Winterlands 2 - Dragonshadow (42 page)

On the last night before the King’s Moon, two shadows made their way down the painted corridors of the old temple of Syn, in what had been the city of Ernine. Their lantern threw swaying light over the painted gazelles and brought the stars depicted overhead into alternating brightness and obscurity; the comet seemed to wink and follow them through the corridor and into the round room. Along with the hothwais of starlight, Miss Mab had smuggled to Jenny a diagram to follow and the correct powder of mingled silver and blood: It’ll never work, whispered Amayon in her mind. Not without my help. Nothing you do will ever work again. What would I be, Morkeleb had asked, without magic?

That was different. He was a dragon—whatever, she thought, a dragon was. She was only a woman, left with nothing.

She wondered how she could face life without magic. How she could face life, face John, face her children, with the memory of what she had done. And of what she had lost. Somehow she made herself draw the sigils of power on the floor. Her twisted fingers trembled as she arranged within it the bottle of glass and alabaster, the softly glowing hothwais of starlight, the arrowhead. Behind them in a semicircle she set out the seven demon prisons and the seven spikes of glass and mercury that had been extracted from the heads of the dragons, grimly sealing her mind to the far-off howling of the spirits imprisoned within. The dreams of their upcoming torment were fresh as a new brand on her: agony, nausea, shame. How could she turn Amayon over to that?

It took her some time to realize that it was John that she’d saved from it.

Still, she couldn’t set down the white shell. He’d been difficult, yes. But at other times he’d been so good to her, so considerate. The pleasure he had given her could never be duplicated. It wasn’t something she’d turn to often, of course, but to know it was there, now and then when things were bad …

A warm hand closed over her scarred one. “Better leave it, love.”

He was right, but she pulled her hand away from his, slapped the shell into it, hating him. “You do it, then,” she said. “You’ll be glad to see it, won’t you?”

He looked for a long time into her eyes. “That I will,” he said gently. “That I will.”

She turned away, shaking all over, and would not look. It was John who completed the sigil and spoke to the seal still printed on the mirror’s burning darkness.

“It’s the Moon of Sacrifice, love,” he said, “and here I am. And here’s all the rare and precious things you asked me for: a piece of a star, a true star, caught in the stone of the gnomes; and a dragon’s tears.” He smiled. “And the arrowhead was given to me gie hard by one who wished me ill, and if you like I’ll show you the hole to prove it. And to show you I’ve no ill will, you can have a baker’s dozen and one of the rest of ’em, to serve as you served me; and as they’d have served you.”

Jenny heard the voices of the things behind the mirror. The slurping of their tongues, and the long, thick breath.

Then the Demon Queen said, “And you, beloved?” Her voice was roses and smoke, amber and the whisper of the summer sea. “Will you not leave that scarred dwarf you’ve been tupping all these years and come, too? She’s protected you for the last time— dried up now, and bitter. Think carefully, my love. In another year she’ll be a screaming hagwife, if she isn’t one now. You may not find it pleasant to live with what the sea-wights left behind.”

Jenny turned and left the chamber, fumbled her way through the anteroom, and along the painted hallway in the dark. She stumbled out into the thick liquid warmth of the night and crumpled on the step, her shoulder against the stained marble, the strange sweetness of the Marches swamps filling her lungs and her mind. She doubled over, trembling, hurting inside and knowing what the Demon Queen said was true. Seeing what she would be, what she would become, without magic, without music … without Amayon. She buried her face in her crippled hands.

Jenny, don’t! Go back there! Stop him, beloved, enchanted one! Amayon’s voice screamed all the more clearly in her mind. Pretty Lady! Heart of my hearts! Do you know what they’ll do to me? Do you know what demons do to other Hellspawn, when they get hold of them? I’m immortal, enchanted one, I can’t die, but I can feel—I can feel…

She closed her mind, dug her nails into the papery scabs on her wrist, and his voice went on, desperate, frantic, like a fist beating at a door.

Don’t let him! He’s jealous, jealous because he cannot give you what I gave! You think he’ll want you in his bed, knowing what you were to me?

Don’t answer, Morkeleb had said—and so she did not. But the memory of the pleasure was a torment in her flesh, rising to drown her.

Jenny! JENNY!

She knew when the Demon Queen reached out and claimed him—claimed them all. All the payment of John’s teind. The screaming rose to a crescendo in her mind, so she crushed her head between her slick scarred hands and closed her eyes, trying not to hear, trying not to know. Trying not to call out his name.

Amayon…

And he was gone. The desolation was worse than when his hold over her had been broken.

She wrapped her arms around herself, shivering and trying to breathe, and was still shuddering when she heard behind her the slow drag of John’s staff; the sliding thud when he fell. She knew she should get up to help him, but she could not. The black hollow within her was too deep. In time she heard him crawl to his feet again.

“Why’d you leave?” His voice was very quiet behind her.

She didn’t look up, scarred head bowed, scarred hands folded on her breast. “Because I couldn’t stay.”

She heard his breathing, saw her own shadow thrown by the lantern, a distorted rumple on the worn sandstone steps.

“Aye, well, then,” he said in time. “We’d better go.”

Morkeleb bore them back to a vale not far from the Jotham camp. Gareth and Ian were waiting for them in the cold glimmer of moonset and dawn, with horses and mules laden for the journey north.

“Yseult hanged herself,” said Gareth, when John and Jenny came near enough to him to speak. “And Summer, the Icerider girl.” He glanced at Ian, seated silent and alone on a fallen tree, and the boy looked neither at him nor at his parents. “About midnight.”

Jenny remembered Amayon’s scream, still bleeding in her heart. The gods knew what Ian’s demon had said to him, promised him, pleaded with him to stop John from ridding the world of them. From sending them behind the mirror. The gods knew what Ian had been going through, while she, Jenny, longed for and hurt for Amayon—did he want his own demon’s return as desperately?

He couldn’t, she thought. He has his magic to comfort him. Her jaw ached from clenching and she put her hands before her mouth.

John said nothing. Armored in his silence, he helped Jenny onto the mare Gareth had provided, swung to the saddle of a gray warhorse, and bent to clasp the young Regent’s hands. “Thank you,” he said.

“I’ve arranged for Master Bliaud to go quietly back to Greenhythe,” Gareth said. “He has estates there, away from his family, where Lord Ector won’t find him if he decides to make trouble. Once you and Jenny are north of the Wildspae I don’t think you need have any fear of … of my father’s sentence against you, or of Lord Ector and the council. What Rocklys left of the garrison at Corflyn won’t have the strength to go against you, and when I replenish it I’ll speak to the new commander.”

“So you’re going to replenish it, are you?” John tilted his head a little, expressionless, suspicious. Gareth looked shocked. “Of course I am. As soon as the men can be organized to march.” John inclined his head and bent from the saddle to kiss his lord’s ring. “Then I thank you again. For all.”

But all these things Jenny saw only from a distance, as if through a thousand layers of dark glass. Amayon’s absence was a blackness and a weariness, the leaden loss of everything that had made the world magical and colorful and wild. Her head ached, her burns throbbed, and the hollow from where her magic had disappeared was a chasm in her soul.

In all the ballads, evil was vanquished, order was restored, and the shining hero prince wed his lady, both beautiful and young. Neither, apparently, had nightmares afterward or dreamed of what they had lost. All wounds healed cleanly and no souls were broken by longings or obsessions or mistrust.

Jenny dreamed about the Mirror of Isychros. Saw again the sigils drawn on the stone floor in blood and silver: the bottle of tears and the softly glowing hothwais of starlight, the arrowhead stained with John’s blood. Amayon’s voice screamed in her mind again, but beneath it, in the still quiet part of herself, she thought, I missed something.

Something important.

She looked back at the scene again.

Amayon’s white shell seemed to drag her attention to it, to be the only thing she could see. She forced herself to look beyond: There was a snuff-bottle holding Bliaud’s demon Zimimar, a pebble that prisoned Gothpys. Miss Enk’s demon had been trapped in a perfume vessel, and Summer’s in another shell. Yseult’s demon was in another perfume bottle, that one of alabaster. Six demons. Eight cold silver spikes.

Better leave it, love.

You’ll be glad to see it.

That I will.

And Amayon screaming, screaming as he was thrust into the Hell of those who hated him, who would torture him beyond the imaginings of humankind, forever.

Six demons. Eight silver spikes.

Caradoc and Ian sitting at a table, eight jewels scattered between them. Destroy the jewel, Ian said, and Caradoc shook his head.

I have my reasons…

What reasons? Jenny asked.

Pretty Lady! Heart of my hearts! She heard Amayon’s voice again in her soul, drowning out all thought. Do you know what they’ll do to me? He’s jealous… He’s jealous… John turning his face away from her as he whispered Aohila’s name. It will pass, Morkeleb said.

Jenny leaned her head on his shoulder, where the steel scales were smooth as glass. How can you be sure?

His warmth came through ironclad bony angles, comforting in the thin autumn chill. Predawn mists filtered both the night’s dark and the light of the breakfast fire, where John was mechanically burning bannocks. Jenny supposed she should care, for Ian’s sake, but Ian had eaten almost nothing for three days that she knew about and almost certainly for longer than that …

And that, too, she found hard to care about, to think about.

It was difficult to think about anything but her loss and her pain.

She had dreamed last night, something, she couldn’t remember what, and upon waking had felt only bitterness and despair. She knew she was behaving like an insane woman, that her longings for Amayon, her obsession with her demon, was disastrous, blinding her to something only she could remember … Something she dreamed, she thought, back at Halnath perhaps, but it was beyond her power to wrest herself free. Ian was silent, drawn in on himself and more so every day that passed. And John …

She found she could no longer think very clearly about John.

All things pass, Jenny, the dragon said. That is the one fact about all things.

As my magic passed? She threw the words bitterly at him, though she told herself daily that she must accept it and make an end of self-pity. But when John had lashed at her to do so, only a few minutes ago, she had snapped, I’ll stop pitying myself when you stop dreaming about the Demon Queen!

The days without her magic had been torture, redoubled by the shame she felt when resentment scalded her at the sight of Ian kindling the campfire with a gesture or healing his father’s wounds. Last night, seeking respite, she had attempted to play the harp Gareth had given Ian, but her crippled hands were slow to respond despite Ian’s healing, and when her son had reached to touch her she had stiffened, so he shrank away.

Morkeleb said nothing. In the darkness he seemed a thing of flesh still, ebony and jet. With the coming of dawnlight, she knew she would be able to see through him, a strange beautiful clearness that held within it both darkness and light.

He had guided them now for three days, scouting through the tangled ravines and thick woods where the men of Imperteng still made war on the Realm. Only an hour ago he had returned to tell them that the road to the north was clear and that he himself would take his departure for the Skerries of Light.

Now he said, It is only magic, Jenny. One thing among a thousand things of life.

Her head jerked up and she hated him, hated him as she hated John and all other things, and her painful stiff little hands tried unsuccessfully to ball into fists to strike him. So he says, she lashed at him, he who never tasted it, never knew it! Easy for you, who gave it up and got wisdom in return, or the illusion of wisdom! It was the core of my bones, the heart of my mind, and I do not know if I can live without it!

Without it? he asked. Or without the demon?

She tried to draw back within herself, where everything gaped and bled. Where everything daily, hourly, spoke Amayon’s name.

Amayon was not the only one, she realized, who knew her well.

Go to him! John had screamed at her as she fled the camp. Become a dragon-wife if you’re going to leave me, but leave me or return for good! You go and you come back and I don’t know if you ’re going to stay next time or not!

Tears ran down her face, a river like the blood of pain in her mind. She said, There is nothing for me, when I gave everything to save him. To save them.

And he, said the dragon softly, to save you.

But she could only close her eyes and rest her head on the strength of his bones. She thought that something touched her hair, though whether it was a dragon’s claw or the semblance of a man’s hand she could not tell; only that it brought her comfort, and peace such as John had said that he had felt on the Birdless Isle.

What would you, then? he asked.

The words fell into the hot aching blackness of her soul like glowing diamonds, stilling the roil of her thoughts. It seemed to her that whatever she asked—to go with him to the Skerries of Light, to find peace and healing, to simply be turned to stone until all this had been worn away by a thousand years of rains— whatever she asked he would do.