Dragon's Bane

by Dragon's Bane (lit)

  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.