tered hand. The fire died, and for a moment only starlight
glittered on the pooling blood and outlined the shape of
his nose and lips against the darkness.
She was underground once more, in the place where
the gnomes had danced. It was empty now, but the hollow
silences beneath the earth seemed filled with the inchoate
murmur of formless sound, as if the stone altar whispered
to itself in the darkness.
Then she saw only the small flaws in the glaze of the
bowl, and the dark, oily surface of the water. The witch-
light had long ago failed above her head, which ached as
it often did when she had overstretched her power. Her
body felt chilled through to the bones, but she was for a
time too weary to move from where she sat. She stared
before her into the darkness, listening to the steady drum
of the rain, hurting in her soul and wishing with all that
was in her that she had not done what she had done.
All divination was chancy, she told herself, and water
50 Barbara Hambly
was the most notorious liar of all. There was no reason
to believe that what she had seen would come to pass.
So she repeated to herself, over and over, but it did
no good. In time she lowered her face to her hands and
wept.
CHAPTER ffl
THEY SET FORTH two days later and rode south through
a maelstrom of wind and water.
In the days of the Kings, the Great North Road had
stretched from Bel itself northward like a gray stone ser-
pent, through the valley of the Wildspae River and across
the farm and forest lands of Wyr, linking the southern
capital with the northern frontier and guarding the great
silver mines of Tralchet. But the mines had flagged, and
the Kings had begun to squabble with their brothers and
cousins over the lordship of the south. The troops who
guarded the Winterlands' forts had been withdrawn—
temporarily, they said, to shore up the forces of one con-
tender against another. They had never returned. Now
the gray stone serpent was disintegrating slowly, like a
shed skin; its stones were torn up to strengthen house
walls against bandits and barbarians, its ditches choked
with decades of detritus, and its very foundations forced
apart by the encroaching tree roots of the forest of Wyr.
The Winterlands had destroyed it, as they destroyed all
things.
Traveling south along what remained of the road was
51
52 Barbara, Hambly
slow, for the autumn storms swelled the icy becks of the
moors to white-toothed torrents and reduced the ground
in the tree-tangled hollows to sodden, nameless mires.
Under the flail of the wind, Gareth could no longer argue
that the ship upon which he had come north would still
be waiting at Eldsbouch to waft them south in relative
comfort and speed, but Jenny suspected he still felt in his
heart that it should have been, and, illogically, blamed
her that it was not.
They rode for the most part in silence. Sometimes when
they halted, as they frequently did for John to scout the
tumbled rocks or dense knots of woodland ahead. Jenny
looked across at Gareth and saw him gazing around him
in a kind of hurt bewilderment at the desolation through
which they rode: at the barren downs with their weed-
grown lines of broken walls; at the old boundary stones,
lumpish and melted-looking as spring snowmen; and at
the stinking bogs or the high, bare tors with their few
twisted trees, giant balls of mistletoe snagged weirdly in
their naked branches against a dreary sky. It was a land
that no longer remembered law or the prosperity of ordered
living that comes with law, and sometimes she could see
him struggling with the understanding of what John was
offering to buy at the stake of his life.
But usually it was plain that Gareth simply found the
halts annoying. "We're never going to get there at this
rate," he complained as John appeared from the smoke-
colored tangle of dead heather that cloaked the lower
flanks of a promontory that hid the road. A watchtower
had once crowned it, now reduced to a chewed-looking
circle of rubble on the hill's crest. John had bellied up the
slope to investigate it and the road ahead and now was
shaking mud and wet out of his plaid. "It's been twenty
days since the dragon came," Gareth added resentfully.
"Anything can have happened."
"It can have happened the day after you took ship, my
Dragonsbane 53
hero," John pointed out, swinging up to th& saddle of his
spare riding horse. Cow. "And if we don't look sharp and
scout ahead, we are never going to get there."
But the sullen glance the boy shot at John's back as
he reined away told Jenny more clearly than words that,
though he could not argue with this statement, he did not
believe it, either.
That evening they camped in the ragged birches of the
broken country where the downs gave place to the hoary
densities of the Wyrwoods. When camp was set, and the
horses and mules picketed. Jenny moved quietly along
the edge of the clearing, the open ground above the high
bank of a stream whose noisy rushing blended with the
sea-sound of the wind in the trees. She touched the bark
of the trees and the soggy mast of acoms, hazelnuts, and
decaying leaves underfoot, tracing them with the signs
that only a mage could see—signs that would conceal the
camp from those who might pass by outside. Looking
back toward the fluttering yellow light of the new fire,
she saw Gareth hunkered down beside it, shivering in his
damp cloak, looking wretched and very forlorn.
Her square, full lips pressed together. Since he had
learned she was his erstwhile hero's mistress, he had barely
spoken to her. His resentment at her inclusion in the expe-
dition was still obvious, as was his unspoken assumption
that she had included herself out of a combination of
meddling and a desire not to let her lover out of her sight.
But Gareth was alone in an alien land, having clearly
never been away from the comforts of his home before,
lonely, disillusioned, and filled with a gnawing fear of what
he would return to find.
Jenny sighed and crossed the clearing to where he sat.
The boy looked up at her suspiciously as she dug into
her jacket pocket and drew out a long sliver of smoky
crystal on the chain that Caerdinn had used to hang around
his neck. "I can't see the dragon in this," she said, "but
54 Barbara Hambly
if you'll tell me the name of your father and something
about your home in Bel, at least I should be able to call
their images and tell you if they're all right."
Gareth turned his face away from her. "No," he said.
Then, after a moment, he added grudgingly, "Thank you
all the same."
Jenny folded
her arms and regarded him for a moment
in the jumpy orange firelight. He huddled a little deeper
into his stained crimson cloak and would not meet her
eyes.
"Is it because you think I can't?" she asked at last.
"Or because you won't take the aid of a witch?"
He didn't answer that, though his full lower lip pinched
up a bit in the middle. With a sigh of exasperation. Jenny
walked away from him to where John stood near the oil-
skin-covered mound of the packs, looking out into the
darkening woods.
He glanced back as she came near, the stray gleams
of firelight throwing glints of dirty orange on the metal of
his patched doublet. "D'you want a bandage for your
nose?" he inquired, as if she'd tried to pet a ferret and
gotten nipped for her trouble. She laughed ruefully.
"He didn't have any objections to me before," she said,
more hurt than she had realized by the boy's enmity.
John put an arm around her and hugged her close. "He
feels cheated, is all," he said easily. "And since God forbid
he should have cheated himself with his expectations, it
must have been one of us that did it, mustn't it?" He
leaned down to kiss her, his hand firm against the bare
nape of her neck beneath the coiled ridge of her braided
hair. Beyond them, among the ghostly birches, the thin
underbrush rustled harshly; a moment later a softer, stead-
ier rushing whispered in the bare branches overhead. Jenny
smelled the rain almost before she was conscious of its
light fingers upon her face.
Behind them, she heard Gareth cursing. He squelched
Dragonsbane 55
across the clearing to join them a moment later, wiping
raindroplets from his spectacles, his hair in lank strings
against his temples.
"We seem to have outsmarted ourselves," he said glum-
ly. "Picked a nice place to camp—only there's no shelter.
There's a cave down under the cut of the streambank..."
"Above the highest rise of the water?" inquired John,
a mischievous glint in his eye.
Gareth said defensively, "Yes. At least—it isn't so very
far down the bank."
"Big enough to put the horses in, always supposing we
could get them down there?"
The boy bristled. "I could go see."
"No," said Jenny. Gareth opened his mouth to protest
this arbitrariness, but she cut him off with, "I've laid spells
of ward and guard about this camp—I don't think they
should be crossed. It's almost full-dark now..."
"But we'll get wetf"
"You've been wet for days, my hero," John pointed
out with cheerful brutality. "Here at least we know we're
safe from the side the stream's on—unless, of course, it
rises over its bank." He glanced down at Jenny, still in
the circle of his arm; she was conscious, too, ofGareth's
sulky gaze. "What about the spell-ward, love?"
She shook her head. "I don't know," she said. "Some-
times the spells will hold against the Whisperers, some-
times they don't. I don't know why—whether it's because
of something about the Whisperers, or because of some-
thing about the spells." Or because, she added to herself,
her own powers weren't strong enough to hold even a
true spell against them.
"Whisperers?" Gareth demanded incredulously.
"A kind of blood-devil," said John, with an edge of
irritation in his voice. "It doesn't matter at the moment,
my hero. Just stay inside the camp."
"Can't I even go look for shelter? I won't go far."
56 Barbara Hambly
"If you leave the camp, you'll never find your way
back to it," John snapped. "You're so bloody anxious not
to lose time on this trip, you wouldn't want to have us
spend the next three days looking for your body, would
you? Come on, Jen—if you're not after making supper,
I'll do it..."
"I'll do it, I'll do it," Jenny agreed, with a haste that
wasn't entirely jest. As she and John walked back to the
smoky, sheltered campfire, she glanced back at Gareth,
still standing on the edge of the faintly gleaming spell-
circle. His vanity stinging from John's last words, the boy
picked up an acom and hurled it angrily out into the wet
darkness. The darkness whispered and rustled, and then
fell still again under the ceaseless pattern of the rain.
They left the folded lands of rock hills and leaping
streams for good after that and entered the ruinous gloom
of the great Forest of Wyr. Here crowded oaks and haw-
thorn pressed close upon the road, catching the faces of
the travelers with warty, overhanging boughs and dirty
moss and their horses' hooves with scabrous roots and
soggy drifts of dead leaves. The black lattices of bare
branches above them admitted only a fraction of the pallid
daylight, but rain still leaked through, pattering in an end-
less, dreary murmur in the dead fern and hazel thickets.
The ground was worse here, sodden and unsteady, or
flooded in meres of silver water in which the trees stood,
knee-deep and rotting; and Aversin remarked that the
marshes of the south were spreading again. In many places
the road was covered, or blocked with fallen trees, and
the labor of clearing it or beating a path through the thick-
ets around these obstacles left them all cold and exhausted.
Even for Jenny, used to the hardships of the Winterlands,
this was tiring, and the more so because there was no
respite; she lay down weary at night and rose weary in
the bleak grayness before dawn to travel on once again.
Dragonsbane 57
What it was to Gareth she could well imagine. As he grew
more weary, his temper shortened, and he complained
bitterly at every halt.
"What's he looking for now?" he demanded one after-
noon, when John ordered their fifth halt in three hours
and, armed with his heavy horn hunting-bow, dismounted
and vanished into the choking tangle of hazel and black-
thorn beside the road.
It had been raining most of the forenoon, and the tall
boy drooped miserably on the back of The Stupid Roan,
one of the spare horses they'd brought from the Hold.
The other spare. Jenny's mount, John had christened The
Stupider Roan, a name that was unfortunately apt. Jenny
suspected that, in his wearier moments, Gareth even
blamed her for the generally poor quality of the Hold's
horseflesh. The rain had ceased now, but cold wind still
probed through the very weave of their garments; every
now and then a gust shook the branches above them and
splattered them with leftover rain and an occasional sod-
den oak leaf that drifted down like a dead bat.
"He's looking for danger." Jenny herself was listening,
her nerves queerly on edge, searching the silence that
hung like an indrawn breath among the dark, close-
crowded trees.
"He didn't find any last time, did he?" Gareth tucked
his
gloved hands under his cloak for warmth and shivered.
Then he looked ostentatiously upward, scanning what sky
was visible, calculating the time of day, and from there
going on to remember how many days they had been on
the road. Under his sarcasm she could hear fear. "Or the
time before that, either."
"And lucky for us that he didn't," she replied. "I think
you have little understanding of the dangers in the Win-
terlands ..."
Gareth gasped, and his gaze fixed. Turning her head
quickly, Jenny followed his eyes to the dark shape of
58 Barbara Hambly
Aversin, his plaids making him nearly invisible in the gloom
among the trees. With a single slow movement he had
raised his bow, the arrow nocked but not yet pulled.
She tracked the trajectory of the arrow's flight to the
source of the danger.
Just visible through the trees, a skinny tittle old man
was stooping arthritically to scrape the dry insides from
a rotting log for kindling. His wife, an equally lean, equally
rag-clad old woman whose thin white hair hung lankly
about her narrow shoulders, was holding a reed basket
to receive the crumbling chips. Gareth let out a cry of
horror. "NO!"
Aversin moved his head. The old woman, alerted also,
looked up and gave a thin wail, dropping her basket to
shield her face futilely with her arms. The dry, woody
punk spilled onto the marshy ground about her feet. The
old man caught her by the arm and the two of them began
to flee dodderingly into the deeper forest, sobbing and
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