Fell, the mere below it like a broken piece of dirty glass,
and the little stone house a chrysalis, cracked open to
release the butterfly that had slept within.
She said, I have not the power to change my essence.
I have, the voice whispered among the visions in her
mind. You have the strength to be a dragon, once you
consent to take the form. I sensed that in you when we
struggled. I was angry then, to be defeated by a human;
but you can be more than human.
Gazing up at the dark splendor of the dragon's angular
form, she shook her head. / will not put myself thus in
your power, Morkeleb. I cannot leave my own form with-
out your aid, nor could I return to it. Do not tempt me.
Tempt? Morkeleb's voice said. There is no temptation
from outside the heart. And as for returning—what are
you as a human. Jenny Waynest? Pitiful, puling, like all
your kin the slave of time that rots the body before the
mind has seen more than a single/lower in all the mead-
ows of the Cosmos. To be a mage you must be a mage,
and I see in your mind that you fight for the time to do
even that. To be a dragon...
"To be a dragon," she said aloud, to force her own
Dragonsbane 239
mind upon it, "I have only to give over my control of
you. I will not lose myself thus in the dragon mind and
the dragon magic. You will not thus get me to release
you."
She felt the strength press against the closed doors in
her mind, then ease, and heard the steely rustle of his
scales as his long tail lashed through the dry grasses with
annoyance. The dark woods came back into focus; the
strange visions receded like a shining mist. The light was
waning fast about them, all the colors bled from straggly
briar and fem. As if his blackness took on the softer hues
of the evening, the dragon was nearly invisible, his shape
blending with the milky stringers of fog that had begun
to veil the woods and with the black, abrupt outlines of
dead branch and charred trunk. Somewhere on the ridge
above her. Jenny could hear Gareth calling her name.
She found she was trembling, not solely from weari-
ness or the piercing cold. The need within her was ter-
rifying—to be what she had always wished to be, to have
what she had wanted since she had been fourteen, ugly,
and cursed with a terrible need. She had tasted the strength
of the dragon's fire, and the taste lingered sweet in her
mouth.
/ can give you this, the voice in her mind said.
She shook her head, more violently this time. No. /
will not betray my friends.
Friends? Those who would bind you to littleness for
their own passing convenience? The man who grudges
you the essence of your soul out of mourning for his
dinner? Do you cling to all these little joys because you
are afraid to taste the great ones. Jenny Waynest?
He had been right when he had said that there is no
temptation from outside the heart. She flung back her
long hair over her shoulders and called to herself all the
strength remaining in her, against the star-prickled dark-
240 Barbara Hambly
ness that seemed to draw upon the very marrow of her
bones.
Get away from me, she told him. Go now and return
to the islands in the northern sea that are your home.
Sing your songs to the rock-gold and the whales, and let
be forever the sons of men and the sons of gnomes.
As if she had struck a black log that, breaking, had
revealed the living fire smoldering within, she felt the
surge of his anger again. He reared back, his body arched
against the dimming sky. The dark wire and silk of his
wings rattled as he said, Be it so then, wizard woman. I
leave to you the gold of the Deep—take of it what you
will. My song is in it. When old age comes, whose mortal
frost you have already begun to feel upon your bones,
press it to your heart and remember that which you have
let pass you by.
He gathered himself upon his haunches, his compact,
snakelike shape rising above her as he gathered about him
the glitter of magic in the air. Black wings unfurled against
the sky, looming over her so that she could see the obsi-
dian gleam of his sides, the baby-skin softness of the
velvet belly, still puckered with the crimped, ugly mouths
of harpoon wounds. Then he flung himself skyward. The
great stroke of his wings caught him up. She felt the magic
that swirled about him, a spindrift of enchantment, the
star trail of an invisible comet. The last rays of sinking
light tipped his wings as he rose beyond the blue shadow
of the ridge. Then he was gone.
Jenny watched him go with desolation in her heart. All
the woods seemed laden now with the smell of wet bum-
ing, and the murky earthiness of dead smoke. She became
slowly aware that the hem of her skirt was sodden from
kneeling in the wet path; her boots were damp and her
feet cold. Listless weariness dragged upon her, from mus-
cles pulled by exertion and Zyeme's spells and also from
Dragonsbane 241
the words the dragon had spoken to her when she had
turned away from what he had offered.
As a dragon, she would have no more hold upon him,
nor would she wish any longer to drive him from the Deep.
Was that, she wondered, why he had offered her the splen-
did and terrifying freedom of that form? They said that
dragons did not entrap with lies but with truth, and she
knew he had read accurately the desires of her soul.
"Jenny?" A smudged, dirty Gareth came hurrying
toward her down the path. To her ears, used to the voice
of the dragon, he sounded tinny and false. "Are you all
right? What happened? I saw the dragon..." He had
removed his specs and was seeking a sufficiently clean
patch of his sooty, spark-holed shirt to wipe them on,
without much success. Against the grime on his face the
lenses had left two white circles, like a mask, in which
his gray eyes blinked nakedly.
Jenny shook her head. She felt weary to the point of
tears, almost incapable of speech. He fell into step with
her as she began slowly climbing the path up the Rise
once more.
"Did Zyerne get away?"
She looked at him, startled. After what had passed
between herself and Morkeleb, she had nearly forgotten
Zyeme. "She—she left. I sent her away." It seemed like
days ago.
"You sent her away?" Gareth gasped, dumfounded.
Jenny nodded, too tired to explain. Thinking about it,
she frowned, as something snagged at her mind. But she
only asked, "And you?"
He looked away from her and reddened with shame.
Part of Jenny sighed in exasperation at this foolishness,
so petty after the force of the dragon's greater seduction;
but part other remembered what it was like to be eighteen,
and prey to the unco
ntrollable yearnings of the body.
Barbara Hambly
Comfortingly, she touched the skinny arm under the ripped
lawn of his shirtsleeve.
"It is a spell she had on you," she said. "Nothing more.
We are all tempted..." She pushed aside the echoing
memory of the dragon's words. "... And what is in our
deepest hearts is still not what we are judged on, but rather
what we ultimately do. She only uses'such spells to draw
you to her, to control you as she controls your father."
They reached the clearing, soggy and dirty-looking,
like a garment upon which acid had been spilled, with
charred spots and little puddles of gleaming water which
still steamed faintly from the smolder they had quenched.
"I know." Gareth sighed and picked up the bucket from
the sodden ground to dip it once more into the well. He
moved stiffly from pulled muscles and exertion but didn't
complain of them as he once might have done. On the
edge of the well trough, he found his tin cup and dipped
water from the bucket to hand to her, the wetness icy
against her fingers. She realized with a little start that she
had neither eaten nor drunk since breakfast. There had
been no time, and now she felt old and exhausted as she
took the cup from his hand.
"You just sent her away?" Gareth asked again. "And
she went? She didn't turn herself into a falcon... ?"
"No." Jenny looked up, as it came to her what it was
that had bothered her about the events of the evening.
"Morkeleb..." She stopped, not wanting to speak of what
Morkeleb had offered to her.
But even so, she thought, she could not have taken on
a dragon's form without his help. His powers had broken
through to the powers within her, but her powers were
still raw and small. And Zyeme...
"I defeated her," she said slowly. "But if she's as shape-
crafty as you have said—if she has that kind of strength—
Dragonsbane 243
I shouldn't have been able to defeat her, even though my
powers have grown."
She almost said, "Even with the dragon's powers in
me," but the words stuck on her lips. She felt the powers
stir in her, like an alien child in the womb of fate, and
tried to put aside the thought of them and of what they
might mean. She raised the cup to her lips, but stopped,
the water untasted, and looked up at Gareth again.
"Have you drunk any of the water from this well?" she
asked.
He looked at her in surprise. "We've all been drinking
it for days," he said.
"This evening, I mean."
He looked ruefully around at the clearing and his own
soaked sleeves. "I was too busy throwing it about to drink
any," he said. "Why?"
She passed her hand across the mouth of the cup. As
things were visible to a wizard in darkness, she saw the
viscid sparkle of green luminosity in the water.
"Has it gone bad?" he asked worriedly. "How can you
tell?"
She upended the cup, dumping the contents to the
ground. "Where was Zyeme when you came into the
clearing?"
He shook his head, puzzled. "I don't remember. It was
like a dream..." He looked around him, though Jenny
knew that the clearing, soggy and trampled in the dismal
gloom, was very different from the soft place of twilight
enchantment if had appeared an hour or so ago.
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
244 Barbara Hambly
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 hunker-
bones, 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 tumed-up sleeves and
slung his cloak around his shoulders once more. The
morning was foggy and cold, and the sweat he'd worked
245
246 Barbara Hambly
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 prob-
ably 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 mis
tress. 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
Dragonsbane 247
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
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