Dragonsbane. Barbara Hambly

or was it something else? Caerdinn would have said that love clouded the instincts of a mage.

      “I think I should go with you.”

      “You think I can’t handle the dragon myself?” His voice was filled with mock indignation.

      “Yes,” Jenny said bluntly, and felt the ribs vibrate under her hand with his laughter. “I don’t know under what circumstances you’ll be meeting it,” she went on. “And there’s more than that.”

      His voice was thoughtful in the darkness, but not surprised. “It strikes you that way too, does it?”

      That was something people tended not to notice about John. Behind his facade of amiable barbarism, behind his frivolous fascination with hog-lore, granny-rhymes, and how clocks were made lurked an agile mind and an almost feminine sensitivity to nuances of situations and relationships. There was not much that he missed.

      “Our hero has spoken of rebellion and treachery in the south,” she said. “If the dragon has come, it will ruin the harvest, and rising bread-prices will make the situation worse. I think you’ll need someone there whom you can trust.”

      “I’ve been thinking it, too,” he replied softly. “Now, what makes you think I won’t be able to trust our Gar? I doubt he’d betray me out of pique that the goods aren’t as advertised.”

      Jenny rolled up onto her elbows, her dark hair hanging in a torrent down over his breast. “No,” she said slowly, and tried to put her finger on what it was that troubled her about that thin, earnest boy she had rescued in the ruins of the old town. At length, she said, “My instincts tell me he can be trusted, at heart. But he’s lying about something, I don’t know what. I think I should go with you to the south.”

      John smiled and drew her down to him again. “The last time I went against your instincts, I was that sorry,” he said. “Myself, I’m torn, for I can smell there’s going to be danger here later in the winter. But I think you’re right. I don’t understand why the King would have given his word and his seal into the keeping of the likes of our young hero, who by the sound of it has never done more than collect ballads in all his life, and not to some proven warrior. But if the King’s pledged his word to aid us, then I’d be a fool not to take the chance to pledge mine. Just the fact that there’s only the two of us, Jen, shows how close to the edge of darkness all this land lies. Besides,” he added, sudden worry in his voice, “you’ve got to come.”

      Her thoughts preoccupied by her nameless forebodings, Jenny turned her head quickly. “What is it?

      Why?”

      “We’ll need someone to do the cooking.”

      With a cat-swift move she was on top of him, smothering his face under a pillow, but she was laughing too much to hold him. They tussled, giggling, their struggles blending into lovemaking. Later, as they drifted in the warm aftermath, Jenny murmured, “You make me laugh at the strangest times.”

      He kissed her then and slept, but Jenny sank no further than the uneasy borderlands of half-dreams. She found herself standing once again on the lip of the gully, the heat from below beating at her face, the poisons scouring her lungs. In the drifting vapors below, the great shape was still writhing, heaving its shredded wings or clawing ineffectually with the stumps of its forelegs at the small figure braced like an exhausted woodcutter over its neck, a dripping ax in his blistered hands. She saw John moving mechanically, half-asphyxiated with the fumes and swaying from the loss of the blood that gleamed stickily on his armor. The small stream in the gully was clotted and red with the dragon’s blood; gobbets of flesh choked it; the stones were blackened with the dragon’s fire. The dragon kept raising its dripping head, trying to snap at John; even in her dream, Jenny felt the air weighted with the strange sensation of singing, vibrant with a music beyond the grasp of her ears and mind.

      The singing grew stronger as she slid deeper into sleep. She saw against the darkness of a velvet sky the burning white disc of the full moon, her private omen of power, and before it the silver-silk flash of membranous wings.

      She woke in the deep of the night. Rain thundered against the walls of the Hold, a torrent roaring in darkness. Beside her John slept, and she saw in the darkness what she had noticed that morning in daylight: that for all his thirty-four years, he had a thread or two of silver in his unruly brown hair.

      A thought crossed her mind. She put it aside firmly, and just as firmly it reintruded itself. It was not a daylight thought, but the nagging whisper that comes only in the dark hours, after troubled sleep. Don’t be a fool, she told herself; the times you have done it, you have always wished you hadn’t.

      But the thought, the temptation, would not go away.

      At length she rose, careful not to wake the man who slept at her side. She wrapped herself in John’s worn, quilted robe and padded from the bedchamber, the worn floor like smooth ice beneath her small, bare feet.

      The study was even darker than the bedchamber had been, the fire there nothing more than a glowing line of rose-colored heat above a snowbank of ash. Her shadow passed like the hand of a ghost over the slumbering shape of the harp and made the sliver of reflected red wink along the pennywhistle’s edge. At the far side of the study, she raised a heavy curtain and passed into a tiny room that was little more than a niche in the Hold’s thick wall. Barely wider than its window, in daylight it was coolly bright, but now the heavy bull’s-eye glass was black as ink, and the witchlight she called into being above her head glittered coldly on the rain streaming down outside.

      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