Dragonsbane (29 page)

Catching up her skirts, Jenny began to run.

The smell of Zyerne’s perfume seemed everywhere in the woods. Darkness was already beginning to collect beneath the trees. Panting, Jenny sprang up the whitish, flinty rocks to the glade by the fountain. Long experience in the Winterlands had taught her to move in utter silence, even at a dead run; and thus, for the first moment, neither of those who stood near the little well was aware of her arrival.

It took her a moment to see Zyerne. Gareth she saw at once, standing frozen beside the wellhead. Spilled water was soaking into the beech mast around his feet; a half-empty bucket balanced on the edge of the stone trough beside the well itself. He didn’t heed it; she wondered how much of his surroundings he was aware of at all.

Zyerne’s spells filled the small glade like the music heard in dreams. Even she, a woman, felt the scented warmth of the air that belied the tingly cold lower down in the Vale and sensed the stirring of need in her flesh. In Gareth’s eyes was a kind of madness, and his hands were shaking where they were clenched, knotted into fists, before him. His voice was a whisper more desperate than a scream as he said, “No.”

“Gareth.” Zyerne moved, and Jenny saw her, as she seemed to float like a ghost in the dusk among the birch trees at the glade’s edge. “Why pretend? You know your love for me has grown, as mine has for you. It is like fire in your flesh now; the taste of your mouth in my dreams has tormented me day and night...”

“While you were lying with my father?”

She shook back her hair, a small, characteristic gesture, brushing the tendrils of it away from her smooth brow. It was difficult to see what she wore in the dusk— something white and fragile that rippled in the stirrings of the wind, pale as the birches themselves. Her hair was loosened down her back like a young girl’s; and, like a young girl, she wore no veils. Years seemed to have vanished from her age, young as she had seemed before. She looked like a girl of Gareth’s age, unless, like Jenny, one saw her with a wizard’s eye.

“Gareth, I never lay with your father,” she said softly. “Oh, we agreed to pretend, for the sake of appearances at Court—but even if he had wanted me to, I don’t think I could have. He treated me like a daughter. It was you I wanted, you...”

“That’s a lie!” His mouth sounded dried by fever heat.

She held out her hands, and the wind lifted the thin fabric of her sleeves back from her arms as she moved a step into the glade. “I could bear waiting no longer. I had to come, to learn what had happened to you—to be with you...”

He sobbed, “Get away from me!” His face was twisted by something close to pain.

She only whispered, “I want you...”

Jenny stepped from the somber shade of the trail and said, “No, Zyerne. What you want is the Deep.”

Zyerne swung around, her concentration breaking, as Morkeleb had tried to break Jenny’s. The lurid sensuality that had dripped from the air shattered with an almost audible snap. At once, Zyerne seemed older, no longer the virgin girl who could inflame Gareth’s passion. The boy dropped to his knees and covered his face, his body racked with dry sobs.

“It’s what you’ve always wanted, isn’t it?” Jenny touched Gareth’s hair comfortingly, and he threw his arms around her waist, clinging to her like a drowning man to a spar. Oddly enough, she felt no fear of Zyerne now, or of the greater strength of the younger woman’s magic. She seemed to see Zyerne differently, even, and felt calm as she faced her—calm and ready.

Zyerne uttered a ribald laugh. “So there’s our boy who won’t tumble his father’s mistress? You had them both to yourself, didn’t you, slut, coming down from the north? Enough time and more to tangle him in your hair.”

Gareth pulled free of Jenny and scrambled to his feet, shaking all over with anger. Though Jenny could see he was still terrified of the sorceress, he faced her and gasped, “You’re lying!”

Zyerne laughed again, foully, as she had in the garden outside the King’s rooms. Jenny only said, “She knows it isn’t true. What did you come here for, Zyerne? To do to Gareth what you’ve done to his father? Or to see if it’s finally safe for you to enter the Deep?”

The enchantress’s mouth moved uncertainly, and her eyes shifted under Jenny’s cool gaze. Then she laughed, the mockery in it marred by her uncertainty. “Maybe to get your precious Dragonsbane at the same time?”

A week—even a day—ago, Jenny would have responded to the taunt with fear for John’s safety. But she knew Zyerne had not gone anywhere near John. She knew she would have sensed it, if such magic had been worked so near—almost, she thought, she would have heard their voices, no matter how softly they spoke. And in any case, John was unable to flee; one deals with the unwounded enemy first.

She saw Zyerne’s hand move and felt the nature of the spell, even as she smelled the singed wool of her skirts beginning to smoke. Her own spell was fast and hard, called with the mind and the minimal gesture of the hand rather than the labor it had once entailed. Zyerne staggered back, her hands over her eyes, taken completely by surprise.

When Zyerne raised her head again, her eyes were livid with rage, yellow as a devil’s in a face transformed with fury. “You can’t keep me from the Deep,” she said in a voice which shook. “It is mine—it will be mine. I’ve driven the gnomes from it. When I take it, no one,
no one,
will be able to contend against my power!”

Stooping, she seized a handful of old leaves and beechnuts from the mast that lay all about their feet. She flung them at Jenny. In the air, they burst into flame, growing as they burned, a tangled bonfire that Jenny swept aside with a spell she had hardly been aware she’d known. The blazing logs scattered everywhere, throwing streamers of yellow fire into the blue gloom and blazing up in half-a-dozen places where they touched dry weeds. Doubling like a hare upon her tracks, Zyerne darted for the path that led down into the Vale. Jenny leaped at her heels, her soft boots in three strides outdistancing the younger woman’s precarious court shoes.

Zyerne twisted in her grip. She was taller than Jenny but not physically as strong, even taking into account Jenny’s exhaustion; for an instant their eyes were inches apart, the yellow gaze boring like balefire into the blue.

Like a hammerblow, Jenny felt the impact of a mind upon hers, spells of hurt and terror that gripped and twisted at her muscles, utterly different from the weight and living strength of the dragon’s mind. She parried the spell, not so much with a spell as with the strength of her will, throwing it back at Zyerne, and she heard the younger woman curse her in a spate of fury like a burst sewer. Nails tore at her wrists as she sought the yellow eyes with her own again, catching Zyerne’s silky curls in a fist like a rock, forcing her to look. It was the first time she had matched strength in anger with another mage, and it surprised her how instinctive it was to probe into the essence—as she had probed into Gareth’s, and Mab into hers—not solely to understand, but to dominate by understanding, to give nothing of her own soul in return. She had a glimpse of something sticky and foul as the plants that eat those foolish enough to came near, the eroded remains of a soul, like an animate corpse of the young woman’s mind.

Zyerne screamed as she felt the secrets of her being bared, and power exploded in the air between them, a burning fire that surrounded them in a whirlwind of tearing force. Jenny felt a weight falling against her, a blackness like the dragon’s mind but greater, the shadow of some crushing power, like an ocean of uncounted years. It drove her to her knees, but she held on, sloughing away the crawling, biting pains that tore at her skin, the rending agony in her muscles, the fire, and the darkness, boring into Zyerne’s mind with her own, like a white needle of fire.

The weight of the shadow faded. She felt Zyerne’s nerve and will break and got to her feet again, throwing the girl from her with all her strength. Zyerne collapsed on the dirt of the path, her dark hair hanging in a torrent over her white dress, her nails broken from tearing at Jenny’s wrists, her nose running and dust plastered to her face with mucus. Jenny stood over her, panting for breath, her every muscle hurting from the twisting impact of Zyerne’s spells. “Go,” she said, her voice quiet, but with power in her words. “Go back to Bel and never touch Gareth again.”

Sobbing with fury, Zyerne picked herself up. Her voice shook. “You stinking gutter-nosed sow! I won’t be kept from the Deep! It’s mine, I tell you; and when I come there, I’ll show you! I swear by the Stone, when I have the Deep, I’ll crush you out like the dung-eating cockroach you are! You’ll see! They’ll all see! They have no right to keep me away!”

“Get out of here,” Jenny said softly.

Sobbing, Zyerne obeyed her, gathering up her trailing white gown and stumbling down the path that led toward the clock tower. Jenny stood for a long time watching her go. The power Jenny had summoned to protect her faded slowly, like fire banked under embers until it was needed again.

It was only after Zyerne was out of sight that she realized that she should never have been able to do what she had just done—not here and not in the Deep.

And it came to her then, what had happened to her when she had touched the mind of the dragon.

The dragon’s magic was alive in her soul, like streaks of iron in gold. She should have known it before; if she had not been so weary, she thought, perhaps she would have. Her awareness, like Morkeleb’s, had widened to fill the Vale, so that, even in sleep, she was conscious of things taking place about her. A shiver passed through her flesh and racked her bones with terror and wonderment, as if she had conceived again, and something alive and alien was growing within her.

Smoke from the woods above stung her nose and eyes, white billows of it telling her that Gareth had succeeded in dousing the flames. Somewhere the horses were whinnying in terror. She felt exhausted and aching, her whole body wrenched by the cramp of those gripping spells, her wrists smarting where Zyerne’s nails had torn them. She began to tremble, the newfound strength draining away under the impact of shock and fear.

A countersurge of wind shook the trees around her, as if at the stroke of a giant wing. Her hair blowing about her face, she looked up, but for a moment saw nothing. It was something she’d heard of—that dragons, for all their size and gaudiness, could be harder to see in plain daylight than the voles of the hedgerow. He seemed to blend down out of the dusk, a vast shape of jointed ebony and black silk, silver-crystal eyes like small moons in the dark.

He could feel my power nearing its end, she thought despairingly, remembering how he had turned on her before. The terrible, shadowy weight of Zyerne’s spells still lay on her bones; she felt they would break if she tried to summon the power to resist the dragon. Wrung with a weariness close to physical nausea, she looked up to face him and hardened her mind once again to meet his attack.

Even as she did so, she realized that he was beautiful, as he hung for a moment like a black, drifting kite upon the air.

Then his mind touched hers, and the last pain of Zyerne’s spells was sponged away.

What is it, wizard woman?
he asked.
It is only evil words, such as fishwives throw at one another.

He settled before her on the path, folding his great wings with a queerly graceful articulation, and regarded her with his silver eyes in the dusk.

He said,
You understand.

No,
she replied.
I think I know what has happened, but I do not understand.

Bah.
In the leaky gray twilight beneath the trees, she saw all the scale-points along his sides ruffle slightly, like the hair of an affronted cat.
I think that you do. When your mind was in mine, my magic called to you, and the dragon within you answered. Know you not your own power, wizard woman? Know you not what you could be?

With a cold vertigo that was not quite fear she understood him then and willed herself not to understand.

He felt the closing of her mind, and irritation smoked from him like a white spume of mist.
You understand,
he said again.
You have been within my mind; you know what it would be to be a dragon.

Jenny said,
No,
not to him, but to that trickle of fire in her mind that surged suddenly into a stream.

As in a dream, images surfaced of things she felt she had once known and forgotten, like the soaring freedom of flight. She saw the earth lost beneath her in the clouds, and about her was a vaporous eternity whose absolute silence was broken only by the sheer of her wings. As from great height, she glimpsed the stone circle on Frost Fell, the mere below it like a broken piece of dirty glass, and the little stone house a chrysalis, cracked open to release the butterfly that had slept within.

She said,
I have not the power to change my essence.

I have,
the voice whispered among the visions in her mind.
You have the strength to be a dragon, once you consent to take the form. I sensed that in you when we struggled. I was angry then, to be defeated by a human; but you can be more than human.

Gazing up at the dark splendor of the dragon’s angular form, she shook her head.
I will not put myself thus in your power, Morkeleb. I cannot leave my own form without your aid, nor could I return to it. Do not tempt me.

Tempt?
Morkeleb’s voice said.
There is no temptation from outside the heart. And as for returning—what are you as a human, Jenny Waynest? Pitiful, puling, like all your kin the slave of time that rots the body before the mind has seen more than a single flower in all the meadows of the Cosmos. To be a mage you must be a mage, and I see in your mind that you fight for the time to do even that. To be a dragon...

“To be a dragon,” she said aloud, to force her own mind upon it, “I have only to give over my control of you. I will not lose myself thus in the dragon mind and the dragon magic. You will not thus get me to release you.”

She felt the strength press against the closed doors in her mind, then ease, and heard the steely rustle of his scales as his long tail lashed through the dry grasses with annoyance. The dark woods came back into focus; the strange visions receded like a shining mist. The light was waning fast about them, all the colors bled from straggly briar and fern. As if his blackness took on the softer hues of the evening, the dragon was nearly invisible, his shape blending with the milky stringers of fog that had begun to veil the woods and with the black, abrupt outlines of dead branch and charred trunk. Somewhere on the ridge above her, Jenny could hear Gareth calling her name.