Dragonsbane (35 page)

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.

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 rime 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 vanished 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 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 fleeting, triangular smile.

Adric had it already, along with the blithe and sunny half of John’s quirky personality. Ian 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, sweetness 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 of Morkeleb’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 mageborn could have felt; the need, like lust or hunger, something only the mageborn 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.

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?

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 moonlight 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 floating 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 struggle 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 Waynest. 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.
I 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 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 Waynest. 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 reechoed 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. Somewhere 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 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 turn 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 conclusions of a dozen ballads reverberant in his shocked features.

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-country voice behind her protest, “Look after John, indeed!”

L
IGHT WATERED THE
darkness, changing the air from velvet to silk. Cold cut into Jenny’s hands and face, imbuing 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 horn 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 horn. The claws lapped easily around her waist. She felt 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 whistled around the spikes that defended the dragon’s backbone—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.

This is the realm of the dragons,
Morkeleb’s voice said within her mind.
The roads of the air. It is yours, for the stretching out of your hand.

In the slant of the light they laid no shadow upon the ground, but it seemed to Jenny that she could almost see the track of their passage written like a ship’s wake upon the wind. Her mind half-within the dragon’s, she could sense the variations of the air, updraft and thermal, as if the wind itself were of different colors. With the dragon’s awareness, she saw other things in the air as well—the paths of energy across the face of the world, the tracks that traveled from star to star, like the lines of force that were repeated in the body, smaller and smaller, in the spreads of dealt cards or thrown runes or the lie of leaves in water. She was aware of life everywhere, of the winter-white foxes and hares in the patchy snowlines beneath the thin scrum of cloud below, and of the King’s troops, camped far down upon the road, who pointed and cried out as the dragon’s dark shape passed overhead.

They crossed the flank of the mountain to its daylight side. Before and below her, she saw the cliff and hill and Citadel of Halnath, a spiky conglomerate of thrusting gray ramparts clinging like a mud-built swallow’s nest to the massive shoulder of a granite cliff. From its feet, the land lay crisscrossed with wooded ravines to the silver curve of a river; mist blended with the blue of woodsmoke to veil the straggling lines of tents and guard posts, horse lines and trenches raw with yellow mud, that made up the siege camps. An open ring of battered ground lay between the walls and the camp, ravaged by battle and bristling with the burned-out shells of the small truck farms that nestled around the walls of any town. Beyond, to the north, the green stretches of the Marches vanished away under a gauze of mists, the horse- and cattle-lands that were the Master’s fief and strength. From the river marshes where pewter waters spread themselves, a skein of danglefoot herons rose through the milky vapors, tiny and clear as a pen sketch.

There.
Jenny pointed with her mind toward the battlements of the high Citadel.
The central court there. It’s narrow, but long enough for us to land.

Wind and her long hair lashed her eyes as the dragon wheeled.

They have armored their walls,
the dragon said.
Look.