Dragonsbane

by Barbara Hambly

  “I don’t know, love.” He got to his feet, barefoot in breeches and creased shirt, and came to the window where she sat. “It doesn’t sound very like you.” His hands were warm through the stiff, chilly satins of her borrowed gown as he collected the raven weight of her hair and sorted it into columns that spilled down through his fingers. “I don’t know about her magic, for I’m not mageborn myself, but I do know she is cruel for the sport of it—not in the big things that would get her pointed at, but in the little ones—and she leads the others on, teaching them by example and jest to be as cruel as she. Myself, I’d take a whip to Ian, if he treated a guest as she treated you. I see now what that gnome we met on the road meant when he said she poisons what she touches. But she’s only a mistress, when all’s said. And as for her being beautiful...” He shrugged. “If I was a bit shapecrafty, I’d be beautiful, too.”

  In spite of herself Jenny laughed and leaned back into his arms.

  But later, in the darkness of the curtained bed, the memory of Zyerne returned once more to her thoughts. She saw again the enchantress and Bond in the rosy aura of the nightlamp and felt the weight and strength of the magic that had filled the room like the silent build of thunder. Was it the magnitude of the power alone that had frightened her, she wondered. Or had it been some sense of filthiness that lay in it, like the back-taste of souring milk? Or had that, in its turn, been only the wormwood of her own jealousy of the younger woman’s greater arts?

  John had said that it didn’t sound very like her, but she knew he was wrong. It was like her, like the part of herself she fought against, the fourteen-year-old girl still buried in her soul, weeping with exhausted, bitter rage when the rains summoned by her teacher would not disperse at her command. She had hated Caerdinn for being stronger than she. And although the long years of looking after the irascible old man had turned that hatred to affection, she had never forgotten that she was capable of it. Even, she added ironically to herself, as she was capable of working the death-spells on a helpless man, as she had on the dying robber in the ruins of the town; even as she was capable of leaving a man and two children who loved her, because of her love of the quest for power.

  Would I have been able to understand what I saw tonight if I had given all my time, all my heart, to the study of magic? Would I have had power like that, mighty as a storm gathered into my two hands?

  Through the windows beyond the half-parted bedcurtains, she could see the chill white eye of the moon. Its light, broken by the leading of the casement, lay scattered like the spangles of a fish’s mail across the black and silver satin of the gown that she had worn and over the respectable brown velvet suit that John had not. It touched the bed and picked out the scars that crossed John’s bare arm, glimmered on the upturned palm of his hand, and outlined the shape of his nose and lips against the darkness. Her vision in the water bowl returned to her again, an icy shadow on her heart.

  Would she be able to save him, she wondered, if she were more powerful? If she had given her time to her powers wholly, instead of portioning it between them and him? Was that, ultimately, what she had cast unknowingly away?

  Somewhere in the night a hinge creaked. Stilling her breathing to listen, she heard the almost soundless pat of bare feet outside her door and the muffled vibration of a shoulder blundering into the wall.

  She slid from beneath the silken quilts and pulled on her shift. Over it she wrapped the first garment she laid hands on, John’s voluminous plaids, and swiftly crossed the blackness of the room to open the door.

  “Gar?”

  He was standing a few feet from her, gawky and very boyish-looking in his long nightshirt. His gray eyes stared out straight ahead of him, without benefit of spectacles, and his thin hair was flattened and tangled from the pillow. He gasped at the sound of her voice and almost fell, groping for the wall’s support. She realized then that she had waked him.

  “Gar, it’s me, Jenny. Are you all right?”

  His breathing was fast with shock. She put her hand gently on his arm to steady him, and he blinked myopically down at her for a moment. Then he drew a long breath. “Fine,” he said shakily. “I’m fine, Jenny. I...” He looked around him and ran an unsteady hand through his hair. “I—I must have been walking in my sleep again.”

  “Do you often?”

  He nodded and rubbed his face. “That is... I didn’t in the north, but I do sometimes here. It’s just that I dreamed...” He paused, frowning, trying to recall. “Zyerne...”

  “Zyerne?”

  Sudden color flooded his pallid face. “Nothing,” he mumbled, and avoided her eyes. “That is—I don’t remember.”

  After she had seen him safely back to the dark doorway of his room, Jenny stood for a moment in the hall, hearing the small sounds of bedcurtains and sheets as he returned to his rest. How late it was, she could not guess. The hunting lodge was deathly silent about her, the smells of long-dead candles, spilled wine, and the frowsty residue of spent passions now flat and stale. All the length of the corridor, every room was dark save one, whose door stood ajar. The dim glow of a single nightlamp shone within, and its light lay across the silky parquet of the floor like a dropped scarf of luminous gold.

  CHAPTER VI

  “HE’LL HAVE TO listen to you.” Gareth perched himself in the embrasure of one of the tall windows that ran the length of the southern wall of the King’s Gallery, the wan sunlight shimmering with moony radiance in the old-fashioned jewels he wore. “I’ve just heard that the dragon destroyed the convoy taking supplies out to the siege troops at Halnath last night. Over a thousand pounds of flour and sugar and meat destroyed—horses and oxen dead or scattered—the bodies of the guards burned past recognition.”

  He nervously adjusted the elaborate folds of his ceremonial mantlings and peered shortsightedly at John and Jenny, who shared a carved bench of ebony inlaid with malachite. Due to the exigencies of court etiquette, formal costume had been petrified into a fashion a hundred and fifty years out of date, with the result that all the courtiers and petitioners assembled in the long room had the stilted, costumed look of characters in a masquerade. Jenny noticed that John, though he might persist in playing the barbarian in his leather and plaids among the admiring younger courtiers, was not about to do so in the presence of the King. Gareth had draped John’s blue-and-cream satin mantlings for him—a valet’s job. Bond Clerlock had offered to do it but, Jenny gathered, there were rigid sartorial rules governing such matters; it would have been very like Bond to arrange the elaborate garment in some ridiculous style, knowing the Dragonsbane was unable to tell the difference.

  Bond was present among the courtiers who awaited the arrival of the King. Jenny could see him, further down the King’s Gallery, standing in one of the slanting bars of pale, platinum light. As usual, his costume outshone every other man’s present; his mantlings were a miracle of complex folds and studied elegance, so thick with embroidery that they glittered like a snake’s back; his flowing sleeves, six generations out of date, were precise to a quarter-inch in their length and hang. He had even painted his face in the archaic formal fashion, which some of the courtiers did in preference to the modern applications of kohl and rouge—John had flatly refused to have anything to do with either style. The colors accentuated the pallor of young Clerlock’s face, though he looked better, Jenny noted, than he had yesterday on the ride from Zyerne’s hunting lodge to Bel—less drawn and exhausted.

  He was looking about him now with nervous anxiety, searching for someone—probably Zyerne. In spite of how ill he had seemed yesterday, he had been her most faithful attendant, riding at her side and holding her whip, her pomander ball, and the reins of her palfrey when she dismounted. Small thanks, Jenny thought, he had gotten for it. Zyerne had spent the day flirting with the unresponsive Gareth.

  It was not that Gareth was immune to her charms. As a nonparticipant, Jenny had an odd sense of unobserved leisure, as if she were watching squirrels from a blind. Unnoticed
by the courtiers, she could see that Zyerne was deliberately teasing Gareth’s senses with every touch and smile. Do the mageborn love? he had asked her once, back in the bleak Winterlands. Evidently he had come to his own conclusions about whether Zyerne loved him, or he her. But Jenny knew full well that love and desire were two different things, particularly to a boy of eighteen. Under her innocently minxish airs, Zyerne was a woman skilled at manipulating the passions of men.

  Why? Jenny wondered, looking up at the boy’s awkward profile against the soft cobalt shadows of the gallery. For the amusement of seeing him struggle not to betray his father? Somehow to use his guilt to control him so that one day she could turn the King against him by crying rape?

  A stir ran the length of the gallery, like wind in dry wheat. At the far end, voices murmured, “The King! The King!” Gareth scrambled to his feet and hastily checked the folds of his mantlings again. John rose, pushing his anachronistic specs a little more firmly up on the bridge of his nose. Taking Jenny’s hand, he followed more slowly, as Gareth hurried toward the line of courtiers that was forming up in the center of the hall.

  At the far end, bronze doors swung inward. The Chamberlain Badegamus stepped through, stout, pink, and elderly, emblazoned in a livery of crimson and gold that smote the eye with its splendor. “My lords, my ladies—the King.”

  Her arm against Gareth’s in the press, Jenny was aware of the boy’s shudder of nervousness. He had, after all, stolen his father’s seal and disobeyed his orders—and he was no longer as blithely unaware of the consequences of his actions as the characters of most ballads seemed to be. She felt him poised, ready to step forward and execute the proper salaam, as others down the rank were already doing, and receive his father’s acknowledgment and invitation to a private interview.

  The King’s head loomed above all others, taller even than his son; Jenny could see that his hair was as fair as Gareth’s but much thicker, a warm barley-gold that was beginning to fade to the color of straw. Like the steady murmuring of waves on the shore, voices repeated “My lord... my lord...”

  Her mind returned briefly to the Winterlands. She supposed she should have felt resentment for the Kings who had withdrawn their troops and left the lands to ruin, or awe at finally seeing the source of the King’s law that John was ready to die to uphold. But she felt neither, knowing that this man, Uriens of Bel, had had nothing to do with either withdrawing those troops or making the Law, but was merely the heir of the men who had. Like Gareth before he had traveled to the Winterlands, he undoubtedly had no more notion of those things than what he had learned from his tutors and promptly forgotten.

  As he approached, nodding to this woman or that man, signing that he would speak to them in private, Jenny felt a vast sense of distance from this tall man in his regal crimson robes. Her only allegiance was to the Winterlands and to the individuals who dwelt there, to people and a land she knew. It was John who felt the ancient bond of fealty; John who had sworn to this man his allegiance, his sword, and his life.

  Nevertheless, she felt the tension as the King approached them, tangible as a color in the air. Covert eyes were on them, the younger courtiers watching, waiting to see the reunion between the King and his errant son.

  Gareth stepped forward, the oak-leaf-cut end of his mantlings gathered like a cloak between the second and third fingers of his right hand. With surprising grace, he bent his long, gangly frame into a perfect Sarmendes-in-Splendor salaam, such as only the Heir could make, and then only to the monarch. “My lord.”

  King Uriens II of Belmarie, Suzerain of the Marches, High Lord of Wyr, Nast, and the Seven Islands, regarded his son for a moment out of hollow and colorless eyes set deep within a haggard, brittle face. Then, without a word, he turned away to acknowledge the next petitioner.

  The silence in the gallery would have blistered the paint from wood. Like black poison dumped into clear water, it spread to the farthest ends of the room. The last few petitioners’ voices were audible through it, clearer and clearer, as if they shouted; the closing of the gilded bronze doors as the King passed on into his audience room sounded like the booming of thunder. Jenny was conscious of the eyes of all the room looking anywhere but at them, then sliding back in surreptitious glances, and of Gareth’s face, as white as his collar lace.

  A soft voice behind them said, “Please don’t be angry with him, Gareth.”

  Zyerne stood there, in plum-colored silk so dark it was nearly black, with knots of pink-tinted cream upon her trailing sleeves. Her mead-colored eyes were troubled. “You did take his seal, you know, and depart without his permission.”

  John spoke up. “Bit of an expensive slap on the wrist, though, isn’t it? I mean, there the dragon is and all, while we’re here waiting for leave to go after it.”

  Zyerne’s lips tightened a little, then smoothed. At the near end of the King’s Gallery, a small door in the great ones opened, and the Chamberlain Badegamus appeared, quietly summoning the first of the petitioners whom the King had acknowledged.

  “There really is no danger to us here, you know. The dragon has been confining his depredations to the farmsteads along the feet of Nast Wall.”

  “Ah,” John said comprehendingly. “That makes it all right, then. And is this what you’ve told the people of those farmsteads to which, as you say, the dragon’s been confining his depredations?”

  The flash of anger in her eyes was stronger then, as if no one had ever spoken to her so—or at least, thought Jenny, observing silently from John’s side, not for a long time. With visible effort, Zyerne controlled herself and said with an air of one reproving a child, “You must understand. There are many more pressing concerns facing the King...”

  “More pressing than a dragon sitting on his doorstep?” demanded Gareth, outraged.

  She burst into a sweet gurgle of laughter. “There’s no need to enact a Dockmarket drama over it, you know. I’ve told you before, darling, it isn’t worth the wrinkles it will give you.”

  He pulled his head back from her playful touch. “Wrinkles! We’re talking about people being killed!”

  “Tut, Gareth,” Bond Clerlock drawled, strolling languidly over to them. “You’re getting as bad as old Polycarp used to be.”

  Under the paint, his face looked even more washed-out next to Zyerne’s sparkling radiance. With a forced effort at his old lightness, he went on, “You shouldn’t grudge those poor farmers the only spice in their dull little lives.”

  “Spice...” Gareth began, and Zyerne squeezed his hand chidingly.

  “Don’t tell me you’re going to go all dull and altruistic on us. What a bore that would be.” She smiled. “And I will tell you this,” she added more soberly. “Don’t do anything that would further anger your father. Be patient—and try to understand.”

  Halfway down the long gallery, the Chamberlain Badegamus was returning, passing the small group of gnomes who sat, an island of isolation, in the shadow of one of the fluted ornamental arches along the east wall. As the Chamberlain walked by, one of them rose in a silken whisper of flowing, alien robes, the cloudy wisps of his milk-white hair floating around his slumped back. Gareth had pointed him out to Jenny earlier—Azwylcartusherands, called Dromar by the folk of men who had little patience with the tongue of gnomes, longtime ambassador from the Lord of the Deep to the Court of Bel. Badegamus saw him and checked his stride, then glanced quickly at Zyerne. She shook her head. Badegamus averted his face and walked past the gnomes without seeing them.

  “They grow impudent,” the enchantress said softly. “To send envoys here, when they fight on the side of the traitors of Halnath.”

  “Well, they can hardly help that, can they, if the back way out of the Deep leads into the Citadel,” John remarked.

  “They could have opened the Citadel gates to let the King’s troops in.”

  John scratched the side of his long nose. “Well, being a barbarian and all, I wouldn’t know how things are done in civilized lands,” he sa
id. “In the north, we’ve got a word for someone who’d do that to a man who gave him shelter when he was driven from his home.”

  For an instant Zyerne was silent, her power and her anger seeming to crackle in the air. Then she burst into another peal of chiming laughter. “I swear, Dragonsbane, you do have a refreshingly naïve way of looking at things. You make me feel positively ancient.” She brushed a tendril of her hair aside from her cheek as she spoke; she looked as sweet and guileless as a girl of twenty. “Come. Some of us are going to slip away from this silliness and go riding along the sea cliffs. Will you come, Gareth?” Her hand stole into his in such a way that he could not avoid it without rudeness—Jenny could see his face color slightly at the touch. “And you, our barbarian? You know the King won’t see you today.”

  “Be that as it may,” John said quietly. “I’ll stay here on the off chance.”

  Bond laughed tinnily. “There’s the spirit that won the Realm!”

  “Aye,” John agreed in a mild voice and returned to the carved bench where he and Jenny had been, secure in his established reputation for barbarous eccentricity.

  Gareth drew his hand from Zyerne’s and sat down nearby, catching his mantlings in the lion’s-head arm of the chair. “I think I’ll stay as well,” he said, with as much dignity as one could have while disentangling oneself from the furniture.

  Bond laughed again. “I think our Prince has been in the north too long!” Zyerne wrinkled her nose, as if at a joke in doubtful taste.

  “Run along, Bond.” She smiled. “I must speak to the King. I shall join you presently.” Gathering up her train, she moved off toward the bronze doors of the King’s antechamber, the opals that spangled her veils giving the impression of dew flecking an apple blossom as she passed the pale bands of the windowlight. As she came near the little group of gnomes, old Dromar rose again and walked toward her with the air of one steeling himself for a loathed but necessary encounter. But she turned her glance from him and quickened her step, so that, to intercept her, he would have to run after her on his short, bandy legs. This he would not do, but stood looking after her for a moment, smoldering anger in his pale amber eyes.