Dragon's Bane
Barbara Hambly
Copyright 1985 by Barbara Hambly

CHAPTER I

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 drop-
pings 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

2                     Barbara Hambly

mare Moon Horse pricked her long ears at the scent of
other beasts, and Jenny wind-whispered to herfor 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
Winteriands—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 pros-
perity 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 Winteriands, she knew that these men could scarcely
help being what they were; she had to put aside both her

Dragonsbane                    3

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 judi-
ciously 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 comer 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. Periph-
erally 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

4                     Barbara Hambly

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. Shs 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

Dragonsbane                    5

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 Winteriands 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.

6                     Barbara Humbly

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

Dragonsbdne                    7

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 other 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

Barbara Hambly

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 Dra-
gonsbane. 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

Dragonsbane                    9

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 aston-
ishing 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

10                   Barbara Hambly

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, wav-
ery 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,
Stem 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 inside
her at the memory of the Golden Dragon of Wyr.

She remembered as if it were yesterday instead of ten

Dragonsbane                   11

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 glad-
ness 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 drag-
on's blood and the singing that seemed to shiver the sear-
ing 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 fames 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."

"PoisonT' 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, exas-
peration 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
naivete that would consider taking a three-foot steel blade

12                    Barbara Humbly

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 oftweJity
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. Shak-
ing the blowing handfuls of her hair out other 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 puz-

Dragonsbane

13




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 ofWyr measured approx. 27' of which
12' was tail; there are rumors of dragons longer than
50'

14                    Barbara Hambly

zlement, 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 Winteriands 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 slaugh-
tering 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 Winteriands 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

Dragonsbane                   15

the most honorable and greatest of challenges to the man-
hood 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 splen-
dor. "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 homs and tufts of white and black
far, 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 farther
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.

*   *

16                   Barbara HamUy

"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

Dragonsbane                   17

like bights of half-unraveled rope, and she caned 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 bunked, making another mental readjust-
ment. "'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 cur-
tain 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 pat-
terns 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

18 Barbara Hambly

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 say-
ing, 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 impa-
tiently 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 profes-
sorial gesture for a man ankle-deep in pig-muck.

Dragonsbane                   19

"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 impa-
tience 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 Dra-
gonsbane, 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 per-
force 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

20                   Barbara Hambly

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 o
a wounded arm, he swept into a very creditable salaan;

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 son-
ority 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.

CHAPTER II

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 dessicated 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.

21

22                    Barbara Hambly

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 recon-
ciled 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 measur-
ing 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 fear-
fully 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 loath-
ing. "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
Zyeme.,."

Dragonsbane                  23
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 witcher-
ies ..." 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 vol-
umes, left at the Hold by the departing armies or scav-
enged 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 laby-
rinth 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

24                    Barbara Hambly

pulleys occupied the rafters in one comer, 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 lortg 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 comers 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 Ups.

"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,

Dragonsbane                   25

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 capa-
ble 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 blast-
ing 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 immedi-
ately by a slender, dark-haired boy of eight. Jenny smiled
and held out her arms to them both. They flung them-
selves against her; small, filthy hands clutched delightedly
at her hair, her skirt, and the sleeves other 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,

26                   Barbara Hambly

clinging to the faded blue cloth of her skirt."/ been good—
Adric hasn't."

"Have, too," retorted the younger one, whom John
had lifted into his arms. "Papa had to whip lan."

"Did he, now?" She smiled down into her older son's
eyes, heavy-lidded and tip-tilted like John's, but as sum-
mer 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 lan'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, look-
ing 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

Dragonsbane                   27

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 Winter-
lands 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 lan, 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 waBs of
the cupboard my granddad used to store winter clothes
in. I could have gone out and thrown rocks at his grave,

28 Barbara Hambly

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 fanners. 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 comers 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 ofMagloshaldon, 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."

Dragonsbane                   29

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 admis-
sion, 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 Dra-
gonsbane," 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,

30                   Barbara Hambly

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: marsh-
devils 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 practi-
cality 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 comer 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 cham-
pions 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-

Dragonsbane                   31

ridge that divides the lowlands ofBelmarie from the north-
eastern 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 ofYlferdun 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 cham-
pions went out..." He swallowed again, his voice tight-
ening 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 com-
pressed 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

32                   Barbara Hambly

bumingly 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 indig-
nantly. "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

Dragonsbane                   33

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 ofDeeping
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

34                    Barbara Hambly

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 pal-
try. "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 carv-
ings—the mingled shapes of all the creatures of the Book
of Beasts. The worn gilding still caught in the chinks flick-
ered 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 con-
sumes 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 liq-
uid fire, and nearly anything it touches'!! 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."

Dragonsbane                   35

"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 cer-
tain 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

36 Barbara Hambly

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 beard the strange sorrov/ 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

Dragons bane                   37

haven't yet said I'd undertake the one, let alone accom-
plish the other."

"But you have to." The boy's voice was a forlorn whis-
per 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 comer 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.

38 Barbara Hambly

"That's another thing that wasn't like the songs," Gar-
eth 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 maneu-
verings 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 helio-
trope; 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 him-
self up again, suddenly embarrassed. "It's a popular tale,"
he concluded, red-faced.

Jenny hid her smile at the abrupt checking of his ebul-
lience. "There were notes for the harp as well—not tunes,
really. He whistled them to me, over and over, until I got
them right."

Dragonsbane                   39

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 fire-
light 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 knowl-
edge, 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; sor-
rows 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 pennywhistle, 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

40                    Barbara Humbly

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; lan 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 mold-
ery 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.

Dragonsbane                   41

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 ofcamelian 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 pro-
vided they make it that far, it weakens those of us that
are left. And the law itself is waning, as fewer and fewer

42                   Barbara Hambly

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 tol-
erance 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 tow-
er'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 medita-
tions, 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

Dragonsbane                  43

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 pup-
pies 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 bum
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

44                   Barbara Hambly

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 remem-
bered 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 trou-
bled 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 weak-
ness 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 sur-
prised. "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

Dragonsbane                   45

how clocks were made lurked an agile mind and an almost
feminine sensitivity to nuances of situations and relation-
ships. 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 forebod-
ings, Jenny turned her head quickly. "What is it? Why?"

"We'll need someone to do the cooking."

46 Barbara Hambly

With a cat-swift move she was on top of him, smoth-
ering 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 inef-
fectually with the stumps of its forelegs at the small figure
braced like an exhausted woodcutter over its neck, a drip-
ping ax in his blistered hands. She saw John moving
mechanically, half-asphyxiated with the fumes and sway-
ing 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 dark-
ness. 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

Dragonsbane                   47

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 waU.
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 Caer-
dinn—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 what-
ever 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

48                   Barbara Hambly

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 swiri
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 catch-
ing 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 hill-
side 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,

Dragonsbane                   49

sable sides; the span of those enormous wings stretched
for a moment like a skeleton's arms to embrace the moon's
stem 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 blis-
tered 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 witch-
light 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

50                   Barbara Hambly

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.

CHAPTER ffl

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 ser-
pent, 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 con-
tender 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

51

52                   Barbara, Hambly

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

Dragonsbane                  53

hero," John pointed out, swinging up to th& 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 acoms, 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 expe-
dition 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

54 Barbara Hambly

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 oil-
skin-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, stead-
ier 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

Dragonsbane                   55

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 glum-
ly. "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 wetf"

"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, ofGareth's
sulky gaze. "What about the spell-ward, love?"

She shook her head. "I don't know," she said. "Some-
times the spells will hold against the Whisperers, some-
times they don't. I don't know why—whether it's because
of something about the Whisperers, or because of some-
thing 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."

56 Barbara Hambly

"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 acom 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 haw-
thorn 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 end-
less, 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 thick-
ets 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.

Dragonsbane                   57

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 after-
noon, 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 black-
thorn 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 sod-
den 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 Win-
terlands ..."

Gareth gasped, and his gaze fixed. Turning her head
quickly, Jenny followed his eyes to the dark shape of

58                   Barbara Hambly

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 tittle 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
knowf 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

Dragonsbane                   59

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 camp-
ing 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 hap-
pen 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 mov-
ing 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, fem-choked spring gurgling

60                   Barbara Hambly

through one side of it, Gareth's hunger-frayed temper
snapped. "What's wrong with it?" he demanded, dis-
mounting 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 Sannendes 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 drop-
lets 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.

Dragonsbane                   61

"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. Gar-

62 Barbara Humbly

eth 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—almoat 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? SpeU 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, anx-
ious 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 hoUow 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.

Dragonsbane                   63

"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
commeal mush, and apples, Gareth remained ostenta-
tiously 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 pro-
vide 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 Heme, but, when she had first met him at fourteen, he
was already very old, feeble, and a little crazy. He had

64 Barbara Hambly

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 clutter 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 Whis-
perers 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 ofpacksaddles, nod-
ding 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 some-
thing gained. She held out small, slender hands, and whis-
pered Gareth's name.

Leaves and dirt were scuffed where he had crossed
the flickering lines of the protective circles.

Dragonsbane                   65

Jenny sat up, shaking back the coarse mane other 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 spe-
cial 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

66                   Barbara Hambly

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 Mee-
winks 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

Dragonsbane                   67

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 bed-
ding; 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

68                   Barbara Hambly

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 comer of his jaw. His scream
ripped the cut wider. The stench of blood was every-
where.

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

Dragonsbane                   69

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 outnum-
bered, 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 por-
ridgey 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 run-

70 Barbara Hambly

rung 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. Mee-
winks 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 down-
ward 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 bal-
anced over the fire. Satisfied with the sizzle, he patted
commeal 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, band-
aged 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 commeal off the
spikes of his armbands. "They'll have enough of their
own dead to keep them fed awhile."

Dragonsbane                   71

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 bet-
ter judgment, to make breakfast. Gareth had dug into his
packs for the bent and battered spectacles that had sur-
vived 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 deep-
est—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 some-
thing ..." Jenny felt him shudder.

72                    Barbara Hambly

"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 Mee-
winks, 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 neg-
lected to mention as the inevitable result of physical com-
bat. 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

Dragonsbane                  73

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 know-
ing that they could not afford to rest—knowing that she
would have no rest until they crossed the great river Wild-
spae 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 bom completely
shapeless for their mothers to sculpt with their tongues,
like Clivy says, because I've seen newbom bear cubs.
But for all I know, lions may be bom dead, although
personally I don't think it's likely."

"They aren't," Gareth said. "Father had a lioness once

74                    Barbara Hambly

as a pet, when I was very little—her cubs were bom 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 hes-
itated, 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 stem, the
touch of her eyes upon his was like a kiss.

CHAPTER IV

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 nervous-
ness 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 horse^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

75

76 Barbara Hambly

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 spec-
tacles, 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 mis-
taken 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."

Dragonsbane                   77

"What—what shapes have you seen them take?" Gar-
eth asked in a hushed voice.

The memory was an evil one, and it was a moment
before Jenny answered. Then she said, "My sons. lan and
Adric." The vision had been so real that even calling their
images in Caerdinn's serving-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, Gar-
eth 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, hold-
ing 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—"

78 Barbara Hambly

"You know."

"Stop it!" He tried to look away and could not. Her
grip upon him tightened, as she probed at his mind, show-
ing 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 sink-
ing 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.

"Zyeme?" It was the name he had muttered in his
dreams at the Hold, when he had flinched aside from her
touch.

"The Lady Zyeme," he said hesitantly. "The—the
King's mistress." Under its streaking of rain and mud his
face was bright carnation pink. Jenny remembered her

Dragonsbane                  79

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—Beau-
tiful 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 forbid-
ding 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—

80 Barbara Humbly

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 cre-
ation upon a rune drawn in the air—we can never give
over the seeking of it. It is the stuff of loneliness, Gareth."

They rode on in silence for a time. The woods about
them were pewter and iron, streaked here and there with
the rust of the dying year. In the wan light Gareth looked
older than he had when they began, for he had lost flesh
on the trip, and lack of sleep had left permanent smudges
of bister beneath his eyes. At length he turned to her again
and asked, "And do the magebom love?"

Jenny sighed again. "They say that a wizard's wife is
a widow. A woman who bears a wizard's child must know
that he will leave her to raise the child alone, should his
powers call him elsewhere. It is for this reason that no
priest will perform the wedding ceremony for the mage-
bom, and no flute player will officiate upon the rites. And
it would be an act of cruelty for a witch to bear any man's
child."

He looked across at her, puzzled both by her words
and by the coolness of her voice, as if the matter had
nothing to do with her.

She went on, looking ahead at the half-hidden road
beneath its foul mire of tangled weeds, "A witch will
always care more for the pursuit of her powers than for
her child, or for any man. She will either desert her child,

Dragonsbane                   81

or come to hate it for keeping her from the time she needs
to meditate, to study, to grow in her arts. Did you know
John's mother was a witch?"

Gareth stared at her, shocked.

"She was a shaman of the Iceriders—his father took
her in battle. Your ballads said nothing of it?"

He shook his head numbly. "Nothing—in fact, in the
Greenhythe variant of the ballad ofAversin and the Golden
Worm of Wyr, it talks about him bidding farewell to his
mother in her bower, before going off to fight the dragon—
but now that I think of it, there is a scene very like it in
the Greenhythe ballad of Selkythar Dragonsbane and in
one of the late Halnath variants of the Song of Antara
Warlady. I just thought it was something Dragonsbanes
did."

A smile brushed her lips, then faded. "She was my first
teacher in the ways of power, when I was six. They used
to say of her what you thought of me—that she had laid
spells upon her lord to make him love her, tangling him
in her long hair. I thought so, too, as a little child—until
I saw how she fought for the freedom that he would not
give her. When I knew her, she had already borne his
child; but when John was five, she left in the screaming
winds of an icestorm, she and the frost-eyed wolf who
was her companion. She was never seen in the Winter-
lands again. And I..."

There was long silence, broken only by the soft squish
of hooves in the roadbed, the patter of rain, and the occa-
sional pop of the mule Clivy's hooves as he overreached
his own stride. When she went on, her voice was low, as
if she spoke to herself.

"He asked me to bear his children, for he wanted chil-
dren, and he wanted those children to be mine also. He
knew I would never live with him as his wife and devote
my time to his comfort and that of his sons. I knew it,
too." She sighed. "The lioness bears her cubs and then

82                   Barbara Hanbly

goes back to the hunting trail. I thought I could do the
same. All my life I have been called heartless—would
that it were really so. I hadn't thought that I would love
them."

Through the trees, the dilapidated towers of the Snake
River bridge came into view, the water streaming high and
yellow beneath the crumbling arches. Before them, a dark
figure sat his horse in the gloomy road, spectacles flashing
like rounds of dirty ice in the cold daylight, signaling that
the way was safe.

They made camp that night outside the ruined town of
Ember, once the capital of the province of Wyr. Nothing
remained of it now save a dimpled stone mound, over
grown with birch and seedling maple, and the decaying
remains of the curtain wall. Jenny knew it of old, from
the days when she and Caerdinn had searched for books
in the buried cellars. He had beaten her, she remembered,
when she had spoken of the beauty of the skeleton lines
of stone that shimmered through the dark cloak of the
fallow earth.

As dusk came down, they pitched their camp outside
the walls. Jenny gathered the quick-burning bark of the
paper birch for kindling and fetched water from the spring
nearby. Gareth saw her coming and broke purposefully
away from his own tasks to join her. "Jenny," he began,
and she looked up at him.

"Yes?"

He paused, like a naked swimmer on the bank of a
very cold pool, then visibly lost his courage. "Er—is there
some reason why we didn't camp in the ruins of the town
itself?"

It was patently not what he had been about to say, but
she only glanced back toward the white bones of the town,
wrapped in shadow and vine. "Yes."

Dragonsbane                   83

His voice dropped. "Is there—is there something that
haunts the ruins?"

The corners of her mouth tucked a little. "Not that I
know of. But the entire town is buried under the biggest
patch of poison ivy this side of the Gray Mountains. Even
so," she said, kneeling beside the little dry firewood they
had been able to find and arranging the birchbark beneath
it, "I have laid spells of ward about the camp, so take
care not to leave it."

He ducked his head a little at this gentle teasing and
blushed.

A little curiously, she added, "Even if this Lady Zyeme
of yours is a sorceress—even if she is fond of you—she
would never have come here from the south, you know.
Mages only transform themselves into birds in ballads,
for to change your essence into the essence of some other
life form—which is what shapeshifting is—aside from
being dangerous, requires an incredible amount of power.
It is not something done lightly. When the magebom go,
they go upon their two feet."

"But..." His high forehead wrinkled in a frown. Hav-
ing decided to be her champion, he was unwilling to believe
there was anything beyond her powers. "But the Lady
Zyeme does it all the time. I've seen her."

Jenny froze in the act of arranging the logs, cut by an
unexpected pang of a hot jealousy she had thought that
she had long outgrown—the bitter jealousy other youth
toward those who had greater skills than she. All her life
she had worked to rid herself of it, knowing it crippled
her from learning from those more powerful. It was this
that made her tell herself, a moment later, that she ought
not to be shocked to learn of another's use of power.

Yet in the back of her mind she could hear old Caerdinn
speaking of the dangers of taking on an alien essence,
even if one had the enormous power necessary to perform

84                    Barbara Humbly

the transformation and of the hold that another form could
take on the minds of all but the very greatest.

"She must be a powerful mage indeed," she said,
rebuking her own envy. With a touch of her mind, she
called fire to the kindling, and it blazed up hotly beneath
the logs. Even that small magic pricked her, like a needle
carelessly left in a garment, with the bitter reflection of
the smallness of her power. "What forms have you seen
her take?" She realized as she spoke that she hoped he
would say he had seen none himself and that it was, in
fact, only rumor.

"Once a cat," he said. "And once a bird, a swallow.
And she's taken other shapes in—in dreams I've had. It's
odd," he went on rather hastily. "In ballads they don't
make much of it. But it's hideous, the most horrible thing
I've ever seen—a woman, and a woman I—I—" He stum-
bled in his words, barely biting back some other verb that
he replaced with, "—I know, twisting and withering,
changing into a beast. And then the beast will watch you
with her eyes."

He folded himself up cross-legged beside the fire as
Jenny put the iron skillet over it and began to mix the
meal for the cakes. Jenny asked him, "Is she why you
asked the King to send you north on this quest? To get
away from her?"

Gareth turned his face from her. After a moment he
nodded. "I don't want to betray—to betray the King."
His words caught oddly as he spoke. "But sometimes I
feel I'm destined to do so. And I don't know what to do.

"Polycarp hated her," he went on, after a few moments
during which John's voice could be heard, cheerfully curs-
ing the mules Clivy and Melonhead as he unloaded the
last of the packs. "The rebel Master ofHalnath. He always
told me to stay away from her. And he hated her influence
over the King."

"Is that why he rebelled?"

Dragonsbane                   85

"It might have had something to do with it. I don't
know." He toyed wretchedly with a scrap of meal left in
the bowl. "He—he tried to murder the King and—and
the Heir to the throne, the King's son. Polycarp is the
next heir, the King's nephew. He was brought up in the
palace as a sort of a hostage after his father rebelled.
Polycarp stretched a cable over a fence in the hunting
field on a foggy morning when he thought no one would
see until it was too late." His voice cracked a little as he
added, "I was the one who saw him do it."

Jenny glanced across at his face, broken by darkness
and the leaping light of the flames into a harsh mosaic of
plane and shadows. "You loved him, didn't you?"

He managed to nod. "I think he was a better friend to
me than anyone else at Court. People—people our age
there—Polycarp is five years older than I am—used to
mock at me, because I collect ballads and because I'm
clumsy and can't see without my spectacles; they'd mock
at him because his father was executed for treason and
because he's a philosopher. Many of the Masters have
been. It's because of the University at Halnath—they're
usually atheists and troublemakers. His father was, who
married the King's sister. But Polycarp was always like
a son to the King." He pushed back the thin, damp weeds
of his hair from his high forehead and finished in a stran-
gled voice, "Even when I saw him do it, I couldn't believe
it."

"And you denounced him?"

Gareth's breath escaped in a defeated sigh. "What could
I do?"

Had this. Jenny wondered, been what he had hidden
from them? The fact that the Realm itself was split by
threat of civil war, like the Kinwars that had drawn the
King's troops away from the Winterlands to begin with?
Had he feared that if John knew that there was a chance

86 Barbara Hambly

the King would refuse to lend him forces needed at home,
he would not consent to make the journey?

Or was there something else?

It had grown fully dark now. Jenny picked the crisp
mealcakes from the griddle and set them on a wooden
plate at her side while she cooked salt pork and beans.
While Gareth had been speaking, John had come to join
them, half-listening to what was said, half-watching the
woods that hemmed them in.

As they ate, Gareth went on, "Anyway, Polycarp man-
aged to get out of the city before they came for him. The
King's troops were waiting for him on the road to Halnath,
but we think he went to the Deep, and the gnomes took
him through to the Citadel that way. Then they—the
gnomes—bolted up the doors leading from the Deep to
the Citadel and said they would not meddle in the affairs
of men. They wouldn't admit the King's troops through
the Deep to take the Citadel from the rear, but they
wouldn't let the rebels out that way, either, or sell them
food. There was some talk of them using blasting powder
to close up the tunnels to Halnath completely. But then
the dragon came."

"And when the dragon came?" asked John.

"When the dragon came, Polycarp opened the Citadel
gates that led into the Deep and let the gnomes take refuge
with him. At least, a lot of the gnomes did take refuge
with him, though Zyeme says they were the ones who
were on the Master's side to begin with. And she should
know—she was brought up in the Deep."

"Was she, now?" John tossed one of the small pork
bones into the fire and wiped his fingers on a piece of
comcake. "I thought the name sounded like the tongue
of the gnomes."

Gareth nodded. "The gnomes used to take a lot of the
children of men as apprentices in the Deep—usually chil-
dren from Deeping, the town that stands—stood—in the

Dragonsbane                   87

vale before the great gates of the Deep itself, where the
smelting of the gold and the trade in foodstuff's went on.
They haven't done so in the last year or so—in fact in
the last year they forbade men to enter the Deep at all."

"Did they?" asked John, curious. "Why was that?"

Gareth shrugged. "I don't know. They're strange crea-
tures, and tricky. You can't ever tell what they're up to,
Zyeme says."

As the night deepened, Jenny left the men by the fire
and silently walked the bounds of the camp, checking the
spell-circles that defended it against the blood-devils, the
Whisperers, and the sad ghosts that haunted the ruins of
the old town. She sat on what had been a boundary stone,
just beyond the edge of the fire's circle of light, and sank
into her meditations, which for some nights now she had
neglected.

It was not the first time she had neglected them—she
was too well aware of the nights she had let them go by
while she was at the Hold with John and her sons. Had
she not neglected them—had she not neglected the pur-
suit of her power—would she be as powerful as this
Zyeme, who could deal in shapeshifting at a casual whim?
Caerdinn's strictures against it returned to her mind, but
she wondered if that was just her own jealousy speaking,
her own spite at another's power. Caerdinn had been old,
and there had been nowhere in the Winterlands that she
could turn for other instruction after he had died. Like
John, she was a scholar bereft of the meat of scholarship;

like the people of the village of Alyn, she was circum-
scribed by the fate that had planted her in such stony soil.

Against the twisting yellow ribbons of the flames, she
could see John's body swaying as he gestured, telling
Gareth some outrageous story from his vast collection of
tales about the Winterlands and its folk. The Fattest Ban-
dit in the Winterlands? she wondered. Or one about his
incredible Aunt Mattie? It occurred to her for the first

88                    Barbara Humbly

time that it was for her, as well as for his people, that he
had undertaken the King's command—for the things that
she had never gotten, and for their sons.

It's not worth his life! she thought desperately,
watching him. / do well with what I have! But the
silent ruins of Ember mocked at her, their naked bones
veiled by darkness, and the calm part of her heart whis-
pered to her that it was his to choose, not hers. She could
only do what she was doing—make her choice and aban-
don her studies to ride with him. The King had sent his
command and his promise, and John would obey the King.

Five days south of Ember, the lands opened up once
more. The forests gave way to the long, flat, alluvial slopes
that led down to the Wildspae, the northern boundary of
the lands of Belmarie. It was an empty countryside, but
without the haunted desolation of the Winterlands; there
were farms here, like little walled fortresses, and the road
was at least passably drained. Here for the first time they
met other travelers, merchants going north and east, with
news and rumor of the capital—of the dread of the dragon
that gripped the land, and the unrest in Bel due to the
high price of grain.

"Stands to reason, don't it?" said a foxlike little trader,
with his cavalcade of laden mules behind him. "What with
the dragon ruining the harvest, and the grain rotting in
the fields; yes, and the gnomes what took refuge in Bel
itself hoarding the stuff, taking it out of the mouths of
honest folk with their ill-got gold."

"Ill-got?" asked John curiously. "They mined and
smelted it, didn't they?" Jenny, who wanted news without
irritating its bearer, kicked him surreptitiously in the shin.

The merchant spat into the brimming ditch by the road-
side and wiped his grizzled reddish beard. "That gives
them no call to buy grain away from folks that needs it,"
he said. "And word has it that they're trafficking regular

Dragonsbane                   89

with their brothers up in Halnath—yes, and that they and
the Master between them kidnapped the King's Heir, his
only child, to hold for ransom."

"Could they have?" John inquired.

"Course they could. The Master's a sorcerer, isn't he?
And the gnomes have never been up to any good, causing
riot and mayhem in the capital..."

"Riot and mayhem?" Gareth protested. "But the gnomes
have been our allies for time out of mind! There's never
been trouble between us."

The man squinted up at him suspiciously. But he only
grumbled, "Just goes to show, doesn't it? Treacherous
little buggers." Jerking on his lead mule's bridle, he passed
them by.

Not long after this they met a company of the gnomes
themselves, traveling banded together, surrounded by
guards for protection, with their wealth piled in carts and
carriages. They peered up at John with wary, shortsighted
eyes of amber or pale blue beneath low, wide brows, and
gave him unwilling answers to his questions about the
south.

"The dragon? Aye, it lairs yet in Ylferdun, and none
of the men the King has sent have dislodged it." The
gnome leader toyed with the soft fur trim of his gloves,
and the thin winds billowed at the silk of his strangely cut
garments. Behind him, the guards of the cavalcade watched
the strangers in deepest suspicion, as if fearing an attack
from even that few. "As for us, by the heart of the Deep,
we have had enough of the charity of the sons of men,
who charge us four times the going price for rooms the
household servants would scorn and for food retrieved
from the rats." His voice, thin and high like that of all the
gnomes, was bitter with the verjuice of hate given back
for hate. "Without the gold taken from the Deep, their
city would never have been built, and yet not a man will
speak to us in the streets, save to curse. They say in the

90                   Barbara Hambly

city now that we plot with our brethren who fled through
the back ways of the Deep into the Citadel of Halnath.
By the Stone, it is lies; but such lies are believed now in
Bel."

From the carts and carriages and curtained litters, a
murmur of anger went up, the rage of those who have
never before been helpless. Jenny, sitting quietly on Moon
Horse, realized that it was the first time she had ever seen
gnomes by daylight. Their eyes, wide and nearly color-
less, were ill-attuned for its glare; the hearing that could
catch the whispers of the cave bats would be daily tor-
tured by the clamor of the cities of men.

Aversin asked, "And the King?"

"The King?" The gnome's piping voice was vicious,
and his whole stooping little body bristled with the raw
hurt of humiliation. "The King cares nothing for us. With
all our wealth mewed up in the Deep, where the dragon
sits hoarding over it, we have little to trade upon but
promises, and with each day that passes those promises
buy less in a city where bread is dear. And all this, while
the King's whore sits with his head in her lap and poisons
his mind as she poisons everything she touches—as she
poisoned the very heart of the Deep."

Beside her. Jenny heard the hissing ofGareth's indrawn
breath and saw the anger that flashed in his eyes, but he
said nothing. When her glance questioned him, he looked
away in shame.

As the gnomes moved out of sight once again into the
mists, John remarked, "Sounds a proper snakes' nest.
Could this Master really have kidnapped the King's child?"

"No," Gareth said miserably, as the horses resumed
their walk toward the ferry, invisible in the foggy bot-
tomlands to the south. "He couldn't have left the Citadel.
He isn't a sorcerer—just a philosopher and an atheist.
I—don't worry about the King's Heir." He looked down
at his hands, and the expression on his face was the one

Dragonsbane                   91

that Jenny had seen in the camp outside Ember that night—
a struggle to gather his courage. "Listen," he began shak-
ily. "I have to..."

"Gar," said John quietly, and the boy startled as if
burned. There was an ironic glint in John's brown eyes
and an edge like chipped flint to his voice. "Now—the
King wouldn't by any chance have sent for me for some
other reason than the dragon, would he?"

"No," Gareth said faintly, not meeting his eyes. "No,
he—he didn't."

"Didn't what?"

Gareth swallowed, his pale face suddenly very strained.
"He—he didn't send for you—for any other reason. That

is..."

"Because," John went on in that quiet voice, "if the
King happened to send me his signet ring to get me involved
in rescuing that child of his, or helping him against this
Master of Halnath I hear such tell of, or for his dealings
with the gnomes, I do have better things to do. There are
real problems, not just money and power, in my own
lands, and the winter closing in looks to be a bad one.
I'll put my life at risk against the dragon for the sake of
the King's protection to the Winterlands, but if there's
aught else in it..."

"No!" Gareth caught his arm desperately, a terrible
fear in his face, as if he thought that with little more
provocation the Dragonsbane would turn around then and
there and ride back to Wyr.

And perhaps, Jenny thought, remembering her vision
in the water bowl, it might be better if they did.

"Aversin, it isn't like that. You are here to slay the
dragon—because you're the only Dragonsbane living.
That's the only reason I sought you out, I swear it. I
swear it! Don't worry about politics and—and all that."
His shortsighted gray eyes pleaded with Aversin to believe,

92                   Barbara Hambty

but in them there was a desperation that could never have
stemmed from innocence.

John's gaze held his for a long moment, gauging him.
Then he said, "I'm trusting you, my hero."

In dismal silence, Gareth touched his heels to Battle-
hammer's sides, and the big horse moved out ahead of
them, the boy's borrowed plaids making them fade quickly
into no more than a dark, cut-out shape in the colorless
fogs. John, riding a little behind, slowed his horse so that
he was next to Jenny, who had watched in speculative
silence throughout.

"Maybe it's just as well you're with me after all, love."

She glanced from Gareth up to John, and then back.
Somewhere a crow called, like the voice of that melan-
choly land. "I don't think he means us ill," she said softly.

"That doesn't mean he isn't gormless enough to get us
killed all the same."

The mists thickened as they approached the river, until
they moved through a chill white world where the only
sound was the creak of harness leather, the pop of hooves,
the faint jingle of bits, and the soughing rattle of the wind
in the spiky cattails growing in the flooded ditches. From
that watery grayness, each stone or solitary tree emerged,
silent and dark, like a portent of strange events. More
than all else. Jenny felt the weight ofGareth's silence, his
fear and dread and guilt. John felt it, too, she knew; he
watched the tall boy from the comer of his eye and lis-
tened to the hush of those empty lands like a man waiting
for ambush. As evening darkened the air. Jenny called a
blue ball of witchfire to light their feet, but the soft, opal-
escent walls of the mist threw back the light at them and
left them nearly as blind as before.

"Jen." John drew rein, his head cocked to listen. "Can
you hear it?"

"Hear what?" Gareth whispered, coming up beside them

Dragonsbane                   93

at the top of the slope which dropped away into blankets

of moving fog.

Jenny flung her senses wide through the dun-colored
clouds, feeling as much as hearing the rushing voice of
the river below. There were other sounds, muffled and
altered by the fog, but unmistakable. "Yes," she said qui-
etly, her breath a puff of white in the raw air. "Voices—
dorses—a group of them on the other side."

John glanced sharply sidelong at Gareth. "They could
be waiting for the ferry," he said, "if they had business
in the empty lands west of the river at the fall of night."

Gareth said nothing, but his face looked white and set.
After a moment John clucked softly to Cow, and the big,
shaggy sorrel plodded forward again down the slope to
the ferry through the clammy wall of vapor.

Jenny let the witchlight ravel away as John pounded
on the door of the squat stone ferry house. She and Gareth
remained in the background while John and the ferryman
negotiated the fare for three people, six horses, and two
mules. "Penny a leg," said the ferryman, his squirrel-dark
eyes darting from one to the other with the sharp interest
of one who sees all the world pass his doorstep. "But
there'll be supper here in an hour, and lodging for the
night. It's growing mortal dark, and there's chowder fog."

"We can get along a few miles before full dark; and
besides," John added, with an odd glint in his eye as he
glanced back at the silent Gareth, "we may have someone
waiting for us on the far bank."

"Ah." The man's wide mouth shut itself like a trap.
"So it's you they're expecting. I heard 'em out there a
bit ago, but they didn't ring no bell for me, so I bided by
my stove where it's warm."

Holding up the lantern and struggling into his heavy
quilted jacket, he led the way down to the slip, while
Jenny followed silently behind, digging in the purse at her
belt for coin.

94 Barbara Hambty

The great horse Battlehammer had traveled north with
Gareth by ship and, in any case, disdained balking at
anything as sheer bad manners; neither Moon Horse nor
Osprey nor any of the spares had such scruples, with the
exception of Cow, who would have crossed a bridge of
flaming knives at his customary phlegmatic plod. It took
Jenny much whispered talk and stroking of ears before
any of them would consent to set foot upon the big raft.
The ferryman made the gate at the raft's tail fast and fixed
his lantern on the pole at its head; then he set to turning
the winch that drew the wide, flat platform out across the
opaque silk of the river. The single lantern made a woolly
blur of yellowish light in the leaden smoke of the fog; now
and then, on the edge of the gleam. Jenny could see the
brown waters parting around a snagged root or branch
that projected from the current like a drowned hand.

From somewhere across the water she heard the jingle
of metal on metal, the soft blowing of a horse, and men's
voices. Gareth still said nothing, but she felt that, if she
laid a hand upon him, she would find him quivering, as
a rope does before it snaps. John came quietly to her side,
his fingers twined warm and strong about hers. His spec-
tacles flashed softly in the lante> slight as he slung an end
of his voluminous plaid around her shoulders and drew
her to his side.

"John," Gareth said quietly, "I—I have something to
tell you."

Dimly through the fog came another sound, a woman's
laugh like the tinkling of silver bells. Gareth twitched, and
John, a dangerous flicker in his lazy-lidded eyes, said, "I
thought you might."

"Aversin," Gareth stammered and stopped. Then he
forced himself on with a rush, "Aversin, Jenny, listen. I'm
sorry. I lied to you—I betrayed you, but I couldn't help
it; I had no other choice. I'm sorry."

Dragonsbane                   95

"Ah," said John softly. "So there was something you
forgot to mention before we left the Hold?"

Unable to meet his eyes, Gareth said, "I meant to tell
you earlier, but—but I couldn't. I was afraid you'd turn
back and—and I couldn't let you turn back. We need
you, we really do."

"For a lad who's always on about honor and courage,"
Aversin said, and there was an ugly edge to his quiet voice,
"you haven't shown very much of either, have you?"

Gareth raised his head, and met his eyes, "No," he
said. "I—I've been realizing that. I thought it was all right
to deceive you in a good cause—that is—I had to get you
to come..."

"All right, then," said John. "What is the truth?"

Jenny glanced from the faces of the two men toward
the far shore, visible dimly now as a dark blur and a few
lights moving like fireflies in the mist. A slightly darker
cloud beyond would be the woodlands of Belmarie. She
touched John's spiked elbow wamingly, and he looked
quickly in that direction. Movement stirred there, shapes
crowding down to wait for the ferry to put in. The horse
Battlehammer flung up his head and whinnied, and an
answering whinny trumpeted back across the water. The
Dragonsbane's eyes returned to Gareth and he folded his
hands over the hilt of his sword.

Gareth drew a deep breath. "The truth is that the King
didn't send for you," he said. "In fact, he—he forbade
me to come looking for you. He said it was a foolish quest,
because you probably didn't exist at all and, even if you
did, you'd have been killed by another dragon long ago.
He said he didn't want me to risk my life chasing a phan-
tom. But—but I had to find you. He wasn't going to send
anyone else. And you're the only Dragonsbane, as it was
in all the ballads..." He stammered uncertainly. "Except
that I didn't know then that it wasn't like the ballads. But
I knew you had to exist. And I knew we needed someone.

96                    Barbara Hambly

I couldn't stand by and let the dragon go on terrorizing
the countryside. I had to come and find you. And once I
found you, I had to bring you back..."

"Having decided you knew better about the needs of
my people and my own choice in the matter than I did?"
John's face never showed much expression, but his voice
had a sting to it now, like a scorpion's tail.

Gareth shied from it, as from a lash. "I—I thought of
that, these last days," he said softly. He looked up again,
his face white with an agony of shame. "But I couldn't
let you turn back. And you will be rewarded, I swear I'll
see that you get the reward somehow."

"And just how'll you manage that?" John's tone was
sharp with disgust. The deck jarred beneath their feet as
the raft ground against the shoals. Lights like marsh can-
dles bobbed down toward them through the gloom. "With
a mage at the Court, it couldn't have taken them long to
figure out who'd pinched the King's seal, nor when he'd
be back in Belmarie. I expect the welcoming commit-
tee ..." he gestured toward the dark forms crowding for-
ward from the mists. "... is here to arrest you for treason."

"No," Gareth said in a defeated voice. "They'll be my
friends from Court."

As if stepping through a door the forms came into
visibility; lantemlight danced over the hard gleam of satin,
caressed velvet's softer nap, and touched edges of stiff-
ened lace and the cloudy gauze of women's veils, salted
all over with the leaping fire of jewels. In the forefront of
them all was a slender, dark-haired girl in amber silk,
whose eyes, golden as honey with a touch of gray, sought
Gareth's and caused the boy to turn aside with a blush.
One man was holding a cloak for her of ermine-tagged
velvet; another her golden pomander ball. She laughed,
a sound at once silvery and husky, like an echo from a
troubled dream.

It could be no one but Zyeme.

Dragonsbane                   97

John looked inquiringly back at Gareth.

"That seal you showed me was real," he said. "I've
seen it on the old documents, down to the little nicks on
its edges. They're taking its theft a bit casually, aren't
they?"

He laid hold of Cow's bridle and led him down the
short gangplank, forcing the others to follow. As they
stepped ashore, every courtier on the bank, led by Zyeme,
swept in unison into an elaborate Phoenix Rising salaam,
touching their knees in respect to the clammy, fish-smelling
mud.

Crimson-faced, Gareth admitted, "Not really. Techni-
cally it wasn't theft. The King is my father. I'm the missing
Heir."

CHAPTER V

"So THAT'S YOUR Dragonsbane, is it?"

At the sound of Zyeme's voice. Jenny paused in the
stony blue dimness of the hall of the enchantress's hunting
lodge. From the gloom in which she stood, the little ante-
chamber beyond the hall glowed like a lighted stage; the
rose-colored gauze of Zyeme's gown, the whites and
violets of Gareth's doublet, sleeves, and hose, and the
pinks and blacks of the rugs beneath their feet all seemed
to bum like the hues of stained glass in the ember-colored
lamplight. The instincts of the Winterlands kept Jenny to
the shadows. Neither saw her.

Zyeme held her tiny goblet of crystal and glass up to
one of the lamps on the mantel, admiring the blood red
lights of the liqueur within. She smiled mischievously. "I
must say, I prefer the ballad version myself."

Seated in one of the gilt-footed ivory chairs on the
opposite side of the low wine table, Gareth only looked
unhappy and confused. The dimple on the side of Zyeme's
curving, shell pink lips deepened, and she brushed a cor-
ner of her lace veils aside from her cheek. Combs of

98

Dragonsbane                   99

crystal and sardonyx flashed in her dark hair as she tipped
her head.

When Gareth didn't speak, her smile widened a little,
and she moved with sinuous grace to stand near enough
to him to envelop him in the faint aura of her perfume.
Like shooting stars, the lamplight jumped from the crystal
facets of Gareth's goblet with the involuntary tremor of
his hand.

"Aren't you even going to thank me for coming to meet
you and offering you the hospitality of my lodge?" Zyeme
asked, her voice teasing.

Because she was jealous of Zyeme's greater powers,
Jenny had forced herself to feel, upon meeting her at the
ferry, nothing but surprise at the enchantress's youth. She
looked no more than twenty, though at the lowest com-
putation—which Jenny could not keep herself from mak-
ing, though the cattiness of her reaction distressed her—
her age could not have been much less than twenty-six.
Where there was jealousy, there could be no learning, she
had told herself; and in any case she owed this girl justice.

But now anger stirred in her. Zyeme's closeness and
the hand that she laid with such artless intimacy on
Gareth's shoulder, so that less than a half-inch of her finger-
tip touched the flesh of his neck above his collar-lace
could be nothing but calculated temptations. From what
he had told her—from every tense line of his face and
body now—Jenny knew he was struggling with all that
was in him against his desire for his father's mistress.
Judging by her expression in the lamplight, Gareth's efforts
to resist amused Zyeme very much.

"Lady—Lady Jenny?"

Jenny's head turned quickly at the hesitant voice. The
stairway of the lodge was enclosed in an elaborate lat-
ticework of pierced stone; in the fretted shadows, she
could make out the shape of a girl of sixteen or so. Only
a little taller than Jenny herself, she was like an exquisitely

100                  Barbara Hambly

dressed doll, her hair done up in an exaggeration of
Zyeme's elaborate coiffure and dyed like white-and-
purple taffy.

The girl curtseyed. "My name is Trey, Trey Cleriock."
She glanced nervously at the two forms framed in the
lighted antechamber, then back up the stair, as if fearing
that one of Zyeme's other guests'would come down and
overhear. "Please don't take this wrongly, but I came to
offer to lend you a dress for dinner, if you'd like one."

Jenny glanced down at her own gown, russet wool with
a hand like silk, banded with embroideries of red and blue.
In deference to custom which dictated that no woman in
polite society was ever seen with her hair uncovered, she
had even donned the white silk veil John had brought
back to her from the east. In the Winteriands she would
have been accounted royally clad.

"Does it matter so much?"

The girl Trey looked as embarrassed as years of deport-
ment lessons would let her. "It shouldn't," she said frankly.
"It doesn't, really, to me, but... but some people at Court
can be very cruel, especially about things like being prop-
erly dressed. I'm sorry," she added quickly, blushing as
she stepped out of the checkered darkness of the stair.
Jenny could see now that she carried a bundle of black
and silver satin and a long, trailing mass of transparent
gauze veils, whose random sequins caught stray spangles
of light.

Jenny hesitated. Ordinarily the conventions of polite
society never had bothered her, and her work left her
little time for them in any case. Knowing she would be
coming to the King's court, she had brought the best gown
she had—her only formal gown, as a matter of fact—
aware that it would be out of date. It had been no concern
to her what others thought of her for wearing it.

But from the moment she had stepped from the ferry
earlier that evening, she had had the feeling of walking

Dragonsbane                  101

among unmarked pitfalls. Zyeme and her little band of
courtiers had been all polite graciousness, but she had
sensed the covert mockery in their language of eyebrows
and glances. It had angered her and puzzled her, too,
reminding her too much of the way the other children in
the village had treated her as a child. But the child in her
was alive enough to feel a morbid dread of their sport.

Zyeme's sweet laughter drifted out into the hall. "I
vow the fellow was looking about him for a bootscraper
as he crossed the threshold... I didn't know whether to
offer him a room with a bed or a pile of nice, comfortable
rushes on the floor—you know a good hostess must make
her guests feel at home..."

For a moment Jenny's natural suspicion made her won-
der if the offer of a gown itself might be part of some
scheme to make her look ridiculous. But Trey's worried
blue eyes held nothing but concern for her—and a little
for herself, lest she be spotted in the act of spoiling sport.
Jenny considered for a moment defying them, then dis-
carded the idea—whatever gratification it might bring was
scarcely worth the fight. She had been raised in the
Winteriands, and every instinct she possessed whispered
for the concealment of protective coloration.

She held out her hands for the slithery annfuls of satin.

"You can change in the little room beneath the stairs,"
Trey offered, looking relieved. "It's a long way back to
your rooms."

"And a longer one back to your own home," Jenny
pointed out, her hand on the latch of the concealed door.
"Did you send for this specially, then?"

Trey regarded her with guileless surprise. "Oh, no.
When Zyerne knew Gareth was returning, she told us all
we'd come here for a welcome dinner: my brother Bond
and myself, the Beautiful Isolde, Caspar of Walfrith and
Merriwyn of Longcleat, and all the others. I always bring

102                  Barbara Hambly

two or three different dinner gowns. I mean, I didn't know
two days ago what I might want to wear."

She was perfectly serious, so Jenny repressed her smile.

She went on, "It's a little long, but I thought it looked
like your colors. Here in the south, only servants wear
brown."

"Ah." Jenny touched the folds of her own gown, which
caught a cinnamon edge in the glow from the antecham-
ber's lamps. "Thank you. Trey, very much—and Trey?
Could I ask yet another favor?"

"Of course," the girl said generously. "I can help..."

"I think I can manage. John—Lord Aversin—will be
down in a few moments..." She paused, thinking of the
somewhat old-fashioned but perfectly decent brown vel-
vet of his doublet and indoor cloak. But it was something
about which she could do nothing, and she shook her
head. "Ask him to wait, if you would."

The room beneath the stairs was small, but showed
evidence of hasty toilettes and even hastier romantic
assignations. As she changed clothes, Jenny could hear
the courtiers assembling in the hall to await the summons
for dinner. Occasionally she could catch some of the muted
bustling from the servants in the dining hall beyond the
antechamber, laying the six cloths and undercover so nec-
essary, according to Gareth, to the proper conduct of a
meal; now and then a maid would laugh and be rebuked
by the butler. Nearer, soft voices gossiped and teased:

"... well, really, what can you say about someone who
still wears those awful smocked sleeves—and she's so
proud of them, too!"... "Yes, but in broad daylight? Out-
doors? And with her husbandT'... "Well, of course it's
all a plot by the gnomes..." "Did you hear the joke about
why gnomes have flat noses?"

Closer, a man's voice laughed, and asked, "Gareth, are
you sure you found the right man? I mean, you didn't
mistake the address and fetch someone else entirely?"

Dragonsbane                  103

"Er—well—" Gareth sounded torn between his loy-
alty to his friends and his dread of mockery. "I suppose
you'd call him a bit barbaric. Bond..."

"A bit!" The man Bond laughed richly. "That is to say
that the dragon has caused 'a bit' of trouble, or that old
polycarp tried to murder you 'a bit.' And you're taking
him to Court? Father will be pleased."

"Gareth?" There was sudden concern in Zyeme's lilt-
ing voice. "You did get his credentials, didn't you? Mem-
bership in the Guild of Dragonsbanes, Proof of
Slaughter..."

"Testimonials from Rescued Maidens," Bond added.
"Or is that one of his rescued maidens he has with him?"

Above her head. Jenny felt rather than heard a light
descending tread on the steps. It was the tread of a man
raised to caution and it stopped, as her own had stopped
for a moment, at the point on the stairs just behind where
the light fell from the room beyond. As she hastened to
pull on the stiffened petticoats, she could feel his silence
in the entwining shadows of the latticed staircase.

"Of course!" Bond was saying, in the voice of a man
suddenly enlightened. "He has to carry her about with
him because nobody in the Winterlands can read a written
testimonial! It's similar to the barter system, you see..."

"Well," another woman's voice purred, "if you ask me,
she isn't much of a maiden."

With teasing naughtiness, Zyerne giggled. "Perhaps it
wasn't much of a dragon."

"She must be thirty if she's a day," someone else added.

"Now, my dear," Zyeme chided, "let us not be catty.
That rescue was a long time ago."

In the general laugh. Jenny was not sure, but she thought
she heard the footsteps overhead soundlessly retreat.
Zyerne went on, "I do think, if this Dragonsbane of yours
was going to cart a woman along, he might at least have
picked a pretty one, instead of someone who looks like

104 Barbara Hambly

a gnome—a short little thing with all that hair. She scarcely
needs a veil for modesty."

"That's probably why she doesn't wear one."
"If you're going to be charitable, my dear..."
"She isn't..." began Gareth's voice indignantly.
"Oh, Gareth, don't take everything so seriously!"
Zyeme's laughter mocked him. "It's such a bore, darling,
besides giving you wrinkles. There. Smile. Really, it's all
in jest—a man who can't take a little joking is only a short
step from far more serious sins, like eating his salad with
a fish fork. I say, you don't think..."

Her hands shaking with a queeriy feelingless anger,
Jenny straightened her veils. The mere touch of the stiff-
ened gauze fired a new spurt of irritation through her,
annoyance at them and that same sense of bafflement she
had feltbefore. The patterns of human relationships inter-
ested her, and this one, shot through with a web of arti-
ficiality and malice, explained a good deal about Gareth.
But the childishness of it quelled her anger, and she was
able to slip soundlessly from her cubbyhole and stand
among them for several minutes before any of them became
aware of her presence.

Lamps had been kindled in the hall. In the midst of a
small crowd of admiring courtiers, Zyeme seemed to spar-
kle bewitchingly under a powdering of diamonds and lace.
"I'll tell you," she was saying. "However much gold
Gareth was moved to offer the noble Dagonsbane as a re-
ward, I think we can offer him a greater one. We'll show
him a few of the amenities of civilization. How does that
sound? He slays our dragon and we teach him how to eat
with a fork?"

There was a good deal of appreciative laughter at this.
Jenny noticed the girl Trey joining in, but without much
enthusiasm. The man standing next to her must be her
brother Bond, she guessed; he had his sister's fine-boned
prettiness, set off by fair hair of which one lovelock, trail-

Dragonsbane                  105

.  down onto a lace collar, was dyed blue. Beside his
graceful slimness, Gareth looked—and no doubt felt—
eangly, overgrown, and miserably out of place; his
expression was one of profound unhappiness and embar-
rassment.

It might have been merely because he wasn't wearing
his spectacles—they were doubtless hideously unfash-
ionable—but he was looking about him at the exquisite
carvings of the rafters, at the familiar glimmer of lamplit
silk and stiffened lace, and at the faces of his friends, with
a weary confusion, as if they had all become strangers to

him.

Even now. Bond was saying, "And is your Dragons-
bane as great as Silkydrawers the Magnificent, who slew
the Crimson-and-Purple-Striped Dragon in the Golden
Woods back in the Reign of Potpourri the Well-Endowed—
or was it Kneebiter the Ineffectual? Do enlighten me,

Prince."

But before the wretched Gareth could answer, Zyeme
said suddenly, "My dears!" and came hurrying to Jenny,
her small white hands stretched from the creamy lace of
her sleeve ruffles. The smile on her face was as sweet
and welcoming as if she greeted a long-lost friend. "My
dearest Lady Jenny—forgive me for not seeing you sooner!
You look exquisite! Did darling Trey lend you her black-
and-silver? How very charitable of her..."

A bell rang in the dining room, and the minstrels in the
gallery began to play. Zyeme took Jenny's arm to lead in
the guests—first women, then men, after the custom of
the south—to dinner. Jenny glanced quickly around the
hall, looking for John but knowing he would not be there.
A qualm crossed her stomach at the thought of sitting
through this alone.

Beside her, the light voice danced on. "Oh, yes, you're
a mage, too, aren't you?... You know I did have some
very good training, but it's the sort of thing that has always

106                  Barbara Hambly

come to me by instinct. You must tell me about using your
powers to make a living. I've never had to do that, you
know..." Like the prick of knives in her back, she felt
the covert smiles of those who walked in procession
behind.

Yet because they were deliberate. Jenny found that the
younger woman's slights had lost all power to wound her.
They stirred in her less anger than Zyeme's temptation
of Gareth had. Arrogance she had expected, for it was
the besetting sin of the magebom and Jenny knew herself
to be as much prey to it as the others and she sensed the
enormous power within Zyeme. But this condescension
was a girl's ploy, the trick of one who was herself insecure.

What, she wondered, did Zyerne have to feel insecure
about?

As they took their places at the table. Jenny's eyes
traveled slowly along its length, seeing it laid like a winter
forest with snowy linen and the crystal icicles of cande-
labra pendant with jewels. Each silver plate was inlaid
with traceries of gold and flanked with a dozen little forks
and spoons, the complicated armory of etiquette; all these
young courtiers in their scented velvet and stiffened lace
were clearly her slaves, each more interested in carrying
on a dialogue, however brief, with her, than with any of
their neighbors. Everything about that delicate hunting
lodge was designed to speak her name, from the entwined
Zs and Us carved in the comers of the ceiling to the
delicate bronze of the horned goddess of love Hartem-
garbes, wrought in Zyeme's image, in its niche near the
door. Even the delicate music of hautbois and hurdy-
gurdy in the gallery was a proclamation, a boast that Zyeme
had and would tolerate nothing but the very finest.

Why then the nagging fear that lay behind pettiness?

She turned to look at Zyeme with clinical curiosity,
wondering about the pattern of that giri's life. Zyeme's
eyes met hers and caught their expression of calm and

Dragonsbane                  107

slightly pitying question. For an instant, the golden orbs
narrowed, scorn and spite and anger stirring in their depths.
Then the sweet smile returned, and Zyerne asked, "My
dear, you haven't touched a bite. Do you use forks in the
north?"

There was a sudden commotion in the arched doorway
of the hall. One of the minstrels in the gallery, shocked,
hit a glaringly wrong squawk out of his recorder; the oth-
ers stumbled to silence.

"Gaw," Aversin's voice said, and every head along the
shimmering board turned, as if at the clatter of a dropped
plate. "Late again."

He stepped into the waxlight brightness of the hall with
a faint jingle of scraps of chain mail and stood looking
about him, his spectacles glinting like steel-rimmed moons.
He had changed back into the battered black leather he'd
worn on the journey, the wolflude-lined jerkin with its
stray bits of mail and metal plates and spikes and the dark
leather breeches and scarred boots. His plaids were slung
back over his shoulder like a cloak, cleaned of mud but
frayed and scruffy, and there was a world of bright mis-
chief in his eyes.

Gareth, at the other end of the table, went red with
mortification to the roots of his thinning hair. Jenny only
sighed, momentarily closed her eyes, and thought
resignedly, John.

He strode cheerily into the room, bowing with impar-
tial goodwill to the courtiers along the board, not one of
whom seemed capable of making a sound. They had, for
the most part, been looking forward to baiting a country
cousin as he tried unsuccessfully to ape his betters; they
had scarcely been prepared for an out-and-out barbarian
who obviously wasn't even going to bother to try.

With a friendly nod to his hostess, he settled into his
place on the opposite side of Zyerne from Jenny. For a
moment, he studied the enormous battery of cutlery

108                  Barbara Hambly

arrayed on both sides of his plate and then, with perfect
neatness and cleanliness, proceeded to eat with his fin-
gers.

Zyeme recovered her composure first. With a silky
smile, she picked up a fish fork and offered it to him.
"Just as a suggestion, my lord. We do do things differently
here."

Somewhere down the board, one of the ladies tittered.
Aversin regarded Zyeme with undisguised suspicion. She
speared a scallop with the fish fork and held it out to him,
by way of demonstration, and he broke into his sunniest
smile. "Ah, so that's what they're for," he said, relieved.
Removing the scallop from the tines with his fingers, he
took a neat bite out of it. In a north-country brogue six
times worse than anything Jenny had ever heard him use
at home, he added, "And here I was thinking I'd been in
your lands less than a night, and already challenged to a
duel with an unfamiliar weapon, and by the local magewife
at that. You had me gie worrit."

On his other side. Bond Clerlock nearly choked on his
soup, and John thumped him helpfully on the back.

"You know," he went on, gesturing with the fork in
one hand and selecting another scallop with the other,
"we did uncover a great box of these things—all different
sizes they were, like these here—in the vaults of the Hold
the year we looked out the bath for my cousin Kat's
wedding. We hadn't a clue what they were for, not even
Father Hiero—Father Hiero's our priest—but the next
time the bandits came down raiding from the hills, we
loaded the lot into the ballistas instead of stone shot and
let fly. Killed one of 'em dead on the spot and two others
went riding off over the moor with all these little spikey
things sticking into their backs..."

"I take it," Zyeme said smoothly, as stifled giggles
skittered around the table, "that your cousin's wedding
was an event of some moment, if it occasioned a bath?"

Dragonsfcane                  109

"Oh, aye." For someone whose usual expression was
one of closed watchfulness, Aversin had a dazzling smile.
"She was marrying this southern fellow..."

It was probably. Jenny thought, the first time that any-
one had succeeded in taking an audience away from
Zyeme, and, by the glint in the sorceress's eyes, she did
not like it. But the courtiers, laughing, were drawn into
the circle of Aversin's warm and dotty charm; his exag-
gerated barbarity disarmed their mockery as his increas-
ingly outrageous tale of his cousin's fictitious nuptials
reduced them to undignified whoops. Jenny had enough
of a spiteful streak in her to derive a certain amount of
enjoyment from Zyeme's discomfiture—it was Zyeme,
after all, who had mocked Gareth for not being able to
take jests—but confined her attention to her plate. If John
was going to the trouble of drawing their fire so that she
could finish her meal in peace, the least she could do was
not let his efforts go to waste.

On her other side. Trey said softly, "He doesn't look
terribly ferocious. From Gareth's ballads, I'd pictured
him differently—stem and handsome, like the statues of
the god Sannendes. But then," she added, winkling the
meat from an escargot with the special tongs to show
Jenny how it was done, "I suppose it would have been a
terrific bore for you to ride all the way back from the
Winterlands with someone who just spent his time 'scan-
ning th'encircling welkin with his eagle-lidded eyes,' as
the song says."

In spite of Zyeme's disapproving glances, her hand-
some cicisbeo Bond was wiping tears of laughter from his
eyes, albeit with great care for his makeup. Even the
servants were having a hard time keeping their faces prop-
erly expressionless as they carried in peacocks roasted
and resplendent in all their feathers and steaming removes
of venison in cream.

"... so the bridegroom looked about for one of those

110                  Barbara Hambly

wood things such as you have here in my rooms," John
was continuing, "but as he couldn't find one, he hung his
clothes over the armor-stand, and damned if Cousin Kat
didn't wake in the night and set about it with her sword,
taking it for a bandit..."

Trust John, Jenny thought, that if he couldn't make an
impression on them on their own grounds, he wouldn't
try to do it on the grounds of Gareth's ballads, either.
They had succumbed to the devil of mischief in him, the
devil that had drawn her from the first moment they had
met as adults. He had used his outrageousness as a defense
against their scorn, but the fact that he had been able to
use it successfully made her think a little better of these
courtiers of Zyeme's.

She finished her meal in silence, and none of them saw
her go.

"Jenny, wait." A tall figure detached itself from the
cluster of bright forms in the antechamber and hurried
across the hall to catch her, tripping over a footstool half-
way.

Jenny paused in the enclosing shadow of the stair lat-
tice. From the anteroom, music was already lilting—not
the notes of the hired musicians, this time, but the com-
plex tunes made to show off the skill of the courtiers
themselves. To play well, it seemed, was the mark of a
true gentleperson; the music of the cwrdth and the
double-dulcimer blended into a counterpoint like lace,
from which themes would emerge like half-familiar
faces glimpsed in a crowd. Over the elaborate harmonies,
she heard the blithe, unrepentant air of the pennywhistle,
following the melody by ear, and she smiled. If the Twelve
Gods of the Cosmos came down, they would be hard put
to disconcert John.

"Jenny, I—I'm sorry." Gareth was panting a little from
his haste. He had resumed his battered spectacles; the

Dragonsbane                  111

fracture in the bottom of the right-hand lens glinted like
a star. "I didn't know it would be like that. I thought—
he's a Dragonsbane..."

She was standing a few steps up the flight; she put out
her hand and touched his face, nearly on level with her
own. "Do you remember when you first met him?"

He flushed with embarrassment. In the illuminated
antechamber, John's scruffy leather and plaids made him
look like a mongrel in a pack of lapdogs. He was exam-
ining a lute-shaped hurdy-gurdy with vast interest, while
the red-haired. Beautiful Isolde of Greenhythe told the
latest of her enormous stock of scatological jokes about
the gnomes. Everyone guffawed but John, who was far
too interested in the musical instrument in his lap to notice;

Jenny saw Gareth's mouth tighten with something between
anger and confused pain. He went north seeking a dream,
she thought; now he had neither that which he had sought
nor that to which he had thought he would return.

"I shouldn't have let them bait you like that," he said
after a moment. "I didn't think Zyeme..."

He broke off, unable to say it. She saw bitterness harden
his mouth, and a disillusion worse than the one John had
dealt him beside the pigsty at Alyn. He had probably
never seen Zyeme being petty before, she thought; or
perhaps he had only seen her in the context of the world
she had created, never having been outside of it himself.
He took a deep breath and went on, "I know I should
have taken up for you somehow, but... but I didn't
know how!" He spread his hands helplessly. With the first
rueful humor at himself that Jenny had seen, he added,
"You know, in ballads it's so easy to rescue someone. I
mean, even if you're defeated, at least you can die grace-
fully and not have everyone you know laugh at you for
the next three weeks."

Jenny laughed and reached out to pat his arm. In the
gloom, his features were only an edge of gold along the

112                  Barbara Hambly

awkward cheekline, and the twin circles of glass were
opaque with the lamplight's reflection that glinted on a
few flame-caught strands of hair and formed a spiky illu-
mination along the edges of his lace collar. "Don't worry
about it." She smiled. "Like slaying dragons, it's a special
art."

"Look," said Gareth, "I—I'm sorry I tricked you. I
wouldn't have done it, if I'd known it would be like this.
But Zyeme sent a messenger to my father—it's only a
day's ride to Bel, and a guest house is being prepared for
you in the Palace. I'll be with you when you present
yourselves to him, and I know he'll be willing to make
terms..." He caught himself, as if remembering his earlier
lying assurances. "That is, I really do know it, this time.
Since the coming of the dragon, there's been a huge stand-
ing reward for its slaying, more than the pay of a garrison
for a year. He has to listen to John."

Jenny leaned one shoulder against the openwork of the
newel post, the chips of reflected lamplight filtering through
the lattice and dappling her black and silver gown with
gold. "Is it so important to you?"

He nodded. Even with the fashionable padding of his
white-and-violet doublet, his narrow shoulders looked
stooped with tiredness and defeat. "I didn't tell very much
truth at the Hold," he said quietly. "But I did tell this:

that I know I'm not a warrior, or a knight, and I know
I'm not good at games. And I'm not stupid enough to
think that the dragon wouldn't kill me in a minute, if I
went there. But—I know everyone around here laughs
when I talk about chivalry and honor and a knight's duty,
and you and John do, too... But that's what makes John
the Thane of the Winterlands and not just another bandit,
doesn't it? He didn't have to kill that first dragon." The
boy gestured wearily, a half-shrug that sent fragments of
luminosity slithering along the white stripes of his slashed

Dragonsbane                  113

sleeves to the diamonds at his cuffs. "I couldn't not do
something. Even if I did muff it up."

Jenny felt she had never liked him so well. She said,
"If you had truly muffed it up, we wouldn't be here."

She climbed the stairs slowly and crossed the gallery
that spanned the hall below. Like the stair, it was enclosed
in a stone trellis cut into the shapes of vines and trees,
and the shadows flickered in a restless harlequin over her
gown and hair. She felt tired and cold from holding herself
braced all evening—the sly baiting and lace-trimmed mal-
ice of Zyeme's court had stung more than she cared to
admit. She pitied them, a little, for what they were, but
she did not have John's brass hide.

She and John had been given the smaller of the two
rooms at the end of the wing; Gareth, the larger, next
door to theirs. Like everything else in Zyeme's lodge,
they were beautifully appointed. The red damasked bed
hangings and alabaster lamps were designed both as a
setting for Zyeme's beauty and a boast of her power to
get what she wanted from the King. No wonder, thought
Jenny, Gareth distrusted and hated any witch who held
sway over a ruler's heart.

As she left the noise of the gallery behind her and
turned down the corridor toward her room, she became
conscious of the stiff rustling of her borrowed finery upon
the inlaid wood of the floor and, with her old instinct for
silence, gathered the heavy skirts up in her hands. Lamp-
light from a half-opened door laid a molten trapezoid of
brightness across the darkness before her. Zyeme, Jenny
knew, was not downstairs with the others, and she felt
uneasy about meeting that beautiful, spoiled, powerful
girl, especially here in her own hunting lodge where she
held sole dominion. Thus Jenny passed the open doorway
in a drift of illusion; and, though she paused in the shad-
ows at what she saw by the lights within, she remained
herself unseen.

114                  Barbara Hambly

It would have been so, she thought later, even had she
not been cloaked in the spells that thwart the casual eye.
Zyeme sat in an island of brightness, the glow of a night-
lamp stroking the gilt-work of her blackwood chair, so
still that not even the rose-point shadows of her lace veils
stirred upon her gown. Her hands were cupped around
the face of Bond Clerlock, who knelt at her feet, and such
was his immobility that not even the sapphires pinning
his hair glinted, but burned steadily with a single reflec-
tion. Though he looked up toward her face, his eyes were
closed; his expression was the contorted, intent face of
a man in ecstasy so strong that it borders pain.

The room smoked with magic, the weight of it like a
glittering lour in the air. As a mage. Jenny could feel it,
smell it like an incense; but it was an incense tainted with
rot. She stepped back, repelled. Though the touch of
Zyeme's hands upon Bond's face was the only contact
between their two bodies, she had the sickened sensation
of having looked upon that which was obscene. Zyeme's
eyes were closed, her childlike brow puckered in slight
concentration; the smile that curved her lips was one of
physical and emotional satisfaction, like a woman's after
the act of love.

Not love, thought Jenny, drawing back from the scene
and moving soundlessly down the hall once more, but
some private satiation.

She sat for a long time in the dark window embrasure
of her room and thought about Zyeme. The moon rose,
flecking the bare tips of the trees above the white carpet
of ground mists; she heard the clocks strike downstairs
and the drift of voices and laughter. The moon was in its
first quarter, and something about that troubled her,
though she could not for the moment think what. After
a long time she heard the door open softly behind her and
turned to see John silhouetted in the dim lamplight from
the hall, its reflection throwing a scatter of metallic glints

Dragonsbane                  115

from his doublet and putting a rough halo on the coarse
wool of his plaids.

Into the darkness he said softly, "Jen?"

"Here."

Moonlight flashed across his specs. She moved a lit-
tle—the barring of the casement shadows on her black
and silver gown made her nearly invisible. He came cau-
tiously across the unfamiliar terrain of the floor, his hands
and face pale blurs against his dark clothing.

"Gaw," he said in disgust as he slung off his plaids.
"To come here to risk my bones slaying a dragon and end
up playing dancing bear for a pack of children." He sat
on the edge of the curtained bed, working at the heavy
buckles of his doublet.

"Did Gareth speak to you?"

His spectacles flashed again as he nodded.

"And?"

John shrugged. "Seeing the pack he runs with, I'm not
surprised he's a gammy-handed chuff with less sense than
my Cousin Dilly's mulberry bushes. And he did take the
risk to search for me, I'll give him that." His voice was
muffled as he bent over to pull off his boots. "Though I'll
wager all the dragon's gold to little green apples he had
no idea how dangerous it would be. God knows what I'd
have done in his shoes, and him that desperate to help
and knowing he hadn't a chance against the dragon him-
self." He set his boots on the floor and sat up again.
"However we came here, I'd be a fool not to speak with
the King and see what he'll offer me, though it's in my
mind that we'll run up against Zyerne in any dealings we
have with him."

Even while playing dancing bear, thought Jenny as she
drew the pins from her hair and let her fashionable veils
slither to the floor, John didn't miss much. The stiffened
silk felt cold under her fingers, from the touch of the
window's nearness, even as her hair did when she unwound

116                  Barbara Humbly

its thick coil and let it whisper dryly down over her bony,
half-bared shoulders.

At length she said, "When Gareth first spoke to me of
her, I was jealous, hating her without ever having seen
her. She has everything that I wanted, John: genius, time
... and beauty," she added, realizing that that, too, mat-
tered. "I was afraid it was that, still."

"I don't know, love." He got to his feet, barefoot in
breeches and creased shirt, and came to the window where
she sat. "It doesn't sound very like you." His hands were
warm through the stiff, chilly satins of her borrowed gown
as he collected the raven weight of her hair and sorted it
into columns that spilled down through his fingers. "I
don't know about her magic, for I'm not magebom myself,
but I do know she is cruel for the sport of it—not in the
big things that would get her pointed at, but in the little
ones—and she leads the others on, teaching them by
example and jest to be as cruel as she. Myself, I'd take
a whip to lan, if he treated a guest as she treated you. I
see now what that gnome we met on the road meant when
he said she poisons what she touches. But she's only a
mistress, when all's said. And as for her being beauti-
ful. .." He shrugged. "If I was a bit shapecrafty, I'd be
beautiful, too."

In spite of herself Jenny laughed and leaned back into
his arms.

But later, in the darkness of the curtained bed, the
memory of Zyeme returned once more to her thoughts.
She saw again the enchantress and Bond in the rosy aura
of the nightlamp and felt the weight and strength of the
magic that had filled the room like the silent build of
thunder. Was it the magnitude of the power alone that
had frightened her, she wondered. Or had it been some
sense of filthiness that lay in it, like the back-taste of
souring milk? Or had that, in its turn, been only the worm-

Dragonsi>a»»e                    117

wood other own jealousy of the younger woman's greater
arts?

John had said that it didn't sound very like her, but
she knew he was wrong. It was like her, like the part of
herself she fought against, the fourteen-year-old girl still
buried in her soul, weeping with exhausted, bitter rage
when the rains summoned by her teacher would not dis-
perse at her command. She had hated Caerdinn for being
stronger than she. And although the long years of looking
after the irascible old man had turned that hatred to affec-
tion, she had never forgotten that she was capable of it.
Even, she added ironically to herself, as she was capable
of working the death-spells on a helpless man, as she had
on the dying robber in the ruins of the town; even as she
was capable of leaving a man and two children who loved
her, because of her love of the quest for power.

Would I have been able to understand what I saw tonight
if I had given all my time, all my heart, to the study of
magic? Would I have had power like that, mighty as a
storm gathered into my two hands?

Through the windows beyond the half-parted bedcur-
tains, she could see the chill white eye of the moon. Its
light, broken by the leading of the casement, lay scattered
like the spangles of a fish's mail across the black and silver
satin of the gown that she had worn and over the respect-
able brown velvet suit that John had not. It touched the
bed and picked out the scars that crossed John's bare
arm, glimmered on the upturned palm of his hand, and
outlined the shape of his nose and lips against the dark-
ness. Her vision in the water bowl returned to her again,
an icy shadow on her heart.

Would she be able to save him, she wondered, if she
were more powerful? If she had given her time to her
powers wholly, instead of portioning it between them and
him? Was that, ultimately, what she had cast unknowingly
away?

118                  Barbara Hambly

Somewhere in the night a hinge creaked. Stilling her
breathing to listen, she heard the almost soundless pat of
bare feet outside her door and the muffled vibration of a
shoulder blundering into the wall.

She slid from beneath the silken quilts and pulled on
her shift. Over it she wrapped the first garment she laid
hands on, John's voluminous plaids, and swiftly crossed
the blackness of the room to open the door.

"Gar?"

He was standing a few feet from her, gawky and very
boyish-looking in his long nightshirt. His gray eyes stared
out straight ahead of him, without benefit of spectacles,
and his thin hair was flattened and tangled from the pillow.
He gasped at the sound of her voice and almost fell, grop-
ing for the wall's support. She realized then that she had
waked him.

"Gar, it's me, Jenny. Are you all right?"

His breathing was fast with shock. She put her hand
gently on his arm to steady him, and he blinked myop-
ically down at her for a moment. Then he drew a long
breath. "Fine," he said shakily. "I'm fine, Jenny. I..."
He looked around him and ran an unsteady hand through
his hair. "I—I must have been walking in my sleep again."

"Do you often?"

He nodded and rubbed his face. "That is... I didn't in
the north, but I do sometimes here. It's just that I
dreamed..." He paused, frowning, trying to recall.
"Zyeme..."

"Zyeme?"

Sudden color flooded his pallid face. "Nothing," he
mumbled, and avoided her eyes. "That is—I don't
remember."

After she had seen him safely back to the dark doorway
of his room. Jenny stood for a moment in the hall, hearing
the small sounds ofbedcurtains and sheets as he returned
to his rest. How late it was, she could not guess. The

Dragonsbane                  119

hunting lodge was deathly silent about her, the smells of
long-dead candles, spilled wine, and the frowsty residue
of spent passions now flat and stale. All the length of the
corridor, every room was dark save one, whose door stood
ajar. The dim glow of a single nightlamp shone within,
and its light lay across the silky parquet of the floor like
a dropped scarf of luminous gold.

CHAPTER VI

"HE'LL HAVE TO listen to you." Gareth perched him-
self in the embrasure of one of the tall windows that ran
the length of the southern wall of the King's Gallery, the
wan sunlight shimmering with moony radiance in the old-
fashioned jewels he wore. "I've just heard that the dragon
destroyed the convoy taking supplies out to the siege
troops at Halnath last night. Over a thousand pounds of
flour and sugar and meat destroyed—horses and oxen
dead or scattered—the bodies of the guards burned past
recognition."

He nervously adjusted the elaborate folds of his cer-
emonial mantlings and peered shortsightedly at John and
Jenny, who shared a carved bench of ebony inlaid with
malachite. Due to the exigencies of court etiquette, formal
costume had been petrified into a fashion a hundred and
fifty years out of date, with the result that all the courtiers
and petitioners assembled in the long room had the stilted,
costumed look of characters in a masquerade. Jenny
noticed that John, though he might persist in playing the
barbarian in his leather and plaids among the admiring
younger courtiers, was not about to do so in the presence

120

Dragonsbane                  121

of the King. Gareth had draped John's blue-and-cream
satin mantlings for him—a valet's job. Bond Cleriock had
offered to do it but. Jenny gathered, there were rigid sar-
torial rules governing such matters; it would have been
very like Bond to arrange the elaborate garment in some
ridiculous style, knowing the Dragonsbane was unable to
tell the difference.

Bond was present among the courtiers who awaited
the arrival of the King. Jenny could see him, further down
the King's Gallery, standing in one of the slanting bars of
pale, platinum light. As usual, his costume outshone every
other man's present; his mantlings were a miracle of com-
plex folds and studied elegance, so thick with embroidery
that they glittered like a snake's back; his flowing sleeves,
six generations out of date, were precise to a quarter-inch
in their length and hang. He had even painted his face in
the archaic formal fashion, which some of the courtiers
did in preference to the modem applications of kohl and
rouge—John had flatly refused to have anything to do
with either style. The colors accentuated the pallor of
young Clerlock's face, though he looked better. Jenny
noted, than he had yesterday on the ride from Zyeme's
hunting lodge to Bel—less drawn and exhausted.

He was looking about him now with nervous anxiety,
searching for someone—probably Zyeme. In spite of how
ill he had seemed yesterday, he had been her most faithful
attendant, riding at her side and holding her whip, her
pomander ball, and the reins of her palfrey when she
dismounted. Small thanks. Jenny thought, he had gotten
for it. Zyeme had spent the day flirting with the unre-
sponsive Gareth.

It was not that Gareth was immune to her charms. As
a nonparticipant. Jenny had an odd sense of unobserved
leisure, as if she were watching squirrels from a blind.
Unnoticed by the courtiers, she could see that Zyeme
was deliberately teasing Gareth's senses with every touch

122                  Barbara Hambly

and smile. Do the magebom love? he had asked her once,
back in the bleak Winterlands. Evidently he had come to
his own conclusions about whether Zyeme loved him, or
he her. But Jenny knew full well that love and desire were
two different things, particularly to a boy of eighteen.
Under her innocently minxish airs, Zyeme was a woman
skilled at manipulating the passions' of men.

Wry? Jenny wondered, looking up at the boy's awk-
ward profile against the soft cobalt shadows of the gallery.
For the amusement of seeing him struggle not to betray
his father? Somehow to use his guilt to control him so
that one day she could turn the King against him by crying
rape?

A stir ran the length of the gallery, like wind in dry
wheat. At the far end, voices murmured, "The King! The
King!" Gareth scrambled to his feet and hastily checked
the folds of his mantlings again. John rose, pushing his
anachronistic specs a little more firmly up on the bridge
of his nose. Taking Jenny's hand, he followed more slowly,
as Gareth hurried toward the line of courtiers that was
forming up in the center of the hall.

At the far end, bronze doors swung inward. The Cham-
berlain Badegamus stepped through, stout, pink, and
elderly, emblazoned in a livery of crimson and gold that
smote the eye with its splendor. "My lords, my ladies—
the King."

Her arm against Gareth's in the press. Jenny was aware
of the boy's shudder of nervousness. He had, after all,
stolen his father's seal and disobeyed his orders—and he
was no longer as blithely unaware of the consequences
of his actions as the characters of most ballads seemed
to be. She felt him poised, ready to step forward and
execute the proper salaam, as others down the rank were
already doing, and receive his father's acknowledgment
and invitation to a private interview.

The King's head loomed above all others, taller even

Dragonsbane                  123

than his son; Jenny could see that his hair was as fair as
Gareth's but much thicker, a warm barley-gold that was
beginning to fade to the color of straw. Like the steady
murmuring of waves on the shore, voices repeated "My
lord... my lord..."

Her mind returned briefly to the Winterlands. She sup-
posed she should have felt resentment for the Kings who
had withdrawn their troops and left the lands to ruin, or
awe at finally seeing the source of the King's law that
John was ready to die to uphold. But she felt neither,
knowing that this man, Uriens of Bel, had had nothing to
do with either withdrawing those troops or making the
Law, but was merely the heir of the men who had. Like
Gareth before he had traveled to the Winterlands, he
undoubtedly had no more notion of those things than what
he had learned from his tutors and promptly forgotten.

As he approached, nodding to this woman or that man,
signing that he would speak to them in private, Jenny felt
a vast sense of distance from this tall man in his regal
crimson robes. Her only allegiance was to the Winterlands
and to the individuals who dwelt there, to people and a
land she knew. It was John who felt the ancient bond of
fealty; John who had sworn to this man his allegiance,
his sword, and his life.

Nevertheless, she felt the tension as the King
approached them, tangible as a color in the air. Covert
eyes were on them, the younger courtiers watching, wait-
ing to see the reunion between the King and his errant
son.

Gareth stepped forward, the oak-leaf-cut end of his
mantlings gathered like a cloak between the second and
third fingers of his right hand. With surprising grace, he
bent his long, gangly frame into a perfect Sarmendes-in-
Splendor salaam, such as only the Heir could make, and
then only to the monarch. "My lord."

King Uriens II of Belmarie, Suzerain of the Marches,

124                  Barbara Hambly

High Lord ofWyr, Nast, and the Seven Islands, regarded
his son for a moment out of hollow and colorless eyes set
deep within a haggard, brittle face. Then, without a word,
he turned away to acknowledge the next petitioner.

The silence in the gallery would have blistered the paint
from wood. Like black poison dumped into clear water,
it spread to the farthest ends of the room. The last few
petitioners' voices were audible through it, clearer and
clearer, as if they shouted; the closing of the gilded bronze
doors as the King passed on into his audience room
sounded like the booming of thunder. Jenny was con-
scious of the eyes of all the room looking anywhere but
at them, then sliding back in surreptitious glances, and of
Gareth's face, as white as his collar lace.

A soft voice behind them said, "Please don't be angry
with him, Gareth."

Zyeme stood there, in plum-colored silk so dark it was
nearly black, with knots of pink-tinted cream upon her
trailing sleeves. Her mead-colored eyes were troubled.
"You did take his seal, you know, and depart without his
permission."

John spoke up. "Bit of an expensive slap on the wrist,
though, isn't it? I mean, there the dragon is and all, while
we're here waiting for leave to go after it."

Zyeme's lips tightened a little, then smoothed. At the
near end of the King's Gallery, a small door in the great
ones opened, and the Chamberlain Badegamus appeared,
quietly summoning the first of the petitioners whom the
King had acknowledged.

"There really is no danger to us here, you know. The
dragon has been confining his depredations to the farm-
steads along the feet of Nast Wall."

"Ah," John said comprehendingly. "That makes it all
right, then. And is this what you've told the people of
those farmsteads to which, as you say, the dragon's been
confining his depredations?"

Dragonsbane                  125

The flash of anger in her eyes was stronger then, as if
no one had ever spoken to her so—or at least, thought
Jenny, observing silently from John's side, not for a long
time. With visible effort, Zyeme controlled herself and
said with an air of one reproving a child, "You must under-
stand. There are many more pressing concerns facing the

King..."

"More pressing than a dragon sitting on his doorstep?"
demanded Gareth, outraged.

She burst into a sweet gurgle of laughter. "There's no
need to enact a Dockmarket drama over it, you know.
I've told you before, darling, it isn't worth the wrinkles
it will give you."

He pulled his head back from her playful touch.
"Wrinkles! We're talking about people being killed!"

"Tut, Gareth," Bond Clerlock drawled, strolling
languidly over to them. "You're getting as bad as old
Polycarp used to be."

Under the paint, his face looked even more washed-
out next to Zyeme's sparkling radiance. With a forced
effort at his old lightness, he went on, "You shouldn't
grudge-those poor farmers the only spice in their dull little
lives."

"Spice..." Gareth began, and Zyeme squeezed his
hand chidingly.

"Don't tell me you're going to go all dull and altruistic
on us. What a bore that would be." She smiled. "And I
will tell you this," she added more soberly. "Don't do
anything that would further anger your father. Be patient—
and try to understand."

Halfway down the long gallery, the Chamberlain Bad-
egamus was returning, passing the small group of gnomes
who sat, an island of isolation, in the shadow of one of
the fluted ornamental arches along the east wall. As the
Chamberlain walked by, one of them rose in a silken whis-
per of flowing, alien robes, the cloudy wisps of his milk-

126                  Barbara Hambly

white hair floating around his slumped back. Gareth had
pointed him out to Jenny earlier—Azwylcartusherands,
called Dromar by the folk of men who had little patience
with the tongue of gnomes, longtime ambassador from the
Lord of the Deep to the Court of Bel. Badegamus saw
him and checked his stride, then glanced quickly at Zyeroe.
She shook her head. Badegamus averted his face and
walked past the gnomes without seeing them.

"They grow impudent," the enchantress said softly.
"To send envoys here, when they fight on the side of the
traitors of Halnath."

"Well, they can hardly help that, can they, if the back
way out of the Deep leads into the Citadel," John remarked.

"They could have opened the Citadel gates to let the
King's troops in."

John scratched the side of his long nose. "Well, being
a barbarian and all, I wouldn't know how things are done
in civilized lands," he said. "In the north, we've got a
word for someone who'd do that to a man who gave him
shelter when he was driven from his home."

For an instant Zyeme was silent, her power and her
anger seeming to crackle in the air. Then she burst into
another peal of chiming laughter. "I swear, Dragonsbane,
you do have a refreshingly naive way of looking at things.
You make me feel positively ancient." She brushed a ten-
dril of her hair aside from her cheek as she spoke; she
looked as sweet and guileless as a girl of twenty. "Come.
Some of us are going to slip away from this silliness and
go riding along the sea cliffs. Will you come, Gareth?"
Her hand stole into his in such a way that he could not
avoid it without rudeness—Jenny could see his face color
slightly at the touch. "And you, our barbarian? You know
the King won't see you today."

"Be that as it may," John said quietly. "I'll stay here
on the off chance."

Dragonsbane                  127

Bond laughed tinnily. "There's the spirit that won the
Realm!"

"Aye," John agreed in a mild voice and returned to the
carved bench where he and Jenny had been, secure in his
established reputation for barbarous eccentricity.

Gareth drew his hand from Zyeme's and sat down
nearby, catching his mantlings in the lion's-head arm of
the chair. "I think I'll stay as well," he said, with as much
dignity as one could have while disentangling oneself from
the furniture.

Bond laughed again. "I think our Prince has been in
the north too long!" Zyerne wrinkled her nose, as if at a
joke in doubtful taste.

"Run along, Bond." She smiled. "I must speak to the
King. I shall join you presently." Gathering up her train,
she moved off toward the bronze doors of the King's
antechamber, the opals that spangled her veils giving the
impression of dew flecking an apple blossom as she passed
the pale bands of the windowlight. As she came near the
little group of gnomes, old Dromar rose again and walked
toward her with the air of one steeling himself for a loathed
but necessary encounter. But she turned her glance from
him and quickened her step, so that, to intercept her, he
would have to run after her on his short, bandy legs. This
he would not do, but stood looking after her for a moment,
smoldering anger in his pale amber eyes.

"I don't understand it," said Gareth, much later, as the
three of them jostled their way along the narrow lanes of
the crowded Dockmarket quarter. "She said Father was
angry, yes—but he knew whom I'd be bringing with me.
And he must have known about the dragon's latest attack."
He hopped across the fish-smelling slime of the gutter to
avoid a trio of sailors who'd come staggering out of one
of the taverns that lined the cobbled street and nearly
tripped over his own cloak.

128                  Barbara Hambly

When Badegamus had announced to the nearly empty
gallery that the King would see no one else that day, John
and Jenny had taken the baffled and fuming Gareth back
with them to the guest house they had been assigned in
one of the outer courts of the Palace. There they had
changed out of their borrowed court dress, and John had
announced his intention of spending the remainder of the
afternoon in the town, in quest of gnomes.

"Gnomes?" Gareth said, surprised.

"Well, if it hasn't occurred to anyone else, it has
occurred to me that, if I'm to fight this drake, I'm going
to need to know the layout of the caverns." With sur-
prising deftness, he disentangled himself from the intri-
cate crisscross folds of his mantlings, his head emerging
from the double-faced satin like a tousled and unruly weed.
"And since it didn't seem the thing to address them at
Court..."

"But they're plotting!" Gareth protested. He paused
in his search for a place to dump the handful of old-
fashioned neck-chains and rings among the already-
accumulating litter of books, harpoons, and the contents
of Jenny's medical pouch on the table. "Speaking to them
at Court would have been suicide! And besides, you're
not going to fight him in the Deep, are you? I mean..."
He barely stopped himself from the observation that in
all the ballads the Dragonsbanes had slain their foes in
front of their lairs, not in them.

"If I fight him outside and he takes to the air, it's all
over," John returned, as if he were talking about back-
gammon strategy. "And though it's crossed my mind we're
walking through a morass of plots here, it's to no one's
advantage to have the dragon stay in the Deep. The rest
of it's all none of my business. Now, are you going to
guide us, or do we go about the streets asking folk where
the gnomes might be found?"

Dragonsbane                  129

To Jenny's surprise and probably a little to his own,
Gareth offered his services as a guide.

"Tell me about Zyerne, Gar," Jenny said now, thrusting
her hands deep into her jacket pockets as she walked.
"Who is she? Who was her teacher? What Line was she

in?"

"Teacher?" Gareth had obviously never given the mat-
ter a thought. "Line?"

"If she is a mage, she must have been taught by some-
one." Jenny glanced up at the tall boy towering beside
her, while they detoured to avoid a gaggle of passersby
around a couple of street-comer jugglers. Beyond them,
in a fountain square, a fat man with the dark complexion
of a southerner had set up a waffle stand, bellowing his
wares amid clouds of steam that scented the raw, misty
air for yards.

"There are ten or twelve major Lines, named for the
mages that founded them. There used to be more, but
some have decayed and died. My own master Caerdinn,
and therefore I and any other pupils of his, or of his
teacher Spaeth, or Spaeth's other students, are all in the
Line of Herne. To a mage, knowing that I am of the Line
of Heme says—oh, a hundred things about my power
and my attitude toward power, about the kinds of spells
that I know, and about the kind that I will not use."

"Really?" Gareth was fascinated. "I didn't know it was
anything like that. I thought that magic was just some-
thing—well, something you were born with."

"So is the talent for art," Jenny said. "But without
proper teaching, it never comes to fullest fruition; without
sufficient time given to the study of magic, sufficient striv-
ing ..." She broke off, with an ironic smile at herself. "All
power has to be paid for," she continued after a moment.
"And all power must come from somewhere, have been
passed along by someone."

It was difficult for her to speak of her power; aside

130                  Barbara Hambly

from the confusion of her heart about her own power,
there was much in it that any not magebom simply did
not understand. She had in all her life met only one who
did, and he was presently over beside the waffle stand,
getting powdered sugar on his plaids.

Jenny sighed and came to a halt to wait for him at the
edge of the square. The cobbles were slimy here with sea
air and offal; the wind smelled offish and, as everywhere
in the city of Del, of the intoxicating wildness of the sea.
This square was typical of the hundreds that made up the
interlocking warrens ofBel's Dockmarket, hemmed in on
three-and-a-half sides by the towering, rickety tenements
and dominated by the moldering stones of a slate-gray
clock tower, at whose foot a neglected shrine housed the
battered image of Quis, the enigmatic Lord of Time. In
the center of the square bubbled a fountain in a wide basin
of chip-edged granite, the stones of its rim worn smooth
and white above and clotted beneath with the black-green
moss that seemed to grow everywhere in the damp air of
the city. Women were dipping water there and gossiping,
their skirts hiked up almost to their thighs but their heads
modestly covered in clumsy wool veils tied in knots under
their hair to keep them out of the way.

In the mazes of stucco and garish color of the Dock-
market, John's outlandishness hadn't drawn much notice.
The sloping, cobbled streets were crowded with sojoum-
ers from three-fourths of the Realm and all the Southern
Lands: sailors with shorn heads and beards like coconut
husks; peddlers from the garden province of Istmark in
their old-fashioned, bundly clothes, the men as well as
the women wearing veils; moneychangers in the black
gabardine and skullcaps that marked them out as the Wan-
derer's Children, forbidden to own land; whores painted
to within an inch of their lives; and actors, jugglers, scarf
sellers, rat killers, pickpockets, cripples, and tramps. A
few women cast looks of dismissive scorn at Jenny's

Dragonsbane                  131

uncovered head, and she was annoyed at the anger she

felt at them.

She asked, "How much do you know about Zyeme?
What was she apprenticed as in the Deep?"

Gareth shrugged. "I don't know. My guess would be
in the Places of Healing. That was where the greatest
power of the Deep was supposed to lie—among their
healers. People used to journey for days to be tended
there, and I know most of the mages were connected with

them."

Jenny nodded. Even in the isolated north, among the
children of men who knew virtually nothing of the ways
of the gnomes, Caerdinn had spoken with awe of the
power that dwelled within the Places of Healing in the
heart of the Deep of Ylferdun.

Across the square, a religious procession came into
view, the priests of Kantirith, Lord of the Sea, walking
with their heads muffled in their ceremonial hoods, lest
an unclean sight distract them, the ritual wailing of the
flutes all but drowning out their murmured chants. Like
all the ceremonials of the Twelve Gods, both the words
and the music of the flutes had been handed down by rote
from ancient days; the words were unintelligible, the music
like nothing Jenny had heard at Court or elsewhere.

"And when did Zyeme come to Bel?" she asked Gar-
eth, as the muttering train filed past.

The muscles of the boy's jaw tightened. "After my
mother died," he said colorlessly. "I—I suppose I shouldn't
have been angry at Father about it. At the time I didn't
understand the way Zyeme can draw people, sometimes
against their will." He concentrated his attention upon
smoothing the ruffles of his sleeve for some moments,
then sighed. "I suppose he needed someone. I wasn't
particularly good to him about Mother's death."

Jenny said nothing, giving him room to speak or hold
his peace. From the other end of the square, another

132 Barbara Hambly

religious procession made its appearance, one of the
southern cults that spawned in the Dockmarket like rab-
bits; dark-complexioned men and women were clapping
their hands and singing, while skinny, androgynous priests
swung their waist-length hair and danced for the little idol
borne in their midst in a carrying shrine of cheap, pink
chintz. The priests of Kantiritfc seemed to huddle a little
more closely in their protecting hoods, and the wailing of
the flutes increased. Gareth spared the newcomers a dis-
approving glance, and Jenny remembered that the King
of Bel was also Pontifex Maximus of the official cult;

Gareth had no doubt been brought up in the most careful
orthodoxy.

But the din gave them the illusion of privacy. For all
any of the crowd around them cared, they might have
been alone; and after a time Gareth spoke again.

"It was a hunting accident," he explained. "Father and
I both hunt, although Father hasn't done so lately. Mother
hated it, but she loved my father and would go with him
when he asked her to. He teased her about it, and made
little jokes about her cowardice—but he wasn't really
joking. He can't stand cowards. She'd follow him over
terrible country, clinging to her sidesaddle and staying up
with the hunt; after it was over, he'd hug her and laugh
and ask her if it wasn't worth it that she'd plucked up her
courage—that sort of thing. She did it for as long as I
can remember. She used to lie and tell him she was starting
to leam to enjoy it; but when I was about four, I remember
her in her hunting habit—it was peach-colored velvet with
gray fur, I remember—just before going out, throwing up
because she was so frightened."

"She rounds like a brave lady," Jenny said quietly.

Gareth's glance flicked up to her face, then away again.
"It wasn't really Father's fault," he went on after a moment.
"But when it finally did happen, he felt that it was. The
horse came down with her over some rocks—in a side-

Dragonsbane                  133

saddle you can't fall clear. She died four or five days later.
That was five years ago. I—" He hesitated, the words
sticking in his throat. "I wasn't very good to him about

it."

He adjusted his specs in an awkward and unconvincing
cover for wiping his eyes on his sleeve ruffle. "Now that
I look back on it, I think, if she'd been braver, she'd
probably have had the courage to tell him she didn't want
to go—the courage to risk his mockery. Maybe that's
where I get it," he added, with the shy flash of a grin.
"Maybe I should have seen that I couldn't possibly blame
him as much as he blamed himself—that I didn't say
anything to him that he hadn't already thought." He
shrugged his bony shoulders. "I understand now. But when
I was thirteen, I didn't. And by the time I did understand,
it had been too long to say anything to him. And by that
time, there was Zyeme."

The priests of Kantirith wound their way out of sight
up a crooked lane between the drunken lean of crazy
buildings. Children who had stopped to gawk after the
procession took up their games once more; John resumed
his cautious way across the moss-edged, herringbone pat-
tern of the wet cobbles toward them, stopping every few
paces to stare at some new marvel—a chair-mender pur-
suing his trade on the curbstone, or the actors within a
cheap theater gesticulating wildly while a crier outside
shouted tidbits of the plot to the passersby around the
door. He would never, Jenny reflected with rueful amuse-
ment, leam to comport himself like the hero of legend
that he was.

"It must have been hard for you," she said.

Gareth sighed. "It was easier a few years ago," he
admitted. "I could hate her cleanly then. Later, for a while
I—I couldn't even do that." He blushed again. "And
now..."

A commotion in the square flared suddenly, like the

134 Barbara Hambly

noise of a dogfight; a woman's jeering voice yelled,
"Whore!" and Jenny's head snapped around.

But it was not she and her lack of veils that was the
target. A little gnome woman, her soft mane of hair like
an apricot cloud in the wan sunlight, was making her
hesitant way toward the fountain. Her black silk trousers
were hitched up over her knees to keep them out of the
puddles in the broken pavement, and her white tunic, with
its flowing embroideries and carefully mended sleeves,
proclaimed that she was living in poverty alien to her
upbringing. She paused, peering around her with a painful
squint in the too-bright daylight; then her steps resumed
in the direction of the fountain, her tiny, round hands
clutching nervously at the handle of the bucket that she
inexpertly bore.

Somebody else shouted, "Come slumming, have we,
m'lady? Tired of sitting up there on all that grain you got
hid? Too cheap to hire servants?"

The woman stopped again, swinging her head from side
to side as if seeking her tormentors, half-blind in the out-
door glare. Someone caught her with a dog turd on the
arm. She hopped, startled, and her narrow feet in their
soft leather shoes skidded on the wet, uneven stones. She
dropped the bucket as she fell, and groped about for it
on hands and knees. One of the women by the fountain,
with the grinning approbation of her neighbors, sprang
down to kick it beyond her reach.

"That'll leam you to hoard the bread you've bought
out of honest folks' mouths!"

The gnome made a hasty scrabble around her. A faded,
fat woman who'd been holding forth the loudest in the
gossip around the fountain kicked the pail a little further
from the searching hands.

"And to plot against the King!"

The gnome woman raised herself to her knees, peering
about her, and one of the children darted out of the gath-

Dragonsbane                  135

ering crowd behind her and pulled the long wisps of her
hair. She spun around, clutching, but the boy had gone.
Another took up the game and sprang nimbly out to do
the same, too engrossed in the prospect of fun to notice
John.

At the first sign of trouble, the Dragonsbane had turned
to the man next to him, a blue-tattooed easterner in a
metalsmith's leather apron and not much else, and handed
him the three waffles he held stacked in his hands. "Would
you ever hold these?" Then he made his way unhurriedly
through the press, with a courteous string of "Excuse me
... pardon..." in time to catch the second boy who'd
jumped out to take up the baiting where the first had begun
it.

Gareth could have told them what to expect—Zyeme's
courtiers weren't the only ones deceived by John's
appearance of harmless friendliness. The bully, caught
completely offguard from behind, didn't even have time
to shriek before he hit the waters of the fountain. A huge
splash doused every woman on the steps and most of the
surrounding idlers. As the boy surfaced, spitting and gasp-
ing, Aversin turned from picking up the bucket and said
in a friendly tone, "Your manners are as filthy as your
clothes—I'm surprised your mother lets you out like that.
They'll be a bit cleaner now, won't they?"

He dipped the bucket full and turned back to the man
who was holding his waffles. For an instant Jenny thought
the smith would throw them into the fountain, but John
only smiled at him, bright as the sun on a knifeblade, and
sullenly the man put the waffles into his free hand. In the
back of the crowd a woman sneered, "Gnome lover!"

"Thanks." John smiled, still at his brass-faced friend-
liest. "Sorry I threw offal in the fountain and all." Bal-
ancing the waffles in his hand, he descended the few steps
and walked beside the little gnome woman across the
square toward the mouth of the alley whence she had




136 Barbara Hambly

come. Jenny, hurrying after him with Gareth at her heels,
noticed that none followed them too closely.

"John, you are incorrigible," she said severely. "Are
you all right?" This last was addressed to the gnome, who
was hastening along on her short, bowed legs, clinging to
the Dragonsbane's shadow for protection.

She peered up at Jenny with teeble, colorless eyes.
"Oh, yes. My thanks. I had never—always we went out
to the fountain at night, or sent the girl who worked for
us, if we needed water during the day. Only she left." The
wide mouth pinched up on the words, at the taste of some
unpleasant memory.

"I bet she did, if she was like that lot," John remarked,
jerking his thumb back toward the square. Behind them,
the crowd trailed menacingly, yelling, "Traitors! Hoard-
ers ! Ingrates!" and fouler things besides. Somebody threw
a fish head that fucked off Jenny's skirts and shouted
something about an old whore and her two pretty-boys;

Jenny felt the bristles of rage rise along her spine. Others
took up this theme. She felt angry enough to curse them,
but in her heart she knew that she could lay no greater
curse upon them than to be what they already were.

"Have a waffle?" John offered disanningly, and the
gnome lady took the preferred confection with hands that
shook.

Gareth, carmine with embarrassment, said nothing.

Around a mouthful of sugar, John said, "Gie lucky for
us fruit and vegies are a bit too dear these days to fling,
isn't it? Here?"

The gnome ducked her head quickly as she entered the
shadows of a doorway to a huge, crumbling house wedged
between two five-storey tenements, its rear wall dropping
straight to the dank brown waters of a stagnant canal.
The windows were tightly shuttered, and the crumbling
stucco was written over with illiterate and filthy scrawls,
splattered with mud and dung. From every shutter Jenny

Dragonsbane                  137

could sense small, weak eyes peering down in apprehen-
sion.

The door was opened from within, the gnome taking
her bucket and popping through like a frightened mole
into its hill. John put a quick hand on the rotting panels
to keep them from being shut in his face, then braced with
all his strength. The doorkeeper was determined and had
the prodigious muscles of the gnomes.

"Wait!" John pleaded, as his feet skidded on the wet
marble of the step. "Listen! I need your help! My name's
John Aversin—I've come from the north to see about this
dragon of yours, but I can't do it without your aid." He
wedged his shoulder into the narrow slit that was all that
was left. "Please."

The pressure on the other side of the door was released
so suddenly that he staggered inward under his own
momentum. From the darkness beyond a soft, high voice
like a child's said in the archaic High Speech that the
gnomes used at Court, "Come in, thou others. It does
thee no good to be thus seen at the door of the house of
the gnomes."

As they stepped inside, John and Gareth blinked against
the dimness, but Jenny, with her wizard's sight, saw at
once that the gnome who had admitted them was old
Dromar, ambassador to the court of the King.

Beyond him, the lower hall of the house stretched in
dense shadow. It had once been grand in the severe style
of a hundred years ago—the old manor, she guessed,
upon whose walled grounds the crowded, stinking tene-
ments of the neighborhood had later been erected. In
places, rotting frescoes were still dimly visible on the
stained walls; and the vastness of the hall spoke of gra-
cious furniture now long since chopped up for firewood
and of an aristocratic carelessness about the cost of heat-
ing fuel. The place was like a cave now, tenebrous and
damp, its boarded windows letting in only a few chinks

138 Barbara Hambly

of watery light to outline stumpy pillars and the dry mosa-
ics of the impluvium. Above the sweeping curve of the
old-fashioned, open stair she saw movement in the gallery.
It was crowded with gnomes, watching warily these
intruders from the hostile world of men.

In the gloom, the soft, childlike voice said, "Thy name
is not unknown among us, John Aversin."

"Well, that makes it easier," John admitted, dusting off
his hands and looking down at the round head of the
gnome who stood before him and into sharp, pale eyes
under the flowing mane of snowy hair. "Be a bit awkward
if I had to explain it all, though I imagine Gar here could
sing you the ballads."

A slight smile tugged at the gnome's mouth—the first,
Jenny suspected, in a long time—as he studied the incon-
gruous, bespectacled reality behind the glitter of the leg-
ends. "Thou art the first," he remarked, ushering them
into the huge, chilly cavern of the room, his mended silk
robes whispering as he moved. "How many hast thy father
sent out. Prince Gareth? Fifteen? Twenty? And none of
them came here, nor asked any of the gnomes what they
might know of the dragon's coming—we, who saw it best."

Gareth looked disconcerted. "Er—that is—the wrath
of the King..."

"And whose fault was that. Heir ofUriens, when rumor
had been noised abroad that we had made an end of thee?"

There was an uncomfortable silence as Gareth red-
dened under that cool, haughty gaze. Then he bent his
head and said in a stifled voice, "I am sorry, Dromar. I
never thought of—of what might be said, or who would
take the blame for it, if I disappeared. Truly I didn't know.
I behaved rashly—I seem to have behaved rashly all the
way around."

The old gnome sniffed. "Soi" He folded his small hands
before the complicated knot of his sash, his gold eyes
studying Gareth in silence for a time. Then he nodded,

Dragonsbane                  139

and said, "Well, better it is that thou fall over thine own
feet in the doing of good than sit upon thy hands and let
it go undone, Gareth ofMagloshaldon. Another time thou
shalt do better." He turned away, gesturing toward the
inner end of the shadowed room, where a blackwood table
could be distinguished in the gloom, no more than a foot
high, surrounded by burst and patched cushions set on
the floor in the fashion of the gnomes. "Come. Sit. What
is it that thou wish to know, Dragonsbane, of the coming
of the dragon to the Deep?"

"The size of the thing," John said promptly, as they all
settled on their knees around the table. "I've only heard
rumor and story—has anybody got a good, concrete mea-
surement?"

From beside Jenny, the high, soft voice of the gnome
woman piped, "The top of his haunch lies level with the
frieze carved above the pillars on either side of the door-
way arch, which leads from the Market Hall into the Grand
Passage into the Deep itself. That is twelve feet, by the
measurements of men."

There was a moment's silence, as Jenny digested the
meaning of that piece of information. Then she said, "If
the proportions are the same, that makes it nearly forty
feet."

"Aye," Dromar said. "The Market Hall—the first cav-
ern of the Deep, that lies just behind the Great Gates that
lead into the outer world—is one hundred and fifty feet
from the Gates to the inner doors of the Grand Passage
at the rear. The dragon was nearly a third of that length."

John folded his hands on the table before him. Though
his face remained expressionless. Jenny detected the slight
quickening of his breath. Forty feet was half again the
size of the dragon that had come so close to killing him
in Wyr, with all the dark windings of the Deep in which
to hide.

"D'you have a map of the Deep?"

140 Barbara Hambly

The old gnome looked affronted, as if he had inquired
about the cost of a night with his daughter. Then his face
darkened with stubborn anger. "That knowledge is for-
bidden to the children of men."

Patiently, John said, "After all that's been done you
here, I don't blame you for not wanting to give out the
secrets of the Deep; but I need to know. I can't take the
thing from the front. I can't fight something that big head-
on. I need to have some idea where it will be lairing."

"It will be lairing in the Temple of Sarmendes, on the
first level of the Deep." Dromar spoke grudgingly, his
pale eyes narrow with the age-old suspicion of a smaller,
weaker race that had been driven underground millennia
ago by its long-legged and bloodthirsty cousins. "It lies
just off the Grand Passage that runs back from the Gates.
The Lord of Light was beloved by the men who dwelt
within the Deep—the King's ambassadors and then-
households, and those who had been apprenticed among
our people. His Temple is close to the surface, for the
folk of men do not like to penetrate too far into the bones
of the Earth. The weight of the stone unnerves them; they
find the darkness disquieting. The dragon will lie there.
There he will bring his gold."

"Is there a back way into it?" John asked. "Through
the priests' quarters or the treasuries?"

Dromar said, "No," but the little gnome woman said,
"Yes, but thou would never find it, Dragonsbane."

"By the Stone!" The old gnome whirled upon her, smol-
dering rage in his eyes. "Be silent, Mab! The secrets of
the Deep are not for his kind!" He looked viciously at
Jenny and added, "Nor for hers."

John held up his hand for silence. "Why wouldn't I
find it?"

Mab shook her head. From beneath a heavy brow, her
round, almost colorless blue eyes peered up at him, kindly
and a little sad. "The ways lead through the warrens,"

Dragonsbane                  141

she said simply. "The caverns and tunnels there are a
maze that we who dwell there can learn, in twelve or
fourteen years of childhood. But even were we to tell thee
the turnings thou must take, one false step would con-
demn thee to a death by starvation and to the madness
that falls upon men in the darkness under the earth. We
filled the mazes with lamps, but those lamps are quenched
now."

"Can you draw me a map, then?" And, when the two
gnomes only looked at him with stubborn secrets in their
eyes, he said, "Dammit, I can't do it without your help!
I'm sorry it has to be this way, but it's trust me or lose
the Deep forever; and those are your only choices!"

Dromar's long, outward-curling eyebrows sank lower
over the stub of his nose. "So be it, then," he said.

But Miss Mab turned resignedly and began to rise. The
ambassador's eyes blazed. "No! By the Stone, is it not
enough that the children of men seek to steal the secrets
of the Deep? Must thou give them up freely?"

"Tut," Mab said with a wrinkled smile. "This Dragons-
bane will have problems enow from the dragon, without
going seeking in the darkness for others."

"A map that is drawn may be stolen!" Dromar insisted.
"By the Stone that lies in the heart of the Deep..."

Mab got comfortably to her feet, shaking out her patched
silken garments, and pottered over to the scroll-rack that
filled one comer of the dim hall. She returned with a reed
pen and several sheets of tattered papyrus paper in her
hand. "Those whom you fear would steal it know the way
to the heart of the Deep already," she pointed out gently.
"If this barbarian knight has ridden all the way from the
Winterlands to be our champion, it would be paltry not
to offer him a shield."

"And her?" Dromar jabbed one stumpy finger, laden
with old-fashioned, smooth-polished gems, at Jenny. "She
is a witch. What surety have we that she will not go




142                  Barbara Hambly

snooping and spying, delving out our secrets, turning them
against us, defiling them, poisoning them, as others have
done?"

The gnome woman frowned down at Jenny for a
moment, her wide mouth pursed up with thought. Then
she knelt beside her again and pushed the writing things
across the table at Dromar. "There," she said. "Thou may
draw the maps, and put upon them what thou will, and
leave from them what thou will."

"And the witch?" There was suspicion and hatred in
his voice, and Jenny reflected that she was getting very
tired of being mistaken for Zyeme.

"Ah," said Miss Mab, and reaching out, took Jenny's
small, scratched, boyish brown hands in her own. For a
long moment she looked into her eyes. As if the small,
cold fingers clasping hers stirred at the jewel heap of her
dreams, Jenny felt the gnome woman's mind probing at
her thoughts, as she had probed at Gareth's, seeking to
see the shape of her essence. She realized that Miss Mab
was a mage, like herself.

Reflex made her stiffen. But Mab smiled gently and
held out to her the depths of her own mind and soul—
gentle and clear as water, and stubborn as water, too,
containing none of the bitterness, resentments, and doubts
that Jenny knew clotted the comers of her own heart.
She relaxed, feeling as ashamed as if she had struck out
at an inquiry kindly made, and felt some other own angers
dissolving under that wise scrutiny. She felt the other
woman's power, much greater than her own, but gentle
and warm as sunlight.

When Miss Mab spoke, it was not to Dromar, but to
her. "Thou art afraid for him," she said softly. "And per-
haps thou should be." She put out one round little hand,
to pat Jenny's hair. "But remember that the dragon is not
the greatest of evils in this land, nor is death the worst
that can befall; neither for him, nor for thee."

CHAPTER VII

IN THE WEEK that followed. Jenny returned many times
to the crumbling house in the Dockmarket. Twice John
accompanied her, but John, for the most part, spent his
days in the King's Gallery with Gareth, waiting for a sign
from the King. His evenings he spent with the wild young
courtiers who surrounded Zyeme, playing dancing bear,
as he called it, and dealing as best he could with the slow
torture of waiting for a combat that could cost his life.
Being John, he did not speak of it, but Jenny felt it when
they made love and in his silences when they were alone
together, this gradual twisting of the nerves that was driv-
ing him nearly mad.

She herself avoided the Court for the most part and
spent her days in the city or in the house of the gnomes.
She went there quietly, wrapped in spells to conceal her
from the folk in the streets, for, as the days ground by,
she could feel the ugly miasma of hate and fear spreading
through the streets like poisoned fog. On her way through
the Dockmarket quarter, she would pass the big taverns—
the Lame Ox, the Gallant Rat, the Sheep in the Mire—
where the unemployed men and women who had come

143

144                  Barbara Hambly

in off the ruined farms gathered daily, hoping for a few
hours' hire. Those in need of cheap labor knew to go
there to find people who would move furniture or clean
out stables for a few coppers; but with the winter storms
making the shipping scarce and the high price of bread
taking all the spare funds to be had, there were few enough
who could afford to pay even that. None of the gnomes
still living in the city—and there were many of them, in
spite of the hardships—dared go by the Sheep in the Mire
after noontime, for by that hour those within would have
given up hope of work that day and would be concen-
trating what little energy they had on getting drunk.

So Jenny moved in her shadowy secrets, as she had
moved through the lawless Winterlands, to visit the Lady
Taseldwyn, who was called Miss Mab in the language of
men.

From the first, she had been aware that the gnome
woman was a more powerful mage than she. But, rather
than jealousy and resentment, she felt only gladness that
she had found someone to teach her after all those years.

In most things, Mab was a willing teacher, though the
shape of the gnomes' wizardry was strange to Jenny, alien,
as their minds were alien. They had no Lines, but seemed
to transmit their power and knowledge whole from gen-
eration to generation of mages in some fashion that Jenny
did not understand. Mab told her of the healing spells for
which the Deep was famous, of the drugs now sequestered
there, lost to them as surely as the dragon's gold was lost,
of the spells that could hold the soul, the essence of life,
to the flesh, or of the more dangerous spells by which the
life-essence of one person could be drawn to strengthen
the crumbling life of another. The gnome woman taught
her other spells of the magic underground—spells of crys-
tal and stone and spiraling darkness, whose meaning Jenny
could only dimly comprehend. These she could only mem-
orize by rote, hoping that with later meditation, skill and

Dragonsbane                  145

understanding would come. Mab spoke also to her of the
secrets of the earth, the movement of water, and how
stones thought; and she spoke of the dark realms of the
Deep itself, cavern beneath cavern in endless succession
of hidden glories that had never seen light.

Once, she spoke of Zyeme.

"Aye, she was apprenticed among us Healers." She
sighed, putting aside the three-stringed dulcimer upon
which she had been outlining to Jenny the song-spells of
their craft. "She was a vain little girl, vain and spoiled.
She had her talent for mockery even then—she would
listen to the Old Ones among us, the great Healers, who
had more power at their command than she could ever
dream of, nodding that sleek little head others in respect,
and then go and imitate their voices to her friends in
Deeping."

Jenny remembered the silvery chime of the sorceress's
laughter at dinner and the way she had hurried her steps
to make Dromar run after her if he would speak.

It was early evening. For all its cold, the great hall of
the gnomes' house was stuffy, the air stagnant beneath
its massive arches and along the faded pavement of its
checkered corridors. The noises of the streets had fallen
to their dinnertime lull, save for the chiming of the clock
towers all over the city and one lone kindling-peddler
crying his wares.

Mab shook her head, her voice low with remembrance
of times past. "She was greedy for secrets, as some girls
are greedy for sweets—covetous for the power they could
give her. She studied out the hidden ways around the
Places of Healing so that she could sneak and spy, hiding
to listen in darkness. All power must be paid for, but she
took the secrets of those greater than she and defiled
them, tainted them—poisoned them as she poisoned the
very heart of the Deep—yes, she did poison if—and
turned all our strength against us."

146 Barbara Hambly

Jenny shook her head, puzzled. "Dromar said some-
thing of the kind," she said. "But how can you taint spells?
You can spoil your own magic, for it colors your soul as
you wield it, but you cannot spoil another's. I don't under-
stand."

Mab glanced sharply at her, as if remembering her
presence and remembering also that she was not one of
the folk of the gnomes. "Nor should thou," she said in
her soft, high voice. "These are things that concern the
magic of gnomes only. They are not human things."

"Zyeme seems to have made them human things."
Jenny moved her weight on her heels, easing her knees
on the hardness of the stone floor through the shabby
cushion. "If it is, indeed, from the Places of Healing that
she learned the arts that have made her the most powerful
mage in the land."

"Pah!" the gnome mage said in disgust. "The Healers
of the Deep were more powerful than she—by the Stone,
/ was more powerful!"

"Was?" Jenny said, perplexed. "I know that most of
the Healers in the Deep were killed with the coming of
the dragon; I had thought none of sufficient strength sur-
vived to defy her. The magic of gnomes is different from
the spells of men, but power is power. How could Zyeme
have lessened yours?"

Mab only shook her head furiously, so that her pale,
web-colored hair whipped back and forth, and said, "These
are the things of the gnomes."

In those days Jenny did not see much of Zyerne, but
the enchantress was often on her mind. Zyeme's influence
pervaded the court like the faint waft of her cinnamon
perfume; when Jenny was in the Palace confines, she was
always conscious of her. However Zyeme had acquired
her power and whatever she had done with it since. Jenny
never forgot that it was so much greater than hers. When
she neglected what tomes of magic John was able to pilfer

Dragonsbane                  147

from the Palace library to sit with her scrying-stone,
watching the tiny, soundless images of her sons skylarking
perilously along the snow-covered battlements of the Hold,
she felt a pang of guilt. Zyeme was young, at least ten
years younger than she; her power shone from her like
the sun. Jenny no longer felt jealousy and she could not,
in all honesty, feel anger at Zyeme for having what she
herself did not, as long as she was not willing to do what
was needful to obtain that power. But she did feel envy,
the envy of a traveler on a cold night who saw into the
warmth of a lighted room.

But when she asked Mab about Zyeme—about the
powers that had once been less than Mab's, but now were
greater; about why the gnomes had forbidden her to enter
the Deep—the little mage would only say stubbornly,
"These are the things of the gnomes. They have naught
to do with men."

In the meantime John went his own way, a favorite of
the younger courtiers who laughed at his extravagant bar-
barism and called him their tame savage, while he held
forth about engineering and the mating customs of pigs,
or quoted classical authors in his execrable north-country
drawl. And still, every morning, the King passed them
by in the gallery, turning his dull eyes aside from them,
and the etiquette of the Court forbade Gareth to speak.

"What's his delay?" John demanded as he and Gareth
emerged from the arched porticoes of the gallery into the
chill, fleet sunlight of the deserted terrace after yet another
futile day's waiting. Jenny joined them quietly, coming up
the steps from the deserted garden below, carrying her
harp. She had been playing it on the rocks above the sea
wall, waiting for them and watching the rainelouds scud
far out over the sea. It was the season of winds and sudden
gales, and in the north the weather would be sleety and
cold, but here days of high, heatless sunlight alternated
with fogs and blowing rains. The matte, white day-moon

148 Barbara Hambly

was visible, sinking into the cloud wrack over the sea;

Jenny wondered what it was that troubled her about its
steady waxing toward its half. Against the loamy colors
of the fallow earth, the clothes of Zyeme and her court
stood out brightly as they passed on down into the garden,
and Jenny could hear the enchantress's voice lifted in a
wickedly accurate imitation of the gnomes' shrill speech.

John went on, "Is he hoping the dragon will fall on the
Citadel and spare him the trouble of the siege?"

Gareth shook his head. "I don't think so. I'm told
Polycarp has catapults for slinging naphtha set up on the
highest turrets. The dragon keeps his distance." In spite
of the Master's treason. Jenny could hear in the Prince's
voice a trace of pride in his former friend.

Unlike John, who had rented a Court costume from a
shop outside the palace gates which specialized in such
things for petitioners to the King, Gareth owned at least
a dozen of them—like all Court costumes, criminally
expensive. The one he wore today was parakeet green
and primrose and, in the uncertain light of the afternoon,
it turned his rather sallow complexion yellow.

John pushed his specs a little further up on the bridge
of his nose. "Well, I tell you, I'm not exactly ettling to
go on kicking my heels here like a rat catcher waiting for
the King to decide he wants my services. I came here to
protect my lands and my people, and right now they're
getting nothing from the King who's supposed to guard
them, nor from me."

Gareth had been gazing down into the garden at the
little group around the leaf-stained marble statue of the
god Kantirith absently, as if not aware of where he looked;

now he turned his head quickly. "You can't go," he said,
worry and fear in his voice.

"And why not?"

The boy bit his lip and did not answer, but his glance
darted nervously back down to the garden. As if she felt

Dragonsbane                  149

the touch of it, Zyeme turned and blew him a playful kiss,
and Gareth looked away. He looked tired and hagridden,
and Jenny suddenly wondered if he still dreamed of Zyeme.

The uncomfortable silence was broken, not by him,
but by the high voice of Dromar.

"My lord Aversin..." The gnome stepped out onto the
terrace and blinked painfully in the wan, overcast light.
His words came haltingly, as if they were unfamiliar in
his mouth. "Please—do not go."

John glanced down at him sharply. "You haven't pre-
cisely extended your all in welcome and help, either, have
you?"

The old ambassador's gaze challenged him. "I drew
thee the maps of the Deep. By the Stone, what more canst
thou want?"

"Maps that don't lie," John said coolly. "You know as
well as I do the maps you drew have sections of 'em left
blank. And when I put them together, the maps of the
various levels and the up-and-down map, damned if it
wasn't the same place on all of them. I'm not interested
in the secrets of your bloody Deep, but I can't know
what's going to happen, nor where I may end up playing
catch-me in the dark with the dragon, and I'd just as soon
have an accurate map to do it with."

There was an edge of anger on his level voice, and an
edge of fear. Dromar must have heard both, for the
answering blaze died out of his own countenance, and he
looked down at his hands, clasped over the knots of his
sash. "This is a matter that has nothing to do with the
dragon, nothing to do with thee," he said quietly. "The
maps are accurate—I swear it by the Stone in the heart
of the Deep. What is left off is the affair of the gnomes,
and the gnomes only—the very secret of the heart of the
Deep. Once, one of the children of men spied out that
heart, and since then we have had cause to regret it bit-
terly."

150                  Barbara Hambly

He lifted his head again, pale eyes somber under the
long shelf of snowy brow. "I beg that thou trust me, Drag-
onsbane. It goes against our ways to ask the aid of the
children of men. But thou must help us. We are miners
and traders; we are not warriors, and it is a warrior that
we need. Day by day, more of our folk are forced to leave
this city. If the Citadel falls, many of the people of the
Deep will be slaughtered with the rebels who have given
them not only the shelter of their walls, but the very bread
of their rations. The King's troops will not let them leave
the Citadel, even if they would—and believe me, many
have tried. Here in Bel, the cost of bread rises, and soon
we shall be starved out, if we are not murdered by the
mobs from the taverns. In a short time we shall be too
few to hold the Deep, even should we be able to pass its
gates."

He held out his hands, small as a child's and gro-
tesquely knotted with age, pallidly white against the soft
black layerings of his strangely cut sleeves. "If thou dost
not help us, who among the children of men will?"

"Oh, run along, Dromar, do." Clean and sweet as a
silver knife, Zyeme's voice cut across his last words. She
came mounting the steps from the garden, light as an
almond blossom floating on the breeze, her pink-edged
veils blown back over the dark and intricate cascades of
her hair. "Isn't it enough that you try to foist your way
into the King's presence day after day, without troubling
these poor people with politics out of season? Gnomes
may be vulgar enough to talk business and buttonhole
their betters in the evening, but here we feel that once
the day is done, it should be a time for enjoyment." She
made shooing gestures with her well-kept hands and pouted
in impatience. "Now run along," she added in a teasing
tone, "or I shall call the guards."

The old gnome stood for a moment, his eyes upon hers,
his cloudy white hair drifting like cobwebs around his

Dragonsbane                  151

wrinkled face in the stir of the sea winds. Zyeme wore
an expression of childlike pertness, like a well-loved little
girl demanding her own way. But Jenny, standing behind
her, saw the delighted arrogance of her triumph in every
line and muscle of her slim back. She had no doubt that
Zyerne would, in fact, call the guards.

Evidently Dromar hadn't, either. Ambassador from the
court of one monarch to another for thirty years, he turned
and departed at the behest of the King's leman. Jenny
watched him stump away down the gray and lavender
stonework of the path across the garden, with Bond Cler-
lock, pale and brittle-looking, imitating his walk behind
his back.

Ignoring Jenny as she generally did, Zyeme slid one
hand through Gareth's arm and smiled up at him. "Back-
biting old plotter," she remarked. "I must present myself
to your father at supper in an hour, but there's time for
a stroll along the sea wall, surely? The rains won't start
until then."

She could say it with surety, thought Jenny; at the
touch of her spells, the clouds would come and depart
like lapdogs waiting to be fed.

Still holding Gareth's arm and leaning her suppleness
against his height, she drew him toward the steps leading
down into the garden; the courtiers there were already
dispersing, and its walks were empty under the wind-
driven scurry of fugitive leaves. Gareth cast a despairing
glance back at John and Jenny, standing together on the
terrace, she in the plaids and sheepskin jacket of the north,
and he in the ornate blue-and-cream satins of the Court,
his schoolboy spectacles balanced on his nose.

Jenny nudged John gently. "Go after them."

He looked down at her with a half-grin. "So from a
dancing bear I'm being promoted to a chaperon for our
hero's virtue?"

"No," Jenny said, her voice low. "A bodyguard for his

152                  Barbara Hambly

safety. I don't know what it is about Zyeme, but he feels
it, too. Go after them."

John sighed and bent to kiss her lips. "The King had
better pay me extra for this." His hug was like being
embraced by a satin lion. Then he was off, trotting down
the steps and calling to them in horrible north-country
brogue, the wind billowing his mantlings and giving him
the appearance of a huge orchid in the gray garden.

In all, it was just over a week, before the King finally
sent for his son.

"He asked me where I'd been," Gareth said quietly.
"He asked me why I hadn't presented myself to him
before." Turning, he struck the side of his fist against the
bedpost, his teeth gritted to fight tears of rage and con-
fusion. "Jenny, in all these days he hasn't even seen me!"

He swung angrily around. The faded evening light,
falling through the diamond-shaped panes of the window
where Jenny sat, brushed softly across the citron-and-
white satins of his Court mantlings and flickered eerily in
the round, facetless old jewels on his hands. His hair had
been carefully curled for the audience with his father and,
as was the nature of fine hair, hung perfectly straight
around his face again, except for a stray lock or two. He'd
put on his spectacles after the audience, cracked and bent
and unlikely-looking with his finery; the lenses were
speckled with the fine blowing rain that chilled the win-
dowglass.

"I don't know what to do," he said in a strangulated
voice. "He said—he said we'd talk about the dragon the
next time he saw me. I don't understand what's going
on..."

"Was Zyeme there?" John inquired. He was sitting at
the spindly desk, which, like the rest of the upper floor
of his and Jenny's guest house, was heaped with books.
The whole room, after eight days, had the appearance of

Dragonsbane                  153

a ransacked library; volumes were propped against one
another, places marked by pages of John's notes or odd
articles of clothing or other books—and in one case a
dagger—slipped between the leaves.

Gareth nodded miserably. "Half the time when I asked
him things, she'd answer. Jenny, could she be holding him
under some kind of spell?"

Jenny started to say, "Possibly..."

"Well, of course she is," John said, tipping back his
high stool to lean the small of his back against the desk.
"And if you hadn't been so bloody determined to do that
slick little baggage justice, Jen, you'd have seen it a week
ago. Come!" he added, as a soft tapping sounded at the

door.

It opened wide enough for Trey Clerlock to put her
head around the doorframe. She hesitated a moment; then,
when John gestured, she came in, carrying a pearwood
hurdy-gurdy with ivory stars scattered at random over its
stubby neck box and playing pegs. John beamed with
delight as he took it, and Jenny groaned.

"You're not going to play that thing, are you? You'll
frighten the cattle for miles around, you know."

"I'll not," John retorted. "And besides, there's a trick
to making it louder or softer..."

"Do you know it?"

"I can leam. Thank you. Trey, love—some people just
haven't any appreciation for the sound of fine music."

"Some people haven't any appreciation for the sound
of a cat being run through a mangle," Jenny replied. She
turned back to Gareth. "Zyeme could be holding him
under a spell, yes—but from what you've told me of your
father's stubbornness and strength of will, I'm a little
surprised that her influence is that great."

Gareth shook his head. "It isn't only that," he said.
"I—I don't know how to put this, and I can't be sure,
because I wasn't wearing my spectacles during the inter-

154                  Barbara Hambly

view, but it almost seems that he's faded since I've been
gone. That's a stupid idea," he recanted at once, seeing
Jenny's puzzled frown.

"No," said Trey unexpectedly. The other three looked
at her, and she blushed a little, like a flustered doll. "I
don't think it's stupid. I think it's true, and faded is a
good word for it. Because I—I think the same thing is
happening to Bond."

"Bond?" Jenny said, and the memory of the King's
face flashed across her mind; how hollow and brittle he
had looked, and how, like Bond, the paint on his face had
seemed to stand out from the waxiness beneath.

Trey appeared to concentrate for a moment on care-
fully straightening the lace on her left cuff. An opal flick-
ered softly in the particolored coils of her hair as she
looked up. "I thought it was just me," she said in a small
voice. "I know he's gotten heavier-handed, and less funny
about his jests, the way he is when his mind is on some-
thing else. Except that his mind doesn't seem to be on .
anything else; it just isn't on what he's doing, these days.
He's so absentminded, the way your father's gotten." Her
gaze went to Jenny's, imploring. "But why would Zyeme
put a spell on my brother? She's never needed to hold
him to her. He's always squired her around. He was one
of the first friends she had at Court. He—he loved her.
He used to dream about her..."

"Dream about her how?" Gareth demanded sharply.

Trey shook her head. "He wouldn't tell me."

"Did he sleepwalk?"

The surprise in the girl's eyes answered the question
before she spoke. "How did you know?"

The fitful rain outside had ceased; in the long silence,
the voices of the palace guards in the court below the
guest house windows could be heard clearly, telling a story
about a gnome and a whore in town. Even the hazy light
of the afternoon was failing, and the room was cold and

Dragonsbane                 155
slate gray. Jenny asked, "Do you dream about her still,

Gareth?"

The boy turned red as if scalded. He stammered, shook

his head, and finally said, "I—I don't love her. I truly
don't. I try—I don't want to be alone with her. But..."
He gestured helplessly, unable to fight the traitor dreams.

Jenny said softly, "But she is calling you. She called
you that first night we were in her hunting lodge. Had
she done so before?"

"I—I don't know." He looked shaken and in and very
frightened, as he had when Jenny had probed at his mind,
as if looking at things that he did not want to see. Trey,
who had gone to take a spill from the fire and was lighting
the small ivory lamps on the edge of John's desk, shook
out her taper, went quietly over to him, and got him to
sit down beside her on the edge of the curtained bed.

At length Gareth said, "She might have. A few months
ago she asked me to dine with her and my father in her
wing of the palace. I didn't go. I was afraid Father would
be angry at me for slighting her, but later on he said
something that made me wonder whether he'd even known
about it. I wondered then. I thought..." He blushed still
more hotly. "That was when I thought she might have
been in love with me."

"I've seen loves like that between wolves and sheep,
but the romance tends to be a bit one-sided," John
remarked, scratching his nose. "What prevented you from

going?"

"Polycarp." He toyed with the folds of his mantlings,
which caught a soft edge of brightness where the angle
of the lamplight came down past the curtains of the bed.
"He was always telling me to beware of her. He found
out about the dinner and talked me out of going."

"Well, I don't know much about magic and all that,
but just offhand, lad, I'd say he might have saved your

156                  Barbara Hambly

life." John braced his back against the desk's edge and
fingered a silent run of melody up the hurdy-gurdy's keys.

Gareth shook his head, puzzled. "But why? It wasn't
a week before he tried to kill us—me and my father both."

"If that was him."

The boy stared at him, slowly-growing horror and real-
ization in his face. He whispered, "But I saw him."

"If she could take the shape of a cat or a bird, putting
on the form of the Master of Halnath wouldn't be beyond
her—Jen?" He glanced across the room to where she sat
silent, her arm resting across one up-drawn knee, her chin
upon her wrist.

"She wouldn't have taken on his actual being," she
said quietly. "An illusion would have served. Shape-
shifting requires enormous power—but then, Zyeme has
enormous power. However she did it, the act itself is
logical. If Polycarp had begun to suspect her intentions
toward Gareth, it would dispose of and discredit him at
once. By making you the witness. Gar, she removed all
chance of your helping him. She must have known how
bitter a betrayal it would be."

Numbly, Gareth whispered, "No!" struck by the horror
of what he had done.

Trey's voice was soft in the stillness. "But what does
she want with Gareth? I can understand her holding the
King, because without his support she'd—she wouldn't
exactly be nothing, but she certainly wouldn't be able to
live as she does now. But why entrap Gareth as well?
And what does she want with Bond? He's no good to her
... We're really only a very minor family, you know. I
mean, we haven't any political power, and not that much
money." A rueful smile touched one comer of her lips as
she fingered the rose-point lace of her cuff. "All this...
One must keep up appearances, of course, and Bond is
trying to marry me off well. But we really haven't any-
thing Zyeme would want."

Dragonsbane                  157

"And why destroy them?" Gareth asked, desperate
concern for his father in his voice. "Do all spells do that?"

"No," Jenny said. "That's what surprises me about
this—I've never heard of a spell of influence that would
waste the body of the victim as it holds the mind. But
neither have I heard of one holding as close as the one
which she has upon your father, Gareth; nor of one that
lasts so long. But her magic is the magic of the gnomes
and unlike the spells of men. It may be that among their
secrets is one that will hold the very essence of another,
twining around it like the tendrils of a morning-glory vine,
which can tear the foundations of a stone house asunder.
But then," she went on, her voice low, "it is almost certain
that to have that kind of control over him, at the first,
she had to obtain his consent."

"His consent?" Trey cried, horrified. "But how could
he? How could anyone?"

Gareth, Jenny was interested to note, said nothing to
this. He had seen, however briefly, on the road in the
north, the mirror of his own soul—and he also knew
Zyeme.

Jenny explained, "To tamper that deeply with another's
essence always requires the consent of the victim. Zyeme
is a shapeshifter—the principle is the same."

Trey shook her head. "I don't understand."

Jenny sighed and, rising to her feet, crossed to where
the two young people sat side-by-side. She put her hand
on the girl's shoulder. "A shapeshifter can change some-
one else's essence, even as she can change her own. It
requires enormous power—and first she must in some
fashion obtain the victim's consent. The victim can resist,
unless the shapeshifter can find some chink of consenting,
some hidden demon within—some part of the essence
that wills to be changed."

The deepening darkness outside made the lamplight
even more golden, like honey where it lay over the girl's

158 Barbara Hambly

face. Under the shadows of the long, thick lashes. Jenny
could read both fear and fascination, that half-understand-
ing that is the first whisper of consent.

"I think you would resist me if I tried to transform you
into a lapdog, had I the power to do so. There is very
little of the lapdog in your soul. Trey Clerlock. But if I
were to transform you into a horse—a yearling filly, smoke-
gray and sister to the sea winds—I think I could obtain
your consent to that."

Trey jerked her eyes away, hiding them against Ga-
reth's shoulder, and the young man put a protective
arm around her as well as he could, considering that he
was sitting on the trailing ends of his extravagant sleeves.

"It is the power ofshapeshifting and the danger," Jenny
said, her voice low in the silence of the room. "If I trans-
formed you into a filly. Trey, your essence would be the
essence of a horse. Your thoughts would be a horse's
thoughts, your body a mare's body; your loves and desires
would be those of a young, swift beast. You might remem-
ber for a time what you were, but you could not find your
way back to be it once again. I think you would be happy
as a filly."

"Stop it," Trey whispered, and covered her ears.
Gareth's hold about her tightened. Jenny was silent. After
a moment the girl looked up again, her eyes dark with the
stirred depths of her dreams. "I'm sorry," she said, her
voice small. "It's not you I'm afraid of. It's me."

"I know," Jenny replied softly. "But do you understand
now? Do you understand what she might have done to
your father, Gareth? It is sometimes less painful to give
over striving and let another mind rule yours. When Zyeme
first came to power she couldn't have acquired that kind
of hold over you, because you would not come near enough
for her to do it. You hated her, and you were only a boy—
she could not draw you as she draws men. But when you
became a man..."

Dragonsbane                  159

"I think that's loathsome." It was Trey's turn to put a
orotective arm around Gareth's satin shoulders.

"But a damn good way to keep her power," John pointed
out, leaning one arm across the hurdy-gurdy resting upon

his knees.

"I still can't be sure that this is what she did," Jenny
said. "And it still wouldn't explain why she did the same
thing to Bond. I would not know for certain until I could
see the King, speak to him..."

"God's Grandmother, he'll scarcely speak to his own
son, love, let alone me or thee." John paused, listening
to his own words. "Which might be a good reason for not
speaking to me or thee, come to that." His eyes flickered
to Gareth. "You know. Gar, the more I see of this, the
more I think I'd like to have a few words with your dad."

CHAPTER Vni

IN THE DEATHLY hush that hung over the gardens,
Gareth's descent from the wall sounded like the mating
of oxen in dry brush. Jenny winced as the boy crashed
down the last few feet into the shrubbery; from the shad-
ows of the ivy on the wall top at her side she saw the dim
flash of spectacle lenses and heard a voice breathe, "You
forgot to shout 'Eleven o'clock and all's well,' my hero!"

A faint slur of ivy followed. She felt John land on the
ground below more than she heard him. After a last check
of the dark garden half-visible through the woven branches
of the bare trees, she slipped down to join them. In the
darkness, Gareth was a gawky shadow in rust-colored
velvet, John barely to be seen at all, the random pattern
of his plaids blending into the colors of the night.

"Over there," Gareth whispered, nodding toward the
far side of the garden where a light burned in a niche
between two trefoil arches. Its brightness spangled the
wet grass like pennies thrown by a careless hand.

He started to lead the way, but John touched his arm
and breathed, "I think we'd better send a scout, if it's
burglary and all we're after. I'll work round the three sides

160

Dragonsbane                  161

through the shadows of the wall; when I get there, I'll
whistle once like a nightjar. Right?"

Gareth caught his sleeve as he started to move off.
"But what if a real nightjar whistles?"

"What, at this time of the year?" And he melted like
a cat into the darkness. Jenny could see him, shifting his
way through the checkered shadows of the bare topiary
that decorated the three sides of the King's private court;

by the way Gareth moved his head, she could tell he had
lost sight of him almost at once.

Near the archways there was a slither of rosy lamplight
on a spectacle frame, the glint of spikes, and the brief
outline of brightness on the end of a long nose. Gareth,
seeing him safe, started to move, and Jenny drew him
soundlessly back again. John had not yet whistled.

An instant later, Zyeme appeared in the doorway arch.

Though John stood less than six feet from her, she did
not at first see him, for he settled into stillness like a
snake in leaves. The enchantress's face, illuminated in the
warm apricot light, wore that same sated look Jenny had
seen in the upstairs room at the hunting lodge near the
Wildspae—the look of deep content with some wholly
private pleasure. Now, as then, it raised the hackles on
Jenny's neck, and at the same time she felt a cold shudder
of fear.

Then Zyeme turned her head. She startled, seeing John
motionless so near to her; then she smiled. "Well. An
enterprising barbarian." She shook out her unbound,
unveiled hair, straying tendrils of it lying against the hol-
low of her cheek, like an invitation to a caress. "A little
late, surely, to be paying calls on the King."

"A few weeks late, by all I've heard." Aversin scratched
his nose self-consciously. "But better late than never, as
Dad said at Granddad's wedding."

Zyeme giggled, a sweet and throaty sound. Beside her,

162                  Barbara Hambly

Jenny felt Gareth shiver, as if the seductive laughter
brought memories of evil dreams.

"And impudent as well. Did your mistress send you
along to see if Uriens had been entangled in spells other
than his own stupidity and lust?"

Jenny heard the hiss ofGareth's breath and sensed his
anger and his shock at hearing the guttersnipe words fall
so casually from those pink lips. Jenny wondered why
she herself was not surprised.

John only shrugged and said mildly, "No. It's just I'm
no dab hand at waiting."

"Ah." Her smile widened, lazy and alluring. She seemed
half-drunk, but not sleepy as drunkards are; she glowed,
as she had on that first morning in the King's Gallery,
bursting with life and filled with the casual arrogance of
utter well-being. The lamp in its tiled niche edged her
profile in amber as she stepped toward John, and Jenny
felt again the grip of fear, as if John stood unknowingly
in deadly danger. "The barbarian who eats with his hands—
and doubtless makes love in his boots."

Her hands touched his shoulders caressingly, shaping
themselves to the muscle and bone beneath the leather
and plaid. But Aversin stepped back a pace, putting dis-
tance between them, rather as she had done in the gallery
to Dromar. Like Dromar, she would not relax her self-
consequence enough to pursue.

In a deliberately deepened north-country drawl, he said,
"Aye, my lack of manners does give me sleepless nights.
But it weren't to eat prettily nor yet to make love that I
came south. I was told you had this dragon eating folks
hereabouts."

She giggled again, an evil trickle of sound in the night.
"You shall have your chance to slay it when all is ready.
Timing is a civilized art, my barbarian."

"Aye," John's voice agreed, from the dark cutout of
his silhouette against the golden light. "And I've had buck-

Dragwsbane                 163

ets of time to study it here, along with aB them other
civilized arts, like courtesy and kindness to suppliants,
not to speak of honor, and keeping one's faith with one's
lover, instead of rubbing up against his son."

There were perhaps three heartbeats of silence before
she spoke. Jenny saw her back stiffen; when she spoke
again, her voice, though still sweet, had a note to it like
a harp string taken a half-turn above its true note. "What
is it to you, John Aversin? It is how things are done here
in the south. None of it shall interfere with your chance
of glory. That is all that should concern you. I shall tell
you when it is right for you to go.

"Listen to me, Aversin, and believe me. I know this
dragon. You have slain one worm—you have not met
Morkeleb the Black, the Dragon ofNast Wall. He is might-
ier than the worm you slew before, mightier than you can

ever know."

"I'd guessed that." John pushed up his specs, the rosy
light glancing off the spikes of his armbands as from spear-
points. "I'll just have to slay him how I can, seemingly."

"No." Acid burned through the sweetness other voice
like poisoned candy. "You can not. I know it, if you and
that slut of yours don't. Do you think I don't know that
those stinking offal-eaters, the gnomes, have lied to you?
That they refused to give you true maps of the Deep? I
know the Deep, John Aversin—I know every tunnel and
passage. I know the heart of the Deep. Likewise I know
every spell of illusion and protection, and believe me, you
will need them against the dragon's wrath. You will need
my aid, if you are to have victory—you will need my aid
if you are to come out of that combat with your life. Wait,
I say, and you shall have that aid; and afterward, from
the spoils of the Deep, I shall reward you beyond the
dreams of any man's avarice."

John tilted his head a little to one side. "You'll reward

-?"

me'

164                  Barbara Hambly

In the silence of the sea-scented night. Jenny heard the
other woman's breath catch.

"How is it you'll be the one to divvy up the gnomes'
treasure?" John asked. "Are you anticipating taking over
the Deep, once the dragon's out of the way?"

"No," she said, too quickly. "That is—surely you know
that the insolence of the gnomes has led them to plot
against his Majesty? They are no longer the strong folk
they were before the coming of Morkeleb. Those that
were not slain are divided and weak. Many have left this
town, forfeiting all their rights, and good riddance to them."

"Were I treated as I've seen them treated," John
remarked, leaning one shoulder against the blue-and-
yellow tiles of the archway, "I'd leave, myself."

"They deserved it." Her words stung with sudden
venom. "They kept me from..." She stopped herself,
then added, more reasonably, "You know they are openly
in league with the rebels ofHalnath—or you should know
it. It would be foolish to dispose of the dragon before their
plots are uncovered. It would only give them a strong
place and a treasure to return to, to engage in plotting
further treason."

"I know the King and the people have heard nothing
but how the gnomes are plotting," Aversin replied in a
matter-of-fact voice. "And from what I hear, the gnomes
up at the Citadel haven't much choice about whose side
they're on. Gar's being gone must have been a real boon
to you there; with the King half-distracted, he'd have been
about ready to believe anything. And I suppose it would
be foolish to get rid of the dragon before so many of the
gnomes have left the Realm—or some reason can be found
for getting rid of the rest of 'em—that they can't reoccupy
their stronghold, if so be it happened someone else wanted
the place, that is."

There was a moment's silence. Jenny could see the
light slither quickly along the silk facing ofZyeme's sleeve,

Dragonsbane                  165

where her small hand clenched it in anger, leaving a print
of wrinkles like the track of invisible thoughts. "These
are matters of high polity, Dragonsbane. It is nothing to
you, after all. I tell you, be patient and wait until I tell
you it is time for us to ride together to the Deep, you and
1.1 promise that you shall not be cheated of this slaying."

She stepped close to him again, and the diamonds on
her hands threw little spits of fire against the dullness of
leather and plaid.

"No," Aversin said, his voice low. "Nor shall you be
cheated of the Deep, after I've done your butchering for
you. You summoned the dragon, didn't you?"

"No." The word was brittle as the snap of a frost-killed
twig. "Of course not."

"Didn't you, love? Then it's gie lucky for you that it
came along just when it did, when you were wanting a
power base free of the King, in case he tired of you or
died; not to speak of all that gold."

Jenny felt the scorch of her wrath like an invisible
explosion across the garden, even as Zyerne raised her
hand. Jenny's throat closed on a cry of fear and warning,
knowing she could never have moved in time to help and
could not have stood against the younger woman's magic,
if she did; Aversin, his back to the stone of the arch, could
only throw his arm before his eyes as the white fire snaked
from Zyeme's hand. The hissing crackle of it in the air
was like lightning; the blaze of it, so white it seemed edged
in violet, seared over every stone chink and moss tuft in
the pavement and outlined each separate, waxy petal of
the winter roses in colorless glare. In its aftermath, the
air burned with the smell of ozone and scorched leaves.

After a long moment, John raised his face from his
protecting arms. Even across the garden. Jenny could see
he was shaking; her own knees were so weak from shock
and fear she felt she could have collapsed, except for her

166                  Barbara Hambly

greater fear of Zyeme; and she cursed her own lack of
power. John, standing before Zyeme, did not move.

It was Zyeme who spoke, her voice dripping with
triumph. "You get above yourself, Dragonsbane. I'm not
that snaggle-haired trollop of yours, that you can speak
to me with impunity. I am a true sorceress."

Aversin said nothing, but carefully removed his spec-
tacles and wiped his eyes. Then he replaced them and
regarded her silently in the dim light of the garden lamp.

"I am a true sorceress," she repeated softly. She held
out her hands to him, the small fingers plucking at his
sleeves, and a husky note crept into her sweet voice. "And
who says our alliance must be so truculent, Dragonsbane?
You need not spend your time here tugging with impa-
tience to be gone. I can make the wait pleasant."

As her delicate hands touched his face, however, Aver-
sin caught the fragile wrists, forcing her away at arm's
length. For an instant they stood so, facing one another,
the silence absolute but for the racing draw of their breath.
Her eyes were fixed upon his, probing at his mind. Jenny
knew, the same way she had probed at Gareth's earlier,
seeking some key of consent.

With a curse she twisted free of his grip. "So," she
whispered. "That raddled bitch can at least get her rutting-
spells right, can she? With her looks, she'd have to. But
let me tell you this, Dragonsbane. When you ride to meet
the dragon, like it or not, it will be me who rides with
you, not her. You shall need my aid, and you shall ride
forth when I say so, when I tell the King to give you
leave, and not before. So learn a little of the civilized art
of patience, my barbarian—for without my aid against
Morkeleb, you shall surely die."

She stepped away from him and passed under the lamp-
lit arch, reaching out to take the light with her as she
went. In its honeyed brightness her face looked as gentle
and guileless as that of a girl of seventeen, unmarked

Dragonsbane                  167

by rage or perversion, pettiness or spite. John remained
where he was, watching her go, sweat beading his face
like a mist of diamonds, motionless save where he rubbed
the thin, sharp flashburns on his hands.

A moment later, the window behind him glowed into
soft life- Through the fretted screen of scented shrubs and
vine that twined its filigreed lattice. Jenny got a glimpse
of the room beyond. She had an impression of half-seen
frescoes on the walls, of expensive vessels of gold and
silver, and of the glint of bullion embroidery thickly edging
the hangings of the bed. A man lay in the bed, moving
feebly in some restless dream, his gold hair faded and
colorless where it lay in disorder over the embroidered
pillows. His face was sunken and devoid of life, like the
face of a man whom a vampire has kissed.

"It would serve her right if you left tonight!" Gareth
stormed. "Rode back north and left her to deal with her
own miserable worm, if she wanted it so badly!"

He swung around to pace the big chamber of the guest
house again, so furious he could barely splutter. In his
anger, he seemed to have forgotten his own fear of Zyeme
and his desire for protection against her, forgotten his
long quest to the Winterlands and his desperation to have
it succeed. From her seat in the window. Jenny watched
him fulminate, her own face outwardly calm but her mind

racing.

John looked up from tinkering with the keys of the
hurdy-gurdy. "It wouldn't do, my hero," he said quietly.
"However and whyever it got here, the dragon's here now.
As Zyeme said, the people hereabouts are no concern of
mine, but I can't be riding off and leaving them to the
dragon. Leaving out the gnomes, there's the spring plant-
ing to be thought of."

The boy stopped in his pacing, staring at him. "Hunh?"
John shrugged, his fingers stilling on the pegs. "The

168 Barbara Hambly

harvest's gone," he pointed out. "If the dragon's still abroad
in the land in the spring, there'll be no crop, and then,
my hero, you'll see real starvation in this town."

Gareth was silent. It was something he had never
thought of. Jenny guessed. He had clearly never gone
short of food in his life.

"Besides," John went on, "unless the gnomes can reoc-
cupy the Deep pretty quick, Zyeme will destroy them
here, as Dromar said, and your friend Polycarp in the
Citadel as well. For all Dromar's hedging about keeping
us out of the heart of the Deep, the gnomes have done
for us what they can; and the way I see it, Polycarp saved
your life, or at least kept you from ending up like your
father, so deep under Zyeme's spells he can't tell one
week from the next. No, the dragon's got to be killed."

"But that's just it," Gareth argued. "If you kill the
dragon, she'll be free to take over the Deep, and then the
Citadel will fall because they'll be able to attack it from
the rear." He looked worriedly over at Jenny. "Could she
have summoned the dragon?"

Jenny was silent, thinking about that terrible power
she had felt in the garden, and the dreadful, perverted
lour of it in the lamplit room at Zyeme's hunting lodge.
She said, "I don't know. It's the first time I've heard of
human magic being able to touch a dragon—but then,
Zyeme derives her magic from the gnomes. I have never
heard of such a thing..."

"Cock by its feet, horse by its home..." repeated John.
"Could she be holding the dragon by his name? She knows
it, right enough."

Jenny shook her head. "Morkeleb is only the name
men give it, the way they call Azwylcartusherands Dro-
mar, and Taseldwyn Mab. If she'd had his true name, his
essence, she could send him away again; and she obviously
can't, or she would have killed you in the garden tonight."

She hitched her shawl up over her shoulders, a thin

Dragonsbane                  169

and glittering spiderweb of South Islands silk, the thick
masses of her hair lying over it like a second shawl. Cold
seemed to breathe through the window at her back.

Gareth went back to pacing, his hands shoved in the
pockets of the old leather hunting breeches he'd put on

to go burgling.

"But she didn't know its name, did she?"
"No," replied Jenny. "And in that case..." She paused,

then frowned, dismissing the thought.

"What?" John wanted to know, catching the doubt in

her voice.

"No," she repeated. "It's inconceivable that at her level
of power she wouldn't have been taught Limitations. It's
the first thing anyone learns." And seeing Gareth's incom-
prehension, she explained. "It's one of the things that
takes me so long when I weave spells. You have to limit
the effect of any spell. If you call rain, you must specify
a certain heaviness, so as not to flood the countryside. If
you call a curse of destruction upon someone or some-
thing, you have to set Limitations so that their destruction
doesn't come in a generalized catastrophe that wipes out
your own house and goods. Magic is very prodigal in its
effects. Limitations are among the earliest things a mage
is taught."

"Even among the gnomes?" Gareth asked. "You said

their magic is different."

"It is taught differently—transmitted differently. There
are things Mab has said that I do not understand and things
that she refuses to tell me about how their power is formed.
But it is still magic. Mab knows the Limitations—from
what she has told me, I gather they are more important
in the night below the ground. If she studied among the
gnomes, Zyeme would have to have learned about them."

John threw back his head and laughed in genuine
amusement. "Gaw, it must be rotting her!" He chuckled.
"Think of it, Jen. She wants to get rid of the gnomes, so

170 Barbara Hambly

she calls down a generalized every-worst-curse she can
think of upon them—and gets a dragon she can't get rid
of! It's gie beautiful!"

"It's 'gie' frivolous," Jenny retorted.

"No wonder she threw fire at me! She must be that
furious just thinking about it!" His eyes were dancing
under his singed brows.

"It just isn't possible," Jenny insisted, in the cool voice
she used to call their sons back from skylarking. Then,
more seriously, "She can't have gotten to that degree of
power untaught, John. It's impossible. All power must be
paid for, somehow."

"But it's the sort of thing that would happen if it hadn't
been, isn't it?"

Jenny didn't reply. For a long time she stared out the
window at the dark shape of the battlements, visible
beneath the chilly autumn stars. "I don't know," she said
at last, stroking the spiderweb fringes other gauze shawl.
"She has so much power. It's inconceivable that she hasn't
paid for it in some fashion. The key to magic is magic.
She has had all time and all power to study it fully. And
yet..." She paused, identifying at last her own feelings
toward what Zyeme was and did. "I thought that someone
who had achieved that level of power would be different."

"Ah," John said softly. Across the room, their eyes
met. "But don't think that what she's done with her
achievement has betrayed your striving, love. For it hasn't.
It's only betrayed her own."

Jenny sighed, reflecting once again on John's uncanny
ability to touch the heart of any problem, then smiled a
little at herself; and they traded a kiss in a glance.

Gareth said quietly, "But what are we going to do? The
dragon has to be destroyed; and, if you destroy it, you'll
be playing right into her hands."

A smile flicked across John's face, a glimpse of the
bespectacled schoolboy peeking out from behind the com-

Dragonsbane                  171

plex barricades raised by the hardships of the Winteriands
and his father's embittered domination. Jenny felt his eyes
on her again—the tip of one thick reddish brow and the
question in the bright glance. After ten years, they had
grown used to speaking without words.

A qualm of fear passed over her, though she knew he
was right. After a moment, she drew her breath in another

sigh and nodded.

"Good." John's impish smile widened, like that of a
boy intent on doing mischief, and he rubbed his hands
briskly. He turned to Gareth. "Get your socks packed,
my hero. We leave for the Deep tonight."

CHAPTER IX

"STOP."

Puzzled, Gareth and John drew rein on either side of
Jenny, who sat Moon Horse where she had halted her in
the middle of the leaf-drifted track. All around them the
foothills of Nast Wall were deathly silent, save for the
trickle of wind through the charred trunks of what had
once been woods to either side of the road and the faint
jingle of brass as Osprey tugged at his leading-rein and
Clivy began foraging prosaically in the sedges of the ditch-
side. Lower down the hills, the woods were still whole,
denuded by coming winter rather than fire; under the
pewter-gray trunks of the beeches, the rust-colored
underbrush lay thick. Here it was only a tangle of brittle
stems, ready to crumble at a touch. Half-hidden in the
weeds near the scorched paving stones of the road were
the blackened bones of fugitives from the dragon's first
attack, mixed with shattered cooking vessels and the sil-
ver coins that had been dropped in flight. The coins lay
in the mud still. No one had ventured this close to the
ruined town to retrieve them.

Up ahead in the weak sunlight of winter, the remains

172

Dragonsbane                  173

of the first houses of Deeping could be seen. According
to Gareth the place had never been walled. The road ran
into the town under the archway below the broken clock
tower.

For a long while Jenny sat listening in silence, turning
her head this way and that. Neither of the men spoke—
indeed, ever since they had slipped out of the Palace in
the small hours before dawn, Jenny had been acutely
conscious of John's growing silence. She glanced across
at him now, where he sat withdrawn into himself on his
riding horse Cow, and remembered for the dozenth time
that day Zyeme's words—that without her assistance,
neither he nor Jenny would be capable of meeting the
dragon Morkeleb.

Beyond a doubt John was remembering them, too.

"Gareth," Jenny said at last, her voice little more than
a whisper, "is there another way into the town? Some
place in the town that is farther from the Gates of the
Deep than we are now?"

Gareth frowned. "Why?"

Jenny shook her head, not certain herself why she had
spoken. But something whispered across her nerves, as
it had all those weeks ago by the ruins of the nameless
town in the Winteriands—a sense of danger that caused
her to look for the signs of it. Under Mab's tutelage she
had become more certain of trusting her instincts, and
something in her hated to go closer than the ruined clock
tower into the sunlight that fell across Deeping Vale.

After a moment's consideration Gareth said, "The far-
thest point in Deeping from the Great Gates would be the
Tanner's Rise. It's at the bottom of that spur over there
that bounds the town to the west. I think it's about a half-
mile from the Gates. The whole town isn't—wasn't—
much more than a quarter-mile across."

"Will we have a clear view of the Gates from there?"

Confused by this bizarre stipulation, he nodded. "The

174                  Barbara Humbly

ground's high, and most of the buildings were flattened
in the attack. But if we wanted a lookout on the gates,
you can see there's enough of the clock tower left for
a..."

"No," Jenny murmured. "I don't think we can go that
near."

John's head came sharply around at that. Gareth fal-
tered, "It can't—it can't hear us, can it?"

"Yes," Jenny said, not knowing why she said it. "No—
it isn't hearing, exactly. I don't know. But I feel some-
thing, on the fringes of my mind. I don't think it knows
we're here—not yet. But if we rode closer, it might. It is
an old dragon, Gareth; it must be, for its name to be in
the Lines. In one of the old books from the Palace library,
it says that dragons change their skins with their souls,
that the young are simply colored and bright; the mature
are complex of pattern and the old become simpler and
simpler again, as their power deepens and grows. Mor-
keleb is black. I don't know what that means, but I don't
like what I think it implies—great age, great power—his
senses must fill the Vale of Deeping like still water, sen-
sitive to the slightest ripple."

"He pox-sure heard your father's knights coming, didn't
he?" John added cynically.

Gareth looked unhappy. Jenny nudged her mare gently
and took a step or two closer to the clock tower, casting
her senses wide over all the Vale. Through the broken
webs of branches overhead, the massive darkness of the
westward-facing cliffs of Nast Wall could be seen. Their
dizzy heights towered like rusted metal, streaked with
purple where shadows hit; boulders flashed white upon
it like outcroppings of broken bone. Above the line of the
dragon's burning, the timber grew on the flanks of the
mountain around the cliffs, up toward the mossed rocks
of the cirques and snowfields above. The ice-gouged homs
of the Wall's bare and ragged crest were veiled in cloud

Dragonsbane                  175

now, but beyond its hunched shoulder to the east a thin
track of smoke could be seen,'marking the Citadel of
Halnath and the siege camps beneath it.

Below that wall of stone and trees, the open spaces of
the Vale lay, a huge well of air, a gulf filled with pale,
sparkly sunlight—and with something else. Jenny's mind
touched it briefly and shrank from that living conscious-
ness that she sensed, coiled like a snake in its dark lair.

Behind her, she heard Gareth argue, "But the dragon
you killed up in the gully in Wyr didn't know you were
coming." The very loudness of his voice scraped her nerves
and made her want to cuff him into silence. "You were
able to get around behind it and take it by surprise. I don't

see how..."

"Neither do I, my hero," John cut in softly, collecting
Cow's reins in one hand and the charger Osprey's lead in
the other. "But if you're willing to bet your life Jen's
wrong, I'm not. Lead us on to the famous Rise."

On the night of the dragon, many had taken refuge in
the buildings on Tanner's Rise; their bones lay every-
where among the blackened ruin of crumbled stone. From
the open space in front of what had been the warehouses,
it had once been possible to overlook the whole thriving
little town of Deeping, under its perpetual haze of smoke
from the smelters and forges down below. That haze was
gone now, burned off in the dragon's greater fire; the
whole town lay open to the mild, heatless glitter of the
winter sunlight, a checkerwork of rubble and bones.

Looking about her at the buildings of the Rise, Jenny
felt cold with shock, as if she had been struck in the pit
of the stomach; then, as she realized why she recognized
the place, the shock was replaced by horror and despair.

It was the place where she had seen John dying, in her
vision in the water bowl.

She had done divination before, but never so accu-
rately as this. The precision of it appalled her—every

176                  Barbara Hambly

stone and puddle and broken wall was the same; she
remembered the way the looming line of the dark cliffs
looked against the sky and the very patterns of the bones
of the town below. She felt overwhelmed by a despairing
urge to change something—to shatter a wall, to dig a hole,
to clear away the brush at the gravelly lip of the Rise
where it sloped down to the town—anything to make it
not as it had been. Yet in her soul she knew doing so
would change nothing and she feared lest whatever she
did would make the picture she had seen more, rather
than less, exact.

Her lips felt stiff as she spoke. "Is this the only point
in the town this far from the Gates?" She knew already
what Gareth would reply.

"It had to be, because of the smell of the tanneries.
You see how nothing was built near it. Even the water
tanks and reservoirs were put up in those rocks to the
north, rather than here where the better springs were."

Jenny nodded dully, looking out toward the high rocks
to the north of the town where he was pointing. Her whole
soul was crying No! No...

She felt suddenly hopeless and stupid, overmatched
and unprepared and incredibly naive. We were fools, she
thought bitterly. The slaying of the first worm was a fluke.
We should never have been so stupid as to presume upon
it, never have thought we could do it again. Zyeme was
right. Zyeme was right.

She looked over at John, who had dismounted from
Cow and was standing on the rocky lip of the Rise where
the ground fell sharply to the dale below, looking across
toward the opposite rise of the Gates. Cold seemed to
cover her bones like a vast, winged shadow blocking the
sun, and she heeled Moon Horse gently over beside him.
Without looking up at her, he said, "I figure I can just
make it. The Temple of Sarmendes is about a quarter-
mile along the Grand Passage, if Dromar was telling the

Dragonsbane                  177

truth. If Osprey and I go full-pelt, we should just about
be able to catch the dragon in the Market Hall, just within
the Gates. Saying he's able to hear me the minute I start
down the Rise, I should still be able to catch him before
he can get out into the air. I'll have room to fight him in
the Market Hall. That will be my only chance."

"No," Jenny said quietly. He looked up at her, eye-
brows quirking. "You have another chance, if we ride
back now to Bel. Zyeme can help you take the thing from
behind, deeper in the caves. Her spells will protect you,
too, as mine can not."

"Jen." The closed wariness of his expression split sud-
denly into the white flash of teeth. He held up his hands
to help her down, shaking his head reprovingly.

She made no move. "At least it is to her advantage to
preserve you safe, if she wants the dragon slain. The rest
is none of your affair."

His smile widened still further. "You have a point,
love," he assented. "But she doesn't look to me like she
can cook worth a row of beans." And he helped her down
from her horse.

The foreboding that weighed on Jenny's heart did not
decrease; rather, it grew upon her through the short after-
noon. She told herself, again and again, as she paced out
the magic circles and set up her fire in their midst to brew
her poisons, that water was a liar; that it divined the future
as crystal could not, but that its divinations were less
reliable even than fire's. But a sense of impending doom
weighed upon her heart, and, as the daylight dimmed, in
the fire under her simmering kettle she seemed to see
again the same picture: John's shirt of chain mail rent
open by claws in a dozen places, the broken links all
glittering with dark blood.

Jenny had set up her fire at the far end of the Rise,
where the wind would carry the smoke and the vapors

178 Barbara Hambly

away from both the camp and the Vale, and worked
throughout the afternoon spelling the ingredients and the
steel of the harpoons themselves. Miss Mab had advised
her about the more virulent poisons that would work upon
dragons, and such ingredients as the gnome wizard had
not had among her slender stocks Jenny had purchased
in the Street of the Apothecaries-in the Dockmarket in
Bel. While she worked, the two men prowled the Rise,
fetching water for the horses from the little well some
distance into the woods, since the fountain house that had
served the tanneries had been crushed like an eggshell,
and setting up a camp. John had very little to say since
she had spoken to him on the edge of the Rise; Gareth
seemed to shiver all over with a mingling of excitement
and terror.

Jenny had been a little surprised at John's invitation
that Gareth join them, though she had planned to ask John
to extend it. She had her own reasons for wanting the
boy with them, which had little to do with his expressed
desire—though he had not expressed it lately—to see a
dragonslaying close at hand. She—and undoubtedly John
as well—knew that their departure would have left Gareth
unprotected in Bel.

Perhaps Mab had been right, she thought, as she turned
her face from the ghastly choke of the steam and wiped
it with one gloved hand. There were worse evils than the
dragon in the land—to be slain by it might, under certain
circumstances, be construed as a lesser fate.

The voices of the men came to her from the other side
of the camp as they moved about preparing supper; she
had noticed that neither spoke very loudly when they were
anywhere near the edge of the Rise. John said, "I'll get
this right yet," as he dropped a mealcake onto the griddle
and looked up at Gareth. "What's the Market Hall like?
Anything I'll be likely to trip over?"

"I don't think so, if the dragon's been in and out,"

Dragonsbane                  179

Gareth said after a moment. "It's a huge hall, as Dromar
said; over a hundred feet deep and even wider side to
side. The ceiling's very high, with fangs of rock hanging
down from it—chains, too, that used to support hundreds
of lamps. The floor was leveled, and used to be covered
with all kinds of booths, awnings, and vegetable stands;

all the produce from the Realm was traded to the Deep
there. I don't think there was anything there solid enough
to resist dragon fire."

Aversin dropped a final mealcake on the griddle and
straightened up, wiping his fingers on the end of his plaid.
Blue darkness was settling over Tanner's Rise. From her
small fire. Jenny could see the two of them outlined in
gold against a background of azure and black. They did
not come near her, partly because of the stench of the
poisons, partly because of the spell-circles glimmering
faintly in the sandy earth about her. The key to magic is
magic—Jenny felt that she looked out at them from an
isolated enclave of another world, alone with the oven-
heat of the fire, the biting stench of the poison fumes,
and the grinding weight of the death-spells in her heart.

John walked to the edge of the Rise for perhaps the
tenth time that evening. Across the shattered bones of
Deeping, the black skull-eye of the Gates looked back at
him. Slabs of steel and splintered shards of burned wood
lay scattered over the broad, shallow flight of granite steps
below them, faintly visible in the watery light of the wax-
ing moon. The town itself lay in a pool of impenetrable
dark.

"It isn't so far," said Gareth hopefully. "Even if he
hears you coming the minute you ride into the Vale, you
should reach the Market Hall in plenty of time."

John sighed. "I'm not so sure of that, my hero. Dragons
move fast, even afoot. And the ground down there's bad.
Even full-tilt, Osprey won't be making much speed of it,
when all's said. I would have liked to scout for the clearest

180                 Barbara Hamhty

route, but that isn't possible, either. The most I can hope
for is that there's no uncovered cellar doors or privy pits
between here and the Gates."

Gareth laughed softly. "It's funny, but I never thought
about that. In the ballads, the hero's horse never trips on
the way to do battle with the dragon, though they do it
from time to time even in tourneys, where the ground of
the lists has been smoothed beforehand. I thought it would
be—oh, like a ballad. Very straight. I thought you'd ride
out of Bel, straight up here and on into the Deep..."

"Without resting my horse after the journey, even on
a lead-rein, nor scouting the lay of the land?" John's eyes
danced behind his specs. "No wonder the King's knights
were killed at it." He sighed. "My only worry is that if I
miss my timing by even a little, I'm going to be spot under
the thing when it comes out of the Gates..."

Then he coughed, fanning at the air, and said, "Pox
blister it!" as he dashed back to pick the flaming meal-
cakes off the griddle. Around burned fingers, he said,
"And the damn thing is, even Adric cooks better than I
do..."

Jenny turned away from their voices and the sweetness
of the night beyond the blazing heat of her fire. As she
dipped the harpoons into the thickening seethe of brew
in her kettle, the sweat plastered her long hair to her
cheeks, running down her bare arms from the turned-up
sleeves of her shift to the cuffs of the gloves she wore;

the heat lay like a red film over her toes and the tops of
her feet, bare as they often were when she worked magic.

Like John, she felt withdrawn into herself, curiously
separated from what she did. The death-spells hung like
a stench in the air all around her, and her head and bones
were beginning to ache from the heat and the effort of the
magic she had wrought. Even when the powers she called
were for good, they tired her; she felt weighed down by

Dvagonsbane                  181

them now, exhausted and knowing that she had wrought
nothing good from that weariness.

The Golden Dragon came to her mind again, the first
heartstopping instant she had seen it dropping from the
sky like amber lightning and had thought. This is beauty.
She remembered, also, the butchered ruin left in the gorge,
the stinking puddles of acid and poison and blood, and
the faint, silvery singing dying out of the shivering air. It
might have been only the fumes she inhaled, but she felt
herself turn suddenly sick at the thought.

She had slaughtered Meewinks, or mutilated them and
left them to be eaten by their brothers; she remembered
the crawling greasiness of the bandit's hair under her fin-
gers as she had touched his temples. But they were not
like the dragon. They had chosen to be what they were.

Even as I have.

And what are you. Jenny Waynest?

But she could find no answer that fitted.

Gareth's voice drifted over to her from the other fire.
"That's another thing they never mention in the ballads
that I've been meaning to ask you. I know this sounds
silly, but—how do you keep your spectacles from getting
broken in battle?"

"Don't wear 'em," John's voice replied promptly. "If
you can see it coming, it's too late anyway. And then, I
had Jen lay a spell on them, so they wouldn't get knocked
off or broken by chance when I do wear them."

She looked over at the two of them, out of the con-
densing aura of death-spells and the slaughter of beauty
that surrounded her and her kettle of poison. Firelight
caught in the metal of John's jerkin; against the blueness
of the night it gleamed like a maker's mark stamped in
gold upon a bolt of velvet. She could almost hear the
cheerful grin in his voice, "I figured if I was going to break
my heart loving a magewife, I might as well get some
good from it."

182 Barbara Hambly

Over the shoulder of Nast Wall the moon hung, a half-
open white eye, waxing toward its third quarter. With a
stab like a shard of metal embedded somewhere in her
heart. Jenny remembered then that it had been so, in her
vision in the water.

Silently, she pulled herself back into her private circle
of death, closing out that outer world of friendship and
love and silliness, closing herself in with spells of ruin
and despair and the cold failing of strength. It was her
power to deal death in this way, and she hated herself for
it; though, like John, she knew she had no choice.

"Do you think you'll make it?" Gareth nattered. Before
them, the ruins of the broken town were purple and slate
with shadow in the early light. The war horse Osprey's
breath was warm over Jenny's hand where she held the
reins.

"I'll have to, won't I?" John checked the girths and
swung up into the saddle. The cool reflection of the mom-
ing sky gleamed slimily on the grease Jenny had made for
him late last night to smear on his face against the worst
scorching of the dragon's fire. Frost crackled in the weeds
as Osprey fidgeted his feet. The last thing Jenny had done,
shortly before dawn, had been to send away the mists
that seeped up from the woods to cloak the Vale, and all
around them the air was brilliantly clear, the fallow winter
colors warming to life. Jenny herself felt cold, empty, and
overstretched; she had poured all her powers into the
poisons. Her head ached violently and she felt unclean,
strange, and divided in her mind, as if she were two sep-
arate people. She had felt so, she recalled, when John
had ridden against the first dragon, though then she had
not known why. Then she had not known what the slaugh-
ter of that beauty would be like. She feared for him and
felt despair like a stain on her heart; she only wanted the
day to be over, one way or the other.

Dragonsbane                  183

The mail rings on the back of John's gloves rattled
sharply as he reached down, and she handed him up his
harpoons. There were six of them, in a quiver on his back;

the steel of their barbed shafts caught a slither of the early
light, save for the ugly black that covered their points.
The leather of the grips was firm and tough under her
palms. Over his metal-patched doublet, John had pulled
a chain mail shirt, and his face was framed in a coif of
the same stuff. Without his spectacles and with his shaggy
hair hidden beneath it, the bones of his face were suddenly
prominent, showing what his features could look like in
an old age he might never reach.

Jenny felt she wanted to speak to him, but there was
nothing she could think of to say.

He gathered the reins in hand. "If the dragon comes
out of the Gate before I reach it, I want the pair of you
to leg it," he said, his voice calm. "Get into cover as deep
as you can, the higher up the ridge the better. Let the
horses go if you can—there's a chance the dragon will
go after them first." He did not add that by that time he
would already be dead.

There was a momentary silence. Then he bent from
the saddle and touched Jenny's lips with his own. His felt,
as they always did, surprisingly soft. They had spoken
little, even last night; each had already been drawn into
an armor of silence. It was something they both under-
stood.

He reined away, looking across the Vale to the black
eye of the Deep, and to the black thing waiting within.
Osprey fiddle-footed again, catching John's battle nerves;

the open ground of Deeping seemed suddenly to stretch
away into miles of enormous, broken plain. To Jenny's
eye, every tumbled wall looked as tall as the house it had
once been, every uncovered cellar a gaping chasm. He
would never cross in time, she thought.

Beside her, John leaned down again, this time to pat

184                  Barbara Hambly

Osprey's dappled neck encouragingly. "Osprey, old
friend," he said softly, "don't spook on me now."

He drove in his spurs, and the sharp crack of iron-
shod hooves as they shot forward was like the chip of
distant lightning on a summer noon. Jenny took two steps
down the loose, rocky slope after him, watching the gray
horse and the pewter-dark shape of the man as they plunged
through the labyrinth of gaping foundations, broken beams,
standing water who knew how deep, slipping down drifts
of charred wood chips and racing toward the open black
mouth of the Gates. Her heart hammering achingly in her
chest, Jenny stretched her mageborn senses toward the
Gate, straining to hear. The cold, tingling air seemed to
breathe with the dragon's mind. Somewhere in that dark-
ness was the slithery drag of metallic scales on stone...

There was no way to call the image of the dragon in
her scrying-stone, but she sat down suddenly where she
was on the loose, charred rubble of the slope and pulled
the slip of dirty-white crystal upon its chain from her
jacket pocket. She heard Gareth call her name from the
top of the slope, but she vouchsafed neither answer nor
glance. Across the Vale, Osprey leaped the split ruin of
the demolished Gates on the granite steps, cool blue shad-
ows falling over him and his rider like a cloak as the Gate
swallowed them up.

There was a flick and a gleam, as the wan sunlight
caught in the facets of the jewel. Then Jenny caught a
confused impression of hewn stone walls that could have
encompassed the entire palace of Bel, a cavem-ceiling
bristling with stone teeth from which old lamp-chains hung
down into vast, cobalt spaces of air... black doorways
piercing the walls, and the greatest of them opening oppo-
site. ...

Jenny cupped her hands around the jewel, trying to
see into its depths, straining past the curtains of illusion
that covered the dragon from her sight. She thought she

Dragonsbane                  185

saw the flash of diffuse sunlight on chain mail and saw
Osprey trip on the charred debris of blackened bones and
spilled coins and half-bumed poles that littered the floor.
She saw John pull him out of the stumble and saw the
gleam of the harpoon in his hand... Then something
spurted from the inner doors, like a drench of thrown
bathwater, splattering viscously into the dry ash of the
floor, searing upward in a curtain of fire.

There was a darkness in the crystal and in that dark-
ness, two burning silver lamps.

Nothing existed around her, not the cool shift of the
morning air, nor the sunlight wanning her ankles in her
buckskin boots where her heels rested on the chopped-
up slope of gravel and weeds, not the wintry smell of
water and stone from below, nor the small noises of the
restless horses above. Cupped in her hands, the edges of
the crystal seemed to burn in white light, but its heart
was dark; through that darkness only fragmentary images
came—a sense of something moving that was vast and
dark, the swinging curve of John's body as he flung a
harpoon, and the cloudy swirls of blinding fumes.

In some way she knew Osprey had gone down, smitten
by the stroke of the dragon's tail. She had a brief impres-
sion of John on his knees, his eyes red and swollen from
the acrid vapors that filled the hall, aiming for another
throw. Something like a wing of darkness covered him.
She saw flame again and, as a queer, detached image,
three harpoons lying like scattered jackstraws in the mid-
dle of a puddle of blackened and steaming slime. Some-
thing within her turned to ice; there was only darkness
and movement in the darkness, and then John again, blood
pouring through the rips in his mail shirt, staring up at a
towering shape of glittering shadow, his sword in his hand.

Blackness swallowed the crystal. Jenny was aware that
her hands were shaking, her whole body hurting with a
pain that radiated from a seed of cold under her breast-

186 Barbara Hambly

bone, her throat a bundle of twisted wires. She thought
blindly, John, remembering him striding with graceful
insouciance into Zyeme's dining room, his armor of out-
rageousness protecting him from Zyeme's claws; she
remembered the flash of autumn daylight on his specs as
he stood ankle-deep in pig muck at the Hold, reaching up
his hands to help her dismount.

She could not conceive of what life would be like with-
out that fleeting, triangular grin.

Then somewhere in her mind she heard him call out
to her: Jenny...

She found him lying just beyond the edge of the trap-
ezoid of light that fell through the vast square of the Gates.
She had left Moon Horse outside, tossing her head in fear
at the acrid reek of the dragon that pervaded all that end
of the Vale. Jenny's own heart was pounding, so that it
almost turned her sick; all the way across the ruins of
Deeping she had been waiting for the dark shape of the
dragon to emerge from the Gates.

But nothing had come forth. The silence within the
darkness was worse than any sound could have been.

After the brightness of the Vale, the blue vaults of the
Market Hall seemed almost black. The air was murky
with vapors that diffused what little light there was. The
trapped fumes burned her eyes and turned her dizzy, mixed
with the smoke of burning and the heavy reek of poisoned
slag. Even with a wizard's sight, it took Jenny's eyes a
moment to accustom themselves. Then sickness came
over her, as if the blood that lay spread everywhere had
come from her body, rather than John's.

He lay with his face hidden by his outflung arm, the
mail coif dragged back and the hair beneath it matted with
blood where it had not been singed away. Blood lay in a
long, inky trail behind him, showing where he had crawled
after the fight was over, past the carcass of the horse

Dragonsbane                  187

Osprey, leading like a sticky path to the vast, dark bulk
of the dragon.

The dragon lay still, like a shining mound of obsidian
knives. Supine, it was a little higher than her waist, a
glittering blacksnake nearly forty feet long, veiled in the
white smoke of its poisons and the darkness of its magic,
harpoons sticking from it like darts. One foreleg lay
stretched out toward John, as if with its last strength it
had reached to tear him, and the great talon lay like a
skeleton hand in a pool of leaked black blood. The atmos-
phere all about it seemed heavy, filled with a sweet, clear
singing that Jenny thought was as much within her skull
as outside of it. It was a song with words she could not
understand; a song about stars and cold and the long,
ecstatic plunge through darkness. The tune was half-
familiar, as if she had heard a phrase of it once, long ago,
and had carried it since in her dreams.

Then the dragon Morkeleb raised his head, and for a
time she looked into his eyes.

They were like lamps, a crystalline white kaleidoscope,
cold and sweet and burning as the core of a flame. It
struck her with a sense of overwhelming shock that she
looked into the eyes of a mage like herself. It was an alien
intelligence, clean and cutting as a sliver of black glass.
There was something terrible and fascinating about those
eyes; the singing in her mind was like a voice speaking
to her in words she almost understood. She felt a calling
within her to the hungers that had all of her life consumed
her.

With a desperate wrench, she pulled her thoughts from
it and turned her eyes aside.

She knew then why the legends warned never to look
into a dragon's eyes. It was not only because the dragon
could snag some part of your soul and paralyze you with
indecision while it struck.

188                  Barbara Hambly

It was because, in pulling away, you left some shred
of yourself behind, snared in those ice-crystal depths.

She turned to flee, to leave that place and those too-
knowing eyes, to run from the singing that whispered to
the harmonics of her bones. She would have run, but her
booted foot brushed something as she turned. Looking
down to the man who lay at her feet, she saw for the first
time that his wounds still bted.

CHAPTER X

"HE CAN'T BE dying!"- Gareth finished laying a heap
of fresh-cut branches beside the low fire and turned to
Jenny, his eyes pleading with her. As if. Jenny thought,
with what power was left in her numbed mind, his saying
could make it so.

Without speaking, she leaned across to touch the ice-
cold face of the man who lay covered with plaids and
bearskins, so close to the flickering blaze.

Her mind felt blunted, like a traveler lost in the woods
who returned again and again to the same place, unable
to struggle clear.

She had known that it would come to this, when first
she had taken him into her life. She should never have
yielded to the mischief in those brown eyes. She should
have sent him away and not given in to that weak part of
herself that whispered: I want a friend.

She stood up and shook out her skirts, pulling her plaid
more tightly around her sheepskin jacket. Gareth was
watching her with frightened dog eyes, hurt and pleading;

he followed her over to the heap of the packs on the other
side of the fire.

189

190 Barbara Hambly

She could have had her fill of lovers. There were always
those who would lie with a witch for the novelty of it or
for the luck it was said to bring. Why had she let him stay
until morning and talked to him as if he were not a man
and an enemy whom she knew even then would fetter her
soul? Why had she let him touch her heart as well as her
body?

The night was dead-still, the sky dark save for the white
disc of the waxing moon. Its ghostly light barely outlined
the broken bones of the empty town below. A log settled
in the dying fire; the spurt of light touched a spangle of
red on the twisted links of John's mail shirt and glimmered
stickily on the upturned palm of one blistered hand. Jenny
felt her whole body one open wound of grief.

We change what we touch, she thought. Why had she
let him change her? She had been happy, alone with her
magic. The key to magic is magic—she should have held
to that from the start. She had known even then that he
was a man who would give his life to help others, even
others not his own.

If he had waited for Zyeme...

She pushed the thought away with bitter violence,
knowing Zyeme's magic could have saved him. All day
she had wanted to weep, not only with grief, but with
anger at herself for all the choices of the past.

Thin and plaintive as a child's, Gareth's voice broke
into her circle of stumbling self-hate. "Isn't there anything
that you can do?"

"I have done what I can," she replied wearily. "I have
washed his wounds and stitched them shut, laid spells of
healing upon them. The dragon's blood is a poison in his
veins, and he has lost too much blood of his own."

"But surely there's something..." In the brief gleam
of the fire, she could see that he had been weeping. Her
own soul felt cold now and drained as John's flesh.

"You have asked me that seven times since it grew

Dragonsbane                  191

dark," she said. "This is beyond my skills—beyond the
medicines that I have—beyond my magic."

She tried to tell herself that, even had she not loved
him, even had she not given up the time she could have
spent studying, it would still have been so.

Would she have been able to save him, if she had not
given him all those hours; if she had spent all those early
mornings meditating among the stones in the solitude of
the hilltop instead of lying talking in his bed?

Or would she only have been a little bleaker, a little
madder—a little more like the worst side of herself—a
little more like Caerdinn?

She did not know, and the hurt of that was almost as
bad as the hurt of suspecting that she did know.

But she had only her own small powers—spells worked
one rune at a time, patiently, in the smallest increments
of thought. She slowed and calmed her mind, as she did
when she worked magic, and realized she could not cure
him. What then could she do for him? What had Mab
said, when she had spoken of healing?

She ran her hands through her long hair, shifting the
weight of it from her face and neck. Her shoulders hurt
with cramp; she had not slept in two nights, and her body
ached.

"The most we can do now is keep heating stones in
the fire to put around him," she said at last. "We must
keep him warm."

Gareth swallowed and wiped his nose. "Just that?"

"For now, yes. If he seems a little stronger in the mom-
ing, we may be able to move him." But she knew in her
heart that he would not live until morning. Like a whis-
pering echo, the vision in the water bowl returned to her,
a bitter nightmare of failed hope.

Hesitantly, Gareth offered, "There are physicians up
at Halnath. Polycarp, for one."

"And an army around its walls." Her voice sounded

192                  Barbara Hambly

very cold to her own ears. "If he's still alive in the morning
... I didn't want you to risk putting yourself once again
where Zyeme might reach you, but in the morning, I think
you should take Battlehammer and ride back to Bel."

Gareth looked frightened at the mention of Zyeme's
name and at the thought of possibly facing her alone, but
he nodded. Jenny was interested to note, in some detached
portion of her tired soul, that, having sought all his life
for heroism, while Gareth might now flinch from it, he
did not flee.

She went on, "Go to the house of the gnomes and fetch
Miss Mab here. The medicines of the gnomes may be
locked away in the Deep, but..." Her voice trailed off.
Then she repeated softly, "The medicines of the gnomes."

Like pins and needles in a numbed limb, the hurt of
hope renewed as a sudden wash of agony. She whispered,
"Gareth, where are John's maps?"

Gareth blinked at her uncomprehendingly, too preoc-
cupied for the moment with his own fears of Zyerne to
realize what she was getting at. Then he gave a start, and
hope flooded into his face, and he let out a whoop that
could have been heard in Bel. 'The Places of Healing!"
he cried, and threw his arms around her, sweeping her
off her feet. "I knew it!" he shouted, with all his old forlorn
cockiness. "I knew you could think of something! You
can..."

"You don't know anything of the kind." She fought
free of him, angry at him for expressing what was already
surging through her veins like a swig of cheap brandy.
She brushed past him and almost ran to John's side, while
Gareth, gamboling like a large puppy, began to ransack
the camp for the maps.

If there was anything worse than the pain of despair,
she thought, it was the pain of hope. At least despair is
restful. Her own heart was hammering as she brushed
aside the russet hair from John's forehead, almost black-

Dragonsbane                  193

looking now against the bloodless flesh. Her mind was
racing ahead, ticking off the remedies Mab had spoken
of: distillations to slow and strengthen the thready heart-
beat; salves to promote the healing of the flesh; and phil-
ters to counteract poison and give him back the blood he
had lost. There would be spell-books, too, she thought,
hidden in the Places of Healing, words with which to bind
the soul to the flesh, until the flesh itself could recover.
She could find them, she told herself desperately, she
must. But the knowledge of what was at stake lay on her
heart like stones. For a moment she felt so tired that she
almost wished for his death, because it would require no
further striving from her and threaten her with no further

failure.

Holding his icy hands, she slid for a moment into the
outer fringes of the healing trance and whispered to him
by his inner name. But it was as if she called at the head
of a descending trail along which he had long since
passed—there was no answer.

But there was something else. In her trance she heard
it, a soft touch of sound that twisted her heart with fright—
the slur of scales on rock, the shiver of alien music.

Her eyes opened; she found herself shaking and cold.

The dragon was alive.

"Jenny?" Gareth came nattering over to her side, his
hands full of creased bits of dirty papyrus. "I found them,
but—but the Places of Healing aren't on them." His eyes
were filled with worry behind the cracked, crazy specs.
"I've looked..."

Jenny took them from his hand with fingers that shook.
In the firelight she could make out passages, caverns,
rivers, all marked in Dromar's strong, runic hand, and the
blank spots, unmarked and unlabeled. The affair of the
gnomes.

Anger wrenched at her, and she threw the maps from
her. "Damn Dromar and his secrets," she whispered

194 Barbara Hambly

viciously. "Of course the Places of Healing are the heart
of the Deep that they all swear by!"

"But—" Gareth stammered weakly. "Can you—can
you find them anyway?"

Fury welled up in her, of hope thwarted, first by fear
and now by one gnome's stubbornness, like molten rock
pouring through the cracks of exhaustion in her soul. "In
those warrens?" she demanded. For a moment anger,
weariness, and the knowledge of the dragon claimed her,
tearing at her so that she could have screamed and called
down the lightning to rive apart the earth.

As Zyeme did, she told herself, fighting for calm. She
closed her fists, one around the other, and pressed her
lips against them, willing the rage and the fear to pass;

and when they passed, there was nothing left. It was as
if the unvoiced scream had burned everything out of her
and left only a well of dark and unnatural calm, a universe
deep.

Gareth was still looking at her, his eyes pleading. She
said quietly, "Maybe. Mab spoke of the way. I may be
able to reason it out." Mab had also said that one false
step would condemn her to a death by starvation, wan-
dering in darkness.

Like an answer, she knew at once what John would
have said to that—God's Grandmother, Jen, the dra-
gon'11 eat you before you get a chance to starve.

Trust John, she thought, to make me laugh at a time
like this.

She got to her feet, chilled to the bone and feeling a
hundred years old, and walked to the packs once more.
Gareth trailed along after her, hugging his crimson cloak
about himself for warmth and chattering on about one
thing and another; locked in that strange stasis of calm,
Jenny scarcely heard.

It was only as she slung her big satchel about her shoul-
der and picked up her halberd that he seemed to feel her

Dragonsbane                  195

silence. "Jenny," he said doubtfully, catching the edge of
her plaid. "Jenny—the dragon is dead, isn't it? I mean,
the poison did work, didn't it? It must have, if you were
able to get John out of there..."

"No," Jenny said quietly. She wondered a little at the
weird silence within her; she had felt more fear listening
for the Whisperers in the Woods ofWyr than she did now.
She started to move off toward the darkness of the shadow-
drowned ruins. Gareth ran around in front of her and
caught her by the arms.

"But—that is—how long..."

She shook her head. 'Too long, almost certainly." She
put her hand on his wrist to move him aside. Having made
up her mind what she must do, she wanted it over with,
though she knew she would never succeed.

Gareth swallowed hard, his thin face working in the
low ruby light of the fire. "I—I'll go," he volunteered
shakily. "Tell me what I should look for, and I..."

For an instant, laughter threatened to crack all her
hard-won resolve—not laughter at him, but at the wan
gallantry that impelled him, like the hero of a ballad, to
take her place. But he would not have understood how
she loved him for the offer, absurd as it was; and if she
began to laugh she would cry, and that weakness she knew
she could not now afford. So she only stood on her toes
and pulled his shoulders down so that she could kiss his
soft, thin cheek. "Thank you, Gareth," she murmured.
"But I can see in the darkness, and you cannot, and I
know what I seek."

"Really," he persisted, torn visibly between relief at
her refusal, awareness that she was in fact far better suited
than he for the task, a lifetime of chivalric precept, and
a very real desire to protect her from harm.

"No," she said gently. "Just see that John stays warm.
If I don't come back..." Her voice faltered at the knowl-
edge of what lay before her—the death by the dragon, or

196                  Barbara Humbly

the death within the maze. She forced strength into her
words. "Do what seems best to you, but don't try to move
him too soon."

The admonition was futile, and she knew it. She tried
to remember Mab's words regarding the lightless laby-
rinths of the Deep and they slid from her mind like a
fistful of water, leaving only the recollection of the shining
wheels of diamond that were the dragon's watching eyes.
But she had to reassure Gareth; and while John breathed,
she knew she could never have remained in camp.

She squeezed Gareth's hand and withdrew from him.
Hitching her plaids higher on her shoulder, she turned
toward the shadowy trails through the Vale and the dark
bulk of Nast Wall that loomed against a sullen and pitchy
sky. Her final glimpse of John was of the last glow of the
dying fire that outlined the shape of his nose and lips
against the darkness.

Long before she reached the Great Gates of the Deep,
Jenny was aware of the singing. As she crossed the frost-
skimmed stones of the ruins, bled of all their daytime
color by the feeble wash of the moonlight, she felt it—a
hunger, a yearning, and a terrifying beauty, far beyond
her comprehension. It intruded into her careful piecing-
together of those fragmentary memories of Mab's remarks
about the Places of Healing, broke even into her fears for
John. It seemed to float around her in the air, and yet she
knew that it could only be heard by her; it shivered in
her bones, down to her very finger ends. When she stood
in the Gates with the blackness of the Market Hall lying
before her and her own shadow a diffuse smudge on the
scuffed and blood-gummed refuse of the floor, it was almost
overwhelming.

There was no sound to it, but its rhythm called her
blood. Braided images that she could neither completely
sense nor wholly understand twisted through her con-

Dragonsbane                  197

sciousness—knots of memory, of starry darkness that
sunlight had never seen, of the joyous exhaustion of phys-
ical love whose modes and motives were strange to her,
and of mathematics and curious relationships between
things that she had never known were akin. It was stronger
and very different from the singing that had filled the gully
when the Golden Dragon ofWyr lay gasping its last. There
was a piled strength in it of years lived fully and of patterns
comprehended across unknowable gulfs of time.

The dragon was invisible in the darkness. She heard
the soft scrape of his scales and guessed him to be lying
across the inner doors of the Market Hall, that led to the
Grand Passage and so into the Deep. Then the silver lamps
of his eyes opened and seemed to glow softly in the
reflected moonlight, and in her mind the singing flowed
and intensified its colors into the vortex of a white core.
In that core words formed.

Have you come seeking medicines, wizard woman? Or
is that weapon you carry simply what you have deluded
yourself into thinking sufficient to finish what your poi-
sons do too slowly for your convenience'!

The words were almost pictures, music and patterns
shaped as much by her own soul as by his. They would
hurt, she thought, if allowed to sink too deeply.

"I have come seeking medicines," she replied, her voice
reverberating against the fluted dripstone of the toothed
ceiling. "The power of the Places of Healing was every-
where renowned."

This I knew. There was a knot of gnomes that held out
in the place where they took au the wounded. The door
was low, but I could reach through it like a wolf raiding
a bury of rabbits. I fed upon them for many days, until
they were all gone. They had the wherewithal to make
poisons there, too. They poisoned the carrion, as if they
did not think that I could see the death that tainted the
meat. This will be the place that you seek.

198                  Barbara Hambly

Because he spoke partially in pictures, she glimpsed
also the dark ways into the place, like a half-remembered
dream in her mind. Her hope stirred, and she fixed the
pictures in her thoughts—tiny fragments, but perhaps
enough to serve.

With her wizard's sight she could distinguish him now,
stretched before her across the doors in the darkness. He
had dislodged the harpoons from his throat and belly, and
they lay blackened with his blood in the muck of slime
and ash on the floor. The thorny scales of his back and
sides lay sleek now, their edges shining faintly in the dim
reflection of the moon. The heavy ridges of spikes that
guarded his backbone and the joints of his legs still bristled
like weapons. The enormous wings lay folded neatly along
his sides, and their joints, too, she saw, were armored
and spined. His head fascinated her most, long and narrow
and birdlike, its shape concealed under a mask of bony
plates. From those plates grew a vast mane of ribbonlike
scales, mingled with tufts of fur and what looked like
growths of ferns and feathers; his long, delicate antennae
with their glittering bobs of jet lay limp upon the ground
around his head. He lay like a dog, his chin between his
forepaws; but the eyes that burned into hers were the
eyes of a mage who is also a beast.

J n'(7/ bargain with you, wizard woman.

She knew, with chill premonition but no surprise what
his bargain would be, and her heart quickened, though
whether with dread or some strange hope she did not
know. She said, "No," but within herself she felt, like a
forbidden longing, the unwillingness to let something this
beautiful, this powerful, die. He was evil, she told herself,
knowing and believing it in her heart. Yet there was some-
thing in those silver eyes that drew her, some song of
black and latent fire whose music she understood.

The dragon moved his head a little on the powerful

Dragonsbane                  199

curve of his neck. Blood dripped down from the tattered

ribbons of his mane.

Do you think that even you, a wizard who sees in dark-
ness, can search out the ways of the gnomes'?

The pictures that filled her mind were of the darkness,
of clammy and endless mazes of the world underground.
Her heart sank with dread at the awareness of them; those
few small images of the way to the Places of Healing,
those fragmentary words of Mab's, turned in her hands
to the pebbles with which a child thinks it can slaughter

lions.

Still she said, "I have spoken to one of them of these

ways."

And did she tell the truth? The gnomes are not famed

for it in matters concerning the heart of the Deep.

Jenny remembered the empty places on Dromar's maps.
But she retorted, "Nor are dragons."

Beneath the exhaustion and pain, she felt in the drag-
on's mind amusement at her reply, like a thin spurt of

cold water in hot.

What is truth, wizard woman? The truth that dragons
see is not pleasant to the human eyes, however uncom-
fortably comprehensible it may be to their hearts. You

know this.

She saw that he had felt her fascination. The silver
eyes drew her; his mind touched hers, as a seducer would
have touched her hand. She saw, also, that he understood
that she would not draw back from that touch. She forced
her thoughts away from him, holding to the memories of
John and of their sons, against the power that called to
her like a whisper of amorphous night.

With effort, she tore her eyes from his and turned to
leave.

Wizard woman, do you think this man for whom you
risk the bones of your body will live longer than I?

She stopped, the toes of her boots touching the hem

\

200                  Barbara Hambly

of the carpet of moonlight which lay upon the flagstoned
floor. Then she turned back to face him, despairing and
torn. The wan light showed her the pools of acrid blood
drying over so much of the floor, the sunken look to the
dragon's flesh; and she realized that his question had struck
at her weakness and despair to cover his own.

She said calmly, "There is the chance that he will."
She felt the anger in the movement of his head, and
the pain that sliced through him with it. And will you
wager on that? Will you wager that, even did the gnomes
speak the truth, you will be able to sort your way through
their warrens, spiral within spiral, dark within dark, to
find what you need in time? Heal me, wizard woman, and
I will guide you with my mind and show you the place
that you seek.

For a time she only gazed up at that long bulk of shining
blackness, the dark mane of bloody ribbons, and the eyes
like oiled metal ringing eternal darkness. He was a wonder
such as she had never seen, a spined and supple shadow
from the thomed tips of his backswept wings to the honied
beak of his nose. The Golden Dragon John had slain on
the windswept hills of Wyr had been a being of sun and
fire, but this was a smoke-wraith of night, black and strong
and old as time. The spines of his head grew into fantastic
twisted homs, icy-smooth as steel; his forepaws had the
shape of hands, save that they had two thumbs instead
of one. The voice that spoke in her mind was steady, but
she could see the weakness dragging at every line of that
great body and feel the faint shiver of the last taut strength
that fought to continue the bluff against her.

Unwillingly, she said, "I know nothing of the healing
of dragons."

The silver eyes narrowed, as if she had asked him for
something he had not thought to give. For a moment they
faced one another, cloaked in the cave's darkness. She
was aware of John and of time—distantly, like something

Dragonsbane                  201

urgent in a dream. But she kept her thoughts concentrated
upon the creature that lay before her and the diamond-
prickled darkness of that alien mind that struggled with

hers.

Then suddenly the gleaming body convulsed. She felt,
through the silver eyes, the pain like a scream through
the steel ropes of his muscles. The wings stretched out
uncontrollably, the claws extending in a terrible spasm as
the poison shifted in his veins. The voice in her mind
whispered. Go,

At the same moment memories flooded her thoughts
of a place she had never been before. Vague images
crowded to her mind of blackness as vast as the night
outdoors, columned with a forest of stone trees that whis-
pered back the echo of every breath, of rock seams a few
yards across whose ceilings were lost in distant darkness,
and of the murmuring of endless water under stone. She
felt a vertigo of terror as in a nightmare, but also a queer
sense of deja vu, as if she had passed that way before.

It came to her that it was Morkeleb and not she who
had passed that way; the images were the way to the
Places of Healing, the very heart of the Deep.

The spined black body before her twisted with another
paroxysm of anguish, the huge tail slashing like a whip
against the rock of the wall. The pain was visible now in
the silver eyes as the poison ate into the dragon's blood.
Then his body dropped slack, a dry clatter of horns and
spines like a skeleton falling on a stone floor, and from a
great distance off she heard again. Go.

His scales had all risen in a blanket of razors at his
agony; quiveringly, they smoothed themselves flat along
the sunken sides. Jenny gathered her courage and strode
forward; without giving herself time to think of what she
was doing, she scrambled over the waist-high hill of the
ebony flank that blocked the doorway of the Grand Tun-
nel. The backbone ridge was like a hedge of spears, thrust-

202           '      Barbara Hambly

ing stiffly from the unsteady footing of the hide. Kilting
up her skirt, she put a hand to steady herself on the carved
stone pillar of the doorjamb and leaped over the spines
awkwardly, fearing to the last that some renewed con-
vulsion would thrust them into her thighs.

But the dragon lay quiet. Jenny could sense only the
echoes of his mind within hers, like a faint gleam of far-
off light. Before her stretched the darkness of the Deep.

If she thought about them, the visions she had seen
retreated from her. But she found that if she simply walked
forward, as if she had trodden this way before, her feet
would lead her. Dream memories whispered through her
mind of things she had seen, but sometimes the angle of
sight was different, as if she had looked down upon them
from above.

The upper levels of the Deep were dry, wrought by the
gnomes after the fashion of the tastes of men. The Grand
Passage, thirty feet broad and paved in black granite,
worn and runnelled with the track of uncounted genera-
tions of feet, had been walled with blocks of cut stone to
hide the irregularities of its shape; broken statues lying
like scattered bones in the dark attested the classical
appearance of the place in its heyday. Among the frag-
mented whiteness of the marble limbs lay real bones, and
with them the twisted bronze frames and shattered glass
of the huge lamps that had once depended from the high
ceiling, all scraped together along the walls, like leaves
in a gutter, by the passage of the dragon's body. Even in
the darkness, Jenny's wizard's sight showed her the fire-
blackening where the spilled oil had been ignited by the
dragon's breath.

Deeper down, the place had the look of the gnomes.
Stalagmites and columns ceased to be carved into the
straight pillars favored by the children of men, and were
wrought into the semblance of trees in leaf, or beasts, or

Dragonsbane                  203

grotesque things that could have been either; more and
more frequently they had simply been left to keep the
original shape of pouring water which had been their own.
The straight, handsomely finished water courses of the
higher levels gave place to tumbling streams in the lower
deeps; in some places the water fell straight, fifty or a
hundred feet from distant ceilings, like a living pillar, or
gushed away into darkness through conduits shaped like
the skulls of gargoyles. Jenny passed through caverns and
systems of caves that had been transformed into the vast,
interconnected dwelling places of the great clans and fam-
ilies of the gnomes, but elsewhere she found halls and
rooms large enough to contain all the village of Deeping,
where houses and palaces had been built freestanding,
their bizarre spires and catwalks indistinguishable from
the groves of stalagmites that clustered in strange forests
on the banks of pools and rivers like polished onyx.

And through these silent realms of wonder she saw
nothing but the evidences of ruin and decay and the scrap-
ing track of the dragon. White ur-toads were everywhere,
squabbling with rats over the rotting remains of stored
food or month-old carrion; in some places, the putrescent
fetor of what had been hoards of cheese, meat, or vege-
tables was nearly unbreathable. The white, eyeless ver-
min of the deeper pits, whose names she could only guess
at from Mab's accounts, slipped away at her approach,
or hid themselves behind the fire-marked skulls and
dropped vessels of chased silver that everywhere scat-
tered the halls.

As she went deeper, the air became cold and very
damp, the stone increasingly slimy beneath her boots; the
weight of the darkness was crushing. As she walked the
lightless mazes, she understood that Mab had been right;

without guidance, even she, whose eyes could pierce that
utter darkness, would never have found her way to the
heart of the Deep.

204                 Barbara HamUy

But find it she did. The echo of it was in the dragon's
mind, setting up queer resonances in her soul, a lamina-
tion of feelings and awareness whose alien nature she
shrank from, uncomprehending. Beside its doors, she felt
the aura of healing that lingered still in the air, and the
faint breath of ancient power.

All through that series of caverns, the air was warm,
smelling of dried camphor and spices; the putrid stench
of decay and the crawling vermin were absent. Stepping
through the doors into the domed central cavern, where
ghost-pale stalactites regarded themselves in the oiled
blackness of a central pool, she wondered how great a
spell it would take to hold that healing warmth, not only
against the cold in the abysses of the earth, but for so
long after those who had wrought the spell had perished.

The magic here was great indeed.

It pervaded the place; as she passed cautiously through
the rooms of meditation, of dreaming, or of rest. Jenny
was conscious of it as a living presence, rather than the
stasis of dead spells. At times the sensation of it grew so
strong that she looked back over her shoulder and called
out to the darkness, "Is someone there?" though in her
reason she knew there was not. But as with the Whis-
perers in the north, her feelings argued against her reason,
and again and again she extended her senses through that
dark place, her heart pounding in hope or fear—she could
not tell which. But she touched nothing, nothing but dark-
ness and the drip of water falling eternally from the hang-
ing teeth of the stones.

There was living magic there, whispering to itself in
darkness—and like the touch of some foul thing upon her
flesh, she felt the sense of evil.

She shivered and glanced around her nervously once
more. In a small room, she found the medicines she sought,
row after row of glass phials and stoppered jars of the
green-and-white marbled ware the gnomes made in such

Dragonsbane                  205

quantity. She read their labels in the darkness and stowed
them in her satchel, working quickly, partly from a grow-
ing sense of uneasiness and partly because she felt time
leaking away and John's life ebbing like the going-out of

the tide.

He can't die, she told herself desperately, not after all
this—but she had come too late to too many bedsides in
her years as a healer to believe that. Still, she knew that
the medicines alone might not be enough. Hastily, glanc-
ing back over her shoulder as she moved from room to
dark and silent room, she began searching for the inner
places of power, the libraries where they would store the
books and scrolls of magic that, she guessed, made up
the true heart of the Deep.

Her boots swished softly on the sleek floors, but even
that small noise twisted at her nerves. The floors of the
rooms, like all the places inhabited by gnomes, were never
at one level, but made like a series of terraces; even the
smallest chambers had two or more. And as she searched,
the eerie sense of being watched grew upon her, until she
feared to pass through new doors, half-expecting to meet
some evil thing gloating in the blackness. She felt a power,
stronger than any she had encountered—stronger than
Zyerne's, stronger than the dragon's. But she found noth-
ing, neither that waiting, silent evil, nor any book of power
by which magic would be transmitted down the years
among the gnome mages—only herbals, anatomies, or
catalogs of diseases and cures. In spite of her uneasy fear,
she felt puzzled—Mab had said that the gnomes had no
Lines, yet surely the power had to be transmitted some-
how. So she forced herself to seek, deeper and deeper,
for the books that must contain it.

Exhaustion was beginning to weaken her like slow ill-
ness. Last night's watching and the night's before weighed
her bones, and she knew she would have to abandon her
search. But knowledge of her own inadequacy drove her,

206 Barbara Hambly

questing inward into the forbidden heart of the Deep,
desperate to find what she might before she returned to
the surface to do what she could with what she had.

She stepped through a door into a dark place that echoed
with her breathing.

She had felt cold before, but it seemed nothing now;

nothing compared to the dread that congealed around her
heart.

She stood in the place she had seen in the water bowl,
in the visions of John's death.

It shocked her, for she had come on it unexpectedly.
She had thought to find an archive there, a place of teach-
ing, for she guessed this to be the heart and center of the
blank places on Dromar's ambiguous maps. But through
a knotted forest of stalactites and columns, she glimpsed
only empty darkness that smelled faintly of the wax of a
thousand candles, which slumped like dead things in the
niches of the rock. No living thing was there, but she felt
again that sense of evil and she stepped cautiously forward
into the open spaces of black toward the misshapen stone
altar.

She laid her hands upon the blue-black, soapy-feeling
stone. In her vision the place had been filled with mut-
tering whispers, but now there was only silence. For a
moment, dark swirlings seemed to stir in her mind, the
inchoate whisperings of fragmentary visions, but they
passed like a groundswell, leaving no more aftertaste than
a dream.

Still, they seemed to take from her the last of her
strength and her will; she felt bitterly weary and suddenly
very frightened of the place. Though she heard no sound,
she whirled, her heart beating so that she could almost
hear its thudding echo in the dark. There was evil there,
somewhere—she knew it now, felt it close enough to leer
over her shoulder. Shifting the bulging satchel upon her
shoulder, she hastened like a thief across the slithery dark-

Dragonsbane                 207

ness of the gnomes' dancing floor, seeking the ways that
would lead her out of the darkness, back to the air above.

Morkeleb's mind had guided her down into the abyss,
but she could feel no touch of it now. She followed the
marks she had made, runes that only she could see, drawn
upon the walls with her forefinger. As she ascended through
the dark rock seams and stairs of amber flowstone, she
wondered if the dragon were dead. A part of her hoped
that he was, for the sake of the people of these lands, for
the gnomes, and for the Master; a part of her felt the same
grief that she had, standing above the dragon's corpse in
the gully ofWyr. But there was something about that grief
that made her hope still more that the dragon was dead,
for reasons she hesitated to examine.

The Grand Passage was as dark as the bowels of the
Deep had been, bereft of even the little moonlight that
had leaked in to illuminate it before; but even in the utter
darkness, the air here was different—cold but dry and
moving, unlike the still, brooding watchfulness of the heart
of the Deep.

Her wizard's sight showed her the dark, bony shape
of the dragon's haunch lying across the doorway, the bris-
tling spears of his backbone pointing inward toward her.
As she came nearer she saw how sunken the scaled skin
lay on the curve of the bone.

Listen as she would, she heard no murmur of his mind.
But, the music that had seemed to fill the Market Hall
echoed there still, faint and piercing, with molten shivers
of dying sound.

He was unconscious—dying, she thought. Do you think
this man will live longer than I? he had asked.

Jenny unslung her plaid from her shoulder and laid the
thick folds over the cutting knives of the dragon's spine.
The edges drove through the cloth; she added the heavy
sheepskin of her jacket and, shivering as the outer cold

208 Barbara Hambly

sliced through the thin sleeves of her shift, worked her
foot onto the largest of the spines. Catching the doorpost
once again for leverage, she swung herself nimbly up and
over. For an instant she balanced on the haunch, feeling
the slender suppleness of the bones under the steel scales
and the soft heat that radiated from the dragon's body;

then she sprang down. She stood for a moment, listening
with her ears and her mind.

The dragon made no move. The Market Hall lay before
her, blue-black and ivory with the feeble trickle of starlight
that seemed so bright after the utter night below the ground.
Even though the moon had set, every pot sherd and skewed
lampframe seemed to Jenny's eyes outlined in brightness,
every shadow like spilled ink. The blood was drying,
though the place stank of it. Osprey still lay in a smeared
pool of darkness, surrounded by glinting harpoons. The
night felt very old. A twist of wind brought her the smell
of woodsmoke from the fire on Tanner's Rise.

Like a ghost Jenny crossed the hall, shivering in the
dead cold. It was only when she reached the open night
of the steps that she began to run.

CHAPTER XI

AT DAWN SHE felt John's hand tighten slightly around
her own.

Two nights ago she had worked the death-spells, weav-
ing an aura of poison and ruin—the circles of them still
lay scratched in the earth at the far end of the Rise. She
had not slept more than an hour or so the night before
that, somewhere on the road outside Bel, curled in John's
arms. Now the drifting smoke of the low fire was a smudge
of gray silk in the pallid morning air, and she felt worn
and chilled and strange, as if her skin had been sand-
papered and every nerve lay exposed. Yet she felt strangely
calm.

She had done everything she could, slowly, meticu-
lously, step by step, following Miss Mab's remembered
instructions as if the body she knew so well were a strang-
er's. She had given him the philters and medicines as the
gnomes did, by means of a hollow needle driven into the
veins, and had packed poultices on the wounds to draw
from them the poison of the dragon's blood. She had
traced the runes of healing where the marks of the wounds
cut the paths of life throughout his body, touching them

209

210 Barbara Hambly

with his inner name, the secret of his essence, woven into
the spells. She had called him patiently, repeatedly, by
the name that his soul knew, holding his spirit to his body
by what force of magic she could muster, until the med
icines could take hold.

She had not thought that she would succeed. When
she did, she was exhausted past grief or joy, able to think
no further than the slight lift of his ribcage and the crease
of his blackened eyelids with his dreams.

Gareth said softly, "Will he be all right?" and she nod-
ded. Looking at the gawky young prince who hunkered
at her side by the fire, she was struck by his silence.
Perhaps the closeness of death and the endless weariness
of the night had sobered him. He had spent the hours
while she was in the Deep patiently heating stones and
placing them around John's body as he had been told to
do—a dull and necessary task, and one to which, she was
almost certain, she owed the fact that John had still been
alive when she had returned from the dragon's lair.

Slowly, her every bone hurting her to move, she put
off the scuffed scarlet weight of his cloak. She felt scraped
and aching, and wanted only to sleep. But she stood up,
knowing there was something else she must do, worse
than all that had gone before. She stumbled to her med-
icine bag and brought out the brown tabat leaves she
always carried, dried to the consistency of leather. Break-
ing two of them to pieces, she put them in her mouth and
chewed.

Their wringing bitterness was in itself enough to wake
her, without their other properties. She had chewed them
earlier in the night, against the exhaustion that she had
felt catching up with her while she worked. Gareth watched
her apprehensively, his long face haggard within the
straggly frame of his green-tipped hair, and she reflected
that he must be almost as weary as she. Lines that had
existed only as brief traces of passing expressions were

Dragonsbane                  211

etched there now, from his nostrils to the comers of his
mouth, and others showed around his eyes when he took
off his broken spectacles to rub the inner corners of the
lids—lines that would deepen and settle into his manhood
and his old age. As she ran her hands through the loosened
cloud of her hair, she wondered what her own face looked
like, or would look like after she did what she knew she

must do.

She began collecting medicines into her satchel once

more.

"Where are you going?"

She found one of John's plaids and wrapped it about
her, all her movements stiff with weariness. She felt
threadbare as a piece of worn cloth, but the uneasy strength
of the tabat leaves was already coursing through her veins.
She knew she would have to be careful, for the tabat was
like a usurer; it lent, but it had a way of demanding back
with interest when one could least afford to pay. The moist
air felt cold in her lungs; her soul was oddly numb.

"To keep a promise," she said.

The boy watched her with trepidation in his earnest
gray eyes as she shouldered her satchel once more and
set off through the misty silences of the ruined town toward
the Gates of the Deep.

"Morkeleb?"

Her voice dissipated like a thread of mist in the stillness
of the Market Hall. Vapor and blue morning shadow
cloaked the Vale outside, and the light here was gray and
sickly. Before her the dragon lay like a dropped garment
of black silk, held to shape only by its bonings. One wing
stretched out, where it had fallen after the convulsions of
the night before; the long antennae trailed limp among the
ribbons of the mane. Faint singing still lay upon the air,
drawing at Jenny's heart.

He had given her the way through the Deep, she

212 Barbara Hambly

thought; it was John's life that she owed him. She tried
to tell herself that it was for this reason only that she did
not want that terrible beauty to die.

Her voice echoed among the upended ivory turrets of
the roof. "Morkeleb!"

The humming changed within her mind, and she knew
he heard. One delicate, crayfish antenna stirred. The lids
of silver eyes slipped back a bare inch. For the first time
she saw how delicate those lids were, tinted with subtle
shades of violet and green within the blackness. Looking
into the white depths they partly shielded, she felt fear,
but not fear for her body; she felt again the cross-blowing
winds of present should and future if, rising up out of the
chasms of doubt. She summoned calm to her, as she sum-
moned clouds or the birds of the hawthorn brakes, and
was rather surprised at the steadiness of her voice.

"Give me your name."

Life moved in him then, a gold heat that she felt through
the singing of the air. Anger and resistance; bitter resis-
tance to the last.

"I cannot save you without knowing your name," she
said. "If you slip beyond the bounds of your flesh, I need
something by which to call you back."

Still that molten wrath surged through the weakness
and pain. She remembered Caerdinn saying, "Save a
dragon, slave a dragon." At that time, she had not known
why anyone would wish to save the life of such a creature,
nor how doing so would place something so great within
your power. Cock by its feet...

"Morkeleb!" She walked forward, forgetting her fear
of him—perhaps through anger and dread that he would
die, perhaps only through the tabat leaves—and laid her
small hands on the soft flesh around his eyes. The scales
there were tinier than the ends of needles. The skin felt
like dry silk beneath her hand, pulsing with warm life.
She felt again that sense, half-fright, half-awe, of taking

Dragonsbane                  213

a step down a road which should not be trodden, and
wondered if it would be wiser and better to turn away
and let him die. She knew what he was. But having touched
him, having looked into those diamond eyes, she could
more easily have given up her own life.

In the glitter of the singing within her mind, one single
air seemed to detach itself, as if the thread that bound
together the complex knots of its many harmonies had
suddenly taken on another color. She knew it immediately
in its wholeness, from the few truncated fragments Caer-
dinn had whistled for her in a hedgerow one summer day.
The music itself was the dragon's name.

It slid through her fingers, soft as silken ribbons; taking
it, she began to braid it into her spells, weaving them like
a rope of crystal around the dragon's fading soul. Through
the turns of the music, she glimpsed the entrance to the
dark, starry mazes of his inner mind and heart and, by
the flickering light of it, seemed to see the paths that she
must take to the healing of his body.

She had brought with her the medicines from the Deep,
but she saw now that they were useless. Dragons healed
themselves and one another through the mind alone. At
times, in the hours that followed, she was terrified of this
healing, at others, only exhausted past anything she had
ever experienced or imagined, even in the long night
before. Her weariness grew, encompassing body and brain
in mounting agony; she felt entangled in a net of light and
blackness, struggling to draw across some barrier a vast,
cloudy force that pulled her toward it over that same
frontier. It was not what she had thought to do, for it had
nothing to do with the healing of humans or beasts. She
summoned the last reserves of her own power, digging
forgotten strengths from the marrow of her bones to battle
for his life and her own. Holding to the ropes of his life
took all this strength and more that she did not have; and
in a kind of delirium, she understood that if he died, she

214                  Barbara Hambly

would die also, so entangled was her essence in the starry
skeins of his soul. Small and clear, she got a glimpse of
the future, like an image in her scrying-stone—that if she
died, John would die within the day, and Gareth would
last slightly less than seven years, as a husk slowly hol-
lowed by Zyeme's perverted powers. Turning from this,
she clung to the small, rock-steady strength of what she
knew: old Caerdinn's spells and her own long meditations
in the solitude among the stones of Frost Fell.

Twice she called Morkeleb by his name, tangling the
music of it with the spells she had so laboriously learned
rune by rune, holding herself anchored to this life with
the memory of familiar things—the shapes of the leaves
of plants, gentian and dog's mercury, the tracks of hares
upon the snow, and wild, vagrant airs played on the
pennywhistle upon summer nights. She felt the dragon's
strength stir and the echo of his name return.

She did not remember sleeping afterward. But she woke
to the warmth of sunlight on her hair. Through the open
Gates of the Deep, she could see the looming rock face
of the cliffs outside drenched with cinnabar and gold by
the afternoon's slanted light. Turning her head, she saw
that the dragon had moved and lay sleeping also, great
wings folded once more and his chin upon his foreclaws
like a dog. In the shadows, he was nearly invisible. She
could not see that he breathed, but wondered if she ever
had. Did dragons breathe?

Lassitude flooded her, burying her like silk-fine sand.
The last of the tabat leaves had burned out of her veins,
and that exhaustion added to the rest. Scraped, drained,
wrung, she wanted only to sleep again, hour after hour,
for days if possible.

But she knew it was not possible. She had saved Mor-
keleb, but was under no illusion that this would let her
sleep safely in his presence, once he had regained a little
of his strength. A detached thread of amusement at herself

Dragonsbane                  215

made her chuckle; lan and Adric, she thought, would
boast to each other and every boy in the village that their
mother could go to sleep in a dragon's lair—that is, if she
ever made it back to tell them of it. Even rolling over hurt
her bones. The weight of her clothes and her hair dragged
at her like chain mail as she stood.

She stumbled to the Gates and stood for a moment,
leaning against the rough-hewn granite of the vast pillar,
the dry, moving freedom of the air fingering her face.
Turning her head, she looked back over her shoulder and
met the dragon's open eyes. Their depths stared into hers
for one instant, crystalline flowers of white and silver,
like glittering wells of rage and hate. Then they slid shut
again. She walked from the shadows out into the brilliance
of the evening.

Her mind as well as her body felt numbed as she walked
slowly back through Deeping. Everything seemed queer
and changed, the shadow of each pebble and weed a thing
of new and unknown significance to her, as if for years
she had walked half-blind and now had opened her eyes.
At the northern side of the town, she climbed the rocks
to the water tanks, deep black pools cut into the bones
of the mountain, with sun flashing on their opaque sur-
faces. She stripped and swam, though the water was very
cold. Afterward she lay for a long time upon her spread-
out clothing, dreaming she knew not what. Wind tracked
across her bare back and legs like tiny footprints, and the
sun-dance changed in the pool as shadows crept across
the black water. She felt it would have been good to cry,
but was too weary even for that.

In time she got up, put on her clothes again, and returned
to camp. Gareth was asleep, sitting with his knees drawn
up and his face upon them on his crossed arms, near the
glowing ashes of the fire.

Jenny knelt beside John, feeling his hands and face.
They seemed warmer, though she could detect no surface

216                  Barbara Hambly

blood under the thin, fair skin. Still, his eyebrows and
the reddish stubble of his beard no longer seemed so dark.
She lay down beside him, her body against his beneath
the blankets, and fell asleep.

In the drowsy warmth of half-waking, she heard John
murmur, "I thought that was you calling me." His breath
was no more than a faint touch against her hair. She blinked
into waking. The light had changed again. It was dawn.

She said, "What?" and sat up, shaking back the thick
weight of her hair from her face. She still felt tired to
death, but ravenously hungry. Gareth was kneeling by the
campfire, tousled and unshaven with his battered spec-
tacles sliding down the end of his nose, making griddle-
cakes. She noted that he was better at it than John had
ever been.

"I thought you were never waking up," he said.

"I thought I was never waking up either, my hero,"
John whispered. His voice was too weak to carry even
that short distance, but Jenny heard him and smiled.

She climbed stiffly to her feet, pulled on her skirt again
over her creased shift, laced her bodice and put on her
boots, while Gareth set water over the coals to boil for
coffee, a bitter black drink popular at Court. When Gareth
went to fetch more water from the spring in the woods
beyond the wrecked well house. Jenny took some of the
boiling water to renew John's poultices, welcoming the
simplicity of human healing; and the smell of herbs soon
filled the little clearing among the ruins, along with the
warm, strange smell of the drink. John fell asleep again,
even before Jenny had finished with the bandages, but
Gareth fetched her some bannocks and honey and sat
with her beside the breakfast fire.

"I didn't know what to do, you were gone so long,"
he said around a mouthful ofmealcake. "I thought about
following you—that you might need help—but I didn't

Dragonsbane                  217

want to leave John alone. Besides," he added with a rueful
grin, "I've never managed to rescue you from anything

yet."

Jenny laughed and said, "You did right."

"And the promise you made?"

"I kept it."

He let out his breath with a sigh and bowed his head,
as if some great weight that had been pressing down upon
him had been lifted. After a while he said shyly, "While
I was waiting for you, I made up a song... a ballad. About
the slaying of Morkeleb, the Black Dragon of Nast Wall.
It isn't very good..."

"It wouldn't be," Jenny said slowly, and licked the
honey from her fingers. "Morkeleb is not dead."

He stared at her, as he once had when she had told
him that John had killed the Golden Dragon of Wyr with
an ax. "But I thought—wasn't your promise to John to—
to slay him if—if John could not?"

She shook her head, the dark cloud of her hair snagging
in the grubby fleece of her jacket collar. "My promise was
to Morkeleb," she said. "It was to heal him."

Collecting her feet beneath her, she rose and walked
over to John once more, leaving Gareth staring after her
in appalled and unbelieving bewilderment.

A day passed before Jenny returned to the Deep. She
stayed close to the camp, taking care of John and washing
clothes—a mundane task, but one that needed to be done.
Somewhat to her surprise, Gareth helped her in this,
fetching water from the spring in the glade, but without
his usual chatter. Knowing she would need her strength,
she slept a good deal, but her dreams were disquieting.
Her waking hours were plagued with a sense of being
watched. She told herself that this was simply because
Morkeleb, waking, had extended his awareness across
the Vale and knew where they were, but certain under-

218                  Barbara Hambly

standings she had found within the mazes of the dragon's
mind would not allow her to believe this.

She was aware that Gareth was watching her, too,
mostly when he thought she wasn't looking.

She was aware of other things, as well. Never had she
felt so conscious of the traces and turnings of the wind,
and of the insignificant activities of the animals in the
surrounding woods. She found herself prey to strange
contemplation and odd knowledge of things before unsus-
pected—how clouds grow, and why the wind walked the
way it did, how birds knew their way south, and why, in
certain places of the world at certain times, voices could
be heard speaking indistinctly in empty air. She would
have liked to think these changes frightened her because
she did not understand them, but in truth the reason she
feared them was because she did.

While she slept in the late afternoon, she heard Gareth
speak to John of it, seeing them and understanding through
the depths of her altered dreams.

"She healed him," she heard Gareth whisper, and was
aware of him squatting beside the tangle of bearskins and
plaids where John lay. "I think she promised to do so, in
trade for his letting her past him to fetch the medicines."

John sighed and moved one bandaged hand a little
where it lay on his chest. "Better, maybe, she had let me
die."

"Do you think..." Gareth swallowed nervously and
cast a glance at her, as if he knew that asleep, she still
could hear. "Do you think he's put a spell on her?"

John was silent for a time, looking up at the gulfs of
sky above the Vale, thinking. Though the air down here
was still, great winds racked the upper atmosphere, herd-
ing piled masses of cloud, charcoal gray and blinding white,
up against the shaggy flanks of the mountains. At length
he said, "I think I'd feel it, if there were another mind
controlling hers. Or I'd like to flatter myself to thinking

Dragonsbane                  219

I'd feel it. They say you should never look into a dragon's
eyes, lest he put a spell on you. But she's stronger than

that."

He turned his head a little and looked at where she

lay, squinting to focus his shortsighted brown eyes upon
her. The bare flesh on either side of the bandages on his
arms and chest was livid with bruises and pitted with tiny
scabs where the broken links of the mail shirt had been
dragged through it. "When I used to dream of her, she
didn't look the same as in waking. When I was delirious,
I dreamed of her—it's as if she's grown more herself, not

less."

He sighed and looked back at Gareth. "I used to be
jealous other, you know. Not of another man, but jealousy
of herself, of that part other she'd never give me—though
God knows, back in those days, what I wanted it for. Who
was it who said that jealousy is the only vice that gives
no pleasure? But that was the first thing I had to leam
about her, and maybe the hardest I've ever learned about
anything—that she is her own, and what she gives me is
of her choosing, and the more precious because of it.
Sometimes a butterfly will come to sit in your open palm,
but if you close your hand, one way or the other, it—and
its choice to be there—are gone."

From there Jenny slid into deeper dreams of the crush-
ing darkness of Ylferdun and the deep magic she sensed
slumbering in the Places of Healing. As if from a great
distance, she saw her children, her boys, whom she had
never wanted to conceive but had borne and birthed for
John's sake, but loved uneasily, unwillingly, and with des-
perately divided heart. With her wizard's sight she could
see them sitting up in their curtained bed in the darkness,
while wind drove snow against the tower walls; not sleep-
ing at all, but telling one another tales about how their
father and mother would slay the dragon and ride back
with pack trains and pack trains of gold.

220                  Barbara Hambly

She woke when the sun lay three-quarters down the
sky toward the flinty crest of the ridge. The wind had
shifted; the whole Vale smelled of sharp snow and pine
needles from the high slopes. The air in the lengthening
slaty shadows was cold and damp.

John was asleep, wrapped in every cloak and blanket
in the camp. Gareth's voice could be heard in the woods
near the little stone fountain, tunelessly singing romantic
lyrics of passionate love for the edification of the horses.
Moving with her habitual quiet, Jenny laced up her bod-
ice and put on her boots and her sheepskin jacket. She
thought about eating something and decided not to. Food
would break her concentration, and she felt the need of
every fragment of strength and alertness that she could
muster.

She paused for a moment, looking around her. The old,
uneasy sensation of being watched returned to her, like
a hand touching her elbow. But she sensed, also, the faint
tingling of Morkeleb's power in the back of her mind and
knew that the dragon's strength was returning far more
quickly than that of the man he had almost slain.

She would have to act and act now, and the thought
of it filled her with fear.

"Save a dragon, slave a dragon," Caerdinn had said.
Her awareness of how small her own powers were ter-
rified her, knowing what it was against which she must
pit them. So this, in the end, was what she had paid for
John's love, she told herself, with a little wry amusement.
To go into a battle she could not hope to win. Involuntarily
another part of her thought at once that at least it wasn't
John's life, but her own, that would be forfeit, and she
shook her head in wonderment at the follies of love. No
wonder those with the power were warned against it, she
thought.

As for the dragon, she had a sense, almost an instinct,
of what she must do, alien to her and yet terrifyingly clear.

Dragonsbane                  221

Her heart was hammering as she selected a scruffy plaid
from the top of the pile over John. The thin breezes flut-
tered at its edges as she slung it around her; its colors
faded into the muted hues of weed and stone as she made
her way silently down the ridge once more and took the
track for the Deep.

Morkeleb no longer lay in the Market Hall. She fol-
lowed the scent of him through the massive inner doors
and along the Grand Passage—a smell that was pungent
but not unpleasant, unlike the burning, metallic reek of
his poisons. The tiny echoes of her footfalls were like far-
off water dripping in the silent vaults of the passage—
she knew Morkeleb would hear them, lying upon his gold
in the darkness. Almost, she thought, he would hear the
pounding of her heart.

As Dromar had said, the dragon was laired in the Tem-
ple of Sarmendes, some quarter-mile along the passage.
The Temple had been built for the use of the children of
men and so had been wrought into the likeness of a room
rather than a cave. From the chryselephantine doors Jenny
looked about, her eyes piercing the absolute darkness
there, seeing how the stalagmites that rose from the floor
had been cut into pillars, and how walls had been built
to conceal the uneven shape of the cavern's native rock.
The floor was smoothed all to one level; the statue of the
god, with his lyre and his bow, had been sculpted of white
marble from the royal quarries of Istmark, as had been
his altar with its carved garlands. But none of this could
conceal the size of the place, nor the enormous, irregular
grandeur of its proportions. Above those modestly clas-
sical walls arched the ceiling, a maze of sinter and crystal
that marked the place as nature's work timidly home-
steaded by man.

The smell of the dragon was thick here, though it was
clean of offal or carrion. Instead the floor was heaped
with gold, all the gold of the Deep, plates, holy vessels,

222                  Barbara Hambly

reliquaries of forgotten saints and demigods, piled between
the pillars and around the statues, tiny cosmetic pots
smelling of balsam, candlesticks quivering with pendant
pearls like aspen leaves in spring wind, cups whose rims
flashed with the dark fire of jewels, a votive statue of
Salemesse, the Lady of Beasts, three feet high and solid
gold... All the things that gnomes or men had wrought
of that soft and shining metal had been gathered there
from the farthest tunnels of the Deep. The floor was like
a beach with the packed coins that had spilled from their
torn sacks, and through it gleamed the darkness of the
floor, like water collected in hollows of the sand.

Morkeleb lay upon the gold, his vast wings folded along
his sides, their tips crossed over his tail, black as coal
and seeming to shine, his crystal eyes like lamps in the
dark. The sweet, terrible singing that Jenny had felt so
strongly had faded, but the air about him was vibrant with
the unheard music.

"Morkeleb," she said softly, and the word whispered
back at her from the forest of glittering spikes overhead.
She felt the silver eyes upon her and reached out, ten-
tatively, to the dark maze of that mind.

Why gold? she asked. Why do dragons covet the gold
of men?

It was not what she had meant to say to him, and she
felt, under his coiled anger and suspicion, something else
move.

What is that to you, wizard woman?

What was it to me that I returned here to save your
life? It would have served me and mine better to have let
you die.

Why then did you not?

There were two answers. The one she gave him was,
Because it was understood between us that if you gave
me the way into the heart of the Deep, I should heal you
and give you your life. But in that healing you gave me

Dragonsbane                  223

your name, Morkeleb the Black—and the name she spoke
in her mind was the ribbon of music that was his true
name, his essence; and she saw him flinch. They have
said, Save a dragon, slave a dragon, and by your name
you shall do as I bid you.

The surge of his anger against her was like a dark wave,
and all along his sides the knifelike scales lifted a little,
like a dog's hackles. Around them in the blackness of the
Temple, the gold seemed to whisper, picking up the
groundswell of his wrath.

/ am Morkeleb the Black. I am and will be slave to no
one and nothing, least of all a human woman, mage though
she may be. I do no bidding save my own.

The bitter weight of alien thoughts crushed down upon
her, heavier than the darkness. But her eyes were a mage's
eyes, seeing in darkness; her mind held a kind of glowing
illumination that it had not had before. She felt no fear
of him now; a queer strength she had not known she
possessed stirred in her. She whispered the magic of his
name as she would have formed its notes upon her harp,
in all its knotted complexities, and saw him shrink back
a little. His razor claws stirred faintly in the gold.

By your name, Morkeleb the Black, she repeated, you
shall do my bidding. And by your name, I tell you that
you will do no harm, either to John Aversin, or to Prince
Gareth, or to any other human being while you remain
here in the south. When you are well enough to sustain
the journey, you shall leave this place and return to your
home.

Ire radiated from his scales like a heat, reflected back
about him by the thrumming gold. She felt in it the iron
pride of dragons, and their contempt for humankind, and
also his furious grief at being parted from the hoard
that he had so newly won. For a moment their souls met
and locked, twisting together like snakes striving, fighting
for advantage. The tide other strength rose in her, surging

224                  Barbara Hambly

and sure, as if it drew life from the combat itself. Terror
and exhilaration flooded her, like the tabat leaves, only
far stronger, and she cast aside concern for the limitations
other flesh and strove against him mind to mind, twisting
at the glittering chain of his name.

She felt the spew of his venomous anger, but would
not let go. If you kill me, I shall drag you down with me
into death, she thoughts/or dying, I shall not release your
name from my mind.

The strength that was breaking the sinews of her mind
drew back, but his eyes held to hers. Her thoughts were
suddenly flooded with images and half-memories, like the
visions of the heart of the Deep; things she did not under-
stand, distracting and terrifying in their strangeness. She
felt the plunging vertigo of flight in darkness; saw black
mountains that cast double shadows, red deserts unstirred
by wind since time began and inhabited by glass spiders
that lived upon salt. They were dragon memories, con-
fusing her, luring her toward the place where his mind
could close around hers like a trap, and she held fast to
those things of her own life that she knew and her memory
of the piping of old Caerdinn whistling the truncated air
of Morkeleb's true name. Into that air she twisted her
own spells of breaking and exhaustion, mingling them
with the rhythm of his heart that she had learned so well
in the healing, and she felt once more his mind draw back
from hers.

His wrath was like the lour of thunder-sky, building all
around her; he loomed before her like a cloud harboring
lightning. Then without warning he struck at her like a
snake, one thin-boned claw raised to slash.

He would not strike, she told herself as her heart con-
tracted with terror and her every muscle screamed to flee
... He could not strike her for she had his name and he
knew it... She had saved him; he must obey... Her mind
gripped the music of his name even as the claws hissed

Dragonsbane                  225

down. The wind of them slashed at her hair, the saber
blades passing less than a foot from her face. White eyes
stared down at her, blazing with hate; the rage of him
beat against her like a storm.

Then he settled back slowly upon his bed of gold. The
tang of his defeat was like wormwood in the air.

You chose to give me your name rather than die, Mor-
keleb. She played his name like a glissando and felt the
surge of her own rising power hum in the gold against his.
You will go from these lands and not return.

For a moment more she felt his anger, resentment, and
the fury of his humbled pride. But there was something
else in the hoarfrost glitter of his gaze upon her, the knowl-
edge that she was not contemptible.

He said quietly. Do you not understand?

Jenny shook her head. She looked around her once
again at the Temple, its dark archways piled high with
more gold than she had ever seen before, a treasure more
fabulous than any other upon earth. It would have bought
all of Bel and the souls of most of the men who dwelled
there. But, perhaps because she herself had little use for
gold, she felt drawn to ask again, Why gold, Morkeleb?
Was it the gold that brought you here?

He lowered his head to his paws again, and all around
them the gold vibrated with the whisper of the dragon's
name. // was the gold, and the dreams of the gold, he
said. / had discontent in all things; the longing grew upon
me while I slept. Do you not know, wizard woman, the
love that dragons have for gold?

She shook her head again. Only that they are greedy
for it, as men are greedy.

Rose-red light rimmed the slits of his nostrils as he
sniffed. Men, he said softly. They have no understanding
of gold; no understanding of what it is and of what it can
be. Come here, wizard woman. Put your hand upon me
and listen with my mind.

226 Barbara Hambly

She hesitated, fearing a trap, but her curiosity as a
mage drove her. She picked her way over the cold, uneven
heaps of rings, platters, and candlesticks, to rest her hand
once more against the soft skin below the dragon's great
eye. As before, it felt surprisingly warm, unlike a reptile'.,
skin, and soft as silk. His mind touched hers like a firm
hand in the darkness.

In a thousand murmuring voices, she could hear the
gold pick up the music of the dragon's name. The blended
nuances of thought were magnified and made richer, dis-
tinct as subtle perfumes, piercing the heart with beauty.
It seemed to Jenny that she could identify every piece 01
gold within that enormous chamber by its separate sound-
ing, and hear the harmonic curve of a vessel, the melding
voices of every single coin and hairpin, and the sweet
tingling locked in the crystal heart of every jewel. Her
mind, touching the dragon's, flinched in aching wonder
from the caress of that unbearable sweetness as the echoes
awoke answering resonances within her soul. Memories
of dove-colored dusks on the Fell that was her home
pulled at her with the deep joy of winter nights lying on
the bearskins before the hearth at Alyn Hold, with John
and her sons at her side. Happiness she could not name
swept over her, breaking down the defenses of her heart
as the intensity of the music built, and she knew that foi
Morkeleb it was the same in the chimeric deeps of his
mind.

When the music faded, she realized she had closed her
eyes, and her cheeks were wet with tears. Looking about
her, though the room was as black as before, she thought
that the memory of the dragon's song lingered in the gold,
and a faint luminosity clung to it still.

In time she said. That is why men say that dragon's
gold is poisoned. Others say that it is lucky... but it is
merely charged with yearning and with music, so that
even dullards can feel it through their fingers.

Dragonsbane                  227

Even so, whispered the voice of the dragon in her mind.

But dragons cannot mine gold, nor work it. Only gnomes
and the children of men.

We are like the whales that live in the sea, he said,
civilizations without artifacts, living between stone and
sky in our islands in the northern oceans. We lair in rocks
that bear gold, but it is impure. Only with pure gold is
this music possible. Now do you understand?

The sharing had broken something between them, and
she felt no fear of him now. She went to sit close to the
bony curve of his shoulder and picked up a gold cup from
the hoard. She felt as she turned it over in her hands that
she could have chosen it out from a dozen identical ones.
Its resonance was clear and individuated in her mind; the
echo of the dragon's music held to it, like a remembrance
of perfume. She saw how precisely it was formed, chas-
tened and highly polished, its handles tiny ladies with
garlands twined in their hair where it streamed back over
the body of the cup; even microscopically fine, the flowers
were recognizable as the lilies of hope and the roses of
fulfillment. Morkeleb had killed the owner of this cup,
she thought to herself, only for the sake of the incredible
music which he could call from the gold. Yet his love for
the gold had as little to do with its beauty as her love for
her sons had to do with their—undeniable, she thought—
good looks.

How did you know this was here?

Do you not think that we, who live for hundreds of
years, would be aware of the comings and goings of men?
Where they build their cities, and with whom they trade,
and in what? I am old. Jenny Waynest. Even among the
dragons, my magic is accounted great. I was born before
we came to this world; I can sniff gold from the bones of
the earth and follow its path for miles, as you follow
ground water with a hazel twig. The gold-seams of the

228                  Barbara Hambly

Wall rise to the surface here like the great salmon of the
north country rising to spawn.

The dragon's words were spoken in her mind, and in
her mind she had a brief, distant glimpse of the Earth as
the dragons saw it, spread out like a mottled carpet of
purple and green and brown. She saw the green-black pelt
of the forests of Wyr, the infinitely delicate cloud shapes
of the crowns of the tall oaks, fragile and thready with
winter, and saw how, toward the north, they were more
and more replaced by the coarse spiky teeth of pine and
fir. She saw the gray and white stones of the bare Win-
terlands, stained all the colors of the rainbow with lichen
and moss in summer, and saw how the huge flashing silver
shapes of eight- and ten-foot salmon moved beneath the
waters of the rivers, under the blue, gliding shadow of
the dragon's wings. For an instant, it was as if she could
feel the air all about her, holding her up like water; its
currents and countereddies,. its changes from warm to
cold.

Then she felt his mind closing around hers, like the
jaws of a trap. For an instant she was locked into suf-
focating darkness, the utter darkness that not even the
eyes of a wizard could pierce. Panic crushed her. She
could neither move nor think, and felt only the acid gloat-
ing of the dragon all around her, and, opening beneath
her, a bottomless despair.

Then as Caerdinn had taught her, as she had done in
healing John—as she had always done within the circum-
scribed limits of her small magic—she forced her mind
to calm and began to work rune by rune, note by note,
concentrating singly and simply upon each element with
her whole mind. She felt the wrath of the dragon smoth-
ering her like a hot sea of night, but she wedged open a
crack of light, and into that crack she drove the music of
the dragon's name, fashioned by her spells into a spear.

She felt his mind flinch and give. Her sight returned,

Dragonsbane                  229

and she found herself on her feet among the knee-deep
piles of gold, the monstrous dark shape backing from her
in anger. This time she did not let him go, but flung her
own wrath and her will after him, playing upon the music
of his name and weaving into it the fires that scorched
his essence. All the spells of pain and ruin she had wrought
into the poison flooded to her mind; but, like her fury at
the bandits at the crossroads these many weeks ago, her
anger had no hate in it, offering him no hold upon her
mind. He shrank back from it, and the great head lowered
so that the ribbons of his mane swept the coins with a
slithery tinkle.

Wrapped in a rage of magic and fire, she said, You shall
not dominate me, Morkeleb the Black—neither with your
power nor with your treachery. I have saved your life,
and you shall do as I command you. By your name you
shall go, and you shall not return to the south. Do you
hear me?

She felt him resist, and drove her will and the strength
of her newfound powers against him. Like a wrestler's
body, she felt the dark, sutfurous rage slither from beneath
the pressure of her will; she stepped back, almost instinc-
tively, and faced him where he crouched against the wall
like a vast, inky cobra, his every scale bristling with glit-
tering wrath.

She heard him whisper, I hear you, wizard woman, and
heard, in the cold voice, the reasonance not only of furious
anger at being humbled, but of surprise that she could
have done so.

Turning without a word, she left the Temple and walked
back toward the square of diffuse light that marked the
outer hall at the end of the Grand Passage and the Great
Gates beyond.

CHAPTER XII

WHEN JENNY CAME down the steps of the Deep she
was shaking with exhaustion and an aftermath of common
sense that told her that she should have been terrified.
Yet she felt curiously little fear ofMorkeleb, even in the
face of his treachery and his wrath. Her body ached—
the power she had put forth against him had been far in
excess of what her flesh was used to sustaining—but her
head felt clear and alert, without the numbed weariness
she felt when she had overstretched her powers. She was
aware, down to her last finger end, of the depth and great-
ness of the dragon's magic, but was aware also of her
own strength against him.

Evening wind dusted across her face. The sun had sunk
beyond the flinty crest of the westward ridge, and though
the sky still held light, Deeping lay at the bottom of a lake
of shadow. She was aware of many things passing in the
Vale, most of them having nothing to do with the affairs
of dragons or humankind—the skreak of a single cricket
under a charred stone, the flirt of a squirrel's tail as it fled
from its hopeful mate, and the flutterings of the chaf-
finches as they sought their nighttime nests. Where the

230

Dragonsbane                  231

trail turned downward around a broken pile of rubble that
had once been a house, she saw a man's skeleton lying
in the weeds, the bag of gold he had died clutching split
open and the coins singing softly to her where they lay
scattered among his ribs.

She was aware, suddenly, that someone else had entered
the Vale.

It was analagous to sound, though unheard. The scent
of magic came to her like smoke on the shift of the wind.
She stopped still in the dry tangle of broomsedge, cold
shreds of breeze that frayed down from the timberline
stirring in her plaids. There was magic in the Vale, up on
the ridge. She could hear the slither and snag of silk on
beech mast, the startled splash of spilled water in the dusk
by the fountain, and Gareth's voice halting over a name...

Catching up her skirts. Jenny began to run.

The smell of Zyerne's perfume seemed everywhere in
the woods. Darkness was already beginning to collect
beneath the trees. Panting, Jenny sprang up the whitish,
flinty rocks to the glade by the fountain. Long experience
in the Winterlands had taught her to move in utter silence,
even at a dead run; and thus, for the first moment, neither
of those who stood near the little well was aware of her
arrival.

It took her a moment to see Zyeme. Gareth she saw
at once, standing frozen beside the wellhead. Spilled water
was soaking into the beech mast around his feet; a half-
empty bucket balanced on the edge of the stone trough
beside the well itself. He didn't heed it; she wondered
how much of his surroundings he was aware of at all.

Zyeme's spells filled the small glade like the music
heard in dreams. Even she, a woman, felt the scented
warmth of the air that belied the tingly cold lower down
in the Vale and sensed the stirring of need in her flesh.
In Gareth's eyes was a kind of madness, and his hands
were shaking where they were clenched, knotted into fists,

232                  Barbara Humbly

before him. His voice was a whisper more desperate than
a scream as he said, "No."

"Gareth." Zyeme moved, and Jenny saw her, as she
seemed to float like a ghost in the dusk among the birch
trees at the glade's edge. "Why pretend? You know you;

love for me has grown, as mine has for you. It is like file
in your flesh now; the taste of your mouth in my dreama
has tormented me day and night..."

"While you were lying with my father?"

She shook back her hair, a small, characteristic ges
tare, brushing the tendrils of it away from her smooth
brow. It was difficult to see what she wore in the dusk—
something white and fragile that rippled in the stirrings
of the wind, pale as the birches themselves. Her hair was
loosened down her back like a young girl's; and, like a
young girl, she wore no veils. Years seemed to have van-
ished from her age, young as she had seemed before. She
looked like a girl of Gareth's age, unless, like Jenny, one
saw her with a wizard's eye.

"Gareth, I never lay with your father," she said softly.
"Oh, we agreed to pretend, for the sake of appearances
at Court—but even if he had wanted me to, I don't think
I could have. He treated me like a daughter. It was you
I wanted, you..."

"That's a lie!" His mouth sounded dried by fever heat.

She held out her hands, and the wind lifted the thin
fabric of her sleeves back from her arms as she moved a
step into the glade. "I could bear waiting no longer. I had
to come, to leam what had happened to you—to be with
you..."

He sobbed, "Get away from me!" His face was twisted
by something close to pain.

She only whispered, "I want you..."

Jenny stepped from the somber shade of the trail and
said, "No, Zyeme. What you want is the Deep."

Zyeme swung around, her concentration breaking, as

233

Morkeleb had tried to break Jenny's. The lurid sensuality
that had dripped from the air shattered with an almost
audible snap. At once, Zyeme seemed older, no longer
the virgin girl who could inflame Gareth's passion. The
boy dropped to his knees and covered his face, his body
racked with dry sobs.

"It's what you've always wanted, isn't it?" Jenny
touched Gareth's hair comfortingly, and he threw his arms
around her waist, clinging to her like a drowning man to
a spar. Oddly enough, she felt no fear of Zyeme now, or
of the greater strength of the younger woman's magic.
She seemed to see Zyeme differently, even, and felt calm
as she faced her—calm and ready.

Zyeme uttered a ribald laugh. "So there's our boy who
won't tumble his father's mistress? You had them both to
yourself, didn't you, slut, coming down from the north?
Enough time and more to tangle him in your hair."

Gareth pulled free of Jenny and scrambled to his feet,
shaking all over with anger. Though Jenny could see he
was still terrified of the sorceress, he faced her and gasped,
"You're lying!"

Zyeme laughed again, foully, as she had in the garden
outside the King's rooms. Jenny only said, "She knows
it isn't true. What did you come here for, Zyeme? To do
to Gareth what you've done to his father? Or to see if it's
finally safe for you to enter the Deep?"

The enchantress's mouth moved uncertainly, and her
eyes shifted under Jenny's cool gaze. Then she laughed,
the mockery in it marred by her uncertainty. "Maybe to
get your precious Dragonsbane at the same time?"

A week—even a day—ago. Jenny would have
responded to the taunt with fear for John's safety. But
she knew Zyeme had not gone anywhere near John. She
knew she would have sensed it, if such magic had been
worked so near—almost, she thought, she would have
heard their voices, no matter how softly they spoke. And

234 Barbara Hambly

in any case, John was unable to flee; one deals with the
unwounded enemy first.

She saw Zyeme's hand move and felt the nature of the
spell, even as she smelled the singed wool of her skirts
beginning to smoke. Her own spell was fast and hard,
called with the mind and the minimal gesture of the hand
rather than the labor it had once entailed. Zyerne stag-
gered back, her hands over her eyes, taken completely
by surprise.

When Zyeme raised her head again, her eyes were livid
with rage, yellow as a devil's in a face transformed with
fury. "You can't keep me from the Deep," she said in a
voice which shook. "It is mine—it will be mine. I've
driven the gnomes from it. When I take it, no one, no
one, will be able to contend against my power!"

Stooping, she seized a handful of old leaves and beech-
nuts from the mast that lay all about their feet. She flung
them at Jenny. In the air, they burst into flame, growing
as they burned, a tangled bonfire that Jenny swept aside
with a spell she had hardly been aware she'd known. The
blazing logs scattered everywhere, throwing streamers of
yellow fire into the blue gloom and blazing up in half-a-
dozen places where they touched dry weeds. Doubling
like a hare upon her tracks, Zyeme darted for the path
that led down into the Vale. Jenny leaped at her heels,
her soft boots in three strides outdistancing the younger
woman's precarious court shoes.

Zyeme twisted in her grip. She was taller than Jenny
but not physically as strong, even taking into account
Jenny's exhaustion; for an instant their eyes were inches
apart, the yellow gaze boring like balefire into the blue.

Like a hammerblow. Jenny felt the impact of a mind
upon hers, spells of hurt and terror that gripped and twisted
at her muscles, utterly different from the weight and living
strength of the dragon's mind. She parried the spell, not
so much with a spell as with the strength of her will,

Dragonsbane                  235

throwing it back at Zyeme, and she heard the younger
woman curse her in a spate of fury like a burst sewer.
Nails tore at her wrists as she sought the yellow eyes with
her own again, catching Zyeme's silky curls in a fist like
a rock, forcing her to look. It was the first time she had
matched strength in anger with another mage, and it sur-
prised her how instinctive it was to probe into the
essence—as she had probed into Gareth's, and Mab into
hers_not solely to understand, but to dominate by under-
standing, to give nothing of her own soul in return. She
had a glimpse of something sticky and foul as the plants
that eat those foolish enough to came near, the eroded
remains of a soul, like an animate corpse of the young
woman's mind.

Zyeme screamed as she felt the secrets of her being
bared, and power exploded in the air between them, a
burning fire that surrounded them in a whirlwind of tearing
force. Jenny felt a weight falling against her, a blackness
like the dragon's mind but greater, the shadow of some
crushing power, like an ocean of uncounted years. It drove
her to her knees, but she held on, sloughing away the
crawling, biting pains that tore at her skin, the rending
agony in her muscles, the fire, and the darkness, boring
into Zyeme's mind with her own, like a white needle of
fire.

The weight of the shadow faded. She felt Zyerne's
nerve and will break and got to her feet again, throwing
the girl from her with all her strength. Zyeme collapsed
on the dirt of the path, her dark hair hanging in a torrent
over her white dress, her nails broken from tearing at
Jenny's wrists, her nose running and dust plastered to her
face with mucus. Jenny stood over her, panting for breath,
her every muscle hurting from the twisting impact of
Zyeme's spells. "Go," she said, her voice quiet, but with
power in her words. "Go back to Bel and never touch
Gareth again."

236                  Barbara Hambly

Sobbing with fury, Zyeme picked herself up. Her voice
shook. "You stinking gutter-nosed sow! I won't be kept
from the Deep! It's mine, I tell you; and when I come
there, I'll show you! I swear by the Stone, when I have
the Deep, I'll crush you out like the dung-eating cock-
roach you are! You'll see! They'll all see! They have no
right to keep me away!"

"Get out of here," Jenny said softly.

Sobbing, Zyeme obeyed her, gathering up her trailing
white gown and stumbling down the path that led toward
the clock tower. Jenny stood for a long time watching her
go. The power Jenny had summoned to protect her faded
slowly, like fire banked under embers until it was needed
again.

It was only after Zyeme was out of sight that she real-
ized that she should never have been able to do what she
had just done—not here and not in the Deep.

And it came to her then, what had happened to her
when she had touched the mind of the dragon.

The dragon's magic was alive in her soul, like streaks
of iron in gold. She should have known it before; if she
had not been so weary, she thought, perhaps she would
have. Her awareness, like Morkeleb's, had widened to
fill the Vale, so that, even in sleep, she was conscious of
things taking place about her. A shiver passed through
her flesh and racked her bones with terror and wonder-
ment, as if she had conceived again, and something alive
and alien was growing within her.

Smoke from the woods above stung her nose and eyes,
white billows of it telling her that Gareth had succeeded
in dousing the flames. Somewhere the horses were whin-
nying in terror. She felt exhausted and aching, her whole
body wrenched by the cramp of those gripping spells, her
wrists smarting where Zyeme's nails had torn them. She
began to tremble, the newfound strength draining away
under the impact of shock and fear.

Dragonsbane                  237

A countersurge of wind shook the trees around her, as
if at the stroke of a giant wing. Her hair blowing about
her face, she looked up, but for a moment saw nothing.
It was something she'd heard of—that dragons, for all
their size and gaudiness, could be harder to see in plain
daylight than the voles of the hedgerow. He seemed to
blend down out of the dusk, a vast shape of jointed ebony
and black silk, silver-crystal eyes like small moons in the

dark.

He could feel my power nearing its end, she thought

despairingly, remembering how he had turned on her
before. The terrible, shadowy weight of Zyeme's spells
still lay on her bones; she felt they would break if she
tried to summon the power to resist the dragon. Wrong
with a weariness close to physical nausea, she looked up
to face him and hardened her mind once again to meet
his attack.

Even as she did so, she realized that he was beautiful,
as he hung for a moment like a black, drifting kite upon
the air.

Then his mind touched hers, and the last pain of
Zyeme's spells was sponged away.

What is it, wizard woman? he asked. It is only evil
words, such as fishwives throw at one another.

He settled before her on the path, folding his great
wings with a queerly graceful articulation, and regarded
her with his silver eyes in the dusk.

He said, You understand.

No, she replied. / think I know what has happened,
but I do not understand.

Bah. In the leaky gray twilight beneath the trees, she
saw all the scale-points along his sides ruffle slightly, like
the hair of an affronted cat. / think that you do. When
your mind was in mine, my magic called to you, and the
dragon within you answered. Know you not your own
power, wizard woman? Know you not what you could be?

238                  Barbara Hambly

With a cold vertigo that was not quite fear she under-
stood him then and willed herself not to understand.

He felt the closing of her mind, and irritation smoked
from him like a white spume of mist. You understand, he
said again. You have been within my mind; you know what
it would be to be a dragon.

Jenny said. No, not to him, but to that trickle of fire
in her mind that surged suddenly into a stream.

As in a dream, images surfaced of things she felt she
had once known and forgotten, like the soaring freedom
of flight. She saw the earth lost beneath her in the clouds,
and about her was a vaporous eternity whose absolute
silence was broken only by the sheer of her wings. As
from great height, she glimpsed the stone circle on Frost
Fell, the mere below it like a broken piece of dirty glass,
and the little stone house a chrysalis, cracked open to
release the butterfly that had slept within.

She said, I have not the power to change my essence.

I have, the voice whispered among the visions in her
mind. You have the strength to be a dragon, once you
consent to take the form. I sensed that in you when we
struggled. I was angry then, to be defeated by a human;

but you can be more than human.

Gazing up at the dark splendor of the dragon's angular
form, she shook her head. / will not put myself thus in
your power, Morkeleb. I cannot leave my own form with-
out your aid, nor could I return to it. Do not tempt me.

Tempt? Morkeleb's voice said. There is no temptation
from outside the heart. And as for returning—what are
you as a human. Jenny Waynest? Pitiful, puling, like all
your kin the slave of time that rots the body before the
mind has seen more than a single/lower in all the mead-
ows of the Cosmos. To be a mage you must be a mage,
and I see in your mind that you fight for the time to do
even that. To be a dragon...

"To be a dragon," she said aloud, to force her own

Dragonsbane                  239

mind upon it, "I have only to give over my control of
you. I will not lose myself thus in the dragon mind and
the dragon magic. You will not thus get me to release

you."

She felt the strength press against the closed doors in
her mind, then ease, and heard the steely rustle of his
scales as his long tail lashed through the dry grasses with
annoyance. The dark woods came back into focus; the
strange visions receded like a shining mist. The light was
waning fast about them, all the colors bled from straggly
briar and fem. As if his blackness took on the softer hues
of the evening, the dragon was nearly invisible, his shape
blending with the milky stringers of fog that had begun
to veil the woods and with the black, abrupt outlines of
dead branch and charred trunk. Somewhere on the ridge
above her. Jenny could hear Gareth calling her name.

She found she was trembling, not solely from weari-
ness or the piercing cold. The need within her was ter-
rifying—to be what she had always wished to be, to have
what she had wanted since she had been fourteen, ugly,
and cursed with a terrible need. She had tasted the strength
of the dragon's fire, and the taste lingered sweet in her
mouth.

/ can give you this, the voice in her mind said.

She shook her head, more violently this time. No. /
will not betray my friends.

Friends? Those who would bind you to littleness for
their own passing convenience? The man who grudges
you the essence of your soul out of mourning for his
dinner? Do you cling to all these little joys because you
are afraid to taste the great ones. Jenny Waynest?

He had been right when he had said that there is no
temptation from outside the heart. She flung back her
long hair over her shoulders and called to herself all the
strength remaining in her, against the star-prickled dark-

240                  Barbara Hambly

ness that seemed to draw upon the very marrow of her
bones.

Get away from me, she told him. Go now and return
to the islands in the northern sea that are your home.
Sing your songs to the rock-gold and the whales, and let
be forever the sons of men and the sons of gnomes.

As if she had struck a black log that, breaking, had
revealed the living fire smoldering within, she felt the
surge of his anger again. He reared back, his body arched
against the dimming sky. The dark wire and silk of his
wings rattled as he said, Be it so then, wizard woman. I
leave to you the gold of the Deep—take of it what you
will. My song is in it. When old age comes, whose mortal
frost you have already begun to feel upon your bones,
press it to your heart and remember that which you have
let pass you by.

He gathered himself upon his haunches, his compact,
snakelike shape rising above her as he gathered about him
the glitter of magic in the air. Black wings unfurled against
the sky, looming over her so that she could see the obsi-
dian gleam of his sides, the baby-skin softness of the
velvet belly, still puckered with the crimped, ugly mouths
of harpoon wounds. Then he flung himself skyward. The
great stroke of his wings caught him up. She felt the magic
that swirled about him, a spindrift of enchantment, the
star trail of an invisible comet. The last rays of sinking
light tipped his wings as he rose beyond the blue shadow
of the ridge. Then he was gone.

Jenny watched him go with desolation in her heart. All
the woods seemed laden now with the smell of wet bum-
ing, and the murky earthiness of dead smoke. She became
slowly aware that the hem of her skirt was sodden from
kneeling in the wet path; her boots were damp and her
feet cold. Listless weariness dragged upon her, from mus-
cles pulled by exertion and Zyeme's spells and also from

Dragonsbane                  241

the words the dragon had spoken to her when she had
turned away from what he had offered.

As a dragon, she would have no more hold upon him,
nor would she wish any longer to drive him from the Deep.
Was that, she wondered, why he had offered her the splen-
did and terrifying freedom of that form? They said that
dragons did not entrap with lies but with truth, and she
knew he had read accurately the desires of her soul.

"Jenny?" A smudged, dirty Gareth came hurrying
toward her down the path. To her ears, used to the voice
of the dragon, he sounded tinny and false. "Are you all
right? What happened? I saw the dragon..." He had
removed his specs and was seeking a sufficiently clean
patch of his sooty, spark-holed shirt to wipe them on,
without much success. Against the grime on his face the
lenses had left two white circles, like a mask, in which
his gray eyes blinked nakedly.

Jenny shook her head. She felt weary to the point of
tears, almost incapable of speech. He fell into step with
her as she began slowly climbing the path up the Rise
once more.

"Did Zyerne get away?"

She looked at him, startled. After what had passed
between herself and Morkeleb, she had nearly forgotten
Zyeme. "She—she left. I sent her away." It seemed like
days ago.

"You sent her away?" Gareth gasped, dumfounded.

Jenny nodded, too tired to explain. Thinking about it,
she frowned, as something snagged at her mind. But she
only asked, "And you?"

He looked away from her and reddened with shame.
Part of Jenny sighed in exasperation at this foolishness,
so petty after the force of the dragon's greater seduction;

but part other remembered what it was like to be eighteen,
and prey to the uncontrollable yearnings of the body.

Barbara Hambly

Comfortingly, she touched the skinny arm under the ripped
lawn of his shirtsleeve.

"It is a spell she had on you," she said. "Nothing more.
We are all tempted..." She pushed aside the echoing
memory of the dragon's words. "... And what is in our
deepest hearts is still not what we are judged on, but rather
what we ultimately do. She only uses'such spells to draw
you to her, to control you as she controls your father."

They reached the clearing, soggy and dirty-looking,
like a garment upon which acid had been spilled, with
charred spots and little puddles of gleaming water which
still steamed faintly from the smolder they had quenched.

"I know." Gareth sighed and picked up the bucket from
the sodden ground to dip it once more into the well. He
moved stiffly from pulled muscles and exertion but didn't
complain of them as he once might have done. On the
edge of the well trough, he found his tin cup and dipped
water from the bucket to hand to her, the wetness icy
against her fingers. She realized with a little start that she
had neither eaten nor drunk since breakfast. There had
been no time, and now she felt old and exhausted as she
took the cup from his hand.

"You just sent her away?" Gareth asked again. "And
she went? She didn't turn herself into a falcon... ?"

"No." Jenny looked up, as it came to her what it was
that had bothered her about the events of the evening.
"Morkeleb..." She stopped, not wanting to speak of what
Morkeleb had offered to her.

But even so, she thought, she could not have taken on
a dragon's form without his help. His powers had broken
through to the powers within her, but her powers were
still raw and small. And Zyeme...

"I defeated her," she said slowly. "But if she's as shape-
crafty as you have said—if she has that kind of strength—

Dragonsbane                  243

I shouldn't have been able to defeat her, even though my
powers have grown."

She almost said, "Even with the dragon's powers in
me," but the words stuck on her lips. She felt the powers
stir in her, like an alien child in the womb of fate, and
tried to put aside the thought of them and of what they
might mean. She raised the cup to her lips, but stopped,
the water untasted, and looked up at Gareth again.

"Have you drunk any of the water from this well?" she
asked.

He looked at her in surprise. "We've all been drinking
it for days," he said.

"This evening, I mean."

He looked ruefully around at the clearing and his own
soaked sleeves. "I was too busy throwing it about to drink
any," he said. "Why?"

She passed her hand across the mouth of the cup. As
things were visible to a wizard in darkness, she saw the
viscid sparkle of green luminosity in the water.

"Has it gone bad?" he asked worriedly. "How can you
tell?"

She upended the cup, dumping the contents to the
ground. "Where was Zyeme when you came into the
clearing?"

He shook his head, puzzled. "I don't remember. It was
like a dream..." He looked around him, though Jenny
knew that the clearing, soggy and trampled in the dismal
gloom, was very different from the soft place of twilight
enchantment if had appeared an hour or so ago.

At last he said, "I think she was sitting where you are
now, on the edge of the wellhead."

Morkeleb had said. They did not think that I could see
the death that tainted the meat. Was it Dromar who had
remarked that dragons were impossible to poison?

She twisted her body and moved her hands across the

244                  Barbara Hambly

surface of the bucket that Gareth had drawn up. The reek
of death rose from it, and she recoiled in disgust and
horror, as if the water had turned to blood beneath her
fingers.

CHAPTER XIII

"BUT WHY?" SQUATTING before the fire on his hunker-
bones, Gareth turned to look at John, who lay in his nest
of bearskin blankets and ratty plaids a few feet away. "As
far as she was concerned, you'd slain her dragon for her."
He unraveled the screw of paper in which they'd brought
the coffee up from Bel, decided there wasn't enough to
bother with measuring, and dumped it into the pot of
water that bubbled over the fire. "She didn't know then
that Jenny was any threat to her. Why poison us?"

"At a guess," John said, propping himself with great
care up on one elbow and fitting his spectacles to his dirty,
unshaven face, "to keep us from riding back to Bel with
the news that the dragon was dead before she could get
your dad to round up the remaining gnomes on some
trumped-up charge. As far as she knew, the dragon was
dead—I mean, she couldn't have seen him in a crystal or
a water bowl, but she could see us all alive and chipper,
and the inference is a pretty obvious one."

"I suppose." Gareth unrolled his tumed-up sleeves and
slung his cloak around his shoulders once more. The
morning was foggy and cold, and the sweat he'd worked

245

246 Barbara Hambly

up clearing out the well house close to their camp in the
ruined tanneries was drying.

"I doubt she'd have poisoned you," John went on. "If
she'd wanted you dead, she'd never have waited for you."

Gareth blushed hotly. "That isn't why she waited," he
mumbled.

"Of course not," John said. "Dead, you're not only no
good to her—if you die, she loses everything."

The boy frowned. "Why? I mean, I can see her wanting
me under her power so I'd no longer be a threat to her,
the same reason she put Polycarp out of the way. And if
she killed the two of you, she'd need me to back up her
story about the dragon still being in the Deep, at least
until she could get rid of the gnomes." He sniffed bitterly
and held out his blistered hands to the fire. "She'd prob-
ably use Bond and me as witnesses to say eventually that
she slew the dragon. Then she'd be able to justify having
my father give her the Deep."

He sighed, his mouth tight with disillusionment. "And
I thought Polycarp stretching a bit of cable over a fence
sounded like the depths of perfidy." He settled the griddle
over the fire, his thin face looking much older than it had
in the jonquil pallor of the daytime flames.

"Well," John said gently, "it isn't only that. Gar." He
glanced over at Jenny, who sat in the shadows of the newly
cleared doorway of the well house, but she said nothing.
Then he looked back to Gareth. "How long do you think
your father's going to last with Zyeme alive? I don't know
what her spells are doing to him, and I know a dying man
when I see one. As it is, for all her power, she's only a mis
tress. She needs the Deep for a power base and fortress
independent of the King, and she needs the Deep's gold."

"My father would give it to her," Gareth said softly.
"And I—I suppose I'm just the contingency plan, in case
he should die?" He poked at the softly sizzling cakes on
the griddle. "Then she had to destroy Polycarp, whether

Dragonsbane                  247

or not he tried to warn me of her. The Citadel guards the
back way into the Deep."

"Well, not even that." John lay back down again and
folded his hands on his breast. "She wanted to be rid of
Polycarp because he's an alternative heir."

"Alternative to whom?" Gareth asked, puzzled. "To

me?"

John shook his head. "Alternative to Zyeme's child."

The horror that crossed the boy's face was deeper than
fear of death—deeper. Jenny thought with the strange
dispassion that had lain upon her all that morning and
through the previous night, than fear of being subjugated
to the enchantress's spells. He looked nauseated by the
thought, as if at the violation of some dark taboo. It was
a long time before he could speak. "You mean—my father's
child?"

"Or yours. It would scarcely matter which, as long as
it had the family looks." Bandaged hands folded, John
looked shortsightedly up at the boy as, half-numbed,
Gareth went through the automatic motions of forking
griddlecakes from the skillet. Still in that gentle, matter-
of-fact voice, he went on, "But you see, after this long
under Zyeme's spells, your father may not be capable of
fathering a child. And Zyeme needs a child, if she's to go
on ruling."

Jenny looked away from them, thinking about what it
would be, to be that child. The same wave of sickness
Gareth had felt passed over her at the knowledge of what
Zyeme would do to any child others. She would not feed
upon it, as she fed upon the King and Bond; but she would
raise it deliberately as an emotional cripple, forever
dependent upon her and her love. Jenny had seen it done,
by women or by men, and knew what manner of man or
woman emerged from that smothered childhood. But even
then, the twisting had been from some need of the parent's
heart, and not something done merely to keep power.

248 Barbara Hambly

She thought of her own sons and the absurd love she
bore them. She might have abandoned them, she thought
with sudden fury at Zyeme, but even had she not loved
them, even were they got on her by rape, she would never
have done that to them. It was a thing she would have
liked to think she herself could scarcely conceive of any-
one doing to an innocent child—except that in her heart
she knew exactly how it could be done.

Anger and sickness stirred in her, as if she had looked
upon torture.

"Jenny?"

Gareth's voice broke her from her thoughts. He stood
a few paces from her, looking pleadingly down at her. "He
will get better, won't he?" he asked hesitantly. "My father,
I mean? When Zyeme is banished, or—or is killed—he
will be the way he was before?"

Jenny sighed. "I don't know," she replied in a low
voice. She shook her mind free of the lethargy that gripped
her, a weariness of the spirit as much as the ache of hei
body left by the battering of Zyeme's spells. It was not
only that she had badly overstretched her own newfound
powers, not only that her body was unused to sustaining
the terrible demands of the dragon's magic. She was aware
now that her very perceptions were changing, that it wa?
not only her magic that had been changed by the touch
of the dragon's mind. The dragon in you answered, he
had said—she was starting to see things as a dragon saw.

She got stiffly to her feet, staggering a little against the
shored-up doorpost of the well house, feeling physically
drained and very weak. She had watched through the
night, telling herself it was for Zyeme that she watched,
though in her heart she knew the enchantress would not
be back, and it was not, in fact, for her that she waited
She said, "It isn't the spells that she holds him under that
are harming him. Zyeme is a vampire, Gareth—not of
the blood, like the Whisperers, but of the life-essence

Dragonsbane                  249

itself. In her eyes last night I saw her essence, her soul;

a sticky and devouring thing, yes, but a thing that must
feed to go on living. Miss Mab told me of the spells of
the Places of Healing that can shore up the life of a dying
man by taking a little of the life-energy of those who
consent to give it. It is done seldom, and only in cases of
great need. I am certain this is what she has done to your
father and to Bond. What I don't understand is why she
would need to. Her powers are such that..."

"You know," John broke in, "it says in Dotys' Histories
... or maybe it's in Terens... or is it the Elucidus Lapi-
darus... ?"

"But what can we doT Gareth pleaded. "There must
be something! I could ride back to Bel and let Dromar
know it's safe for the gnomes to reoccupy the Deep. It
would give them a strong base to..."

"No," Jenny said. "Zyeme's hold on the city is too
strong. After this, she'll be watching for you, scrying the
roads. She'd intercept you long before you came near
Bel."

"But we have to do something!" Panic and desperation
lurked at bay in his voice. "Where can we go? Polycarp
would give us shelter in the Citadel..."

"You going to tell the siege troops around the walls
you want a private word with him?" John asked, forgetting
all about his speculations upon the classics.

"There are ways through the Deep into Halnath."

"And a nice locked door at the end of 'em, I bet, or
the tunnels sealed shut with blasting powder to keep the
dragon out—even if old Dromar had put them on his
maps, which he didn't. I had a look for that back in Bel."

"Damn him..." Gareth began angrily, and John waved
him silent with a mealcake in hand.

"I can't blame him," he said. Against the random browns
and heathers of the bloodstained plaid folded beneath his
head his face still looked pale but had lost its dreadful

250 Barbara Hambly

chalkiness. Behind his specs, his brown eyes were bright
and alert. "He's a canny old bird, and he knows Zyerne.
If she didn't know where the ways through to the Citadel
hooked up into the main Deep, he wasn't going to have
that information down on paper that she could steal. Still,
Jen might be able to lead us."

"No." Jenny glanced over at him from where she sat
cross-legged beside the fire, dipping the last bite of her
griddlecake into the honey. "Even being able to see in
darkness, I could not scout them out unaided. As for you
going through them, if you try to get up in under a week,
I'll put a spell of lameness on you."

"Cheat."

"Watch me." She wiped her fingers on the end of her
plaid. "Morkeleb guided me through to the heart of the
Deep; I could never have found it, else."

"What was it like?" Gareth asked after a moment. "The
heart of the Deep? The gnomes swear by it..."

Jenny frowned, remembering the whispering darkness
and the soapy feel of the stone altar beneath her fingertips.
"I'm not sure," she said softly. "I dreamed about it..."

As one, the horses suddenly flung up their heads from
the stiff, frosted grass. Battlehammer nickered softly and
was answered, thin and clear, from the mists that floated
on the fringes of the woods that surrounded Deeping Vale.
Hooves struck the stone, and a girl's voice called out,
"Gar? Gar, where are you?"

"It's Trey." He raised his voice to shout. "Here!"

There was a frenzied scrambling of sliding gravel, and
the whitish mists solidified into the dark shapes of a horse
and rider and a fluttering of dampened veils. Gareth strode
to the edge of the high ground of the Rise to catch the
bridle of Trey's dappled palfrey as it came stumbling up
the last slope, head-down with exhaustion and matted
with sweat in spite of the day's cold. Trey, clinging to the
saddlebow, looked scarcely better off, her face scratched

Dragonsbane                 251

as if she had ridden into low-hanging branches in the wood
and long streamers clawed loose from her purple-and-
white coiffure.

"Gar, I knew you had to be all right." She slid from
the saddle into his arms. "They said they saw the dragon—
that Lady Jenny had put spells upon him—I knew you
had to be all right."

"We're fine. Trey," Gareth said doubtfully, frowning
at the terror and desperation of the girl's voice. "You look
as if you've ridden here without a break."

"I had to!" she gasped. Under the torn rags of her white
Court dress, her knees were trembling, and she clung to
Gareth's arm for support; her face was colorless beneath
what was left of its paint. "They're coming for you! I
don't understand what's happening, but you've got to get
out of here! Bond..." She stumbled on her brother's name.

"What about Bond? Trey, what's going on?"

"I don't know!" she cried. Tears of wretchedness and
exhaustion overflowed her eyes, and she wiped them
impatiently, leaving faint streaks of blue-black kohl on her
round cheeks. "There's a mob on its way, Bond's leading
it..."

"Bond?" The idea of the lazy and elegant Bond trou-
bling himself to lead anyone anywhere was absurd.

"They're going to kill you. Gar! I heard them say so!
You, and Lady Jenny, and Lord John."

"What? Why?" Gareth was growing more and more
confused.

"More to the point, who?" John asked, propping him-
self up among his blankets once again.

"These—these people, laborers mostly—smelters and
artisans from Deeping out of work, the ones who hang
around the Sheep in the Mire all day. There are Palace
guards with them, too, and I think more are coming—I
don't know why! I tried to get some sense out of Bond,

252                  Barbara Hambly

but it's as if he didn't hear me, didn't know me! He slapped
me—and he's never hit me, Gar, not since I was a child..."

"Tell us," Jenny said quietly, taking the girl's hand,
cold as a dead bird in her warm rough one. "Start from
the beginning."

Trey gulped and wiped her eyes again, her hands shak-
ing with weariness and the exertion of a fifteen-mile ride
The ornamental cloak about her shoulders was an indoor
garment of white silk and milky fur, designed to ward off
the chance drafts of a ballroom, not the bitter chill of
a foggy night such as the previous one had been. Her long
fingers were chapped and red among their diamonds.

"We'd all been dancing," she began hesitantly. "It was
past midnight when Zyeme came in. She looked strange—
I thought she'd been sick, but I'd seen her in the morning
and she'd been fine then. She called Bond to her, into an
alcove by the window. I—" Some color returned to her
too-white cheeks. "I crept after them to eavesdrop. I know
it's a terribly rude and catty thing to do, but after what
we'd talked of before you left I—I couldn't help doing it.
It wasn't to leam gossip," she added earnestly. "I was
afraid for him—and I was so scared because I'd never
done it before and I'm not nearly as good at it as someone
like Isolde or Merriwyn would be."

Gareth looked a little shocked at this frankness, but
John laughed and patted the toe of the girl's pearl-beaded
slipper in commiseration. "We'll forgive you this time,
love, but don't neglect your education like that again. You
see where it leads you?" Jenny kicked him, not hard, in
his unwounded shoulder.

"And then?" she asked.

"I heard her say, 'I must have the Deep. They must
be destroyed, and it must be now, before the gnomes hear.
They mustn't be allowed to reach it.' I followed them
down to that little postern gate that leads to the Dock-
market; they went to the Sheep in the Mire. The place

Dragonsbane                  253

was still full of men and women; all drunk and quarreling
with each other. Bond went rushing in and told them he'd
heard you'd betrayed them, sold them out to Polycarp;

that you had the dragon under Lady Jenny's spells and
were going to turn it against Bel; that you were going to
keep the gold of the Deep for yourselves and not give it
to them, its rightful owners. But they weren't ever its
rightful owners—it always belonged to the gnomes, or to
the rich merchants in Deeping. I tried to tell that to
Bond..." Her cold-reddened hand stole to her cheek, as
if to wipe away the memory of a handprint.

"But they were all shouting how they had to kill you
and regain their gold. They were all drunk—Zyeme got
the innkeeper to broach some more kegs. She said she
was going to re-enforce them with the Palace guards. They
were yelling and making torches and getting weapons. I
ran back to the Palace stables and got Prettyfeet, here..."
She stroked the exhausted pony's dappled neck, and her
voice grew suddenly small. "And then I came here. I rode
as fast as I dared—I was afraid of what might happen if
they caught me. I'd never been out riding alone at night..."

Gareth pulled off his grubby crimson cloak and slung
it around her shoulders as her trembling increased.

She concluded, "So you have to get out of here..."

"That we do." John flung back the bearskins from over
his body. "We can defend the Deep."

"Can you ride that far?" Gareth asked worriedly, hand-
ing him his patched, iron-plated leather jerkin.

"I'll be gie in trouble if I can't, my hero."

"Trey?"

The girl looked up from gathering camp things as Jenny
spoke her name.

Jenny crossed quietly to where she stood and took her
by the shoulders, looking into her eyes for a long moment.
The probing went deep, and Trey pulled back with a thin
cry of alarm that brought Gareth running. But to the bot-

254 Barbara HamUy

torn, her mind was a young girl's—not always truthful,
anxious to please, eager to love and to be loved. There
was no taint on it, and its innocence twisted at Jenny's
own heart.

Then Gareth was there, indignantly gathering Trey to
him.

Jenny's smile was crooked but kind. "I'm sorry," she
said. "I had to be sure."

By their shocked faces she saw that it had not occurred
to either of them that Zyeme might have made use of
Trey's form—or of Trey.

"Come," she said. "We probably don't have much time
Gar, get John on a horse. Trey, help him."

"I'm perfectly capable..." John began, irritated.

But Jenny scarcely heard. Somewhere in the mists of
the half-burned woods below the town, she felt sudden
movement, the intrusion of angry voices among the frost-
rimmed silence of the blackened trees. They were coming
and they were coming fast—she could almost see them
at the turning of the road below the crumbling ruin of the
clock tower.

She turned swiftly back to the others. "Go!" she said
"Quickly, they're almost on us!"

"How..." began Gareth.

She caught up her medicine bag and her halberd and
vaulted to Moon Horse's bare back. "Now! Gar, take Trey
with you. John, RIDE, damn you!" For he had wheeled
back, barely able to keep upright in Cow's saddle, to
remain at her side. Gareth flung Trey up to Battle-
hammer's back in a flurry of torn skirts; Jenny could hear
the echo of hooves on the trail below.

Her mind reached out, gathering spells together, even
the small effort wrenching at her. She set her teeth at the
stabbing pain as she gathered the dispersing mists that
had been burning off in the sun's pallid brightness—her
body was not nearly recovered from yesterday. But there

Dragonsbane                  255

was no time for anything else. She wove the cold and
dampness into a cloak to cover all the Vale of Deeping;

like a secondary pattern in a plaid, she traced the spells
of disorientation, ofjamais vu. Even as she did so, the
hooves and the angry, incoherent voices were very close.
They rang in the misty woods around the Rise and near
the gatehouse in the Vale as well—Zyeme must have told
them where to come. She wheeled Moon Horse and gave
her a hard kick in her skinny ribs, and the white mare
threw herself down the rocky slope in a gangly sprawl of
legs, making for the Gates of the Deep.

She overtook the others in the gauzy boil of the mists
in the Vale. They had slowed down as visibility lessened;

she led them at a canter over the paths that she knew so
well through the town. Curses and shouts, muffled by the
fog, came from the Rise behind them. Cold mists shredded
past her face and stroked back the black coils other hair.
She could feel the spells that held the brume in place
fretting away as she left the Rise behind, but dared not
try to put forth the strength of will it would take to hold
them after she was gone. Her very bones ached from even
the small exertion of summoning them; she knew already
that she would need all the strength she could summon
for the final battle.

The three horses clattered up the shallow granite steps.
From the great darkness of the gate arch. Jenny turned
to see the mob still milling about in the thinning fog, some
fifty or sixty of them, of all stations and classes but mostly
poor laborers. The uniforms of the handful of Palace guards
stood out as gaudy splotches in the grayness. She heard
their shouts and swearing as they became lost within plain
sight of one another in territory they had all known well
of old. That won't last long, she thought.

Moon Horse shied and fidgeted at the smell of the dragon
and of the old blood within the vast gloom of the Market
Hall. The carcass of the horse Osprey had disappeared, but

256 Barbara Hambly

the place still smelled of death, and all the horses felt it,
Jenny slid from her mare's tall back and stroked her neck,
then whispered to her to stay close to the place in case of
need and let her go back down the steps.

Hooves clopped behind her on the charred and broken
flagstones. She looked back and saw John, ashen undei
the stubble of beard, still somehow upright in Cow's sad-
dle. He studied the Vale below them with his usual cool
expressionlessness. "Zyeme out there?" he asked, and
Jenny shook her head.

"Perhaps I hurt her too badly. Perhaps she's only
remaining at the Palace to gather other forces to send
against us."

"She always did like her killing to be done by others.
How long will your spells hold them?"

"Not long," Jenny said doubtfully. "We have to hold
this gate here, John. If they're from Deeping, many of
them will know the first levels of the Deep. There are
four or five ways out of the Market Hall. If we retreat
further in, we'll be flanked."

"Aye." He scratched the side of his nose thoughtfully.
"What's wrong with just letting them in? We could hide
up somewhere—once they got to the Temple of Sar-
mendes with all that gold, I doubt they'd waste much
energy looking for us."

Jenny hesitated for a moment, then shook her head.
"No," she said. "If they were an ordinary mob, I'd say
yes, but—Zyeme wants us dead. If she cannot break and
overwhelm my mind with her magic, she's not going to
give up before she has destroyed my body. There are
enough of them that would keep hunting us, and we can't
take a horse into the deeper tunnels to carry you; without
one, we'd never be able to move swiftly enough to avoid
them. We'd be trapped in a cul-de-sac and slaughtered.
No, if we're to hold them, it has to be here."

"Right." He nodded. "Can we help you?"

257

She had returned her attention to the angry snarl of
moving figures out in the pale ruins. Over her shoulder,
she said, "You can't even help yourself."

"I know that," he agreed equably. "But that wasn't my
question, love. Look..." He pointed. "That bloke there's
figured out the way. Here they come. Gaw, they're like

ants."

Jenny said nothing, but felt a shiver pass through her
as she saw the trickle of attackers widen into a stream.

Gareth came up beside them, leading Battlehammer;

Jenny whispered to the big horse and turned him loose
down the steps. Her mind was already turning inward
upon itself, digging at the strength in the exhausted depths
of her spirit and body. John, Gareth, and the slender girl
in the white rags of a Court gown, clinging to Gareth's
arm, were becoming mere wraiths to her as her soul spi-
raled down into a single inner vortex, like the single-
minded madness that comes before childbearing—nothing
else existed but herself, her power, and what she must
do.

Her hands pressed to the cold rock of the gate pillar,
and she felt that she drew fire and strength from the stone
itself and from the mountain beneath her feet and above
her head—drew it from the air and the darkness that
surrounded her. She felt the magic surge into her veins
like a reined whirlwind of compressed lightning. Its power
frightened her, for she knew it was greater than her body
would bear, yet she could afford no Limitation upon these
spells. It was thus, she knew, with dragons, but her body
was not a dragon's.

She was aware of John reining Cow sharply back away
from her, as if frightened; Gareth and Trey had retreated
already. But her mind was out in the pale light of the
steps, looking down over Deeping, contemplating in lei-
surely timelessness the men and women running through
the crumbled walls of the ruins. She saw each one of them

258                   Barbara Hambly

with the cool exactness of a dragon's eyes, not only how
they were dressed, but the composition of their souls
through the flesh they wore. Bond she saw distinctly,
urging them on with a sword in his hand, his soul eaten
through with abcesses like termite-riddled wood.

The forerunners hit the cracked pavement and dust of
the square before the gates. Like the chirp of an insect
in a wall, she heard Gareth nattering, "What can we do^
We have to help her!" as she dispassionately gathered the
lightning in her hands.

"Put that down," John's voice said, suddenly weak and
bleached. "Get ready to run for it—you can hide in the
warrens for a time if they get through. Here's the maps..."

The mob was on the steps. Incoherent hate rose around
her like a storm tide. Jenny lifted her hands, the whole
strength of rock and darkness tunneling into her body,
her mind relaxing into the shock instead of bracing against
it.

The key to magic is magic, she thought. Her life began
and ended in each isolate crystal second of impacted time.

The fire went up from the third step, a red wall of it,
whole and all-consuming. She heard those trapped in the
first rush screaming and smelled smoke, charring meat,
and burning cloth. Like a dragon, she killed without hate,
striking hard and cruel, knowing that the first strike must
kill or her small group would all be dead.

Then she slammed shut before her the illusion of the
doors that had long ago been broken from the gateway
arch. They appeared like faded glass from within, but
every nail and beam and brace of them was wrought per-
fectly from enchanted air. Through them she saw men and
women nulling about the base of the steps, pointing up
at what they saw as the renewed Gates of the Deep and
crying out in wonder and alarm. Others lay on the ground,
or crawled helplessly here and there, beating out the flames
from their clothes with frenzied hands. Those who had

Dragonsbane                  259

not been trapped in the fire made no move to help them,
but stood along the bottom of the step, looking up at the
gates and shouting with drunken rage. With the caco-
phony of the screams and groans of the wounded, the
noise was terrible, and worse than the noise was the stench
of sizzling flesh. Among it all. Bond Clerlock stood, star-
ing up at the phantom gates with his hunger-eaten eyes.

Jenny stepped back, feeling suddenly sick as the human
in her looked upon what the dragon in her had done. She
had killed before to protect her own life and the lives of
those she loved. But she had never killed on this scale,
and the power she wielded shocked her even as it drained
her of strength.

The dragon in you answered, Morkeleb had said. She
felt sick with horror at how true his knowledge of her had
been.

She staggered back, and someone caught her—John
and Gareth, looking like a couple of not-very-successful
brigands, filthy and battered and incongruous in their
spectacles. Trey, with Gareth's tattered cloak still draped
over her mud-stained white silks and her purple-and-wtute
hair hanging in asymmetrical coils about her chalky face,
wordlessly took a collapsible tin cup from her pearl-beaded
reticule, filled it from the water bottle on Cow's saddle,
and handed it to her.

John said, "It hasn't stopped them for long." A mist
of sweat covered his face, and the nostrils of his long nose
were marked by dints of pain from the mere effort of
standing. "Look, there's Bond drumming up support for
a second go. Silly bleater." He glanced across at Trey and
added, "Sorry." She only shook her head.

Jenny freed herself and walked unsteadily to the edge
of the shadow gate. Her head throbbed with exhaustion
that bordered nausea. The voices of the men and her own
voice, when she spoke, sounded flat and unreal. "He'll
get it, too."

260                  Barbara Hambly

In the square below the gates, Bond was running here
and there among the men, stepping over the charred bod-
ies of the dying, gesticulating and pointing up at the phan-
tom doors. The Palace guards looked uncertain, but the
laborers from the Dockmarket were gathered about him,
listening and passing wineskins among themselves. They
shook their fists up at the Deep, and Jenny remarked,
"Like the gnomes, they've had their taste of poverty."

"Yes, but how can they blame us for it?" Gareth objected
indignantly. "How can they blame the gnomes? The
gnomes were even more victims of it than they."

"Whether or no," John said, leaning against the stone
pillar of the Gate, "I bet they're telling themselves the
treasures of the Deep are theirs by right. It's what Zyeme
will have told 'em, and they obviously believe it enough
to kill for them."

"But it's silly!"

"Not as silly as falling in love with a witch, and we've
both done that," John replied cheerfully. In spite of her
exhaustion, Jenny chuckled. "How long can you hold
them, love?"

Something in the sound of his voice made her look
back quickly at him. Though he had dismounted from
Cow to help her, it was obvious he could not stand alone;

his flesh looked gray as ash. Shouting from below drew
her attention a moment later; past the smoke still curling
from the steps, she could see men forming up into a ragged
line, the madness of unreasoning hate in their eyes.

"I don't know," she said softly. "All power must be
paid for. Maintaining the illusion of the Gates draws still
more of my strength. But it buys us a little time, breaking
the thrust of their will if they think they'll have to break
them."

"I doubt that lot has the brains to think that far." Still
leaning heavily on the pillar, John looked out into the
slanted sun of the square outside. "Look, here they come."

Dragonsbane                  261

"Get back," Jenny said. Her bones hurt with the thought
of drawing forth power from them and from the stone and
air around her one more time. "I don't know what will
happen without Limitations."

"I can't get back, love; if I let go of this wall, I'll fall
down."

Through the ghost shape of the Gates, she saw them
coming, running across the square toward the steps. The
magic came more slowly, dredged and scraped from the
seared core of her being—her soul felt bleached by
the effort. The voices below rose in a mad crescendo, in
which the words "gold" and "kill" were flung up like spars
of driftwood on the rage of an incoming wave. She glimpsed
Bond Clerlock, or what was left of Bond Clerlock, some-
where in their midst, his Court suit pink as a shell among
the blood-and-buttercup hues of the Palace guards. Her
mind locked into focus, like a dragon's mind; all things
were clear to her and distant, impersonal as images in a
divining crystal. She called the white dragon rage like a
thunderclap and smote the steps with fire, not before them
now, but beneath their feet.

As the fire exploded from the bare stone, a wave of
sickness consumed her, as if in that second all her veins
had been opened. The shrieking of men, caught in the
agony of the fire, struck her ears like a slapping hand, as
grayness threatened to drown her senses and heat rose
through her, then sank away, leaving behind it a cold like
death.

She saw them reeling and staggering, ripping flaming
garments from charred flesh. Tears of grief and weakness
ran down her face at what she had done, though she knew
that the mob would have torn the four of them apart and
had known, that time, that she could summon fire. The
illusion of the Gates felt as tenuous as a soap-bubble around
her—like her own body, light and drifting. John stumbled
to catch her as she swayed and pulled her back to the

262 Barbara Hambly

pillar against which he had stood; for a moment they boih
held to it, neither strong enough to stand.

Her eyes cleared a little. She saw men running about
the square in panic, rage, and pain; and Bond, oblivion^
to bums which covered his hand and arm, was chasing
after them, shouting.

"What do we do now, love?"

She shook her head. "I don't know," she whispered
"I feel as if I'm going to faint."

His arm tightened around her waist. "Oh, do," he
encouraged enthusiastically. "I've always wanted to carr>
you to safety in my arms."

Her laughter revived her, as he had no doubt meant it
to. She pushed herself clear of his support as Gareth and
Trey came up, both looking ill and frightened.

"Could we run for it through the Deep?" Gareth asked,
fumbling the maps from an inner pocket and dropping two
of them. "To the Citadel, I mean?"

"No," Jenny said. "I told John—if we left the Market
Hall, they'd flank us; and carrying John, we couldn't out-
distance them."

"I could stay here, love," John said quietly. "I could
buy you time."

Sarcastically, she replied, "The time it would take them
to pick themselves up after tripping over your body ic
the archway would scarcely suffice."

"One of us could try to get through," Trey suggesteu
timidly. "Polycarp and the gnomes at the Citadel would
know the way through from that side. They could come
for the rest of you. I have some candles in my reticule,
and some chalk to mark the way, and I'm no good to you
here..."

"No," Gareth objected, valiantly fighting his terror of
the dark warrens. "I'll go."

"You'd never find it," Jenny said. "I've been down in
the Deep, Gareth, and believe me, it is not something that

Dragonsbane                  263

can be reasoned out with chalk and candles. And, as John
has said, the door at the end will be locked in any case,
even if they didn't blast it shut."

Down below them, Bond's voice could be heard dimly,
shouting that the Gate wasn't real, that it was just a witch's
trick, and that all the gold that had been lost was theirs
by right. People were yelling, "Death to the thieves! Death
to the gnome-lovers!" Jenny leaned her head against the
stone of the pillar, a bar of sunlight falling through the
Gate around her and lying like a pale carpet on the fire-
black rubble of the Market Hall. She wondered if Zyeme
had ever felt like this, when she had called upon the deep
reserves of her powers, without Limitations—helpless
before the anger of men.

She doubted it. It did something to you to be helpless.

All power must be paid for. Zyeme had never paid.

She wondered, just for a moment, how the enchantress
had managed that.

"What's that?"

At the sound of Trey's voice, she opened her eyes again
and looked out to where the girl was pointing. The light
filling the Vale glinted harshly on something up near the
ruined clock tower. Listening, she could pick out the sound
of hooves and voices and feel the distant clamor of anger
and unthinking hate. Against the dull slate color of the
tower's stones, the weeds of the hillside looked pale as
yellow wine; between them the uniforms of half a com-
pany of Palace guards glowed like a tumble of hothouse
poppies. The sun threw fire upon their weapons.

"Gaw," John said. "Reinforcements."

Bond and a small group of men were running up through
the rubble and sedge toward the new company, flies
swarming thick on the young courtier's untended wounds.
Small with distance. Jenny saw more and more men under
the shadow of the tower, the brass of pike and cuirass
flashing, the red of helmet crests like spilled blood against

264                  Barbara Hambly

the muted hues of the stone. Exhaustion ate like poison
into her bones. Her skin felt like a single open, throbbing
wound; through it, she could feel the illusion of the Ga^c
fading to nothingness as her power drained and died.

She said quietly, "You three get back to the doors into
the Grand Passage. Gar, Trey—carry John. Bolt the dooi s
from the inside—there are winches and pulleys there."

"Don't be stupid." John was clinging to the gatepost
beside her to stay upright.

"Don't you be stupid." She would not take her eyes
from the swarming men in the square below.

"We're not leaving you," Gareth stated. "At least, I'm
not. Trey, you take John..."

"No," Trey and the Dragonsbane insisted in approxi-
mate unison. They looked at one another and managed
the ghost of a mutual grin.

"It's all of us or none of us, love."

She swung around on them, her eyes blazing palely
with the crystalline coldness of the dragon's eyes. "None
of you can be of the slightest use to me here against so
many. John and Trey, all you'll be is killed immediately.
Gareth..." Her eyes pinned his like a lance of frost. "You
may not be. They may have other instructions concerning
you, from Zyeme. I may have the strength for one more
spell. That can buy you some time. John's wits may keep
you alive for a while more in the Deep; you'll need Trey's
willingness as well. Now go."

There was a short silence, in which she could feel
John's eyes upon her face. She was conscious of the men
approaching in the Vale; her soul screamed at her to get
rid of these three whom she loved while there was yet
time.

It was Gareth who spoke. "Will you really be able to
hold the Gate against another charge? Even of—of my
father's men?"

Dragonsbane                  265

"I think so," Jenny lied, knowing she hadn't the strength
left to light a candle.

"Aye, then, love," said John softly. "We'd best go."
He took her halberd to use as a crutch; holding himself
upright with it, he put a hand on her nape and kissed her.
His mouth felt cold against hers, his lips soft even through
the hard scratchiness of five days' beard. As their lips
parted, their eyes met, and, through the dragon armor of
hardness, she saw he knew she'd lied.

"Let's go, children," he said. "We won't shoot the bolts
till we have to, Jen."

The line of soldiers was descending through the lab-
yrinth of shattered foundations and charred stone. They
were joined by the men and women of Deeping, those,
Jenny noted, who had thrown garbage at Miss Mab in the
fountain square of Bel. Makeshift weapons jostled pikes
and swords. In the brilliance of daylight everything seemed
hard and sharp. Every house beam and brick stood out
to Jenny's raw perceptions like filigree work, every tangle
of weed and stand of grass clear and individuated. The
amber air held the stench of sulfur and burned flesh. Like
a dim background to angry ranting and exhortation rose
the keening of the wounded and, now and again, voices
crying, "Gold... gold..."

They scarcely even know what it is for, Morkeleb had
said.

Jenny thought about lan and Adric, and wondered
briefly who would raise them, or if, without her and John's
protection of the Winterlands, they would live to grow
up at all. Then she sighed and stepped forth from the
shadows into the light. The pale sun drenched her, a small,
skinny, black-haired woman alone in the vast arch of the
shattered Gate. Men pointed, shouting. A rock clattered
against the steps, yards away. The sunlight felt warm and
pleasant upon her face.

Bond was screaming hysterically, "Attack! Attack now!

266 Barbara Hambly

KU1 the witch-bitch! It's our gold! We'll get the slut thip
time—get her..."

Men began to run forward up the steps. She watchec
them coming with a curious feeling of absolute detach
ment. The fires of dragon-magic had drained her utterly—
one last trap, she thought ironically, from Morkeleb, i
final vengeance for humiliating him. The mob curled like
a breaking wave over the ruined beams and panels of the
shattered gates, the sunlight flashing on the steel of the
weapons in their hands.

Then a shadow crossed the sunlight—like a hawk's,
but immeasurably more huge.

One man looked up, pointed at the sky, and screamed.

Again the sunlight was darkened by circling shade.
Jenny raised her head. The aureate light streamed trans-
lucently through the black spread of bones and the dark
veins of sable wings, sparkled from the spikes that tipped
the seventy-foot span of that silent silk, and gilded every
hom and ribbon of the gleaming mane.

She watched the dragon circling, riding the thermals
like a vast eagle, only peripherally conscious of the ter-
rified shouting of the men and the frenzied squeals of the
guards' horses. Yelling and crashing in the rubble, the
attackers of the Deep turned and fled, trampling upon
their dead and dropping their weapons in their headlong
flight.

The Vale was quite empty by the time Morkeleb lighted
upon the heat-cracked steps of the Deep.

CHAPTER XIV

WHY DID YOU RETURN?

The sun had set. Echoes of its brightness lingered on
the cinnamon edges of the cliff above. After the firelight
and blackness of the Market Hall, where Gareth and Trey
could be heard talking softly beside the small blaze they
had kindled, the windy coolness of the steps was deeply
refreshing. Jenny ran tired hands through her hair, the
cold of her fingers welcome against her aching skull.

The great, gleaming black shape that lay like a sphinx
along the top step turned its head. In the reflected glow
from the fire in the hall she saw the long edges of that
birdlike skull, the turn and flutter of the ribboned mane
and the glint of the bobs of jet that quivered on long
antennae.

His voice was soft in her mind. I need your help, wizard
woman.

What? It was the last thing she would have expected
from the dragon. She wondered illogically if she had heard
rightly, though with dragons there was never a question
of that. My HELP? MY help?

Bitter anger curled from the dragon like an acrid smoke,

267

268                  Barbara Hambly

anger at having to ask the help of any human, anger at
needing help, anger at admitting it, even to himself. But
in the close-shielded mind, she felt other things—exhaus-
tion approaching her own and the chill thread of fear.

By my name you drove me forth from this place, he
said. But something else, something beyond my name,
draws me back. Like a jewel, one jet-bobbed antenna
flicked in the wind. Like the discontented dreams that
first brought me to this place, it will not let me rest; it is
a yearning like the craving for gold, but worse. It tor-
mented me as I flew north, mounting to pain, and the
only ease I had was when I turned south again. Now all
the torments of my soul and my dreams center upon this
mountain. Before you entered my mind, it was not so—
I came and went as I pleased, and naught but my own
desire for the gold made me return. But this pain, this
longing of the heart, is something I never felt before, in
all my years; it is something I never knew of, until your
healing touched me. It is not of you, for you commanded
me to go. It is a magic that I do not understand, unlike
the magic of dragons. It gives me no rest, no peace. I
think of this place constantly, though, by my name, wizard
woman, it is against my will that I return.

He shifted upon his haunches, so that he lay as a cat
will sometimes lie, his forelimbs and shoulders sphinx-
like, but his hinder legs stretched out along the uppermost
step. The spiked club of his tail lashed slightly at its clawed
tip.

It is not the gold, he said. Gold calls to me, but never
with a madness like this. It is alien to my understanding,
as if the soul were being rooted from me. I hate this place,
for it is a place of defeat and disgrace to me now, but the
craving to be here consumes me. I have never felt this
before and I do not know what It is. Has it come from
you, wizard woman? Do you know what is it?

Jenny was silent for a time. Her strength was slowly

Dragonsbane                  269

returning, and she felt already less weak and brittle than
she had. Sitting on the steps between the dragon's claws,
his head rose above hers, the thin, satiny ribbons of his
mane brushing against her face. Now he cocked his head
down; looking up, she met one crystalline silver eye.

She said. It is a longing such as humans feel. I do not
know why it should possess you, Morkeleb—but I think
it is time that we found out. You are not the only one
drawn to the Deep as if possessed. Like you, I do not
think it is the gold. There is something within the Deep.
I sense it, feel it within my bones.

The dragon shook his great head. / know the Deep, he
said. It was my hold and dominion. I know every dropped
coin and every soda-straw crystal; I heard the tread of
every foot passing in the Citadel overhead and the slip-
ping of the blind white fish through the waters deep below.
I tell you, there is nothing in the Deep but water, stone,
and the gold of the gnomes, sleeping in the darkness.
There is nothing there that should draw me so.

Perhaps, Jenny said. Then, aloud, she called into the
echoing cavern behind her, "Gareth? John? Trey?"

The dragon lifted his head with indignation as soft foot-
falls scuffled within. Like speech without words, Jenny
felt the sharp flash of his pride and his annoyance at her
for bringing other humans into their counsels and she
longed to slap his nose as she slapped her cat's when he
tried to steal food from her fingers.

He must have felt the returning glint of her exasper-
ation, for he subsided, his narrow chin sinking to rest
upon the long-boned hooks of one black foreclaw. Beyond
the spears of his backbone she saw the great tail lash.

The others came out, Gareth and Trey supporting John
between them. He had slept a little and rested and looked
better than he had. The spells of healing she had laid upon
him were having their effect. He gazed up at the dark
shape of the dragon, and Jenny felt their eyes meet and

270                  Barbara Hambly

knew that Morkeleb spoke to him, thought she heard not
what he said.

John replied in words. "Well, it was just as well, wasn't
it? Thank you."

Their eyes held for a moment more. Then the dragon
raised his head and turned it away irritably, transferring
his cold silver gaze to Gareth. Jenny saw the young man
flush with shame and confusion; whatever the dragon said
to him, he made no reply at all.

They laid John down with his back to the granite door
pillar, his plaid folded beneath his shoulders. His spec-
tacles caught the starlight, rather like the silvery glow of
the dragon's eyes. Jenny seated herself on the steps
between him and the dragon's talons; Gareth and Trey,
as if for mutual protection, sat opposite and close together,
staring up in wonder at the thin, serpentine form of the
Black Dragon of Nast Wall.

In time, Jenny's flawed, silver-shot voice broke the
silence. "What is in the Deep?" she asked. "What is it
that Zyeme wants so badly there? All her actions have
been aimed toward having it—her hold over the King,
her attempts to seduce Gareth, her desire for a child, the
siege of Halnath, and the summoning of the dragon."

She did not summon me, retorted Morkeleb angrily.
She could not have done that. She has no hold upon my
mind.

"You're here, ain't you?" John drawled, and the drag-
on's metallic claws scraped upon the stone as his head
swung round.

Jenny said sharply, "John! Morkeleb!"

The dragon subsided with a faint hiss, but the bobs of
his antennae twitched with annoyance.

She went on, "Might it be that she is herself sum-
moned?"

/ tell you there is nothing there, the dragon said. Noth-
ing save stone and gold, water and darkness.

Dragonsbane                  271

"Let's back up a bit, then," John said. "Not what does
Zveme want in the Deep, but just what does she want?"

Gareth shrugged. "It can't be gold. You've seen how
she lives. She could have all the gold in the Realm for the
asking. She has the King..." He hesitated, and then went
on calmly, "If I hadn't left for the north when I did, she
would certainly have had me, and very probably a son to
rule through for the rest of her life."

"She used to live in the Deep," Trey pointed out. "It
seems that, ever since she left it, she's been trying to get
control of it. Why did she leave? Did the gnomes expel

her?"

"Not really," Gareth said. "That is, they didn't formally

forbid her to enter the Deep at all until this year. Up until
then she could come and go in the upper levels, just like
any other person from Bel."

"Well if she's shapestrong, that's to say she had the
run of the place, so long as she stayed clear of the mage-
born," John reasoned, propping his specs with one fore-
finger. "And what happened a year ago?"

"I don't know," Gareth said. "Dromar petitioned my
father in the name of the Lord of the Deep not to let her—
or any of the children of men, for that matter..."

"Again, that's a logical precaution against a shape-
shifter."

"Maybe." Gareth shrugged. "I didn't think of it then—
a lot of the unpopularity of the gnomes started then,
because of that stipulation. But they said Zyeme specif-
ically, because she had..." He fished in his compendious,
ballad-trained memory for the exact wording. "... 'defiled
a holy thing.'"

"No idea what it was?"

The prince shook his head. Like John, he looked drawn
and tired, his shirt a fluttering ruin of dirt and spark holes,
his face sparkling faintly with an almost-invisible adoles-
cent stubble. Trey, sitting beside him, looked little better.

272

Barbara Humbly

With her typical practicality, she had carried a comb in
her reticule and had combed out her hair, so that it hung
past her hips in crinkled swaths, the smooth sheen of its
fantastic colors softened to a stippling of snow white and
violet, like the pelt of some fabulous beast against the
matted nap of Gareth's cloak.

'"Defiled a holy thing." Jenny repeated thoughtfully.
"It isn't how Mab put it. She said that she had poisoned
the heart of the Deep—but the heart of the Deep is a
place, rather than an object."

"Is it?" said John curiously.                        _
"Of course. I've been there." The silence of it whis- f
pered along her memory. "But as for what Zyeme wants..."
"You're a witch, Jen," said John. "What do you want?"
Gareth looked shocked at the comparison, but Jenny
only thought for a moment, then said, "Power. Magic.
The key to magic is magic. My greatest desire, to which
I would sacrifice all things else, is to increase my skills."

"But she's already the strongest sorceress in the land,"
Trey protested.

"Not according to Mab."

"I suppose there were gnome wizards in the Deep
stronger," John said interestedly. "If there hadn't been,
she wouldn't have needed to summon Morkeleb."

She did not summon me! The dragon's tail lashed again,
like a great cat's. She could not. Her power is not that
great.

"Somebody's is," John remarked. "Before you wiped
out the Deep and the mages in it, the gnomes were strong
enough to keep Zyerne out. But they all perished, or at
least all the strong ones did..."

"No," Jenny said. "That's what has puzzled me. Mab
said that she herself was stronger than Zyeme at some
time in the past. That means that either Mab grew weaker,
or Zyeme stronger."

"Could Mab's power have been weakened in some way

Dragonsbane                  273

when Morkeleb showed up?" John glanced up at the
dragon. "Would that be possible? That your magic would
lessen someone else's?"

/ know nothing of the magic of humans, nor yet of the
magic of gnomes, the dragon replied. Yet among us, there
is no taking away of another's magic. It is like taking
away another's thoughts from him, and leaving him with

none.

"That's another thing," Jenny said, folding her arms
about her drawn-up knees. "When I met Zyerne yesterday
... My powers have grown, but I should not have been
able to defeat her as I did. She is shapestrong—she should
have far more strength than I did." She glanced over at
Gareth. "But she didn't shift shape."

"But she can," the boy protested. "I've seen her."

"Lately?" asked John suddenly.

Gareth and Trey looked at one another.

"Since the coming of the dragon? Or, to put it another
way, since she hasn't been able to enter the Deep?"

"But either way, it's inconceivable," Jenny insisted.
"Power isn't something that's contingent upon any place
or thing, any more than knowledge is. Zyeme's power
couldn't have weakened any more than Mab's could.
Power is within you—here, or in Bel, or in the Winter-
lands, or wherever you are. It is something you learn,
something you develop. AH power must be paid for..."

"Except that it's never looked as if Zyeme had paid
for hers," John said. His glance went from Jenny to the
dragon and back. "You said the magic of the gnomes is
different. Is there a way she could have stolen power,
Jen? That she could be using something she's no right to?
I'm thinking how you said she doesn't know about Lim-
itations—obviously, since she summoned a dragon she
can't get ridof..."

She did not summon me!

"She seems to think she did," John pointed out. "At

274                  Barbara Hambly

least she's kept saying how she was the one who kicked
the gnomes out of the Deep. But mostly I'm thinking
about the wrinkles on her face."

"But she doesn't have any wrinkles," Trey objected,
disconcerted at this lightning change of topic.

"Exactly. Why doesn't she? Every mage I've known—
Mab, who isn't that old as gnomes go, old Caerdinn, that
crazy little wander-mage who used to come through the
Winterlands, and you, Jen—the marks of power are
printed on their faces. Though it hasn't aged you," he
added quickly, with a concern for her vanity that made
Jenny smile.

"You are right," she said slowly. "Now that you speak
of it, I don't think I've ever encountered a mage that—
that sweet-looking. Maybe that's what first troubled me.
And Mab said something about Zyeme stealing secrets.
Zyeme herself said that when she is able to get into the
Deep, she'll have the power to destroy us all." She
frowned, some other thought tugging at her mind. "But
it doesn't make sense. If you think she could have gained
her powers by studying arts possessed by the gnomes—
by breaking into and reading the books of their deeper
magic—you're wrong. I searched through the Places of
Healing in quest of just such books, and found none."

"That's a bit odd in itself, isn't it?" John mused. "But
when you said power isn't contingent on any thing, any
more than knowledge is—knowledge can be stored in a
book. Is there any way power can be stored? Can a mage
use another mage's power?"

Jenny shrugged. "Oh, yes. Power can be accumulated
by breadth as well as by depth; several mages can focus
their power together and direct it toward a single spell
that lies beyond their separate strengths. It can be done
by chanting, meditating, dancing..." She broke off, as
the vision rose once more to her mind—the vision of the

Dragonsbane                  275

heart of the Deep. "Dancing..." she repeated softly, then
shook her head. "But in any case, the power is controlled
by those who raise it."

"Is it?" asked John. "Because in Polyborus it says..."

Morkeleb cut him off. But if she were forbidden the
Deep, Zyerne could have been nowhere near it when the
power was raised that sent this yearning unto me and
called me back. Nor, indeed, could she have been near
the Deep to conjure the dreams that first brought me here.
And no other mages would have combined to raise that
power.

"That's what I'm trying to tell you!" John broke in.
"In Dotys—or Polyborus' Analects—or maybe it's the
Elucidus Lapidarus..."

"What?" demanded Jenny, well aware that John was
perfectly capable of fishing for the source of reference for
ten minutes in the jackdaw-nest of his memory.

"Dotys—or Polyborus—says that it used to be rumored
that mages could use a certain type of stone for a power-
sink. They could call power into it, generation after gen-
eration, sometimes, or they could combine—and I think
he mentioned dancing—and when they needed great power,
forthe defense of their realm or defeat ofadragonorareally
powerful devil, they could call power out of it."

They looked at one another in silence—witch and
prince, maiden and warrior and dragon.

John went on, "I think what the gnomes were guard-
ing—what lies in the heart of the Deep—is a power sink."

"The Stone," Jenny said, knowing it for truth. "They
swear 'by the Stone' or 'by the Stone in the heart of the
Deep.' Even Zyeme does. In my vision, they were danc-
ing around it."

John's voice was soft in the velvety darkness. "And
in that case, all Zyeme would have needed to steal was
the key to unlock it. If she was apprenticed in the Places
of Healing near there, that wouldn't have been hard."

276                  Barbara Hmnbty

"If she's mentally in contact with it, she could use it
somewhat, even at a distance," Jenny said. "I felt it, when
I struggled with her—some power I have never felt. Not
living, like Morkeleb—but strong because it is dead and
does not care what it does. It must be the source of all
her strength, for shapechanging and for the curse she sent
to the gnomes, the curse that brought you here from the
north, Morkeleb."

"A curse that's still holding good whether she wants
it to or not." John's spectacles flashed in the starlight as
he grinned. "But she must not be able to wield it accu-
rately at a distance, even as Miss Mab can't use it against
her. It would explain why she's so wild not to let them
get even a chance of going back."

So what thenf demanded Morkeleb grimly. Did your
estimable Dotys, your wise Polyborus, speak of a way to
combat the magic of these stones?

"Well," John said, a faint grin of genuine amusement
touching the comers of his mouth, "that was the whole
point of my coming south, you see. My copy of the Elu-
cidus Lapidarus isn't complete. Almost nothing in my
library is. It's why I agreed to become a Dragonsbane for
the King's hire in the first place—because we need books,
we need knowledge. I'm as much a scholar as I can be,
but it isn't easy."

With the size of a human brain, it would not be\ Mor-
keleb snapped, irrationally losing his temper. You are no
more scholar than you are Dragonsbane!

"But I never claimed to be," John protested. "It's just
there's all these ballads, see..."

The jet claws rattled again on the pavement. Jenny,
exasperated with them both, began, "I really am going to
let him eat you this time..."

Trey put in hastily, "Could you use the Stone yourself,
Lady Jenny? Use it against Zyerne?"

Dragonsbane                  277

"Of course!" Gareth bounced like a schoolboy on the
hard step. "That's it! Fight fire with fire."

Jenny was silent. She felt their eyes upon her—Trey's,
Gareth's, John's, the crystal gaze of the dragon turned
down at her from above. The thought of the power stirred
in her mind like lust—Zyeme's power. The key to magic

is magic...

She saw the worry in John's eyes and knew what her
own expression must look like. It sobered her. "What are
you thinking?"

He shook his head. "I don't know, love."

He meant that he would not stand in the way of any
decision she made. Correctly interpreting his look, she
said gently, "I would not misuse the power, John. I would
not become like Zyeme."

His voice was pitched to her ears alone. "Can you
know that?"

She started to reply, then stilled herself. Shrill and clear
she heard Miss Mab's voice saying. She took the secrets
of those greater than she, defiled them, tainted them,
poisoned the very heart of the Deep ... She remembered,
too, that sense of perverted power that had sparkled in
the lamplight around Zyerne and the luckless Bond, and
how the touch of the dragon's mind had changed her.

"No," she said at last. "I cannot know. And it would
be stupid of me to meddle with something so powerful
without knowing its dangers, even if I could figure out
the key by myself."

"But," Gareth protested, "it's our only chance of
defeating Zyeme! They'll be back—you know they will!
We can't stay holed up here forever."

"Could we learn enough about the Stone for you to
circumvent its powers somehow?" Trey suggested. "Would
there be a copy of the Whatsus Howeverus you talked
about in the Palace library?"

Gareth shrugged. His scholarship might extend to seven

278                  Barbara Humbly

minor variants of the ballad of the Wariady and the Red
Worm of Weldervale, but it was a broken reed insofar as
obscure encyclopedists went.

"There would be one at Halnath, though, wouldn't
there?" Jenny said. "And if it didn't contain the infor-
mation, there are gnomes there who might know."

"If they'd tell." John propped himself gingerly a little
higher against the granite of the gate pillar, the few por-
tions of his shirt not darkened with bloodstains very white
in the rising moonlight against the metallic glints of his
doublet. "Dromar's lot wouldn't even admit it existed.
They've had enough of humans controlling the Stone, and
I can't say as I blame them. But whatever happens," he
added, as the others subsided from their enthusiasm into
dismal reflection once more, "our next move had better
be to get out of here. As our hero says, you know Bond
and the King's troops will be back. The only place we
can go is Halnath, and maybe not there. How tight are
the siege lines. Gar?"

"Tight," Gareth said gloomily. "Halnath is built on a
series of cliffs—the lower town, the upper town, the Uni-
versity, and the Citadel above that, and the only way in
is through the lower town. Spies have tried to sneak in
over the cliffs on the mountain side of the city and have
fallen to their deaths." He readjusted his cracked spec-
tacles. "And besides," he went on, "Zyerne knows as
well as we do that Halnath is the only place we can go."

"Pox." John glanced over at Jenny, where she sat against
the alien curves of the dragon's complicated shoulder
bones. "For something that was never any of our business
to begin with, this is looking worse and worse."

"I could go," Trey ventured. "The troops would be
least likely to recognize me. I could tell Polycarp..."

"They'd never let you through," John said. "Don't think
Zyeme doesn't know you're here, Trey; and don't think
she'd let you off because you're Bond's sister or that Bond

Dragonsbane                  279

would risk Zyeme so much as pouting at him to get you
off. Zyerne can't afford even one of us returning to the
gnomes with word the dragon's left the Deep."

That, Morkeleb said thinly, is precisely our problem.
The dragon has NOT left the Deep. Nor will he, until this
Zyerne is destroyed. And I will not remain here docile,
to watch the gnomes carrying on their petty trafficking

with my gold.

"Your gold?" John raised an eyebrow. With a swift

gesture of her mind Jenny stilled Morkeleb again.

Nor would they allow it, she said, for the dragon alone.
It would only be a matter of time until their distrust of
you mastered them, and they tried to slay you. No—you

must be freed.

Freed! The voice within her mind was acrid as the

stench of vinegar. Freed to be turned like a beggar onto
the roads? The dragon swung his head away, the long
scales of his mane clashing softly, like the searingly thin
notes of a wind chime. You have done this to me, wizard
woman! Before your mind touched mine I was not bound

to this place...

"You were bound," Aversin said quietly. "It's just that,

before Jenny's mind touched yours, you weren't aware
of it. Had you tried to leave before?"

/ remained because it was my will to remain.
"And it's the old King's will to remain with Zyeme,
though she's killing him. No, Morkeleb—she got you
through your greed, as she got poor Gar's dad through
his grief and Bond through his love. If we hadn't come,
you'd have stayed here, bound with spells to brood over
your hoard till you died. It's just that now you know it."

That is not true!

True or not. Jenny said, it is my bidding, Morkeleb,
that as soon as the sky grows light, you shall carry me
over the mountain to the Citadel of Halnath, so that I

280                  Barbara Humbly

can send Polycarp the Master to bring these others to
safety there through the Deep.

The dragon reared himself up, bristling all over with
rage. His voice lashed her mind like a silver whip. / am
not your pigeon nor your servant!

Jenny was on her feet now, too, looking up into the
blazing white deeps of his eyes. No, she said, holding to
the crystal chain of his inner name. You are my slave, by
that which you gave me when I saved your life. And by
that which you gave me, I tell you this is what you shall
do.

Their eyes held. The others, not hearing what passed
between their two minds, saw and felt only the dragon's
scorching wrath. Gareth caught up Trey and drew her
back toward the shelter of the gateway; Aversin made a
move to rise and sank back with a gasp. He angrily shook
offGareth's attempt to draw him to safety, his eyes never
leaving the small, thin form of the woman who stood
before the smoking rage of the beast.

All this Jenny was aware of, but peripherally, like the
weave of a tapestry upon which other colors are painted.
Her whole mind focused in crystal exactness against the
mind that surged like a dark wave against hers; The power
bom in her from the touch of the dragon's mind strength-
ened and burned, forcing him back. Her understanding
of his name was a many-pointed weapon in her hands. In
time Morkeleb sank to his haunches again, and back to
his sphinx position.

In her mind his voice said softly, You know you do not
need me, Jenny Waynest, to fly over the mountains. You
know the form of the dragons and their magic. One of
them you have put on already.

The other I might put on, she replied, for you would
help me in that, to be free of my will. But you would not
help me put it off again.

Dragonsbane                  281

The deeps of his eyes were like falling into the heart
of a star. If you wished it, I would.

The need in her for power, to separate herself from all
that had separated her from its pursuit, shuddered through
her like the racking heat of fever. "To be a mage you must
be a mage," Caerdinn had said.

He had also said, "Dragons do not deceive with lies,
but with truth." Jenny turned her eyes from those cosmic
depths. You say it only because in becoming a dragon, I
will cease to want to hold power over you, Morkeleb the

Black.

He replied. Not 'only,' Jenny Waynest.
Like a wraith he faded into the darkness.

Though still exhausted from the battle at the Gates,
Jenny did not sleep that night. She sat upon the steps, as
she had sat awake most of the night before, watching and
listening—for the King's men, she told herself, though
she knew they would not come. She was aware of the
night with a physical intensity, the moonlight like a rune
of molten silver on every chink and crack of the scarred
steps upon which she sat, turning to slips of white each
knotted weed-stem in the scuffed dust of the square below.
Earlier, while she had been tending to John by the fire in
the Market Hall, the bodies of the slain rioters had van-
ished from the steps, though whether this was due to
fastidiousness on Morkeleb's part or hunger, she wasn't
sure.

Sitting in the cold stillness of the night, she meditated,
seeking an answer within herself. But her own soul was
unclear, torn between the great magic that had always lain
beyond her grasp and the small joys she had cherished in
its stead—the silence of the house on Frost Fell, the
memory of small hands that seemed to be printed on her
palms, and John.

John, she thought, and looked back through the wide

282                   Barbara Hambly

arch of the Gate to where he lay, wrapped in bearskins
beside the small glow of the fire.

In the darkness she made out his shape, the broad-
shouldered compactness that went so oddly with the
whippet litheness of his movements. She remembered the
fears that had driven her to the Deep to seek medicines—
that had driven her first to look into the dragon's silver
eyes. Now, as then, she could scarcely contemplate years
of her life that did not—or would not—include that fleet-
ing, triangular smile.

Adric had it already, along with the blithe and sunny
half of John's quirky personality. lan had his sensitivity,
his maddening, insatiable curiosity, and his intentness.
His sons, she thought. My sons.

Yet the memory of the power she had called to stop
the lynch mob on these very steps returned to her, sweet-
ness and terror and exultation. Its results had horrified
her, and the weariness of it still clung to her bones, but
the taste that lingered was one of triumph at having wielded
it. How could she, she wondered, have wasted all those
years before this beginning? The touch ofMorkeleb's mind
had half-opened a thousand doors within her. If she turned
away from him now, how many of the rooms behind those
doors would she be able to explore? The promise of the
magic was something only a magebom could have felt;

the need, like lust or hunger, something only the magebom
would have understood. There was a magic she had never
dreamed of that could be wrought from the light of certain
stars, knowledge unplumbed in the dark, eternal minds
of dragons and in the singing of the whales in the sea.
The stone house on the Fell that she loved came back to
her like the memory of a narrow prison; the clutch of
small hands on her skirts, of an infant's mouth at her
breast, seemed for a time nothing more than bonds holding
her back from walking through its doors to the moving
air outside.

Dragonsbane                  283

Was this some spell of Morkeleb's? she wondered,
wrapping the soft weight of a bearskin more tightly around
her shoulders and gazing at the royal blue darkness of the
sky above the western ridge. Was it something he had
sung up out of the depths of her soul, so that she would
leave the concerns of humans and free him of his bondage

to her?

Why did you say, "Not" 'only,'"Morkeleb the Black?

You know that as well as I, Jenny Waynest.

He had been invisible in the darkness. Now the moon-
light sprinkling his back was like a carpet of diamonds
and his silver eyes were like small, half-shut moons. How
long he had been there she did not know—the moon had
sunk, the stars moved. His coming had been like the float-
ing of a feather on the still night.

What you give to them you have taken from yourself.
When our minds were within one another, I saw the strug-
gle that has tortured you all your life. I do not understand
the souls of humans, but they have a brightness to them,
like soft gold. You are strong and beautiful. Jenny Way-
nest. I would like it if you would become one of us and
live among us in the rock islands of the northern seas.

She shook her head. / will not turn against those that
I love.

Turn against? The sinking moonlight striped his mane
with frost as he moved his head. No. That I know you
would never do, though, for what their love has done to
you, they would well deserve it if you did. And as to this
love you speak of, I do not know what it is—it is not a
thing of dragons. But when I am freed of the spells that
bind me here, when I fly to the north again, fly with me.
This is something also that I have never felt—this wanting
of you to be a dragon that you can be with me. And tell
me, what is it to you if this boy Gareth becomes the slave
of his father's woman or to one of his own choosing?
What is it to you who rules the Deep, or how long this

284                  Barbara Hambly

woman Zyerne can go on polluting her mind and her body
until she dies because she no longer recalls enough about
her own magic to continue living? What is it to you if the
Winterlands are ruled and defended by one set of men or
another, or if they have books to read about the deeds
of yet a third? It is nothing. Jenny Way nest. Your powers
are beyond that.

To leave them now would be to turn against them. They
need me.

They do not need you, the dragon replied. Had the
King's troops killed you upon these steps, it would have
been the same for them.

Jenny looked up at him, that dark shape of power—
infinitely more vast than the dragon John had slain in Wyr
and infinitely more beautiful. The singing of his soul re-
echoed in her heart, magnified by the beauty of the gold.
Clinging to the daylight that she knew against the calling
of the dark, she shook her head again and said. It would
not have been the same.

She gathered the furs about her, rose, and went back
into the Deep.

After the sharpness of the night air, the huge cavern
felt stuffy and stank of smoke. The dying fire threw weird
flickers of amber against the ivory labyrinth of inverted
turrets above and glinted faintly on the ends of the broken
lamp chains that hung down from the vaulted blackness.
It was always so, going from free night air to the frowsty
stillness of indoors, but her heart ached suddenly, as if
she had given up free air for a prison forever.

She folded the bearskin, laid it by the campfire, and
found where her halberd had been leaned against the few
packs they had brought with them from the camp. Some-
where in the darkness, she heard movement, the sound
of someone tripping over a plaid. A moment later Gareth's
voice said softly, "Jenny?"

"Over here." She straightened up, her pale face and

285

the metal buckles of her sheepskin jacket catching the low
firelight. Gareth looked tired and bedraggled in his shirt,
breeches, and a stained and scruffy plaid, as unlike as
possible to the self-conscious young dandy in primrose-
and-white Court mantlings of less than a week ago. But
then, she noted, there was less in him now than there had
been, even then, of the gawky and earnest young man
who had ridden to the Winterlands in quest of his hero.

"I must be going," she said softly. "It's beginning to
mm light. Gather what kindling you can, in case the King's
men return and you have to barricade yourselves behind
the inner doors in the Grand Passage. There are foul things
in the darkness. They may come at you when the light is

gone."

Gareth shuddered wholeheartedly and nodded.

"I'll tell Polycarp how things stand. He should come
back here to get you, if they didn't blast shut the ways
into the Deep. If I don't make it to Halnath..."

The boy looked at her, the heroically simple conclu-
sions of a dozen ballads reverberant in his shocked fea-
tures.

She smiled, the pull of the dragon in her fading. She
reached up the long distance to lay a hand on his bristly
cheek. "Look after John for me."

Then she knelt and kissed John's lips and his shut
eyelids. Rising, she collected a plaid and her halberd and
walked toward the clear slate-gray air that lay like water
outside the darker arch of the Gate.

As she passed through it, she heard a faint north-coun-
try voice behind her protest, "Look after John, indeed!"

CHAPTER XV

LIGHT WATERED THE darkness, changing the air from
velvet to silk. Cold cut into Jenny's hands and face, imbu-
ing her with a sense of strange and soaring joy. The high
cirques and hanging valleys of the Wall's toothy summits
were stained blue and lavender against the charcoal gray
of the sky; below her, mist clung like raveled wool to the
bones of the shadowy town. For a time she was alone
and complete, torn by neither power nor love, only
breathing the sharp air of dawn.

Like a shift in perception, she became aware of the
dragon, lying along the bottom step. Seeing her, he rose
and stretched like a cat, from nose to tail knob to the tips
of the quivering wings, every spine and hom blinking in

the gray-white gloom.

Wrap yourself well, wizard woman. The upper airs are

cold.

He sat back upon his haunches and, reaching delicately

down, closed around her one gripping talon, like a hand
twelve inches across the back and consisting of nothing
but bone wrapped in muscle and studded with spike and
hom. The claws lapped easily around her waist. She felt

286

Dragonsbane                  287

no fear of him; though she knew he was treacherous, she
had been within his mind and knew he would not kill her.
Still, a shivery qualm passed through her as he lifted her
up against his breast, where she would be out of the air-
stream.

The vast shadow of his wings spread against the mauve

gloom of the cliff behind them, and she cast one quick
glance down at the ground, fifteen feet below. Then she
looked up at the mountains surrounding the Vale and at
the white, watching eye of the moon on the flinty crest
of the ridge, a few days from full and bright in the western

air as the lamps of the dragon's eyes.

Then he flung himself upward, and all the world dropped

away.

Cold sheered past her face, its bony fingers clawing

through her hair. Through the plaids wrapped around her,
she felt the throbbing heat of the dragon's scales. From
the sky she looked to the earth again, the Vale like a well
of blue shadow, the mountain slopes starting to take on
the colors of dawn as the sun brushed them, rust and
purple and all shades of brown from the whitest dun to
the deep hue of coffee, all edged and trimmed with the
dark lace of trees. The rain tanks north of Deeping caught
the new day like chips of mirror; as the dragon passed
over the flanks of the mountain, circling higher, she saw
the bright leap of springs among the pine trees, and the

white spines of thrusting rock.

The dragon tilted, turning upon the air, the vast wings

searing faintly at the wind. Occasional eddies of it whis-
tled around the spikes that defended the dragon's back-
bone—some of them no longer than a finger, others almost
a cubit, dagger-sharp. In flight the dragon seemed to be
a thing made of silk and wire, lighter than his size would
lead one to think, as if the flesh and muscle, like the mind
and the shape of his bones, were different in composition
from all things else upon the Earth.

288                  Barbara Hambly

This is the realm of the dragons, Morkeleb's voice said
within her mind. The roads of the air. It is yours, for the
stretching out of your hand.

In the slant of the light they laid no shadow upon the
ground, but it seemed to Jenny that she could almost see
the track of their passage written like a ship's wake upon
the wind. Her mind half-within the dragon's, she could
sense the variations of the air, updraft and thermal, as if
the wind itself were of different colors. With the dragon's
awareness, she saw other things in the air as well—the
paths of energy across the face of the world, the tracks
that traveled from star to star, like the lines of force that
were repeated in the body, smaller and smaller, in the
spreads of dealt cards or thrown runes or the lie of leaves
in water. She was aware of life everywhere, of the winter-
white foxes and hares in the patchy snowlines beneath
the thin scrum of cloud below, and of the King's troops;

camped far down upon the road, who pointed and cried
out as the dragon's dark shape passed overhead.

They crossed the flank of the mountain to its daylight
side. Before and below her, she saw the cliff and hill and
Citadel ofHalnath, a spiky conglomerate of thrusting gray
ramparts clinging like a mud-built swallow's nest to the
massive shoulder of a granite cliff. From its feet, the land
lay crisscrossed with wooded ravines to the silver curve
of a river; mist blended with the blue of woodsmoke to
veil the straggling lines of tents and guard posts, horse
lines and trenches raw with yellow mud, that made up
the siege camps. An open ring of battered ground lay
between the walls and the camp, ravaged by battle and
bristling with the burned-out shells of the small truck farms
that nestled around the walls of any town. Beyond, to the
north, the green stretches of the Marches vanished away
under a gauze of mists, the horse- and cattle-lands that
were the Master's fief and strength. From the river marshes
where pewter waters spread themselves, a skein of dan-

Dragonsbane                  289

defoot herons rose through the milky vapors, tiny and

clear as a pen sketch.

There. Jenny pointed with her mind toward the battle-
ments of the high Citadel. The central court there. It's
narrow, but long enough for us to land.

Wind and her long hair lashed her eyes as the dragon

wheeled.

They have armored their walls, the dragon said. Look.
Men were running about the ramparts, pointing and
waving at the enormous wings flashing in the air. Jenny
glimpsed catapults mounted on the highest turrets, coun-
terweighted slings bearing buckets that burst suddenly
into red flame and massive crossbows whose bolts could
point nowhere but at the sky.

We'll have to go in. Jenny said. I'll protect you.
By catching the bolts in your teeth, wizard womanf
Morkeleb asked sarcastically, circling away as some over-
eager slinger slipped his ropes and a bucketful of naphtha
described a curving trajectory, flames streaming like faded
orange pennants against the brightness of the new day.
What protection can you, a human, offer me?

Jenny smiled to herself, watching the naphtha as it broke
into blazing lumps in falling. None of them landed in the
town on the slopes below—they knew their mathematics,
these defenders ofHalnath, and how to apply them to bal-
listics. For herself, she supposed she should have been ter-
rified, to be carried this high above the reeling earth—if she
fell, she would fall for a long time before she died. But
whether it was her trust in Morkeleb, or the dragon's mind
that enveloped hers in the thoughts of those who lived in
the airstream, she felt no fear of it. Indeed, she almost be-
lieved that, if she were to drop, she had only to spread out
her own wings, as she did in dreams of flight.

Small as toys on the walls of the Citadel, the machines
of defense were being cranked around to bear upon them.
They looked, at this distance, like nothing so much as

290

Barbara Hambly

John's little models. And to think I grew impatient when
he insisted upon showing me how every one of them fired.
She smiled, half to Morkeleb and half to herself. Swing
north, Morkeleb, and come at them from along that ridge.
The problem with machines has always been that it requires
only the touch of a wizard's mind to fox their balance.

There were two engines guarding the approach she had
set, a bolt-firing catapult and a spring-driven sling. She
had thrown her magic before, conjuring images within her
mind, to foul the bowstrings of bandits in the north and
to cause their feet to find roots as they ran, or their swords
to stick in their sheaths. Having seen the mechanisms
of these weapons in John's models, she found this no
harder. Ropes twisted in the catapult, jamming the knots
when the triggering cord was jerked. With a dragon's
awareness, she saw a man running in panic along the
battlements; he knocked over a bucket into the mecha-
nism of the sling so that it could not be turned to aim.
The dragon swung lazily from the weapon's possible path,
guided by the touch of Jenny's mind within his; and she
felt, like a chuckle of dark laughter, his appreciation for
the ease with which she thwarted the mechanical devices.

You are small, wizard woman, he said, amused, but a
mighty defender of dragons, nevertheless.

Throwing her streaming hair back from her eyes. Jenny
could see men on the battlements below them clearly now.
They were clothed in makeshift uniforms, the black, bil-
lowing gowns of scholars covered with battered bits of
armor, some of it stamped with the royal arms and
obviously taken from prisoners or the slain. They fled in
all directions as the dragon drew near, save for one man
tall, red-haired, and thin as a scarecrow in his ragged black-
gown, who was swinging something to bear upon them
that looked for a moment like a telescope—a metal tube
braced upon stakes. The walls swooped closer. At the last
moment Jenny saw harpoons stacked beside him and,

Dragonsbane                  291
instead of glass in the tube's mouth, the glint of a metal

point.

The lone defender had a burning spill in one hand,

lighted from one of the naphtha buckets. He was watching
them come in, taking aim—Blasting powder, thought
Jenny; the gnomes will have brought plenty up from the
mines. She remembered John's abortive experiments with

rockets.

The scene rushed to meet them, until every chipped

stone of the wall and every patch on the scholar's ragged
gown seemed within reach of Jenny's hand. As he brought
the spill down to the touch-hole, Jenny used her mind to
extinguish the flame, as she would have doused a candle.
Then she spread out her arms and cried, "STOP!" at

the top of her voice.

He froze in mid-motion, the harpoon he had snatched

from the pile beside him cocked back already over his
shoulder, though Jenny could tell by the way he held it
that he had never thrown one before and could not have
hit them. Even at that distance, she saw wonder, curiosity,
and delight on his thin face. Like John, she thought, he
was a true scholar, fascinated with any wonder, though

it carried his death upon its wings.

Morkeleb braked in the air, the shift of his muscles
rippling against Jenny's back. All men had fled the long,
narrow court of the Citadel and the walls around it, save
that single defender. The dragon hung for a moment like
a hovering hawk, then settled, delicate as a dandelion
seed, to perch on the wall above the shadowy well of the
court. The great hind-talons gripped the stone as the long
neck and tail counterbalanced, and he stooped like a vast
bird to set Jenny on her feet upon the rampart.

She staggered, her knees weak from shock, her whole
body trembling with exhilaration and cold. The tall, red-
haired young man, harpoon still in one hand, moved for-
ward along the walkway, black robe billowing beneath an

292                  Barbara Hambly

outsize hauberk of chain mail. Though he was clearly
cautious. Jenny thought from the way he looked at Mor-
keleb that he could have stood and studied the dragon for
hours; but there was a court-bred politeness in the way
he offered Jenny his hand.

It took her a moment to remember to speak in words.

"Polycarp of Halnath?"

He looked surprised and disconcerted at hearing his
name. "I am he." Like Gareth, it took more than dragons
or bandits to shake his eariy training; he executed a very
creditable Dying Swan in spite of the harpoon.

Jenny smiled and held out her hands to him. "I am
Jenny Waynest, Gareth's friend."

"Yes, there is a power sink in the heart of the Deep."
Polycarp, Master of the Citadel ofHalnath and Doctor of
Natural Philosophy, folded long, narrow hands behind his
back and turned from the pointed arches of the window
to look at his rescued, oddly assorted guests. "It is what
Zyeme wants; what she has always wanted, since first
she knew what it was."

Gareth looked up from the ruins of the simple meal
which strewed the plain waxed boards of the workroom
table. "Why didn't you tell me?"

The bright blue eyes flickered to him. "What could I
have said?" he asked. "Up until a year ago I wasn't even
sure. And when I was..." His glance moved to the gnome
who sat at the table's head, tiny and stooped and very
old, his eyes like pale green glass beneath the long mane
of milk-white hair. "Sevacandrozardus—Balgub, in the
tongue of men; brother of the Lord of the Deep who was
slain by the dragon—forbade me to speak of it. I could
not break his confidence."

Beyond the tall windows, the turrets of the lower Cit-
adel, the University, and the town beneath could be
glimpsed, the sunlight on them yellow as summer butter,

Dragonsbane                  293

though the buildings below were already cloaked in the
shadows of the mountain as the sun sank behind its shoul-
der. Sitting on the end of the couch where John lay. Jenny
listened in quiet to the debating voices. Her body ached
for sleep and her mind for stillness, but she knew that
both would be denied her. Neither the words of the
impromptu council nor the recollection of the trip back
through the Deep with Polycarp and the gnomes to fetch
the others had eradicated from her thoughts the soaring
memory of the dragon's flight.

She knew she ought not to let it hold her so. She ought
to be more conscious of her own gladness that they were,
at least for the moment, relatively safe and more preoc-
cupied with their exchange of information with the Master
and with plans for how to deal with the Stone and its
mistress. Yet the flight and the memory of the dragon's
mind had shaken her to the bones. She could not put that
wild intoxication from her heart.

The old gnome was saying, "It has always been for-
bidden to speak of the Stone to outsiders. After it became
clear that the girl Zyeme had heard of it somehow and
had spied upon those who used it and learned its key, my
brother, the Lord of the Deep, redoubled the anathema.
It has from the darkness of time been the heart of the
Deep, the source of power for our Healers and mages,
and has made our magic so great that none dared to assault
the Deep of Ylferdun. But always we knew its danger as
well—that the greedy could use such a thing for their own
ends. And so it was."

Jenny roused herself from her thoughts to ask, "How
did you know she had used it?" Like the others, she had
bathed and was now dressed like them all in the frayed
black gown of a scholar of the University, too large for
her and belted tight about her waist. Her hair, still damp
from washing, hung about her shoulders.

The gnome's light eyes shifted. Grudgingly, he said,

294                  Barbara Hambty

"To take power from the Stone, there must be a return.
It gives to those who draw upon it, but later it asks back
from them. Those who were used to wielding its power—
myself, Taseldwyn whom you know as Miss Mab, and
others—could feel the imbalance. Then it corrected itself,
or seemed to. I was content." He shook his head, the
opals that pinned his white hairflashing in the diffuse light
of the long room. "Mab was not."

"What return does it ask?"

For a moment his glance touched her, reading in her,
as Mab had done, the degree other power. Then he said,
"Power for power. All power must be paid for, whether
it is taken from your own spirit, or from the holding-sink
of others. We, the Healers, of whom I was chief, used to
dance for it, to concentrate our magic and feed it into the
Stone, that others might take of its strength and not have
their very life-essences drawn from them by it—the woman
Zyeme did not know how to make the return of magic to
it, did not even leam that she should. She was never
taught its use, but had only sneaked and spied until she
learned what she thought was its secret. When she did
not give back to it, the Stone began to eat at her essence."

"And to feed it," said Jenny softly, suddenly under-
standing what she had seen in the lamplight of Zyeme's
room, "she perverted the healing spells that can draw
upon the essences of others for strength. She drank, like
a vampire, to replace what was being drunk from her."

In the pale light of the window, Polycarp said, "Yes,"
and Gareth buried his face in his hands. "Even as she can
draw upon the Stone's magic at a distance, it draws upon
her. I am glad," he added, the tone of his light voice
changing, "to see you're still all right, Gar."

Gareth raised his head despairingly. "Did she try to
use you?"

The Master nodded, his thin, foxy face grim. "And
when I kept my distance and made you keep yours, she

Dragonsbane                  295

turned to Bond, who was the nearest one she could prey
upon. Your father..." He fished for the kindest words to
use. "Your father was of little more use to her by that

time."

The prince's .fist struck the table with a violence that
startled them all—and most of all Gareth himself. But he
said nothing, and indeed, there was little he could say, or
that any could say to him. After a moment. Trey Clerlock
rose from the couch in the comer, where she had been
lying like a child playing dress-up in her flapping black
robe, and came over to rest her hands upon his shoulders.

"Is there any way of destroying her?" the girl asked,
looking across the table to the tiny gnome and the tall
Master who had come to stand at his side.

Gareth turned to stare up at her in shock, having, man-
like, never suspected the ruthless practicality of women.

"Not with the power she holds through the King and
through the Stone," Polycarp said. "Believe me, I thought
about it, though I knew I truly would face a charge of
murder for it." A brief grin flickered across his face. "But
as I ended up facing one anyway..."

"What about destroying the Stone, then?" John asked,
turning his head from where he lay flat on his back on a
tall-legged sleeping couch. Even the little he had been
able to eat seemed to have done him good. In his black
robe, he looked like the corpse at a wake, washed and
tended and cheerful with his specs perched on the end of
his long nose. "I'm sure you could find a good Stonebane
someplace..."

"Never!" Balgub's wrinkled walnut face grew livid. "It
is the source of the healing arts of the gnomes! The source
of the strength of the Deep! It is ours..."

"It will do you precious little good if Zyeme gets her
hands on it," John pointed out. "I doubt she could break
through all the doors and gates you locked behind us on
our way up here through the Deep, but if the King's troops

296                  Barbara Hambly

manage to breach the Citadel wall, that won't make much
difference."

"If Jenny could be given the key to the use of the
Stone..." suggested Gareth.

"No!" Balgub and Jenny spoke at once. All those w
the Master's long, scrubbed stone workroom, John
included, looked curiously at the witch of Wyr.

"No human shall touch it!" insisted the gnome with
shrill fury. "We saw the evil it did. It is for the gnomes,
and only for us."

"And I would not touch it if I could." Jenny drew her
knees up close to her chest and folded her arms around
them; Balgub, in spite of his protest, looked affronted that
the greatest treasure of the Deep should be refused. Jenny
said, "According to Mab, the Stone itself has been defiled
Its powers, and the spells of those that use it, are polluted
by what Zyeme has done."

"That is not true." Balgub's tight little face set in an
expression of obstinancy. "Mab insisted that the Stone's
powers were becoming unpredictable and its influence
evil on the minds of those who used it. By the heart of
the Deep, this is not so, and so I told her, again and again.
I do not see how..."

"After being fed chewed-up human essences instead
of controlled spells, it would be a wonder if it didn't become
unpredictable," John said, with his usual good-natured
affability.

The gnome's high voice was scornful. "What can a
warrior know of such things? A warrior hired to slay the
dragon, who has," he added, with heavy sarcasm, "sig-
nally failed in even that task."

"I suppose you'd rather he'd signally succeeded?" Gar-
eth demanded hotly. "You'd have had the King's troops
coming at you through the Deep by this time."

"Lad." John reached patiently out to touch the angry

Dragonsbane                  297

prince's shoulder. "Let's don't fratch. His opinion does
me no harm and shouting at him isn't going to change it."

"The King's troops would never have found their way
through the Deep, even with the gates unbolted," Balgub
growled. "And now the gates are locked; if necessary we
will seal them with blasting powder—it is there and ready,
within yards of the last gate."

"If Zyeme was leading them, they would have found
the way," Polycarp returned. The links of the too-large
mail shirt he wore over his gown rattled faintly as he
folded his arms. "She knows the way to the heart of the
Deep well enough from the Deeping side. As you all saw,
from there to the underground gates of the Citadel it's an
almost straight path. And as for the Stone not having been
affected by what she has put into it..." He glanced down
at the stooped back and round white head of the gnome
perched in the carved chair beside him. "You are the only
Healer who escaped the dragon to come here, Balgub,"
he said. "Now that the dragon is no longer in the Deep,
will you go in and use the Stone?"

The wide mouth tightened, and the green eyes did not
meet the blue.

"So," said the Master softly.

"I do not believe that Mab was right," Balgub insisted
stubbornly. "Nevertheless, until she, I, and the remaining
Healers in Bel can examine the thing, I will not have it
tampered with for good or ill. If it came to saving the
Citadel, or keeping Zyeme from the Deep, yes, I would
risk using it, rather than let her have it." Little and white
as two colorless cave shrimp, his hands with their smooth
moonstone rings closed upon each other on the inkstained
tabletop. "We have sworn that Zyeme shall never again
have the use of the Stone. Every gnome—and every
man..." He cast a glance that was half-commanding, half-
questioning up at the Master, and Polycarp inclined his

298                  Barbara Hambly

head slightly, "—in this place will die before she lays a
hand upon what she seeks."

"And considering what her powers will be like if she
does," Polycarp added, with the detached speculation of
a scholar, "that would probably be just as well."

"Jen?"

Jenny paused in the doorway of the makeshift guest
room to which she and John had been assigned. After the
windy ramparts, the place smelled close and stuffy, as the
Market Hall had last night. The mingled scents of dusty
paper and leather bindings of the books stored there com-
pounded with the moldery odors of straw ticks that had
gone too long without having the straw changed; after the
grass-and-water scents of the east wind, they made the
closeness worse. The lumpish shapes of piles of books
heaped along two walls and the ghostly scaffolding of
scroll racks lining the third made her think of John's over-
crowded study in the north; several of the volumes that
had been put here to make room for refugees trapped by
the siege had been taken from their places and already
bore signs of John's reading. John himself stood between
the tall lights of two of the pointed windows, visible only
as a white fold of shirt sleeve and a flash of round glass
in the gloom.

She said, "You shouldn't be out of bed."
"I can't be on the broad of my back forever." Through
his fatigue, he sounded cheerful. "I have the feeling we're
all going to be put to it again in the near future, and I'd
rather do it on my feet this time."

He was silent for a moment, watching her silhouette
in the slightly lighter doorway.

He went on, "And for a woman who hasn't slept more
than an hour or so for three nights now, you've no room
to speak. What is it, Jen?"

Like a dragon, she thought, he has a way of not being

Dragonsbane                  299

lied to. So she did not say, "What is what?" but ran her
hands tiredly through her hair and crossed to where he

stood.

"You've avoided speaking to me of it—not that we've
had time to do so, mind. I don't feel you're angry with
me, but I do feel your silence. It's to do with your power,

isn't it?"

His arm was around her shoulder, her head resting
against the rock-hardness of his pectoral, half-uncovered
by the thin muslin shirt. She should have known, she told
herself, that John would guess.

So she nodded, unable to voice the turmoil that had
been all day in her mind, since the dragon's flight and all
the night before. Since sunset she had been walking the
ramparts, as if it were possible to outwalk the choice that
had stalked her now for ten years.

Morkeleb had offered her the realms of the dragons,
the woven roads of the air. All the powers of earth and
sky, she thought, and all the years of time. The key to
magic is magic; the offer was the answer to all the thwarted
longings of her life.

"Jen," John said softly, "I've never wanted you to be
torn. I know you've never been complete and I didn't
want to do that to you. I tried not to."

"It wasn't you." She had told herself, a hundred years
ago it seemed, that it was her choice, and so it had been—-
the choice of doing nothing and letting things go on as
they were, or of doing something. And, as always, her
mind shrank from the choice.

"Your magic has changed," he said. "I've felt it and
I've seen what it's doing to you."

"It is calling me," she replied. "If I embrace it, I don't
think I would want to let go, even if I could. It is every-
thing that I have wanted and worth to me, I think, every-
thing that I have."

She had said something similar to him long ago, when

300                  Barbara Humbly

they had both been very young. In his jealous posses-
siveness, he had screamed at her, "But you are everything
that I have or want to have!" Now his arms only tightened
around her, as much, she sensed, against her grief as his
own, though she knew the words he had spoken then were
no less true tonight.

"It's your choice, love," he said- "As it's always been
your choice. Everything you've given me, you've given
freely. I won't hold you back." Her cheek was pressed
to his chest, so that she only felt the quick glint of his
smile as he added, "As if I ever could, anyway."

They went to the straw mattress and huddle of blan-
kets, the only accommodation the besieged Citadel had
been able to offer. Beyond the windows, moisture glinted
on the black slates of the crowded stone houses below;

a gutter's thread was like a string of diamonds in the
moonlight. In the siege camps, bells were ringing for the
midnight rites of Sarmendes, lord of the wiser thoughts
of day.

Under the warmth of the covers, John's body was
familiar against hers, as familiar as the old temptation to
let the chances of pure power go by for yet another day.
Jenny was aware, as she had always been, that it was less
easy to think about her choices when she lay in his arms.
But she was still there when sleep finally took her, and
she drifted into ambiguous and unresolved dreams.

CHAPTER XVI

WHEN JENNY WAKENED, John was gone.

Like a dragon, in her dreams she was aware of many
things; she had sensed him waking and lying for a long
while propped on one elbow beside her, watching her as
she slept; she had been aware, too, of him rising and
dressing, and of the slow painfulness of donning his shirt,
breeches, and boots and of how the bandages pulled pain-
fully over the half-healed mess of slashes and abrasions
on his back and sides. He had taken her halberd for sup-
port, kissed her gently, and gone.

Still weary, she lay in the tangle of blankets and straw-
ticks, wondering where he had gone, and why she felt
afraid.

Dread seemed to hang in the air with the stormclouds
that reared dark anvil heads above the green distances
north of Nast Wall. There was a queer lividness to the
light that streamed through the narrow windows, a breath-
less sense of coming evil, a sense that had pervaded her
dreams...

Her dreams, she thought confusedly. What had she
dreamed?

301

302                  Barbara Hambly

She seemed to remember Gareth and the Master Poly-
carp walking on the high battlements of the Citadel, both
in the billowing black robes of students, talking with the
old ease of their interrupted friendship. "You must admit
it was a singularly convincing calumny," Polycarp was
saying.

Gareth replied bitterly, "I didn't have to believe it as
readily as I did."

Polycarp grinned and drew from some pocket in his
too-ample garments a brass spyglass, unfolding its jointed
sections to scan the fevered sky. "You're going to be
Pontifex Maximus one day. Cousin—you need practice
in believing ridiculous things," And looking out toward
the road that led south he had stared, as if he could not
believe what he saw.

Jenny frowned, remembering the cloudy tangles of the
dream.

The King, she thought—it had been the King, riding
up the road toward the siege camps that surrounded the
Citadel. But there had been something wrong with that
tall, stiff form and its masklike face, riding through the
sulfurous storm light. An effect of the dream? she won-
dered. Or had the eyes really been yellow—Zyeme's eyes?

Troubled, she sat up and pulled on her shift. There was
a wash bowl in a comer of the room near the window,
the surface of the water reflecting the sky like a piece of
smoked steel. Her hand brushed across it; at her bidding,
she saw Morkeleb, lying in the small upper courtyard of
the Citadel, a small square of stone which contained noth-
ing save a few withered apple trees, a wooden lean-to that
had once held gardening equipment and now, like every
other shelter in the Citadel, housed displaced books. The
dragon lay stretched out like a cat in the pallid sunlight,
the jeweled bobs of his antennae flicking here and there
as if scenting the welter of the air, and beside him, on the
court's single granite bench, sat John.

303

The dragon was saying. Why this curiosity. Dragons-
bane? That you may know us better, the next time you
choose to kill one of us?

"No," John said. "Only that I may know dragons bet-
ter. I'm more circumscribed than you, Morkeleb—by a
body that wears out and dies before the mind has seen
half what it wants to, by a mind that spends half its time
doing what it would really rather not, for the sake of the
people who're in my care. I'm as greedy about knowledge
as Jenny is—as you are for gold, maybe more so—for I
know I have to snatch it where I can."

The dragon sniffed in disdain, the velvet-rimmed nos-
tril flaring to show a surface ripple of deeper currents of
thought; then he turned his head away. Jenny knew she
ought to feel surprise at being able to call Morkeleb's
image in the water bowl, but did not; though she could
not have phrased it in words, but only in the half-pictured
understandings of dragon-speech, she knew why it had
formerly been impossible, but was possible to her now.
Almost, she thought, she could have summoned his image
and surroundings without the water.

For a time they were silent, man and dragon, and the
shadows of the black-bellied thunderheads moved across
them, gathering above the Citadel's heights. Morkeleb did
not look the same in the water as he did face to face, but
it was a difference, again, that could not be expressed by
any but a dragon. A stray wind shook the boughs of the
cronelike trees, and a few spits of rain speckled the pave-
ment of the long court below them. At its far end. Jenny
could see the small and inconspicuous—and easily defen-
sible—door that led into the antechambers of the Deep.
It was not wide, for the trade between the Citadel and
the Deep had never been in anything bulkier than books
and gold, and for the most part their traffic had been in
knowledge alone.

Why? Morkeleb asked at length. If, as you say, yours

304 Barbara Hambly

is a life limited by the constraints of the body and the
narrow perimeters of time, if you are greedy for knowl-
edge as we are for gold, why do you give what you have,
half of all that you own, to others?

The question had risen like a whale from unguessed
depths, and John was silent for a moment before answer-
ing. "Because it's part of being human, Morkeleb. Having
so little, we share among ourselves to make any of it worth
having. We do what we do because the consequences of
not caring enough to do it would be worse."

His answer must have touched some chord in the drag
on's soul, for Jenny felt, even through the distant vision,
the radiant surge ofMorkeleb's annoyance. But the drag-
on's thoughts sounded down to their depths again, and
he became still, almost invisible against the colors of the
stone. Only his antennae continued to move, restless, as
if troubled by the turmoil in the air.

A thunderstorm? Jenny thought, suddenly troubled. In
winter?

"Jenny?" She looked up quickly and saw the Master
Polycarp standing in the tall slit of the doorway. She did
not know why at first, but she shuddered when she saw
hanging at his belt the brass spyglass he had used in her
dream. "I didn't want to wake you—I know you've been
without sleep..."

"What is it?" she asked, hearing the trouble in his
voice.

"It's the King."

Her stomach jolted, as if she had missed one step of
a stairway in darkness, the dread other dream coalescing
in her, suddenly hideously real.

"He said he'd escaped from Zyeme—he wanted sanc-
tuary here, and wanted above all to talk to Gar. They
went off together..."

"No!" Jenny cried, horrified, and the young philoso-
pher looked at her in surprise. She snatched up and flung

Dragonsbane                  305

on the black robe she had been wearing earlier, dragging
its belt tight. "It's a trick!"

"What...?"

She pushed her way past him, shoving up the robe's
too-long sleeves over her forearms; cold air and the smell
of thunder smote her as she came into the open and began
to run down the long, narrow stairs. She could hear Mor-
keleb calling to her, faint and confused with distance; he
was waiting for her in the upper court, his half-risen scales
glittering uneasily in the sickly storm light.

Zyerne, she said.

Yes. I saw her just novv, walking with your little prince
to the door that leads down into the Deep. She was in
the guise of the old King—they had already passed through
the door when I spoke of it to Aversin. Is it possible that
the prince did not know it, as Aversin said to me? I know
that humans can fool one another with the illusions of
their magic, but are even his own son and his nephew
whom he raised so stupid that they could not have told
the difference between what they saw and what they knew?

As always, his words came as pictures in her mind—
the old King leaning, whispering, on Gareth's shoulder
for support as they walked the length of the narrow court
toward the door to the Deep, the look of pity, involuntary
repulsion, and wretched guilt on the boy's face—feeling
repelled, and not knowing why.

Jenny's heart began to pound. They know the King has
been ill, she said. No doubt she counted upon their for-
giveness of any lapses. She will go to the Stone, to draw
power from it, and use Gareth's life to replace it. Where's
John now? He has to...

He has gone after them.

WHAT? Like a dragon, the word emerged only as a
blazing surge of incredulous wrath. He'll kill himself!

He will likely be forestalled, Morkeleb replied cyni-
cally. But Jenny did not stay to listen. She was already

306                  Barbara Hambly

running down the steep twist of steps to the lower court.
The cobbles of the pavement there were uneven and badly
worn, with tiny spangles of vagrant rain glittering among
them like silver beads on some complex trapunto; the
harshness of the stone tore at her feet as she ran toward
that small, unprepossessing door.

She flung back to the dragon the words. Wait for her
here. If she reaches the Stone, she will have all power at
her command—I will never be able to defeat her, as I did
before. You must take her when she emerges...

It is the Stone that binds me, the dragon's bitter voice
replied in her mind. If she reaches it, what makes you
think I shall be able to do anything but her will?

Without answering Jenny flung open the door and
plunged through into the shadowy antechambers of the
earth.

She had seen them the previous morning, when she
had passed through with the gnomes who had gone to
fetch John, Gareth, and Trey from the other side of the
Deep. There were several rooms used for trade and busi-
ness, and then a guardroom, whose walls were carved to
three-quarters of their height from the living bone of the
mountain. The windows, far up under the vaulted ceilings,
let in a shadowy blue light by which she could just see
the wide doors of the Deep itself, faced and backed with
bronze and fitted with massive bars and bolts of iron.

These gates were still locked, but the man-sized pos-
tern door stood ajar. Beyond it lay darkness and the cold
scent of rock, water, and old decay. Gathering up her
robes. Jenny stepped over the thick sill and hurried on,
her senses probing ahead of her, dragonlike, her eyes
seeking the silvery runes she had written on the walls
yesterday to mark her path.

The first passage was wide and had once been pleasant,
with basins and fountains lining its walls. Now some were
broken, others clogged in the months of utter neglect;

Dragonsbane                  307

moss clotted them and water ran shining down the walls
and along the stone underfoot, wetting the hem of Jenny's
robe and slapping coldly at her ankles. As she walked,
her mind tested the darkness before her; retracing yes-
terday's route, she paused again and again to listen. The
way through the Deep ran near the Places of Healing, but
not through them; somewhere, she would have to turn
aside and seek the unmarked ways.

So she felt at the air, seeking the living tingle of magic
that marked the heart of the Deep. It should lie lower
than her own route, she thought, and to her left. Her mind
returned uncomfortably to Miss Mab's words about a false
step leaving her to die of starvation in the labyrinthine
darkness. If she became lost, she told herself, Morkeleb
could still hear her, and guide her forth...

But not, she realized, ifZyeme reached the Stone. The
power and longing of the Stone were lodged in the drag-
on's mind. If she got lost, and Zyeme reached the Stone
and gained control of Morkeleb, there would be no day-
light for her again.

She hurried her steps, passing the doors that had been
raised for the defense of the Citadel from the Deep, all
unlocked now by Gareth and the one he supposed to be
the King. By the last of them, she glimpsed the sacks of
blasting powder that Balgub had spoken of, that final
defense in which he had placed such faith. Beyond was
a branching of the ways, and she stopped again under
an arch carved to look like a monstrous mouth, with sta-
lactites of ivory grimacing in a wrinkled gum of salmon-
pink stone. Her instincts whispered to her that this was
the place—two tunnels diverged from the main one, both
going downwards, both to the left. A little way down the
nearer one, beside the trickle of water from a broken
gutter, a wet footprint marked the downward-sloping stone.

John's, she guessed, for the print was dragged and
slurred. Further along that way, she saw the mark of a

308                  Barbara Hambly

drier boot, narrower and differently shaped. She saw the
tracks again, dried to barely a sparkle of dampness on
the first steps of a narrow stair which wound like a path
up a hillslope of gigantic stone mushrooms in an echoing
cavern, past the dark alabaster mansions of the gnomes,
to a narrow doorway in a cavern wall. She scribbled a
rune beside the door and followed, through a rock seam
whose walls she could touch with her outstretched hands,
downward, into the bowels of the earth.

In the crushing weight of the darkness, she saw the
faint flicker of yellow light.

She dared not call out, but fled soundlessly toward it.
The air was warmer here, unnatural in those clammy
abysses; she felt the subtle vibrations of the living magic
that surrounded the Stone. But there was an unwhole-
someness in the air now, like the first smell of rot in
decaying meat or like the livid greenness that her dragon
eyes had seen in the poisoned water. She understood that
Miss Mab had been right and Balgub wrong. The Stone
had been defiled. The spells that had been wrought with
its strength were slowly deteriorating, perverted by the
poisons drawn from Zyeme's mind.

At the end of a triangular room the size of a dozen
barns, she found a torch, guttering itself out near the foot
of a flight of shallow steps. The iron door at the top stood
unbolted and ajar, and across its threshold John lay
unconscious, scavenger-slugs already sniffing inquiringly
at his face and hands.

Beyond, in the darkness. Jenny heard Gareth's voice
cry, "Stop!" and the sweet, evil whisper of Zyeme's laugh-
ter.

"Gareth," the soft voice breathed. "Did you ever think
it was possible that you could stop me?"

Shaken now with a cold that seemed to crystallize at
the marrow of her bones. Jenny ran forward into the heart
of the Deep.

Dragonsbane                 309

Through the forest of alabaster pillars she saw them,
the nervous shadows of Gareth's torch jerking over the
white stone lace that surrounded the open floor. His face
looked dead white against the black, baggy student gown
he wore; his eyes held the nightmare terror of every dream,
every encounter with his father's mistress, and the knowl-
edge of his own terrifying weakness. In his right hand he
held the halberd John had been using for a crutch. John
must have warned him that it was Zyeme, Jenny thought,
before he collapsed. At least Gareth has a weapon. But
whether he would be capable of using it was another mat-
ter.

The Stone in the center of the onyx dancing floor seemed
to glow in the vibrating dark with a sickly corpse light of
its own. The woman before it was radiant, beautiful as
the Death-lady who is said to walk on the sea in times of
storm. She looked younger than Jenny had ever seen her,
with the virgin fragility of a child that was both an armor
against Gareth's desperation and a weapon to pierce his
flesh if not his heart. But even at her most delicate, there
was something nauseating about her, like poisoned mar-
zipan—an overwhelming, polluted sensuality. Wind that
Jenny could not feel seemed to lift the soft darkness of
Zyeme's hair and the sleeves of the frail white shift that
was all that she wore. Stopping on the edge of the flow-
stone glades, Jenny realized that she was seeing Zyeme
as she had once been, when she first had come to this
place—a magebom girl-child who had run through these
lightless corridors seeking power, as she herself had sought
it in the rainy north; trying, as she herself had tried, to
overcome the handicap of its lack in whatever way she
could.

Zyeme laughed, her sweet mouth parting to show pearls
of teeth. "It is my destiny," she whispered, her small
hands caressing the blue-black shine of the Stone. "The
gnomes had no right to keep it all to themselves. It is

310                  Barbara Hambly

mine now. It was meant to be mine from the founding of
the world. As you were."

She held out her hands, and Gareth whispered, "No."
His voice was thin and desperate as the wanting of her
clutched at his flesh.

"What is this No? You were made for me, Gareth.
Made to be King. Made to be my love. Made to father
my son."

Like a phantom in a dream, she drifted toward him
over the oily blackness of the great floor. Gareth slashed
at her with the torch, but she only laughed again and did
not even draw back. She knew he hadn't the courage to
touch her with the flame. He edged toward her, the hal-
berd in his hand, but Jenny could see his face rolling with
streams of sweat. His whole body shook as he summoned
the last of his strength to cut at her when she came near
enough—fighting for the resolution to do that and not to
fling down the weapon and crush her in his arms.

Jenny strode forward from the alabaster glades in a
blaze of blue witchlight, and her voice cut the palpitant
air like a knife tearing cloth. She cried, "ZYERNE!" and
the enchantress spun, her eyes yellow as a cat-devil's in
the white blaze of the light, as they had been in the woods.
The spell over Gareth snapped, and at that instant he
swung the halberd at her with all the will he had left.

She flung the spell of deflection at him almost
contemptuously; the weapon rang and clattered on the
stone floor. Swinging back toward him, she raised her
hand, but Jenny stepped forward, her wrath swirling about
her like woodsmoke and phosphorous, and flung at Zyeme
a rope of white fire that streamed coldly from the palm
of her hand.

Zyeme hurled it aside, and it splattered, sizzling, on
the black pavement. Her yellow eyes burned with unholy
light. "You," she whispered. "I told you I'd get the Stone—
and I told you what I'd do to you when I did, you ignorant

Dragonsbane                  311

bitch. I'll rot the stinking bones of your body for what
you did!"

A spell of crippling and ruin beat like lightning in the
close air of the cavern, and Jenny flinched from it, feeling
all her defenses buckle and twist. The power Zyeme
wielded was like a weight, the vast shadow she had only
sensed before turned now to the weight of the earth where
it smote against her. Jenny threw it aside and writhed
from beneath it; but for a moment, she hadn't the strength
to do more. A second spell struck her, and a third, cramp-
ing and biting at the muscles and organs of her body,
smoking at the hem of her gown. She felt something break
within her and tasted blood in her mouth; her head
throbbed, her brain seemed to blaze, all the oxygen in
the world was insufficient to her lungs. Under the ruthless
battering she could do no more than defend herself; no
counterspell would come, no way to make it stop. And
through it all, she felt the weaving of the death-spells,
swollen and hideous perversions of what she herself had
woven, returning like a vengeance to crush her beneath
them. She felt Zyerne's mind, powered by the force of
the Stone, driving like a black needle of pain into hers;

felt the grappling of a poisoned and vicious essence seek-
ing her consent.

And why nofi she thought. Like the black slime of
bursting pustules, all her self-hatreds flowed into the light.
She had murdered those weaker than herself; she had
hated her master; she had used a man who loved her for
her own pleasure and had abandoned the sons of her body;

she had abandoned her birthright of power out of sloth
and fear. Her body screamed, and her will to resist all the
mounting agonies weakened before the scorching onslaught
of the mind. How could she presume to fight the evil of
Zyeme, when she herself was evil without even the excuse
of Zyeme's grandeur?

Anger struck her then, like the icy rains of the Win-

312                  Barbara Hambly

terlands, and she recognized what was happening to her
as a spell. Like a dragon, Zyerne deceived with the truth,
but it was deception all the same. Looking up she saw
that perfect, evil face bending over her, the golden eyes
filled with gloating fire. Reaching out, Jenny seized the
fragile wrists, the very bones of her hands hurting like an
old woman's on a winter night; but she forced her hands
to close.

Grandeur? her mind cried, slicing up once more through
the fog of pain and enchantment. It is only you who see
yourself as grand, Zyerne. Yes, lam evil, and weak, and
cowardly, but, like a dragon, I know what it is that I am.
You are a creature of lies, of poisons, of small and petty
fears—it is that which will kill you. Whether I die or not,
Zyerne, it is you who will bring your own death upon
yourself, not for what you do, but for what you are.

She felt Zyeme's mind flinch at that. With a twist of
fury Jenny broke the brutal grip it held upon hers. At the
same moment her hands were struck aside. From her
knees, she looked up through the tangle of her hair, to
see the enchantress's face grow livid. Zyeme screamed
"You! You..." With a piercing obscenity, the sorceress's
whole body was wrapped in the rags of heat and fire and
power. Jenny, realizing the danger was now to her body
rather than to her mind, threw herself to the floor and
rolled out of the way. In the swirling haze of heat and
power stood a creature she had never seen before, hideous
and deformed, as if a giant cave roach had mated with a
tiger. With a hoarse scream, the thing threw itself upon
her.

Jenny rolled aside from the rip of the razor-combed
feet. She heard Gareth cry her name, not in terror as he
would once have done, and from the comer of her eye
she saw him slide the halberd across the glass-slick floor
to her waiting hand. She caught the weapon just in time
to parry a second attack. The metal of the blade shrieked

Dragonsbane                  313

on the tearing mandibles as the huge weight of the thing
bore her back against the blue-black Stone. Then the thing
turned, doubling on its tracks as Zyeme had done that
evening in the glade, and in her mind Jenny seemed to
hear Zyeme's distant voice howling, "I'll show you! I'll
show you all!"

It scuttled into the forest of alabaster, making for the
dark tunnels that led to the surface.

Jenny started to get to her feet to follow and collapsed
at the foot of the Stone. Her body hurt her in every limb
and muscle; her mind felt pulped from the ripping cruelty
of Zyeme's spells, bleeding still from her own acceptance
of what she was. Her hand, which she could see lying
over the halberd's shaft, seemed no longer part of her,
though, rather to her surprise, she saw it was still on the
end of her arm and attached to her body; the brown fingers
were covered with blisters, from some attack she had not
even felt at the time. Gareth was bending over her, holding
the guttering torch.

"Jenny—Jenny, wake up—Jenny please\ Don't make
me go after it alone!"

"No," she managed to whisper and swallowed blood.
Some instinct told her the lesion within her had healed,
but she felt sick and drained. She tried to rise again and
collapsed, vomiting; she felt the boy's hands hold her
steady even though they shook with fear. Afterward, empty
and chilled, she wondered if she would faint and told
herself not to be silly.

"She's going to get Morkeleb," she whispered, and
propped herself up again, her black hair hanging down in
her face. "The power of the Stone rules him. She will be
able to hold his mind, as she could not hold mine."

She managed to get to her feet, Gareth helping her as
gently as he could, and picked up the halberd. "I have to
stop her before she gets clear of the caverns. I defeated

314                  Barbara Hambly

her mind—while the tunnels limit her size, I may be able
to defeat her body. Stay here and help John."

"But..." Gareth began. She shrugged free of his hold
and made for the dark doorway at a stumbling run.

Beyond it, spells of loss and confusion tangled the
darkness. The runes that she had traced as she'd followed
John were gone, and for a few moments the subtle obscu
rity of Zyeme's magic smothered her mind and made ali
those shrouded ways look the same. Panic knotted around
her throat as she thought of wandering forever in the
darkness; then the part of her that had found her way
through the woods of the Winterlands said. Think. Think
and listen. She released magic from her mind and looked
about her in the dark; with instinctive woodcraftiness,
she had taken back-bearings of her route while making
her rune-markings, seeing what the landmarks looked like
coming the other way. She spread her senses through the
phantasmagoric domain of fluted stone, listening for the
echoes that crossed and recrossed in the blackness. She
heard the muted murmur of John's voice speaking to Gar-
eth about doors the gnomes had meant to bar and the
clawed scrape of unclean chitin somewhere up ahead.
She deepened her awareness and heard the skitter of the
vermin of the caves as they fled, shocked, from a greater
vermin. Swiftly, she set off in pursuit.

She had told Morkeleb to stand guard over the outer
door. She prayed now that he had had the sense not to,
but it scarcely mattered whether he did or not.The power
of the Stone was in Zyeme—from it she had drawn the
deepest reserves of its strength, knowing that, when the
time came to pay it back, she would have lives aplenty
at her disposal to do it. The power of the Stone was lodged
in Morkeleb's mind, tighter now that his mind and hers
had touched. With the dragon her slave, the Citadel would
fall, and the Stone be Zyeme's forever.

Jenny quickened once more to a jog that felt ready to

Dragonsbane                  315

break her bones. Her bare feet splashed in the trickling
water, making a faint, sticky pattering among the looming
shapes of the limestone darkness; her hands felt frozen
around the halberd shaft. How long a start Zyeme had
she didn't know, or how fast the abomination she had
become could travel. Zyeme had no more power over
her, but she feared to meet her now and pit her body
against that body. A part other mind thought wryly: John
should have been doing this, not she—it was his end of
the bargain to deal with monsters. She smiled bitterly.
Mab had been right; there were other evils besides drag-
ons in the land.

She passed a hillslope of stone mushrooms, an archway
of teeth like grotesque daggers. Her heart pounded and
her chilled body ached with the ruin Zyeme had wrought
on her. She ran, passing the locks and bars the gnomes
had set such faith in, knowing already that she would be
too late.

In the blue dimness of the vaults below the Citadel,
she found the furniture toppled and scattered, and she
forced herself desperately to greater speed. Through a
doorway, she glimpsed a reflection of the fevered daylight
outside; the stench of blood struck her nostrils even as
she tripped and, looking down, saw the decapitated body
of a gnome lying in a pool of warm blood at her feet. The
last room of the Citadel vaults was a slaughterhouse, men
and gnomes lying in it and in the doorway to the outside,
their makeshift black livery sodden with blood, the close
air of the room stinking with the gore that splattered the
walls and even the ceiling. From beyond the doorway,
shouting and the stench of burning came to her; and,
stumbling through the carnage. Jenny cried out Morkeleb\
She hurled the music of his name like a rope into the
sightless void. His mind touched hers, and the hideous
weight of the Stone pressed upon them both.

Light glared in her eyes. She scrambled over the bodies

316                  Barbara Hambly

in the doorway and stood, blinking for an instant in the
lower court, seeing all around the door the paving stones
charred with a crisped muck of blood. Before her the
creature crouched, larger and infinitely more hideous in
the befouled and stormy daylight, metamorphosed into
something like a winged ant, but without an ant's compact
grace. Squid, serpent, scorpion, wasp—it was everything
hideous, but no one thing in itself. The screaming laughter
that filled her mind was Zyeme's laughter. It was Zyerne's
voice that she heard, calling to Morkeleb as she had called
to Gareth, the power of the Stone a tightening noose upon
his mind.

The dragon crouched immobile against the far rampart
of the court. His every spike and scale were raised for
battle, yet to Jenny's mind came nothing from him but
grating agony. The awful, shadowy weight of the Stone
was tearing at his mind, a power built generation after
generation, fermenting in upon itself and directed by
Zyeme upon him now, summoning him to her bidding,
demanding that he yield. Jenny felt his mind a knot of
iron against that imperious command, and she felt it when
the knot fissured.

She cried again, Morkeleb\ and flung herself, mind and
body, toward him. Their minds gripped and locked.
Through his eyes, she saw the horrible shape of the crea-
ture and recognized how he had known Zyerne through
her disguise—the patterning of her soul was unmistaka-
ble. Peripherally, she was aware that this was true for
every man and gnome who cowered within the doorways
and behind the protection of each turret; she saw things
as a dragon sees. The force of the Stone hammered again
at her mind, and yet it had no power over her, no hold
upon her. Through Morkeleb's eyes, she saw herself still
running toward him—toward, in a sense, herself—and
saw the creature turn to strike at that small, flying rag of

Dragonsbane                  317

black-wrapped bones and hair that she knew in a detached

way for her own body.

Her mind was within the dragon's, shielding him from
the burning grip of the Stone. Like a cat, the dragon
struck, and the creature that had been Zyerne wheeled
to meet the unexpected threat. Half within her own body,
half within Morkeleb's, Jenny stepped in under the sag-
ging, bloated belly of the monster that loomed so hugely
near her and thrust upward with her halberd. As the blade
slashed at the stinking flesh, she heard Zyeme's voice in
her mind, screaming at her the back-street obscenities of
a spoiled little slut whom the gnomes had taken in on
account of the promise of her power. Then the creature
gathered its mismated limbs beneath it and hurled itself
skyward out of their way. From overhead, Jenny felt the

hot rumble of thunder.

Her counterspell blocked the bolt of lightning that would
have come hurling down on the court an instant later; she
used a dragon-spell, such as those who walked the roads
of the air used to allow them to fly in storms. Morkeleb
was beside her then, her mind shielding his from the Stone
as his body shielded hers from Zyeme's greater strength.
Minds interlinked, there was no need of words between
them. Jenny seized the knife-tipped spikes of his foreleg
as he raised her to his back, and she wedged herself
uncomfortably between the spearpoints that guarded his
spine. More thunder came, and the searing breathlessness
of ozone. She flung a spell to turn aside that bolt, and the
lightning—channeled, she saw, through the creature that
hovered in the livid air above the Citadel like a floating
sack of pus—struck the tubular harpoon gun on the ram-
part. It exploded in a bursting star of flame and shattered
iron, and the two men who were cranking another catapult
to bear on the monster turned and fled.

Jenny understood then that the storm had been sum-
moned by Zyeme, called by her powers through the Stone

318                  Barbara Hambly

from afar, and the Stone's magic gave her the power to
direct the lightning when and where she would. It had
been her weapon to destroy the Citadel—the Stone, the
storm, and the dragon.

She pulled off her belt and used it to lash herself to
the two-foot spike before her. It would be little use if the
dragon turned over in flight, but would keep her from
being thrown off laterally, and that was all she could hope
for now. She knew her body was exhausted and hurt, but
the dragon's mind lifted her out of herself; and in any
case, she had no choice. She sealed herself off from the
pain and ripped the Limitations from mind and flesh.
The dragon hurtled skyward to the thing waiting above.
Winds tore at them, buffeting Morkeleb's wings so
that he had to veer sharply to miss being thrown into the
highest turret of the Citadel. From above them, the crea-
ture spat a rain of acid mucus. Green and stinking, it seared
Jenny's face and hands like poison and made smoking
tracks of corrosion on the steel of the dragon's scales.
Furiously keeping her mind concentrated against the sear-
ing agony. Jenny cast her will at the clouds, and rain began
to sluice down, washing the stuff away and half-blinding
her with its fury. Long black hair hung stickily down over
her shoulders as the dragon swung on the wind, and she
felt lightning channeling again into the hovering creature
before them. Seizing it with her mind, she flung it back.
It burst somewhere between them, the shock of it striking
her bones like a Mow. She had forgotten she was not a
dragon, and that her flesh was mortal.

Then the creature fell upon them, its stumpy wings
whirring like a foul bug's. The weight of it rolled the
dragon in the air so that Jenny had to grasp the spikes on
either side of her, below the blades and yet still cutting
her fingers. The earth rolled and swung below them, but
her eyes and mind locked on the thing above. Its stink     i^
was overpowering, and from the pullulant mass of its     j||

Dragonsbane                  319

flesh, a sharklike head struck, biting at the massive joints
of the dragon's wings, while the whirlwind of evil spells
sucked and ripped around them, tearing at their linked
minds.

Ichorous yellow fluid burst from the creature's mouth
as it bit at the spikes of the wing-joints. Jenny slashed at
the eyes, human and as big as her two fists, gray-gold as
mead—Zyeme's eyes. The halberd blade clove through
the flesh—and from among the half-severed flaps of the
wound, other heads burst like a knot of snakes among
spraying gore, tearing at her robe and her flesh with suck-
eriike mouths. Grimly, fighting a sense of nightmare hor-
ror, she chopped again, her blistered hands clotted and
running with slime. Half her mind called from the depths
of the dragon's soul the healing-spells against the poisons
she knew were harbored in those filthy jaws.

When she slashed at the other eye, the creature broke
away from them. The pain of Morkeleb's wounds as well
as her own tore at her as he swung and circled skyward,
and she knew he felt the burning of her ripped flesh. The
Citadel dropped away below them; rain poured over them
like water from a pail. Looking up, she could see the
deadly purplish glow of stored lightning rimming the black
pillows of cloud so close above their heads. The battering
of Zyeme's mind upon theirs lessened as the sorceress
rallied her own spells, spells of wreckage and ruin against
the Citadel and its defenders below.

Mists veiled the thrusting folds of the land beneath
them, the toy fortress and the wet, slate-and-emerald of
the meadows beside the white stream of the river. Mor-
keleb circled. Jenny's eyes within his seeing all things
with clear, incredible calm. Lightning streaked down by
her and she saw, as if it had been drawn in fine lines
before her eyes, another catapult explode on the ram-
parts, and the man who had been winding it flung back-

320                  Barbara Hambly

ward over the parapet, whirling limply down the side of
the cliff.

Then the dragon folded his wings and dropped. Her
mind in Morkeleb's, Jenny felt no fear, clinging to the
spikes while the wind tore her sopping hair back and her
bloody, rain-wet robes plastered to her body and arms.
Her mind was the mind of a stooping falcon. She saw,
with precise pleasure, the sacklike, threshing body that
was their target, felt the joy of impending impact as the
dragon fisted his claws...

The jar all but threw her from her precarious perch on
the dragon's backbone. The creature twisted and sagged
in the air, then writhed under them, grabbing with a dozen
mouths at Morkeleb's belly and sides, heedless of the
spikes and the monstrous slashing of the dragon's tail.
Something tore at Jenny's back; turning, she hacked the
head off a serpentine tentacle that had ripped at her, but
she felt the blood flowing from the wound. Her efforts to
close it were fogged and slow. They seemed to have fallen
into a vortex of spells, and the weight of the Stone's
strength dragged upon them, trying to rend apart the locked
knot of their minds.

What was human magic and what dragon she no longer
knew, only that they sparkled together, iron and gold, in
a welded weapon that attacked both body and mind. She
could feel Morkeleb's growing exhaustion and her own
dizziness as the Citadel walls and the stone-toothed cliflfs
of Nast Wall wheeled crazily beneath them. The more
they hacked and cut at the awful, stinking thing, the more
mouths and gripping tentacles it sprouted and the tighter
its clutch upon them became. She felt no more fear than
a beast might feel in combat with its own kind, but she
did feel the growing weight of the thing as it multiplied,
getting larger and more powerful as the two entwined
bodies thrashed in the sea of streaming rain.

The end, when it came, was a shock, like the impact

Dragonsbane                  321

of a club. She was aware of a booming roar somewhere
in the earth beneath them, dull and shaking through her
exhausted singlemindedness; then, more clearly, she heard
a voice like Zyeme's screaming, multiplied a thousandfold
through the spells that suffocated her until it axed through
her skull with the rending echo of indescribable pain.

Like the passage from one segment of a dream to
another, she felt the melting of the spells that surrounded
them and the falling-away of the clinging, flaccid flesh and
muscle. Something flashed beneath them, falling through
the rainy air toward the wet roof crests of the Citadel
below, and she realized that the plunging flutter of stream-
ing brown hair and white gauze was Zyeme.

The instantaneous Get her and Morkeleb's Let her fall
passed between them like a spark. Then he was plunging
again, as he had plunged before, falconlike, tracking the
falling body with his precise crystal eyes and plucking it
from the air with the neatness of a child playing jacks.

Charcoal-gray with rain, the walls of the Citadel court
rose up around them. Men, women, and gnomes were
everywhere on the ramparts, hair slicked down with the
pouring cloudburst to which nobody was paying the slight-
est attention. White smoke poured from the narrow door
that led into the Deep, but all eyes were raised skyward
to that black, plummeting form.

The dragon balanced for a moment upon the seventy-
foot span of his wings, then extended three of his delicate
legs to touch the ground. With the fourth, he laid Zyeme
on the puddled stone pavement, her dark hair spreading
out around her under the driving rain.

Sliding from the dragon's back, Jenny knew at once
that Zyeme was dead. Her mouth and eyes were open.
Distorted with rage and terror, her face could be seen to
be pointy and shrewish with constant worry and the can-
cerous addiction to petty angers.

Trembling with weariness. Jenny leaned against the

322 Barbara Hambly

dragon's curving shoulder. Slowly, the scintillant helix of
their minds unlinked. The rim of brightness and color that
had seemed to edge everything vanished from her vision.
Living things had solid bodies once more, instead of incor-
poreal ghosts of flesh through which shone the shapes of
souls.

A thousand pains came back to her—of her body and
of the stripped, hurting ruin of her mind. She became
aware of the blood that stuck her torn robe to her back
and ran down her legs to her bare feet—became aware
of all the darkness in her own heart, which she had accepted
in her battle with Zyeme.

Holding to the thomed scales for support, she looked
down at the sharp, white face staring upward at her from
the rain-hammered puddles. A human hand steadied her
elbow, and turning, she saw Trey beside her, her frivo-
lously tinted hair plastered with wet around her pale face.
It was the closest, she realized, that she had seen any
human besides herself come to Morkeleb. A moment later
Polycarp joined them, one arm wrapped in makeshift
dressings and half his red hair burned away by the crea-
ture's first attack upon the door.

White smoke still billowed from the door of the Deep.
Jenny coughed, her lungs hurting, in the acrid fumes.
Everyone in the court was coughing—it was as if the
Deep itself were in flames.

More coughing came from within. In the shadowy slot,
two forms materialized, the shorter leaning upon the taller.
From soot-blackened faces, two pairs of spectacle lenses
flashed whitely in the pallid light.

A moment later they emerged from the smoke and
shadow into the stunned silence of the watching crowd
in the court.

"Miscalculated the blasting powder," John explained
apologetically.

CHAPTER XVII

IT WAS NOT for several days after John and Gareth
blew up the Stone that Jenny began to recover from the
battle beneath and above the Citadel.

She had cloudy recollections of them telling Polycarp
how they had backtracked to the room by the gates where
the blasting powder had been left, while her own con-
sciousness darkened, and a vague memory of Morkeleb
catching her in his talons as she fell and carrying her,
catlike, to the small shelter in the upper court. More clear
was the remembrance of John's voice, forbidding the oth-
ers to go after them. "She needs a healing we can't give
her," she heard him say to Gareth. "Just let her be."

She wondered how he had known that. But then, John
knew her very well.

Morkeleb healed her as dragons heal, leading the body
with the mind. Her body healed fairly quickly, the poisons
burning themselves out of her veins, the slashed, puck-
ered wounds left by the creature's mouths closing to leave
round, vicious-looking scabs the size of her palm. Like
John's dragon-slaying scars, she thought, they would stay
with her for what remained of her life.

323

324                  Barbara Hambly

Her mind healed more slowly. Open wounds left by
her battle with Zyeme remained open. Worst was the
knowledge that she had abandoned the birthright of her
power, not through the fate that had denied her the ability
or the circumstances that had kept her from its proper
teaching, but through her own fear.

They are yours for the stretching-out of your hand,
Morkeleb had said.

She knew they always had been.

Turning her head from the shadows of the crowded
lean-to, she could see the dragon lying in the heatless sun
of the court, a black cobra with his tasseled head raised,
his antennae flicking to listen to the wind. She felt her
soul streaked and mottled with the mind and soul of the
dragon and her life entangled with the crystal ropes of his
being.

She asked him once why he had remained at the Citadel
to heal her. The Stone is broken—the ties that bind you
to this place are gone.

She felt the anger coiled within him stir. I do not know,
wizard woman. You cannot have healed yourself—I did
not wish to see you broken forever. The words in her
mind were tinted, not only with anger, but with the mem-
ory of fear and with a kind of shame.

Whyf she asked. You have often said that the affairs
of humankind are nothing to dragons.

His scales rattled faintly as they hackled, then, with a
dry whisper, settled again. Dragons did not lie, but she
felt the mazes of his mind close against her.

Nor are they. But I have felt stirring in me things that
I do not understand, since you healed me and shared with
me the song of the gold in the Deep. My power has waked
power in you, but what it is in you that has waked its
reflection in me I do not know, for it is not a thing of
dragons. It let me feel the grip of the Stone, as I flew
north—a longing and a hurt, which before was only my

Dragonsbane                 325

own will. Now because of it, I do not want to see you
hurt—I do not want to see you die, as humans die. I want
you to come with me to the north. Jenny; to be one of
the dragons, with the power for which you have always
sought. I want this, as much as I have ever wanted the
gold of the earth. I do not know why. And is it not what
you want?

But to that, Jenny had no reply.

Long before he should have been on his feet, John
dragged himself up the steps to the high court to see her,
sitting behind her on the narrow makeshift cot in her little
shelter, brushing her hair as he used to at the Hold on
those nights when she would come there to be with him
and their sons. He spoke of commonplaces, of the dis-
mantling of the siege troops around the Citadel and of the
return of the gnomes to the Deep, ofGareth's doings, and
of the assembling of the books they would take back to
the north, demanding nothing other, neither speech, deci-
sion, nor thought. But it seemed to her that the touch of
his hands brought more bitter pain to her than all Zyeme's
spells of ruin.

She had made her choice, she thought, ten years ago
when first they had met; and had remade it every day
since then. But there was, and always had been, another
choice. Without turning her head, she was aware of the
thoughts that moved behind the diamond depths of Mor-
keleb's watching eyes.

When he rose to go, she laid a hand on the sleeve of
his frayed black robe. "John," she said quietly. "Will you
do something for me? Send a message to Miss Mab, asking
her to choose out the best volumes of magic that she
knows of, both of the gnomes and of humankind, to go
north also?"

He regarded her for a moment, where she lay on the
rough paillasse on her narrow cot which for four nights
now had been her solitary bed, her coarse dark hair hang-

326                  Barbara Humbly

ing over the whiteness of her shift. "Wouldn't you rather
look them out for yourself, love? You're the one who's
to be using them, after all."

She shook her head. His back was to the light of the
open court, his features indistinct against the glare; she
wanted to reach out her hand to touch him, but somehow
could not bring herself to do so. In a cool voice like silver
she explained, "The magic of the dragon is in me, John;

it is not a thing of books. The books are for lan, when
he comes into his power."

John said nothing for a moment. She wondered if he,
too, had realized this about their older son. When he did
speak, his voice was small. "Won't you be there to teach
him?"

She shook her head. "I don't know, John," she whis-
pered. "I don't know."

He made a move to lay his hand on her shoulder, and
she said, "No. Don't touch me. Don't make it harder for
me than it already is."

He remained standing for a moment longer before her,
looking down into her face. Then, obedient, he silently
turned and left the shed.

She had come to no further conclusion by the day of
their departure from the Citadel, to take the road back to
the north. She was conscious of John watching her, when
he thought she wasn't looking; conscious of her own glad-
ness that he never used the one weapon that he must have
known would make her stay with him—he never spoke
to her of their sons. But in the nights, she was conscious
also of the dark cobra shape of the dragon, glittering in
the moonlight of the high court, or wheeling down from
the black sky with the cold stars of winter prickling upon
his spines, as if he had flown through the heart of the
galaxy and come back powdered with its light.

The morning of their departure was a clear one, though
bitterly cold. The King rode up from Bel to see them off,

Dragonsbane                  327

surrounded by a flowerbed of courtiers, who regarded
John with awe and fear, as if wondering how they had
dared to mock him, and why he had not slain them all.
With him, also, were Polycarp and Gareth and Trey, hand-
fast like schoolchildren. Trey had had her hair redyed,
burgundy and gold, which would have looked impressive
had it been done in the elaborate styles of the Court instead
of in two plaits like a child's down her back.

They had brought with them a long line of horses and
mules, laden with supplies for the journey and also with
the books for which John had so cheerfully been prepared
to risk his life. John knelt before the tall, vague, faded
old man, thanking him and swearing fealty; while Jenny,
clothed in her colorless northlands plaids, stood to one
side, feeling queerly distant from them all and watching
how the King kept scanning the faces of the courtiers
around him with the air of one who seeks someone, but
no longer remembers quite who.

To John the King said, "Not leaving already? Surely
it was only yesterday you presented yourself?"

"It will be a long way home, my lord." John did not
mention the week he had spent waiting the King's leave
to ride forth against the dragon—it was clear the old man
recalled little, if anything, of the preceding weeks. "It's
best I start before the snows come on heavy."

"Ah." The King nodded vaguely and turned away, lean-
ing on the arms of his tall son and his nephew Polycarp.
After a pace or two, he halted, frowning as something
surfaced from the murk of his memory, and turned to
Gareth. "This Dragonsbane—he did kill the dragon, after
all?"

There was no way to explain all that had passed, or
how rightness had been restored to the kingdom, save by
the appropriate channels, so Gareth said simply, "Yes."

"Good," said the old man, nodding dim approval.
"Good."

328                  Barbara Hambly

Gareth released his arm; Polycarp, as Master of the
Citadel and his host, led the King away to rest, the cour-
tiers trailing after like a school of brightly colored, orna-
mental fish. From among them stepped three small, stout
forms, their silken robes stirring in the ice winds that
played from the soft new sky.

Balgub, the new Lord of the Deep ofYlferdun, inclined
his head; with the stiff unfamiliarity of one who has sel-
dom spoken the words, he thanked Lord Aversin the Drag-
onsbane, though he did not specify for what.

"Well, he hardly could, now, could he?" John remarked,
as the three gnomes left the court in the wake of the King's
party. Only Miss Mab had caught Jenny's eye and winked
at her. John went on, "If he came out and said, 'Thank
you for blowing up the Stone,' that would be admitting
that he was wrong about Zyerne not poisoning it."

Gareth, who was still standing hand-in-hand with Trey
beside them, laughed. "You know, I think he does admit
it in his heart, though I don't think he'll ever completely
forgive us for doing it. At least, he's civil to me in Council—
which is fortunate, since I'm going to have to be dealing
with him for a long time."

"Are you?" A flicker of intense interest danced in John's
eye.

Gareth was silent for a long moment, fingering the stiff
lace of his cuff and not meeting John's gaze. When he
looked up again, his face was weary and sad.

"I thought it would be different," he said quietly. "I
thought once Zyerne was dead, he would be all right. And
he's better, he really is." He spoke like a man trying to
convince himself that a mended statue is as beautiful as
it was before it broke. "But he's—he's so absentminded.
Badegamus says he can't be trusted to remember edicts
he's made from one day to the next. When I was in Bel,
we made up a Council—Badegamus, Balgub, Polycarp,
Dromar, and I—to sort out what we ought to do; then I

Dragonsbane                  329

tell Father to do it—or remind him it's what he was going
to do, and he'll pretend he remembers. He knows he's
gotten forgetful, though he doesn't quite remember why.
Sometimes he'll wake in the night, crying Zyeme's name
or my mother's." The young man's voice turned momen-
tarily unsteady. "But what if he never recovers?"

"What if he never does?" John returned softly. "The
Realm will be yours in any case one day, my hero." He
turned away and began tightening the cinches of the mules,
readying them for the trek down through the city to the
northward road.

"But not now!" Gareth followed him, his words making
soft puffs of steam in the morning cold. "I mean—I never
have time for myself anymore! It's been months since I
worked on my poetry, or tried to complete that southern
variant of the ballad of Antara Warlady..."

"There'll be time, by and by." The Dragonsbane paused,
resting his hand on the arched neck of Battlehanuner,
Gareth's parting gift to him. "It will get easier, when men
know to come to you directly instead of to your father."

Gareth shook his head. "But it won't be the same."

"Is it ever?" John moved down the line, tightening
cinches, checking straps on the parcels of books—vol-
umes of healing, Anacetus' works on greater and lesser
demons, Luciard's Firegiver, books on engineering and
law, by gnomes and men. Gareth followed him silently,
digesting the fact that he was now, for all intents and
purposes, the Lord of Bel, with the responsibilities of the
kingdom—for which he had been academically prepared
under the mental heading of "some day"—thrust suddenly
upon his unwilling shoulders. Like John, Jenny thought
pityingly, he would have to put aside the pursuit of his
love of knowledge for what he owed his people and return
to it only when he could. The only difference was that
his realm was at peace and that John had been a year

330                  Barbara Hambly

younger than Gareth was when the burden had fallen to
him.

"And Bond?" John asked gently, looking over at Trey.
She sighed and managed to smile. "He still asks about
Zyeme," she said softly. "He really did love her, you
know. He knows she's dead and he tries to pretend he
remembers it happening the way'I told him, about her
falling off a horse... But it's odd. He's kinder than he
was. He'll never be considerate, of course, but he's not
so quick or so clever, and I think he hurts people less.
He dropped a cup at luncheon yesterday—he's gotten
very clumsy—and he even apologized to me." There was
a slight wryness to her smile, perhaps to cover tears. "I
remember when he would not only have blamed me for
it, but gotten me to blame myself."

She and Gareth had been following John down the line,
still hand in hand, the girl's rose-colored skirts bright
against the pewter grayness of the frosted morning. Jenny,
standing apart, listened to their voices, but felt as if she
saw them through glass, part of a life from which she was
half-separated, to which she did not have to go back unless
she chose. And all the while, her mind listened to the sky,
hearing with strange clarity the voices of the wind around
the Citadel towers, seeking something...

She caught John's eye on her and saw the worry crease
between his brows; something wrung and wrenched in
her heart.

"Must you go?" Gareth asked hesitantly, and Jenny,
feeling as if her thoughts had been read, looked up; but
it was to John that he had spoken. "Could you stay with
me, even for a little while? It will take nearly a month for
the troops to be ready—you could have a seat on the
Council. I—I can't do this alone."

John shook his head, leaning on the mule Clivy's with-
ers. "You are doing it alone, my hero. And as for me,
I've my own realm to look after. I've been gone long as

Dragonsbane                  331

it is." He glanced questioningly at Jenny as he spoke, but
she looked away.

Wind surged down around them, crosswise currents
swirling her plaids and her hair like the stroke of a giant
wing. She looked up and saw the shape of the dragon
melting down from the gray and cobalt of the morning

sky.

She turned from the assembled caravan in the court
without a word and ran to the narrow stair that led up to
the walls. The dark shape hung like a black kite on the
wind, the soft voice a song in her mind.

By my name you have bidden me go. Jenny Waynest,
he said. Now that you are going, I too shall depart. But
by your name, I ask that you follow. Come with me, to
the islands of the dragons in the northern seas. Come
with me, to be of us, now and forever.

She knew in her heart that it would be the last time of
his asking; that if she denied him now, that door would
never open again. She stood poised for a moment, between
silver ramparts and silver sky. She was aware of John
climbing the steps behind her, his face emptied of life and
his spectacle lenses reflecting the pearly colors of the
morning light; was aware, through him, of the two little
boys waiting for them in the crumbling tower of Alyn
Hold—boys she had bome without intention of raising,
boys she should have loved, she thought, either more or
less than she had.

But more than them, she was aware of the dragon,
drifting like a ribbon against the remote white eye of the
day moon. The music of his name shivered in her bones;

the iron and fire of his power streaked her soul.

To be a mage you must be a mage, she thought. The
key to magic is magic.

She turned and looked back, to see John standing on
the root-buckled pavement between the barren apple trees
behind her. Past him, she glimpsed the caravan of horses

332                  Barbara Hambly

in the court below. Trey and Gareth holding the horses'
heads as they snorted and fidgeted at the scent of the
dragon. For a moment, the memory of John's body and
John's voice overwhelmed her—the crushing strength of
his muscles and the curious softness of his lips, the cold
slickness of a leather sleeve, and the fragrance of his body
mixed with the more prosaic pungence ofwoodsmoke and
horses that permeated his scruffy plaids.

She was aware, too, of the desperation and hope in his
eyes.

She saw the hope fade, and he smiled. "Go if you must,
love," he said softly. "I said I wouldn't hold you, and I
won't. I've known it for days."

She shook her head, wanting to speak, but unable to
make a sound, her dark hair swirled by the wind of the
dragon's wings. Then she turned from him, suddenly, and
ran to the battlements, beyond which the dragon lay wait-
ing in the air.

Her soul made the leap first, drawing power from the
wind and from the rope of crystal thought that Morkeleb
flung her, showing her the way. The elements around the
nucleus of her essence changed, as she shed the shape
that she had known since her conception and called to
her another, different shape. She was half-conscious of
spreading her arms against the wind as she strode forward
over the edge of the battlement, of the wind in her dark
hair as she sprang outward over the long drop of stone
and cliff and emptiness. But her mind was already speed-
ing toward the distant cloud peaks, the moon, the dragon.

On the walls behind her, she was aware of Trey whis-
pering, "She's beautiful..."

Against the fading day moon, the morning's strength-
ening light caught in the milk-white silk of her spreading
wings and flashed like a spiked carpet of diamonds along
the ghost-pale armor of the white dragon's back and sides.

But more than of that, she was conscious of John,

Dragonsbane                  JJJ

Dragonsbane of ballad and legend, watching her with silent
tears running down his still face as she circled into the
waiting sky, like a butterfly released from his hand. Then
he turned from the battlements, to the court where the
horses waited. Taking the rein from the stunned Gareth,
he mounted Battlehammer and rode through the gateway,
to take the road back to the north.

CHAPTER XVIII

THEY FLEW NORTH together, treading the woven roads
of the sky.

The whole Earth lay below her, marked with the long
indigo shadows of morning, the bright flash of springing
water, and the icy knives of the glaciers. She saw the
patterns of the sea, with its currents of green and violet,
its great, gray depths, and the scrum of white lace upon
its surface, and those of the moving air. All things were
to her as a dragon sees them, a net of magic and years,
covering the Earth and holding it to all the singing uni-
verse in a crystal web of time.

They nested among the high peaks ofNast Wall, among
the broken bone ends of the world, looking eastward over
the gorges where the bighorn sheep sprang like fleas from
rock to rock, past dizzying drops of green meltwater and
woods where the dampness coated each tree in pillows
of emerald moss, and down to the woods on the foothills
of the Marches, where those who swore fealty to the
Master dwelt. Westward, she could look past the glacier
that lay like a stilled river of green and white through the
gouged gray breakers of the cliffs, past cold and barren

334

Dragonsbane                  335

rocks, to see the Wildspae gleaming like a sheet of brown
silk beneath the steam of its mists and, in the glimmering
bare woods along its banks, make out the lacework turrets
of Zyerne's hunting lodge among the trees.

Like a dragon, she saw backward and forward in time;

and like a dragon, she felt no passion at what she saw.

She was free, to have what she had always sought—
not only the power, which the touch of Morkeleb's mind
had kindled in her soul, but freedom to pursue that power,
released from the petty grind of the work of days.

Her mind touched and fingered that knowledge, won-
dering at its beauty and its complexity. It was hers now,
as it had always been hers for the taking. No more would
she be asked to put aside her meditations, to trek ten
miles on foot over the wintry moors to deliver a child; no
more would she spend the hours needed for the study of
her power ankle-deep in a half-frozen marsh, looking for
frogwort for Muffle the smith's rheumatism.

No more would her time—and her mind—be divided
between love and power.

Far off, her dragon's sight could descry the caravan of
horses, making their antlike way along the foothills arid
into the woods. So clear was her crystal sight that she
could identify each beast within that train—the white
Moon Horse, the balky roans, the stupid sorrel Cow, and
the big liver-bay Battlehammer—she saw, too, the flash
of spectacle lenses and the glint of metal spikes on a
patched old doublet.

He was no more to her now than the first few inches
upon the endless ribbon of dragon years. Like the bandits
and the wretched Meewinks—like his and her sons—he
had his own path to follow through the labyrinth patterns
of darkening time. He would go on with his fights for his
people and with his dogged experiments with rock salts
and hot-air balloons, his model ballistas and his quest for
lore about pigs. One day, she thought, he would take a

336                  Barbara Hambly

boat out to the rough waters ofEldsbouch Cove to search
for the ruins of the drowned breakwater, and she would
not be waiting for him on the round pebbles of the gravel
beach... He would ride out to the house beneath the
standing stones on Frost Fell, and she would not be stand-
ing in its doorway.

In time, she knew, even these memories would fade.
She saw within herself, as she had probed at the souls of
others. Trey's, she recalled, had been like a clear pool,
with bright shallows and unsuspected depths. Zyeme's
had been a poisoned flower. Her own soul she saw also
as a flower whose petals were turning to steel at their
outer edges but whose heart was still soft and silky flesh.
In time, it would be ail steel, she saw, breathtakingly
beautiful and enduring forever—but it would cease to be
a flower.

She lay for a long time in the rocks, motionless save
for the flick of her jeweled antennae as she scried the
colors of the wind.

It was thus to be a dragon, she told herself, to see the
patterns of all things from the silence of the sky. It was
thus to be free. But pain still poured from some broken
place inside her—the pain of choice, of loss, and of still-
born dreams. She would have wept, but there was nothing
within dragons that could weep. She told herself that this
was the last time she would have to feel this pain or the
love that was its source. It was for this immunity that she
had sought the roads of the sky.

The key to magic is magic, she thought. And all magic,
all power, was now hers.

But within her some other voice asked, For what pur-
pose? Afar off she was aware of Morkeleb, hunting the
great-homed sheep in the rocks. Like a black bat of steel
lace, he passed as soundlessly as his own shadow over
the snowfields, wrapping himself in the colors of the air
to drop down the gorges, the deceptive glitter of his magic

Dragonsbane                  337

hiding him from the nervous, stupid eyes of his prey.
Magic was the bone of dragon bones, the blood of their
blood; the magic of the cosmos tinted everything they
perceived and everything they were.

And yet, in the end, their magic was sterile, seeking
nothing but its own—as Zyeme's had been.

Zyeme, Jenny thought. The key to magic is magic. For
it Zyeme had sacrificed the men who loved her, the son
she would have borne, and, in the end, her very
humanity—even as she herself had done!

Caerdinn had been wrong. For all his striving to perfect
his arts, in the end he had been nothing but a selfish,
embittered old man, the end of a Line that was failing
because it sought magic for magic's sake. The key to
magic was not magic, but the use of magic; it lay not in
having, but in giving and doing—in loving, and in being
loved.

And to her mind there rose the image of John, sitting
beside Morkeleb in the high court of the Citadel. Having
so little, we shared among ourselves to make any of it
worth having... the consequences of not caring enough
to do it would have been worse...

It had been John all along, she thought. Not the prob-
lem, but the solution.

Shadow circled her, and Morkeleb sank glittering to
the rocks at her side. The sun was half-down the west
and threw the shimmer of the blue glacier light over him
like a sparkling cloak of flame.

What is it, wizard woman?

She said, Morkeleb, return me to being what I was.

His scales bristled, flashing, and she felt the throb of
his anger deep in her mind. Nothing can ever return to
being what it was, wizard woman. You know that. My
power will be within you forever, nor can the knowledge
of what it is to be a dragon ever be erased from your
mind.

338                  Barbara Humbly

Even so, she said. Yet I would rather live as a woman
who was once a dragon than a dragon who was once a
woman. On the steps of the Deep, I killed with fire, as a
dragon kills; and like a dragon, I felt nothing. I do not
want to become that, Morkeleb.

Bah, Morkeleb said. Heat smoked from the thousand
razor edges of his scales, from the long spikes and the
folded silk of his wings. Do not be a fool. Jenny Waynest.
All the knowledge of the dragons, all their power, is yours,
and all the years of time. You will forget the loves of the
earth soon and be healed. The diamond cannot love the
flower, for the flower lives only a day, then fades and
dies. You are a diamond now.

The flower dies. Jenny said softly, having lived. The
diamond will never do either. I do not want to forget, and
the healing will make me what I never wanted to be.
Dragons have all the years of time, Morkeleb, but even
dragons cannot roll back the flow of days, nor return
along them to find again time that they have lost. Let
me go.

No! His head swung around, his white eyes blazing,
his long mane bristling around the base of his many horns.
/ want you, wizard woman, more than I have ever wanted
any gold. It is something that was born in me when your
mind touched mine, as my magic was born in you. Having
you, I will not give you up.

She gathered her haunches beneath her and threw her-
self out into the void of the air, white wings cleaving the
wind. He flung himself after, swinging down the gray cliffs
and waterfalls of Nast Wall, their shadows chasing one
another over snow clefts dyed blue with the coming eve-
ning and rippling like gray hawks over the darkness of
stone and chasm. Beyond, the world lay carpeted by
autumn haze, red and ochre and brown; and from the
unleaved trees of the woods near the river, Jenny could

Dragonsbane                  339

see a single thread of smoke rising, far off on the evening
wind.

The whiteness of the full moon stroked her wings; the
stars, through whose secret paths the dragons had once
come to the earth and along which they would one day
depart, swung like a web of light in their unfolding pat-
terns above. Her dragon sight descried the camp in the
woods and a lone, small figure patiently scraping burned
bannocks off the griddle, books from a half-unpacked box
stacked around him.

She circled the smoke, invisible in the colors of the
air, and felt the darkness of a shadow circling above her.

Wizard woman, said the voice of the dragon in her
mind, is this truly what you want7

She did not reply, but she knew that, dragon-wise, he
felt the surge and patterns of her mind. She felt his baf-
flement at them, and his anger, both at her and at some-
thing within himself.

At length he said,/ want you. Jenny Way nest. But more
than you, I want your happiness, and this I do not under-
stand—I do not want you in grief. And then, his anger
lashing at her like a many-tailed whip. You have done this
to me!

I am sorry, Morkeleb, she said softly. What you feel is
the love of humans, and a poor trade for the power that
the touch of your mind gave me. It is what I learned first,
from loving John—both the pain and the fact that to feel
it is better than not to be able to feel.

Is this the pain that drives you7 he demanded.

She said. Yes.

Bitter anger sounded in his mind, like the far-off echo
of the gold that he had lost. Go, then, he said, and she
circled down from the air, a thing of glass and lace and
bone, invisible in the soft, smoky darkness. She felt the
dragon's power surround her with heat and magic, the
pain shimmering along her bones. She leaned into the fear

340 Barbara Hambly

that melted her body, as she had leaned into the winds of
flight.

Then there was only weariness and grief. She knelt
alone in the darkness of the autumn woods, the night chill
biting into all the newly healed wounds of her back and
arms. Through the warty gray and white of the tree boles,
she could see the red glow of fire and smell the familiar
odors of woodsmoke and horses; the plaintive strains of
a pennywhistle keened thinly in the air. The bright edge
of color had vanished from all things; the evening was
raw and misty, colorless, and very cold. She shivered and
drew her sheepskin jacket more closely about her. The
earth felt damp where her knees pressed it through her
faded skirts.

She brushed aside the dark, coarse mane of her hair
and looked up. Beyond the bare lace of the trees, she
could see the black dragon still circling, alone in the
sounding hollow of the empty sky.

Her mind touched his, with thanks deeper than words.
Grief came down to her, grief and hurt, and rage that he
could feel hurt.

// is a cruel gift you have given me, wizard woman, he
said. For you have set me apart from my own and destroyed
the pleasure of my old joys; my soul is marked with this
love, though I do not understand what it is and, like you,
I shall never be able to return to what I have been.

lam sorry, Morkeleb, she said to him. We change what
we touch, be it magic, or power, or another Iffe. Ten years
ago I would have gone with you, had I not touched John,
and been touched by him.

Like an echo in her mind she heard his voice. Be happy,
then, wizard woman, with this choice that you have made.
I do not understand the reasons for it, for it is not a thing
of dragons—but then neither, any longer, am I.

She felt rather than saw him vanish, flying back in the
darkness toward the empty north. For a moment he passed

Dragonsbane                  341

before the white disk of the moon, skeletal silk over its
stem face—then he was gone. Grief closed her throat,
the grief of roads untaken, of doors not opened, of songs
unsung—the human grief of choice. In freeing her, the
dragon, too, had made his choice, of what he was and
would be.

We change what we touch, she thought. And in that,
she supposed, John—and the capacity to love and to care
that John had given her—was, and forever would be,
Morkeleb's bane.

She sighed and got stiffly to her feet, dusting the twigs
and leaves from her skirts. The shrill, sweet notes of the
pecnywhistle still thr<. ed the evening breeze, but with
them was the smell of smoke, and of bannocks starting
to burn. She hitched her plaid up over her shoulder and
started up the path for the clearing.