Dragonsbane (40 page)

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 slightest 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 Zyerne 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 Zyerne 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 cancerous addiction to petty angers.

Trembling with weariness, Jenny leaned against the 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 incorporeal 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 Zyerne.

Holding to the thorned 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 frivolously 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 creature’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.

I
T 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 consciousness 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 others 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 burning themselves out of her veins, the slashed, puckered 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.

Her mind healed more slowly. Open wounds left by her battle with Zyerne 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 memory of fear and with a kind of shame.

Why?
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 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 dismantling of the siege troops around the Citadel and of the return of the gnomes to the Deep, of Gareth’s doings, and of the assembling of the books they would take back to the north, demanding nothing of her, neither speech, decision, nor thought. But it seemed to her that the touch of his hands brought more bitter pain to her than all Zyerne’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 Morkeleb’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 hanging 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 Ian, 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 whispered. “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 gladness 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, 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 her 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, leaning 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 lightness 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.”

Gareth released his arm; Polycarp, as Master of the Citadel and his host, led the King away to rest, the courtiers trailing after like a school of brightly colored, ornamental 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 of Ylferdun, inclined his head; with the stiff unfamiliarity of one who has seldom spoken the words, he thanked Lord Aversin the Dragonsbane, though he did not specify for what.

“Well, he hardly could, now, could he?” John remarked, as the three gnomes left the court in the wake of the King’s party. Only Miss Mab had caught Jenny’s eye and winked at her. John went on, “If he came out and said, ‘Thank you for blowing up the Stone,’ that would be admitting that he was wrong about Zyerne not poisoning it.”

Gareth, who was still standing hand-in-hand with Trey beside them, laughed. “You know, I think he does admit it in his heart, though I don’t think he’ll ever completely forgive us for doing it. At least, he’s civil to me in Council— which is fortunate, since I’m going to have to be dealing with him for a long time.”

“Are you?” A flicker of intense interest danced in John’s eye.

Gareth was silent for a long moment, fingering the stiff lace of his cuff and not meeting John’s gaze. When he looked up again, his face was weary and sad.

“I thought it would be different,” he said quietly. “I thought once Zyerne was dead, he would be all right. And he’s better, he really is.” He spoke like a man trying to convince himself that a mended statue is as beautiful as it was before it broke. “But he’s—he’s so absentminded. Badegamus says he can’t be trusted to remember edicts he’s made from one day to the next. When I was in Bel, we made up a Council—Badegamus, Balgub, Polycarp, Dromar, and I—to sort out what we ought to do; then I tell Father to do it—or remind him it’s what he was going to do, and he’ll pretend he remembers. He knows he’s gotten forgetful, though he doesn’t quite remember why. Sometimes he’ll wake in the night, crying Zyerne’s name or my mother’s.” The young man’s voice turned momentarily unsteady. “But what if he never recovers?”

“What if he never does?” John returned softly. “The Realm will be yours in any case one day, my hero.” He turned away and began tightening the cinches of the mules, readying them for the trek down through the city to the northward road.

“But not now!” Gareth followed him, his words making soft puffs of steam in the morning cold. “I mean—I never have time for myself anymore! It’s been months since I worked on my poetry, or tried to complete that southern variant of the ballad of Antara Warlady...”

“There’ll be time, by and by.” The Dragonsbane paused, resting his hand on the arched neck of Battlehammer, Gareth’s parting gift to him. “It will get easier, when men know to come to you directly instead of to your father.”

Gareth shook his head. “But it won’t be the same.”

“Is it ever?” John moved down the line, tightening cinches, checking straps on the parcels of books—volumes of healing, Anacetus’ works on greater and lesser demons, Luciard’s
Firegiver,
books on engineering and law, by gnomes and men. Gareth followed him silently, digesting the fact that he was now, for all intents and purposes, the Lord of Bel, with the responsibilities of the kingdom—for which he had been academically prepared under the mental heading of “some day”—thrust suddenly upon his unwilling shoulders. Like John, Jenny thought pityingly, he would have to put aside the pursuit of his love of knowledge for what he owed his people and return to it only when he could. The only difference was that his realm was at peace and that John had been a year younger than Gareth was when the burden had fallen to him.