Dragonsbane

by Barbara Hambly

  Zyerne uttered a ribald laugh. “So there’s our boy who won’t tumble his father’s mistress? You had them both to yourself, didn’t you, slut, coming down from the north? Enough time and more to tangle him in your hair.”

  Gareth pulled free of Jenny and scrambled to his feet, shaking all over with anger. Though Jenny could see he was still terrified of the sorceress, he faced her and gasped, “You’re lying!”

  Zyerne laughed again, foully, as she had in the garden outside the King’s rooms. Jenny only said, “She knows it isn’t true. What did you come here for, Zyerne? To do to Gareth what you’ve done to his father? Or to see if it’s finally safe for you to enter the Deep?”

  The enchantress’s mouth moved uncertainly, and her eyes shifted under Jenny’s cool gaze. Then she laughed, the mockery in it marred by her uncertainty. “Maybe to get your precious Dragonsbane at the same time?”

  A week—even a day—ago, Jenny would have responded to the taunt with fear for John’s safety. But she knew Zyerne had not gone anywhere near John. She knew she would have sensed it, if such magic had been worked so near—almost, she thought, she would have heard their voices, no matter how softly they spoke. And in any case, John was unable to flee; one deals with the unwounded enemy first.

  She saw Zyerne’s hand move and felt the nature of the spell, even as she smelled the singed wool of her skirts beginning to smoke. Her own spell was fast and hard, called with the mind and the minimal gesture of the hand rather than the labor it had once entailed. Zyerne staggered back, her hands over her eyes, taken completely by surprise.

  When Zyerne raised her head again, her eyes were livid with rage, yellow as a devil’s in a face transformed with fury. “You can’t keep me from the Deep,” she said in a voice which shook. “It is mine—it will be mine. I’ve driven the gnomes from it. When I take it, no one, no one, will be able to contend against my power!”

  Stooping, she seized a handful of old leaves and beechnuts from the mast that lay all about their feet. She flung them at Jenny. In the air, they burst into flame, growing as they burned, a tangled bonfire that Jenny swept aside with a spell she had hardly been aware she’d known. The blazing logs scattered everywhere, throwing streamers of yellow fire into the blue gloom and blazing up in half-a-dozen places where they touched dry weeds. Doubling like a hare upon her tracks, Zyerne darted for the path that led down into the Vale. Jenny leaped at her heels, her soft boots in three strides outdistancing the younger woman’s precarious court shoes.

  Zyerne twisted in her grip. She was taller than Jenny but not physically as strong, even taking into account Jenny’s exhaustion; for an instant their eyes were inches apart, the yellow gaze boring like balefire into the blue.

  Like a hammerblow, Jenny felt the impact of a mind upon hers, spells of hurt and terror that gripped and twisted at her muscles, utterly different from the weight and living strength of the dragon’s mind. She parried the spell, not so much with a spell as with the strength of her will, throwing it back at Zyerne, and she heard the younger woman curse her in a spate of fury like a burst sewer. Nails tore at her wrists as she sought the yellow eyes with her own again, catching Zyerne’s silky curls in a fist like a rock, forcing her to look. It was the first time she had matched strength in anger with another mage, and it surprised her how instinctive it was to probe into the essence—as she had probed into Gareth’s, and Mab into hers—not solely to understand, but to dominate by understanding, to give nothing of her own soul in return. She had a glimpse of something sticky and foul as the plants that eat those foolish enough to came near, the eroded remains of a soul, like an animate corpse of the young woman’s mind.

  Zyerne screamed as she felt the secrets of her being bared, and power exploded in the air between them, a burning fire that surrounded them in a whirlwind of tearing force. Jenny felt a weight falling against her, a blackness like the dragon’s mind but greater, the shadow of some crushing power, like an ocean of uncounted years. It drove her to her knees, but she held on, sloughing away the crawling, biting pains that tore at her skin, the rending agony in her muscles, the fire, and the darkness, boring into Zyerne’s mind with her own, like a white needle of fire.

  The weight of the shadow faded. She felt Zyerne’s nerve and will break and got to her feet again, throwing the girl from her with all her strength. Zyerne collapsed on the dirt of the path, her dark hair hanging in a torrent over her white dress, her nails broken from tearing at Jenny’s wrists, her nose running and dust plastered to her face with mucus. Jenny stood over her, panting for breath, her every muscle hurting from the twisting impact of Zyerne’s spells. “Go,” she said, her voice quiet, but with power in her words. “Go back to Bel and never touch Gareth again.”

  Sobbing with fury, Zyerne picked herself up. Her voice shook. “You stinking gutter-nosed sow! I won’t be kept from the Deep! It’s mine, I tell you; and when I come there, I’ll show you! I swear by the Stone, when I have the Deep, I’ll crush you out like the dung-eating cockroach you are! You’ll see! They’ll all see! They have no right to keep me away!”

  “Get out of here,” Jenny said softly.

  Sobbing, Zyerne obeyed her, gathering up her trailing white gown and stumbling down the path that led toward the clock tower. Jenny stood for a long time watching her go. The power Jenny had summoned to protect her faded slowly, like fire banked under embers until it was needed again.

  It was only after Zyerne was out of sight that she realized that she should never have been able to do what she had just done—not here and not in the Deep.

  And it came to her then, what had happened to her when she had touched the mind of the dragon.

  The dragon’s magic was alive in her soul, like streaks of iron in gold. She should have known it before; if she had not been so weary, she thought, perhaps she would have. Her awareness, like Morkeleb’s, had widened to fill the Vale, so that, even in sleep, she was conscious of things taking place about her. A shiver passed through her flesh and racked her bones with terror and wonderment, as if she had conceived again, and something alive and alien was growing within her.

  Smoke from the woods above stung her nose and eyes, white billows of it telling her that Gareth had succeeded in dousing the flames. Somewhere the horses were whinnying in terror. She felt exhausted and aching, her whole body wrenched by the cramp of those gripping spells, her wrists smarting where Zyerne’s nails had torn them. She began to tremble, the newfound strength draining away under the impact of shock and fear.

  A countersurge of wind shook the trees around her, as if at the stroke of a giant wing. Her hair blowing about her face, she looked up, but for a moment saw nothing. It was something she’d heard of—that dragons, for all their size and gaudiness, could be harder to see in plain daylight than the voles of the hedgerow. He seemed to blend down out of the dusk, a vast shape of jointed ebony and black silk, silver-crystal eyes like small moons in the dark.

  He could feel my power nearing its end, she thought despairingly, remembering how he had turned on her before. The terrible, shadowy weight of Zyerne’s spells still lay on her bones; she felt they would break if she tried to summon the power to resist the dragon. Wrung with a weariness close to physical nausea, she looked up to face him and hardened her mind once again to meet his attack.

  Even as she did so, she realized that he was beautiful, as he hung for a moment like a black, drifting kite upon the air.

  Then his mind touched hers, and the last pain of Zyerne’s spells was sponged away.

  What is it, wizard woman? he asked. It is only evil words, such as fishwives throw at one another.

  He settled before her on the path, folding his great wings with a queerly graceful articulation, and regarded her with his silver eyes in the dusk.

  He said, You understand.

  No, she replied. I think I know what has happened, but I do not understand.

  Bah. In the leaky gray twilight beneath the trees, she saw all the scale-points along his sides ruff
le slightly, like the hair of an affronted cat. I think that you do. When your mind was in mine, my magic called to you, and the dragon within you answered. Know you not your own power, wizard woman? Know you not what you could be?

  With a cold vertigo that was not quite fear she understood him then and willed herself not to understand.

  He felt the closing of her mind, and irritation smoked from him like a white spume of mist. You understand, he said again. You have been within my mind; you know what it would be to be a dragon.

  Jenny said, No, not to him, but to that trickle of fire in her mind that surged suddenly into a stream.

  As in a dream, images surfaced of things she felt she had once known and forgotten, like the soaring freedom of flight. She saw the earth lost beneath her in the clouds, and about her was a vaporous eternity whose absolute silence was broken only by the sheer of her wings. As from great height, she glimpsed the stone circle on Frost Fell, the mere below it like a broken piece of dirty glass, and the little stone house a chrysalis, cracked open to release the butterfly that had slept within.

  She said, I have not the power to change my essence.

  I have, the voice whispered among the visions in her mind. You have the strength to be a dragon, once you consent to take the form. I sensed that in you when we struggled. I was angry then, to be defeated by a human; but you can be more than human.

  Gazing up at the dark splendor of the dragon’s angular form, she shook her head. I will not put myself thus in your power, Morkeleb. I cannot leave my own form without your aid, nor could I return to it. Do not tempt me.

  Tempt? Morkeleb’s voice said. There is no temptation from outside the heart. And as for returning—what are you as a human, Jenny Waynest? Pitiful, puling, like all your kin the slave of time that rots the body before the mind has seen more than a single flower in all the meadows of the Cosmos. To be a mage you must be a mage, and I see in your mind that you fight for the time to do even that. To be a dragon...

  “To be a dragon,” she said aloud, to force her own mind upon it, “I have only to give over my control of you. I will not lose myself thus in the dragon mind and the dragon magic. You will not thus get me to release you.”

  She felt the strength press against the closed doors in her mind, then ease, and heard the steely rustle of his scales as his long tail lashed through the dry grasses with annoyance. The dark woods came back into focus; the strange visions receded like a shining mist. The light was waning fast about them, all the colors bled from straggly briar and fern. As if his blackness took on the softer hues of the evening, the dragon was nearly invisible, his shape blending with the milky stringers of fog that had begun to veil the woods and with the black, abrupt outlines of dead branch and charred trunk. Somewhere on the ridge above her, Jenny could hear Gareth calling her name.

  She found she was trembling, not solely from weariness or the piercing cold. The need within her was terrifying—to be what she had always wished to be, to have what she had wanted since she had been fourteen, ugly, and cursed with a terrible need. She had tasted the strength of the dragon’s fire, and the taste lingered sweet in her mouth.

  I can give you this, the voice in her mind said.

  She shook her head, more violently this time. No. I will not betray my friends.

  Friends? Those who would hind you to littleness for their own passing convenience? The man who grudges you the essence of your soul out of mourning for his dinner? Do you cling to all these little joys because you are afraid to taste the great ones, Jenny Waynest?

  He had been right when he had said that there is no temptation from outside the heart. She flung back her long hair over her shoulders and called to herself all the strength remaining in her, against the star-prickled darkness that seemed to draw upon the very marrow of her bones.

  Get away from me, she told him. Go now and return to the islands in the northern sea that are your home. Sing your songs to the rock-gold and the whales, and let be forever the sons of men and the sons of gnomes.

  As if she had struck a black log that, breaking, had revealed the living fire smoldering within, she felt the surge of his anger again. He reared back, his body arched against the dimming sky. The dark wire and silk of his wings rattled as he said, Be it so then, wizard woman. I leave to you the gold of the Deep—take of it what you will. My song is in it. When old age comes, whose mortal frost you have already begun to feel upon your bones, press it to your heart and remember that which you have let pass you by.

  He gathered himself upon his haunches, his compact, snakelike shape rising above her as he gathered about him the glitter of magic in the air. Black wings unfurled against the sky, looming over her so that she could see the obsidian gleam of his sides, the baby-skin softness of the velvet belly, still puckered with the crimped, ugly mouths of harpoon wounds. Then he flung himself skyward. The great stroke of his wings caught him up. She felt the magic that swirled about him, a spindrift of enchantment, the star trail of an invisible comet. The last rays of sinking light tipped his wings as he rose beyond the blue shadow of the ridge. Then he was gone.

  Jenny watched him go with desolation in her heart. All the woods seemed laden now with the smell of wet burning, and the murky earthiness of dead smoke. She became slowly aware that the hem of her skirt was sodden from kneeling in the wet path; her boots were damp and her feet cold. Listless weariness dragged upon her, from muscles pulled by exertion and Zyerne’s spells and also from the words the dragon had spoken to her when she had turned away from what he had offered.

  As a dragon, she would have no more hold upon him, nor would she wish any longer to drive him from the Deep. Was that, she wondered, why he had offered her the splendid and terrifying freedom of that form? They said that dragons did not entrap with lies but with truth, and she knew he had read accurately the desires of her soul.

  “Jenny?” A smudged, dirty Gareth came hurrying toward her down the path. To her ears, used to the voice of the dragon, he sounded tinny and false. “Are you all right? What happened? I saw the dragon...” He had removed his specs and was seeking a sufficiently clean patch of his sooty, spark-holed shirt to wipe them on, without much success. Against the grime on his face the lenses had left two white circles, like a mask, in which his gray eyes blinked nakedly.

  Jenny shook her head. She felt weary to the point of tears, almost incapable of speech. He fell into step with her as she began slowly climbing the path up the Rise once more.

  “Did Zyerne get away?”

  She looked at him, startled. After what had passed between herself and Morkeleb, she had nearly forgotten Zyerne. “She—she left. I sent her away.” It seemed like days ago.

  “You sent her away?” Gareth gasped, dumfounded.

  Jenny nodded, too tired to explain. Thinking about it, she frowned, as something snagged at her mind. But she only asked, “And you?”

  He looked away from her and reddened with shame. Part of Jenny sighed in exasperation at this foolishness, so petty after the force of the dragon’s greater seduction; but part of her remembered what it was like to be eighteen, and prey to the uncontrollable yearnings of the body. Comfortingly, she touched the skinny arm under the ripped lawn of his shirtsleeve.

  “It is a spell she had on you,” she said. “Nothing more. We are all tempted...” She pushed aside the echoing memory of the dragon’s words. “...And what is in our deepest hearts is still not what we are judged on, but rather what we ultimately do. She only uses such spells to draw you to her, to control you as she controls your father.”

  They reached the clearing, soggy and dirty-looking, like a garment upon which acid had been spilled, with charred spots and little puddles of gleaming water which still steamed faintly from the smolder they had quenched.

  “I know.” Gareth sighed and picked up the bucket from the sodden ground to dip it once more into the well. He moved stiffly from pulled muscles and exertion but didn’t complain of them as he once might have done. On the edge of the we
ll trough, he found his tin cup and dipped water from the bucket to hand to her, the wetness icy against her fingers. She realized with a little start that she had neither eaten nor drunk since breakfast. There had been no time, and now she felt old and exhausted as she took the cup from his hand.

  “You just sent her away?” Gareth asked again. “And she went? She didn’t turn herself into a falcon...?”

  “No.” Jenny looked up, as it came to her what it was that had bothered her about the events of the evening. “Morkeleb...” She stopped, not wanting to speak of what Morkeleb had offered to her.

  But even so, she thought, she could not have taken on a dragon’s form without his help. His powers had broken through to the powers within her, but her powers were still raw and small. And Zyerne...

  “I defeated her,” she said slowly. “But if she’s as shape-crafty as you have said—if she has that kind of strength— I shouldn’t have been able to defeat her, even though my powers have grown.”

  She almost said, “Even with the dragon’s powers in me,” but the words stuck on her lips. She felt the powers stir in her, like an alien child in the womb of fate, and tried to put aside the thought of them and of what they might mean. She raised the cup to her lips, but stopped, the water untasted, and looked up at Gareth again.

  “Have you drunk any of the water from this well?” she asked.

  He looked at her in surprise. “We’ve all been drinking it for days,” he said.

  “This evening, I mean.”

  He looked ruefully around at the clearing and his own soaked sleeves. “I was too busy throwing it about to drink any,” he said. “Why?”

  She passed her hand across the mouth of the cup. As things were visible to a wizard in darkness, she saw the viscid sparkle of green luminosity in the water.

  “Has it gone bad?” he asked worriedly. “How can you tell?”

  She upended the cup, dumping the contents to the ground. “Where was Zyerne when you came into the clearing?”