Dragonstar

by Barbara Hambly

  “Damn them.” John hurled his washrag into the basin, the murky light of the dip flashing off his specs. “Brâk warned me about that in the summer. Brâk was the leader of the escaped human slaves who were hidin' out in the Tralchet mines, you remember, when I went callin' on the gnomes up there. Brâk warned me about Goffyer, too—the Lord of the Twelfth Deep, an' a mage who was obviously in league with the demons long before Folcalor took him over bodily. Brâk didn't know what was afoot, but he warned me to fight to the death if Goffyer came at me with opals in his hand.”

  “He had a bowl of jewels in my dream.” Jenny shook the scouring sand into a second bucket and wiped out the pots. “Folcalor was driven from Caradoc's body in the sea. He could have used any water as a gate, to get to Goffyer. You say the mages of Prokep were astronomers, who used their own knowledge of the Dragonstar to trap the demons. Some of that knowledge may have remained in the library at Halnath. But if, as you say, the Master has been taken …”

  “We'll have to do somethin' about that, yes,” said John. He dried his hands, his eyes bright with a faraway gleam. “But as it happens, we don't need to go up to Halnath to learn about the Dragonstar's nature. I've got notes about the whole thing—what it is, what it's made of, how it works—in me jacket.”

  They banked the fire, turned the mastiffs into the yard, and went out themselves, barring the kitchen door behind them. The Dragonstar stood barely visible above the black line of the stable roof, so clear that each of its multiple tails stood out like an infinitely tiny thread of fire. Through Jenny's glove, John's gloved fingers were strong and warm, steadying and reassuring, as if he could support her through flood and fire and world's end. She felt as if she'd come home.

  Ridiculous, given the peril they stood in and the horror she was certain they'd have to face. But she wanted to laugh and dance.

  “First thing to do is make sure Gar is safe,” said John as they stepped out into the inky lane. “Gar and his daughter, and get Polycarp away from the dungeons … they can't just murder the Master of Halnath in his cell without a major war breakin' out, and I don't think Folcalor's willin' to risk that until he's had a crack at the Henge in Prokep. Though with demons it's hard to tell what they'll do. But those things done—”

  “I like the way you say that.”

  He shoved her, like a schoolboy nudging a mate, and she shoved him back.

  “Those things done, we can see what we can do about finding Corvin, and putting Aohila's name back into your little catch-bottle.”

  “If it's Aohila we need most to trap,” said Jenny thoughtfully.

  “Who else did you have in mind, love?”

  “Folcalor.”

  “And wherever are we to get … ?” He thought about it a moment, and said, “Oh, aye. Yes.” That was, Jenny reflected, one of the things she loved most, and had missed most, about John. You didn't need to explain much.

  They walked for a time in silence down the lane, the stars of springtide glittering sharp through breaking clouds. “I was afraid for you,” said John out of the dark. “I missed you something desperate, I wanted you … an' you'd have been gie interested in the Hells I saw, an' the Otherworld.… But all the time I kept hopin' you'd be all right. That you'd … that you'd forgive me. Because I did act like a right bastard.”

  “You acted like a man who was afraid,” said Jenny softly.

  “Afraid? I was dissolvin'! What I don't understand is … and you can tell me this is none of my business if you want to … you said you took on dragon form again, of yourself, with Ian's help, when the demons attacked the Hold.” He stopped in the alley along the stable wall, holding her hands in his. Moonlight glimmered a little on the dirty snow, made silver rounds of his spectacle lenses and diamonds of his breath. “What I don't understand is, why did you come back after that? After what I said, and what I did …”

  Jenny put her fingers to his lips. “When I made my choice five years ago—when Morkeleb first offered me the power of dragon form—my choice was a real one. I knew that to be human is to have what humans have, which is the near-certainty of occasional pain. And that there is a kind of pain that comes from loving, that doesn't come from any other thing in the living world. I chose to be human, John, something very few people can truly choose.”

  He shook his head and said, “No, love. We all choose it, sooner or late.”

  “Maybe,” said Jenny. “But having chosen, I would no more have called on Morkeleb to change me back—to run away from pain—than you would have called on the Demon Queen when you were at the stake. It is not what I am.”

  “And what are you, love?”

  And she smiled. “What I am.”

  Then as they turned to go, Jenny paused in her stride, something catching at her mind, half-remembered like a dropped glove. Something she'd left in the kitchen … done in the kitchen …

  She looked straight across the lane at the bare ground of the orchard, at a wisp of the straw someone had unwrapped from around the first of the pear trees and left in a corner in the snow. The straw burst into flames, causing John, a halfpace ahead of her, to whip around, sword in his hand like a conjurer's penny. He looked at the burning straw, looked at her, as she turned her eyes to the yellow flag of fire again and quenched it. Even above the moss-smell and the dung-smell and the piss-smell of the neighborhood, the wisp of fresh smoke was a touch of perfume.

  John said, “Ah, love,” and, sheathing his sword, put his two hands on the sides of her face and kissed her again, gentle and deep as the stir of spring beneath winter's ice.

  CHAPTER TEN

  “There's someone there,” whispered Jenny, in the breathsoft murmur of hunters in the Winterlands, whose life depends upon not being heard. Under the sigh of the wind in the pine trees, and the distant sursurrance of the unseen river, this wasn't difficult. She strained her ears, extended her senses toward the dark blot against the dark of the trees. “A woman …”

  She made her own heart quiet, listened beneath the soughing of the boughs. Putting aside the voice of the river, and each sound of the still winter night. Scenting the cloaked forms as a fox scents rabbits. “Herbed soap, no perfume. A child is with her, sleeping. Two children.” And whimpering with cold and fear in their sleep.

  “The nurse.” John's voice was no more than a thread in a mingled skein of tree rustlings. “Danae. And at a bet the nurse's child. Anything else?”

  Meaning, Jenny knew, any demons watching the place. She half-shut her eyes, closing out the sea roar of the wind in the trees and the leathery creak of the branches. Closing out the scents of coming rain, of wet vegetation, of smoke and sewage discernible even at five miles' distance from the city itself. Demons could wait in perfect silence, but the human bodies they wore would breathe, and their boots would creak and their clothing rustle. She heard none of these things. Moreover, the nurse's breathing, though the tense breath of wakefulness, was reasonably deep, not shallow with panic.

  “I don't think so.”

  “Well, I'll scream and point at you if you're wrong.”

  He whistled softly twice, just loud enough to sound over the wind, and walked toward the inky huddle of cloaked forms against the snow. Jenny heard him call out softly, “Danae,” and saw the pale oval of the woman's face against the ruffles of her hood. A knife glinted. She'd been holding it out of sight beneath the cloak. But she didn't attack, only held it ready, watching John with her whole body tense. “Where's the Prince?”

  “I don't know, my lord.” Her voice trembled with the cold, but she spoke as evenly as she apparently could. “I waited for him as long as I dared. But when I saw the Lady Trey returning from supper, I thought it best … I could not help overhearing …” She looked quickly aside, and shifted the knife in her gloved hands. Struggling, Jenny guessed, against speaking ill of the mistress who had for years been her dear friend.

  In a quieter voice she said, “He asked me if I thought she had changed. Trey—the Lady Trey, I mean.” And her other ar
m tightened protectively around the children sleeping within the all-blanketing cloak.

  Jenny remembered Danae from Millença's naming-feast, almost three years ago. A cousin of both Gareth's and Trey's, she was of the country nobility, barely a step above the wealthy yeomen farmers whose wide manors in districts like Nearhythe and Istmark were little kingdoms in themselves. She'd been married to one of the palace guards, a younger son of one of the lesser houses; her daughter Branwen had been barely six months old when he had died, in the fighting when the witch Zyerne had been trying to break the Citadel of Halnath.

  Without her elaborately starched coif, Danae looked younger, though now her shoulders had a weary stoop to them even when she straightened up, like one who has carried too heavy a load for too long. Her voice, deep for a woman's and with the slight accent of the West, was tired. “And she has changed, lord. Since her illness—or since she recovered, I should say, for when she was very bad, when we all thought we would lose her, she was … she was still … still herself, if you know what I mean.”

  “Aye,” murmured John. “Aye, I know exactly what you mean.”

  “It isn't that she isn't pleasant with me,” Danae hastened to add. “Afterward, I mean. Nor concerned for the child, especially now that the poor thing's started having these … these little sick spells. But she's short with the maids. Try as she will, she can't help that it angers her, that the children have taken against her. Not just poor little Milla, that might be expected, with this sickness they now say she has, but Branwen, too.”

  “And you?” John asked softly.

  Jenny saw Danae turn her face from him again. With the rising moon still tangled in the thick of the trees, and clouds coming in, the nurse must be struggling even to make out sight of him. Then Danae put away her knife and stood, John sheathing his sword to help her, for she was cramped with long sitting in the cold. There was a whisper of metal sliding, and a glimmer of yellow lantern light. By the thready glow of her lantern Danae studied John's face, not reassuring, Jenny thought, with his black beard and the savage half-healed wound on his cheekbone. Then she asked, “Is it … do you know if it's a catching sickness, that the child has, lord?”

  “Nay,” said John, “I don't know. I don't think so.” He reached down to touch the child Branwen's round face. “D'you have a horse?”

  Danae shook her head. “I thought it better … Prince Gareth said to take the girls out without being seen, and wait for him—and for you—here. There's a hunting-box that belonged to his mother—Queen Lyris—about four miles from here, where the river bends. The keeper's cottage is kept stocked with wood and food, though there hasn't been a keeper there this winter. I was afraid one of the grooms would send Trey word if I took out a horse so late, after the gates of the palace were shut.”

  “Likely they would. I'm just glad you were able to get out the city gates.”

  Danae shook her head and said, “If you have money, or a jeweled ring, that isn't hard.”

  “You didn't really send the plague, did you?” asked the girl Branwen, when John took the lantern and held it close to Mil-lença's face. Jenny saw the child move, and she must have opened her eyes: John looked at her long and steadily. Whatever he saw in the child's sleepy eyes must have reassured him, for he moved more easily as he looked into Branwen's face, then Danae's. Then he straightened up and snapped his fingers twice, once at shoulder height and once at waist height, an old signal that he and Jenny had used for years between them when patrolling the Winterlands, to say at a distance that all was well.

  Branwen followed these proceedings with curiosity, then willingly accepted the lantern John handed her as he drew his sword and gently lifted Millença into his other arm. “Prince Gareth said you didn't.”

  “I'm glad he believes in me,” remarked John, glancing around him at the woods as Danae gathered up the small bundle of the girls' belongings. “Nobody else seems to. And I did get a bit worried when they were tyin' me to that stake.”

  “If you didn't send the plague,” Branwen persisted, “why did the demons send the dragon to save you? I watched from the South Tower balcony. Mother told me not to, and I had to stay in my room afterward. But I'm glad I saw the dragon.”

  “Not near as glad as I was, believe me.”

  Jenny followed at a distance as the little party moved off into the woods, sometimes keeping in sight of the bobbing firefly of lantern light, sometimes tracking them only by the sound of the nurse's boots in the crust of snow between the trees. The wind blew harder and the cold deepened, piercing Jenny's sheepskin jacket and plaids like a thousand burning needles, until her body ached with it and her fingers grew numb in her gloves. Once Branwen said, “I'm cold, Mother,” but Milla, wrapped tight under John's decrepit cloak, never complained. Never said a word.

  What did she think, wondered Jenny, about the mother she had lost? About the woman who came to her one day wearing her mother's face and her mother's garments and her mother's hands, whom she knew was not her mother? Who looked at her with demon eyes?

  Jenny shivered at the wary silence of that child who had already learned so young not to trust. Her own daughter, Mag, was a year younger. Silent, too, but her silence had a different quality: She'd learned already that to find out things it was sometimes necessary only to keep completely still and wait.

  Three or four times, while Jenny lay in Miss Mab's small warm enclave in the mines, she had asked Morkeleb to scry the Hold, to tell her if all things were well there with Ian and Adric and Mag. She remembered the fire again, blazing out of the straw at her calling, and wondered if, when next she gazed into standing water, she would be able to see her children herself ?

  What of all the children in the city, she thought, who had had the same thing happen to them? To pass through the grief at a parent's illness, helpless witnesses to a mother's or a fa-ther's helpless prayers for a dying spouse—and then to see that dying parent come back to life and to KNOW something had changed.

  She thought of what a demon-parent would do to a child—would do to the survivor spouse, who hoped against frantic hope that all would be well with the beloved one—and her stubbly hair prickled on her head with rage. She understood demons now and understood what they did, to amuse themselves. Tears were a different entertainment than blood. Many demons preferred them.

  Do you like games? the Queen's voice whispered again in her mind.

  “… said he would speak to Lord Bliaud about the matter.” Danae's soft voice flickered back to Jenny on the raw whip of the wind. “But when I looked out into the court, I saw Lord Bliaud among those around Lady Trey, and no sign of Prince Gareth. It's true that since his father's recovery he has kept more to his own rooms, and I refuse to believe those who say it's jealousy. My lord Gareth hasn't an envious bone in his body, and so many times I've heard him speak of his father's illness. He'd never begrudge his return, to being the man he was.…”

  And John, his sword in hand, watched and listened to the darkness around them, above and past that murmuring voice, and the thrashing snarl of the winds. Jenny, whose ears were sharper, listened farther, and detected nothing but the bitter sounds of the night.

  All was darkness and cold at the hunting-box, a rustic longhouse built of logs and decorated with elaborate peasantstyle carving after the fashion popular among the very rich. John remained with Danae and the children at the foot of its front stair while Jenny flitted through the single shadowy hall of the downstairs, the myriad attic chambers above, then across the stable-yard to the keeper's cottage and the stables themselves. There was no sign of demons, no smell or whisper of them anywhere, not even in the covered well in the center of the yard. Jenny marked the corners of the buildings and the rails of their galleries with sigils of protection and inconspicuousness, still not at all certain that she had the power within her to make them work, though afterward she felt the familiar exhaustion of having called power.

  But it was unfamiliar power, and could have been only her imagining
, and the cold. She incorporated, too, for the first time in her spells a sigil of sourcing from the Dragonstar comet itself, weaving its little signs of iron and ice, of two tails and dual nature—details John had given her on the long walk from the city walls—like an improvisatory rill on her harp. “Why does it take so LONG?” demanded Branwen, when Danae and the children walked past her to the keeper's cottage. Danae shook her daughter by the shoulder in horror at this lapse of manners, but Jenny laughed.

  “It's like a great lady applying face-paint,” she explained, standing back from the light of the lantern as they passed her. “One cannot hurry.”

  The child halted to look up at her and sighed with grownup exasperation. “I know. Mother always tells me that when I use her paints.”

  Jenny would have liked to go into the cottage with them, for the night was icy. Instead, she crossed to the gallery that circled the main longhouse, and sheltered there from the wind, the hothwais of heat cradled in her hands. Watching the woods, and scenting the night. She would have liked to sit still, eyes shut, and let her mind drift, seeking Morkeleb's awareness as she guessed he sought hers. She had had no time, since she had emerged from the catch-bottle, to hunt for him so. In the city she had not dared take her attention from watchfulness, wariness. And when she had left the city, she had found John.

  Morkeleb would be seeking her, she knew, and would find her in time. The danger of demons was still too great to take her attention from each separate moan of the night-wind, each individual scent. She thought, I am here, my friend, and his image came to her mind briefly, shearing his way through the blackness of the clouds, or rising above them, through the billowing columns of moon-edged vapor, silver light flashing on his wings.

  In time, John emerged from the cottage door, crossed through the yard to her, leaning hard on the wind. He stopped to scan the gallery, though in the pitch-black darkness it was a wonder he could see even the outline of the longhouse; Jenny spoke the words of light, hesitantly, in her mind, and was rewarded with a thin blue radiance that flickered along the gallery's carved railing from ward to ward, then at once died.