky the burning white disc of the full moon, her private omen of power, and before it the silver-silk flash of membranous wings.
She woke in the deep of the night. Rain thundered against the walls of the Hold, a torrent roaring in darkness. Beside her John slept, and she saw in the darkness what she had noticed that morning in daylight: that for all his thirty-four years, he had a thread or two of silver in his unruly brown hair.
A thought crossed her mind. She put it aside firmly, and just as firmly it reintruded itself. It was not a daylight thought, but the nagging whisper that comes only in the dark hours, after troubled sleep. Don’t be a fool, she told herself; the times you have done it, you have always wished you hadn’t.
But the thought, the temptation, would not go away.
At length she rose, careful not to wake the man who slept at her side. She wrapped herself in John’s worn, quilted robe and padded from the bedchamber, the worn floor like smooth ice beneath her small, bare feet.
The study was even darker than the bedchamber had been, the fire there nothing more than a glowing line of rose-colored heat above a snowbank of ash. Her shadow passed like the hand of a ghost over the slumbering shape of the harp and made the sliver of reflected red wink along the pennywhistle’s edge. At the far side of the study, she raised a heavy curtain and passed into a tiny room that was little more than a niche in the Hold’s thick wall. Barely wider than its window, in daylight it was coolly bright, but now the heavy bull’s-eye glass was black as ink, and the witchlight she called into being above her head glittered coldly on the rain streaming down outside.
The phosphorescent glow that illuminated the room outlined the shape of a narrow table and three small shelves. They held things that had belonged to the cold-eyed ice-witch who had been John’s mother, or to Caerdinn—simple things, a few bowls, an oddly shaped root, a few crystals like fragments of broken stars sent for mending. Pulling her robe more closely about her, Jenny took from its place a plain pottery bowl, so old that whatever designs had once been painted upon its outer surface had long since been rubbed away by the touch of mages’ hands. She dipped it into the stone vessel of water that stood in a corner and set it upon the table, drawing up before it a tall, spindle-legged chair.
For a time she only sat, gazing down into the water. Slips of foxfire danced on its black surface; as she slowed her breathing, she became aware of every sound from the roaring of the rain gusts against the tower’s walls to the smallest drip of the eaves. The worn tabletop was like cold glass under her fingertips; her breath was cold against her own lips. For a time she was aware of the small flaws and bubbles in the glaze of the bowl’s inner surface; then she sank deeper, watching the colors that seemed to swirl within the endless depths. She seemed to move down toward an absolute darkness, and the water was like ink, opaque, ungiving.
Gray mists rolled in the depths, then cleared as if wind had driven them, and she saw darkness in a vast place, pricked by the starlike points of candleflame. An open space of black stone lay before her, smooth as oily water; around it was a forest, not of trees, but of columns of stone. Some were thin as silk, others thicker than the most ancient of oaks, and over them swayed the shadows of the dancers on the open floor. Though the picture was silent, she could feel the rhythm to which they danced—gnomes, she saw, their long arms brushing the floor as they bent, the vast, cloudy manes of their pale hair catching rims of firelight like sunset seen through heavy smoke. They danced around a misshapen stone altar, the slow dances that are forbidden to the eyes of the children of men.
The dream changed. She beheld a desolation of charred and broken ruins beneath the dark flank of a tree-covered mountain. Night sky arched overhead, wind-cleared and heart-piercingly beautiful. The waxing moon was like a glowing coin; its light touching with cold, white fingers the broken pavement of the empty square below the hillside upon which she stood, edging the raw bones that moldered in puddles of faintly smoking slime. Something flashed in the velvet shadow of the mountain, and she saw the dragon. Starlight gleamed like oil on the lean, sable sides; the span of those enormous wings stretched for a moment like a skeleton’s arms to embrace the moon’s stern face. Music seemed to drift upon the night, a string of notes like a truncated air, and for an instant her heart leaped toward that silent, dangerous beauty, lonely and graceful in the secret magic of its gliding flight.
Then she saw another scene by the low light of a dying fire. She thought she was in the same place, on a rise overlooking the desolation of the ruined town before the gates of the Deep. It was the cold hour of the tide’s ebbing, some hours before dawn. John lay near the fire, dark blood leaking from the clawed rents in his armor. His face was a mass of blisters beneath a mask of gore and grime; he was alone, and the fire was dying. Its light caught a spangle of red from the twisted links of his torn mail shirt and glimmered stickily on the upturned palm of one blistered hand. The fire died, and for a moment only starlight glittered on the pooling blood and outlined the shape of his nose and lips against the darkness.
She was underground once more, in the place where the gnomes had danced. It was empty now, but the hollow silences beneath the earth seemed filled with the inchoate murmur of formless sound, as if the stone altar whispered to itself in the darkness.
Then she saw only the small flaws in the glaze of the bowl, and the dark, oily surface of the water. The witchlight had long ago failed above her head, which ached as it often did when she had overstretched her power. Her body felt chilled through to the bones, but she was for a time too weary to move from where she sat. She stared before her into the darkness, listening to the steady drum of the rain, hurting in her soul and wishing with all that was in her that she had not done what she had done.
All divination was chancy, she told herself, and water was the most notorious liar of all. There was no reason to believe that what she had seen would come to pass.
So she repeated to herself, over and over, but it did no good. In time she lowered her face to her hands and wept.
THREE (#ulink_d36a6191-d004-5ee8-ab0c-45226f534bdd)
THEY SET FORTH two days later and rode south through a maelstrom of wind and water.
In the days of the Kings, the Great North Road had stretched from Bel itself northward like a gray stone serpent, through the valley of the Wildspae River and across the farm and forest lands of Wyr, linking the southern capital with the northern frontier and guarding the great silver mines of Tralchet. But the mines had flagged, and the Kings had begun to squabble with their brothers and cousins over the lordship of the south. The troops who guarded the Winterlands’ forts had been withdrawn—temporarily, they said, to shore up the forces of one contender against another. They had never returned. Now the gray stone serpent was disintegrating slowly, like a shed skin; its stones were torn up to strengthen house walls against bandits and barbarians, its ditches choked with decades of detritus, and its very foundations forced apart by the encroaching tree roots of the forest of Wyr. The Winterlands had destroyed it, as they destroyed all things.
Traveling south along what remained of the road was slow, for the autumn storms swelled the icy becks of the moors to white-toothed torrents and reduced the ground in the tree-tangled hollows to sodden, nameless mires. Under the flail of the wind, Gareth could no longer argue that the ship upon which he had come north would still be waiting at Eldsbouch to waft them south in relative comfort and speed, but Jenny suspected he still felt in his heart that it should have been, and, illogically, blamed her that it was not.
They rode for the most part in silence. Sometimes when they halted, as they frequently did for John to scout the tumbled rocks or dense knots of woodland ahead, Jenny looked across at Gareth and saw him gazing around him in a kind of hurt bewilderment at the desolation through which they rode: at the barren downs with their weed-grown lines of broken walls; at the old boundary stones, lumpish and melted-looking as spring snowmen; and at the stinking bogs or the high, bare tors with their few twisted trees, giant balls of mistletoe snagged weirdly in their naked branches against a dreary sky. It was a land that no longer remembered law or the prosperity of ordered living that comes with law, and sometimes she could see him struggling with the understanding of what John was offering to buy at the stake of his life.
But usually it was plain that Gareth simply found the halts annoying. “We’re never going to get there at this rate,” he complained as John appeared from the smoke-colored tangle of dead heather that cloaked the lower flanks of a promontory that hid the road. A watchtower had once crowned it, now reduced to a chewed-looking circle of rubble on the hill’s crest. John had bellied up the slope to investigate it and the road ahead and now was shaking mud and wet out of his plaid. “It’s been twenty days since the dragon came,” Gareth added resentfully. “Anything can have happened.”
“It can have happened the day after you took ship, my hero,” John pointed out, swinging up to the saddle of his spare riding horse, Cow. “And if we don’t look sharp and scout ahead, we are never going to get there.”
But the sullen glance the boy shot at John’s back as he reined away told Jenny more clearly than words that, though he could not argue with this statement, he did not believe it, either.
That evening they camped in the ragged birches of the broken country where the downs gave place to the hoary densities of the Wyrwoods. When camp was set, and the horses and mules picketed, Jenny moved quietly along the edge of the clearing, the open ground above the high bank of a stream whose noisy rushing blended with the sea-sound of the wind in the trees. She touched the bark of the trees and the soggy mast of acorns, hazelnuts, and decaying leaves underfoot, tracing them with the signs that only a mage could see—signs that would conceal the camp from those who might pass by outside. Looking back toward the fluttering yellow light of the new fire, she saw Gareth hunkered down beside it, shivering in his damp cloak, looking wretched and very forlorn.
Her square, full lips pressed together. Since he had learned she was his erstwhile hero’s mistress, he had barely spoken to her. His resentment at her inclusion in the expedition was still obvious, as was his unspoken assumption that she had included herself out of a combination of meddling and a desire not to let her lover out of her sight. But Gareth was alone in an alien land, having clearly never been away from the comforts of his home before, lonely, disillusioned, and filled with a gnawing fear of what he would return to find.
Jenny sighed and crossed the clearing to where he sat.
The boy looked up at her suspiciously as she dug into her jacket pocket and drew out a long sliver of smoky crystal on the chain that Caerdinn had used to hang around his neck. “I can’t see the dragon in this,” she said, “but if you’ll tell me the name of your father and something about your home in Bel, at least I should be able to call their images and tell you if they’re all right.”
Gareth turned his face away from her. “No,” he said. Then, after a moment, he added grudgingly, “Thank you all the same.”
Jenny folded her arms and regarded him for a moment in the jumpy orange firelight. He huddled a little deeper into his stained crimson cloak and would not meet her eyes.
“Is it because you think I can’t?” she asked at last. “Or because you won’t take the aid of a witch?”
He didn’t answer that, though his full lower lip pinched up a bit in the middle. With a sigh of exasperation, Jenny walked away from him to where John stood near the oilskin-covered mound of the packs, looking out into the darkening woods.
He glanced back as she came near, the stray gleams of firelight throwing glints of dirty orange on the metal of his patched doublet. “D’you want a bandage for your nose?” he inquired, as if she’d tried to pet a ferret and gotten nipped for her trouble. She laughed ruefully.
“He didn’t have any objections to me before,” she said, more hurt than she had realized by the boy’s enmity.
John put an arm around her and hugged her close. “He feels cheated, is all,” he said easily. “And since God forbid he should have cheated himself with his expectations, it must have been one of us that did it, mustn’t it?” He leaned down to kiss her, his hand firm against the bare nape of her neck beneath the coiled ridge of her braided hair. Beyond them, among the ghostly birches, the thin underbrush rustled harshly; a moment later a softer, steadier rushing whispered in the bare branches overhead. Jenny smelled the rain almost before she was conscious of its light fingers upon her face.
Behind them, she heard Gareth cursing. He squelched across the clearing to join them a moment later, wiping raindroplets from his spectacles, his hair in lank strings against his temples.
“We seem to have outsmarted ourselves,” he said glumly. “Picked a nice place to camp—only there’s no shelter. There’s a cave down under the cut of the streambank …”
“Above the highest rise of the water?” inquired John, a mischievous glint in his eye.
Gareth said defensively, “Yes. At least—it isn’t so very far down the bank.”
“Big enough to put the horses in, always supposing we could get them down there?”
The boy bristled. “I could go see.”
“No,” said Jenny. Gareth opened his mouth to protest this arbitrariness, but she cut him off with, “I’ve laid spells of ward and guard about this camp—I don’t think they should be crossed. It’s almost full-dark now …”
“But we’ll get wet!”
“You’ve been wet for days, my hero,” John pointed out with cheerful brutality. “Here at least we know we’re safe from the side the stream’s on—unless, of course, it rises over its bank.” He glanced down at Jenny, still in the circle of his arm; she was conscious, too, of Gareth’s sulky gaze. “What about the spell-ward, love?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. “Sometimes the spells will hold against the Whisperers, sometimes they don’t. I don’t know why—whether it’s because of something about the Whisperers, or because of something about the spells.” Or because, she added to herself, her own powers weren’t strong enough to hold even a true spell against them.
“Whisperers?” Gareth demanded incredulously.
“A kind of blood-devil,” said John, with an edge of irritation in his voice. “It doesn’t matter at the moment, my hero. Just stay inside the camp.”
“Can’t I even go look for shelter? I won’t go far.”
“If you leave the camp, you’ll never find your way back to it,” John snapped. “You’re so bloody anxious not to lose time on this trip, you wouldn’t want to have us spend the next three days looking for your body, would you? Come on, Jen—if you’re not after making supper, I’ll do it …”
“I’ll do it, I’ll do it,” Jenny agreed, with a haste that wasn’t entirely jest. As she and John walked back to the smoky, sheltered campfire, she glanced back at Gareth, still standing on the edge of the faintly gleaming spell-circle. His vanity stinging from John’s last words, the boy picked up an acorn and hurled it angrily out into the wet darkness. The darkness whispered and rustled, and then fell still again under the ceaseless pattern of the rain.
They left the folded lands of rock hills and leaping streams for good after that and entered the ruinous gloom of the great Forest of Wyr. Here crowded oaks and hawthorn pressed close upon the road, catching the faces of the travelers with warty, overhanging boughs and dirty moss and their horses’ hooves with scabrous roots and soggy drifts of dead leaves. The black lattices of bare branches above them admitted only a fraction of the pallid daylight, but rain still leaked through, pattering in an endless, dreary murmur in the dead fern and hazel thickets. The ground was worse here, sodden and unsteady, or flooded in meres of silver water in which the trees stood, knee-deep and rotting; and Aversin remarked that the marshes of the south were spreading again. In many places the road was covered, or blocked with fallen trees, and the labor of clearing it or beating a path through the thickets around these obstacles left them all cold and exhausted. Even for Jenny, used to the hardships of the Winterlands, this was tiring, and the more so because there was no respite; she lay down weary at night and rose weary in the bleak grayness before dawn to travel on once again. What it was to Gareth she could well imagine. As he grew more weary, his temper shortened, and he complained bitterly at every halt.
“What’s he looking for now?” he demanded one afternoon, when John ordered their fifth halt in three hours and, armed with his heavy horn hunting-bow, dismounted and vanished into the choking tangle of hazel and blackthorn beside the road.
It had been raining most of the forenoon, and the tall boy drooped miserably on the back of The Stupid Roan, one of the spare horses they’d brought from the Hold. The other spare, Jenny’s mount, John had christened The Stupider Roan, a name that was unfortunately apt. Jenny suspected that, in his wearier moments, Gareth even blamed her for the generally poor quality of the Hold’s horseflesh. The rain had ceased now, but cold wind still probed through the very weave of their garments; every now and then a gust shook the branches above them and splattered them with leftover rain and an occasional sodden oak leaf that drifted down like a dead bat.
“He’s looking for danger.” Jenny herself was listening, her nerves queerly on edge, searching the silence that hung like an indrawn breath among the dark, close-crowded trees.
“He didn’t find any last time, did he?” Gareth tucked his gloved hands under his cloak for warmth and shivered. Then he looked ostentatiously upward, scanning what sky was visible, calculating the time of day, and from there going on to remember how many days they had been on the road. Under his sarcasm she could hear fear. “Or the time before that, either.”
“And lucky for us that he didn’t,” she replied. “I think you have little understanding of the dangers in the Winterlands …”
Gareth gasped, and his gaze fixed. Turning her head quickly, Jenny followed his eyes to the dark shape of Aversin, his plaids making him nearly invisible in the gloom among the trees. With a single slow movement he had raised his bow, the arrow nocked but not yet pulled.
She tracked the trajectory of the arrow’s flight to the source of the danger.
Just visible through the trees, a skinny little old man was stooping arthritically to scrape the dry insides from a rotting log for kindling. His wife, an equally lean, equally rag-clad old woman whose thin white hair hung lankly about her narrow shoulders, was holding a reed basket to receive the crumbling chips. Gareth let out a cry of horror. “NO!”
Aversin moved his head. The old woman, alerted also, looked up and gave a thin wail, dropping her basket to shield her face futilely with her arms. The dry, woody punk spilled onto the marshy ground about her feet. The old man caught her by the arm and the two of them began to flee dodderingly into the deeper forest, sobbing and covering their heads with their arms, as if they supposed that the broad-tipped iron war arrow would be stopped by such slack old flesh.
Aversin lowered his bow and let his targets stumble unshot into the wet wilderness of trees.
Gareth gasped, “He was going to kill them! Those poor old people …”
Jenny nodded, as John came back to the road. “I know.” She understood why; but, as when she had killed the dying robber in the ruins of the old town, she still felt unclean.
“Is that all you can say?” Gareth raged, horrified. “You know? He would have shot them in cold blood …”
“They were Meewinks, Gar,” John said quietly. “Shooting’s the only thing you can do with Meewinks.”
“I don’t care what you call them!” he cried. “They were old and harmless! All they were doing was gathering kindling!”
A small, straight line appeared between John’s reddish brows, and he rubbed his eyes. Gareth, Jenny thought, was not the only one upon whom this trip was telling.
“I don’t know what you call them in your part of the country,” Aversin said tiredly. “Their people used to farm all the valley of the Wildspae. They …”
“John.” Jenny touched his arm. She had followed this exchange only marginally; her senses and her power were diffused through the damp woods, and in the fading light she scented danger. It seemed to prickle along her skin—a soft plashing movement in the flooded glades to the north, a thin chittering that silenced the small restive noises of fox and weasel. “We should be moving. The light’s already going. I don’t remember this part of the woods well but I know it’s some distance from any kind of camping place.”
“What is it?” His voice, like hers, dropped to a whisper.
She shook her head. “Maybe nothing. But I think we should go.”
“Why?” Gareth bleated. “What’s wrong? For three days you’ve been running away from your own shadows …”
“That’s right,” John agreed, and there was a dangerous edge to his quiet voice. “You ever think what might happen to you if your own shadow caught you? Now ride—and ride silent.”
It was nearly full night when they made camp, for, like Jenny, Aversin was nervous, and it took some time for him to find a camping place that his woodsmanship judged to be even relatively safe. One of them Jenny rejected, not liking the way the dark trees crowded around it; another John passed by because the spring could not be seen from where the fire would be. Jenny was hungry and tired, but the instincts of the Winterlands warned her to keep moving until they found a place that could be defended, though against what she could not tell.
When Aversin ruled against a third place, an almost-circular clearing with a small, fern-choked spring gurgling through one side of it, Gareth’s hunger-frayed temper snapped. “What’s wrong with it?” he demanded, dismounting and huddling on the lee-side of The Stupid Roan for warmth. “You can take a drink without getting out of sight of the fire, and it’s bigger than the other place was.”
Annoyance glinted like the blink of drawn steel in John’s voice.
“I don’t like it.”
“Well, why in the name of Sarmendes not?”
Aversin looked around him at the clearing and shook his head. The clouds had parted overhead enough to admit watery moonlight to glint on his specs, on the water droplets in his hair when he pushed back his hood, and on the end of his long nose. “I just don’t. I can’t say why.”
“Well, if you can’t say why, what would you like?”
“What I’d like,” the Dragonsbane retorted with his usual devastating accuracy, “is not to have some snirp of a silk-lined brat telling me a place is safe because he wants his supper.”
Because that was obviously Gareth’s first concern, the boy exploded, “That isn’t the reason! I think you’ve lived like a wolf for so long you don’t trust anything! I’m not going to trek through the woods all night long because …”
“Fine,” said Aversin grimly. “You can just bloody well stay here, then.”
“That’s right! Go ahead, abandon me! Are you going to take a shot at me if I try to come after you and you hear the bushes rustle?”
“I might.”
“John!” Jenny’s cool, slightly gravelly voice cut across his next words. “How much longer can we travel without lights of some kind? Clouds are moving up. It won’t rain, but you won’t be able to see a foot ahead of you in two hours.”
“You could,” he pointed out. He felt it, too, she thought—that growing sensation that had begun back along the road; the uneasy feeling of being watched.
“I could,” she agreed quietly. “But I don’t have your woodsmanship. And I know this part of the road—there isn’t a better place ahead. I don’t like this place either, but I’m not sure that staying here wouldn’t be safer than showing up our position by traveling with lights, even a very dim magelight. And even that might not show up signs of danger.”
John looked about him at the dark woods, now barely visible in the cold gloom. Wind stirred at the bare boughs interlaced above their heads, and somewhere before them in the clearing Jenny could hear the whisper of the ferns and the rushing voice of the rain-fed stream. No sound of danger, she thought. Why then did she subconsciously watch with her peripheral vision; why this readiness to flee?
Aversin said quietly, “It’s too good.”
Gareth snapped, “First you don’t like it and then you say it’s too good …”
“They’ll know all the camping places anyway,” Jenny replied softly across his words.
Furious, Gareth sputtered, “Who’ll know?”
“The Meewinks, you stupid oic,” snapped John back at him.
Gareth flung up his hands. “Oh, fine! You mean you don’t want to camp here because you’re afraid of being attacked by a little old man and a little old lady?”
“And about fifty of their friends, yes,” John retorted. “And one more word out of you, my hero, and you’re going to find yourself slammed up against a tree.”
Thoroughly roused now, Gareth retorted, “Good! Prove how clever you are by thrashing someone who disagrees with you! If you’re afraid of being attacked by a troop of forty four-foot-tall septuagenarians …”
He never even saw Aversin move. The Dragonsbane might not have the appearance of a hero, Jenny thought, but he nevertheless had the physical reflexes of one. Gareth gasped as he was literally lifted off his feet by a double-handful of cloak and doublet, and Jenny strode forward to catch John’s spike-studded forearm. With softness as definite as an assassin’s footfall, she said, “Be quiet! And drop him.”
“Got a cliff handy?” But she felt the momentum of his rage slack. After a pause he pushed—almost threw—Gareth from him. “Right.” Behind his anger he sounded embarrassed. “Thanks to our hero, it’s well too dark now to be moving on. Jen, can you do anything with this place? Spell it?”
Jenny thought for a few moments, trying to analyze what it was that she feared. “Not against the Meewinks, no,” she replied at last. She added acidly, “They’ll have tracked you gentlemen by your voices.”
“It wasn’t me who …”
“I didn’t ask who it was.” She took the reins of the horses and mules and led them on into the clearing, anxious now to get a camp set and circled with the spells of ward before they were seen from the outside. Gareth, a little shamefaced at his outburst, followed sulkily, looking at the layout of the clearing.
In the voice of one who sought to mollify by pretending that the disagreement never happened, he asked, “Does this hollow look all right for the fire?”
Irritation still crackled in Aversin’s voice. “No fire. We’re in for a cold camp tonight—and you’ll take the first watch, my hero.”
Gareth gasped in protest at this arbitrary switch. Since leaving the Hold, Gareth had always taken the last watch, the dawn watch, because at the end of a day’s riding he wanted nothing more than to lie down and sleep; Jenny had always taken second; and John, used to the habits of wolves who hunted in the early part of the night, took the first. The boy began, “But I …” and Jenny swung around to look at them in the somber gloom.
“One more word out of either of you and I will lay a spell of dumbness upon you both.”
John subsided at once. Gareth started to speak again, then thought better of it. Jenny pulled the picket rope out of the mule Clivy’s pack and looped it around a sapling. Half to herself, she added, “Though God knows it couldn’t make you any dumber.”
Throughout their meager dinner of dried beef, cold cornmeal mush, and apples, Gareth remained ostentatiously silent. Jenny scarcely noticed, and John, seeing her preoccupied, said little to her, not wanting to disturb her concentration. She was not sure how much he felt of the danger she sensed in the woods all around them—she didn’t know how much of it was only the product of her own weariness. But she wove all her concentration, all her abilities, into the spell-circle that she put around the camp that night: spells of ward that would make their campsite unnoticeable from the outside, that would thwart the eye of any who were not actually within the circle. They would not be much help against the Meewinks, who would know where the clearing was, but they might provide a delay that would buy time. To these she added other spells against other dangers, spells that Caerdinn had taught her against the blood-devils and Whisperers that haunted the Woods of Wyr, spells whose efficacy she privately doubted because she knew that they sometimes failed, but the best spells that she—or anyone to whom she had spoken—knew.
She had long suspected that the Lines of magic were thinning and that every generation attenuated the teaching of magic that had been passed down from the old times, the times before the Realm of Belmarie had united all the West under itself and the glittering worship of the Twelve Gods. Caerdinn had been one of the mightiest of the Line of Herne, but, when she had first met him at fourteen, he was already very old, feeble, and a little crazy. He had taught her, trained her in the secrets of the Line passed from master to pupil over a dozen generations. But since his death she had found two instances where his knowledge had been incorrect and had heard of spells from her Line-kindred, the pupils’ pupils of Caerdinn’s master Spaeth Skywarden, which Caerdinn had either not bothered to teach her, or had not known himself. The spells of guard against the Whisperers that had more and more come to haunt the Wyrwoods were ineffective and sporadic, and she knew of no spell that would drive them or the blood-devils out of an area to render it safe for humans again. Such things might reside somewhere in a book, written down by the mage who discovered them, but neither Jenny, nor any mage she had met, had known of them.
She slept that night uneasily, exhausted in body and troubled by strange shapes that seemed to slide in and out through the cracks in her dreams. She seemed to be able to hear the whistling chitter of the blood-devils as they flitted from tree to tree in the marshy woods across the stream and below them the soft murmurs of the Whisperers in the darkness beyond the barrier of spells. Twice she pulled herself painfully from the sucking darkness of sleep, fearing some danger, but both times she only saw Gareth sitting propped against a pile of packsaddles, nodding in the misty blackness.
The third time she woke up, Gareth was gone.
It had been a dream that woke her; a dream of a woman standing half-hidden among the trees. She was veiled, like all the women of the south; the lace of that veil was like a cloak of flowers scattered over her dark curls. Her soft laughter was like silver bells, but there was a husky note in it, as if she never laughed save with pleasure at something gained. She held out small, slender hands, and whispered Gareth’s name.
Leaves and dirt were scuffed where he had crossed the flickering lines of the protective circles.
Jenny sat up, shaking back the coarse mane of her hair, and touched John awake. She called the witchlight into being, and it illuminated the still, silent camp and glowed in the eyes of the wakened horses. The voice of the spring was loud in the hush.
Like John, she had slept in her clothes. Reaching over to the bundle of her sheepskin jacket, her plaids, her boots and her belt that lay heaped at one side of their blankets, she pulled from its pouch the small scrying-crystal and angled it to the witchlight while John began, without a word, to pull on his boots and wolfskin-lined doublet.
Of the four elements, scrying earth—crystal—was easiest and most accurate, though the crystal itself had to be enchanted beforehand. Scrying fire needed no special preparation, but what it showed was what it would, not always what was sought; water would show both future and past, but was a notorious liar. Only the very greatest of mages could scry the wind.
The heart of Caerdinn’s crystal was dark. She stilled her fears for Gareth’s safety, calming her mind as she summoned the images; they gleamed on the facets, as if reflected from somewhere else. She saw a stone room, extremely small, with the architecture of some place half-dug into the ground; the only furnishing was a bed and a sort of table formed by a block of stone projecting from the wall itself. A wet cloak was thrown over the table, with a puddle of half-dried water about it—swamp weeds clung to it like dark worms. A much-bejeweled longsword was propped nearby, and on top of the table and cloak lay a pair of spectacles. The round lenses caught a spark of greasy yellow lamplight as the door of the room opened.
Someone in the corridor held a lamp high. Its light showed small, stooped forms crowding in the broad hall beyond. Old and young, men and women, there must have been forty of them, with white, sloped, warty faces and round, fishlike eyes. The first through the doorway were the old man and the old woman, the Meewinks whom John had nearly shot that afternoon.
The old man held a rope; the woman, a cleaver.
The house of the Meewinks stood where the land lay low, on a knoll above a foul soup of mud and water from whose surface rotting trees projected like half-decayed corpses. Squat-built, it was larger than it looked—stone walls behind it showed one wing half-buried underground. In spite of the cold, the air around the place was fetid with the smell of putrefying fish, and Jenny closed her teeth hard against a queasiness that washed over her at the sight of the place. Since first she had known what they were, she had hated the Meewinks.
John slid from his dapple war horse Osprey’s back and looped his rein and Battlehammer’s over the limb of a sapling. His face, in the rainy darkness, was taut with a mingling of hatred and disgust. Twice households of Meewinks had tried to establish themselves near Alyn Hold; both times, as soon as he had learned of them, he had raised what militia he could and burned them out. A few had been killed each time, but he had lacked the men to pursue them through the wild lands and eradicate them completely. Jenny knew he still had nightmares about what he had found in their cellars.
He whispered, “Listen,” and Jenny nodded. From the house she could detect a faint clamor of voices, muffled, as if half-below the ground, thin and yammering like the barking of beasts. Jenny slid her halberd from the holster on Moon Horse’s saddle and breathed to all three mounts for stillness and silence. She sketched over them the spells of ward, so that the casual eye would pass them by, or think they were something other than horses—a hazel thicket, or the oddly shaped shadow of a tree. It was these same spells upon the camp, she knew, that had prevented Gareth from finding his way back to it, once what must have been the Whisperer had led him away.
John tucked his spectacles into an inner pocket. “Right,” he murmured. “You get Gar—I’ll cover you both.”
Jenny nodded, feeling cold inside, as she did when she emptied her mind to do some great magic beyond her power, and steeled herself for what she knew was coming. As they crossed the filthy yard and the strange, muffled outcry in the house grew stronger, John kissed her and, turning, smashed his booted foot into the small house’s door.
They broke through the door like raiders robbing Hell. A hot, damp fetor smote Jenny in the face as she barged through on John’s heels, the putrid stink of the filth the Meewinks lived in and of the decaying fish they ate—above it all was the sharp, copper-bright stench of new-shed blood. The noise was a pandemonium of yammering screams; after the darkness outside, even the smoky glow of the fire in the unnaturally huge hearth seemed blinding. Bodies seethed in a heaving mob around the small door at the opposite side of the room; now and then sharp flashes of light glinted from the knives clutched in moist little hands.
Gareth was backed to the doorpost in the midst of the mob. He had evidently fought his way that far but knew if he descended into the more open space of the big room he would be surrounded. His left arm was wrapped, shieldlike, in a muffling tangle of stained and filthy bedding; in his right hand was his belt, the buckle-end of which he was using to slash at the faces of the Meewinks all around him. His own face was streaming with blood from knife-cuts and bites—mixed with sweat, it ran down and encrimsoned his shirt as if his throat had been cut. His naked gray eyes were wide with a look of sickened, nightmare horror.
The Meewinks around him were gibbering like the souls of the damned. There must have been fifty of them, all armed with their little knives of steel, or of sharpened shell. As John and Jenny broke in, Jenny saw one of them crawl in close to Gareth and slash at the back of his knee. His thighs were already gashed with a dozen such attempts, his boots sticky with runnels of blood; he kicked his attacker in the face, rolling her down a step or two into the mass of her fellows. It was the old woman he had kept John from shooting.
Without a word, John plunged down into the heaving, stinking mob. Jenny sprang after him, guarding his back; blood splattered her from the first swing of his sword, and around them the noise rose like the redoubling of a storm at sea. The Meewinks were a small folk, though some of the men were as tall as she; it made her cringe inside to cut at the slack white faces of people no bigger than children and to slam the weighted butt of the halberd into those pouchy little stomachs and watch them fall, gasping, vomiting, and choking. But there were so many of them. She had kilted her faded plaid skirts up to her knees to fight and she felt hands snatch and drag at them, as one man caught up a cleaver from among the butcher’s things lying on the room’s big table, trying to cripple her. Her blade caught him high on the cheekbone and opened his face down to the opposite corner of his jaw. His scream ripped the cut wider. The stench of blood was everywhere.
It seemed to take only seconds to cross the room. Jenny yelled, “Gareth!” but he swung at her with the belt—she was short enough to be a Meewink, and he had lost his spectacles. She flung up the halberd; the belt wrapped itself around the shaft, and she wrenched it from his hands. “It’s Jenny!” she shouted, as John’s sword strokes came down, defending them both as it splattered them with flying droplets of gore. She grabbed the boy’s bony wrist, jerking him down the steps into the room. “Now, run!”
“But we can’t …” he began, looking back at John, and she shoved him violently in the direction of the door. After what appeared to be a momentary struggle with a desire not to seem a coward by abandoning his rescuers, Gareth ran. They passed the table and he caught up a meat hook in passing, swinging at the pallid, puffy faces all around them and at the little hands with their jabbing knives. Three Meewinks were guarding the door, but fell back screaming before the greater length of Jenny’s weapon. Behind her, she could hear the squeaky cacophony around John rising to a crescendo; she knew he was outnumbered, and her instincts to rush back to fight at his side dragged at her like wet rope. It was all she could do to force herself to hurl open the door and drag Gareth at a run across the clearing outside.
Gareth balked, panicky. “Where are the horses? How are we …?”
For all her small size, she was strong; her shove nearly toppled him. “Don’t ask questions!” Already small, slumped forms were running about the darkness of the woods ahead. The ooze underfoot soaked through her boots as she hauled Gareth toward where she, at least, could see the three horses, and she heard Gareth gulp when they got close enough for the spells to lose their effectiveness.
While the boy scrambled up to Battlehammer’s back, Jenny flung herself onto Moon Horse, caught Osprey’s lead-rein, and spurred back toward the house in a porridgey spatter of mud. Pitching her voice to cut through the screaming clamor within, she called out, “JOHN!” A moment later a confused tangle of figures erupted through the low doorway, like a pack of dogs trying to bring down a bear. The white glare of the witchlight showed Aversin’s sword bloody to the pommel, his face streaked and running with his own blood and that of his attackers, his breath pouring like a ribbon of steam from his mouth. Meewinks clung to his arms and his belt, hacking and chewing at the leather of his boots.
With a screaming battle cry like a gull’s, Jenny rode down upon them, swinging her halberd like a scythe. Meewinks scattered, mewing and hissing, and John wrenched himself free of the last of them and flung himself up to Osprey’s saddle. A tiny Meewink child hurled up after him, clinging to the stirrup leather and jabbing with its little shell knife at his groin; John swung his arm downward and caught the child across its narrow temple with the spikes of his armband, sweeping it off as he would have swept a rat.
Jenny wheeled her horse sharply, spurring back to where Gareth still clung to Battlehammer’s saddle on the edge of the clearing. With the precision of circus riders, she and John split to grab the big gelding’s reins, one on either side, and, with Gareth in tow between them, plunged back into the night.
“There.” Aversin dipped one finger into a puddle of rainwater and flicked a droplet onto the iron griddle balanced over the fire. Satisfied with the sizzle, he patted cornmeal into a cake and dropped it into place. Then he glanced across at Gareth, who was struggling not to cry out as Jenny poured a scouring concoction of marigold-simple into his wounds. “Now you can say you’ve seen Aversin the Dragonsbane run like hell from a troop of forty four-foot-tall septuagenarians.” His bitten, bandaged hands patted another cake into shape, and the dawn grayness flashed off his specs as he grinned.
“Will they be after us?” Gareth asked faintly.
“I doubt it.” He picked a fleck of cornmeal off the spikes of his armbands. “They’ll have enough of their own dead to keep them fed awhile.”
The boy swallowed queasily, though having seen the instruments laid out on the table in the Meewinks’ house, there could be little doubt what they had meant for him.
At Jenny’s insistence, after the rescue, they had shifted their camp away from the garnered darkness of the woods. Dawn had found them in relatively open ground on the formless verges of a marsh, where long wastes of ice-scummed, standing water reflected a steely sky among the black pen strokes of a thousand reeds. Jenny had worked, cold and weary, to lay spells about the camp, then had occupied herself with the contents of her medicine satchel, leaving John, somewhat against her better judgment, to make breakfast. Gareth had dug into his packs for the bent and battered spectacles that had survived the fight in the ruins up north, and they perched forlornly askew now on the end of his nose.
“They were always a little folk,” John went on, coming over to the packs where the boy sat, letting Jenny finish binding up his slashed knees. “After the King’s troops left the Winterlands, their villages were forever being raided by bandits, who’d steal whatever food they raised. They never were a match for an armored man, but a village of ’em could pull one down—or, better still, wait till he was asleep and hack him up as he lay. In the starving times, a bandit’s horse could feed a whole village for a week. I expect it started out as only the horses.”
Gareth swallowed again and looked as if he were going to be ill.
John put his hands through his metal-plated belt. “They generally strike right before dawn, when sleep is deepest—it’s why I switched the watches, so I’d be the one they dealt with, instead of you. It was a Whisperer that got you away from the camp, wasn’t it?”
“I—I suppose so.” He looked at the ground, a shadow crossing his thin face. “I don’t know. It was something …” Jenny felt him shudder.
“I’ve seen them on my watch, once or twice … Jen?”
“Once.” Jenny spoke shortly, hating the memory of those crying shapes in the darkness.
“They take all forms,” John said, sitting on the ground beside her and wrapping his arms about his knees. “One night one even took Jen’s, with her lying beside me … Polyborus says in his Analects—or maybe it’s in that half-signature of Terens’ Of Ghosts—that they read your dreams and take on the forms that they see there. From Terens—or is it Polyborus? Or maybe it’s in Clivy, though it’s a bit accurate for Clivy—I get the impression they used to be much rarer than they are now, whatever they are.”
“I don’t know,” Gareth said quietly. “They must have been, because I’d never heard of them, or of the Meewinks, either. After it—it lured me into the woods, it attacked me. I ran, but I couldn’t seem to find the camp again. I ran and ran … and then I saw the light from that house …” He fell silent again with a shudder.
Jenny finished wrapping Gareth’s knee. The wounds weren’t deep, but, like those on John’s face and hands, they were vicious, not only the knife cuts, but the small, crescent-shaped tears of human teeth. Her own body bore them, too, and experience had taught her that such wounds were filthier than poisoned arrows. For the rest, she was aching and stiff with pulled muscles and the general fatigue of battle, something she supposed Gareth’s ballads neglected to mention as the inevitable result of physical combat. She felt cold inside, too, as she did when she worked the death-spells, something else they never mentioned in ballads, where all killing was done with serene and noble confidence. She had taken the lives of at least four human beings last night, she knew, for all that they had been born and raised into a cannibal tribe; had maimed others who would either die when their wounds turned septic in that atmosphere of festering decay, or would be killed by their brothers.
To survive in the Winterlands, she had become a very competent killer. But the longer she was a healer, the more she learned about magic and about life from which all magic stemmed, the more she loathed what she did. Living in the Winterlands, she had seen what death did to those who dealt it out too casually.
The gray waters of the marsh began to brighten with the remote shine of daybreak beyond the clouds. With a soft winnowing of a thousand wings, the wild geese rose from the black cattail beds, seeking again the roads of the colorless sky. Jenny sighed, weary to her bones and knowing that they could not afford to rest—knowing that she would have no rest until they crossed the great river Wildspae and entered the lands of Belmarie.
Quietly, Gareth said, “Aversin—Lord John—I—I’m sorry. I didn’t understand about the Winterlands.” He looked up, his gray eyes tired and unhappy behind their cracked specs. “And I didn’t understand about you. I—I hated you, for not being what—what I thought you should be.”
“Oh, aye, I knew that,” John said with a fleet grin. “But what you felt about me was none of my business. My business was to see you safe in a land you had no knowledge of. And as for being what you expected—Well, you can only know what you know, and all you knew were those songs. I mean, it’s like Polyborus and Clivy and those others. I know bears aren’t born completely shapeless for their mothers to sculpt with their tongues, like Clivy says, because I’ve seen newborn bear cubs. But for all I know, lions may be born dead, although personally I don’t think it’s likely.”
“They aren’t,” Gareth said. “Father had a lioness once as a pet, when I was very little—her cubs were born live, just like big kittens. They were spotted.”
“Really?” Aversin looked genuinely pleased for one more bit of knowledge to add to the lumber room of his mind. “I’m not saying Dragonsbanes aren’t heroic, because Selkythar and Antara Warlady and the others might have been, and may have gone about it all with swords in golden armor and plumes. It’s just that I know I’m not. If I’d had a choice, I’d never have gone near the bloody dragon, but nobody asked me.” He grinned and added, “I’m sorry you were disappointed.”
Gareth grinned back. “I suppose it had to rain on my birthday sometime,” he said, a little shyly. Then he hesitated, as if struggling against some inner constraint. “Aversin, listen,” he stammered. Then he coughed as the wind shifted, and smoke swept over them all.
“God’s Grandmother, it’s the bloody cakes!” John swore and dashed back to the fire, cursing awesomely. “Jen, it isn’t my fault …”
“It is.” Jenny walked in a more leisurely manner to join him, in time to help him pick the last pitiful black lump from the griddle and toss it into the waters of the marsh with a milky plash. “I should have known better than to trust you with this. Now go tend the horses and let me do what you brought me along to do.” She picked up the bowl of meal. Though she kept her face stern, the touch of her eyes upon his was like a kiss.
FOUR (#ulink_fefdf0c8-1e19-5d82-8004-1ef8a04c0fe9)
IN THE DAYS that followed, Jenny was interested to notice the change in Gareth’s attitude toward her and toward John. For the most part he seemed to return to the confiding friendliness he had shown her after she had rescued him from the bandits among the ruins, before he had learned that she was his hero’s mistress, but it was not quite the same. It alternated with a growing nervousness and with odd, struggling silences in his conversation. If he had lied about something at the Hold, Jenny thought, he was regretting it now—but not regretting it enough yet to confess the truth.
Whatever the truth was, she felt that she came close to learning it the day after the rescue from the Meewinks. John had ridden ahead to scout the ruinous stone bridge that spanned the torrent of the Snake River, leaving them alone with the spare horses and mules in the louring silence of the winter woods. “Are the Whisperers real?” he asked her softly, glancing over his shoulder as if he feared to see last night’s vision fading into daytime reality from the mists between the trees.
“Real enough to kill a man,” Jenny said, “if they can lure him away from his friends. Since they drink blood, they must be fleshly enough to require sustenance; but, other than that, no one knows much about them. You had a narrow escape.”
“I know,” he mumbled, looking shamefacedly down at his hands. They were bare, and chapped with cold—as well as his cloak and sword, he had lost his gloves in the house of the Meewinks; Jenny suspected that later in the winter the Meewinks would boil them and eat the leather. One of John’s old plaids was draped on over the boy’s doublet and borrowed jerkin. With his thin hair dripping with moisture down onto the lenses of his cracked spectacles, he looked very little like the young courtier who had come to the Hold.
“Jenny,” he said hesitantly, “thank you—this is the second time—for saving my life. I—I’m sorry I’ve behaved toward you as I have. It’s just that …” His voice tailed off uncertainly.
“I suspect,” said Jenny kindly, “that you had me mistaken for someone else that you know.”
Ready color flooded to the boy’s cheeks. Wind moaned through the bare trees—he startled, then turned back to her with a sigh. “The thing is, you saved my life at the risk of your own, and I endangered you both stupidly. I should have known better than to trust the Meewinks; I should never have left the camp. But …”
Jenny smiled and shook her head. The rain had ceased, and she had put back her hood, letting the wind stir in her long hair; with a touch of her heels, she urged The Stupider Roan on again, and the whole train of them moved slowly down the trail.
“It is difficult,” she said, “not to believe in the illusions of the Whisperers. Even though you know that those whom you see cannot possibly be there outside the spell-circle crying your name, there is a part of you that needs to go to them.”
“What—what shapes have you seen them take?” Gareth asked in a hushed voice.
The memory was an evil one, and it was a moment before Jenny answered. Then she said, “My sons. Ian and Adric.” The vision had been so real that even calling their images in Caerdinn’s scrying-crystal to make sure that they were safe at the Hold had not entirely banished her fears for them from her mind. After a moment’s thought she added, “They have an uncanny way of taking the shape that most troubles you; of knowing, not only your love, but your guilt and your longing.”
Gareth flinched at that, and looked away. They rode on in silence for a few moments; then he asked, “How do they know?”
She shook her head. “Perhaps they do read your dreams. Perhaps they are themselves only mirrors and, like mirrors, have no knowledge of what they reflect. The spells we lay upon them cannot be binding because we do not know their essence.”
He frowned at her, puzzled. “Their what?”
“Their essence—their inner being.” She drew rein just above a long, flooded dip in the road where water lay among the trees like a shining snake. “Who are you, Gareth of Magloshaldon?”
He startled at that, and for an instant she saw fright and guilt in his gray eyes. He stammered, “I—I’m Gareth of—of Magloshaldon. It’s a province of Belmarie …”
Her eyes sought his and held them in the gray shadows of the trees. “And if you were not of that province, would you still be Gareth?”
“Er—yes. Of course. I …”
“And if you were not Gareth?” she pressed him, holding his gaze and mind locked with her own. “Would you still be you? If you were crippled, or old—if you became a leper, or lost your manhood—who would you be then?”
“I don’t know—”
“You know.”
“Stop it!” He tried to look away and could not. Her grip upon him tightened, as she probed at his mind, showing him it through her eyes: a vivid kaleidoscope of the borrowed images of a thousand ballads, burning with the overwhelming physical desires of the adolescent; the raw wounds left by some bitter betrayal, and over all, the shadowing darkness of a scarcely bearable guilt and fear.
She probed at that darkness—the lies he had told her and John at the Hold, and some greater guilt besides. A true crime, she wondered, or only that which seemed one to him? Gareth cried, “Stop it!” again, and she heard the despair and terror in his voice; for a moment, through his eyes, she saw herself—pitiless blue eyes in a face like a white wedge of bone between the cloud-dark streams of her hair. She remembered when Caerdinn had done this same thing to her, and released Gareth quickly. He turned away, covering his face, his whole body shivering with shock and fright.
After a moment Jenny said softly, “I’m sorry. But this is the inner heart of magic, the way all spells work—with the essence, the true name. It is true of the Whisperers and of the greatest of mages as well.”
She clucked to the horses and they started forward again, their hooves sinking squishily into the tea-colored ooze. She went on, “All you can do is ask yourself if it is reasonable that those you see would be there in the woods, calling to you.”
“But that’s just it,” said Gareth. “It was reasonable. Zyerne …” He stopped himself.
“Zyerne?” It was the name he had muttered in his dreams at the Hold, when he had flinched aside from her touch.
“The Lady Zyerne,” he said hesitantly. “The—the King’s mistress.” Under its streaking of rain and mud his face was bright carnation pink. Jenny remembered her strange and cloudy dream of the dark-haired woman and her tinkling laughter.
“And you love her?”
Gareth blushed even redder. In a stifled voice he repeated, “She is the King’s mistress.”
As I am John’s, Jenny thought, suddenly realizing whence his anger at her had stemmed.
“In any case,” Gareth went on after a moment, “we’re all in love with her. That is—she’s the first lady of the Court, the most beautiful … We write sonnets to her beauty …”
“Does she love you?” inquired Jenny, and Gareth fell silent for a time, concentrating on urging his horse through the mud and up the stony slope beyond.
At length he said, “I—I don’t know. Sometimes I think …” Then he shook his head. “She frightens me,” he admitted. “And yet—she’s a witch, you see.”
“Yes,” said Jenny softly. “I guessed that, from what you said at the Hold. You feared I would be like her.”
He looked stricken, as if caught in some horrible social gaffe. “But—but you’re not. She’s very beautiful …” He broke off, blushing in earnest, and Jenny laughed.
“Don’t worry. I learned a long time ago what a mirror was for.”
“But you are beautiful,” he insisted. “That is—Beautiful isn’t the right word.”
“No.” Jenny smiled. “I do think ‘ugly’ is the word you’re looking for.”
Gareth shook his head stubbornly, his honesty forbidding him to call her beautiful and his inexperience making it impossible to express what he did mean. “Beauty—beauty really doesn’t have anything to do with it,” he said at last. “And she’s nothing like you—for all her beauty, she’s crafty and hard-hearted and cares for nothing save the pursuit of her powers.”
“Then she is like me,” said Jenny. “For I am crafty—skilled in my crafts, such as they are—and I have been called hard-hearted since I was a little girl and chose to sit staring at the flame of a candle until the pictures came, rather than play at house with the other little girls. And as for the rest …” She sighed. “The key to magic is magic; to be a mage you must be a mage. My old master used to say that. The pursuit of your power takes all that you have, if you will be great—it leaves neither time, nor energy, for anything else. We are born with the seeds of power in us and driven to be what we are by a hunger that knows no slaking. Knowledge—power—to know what songs the stars sing; to center all the forces of creation upon a rune drawn in the air—we can never give over the seeking of it. It is the stuff of loneliness, Gareth.”
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