teeth hard against a queasiness that washed over her at
the sight of the place. Since first she had known what
they were, she had hated the Meewinks.
John slid from his dapple war horse Osprey's back and
looped his rein and Battlehammer's over the limb of a
sapling. His face, in the rainy darkness, was taut with a
mingling of hatred and disgust. Twice households of Mee-
winks had tried to establish themselves near Alyn Hold;
both times, as soon as he had learned of them, he had
raised what militia he could and burned them out. A few
had been killed each time, but he had lacked the men to
pursue them through the wild lands and eradicate them
completely. Jenny knew he still had nightmares about what
he had found in their cellars.
He whispered, "Listen," and Jenny nodded. From the
house she could detect a faint clamor of voices, muffled,
as if half-below the ground, thin and yammering like the
barking of beasts. Jenny slid her halberd from the holster
on Moon Horse's saddle and breathed to all three mounts
for stillness and silence. She sketched over them the spells
of ward, so that the casual eye would pass them by, or
think they were something other than horses—a hazel
thicket, or the oddly shaped shadow of a tree. It was these
same spells upon the camp, she knew, that had prevented
Dragonsbane 67
Gareth from finding his way back to it, once what must
have been the Whisperer had led him away.
John tucked his spectacles into an inner pocket. "Right,"
he murmured. "You get Gar—I'll cover you both."
Jenny nodded, feeling cold inside, as she did when she
emptied her mind to do some great magic beyond her
power, and steeled herself for what she knew was coming.
As they crossed the filthy yard and the strange, muffled
outcry in the house grew stronger, John kissed her and,
turning, smashed his booted foot into the small house's
door.
They broke through the door like raiders robbing Hell.
A hot, damp fetor smote Jenny in the face as she barged
through on John's heels, the putrid stink of the filth the
Meewinks lived in and of the decaying fish they ate—
above it all was the sharp, copper-bright stench of new-
shed blood. The noise was a pandemonium of yammering
screams; after the darkness outside, even the smoky glow
of the fire in the unnaturally huge hearth seemed blinding.
Bodies seethed in a heaving mob around the small door
at the opposite side of the room; now and then sharp
flashes of light glinted from the knives clutched in moist
little hands.
Gareth was backed to the doorpost in the midst of the
mob. He had evidently fought his way that far but knew
if he descended into the more open space of the big room
he would be surrounded. His left arm was wrapped,
shieldlike, in a muffling tangle of stained and filthy bed-
ding; in his right hand was his belt, the buckle-end of
which he was using to slash at the faces of the Meewinks
all around him. His own face was streaming with blood
from knife-cuts and bites—mixed with sweat, it ran down
and encrimsoned his shirt as if his throat had been cut.
His naked gray eyes were wide with a look of sickened,
nightmare horror.
The Meewinks around him were gibbering like the souls
68 Barbara Hambly
of the damned. There must have been fifty of them, all
armed with their little knives of steel, or of sharpened
shell. As John and Jenny broke in. Jenny saw one of them
crawl in close to Gareth and slash at the back of his knee.
His thighs were already gashed with a dozen such attempts,
his boots sticky with runnels of blood; he kicked his
attacker in the face, rolling her down a step or two into
the mass of her fellows. It was the old woman he had
kept John from shooting.
Without a word, John plunged down into the heaving,
stinking mob. Jenny sprang after him, guarding his back;
blood splattered her from the first swing of his sword,
and around them the noise rose like the redoubling of a
storm at sea. The Meewinks were a small folk, though
some of the men were as tall as she; it made her cringe
inside to cut at the slack white faces of people no bigger
than children and to slam the weighted butt of the halberd
into those pouchy little stomachs and watch them fall,
gasping, vomiting, and choking. But there were so many
of them. She had kilted her faded plaid skirts up to her
knees to fight and she felt hands snatch and drag at them,
as one man caught up a cleaver from among the butcher's
things lying on the room's big table, trying to cripple her.
Her blade caught him high on the cheekbone and opened
his face down to the opposite comer of his jaw. His scream
ripped the cut wider. The stench of blood was every-
where.
It seemed to take only seconds to cross the room.
Jenny yelled, "Gareth!" but he swung at her with the
belt—she was short enough to be a Meewink, and he had
lost his spectacles. She flung up the halberd; the belt
wrapped itself around the shaft, and she wrenched it from
his hands. "It's Jenny!" she shouted, as John's sword
strokes came down, defending them both as it splattered
them with flying droplets of gore. She grabbed the boy's
Dragonsbane 69
bony wrist, jerking him down the steps into the room.
"Now, run!"
"But we can't..." he began, looking back at John, and
she shoved him violently in the direction of the door. After
what appeared to be a momentary struggle with a desire
not to seem a coward by abandoning his rescuers, Gareth
ran. They passed the table and he caught up a meat hook
in passing, swinging at the pallid, puffy faces all around
them and at the little hands with their jabbing knives.
Three Meewinks were guarding the door, but fell back
screaming before the greater length of Jenny's weapon.
Behind her, she could hear the squeaky cacophony around
John rising to a crescendo; she knew he was outnum-
bered, and her instincts to rush back to fight at his side
dragged at her like wet rope. It was all she could do to
force herself to hurl open the door and drag Gareth at a
run across the clearing outside.
Gareth balked, panicky. "Where are the horses? How
are we...?"
For all her small size, she was strong; her shove nearly
toppled him. "Don't ask questions!" Already small,
slumped forms were running about the darkness of the
woods ahead. The ooze underfoot soaked through her
boots as she hauled Gareth toward where she, at least,
could see the three horses, and she heard Gareth gulp
when they got close enough for the spells to lose their
effectiveness.
While the boy scrambled up to Battlehammer's back,
Jenny flung herself onto Moon Horse, caught Osprey's
lead-rein, and spurred back
toward the house in a por-
ridgey spatter of mud. Pitching her voice to cut through
the screaming clamor within, she called out, "JOHN!" A
moment later a confused tangle of figures erupted through
the low doorway, like a pack of dogs trying to bring down
a bear. The white glare of the witchlight showed Aversin's
sword bloody to the pommel, his face streaked and run-
70 Barbara Hambly
rung with his own blood and that of his attackers, his
breath pouring like a ribbon of steam from his mouth.
Meewinks clung to his arms and his belt, hacking and
chewing at the leather of his boots.
With a screaming battle cry like a gull's, Jenny rode
down upon them, swinging her halberd like a scythe. Mee-
winks scattered, mewing and hissing, and John wrenched
himself free of the last of them and flung himself up to
Osprey's saddle. A tiny Meewink child hurled up after
him, clinging to the stirrup leather and jabbing with its
little shell knife at his groin; John swung his arm down-
ward and caught the child across its narrow temple with
the spikes of his armband, sweeping it off as he would
have swept a rat.
Jenny wheeled her horse sharply, spurring back to where
Gareth still clung to Battlehammer's saddle on the edge
of the clearing. With the precision of circus riders, she
and John split to grab the big gelding's reins, one on either
side, and, with Gareth in tow between them, plunged back
into the night.
"There." Aversin dipped one finger into a puddle of
rainwater and flicked a droplet onto the iron griddle bal-
anced over the fire. Satisfied with the sizzle, he patted
commeal into a cake and dropped it into place. Then he
glanced across at Gareth, who was struggling not to cry
out as Jenny poured a scouring concoction of marigold-
simple into his wounds. "Now you can say you've seen
Aversin the Dragonsbane run like hell from a troop of
forty four-foot-tall septuagenarians." His bitten, band-
aged hands patted another cake into shape, and the dawn
grayness flashed off his specs as he grinned.
"Will they be after us?" Gareth asked faintly.
"I doubt it." He picked a fleck of commeal off the
spikes of his armbands. "They'll have enough of their
own dead to keep them fed awhile."
Dragonsbane 71
The boy swallowed queasily, though having seen the
instruments laid out on the table in the Meewinks' house,
there could be little doubt what they had meant for him.
At Jenny's insistence, after the rescue, they had shifted
their camp away from the garnered darkness of the woods.
Dawn had found them in relatively open ground on the
formless verges of a marsh, where long wastes of ice-
scummed, standing water reflected a steely sky among
the black pen strokes of a thousand reeds. Jenny had
worked, cold and weary, to lay spells about the camp,
then had occupied herself with the contents of her
medicine satchel, leaving John, somewhat against her bet-
ter judgment, to make breakfast. Gareth had dug into his
packs for the bent and battered spectacles that had sur-
vived the fight in the ruins up north, and they perched
forlornly askew now on the end of his nose.
"They were always a little folk," John went on, coming
over to the packs where the boy sat, letting Jenny finish
binding up his slashed knees. "After the King's troops
left the Winterlands, their villages were forever being
raided by bandits, who'd steal whatever food they raised.
They never were a match for an armored man, but a
village of 'em could pull one down—or, better still, wait
till he was asleep and hack him up as he lay. In the starving
times, a bandit's horse could feed a whole village for a
week. I expect it started out as only the horses."
Gareth swallowed again and looked as if he were going
to be ill.
John put his hands through his metal-plated belt. "They
generally strike right before dawn, when sleep is deep-
est—it's why I switched the watches, so I'd be the one
they dealt with, instead of you. It was a Whisperer that
got you away from the camp, wasn't it?"
"I—I suppose so." He looked at the ground, a shadow
crossing his thin face. "I don't know. It was some-
thing ..." Jenny felt him shudder.
72 Barbara Hambly
"I've seen them on my watch, once or twice... Jen?"
"Once." Jenny spoke shortly, hating the memory of
those crying shapes in the darkness.
"They take all-forms," John said, sitting on the ground
beside her and wrapping his arms about his knees. "One
night one even took Jen's, with her lying beside me...
Polyborus says in his Analects—or maybe it's in that half-
signature of Terens' Of Ghosts—that they read your
dreams and take on the forms that they see there. From
Terens—or is it Polyborus? Or maybe it's in Clivy, though
it's a bit accurate for Clivy—I get the impression they
used to be much rarer than they are now, whatever they
are."
"I don't know," Gareth said quietly. "They must have
been, because I'd never heard of them, or of the Mee-
winks, either. After it—it lured me into the woods, it
attacked me. I ran, but I couldn't seem to find the camp
again. I ran and ran... and then I saw the light from that
house..." He fell silent again with a shudder.
Jenny finished wrapping Gareth's knee. The wounds
weren't deep, but, like those on John's face and hands,
they were vicious, not only the knife cuts, but the small,
crescent-shaped tears of human teeth. Her own body bore
them, too, and experience had taught her that such wounds
were filthier than poisoned arrows. For the rest, she was
aching and stiff with pulled muscles and the general fatigue
of battle, something she supposed Gareth's ballads neg-
lected to mention as the inevitable result of physical com-
bat. She felt cold inside, too, as she did when she worked
the death-spells, something else they never mentioned in
ballads, where all killing was done with serene and noble
confidence. She had taken the lives of at least four human
beings last night, she knew, for all that they had been born
and raised into a cannibal tribe; had maimed others who
Dragonsbane 73
would either die when their wounds turned septic in that
atmosphere of festering decay, or would be killed by their
brothers.
To survive in the Winterlands, she had become a very
competent killer. But the longer she was a healer, the
more she learned about magic and about life from which
all magic stemmed, the more she loathed what she did.
Living in the Winterlands, she had seen what death did
to those who dealt it out too casually.
The gray waters of the marsh began to brighten with
the remote shine of daybreak beyond the clouds. With a
soft winnowing of a thousand wings, the wild
geese rose
from the black cattail beds, seeking again the roads of the
colorless sky. Jenny sighed, weary to her bones and know-
ing that they could not afford to rest—knowing that she
would have no rest until they crossed the great river Wild-
spae and entered the lands of Belmarie.
Quietly, Gareth said, "Aversin—Lord John—I—I'm
sorry. I didn't understand about the Winterlands." He
looked up, his gray eyes tired and unhappy behind their
cracked specs. "And I didn't understand about you. I—
I hated you, for not being what—what I thought you
should be."
"Oh, aye, I knew that," John said with a fleet grin.
"But what you felt about me was none of my business.
My business was to see you safe in a land you had no
knowledge of. And as for being what you expected—Well,
you can only know what you know, and all you knew
were those songs. I mean, it's like Polyborus and Clivy
and those others. I know bears aren't bom completely
shapeless for their mothers to sculpt with their tongues,
like Clivy says, because I've seen newbom bear cubs.
But for all I know, lions may be bom dead, although
personally I don't think it's likely."
"They aren't," Gareth said. "Father had a lioness once
74 Barbara Hambly
as a pet, when I was very little—her cubs were bom live,
just like big kittens. They were spotted."
"Really?" Aversin looked genuinely pleased for one
more bit of knowledge to add to the lumber room of his
mind. "I'm not saying Dragonsbanes aren't heroic, because
Selkythar and Antara Warlady and the others might have
been, and may have gone about it all with 'swords in golden
armor and plumes. It's just that I know I'm not. If I'd
had a choice, I'd never have gone near the bloody dragon,
Dragon's Bane Page 9