Dragonsbane (7 page)

The phosphorescent glow that illuminated the room outlined the shape of a narrow table and three small shelves. They held things that had belonged to the cold-eyed ice-witch who had been John’s mother, or to Caerdinn—simple things, a few bowls, an oddly shaped root, a few crystals like fragments of broken stars sent for mending. Pulling her robe more closely about her, Jenny took from its place a plain pottery bowl, so old that whatever designs had once been painted upon its outer surface had long since been rubbed away by the touch of mages’ hands. She dipped it into the stone vessel of water that stood in a corner and set it upon the table, drawing up before it a tall, spindle-legged chair.

For a time she only sat, gazing down into the water. Slips of foxfire danced on its black surface; as she slowed her breathing, she became aware of every sound from the roaring of the rain gusts against the tower’s walls to the smallest drip of the eaves. The worn tabletop was like cold glass under her fingertips; her breath was cold against her own lips. For a time she was aware of the small flaws and bubbles in the glaze of the bowl’s inner surface; then she sank deeper, watching the colors that seemed to swirl within the endless depths. She seemed to move down toward an absolute darkness, and the water was like ink, opaque, ungiving.

Gray mists rolled in the depths, then cleared as if wind had driven them, and she saw darkness in a vast place, pricked by the starlike points of candleflame. An open space of black stone lay before her, smooth as oily water; around it was a forest, not of trees, but of columns of stone. Some were thin as silk, others thicker than the most ancient of oaks, and over them swayed the shadows of the dancers on the open floor. Though the picture was silent, she could feel the rhythm to which they danced— gnomes, she saw, their long arms brushing the floor as they bent, the vast, cloudy manes of their pale hair catching rims of firelight like sunset seen through heavy smoke. They danced around a misshapen stone altar, the slow dances that are forbidden to the eyes of the children of men.

The dream changed. She beheld a desolation of charred and broken ruins beneath the dark flank of a tree-covered mountain. Night sky arched overhead, wind-cleared and heart-piercingly beautiful. The waxing moon was like a glowing coin; its light touching with cold, white fingers the broken pavement of the empty square below the hillside upon which she stood, edging the raw bones that moldered in puddles of faintly smoking slime. Something flashed in the velvet shadow of the mountain, and she saw the dragon. Starlight gleamed like oil on the lean, sable sides; the span of those enormous wings stretched for a moment like a skeleton’s arms to embrace the moon’s stern face. Music seemed to drift upon the night, a string of notes like a truncated air, and for an instant her heart leaped toward that silent, dangerous beauty, lonely and graceful in the secret magic of its gliding flight.

Then she saw another scene by the low light of a dying fire. She thought she was in the same place, on a rise overlooking the desolation of the ruined town before the gates of the Deep. It was the cold hour of the tide’s ebbing, some hours before dawn. John lay near the fire, dark blood leaking from the clawed rents in his armor. His face was a mass of blisters beneath a mask of gore and grime; he was alone, and the fire was dying. Its light caught a spangle of red from the twisted links of his torn mail shirt and glimmered stickily on the upturned palm of one blistered hand. The fire died, and for a moment only starlight glittered on the pooling blood and outlined the shape of his nose and lips against the darkness.

She was underground once more, in the place where the gnomes had danced. It was empty now, but the hollow silences beneath the earth seemed filled with the inchoate murmur of formless sound, as if the stone altar whispered to itself in the darkness.

Then she saw only the small flaws in the glaze of the bowl, and the dark, oily surface of the water. The witch-light had long ago failed above her head, which ached as it often did when she had overstretched her power. Her body felt chilled through to the bones, but she was for a time too weary to move from where she sat. She stared before her into the darkness, listening to the steady drum of the rain, hurting in her soul and wishing with all that was in her that she had not done what she had done.

All divination was chancy, she told herself, and water was the most notorious liar of all. There was no reason to believe that what she had seen would come to pass.

So she repeated to herself, over and over, but it did no good. In time she lowered her face to her hands and wept.

T
HEY SET FORTH
two days later and rode south through a maelstrom of wind and water.

In the days of the Kings, the Great North Road had stretched from Bel itself northward like a gray stone serpent, through the valley of the Wildspae River and across the farm and forest lands of Wyr, linking the southern capital with the northern frontier and guarding the great silver mines of Tralchet. But the mines had flagged, and the Kings had begun to squabble with their brothers and cousins over the lordship of the south. The troops who guarded the Winterlands’ forts had been withdrawn— temporarily, they said, to shore up the forces of one contender against another. They had never returned. Now the gray stone serpent was disintegrating slowly, like a shed skin; its stones were torn up to strengthen house walls against bandits and barbarians, its ditches choked with decades of detritus, and its very foundations forced apart by the encroaching tree roots of the forest of Wyr. The Winterlands had destroyed it, as they destroyed all things.

Traveling south along what remained of the road was slow, for the autumn storms swelled the icy becks of the moors to white-toothed torrents and reduced the ground in the tree-tangled hollows to sodden, nameless mires. Under the flail of the wind, Gareth could no longer argue that the ship upon which he had come north would still be waiting at Eldsbouch to waft them south in relative comfort and speed, but Jenny suspected he still felt in his heart that it should have been, and, illogically, blamed her that it was not.

They rode for the most part in silence. Sometimes when they halted, as they frequently did for John to scout the tumbled rocks or dense knots of woodland ahead, Jenny looked across at Gareth and saw him gazing around him in a kind of hurt bewilderment at the desolation through which they rode: at the barren downs with their weed-grown lines of broken walls; at the old boundary stones, lumpish and melted-looking as spring snowmen; and at the stinking bogs or the high, bare tors with their few twisted trees, giant balls of mistletoe snagged weirdly in their naked branches against a dreary sky. It was a land that no longer remembered law or the prosperity of ordered living that comes with law, and sometimes she could see him struggling with the understanding of what John was offering to buy at the stake of his life.

But usually it was plain that Gareth simply found the halts annoying. “We’re never going to get there at this rate,” he complained as John appeared from the smoke-colored tangle of dead heather that cloaked the lower flanks of a promontory that hid the road. A watchtower had once crowned it, now reduced to a chewed-looking circle of rubble on the hill’s crest. John had bellied up the slope to investigate it and the road ahead and now was shaking mud and wet out of his plaid. “It’s been twenty days since the dragon came,” Gareth added resentfully. “Anything can have happened.”

“It can have happened the day after you took ship, my hero,” John pointed out, swinging up to the saddle of his spare riding horse, Cow. “And if we don’t look sharp and scout ahead, we
are
never going to get there.”

But the sullen glance the boy shot at John’s back as he reined away told Jenny more clearly than words that, though he could not argue with this statement, he did not believe it, either.

That evening they camped in the ragged birches of the broken country where the downs gave place to the hoary densities of the Wyrwoods. When camp was set, and the horses and mules picketed, Jenny moved quietly along the edge of the clearing, the open ground above the high bank of a stream whose noisy rushing blended with the sea-sound of the wind in the trees. She touched the bark of the trees and the soggy mast of acorns, hazelnuts, and decaying leaves underfoot, tracing them with the signs that only a mage could see—signs that would conceal the camp from those who might pass by outside. Looking back toward the fluttering yellow light of the new fire, she saw Gareth hunkered down beside it, shivering in his damp cloak, looking wretched and very forlorn.

Her square, full lips pressed together. Since he had learned she was his erstwhile hero’s mistress, he had barely spoken to her. His resentment at her inclusion in the expedition was still obvious, as was his unspoken assumption that she had included herself out of a combination of meddling and a desire not to let her lover out of her sight. But Gareth was alone in an alien land, having clearly never been away from the comforts of his home before, lonely, disillusioned, and filled with a gnawing fear of what he would return to find.

Jenny sighed and crossed the clearing to where he sat.

The boy looked up at her suspiciously as she dug into her jacket pocket and drew out a long sliver of smoky crystal on the chain that Caerdinn had used to hang around his neck. “I can’t see the dragon in this,” she said, “but if you’ll tell me the name of your father and something about your home in Bel, at least I should be able to call their images and tell you if they’re all right.”

Gareth turned his face away from her. “No,” he said. Then, after a moment, he added grudgingly, “Thank you all the same.”

Jenny folded her arms and regarded him for a moment in the jumpy orange firelight. He huddled a little deeper into his stained crimson cloak and would not meet her eyes.

“Is it because you think I can’t?” she asked at last. “Or because you won’t take the aid of a witch?”

He didn’t answer that, though his full lower lip pinched up a bit in the middle. With a sigh of exasperation, Jenny walked away from him to where John stood near the oilskin-covered mound of the packs, looking out into the darkening woods.

He glanced back as she came near, the stray gleams of firelight throwing glints of dirty orange on the metal of his patched doublet. “D’you want a bandage for your nose?” he inquired, as if she’d tried to pet a ferret and gotten nipped for her trouble. She laughed ruefully.

“He didn’t have any objections to me before,” she said, more hurt than she had realized by the boy’s enmity.

John put an arm around her and hugged her close. “He feels cheated, is all,” he said easily. “And since God forbid he should have cheated himself with his expectations, it must have been one of us that did it, mustn’t it?” He leaned down to kiss her, his hand firm against the bare nape of her neck beneath the coiled ridge of her braided hair. Beyond them, among the ghostly birches, the thin underbrush rustled harshly; a moment later a softer, steadier rushing whispered in the bare branches overhead. Jenny smelled the rain almost before she was conscious of its light fingers upon her face.

Behind them, she heard Gareth cursing. He squelched across the clearing to join them a moment later, wiping raindroplets from his spectacles, his hair in lank strings against his temples.

“We seem to have outsmarted ourselves,” he said glumly. “Picked a nice place to camp—only there’s no shelter. There’s a cave down under the cut of the streambank...”

“Above the highest rise of the water?” inquired John, a mischievous glint in his eye.

Gareth said defensively, “Yes. At least—it isn’t so very far down the bank.”

“Big enough to put the horses in, always supposing we could get them down there?”

The boy bristled. “I could go see.”

“No,” said Jenny. Gareth opened his mouth to protest this arbitrariness, but she cut him off with, “I’ve laid spells of ward and guard about this camp—I don’t think they should be crossed. It’s almost full-dark now...”

“But we’ll get
wet!
”

“You’ve been wet for days, my hero,” John pointed out with cheerful brutality. “Here at least we know we’re safe from the side the stream’s on—unless, of course, it rises over its bank.” He glanced down at Jenny, still in the circle of his arm; she was conscious, too, of Gareth’s sulky gaze. “What about the spell-ward, love?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. “Sometimes the spells will hold against the Whisperers, sometimes they don’t. I don’t know why—whether it’s because of something about the Whisperers, or because of something about the spells.” Or because, she added to herself, her own powers weren’t strong enough to hold even a true spell against them.

“Whisperers?” Gareth demanded incredulously.

“A kind of blood-devil,” said John, with an edge of irritation in his voice. “It doesn’t matter at the moment, my hero. Just stay inside the camp.”

“Can’t I even go
look
for shelter? I won’t go far.”

“If you leave the camp, you’ll never find your way back to it,” John snapped. “You’re so bloody anxious not to lose time on this trip, you wouldn’t want to have us spend the next three days looking for your body, would you? Come on, Jen—if you’re not after making supper, I’ll do it...”

“I’ll do it, I’ll do it,” Jenny agreed, with a haste that wasn’t entirely jest. As she and John walked back to the smoky, sheltered campfire, she glanced back at Gareth, still standing on the edge of the faintly gleaming spell-circle. His vanity stinging from John’s last words, the boy picked up an acorn and hurled it angrily out into the wet darkness. The darkness whispered and rustled, and then fell still again under the ceaseless pattern of the rain.

They left the folded lands of rock hills and leaping streams for good after that and entered the ruinous gloom of the great Forest of Wyr. Here crowded oaks and hawthorn pressed close upon the road, catching the faces of the travelers with warty, overhanging boughs and dirty moss and their horses’ hooves with scabrous roots and soggy drifts of dead leaves. The black lattices of bare branches above them admitted only a fraction of the pallid daylight, but rain still leaked through, pattering in an endless, dreary murmur in the dead fern and hazel thickets. The ground was worse here, sodden and unsteady, or flooded in meres of silver water in which the trees stood, knee-deep and rotting; and Aversin remarked that the marshes of the south were spreading again. In many places the road was covered, or blocked with fallen trees, and the labor of clearing it or beating a path through the thickets around these obstacles left them all cold and exhausted. Even for Jenny, used to the hardships of the Winterlands, this was tiring, and the more so because there was no respite; she lay down weary at night and rose weary in the bleak grayness before dawn to travel on once again. What it was to Gareth she could well imagine. As he grew more weary, his temper shortened, and he complained bitterly at every halt.