Dragonshadow

by Barbara Hambly

  It was a few moments. The girl didn’t have a scrying-stone of her own and, by the look of it, was bent over a puddle outside the back door.

  “Yseult, I’m here. I’m coming in.”

  And if it’s a trap, thought Jenny, with a twist of wryness to her mouth, shame on me.

  The house had been looted years ago. The stone walls of the old dwelling, where the family had lived before they’d degenerated into night-creeping scavengers, were charred and smoke-stained. The dirty little hummocks and burrows all around it, where the Grubbies had actually slept and stored their food, appeared undamaged, but Jenny saw that all the entrances had been stopped, imprisoning the inhabitants to starve. Unlike the Meewinks, who took in travelers, then killed and ate them, Grubbies as a tribe subsisted on garbage, gleanings of the fields and middens, and the occasional pilfered chicken or cow. Yet in their way they were even more despised: inbred, bestial, with neither laws nor lore of any sort. Pellanor, who had begun with intentions of being a ruler to all he found in his part of the Wyr-woods, had ended by simply driving them out.

  Jenny saw no sign of Yseult at first. But she waited patiently, showing herself to be alone. After a few moments the girl crawled out from one of the burrows, and stood picking dirt out of her hair. “Don’t let him get me,” she whispered and glanced around her. “Please.” Both her eyes were blackened.

  “I promise.” Jenny saw by the tilt of the girl’s head that I promise was something from her childhood, something that meant she was being lied to.

  “Just get me away from here.” Yseult shivered but made no attempt to escape when Jenny walked over and gave her a gentle hug. It was like putting her arms around a wooden doll. “I don’t care if you take me to Rocklys or give me to the demons or what. I just can’t be with him no more.”

  And if he comes back, thought Jenny, looking up into those shadowed eyes, you’ll fly to him again, and you know it. Yet if she left Pellanor now, to convey this wretched child southwest to Corflyn, there would be only corpses at Palmorgin when she returned. She knew this as clearly as if she saw it in her scrying-stone.

  “Can you stay here another night and a day?” she asked. “I can’t leave my friends, not until I’ve made some provision for their safety. Balgodorus will think you’ve come into the fort with us. I’ll make sure he thinks so. He won’t be hunting you here. Would you be willing to travel with someone else to Corflyn Hold?”

  Yseult looked scared, eyes showing white all around the rims; her blunt childish hands tightened on Jenny’s plaid. “Can’t I wait for you?” she asked. “If it’s not too long? It wouldn’t be. Them spells I puts on Balgodorus’ armor and weapons and such, I have to put them on just about every day. They wears off that fast.”

  Of course they would, thought Jenny, with a rush of sympathy for the mind-breaking work of making and remaking all those spells. She can’t source power from one day to the next. She must be on the verge of collapse.

  “Will you be all right here?” she asked. “I’ll try to get food to you, but I may not be able to.”

  Yseult shrugged and wiped her nose. “I been hungry afore.”

  “Whatever you do,” said Jenny, opening her satchel, “don’t go out of the circle of these walls. I’m going to strengthen the spells on them, so that Balgodorus’ searchers won’t see you in here. They won’t even see this house or think about the house being here. They’ll think they’re in another part of the woods entirely.

  But if you go outside, not only will they be able to see you, but the spells themselves will be broken, and the house will no longer be protection.”

  “Why’s that?” Yseult followed Jenny as she laid out her small packets of powdered herbs and dried wolf-blood, her silver-dust and ochre earth. The girl kept her hands behind her back, watching alertly as Jenny remade the guardians at the corners and began to sketch the power lines to source the magic of sky and stars and earth.

  “Because the spells demarcate and stabilize a situation as it is,” Jenny replied. “Power moves along the lines, in a flowing circle. Once the lines are broken, the power flows out.”

  “And you learned all this?” For the first time her expression showed something besides terror or apathy. “And can I learn all this, about witchery? How long did it take?”

  “It took many years.” Jenny traced a line in the air and saw Yseult’s eyes follow. She must see, as the mageborn could, the glowing trace of the spell. “I started learning when I was a little girl. There was an Icerider woman, an Icewitch, living in the Hold …”

  She hesitated, seeing as if it were yesterday, and not forty years gone, the elongated elegant face, the colorless eyes stony with contempt at Lord Aver’s frustrated rage. “Bitch!” he’d screamed at her. “Hagwife!” Jenny couldn’t recall what the fight was about, if she ever knew it. Now she understood that John’s father had hated this woman because she had given him her body in derision. Because he could not turn away.

  Why are you here? she had asked Nightraven once, with a child’s frank curiosity. If you know all this magic, why are you with Lord Aver? Because even as a five-year-old child, she could see the look in Nightraven’s eyes when she regarded her husband/captor, the man who had taken her at the point of his spear. Why can’t you just get away?

  Nightraven had folded those impossibly slender hands. In her height and her slimness, her sinuous bonelessness, she had always seemed almost like a drawing rather than a real woman; her black hair hung braided to her thighs. Her lips were very red, and though they were full and shapely, still they had that sensitive line, that reserve, that marked her son’s. I was cast out by my people, for my failure and my pride, she had said. They laid a geas on me, a spell of binding. One day they will send me word that my time of exile is done.

  And so they must have done. For one bitter autumn day when she was eleven Jenny had run from the Hold’s kitchens where she slept up to the Lady’s rooms and had found her gone, she and her frost-eyed wolf. Gone with no word, only a swirl of snow on the floor, leaving a baffled red-haired toddler motherless and a complex of love-spells on the man who had taken her prisoner such that he had never loved again, nor married any woman to be the stepmother of his child or the rival of Nightraven’s memory in his broken heart.

  “They’s Iceriders with Balgodorus,” Yseult ventured timidly, breaking Jenny’s long silence. “One or two, that was throwed out of their tribe. They told me about the Icewitches.”

  “But none of them Icewitches themselves?” That, thought Jenny, would be all we need.

  Yseult shook her head.

  “Balgodorus has no other mages in his troop?”

  Again the headshake. “Only me. He said …” She licked her lips. “He said he needed me.” She sounded wistful.

  “I daresay.” Jenny tried hard to keep the sarcasm from her voice.

  “Are there any but you, with Commander Rocklys?”

  She sighed and traced the Fourth Guardian, connecting the links save the one through which she must pass when she left. The Sigil of the Rose, which drew the power of the moon, speaking to the others through the silver lines. “No. This would be easier if there were.”

  “I saw this other,” said Yseult, and twisted again her chemise-points around grubby fingers. “Or dreamed about him, bringing a dragon back to life. Are dragons really beautiful, all different colors, with eyes like that? I thought they was green and ugly, and smelled of brimstone.”

  Jenny’s hand froze in the air, and her breath in her lungs.

  “He had a boy with him,” the girl went on, groping at the recollection. “A wizard-boy, I thought—it was just a dream, I dunno how I knew—and he brought him up to the dragon, and they rode away on it together. I thought in my dream he might have been with Rocklys and was going to feed the wizard-boy to the dragon, and that’s why I was afraid when I saw you. That you might do that to me. And there was something else there,” she added, frowning. “Something I couldn’t see. Something bad.”

&nb
sp; “Where?” said Jenny. “Did you see where this was? Or where they went? What the man looked like?”

  Yseult only shook her head. “I didn’t see his face at all. I couldn’t. It was almost like he didn’t have one. Or like it was a mask, and the eyes in it was a snake’s or a dog’s. Only the boy, and this dragon. And I was scared. But now I figure, even being fed to a dragon can’t be no worse than staying with Balgodorus, if he’s going to treat me like this. Can’t you … Can’t you take me not to Rocklys but just away from here? Can’t you take me home with you, maybe, and teach me to be a witch and take care of myself? I won’t be no trouble. I promise I won’t steal from you or anything.” And she crossed her heart like a child.

  In the dark eaves of the Wyrwoods, Jenny heard the men searching, calling out to one another and cursing as they stepped in mud or on roots. She thought she could hear Balgodorus’ voice, a roar of hatred against all things, perhaps women most of all. They’d be launching another attack, she thought. It was time to get back.

  “When you meet Rocklys,” Jenny said, “I’ll let you decide, Yseult. But in the meantime, if there’s a wizard out there who’s kidnapping boys”—her voice seemed to strangle in her throat— “who’s dealing with dragons, I think Rocklys ought to know about it.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Not a thing of dragons.

  That indifference, John reflected, might just be the saving of him.

  The star-drakes were curious but unafraid. Reckoning perhaps that nothing human could do them harm.

  God knows that’s the truth. He lay on the palm of death like a thistledown on a still day. Like dolphins in the sea, or cows in a pasture, the dragons came to watch.

  Two of them picked him up between Nymr’s isle and the next, floating, as Nymr had done, weightless as kites above and behind him, following with slow lazy wing-beats above the winking sea. They were too far for him to identify them from the old lists. Likely not all the dragons were on the lists in any case, and only a handful of the tunes had survived. They were multicolored, iridescent as gems: the one to the north striped in yellow and green, to the south a marvelous jumble of reds and golds and blues. Later a third joined them, bronze spotted with blue like a peacock’s tail, behind him to the east.

  At the second isle he cast anchor, snagging the rocks above a little crescent of beach, and laboriously cranked the Milkweed down. This isle was perhaps thrice the size of Nymr’s, with freshwater springs around which clustered twisted pines, heather, and hairy-stemmed northland poppies all pale pink and gold. Wild sheep roved here—John had seen them from the air—and birds without number, gulls and terns and pelicans, and some kind of fat gray flightless creature the height of his knee that waddled trustingly up to him as he dropped down over the gunwale and tried to eat the buckles on the sides of his boots.

  Killing them would have been embarrassingly easy; so easy in fact that John couldn’t bring himself to do it. Never having seen humankind, the mountain sheep would have proved scarcely less challenging targets, but he had no time to hang and smoke that much meat and was loath to waste it. He took his bow and shot gulls and terns; the bronze-dappled dragon flew in close, hovered and circled for some time around the Milkweed on its tether. It ignored John completely but reached out its long neck from time to time and bumped the air bags with its beak, like a dog sniffing at a floating bladder. John wondered what would become of him should one of the dragons decide to destroy the craft.

  I suppose I’d live on fish and sheep till I’m an old man with a long beard, he thought, bemused by the image though by all rights he supposed he should be stiff with terror. He wondered if the dragons had the imagination to make the experiment, just to see what would happen. Since the dragons would do what they would do, beyond any ability of his to change, and since he had no other enemies in all the northern sea, he stretched out on the beach and slept, grateful not to be setting sail or charting a course or drawing maps or cranking the engine-pulley. He slept deep and did not dream, except for fragments of something about daffodils and Jenny braiding her hair.

  When he woke a dragon was there, sitting on the rocks.

  It had killed a sheep and was eating it, tearing it open to rip out the meat and entrails but leaving the pelt like a fruit-husk. John had seen such remains before, in the northlands. The dragon was yellow and black and white, with tiny complicated patterns of greens and purples worked along its back and down like a mask over its face. It ate cleanly, licking its paws and whiskers. He felt its mind touch and probe his, though he would not meet its eyes. Its thoughts came like music into his brain.

  ????—a question as much about the machine as about himself.

  “Well, it’s too long a way to come in a boat over the sea,” pointed out John, sitting up and taking a drink from his water bottle. The dragon tilted its head and settled into a sort of resting crouch, watching him without movement save for the flicker of wind in the soft fuzz around the base of its horns. Gulls settled close to it. A piper ran up over the sand, and the fat gray dummies waddled near and pecked at the sheep’s carcass as if they weren’t aware of the dragon at all.

  In time, keeping a wary eye on his visitor, John set a griddle over the embers of the fire, took a bowl and began to mix barley and water and a little salt, to make bannocks for his dinner. The white slip of the new moon set in the pale sky, the tide retreating from the shallow curve of beach. The world smelled of salt.

  “I’m seeking Morkeleb the Black, who’s said to be the greatest of the dragons; there’s aught I’d learn of him. You lot have to admit it’s the fastest way.”

  The dragon licked his whiskers again and combed them with his claws. John felt the strange-colored alien words tumble in his mind: Hurrying always hurrying soon to die. Dayfly monkey-making-puzzle, seeking seeking always fiddling always. Learning why learning only to lose it all in the dark so soon?

  “It’s just the way of us.” John patted the bannocks into shape, dropped them onto the griddle. And let’s not forget and let them burn this time, you git. “We build cities and tell each other tales, the way sheep climb the crags and birds fly.”

  Silly peeping. Morkeleb. Morkeleb.

  And the thought entered his mind, not of Morkeleb’s name but of the music that trailed behind it, and with that music the dragon’s dark shape against the limitless stars. Black like the black of night, and misted with light.

  Gone away. Gone away. Not a thing of dragons. “Morkeleb’s gone?” His heart sank. He had been prepared for a murderous attack by the black dragon, but not for his absence.

  Not a thing of dragons anymore. “D’you know why? And where he went?” Indifference, like Nymr’s, but tinged with something else. John realized the yellow dragon was afraid of Morkeleb.

  Not get too near, not get too near. Always dangerous deep deep, falling into the stars. Black well in a black maze buried under a mountain, thoughts rising into his mind, cold darkness rising, then returning to the well. Shadowdrakes, dragonshadow, birdless isle in the west west west. Not a thing of dragons. This thing is made of what?

  The dragon spread its silken wings, leaped skyward like a cat. It circled the Milkweed, and John called out the only name he knew—yellow as the flowers, white and black… “Enismirdal!” And when the dragon checked its flight, backing infinitesimally, he scrambled to his feet and pulled his pennywhistle from his pocket, forming shrill and thin the fifteenth of the dragon-songs, swift and pattering like the rain.

  The dragon circled back. Flame and heat haloed its nostrils, and it hung in the air and hissed.

  “Enismirdal,” called John again, “if that’s your name. The dragons themselves may be in peril. I need to find Morkeleb, or one of you who remembers a time when dragons were enslaved and made to serve wizards in the old days.”

  Peril? Dragons did not laugh, but there was a chiming in the air, like the falling ripple of ten thousand silver discs clashing. Enismirdal flung wide about him the net of his dragon-senses— John could al
most see it, like a great cloud of golden spray on the air—and shivered all the defensive spikes of his body, from the horned and spired head down to the cruel mace of tail-tip.

  Peril?

  Then it reached from the air with black enameled claws, and like a cat batting an insect in play caught John across the shoulders, lifting him and hurling him down into the sand.

  Peril, Flying Man? Peril from that and you to star-drakes of the Skerries of Light?

  The silver discords burned the air, needled John’s skull. Winded, bleeding, and covered in sand, John rose to his knees in the surf as Enismirdal wheeled toward the Milkweed, spitting fire.

  “Ye stupid salamander, d’ye think I’d come here in this thing and warn you of it if the peril was from me and from that?” he bellowed. He wiped blood from his face. “Festering hell, I thought you drakes was supposed to be wise!”

  Serpentine on flower-bed wings the dragon snapped around in the air, and all about it shimmered the scorch of its anger. Wise? Wiser than some, who speak thus.

  It hung, a soundless cloud of brilliance above John, shadow lying on him where he knelt in the waves. The acid of its mouth dripped down to burn his face.

  “You tell me if Centhwevir has been the same, since he returned from the lands of the east.” John’s breath rasped in his lungs; he squinted up at the creature. “And then kill me if you will.”

  The silence was so deep then that the crying of gulls rang loud, and the sough of the waves breaking behind him was a leisurely drum.

  Not a thing of dragons, said Enismirdal’s voice in his mind. Others among us, each to his island alone. Centhwevir blue and gold—and in the dragon’s mind there was only the shape of the name, wrought of music—nothing to me, nothing to me, where he comes or where he goes, and how he abides. Children of the stars, Flying Man; jewels of adamant, not slaves of Time as you. Not you, not me, none to say who we are or what we do. The silver glitter of the dragon’s anger chimed around him. Being each of us—being. Remember.