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 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 hunkerbones, 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 turned-up sleeves and slung his cloak around his shoulders once more. The morning was foggy and cold, and the sweat he’d worked 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 probably 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 mistress. 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 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.
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 anyone 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 her 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 was 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 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 Lapidarus... ?”
“But what can we do?” 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 chalkiness. Behind his specs, his brown eyes were bright and alert. “He’s a canny old bird, and he knows Zyeme. 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 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 troubling 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 himself 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, 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 shaking 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 learn 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 Dockmarket; they went to the Sheep in the Mire. The place 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, handing 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 bottom, 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 Battlehammer’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 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, of jamais 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.
Dragon’s Bane Page 24