before her eyes, another catapult explode on the ram-
parts, and the man who had been winding it flung back-
320 Barbara Hambly
ward over the parapet, whirling limply down the side of
the cliff.
Then the dragon folded his wings and dropped. Her
mind in Morkeleb's, Jenny felt no fear, clinging to the
spikes while the wind tore her sopping hair back and her
bloody, rain-wet robes plastered to her body and arms.
Her mind was the mind of a stooping falcon. She saw,
with precise pleasure, the sacklike, threshing body that
was their target, felt the joy of impending impact as the
dragon fisted his claws...
The jar all but threw her from her precarious perch on
the dragon's backbone. The creature twisted and sagged
in the air, then writhed under them, grabbing with a dozen
mouths at Morkeleb's belly and sides, heedless of the
spikes and the monstrous slashing of the dragon's tail.
Something tore at Jenny's back; turning, she hacked the
head off a serpentine tentacle that had ripped at her, but
she felt the blood flowing from the wound. Her efforts to
close it were fogged and slow. They seemed to have fallen
into a vortex of spells, and the weight of the Stone's
strength dragged upon them, trying to rend apart the locked
knot of their minds.
What was human magic and what dragon she no longer
knew, only that they sparkled together, iron and gold, in
a welded weapon that attacked both body and mind. She
could feel Morkeleb's growing exhaustion and her own
dizziness as the Citadel walls and the stone-toothed cliflfs
of Nast Wall wheeled crazily beneath them. The more
they hacked and cut at the awful, stinking thing, the more
mouths and gripping tentacles it sprouted and the tighter
its clutch upon them became. She felt no more fear than
a beast might feel in combat with its own kind, but she
did feel the growing weight of the thing as it multiplied,
getting larger and more powerful as the two entwined
bodies thrashed in the sea of streaming rain.
The end, when it came, was a shock, like the impact
Dragonsbane 321
of a club. She was aware of a booming roar somewhere
in the earth beneath them, dull and shaking through her
exhausted singlemindedness; then, more clearly, she heard
a voice like Zyeme's screaming, multiplied a thousandfold
through the spells that suffocated her until it axed through
her skull with the rending echo of indescribable pain.
Like the passage from one segment of a dream to
another, she felt the melting of the spells that surrounded
them and the falling-away of the clinging, flaccid flesh and
muscle. Something flashed beneath them, falling through
the rainy air toward the wet roof crests of the Citadel
below, and she realized that the plunging flutter of stream-
ing brown hair and white gauze was Zyeme.
The instantaneous Get her and Morkeleb's Let her fall
passed between them like a spark. Then he was plunging
again, as he had plunged before, falconlike, tracking the
falling body with his precise crystal eyes and plucking it
from the air with the neatness of a child playing jacks.
Charcoal-gray with rain, the walls of the Citadel court
rose up around them. Men, women, and gnomes were
everywhere on the ramparts, hair slicked down with the
pouring cloudburst to which nobody was paying the slight-
est attention. White smoke poured from the narrow door
that led into the Deep, but all eyes were raised skyward
to that black, plummeting form.
The dragon balanced for a moment upon the seventy-
foot span of his wings, then extended three of his delicate
legs to touch the ground. With the fourth, he laid Zyeme
on the puddled stone pavement, her dark hair spreading
out around her under the driving rain.
Sliding from the dragon's back, Jenny knew at once
that Zyeme was dead. Her mouth and eyes were open.
Distorted with rage and terror, her face could be seen to
be pointy and shrewish with constant worry and the can-
cerous addiction to petty angers.
Trembling with weariness. Jenny leaned against the
322 Barbara Hambly
dragon's curving shoulder. Slowly, the scintillant helix of
their minds unlinked. The rim of brightness and color that
had seemed to edge everything vanished from her vision.
Living things had solid bodies once more, instead of incor-
poreal ghosts of flesh through which shone the shapes of
souls.
A thousand pains came back to her—of her body and
of the stripped, hurting ruin of her mind. She became
aware of the blood that stuck her torn robe to her back
and ran down her legs to her bare feet—became aware
of all the darkness in her own heart, which she had accepted
in her battle with Zyeme.
Holding to the thomed scales for support, she looked
down at the sharp, white face staring upward at her from
the rain-hammered puddles. A human hand steadied her
elbow, and turning, she saw Trey beside her, her frivo-
lously tinted hair plastered with wet around her pale face.
It was the closest, she realized, that she had seen any
human besides herself come to Morkeleb. A moment later
Polycarp joined them, one arm wrapped in makeshift
dressings and half his red hair burned away by the crea-
ture's first attack upon the door.
White smoke still billowed from the door of the Deep.
Jenny coughed, her lungs hurting, in the acrid fumes.
Everyone in the court was coughing—it was as if the
Deep itself were in flames.
More coughing came from within. In the shadowy slot,
two forms materialized, the shorter leaning upon the taller.
From soot-blackened faces, two pairs of spectacle lenses
flashed whitely in the pallid light.
A moment later they emerged from the smoke and
shadow into the stunned silence of the watching crowd
in the court.
"Miscalculated the blasting powder," John explained
apologetically.
CHAPTER XVII
IT WAS NOT for several days after John and Gareth
blew up the Stone that Jenny began to recover from the
battle beneath and above the Citadel.
She had cloudy recollections of them telling Polycarp
how they had backtracked to the room by the gates where
the blasting powder had been left, while her own con-
sciousness darkened, and a vague memory of Morkeleb
catching her in his talons as she fell and carrying her,
catlike, to the small shelter in the upper court. More clear
was the remembrance of John's voice, forbidding the oth-
ers to go after them. "She needs a healing we can't give
her," she heard him say to Gareth. "Just let her be."
She wondered how he had known that. But then, John
knew her very well.
Morkeleb healed her as dragons heal, leading the body
with the mind. Her body healed fairly quickly, the poisons<
br />
burning themselves out of her veins, the slashed, puck-
ered wounds left by the creature's mouths closing to leave
round, vicious-looking scabs the size of her palm. Like
John's dragon-slaying scars, she thought, they would stay
with her for what remained of her life.
323
324 Barbara Hambly
Her mind healed more slowly. Open wounds left by
her battle with Zyeme remained open. Worst was the
knowledge that she had abandoned the birthright of her
power, not through the fate that had denied her the ability
or the circumstances that had kept her from its proper
teaching, but through her own fear.
They are yours for the stretching-out of your hand,
Morkeleb had said.
She knew they always had been.
Turning her head from the shadows of the crowded
lean-to, she could see the dragon lying in the heatless sun
of the court, a black cobra with his tasseled head raised,
his antennae flicking to listen to the wind. She felt her
soul streaked and mottled with the mind and soul of the
dragon and her life entangled with the crystal ropes of his
being.
She asked him once why he had remained at the Citadel
to heal her. The Stone is broken—the ties that bind you
to this place are gone.
She felt the anger coiled within him stir. I do not know,
wizard woman. You cannot have healed yourself—I did
not wish to see you broken forever. The words in her
mind were tinted, not only with anger, but with the mem-
ory of fear and with a kind of shame.
Whyf she asked. You have often said that the affairs
of humankind are nothing to dragons.
His scales rattled faintly as they hackled, then, with a
dry whisper, settled again. Dragons did not lie, but she
felt the mazes of his mind close against her.
Nor are they. But I have felt stirring in me things that
I do not understand, since you healed me and shared with
me the song of the gold in the Deep. My power has waked
power in you, but what it is in you that has waked its
reflection in me I do not know, for it is not a thing of
dragons. It let me feel the grip of the Stone, as I flew
north—a longing and a hurt, which before was only my
Dragonsbane 325
own will. Now because of it, I do not want to see you
hurt—I do not want to see you die, as humans die. I want
you to come with me to the north. Jenny; to be one of
the dragons, with the power for which you have always
sought. I want this, as much as I have ever wanted the
gold of the earth. I do not know why. And is it not what
you want?
But to that, Jenny had no reply.
Long before he should have been on his feet, John
dragged himself up the steps to the high court to see her,
sitting behind her on the narrow makeshift cot in her little
shelter, brushing her hair as he used to at the Hold on
those nights when she would come there to be with him
and their sons. He spoke of commonplaces, of the dis-
mantling of the siege troops around the Citadel and of the
return of the gnomes to the Deep, ofGareth's doings, and
of the assembling of the books they would take back to
the north, demanding nothing other, neither speech, deci-
sion, nor thought. But it seemed to her that the touch of
his hands brought more bitter pain to her than all Zyeme's
spells of ruin.
She had made her choice, she thought, ten years ago
when first they had met; and had remade it every day
since then. But there was, and always had been, another
choice. Without turning her head, she was aware of the
thoughts that moved behind the diamond depths of Mor-
keleb's watching eyes.
When he rose to go, she laid a hand on the sleeve of
his frayed black robe. "John," she said quietly. "Will you
do something for me? Send a message to Miss Mab, asking
her to choose out the best volumes of magic that she
knows of, both of the gnomes and of humankind, to go
north also?"
He regarded her for a moment, where she lay on the
rough paillasse on her narrow cot which for four nights
now had been her solitary bed, her coarse dark hair hang-
326 Barbara Humbly
ing over the whiteness of her shift. "Wouldn't you rather
look them out for yourself, love? You're the one who's
to be using them, after all."
She shook her head. His back was to the light of the
open court, his features indistinct against the glare; she
wanted to reach out her hand to touch him, but somehow
could not bring herself to do so. In a cool voice like silver
she explained, "The magic of the dragon is in me, John;
it is not a thing of books. The books are for lan, when
he comes into his power."
John said nothing for a moment. She wondered if he,
too, had realized this about their older son. When he did
speak, his voice was small. "Won't you be there to teach
him?"
She shook her head. "I don't know, John," she whis-
pered. "I don't know."
He made a move to lay his hand on her shoulder, and
she said, "No. Don't touch me. Don't make it harder for
me than it already is."
He remained standing for a moment longer before her,
looking down into her face. Then, obedient, he silently
turned and left the shed.
She had come to no further conclusion by the day of
their departure from the Citadel, to take the road back to
the north. She was conscious of John watching her, when
he thought she wasn't looking; conscious of her own glad-
ness that he never used the one weapon that he must have
known would make her stay with him—he never spoke
to her of their sons. But in the nights, she was conscious
also of the dark cobra shape of the dragon, glittering in
the moonlight of the high court, or wheeling down from
the black sky with the cold stars of winter prickling upon
his spines, as if he had flown through the heart of the
galaxy and come back powdered with its light.
The morning of their departure was a clear one, though
bitterly cold. The King rode up from Bel to see them off,
Dragonsbane 327
surrounded by a flowerbed of courtiers, who regarded
John with awe and fear, as if wondering how they had
dared to mock him, and why he had not slain them all.
With him, also, were Polycarp and Gareth and Trey, hand-
fast like schoolchildren. Trey had had her hair redyed,
burgundy and gold, which would have looked impressive
had it been done in the elaborate styles of the Court instead
of in two plaits like a child's down her back.
They had brought with them a long line of horses and
mules, laden with supplies for the journey and also with
the books for which John had so cheerfully been prepared
to risk his life. John knelt before the tall, vague, faded
old man, thanking him and swearing fealty; while Jenny,
clothed in h
er colorless northlands plaids, stood to one
side, feeling queerly distant from them all and watching
how the King kept scanning the faces of the courtiers
around him with the air of one who seeks someone, but
no longer remembers quite who.
To John the King said, "Not leaving already? Surely
it was only yesterday you presented yourself?"
"It will be a long way home, my lord." John did not
mention the week he had spent waiting the King's leave
to ride forth against the dragon—it was clear the old man
recalled little, if anything, of the preceding weeks. "It's
best I start before the snows come on heavy."
"Ah." The King nodded vaguely and turned away, lean-
ing on the arms of his tall son and his nephew Polycarp.
After a pace or two, he halted, frowning as something
surfaced from the murk of his memory, and turned to
Gareth. "This Dragonsbane—he did kill the dragon, after
all?"
There was no way to explain all that had passed, or
how rightness had been restored to the kingdom, save by
the appropriate channels, so Gareth said simply, "Yes."
"Good," said the old man, nodding dim approval.
"Good."
328 Barbara Hambly
Gareth released his arm; Polycarp, as Master of the
Citadel and his host, led the King away to rest, the cour-
tiers trailing after like a school of brightly colored, orna-
mental fish. From among them stepped three small, stout
forms, their silken robes stirring in the ice winds that
played from the soft new sky.
Balgub, the new Lord of the Deep ofYlferdun, inclined
his head; with the stiff unfamiliarity of one who has sel-
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