Dragonstar. Barbara Hambly

prison, feeling the hot brilliant rush of demon magic, pain, and shame. The memory of what the world had looked like when Amayon had been within her mind.

      In nightmare she heard, too, Amayon’s screams when John had turned him over to the Demon Queen behind the mirror, to be tormented forever. Felt anew the blasting shock of utter grief, when in killing the wizard Caradoc—in driving Folcalor from his body—her own magic had been seared away to ashes.

      Desolation and cold washed over her, the recollection of having nothing left of the power that had been hers.

      She wondered, as she sank into deeper darkness, whether death would liberate her from those nightmares. Or was that what death consisted of: helplessly reliving horror, over and over again?

      “Jenny my child,” a soft old creaky voice whispered in her ear, “thou art what thou art.” Someone was with her in the darkness, someone whose strength touched that cold, disembodied pain and slowly melted it into nothingness. Someone whose strength kept her from sinking beneath those black waters.

      “Past and present and yet to come, this thou art. All of it, fire and water, earth and air. All of magic ariseth from understanding this.”

      The voice was familiar, and Jenny thought, Ah.

      Her past was clear to her, as clear as the old scars on her back. Caerdinn, the bitter old wander-mage who had taught her spells, had often struck her in his anger, but it was he who had made her a wizard. He who had taught her the uses of power.

      She had been a witch-child, knowing from earliest awareness that magic was in her. She could look at a lamp and call flame to its wick, or find her mother’s thimble when the cat had knocked it under the wood-box. She could see in the dark, while others groped and blundered in that gloomy little house in the lower village, beneath the walls of red-bearded Lord Aver’s Hold. Lord Aver had had a prisoner at the Hold when Jenny was small, a black-haired Ice-witch he’d captured in a raid on an Icerider camp one year when those nomads had come raiding down from the North. This Ice-witch was a shaman among those northern nomads, she had told the child Jenny, and had been cast out from her people. She could not go back.

      Kahiera Nightraven had been Jenny’s first teacher.

       Past and present and yet to come, this thou art …

      Sweet incense and warmth slowly returning to the innermost hollows of her flesh. The cold star of poison pain slowly fading. The sweetness of herbs.

      The Nightraven had not been a good woman, or an easy teacher. Coldhearted and beautiful, she had laid spells over her captor, so that Lord Aver had loved her even when they fought. His sisters, Jane and Rowan, had hated her like death. When she had disappeared, leaving behind her a son, a puzzled, wary toddler who never quite trusted the world, the spells on Lord Aver had remained: he had never loved another woman, not even his former longtime mistress Hollyberry, the town blacksmith’s wife.

      Jenny, too, had been left with a hole in her heart.

      It was old Caerdinn, the half-mad and rage-filled old hedge-wizard Lord Aver got for his son John’s tutor, who took Jenny as a pupil when she was thirteen. Caerdinn took her into his crumbling stone house on Frost Fell, and taught her how magic was organized. Showed her how to draw power from the sun and the earth and from her own flesh and bones and blood. How to observe, and to name each tiniest flower and grass blade by its true name so that they would be within her power: how to call power from these true names. How to weave Limitations on each spell, so that cows would not run mad, nor birds forget how to fly, nor thatch roofs take fire two villages away when she summoned Power; and how to harmlessly disperse the power she’d called, after her spells were accomplished, lest it linger in the place where she’d raised it and mix with later spells. This was how Spaeth, his master, had taught him, and all the wizards of their Line back to the shadowy ancient warlock Herne.

      All magic comes from understanding, Caerdinn had told her, staring at her with his huge pale blue eyes, like a demented goat’s beneath white brows. He seized her by the shoulder, small hands but terribly strong. The long nails stained yellow with the herbs he smoked dug into her flesh. Know the names of each pebble underfoot, and you can call even their tiny magics from them at need. The more of them you know, the more accurately you know their nature, the greater will be your power.

      In the darkness, in her pain, in her forty-sixth year, she thought now, There is power in me still.

      She breathed in deep, feeling the demons nearby. Their minds circled hers like ravens. She felt the presence of Morkeleb the Dragonshadow, who in his days as a dragon had nearly destroyed this Deep. He had dwelled here for a time after driving the gnomes forth, and knew its every passageway and chamber. His calm strength upheld her, flowing into her lungs and blood.

      As her mind and body relaxed she felt the warmth return. Past and present … the glimmer of cold disdain that had been the Nightraven, who had given her the first knowledge of what power was.

      Caerdinn’s resentment and bitterness, that had not stopped him from teaching her all the little he knew. Even though they were dead—Caerdinn for certain, and Nightraven for all she knew—Jenny felt them still, a part of her body, her self as surely as Morkeleb’s magic had once been a part of her bones and blood.

      And a farther mind, that sweet creaky little voice again, said, Linger till we come, child. Hold my hand.

      Mab, thought Jenny, clasping that strong, gentle shadow. Miss Mab, the men of Bel called her: Taseldwyn of the House of Howeth-Arawan, the tough little gnome-wife whose spells had enabled John to pass through the Burning Mirror at Ernine—to survive his first encounter with the Demon Queen.

      Mab was still far away. The Wise Ones of the Deep had put her under house arrest in the warrens of her own clan, but in her dream Jenny felt her hand. It was no bigger than a child’s and hard-muscled like a blacksmith’s, thick with the gaudy rings in which the gnomes delighted. There was comfort in her grip, reminding Jenny of all those nights when she’d gone to sleep holding John’s hand.

      John, she thought, giddy and frightened. Where is John?

      She saw him riding away from her through the blowing snow of a coming storm. Riding down Frost Fell after they’d found their son, Ian: the boy had taken poison, to keep the demons from returning to his flesh. She saw John ride away and felt the darkness that she’d felt then, too despairing even to speak to him or to anyone of her pain.

      Morkeleb lifted her. She heard the slither of boulders pushed aside, smelled the brimstone residue of blasting powder and the choke of rock dust. From a great distance she heard the dragon speak her name in that voice like the dark behind the stars, and though she’d already wandered a long way into a quiet gray country beyond the borders of sleep, she could still speak to him, for she was still holding Mab’s hand. I’m here, she said.

      His body was warm. Like sleeping near a stove on a freezing night. It flashed through her how cold she was, and she tightened her grip on Mab’s hand: I’m cold, she said.

      Endure. The word flowed over her like the tides of the sea.

      She didn’t know how she would, but she thought again, There is power in me still. Not really magic, she thought, but power of a kind. She tried weaving a little skein of magic from the name of that black-haired girl-child, running after Kahiera Nightraven along the battlements of Alyn Hold. To that she added a thread of power from the awkward, un-pretty thirteen-year-old who had fetched Caerdinn’s breakfast porridge for him all those mornings when he’d been too crippled with arthritis to rise from his bed. Who had endured his slaps and curses because he was the only one who could teach her spells.

      She colored the magic with her endurance then: If I could stand living with him, I can surely stand this.

       Magic from understanding. Know the names of each pebble …

      The name of this pebble was Jenny Waynest, she thought. What I am is that person who was.

      She breathed a