Dragonshadow

by Barbara Hambly

  “Curse it,” said John. “Balgodorus Black-Knife, damn his tripes, and they had a wizard with ’em, didn’t they, love?” He leaned against the clay wall of the bank, panting; Jenny pressed her hand against his thigh, where the first arrowhead had cut, but felt no poison in the wound.

  “Somebody who knew enough about dragon-slaying to know we’d have to attack it alone, together.”

  “Maggots fester it—ow!” he added, as Jenny applied a rough bandage to the wound. “Anybody’d know that who’s heard me talk about it, or talked to someone who had. Anyway, it wasn’t me they was after, love.” He reached down and touched her face. “It was you.”

  She looked up, filthy with sweat and soot, her dark hair unraveled: a thin small brown woman of forty-five, flushed—she was annoyed to note—with yet another rise of inner heat. She sent it away, exasperated at the untimeliness and the reminder of her age.

  “Me?” She got to her feet. The rush of the stream was dying as quickly as it had risen. Bandits slain by John’s sword, or her halberd, or by the arrows of Rocklys’ men, lay where the water had washed them.

  “You’re the only mage in the Winterlands.” John tucked up a wet straggle of her hair into a half-collapsed braid, broke off a twig from a nearby laurel bush and worked it in like a hairpin to hold it in place. “In the whole of the King’s Realm, for all I know. Gar”—that was the Regent—“told me he’s been trying to find wizards in Bel and Greenhythe and all around the Realm, and hasn’t located a one, bar a couple of gnomes. So if a bandit like Balgodorus Black-Knife’s got a wizard in his troop, and we have none …”

  “We’d have been in a lot of trouble,” Jenny said softly, “had this ambush succeeded.”

  “And it might have,” mused John, “if their boy—”

  “Girl.”

  “Eh?”

  “Their mage is a woman. I’m almost certain of it.”

  He sniffed. “Girl, then. If their girl had known the first thing about star-drakes, beyond that they have wings and long tails, you might not have twigged soon enough to keep us out of the jaws of the trap. Which goes to demonstrate the value of a classical education …”

  Commander Rocklys returned in a clatter of hooves, Borin at her side. “Are you all right?” She sprang down from her tall bronze-bay warhorse, a lanky powerful woman of thirty, gold-stamped boots spattered with mud and gore. “We were saddled and ready to ride to your help with the dragon when Borin charged into camp shouting you were being ambushed.”

  “The dragon was a hoax,” John said briefly. He wiped a gout of blood from his cheekbone and scrubbed his gloved fingers with the end of his plaid. “Better if it had been a real drake than what’s really going on.”

  Rocklys of Galyon listened, arms folded, to his account. It was a rare woman, Jenny knew, who could get men to follow her into combat; on the whole, most soldiers knew of women only what they saw of their victims during the sack of farmsteads or towns, or what they learned from the camp whores. Some, like John, were willing to learn different. Others had to be strenuously taught. Though the women soldiers Jenny had met—mostly bandits—tended to gang together to protect one another in the war camps, a woman commander as a rule had to be large and strong enough to take on and beat a good percentage of the men under her command.

  Rocklys of the House of Uwanë was such a woman. The royal house of Bel was a tall one, and she was easily John’s nearly six-foot height, with powerful arms and shoulders that could only have been achieved by the most strenuous physical training. As a cousin of the King, Jenny guessed she would have been granted a position as second-in-command or a captaincy of royal guards regardless, but it was clear by the set of her square chin that an honorary post was not what she wanted.

  For the rest, she was fair-haired, like her cousin the Regent Gareth—though the last time Jenny had seen Gareth, two years ago, he’d still affected a dandy’s habit of dyeing portions of his hair blue or pink or whatever the fashionable shade was that year. Her eyes, like Gareth’s, were a light, cold gray. She neither interrupted nor reacted to John’s tale, only stood with the slight breezes moving the gold tassels on her sword-belt and on the red wool oversleeves that covered her linen shirt. At the end of his recital she said, “Damn it.” Her voice was a sort of husky growl, and Jenny guessed she’d early acquired the habit of deepening it. “If I’d known there was a wizard with them I’d never have called off the men so soon. You’re sure?”

  “I’m sure.” Jenny stepped up beside John. “Completely aside from the green dragon, which was sheer illusion—only created to lure John and me—I could feel this mage’s mind, her power, with every spell I tried to cast. There’s a wizard with Balgodorus, and a strong one.”

  “Damn it.” Rocklys’ mouth hardened, and for a moment Jenny saw a genuine fury in her eyes. Then they shifted, thoughtful, considering the two people before her: the bloodied and shabby Dragonsbane and the Witch of Frost Fell. Jenny knew the look in her eyes, for she’d seen it often in John’s. The look of a commander, considering the tools she has and the job that needs to be done.

  “Lady Jenny,” she said. “Lord John.”

  “Now we’re in trouble.” John looked up from polishing his spectacles on his shirt. “Anytime anyone comes to me and says …” He shifted into an imitation of that of the Mayor of Far West Riding, or one of the councilmen of Wrynde, when those worthies would come to the Hold asking him to kill wolves or deal with bandits, “‘Lord John’—or worse, ‘Your lordship.’”

  Commander Rocklys, who didn’t have much of a sense of humor, frowned. “But we are in trouble,” she said. “And we shall be in far worse trouble should Balgodorus Black-Knife continue at large, with a witch …” She hesitated—she’d used a southern word for the mageborn that had pejorative connotations of evil and slyness—and politely changed it. “… with a wizard in his band. Surely you agree.”

  “And you want our Jen to go after ’em.”

  Rocklys looked a little surprised to find her logic so readily followed. As if, thought Jenny, the necessity for her to pursue the renegade mage was not obvious to all. “For the good of all the Winterlands, you must agree.”

  John glanced at Jenny, who nodded slightly. He sighed and said, “Aye.” The good of all the Winterlands had ruled his life for twenty-two years, since his father’s death. Even before that, when as his father’s only son he had been torn from his books and his music and his tinkerings with pulleys and steam, and had a sword thrust into his hand.

  Four years ago it had been the good of all the Winterlands that took him south, to barter his body and bones in the fight against Morkeleb the Black, so the King would in return send troops to garrison those lost territories and bring them again under the rule of law.

  “Aye, love, you’d best go. God knows if you don’t we’ll only have ‘em besiegin’ the Hold in the end.”

  “Good.” Rocklys nodded briskly, though she still looked vexed. “I’ve already sent one of the men back to Skep Dhû, with orders to outfit a pack-train, Lady Jenny; you’ll ride with twenty-five of my men here.”

  “Twenty-five?” said John. “There were at least twenty in the band that attacked us, and rumor has it Balgodorus commands hundreds these days.”

  Rocklys shook her head. “My scouts report no more than forty. Untrained men at that, scum and outlaws, no match for disciplined troops.

  “If at all possible,” she went on, “bring the woman back alive. The Realm needs mages, Lady Jenny. You know that, you and I have talked of this before. It is only the most appalling prejudice that has caused wizardry to fall into disrepute, so that the Lines of teaching died out or went underground. I am told the gnomes have wizards: That alone should have convinced my uncle and his predecessors to foster, rather than forbid, the study of those arts. Instead, what did they do? Simply crippled themselves, so that four years ago when an evil mage like the Lady Zyerne rose up, no one was prepared to deal with her. That situation cannot be allowed to repeat itsel
f. Yes, Geryon?”

  She turned as an orderly spoke to her; John put his hands on Jenny’s shoulders.

  “Will you be all right?” she asked him, and he bent to kiss her lips. She tasted blood on his, and sweat and dirt; he must have tasted the same.

  “Who, me? With Muffle and Ian and me aunties to defend the Hold if we’re attacked? Nothing to it.” Deadpan, he propped his spectacles more firmly onto the bridge of his long nose. “Shall I send a messenger after you with your good shoes and a couple of silk dresses just in case you want a change?”

  “I’ll manage with what I have,” said Jenny gravely. “Borin was right, you know, ” she added. “The garrisons may be a nuisance, and the farmers may grumble about the extra taxes, but there hasn’t been a major bandit attack since their coming. I’ll scry you, and the Hold, in my crystal every night—a pity Ian’s powers haven’t grown strong enough yet for him to learn to speak with me through a crystal or through fire. But he’s a fair healer already. And if there’s trouble …” She raised her hand, touched the long hair where it straggled, pointy with sweat, over his bruised face. “Braid a red ribbon into your hair. I’ll see it when I call your image. If I can, I’ll return to you.”

  John caught her hand as she would have lowered it and kissed her dirty fingers; and she drew down his in return, pressed her lips to the scruffy leather, the battered chain-mail of his glove. Skaff Gradely and the Darrow boys had come up by this time, arguing all the way with Borin’s fellow messengers, with the spare horses and the baggage, so there was little to stay for.

  “Borin will ride with you,” Commander Rocklys said, “and his fellows. Send one of them to me when you’ve come up with these bandits and their wizard. Let us know where you are and if you need troops. I’ll dispatch as many as I can, as swiftly as I can. And bring the woman alive, at whatever the cost. We’ll make it worth her while to pledge her services to the Realm.”

  “Even so.” Jenny swung to Moon Horse’s saddle again and adjusted her halberd and bow. She wondered what reward she herself would consider “worth her while” to betray John, to turn against him, to ride with his foes …

  Or, she thought, as the twenty-five picked pursuers formed up around her, to leave him and our children and the folk of Alyn Hold to their own devices, when I know there’s a bandit wizard abroad in the lands?

  The good of all the Winterlands, maybe.

  The good of the Realm, which John considered his first and greatest loyalty.

  She lifted her hand to him as she and the men rode off. A little later, as they crested the rise above the ravine and approached the oak woods into which the bandits had fled, she looked back to see Commander Rocklys marshaling her forces to ride back to Cair Corflyn, the garrison on the banks of the Black River, which was the headquarters for the whole network of new manors and forts. John’s doing, those garrisons, she thought. The protection he had bought with the blood he’d shed, dragon-fighting four years ago. His reward.

  As the dragon-magic in her veins was hers.

  John himself stood, a small tatty black figure on the high ground above the stream, watching her. She lifted her hand again to him, and his spectacles flashed like mirrors as he waved goodbye. The wasting moon still stood above the moors to the west, a pale crescent like a slice of cheese.

  Less than three weeks later, before that moon waxed again to its full, a real dragon descended on the farms near Alyn Hold.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “A hundred feet long it was, my lord.” Deke Brown from the Lone Steadings, a man John had known all his life, folded his hands together before his knees and leaned forward from the library chair in the flicker of the candlelight. His face was bruised, and there was a running burn on his forehead, the kind John knew was made by a droplet of the flaming acid that dragons spit. “Blue it was, but like as if it had gold flowers spread all over it, and golden wings, and the horns of it all black and white stripes, and maned like a lion. It had three of the cows, and I bare got April and the babies out’n the house and in the root cellar in time.”

  In the silence John was very conscious of the hoarseness of the man’s breathing, and of the thumping of his own heart.

  No illusion this time. Or a damn good one if it was.

  Jenny, wherever you are, I need you. I can’t handle this alone.

  “I heard down in the village that Ned Wooley was up here yesterday, from Great Toby.” Brown spoke diffidently, trying to word it without sounding accusing. “They said this thing killed his horse and his mule on the road to the Bottom Farms, and near as check killed him.”

  John said, “Aye.” He swallowed hard, feeling very cold inside. “We’ve been makin’ up the poisons and gettin’ ready to go all day. You didn’t happen to see which way it went?”

  “I didn’t, no, my lord. I was that done up about the cows. They’re all we’ve got. But April says it went off northwest. She says to tell you she saw it circling above Cair Dhû.”

  “You give April a kiss for me.” He knew the ruins of the old watchtower, every ditch, bank, and clump of broken masonry; he’d played there as a child, risking life and soul because blood devils haunted them at certain times of the year. He’d hunted rabbits there, too, and hidden from his father. At least I’ll be fighting it on familiar ground. “Get Cousin Dilly to give you something from the kitchen, you look fagged out. I’ll be going there in the morning.”

  He drew a deep breath, trying to put the thought of the dragon from his mind. “We’ll see about getting you another cow. One of the Red Shaggies is heavy with calf; I could probably let you have the both of them. Clivy writes that red cows give more wholesome milk that’s higher in butter, but I’ve never measured—still, it’s the best I can do. We’ll talk about it when I get back.”

  If I get back.

  Brown disappeared down the tower stair.

  Jenny, I need you.

  Behind him a clock chimed the hour, amid a great parade of mechanical lions, elephants, trumpeters, and flying swans. The moon turned its phases, and an allegorical representation of Good thumped Evil repeatedly over the head with a golden mallet. John watched the show with his usual grave delight, then got up and consulted the water-clock that gurgled quietly in a corner of the study.

  Not even close.

  Shaking his head regretfully, he descended the tower stair.

  He passed the kitchen, where Dilly, Rowan, and Jane clustered around Deke Brown, exclaiming over his few bruises and filling him in on what had befallen Ned Wooley—“A hundred feet long, it was, and breathed green fire …”

  Ian was in the old barracks court, the firelight under the cauldrons gleaming on the sweat that sheathed his bare arms. Tawny light tongued Jenny’s red and black poison pots, carefully stoppered and arranged along a wall out of all possible chance of being tripped over, broken, or gotten into by anything or anyone. The fumes burned John’s eyes. It was all a repeat of the scene three weeks ago.

  He hoped to hell the stuff would work.

  “Father.” The boy laid his stirring stick down and crossed the broken and weedy pavement toward him. Muffle and Adric put down their loads of wood and followed, stripped, like Ian, to their breeches, boots, and knitted singlets in the heat; clothed like Ian in sweat. “That messenger wasn’t …?”

  “Deke Brown. It hit his farm.”

  “Devils bugger it,” Muffle said. He hitched his belt under the muscled roll of his huge belly. “April and the children …?”

  “Are fine. April saw the thing to ground at Cair Dhû.”

  “Good for April.” John’s half-brother regarded him for a moment, his thick, red-stubbled face eerily like their father’s, trying to read his thoughts. “No word from Jenny?”

  John shook his head, his own face ungiving: a holdover, he supposed, from growing up with his father’s notions about what a man and the Lord of Alyn Hold must and must not feel. It would never have occurred to him to beat Adric for showing fear—not that Adric had the slightest concept
of what the word meant. And Ian …

  Mageborn children feared different things.

  “Wherever she is, she can’t come.” The bloody light darkened the red ribbon he’d braided yesterday into his hair. I’ll scry every evening in my crystal… “Or she can’t come in time.”

  “I could go to the house on Frost Fell.” Ian wiped his face with the back of his arm. “Mother’s books—old Caerdinn has to have written down how to do …” he hesitated, “how to do death-spells.”

  “No.” John had thought of that yesterday.

  “I don’t think these poisons are going to work against a dragon unless there are fresh death-spells put into their making.” Returning from the false alarm and ambush, John had cleansed the harpoons with water and with fire, as Jenny had instructed him to do: a necessary precaution given little Mag’s eerie facility with locks, bolts, and anything else she was particularly not supposed to get into. Jenny, he knew, was conscientious about the Limitations she put on the death-spells. It had never occurred to either of them that they’d be needed again so soon. “We need to put death-spells on the harpoons as well.”

  “No.” John had thought of that, too. “I don’t want you touching such stuff.”

  “But we don’t want you to die!“protested Adric reasonably.

  Muffle raised his brows and looked away in a fashion that said, The boy’s got a point.

  “Mother uses them.”

  “You’re twelve years old, Ian.” John swallowed hard, hoping by all the gods that his own fear didn’t show. “Leavin’ out the fact that certain spells can be too strong for an inexperienced mage to wield—”

  “I’m not inexperienced.”

  “—you haven’t learned near all there is to know about Limitations, and I for one don’t want to end up havin’ one of me feet fall off from leprosy in the middle of the fight because you got a word wrong.”