Dragonsbane (11 page)

There was long silence, broken only by the soft squish of hooves in the roadbed, the patter of rain, and the occasional pop of the mule Clivy’s hooves as he overreached his own stride. When she went on, her voice was low, as if she spoke to herself.

“He asked me to bear his children, for he wanted children, and he wanted those children to be mine also. He knew I would never live with him as his wife and devote my time to his comfort and that of his sons. I knew it, too.” She sighed. “The lioness bears her cubs and then goes back to the hunting trail. I thought I could do the same. All my life I have been called heartless—would that it were really so. I hadn’t thought that I would love them.”

Through the trees, the dilapidated towers of the Snake River bridge came into view, the water streaming high and yellow beneath the crumbling arches. Before them, a dark figure sat his horse in the gloomy road, spectacles flashing like rounds of dirty ice in the cold daylight, signaling that the way was safe.

They made camp that night outside the ruined town of Ember, once the capital of the province of Wyr. Nothing remained of it now save a dimpled stone mound, overgrown with birch and seedling maple, and the decaying remains of the curtain wall. Jenny knew it of old, from the days when she and Caerdinn had searched for books in the buried cellars. He had beaten her, she remembered, when she had spoken of the beauty of the skeleton lines of stone that shimmered through the dark cloak of the fallow earth.

As dusk came down, they pitched their camp outside the walls. Jenny gathered the quick-burning bark of the paper birch for kindling and fetched water from the spring nearby. Gareth saw her coming and broke purposefully away from his own tasks to join her. “Jenny,” he began, and she looked up at him.

“Yes?”

He paused, like a naked swimmer on the bank of a very cold pool, then visibly lost his courage. “Er—is there some reason why we didn’t camp in the ruins of the town itself?”

It was patently not what he had been about to say, but she only glanced back toward the white bones of the town, wrapped in shadow and vine. “Yes.”

His voice dropped. “Is there—is there
something
that haunts the ruins?”

The corners of her mouth tucked a little. “Not that I know of. But the entire town is buried under the biggest patch of poison ivy this side of the Gray Mountains. Even so,” she said, kneeling beside the little dry firewood they had been able to find and arranging the birchbark beneath it, “I have laid spells of ward about the camp, so take care not to leave it.”

He ducked his head a little at this gentle teasing and blushed.

A little curiously, she added, “Even if this Lady Zyerne of yours is a sorceress—even if she is fond of you—she would never have come here from the south, you know. Mages only transform themselves into birds in ballads, for to change your essence into the essence of some other life form—which is what shapeshifting is—aside from being dangerous, requires an incredible amount of power. It is not something done lightly. When the mageborn go, they go upon their two feet.”

“But...” His high forehead wrinkled in a frown. Having decided to be her champion, he was unwilling to believe there was anything beyond her powers. “But the Lady Zyerne does it all the time. I’ve seen her.”

Jenny froze in the act of arranging the logs, cut by an unexpected pang of a hot jealousy she had thought that she had long outgrown—the bitter jealousy of her youth toward those who had greater skills than she. All her life she had worked to rid herself of it, knowing it crippled her from learning from those more powerful. It was this that made her tell herself, a moment later, that she ought not to be shocked to learn of another’s use of power.

Yet in the back of her mind she could hear old Caerdinn speaking of the dangers of taking on an alien essence, even if one had the enormous power necessary to perform the transformation and of the hold that another form could take on the minds of all but the very greatest.

“She must be a powerful mage indeed,” she said, rebuking her own envy. With a touch of her mind, she called fire to the kindling, and it blazed up hotly beneath the logs. Even that small magic pricked her, like a needle carelessly left in a garment, with the bitter reflection of the smallness of her power. “What forms have you seen her take?” She realized as she spoke that she hoped he would say he had seen none himself and that it was, in fact, only rumor.

“Once a cat,” he said. “And once a bird, a swallow. And she’s taken other shapes in—in dreams I’ve had. It’s odd,” he went on rather hastily. “In ballads they don’t make much of it. But it’s hideous, the most horrible thing I’ve ever seen—a woman, and a woman I—I—” He stumbled in his words, barely biting back some other verb that he replaced with, “—I know, twisting and withering, changing into a beast. And then the beast will watch you with her eyes.”

He folded himself up cross-legged beside the fire as Jenny put the iron skillet over it and began to mix the meal for the cakes. Jenny asked him, “Is she why you asked the King to send you north on this quest? To get away from her?”

Gareth turned his face from her. After a moment he nodded. “I don’t want to betray—to betray the King.” His words caught oddly as he spoke. “But sometimes I feel I’m destined to do so. And I don’t know what to do.

“Polycarp hated her,” he went on, after a few moments during which John’s voice could be heard, cheerfully cursing the mules Clivy and Melonhead as he unloaded the last of the packs. “The rebel Master of Halnath, He always told me to stay away from her. And he hated her influence over the King.”

“Is that why he rebelled?”

“It might have had something to do with it. I don’t know.” He toyed wretchedly with a scrap of meal left in the bowl. “He—he tried to murder the King and—and the Heir to the throne, the King’s son. Polycarp is the next heir, the King’s nephew. He was brought up in the palace as a sort of a hostage after his father rebelled. Polycarp stretched a cable over a fence in the hunting field on a foggy morning when he thought no one would see until it was too late.” His voice cracked a little as he added, “I was the one who saw him do it.”

Jenny glanced across at his face, broken by darkness and the leaping light of the flames into a harsh mosaic of plane and shadows. “You loved him, didn’t you?”

He managed to nod. “I think he was a better friend to me than anyone else at Court. People—people our age there—Polycarp is five years older than I am—used to mock at me, because I collect ballads and because I’m clumsy and can’t see without my spectacles; they’d mock at him because his father was executed for treason and because he’s a philosopher. Many of the Masters have been. It’s because of the University at Halnath—they’re usually atheists and troublemakers. His father was, who married the King’s sister. But Polycarp was always like a son to the King.” He pushed back the thin, damp weeds of his hair from his high forehead and finished in a strangled voice, “Even when I saw him do it, I couldn’t believe it.”

“And you denounced him?”

Gareth’s breath escaped in a defeated sigh. “What could I do?”

Had this, Jenny wondered, been what he had hidden from them? The fact that the Realm itself was split by threat of civil war, like the Kinwars that had drawn the King’s troops away from the Winterlands to begin with? Had he feared that if John knew that there was a chance the King would refuse to lend him forces needed at home, he would not consent to make the journey?

Or was there something else?

It had grown fully dark now. Jenny picked the crisp mealcakes from the griddle and set them on a wooden plate at her side while she cooked salt pork and beans. While Gareth had been speaking, John had come to join them, half-listening to what was said, half-watching the woods that hemmed them in.

As they ate, Gareth went on, “Anyway, Polycarp managed to get out of the city before they came for him. The King’s troops were waiting for him on the road to Halnath, but we think he went to the Deep, and the gnomes took him through to the Citadel that way. Then they—the gnomes—bolted up the doors leading from the Deep to the Citadel and said they would not meddle in the affairs of men. They wouldn’t admit the King’s troops through the Deep to take the Citadel from the rear, but they wouldn’t let the rebels out that way, either, or sell them food. There was some talk of them using blasting powder to close up the tunnels to Halnath completely. But then the dragon came.”

“And when the dragon came?” asked John.

“When the dragon came, Polycarp opened the Citadel gates that led into the Deep and let the gnomes take refuge with him. At least, a lot of the gnomes
did
take refuge with him, though Zyerne says they were the ones who were on the Master’s side to begin with. And she should know—she was brought up in the Deep.”

“Was she, now?” John tossed one of the small pork bones into the fire and wiped his fingers on a piece of corncake. “I thought the name sounded like the tongue of the gnomes.”

Gareth nodded. “The gnomes used to take a lot of the children of men as apprentices in the Deep—usually children from Deeping, the town that stands—stood—in the vale before the great gates of the Deep itself, where the smelting of the gold and the trade in foodstuffs went on. They haven’t done so in the last year or so—in fact in the last year they forbade men to enter the Deep at all.”

“Did they?” asked John, curious. “Why was that?”

Gareth shrugged. “I don’t know. They’re strange creatures, and tricky. You can’t ever tell what they’re up to, Zyerne says.”

As the night deepened, Jenny left the men by the fire and silently walked the bounds of the camp, checking the spell-circles that defended it against the blood-devils, the Whisperers, and the sad ghosts that haunted the ruins of the old town. She sat on what had been a boundary stone, just beyond the edge of the fire’s circle of light, and sank into her meditations, which for some nights now she had neglected.

It was not the first time she had neglected them—she was too well aware of the nights she had let them go by while she was at the Hold with John and her sons. Had she not neglected them—had she not neglected the pursuit of her power—would she be as powerful as this Zyerne, who could deal in shapeshifting at a casual whim? Caerdinn’s strictures against it returned to her mind, but she wondered if that was just her own jealousy speaking, her own spite at another’s power. Caerdinn had been old, and there had been nowhere in the Winterlands that she could turn for other instruction after he had died. Like John, she was a scholar bereft of the meat of scholarship; like the people of the village of Alyn, she was circumscribed by the fate that had planted her in such stony soil.

Against the twisting yellow ribbons of the flames, she could see John’s body swaying as he gestured, telling Gareth some outrageous story from his vast collection of tales about the Winterlands and its folk. The Fattest Bandit in the Winterlands? she wondered. Or one about his incredible Aunt Mattie? It occurred to her for the first time that it was for her, as well as for his people, that he had undertaken the King’s command—for the things that she had never gotten, and for their sons.

It’s not worth his life!
she thought desperately, watching him.
I do well with what I have!
But the silent ruins of Ember mocked at her, their naked bones veiled by darkness, and the calm part of her heart whispered to her that it was his to choose, not hers. She could only do what she was doing—make her choice and abandon her studies to ride with him. The King had sent his command and his promise, and John would obey the King.

Five days south of Ember, the lands opened up once more. The forests gave way to the long, flat, alluvial slopes that led down to the Wildspae, the northern boundary of the lands of Belmarie. It was an empty countryside, but without the haunted desolation of the Winterlands; there were farms here, like little walled fortresses, and the road was at least passably drained. Here for the first time they met other travelers, merchants going north and east, with news and rumor of the capital—of the dread of the dragon that gripped the land, and the unrest in Bel due to the high price of grain.

“Stands to reason, don’t it?” said a foxlike little trader, with his cavalcade of laden mules behind him. “What with the dragon ruining the harvest, and the grain rotting in the fields; yes, and the gnomes what took refuge in Bel itself hoarding the stuff, taking it out of the mouths of honest folk with their ill-got gold.”

“Ill-got?” asked John curiously. “They mined and smelted it, didn’t they?” Jenny, who wanted news without irritating its bearer, kicked him surreptitiously in the shin.

The merchant spat into the brimming ditch by the roadside and wiped his grizzled reddish beard. “That gives them no call to buy grain away from folks that needs it,” he said. “And word has it that they’re trafficking regular with their brothers up in Halnath—yes, and that they and the Master between them kidnapped the King’s Heir, his only child, to hold for ransom.”

“Could they have?” John inquired.

“Course they could. The Master’s a sorcerer, isn’t he? And the gnomes have never been up to any good, causing riot and mayhem in the capital...”

“Riot and mayhem?” Gareth protested. “But the gnomes have been our allies for time out of mind! There’s never been trouble between us.”

The man squinted up at him suspiciously. But he only grumbled, “Just goes to show, doesn’t it? Treacherous little buggers.” Jerking on his lead mule’s bridle, he passed them by.

Not long after this they met a company of the gnomes themselves, traveling banded together, surrounded by guards for protection, with their wealth piled in carts and carriages. They peered up at John with wary, shortsighted eyes of amber or pale blue beneath low, wide brows, and gave him unwilling answers to his questions about the south.

“The dragon? Aye, it lairs yet in Ylferdun, and none of the men the King has sent have dislodged it.” The gnome leader toyed with the soft fur trim of his gloves, and the thin winds billowed at the silk of his strangely cut garments. Behind him, the guards of the cavalcade watched the strangers in deepest suspicion, as if fearing an attack from even that few. “As for us, by the heart of the Deep, we have had enough of the charity of the sons of men, who charge us four times the going price for rooms the household servants would scorn and for food retrieved from the rats.” His voice, thin and high like that of all the gnomes, was bitter with the verjuice of hate given back for hate. “Without the gold taken from the Deep, their city would never have been built, and yet not a man will speak to us in the streets, save to curse. They say in the city now that we plot with our brethren who fled through the back ways of the Deep into the Citadel of Halnath. By the Stone, it is lies; but such lies are believed now in Bel.”