Dragon’s Bane

by Barbara Hambly

  “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 warningly, 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 phantom. 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.

  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 candles 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 committee ...” he gestured toward the dark forms crowding forward 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; lanternlight danced over the hard gleam of satin, caressed velvet’s softer nap, and touched edges of stiffened 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.

  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. Technically 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 antechamber 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 corner of her lace veils aside from her cheek. Combs of 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 computation—which Jenny could not keep herself from making, 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 fingertip 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 latticework 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 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 Clerlock.” 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 Winterlands she would have been accounted royally clad.

  “Does it matter so much?”

  The girl Trey looked as embarrassed as years of deportment 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 properly dressed. I’m sorry,” she added quickly, blushing as she stepp
ed 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 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 wonder 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 discarded the idea—whatever gratification it might bring was scarcely worth the fight. She had been raised in the Winterlands, and every instinct she possessed whispered for the concealment of protective coloration.

  She held out her hands for the slithery armfuls 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 Zyeme 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 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 antechamber’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 velvet 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 necessary, 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? Outdoors? And with her husband!”... “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?” “Er—well—” Gareth sounded torn between his loyalty 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 lilting voice. “You did get his credentials, didn’t you? Membership 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, Zyeme 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. Zyeme 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 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 queerly feelingless anger, Jenny straightened her veils. The mere touch of the stiffened gauze fired a new spurt of irritation through her, annoyance at them and that same sense of bafflement she had felt before. The patterns of human relationships interested her, and this one, shot through with a web of artificiality 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 sparkle 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 Dragonsbane as a reward, 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. down onto a lace collar, was d
yed blue. Beside his graceful slimness, Gareth looked—and no doubt felt—angly, overgrown, and miserably out of place; his expression was one of profound unhappiness and embarrassment.

  It might have been merely because he wasn’t wearing his spectacles—they were doubtless hideously unfashionable—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 Dragonsbane 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 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.