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-
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