Yet because they were deliberate, Jenny found that the younger woman’s slights had lost all power to wound her. They stirred in her less anger than Zyerne’s temptation of Gareth had. Arrogance she had expected, for it was the besetting sin of the mageborn and Jenny knew herself to be as much prey to it as the others and she sensed the enormous power within Zyerne. But this condescension was a girl’s ploy, the trick of one who was herself insecure.
What, she wondered, did Zyerne have to feel insecure about?
As they took their places at the table, Jenny’s eyes traveled slowly along its length, seeing it laid like a winter forest with snowy linen and the crystal icicles of candelabra pendant with jewels. Each silver plate was inlaid with traceries of gold and flanked with a dozen little forks and spoons, the complicated armory of etiquette; all these young courtiers in their scented velvet and stiffened lace were clearly her slaves, each more interested in carrying on a dialogue, however brief, with her, than with any of their neighbors. Everything about that delicate hunting lodge was designed to speak her name, from the entwined Zs and Us carved in the corners of the ceiling to the delicate bronze of the horned goddess of love Hartemgarbes, wrought in Zyerne’s image, in its niche near the door. Even the delicate music of hautbois and hurdy-gurdy in the gallery was a proclamation, a boast that Zyerne had and would tolerate nothing but the very finest.
Why then the nagging fear that lay behind pettiness?
She turned to look at Zyerne with clinical curiosity, wondering about the pattern of that girl’s life. Zyerne’s eyes met hers and caught their expression of calm and slightly pitying question. For an instant, the golden orbs narrowed, scorn and spite and anger stirring in their depths. Then the sweet smile returned, and Zyerne asked, “My dear, you haven’t touched a bite. Do you use forks in the north?”
There was a sudden commotion in the arched doorway of the hall. One of the minstrels in the gallery, shocked, hit a glaringly wrong squawk out of his recorder; the others stumbled to silence.
“Gaw,” Aversin’s voice said, and every head along the shimmering board turned, as if at the clatter of a dropped plate. “Late again.”
He stepped into the waxlight brightness of the hall with a faint jingle of scraps of chain mail and stood looking about him, his spectacles glinting like steel-rimmed moons. He had changed back into the battered black leather he’d worn on the journey, the wolfhide-lined jerkin with its stray bits of mail and metal plates and spikes and the dark leather breeches and scarred boots. His plaids were slung back over his shoulder like a cloak, cleaned of mud but frayed and scruffy, and there was a world of bright mischief in his eyes.
Gareth, at the other end of the table, went red with mortification to the roots of his thinning hair. Jenny only sighed, momentarily closed her eyes, and thought resignedly, John.
He strode cheerily into the room, bowing with impartial goodwill to the courtiers along the board, not one of whom seemed capable of making a sound. They had, for the most part, been looking forward to baiting a country cousin as he tried unsuccessfully to ape his betters; they had scarcely been prepared for an out-and-out barbarian who obviously wasn’t even going to bother to try.
With a friendly nod to his hostess, he settled into his place on the opposite side of Zyerne from Jenny. For a moment, he studied the enormous battery of cutlery arrayed on both sides of his plate and then, with perfect neatness and cleanliness, proceeded to eat with his fingers.
Zyerne recovered her composure first. With a silky smile, she picked up a fish fork and offered it to him. “Just as a suggestion, my lord. We do do things differently here.”
Somewhere down the board, one of the ladies tittered. Aversin regarded Zyerne with undisguised suspicion. She speared a scallop with the fish fork and held it out to him, by way of demonstration, and he broke into his sunniest smile. “Ah, so that’s what they’re for,” he said, relieved. Removing the scallop from the tines with his fingers, he took a neat bite out of it. In a north-country brogue six times worse than anything Jenny had ever heard him use at home, he added, “And here I was thinking I’d been in your lands less than a night, and already challenged to a duel with an unfamiliar weapon, and by the local magewife at that. You had me gie worrit.”
On his other side, Bond Clerlock nearly choked on his soup, and John thumped him helpfully on the back.
“You know,” he went on, gesturing with the fork in one hand and selecting another scallop with the other, “we did uncover a great box of these things—all different sizes they were, like these here—in the vaults of the Hold the year we looked out the bath for my cousin Kat’s wedding. We hadn’t a clue what they were for, not even Father Hiero—Father Hiero’s our priest—but the next time the bandits came down raiding from the hills, we loaded the lot into the ballistas instead of stone shot and let fly. Killed one of ’em dead on the spot and two others went riding off over the moor with all these little spikey things sticking into their backs...”
“I take it,” Zyerne said smoothly, as stifled giggles skittered around the table, “that your cousin’s wedding was an event of some moment, if it occasioned a bath?”
“Oh, aye.” For someone whose usual expression was one of closed watchfulness, Aversin had a dazzling smile. “She was marrying this southern fellow...”
It was probably, Jenny thought, the first time that anyone had succeeded in taking an audience away from Zyerne, and, by the glint in the sorceress’s eyes, she did not like it. But the courtiers, laughing, were drawn into the circle of Aversin’s warm and dotty charm; his exaggerated barbarity disarmed their mockery as his increasingly outrageous tale of his cousin’s fictitious nuptials reduced them to undignified whoops. Jenny had enough of a spiteful streak in her to derive a certain amount of enjoyment from Zyerne’s discomfiture—it was Zyerne, after all, who had mocked Gareth for not being able to take jests—but confined her attention to her plate. If John was going to the trouble of drawing their fire so that she could finish her meal in peace, the least she could do was not let his efforts go to waste.
On her other side, Trey said softly, “He doesn’t look terribly ferocious. From Gareth’s ballads, I’d pictured him differently—stern and handsome, like the statues of the god Sarmendes. But then,” she added, winkling the meat from an escargot with the special tongs to show Jenny how it was done, “I suppose it would have been a terrific bore for you to ride all the way back from the Winterlands with someone who just spent his time ‘scanning th’encircling welkin with his eagle-lidded eyes,’ as the song says.”
In spite of Zyerne’s disapproving glances, her handsome cicisbeo Bond was wiping tears of laughter from his eyes, albeit with great care for his makeup. Even the servants were having a hard time keeping their faces properly expressionless as they carried in peacocks roasted and resplendent in all their feathers and steaming removes of venison in cream.
“...so the bridegroom looked about for one of those wood things such as you have here in my rooms,” John was continuing, “but as he couldn’t find one, he hung his clothes over the armor-stand, and damned if Cousin Kat didn’t wake in the night and set about it with her sword, taking it for a bandit...”
Trust John, Jenny thought, that if he couldn’t make an impression on them on their own grounds, he wouldn’t try to do it on the grounds of Gareth’s ballads, either. They had succumbed to the devil of mischief in him, the devil that had drawn her from the first moment they had met as adults. He had used his outrageousness as a defense against their scorn, but the fact that he had been able to use it successfully made her think a little better of these courtiers of Zyerne’s.
She finished her meal in silence, and none of them saw her go.
“Jenny, wait.” A tall figure detached itself from the cluster of bright forms in the antechamber and hurried across the hall to catch her, tripping over a footstool halfway.
Jenny paused in the enclosing shadow of the stair lattice. From the anteroom, music was already lilting—not the notes
of the hired musicians, this time, but the complex tunes made to show off the skill of the courtiers themselves. To play well, it seemed, was the mark of a true gentleperson; the music of the cwrdth and the double-dulcimer blended into a counterpoint like lace, from which themes would emerge like half-familiar faces glimpsed in a crowd. Over the elaborate harmonies, she heard the blithe, unrepentant air of the pennywhistle, following the melody by ear, and she smiled. If the Twelve Gods of the Cosmos came down, they would be hard put to disconcert John.
“Jenny, I—I’m sorry.” Gareth was panting a little from his haste. He had resumed his battered spectacles; the fracture in the bottom of the right-hand lens glinted like a star. “I didn’t know it would be like that. I thought—he’s a Dragonsbane...”
She was standing a few steps up the flight; she put out her hand and touched his face, nearly on level with her own. “Do you remember when you first met him?”
He flushed with embarrassment. In the illuminated antechamber, John’s scruffy leather and plaids made him look like a mongrel in a pack of lapdogs. He was examining a lute-shaped hurdy-gurdy with vast interest, while the red-haired, Beautiful Isolde of Greenhythe told the latest of her enormous stock of scatalogical jokes about the gnomes. Everyone guffawed but John, who was far too interested in the musical instrument in his lap to notice; Jenny saw Gareth’s mouth tighten with something between anger and confused pain. He went north seeking a dream, she thought; now he had neither that which he had sought nor that to which he had thought he would return.
“I shouldn’t have let them bait you like that,” he said after a moment. “I didn’t think Zyerne...”
He broke off, unable to say it. She saw bitterness harden his mouth, and a disillusion worse than the one John had dealt him beside the pigsty at Alyn. He had probably never seen Zyerne being petty before, she thought; or perhaps he had only seen her in the context of the world she had created, never having been outside of it himself. He took a deep breath and went on, “I know I should have taken up for you somehow, but... but I didn’t know how!” He spread his hands helplessly. With the first rueful humor at himself that Jenny had seen, he added, “You know, in ballads it’s so easy to rescue someone. I mean, even if you’re defeated, at least you can die gracefully and not have everyone you knew laugh at you for the next three weeks.”
Jenny laughed and reached out to pat his arm. In the gloom, his features were only an edge of gold along the awkward cheekline, and the twin circles of glass were opaque with the lamplight’s reflection that glinted on a few flame-caught strands of hair and formed a spiky illumination along the edges of his lace collar. “Don’t worry about it.” She smiled. “Like slaying dragons, it’s a special art.”
“Look,” said Gareth, “I—I’m sorry I tricked you. I wouldn’t have done it, if I’d known it would be like this. But Zyerne sent a messenger to my father—it’s only a day’s ride to Bel, and a guest house is being prepared for you in the Palace. I’ll be with you when you present yourselves to him, and I know he’ll be willing to make terms...” He caught himself, as if remembering his earlier lying assurances. “That is, I really do know it, this time. Since the coming of the dragon, there’s been a huge standing reward for its slaying, more than the pay of a garrison for a year. He has to listen to John.”
Jenny leaned one shoulder against the openwork of the newel post, the chips of reflected lamplight filtering through the lattice and dappling her black and silver gown with gold. “Is it so important to you?”
He nodded. Even with the fashionable padding of his white-and-violet doublet, his narrow shoulders looked stooped with tiredness and defeat. “I didn’t tell very much truth at the Hold,” he said quietly. “But I did tell this: that I know I’m not a warrior, or a knight, and I know I’m not good at games. And I’m not stupid enough to think that the dragon wouldn’t kill me in a minute, if I went there. But—I know everyone around here laughs when I talk about chivalry and honor and a knight’s duty, and you and John do, too... But that’s what makes John the Thane of the Winterlands and not just another bandit, doesn’t it? He didn’t have to kill that first dragon.” The boy gestured wearily, a half-shrug that sent fragments of luminosity slithering along the white stripes of his slashed sleeves to the diamonds at his cuffs. “I couldn’t not do something. Even if I did muff it up.”
Jenny felt she had never liked him so well. She said, “If you had truly muffed it up, we wouldn’t be here.”
She climbed the stairs slowly and crossed the gallery that spanned the hall below. Like the stair, it was enclosed in a stone trellis cut into the shapes of vines and trees, and the shadows flickered in a restless harlequin over her gown and hair. She felt tired and cold from holding herself braced all evening—the sly baiting and lace-trimmed malice of Zyerne’s court had stung more than she cared to admit. She pitied them, a little, for what they were, but she did not have John’s brass hide.
She and John had been given the smaller of the two rooms at the end of the wing; Gareth, the larger, next door to theirs. Like everything else in Zyerne’s lodge, they were beautifully appointed. The red damasked bed hangings and alabaster lamps were designed both as a setting for Zyerne’s beauty and a boast of her power to get what she wanted from the King. No wonder, thought Jenny, Gareth distrusted and hated any witch who held sway over a ruler’s heart.
As she left the noise of the gallery behind her and turned down the corridor toward her room, she became conscious of the stiff rustling of her borrowed finery upon the inlaid wood of the floor and, with her old instinct for silence, gathered the heavy skirts up in her hands. Lamplight from a half-opened door laid a molten trapezoid of brightness across the darkness before her. Zyerne, Jenny knew, was not downstairs with the others, and she felt uneasy about meeting that beautiful, spoiled, powerful girl, especially here in her own hunting lodge where she held sole dominion. Thus Jenny passed the open doorway in a drift of illusion; and, though she paused in the shadows at what she saw by the lights within, she remained herself unseen.
It would have been so, she thought later, even had she not been cloaked in the spells that thwart the casual eye. Zyerne sat in an island of brightness, the glow of a night-lamp stroking the gilt-work of her blackwood chair, so still that not even the rose-point shadows of her lace veils stirred upon her gown. Her hands were cupped around the face of Bond Clerlock, who knelt at her feet, and such was his immobility that not even the sapphires pinning his hair glinted, but burned steadily with a single reflection. Though he looked up toward her face, his eyes were closed; his expression was the contorted, intent face of a man in ecstasy so strong that it borders pain.
The room smoked with magic, the weight of it like a glittering lour in the air. As a mage, Jenny could feel it, smell it like an incense; but it was an incense tainted with rot. She stepped back, repelled. Though the touch of Zyerne’s hands upon Bond’s face was the only contact between their two bodies, she had the sickened sensation of having looked upon that which was obscene. Zyerne’s eyes were closed, her childlike brow puckered in slight concentration; the smile that curved her lips was one of physical and emotional satisfaction, like a woman’s after the act of love.
Not love, thought Jenny, drawing back from the scene and moving soundlessly down the hall once more, but some private satiation.
She sat for a long time in the dark window embrasure of her room and thought about Zyerne. The moon rose, flecking the bare tips of the trees above the white carpet of ground mists; she heard the clocks strike downstairs and the drift of voices and laughter. The moon was in its first quarter, and something about that troubled her, though she could not for the moment think what. After a long time she heard the door open softly behind her and turned to see John silhouetted in the dim lamplight from the hall, its reflection throwing a scatter of metallic glints from his doublet and putting a rough halo on the coarse wool of his plaids.
Into the darkness he said softly, “Jen?”
“Here.”
&
nbsp; Moonlight flashed across his specs. She moved a little—the barring of the casement shadows on her black and silver gown made her nearly invisible. He came cautiously across the unfamiliar terrain of the floor, his hands and face pale blurs against his dark clothing.
“Gaw,” he said in disgust as he slung off his plaids. “To come here to risk my bones slaying a dragon and end up playing dancing bear for a pack of children.” He sat on the edge of the curtained bed, working at the heavy buckles of his doublet.
“Did Gareth speak to you?”
His spectacles flashed again as he nodded.
“And?”
John shrugged. “Seeing the pack he runs with, I’m not surprised he’s a gammy-handed chuff with less sense than my Cousin Dilly’s mulberry bushes. And he did take the risk to search for me, I’ll give him that.” His voice was muffled as he bent over to pull off his boots. “Though I’ll wager all the dragon’s gold to little green apples he had no idea how dangerous it would be. God knows what I’d have done in his shoes, and him that desperate to help and knowing he hadn’t a chance against the dragon himself.” He set his boots on the floor and sat up again. “However we came here, I’d be a fool not to speak with the King and see what he’ll offer me, though it’s in my mind that we’ll run up against Zyerne in any dealings we have with him.”
Even while playing dancing bear, thought Jenny as she drew the pins from her hair and let her fashionable veils slither to the floor, John didn’t miss much. The stiffened silk felt cold under her fingers, from the touch of the window’s nearness, even as her hair did when she unwound its thick coil and let it whisper dryly down over her bony, half-bared shoulders.
At length she said, “When Gareth first spoke to me of her, I was jealous, hating her without ever having seen her. She has everything that I wanted, John: genius, time... and beauty,” she added, realizing that that, too, mattered. “I was afraid it was that, still.”
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