Dragonsbane

by Barbara Hambly

  “Well, he hardly could, now, could he?” John remarked, as the three gnomes left the court in the wake of the King’s party. Only Miss Mab had caught Jenny’s eye and winked at her. John went on, “If he came out and said, ‘Thank you for blowing up the Stone,’ that would be admitting that he was wrong about Zyerne not poisoning it.”

  Gareth, who was still standing hand-in-hand with Trey beside them, laughed. “You know, I think he does admit it in his heart, though I don’t think he’ll ever completely forgive us for doing it. At least, he’s civil to me in Council— which is fortunate, since I’m going to have to be dealing with him for a long time.”

  “Are you?” A flicker of intense interest danced in John’s eye.

  Gareth was silent for a long moment, fingering the stiff lace of his cuff and not meeting John’s gaze. When he looked up again, his face was weary and sad.

  “I thought it would be different,” he said quietly. “I thought once Zyerne was dead, he would be all right. And he’s better, he really is.” He spoke like a man trying to convince himself that a mended statue is as beautiful as it was before it broke. “But he’s—he’s so absentminded. Badegamus says he can’t be trusted to remember edicts he’s made from one day to the next. When I was in Bel, we made up a Council—Badegamus, Balgub, Polycarp, Dromar, and I—to sort out what we ought to do; then I tell Father to do it—or remind him it’s what he was going to do, and he’ll pretend he remembers. He knows he’s gotten forgetful, though he doesn’t quite remember why. Sometimes he’ll wake in the night, crying Zyerne’s name or my mother’s.” The young man’s voice turned momentarily unsteady. “But what if he never recovers?”

  “What if he never does?” John returned softly. “The Realm will be yours in any case one day, my hero.” He turned away and began tightening the cinches of the mules, readying them for the trek down through the city to the northward road.

  “But not now!” Gareth followed him, his words making soft puffs of steam in the morning cold. “I mean—I never have time for myself anymore! It’s been months since I worked on my poetry, or tried to complete that southern variant of the ballad of Antara Warlady...”

  “There’ll be time, by and by.” The Dragonsbane paused, resting his hand on the arched neck of Battlehammer, Gareth’s parting gift to him. “It will get easier, when men know to come to you directly instead of to your father.”

  Gareth shook his head. “But it won’t be the same.”

  “Is it ever?” John moved down the line, tightening cinches, checking straps on the parcels of books—volumes of healing, Anacetus’ works on greater and lesser demons, Luciard’s Firegiver, books on engineering and law, by gnomes and men. Gareth followed him silently, digesting the fact that he was now, for all intents and purposes, the Lord of Bel, with the responsibilities of the kingdom—for which he had been academically prepared under the mental heading of “some day”—thrust suddenly upon his unwilling shoulders. Like John, Jenny thought pityingly, he would have to put aside the pursuit of his love of knowledge for what he owed his people and return to it only when he could. The only difference was that his realm was at peace and that John had been a year younger than Gareth was when the burden had fallen to him.

  “And Bond?” John asked gently, looking over at Trey.

  She sighed and managed to smile. “He still asks about Zyerne,” she said softly. “He really did love her, you know. He knows she’s dead and he tries to pretend he remembers it happening the way I told him, about her falling off a horse... But it’s odd. He’s kinder than he was. He’ll never be considerate, of course, but he’s not so quick or so clever, and I think he hurts people less. He dropped a cup at luncheon yesterday—he’s gotten very clumsy—and he even apologized to me.” There was a slight wryness to her smile, perhaps to cover tears. “I remember when he would not only have blamed me for it, but gotten me to blame myself.”

  She and Gareth had been following John down the line, still hand in hand, the girl’s rose-colored skirts bright against the pewter grayness of the frosted morning. Jenny, standing apart, listened to their voices, but felt as if she saw them through glass, part of a life from which she was half-separated, to which she did not have to go back unless she chose. And all the while, her mind listened to the sky, hearing with strange clarity the voices of the wind around the Citadel towers, seeking something...

  She caught John’s eye on her and saw the worry crease between his brows; something wrung and wrenched in her heart.

  “Must you go?” Gareth asked hesitantly, and Jenny, feeling as if her thoughts had been read, looked up; but it was to John that he had spoken. “Could you stay with me, even for a little while? It will take nearly a month for the troops to be ready—you could have a seat on the Council. I—I can’t do this alone.”

  John shook his head, leaning on the mule Clivy’s withers. “You are doing it alone, my hero. And as for me, I’ve my own realm to look after. I’ve been gone long as it is.” He glanced questioningly at Jenny as he spoke, but she looked away.

  Wind surged down around them, crosswise currents swirling her plaids and her hair like the stroke of a giant wing. She looked up and saw the shape of the dragon melting down from the gray and cobalt of the morning sky.

  She turned from the assembled caravan in the court without a word and ran to the narrow stair that led up to the walls. The dark shape hung like a black kite on the wind, the soft voice a song in her mind.

  By my name you have bidden me go, Jenny Waynest, he said. Now that you are going, I too shall depart. But by your name, I ask that you follow. Come with me, to the islands of the dragons in the northern seas. Come with me, to be of us, now and forever.

  She knew in her heart that it would be the last time of his asking; that if she denied him now, that door would never open again. She stood poised for a moment, between silver ramparts and silver sky. She was aware of John climbing the steps behind her, his face emptied of life and his spectacle lenses reflecting the pearly colors of the morning light; was aware, through him, of the two little boys waiting for them in the crumbling tower of Alyn Hold—boys she had borne without intention of raising, boys she should have loved, she thought, either more or less than she had.

  But more than them, she was aware of the dragon, drifting like a ribbon against the remote white eye of the day moon. The music of his name shivered in her bones; the iron and fire of his power streaked her soul.

  To be a mage you must be a mage, she thought. The key to magic is magic.

  She turned and looked back, to see John standing on the root-buckled pavement between the barren apple trees behind her. Past him, she glimpsed the caravan of horses in the court below, Trey and Gareth holding the horses’ heads as they snorted and fidgeted at the scent of the dragon. For a moment, the memory of John’s body and John’s voice overwhelmed her—the crushing strength of his muscles and the curious softness of his lips, the cold slickness of a leather sleeve, and the fragrance of his body mixed with the more prosaic pungence of woodsmoke and horses that permeated his scruffy plaids.

  She was aware, too, of the desperation and hope in his eyes.

  She saw the hope fade, and he smiled. “Go if you must, love,” he said softly. “I said I wouldn’t hold you, and I won’t. I’ve known it for days.”

  She shook her head, wanting to speak, but unable to make a sound, her dark hair swirled by the wind of the dragon’s wings. Then she turned from him, suddenly, and ran to the battlements, beyond which the dragon lay waiting in the air.

  Her soul made the leap first, drawing power from the wind and from the rope of crystal thought that Morkeleb flung her, showing her the way. The elements around the nucleus of her essence changed, as she shed the shape that she had known since her conception and called to her another, different shape. She was half-conscious of spreading her arms against the wind as she strode forward over the edge of the battlement, of the wind in her dark hair as she sprang outward over the long drop of stone and cliff and empt
iness. But her mind was already speeding toward the distant cloud peaks, the moon, the dragon.

  On the walls behind her, she was aware of Trey whispering, “She’s beautiful...”

  Against the fading day moon, the morning’s strengthening light caught in the milk-white silk of her spreading wings and flashed like a spiked carpet of diamonds along the ghost-pale armor of the white dragon’s back and sides.

  But more than of that, she was conscious of John, Dragonsbane of ballad and legend, watching her with silent tears running down his still face as she circled into the waiting sky, like a butterfly released from his hand. Then he turned from the battlements, to the court where the horses waited. Taking the rein from the stunned Gareth, he mounted Battlehammer and rode through the gateway, to take the road back to the north.

  CHAPTER XVIII

  THEY FLEW NORTH together, treading the woven roads of the sky.

  The whole Earth lay below her, marked with the long indigo shadows of morning, the bright flash of springing water, and the icy knives of the glaciers. She saw the patterns of the sea, with its currents of green and violet, its great, gray depths, and the scrum of white lace upon its surface, and those of the moving air. All things were to her as a dragon sees them, a net of magic and years, covering the Earth and holding it to all the singing universe in a crystal web of time.

  They nested among the high peaks of Nast Wall, among the broken bone ends of the world, looking eastward over the gorges where the bighorn sheep sprang like fleas from rock to rock, past dizzying drops of green meltwater and woods where the dampness coated each tree in pillows of emerald moss, and down to the woods on the foothills of the Marches, where those who swore fealty to the Master dwelt. Westward, she could look past the glacier that lay like a stilled river of green and white through the gouged gray breakers of the cliffs, past cold and barren rocks, to see the Wildspae gleaming like a sheet of brown silk beneath the steam of its mists and, in the glimmering bare woods along its banks, make out the lacework turrets of Zyerne’s hunting lodge among the trees.

  Like a dragon, she saw backward and forward in time; and like a dragon, she felt no passion at what she saw.

  She was free, to have what she had always sought— not only the power, which the touch of Morkeleb’s mind had kindled in her soul, but freedom to pursue that power, released from the petty grind of the work of days.

  Her mind touched and fingered that knowledge, wondering at its beauty and its complexity. It was hers now, as it had always been hers for the taking. No more would she be asked to put aside her meditations, to trek ten miles on foot over the wintry moors to deliver a child; no more would she spend the hours needed for the study of her power ankle-deep in a half-frozen marsh, looking for frogwort for Muffle the smith’s rheumatism.

  No more would her time—and her mind—be divided between love and power.

  Far off, her dragon’s sight could descry the caravan of horses, making their antlike way along the foothills and into the woods. So clear was her crystal sight that she could identify each beast within that train—the white Moon Horse, the balky roans, the stupid sorrel Cow, and the big liver-bay Battlehammer—she saw, too, the flash of spectacle lenses and the glint of metal spikes on a patched old doublet.

  He was no more to her now than the first few inches upon the endless ribbon of dragon years. Like the bandits and the wretched Meewinks—like his and her sons—he had his own path to follow through the labyrinth patterns of darkening time. He would go on with his fights for his people and with his dogged experiments with rock salts and hot-air balloons, his model ballistas and his quest for lore about pigs. One day, she thought, he would take a boat out to the rough waters of Eldsbouch Cove to search for the ruins of the drowned breakwater, and she would not be waiting for him on the round pebbles of the gravel beach... He would ride out to the house beneath the standing stones on Frost Fell, and she would not be standing in its doorway.

  In time, she knew, even these memories would fade. She saw within herself, as she had probed at the souls of others. Trey’s, she recalled, had been like a clear pool, with bright shallows and unsuspected depths. Zyerne’s had been a poisoned flower. Her own soul she saw also as a flower whose petals were turning to steel at their outer edges but whose heart was still soft and silky flesh. In time, it would be all steel, she saw, breathtakingly beautiful and enduring forever—but it would cease to be a flower.

  She lay for a long time in the rocks, motionless save for the flick of her jeweled antennae as she scried the colors of the wind.

  It was thus to be a dragon, she told herself, to see the patterns of all things from the silence of the sky. It was thus to be free. But pain still poured from some broken place inside her—the pain of choice, of loss, and of stillborn dreams. She would have wept, but there was nothing within dragons that could weep. She told herself that this was the last time she would have to feel this pain or the love that was its source. It was for this immunity that she had sought the roads of the sky.

  The key to magic is magic, she thought. And all magic, all power, was now hers.

  But within her some other voice asked, For what purpose? Afar off she was aware of Morkeleb, hunting the great-horned sheep in the rocks. Like a black bat of steel lace, he passed as soundlessly as his own shadow over the snowfields, wrapping himself in the colors of the air to drop down the gorges, the deceptive glitter of his magic hiding him from the nervous, stupid eyes of his prey. Magic was the bone of dragon bones, the blood of their blood; the magic of the cosmos tinted everything they perceived and everything they were.

  And yet, in the end, their magic was sterile, seeking nothing but its own—as Zyerne’s had been.

  Zyerne, Jenny thought. The key to magic is magic. For it Zyerne had sacrificed the men who loved her, the son she would have borne, and, in the end, her very humanity—even as she herself had done!

  Caerdinn had been wrong. For all his striving to perfect his arts, in the end he had been nothing but a selfish, embittered old man, the end of a Line that was failing because it sought magic for magic’s sake. The key to magic was not magic, but the use of magic; it lay not in having, but in giving and doing—in loving, and in being loved.

  And to her mind there rose the image of John, sitting beside Morkeleb in the high court of the Citadel. Having so little, we shared among ourselves to make any of it worth having... the consequences of not caring enough to do it would have been worse...

  It had been John all along, she thought. Not the problem, but the solution.

  Shadow circled her, and Morkeleb sank glittering to the rocks at her side. The sun was half-down the west and threw the shimmer of the blue glacier light over him like a sparkling cloak of flame.

  What is it, wizard woman?

  She said, Morkeleb, return me to being what I was.

  His scales bristled, flashing, and she felt the throb of his anger deep in her mind. Nothing can ever return to being what it was, wizard woman. You know that. My power will be within you forever, nor can the knowledge of what it is to be a dragon ever be erased from your mind.

  Even so, she said. Yet I would rather live as a woman who was once a dragon than a dragon who was once a woman. On the steps of the Deep, I killed with fire, as a dragon kills; and like a dragon, I felt nothing. I do not want to become that, Morkeleb.

  Bah, Morkeleb said. Heat smoked from the thousand razor edges of his scales, from the long spikes and the folded silk of his wings. Do not be a fool, Jenny Waynest. All the knowledge of the dragons, all their power, is yours, and all the years of time. You will forget the loves of the earth soon and be healed. The diamond cannot love the flower, for the flower lives only a day, then fades and dies. You are a diamond now.

  The flower dies, Jenny said softly, having lived. The diamond will never do either. I do not want to forget, and the healing will make me what I never wanted to be. Dragons have all the years of time, Morkeleb, but even dragons cannot roll back the flow of days, nor return along th
em to find again time that they have lost. Let me go.

  No! His head swung around, his white eyes blazing, his long mane bristling around the base of his many horns. I want you, wizard woman, more than I have ever wanted any gold. It is something that was born in me when your mind touched mine, as my magic was born in you. Having you, I will not give you up.

  She gathered her haunches beneath her and threw herself out into the void of the air, white wings cleaving the wind. He flung himself after, swinging down the gray cliffs and waterfalls of Nast Wall, their shadows chasing one another over snow clefts dyed blue with the coming evening and rippling like gray hawks over the darkness of stone and chasm. Beyond, the world lay carpeted by autumn haze, red and ochre and brown; and from the unleaved trees of the woods near the river, Jenny could see a single thread of smoke rising, far off on the evening wind.

  The whiteness of the full moon stroked her wings; the stars, through whose secret paths the dragons had once come to the earth and along which they would one day depart, swung like a web of light in their unfolding patterns above. Her dragon sight descried the camp in the woods and a lone, small figure patiently scraping burned bannocks off the griddle, books from a half-unpacked box stacked around him.

  She circled the smoke, invisible in the colors of the air, and felt the darkness of a shadow circling above her.

  Wizard woman, said the voice of the dragon in her mind, is this truly what you want?

  She did not reply, but she knew that, dragon-wise, he felt the surge and patterns of her mind. She felt his bafflement at them, and his anger, both at her and at something within himself.

  At length he said, I want you, Jenny Waynest. But more than you, I want your happiness, and this I do not understand—I do not want you in grief. And then, his anger lashing at her like a many-tailed whip, You have done this to me!

  I am sorry, Morkeleb, she said softly. What you feel is the love of humans, and a poor trade for the power that the touch of your mind gave me. It is what I learned first, from loving John—both the pain and the fact that to feel it is better than not to be able to feel.