Dragon's Bane

  caught a thread ofcamelian from the shoulder-length mop

  of his hair. "Jen, we can't go on like this. You know we

  can't. We're weakening all the time. The lands of the

  King's law, the law that keeps the stronger from enslaving

  the weaker, are shrinking away. Every time a farm is

  wiped out by wolves or brigands or Iceriders, it's one less

  shield in the wall. Every time some family ups and goes

  south to indenture themselves as serfs there, always pro-

  vided they make it that far, it weakens those of us that

  are left. And the law itself is waning, as fewer and fewer

  42 Barbara Hambly

  people even know why there is law. Do you realize that

  because I've read a handful of volumes of Dotys and

  whatever pages of Polyborus' Jurisprudence I could find

  stuck in the cracks of the tower I'm accounted a scholar?

  We need the help of the King, Jen, if we're not to be

  feeding on one another within a generation. I can buy

  them that help."

  "With what?" asked Jenny softly. "The flesh off your

  bones? If you are killed by the dragon, what of your

  people then?"

  Beneath her cheek she felt his shoulder move. "I could

  be killed by wolves or bandits next week—come to that,

  I could fall off old Osprey and break my neck." And when

  she chuckled, unexpectedly amused at that, he added in

  an aggrieved voice, "It's exactly what my father did."

  "Your father knew no better than to ride drunk." She

  smiled a little in spite of herself. "I wonder what he would

  have made of our young hero?"

  John laughed in the darkness. "Gaw, he'd have eaten

  him for breakfast." Seventeen years, ten of which had

  been spent knowing Jenny, had finally given him a tol-

  erance of the man he had grown up hating. Then he drew

  her closer and kissed her hair. When he spoke again, his

  voice was quiet. "I have to do it, Jen. I won't be gone

  long."

  A particularly fierce gust of wind shivered in the tow-

  er's ancient bones, and Jenny drew the worn softness of

  quilts and furs up over her bare shoulders. A month,

  perhaps, she calculated; maybe a little more. It would

  give her a chance to catch up on her neglected medita-

  tions, to pursue the studies that she too often put aside

  these days, to come to the Hold to be with him and their

  sons.

  To be a mage you must be a mage, Caerdinn had said.

  Magic is the only key to magic. She knew that she was

  not the mage that he had been, even when she had known

  Dragonsbane 43

  him first, when he was in his eighties and she a skinny,

  wretched, ugly girl of fourteen. She sometimes wondered

  whether it was because he had been so old, at the end of

  his strength, when he came to teach her, the last of his

  pupils, or because she was simply not very good. Lying

  awake in the darkness, listening to the wind or to the

  terrible greatness of the moor silence which was worse,

  she sometimes admitted the truth to herself—that what

  she gave to John, what she found herself more and more

  giving to those two little boys snuggled together like pup-

  pies upstairs, she took from the strength of her power.

  All that she had, to divide between her magic and her

  love, was time. In a few years she would be forty. For

  ten years she had scattered her time, sowing it broadcast

  like a farmer in summer sunshine, instead of hoarding it

  and pouring it back into meditation and magic. She moved

  her head on John's shoulder, and the warmth of their long

  friendship was in the tightening of his arm around her.

  Had she forgone this, she wondered, would she be as

  powerful as Caerdinn had-once been? As powerful as she

  sometimes felt she could be, when she meditated among

  the stones on her lonely hill?

  She would have that time, with her mind undistracted,

  time to work and strive and study. The snow would be

  deep by the time John returned.

  If he returned.

  The shadow of the dragon of Wyr seemed to cover her

  again, blotting the sky as it swooped down like a hawk

  over the autumn dance floor at Great Toby. The sickening

  jam of her heart in her throat came back to her, as John

  ran forward under that descending shadow, trying to reach

  the terrified gaggle of children cowering in the center of

  the floor. The metallic stink of spat fire seemed to bum

  again in her nostrils, the screams echoing in her ears...

  Twenty-seven feet, John had said. What it meant was

  that from the top of the dragon's shoulder to the ground

  44 Barbara Hambly

  was the height of a man's shoulder, and half again that to

  the top of its tall haunches, backed by all that weight and

  strength and speed.

  And for no good reason she could think of, she remem-

  bered the sudden shift of the boy Gareth's eyes.

  After a long time of silence she said, "John?"

  "Aye, love?"

  "I want to go with you, when you ride south."

  She felt the hardening of the muscles of his body. It

  was nearly a full minute before he answered her, and she

  could hear in his voice the struggle between what he wanted

  and what he thought might be best. "You've said yourself

  it'll be a bad winter, love. I'm thinking one or the other

  of us should be here."

  He was right, and she knew it. Even the coats of her

  cats were thick this fall. A month ago she had been trou-

  bled to see how the birds were departing, early and swiftly,

  anxious to be gone. The signs pointed to famine and sleet,

  and on the heels of those would come barbarian raids

  from across the ice-locked northern sea.

  And yet, she thought... and yet... Was this the weak-

  ness of a woman who does not want to be parted from

  the man she loves, or was it something else? Caerdinn

  would have said that love clouded the instincts of a mage.

  "I think I should go with you."

  "You think I can't handle the dragon myself?" His

  voice was filled with mock indignation.

  "Yes," Jenny said bluntly, and felt the ribs vibrate under

  her hand with his laughter. "I don't know under what

  circumstances you'll be meeting it," she went on. "And

  there's more than that."

  His voice was thoughtful in the darkness, but not sur-

  prised. "It strikes you that way too, does it?"

  That was something people tended not to notice about

  John. Behind his facade of amiable barbarism, behind his

  frivolous fascination with hog-lore, granny-rhymes, and

  Dragonsbane 45

  how clocks were made lurked an agile mind and an almost

  feminine sensitivity to nuances of situations and relation-

  ships. There was not much that he missed.

  "Our hero has spoken of rebellion and treachery in the

  south," she said. "If the dragon has come, it will ruin the

  harvest, and rising bread-prices will make the situation

  worse. I think you'll need someone there whom you can

  trust."


  "I've been thinking it, too," he replied softly. "Now,

  what makes you think I won't be able to trust our Gar?

  I doubt he'd betray me out of pique that the goods aren't

  as advertised."

  Jenny rolled up onto her elbows, her dark hair hanging

  in a torrent down over his breast. "No," she said slowly,

  and tried to put her finger on what it was that troubled

  her about that thin, earnest boy she had rescued in the

  ruins of the old town. At length, she said, "My instincts

  tell me he can be trusted, at heart. But he's lying about

  something, I don't know what. I think I should go with

  you to the south."

  John smiled and drew her down to him again. "The

  last time I went against your instincts, I was that sorry,"

  he said. "Myself, I'm torn, for I can smell there's going

  to be danger here later in the winter. But I think you're

  right. I don't understand why the King would have given

  his word and his seal into the keeping of the likes of our

  young hero, who by the sound of it has never done more

  than collect ballads in all his life, and not to some proven

  warrior. But if the King's pledged his word to aid us, then

  I'd be a fool not to take the chance to pledge mine. Just

  the fact that there's only the two of us, Jen, shows how

  close to the edge of darkness all this land lies. Besides,"

  he added, sudden worry in his voice, "you've got to come."

  Her thoughts preoccupied by her nameless forebod-

  ings, Jenny turned her head quickly. "What is it? Why?"

  "We'll need someone to do the cooking."

  46 Barbara Hambly

  With a cat-swift move she was on top of him, smoth-

  ering his face under a pillow, but she was laughing too

  much to hold him. They tussled, giggling, their struggles

  blending into lovemaking. Later, as they drifted in the

  warm aftermath, Jenny murmured, "You make me laugh

  at the strangest times."

  He kissed her then and slept, but Jenny sank no further

  than the uneasy borderlands of half-dreams. She found

  herself standing once again on the lip of the gully, the heat

  from below beating at her face, the poisons scouring her

  lungs. In the drifting vapors below, the great shape was

  still writhing, heaving its shredded wings or clawing inef-

  fectually with the stumps of its forelegs at the small figure

  braced like an exhausted woodcutter over its neck, a drip-

  ping ax in his blistered hands. She saw John moving

  mechanically, half-asphyxiated with the fumes and sway-

  ing from the loss of the blood that gleamed stickily on his

  armor. The small stream in the gully was clotted and red

  with the dragon's blood; gobbets of flesh choked it; the

  stones were blackened with the dragon's fire. The dragon

  kept raising its dripping head, trying to snap at John; even

  in her dream, Jenny felt the air weighted with the strange

  sensation of singing, vibrant with a music beyond the

  grasp of her ears and mind.

  The singing grew stronger as she slid deeper into sleep.

  She saw against the darkness of a velvet sky the burning

  white disc of the full moon, her private omen of power,

  and before it the silver-silk flash of membranous wings.

  She woke in the deep of the night. Rain thundered

  against the walls of the Hold, a torrent roaring in dark-

  ness. Beside her John slept, and she saw in the darkness

  what she had noticed that morning in daylight: that for

  all his thirty-four years, he had a thread or two of silver

  in his unruly brown hair.

  A thought crossed her mind. She put it aside firmly,

  and just as firmly it reintruded itself. It was not a daylight

  Dragonsbane 47

  thought, but the nagging whisper that comes only in the

  dark hours, after troubled sleep. Don't be a fool, she told

  herself; the times you have done it, you have always

  wished you hadn't.

  But the thought, the temptation, would not go away.

  At length she rose, careful not to wake the man who

  slept at her side. She wrapped herself in John's worn,

  quilted robe and padded from the bedchamber, the worn

  floor like smooth ice beneath her small, bare feet.

  The study was even darker than the bedchamber had

  been, the fire there nothing more than a glowing line of

  rose-colored heat above a snowbank of ash. Her shadow

  passed like the hand of a ghost over the slumbering shape

  of the harp and made the sliver of reflected red wink along

  the pennywhistle's edge. At the far side of the study, she

  raised a heavy curtain and passed into a tiny room that

  was little more than a niche in the Hold's thick waU.

  Barely wider than its window, in daylight it was coolly

  bright, but now the heavy bull's-eye glass was black as

  ink, and the witchlight she called into being above her

  head glittered coldly on the rain streaming down outside.

  The phosphorescent glow that illuminated the room

  outlined the shape of a narrow table and three small

  shelves. They held things that had belonged to the cold-

  eyed ice-witch who had been John's mother, or to Caer-

  dinn—simple things, a few bowls, an oddly shaped root,

  a few crystals like fragments of broken stars sent for

  mending. Pulling her robe more closely about her. Jenny

  took from its place a plain pottery bowl, so old that what-

  ever designs had once been painted upon its outer surface

  had long since been rubbed away by the touch of mages'

  hands. She dipped it into the stone vessel of water that

  stood in a corner and set it upon the table, drawing up

  before it a tall, spindle-legged chair.

  For a time she only sat, gazing down into the water.

  Slips of foxfire danced on its black surface; as she slowed

  48 Barbara Hambly

  her breathing, she became aware of every sound from the

  roaring of the rain gusts against the tower's walls to the

  smallest drip of the eaves. The worn tabletop was like

  cold glass under her fingertips; her breath was cold against

  her own lips. For a time she was aware of the small flaws

  and bubbles in the glaze of the bowl's inner surface; then

  she sank deeper, watching the colors that seemed to swiri

  within the endless depths. She seemed to move down

  toward an absolute darkness, and the water was like ink,

  opaque, ungiving.

  Gray mists rolled in the depths, then cleared as if wind

  had driven them, and she saw darkness in a vast place,

  pricked by the starlike points of candleflame. An open

  space of black stone lay before her, smooth as oily water;

  around it was a forest, not of trees, but of columns of

  stone. Some were thin as silk, others thicker than the

  most ancient of oaks, and over them swayed the shadows

  of the dancers on the open floor. Though the picture was

  silent, she could feel the rhythm to which they danced—

  gnomes, she saw, their long arms brushing the floor as

  they bent, the vast, cloudy manes of their pale hair catch-

  ing rims of firelight like sun
set seen through heavy smoke.

  They danced around a misshapen stone altar, the slow

  dances that are forbidden to the eyes of the children of

  men.

  The dream changed. She beheld a desolation of charred

  and broken ruins beneath the dark flank of a tree-covered

  mountain. Night sky arched overhead, wind-cleared and

  heart-piercingly beautiful. The waxing moon was like a

  glowing coin; its light touching with cold, white fingers

  the broken pavement of the empty square below the hill-

  side upon which she stood, edging the raw bones that

  moldered in puddles of faintly smoking slime. Something

  flashed in the velvet shadow of the mountain, and she

  saw the dragon. Starlight gleamed like oil on the lean,

  Dragonsbane 49

  sable sides; the span of those enormous wings stretched

  for a moment like a skeleton's arms to embrace the moon's

  stem face. Music seemed to drift upon the night, a string

  of notes like a truncated air, and for an instant her heart

  leaped toward that silent, dangerous beauty, lonely and

  graceful in the secret magic of its gliding flight.

  Then she saw another scene by the low light of a dying

  fire. She thought she was in the same place, on a rise

  overlooking the desolation of the ruined town before the

  gates of the Deep. It was the cold hour of the tide's ebbing,

  some hours before dawn. John lay near the fire, dark

  blood leaking from the clawed rents in his armor. His face

  was a mass of blisters beneath a mask of gore and grime;

  he was alone, and the fire was dying. Its light caught a

  spangle of red from the twisted links of his torn mail shirt

  and glimmered stickily on the upturned palm of one blis-