Dragonsbane (16 page)

Gareth stepped forward, the oak-leaf-cut end of his mantlings gathered like a cloak between the second and third fingers of his right hand. With surprising grace, he bent his long, gangly frame into a perfect Sarmendes-in-Splendor salaam, such as only the Heir could make, and then only to the monarch. “My lord.”

King Uriens II of Belmarie, Suzerain of the Marches, High Lord of Wyr, Nast, and the Seven Islands, regarded his son for a moment out of hollow and colorless eyes set deep within a haggard, brittle face. Then, without a word, he turned away to acknowledge the next petitioner.

The silence in the gallery would have blistered the paint from wood. Like black poison dumped into clear water, it spread to the farthest ends of the room. The last few petitioners’ voices were audible through it, clearer and clearer, as if they shouted; the closing of the gilded bronze doors as the King passed on into his audience room sounded like the booming of thunder. Jenny was conscious of the eyes of all the room looking anywhere but at them, then sliding back in surreptitious glances, and of Gareth’s face, as white as his collar lace.

A soft voice behind them said, “Please don’t be angry with him, Gareth.”

Zyerne stood there, in plum-colored silk so dark it was nearly black, with knots of pink-tinted cream upon her trailing sleeves. Her mead-colored eyes were troubled. “You did take his seal, you know, and depart without his permission.”

John spoke up. “Bit of an expensive slap on the wrist, though, isn’t it? I mean, there the dragon is and all, while we’re here waiting for leave to go after it.”

Zyerne’s lips tightened a little, then smoothed. At the near end of the King’s Gallery, a small door in the great ones opened, and the Chamberlain Badegamus appeared, quietly summoning the first of the petitioners whom the King had acknowledged.

“There really is no danger to us here, you know. The dragon has been confining his depredations to the farmsteads along the feet of Nast Wall.”

“Ah,” John said comprehendingly. “That makes it all right, then. And is this what you’ve told the people of those farmsteads to which, as you say, the dragon’s been confining his depredations?”

The flash of anger in her eyes was stronger then, as if no one had ever spoken to her so—or at least, thought Jenny, observing silently from John’s side, not for a long time. With visible effort, Zyerne controlled herself and said with an air of one reproving a child, “You must understand. There are many more pressing concerns facing the King...”

“More pressing than a dragon sitting on his doorstep?” demanded Gareth, outraged.

She burst into a sweet gurgle of laughter. “There’s no need to enact a Dockmarket drama over it, you know. I’ve told you before, darling, it isn’t worth the wrinkles it will give you.”

He pulled his head back from her playful touch. “Wrinkles! We’re talking about people being killed!”

“Tut, Gareth,” Bond Clerlock drawled, strolling languidly over to them. “You’re getting as bad as old Polycarp used to be.”

Under the paint, his face looked even more washed-out next to Zyerne’s sparkling radiance. With a forced effort at his old lightness, he went on, “You shouldn’t grudge those poor farmers the only spice in their dull little lives.”

“Spice...” Gareth began, and Zyerne squeezed his hand chidingly.

“Don’t tell me you’re going to go all dull and altruistic on us. What a bore that would be.” She smiled. “And I will tell you this,” she added more soberly. “Don’t do anything that would further anger your father. Be patient—and try to understand.”

Halfway down the long gallery, the Chamberlain Badegamus was returning, passing the small group of gnomes who sat, an island of isolation, in the shadow of one of the fluted ornamental arches along the east wall. As the Chamberlain walked by, one of them rose in a silken whisper of flowing, alien robes, the cloudy wisps of his milk-white hair floating around his slumped back. Gareth had pointed him out to Jenny earlier—Azwylcartusherands, called Dromar by the folk of men who had little patience with the tongue of gnomes, longtime ambassador from the Lord of the Deep to the Court of Bel. Badegamus saw him and checked his stride, then glanced quickly at Zyerne. She shook her head. Badegamus averted his face and walked past the gnomes without seeing them.

“They grow impudent,” the enchantress said softly. “To send envoys here, when they fight on the side of the traitors of Halnath.”

“Well, they can hardly help that, can they, if the back way out of the Deep leads into the Citadel,” John remarked.

“They could have opened the Citadel gates to let the King’s troops in.”

John scratched the side of his long nose. “Well, being a barbarian and all, I wouldn’t know how things are done in civilized lands,” he said. “In the north, we’ve got a word for someone who’d do that to a man who gave him shelter when he was driven from his home.”

For an instant Zyerne was silent, her power and her anger seeming to crackle in the air. Then she burst into another peal of chiming laughter. “I swear, Dragonsbane, you do have a refreshingly naïve way of looking at things. You make me feel positively ancient.” She brushed a tendril of her hair aside from her cheek as she spoke; she looked as sweet and guileless as a girl of twenty. “Come. Some of us are going to slip away from this silliness and go riding along the sea cliffs. Will you come, Gareth?” Her hand stole into his in such a way that he could not avoid it without rudeness—Jenny could see his face color slightly at the touch. “And you, our barbarian? You know the King won’t see you today.”

“Be that as it may,” John said quietly. “I’ll stay here on the off chance.”

Bond laughed tinnily. “There’s the spirit that won the Realm!”

“Aye,” John agreed in a mild voice and returned to the carved bench where he and Jenny had been, secure in his established reputation for barbarous eccentricity.

Gareth drew his hand from Zyerne’s and sat down nearby, catching his mantlings in the lion’s-head arm of the chair. “I think I’ll stay as well,” he said, with as much dignity as one could have while disentangling oneself from the furniture.

Bond laughed again. “I think our Prince has been in the north too long!” Zyerne wrinkled her nose, as if at a joke in doubtful taste.

“Run along, Bond.” She smiled. “I must speak to the King. I shall join you presently.” Gathering up her train, she moved off toward the bronze doors of the King’s antechamber, the opals that spangled her veils giving the impression of dew flecking an apple blossom as she passed the pale bands of the windowlight. As she came near the little group of gnomes, old Dromar rose again and walked toward her with the air of one steeling himself for a loathed but necessary encounter. But she turned her glance from him and quickened her step, so that, to intercept her, he would have to run after her on his short, bandy legs. This he would not do, but stood looking after her for a moment, smoldering anger in his pale amber eyes.

“I don’t understand it,” said Gareth, much later, as the three of them jostled their way along the narrow lanes of the crowded Dockmarket quarter. “She said Father was angry, yes—but he knew whom I’d be bringing with me. And he must have known about the dragon’s latest attack.” He hopped across the fish-smelling slime of the gutter to avoid a trio of sailors who’d come staggering out of one of the taverns that lined the cobbled street and nearly tripped over his own cloak.

When Badegamus had announced to the nearly empty gallery that the King would see no one else that day, John and Jenny had taken the baffled and fuming Gareth back with them to the guest house they had been assigned in one of the outer courts of the Palace. There they had changed out of their borrowed court dress, and John had announced his intention of spending the remainder of the afternoon in the town, in quest of gnomes.

“Gnomes?” Gareth said, surprised.

“Well, if it hasn’t occurred to anyone else, it has occurred to me that, if I’m to fight this drake, I’m going to need to know the layout of the caverns.” With surprising deftness, he disentangled himself from the intricate crisscross folds of his mantlings, his head emerging from the double-faced satin like a tousled and unruly weed. “And since it didn’t seem the thing to address them at Court...”

“But they’re plotting!” Gareth protested. He paused in his search for a place to dump the handful of old-fashioned neck-chains and rings among the already-accumulating litter of books, harpoons, and the contents of Jenny’s medical pouch on the table. “Speaking to them at Court would have been suicide! And besides, you’re not going to fight him in the Deep, are you? I mean...” He barely stopped himself from the observation that in all the ballads the Dragonsbanes had slain their foes in front of their lairs, not in them.

“If I fight him outside and he takes to the air, it’s all over,” John returned, as if he were talking about backgammon strategy. “And though it’s crossed my mind we’re walking through a morass of plots here, it’s to no one’s advantage to have the dragon stay in the Deep. The rest of it’s all none of my business. Now, are you going to guide us, or do we go about the streets asking folk where the gnomes might be found?”

To Jenny’s surprise and probably a little to his own, Gareth offered his services as a guide.

“Tell me about Zyerne, Gar,” Jenny said now, thrusting her hands deep into her jacket pockets as she walked. “Who is she? Who was her teacher? What Line was she in?”

“Teacher?” Gareth had obviously never given the matter a thought. “Line?”

“If she is a mage, she must have been taught by someone.” Jenny glanced up at the tall boy towering beside her, while they detoured to avoid a gaggle of passersby around a couple of street-corner jugglers. Beyond them, in a fountain square, a fat man with the dark complexion of a southerner had set up a waffle stand, bellowing his wares amid clouds of steam that scented the raw, misty air for yards.

“There are ten or twelve major Lines, named for the mages that founded them. There used to be more, but some have decayed and died. My own master Caerdinn, and therefore I and any other pupils of his, or of his teacher Spaeth, or Spaeth’s other students, are all in the Line of Herne. To a mage, knowing that I am of the Line of Herne says—oh, a hundred things about my power and my attitude toward power, about the kinds of spells that I know, and about the kind that I will not use.”

“Really?” Gareth was fascinated. “I didn’t know it was anything like that. I thought that magic was just something—well, something you were born with.”

“So is the talent for art,” Jenny said. “But without proper teaching, it never comes to fullest fruition; without sufficient time given to the study of magic, sufficient striving...” She broke off, with an ironic smile at herself. “All power has to be paid for,” she continued after a moment. “And all power must come from somewhere, have been passed along by someone.”

It was difficult for her to speak of her power; aside from the confusion of her heart about her own power, there was much in it that any not mageborn simply did not understand. She had in all her life met only one who did, and he was presently over beside the waffle stand, getting powdered sugar on his plaids.

Jenny sighed and came to a halt to wait for him at the edge of the square. The cobbles were slimy here with sea air and offal; the wind smelled of fish and, as everywhere in the city of Bel, of the intoxicating wildness of the sea. This square was typical of the hundreds that made up the interlocking warrens of Bel’s Dockmarket, hemmed in on three-and-a-half sides by the towering, rickety tenements and dominated by the moldering stones of a slate-gray clock tower, at whose foot a neglected shrine housed the battered image of Quis, the enigmatic Lord of Time. In the center of the square bubbled a fountain in a wide basin of chip-edged granite, the stones of its rim worn smooth and white above and clotted beneath with the black-green moss that seemed to grow everywhere in the damp air of the city. Women were dipping water there and gossiping, their skirts hiked up almost to their thighs but their heads modestly covered in clumsy wool veils tied in knots under their hair to keep them out of the way.

In the mazes of stucco and garish color of the Dock-market, John’s outlandishness hadn’t drawn much notice. The sloping, cobbled streets were crowded with sojourners from three-fourths of the Realm and all the Southern Lands: sailors with shorn heads and beards like coconut husks; peddlers from the garden province of Istmark in their old-fashioned, bundly clothes, the men as well as the women wearing veils; moneychangers in the black gabardine and skullcaps that marked them out as the Wanderer’s Children, forbidden to own land; whores painted to within an inch of their lives; and actors, jugglers, scarf sellers, rat killers, pickpockets, cripples, and tramps. A few women cast looks of dismissive scorn at Jenny’s uncovered head, and she was annoyed at the anger she felt at them.

She asked, “How much do you know about Zyerne? What was she apprenticed as in the Deep?”

Gareth shrugged. “I don’t know. My guess would be in the Places of Healing. That was where the greatest power of the Deep was supposed to lie—among their healers. People used to journey for days to be tended there, and I know most of the mages were connected with them.”

Jenny nodded. Even in the isolated north, among the children of men who knew virtually nothing of the ways of the gnomes, Caerdinn had spoken with awe of the power that dwelled within the Places of Healing in the heart of the Deep of Ylferdun.

Across the square, a religious procession came into view, the priests of Kantirith, Lord of the Sea, walking with their heads muffled in their ceremonial hoods, lest an unclean sight distract them, the ritual wailing of the flutes all but drowning out their murmured chants. Like all the ceremonials of the Twelve Gods, both the words and the music of the flutes had been handed down by rote from ancient days; the words were unintelligible, the music like nothing Jenny had heard at Court or elsewhere.

“And when did Zyerne come to Bel?” she asked Gareth, as the muttering train filed past.

The muscles of the boy’s jaw tightened. “After my mother died,” he said colorlessly. “I—I suppose I shouldn’t have been angry at Father about it. At the time I didn’t understand the way Zyerne can draw people, sometimes against their will.” He concentrated his attention upon smoothing the ruffles of his sleeve for some moments, then sighed. “I suppose he needed someone. I wasn’t particularly good to him about Mother’s death.”