Dragonstar

by Barbara Hambly

  “In her dream, Ian found the necklace for her, deep in the woods near the Queen's Beck. But in her dream, Mol said, Ian couldn't find it if anyone but her was there. He said—or somebody said to her—the spells won't show, if any's there to know.” He frowned, cogitating on the matter for a time, then said, “But you see, two days later the necklace did go missin', an' she hasn't found it yet. I've told her as how you've said”—his glance went to Jenny—“not to go off like that in the woods, 'specially with Ian, but she's spoke to him of it. She spoke to him yesterday.”

  Ordinarily, of course, an invitation to go off into the woods with Mol Bucket involved neither dreams, spells, nor disappearing pearl necklaces—at least, unless one was the besotted Farmer Gosbosom. But Jenny said nothing, turning the matter over in her mind.

  “When Dan Darrow dreamed that dream,” Muffle went on after a moment, “it was his best heifer as was lost—that black one he calls Madame, with the white star on her forehead? And she was strayed away, next day, only of course Dan has more sense than to obey what someone whispers at him in a dream.”

  “I dreamed Roth would come back,” said Peg, coming to the table with her bowl of stale bread crumbs in her hands. “My husband, you know, the goddess bless him wherever he is. Would come knockin' at the gate by the half-moon's light, in the tenth hour of the night, when all's pitch-dark an' cold.” Her dark eyes were wistful, and in the hearth-glow her long brown braids gleamed with silver, which had been bright as a bay colt when Roth had started off across the hills to visit his sister in Far West Riding one autumn day.

  “First I dreamed I went downstairs with Nin”–she named her youngest daughter, ten years old now—“and poor Roth held out his hand cryin', an' disappeared into the dark. That woke me, and when I slept again I dreamed again, and in my dream I got up and ran and fetched Muffle, like he'd told me to. But when we came to the gate all I saw of Roth was him fadin' back into the storm, cryin' my name.”

  The others at the table were silent. By their faces Jenny saw they'd heard the tale before, but it troubled them still. Ten years ago at the time of Roth's disappearance John had searched the Winterlands for weeks, for some sign of either his body or his desertion—for Roth the Gatekeeper had always been a lighthearted and light-minded man—and had found nothing.

  “Well,” said Peg, “on the night of the half-moon someone did come knock on the gate, in the tenth hour of the night, an' the night dead still an' calm. And I swear to you I didn't dare to even open the window, Jen. Just lay in the bed listenin'. Though the night was so still, no one cried out below. And after a while the knockin' stopped.”

  There was silence, and the weeping of the widowed winds against the shutters. Jenny reached back and put her hand over Peg's wrist. The gatekeeper gave her a tight cockeyed smile, like a child daring a chum to top that for a ghost story.

  “Were there tracks?” John asked at last.

  “You better believe there were tracks, an' none Roth would have made, neither, not with his narrow little feet.” She turned back to the hearth, where Aunt Jane waited impatiently for the bread crumbs: no ghost tales for her.

  “Did Farmer Darrow get Madame back?” Adric wanted to know.

  “Oh, aye,” Muffle said cheerily. “Found next day, over near the Wolf Hills, and it's a wonder the wolves didn't have the poor thing. I went down to the Queen's Beck after Mol told me of her dream, and found these tracks there, too. Barefoot tracks, staggerin' like as if him what made 'em was drunk or sick—or dyin' of cold, most like—but they went off into the glen straight enough. That was three days ago.”

  Jenny rose, as the talk turned onto other matters: the repairing of the stables, the prospects of the harvest's stored corn lasting until spring. Everyone, as usual, had to have his or her word and John talking nineteen to the dozen with them all as usual. Few noticed as Jenny picked up one of the sheepskin coats left to hang in the turret stair, and slung her plaids about her, and climbed the twisting stone flight to the walkway that circled the Hold's outer wall. The storm dragged at her skirts, shoved and thrust her about on the narrow battlement. Looking out over the wall, she could see only a blurred desolation of moorlands and heath, the village fields obscured by snow, the walls barely dark lines in the grayish white. Crescents of blowing ice skimmed the ground, the gauzy tracks of the wind.

  She thought of her house on Frost Fell, and the solitary peace she had had there for so many years, alone with the winds, and her herbs, and her cats.

  What are you? John had asked her, and she had replied, What I am.

  Miss Mab had said, The magic comes from what thou art, and all that thou art.

  The good and the bad. The dragon and the demon and the woman who had turned aside from them both.

  She saw Morkeleb, a skeleton shadow silhouetted in the mealy sleet, and grieved for a moment that she could not be two beings, and have two futures. But that, she understood now, was the essence of humankind. To have only one, and to choose.

  She held out her hands: my friend.

  Wizard-woman. He hung in the air, obscured by the blowing twilight but untouched, beautiful with the lean, thorny beauty of the dragon-kind, and his voice in her mind was the velvet essence of dreaming. Your Dreamweaver has said that he saw the Demon Queen, walking abroad in the sunlight of the streets; therefore must I go. She knows you have the catchbottle still. She will journey to the Skerries of Light, lest others arrive there first and wrest from Corvin the secret of her name. Beware, Wizard-woman. This they will try to do, the servants of Folcalor and the servants of Adromelech and whoever Aohila finds to serve her—or tricks into doing her will—once they know the bottle is in your possession as well.

  I will beware, she said. Can you not, Dragonshadow, warn Corvin in dreams, that fly swifter even than the flight of dragons to the islands of the west?

  And she felt the ripple of annoyance and scorn. Whatever else Morkeleb had laid aside, when he had laid aside his magic, there was still evidently the matter between Corvin and himself of which dragon was still the greatest loremaster and sorcerer of all of dragon-kind.

  If I warned him in dreaming of fire raining from the sky in the next hour, still he would but turn over in his sleep. And if I warned others—Centhwevir and Yrsgendl and Enismirdal—I am not sure they would understand. It is not a thing of dragons, to band together, save in our flights between the stars. I must go myself, and see what I can accomplish.

  Are you not, as Dragonshadow, able to convince Corvin of his danger? Or lead the others?

  The Dragonshadows … He hesitated, as if not certain that she would understand. And she heard in her mind the music of the Dragonshadows, felt the spirit-light and the warmth of them, dazzling and simple yet incomprehensible—even to the dragons, never understood.

  And she remembered saying to John, What I am …

  The Dragonshadows did not lead us, he said at length. We came here, and they followed. I suspect—but I do not know—they followed because they loved us.

  Yes, thought Jenny, feeling, understanding, that this was true. Yes.

  But I did not understand this at the time, because I did not understand what it was to love.

  Once you said to me, Wizard-woman, that the key to magic is to be found in magic, and the key to love, in love. The love that I learned of you was indeed my bane as a dragon. But like all true banes, all death, it proved to be a gate through which I passed into an unknown country. As for the Dragon shadows, they are very old, and have observed many things, and dreamed upon what they have seen. Yet most dragons never ask them why dragons exist, and what it means that we have the abilities that we have. Much less have they queried about the things that dwell on all the various worlds that we have seen. And now that I have passed that gate myself, and become a Dragonshadow, and seek the answers to these questions, they are gone.

  Things are as they are, Wizard-woman. And things being as they are, the only thing that I can do is go to the Skerries of Light to warn my nestmates�
� it was the first time she had heard him speak of relationship, or comradeship, with the others of his kind—of the danger they are in, and speak to them of your Dreamweaver's plan. I will return in a fortnight, to bear you and your Dreamweaver south again, time and to spare to be there ere the demons come to that place.

  Blessings … And the word could not encompass all that she wished for him, the shining glory of fortune and hope that she poured into his mind. It surprised him—she could feel it—as the understanding of love had once surprised him.

  And blessings on your nestmates, Centhwevir Blue-and-Golden, and Nymr the Blue, on my lovely green-and-gold Mellyn and Enismirdal and Yrsgendl and the others that were saved from the demons.

  Morkeleb said, Blessings upon you and yours, and she felt the hesitancy of his musical thoughts, and knew that he had never blessed anyone before.

  His blessing was like a double-handful of chiming stars.

  He turned upon the wind, and flew away through the dark afternoon toward the west.

  “How long's this storm been blowin'?” John was asking as Jenny came back into the kitchen. Several more people had arrived, Blossom and Aunt Hol and Muffle's daughter Cobweb and old Granny Brown, all of them talking at once and offering advice to Peg about what belonged in the pie.

  “This's the second day,” Aunt Rowe said, without even a pause at her loom.

  “Anyone else had any dreams?”

  “If they have,” said Muffle, “they're keepin'it to themselves.”

  John nodded thoughtfully, and glanced at Jenny across Mag's bent red head. “Someone will,” he said.

  The someone was Aunt Jane.

  She had always disliked Jenny, having seen what loving a witchwife had done to her brother. During the weeks of Jenny's estrangement from John, Jane had said cruel things about Jenny, both to John and to Ian, and to other women in the village as well. So Jenny was surprised, the next day, when she and Ian were sorting dried herbs in the loft above the kitchen, to hear Jane's heavy step creak on the ladder, and the woman's deep voice call out, “Mistress Jenny?”

  Jenny and Ian worked in near-darkness—night-sighted as mages are—but as Jane's red coif appeared above the trapdoor, Jenny kindled the wicks of the two iron lamps that hung on the wall near the great warm column of the kitchen chimney. “Thank you,” said Jane, as Ian came to help her—unnecessarily but politely—up the last few rungs. “Might I speak to your mother a bit alone, sweeting?” And she turned to Jenny, her square, heavy face uncomfortable in the wavery glow. The worst of the storm had abated during the night, but winds still scoured across the heath, and the day was very cold. This room, and the kitchen beneath it, were some of the few in the Hold that were genuinely warm, and shirts and petticoats were hung here to dry beneath rafter-loads of smoked meats and cheeses, fare on which the Hold folk lived most of the winter. The vast, dim attic smelled of rosemary and onions and clean linen, and smoke from the kitchen below.

  “I think I've had the dream you spoke of in the kitchen yesterday afternoon,” Jane said. “The dream of taking Ian out somewhere away from the Hold, into the woods.”

  “To find something only he could find?” Jenny brought over a firkin of raisins for her to sit on, and settled herself beside one of the smooth-scrubbed marble slabs where apples were dried in the fall.

  “In a manner of speaking.” Jane folded her big brown hands. “I dreamed there was a woman, a—a lady, hurt by bandits and needing help, but fearing to let any grown woman or man come near to her. It didn't feel like it had aught to do with stupid ruses, like Mol Bucket's necklace—not that those were real pearls, any more real than the kisses Gosbosom bought with them. But I saw this hurt lady plain, a sweet, decent woman, and needing healing, huddled out there in the storm. And I knew—and I think this is what made me know this was a sent dream after all—I knew that our John would fall in love with her. I saw them together, and him holding her hands, and looking at her with the eyes of love. And that was when I woke, and knew this was telling me what … what I wanted to hear.”

  Jenny was silent, looking into the older woman's apologetic dark eyes. Downstairs she dimly heard the thump of Aunt Rowe's loom, and Dilly's voice telling Mag a story in the kitchen. John was at the castle forge, engaged on a project with Muffle that even before breakfast had covered both men with soot and grime and the dust from the vaults beneath the Hold, where John had unearthed the debris of some curious old projects of his own. John had burned his workroom, before riding forth on his errantry for the Demon Queen. The things he had dragged out to work on with Muffle were years old, covered with mildew and rust.

  In any case, Jenny reflected, Jane would not have spoken to John about that dream. Not to Muffle, certainly, nor to any other in the Hold. “Thank you,” she said simply. “That was clever of you, to read the deception in something that … that unobvious.”

  Jane sniffed, and got to her feet. “I may not be clever like my nephew,” she said, with her wry toothy smile, “but I've lived long enough to know that a man who holds out candy in one hand usually has a rope in the other.” She added grudgingly, “And I know John'll never love any but you.”

  And you know a woman would understand that dream, thought Jenny, and a man, not—or not in this way. She said, “Where was this woman lying hurt?”

  “In your old house,” she said. “On Frost Fell.”

  Ian rode out to Frost Fell alone the following morning, when the winds finally sank away. From the attic of the small stone house, where she had watched John vanish into winter's first snowfall, Jenny listened for her son, sitting beside the hole where the steep stair ascended. She had scried the storm's ending just before dawn, and had taken the road over the crest of Toadback Hill under cover of the final flurries of blowing sleet. As the wind calmed, snow began to fall, a thin dusting that covered her tracks. Just after that, Bill and Sergeant Muffle went out to cut brush in the cranberry bog, which, John pointed out, was actually the logical place to ambush someone bound for Frost Fell. Between the bog and the Fell itself, there was no cover.

  So the ambush would have to be here in the house.

  Jenny smelled Caradoc when he entered, coming in through the old stable where Ian would not see his tracks. Her nape prickled. It was here, in early summer, that the demon-possessed wizard had waited for Ian. All those months ago—a lifetime, it felt like. And to this house Ian's dreams of despair had driven him after the loss of his demon, when he feared Folcalor's will would bend him to open a demon gate, as Bliaud had been bent. Even without Folcalor dwelling in his mind anymore, Caradoc would remember this place, as Jenny remembered the Sea-wights' Hell.

  Fool, she thought, listening to the faint, squelching thumps in the kitchen below. The stench of rotting flesh drifted up to her despite the afternoon's bitter cold. When he had taken the corpse of a dead sailor for his body, Caradoc had spoken of bargaining with Folcalor, of “making what he could” of the situation and of his knowledge. Is this your idea of rescue? he had demanded.

  Trapped in the moonstone, Caradoc had some power, weak and attenuated but possibly, Jenny reflected, almost as strong as her own small gifts were now. What he would do, or might do, with the greater powers that were Ian's, if he should kill the boy and use a demon spell to enter his body, she could only imagine.

  Years ago the man had been trapped by Folcalor through his vanity, his lust for greater powers than he had. And it was only a matter of time, thought Jenny, before he was trapped so again. It was clear to her he had not changed his belief in his own cleverness.

  Silence below, a waiting silence. Jenny, crouched close to the top of the attic stair, waited also. And touched, at her belt beneath the thick sheepskins of her coat, the silver catchbottle that had held, for a short time, the Demon Queen. This never left her. Folcalor had too many agents in this world.

  Had the rebellious demon seized the Burning Mirror, as John had said in the ruins of the mirror chamber in Ernine? Jenny had watched Aohila from almost the mo
ment of Folca-lor's departure, until she'd trapped her. She didn't think the Demon Queen had had the opportunity to move the mirror herself.

  And where was she now? What would she do, with the ten days until the setting of the Dragonstar returned the powers of the demons to what they had been for the past thousand years?

  Would she go to the Skerries of Light, as Morkeleb feared? Would the Dragonshadow encounter her there, in that solitary world of rocks and birds and shining water? And would he encounter her before she could destroy Corvin, or seize him as she had seized him before?

  Below her Jenny heard stealthy creaking, as if Caradoc leaned his weight on one of the bent-willow chairs for support. Her quick ears picked up the crunch of hooves on the frozen road up the Fell. She didn't move—didn't dare. If he was able, within his borrowed body, to send out dreams, he had sufficient use of the corpse's senses to detect her movements in the attic. She could not count on his being distracted by his prey's coming. Her sore hip was stiff from sitting in one position and her back ached. She hoped she wouldn't stumble when it came time to leap down the stair.

  John's right, she thought wryly. We're both getting too old for this.

  The light squeak of snow as Ian dismounted. His soft, husky alto: “Is anyone there?”

  “Here!” gasped a reply, startlingly woman-like, hushed and pleading. “Dear gods …”

  The squeak of the iron door hinges. Ian's boots on the flagstoned passage floor. “Where are you? Are you all right?”

  “Here! Kitchen … oh, please … I am dying.…”

  “Smells to me like you're gie dead already,” said John, from the kitchen door.

  Jenny was on her feet and down the stair, halberd in hand, as Caradoc whirled. She lashed out with a counterspell that completely failed to block whatever Word of pain and confusion he laid on John—John gasped, staggered, and Jenny cursed at her own weak uncertain powers, and stepping forward, whacked Caradoc hard behind the knees as he tried to rush John in the kitchen doorway. The wizard collapsed with a grunt and struck the floor, and from beneath the ragged gown he wore gusted a still fouler graveyard stench.