itself?"
It was patently not what he had been about to say, but
she only glanced back toward the white bones of the town,
wrapped in shadow and vine. "Yes."
Dragonsbane 83
His voice dropped. "Is there—is there something that
haunts the ruins?"
The corners of her mouth tucked a little. "Not that I
know of. But the entire town is buried under the biggest
patch of poison ivy this side of the Gray Mountains. Even
so," she said, kneeling beside the little dry firewood they
had been able to find and arranging the birchbark beneath
it, "I have laid spells of ward about the camp, so take
care not to leave it."
He ducked his head a little at this gentle teasing and
blushed.
A little curiously, she added, "Even if this Lady Zyeme
of yours is a sorceress—even if she is fond of you—she
would never have come here from the south, you know.
Mages only transform themselves into birds in ballads,
for to change your essence into the essence of some other
life form—which is what shapeshifting is—aside from
being dangerous, requires an incredible amount of power.
It is not something done lightly. When the magebom go,
they go upon their two feet."
"But..." His high forehead wrinkled in a frown. Hav-
ing decided to be her champion, he was unwilling to believe
there was anything beyond her powers. "But the Lady
Zyeme does it all the time. I've seen her."
Jenny froze in the act of arranging the logs, cut by an
unexpected pang of a hot jealousy she had thought that
she had long outgrown—the bitter jealousy other youth
toward those who had greater skills than she. All her life
she had worked to rid herself of it, knowing it crippled
her from learning from those more powerful. It was this
that made her tell herself, a moment later, that she ought
not to be shocked to learn of another's use of power.
Yet in the back of her mind she could hear old Caerdinn
speaking of the dangers of taking on an alien essence,
even if one had the enormous power necessary to perform
84 Barbara Humbly
the transformation and of the hold that another form could
take on the minds of all but the very greatest.
"She must be a powerful mage indeed," she said,
rebuking her own envy. With a touch of her mind, she
called fire to the kindling, and it blazed up hotly beneath
the logs. Even that small magic pricked her, like a needle
carelessly left in a garment, with the bitter reflection of
the smallness of her power. "What forms have you seen
her take?" She realized as she spoke that she hoped he
would say he had seen none himself and that it was, in
fact, only rumor.
"Once a cat," he said. "And once a bird, a swallow.
And she's taken other shapes in—in dreams I've had. It's
odd," he went on rather hastily. "In ballads they don't
make much of it. But it's hideous, the most horrible thing
I've ever seen—a woman, and a woman I—I—" He stum-
bled in his words, barely biting back some other verb that
he replaced with, "—I know, twisting and withering,
changing into a beast. And then the beast will watch you
with her eyes."
He folded himself up cross-legged beside the fire as
Jenny put the iron skillet over it and began to mix the
meal for the cakes. Jenny asked him, "Is she why you
asked the King to send you north on this quest? To get
away from her?"
Gareth turned his face from her. After a moment he
nodded. "I don't want to betray—to betray the King."
His words caught oddly as he spoke. "But sometimes I
feel I'm destined to do so. And I don't know what to do.
"Polycarp hated her," he went on, after a few moments
during which John's voice could be heard, cheerfully curs-
ing the mules Clivy and Melonhead as he unloaded the
last of the packs. "The rebel Master ofHalnath. He always
told me to stay away from her. And he hated her influence
over the King."
"Is that why he rebelled?"
Dragonsbane 85
"It might have had something to do with it. I don't
know." He toyed wretchedly with a scrap of meal left in
the bowl. "He—he tried to murder the King and—and
the Heir to the throne, the King's son. Polycarp is the
next heir, the King's nephew. He was brought up in the
palace as a sort of a hostage after his father rebelled.
Polycarp stretched a cable over a fence in the hunting
field on a foggy morning when he thought no one would
see until it was too late." His voice cracked a little as he
added, "I was the one who saw him do it."
Jenny glanced across at his face, broken by darkness
and the leaping light of the flames into a harsh mosaic of
plane and shadows. "You loved him, didn't you?"
He managed to nod. "I think he was a better friend to
me than anyone else at Court. People—people our age
there—Polycarp is five years older than I am—used to
mock at me, because I collect ballads and because I'm
clumsy and can't see without my spectacles; they'd mock
at him because his father was executed for treason and
because he's a philosopher. Many of the Masters have
been. It's because of the University at Halnath—they're
usually atheists and troublemakers. His father was, who
married the King's sister. But Polycarp was always like
a son to the King." He pushed back the thin, damp weeds
of his hair from his high forehead and finished in a stran-
gled voice, "Even when I saw him do it, I couldn't believe
it."
"And you denounced him?"
Gareth's breath escaped in a defeated sigh. "What could
I do?"
Had this. Jenny wondered, been what he had hidden
from them? The fact that the Realm itself was split by
threat of civil war, like the Kinwars that had drawn the
King's troops away from the Winterlands to begin with?
Had he feared that if John knew that there was a chance
86 Barbara Hambly
the King would refuse to lend him forces needed at home,
he would not consent to make the journey?
Or was there something else?
It had grown fully dark now. Jenny picked the crisp
mealcakes from the griddle and set them on a wooden
plate at her side while she cooked salt pork and beans.
While Gareth had been speaking, John had come to join
them, half-listening to what was said, half-watching the
woods that hemmed them in.
As they ate, Gareth went on, "Anyway, Polycarp man-
aged to get out of the city before they came for him. The
King's troops were waiting for him on the road to Halnath,
but we think he went to the Deep, and the gnomes took
him through to the Citadel that way. Then they—the
gnomes—bolted up the doors leading from the Deep to
the Citadel and said they would not meddle in the affairs
of men. They wouldn't admit the King's troops through<
br />
the Deep to take the Citadel from the rear, but they
wouldn't let the rebels out that way, either, or sell them
food. There was some talk of them using blasting powder
to close up the tunnels to Halnath completely. But then
the dragon came."
"And when the dragon came?" asked John.
"When the dragon came, Polycarp opened the Citadel
gates that led into the Deep and let the gnomes take refuge
with him. At least, a lot of the gnomes did take refuge
with him, though Zyeme says they were the ones who
were on the Master's side to begin with. And she should
know—she was brought up in the Deep."
"Was she, now?" John tossed one of the small pork
bones into the fire and wiped his fingers on a piece of
comcake. "I thought the name sounded like the tongue
of the gnomes."
Gareth nodded. "The gnomes used to take a lot of the
children of men as apprentices in the Deep—usually chil-
dren from Deeping, the town that stands—stood—in the
Dragonsbane 87
vale before the great gates of the Deep itself, where the
smelting of the gold and the trade in foodstuff's went on.
They haven't done so in the last year or so—in fact in
the last year they forbade men to enter the Deep at all."
"Did they?" asked John, curious. "Why was that?"
Gareth shrugged. "I don't know. They're strange crea-
tures, and tricky. You can't ever tell what they're up to,
Zyeme says."
As the night deepened, Jenny left the men by the fire
and silently walked the bounds of the camp, checking the
spell-circles that defended it against the blood-devils, the
Whisperers, and the sad ghosts that haunted the ruins of
the old town. She sat on what had been a boundary stone,
just beyond the edge of the fire's circle of light, and sank
into her meditations, which for some nights now she had
neglected.
It was not the first time she had neglected them—she
was too well aware of the nights she had let them go by
while she was at the Hold with John and her sons. Had
she not neglected them—had she not neglected the pur-
suit of her power—would she be as powerful as this
Zyeme, who could deal in shapeshifting at a casual whim?
Caerdinn's strictures against it returned to her mind, but
she wondered if that was just her own jealousy speaking,
her own spite at another's power. Caerdinn had been old,
and there had been nowhere in the Winterlands that she
could turn for other instruction after he had died. Like
John, she was a scholar bereft of the meat of scholarship;
like the people of the village of Alyn, she was circum-
scribed by the fate that had planted her in such stony soil.
Against the twisting yellow ribbons of the flames, she
could see John's body swaying as he gestured, telling
Gareth some outrageous story from his vast collection of
tales about the Winterlands and its folk. The Fattest Ban-
dit in the Winterlands? she wondered. Or one about his
incredible Aunt Mattie? It occurred to her for the first
88 Barbara Humbly
time that it was for her, as well as for his people, that he
had undertaken the King's command—for the things that
she had never gotten, and for their sons.
It's not worth his life! she thought desperately,
watching him. / do well with what I have! But the
silent ruins of Ember mocked at her, their naked bones
veiled by darkness, and the calm part of her heart whis-
pered to her that it was his to choose, not hers. She could
only do what she was doing—make her choice and aban-
don her studies to ride with him. The King had sent his
command and his promise, and John would obey the King.
Five days south of Ember, the lands opened up once
more. The forests gave way to the long, flat, alluvial slopes
that led down to the Wildspae, the northern boundary of
the lands of Belmarie. It was an empty countryside, but
without the haunted desolation of the Winterlands; there
were farms here, like little walled fortresses, and the road
was at least passably drained. Here for the first time they
met other travelers, merchants going north and east, with
news and rumor of the capital—of the dread of the dragon
that gripped the land, and the unrest in Bel due to the
high price of grain.
"Stands to reason, don't it?" said a foxlike little trader,
with his cavalcade of laden mules behind him. "What with
the dragon ruining the harvest, and the grain rotting in
the fields; yes, and the gnomes what took refuge in Bel
itself hoarding the stuff, taking it out of the mouths of
honest folk with their ill-got gold."
"Ill-got?" asked John curiously. "They mined and
smelted it, didn't they?" Jenny, who wanted news without
irritating its bearer, kicked him surreptitiously in the shin.
The merchant spat into the brimming ditch by the road-
side and wiped his grizzled reddish beard. "That gives
them no call to buy grain away from folks that needs it,"
he said. "And word has it that they're trafficking regular
Dragonsbane 89
with their brothers up in Halnath—yes, and that they and
the Master between them kidnapped the King's Heir, his
only child, to hold for ransom."
"Could they have?" John inquired.
"Course they could. The Master's a sorcerer, isn't he?
And the gnomes have never been up to any good, causing
riot and mayhem in the capital..."
"Riot and mayhem?" Gareth protested. "But the gnomes
have been our allies for time out of mind! There's never
been trouble between us."
The man squinted up at him suspiciously. But he only
grumbled, "Just goes to show, doesn't it? Treacherous
little buggers." Jerking on his lead mule's bridle, he passed
them by.
Not long after this they met a company of the gnomes
themselves, traveling banded together, surrounded by
guards for protection, with their wealth piled in carts and
carriages. They peered up at John with wary, shortsighted
eyes of amber or pale blue beneath low, wide brows, and
gave him unwilling answers to his questions about the
south.
"The dragon? Aye, it lairs yet in Ylferdun, and none
of the men the King has sent have dislodged it." The
gnome leader toyed with the soft fur trim of his gloves,
and the thin winds billowed at the silk of his strangely cut
garments. Behind him, the guards of the cavalcade watched
the strangers in deepest suspicion, as if fearing an attack
from even that few. "As for us, by the heart of the Deep,
we have had enough of the charity of the sons of men,
who charge us four times the going price for rooms the
household servants would scorn and for food retrieved
from the rats." His voice, thin and high like that of all the
gnomes, was bitter with the verjuice of hate given back
for hate. "Without the gold taken from the Deep, their
&nbs
p; city would never have been built, and yet not a man will
speak to us in the streets, save to curse. They say in the
90 Barbara Hambly
city now that we plot with our brethren who fled through
the back ways of the Deep into the Citadel of Halnath.
By the Stone, it is lies; but such lies are believed now in
Bel."
From the carts and carriages and curtained litters, a
murmur of anger went up, the rage of those who have
never before been helpless. Jenny, sitting quietly on Moon
Horse, realized that it was the first time she had ever seen
gnomes by daylight. Their eyes, wide and nearly color-
less, were ill-attuned for its glare; the hearing that could
catch the whispers of the cave bats would be daily tor-
tured by the clamor of the cities of men.
Aversin asked, "And the King?"
"The King?" The gnome's piping voice was vicious,
and his whole stooping little body bristled with the raw
hurt of humiliation. "The King cares nothing for us. With
all our wealth mewed up in the Deep, where the dragon
sits hoarding over it, we have little to trade upon but
promises, and with each day that passes those promises
buy less in a city where bread is dear. And all this, while
the King's whore sits with his head in her lap and poisons
his mind as she poisons everything she touches—as she
poisoned the very heart of the Deep."
Beside her. Jenny heard the hissing ofGareth's indrawn
breath and saw the anger that flashed in his eyes, but he
said nothing. When her glance questioned him, he looked
away in shame.
As the gnomes moved out of sight once again into the
Dragon's Bane Page 11
