Winterlands 2 - Dragonshadow (15 page)

saw another go shrieking and waving his arms into the bloodied, ruin-choked slop of the moat. She felt no triumph. Poor stupid louts, she thought, and pitied even their chief. To live as they lived, surrounded by brutality and hardship, seemed to her almost punishment enough for being what they were. Many of them had to die, for this would not cease their depredations on the weak; it was all they understood. But her heart ached for the children they had once been. Not many minutes later Pellanor came to the door of her chamber. He was wounded in the head and blood smeared his armor, but he stopped, looking in silently, and made to silently go. Jenny raised her head from her scrying-stone, “No.” Her mouth and face felt numb, as if speech were a great effort through the thick haze of power-spells and concentration. She raised her hand. The Baron’s grizzled eyebrows bunched down over the hatchet of his nose. “Are you all right? Can I fetch you something?”

She shook her head.

“They’re wavering,” he said. “They’ve broken, on the south wall. I thought you were spent, you need rest …”

“I did,” Jenny said thickly. “I do. Not now.” She got to her feet. “I must go. Outside.” “Now? Over the wall?”

She nodded, impatient at the flash of disbelief and anxiety in his voice. Did he think that after all this she’d run away? “Yseult,” she said, hoping that would explain all this and then realizing that it didn’t even come close. If the attackers were wavering before her renewed defenses, it wouldn’t be very many minutes before Balgodorus went back to fetch his mistress; wouldn’t be many minutes before the hunt was on. She had to reach Yseult and renew the warding-signs before then.

But she couldn’t say it, couldn’t say anything. Only shook her head and muttered with great effort, “I’ll be back.”

If Balgodorus even suspected Yseult had taken refuge within the manor, or changed sides to betray him, he would redouble his attacks and would never forgo his vengeance. She barely heard Pellanor’s arguments and questions at her heels as she made her way outside. Only once or twice she shook her head and repeated, “I must go. I’ll be back.”

Men milled about under the south wall. A siege ladder burned in the mud of the ruined moat. Arrows flew back and forth, not nearly as many as there had been earlier; one of the manor children scurried along under the protection of the palisade, pulling out stuck enemy shafts for use tomorrow. Some of those missiles had been back and forth between sides six or eight times. Jenny’s spells and Yseult’s both marked the feathers. In spite of her weariness Jenny had to smile. John would be amused by that.

“They’re breaking.” Pellanor looked behind him across the courtyard, to a woman signaling from the opposite wall. “Old Grond Firebeard’s decided to give us victory at last. Can you tell me where you’re going?”

“Later.” Jenny shut her eyes, called to mind the copse of trees just opposite the northeast watchtower and summoned to it a blinding burst of colored light, so sharp that the glare of it penetrated her eyelids even here. She heard the robbers yell— although both she and Yseult had used such diversions on and off for weeks—and opening her eyes, saw them running in that direction. “Now!”

Pellanor dropped the rope. Jenny swung over the sharpened stakes, dragged around her the rags of concealing spells, and let herself down quickly. Someone cried out, and an arrow broke against the stone of the wall near her shoulder. Too much to hope the spells protected her, exhausted as she was. Rather than strengthen them, which wouldn’t work anyway as long as she was still in their sight, she called instead the easier illusion that she was an elderly man, low in value in the slave market and running for his life.

Someone shouted, “Don’t let him get away!” and a couple of arrows stuck in the earth, wide of their mark. Jenny tightened her grip on her halberd and bolted for the woods. Nymr sea-blue, violet-crowned…

And somehow the turn of that music, medium-swift, trip-foot yet stately, spoke of the shape of the dragon John saw before him, circling the bare pale spires of the rock near which the Milkweed hovered, sixty feet below. Not dark like sapphires, nor yet the color of the sea—not these northern seas at any rate—more was he the color of lobelia or the bluest hearts of blue iris. But he was violet-crowned. The long, curving horns that grew from among the flower-bed mane were striped, white and purple; the ribbon-scales streaming in pennons from the shorter, softer fur gleamed a thousand shades of amethyst and plum. Long antennae swung and bobbed from the whole spiked and rippling cloud, and these were tipped with glowing damson lights. The dragon swung around once and hung motionless on the air like a gull, regarding him. Even at that distance John knew that the eyes, too, were violet, brilliant as handfuls of jewels. Don’t look at his eyes, he thought, bending his head down over the ebon and pearwood hurdy-gurdy, the wind gently rocking the swaying boat. Don’t look at his eyes. He played the tune that was Nymr’s, fingers moving true with long practice over the ivory keys. A hurdy-gurdy is a street instrument, made to be heard above din and at a great distance in open air. The music curled from the rosined wheel like colored ribbon unspooling: blue and violet. Nymr hung in the air for a moment longer, then tilted those vast blue butterfly wings and plunged straight down into the sea.

John saw the wings tuck back, cleave water. From overhead, for two days now, he’d watched the movement of the fish in the ocean, seeing down through the creeping waves to the schools of huge seagoing salmon, swordfish, and marlin, pale shapes that flashed briefly into view and sank away again. The gulls and terns, gray and white and black, that wheeled about the cliff-girt promontory scattered and circled, then returned to mew about the balloons. The dragon speared the deep, plunging away in a long spume of silver bubbles. Creatures of heat and fire, thought John. How did they not die in the water’s cold?

Stillness and silence. The waves broke in ruffles of foam on the rocks, without the slightest roll that spoke of shelving shallows anywhere beneath. Rather the rock rose straight out of the water, all cliffs, line behind jagged line. Dwarf juniper, heather, sea-oats furred them with the occasional wind-crippled tree; birds nested among them casually, like chickens on the rafters of a barn. The wind moaned through the rocks and John turned the fans of the Milkweed to hold the craft steady. The next island lay ten miles to the northwest. The sea horizon was pricked with them, thumb-tiny in distance. The gulls all opened their mouths and screamed … Then the dragon broke the waves in an upleap of water, purple and flashing in the fountain brilliance directly under the Milkweed. John grasped and swung on the rigging, causing the fragile craft to heel, and the tourmaline wing knifed past close enough to douse his face with spray. It had only to spit fire at him and he was done, he thought, swiveling one of the small catapults to bear as the dragon vanished above the air bags. Sixty feet above water, any fight would be a fight to death. Shadow crossed him, light translucent through the stretch of the wings.

Then it was hovering in front of him again, rocking on the air as a boat rocks at anchor.

John stepped back from the weapon, picked up the hurdy-gurdy, and played again the pixilated threnody of the dragon’s name.

The swanlike head dipped and angled. The eyes faced front, a predator’s eyes. The entire great dripping body, thirty feet from beak-tip to the spiked and barbed pinecone of the tail, drifted closer.

John felt a querying, a touch and a pat, cold and alien as long slender fingers, probing at his mind. He concentrated on the music, wondering if indeed the dragon’s name would keep the dragon from killing him. One of Gar’s ballads had Selkythar the Golden writing the Crimson Drake Ruilgir’s name on his shield, so the dragon’s fire rebounded and consumed its creator—not a technique John was eager to put to the test.

Query again, sharper, pricking. He kept himself from looking up, knowing the amethyst eyes sought to capture his.

????, Songweaver.

His heart was beating hard. “I came to work no one’s harm,” he said, raising his head but keeping his eyes on the lapis claws, the beaded azure enamel of the leg-spines. “I’m here seeking Morkeleb the Black. Does he dwell on these isles?”

The mind slipped aside from his, indifference succeeding a momentary spark of curiosity.

Morkeleb the Black had spoken to him mind to mind, in human words or what had felt like human words at the time. All he sensed here was a tumbling surge of images that came and went. For a moment he seemed to see Morkeleb swimming in a thick green sea or flying in thick green air, Morkeleb indefinably different from his memory. Black wings, black mane, black horns; black scales like ebony spikes along back and joints and nape. Black claws reaching out, to slide through a thing that billowed in the water/air before him like a great gelid cloud of poisonous diamond.

Morkeleb in darkness, outlined by the light of stars. Reading the stars, thought John. Weightless in the Night beyond Night and scrying their light, seeing where each star lay and what it was made of.

Then Nymr’s mind turned away, with an almost palpable shrug.

“I need to find him,” John said and averted his eyes quickly as the dragon floated around to face him, reaching for him with those crystalline mulberry eyes. All that came to him through his mind was a sense of dismissal, contempt:

Tiny, peeping—the image was of a bird-baby in its nest— nothing. A flower scent passingly pretty. Devoured.

Nymr floated off. John saw the bird-head cock, rise, and fall on its neck. The star-drake studied the Milkweed, air bags and catapults and wheels and flashing fan-blades. He felt the traces and echoes of the dragon’s curiosity, as if the creature were trying to fit together pieces of a puzzle. He felt it also when Nymr shrugged it away. Nymr’s mind closed, indifferent again. No threat. Nothing that affected him. Not a thing.

Meaning, as he had heard Morkeleb say, Not a thing of dragons.

John leaned on the tiller and put the Milkweed’s fans over a few degrees, strengthening their beat until the craft moved off around the towering crags, toward the next promontory, many miles away. Nymr hovered for a time, watching him—he was aware of the creature’s eyes on his back as he had seldom been aware of anything. Then the dragon plunged down into the ocean again, to emerge a few minutes later with a twelve-foot swordfish struggling in its claws. Jenny circled the Grubbie house three times before going in. The wards she’d showed Yseult glimmered on the slumped stone and mud of the walls, surprisingly strong. The girl had talent, and a genuine feel for the sources of power, once she had an idea of what they were and how to find them. Casting her awareness through the woods all around, Jenny detected no trace of ambush, no scent of men in the trees, no boot-broken twig or trampled mud. Yseult’s tracks, too, had been eradicated where they crossed soft ground, or hidden in the leaves and stones. Crouched in the gathering gloom, Jenny breathed on her crystal and whispered, “Yseult?” 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.”