"You were bound," Aversin said quietly. "It's just that,
before Jenny's mind touched yours, you weren't aware
of it. Had you tried to leave before?"
/ remained because it was my will to remain.
"And it's the old King's will to remain with Zyeme,
though she's killing him. No, Morkeleb—she got you
through your greed, as she got poor Gar's dad through
his grief and Bond through his love. If we hadn't come,
you'd have stayed here, bound with spells to brood over
your hoard till you died. It's just that now you know it."
That is not true!
True or not. Jenny said, it is my bidding, Morkeleb,
that as soon as the sky grows light, you shall carry me
over the mountain to the Citadel of Halnath, so that I
280 Barbara Humbly
can send Polycarp the Master to bring these others to
safety there through the Deep.
The dragon reared himself up, bristling all over with
rage. His voice lashed her mind like a silver whip. / am
not your pigeon nor your servant!
Jenny was on her feet now, too, looking up into the
blazing white deeps of his eyes. No, she said, holding to
the crystal chain of his inner name. You are my slave, by
that which you gave me when I saved your life. And by
that which you gave me, I tell you this is what you shall
do.
Their eyes held. The others, not hearing what passed
between their two minds, saw and felt only the dragon's
scorching wrath. Gareth caught up Trey and drew her
back toward the shelter of the gateway; Aversin made a
move to rise and sank back with a gasp. He angrily shook
offGareth's attempt to draw him to safety, his eyes never
leaving the small, thin form of the woman who stood
before the smoking rage of the beast.
All this Jenny was aware of, but peripherally, like the
weave of a tapestry upon which other colors are painted.
Her whole mind focused in crystal exactness against the
mind that surged like a dark wave against hers; The power
bom in her from the touch of the dragon's mind strength-
ened and burned, forcing him back. Her understanding
of his name was a many-pointed weapon in her hands. In
time Morkeleb sank to his haunches again, and back to
his sphinx position.
In her mind his voice said softly, You know you do not
need me, Jenny Waynest, to fly over the mountains. You
know the form of the dragons and their magic. One of
them you have put on already.
The other I might put on, she replied, for you would
help me in that, to be free of my will. But you would not
help me put it off again.
Dragonsbane 281
The deeps of his eyes were like falling into the heart
of a star. If you wished it, I would.
The need in her for power, to separate herself from all
that had separated her from its pursuit, shuddered through
her like the racking heat of fever. "To be a mage you must
be a mage," Caerdinn had said.
He had also said, "Dragons do not deceive with lies,
but with truth." Jenny turned her eyes from those cosmic
depths. You say it only because in becoming a dragon, I
will cease to want to hold power over you, Morkeleb the
Black.
He replied. Not 'only,' Jenny Waynest.
Like a wraith he faded into the darkness.
Though still exhausted from the battle at the Gates,
Jenny did not sleep that night. She sat upon the steps, as
she had sat awake most of the night before, watching and
listening—for the King's men, she told herself, though
she knew they would not come. She was aware of the
night with a physical intensity, the moonlight like a rune
of molten silver on every chink and crack of the scarred
steps upon which she sat, turning to slips of white each
knotted weed-stem in the scuffed dust of the square below.
Earlier, while she had been tending to John by the fire in
the Market Hall, the bodies of the slain rioters had van-
ished from the steps, though whether this was due to
fastidiousness on Morkeleb's part or hunger, she wasn't
sure.
Sitting in the cold stillness of the night, she meditated,
seeking an answer within herself. But her own soul was
unclear, torn between the great magic that had always lain
beyond her grasp and the small joys she had cherished in
its stead—the silence of the house on Frost Fell, the
memory of small hands that seemed to be printed on her
palms, and John.
John, she thought, and looked back through the wide
282 Barbara Hambly
arch of the Gate to where he lay, wrapped in bearskins
beside the small glow of the fire.
In the darkness she made out his shape, the broad-
shouldered compactness that went so oddly with the
whippet litheness of his movements. She remembered the
fears that had driven her to the Deep to seek medicines—
that had driven her first to look into the dragon's silver
eyes. Now, as then, she could scarcely contemplate years
of her life that did not—or would not—include that fleet-
ing, triangular smile.
Adric had it already, along with the blithe and sunny
half of John's quirky personality. lan had his sensitivity,
his maddening, insatiable curiosity, and his intentness.
His sons, she thought. My sons.
Yet the memory of the power she had called to stop
the lynch mob on these very steps returned to her, sweet-
ness and terror and exultation. Its results had horrified
her, and the weariness of it still clung to her bones, but
the taste that lingered was one of triumph at having wielded
it. How could she, she wondered, have wasted all those
years before this beginning? The touch ofMorkeleb's mind
had half-opened a thousand doors within her. If she turned
away from him now, how many of the rooms behind those
doors would she be able to explore? The promise of the
magic was something only a magebom could have felt;
the need, like lust or hunger, something only the magebom
would have understood. There was a magic she had never
dreamed of that could be wrought from the light of certain
stars, knowledge unplumbed in the dark, eternal minds
of dragons and in the singing of the whales in the sea.
The stone house on the Fell that she loved came back to
her like the memory of a narrow prison; the clutch of
small hands on her skirts, of an infant's mouth at her
breast, seemed for a time nothing more than bonds holding
her back from walking through its doors to the moving
air outside.
Dragonsbane 283
Was this some spell of Morkeleb's? she wondered,
wrapping the soft weight of a bearskin more tightly around
her shoulders and gazing at the royal blue darkness of the
sky above the western ridge. Was it something he had
sung up out of the depths of her soul, so that she would
leave the concerns of humans and free him of his bondage
to her?<
br />
Why did you say, "Not" 'only,'"Morkeleb the Black?
You know that as well as I, Jenny Waynest.
He had been invisible in the darkness. Now the moon-
light sprinkling his back was like a carpet of diamonds
and his silver eyes were like small, half-shut moons. How
long he had been there she did not know—the moon had
sunk, the stars moved. His coming had been like the float-
ing of a feather on the still night.
What you give to them you have taken from yourself.
When our minds were within one another, I saw the strug-
gle that has tortured you all your life. I do not understand
the souls of humans, but they have a brightness to them,
like soft gold. You are strong and beautiful. Jenny Way-
nest. I would like it if you would become one of us and
live among us in the rock islands of the northern seas.
She shook her head. / will not turn against those that
I love.
Turn against? The sinking moonlight striped his mane
with frost as he moved his head. No. That I know you
would never do, though, for what their love has done to
you, they would well deserve it if you did. And as to this
love you speak of, I do not know what it is—it is not a
thing of dragons. But when I am freed of the spells that
bind me here, when I fly to the north again, fly with me.
This is something also that I have never felt—this wanting
of you to be a dragon that you can be with me. And tell
me, what is it to you if this boy Gareth becomes the slave
of his father's woman or to one of his own choosing?
What is it to you who rules the Deep, or how long this
284 Barbara Hambly
woman Zyerne can go on polluting her mind and her body
until she dies because she no longer recalls enough about
her own magic to continue living? What is it to you if the
Winterlands are ruled and defended by one set of men or
another, or if they have books to read about the deeds
of yet a third? It is nothing. Jenny Way nest. Your powers
are beyond that.
To leave them now would be to turn against them. They
need me.
They do not need you, the dragon replied. Had the
King's troops killed you upon these steps, it would have
been the same for them.
Jenny looked up at him, that dark shape of power—
infinitely more vast than the dragon John had slain in Wyr
and infinitely more beautiful. The singing of his soul re-
echoed in her heart, magnified by the beauty of the gold.
Clinging to the daylight that she knew against the calling
of the dark, she shook her head again and said. It would
not have been the same.
She gathered the furs about her, rose, and went back
into the Deep.
After the sharpness of the night air, the huge cavern
felt stuffy and stank of smoke. The dying fire threw weird
flickers of amber against the ivory labyrinth of inverted
turrets above and glinted faintly on the ends of the broken
lamp chains that hung down from the vaulted blackness.
It was always so, going from free night air to the frowsty
stillness of indoors, but her heart ached suddenly, as if
she had given up free air for a prison forever.
She folded the bearskin, laid it by the campfire, and
found where her halberd had been leaned against the few
packs they had brought with them from the camp. Some-
where in the darkness, she heard movement, the sound
of someone tripping over a plaid. A moment later Gareth's
voice said softly, "Jenny?"
"Over here." She straightened up, her pale face and
285
the metal buckles of her sheepskin jacket catching the low
firelight. Gareth looked tired and bedraggled in his shirt,
breeches, and a stained and scruffy plaid, as unlike as
possible to the self-conscious young dandy in primrose-
and-white Court mantlings of less than a week ago. But
then, she noted, there was less in him now than there had
been, even then, of the gawky and earnest young man
who had ridden to the Winterlands in quest of his hero.
"I must be going," she said softly. "It's beginning to
mm light. Gather what kindling you can, in case the King's
men return and you have to barricade yourselves behind
the inner doors in the Grand Passage. There are foul things
in the darkness. They may come at you when the light is
gone."
Gareth shuddered wholeheartedly and nodded.
"I'll tell Polycarp how things stand. He should come
back here to get you, if they didn't blast shut the ways
into the Deep. If I don't make it to Halnath..."
The boy looked at her, the heroically simple conclu-
sions of a dozen ballads reverberant in his shocked fea-
tures.
She smiled, the pull of the dragon in her fading. She
reached up the long distance to lay a hand on his bristly
cheek. "Look after John for me."
Then she knelt and kissed John's lips and his shut
eyelids. Rising, she collected a plaid and her halberd and
walked toward the clear slate-gray air that lay like water
outside the darker arch of the Gate.
As she passed through it, she heard a faint north-coun-
try voice behind her protest, "Look after John, indeed!"
CHAPTER XV
LIGHT WATERED THE darkness, changing the air from
velvet to silk. Cold cut into Jenny's hands and face, imbu-
ing her with a sense of strange and soaring joy. The high
cirques and hanging valleys of the Wall's toothy summits
were stained blue and lavender against the charcoal gray
of the sky; below her, mist clung like raveled wool to the
bones of the shadowy town. For a time she was alone
and complete, torn by neither power nor love, only
breathing the sharp air of dawn.
Like a shift in perception, she became aware of the
dragon, lying along the bottom step. Seeing her, he rose
and stretched like a cat, from nose to tail knob to the tips
of the quivering wings, every spine and hom blinking in
the gray-white gloom.
Wrap yourself well, wizard woman. The upper airs are
cold.
He sat back upon his haunches and, reaching delicately
down, closed around her one gripping talon, like a hand
twelve inches across the back and consisting of nothing
but bone wrapped in muscle and studded with spike and
hom. The claws lapped easily around her waist. She felt
286
Dragonsbane 287
no fear of him; though she knew he was treacherous, she
had been within his mind and knew he would not kill her.
Still, a shivery qualm passed through her as he lifted her
up against his breast, where she would be out of the air-
stream.
The vast shadow of his wings spread against the mauve
gloom of the cliff behind them, and she cast one quick
glance down at the ground, fifteen feet below. Then she
looked up at the mountains surrounding the Vale and at
the white, watching eye of the moon on the flinty crest
> of the ridge, a few days from full and bright in the western
air as the lamps of the dragon's eyes.
Then he flung himself upward, and all the world dropped
away.
Cold sheered past her face, its bony fingers clawing
through her hair. Through the plaids wrapped around her,
she felt the throbbing heat of the dragon's scales. From
the sky she looked to the earth again, the Vale like a well
of blue shadow, the mountain slopes starting to take on
the colors of dawn as the sun brushed them, rust and
purple and all shades of brown from the whitest dun to
the deep hue of coffee, all edged and trimmed with the
dark lace of trees. The rain tanks north of Deeping caught
the new day like chips of mirror; as the dragon passed
over the flanks of the mountain, circling higher, she saw
the bright leap of springs among the pine trees, and the
white spines of thrusting rock.
The dragon tilted, turning upon the air, the vast wings
searing faintly at the wind. Occasional eddies of it whis-
tled around the spikes that defended the dragon's back-
bone—some of them no longer than a finger, others almost
a cubit, dagger-sharp. In flight the dragon seemed to be
a thing made of silk and wire, lighter than his size would
lead one to think, as if the flesh and muscle, like the mind
and the shape of his bones, were different in composition
from all things else upon the Earth.
288 Barbara Hambly
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