Dragonsbane (19 page)

John went on, “Is he hoping the dragon will fall on the Citadel and spare him the trouble of the siege?”

Gareth shook his head. “I don’t think so. I’m told Polycarp has catapults for slinging naphtha set up on the highest turrets. The dragon keeps his distance.” In spite of the Master’s treason, Jenny could hear in the Prince’s voice a trace of pride in his former friend.

Unlike John, who had rented a Court costume from a shop outside the palace gates which specialized in such things for petitioners to the King, Gareth owned at least a dozen of them—like all Court costumes, criminally expensive. The one he wore today was parakeet green and primrose and, in the uncertain light of the afternoon, it turned his rather sallow complexion yellow.

John pushed his specs a little further up on the bridge of his nose. “Well, I tell you, I’m not exactly ettling to go on kicking my heels here like a rat catcher waiting for the King to decide he wants my services. I came here to protect my lands and my people, and right now they’re getting nothing from the King who’s supposed to guard them, nor from me.”

Gareth had been gazing down into the garden at the little group around the leaf-stained marble statue of the god Kantirith absently, as if not aware of where he looked; now he turned his head quickly. “You can’t go,” he said, worry and fear in his voice.

“And why not?”

The boy bit his lip and did not answer, but his glance darted nervously back down to the garden. As if she felt the touch of it, Zyerne turned and blew him a playful kiss, and Gareth looked away. He looked tired and hagridden, and Jenny suddenly wondered if he still dreamed of Zyerne.

The uncomfortable silence was broken, not by him, but by the high voice of Dromar.

“My lord Aversin...” The gnome stepped out onto the terrace and blinked painfully in the wan, overcast light. His words came haltingly, as if they were unfamiliar in his mouth. “Please—do not go.”

John glanced down at him sharply. “You haven’t precisely extended your all in welcome and help, either, have you?”

The old ambassador’s gaze challenged him. “I drew thee the maps of the Deep. By the Stone, what more canst thou want?”

“Maps that don’t lie,” John said coolly. “You know as well as I do the maps you drew have sections of ’em left blank. And when I put them together, the maps of the various levels and the up-and-down map, damned if it wasn’t the same place on all of them. I’m not interested in the secrets of your bloody Deep, but I can’t know what’s going to happen, nor where I may end up playing catch-me in the dark with the dragon, and I’d just as soon have an accurate map to do it with.”

There was an edge of anger on his level voice, and an edge of fear. Dromar must have heard both, for the answering blaze died out of his own countenance, and he looked down at his hands, clasped over the knots of his sash. “This is a matter that has nothing to do with the dragon, nothing to do with thee,” he said quietly. “The maps are accurate—I swear it by the Stone in the heart of the Deep. What is left off is the affair of the gnomes, and the gnomes only—the very secret of the heart of the Deep. Once, one of the children of men spied out that heart, and since then we have had cause to regret it bitterly.”

He lifted his head again, pale eyes somber under the long shelf of snowy brow. “I beg that thou trust me, Dragonsbane. It goes against our ways to ask the aid of the children of men. But thou must help us. We are miners and traders; we are not warriors, and it is a warrior that we need. Day by day, more of our folk are forced to leave this city. If the Citadel falls, many of the people of the Deep will be slaughtered with the rebels who have given them not only the shelter of their walls, but the very bread of their rations. The King’s troops will not let them leave the Citadel, even if they would—and believe me, many have tried. Here in Bel, the cost of bread rises, and soon we shall be starved out, if we are not murdered by the mobs from the taverns. In a short time we shall be too few to hold the Deep, even should we be able to pass its gates.”

He held out his hands, small as a child’s and grotesquely knotted with age, pallidly white against the soft black layerings of his strangely cut sleeves. “If thou dost not help us, who among the children of men will?”

“Oh, run along, Dromar, do.” Clean and sweet as a silver knife, Zyerne’s voice cut across his last words. She came mounting the steps from the garden, light as an almond blossom floating on the breeze, her pink-edged veils blown back over the dark and intricate cascades of her hair. “Isn’t it enough that you try to foist your way into the King’s presence day after day, without troubling these poor people with politics out of season? Gnomes may be vulgar enough to talk business and buttonhole their betters in the evening, but here we feel that once the day is done, it should be a time for enjoyment.” She made shooing gestures with her well-kept hands and pouted in impatience. “Now run along,” she added in a teasing tone, “or I shall call the guards.”

The old gnome stood for a moment, his eyes upon hers, his cloudy white hair drifting like cobwebs around his wrinkled face in the stir of the sea winds. Zyerne wore an expression of childlike pertness, like a well-loved little girl demanding her own way. But Jenny, standing behind her, saw the delighted arrogance of her triumph in every line and muscle of her slim back. She had no doubt that Zyerne would, in fact, call the guards.

Evidently Dromar hadn’t, either. Ambassador from the court of one monarch to another for thirty years, he turned and departed at the behest of the King’s leman. Jenny watched him stump away down the gray and lavender stonework of the path across the garden, with Bond Clerlock, pale and brittle-looking, imitating his walk behind his back.

Ignoring Jenny as she generally did, Zyerne slid one hand through Gareth’s arm and smiled up at him. “Backbiting old plotter,” she remarked. “I must present myself to your father at supper in an hour, but there’s time for a stroll along the sea wall, surely? The rains won’t start until then.”

She could say it with surety, thought Jenny; at the touch of her spells, the clouds would come and depart like lapdogs waiting to be fed.

Still holding Gareth’s arm and leaning her suppleness against his height, she drew him toward the steps leading down into the garden; the courtiers there were already dispersing, and its walks were empty under the wind-driven scurry of fugitive leaves. Gareth cast a despairing glance back at John and Jenny, standing together on the terrace, she in the plaids and sheepskin jacket of the north, and he in the ornate blue-and-cream satins of the Court, his schoolboy spectacles balanced on his nose.

Jenny nudged John gently. “Go after them.”

He looked down at her with a half-grin. “So from a dancing bear I’m being promoted to a chaperon for our hero’s virtue?”

“No,” Jenny said, her voice low. “A bodyguard for his safety. I don’t know what it is about Zyerne, but he feels it, too. Go after them.”

John sighed and bent to kiss her lips. “The King had better pay me extra for this.” His hug was like being embraced by a satin lion. Then he was off, trotting down the steps and calling to them in horrible north-country brogue, the wind billowing his mantlings and giving him the appearance of a huge orchid in the gray garden.

In all, it was just over a week, before the King finally sent for his son.

“He asked me where I’d been,” Gareth said quietly. “He asked me why I hadn’t presented myself to him before.” Turning, he struck the side of his fist against the bedpost, his teeth gritted to fight tears of rage and confusion. “Jenny, in all these days he hasn’t even
seen
me!”

He swung angrily around. The faded evening light, falling through the diamond-shaped panes of the window where Jenny sat, brushed softly across the citron-and-white satins of his Court mantlings and flickered eerily in the round, facetless old jewels on his hands. His hair had been carefully curled for the audience with his father and, as was the nature of fine hair, hung perfectly straight around his face again, except for a stray lock or two. He’d put on his spectacles after the audience, cracked and bent and unlikely-looking with his finery; the lenses were speckled with the fine blowing rain that chilled the windowglass.

“I don’t know what to do,” he said in a strangulated voice. “He said—he said we’d talk about the dragon the next time he saw me. I don’t understand what’s going on...”

“Was Zyerne there?” John inquired. He was sitting at the spindly desk, which, like the rest of the upper floor of his and Jenny’s guest house, was heaped with books. The whole room, after eight days, had the appearance of a ransacked library; volumes were propped against one another, places marked by pages of John’s notes or odd articles of clothing or other books—and in one case a dagger—slipped between the leaves.

Gareth nodded miserably. “Half the time when I asked him things, she’d answer. Jenny, could she be holding him under some kind of spell?”

Jenny started to say, “Possibly...”

“Well, of course she is,” John said, tipping back his high stool to lean the small of his back against the desk. “And if you hadn’t been so bloody determined to do that slick little baggage justice, Jen, you’d have seen it a week ago. Come!” he added, as a soft tapping sounded at the door.

It opened wide enough for Trey Clerlock to put her head around the doorframe. She hesitated a moment; then, when John gestured, she came in, carrying a pearwood hurdy-gurdy with ivory stars scattered at random over its stubby neck box and playing pegs. John beamed with delight as he took it, and Jenny groaned.

“You’re not going to play that thing, are you? You’ll frighten the cattle for miles around, you know.”

“I’ll not,” John retorted. “And besides, there’s a trick to making it louder or softer...”

“Do you know it?”

“I can learn. Thank you, Trey, love—some people just haven’t any appreciation for the sound of fine music.”

“Some people haven’t any appreciation for the sound of a cat being run through a mangle,” Jenny replied. She turned back to Gareth. “Zyerne could be holding him under a spell, yes—but from what you’ve told me of your father’s stubbornness and strength of will, I’m a little surprised that her influence is that great.”

Gareth shook his head. “It isn’t only that,” he said. “I—I don’t know how to put this, and I can’t be sure, because I wasn’t wearing my spectacles during the interview, but it almost seems that he’s
faded
since I’ve been gone. That’s a stupid idea,” he recanted at once, seeing Jenny’s puzzled frown.

“No,” said Trey unexpectedly. The other three looked at her, and she blushed a little, like a flustered doll. “I don’t think it’s stupid. I think it’s true, and
faded
is a good word for it. Because I—I think the same thing is happening to Bond.”

“Bond?” Jenny said, and the memory of the King’s face flashed across her mind; how hollow and brittle he had looked, and how, like Bond, the paint on his face had seemed to stand out from the waxiness beneath.

Trey appeared to concentrate for a moment on carefully straightening the lace on her left cuff. An opal flickered softly in the particolored coils of her hair as she looked up. “I thought it was just me,” she said in a small voice. “I know he’s gotten heavier-handed, and less funny about his jests, the way he is when his mind is on something else. Except that his mind doesn’t seem to
be
on anything else; it just isn’t on what he’s doing, these days. He’s so absentminded, the way your father’s gotten.” Her gaze went to Jenny’s, imploring. “But why would Zyerne put a spell on my brother? She’s never needed to hold him to her. He’s always squired her around. He was one of the first friends she had at Court. He—he loved her. He used to dream about her...”

“Dream about her how?” Gareth demanded sharply.

Trey shook her head. “He wouldn’t tell me.”

“Did he sleepwalk?”

The surprise in the girl’s eyes answered the question before she spoke. “How did you know?”

The fitful rain outside had ceased; in the long silence, the voices of the palace guards in the court below the guest house windows could be heard clearly, telling a story about a gnome and a whore in town. Even the hazy light of the afternoon was failing, and the room was cold and slate gray. Jenny asked, “Do you dream about her still, Gareth?”

The boy turned red as if scalded. He stammered, shook his head, and finally said, “I—I don’t love her. I truly don’t. I try—I don’t want to be alone with her. But...” He gestured helplessly, unable to fight the traitor dreams,

Jenny said softly, “But she is calling you. She called you that first night we were in her hunting lodge. Had she done so before?”

“I—I don’t know.” He looked shaken and ill and very frightened, as he had when Jenny had probed at his mind, as if looking at things that he did not want to see. Trey, who had gone to take a spill from the fire and was lighting the small ivory lamps on the edge of John’s desk, shook out her taper, went quietly over to him, and got him to sit down beside her on the edge of the curtained bed.

At length Gareth said, “She might have. A few months ago she asked me to dine with her and my father in her wing of the palace. I didn’t go. I was afraid Father would be angry at me for slighting her, but later on he said something that made me wonder whether he’d even known about it. I wondered then. I thought...” He blushed still more hotly. “That was when I thought she might have been in love with me.”

“I’ve seen loves like that between wolves and sheep, but the romance tends to be a bit one-sided,” John remarked, scratching his nose. “What prevented you from going?”

“Polycarp.” He toyed with the folds of his mantlings, which caught a soft edge of brightness where the angle of the lamplight came down past the curtains of the bed. “He was always telling me to beware of her. He found out about the dinner and talked me out of going.”

“Well, I don’t know much about magic and all that, but just offhand, lad, I’d say he might have saved your life.” John braced his back against the desk’s edge and fingered a silent run of melody up the hurdy-gurdy’s keys.

Gareth shook his head, puzzled. “But why? It wasn’t a week before he tried to kill us—me and my father both.”