it Zyeme had sacrificed the men who loved her, the son
she would have borne, and, in the end, her very
humanity—even as she herself had done!
Caerdinn had been wrong. For all his striving to perfect
his arts, in the end he had been nothing but a selfish,
embittered old man, the end of a Line that was failing
because it sought magic for magic's sake. The key to
magic was not magic, but the use of magic; it lay not in
having, but in giving and doing—in loving, and in being
loved.
And to her mind there rose the image of John, sitting
beside Morkeleb in the high court of the Citadel. Having
so little, we shared among ourselves to make any of it
worth having... the consequences of not caring enough
to do it would have been worse...
It had been John all along, she thought. Not the prob-
lem, but the solution.
Shadow circled her, and Morkeleb sank glittering to
the rocks at her side. The sun was half-down the west
and threw the shimmer of the blue glacier light over him
like a sparkling cloak of flame.
What is it, wizard woman?
She said, Morkeleb, return me to being what I was.
His scales bristled, flashing, and she felt the throb of
his anger deep in her mind. Nothing can ever return to
being what it was, wizard woman. You know that. My
power will be within you forever, nor can the knowledge
of what it is to be a dragon ever be erased from your
mind.
338 Barbara Humbly
Even so, she said. Yet I would rather live as a woman
who was once a dragon than a dragon who was once a
woman. On the steps of the Deep, I killed with fire, as a
dragon kills; and like a dragon, I felt nothing. I do not
want to become that, Morkeleb.
Bah, Morkeleb said. Heat smoked from the thousand
razor edges of his scales, from the long spikes and the
folded silk of his wings. Do not be a fool. Jenny Waynest.
All the knowledge of the dragons, all their power, is yours,
and all the years of time. You will forget the loves of the
earth soon and be healed. The diamond cannot love the
flower, for the flower lives only a day, then fades and
dies. You are a diamond now.
The flower dies. Jenny said softly, having lived. The
diamond will never do either. I do not want to forget, and
the healing will make me what I never wanted to be.
Dragons have all the years of time, Morkeleb, but even
dragons cannot roll back the flow of days, nor return
along them to find again time that they have lost. Let
me go.
No! His head swung around, his white eyes blazing,
his long mane bristling around the base of his many horns.
/ want you, wizard woman, more than I have ever wanted
any gold. It is something that was born in me when your
mind touched mine, as my magic was born in you. Having
you, I will not give you up.
She gathered her haunches beneath her and threw her-
self out into the void of the air, white wings cleaving the
wind. He flung himself after, swinging down the gray cliffs
and waterfalls of Nast Wall, their shadows chasing one
another over snow clefts dyed blue with the coming eve-
ning and rippling like gray hawks over the darkness of
stone and chasm. Beyond, the world lay carpeted by
autumn haze, red and ochre and brown; and from the
unleaved trees of the woods near the river, Jenny could
Dragonsbane 339
see a single thread of smoke rising, far off on the evening
wind.
The whiteness of the full moon stroked her wings; the
stars, through whose secret paths the dragons had once
come to the earth and along which they would one day
depart, swung like a web of light in their unfolding pat-
terns above. Her dragon sight descried the camp in the
woods and a lone, small figure patiently scraping burned
bannocks off the griddle, books from a half-unpacked box
stacked around him.
She circled the smoke, invisible in the colors of the
air, and felt the darkness of a shadow circling above her.
Wizard woman, said the voice of the dragon in her
mind, is this truly what you want7
She did not reply, but she knew that, dragon-wise, he
felt the surge and patterns of her mind. She felt his baf-
flement at them, and his anger, both at her and at some-
thing within himself.
At length he said,/ want you. Jenny Way nest. But more
than you, I want your happiness, and this I do not under-
stand—I do not want you in grief. And then, his anger
lashing at her like a many-tailed whip. You have done this
to me!
I am sorry, Morkeleb, she said softly. What you feel is
the love of humans, and a poor trade for the power that
the touch of your mind gave me. It is what I learned first,
from loving John—both the pain and the fact that to feel
it is better than not to be able to feel.
Is this the pain that drives you7 he demanded.
She said. Yes.
Bitter anger sounded in his mind, like the far-off echo
of the gold that he had lost. Go, then, he said, and she
circled down from the air, a thing of glass and lace and
bone, invisible in the soft, smoky darkness. She felt the
dragon's power surround her with heat and magic, the
pain shimmering along her bones. She leaned into the fear
340 Barbara Hambly
that melted her body, as she had leaned into the winds of
flight.
Then there was only weariness and grief. She knelt
alone in the darkness of the autumn woods, the night chill
biting into all the newly healed wounds of her back and
arms. Through the warty gray and white of the tree boles,
she could see the red glow of fire and smell the familiar
odors of woodsmoke and horses; the plaintive strains of
a pennywhistle keened thinly in the air. The bright edge
of color had vanished from all things; the evening was
raw and misty, colorless, and very cold. She shivered and
drew her sheepskin jacket more closely about her. The
earth felt damp where her knees pressed it through her
faded skirts.
She brushed aside the dark, coarse mane of her hair
and looked up. Beyond the bare lace of the trees, she
could see the black dragon still circling, alone in the
sounding hollow of the empty sky.
Her mind touched his, with thanks deeper than words.
Grief came down to her, grief and hurt, and rage that he
could feel hurt.
// is a cruel gift you have given me, wizard woman, he
said. For you have set me apart from my own and destroyed
the pleasure of my old joys; my soul is marked with this
love, though I do not understand what it is and, like you,
I shall never be able to return to what I have been.
lam sorry, Morkeleb, she said to him. We change what
we touch, be it magic, or power, or another Iffe. Ten years
ago I would have gone with you, had I not touched John,
<
br /> and been touched by him.
Like an echo in her mind she heard his voice. Be happy,
then, wizard woman, with this choice that you have made.
I do not understand the reasons for it, for it is not a thing
of dragons—but then neither, any longer, am I.
She felt rather than saw him vanish, flying back in the
darkness toward the empty north. For a moment he passed
Dragonsbane 341
before the white disk of the moon, skeletal silk over its
stem face—then he was gone. Grief closed her throat,
the grief of roads untaken, of doors not opened, of songs
unsung—the human grief of choice. In freeing her, the
dragon, too, had made his choice, of what he was and
would be.
We change what we touch, she thought. And in that,
she supposed, John—and the capacity to love and to care
that John had given her—was, and forever would be,
Morkeleb's bane.
She sighed and got stiffly to her feet, dusting the twigs
and leaves from her skirts. The shrill, sweet notes of the
pecnywhistle still thr<. ed the evening breeze, but with
them was the smell of smoke, and of bannocks starting
to burn. She hitched her plaid up over her shoulder and
started up the path for the clearing.
Dragon's Bane Page 42
