worn on the journey, the wolflude-lined jerkin with its
stray bits of mail and metal plates and spikes and the dark
leather breeches and scarred boots. His plaids were slung
back over his shoulder like a cloak, cleaned of mud but
frayed and scruffy, and there was a world of bright mis-
chief in his eyes.
Gareth, at the other end of the table, went red with
mortification to the roots of his thinning hair. Jenny only
sighed, momentarily closed her eyes, and thought
resignedly, John.
He strode cheerily into the room, bowing with impar-
tial goodwill to the courtiers along the board, not one of
whom seemed capable of making a sound. They had, for
the most part, been looking forward to baiting a country
cousin as he tried unsuccessfully to ape his betters; they
had scarcely been prepared for an out-and-out barbarian
who obviously wasn't even going to bother to try.
With a friendly nod to his hostess, he settled into his
place on the opposite side of Zyerne from Jenny. For a
moment, he studied the enormous battery of cutlery
108 Barbara Hambly
arrayed on both sides of his plate and then, with perfect
neatness and cleanliness, proceeded to eat with his fin-
gers.
Zyeme recovered her composure first. With a silky
smile, she picked up a fish fork and offered it to him.
"Just as a suggestion, my lord. We do do things differently
here."
Somewhere down the board, one of the ladies tittered.
Aversin regarded Zyeme with undisguised suspicion. She
speared a scallop with the fish fork and held it out to him,
by way of demonstration, and he broke into his sunniest
smile. "Ah, so that's what they're for," he said, relieved.
Removing the scallop from the tines with his fingers, he
took a neat bite out of it. In a north-country brogue six
times worse than anything Jenny had ever heard him use
at home, he added, "And here I was thinking I'd been in
your lands less than a night, and already challenged to a
duel with an unfamiliar weapon, and by the local magewife
at that. You had me gie worrit."
On his other side. Bond Clerlock nearly choked on his
soup, and John thumped him helpfully on the back.
"You know," he went on, gesturing with the fork in
one hand and selecting another scallop with the other,
"we did uncover a great box of these things—all different
sizes they were, like these here—in the vaults of the Hold
the year we looked out the bath for my cousin Kat's
wedding. We hadn't a clue what they were for, not even
Father Hiero—Father Hiero's our priest—but the next
time the bandits came down raiding from the hills, we
loaded the lot into the ballistas instead of stone shot and
let fly. Killed one of 'em dead on the spot and two others
went riding off over the moor with all these little spikey
things sticking into their backs..."
"I take it," Zyeme said smoothly, as stifled giggles
skittered around the table, "that your cousin's wedding
was an event of some moment, if it occasioned a bath?"
Dragonsfcane 109
"Oh, aye." For someone whose usual expression was
one of closed watchfulness, Aversin had a dazzling smile.
"She was marrying this southern fellow..."
It was probably. Jenny thought, the first time that any-
one had succeeded in taking an audience away from
Zyeme, and, by the glint in the sorceress's eyes, she did
not like it. But the courtiers, laughing, were drawn into
the circle of Aversin's warm and dotty charm; his exag-
gerated barbarity disarmed their mockery as his increas-
ingly outrageous tale of his cousin's fictitious nuptials
reduced them to undignified whoops. Jenny had enough
of a spiteful streak in her to derive a certain amount of
enjoyment from Zyeme's discomfiture—it was Zyeme,
after all, who had mocked Gareth for not being able to
take jests—but confined her attention to her plate. If John
was going to the trouble of drawing their fire so that she
could finish her meal in peace, the least she could do was
not let his efforts go to waste.
On her other side. Trey said softly, "He doesn't look
terribly ferocious. From Gareth's ballads, I'd pictured
him differently—stem and handsome, like the statues of
the god Sannendes. But then," she added, winkling the
meat from an escargot with the special tongs to show
Jenny how it was done, "I suppose it would have been a
terrific bore for you to ride all the way back from the
Winterlands with someone who just spent his time 'scan-
ning th'encircling welkin with his eagle-lidded eyes,' as
the song says."
In spite of Zyeme's disapproving glances, her hand-
some cicisbeo Bond was wiping tears of laughter from his
eyes, albeit with great care for his makeup. Even the
servants were having a hard time keeping their faces prop-
erly expressionless as they carried in peacocks roasted
and resplendent in all their feathers and steaming removes
of venison in cream.
"... so the bridegroom looked about for one of those
110 Barbara Hambly
wood things such as you have here in my rooms," John
was continuing, "but as he couldn't find one, he hung his
clothes over the armor-stand, and damned if Cousin Kat
didn't wake in the night and set about it with her sword,
taking it for a bandit..."
Trust John, Jenny thought, that if he couldn't make an
impression on them on their own grounds, he wouldn't
try to do it on the grounds of Gareth's ballads, either.
They had succumbed to the devil of mischief in him, the
devil that had drawn her from the first moment they had
met as adults. He had used his outrageousness as a defense
against their scorn, but the fact that he had been able to
use it successfully made her think a little better of these
courtiers of Zyeme's.
She finished her meal in silence, and none of them saw
her go.
"Jenny, wait." A tall figure detached itself from the
cluster of bright forms in the antechamber and hurried
across the hall to catch her, tripping over a footstool half-
way.
Jenny paused in the enclosing shadow of the stair lat-
tice. From the anteroom, music was already lilting—not
the notes of the hired musicians, this time, but the com-
plex tunes made to show off the skill of the courtiers
themselves. To play well, it seemed, was the mark of a
true gentleperson; the music of the cwrdth and the
double-dulcimer blended into a counterpoint like lace,
from which themes would emerge like half-familiar
faces glimpsed in a crowd. Over the elaborate harmonies,
she heard the blithe, unrepentant air of the pennywhistle,
following the melody by ear, and she smiled. If the Twelve
Gods of the Cosmos came down, they would be hard put
to disconcert John.
"Jenny, I—I'm sorry."
Gareth was panting a little from
his haste. He had resumed his battered spectacles; the
Dragonsbane 111
fracture in the bottom of the right-hand lens glinted like
a star. "I didn't know it would be like that. I thought—
he's a Dragonsbane..."
She was standing a few steps up the flight; she put out
her hand and touched his face, nearly on level with her
own. "Do you remember when you first met him?"
He flushed with embarrassment. In the illuminated
antechamber, John's scruffy leather and plaids made him
look like a mongrel in a pack of lapdogs. He was exam-
ining a lute-shaped hurdy-gurdy with vast interest, while
the red-haired. Beautiful Isolde of Greenhythe told the
latest of her enormous stock of scatological jokes about
the gnomes. Everyone guffawed but John, who was far
too interested in the musical instrument in his lap to notice;
Jenny saw Gareth's mouth tighten with something between
anger and confused pain. He went north seeking a dream,
she thought; now he had neither that which he had sought
nor that to which he had thought he would return.
"I shouldn't have let them bait you like that," he said
after a moment. "I didn't think Zyeme..."
He broke off, unable to say it. She saw bitterness harden
his mouth, and a disillusion worse than the one John had
dealt him beside the pigsty at Alyn. He had probably
never seen Zyeme being petty before, she thought; or
perhaps he had only seen her in the context of the world
she had created, never having been outside of it himself.
He took a deep breath and went on, "I know I should
have taken up for you somehow, but... but I didn't
know how!" He spread his hands helplessly. With the first
rueful humor at himself that Jenny had seen, he added,
"You know, in ballads it's so easy to rescue someone. I
mean, even if you're defeated, at least you can die grace-
fully and not have everyone you know laugh at you for
the next three weeks."
Jenny laughed and reached out to pat his arm. In the
gloom, his features were only an edge of gold along the
112 Barbara Hambly
awkward cheekline, and the twin circles of glass were
opaque with the lamplight's reflection that glinted on a
few flame-caught strands of hair and formed a spiky illu-
mination along the edges of his lace collar. "Don't worry
about it." She smiled. "Like slaying dragons, it's a special
art."
"Look," said Gareth, "I—I'm sorry I tricked you. I
wouldn't have done it, if I'd known it would be like this.
But Zyeme sent a messenger to my father—it's only a
day's ride to Bel, and a guest house is being prepared for
you in the Palace. I'll be with you when you present
yourselves to him, and I know he'll be willing to make
terms..." He caught himself, as if remembering his earlier
lying assurances. "That is, I really do know it, this time.
Since the coming of the dragon, there's been a huge stand-
ing reward for its slaying, more than the pay of a garrison
for a year. He has to listen to John."
Jenny leaned one shoulder against the openwork of the
newel post, the chips of reflected lamplight filtering through
the lattice and dappling her black and silver gown with
gold. "Is it so important to you?"
He nodded. Even with the fashionable padding of his
white-and-violet doublet, his narrow shoulders looked
stooped with tiredness and defeat. "I didn't tell very much
truth at the Hold," he said quietly. "But I did tell this:
that I know I'm not a warrior, or a knight, and I know
I'm not good at games. And I'm not stupid enough to
think that the dragon wouldn't kill me in a minute, if I
went there. But—I know everyone around here laughs
when I talk about chivalry and honor and a knight's duty,
and you and John do, too... But that's what makes John
the Thane of the Winterlands and not just another bandit,
doesn't it? He didn't have to kill that first dragon." The
boy gestured wearily, a half-shrug that sent fragments of
luminosity slithering along the white stripes of his slashed
Dragonsbane 113
sleeves to the diamonds at his cuffs. "I couldn't not do
something. Even if I did muff it up."
Jenny felt she had never liked him so well. She said,
"If you had truly muffed it up, we wouldn't be here."
She climbed the stairs slowly and crossed the gallery
that spanned the hall below. Like the stair, it was enclosed
in a stone trellis cut into the shapes of vines and trees,
and the shadows flickered in a restless harlequin over her
gown and hair. She felt tired and cold from holding herself
braced all evening—the sly baiting and lace-trimmed mal-
ice of Zyeme's court had stung more than she cared to
admit. She pitied them, a little, for what they were, but
she did not have John's brass hide.
She and John had been given the smaller of the two
rooms at the end of the wing; Gareth, the larger, next
door to theirs. Like everything else in Zyeme's lodge,
they were beautifully appointed. The red damasked bed
hangings and alabaster lamps were designed both as a
setting for Zyeme's beauty and a boast of her power to
get what she wanted from the King. No wonder, thought
Jenny, Gareth distrusted and hated any witch who held
sway over a ruler's heart.
As she left the noise of the gallery behind her and
turned down the corridor toward her room, she became
conscious of the stiff rustling of her borrowed finery upon
the inlaid wood of the floor and, with her old instinct for
silence, gathered the heavy skirts up in her hands. Lamp-
light from a half-opened door laid a molten trapezoid of
brightness across the darkness before her. Zyeme, Jenny
knew, was not downstairs with the others, and she felt
uneasy about meeting that beautiful, spoiled, powerful
girl, especially here in her own hunting lodge where she
held sole dominion. Thus Jenny passed the open doorway
in a drift of illusion; and, though she paused in the shad-
ows at what she saw by the lights within, she remained
herself unseen.
114 Barbara Hambly
It would have been so, she thought later, even had she
not been cloaked in the spells that thwart the casual eye.
Zyeme sat in an island of brightness, the glow of a night-
lamp stroking the gilt-work of her blackwood chair, so
still that not even the rose-point shadows of her lace veils
stirred upon her gown. Her hands were cupped around
the face of Bond Clerlock, who knelt at her feet, and such
was his immobility that not even the sapphires pinning
his hair glinted, but burned steadily with a single reflec-
tion. Though he looked up toward her face, his eyes were
closed; his expression was the contorted, intent face of
a man in ecstasy so strong that it borders pain.
The room smoked with magic, the weight of it like a
<
br /> glittering lour in the air. As a mage. Jenny could feel it,
smell it like an incense; but it was an incense tainted with
rot. She stepped back, repelled. Though the touch of
Zyeme's hands upon Bond's face was the only contact
between their two bodies, she had the sickened sensation
of having looked upon that which was obscene. Zyeme's
eyes were closed, her childlike brow puckered in slight
concentration; the smile that curved her lips was one of
physical and emotional satisfaction, like a woman's after
the act of love.
Not love, thought Jenny, drawing back from the scene
and moving soundlessly down the hall once more, but
some private satiation.
She sat for a long time in the dark window embrasure
of her room and thought about Zyeme. The moon rose,
flecking the bare tips of the trees above the white carpet
of ground mists; she heard the clocks strike downstairs
and the drift of voices and laughter. The moon was in its
first quarter, and something about that troubled her,
though she could not for the moment think what. After
a long time she heard the door open softly behind her and
turned to see John silhouetted in the dim lamplight from
the hall, its reflection throwing a scatter of metallic glints
Dragonsbane 115
from his doublet and putting a rough halo on the coarse
wool of his plaids.
Into the darkness he said softly, "Jen?"
"Here."
Moonlight flashed across his specs. She moved a lit-
tle—the barring of the casement shadows on her black
and silver gown made her nearly invisible. He came cau-
tiously across the unfamiliar terrain of the floor, his hands
and face pale blurs against his dark clothing.
"Gaw," he said in disgust as he slung off his plaids.
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