Gareth grinned back. “I suppose it had to rain on my birthday sometime,” he said, a little shyly. Then he hesitated, as if struggling against some inner constraint. “Aversin, listen,” he stammered. Then he coughed as the wind shifted, and smoke swept over them all.
“God’s Grandmother, it’s the bloody cakes!” John swore and dashed back to the fire, cursing awesomely. “Jen, it isn’t my fault...”
“It is.” Jenny walked in a more leisurely manner to join him, in time to help him pick the last pitiful black lump from the griddle and toss it into the waters of the marsh with a milky plash. “I should have known better than to trust you with this. Now go tend the horses and let me do what you brought me along to do.” She picked up the bowl of meal. Though she kept her face stern, the touch of her eyes upon his was like a kiss.
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 nervousness and with odd, struggling silences in his conversation. If he had lied about something at the Hold, Jenny thought, he was regretting it now—but not regretting it enough yet to confess the truth.
Whatever the truth was, she felt that she came close to learning it the day after the rescue from the Meewinks. John had ridden ahead to scout the ruinous stone bridge that spanned the torrent of the Snake River, leaving them alone with the spare 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 lure him away from his friends. Since they drink blood, they must be fleshly enough to require sustenance; but, other than that, no one knows much about them. You had a narrow escape.”
“I know,” he mumbled, looking shamefacedly down at his hands. They were bare, and chapped with cold—as well as his cloak and sword, he had lost his gloves in the house of the Meewinks; Jenny suspected that later in the winter the Meewinks would boil them and eat the leather. One of John’s old plaids was draped on over the boy’s doublet and borrowed jerkin. With his thin hair dripping with moisture down onto the lenses of his cracked spectacles, he looked very little like the young courtier who had come to the Hold.
“Jenny,” he said hesitantly, “thank you—this is the second time—for saving my life. I—I’m sorry I’ve behaved toward you as I have. It’s just that...” His voice tailed off uncertainly.
“I suspect,” said Jenny kindly, “that you had me mistaken for someone else that you know.”
Ready color flooded to the boy’s cheeks. Wind moaned through the bare trees—he startled, then turned back to her with a sigh. “The thing is, you saved my life at the risk of your own, and I endangered you both stupidly. I should have known better than to trust the Meewinks; I should never have left the camp. But...”
Jenny smiled and shook her head. The rain had ceased, and she had put back her hood, letting the wind stir in her long hair; with a touch of her heels, she urged The Stupider Roan on again, and the whole train of them moved slowly down the trail.
“It is difficult,” she said, “not to believe in the illusions of the Whisperers. Even though you know that those whom you see cannot possibly be there outside the spell-circle crying your name, there is a part of you that needs to go to them.”
“What—what shapes have you seen them take?” Gareth asked in a hushed voice.
The memory was an evil one, and it was a moment before Jenny answered. Then she said, “My sons. Ian and Adric.” The vision had been so real that even calling their images in Caerdinn’s 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, Gareth of Magloshaldon?”
He startled at that, and for an instant she saw fright and guilt in his gray eyes. He stammered, “I—I’m Gareth of—of Magloshaldon. It’s a province of Belmarie...”
Her eyes sought his and held them in the gray shadows of the trees. “And if you were not of that province, would you still be Gareth?”
“Er—yes. Of course. I...”
“And if you were not Gareth?” she pressed him, holding his gaze and mind locked with her own. “Would you still be you? If you were crippled, or old—if you became a leper, or lost your manhood—who would you be then?”
“I don’t know—”
“You know.”
“Stop it!” He tried to look away and could not. Her grip upon him tightened, as she probed at his mind, showing him it through her eyes: a vivid kaleidoscope of the borrowed images of a thousand ballads, burning with the overwhelming physical desires of the adolescent; the raw wounds left by some bitter betrayal, and over all, the shadowing darkness of a scarcely bearable guilt and fear.
She probed at that darkness—the lies he had told her and John at the Hold, and some greater guilt besides. A true crime, she wondered, or only that which seemed one to him? Gareth cried, “Stop it!” again, and she heard the despair and terror in his voice; for a moment, through his eyes, she saw herself—pitiless blue eyes in a face like a white wedge of bone between the cloud-dark streams of her hair. She remembered when Caerdinn had done this same thing to her, and released Gareth quickly. He turned away, covering his face, his whole body shivering with shock and fright.
After a moment Jenny said softly, “I’m sorry. But this is the inner heart of magic, the way all spells work—with the essence, the true name. It is true of the Whisperers and of the greatest of mages as well.” She clucked to the horses and they started forward again, their hooves sinking squishily into the tea-colored ooze. She went on, “All you can do is ask yourself if it is reasonable that those you see would be there in the woods, calling to you.”
“But that’s just it,” said Gareth. “It was reasonable. Zyeme...” 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 strange and cloudy dream of the dark-haired woman and her tinkling laughter.
“And you love her?”
Gareth blushed even redder. In a stifled voice he repeated, “She is the King’s mistress.”
As I am John’s, Jenny thought, suddenly realizing whence his anger at her had stemmed.
“In any case,” Gareth went on after a moment, “we’re all in love with her. That is—she’s the first lady of the Court, the most beautiful... We write sonnets to her beauty...”
“Does she love you?” inquired Jenny, and Gareth fell silent for a time, concentrating on urging his horse through the mud and up the stony slope beyond.
At length he said, “I—I don’t know. Sometimes I think...” Then he shook his head. “She frightens me,” he admitted. “And yet—she’s a witch, you see.”
“Yes,” said Jenny softly. “I guessed that, from what you said at the Hold. You feared I would be like her.”
He looked stricken, as if caught in some horrible social gaffe. “But—but you’re not. She’s very beautiful...” He broke off, blushing in earnest, and Jenny laughed.
“Don’t worry. I learned a long time ago what a mirror was for.”
“But you are beautiful,” he insisted. “That is—Beautiful isn’t the right word.”
“No.” Jenny smiled. “I do think ‘ugly’ is the word you’re looking for.”
Gareth shook his head stubbornly, his honesty forbidding him to call her beautiful and his inexperience making it impossible to express what he did mean. “Beauty—beauty really doesn’t have anything to do with it,” he said at last. “And she’s nothing like you—for all her beauty, she’s crafty and hard-hearted and cares for nothing save the pursuit of her powers.”
“Then she is like me,” said Jenny. “For I am crafty—skilled in my crafts, such as they are—and I have been called hard-hearted since I was a little girl and chose to sit staring at the flame of a candle until the pictures came, rather than play at house with the other little girls. And as for the rest...” She sighed. “The key to magic is magic; to be a mage you must be a mage. My old master used to say that. The pursuit of your power takes all that you have, if you will be great—it leaves neither time, nor energy, for anything else. We are born with the seeds of power in us and driven to be what we are by a hunger that knows no slaking. Knowledge—power—to know what songs the stars sing; to center all the forces of creation upon a rune drawn in the air—we can never give over the seeking of it. It is the stuff of loneliness, Gareth.”
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 mageborn 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 mageborn, 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, 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 of Aversin 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 ice storm, she and the frost-eyed wolf who was her companion. She was never seen in the Winterlands again. And I...”
There was long silence, broken only by the soft squish of hooves in the roadbed, the patter of rain, and the occasional 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 children, 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 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.” 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 mageborn go, they go upon their two feet.”
“But...” His high forehead wrinkled in a frown. Having 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 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 inde
ed,” 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 stumbled 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 cursing the mules Clivy and Melonhead as he unloaded the last of the packs. “The rebel Master of Halnath. He always told me to stay away from her. And he hated her influence over the King.”
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