Do any legends speak of where the Dragonshadows might have gone? asked Jenny, to distract him. To distract herself maybe, from the memories of her fear and her dream. Could they have departed entirely from this world?
I think… The dragon began and stopped, and Jenny could feel the currents of his thought check and swirl, like water around rocks. His profile shifted slightly as he looked at her sidelong. She saw in her mind what John had told her of, the Birdless Isle under the crystal brilliance of new morning, heard the slow heartbeat of the sea and the breathing of the wind. Felt their presence as a core of peace that plumbed the foundations of the world.
I do not think they would have departed this world, said the dragon, a new thought naked as a bird-peep, without telling us.
He led her between sparkling mountains of sinter and great pools that stretched like glass. In time they came to a place where a small river fell singing over five ledges of corrugated white limestone, overlooked by balconies cut and fretted into cavern wall. They will be watching her, said Morkeleb. The Wise Ones of the gnomes.
She said once that she comes forth often on her balcony, said Jenny. We will wait.
The dragon looked at her sidelong again, as if he sensed her weariness and hunger, but he said nothing. While they waited, a little to Jenny’s surprise, he told her stories after the fashion of dragons, by speaking in music and images and scents in her mind, as if he would distract her as she had him. She saw a mingled wonderment of violet suns and gray oceans beating endlessly on lifeless shores, felt the different forms of magic, sourced from all those different stones and suns and those different patterns of stars. He told of worlds where livid-colored plants fought and devoured one another, of raindrop and seagull and the creeping life of the tide pools on the Last Isle. He spoke of the Dragonshadows he had known long ago, their deep power, their wisdom, their peace.
They are like the wind and the air, he said. And yet now that I look back I see that they loved us, all of us who thought we chose our own way here.
His hand, white and thin with its long black curving claws, lay on hers, and looking at his face she could not tell whether she saw a man’s face or a dragon’s.
In time Miss Mab came out on her balcony, clothed in a red robe. Morkeleb and Jenny climbed up to her, quietly, through the soft murmuring of the water and the smooth snow-and-salmon curves of the rock.
“A hothwais,” she said thoughtfully, curling her short legs under her robe and looking from woman to dragon and back.
“Would this be safe?” asked Jenny. “Could demons turn a hothwais to harm, were one given them?”
“The very grasses of the field can demons turn to harm, child. I am not sure but that they cannot turn to harm the starlight thou wilt give them, in this hothwais, though I know not any way they can do so. And indeed, anything will be of lesser harm than what they might do with a true thunderstone. Is it true,” she asked, turning her wise pale eyes on Morkeleb, “that stars be as thou sayest, vast storms of light and fire, not solid anywhere? This be a marvelous thing.”
“Would it not be possible,” asked Morkeleb after a time, “to place a Limitation on the hothwais itself, that its essence, its nature, fades with the fading of the starlight it holds? Thus the Demon Queen would be left with only a stone, of which one presumes, even in the realm of Hell, they have sufficient for their needs.”
Miss Mab was silent for a long time, turning her huge, heavy rings on stubby fingers. Below the balcony the waterfalls gurgled a kind of endless, ever-varying music. As she had said, there was great power in the stream, power that Jenny felt even sitting on the terrace. Close-by someone played a harp, very different from the gnomish zither, and a woman’s voice, unmistakably human, lifted in a sad and wistful song.
Here, too, thought Jenny, they keep human slaves.
“It should be so,” Miss Mab replied slowly. “The nature of hothwais is permanence, not evanescence, so such is not commonly done. Yet I know of no reason why it could not be done. Let me see what I can do. I will send thee word, Jenny Waynest, at Halnath.”
“I misdoubt this will be possible.” Morkeleb spoke up quietly. “With Mistress Waynest’s absence overnight, I think she may not return openly to the citadel. The fear of the Hellspawn is very strong, and she bears their mark.”
Jenny looked, startled, at the dragon, and he returned her gaze with strange galactic eyes.
“It is true,” said Miss Mab, “that mine own people have imprisoned me for a year and a day for even entering the Mirror chamber in the ruins of Ernine.”
“Then send this thing to the camp at Cor’s Bridge,” said Morkeleb. “For there under the Regent’s protection we will surely be.”
Upon those words Miss Mab returned to her chamber and brought out honey-bread and curdled cream, strong-tasting white cheese and fruit, and light woolen blankets, for the air in the caverns was clammy and chill. Jenny slept uneasily, and woke, it seemed to her, more weary than when she had lain down. Morkeleb she did not think slept at all.
The dragon’s prediction about Jenny’s absence overnight turned out to be alarmingly true. When she slipped out of the merchandise cart into the Undermarket shortly before dawn, it was to find the citadel’s soldiers searching the corners of the great cavern—perfunctorily, it was true, as if they truly did not expect to find anyone there. “What would a witch possessed of a demon be doing sleeping here anyway?” demanded one warrior of another, disgustedly pushing back his visor. “She’s probably in Bel by now. And anyway, would we be able to see her?”
Probably, thought Jenny, settling into the darkest corner she could find and freezing. Despite Miss Mab’s spells of dreamless rest the demon Folcalor had returned to her in the night, drawing circles of violation around the jewel that housed her true self, and the effort to keep his power at bay had sapped her strength badly. Still she managed to remain unseen until the guards had gone, then slipped out of the market cavern on their heels and up to the citadel again.
She did not know when Morkeleb left her. It was less magic than simply quiet and remaining unnoticed that got her through the service quarters, down the guarded passageway (“I’ve a bit of food from his Lordship the Master for Master John,” she said to the guards, displaying a pot of honey and several rolls on a glazed tray borrowed from the kitchen) to the cell where she guessed, even without reaching forth her mageborn senses, they would be holding him chained.
She was right. Morkeleb was right. The chains were long enough that he could lie down, and the cell dry and provided with a pallet, but it was heavily guarded. The chains themselves were wyrd-written to render them proof against all but the most powerful spells. Weary as she was, spent as she was, it took Jenny nearly three-quarters of an hour to fashion a tiny cantrip that would send the guard outside to the privy, where she was able to abstract his keys when he set aside his belt.
“Jen!” John sat up, startled, as she entered his cell. He’d been sitting on his pallet, his back against the wall, reading—Polycarp had left him an enormous pile of books, but because of the manacles on his wrists he had to prop his hands and the book with his knees. “I was afraid some guard hereabouts took it into his head to kill you out of hand. They said you’d been missing overnight.”
“I was in the Deep. They have Miss Mab a prisoner—”
“Gah!”
“They’re afraid of the demons, John, and they’ve every right to be so.” She was unlocking the ring of iron around his neck, the spancels on his wrists, as she spoke. The Demon Queen’s mark stood out like a wound. She forced herself not to think about her dream, about the visions of him in those white serpent arms. “Miss Mab is going to make a hothwais to hold the light of a star. A harmless gift for the Demon Queen. But as to the third part of the teind …”
“I’ll settle that.” John stood up, hesitating with the book in his hand, clearly loath to abandon it. Then he shrugged and stuffed it into the front of his doublet, adding for good measure another one. “But
to do it we’ll have to go to Jotham.”
The camp at the bridge bore every mark of hard usage under the bitter gray downpour of guardian storms. Its palisade protected the stone span but was black with fire, save where new wood gleamed yellow under the wet. And yet the banners of the House of Uwanë flew over the charred dugouts. As Morkeleb swept in low from the cloud-choked canyons, Jenny saw that few tents remained standing. The blackened ground within the defensive work was gashed with trenches, the earth above them giving them the look of long, twisted graves.
John, held in the dragon’s claws, waved a white sheet taken from the citadel laundry at the men who came running from the trenches, crying out and pointing their arrows skyward. Only when Jenny saw one man, taller than all the rest and thinner, spectacles flashing in the pale day, emerge from underground at a run and wave his arms at the men did she say softly, “That’s him. We can go in.”
It is a trusting Wizard-woman.
“Even so,” said Jenny. She felt the wave of Morkeleb’s cynicism pass over her, as if he’d plunged through a wall of dark water, but he spread wide his wings for balance and drifted toward the ground. The men below jockeyed for position, but Gareth gestured again. A sweep of fugitive sunlight riffled his hair. The storms were definitely breaking. Flying through the passes, Jenny had felt it—the clouds dissolving, the magic that held them failing at last.
Morkeleb stretched out his hind-legs and settled on the earth.
“My lord, really!” Ector of Sindestray exclaimed angrily as Gareth walked forward, his hands outstretched.
“Jenny. John.”
“Polycarp get in touch with you?” John asked jauntily.
“My lord, this man is under sentence of death …!”
“One of his pigeons came in this morning.” Gareth’s eyes flicked to the demon mark, then away. He looked unhappy. “He said Jenny had vanished. He said he was putting you under guard—”
“Ah. You haven’t had the one about us stealing the vial and the seal and the box, then? You’ll get that one tomorrow.”
As he spoke Jenny touched the satchel she had tied around her body, the satchel Morkeleb had given her just before he resumed the form of the dragon. I think it best we have charge of these, instead of Master Polycarp, he had said. They are, after all, Aversin’s, purchased with the costliest of all currency.
“This is outrageous!” insisted Lord Ector. He still wore court mantlings—Jenny couldn’t imagine how he kept them properly folded. “My lord, you’re aware of how demons influence men’s minds! How they take over men’s bodies! You can’t pretend you trust these … people.”
Gareth reached out, then drew his hand back without touching the satchel. “Polycarp wrote of these things,” he said. “And of what you did to achieve them.” Ector cleared his throat significantly but Gareth would not meet his eyes. Wind flicked the pink and blue ends of his hair. He had a fresh wound on his cheek, and his thick spectacles had been broken and mended, and there was a hardness to his face, a grim set to his mouth.
“It wasn’t you by any chance who told him to chain me up?”
There was long a dreadful silence. Gareth shuffled—No ballad of old Dragonsbanes, thought Jenny, provided guidance on situations like this—then at length said quietly, “No. But you yourself know all the legends, the histories, involving demons. Polycarp isn’t the only one who favors invoking the penalty, you know.”
John glanced at Ector and said nothing. Gareth flushed.
“I’ve told Polycarp, and others on the council, to wait. That I trusted you.”
John bowed his head, but his mouth was wry. “Thank you. But you really shouldn’t. If it weren’t me, you shouldn’t. And with Jen vanishing as she did I can’t blame him, I suppose, for lockin’ me up. Mind you, I’m not ettlin’ to walk into the rest of it, but I’m workin’ on that.” He propped his spectacles on his nose. “Poly’ll be here … when?”
“Tomorrow,” said Gareth. “They’re taking the Urchins through the Deep of Ylferdun today. Reinforcements from Bel have been sighted—the rain that protected us slowed them down.” Another sweep of sunlight sparkled on the soaked and puddled earth of the camp, and Gareth and every warrior there looked uneasily at the sky.
“Played hob with your harvest, too, I’ll bet.” John shoved back the long hair from his eyes. “They’ll be on us tonight, you know—Rocklys and her lot, I mean.”
“I know. They have to, if they’re to take the bridge. I’m having the men stand to …”
“Nah.” John shook his head. “Let ’em eat their dinners and catch a bit of kip. Nuthin’ll happen till … eighth hour of the night, I’d say. Halfway till dawn.”
“Why halfway?”
“Because that’s when men who’ve been standing to since the eighth hour of the afternoon slack their guard and figure nothing’s going to happen till dawn. That’s when they take a bit of a doze or sneak off to the privy, or start lookin’ about the camp to see who else is on watch they can talk to.”
Lord Ector opened his mouth in indignant protest as Gareth and John brushed past him, side by side. “Have you got flares built up, ready to burn? They can see in the dark as well as in daylight, so the bigger the pyres you can torch the better.”
Gareth nodded. “We’ve kept the wood dry as best we can, and we got oil in yesterday’s convoy. When the clouds clear, we’ll need the light. The moon won’t rise until mid-morning tomorrow, and anyway it’s only three days old.”
“Son,” sighed John, “I can tell you to three-quarters of an inch how far the moon’s waxed since I rode to Ernine. Now show me where you’ve got the Urchins from the first attack. Are they put back together? Good. Jen, d’you feel up to a bit of magic?”
True to John’s prediction, the dragons attacked between midnight and morning. Jenny was dozing in John’s arms in the dugout of Gareth and his father the King, reveling in the peace of being left alone by Caradoc and his spells of intrusion and domination. Curled in the heart of her jewel, she was aware that Folcalor had other fish to fry and assumed her, probably, to be still in Halnath Citadel.
Dimly, very dimly, she seemed to see Caradoc himself, the man who had truly once loved Rocklys, who had sought learning and power and walked along Somanthus’ northwestern strand: a broken, white-haired man sleeping, dazed, in the heart of some far-off jewel.
But she felt no pity. Now and then she would reach out through the crystal’s flaw to her body, to feel more closely the warmth of John’s arms, and the tickle of his breath in her hair. Time seemed to her very fragile then, very precious—later she would look back on those moments with an aching longing, as a traveler lost on the winter barrens dreams of warmth. She knew the sentence of death to be a reasonable one, having seen Poly-carp alone in the dimly lit study with Amayon’s prisoning shell. She knew, too, that even the manner of death prescribed was necessary, given the power demons could wield over the dead.
But not John, she thought, closing her hand tight over his. Not John.
Then in her mind Morkeleb’s voice said, Jenny. It is now.
She flowed through the fault in the jewel like water. Flowed into her flesh, her bones, her mind.
John was already sitting up, hair in his eyes and groping around for his spectacles. “Here we go, love,” he said, and slung around his neck the frosted crystal of the Demon Queen’s seal and a little stone knife to draw the blood for freeing. He gathered her to him, his hands cupping her face, collecting together the night of her hair, and kissed her lips. “You know what to do?”
“I know.” There were crossbows stacked in the corner of the room, horn reinforced with steel. The poisoned bolts were so long and heavy she could barely lift the weapons. John slung three of them over his own back, and two over hers. She felt the touch of his hands adjusting the straps; his heart and hers already armored, drawn apart into the fight.
Not good-bye, she thought. Not good-bye.
Above, at ground level, men were shouting, boots pounding b
y the dugout’s opening. The orange glare of torches flashed and juddered along the wall. The King sat up and called out a woman’s name, confused; Gareth was holding his hands and talking to him gently, telling him that all things were well. “Use them carefully,” John said to her, “but if you get the chance, don’t hesitate for anything. Understand?”
He was talking about Ian. She thought about the drunken, slack-mouthed boy fumbling at the bound bodies of camp whores, tied up for his pleasure; thought about the sickened, weeping child she had sometimes glimpsed, a prisoner as she was a prisoner, in her dreams.
“I won’t.”
“Good lass.” He slapped her flank and followed her up the ladder to the slit under the earth-heaped roof. As they made to part he caught her hand; already, against the darkness, the black skeletal shape of Morkeleb had risen. “You haven’t … There isn’t some spell you can lay on me, to keep me from …” He hesitated, then said, without change of expression, “If I die in the fighting, I’m theirs, y’see.”
Jenny hesitated a long time, weighing what she knew of her waning strength against her love for this man. She knew that though destroying his body afterward would prevent his returning as a fetch, if he died in the fighting there would be no way of retrieving his naked soul from the Demon Queen’s hands.
She said, “I can’t. Not and lay the spells I’ll need for the battle.” She didn’t even know if she’d be able to summon sufficient power to protect herself and Morkeleb against the magic of the other dragons. Weaving the wards would take all she had, after laying spells upon the Urchins and these crossbows in the afternoon.
“Aye, well,” he sighed. “I’ll just have to manage to not get meself killed, then.” He kissed her again. “You don’t get yourself killed either, love.”
John caught a soldier outside the trench and handed him the three crossbows, to follow Jenny. They parted in the firelight, John to the squat glittering ball of the Urchin, and Jenny to the smoky shadow of the waiting dragon.
Dragonshadow Page 31
