Dragonsbane

“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.