Dragonsbane (31 page)

She got stiffly to her feet, staggering a little against the shored-up doorpost of the well house, feeling physically drained and very weak. She had watched through the night, telling herself it was for Zyerne that she watched, though in her heart she knew the enchantress would not be back, and it was not, in fact, for her that she waited. She said, “It isn’t the spells that she holds him under that are harming him. Zyerne is a vampire, Gareth—not of the blood, like the Whisperers, but of the life-essence itself. In her eyes last night I saw her essence, her soul; a sticky and devouring thing, yes, but a thing that must feed to go on living. Miss Mab told me of the spells of the Places of Healing that can shore up the life of a dying man by taking a little of the life-energy of those who consent to give it. It is done seldom, and only in cases of great need. I am certain this is what she has done to your father and to Bond. What I don’t understand is why she would need to. Her powers are such that...”

“You know,” John broke in, “it says in Dotys’
Histories
... or maybe it’s in Terens... or is it the
Elucidus Lapidarus
...?”

“But what can we
do?”
Gareth pleaded. “There must be something! I could ride back to Bel and let Dromar know it’s safe for the gnomes to reoccupy the Deep. It would give them a strong base to...”

“No,” Jenny said. “Zyerne’s hold on the city is too strong. After this, she’ll be watching for you, scrying the roads. She’d intercept you long before you came near Bel.”

“But we have to do something!” Panic and desperation lurked at bay in his voice. “Where can we go? Polycarp would give us shelter in the Citadel...”

“You going to tell the siege troops around the walls you want a private word with him?” John asked, forgetting all about his speculations upon the classics.

“There are ways through the Deep into Halnath.”

“And a nice locked door at the end of ’em, I bet, or the tunnels sealed shut with blasting powder to keep the dragon out—even if old Dromar
had
put them on his maps, which he didn’t. I had a look for that back in Bel.”

“Damn him...” Gareth began angrily, and John waved him silent with a mealcake in hand.

“I can’t blame him,” he said. Against the random browns and heathers of the bloodstained plaid folded beneath his head his face still looked pale but had lost its dreadful chalkiness. Behind his specs, his brown eyes were bright and alert. “He’s a canny old bird, and he knows Zyerne. If she didn’t know where the ways through to the Citadel hooked up into the main Deep, he wasn’t going to have that information down on paper that she could steal. Still, Jen might be able to lead us.”

“No.” Jenny glanced over at him from where she sat cross-legged beside the fire, dipping the last bite of her griddlecake into the honey. “Even being able to see in darkness, I could not scout them out unaided. As for you going through them, if you try to get up in under a week, I’ll put a spell of lameness on you.”

“Cheat.”

“Watch me.” She wiped her fingers on the end of her plaid. “Morkeleb guided me through to the heart of the Deep; I could never have found it, else.”

“What was it like?” Gareth asked after a moment. “The heart of the Deep? The gnomes swear by it...”

Jenny frowned, remembering the whispering darkness and the soapy feel of the stone altar beneath her fingertips. “I’m not sure,” she said softly. “I dreamed about it...”

As one, the horses suddenly flung up their heads from the stiff, frosted grass. Battlehammer nickered softly and was answered, thin and clear, from the mists that floated on the fringes of the woods that surrounded Deeping Vale. Hooves struck the stone, and a girl’s voice called out, “Gar? Gar, where are you?”

“It’s Trey.” He raised his voice to shout. “Here!”

There was a frenzied scrambling of sliding gravel, and the whitish mists solidified into the dark shapes of a horse and rider and a fluttering of dampened veils. Gareth strode to the edge of the high ground of the Rise to catch the bridle of Trey’s dappled palfrey as it came stumbling up the last slope, head-down with exhaustion and matted with sweat in spite of the day’s cold. Trey, clinging to the saddlebow, looked scarcely better off, her face scratched as if she had ridden into low-hanging branches in the wood and long streamers clawed loose from her purple-and-white coiffure.

“Gar, I knew you had to be all right.” She slid from the saddle into his arms. “They said they saw the dragon—that Lady Jenny had put spells upon him—I knew you had to be all right.”

“We’re fine, Trey,” Gareth said doubtfully, frowning at the terror and desperation of the girl’s voice. “You look as if you’ve ridden here without a break.”

“I had to!” she gasped. Under the torn rags of her white Court dress, her knees were trembling, and she clung to Gareth’s arm for support; her face was colorless beneath what was left of its paint. “They’re coming for you! I don’t understand what’s happening, but you’ve got to get out of here! Bond...” She stumbled on her brother’s name.

“What about Bond? Trey, what’s going on?”

“I don’t know!” she cried. Tears of wretchedness and exhaustion overflowed her eyes, and she wiped them impatiently, leaving faint streaks of blue-black kohl on her round cheeks. “There’s a mob on its way, Bond’s leading it...”

“Bond?”
The idea of the lazy and elegant Bond troubling himself to lead anyone anywhere was absurd.

“They’re going to kill you, Gar! I heard them say so! You, and Lady Jenny, and Lord John.”

“What? Why?” Gareth was growing more and more confused.

“More to the point, who?” John asked, propping himself up among his blankets once again.

“These—these people, laborers mostly—smelters and artisans from Deeping out of work, the ones who hang around the Sheep in the Mire all day. There are Palace guards with them, too, and I think more are coming—I don’t know why! I tried to get some sense out of Bond, but it’s as if he didn’t hear me, didn’t know me! He slapped me—and he’s never hit me, Gar, not since I was a child...”

“Tell us,” Jenny said quietly, taking the girl’s hand, cold as a dead bird in her warm rough one. “Start from the beginning.”

Trey gulped and wiped her eyes again, her hands shaking with weariness and the exertion of a fifteen-mile ride. The ornamental cloak about her shoulders was an indoor garment of white silk and milky fur, designed to ward off the chance drafts of a ballroom, not the bitter chill of a foggy night such as the previous one had been. Her long fingers were chapped and red among their diamonds.

“We’d all been dancing,” she began hesitantly. “It was past midnight when Zyerne came in. She looked strange— I thought she’d been sick, but I’d seen her in the morning and she’d been fine then. She called Bond to her, into an alcove by the window. I—” Some color returned to her too-white cheeks. “I crept after them to eavesdrop. I know it’s a terribly rude and catty thing to do, but after what we’d talked of before you left I—I couldn’t help doing it. It wasn’t to learn gossip,” she added earnestly. “I was afraid for him—and I was so scared because I’d never done it before and I’m not nearly as good at it as someone like Isolde or Merriwyn would be.”

Gareth looked a little shocked at this frankness, but John laughed and patted the toe of the girl’s pearl-beaded slipper in commiseration. “We’ll forgive you this time, love, but don’t neglect your education like that again. You see where it leads you?” Jenny kicked him, not hard, in his unwounded shoulder.

“And then?” she asked.

“I heard her say, ‘I must have the Deep. They must be destroyed, and it must be now, before the gnomes hear. They mustn’t be allowed to reach it.’ I followed them down to that little postern gate that leads to the Dockmarket; they went to the Sheep in the Mire. The place was still full of men and women; all drunk and quarreling with each other. Bond went rushing in and told them he’d heard you’d betrayed them, sold them out to Polycarp; that you had the dragon under Lady Jenny’s spells and were going to turn it against Bel; that you were going to keep the gold of the Deep for yourselves and not give it to them, its rightful owners. But they weren’t
ever
its rightful owners—it always belonged to the gnomes, or to the rich merchants in Deeping. I tried to tell that to Bond...” Her cold-reddened hand stole to her cheek, as if to wipe away the memory of a handprint.

“But they were all shouting how they had to kill you and regain their gold. They were all drunk—Zyerne got the innkeeper to broach some more kegs. She said she was going to re-enforce them with the Palace guards. They were yelling and making torches and getting weapons. I ran back to the Palace stables and got Prettyfeet, here...” She stroked the exhausted pony’s dappled neck, and her voice grew suddenly small. “And then I came here. I rode as fast as I dared—I was afraid of what might happen if they caught me. I’d never been out riding alone at night...”

Gareth pulled off his grubby crimson cloak and slung it around her shoulders as her trembling increased.

She concluded, “So you have to get out of here...”

“That we do.” John flung back the bearskins from over his body. “We can defend the Deep.”

“Can you ride that far?” Gareth asked worriedly, handing him his patched, iron-plated leather jerkin.

“I’ll be gie in trouble if I can’t, my hero.”

“Trey?”

The girl looked up from gathering camp things as Jenny spoke her name.

Jenny crossed quietly to where she stood and took her by the shoulders, looking into her eyes for a long moment. The probing went deep, and Trey pulled back with a thin cry of alarm that brought Gareth running. But to the bottom, her mind was a young girl’s—not always truthful, anxious to please, eager to love and to be loved. There was no taint on it, and its innocence twisted at Jenny’s own heart.

Then Gareth was there, indignantly gathering Trey to him.

Jenny’s smile was crooked but kind. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I had to be sure.”

By their shocked faces she saw that it had not occurred to either of them that Zyerne might have made use of Trey’s form—or of Trey.

“Come,” she said. “We probably don’t have much time. Gar, get John on a horse. Trey, help him.”

“I’m perfectly capable...” John began, irritated.

But Jenny scarcely heard. Somewhere in the mists of the half-burned woods below the town, she felt sudden movement, the intrusion of angry voices among the frost-rimmed silence of the blackened trees. They were coming and they were coming fast—she could almost see them at the turning of the road below the crumbling ruin of the clock tower.

She turned swiftly back to the others. “Go!” she said. “Quickly, they’re almost on us!”

“How...” began Gareth.

She caught up her medicine bag and her halberd and vaulted to Moon Horse’s bare back. “Now! Gar, take Trey with you. John, RIDE, damn you!” For he had wheeled back, barely able to keep upright in Cow’s saddle, to remain at her side. Gareth flung Trey up to Battlehammer’s back in a flurry of torn skirts; Jenny could hear the echo of hooves on the trail below.

Her mind reached out, gathering spells together, even the small effort wrenching at her. She set her teeth at the stabbing pain as she gathered the dispersing mists that had been burning off in the sun’s pallid brightness—her body was not nearly recovered from yesterday. But there was no time for anything else. She wove the cold and dampness into a cloak to cover all the Vale of Deeping; like a secondary pattern in a plaid, she traced the spells of disorientation, of
jamais vu.
Even as she did so, the hooves and the angry, incoherent voices were very close. They rang in the misty woods around the Rise and near the gatehouse in the Vale as well—Zyerne must have told them where to come. She wheeled Moon Horse and gave her a hard kick in her skinny ribs, and the white mare threw herself down the rocky slope in a gangly sprawl of legs, making for the Gates of the Deep.

She overtook the others in the gauzy boil of the mists in the Vale. They had slowed down as visibility lessened; she led them at a canter over the paths that she knew so well through the town. Curses and shouts, muffled by the fog, came from the Rise behind them. Cold mists shredded past her face and stroked back the black coils of her hair. She could feel the spells that held the brume in place fretting away as she left the Rise behind, but dared not try to put forth the strength of will it would take to hold them after she was gone. Her very bones ached from even the small exertion of summoning them; she knew already that she would need all the strength she could summon for the final battle.

The three horses clattered up the shallow granite steps. From the great darkness of the gate arch, Jenny turned to see the mob still milling about in the thinning fog, some fifty or sixty of them, of all stations and classes but mostly poor laborers. The uniforms of the handful of Palace guards stood out as gaudy splotches in the grayness. She heard their shouts and swearing as they became lost within plain sight of one another in territory they had all known well of old. That won’t last long, she thought.

Moon Horse shied and fidgeted at the smell of the dragon and of the old blood within the vast gloom of the Market Hall. The carcass of the horse Osprey had disappeared, but the place still smelled of death, and all the horses felt it. Jenny slid from her mare’s tall back and stroked her neck, then whispered to her to stay close to the place in case of need and let her go back down the steps.

Hooves clopped behind her on the charred and broken flagstones. She looked back and saw John, ashen under the stubble of beard, still somehow upright in Cow’s saddle. He studied the Vale below them with his usual cool expressionlessness. “Zyerne out there?” he asked, and Jenny shook her head.

“Perhaps I hurt her too badly. Perhaps she’s only remaining at the Palace to gather other forces to send against us.”

“She always did like her killing to be done by others. How long will your spells hold them?”

“Not long,” Jenny said doubtfully. “We have to hold this gate here, John. If they’re from Deeping, many of them will know the first levels of the Deep. There are four or five ways out of the Market Hall. If we retreat further in, we’ll be flanked.”