The mirror chamber was empty. Walls, floor, and what was left of the ceiling were black with fire, the golden constellations and the many-tailed comet smashed to rubble. Under a thin muck of snow, burned-out talisman jewels crunched beneath Jenny's boots as she and John surveyed the devastated room.
Of the bricked-up archway behind which Jenny had found the catch-bottle, only a heap of broken stone remained. John knelt to scrape in the frozen slush with his fingers; this he did in two or three places before straightening his back and wiping the muddied fingers of his glove on his doublet's leather sleeve.
“No glass,” he said thoughtfully. “They said the mirror bein' made of thunderstone would keep it from destruction, an' it looks like they were right. It was too strong for Folcalor, anyway. Looks like he's carried it off whole, to smash when he's taken Adromelech's powers into himself.”
“Leaving only Aohila herself,” Jenny said softly, “at large in the world.”
John raised his eyebrows. In the sickly snow-light the silver curves of Aohila's spell-lines glinted on his throat. “God knows that's trouble enough.”
They slept the night in an empty manor house in Farhythe, not because Morkeleb was at all weary of flight but because in the high sooty roil of cloud the cold and wet were too bitter to be borne by his two passengers. Whether the inhabitants of the manor had gone to Bel for the assembly of the King's Council, or had fled because of the plague, Jenny did not know. The beds had been stripped from the bedsteads and the windows were fitted over with wooden shutters in place of the expensive glass; it hadn't been precipitate flight. Wood lay cut ready in the shed behind the kitchen, and John made up fires; they ate the remains of the palace luncheon that John—ever mindful from long years of Winterlands patrols—had wrapped up and tucked into the bundles of their clothes. In a bedroom Jenny found a small harp swathed in velvet. It had been untuned to spare the frame, and she could find no key for its pegs. But her hands, a few months ago stiff and twisted claws, flexed almost easily as she ran them over the inlaid pearwood of the soundbox; she met John's eyes and smiled.
On the borrowed sheets she dreamed again of her children, and waking, stole softly out of doors. Fog from the Snakewater and the marshes covered the whole of the land, making the night black as pitch, and even Jenny's mageborn sight had trouble penetrating it. From the cloister that looked out upon the kitchen garden she could see only the dim outlines of first bare hedges, but a voice in her thoughts said, Keep your feet dry, Wizard-woman, and stay where it is warm. In the darkness she saw the diamond glint of eyes, and the moving flicker of the jewels on the ends of his antennae. What brings you from your bed?
In the music of his thoughts she would have heard jealousy or sarcasm, had there been any; anger that she shared that bed with a mortal man, when she could have been the dragon consort of a dragon.
There was none. His joy for her reunion with John had been real.
My friend, she said. And then, I dreamed of my children, and my power is not such that I can see yet into the North. Can you listen so far, to see if all is well in the North Country?
Wizard-woman, I can listen unto the ends of the earth, if so be I dream deeply enough, and long enough. When all this trouble with demons is done with, and the world sleeps in peace once more, I will teach you how this is done. For I think that having once been a dragon, you are capable still of dragon dreams. Their secret is this: that you do not think, ‘I will seek the sounds of bandits, that I may learn if my hus-band's hold is in danger,’ or, ‘Where do the rabbits feed, that I may know if demons are near?’ To dream as a dragon dreams is not to seek, and not to expect. It is merely to observe all, with no one grass blade more important than any other grass blade, nor any meaning attached to anything. Only being, throughout the whole of the universe and all of time.
Jenny thought about this, about the stillness of the fogshrouded night, and the invisible friend hidden in the darkness.
She said, You are not of this world, are you? The dragons. You came from one of those other worlds, that John traveled to, lying somewhere beyond beyond. You traversed Hells, and realms that have no existence beneath the sun and the stars that I know; perhaps you came from one of the many Hells, and not a true world at all.
All worlds are true worlds, my Jenny, said the Dragonshadow.
And the Dragonshadows, who have outgrown their bodies and their magic … what are they?
Morkeleb said, I do not know.
Even though you are one? When you crossed over into that being, did they not tell you?
He said, No. Since I became a dragonshadow I have spoken to no other of my kind, and before, when they still inhabited the Birdless Isle, I thought I knew what they were, and did not ask. It is no unusual thing for them to be gone for a time, though they have been gone now longer than ever I can remember before. I can only be as I am, until upon their return I can ask them what they are.
Are they gods? she asked, and again he said, I do not know. But as for your children …
And in her mind Jenny saw as if in a dream the stumpy tower of Alyn Hold, sticking up on its hill above the grubby ring of its dilapidated walls. The wind scoured the walls with snow in the darkness, and no light shone, but Jenny was aware of the repaired thatch on the kitchens and stables, the new plaster over the places where Balgodorus and his slavetrading bandits had burned, earlier in the winter.
Impossibly, above the screaming of the wind, she heard the breathing of the sleepers within those walls: Ian and Adric, huddled together in their tower bedroom; little Maggie in her cot beside Cousin Dilly, who acted as her nurse. Sour grim Aunt Jane in her cramped room off the kitchen, and Aunt Rowe in the trundle bed beside hers, as if the two sisters of old Lord Aver were young girls still glaring around the corners at their brother's unwanted beautiful witch-wife mistress. For a few moments—or a few hours—Jenny was conscious of every sleeper within those walls, of Bill the yardman and his wife, Betne, of Peg the gatekeeper and her children, of old Cowan in the stables and Sergeant Muffle in the room he'd taken with his wife and children behind the forge. Of scullerymaids and grooms and the half-dozen militiamen dossing on the hall floor around the firepit among straw and rushes that smelled of month-old smoke and dogs. A kind of gentle glow, like the embers of a banked fire, rose to Jenny from their dreams.
And as Morkeleb's consciousness widened, she became aware of the sleeping village outside the walls. Of Father Hiero the priest in the attic loft above the broken-down and disregarded village Temple. Of her own younger sister, Sparrow, and Sparrow's husband and children, and all those other families near whom Jenny had grown up. Of the cows in the byres and the horses in the stalls, and all those near and far whose holdings and families were under the protection of the Thane of the Winterlands, who looked to John Aversin to protect them and be answerable for them, even at the cost of his life.
Farther off she was aware of the bleak woods, deep in snow and thrashing beneath the flail of the wind. Of muskrats in their holes and squirrels rolled tight in the hollows of trees, surrounded by the plunder of the autumn on which they'd been living for months. Of deer in the thickets and fish sleeping in the darkness of the frozen streams, of turtles in the mud and bandits far off in the ruined huts and manors that they'd made into hideouts, scratching fleas and snuffling in drunken sleep. Of the degraded Meewinks in the marshes picking over the bones of the travelers they'd killed, and even the whisperers peeping to one another in the slick-frozen ice of the haunted Wraithmire, frozen themselves and singing keening songs of the comet that hung low and smoldering somewhere beyond the hammering storm.
And in all that dark and storm and sleep, gradually Jenny saw, and heard, and felt something moving, something that crept among the torn-up snow of the woods. She felt the rabbits in their holes startle hammer-hearted from sleep at its smell, and curl down tight into the darkness until it went past. Felt the deer grow still in the thickets, ears pricked forward at the staggering, crashing stride. Like a clums
y shadow it moved, frozen flesh tearing unheeded on broken twigs. A fox sniffed at the drip of black fluid that came away on the spearpoint shards, and hastened the other way.
In the village stables a cow flung up her head and lowed in fright. Behind the church, Father Hiero's dog threw himself to the limit of his chain and barked.
The thing did not enter the byre, nor attempt to come near the church. It had no need of warmth in this bitter night. But Jenny dreamed of it circling the walls of the Hold, circling patiently, and now and then coming close enough to scratch at the gates and at the stones.
She woke, losing her balance and stumbling against the doorframe of the old manor house where she stood. Her feet were numb within her boots. Across the bare kitchen-garden in the fog, Morkeleb, a shadow himself, lay invisible between the bare, invisible orchard trees.
Your children sleep safe, my Jenny. In the dragon's speaking she felt his odd tenderness, and his quest as to what her love was, and why the destinies of these three children—and of all who slept in and about the Hold—drove her so. Since surrendering his magic he had become, she knew, curious about all manner of things that were not things of dragons. But as you see, all is not well in the Winterlands.
They reached Alyn Hold the following day at noon. Morkeleb descended, unseen, through the rending howl of the storm winds to the lane before the Hold's main gate, but had he come down in all his glittering midnight splendor Jenny doubted there would have been anyone outside their houses to see. It was the last night of the Moon of Ice, the time of year when even bandits and Iceriders lay low. Every one of the fifty or so families of Alyn Village would be huddled around their hearths in kitchens crammed with wood, whittling or sewing or mending harness or chairs, doing all those things for which there was little time in the short gorgeous Winterlands summers. Every shutter in the village was bolted tight, and John had to pound on the gate and shout before Peg put her head out the window above it to see who was there.
“All the dear gods, where did you spring from?” gasped the gatekeeper, hanging hard onto the postern door to keep it from being slammed out of her grip by the wind. “How did you get here, in all this storm? You must be that frozen! Where are your horses?”
“Never you mind. We're back now, safe and mostly sound.…” John shook back the hood from his head and looked past Jenny out into the sleety rain, but in the gray halfvisible whirl of the village street, no sign of Morkeleb was to be seen.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Mag, Ian, and Adric fell on their parents like savages as they entered the kitchen. In the Hold, as in the smallest village hut, for most of the winter the life of the household centered around the cooking fires. Sergeant Muffle, sweat-soaked in shirtsleeves, strode in from the forge where he'd been making nails, at the summons of his wife, Blossom, who'd been helping Aunt Jane and the kitchen girls with dinner. Cowan, Bill, and Betne appeared all swaddled up in sheepskins and dripping hay from the stalls they'd been cleaning, with the stable dogs Bannock and Snuff trailing at their heels. It was just as well there was a storm, Jenny reflected. Otherwise the whole village would have put in an appearance as well.
“Aye, we've seen it,” said Muffle grimly, once all the exclamations and shouting were done and Aunt Rowe had ladled hot cider from the cauldron for the homecomers, and Cousin Dilly had stopped three-year-old Mag six or seven times from unraveling both their bundles and strewing the contents underfoot. “Or seen its tracks, anyway. At first I thought it was some poor traveler that'd been seized and stripped by bandits even of his boots.”
The blacksmith sipped his own horn of cider, a big man, four or five years older than his brother and the burly, red-haired image of old Lord Aver, but with a pleasanter expression. His mother, Hollyberry, had been the village blacksmith's wife at the time of her liaison with the old Thane, and she was still to be found, four days out of seven, at the Hold: It was a miracle she wasn't in the kitchen this afternoon as well.
Muffle went on, “But next day I found more tracks skirtin' the village, when any man in that state would have gone to one of those houses for help. Mol Bucket said as how her dogs have woke her two nights this week, barkin'—you know what brutes they are, livin' as she does out at the village's end. And she told me she's been havin' queer dreams. Peg has, too.”
Peg nodded, in the act of slicing up an onion into a fry-pan, to make more dressing to add to dinner.
“It's Caradoc, isn't it, Mother?” At thirteen, Ian was too old to crowd onto the bench between his parents to snuggle in their warmth, as Mag was unashamedly doing—or even to sit squeezed in at his father's side like Adric, though Adric was being careful not to hang on to John's arm as he clearly wanted to. But Ian's large blue eyes spoke more clearly than shouted whoops of joy, to see his mother and his father sit together on the bench by the kitchen table as they used to. To see the way John's glance touched Jenny when she spoke, and Jenny's close-lipped sidelong smile.
Oh, my children, thought Jenny, looking from that sud-denly-tall, rail-thin boy to his burly red brother and little sloeeyed Mag. Oh, my children, how could my grief have been such, that it took me away from you?
Whether Ian saw in Jenny's quiet calm what Morkeleb had seen, when the dragon began addressing her as Wizard-woman again, Jenny wasn't sure. It was something to be talked over with her eldest-born when they were together alone. In the days of her bereavement she had spoken to Ian of magic, not instructing him as she formerly had, but reflecting on what it meant and how it changed her perception of the world. She felt, now, that this boy, fine boned like all the Waynests of the village in contrast to Adric's rufous height and bulk, was hardly her son at all, but something closer: another mage, and a mage who like her had come through the harrowing nightmare of demonic possession and the unexpectedly worse horror of its aftermath.
The stories, she reflected, never talked about what happened, once a demon was driven out.
“I think it's Caradoc, yes,” she replied. “I trust you've all been watching one another's backs?”
“Like wolves watching sheep.” Adric slapped the hilt of his sword. It wasn't the boy's weapon John had given him last spring, Jenny saw, but a man's short stabbing-sword pilfered from the armory. At just-turned-nine, Adric was almost tall enough, and certainly strong enough, to wield it as a man, and his face was snow-burned as if Skaff Gradley and the other local militia captains had been letting him ride out with them on patrol.
“I came on tracks just the day before this latest storm, on the other side of Toadback Hill, and tried to get Bill to follow them with me. They led into the bog. I was out with Bill, none of us ever goes out alone. And when he said we shouldn't, but should get help from here, I even went, even if I knew nothing would get done that day and there was sure to be a storm the next. And there was,” he added, aggrieved.
“You have my eternal gratitude, Bill,” Jenny said feelingly, and the yardman grinned.
“And good on you, son,” added John, “for rememberin' your orders an' not goin' off on your own. Your old father's had enough gray hairs for one year. What'd Mol dream, Muffle? I didn't think she ever dreamed of anythin' but”—he caught Aunt Jane's warning glare and glanced at the two younger children, and altered his undoubtedly rude first thought to—“gettin' her corn-patch plowed,” and Jenny kicked him, hard, under the table.
“It's a dream others have been havin'.” Muffle scratched his unshaven chin. It had been less than a month since Jenny and Morkeleb had left the half-burned Hold, to carry the news south that the demons were dealing in slaves with the gnomes and raising the dead. But by the tired lines on the blacksmith's face it looked to have been as exhausting a time here as any that Jenny and John had faced. Roofs burned by Balgodorus Blacknife's outlaws had had to be rebuilt, quickly, the snows and winds that hampered repairs making those repairs all the more desperately urgent, and many of the men and women injured in the defense of the Hold had not been able to lend a hand. Jenny was only glad that her transformation into
dragon form, to drive away the attackers, had come before they'd managed to burn the stored grain and seed-corn. That would, perhaps, have tilted the balance for many from survival to death.
But the big blacksmith had rallied the village, and even the little she'd seen of the Hold spoke worlds of the efforts of them all. Had Muffle's mother not been married at the time of his birth, he would probably have been acknowledged as Lord Aver's son and raised as a warrior—a job he fulfilled, anyway, two winters out of three, when the Iceriders came down from the North. Possibly he would have been made Thane, for he was nearer what the old lord had sought in a son than the bookish John.
John would have been happier, reflected Jenny, looking across the table at her husband, who was gesturing with a bannock as he talked and getting honey on his sleeve. He hated riding the summer circuit of courts of justice and making hard decisions about local crimes and squabbles, hated the hours of training required to maintain a warrior's muscle and reflexes. In his childhood, Muffle had been his sparringpartner, a young and angry Muffle who resented the boy who'd supplanted him.
Yet had Muffle been Thane there was a good chance that no one in the village would have survived the subsequent years, or the coming of the Golden Dragon to the North fifteen years ago. The blacksmith simply did not have John's wits, or John's ruthlessness.
It was enough to make one wonder, thought Jenny, about the ultimate intentions of the gods.
“Not the identical dream, of course,” Muffle was saying now. “But along the same lines. Mol dreamed as how she'd lost a necklace she valued—those pearls that fool Gosbosom bought her from that trader.…”
“Why'd Farmer Gosbosom buy Mol Bucket a pearl necklace?” Adric wanted to know, and Aunt Jane said darkly, “Never you mind.”
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