Dragonshadow

by Barbara Hambly

  Her hair was gone.

  So was her magic.

  Morkeleb asked again, Is it well with you?

  She could barely make her stiff fingers undo the stopper of the silver bottle still clutched in her hand. From it she poured seven jewels into her palm: two rubies, two amethysts, a topaz that had clearly been pried out of another setting, a sapphire, and a flawed peridot. As if in a dream she put the peridot into her mouth and felt herself flow through the flaw and into her body again. Her pain redoubled at once, so she bent over, gasping. Her hands trembled as she spat out the jewel and cast it into the sea.

  She said, It is well. And she wept.

  All around her on the rocks the dragons perched, like winged jewels themselves, gorgeous in the morning sun. The air was filled with their music, music that had been silent the whole of the time Jenny had seen them at Rocklys’ camp, the whole of the battle. It whispered on the air, like the sea breeze or the salt smell of the ocean. Seven dragons, and there was a sort of glitter over the sea, a smoky darkening of the air that Jenny knew was Morkeleb.

  Nymr bent his azure head, Tears/distress/thing of men? He had a voice like distant wind in trees.

  And Morkeleb formed a thought, a silver crystal of loss and necessity and the ongoing tread of time, which Jenny saw that Nymr did not understand. And patiently, Morkeleb explained, Thing of men.

  Save a dragon, slave a dragon, said Centhwevir’s sweet voice in her mind. Debt.

  My magic, said Jenny, raising her scarred face from her ruined hands.

  Dragon-magic.

  It is only possible, said Morkeleb, if you will become a dragon; for in your human self there is nothing now that magic can fasten on. It is all burned away.

  And John’s life with it, she wondered, if the mages back at the camp can’t save him?

  She said, I free you then, all of you. Morkeleb, take me back.

  The music circled her round, and she saw how all the airs and threads of those so-different melodies were in truth part of a single enormous singing. She didn’t know why she hadn’t been aware of it before.

  Dragon-friend, said Centhwevir, the soft clashing of a universe of golden chimes. Dragon-friend.

  Then he spread his wings, a field of lupine and daffodils, and let the wind lift him. They all lifted afterward, pink and green, white and crimson, blue on blue on blue … Lifted, and spun like a drift of leaves over the ocean where the whales rolled and spouted, and swirled away to the north.

  Morkeleb said, The whalemages sent fishes to tear Caradoc’s body to pieces, that the sea-wights could make no use of it. Likewise they have heaped stones before the demon Gate. There is nothing further for us here, Jenny. I will take you back.

  * * *

  “Some general she was.” John grinned weakly as Jenny came into the infirmary tent. “Couldn’t hit a man in the heart at less than fifty feet? The country’s well rid of her.” And he held out his hands to her. “Ah, love, don’t cry.”

  He gathered her gently to him and hesitantly (“Does this hurt too bad, love?”) cradled her scarred and hairless head to his shoulder. “Don’t cry.”

  But she could not stop. And neither he nor Ian, who came out of the shadows to awkwardly pat her back—he had grown, she saw, two inches in his time with Caradoc—could ease the pain that encompassed all her being.

  Rocklys was dead. “When the reinforcements arrived, we called on her to surrender,” said Gareth, who came in, battered and blood-streaked, some time later, in attendance on his father. Uriens, resplendent in his golden wig and armored and cloaked as befit a King, walked among the wounded who had bled for his sake. Now and then he would bend down and speak to this man or that. Once he held the surgeon’s implements when a dirty wound was cleansed and stitched; when Pellanor of Palmorgin was carried in, bleeding from wounds he’d taken fighting at Rocklys’ side, he took his hands and sat beside him until the Lord of Palmorgin whispered, “Forgive me,” and died. Men reached from their beds to touch the King’s cloak, and Ector of Sindestray, walking in his wake, made nervous approving noises in his throat and tried to get him to finish up and leave.

  Cringing with shyness, Gareth brought up a stool and sat, barely noticed, beside John’s cot. He fished out his bent and broken pair of spare spectacles and perched them on his nose, taking care around a place where a blow had opened the side of his face.

  “She called for her sword and rode straight into the thick of the enemy,” he went on unhappily. “I wouldn’t have executed her, you know.”

  “She would have executed you.” Polycarp, who had come in just after him, gingerly eased his left arm, which he wore in a sling. His red hair was sweaty and flattened from a war-helm, but looking up into the Master’s eyes, Jenny could see no trace of the demon. In any case she would have known it, had Amayon gone into another. Would have known and died of jealous grief.

  “That doesn’t mean I’d have …”

  “No,” said the Master. “I mean that she knew what she would have done to you and expected the same.”

  A shadow fell across the lamplight. “Why is this man here?” King Uriens stood looking down at John.

  Gareth stood, tangling the stool in his military cloak and knocking it over. “Father, you remember Lord Aversin.” He scrabbled awkwardly to pick it up. “He defeated the dragon …”

  “He didn’t kill it.” Uriens folded his hands before the ruby buckle of his sword-belt and frowned. “He’s a trafficker with demons. Ector said so. I think the demons must have helped him drive the dragon away the first time, and now it’s come back.”

  “That’s right, your Majesty.” The Lord of Sindestray appeared at his elbow again like an overweight blue-and-white butterfly. “And the woman, too.”

  John’s eyes blazed dangerously. “Now wait a bloody minute! I hadn’t so much as heard about the demons four years ago when I …”

  “He’ll have to be locked up.” Uriens spoke with the self-evident logic of a child. “If he’s trafficked with demons, he’ll have to be done away with. He’ll try to destroy the Realm. They all do.”

  “Father …” Gareth straightened protestingly.

  “I’m sorry, my son. I know he’s your playmate but he’ll try to destroy the Realm.”

  “And the woman,” Ector reminded.

  “He’s a Dragonsbane! He fought the dragon for the sake of the Realm …”

  “Of course we know how Prince Gareth feels about Dragons-banes,” Ector said smoothly. “Naturally, any demon who wanted to gain influence with him has only to …”

  “If you say one more word about how I’ve sold me soul to demons,” began John, half-rising, then sinking back with a quick intake of breath. Guards in the white and azure of the Lord of Sindestray stepped out of the shadows. Jenny raised her hand, furious, conjuring in her mind the Word of Fire and Blindness …

  And it was only a word. A cast dry chiten in her mind. Dead leaves falling from her hand.

  A guard took her by the arm. Jenny whirled, yanking free, but there were other guards, coming from all directions. John somehow had Polycarp’s dagger in his hand, sitting up again with blood staining the bandages on his chest, and Gareth stepped forward and caught his wrist.

  “John …” He turned his head and caught Polycarp’s eye.

  The Master looked aside. Jenny couldn’t find it in her heart to blame him; he knew, too well now, the strength of the demon whispers, the terrible temptation of those promises.

  Gareth’s eyes met John’s. Desperate, pleading … Trust me.

  Trust me.

  John glanced at Jenny. Then he opened his hand and let the knife be taken from him.

  Guards brought a litter: “Take him to the dugout His Majesty slept in last night,” instructed Ector, for the King had wandered away.

  “You mean the one he doesn’t have to sleep in now?” demanded John sarcastically. “Because the dragons have all been sent on their way and the wizards who rode them cured?” His voice was shaking with an
ger.

  “I will not be drawn into controversy with a demon,” Lord Ector said primly. “It is well known they twist any argument to their advantage.”

  John looked at Gareth, who averted his gaze. Jenny watched as John was lifted onto the litter; while Ector’s attention was on that she stepped back into the shadows. Gareth was right, she thought, in not forcing an issue. She would be of more use free than if Ector remembered her presence and persuaded the King to have her imprisoned as well. But John’s face, still as marble, struck in her heart like a dagger of accusation, and the torchlight made a dark patch of the Demon Queen’s mark on his throat.

  As the curtain fell behind Ector and the guards, Jenny saw Gareth return soundlessly and slide his hand under the pillows. He took out a piece of iron, an arrowhead, she thought. This he slipped into the breast of his tunic, out of sight.

  * * *

  That night the surviving mages came to the Regent’s tent. Bliaud seemed the most alive, the most sure of himself, but even he was vague; Miss Enk and Summer the Icerider girl were little more than sleepwalkers until the talisman jewels were put in their mouths and their souls returned to them. And then, because Jenny was keenly aware of Gothpys and Zimimar and the other demons lingering and whispering outside the tent, all the mages joined together in using the Demon Queen’s seal to draw the disabled demons back through the bodies to which they had once been linked and imprisoned them in shells and pebbles and snuff-bottles.

  Afterward they went out, by the flickering witchlight summoned by Yseult, and cast the emptied talisman gems into the River Wildspae, where the current roared strong over the rocks. The amethyst that held the soul of the Icerider boy Werecat, his sister Summer smashed to pieces with a hammer, her face void of expression. Polycarp did the same with the topaz that was among the talismans, which they guessed contained the soul of Caradoc himself. Jenny made herself hope that the merchant prince’s soul would find peace.

  Her magic did not return. Bliaud and Yseult both treated Jenny with the Demon Queen’s powder, but it had no effect. She remembered the demon Folcalor biting and chewing and ripping like a maddened rat at her mind; remembered releasing into the ocean anything that he might have seized to draw her into his power.

  There was nothing inside her.

  Only an aching longing that slowly crystallized: a longing for Amayon. For the fire and color, the power and joy, of the demon within her.

  This was insanity, and she knew it, yet the longing did not go away. In her emptiness it glowed like a gentle comfort, and it seemed to her that even John’s love was a pallid thing beside the wisdom and understanding of the demon who knew her so well.

  She nursed John in the days that followed, in the guarded dugout under the eyes of Uriens’ and Ector’s warriors, and it tormented her soul to see Ian and Yseult and Bliaud able to work the magic of healing on him. Tormented her, too, to imagine them looking aside from her while she performed the humbler tasks, fetching water and grinding herbs. Pitying her. The world turned to poison around her, and she found herself thinking— against all reason and experience—that Amayon alone would care and understand.

  The moon burgeoned fatter and fatter in the afternoon skies, like a white flaccid creature drawing nearer each day to be glutted on the flesh of dying kings; Ector’s men built a pyre on the other side of the bridge. One hot afternoon Jenny could smell the oil they soaked it with. Ector glared at the mages whenever he passed them, for the laws in the south had been made with the understanding that those who had been possessed against their wills by demons, once exorcised, never really returned to their right minds. There was no legal provision for mages who had been taken against their will, for at no time in the history of Bel had demons appeared strong enough to do so. All this Jenny glimpsed through the curtain of obsession, of weariness, of pain.

  That night Jenny met Gareth and Ian beside the dugout prison and took the keys from the sleeping guards. The silence of that enchanted sleep lay over the whole camp as Gareth descended the ladder and came up again with John leaning heavily on his shoulder.

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t … couldn’t stand up for you,” said the young man. “I did everything I could to get Father to change the sentence. It’s abominable after what you’ve done for the Realm!”

  “It’s good sense.” John had shaved that morning for the first time since the battle, and looked haggard and thin. The burn on his throat stood out dark where his doublet and shirt were unlaced; the blazing moonlight seemed to pick out threads of silver where the Demon Queen’s other marks crossed his collarbone and neck. “Meself, I wouldn’t trust a soul who’d gone and made deals with demons. For you to do it, Regent as you are for your dad, you’d have every lord in the land in revolt, and me among ’em. Have you got it?” he added, and Gareth handed him the piece of iron he’d taken from the cot the day John had been placed under arrest.

  “Ian?” John held out his hand to his son. But Ian turned away without speaking. He’d worked quietly, steadily, to heal his father’s wounds, and with Yseult had put spells of healing likewise on Jenny’s burned and crippled hands. Yseult had even done what she could to alleviate the migraines, the hot flashes, the aches and griefs that flooded back to Jenny once the magic that held them at bay had gone.

  But through it all Ian had been silent and avoided his mother, pitying her, she thought—or worse, repulsed by what he had seen in the days when both had been the slaves of their demons.

  Jenny could not watch when Gareth handed John a satchel containing the shells and bottles and pebbles, stopped and marked with sealing-wax, that contained the souls of the demons. She’d spent a week trying not to give in to the desire to scour the camp for them. Under her linen sleeves her scarred arms were welted with the marks of her own fingernails, when the pain of wanting to search grew too bad. For three nights now Amayon had shown her in dreams what would be done to him through all eternity once he was sent behind the mirror, and it was nothing she would have done to her worst enemy—not even to the Demon Queen, whose name she had heard John murmur longingly in his dreams. Some of it she hadn’t conceived of any sentient being doing to anyone or anything.

  Let me out. Let me out. Let me out before they send me there.

  She must not free the demon into this world. She knew that— digging her nails once again into her own flesh she knew it—and knew, too, that there was no chance of sending him back to his own (Yes, there is! I promise I’ll go back there!). And he had done terrible things to her, degraded her in ways she sometimes found it difficult to recall. (When I’m gone, you’ll remember them! In every detail in your dreams forever! Unless you set me free…)

  But still …

  The worst of it was that the aching hollow where her magic had been left her desperate for something to fill it. Amayon’s presence had been comforting. With him occupying her, she had never been alone.

  If you take me back, Pretty Lady, my adorable one, you will have your magic again. Be silent. Be silent. Be silent.

  “What was that he gave you,” she asked John, as they drifted to where Morkeleb waited for them at the edge of the camp. “The first thing, the arrowhead?”

  “This?” He drew it from the pocket where he had also concealed the hothwais of starlight and the glass and alabaster bottle of the dragon’s tears. He held it up, a savagely barbed war-point with an inch or so of shaft still attached.

  “A gift from Rocklys,” he said. “Maybe the last one she ever gave—anyway the most wholehearted. Unless there’s a way you can draw off some of the pain I’m in and put it in a vial to throw in for good measure. I count that as her gift as well.”

  “No.” Jenny looked away, hating him suddenly for reminding her of her loss. For speaking so casually of her pain. Amayon, she thought, would never have harmed her so. “That’s not something I can do now.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  On the last night before the King’s Moon, two shadows made their way down the painted corridors of
the old temple of Syn, in what had been the city of Ernine. Their lantern threw swaying light over the painted gazelles and brought the stars depicted overhead into alternating brightness and obscurity; the comet seemed to wink and follow them through the corridor and into the round room. Along with the hothwais of starlight, Miss Mab had smuggled to Jenny a diagram to follow and the correct powder of mingled silver and blood: It’ll never work, whispered Amayon in her mind. Not without my help. Nothing you do will ever work again.

  What would I be, Morkeleb had asked, without magic?

  That was different. He was a dragon—whatever, she thought, a dragon was. She was only a woman, left with nothing.

  She wondered how she could face life without magic. How she could face life, face John, face her children, with the memory of what she had done. And of what she had lost.

  Somehow she made herself draw the sigils of power on the floor. Her twisted fingers trembled as she arranged within it the bottle of glass and alabaster, the softly glowing hothwais of starlight, the arrowhead. Behind them in a semicircle she set out the seven demon prisons and the seven spikes of glass and mercury that had been extracted from the heads of the dragons, grimly sealing her mind to the far-off howling of the spirits imprisoned within.

  The dreams of their upcoming torment were fresh as a new brand on her: agony, nausea, shame. How could she turn Amayon over to that?

  It took her some time to realize that it was John that she’d saved from it.

  Still, she couldn’t set down the white shell. He’d been difficult, yes. But at other times he’d been so good to her, so considerate. The pleasure he had given her could never be duplicated. It wasn’t something she’d turn to often, of course, but to know it was there, now and then when things were bad …

  A warm hand closed over her scarred one. “Better leave it, love.”

  He was right, but she pulled her hand away from his, slapped the shell into it, hating him. “You do it, then,” she said. “You’ll be glad to see it, won’t you?”