Winterlands 4 - Dragonstar (29 page)

“Aye, we've seen it,” said Muffle grimly, once all the exclamations and shouting were done and Aunt Rowe had ladled hot cider from the cauldron for the homecomers, and Cousin Dilly had stopped three-year-old Mag six or seven times from unraveling both their bundles and strewing the contents underfoot. “Or seen its tracks, anyway. At first I thought it was some poor traveler that'd been seized and stripped by bandits even of his boots.”

The blacksmith sipped his own horn of cider, a big man, four or five years older than his brother and the burly, red-haired image of old Lord Aver, but with a pleasanter expression. His mother, Hollyberry, had been the village blacksmith's wife at the time of her liaison with the old Thane, and she was still to be found, four days out of seven, at the Hold: It was a miracle she wasn't in the kitchen this afternoon as well.

Muffle went on, “But next day I found more tracks skirtin' the village, when any man in that state would have gone to one of those houses for help. Mol Bucket said as how her dogs have woke her two nights this week, barkin'—you know what brutes they are, livin' as she does out at the village's end. And she told me she's been havin' queer dreams. Peg has, too.”

Peg nodded, in the act of slicing up an onion into a fry-pan, to make more dressing to add to dinner.

“It's Caradoc, isn't it, Mother?” At thirteen, Ian was too old to crowd onto the bench between his parents to snuggle in their warmth, as Mag was unashamedly doing—or even to sit squeezed in at his father's side like Adric, though Adric was being careful not to hang on to John's arm as he clearly wanted to. But Ian's large blue eyes spoke more clearly than shouted whoops of joy, to see his mother and his father sit together on the bench by the kitchen table as they used to. To see the way John's glance touched Jenny when she spoke, and Jenny's close-lipped sidelong smile.

Oh, my children, thought Jenny, looking from that sud-denly-tall, rail-thin boy to his burly red brother and little sloeeyed Mag. Oh, my children, how could my grief have been such, that it took me away from you?

Whether Ian saw in Jenny's quiet calm what Morkeleb had seen, when the dragon began addressing her as Wizard-woman again, Jenny wasn't sure. It was something to be talked over with her eldest-born when they were together alone. In the days of her bereavement she had spoken to Ian of magic, not instructing him as she formerly had, but reflecting on what it meant and how it changed her perception of the world. She felt, now, that this boy, fine boned like all the Waynests of the village in contrast to Adric's rufous height and bulk, was hardly her son at all, but something closer: another mage, and a mage who like her had come through the harrowing nightmare of demonic possession and the unexpectedly worse horror of its aftermath.

The stories, she reflected, never talked about what happened, once a demon was driven out.

“I think it's Caradoc, yes,” she replied. “I trust you've all been watching one another's backs?”

“Like wolves watching sheep.” Adric slapped the hilt of his sword. It wasn't the boy's weapon John had given him last spring, Jenny saw, but a man's short stabbing-sword pilfered from the armory. At just-turned-nine, Adric was almost tall enough, and certainly strong enough, to wield it as a man, and his face was snow-burned as if Skaff Gradley and the other local militia captains had been letting him ride out with them on patrol.

“I came on tracks just the day before this latest storm, on the other side of Toadback Hill, and tried to get Bill to follow them with me. They led into the bog. I was out with Bill, none of us ever goes out alone. And when he said we shouldn't, but should get help from here, I even went, even if I knew nothing would get done that day and there was sure to be a storm the next. And there was,” he added, aggrieved.

“You have my eternal gratitude, Bill,” Jenny said feelingly, and the yardman grinned.

“And good on you, son,” added John, “for rememberin' your orders an' not goin' off on your own. Your old father's had enough gray hairs for one year. What'd Mol dream, Muffle? I didn't think she ever dreamed of anythin' but”—he caught Aunt Jane's warning glare and glanced at the two younger children, and altered his undoubtedly rude first thought to—“gettin' her corn-patch plowed,” and Jenny kicked him, hard, under the table.

“It's a dream others have been havin'.” Muffle scratched his unshaven chin. It had been less than a month since Jenny and Morkeleb had left the half-burned Hold, to carry the news south that the demons were dealing in slaves with the gnomes and raising the dead. But by the tired lines on the blacksmith's face it looked to have been as exhausting a time here as any that Jenny and John had faced. Roofs burned by Balgodorus Blacknife's outlaws had had to be rebuilt, quickly, the snows and winds that hampered repairs making those repairs all the more desperately urgent, and many of the men and women injured in the defense of the Hold had not been able to lend a hand. Jenny was only glad that her transformation into dragon form, to drive away the attackers, had come before they'd managed to burn the stored grain and seed-corn. That would, perhaps, have tilted the balance for many from survival to death.

But the big blacksmith had rallied the village, and even the little she'd seen of the Hold spoke worlds of the efforts of them all. Had Muffle's mother not been married at the time of his birth, he would probably have been acknowledged as Lord Aver's son and raised as a warrior—a job he fulfilled, anyway, two winters out of three, when the Iceriders came down from the North. Possibly he would have been made Thane, for he was nearer what the old lord had sought in a son than the bookish John.

John would have been happier, reflected Jenny, looking across the table at her husband, who was gesturing with a bannock as he talked and getting honey on his sleeve. He hated riding the summer circuit of courts of justice and making hard decisions about local crimes and squabbles, hated the hours of training required to maintain a warrior's muscle and reflexes. In his childhood, Muffle had been his sparringpartner, a young and angry Muffle who resented the boy who'd supplanted him.

Yet had Muffle been Thane there was a good chance that no one in the village would have survived the subsequent years, or the coming of the Golden Dragon to the North fifteen years ago. The blacksmith simply did not have John's wits, or John's ruthlessness.

It was enough to make one wonder, thought Jenny, about the ultimate intentions of the gods.

“Not the identical dream, of course,” Muffle was saying now. “But along the same lines. Mol dreamed as how she'd lost a necklace she valued—those pearls that fool Gosbosom bought her from that trader.…”

“Why'd Farmer Gosbosom buy Mol Bucket a pearl necklace?” Adric wanted to know, and Aunt Jane said darkly, “Never you mind.”

“In her dream, Ian found the necklace for her, deep in the woods near the Queen's Beck. But in her dream, Mol said, Ian couldn't find it if anyone but her was there. He said—or somebody said to her—the spells won't show, if any's there to know.” He frowned, cogitating on the matter for a time, then said, “But you see, two days later the necklace did go missin', an' she hasn't found it yet. I've told her as how you've said”—his glance went to Jenny—“not to go off like that in the woods, 'specially with Ian, but she's spoke to him of it. She spoke to him yesterday.”

Ordinarily, of course, an invitation to go off into the woods with Mol Bucket involved neither dreams, spells, nor disappearing pearl necklaces—at least, unless one was the besotted Farmer Gosbosom. But Jenny said nothing, turning the matter over in her mind.

“When Dan Darrow dreamed that dream,” Muffle went on after a moment, “it was his best heifer as was lost—that black one he calls Madame, with the white star on her forehead? And she was strayed away, next day, only of course Dan has more sense than to obey what someone whispers at him in a dream.”

“I dreamed Roth would come back,” said Peg, coming to the table with her bowl of stale bread crumbs in her hands. “My husband, you know, the goddess bless him wherever he is. Would come knockin' at the gate by the half-moon's light, in the tenth hour of the night, when all's pitch-dark an' cold.” Her dark eyes were wistful, and in the hearth-glow her long brown braids gleamed with silver, which had been bright as a bay colt when Roth had started off across the hills to visit his sister in Far West Riding one autumn day.

“First I dreamed I went downstairs with Nin”–she named her youngest daughter, ten years old now—“and poor Roth held out his hand cryin', an' disappeared into the dark. That woke me, and when I slept again I dreamed again, and in my dream I got up and ran and fetched Muffle, like he'd told me to. But when we came to the gate all I saw of Roth was him fadin' back into the storm, cryin' my name.”

The others at the table were silent. By their faces Jenny saw they'd heard the tale before, but it troubled them still. Ten years ago at the time of Roth's disappearance John had searched the Winterlands for weeks, for some sign of either his body or his desertion—for Roth the Gatekeeper had always been a lighthearted and light-minded man—and had found nothing.

“Well,” said Peg, “on the night of the half-moon someone did come knock on the gate, in the tenth hour of the night, an' the night dead still an' calm. And I swear to you I didn't dare to even open the window, Jen. Just lay in the bed listenin'. Though the night was so still, no one cried out below. And after a while the knockin' stopped.”

There was silence, and the weeping of the widowed winds against the shutters. Jenny reached back and put her hand over Peg's wrist. The gatekeeper gave her a tight cockeyed smile, like a child daring a chum to top that for a ghost story.

“Were there tracks?” John asked at last.

“You better believe there were tracks, an' none Roth would have made, neither, not with his narrow little feet.” She turned back to the hearth, where Aunt Jane waited impatiently for the bread crumbs: no ghost tales for her.

“Did Farmer Darrow get Madame back?” Adric wanted to know.

“Oh, aye,” Muffle said cheerily. “Found next day, over near the Wolf Hills, and it's a wonder the wolves didn't have the poor thing. I went down to the Queen's Beck after Mol told me of her dream, and found these tracks there, too. Barefoot tracks, staggerin' like as if him what made 'em was drunk or sick—or dyin' of cold, most like—but they went off into the glen straight enough. That was three days ago.”

Jenny rose, as the talk turned onto other matters: the repairing of the stables, the prospects of the harvest's stored corn lasting until spring. Everyone, as usual, had to have his or her word and John talking nineteen to the dozen with them all as usual. Few noticed as Jenny picked up one of the sheepskin coats left to hang in the turret stair, and slung her plaids about her, and climbed the twisting stone flight to the walkway that circled the Hold's outer wall. The storm dragged at her skirts, shoved and thrust her about on the narrow battlement. Looking out over the wall, she could see only a blurred desolation of moorlands and heath, the village fields obscured by snow, the walls barely dark lines in the grayish white. Crescents of blowing ice skimmed the ground, the gauzy tracks of the wind.

She thought of her house on Frost Fell, and the solitary peace she had had there for so many years, alone with the winds, and her herbs, and her cats.

What are you? John had asked her, and she had replied, What I am.

Miss Mab had said, The magic comes from what thou art, and all that thou art.

The good and the bad. The dragon and the demon and the woman who had turned aside from them both.

She saw Morkeleb, a skeleton shadow silhouetted in the mealy sleet, and grieved for a moment that she could not be two beings, and have two futures. But that, she understood now, was the essence of humankind. To have only one, and to choose.

She held out her hands: my friend.

Wizard-woman. He hung in the air, obscured by the blowing twilight but untouched, beautiful with the lean, thorny beauty of the dragon-kind, and his voice in her mind was the velvet essence of dreaming. Your Dreamweaver has said that he saw the Demon Queen, walking abroad in the sunlight of the streets; therefore must I go. She knows you have the catchbottle still. She will journey to the Skerries of Light, lest others arrive there first and wrest from Corvin the secret of her name. Beware, Wizard-woman. This they will try to do, the servants of Folcalor and the servants of Adromelech and whoever Aohila finds to serve her—or tricks into doing her will—once they know the bottle is in your possession as well.

I will beware, she said. Can you not, Dragonshadow, warn Corvin in dreams, that fly swifter even than the flight of dragons to the islands of the west?

And she felt the ripple of annoyance and scorn. Whatever else Morkeleb had laid aside, when he had laid aside his magic, there was still evidently the matter between Corvin and himself of which dragon was still the greatest loremaster and sorcerer of all of dragon-kind.

If I warned him in dreaming of fire raining from the sky in the next hour, still he would but turn over in his sleep. And if I warned others—Centhwevir and Yrsgendl and Enismirdal—I am not sure they would understand. It is not a thing of dragons, to band together, save in our flights between the stars. I must go myself, and see what I can accomplish.

Are you not, as Dragonshadow, able to convince Corvin of his danger? Or lead the others?

The Dragonshadows … He hesitated, as if not certain that she would understand. And she heard in her mind the music of the Dragonshadows, felt the spirit-light and the warmth of them, dazzling and simple yet incomprehensible—even to the dragons, never understood.

And she remembered saying to John, What I am …

The Dragonshadows did not lead us, he said at length. We came here, and they followed. I suspect—but I do not know—they followed because they loved us.

Yes, thought Jenny, feeling, understanding, that this was true. Yes.

But I did not understand this at the time, because I did not understand what it was to love.

Once you said to me, Wizard-woman, that the key to magic is to be found in magic, and the key to love, in love. The love that I learned of you was indeed my bane as a dragon. But like all true banes, all death, it proved to be a gate through which I passed into an unknown country. As for the Dragon shadows, they are very old, and have observed many things, and dreamed upon what they have seen. Yet most dragons never ask them why dragons exist, and what it means that we have the abilities that we have. Much less have they queried about the things that dwell on all the various worlds that we have seen. And now that I have passed that gate myself, and become a Dragonshadow, and seek the answers to these questions, they are gone.