Read the book: «Dragonsbane»

ONE

BANDITS OFTEN LAY in wait in the ruins of the old town at the fourways—Jenny Waynest thought there were three of them this morning.

She was not sure any more whether it was magic which told her this, or simply the woodcraftiness and instinct for the presence of danger that anyone developed who had survived to adulthood in the Winterlands. But as she drew rein short of the first broken walls, where she knew she would still be concealed by the combination of autumn fog and early morning gloom beneath the thicker trees of the forest, she noted automatically that the horse droppings in the sunken clay of the roadbed were fresh, untouched by the frost that edged the leaves around them. She noted, too, the silence in the ruins ahead; no coney’s foot rustled the yellow spill of broomsedge cloaking the hill slope where the old church had been, the church sacred to the Twelve Gods beloved of the old Kings. She thought she smelled the smoke of a concealed fire near the remains of what had been a crossroads inn, but honest men would have gone there straight and left a track in the nets of dew that covered the weeds all around. Jenny’s white mare Moon Horse pricked her long ears at the scent of other beasts, and Jenny wind-whispered to her for silence, smoothing the raggedy mane against the long neck. But she had been looking for all those signs before she saw them.

She settled into stillness in the protective cloak of fog and shadow, like a partridge blending with the brown of the woods. She was a little like a partridge herself, dark and small and nearly invisible in the dull, random plaids of the northlands; a thin, compactly built woman, tough as the roots of moorland heather. After a moment of silence, she wove her magic into a rope of mist and cast it along the road toward the nameless ruins of the town.

It was something she had done even as a child, before the old wander-mage Caerdinn had taught her the ways of power. All her thirty-seven years, she had lived in the Winterlands—she knew the smells of danger. The late-lingering birds of autumn, thrushes and blackbirds, should have been waking in the twisted brown mats of ivy that half-hid the old inn’s walls—they were silent. After a moment, she caught the scent of horses, and the ranker, dirtier stench of men.

One bandit would be in the stumpy ruin of the old tower that commanded the south and eastward roads, part of the defenses of the ruined town left from when the prosperity of the King’s law had given it anything to defend. They always hid there. A second, she guessed, was behind the walls of the old inn. After a moment she sensed the third, watching the crossroads from a yellow thicket of seedy tamarack. Her magic brought the stink of their souls to her, old greeds and the carrion-bone memories of some cherished rape or murder that had given a momentary glow of power to lives largely divided between the giving and receiving of physical pain. Having lived all her life in the Winterlands, she knew that these men could scarcely help being what they were; she had to put aside both her hatred of them, and her pity for them, before she could braid the spells that she laid upon their minds.

Her concentration deepened further. She stirred judiciously at that compost of memories, whispering to their blunted minds of the bored sleepiness of men who have watched too long. Unless every illusion and Limitation was wrought correctly, they would see her when she moved. Then she loosened her halberd in its holster upon her saddle-tree, settled her sheepskin jacket a little more closely about her shoulders and, with scarcely breath or movement, urged Moon Horse forward toward the ruins.

The man in the tower she never saw at all, from first to last. Through the browning red leaves of a screen of hawthorn, she glimpsed two horses tethered behind a ruined wall near the inn, their breath making plumes of white in the dawn cold; a moment later she saw the bandit crouching behind the crumbling wall, a husky man in greasy old leathers. He had been watching the road, but started suddenly and cursed; looking down, he began scratching his crotch with vigor and annoyance but no particular surprise. He did not see Jenny as she ghosted past. The third bandit, sitting his rawboned black horse between a broken corner of a wall and a spinney of raggedy birches, simply stared out ahead of him, lost in the daydreams she had sent.

She was directly in front of him when a boy’s voice shouted from down the southward road, “LOOK OUT!”

Jenny whipped her halberd clear of its rest as the bandit woke with a start. He saw her and roared a curse. Peripherally Jenny was aware of hooves pounding up the road toward her; the other traveler, she thought with grim annoyance, whose well-meant warning had snapped the man from his trance. As the bandit bore down upon her, she got a glimpse of a young man riding out of the mist full-pelt, clearly intent upon rescue.

The bandit was armed with a short sword, but swung at her with the flat of it, intending to unhorse her without damaging her too badly to rape later. She feinted with the halberd to bring his weapon up, then dipped the long blade on the pole’s end down under his guard. Her legs clinched to Moon Horse’s sides to take the shock as the weapon knifed through the man’s belly. The leather was tough, but there was no metal underneath. She ripped the blade clear as the man doubled up around it, screaming and clawing; both horses danced and veered with the smell of the hot, spraying blood. Before the man hit the muddy bed of the road, Jenny had wheeled her horse and was riding to the aid of her prospective knight-errant, who was engaged in a sloppy, desperate battle with the bandit who had been concealed behind the ruined outer wall.

Her rescuer was hampered by his long cloak of ruby red velvet, which had got entangled with the basketwork hilt of his jeweled longsword. His horse was evidently better trained and more used to battle than he was: the maneuverings of the big liver-bay gelding were the only reason the boy hadn’t been killed outright. The bandit, who had gotten himself mounted at the boy’s first cry of warning, had driven them back into the hazel thickets that grew along the tumbled stones of the inn wall, and, as Jenny kicked Moon Horse into the fray, the boy’s trailing cloak hung itself up on the low branches and jerked its wearer ignominiously out of the saddle with the horse’s next swerve.

Using her right hand as the fulcrum of a swing, Jenny swept the halberd’s blade at the bandit’s sword arm. The man veered his horse to face her; she got a glimpse of piggy, close-set eyes under the rim of a dirty iron cap. Behind her she could hear her previous assailant still screaming. Evidently her current opponent could as well, for he ducked the first slash and swiped at Moon Horse’s face to cause the mare to shy, then spurred past Jenny and away up the road, willing neither to face a weapon that so outreached his own, nor to stop for his comrade who had done so.

There was a brief crashing in the thickets of briar as the man who had been concealed in the tower fled into the raw mists, then silence, save for the dying bandit’s hoarse, bubbling sobs.

Jenny dropped lightly from Moon Horse’s back. Her young rescuer was still thrashing in the bushes like a stoat in a sack, half-strangled on his bejeweled cloak strap. She used the hook on the back of the halberd’s blade to twist the long court-sword from his hand, then stepped in to pull the muffling folds of velvet aside. He struck at her with his hands, like a man swatting at wasps. Then he seemed to see her for the first time and stopped, staring up at her with wide, myopic gray eyes.

After a long moment of surprised stillness, he cleared his throat and unfastened the chain of gold and rubies that held the cloak under his chin. “Er—thank you, my lady,” he gasped in a slightly winded voice, and got to his feet. Though Jenny was used to people being taller than she, this young man was even more so than most. “I—uh—” His skin was as fine-textured and fair as his hair, which was already, despite his youth, beginning to thin away toward early baldness. He couldn’t have been more than eighteen, with a natural awkwardness increased tenfold by the difficult task of thanking the intended object of a gallant defense for saving his life.

“My profoundest gratitude,” he said, and performed a supremely graceful Dying Swan, the like of which had not been seen in the Winterlands since the nobles of the Kings had departed in the wake of the retreating royal armies. “I am Gareth of Magloshaldon, a traveler upon errantry in these lands, and I wish to extend my humblest expressions of …”

Jenny shook her head and stilled him with an upraised hand. “Wait here,” she said, and turned away.

Puzzled, the boy followed her.

The first bandit who had attacked her still lay in the clay muck of the roadbed. The soaking blood had turned it into a mess of heel gouges, strewn with severed entrails; the stink was appalling. The man was still groaning weakly. Against the matte pallor of the foggy morning, the scarlet of the blood stood out shockingly bright.

Jenny sighed, feeling suddenly cold and weary and unclean, looking upon what she had done and knowing what it was up to her yet to do. She knelt beside the dying man, drawing the stillness of her magic around her again. She was aware of Gareth’s approach, his boots threshing through the dew-soaked bindweed in a hurried rhythm that broke when he tripped on his sword. She felt a tired stirring of anger at him for having made this necessary. Had he not cried out, both she and this poor, vicious, dying brute would each have gone their ways …

… And he would doubtless have killed Gareth after she passed. And other travelers besides.

She had long since given up trying to unpick wrong from right, present should from future if. If there was a pattern to all things, she had given up thinking that it was simple enough to lie within her comprehension. Still, her soul felt filthy within her as she put her hands to the dying man’s clammy, greasy temples, tracing the proper runes while she whispered the death-spells. She felt the life go out of him and tasted the bile of self-loathing in her mouth.

Behind her, Gareth whispered, “You—he’s—he’s dead.”

She got to her feet, shaking the bloody dirt from her skirts. “I could not leave him for the weasels and foxes,” she replied, starting to walk away. She could hear the small carrion-beasts already, gathering at the top of the bank above the misty slot of the road, drawn to the blood-smell and waiting impatiently for the killer to abandon her prey. Her voice was brusque—she had always hated the death-spells. Having grown up in a land without law, she had killed her first man when she was fourteen, and six since, not counting the dying she had helped from life as the only midwife and healer from the Gray Mountains to the sea. It never got easier.

She wanted to be gone from the place, but the boy Gareth put a staying hand on her arm, looking from her to the corpse in a kind of nauseated fascination. He had never seen death, she thought. At least, not in its raw form. The pea green velvet of his travel-stained doublet, the gold stampwork of his boots, the tucked embroidery of his ruffled lawn shirt, and the elaborate, feathered crestings of his green-tipped hair all proclaimed him for a courtier. All things, even death, were doubtless done with a certain amount of style where he came from.

He gulped. “You’re—you’re a witch!”

One corner of her mouth moved slightly; she said, “So I am.”

He stepped back from her in fear, then staggered, clutching at a nearby sapling for support. She saw then that among the decorative slashings of his doublet sleeve was an uglier opening, the shirt visible through it dark and wet. “I’ll be fine,” he protested faintly, as she moved to support him. “I just need …” He made a fumbling effort to shake free of her hand and walk, his myopic gray eyes peering at the ankle-deep drifts of moldering leaves that lined the road.

“What you need is to sit down.” She led him away to a broken boundary stone and forced him to do so and unbuttoned the diamond studs that held the sleeve to the body of the doublet. The wound did not look deep, but it was bleeding badly. She pulled loose the leather thongs that bound the wood-black knots of her hair and used them as a tourniquet above the wound. He winced and gasped and tried to loosen it as she tore a strip from the hem of her shift for a bandage, so that she slapped at his fingers like a child’s. Then, a moment later, he tried to get up again. “I have to find …”

“I’ll find them,” Jenny said firmly, knowing what it was that he sought. She finished binding his wound and walked back to the tangle of hazel bushes where Gareth and the bandit had struggled. The frosty daylight glinted on a sharp reflection among the leaves. The spectacles she found there were bent and twisted out of shape, the bottom of one round lens decorated by a star-fracture. Flicking the dirt and wetness from them, she carried them back.

“Now,” she said, as Gareth fumbled them on with hands shaking from weakness and shock. “You need that arm looked to. I can take you …”

“My lady, I’ve no time.” He looked up at her, squinting a little against the increasing brightness of the sky behind her head. “I’m on a quest, a quest of terrible importance.”

“Important enough to risk losing your arm if the wound turns rotten?”

As if such things could not happen to him, did she only have the wits to realize it, he went on earnestly, “I’ll be all right, I tell you. I am seeking Lord Aversin the Dragonsbane, Thane of Alyn Hold and Lord of Wyr, the greatest knight ever to have ridden the Winterlands. Have you heard of him hereabouts? Tall as an angel, handsome as song … His fame has spread through the southlands the way the floodwaters spread in the spring, the noblest of chevaliers … I must find Alyn Hold, before it is too late.”

Jenny sighed, exasperated. “So you must,” she said. “It is to Alyn Hold that I am going to take you.”

The squinting eyes got round as the boy’s mouth fell open. “To—to Alyn Hold? Really? It’s near here?”

“It’s the nearest place where we can get your arm seen to,” she said. “Can you ride?”

Had he been dying, she thought, amused, he would still have sprung to his feet as he did. “Yes, of course; I—do you know Lord Aversin, then?”

Jenny was silent for a moment. Then, softly, she said, “Yes. Yes, I know him.”

She whistled up the horses, the tall white Moon Horse and the big liver-bay gelding, whose name, Gareth said, was Battlehammer. In spite of his exhaustion and the pain of his roughly bound wound, Gareth made a move to offer her totally unnecessary assistance in mounting. As they reined up over the ragged stone slopes to avoid the corpse in its rank-smelling puddles of mud, Gareth asked, “If—if you’re a witch, my lady, why couldn’t you have fought them with magic instead of with a weapon? Thrown fire at them, or turned them into frogs, or struck them blind …”

She had struck them blind, in a sense, she thought wryly—at least until he shouted.

But she only said, “Because I cannot.”

“For reasons of honor?” he asked dubiously. “Because there are some situations in which honor cannot apply …”

“No.” She glanced sidelong at him through the astonishing curtains of her loosened hair. “It is just that my magic is not that strong.”

And she nudged her horse into a quicker walk, passing into the vaporous shadows of the forest’s bare, over-hanging boughs.

Even after all these years of knowing it, she found the admission still stuck in her throat. She had come to terms with her lack of beauty, but never with her lack of genius in the single thing she had ever wanted. The most she had ever been able to do was to pretend that she accepted it, as she pretended now.

Ground fog curled around the feet of the horses; through the clammy vapors, tree roots thrust from the roadbanks like the arms of half-buried corpses. The air here felt dense and smelled of mold, and now and then, from the woods above them, came the furtive crackle of dead leaves, as if the trees plotted among themselves in the fog.

“Did you—did you see him slay the dragon?” Gareth asked, after they had ridden in silence for some minutes. “Would you tell me about it? Aversin is the only living Dragonsbane—the only man who has slain a dragon. There are ballads about him everywhere, about his courage and his noble deeds … That’s my hobby. Ballads, I mean, the ballads of Dragonsbanes, like Selkythar the White back in the reign of Ennyta the Good and Antara Warlady and her brother, during the Kinwars. They say her brother slew …” By the way he caught himself up Jenny guessed he could have gone on about the great Dragonsbanes of the past for hours, only someone had told him not to bore people with the subject. “I’ve always wanted to see such a thing—a true Dragonsbane—a glorious combat. His renown must cover him like a golden mantle.”

And, rather to her surprise, he broke into a light, wavery tenor:

Riding up the hillside gleaming,

Like flame in the golden sunlight streaming;

Sword of steel strong in hand,

Wind-swift hooves spurning land,

Tall as an angel, stallion-strong,

Stern as a god, bright as song …

In the dragon’s shadow the maidens wept,

Fair as lilies in darkness kept.

‘I know him afar, so tall is he,

His plumes as bright as the rage of the sea,’

Spake she to her sister, ‘fear no ill …’

Jenny looked away, feeling something twist inside her at the memory of the Golden Dragon of Wyr.

She remembered as if it were yesterday instead of ten years ago the high-up flash of gold in the wan northern sky, the plunge of fire and shadow, the boys and girls screaming on the dancing floor at Great Toby. They were memories she knew should have been tinted only with horror; she was aware that she should have felt only gladness at the dragon’s death. But stronger than the horror, the taste of nameless grief and desolation came back to her from those times, with the metallic stench of the dragon’s blood and the singing that seemed to shiver the searing air …

Her heart felt sick within her. Coolly, she said, “For one thing, of the two children who were taken by the dragon, John only managed to get the boy out alive. I think the girl had been killed by the fumes in the dragon’s lair. It was hard to tell from the state of the body. And if she hadn’t been dead, I still doubt they’d have been in much condition to make speeches about how John looked, even if he had come riding straight up the hill—which of course he didn’t.”

“He didn’t?” She could almost hear the shattering of some image, nursed in the boy’s mind.

“Of course not. If he had, he would have been killed immediately.”

“Then how …”

“The only way he could think of to deal with something that big and that heavily armored. He had me brew the most powerful poison that I knew of, and he dipped his harpoons in that.”

“Poison?” Such foulness clearly pierced him to the heart. “Harpoons? Not a sword at all?”

Jenny shook her head, not knowing whether to feel amusement at the boy’s disappointed expression, exasperation at the way he spoke of what had been for her and hundreds of others a time of sleepless, nightmare horror, or only a kind of elder-sisterly compassion for the naïveté that would consider taking a three-foot steel blade against twenty-five feet of spiked and flaming death. “No,” she only said, “John came at it from the overhang of the gully in which it was laired—it wasn’t a cave, by the way; there are no caves that large in these hills. He slashed its wings first, so that it couldn’t take to the air and fall on him from above. He used poisoned harpoons to slow it down, but he finished it off with an ax.”

“An ax?!” Gareth cried, utterly aghast. “That’s—that’s the most horrible thing I’ve ever heard! Where is the glory in that? Where is the honor? It’s like hamstringing your opponent in a duel! It’s cheating!”

“He wasn’t fighting a duel,” Jenny pointed out. “If a dragon gets into the air, the man fighting it is lost.”

“But it’s dishonorable!” the boy insisted passionately, as if that were some kind of clinching argument.

“It might have been, had he been fighting a man who had honorably challenged him—something John has never been known to do in his life. Even fighting bandits, it pays to strike from behind when one is outnumbered. As the only representative of the King’s law in these lands, John generally is outnumbered. A dragon is upward of twenty feet long and can kill a man with a single blow of its tail. You said yourself,” she added with a smile, “that there are situations in which honor does not apply.”

“But that’s different!” the boy said miserably and lapsed into disillusioned silence.

The ground beneath the horses’ feet was rising; the vague walls of the misty tunnel through which they rode were ending. Beyond, the silvery shapes of the round-backed hills could be dimly seen. As they came clear of the trees, the winds fell upon them, clearing the mists and nipping their clothes and faces like ill-trained dogs. Shaking the blowing handfuls of her hair out of her eyes, Jenny got a look at Gareth’s face as he gazed about him at the moors. It wore a look of shock, disappointment, and puzzlement, as if he had never thought to find his hero in this bleak and trackless world of moss, water, and stone.

As for Jenny, this barren world stirred her strangely. The moors stretched nearly a hundred miles, north to the ice-locked shores of the ocean; she knew every break in the granite landscape, every black peat-beck and every hollow where the heather grew thick in the short highlands summers; she had traced the tracks of hare and fox and kitmouse in three decades of winter snows. Old Caerdinn, half-mad through poring over books and legends of the days of the Kings, could remember the time when the Kings had withdrawn their troops and their protection from the Winterlands to fight the wars for the lordship of the south; he had grown angry with her when she had spoken of the beauty she found in those wild, silvery fastnesses of rock and wind. But sometimes his bitterness stirred in Jenny, when she worked to save the life of an ailing village child whose illness lay beyond her small skills and there was nothing in any book she had read that might tell her how to save that life; or when the Iceriders came raiding down over the floe-ice in the brutal winters, burning the barns that cost such labor to raise, and slaughtering the cattle that could only be bred up from such meager stock. However, her own lack of power had taught her a curious appreciation for small joys and hard beauties and for the simple, changeless patterns of life and death. It was nothing she could have explained; not to Caerdinn, nor to this boy, nor to anyone else.

At length she said softly, “John would never have gone after the dragon, Gareth, had he not been forced to it. But as Thane of Alyn Hold, as Lord of Wyr, he is the only man in the Winterlands trained to and living by the arts of war. It is for this that he is the lord. He fought the dragon as he would have fought a wolf, as a vermin which was harming his people. He had no choice.”

“But a dragon isn’t vermin!” Gareth protested. “It is the most honorable and greatest of challenges to the manhood of a true knight. You must be wrong! He couldn’t have fought it simply—simply out of duty. He can’t have!”

There was a desperation to believe in his voice that made Jenny glance over at him curiously. “No,” she agreed. “A dragon isn’t vermin. And this one was truly beautiful.” Her voice softened at the recollection, even through the horror-haze of death and fear, of its angular, alien splendor. “Not golden, as your song calls it, but a sort of amber, grading to brownish smoke along its back and ivory upon its belly. The patterns of the scales on its sides were like the beadwork on a pair of slippers, like woven irises, all shades of purple and blue. Its head was like a flower, too; its eyes and maw were surrounded with scales like colored ribbons, with purple horns and tufts of white and black fur, and with antennae like a crayfish’s tipped with bobs of gems. It was butcher’s work to slay it.”

They rounded the shoulder of a tor. Below them, like a break in the cold granite landscape, spread a broken line of brown fields where the mists lay like stringers of dirty wool among the stubble of harvest. A little further along the track lay a hamlet, disordered and trashy under a bluish smear of woodsmoke, and the stench of the place rose on the whipping ice-winds: the lye-sting of soap being boiled; an almost-visible murk of human and animal waste; the rotted, nauseating sweetness of brewing beer. The barking of dogs rose to them like churchbells in the air. In the midst of it all a stumpy tower stood, the tumble-down remnant of some larger fortification.

“No,” said Jenny softly, “the dragon was a beautiful creature, Gareth. But so was the girl it carried away to its lair and killed. She was fifteen—John wouldn’t let her parents see the remains.”

She touched her heels to Moon Horse’s sides and led the way down the damp clay of the track.

“Is this village where you live?” Gareth asked, as they drew near the walls.

Jenny shook her head, drawing her mind back from the bitter and confusing tangle of the memories of the slaying of the dragon. “I have my own house about six miles from here, on Frost Fell—I live there alone. My magic is not great; it needs silence and solitude for its study.” She added wryly, “Though I don’t have much of either. I am midwife and healer for all of Lord Aversin’s lands.”

“Will—will we reach his lands soon?”

His voice sounded unsteady, and Jenny, regarding him worriedly, saw how white he looked and how, in spite of the cold, sweat ran down his hollow cheeks with their faint fuzz of gold. A little surprised at his question, she said, “These are Lord Aversin’s lands.”

He raised his head to look at her, shocked. “These?” He stared around him at the muddy fields, the peasants shouting to one another as they shocked up the last of the corn, the ice-scummed waters of the moat that girdled the rubble fill and fieldstone patches of the shabby wall. “Then—that is one of Lord Aversin’s villages?”

“That,” Jenny said matter-of-factly as the hooves of their horses rumbled hollowly on the wood of the draw-bridge, “is Alyn Hold.”

The town huddled within the curtain wall—a wall built by the present lord’s grandfather, old James Standfast, as a temporary measure and now hoary with fifty winters—was squalid beyond description. Through the archway beneath the squat gatehouse untidy houses were visible, clustered around the wall of the Hold itself as if the larger building had seeded them, low-built of stone and rubble upon the foundations of older walls, thatched with river reed-straw and grubby with age. From the window-turret of the gatehouse old Peg the gatekeeper stuck her head out, her long, gray-streaked brown braids hanging down like bights of half-unraveled rope, and she called out to Jenny, “You’re in luck,” in the glottal lilt of the north-country speech. “Me lord got in last night from ridin’ the bounds. He’ll be about.”

“She wasn’t—was she talking about Lord Aversin?” Gareth whispered, scandalized.

Jenny’s crescent-shaped eyebrows quirked upward. “He’s the only lord we have.”

“Oh.” He blinked, making another mental readjustment. “‘Riding the bounds’?”

“The bounds of his lands. He patrols them, most days of the month, he and militia volunteers.” Seeing Gareth’s face fall, she added gently, “That is what it is to be a lord.”

“It isn’t, you know,” Gareth said. “It is chivalry, and honor, and …” But she had already ridden past him, out of the slaty darkness of the gatehouse passage and into the heatless sunlight of the square.

With all its noise and gossipy squalor, Jenny had always liked the village of Alyn. It had been the home of her childhood; the stone cottage in which she had been born and in which her sister and brother-in-law still lived—though her sister’s husband discouraged mention of the relationship—still stood down the lane, against the curtain wall. They might regard her with awe, these hard-working people with their small lives circumscribed by the work of the seasons, but she knew their lives only a little less intimately than she knew her own. There was not a house in the village where she had not delivered a child, or tended the sick, or fought death in one of the myriad forms that it took in the Winterlands; she was familiar with them, and with the long-spun, intricate patterns of their griefs and joys. As the horses sloshed through mud and standing water to the center of the square, she saw Gareth looking about him with carefully concealed dismay at the pigs and chickens that shared the fetid lanes so amicably with flocks of shrieking children. A gust of wind blew the smoke of the forge over them, and with it a faint wash of heat and a snatch of Muffle the smith’s bawdy song; in one lane laundry flapped, and in another, Deshy Werville, whose baby Jenny had delivered three months ago, was milking one of her beloved cows half-in, half-out of her cottage door. Jenny saw how Gareth’s disapproving gaze lingered upon the shabby Temple, with its lumpish, crudely carved images of the Twelve Gods, barely distinguishable from one another in the gloom, and then went to the circled cross of Earth and Sky that was wrought into the stones of so many village chimneys. His back got a little stiffer at this evidence of paganism, and his upper lip appeared to lengthen as he regarded the pigpen built out from the Temple’s side and the pair of yokels in scruffy leather and plaids who leaned against the railings, gossiping.

“Course, pigs see the weather,” one of them was saying, reaching with a stick across the low palings to scratch the back of the enormous black sow who reposed within. “That’s in Clivy’s On Farming, but I’ve seen them do it. And they’re gie clever, cleverer than dogs. My aunt Mary—you remember Aunt Mary?—used to train them as piglets and she had one, a white one, who’d fetch her shoes for her.”

“Aye?” the second yokel said, scratching his head as Jenny drew rein near them, with Gareth fidgeting impatiently at her side.

“Aye.” The taller man made kissing sounds to the sow, who raised her head in response with a slurping grunt of deepest affection. “It says in Polyborus’ Analects that the Old Cults used to worship the pig, and not as a devil, either, as Father Hiero would have it, but as the Moon Goddess.” He pushed his steel-rimmed spectacles a little higher on the bridge of his long nose, a curiously professorial gesture for a man ankle-deep in pig-muck.

“That a fact, now?” the second yokel said with interest. “Now you come to speak on it, this old girl—when she were young and flighty, that is—had it figured to a T how to get the pen gate open, and would be after … Oh!” He bowed hastily, seeing Jenny and the fuming Gareth sitting their horses quietly.

The taller of the two men turned. As the brown eyes behind the thick spectacle lenses met Jenny’s, they lost their habitual guarded expression and melted abruptly into an impish brightness. Middle-sized, unprepossessing, shaggy and unshaven in his scruffy dark leather clothing, his old wolfskin doublet patched with bits of metal and scraps of chain mail to protect his joints—after ten years, she wondered, what was there about him that still filled her with such absurd joy?

“Jen.” He smiled and held out his hands to her.

Taking them, she slid from the white mare’s saddle into his arms, while Gareth looked on in disapproving impatience to get on with his quest. “John,” she said, and turned back to the boy. “Gareth of Magloshaldon—this is Lord John Aversin, the Dragonsbane of Alyn Hold.”

For one instant, Gareth was shocked absolutely speechless. He sat for a moment, staring, stunned as if struck over the head; then he dismounted so hastily that he clutched his hurt arm with a gasp. It was as if, Jenny thought, in all his ballad-fed fantasies of meeting the Dragonsbane, it had never occurred to him that his hero would be afoot, not to say ankle-deep in mud beside the local pigsty. In his face was plain evidence that, though he himself was over six-foot-three, and must be taller than anyone else he knew, he had never connected this with the fact that, unless his hero was a giant, he would perforce be shorter also. Neither, she supposed, had any ballad mentioned spectacles.

Still Gareth had not spoken. Aversin, interpreting his silence and the look on his face with his usual fiendish accuracy, said, “I’d show you my dragon-slaying scars to prove it, but they’re placed where I can’t exhibit ’em in public.”

It said worlds for Gareth’s courtly breeding—and, Jenny supposed, the peculiar stoicism of courtiers—that, even laboring under the shock of his life and the pain of a wounded arm, he swept into a very creditable salaam of greeting. When he straightened up again, he adjusted the set of his cloak with a kind of sorry hauteur, pushed his bent spectacles a little more firmly up onto the bridge of his nose, and said in a voice that was shaky but oddly determined, “My lord Dragonsbane, I have ridden here on errantry from the south, with a message for you from the King, Uriens of Belmarie.” He seemed to gather strength from these words, settling into the heraldic sonority of his ballad-snatch of golden swords and bright plumes in spite of the smell of the pigsty and the thin, cold rain that had begun to patter down.

“My lord Aversin, I have been sent to bring you south. A dragon has come and laid waste the city of the gnomes in the Deep of Ylferdun; it lairs there now, fifteen miles from the King’s city of Bel. The King begs that you come to slay it ere the whole countryside is destroyed.”

The boy drew himself up, having delivered himself of his quest, a look of noble and martyred serenity on his face, very like, Jenny thought, someone out of a ballad himself. Then, like all good messengers in ballads, he collapsed and slid to the soupy mud and cowpies in a dead faint.

Scale and Structure of a Dragon

(From John Aversin’s notes)

1 Mane structure and spikes at joints are thicker than shown. A bone “shield” extends from the back of the skull beneath the mane to protect the nape of the neck.

2 Golden Dragon of Wyr measured approx. 27’ of which 12’ was tail; there are rumors of dragons longer than 50’.

TWO

RAIN DRUMMED STEADILY, drearily, on the walls of Alyn Hold’s broken-down tower. The Hold’s single guest room was never very bright; and, though it was only mid-afternoon, Jenny had summoned a dim ball of bluish witchfire to illuminate the table on which she had spread the contents of her medicine satchel; the rest of the little cubbyhole was curtained in shadow.

In the bed, Gareth dozed restlessly. The air was sweet with the ghosts of the long-dried fragrances of crushed herbs; the witchlight threw fine, close-grained shadows around the desiccated mummies of root and pod where they lay in the circles Jenny had traced. Slowly, rune by rune, she worked the healing spells over them, each with its own Limitation to prevent a too-quick healing that might harm the body as a whole, her fingers patiently tracing the signs, her mind calling down the qualities of the universe particular to each, like separate threads of unheard music. It was said that the great mages could see the power of the runes they wrought glowing like cold fire in the air above the healing powders and sense the touch of it like plasmic light drawn from the fingertips. After long years of solitary meditation, Jenny had come to accept that, for her, magic was a depth and a stillness rather than the moving brilliance that it was for the great. It was something she would never quite become reconciled to, but at least it kept her from the resentment that would block what powers she did have. Within her narrow bounds, she knew she worked well.

The key to magic is magic, Caerdinn had said. To be a mage, you must be a mage. There is no time for anything else, if you will come to the fullness of your power.

So she had remained in the stone house on Frost Fell after Caerdinn had died, studying his books and measuring the stars, meditating in the crumbling circle of ancient standing stones that stood on the hillcrest above. Through the slow years her powers had grown with meditation and study, though never to what his had been. It was a life that had contented her. She had looked no further than the patient striving to increase her powers, while she healed others where she could and observed the turning of the seasons.

Then John had come.

The spells circled to their conclusion. For a time silence hung on the air, as if every hearth brick and rafter shadow, the fragrance of the applewood fire and the guttural trickle of the rain, had been preserved in amber for a thousand years. Jenny swept the spelled powders together into a bowl and raised her eyes. Gareth was watching her fearfully from the darkness of the curtained bed.

She got to her feet. As she moved toward him, he recoiled, his white face drawn with accusation and loathing. “You are his mistress!”

Jenny stopped, hearing the hatred in that weak voice. She said, “Yes. But it has nothing to do with you.”

He turned his face away, fretful and still half-dreaming. “You are just like her,” he muttered faintly. “Just like Zyerne …”

She stepped forward again, not certain she had heard clearly. “Who?”

“You’ve snared him with your spells—brought him down into the mud,” the boy whispered and broke off with a feverish sob. Disregarding his repulsion, she came worriedly to his side, feeling his face and hands; after a moment, he ceased his feeble resistance, already sinking back to sleep. His flesh felt neither hot nor overly chilled; his pulse was steady and strong. But still he tossed and murmured, “Never—I never will. Spells—you have laid spells on him—made him love you with your witcheries …” His eyelids slipped closed.

Jenny sighed and straightened up, looking down into the flushed, troubled face. “If only I had laid spells on him,” she murmured. “Then I could release us both—had I the courage.”

She dusted her hands on her skirt and descended the narrow darkness of the turret stair.

She found John in his study—what would have been a fair-sized room, had it not been jammed to overflowing with books. For the most part, these were ancient volumes, left at the Hold by the departing armies or scavenged from the cellars of the burned-out garrison towns of the south; rat-chewed, black with mildew, unreadable with waterstains, they crammed every shelf of the labyrinth of planks that filled two walls and they spilled off to litter the long oak table and heaped the floor in the corners. Sheets of notes were interleaved among their pages and between their covers, copied out by John in the winter evenings. Among and between them were jumbled at random the tools of a scribe—prickers and quills, knives and inkpots, pumice stones—and stranger things besides: metal tubes and tongs, plumb-bobs and levels, burning-glasses and pendulums, magnets, the blown shells of eggs, chips of rock, dried flowers, and a half-disassembled clock. A vast spiderweb of hoists and pulleys occupied the rafters in one corner, and battalions of guttered and decaying candles angled along the edges of every shelf and sill. The room was a magpie-nest of picked-at knowledge, the lair of a tinkerer to whom the universe was one vast toyshop of intriguing side issues. Above the hearth, like a giant iron pinecone, hung the tail-knob of the dragon of Wyr—fifteen inches long and nine through, covered with stumpy, broken spikes.

John himself stood beside the window, gazing through the thick glass of its much-mended casement out over the barren lands to the north, where they merged with the bruised and tumbled sky. His hand was pressed to his side, where the rain throbbed in the ribs that the tail-knob had cracked.

Though the soft buckskin of her boots made no sound on the rutted stone of the floor, he looked up as she came in. His eyes smiled greeting into hers, but she only leaned her shoulder against the stone of the doorpost and asked, “Well?”

He glanced ceilingward where Gareth would be lying. “What, our little hero and his dragon?” A smile flicked the corners of his thin, sensitive mouth, then vanished like the swift sunlight of a cloudy day. “I’ve slain one dragon, Jen, and it bloody near finished me. Tempting as the promise is of getting more fine ballads written of my deeds, I think I’ll pass this chance.”

Relief and the sudden recollection of Gareth’s ballad made Jenny giggle as she came into the room.

The whitish light of the windows caught in every crease of John’s leather sleeves as he stepped forward to meet her and bent to kiss her lips.

“Our hero never rode all the way north by himself, surely?”

Jenny shook her head. “He told me he took a ship from the south to Eldsbouch and rode east from there.”

“He’s gie lucky he made it that far,” John remarked, and kissed her again, his hands warm against her sides. “The pigs have been restless all day, carrying bits of straw about in their mouths—I turned back yesterday even from riding the bounds because of the way the crows were acting out on the Whin Hills. It’s two weeks early for them, but it’s in my mind this’ll be the first of the winter storms. The rocks at Eldsbouch are shipeaters. You know, Dotys says in Volume Three of his Histories—or is it in that part of Volume Five we found at Ember?—or is it in Clivy?—that there used to be a mole or breakwater across the harbor there, back in the days of the Kings. It was one of the Wonders of the World, Dotys—or Clivy—says, but nowhere can I find any mention of the engineering of it. One of these days I’m minded to take a boat out there and see what I can find underwater at the harbor mouth …”

Jenny shuddered, knowing John to be perfectly capable of undertaking such an investigation. She had still not forgotten the stone house he had blown up, after reading in some moldering account about the gnomes using blasting powder to tunnel in their Deeps, nor his experiments with water pipes.

Sudden commotion sounded in the dark of the turret stair, treble voices arguing, “She is, too!” and “Let go!” A muted scuffle ensued, and a moment later a red-haired, sturdy urchin of four or so exploded into the room in a swirl of grubby sheepskin and plaids, followed immediately by a slender, dark-haired boy of eight. Jenny smiled and held out her arms to them both. They flung themselves against her; small, filthy hands clutched delightedly at her hair, her skirt, and the sleeves of her shift, and she felt again the surge of ridiculous and illogical delight at being in their presence.

“And how are my little barbarians?” she asked in her coolest voice, which fooled neither of them.

“Good—we been good, Mama,” the older boy said, clinging to the faded blue cloth of her skirt. “I been good—Adric hasn’t.”

“Have, too,” retorted the younger one, whom John had lifted into his arms. “Papa had to whip Ian.”

“Did he, now?” She smiled down into her older son’s eyes, heavy-lidded and tip-tilted like John’s, but as summer blue as her own. “He doubtless deserved it.”

“With a big whip,” Adric amplified, carried away with his tale. “A hundred cuts.”

“Really?” She looked over at John with matter-of-fact inquiry in her expression. “All at one session, or did you rest in between?”

“One session,” John replied serenely. “And he never begged for mercy even once.”

“Good boy.” She ruffled Ian’s coarse black hair, and he twisted and giggled with pleasure at the solemn make-believe.

The boys had long ago accepted the fact that Jenny did not live at the Hold, as other boys’ mothers lived with their fathers; the Lord of the Hold and the Witch of Frost Fell did not have to behave like other adults. Like puppies who tolerate a kennelkeeper’s superintendence, the boys displayed a dutiful affection toward John’s stout Aunt Jane, who cared for them and, she believed, kept them out of trouble while John was away looking after the lands in his charge and Jenny lived apart in her own house on the Fell, pursuing the solitudes of her art. But it was their father they recognized as their master, and their mother as their love.

They started to tell her, in an excited and not very coherent duet, about a fox they had trapped, when a sound in the doorway made them turn. Gareth stood there, looking pale and tired, but dressed in his own clothes again, bandages making an ungainly lump under the sleeve of his spare shirt. He’d dug an unbroken pair of spectacles from his baggage as well; behind the thick lenses, his eyes were filled with sour distaste and bitter disillusion as he looked at her and her sons. It was as if the fact that John and she had become lovers—that she had borne John’s sons—had not only cheapened his erstwhile hero in his eyes, but had made her responsible for all those other disappointments that he had encountered in the Winterlands as well.

The boys sensed at once his disapprobation. Adric’s pugnacious little jaw began to come forward in a miniature version of John’s. But Ian, more sensitive, only signaled to his brother with his eyes, and the two took their silent leave. John watched them go; then his gaze returned, speculative, to Gareth. But all he said was, “So you lived, then?”

Rather shakily, Gareth replied, “Yes. Thank you—” He turned to Jenny, with a forced politeness that no amount of animosity could uproot from his courtier’s soul. “Thank you for helping me.” He took a step into the room and stopped again, staring blankly about him as he saw the place for the first time. Not something from a ballad, Jenny thought, amused in spite of herself. But then, no ballad could ever prepare anyone for John.

“Bit crowded,” John confessed. “My dad used to keep the books that had been left at the Hold in the storeroom with the corn, and the rats had accounted for most of ’em before I’d learned to read. I thought they’d be safer here.”

“Er …” Gareth said, at a loss. “I—I suppose …”

“He was a stiff-necked old villain, my dad,” John went on conversationally, coming to stand beside the hearth and extend his hands to the fire. “If it hadn’t been for old Caerdinn, who was about the Hold on and off when I was a lad, I’d never have got past the alphabet. Dad hadn’t much use for written things—I found half an act of Luciard’s Firegiver pasted over the cracks in the walls of the cupboard my granddad used to store winter clothes in. I could have gone out and thrown rocks at his grave, I was that furious, because of course there’s none of the play to be found now. God knows what they did with the rest of it—kindled the kitchen stoves, I expect. What we’ve managed to save isn’t much—Volumes Three and Four of Dotys’ Histories; most of Polyborus’ Analects and his Jurisprudence; the Elucidus Lapidarus; Clivy’s On Farming—in its entirety, for all that’s worth, though it’s pretty useless. I don’t think Clivy was much of a farmer, or even bothered to talk to farmers. He says that you can tell the coming of storms by taking measurements of the clouds and their shadows, but the grannies round the villages say you can tell just watching the bees. And when he talks about the mating habits of pigs …”

“I warn you, Gareth,” Jenny said with a smile, “that John is a walking encyclopedia of old wives’ tales, granny-rhymes, snippets of every classical writer he can lay hands upon, and trivia gleaned from the far corners of the hollow earth—encourage him at your peril. He also can’t cook.”

“I can, though,” John shot back at her with a grin.

Gareth, still gazing around him in mystification at the cluttered room, said nothing, but his narrow face was a study of mental gymnastics as he strove to adjust the ballads’ conventionalized catalog of perfections with the reality of a bespectacled amateur engineer who collected lore about pigs.

“So, then,” John went on in a friendly voice, “tell us of this dragon of yours, Gareth of Magloshaldon, and why the King sent a boy of your years to carry his message, when he’s got warriors and knights that could do the job as well.”

“Er …” Gareth looked completely taken aback for a moment—messengers in ballads never being asked for their credentials. “That is—but that’s just it. He hasn’t got warriors and knights, not that can be spared. And I came because I knew where to look for you, from the ballads.”

He fished from the pouch at his belt a gold signet ring, whose bezel flashed in a spurt of yellow hearthlight—Jenny glimpsed a crowned king upon it, seated beneath twelve stars. John looked in silence at it for a moment, then bent his head and drew the ring to his lips with archaic reverence.

Jenny watched his action in silence. The King was the King, she thought. It was nearly a hundred years since he withdrew his troops from the north, leaving that to the barbarians and the chaos of lands without law. Yet John still regarded himself as the subject of the King.

It was something she herself had never understood—either John’s loyalty to the King whose laws he still fought to uphold, or Caerdinn’s sense of bitter and personal betrayal by those same Kings. To Jenny, the King was the ruler of another land, another time—she herself was a citizen only of the Winterlands.

Bright and small, the gold oval of the ring flashed as Gareth laid it upon the table, like a witness to all that was said. “He gave that to me when he sent me to seek you,” he told them. “The King’s champions all rode out against the dragon, and none of them returned. No one in the Realm has ever slain a dragon—nor even seen one up close to know how to attack it, really. And there is nothing to tell us. I know, I’ve looked, because it was the one useful thing that I could do. I know I’m not a knight, or a champion …” His voice stammered a little on the admission, breaking the armor of his formality. “I know I’m no good at sports. But I’ve studied all the ballads and all their variants, and no ballad really tells that much about the actual how-to of killing a dragon. We need a Dragonsbane,” he concluded helplessly. “We need someone who knows what he’s doing. We need your help.”

“And we need yours.” The light timbre of Aversin’s smoky voice suddenly hardened to flint. “We’ve needed your help for a hundred years, while this part of the Realm, from the River Wildspae north, was being laid waste by bandits and Iceriders and wolves and worse things, things we haven’t the knowledge anymore to deal with: marshdevils and Whisperers and the evils that haunt the night woods, evils that steal the blood and souls of the living. Has your King thought of that? It’s a bit late in the day for him to be asking favors of us.”

The boy stared at him, stunned. “But the dragon …”

“Pox blister your dragon! Your King has a hundred knights and my people have only me.” The light slid across the lenses of his specs in a flash of gold as he leaned his broad shoulders against the blackened stones of the chimney-breast, the spikes of the dragon’s tail-knob gleaming evilly beside his head. “Gnomes never have just one entrance to their Deeps. Couldn’t your King’s knights have gotten the surviving gnomes to guide them through a secondary entrance to take the thing from behind?”

“Uh …” Visibly nonplussed by the unheroic practicality of the suggestion, Gareth floundered. “I don’t think they could have. The rear entrance of the Deep is in the fortress of Halnath. The Master of Halnath—Polycarp, the King’s nephew—rose in revolt against the King not long before the dragon’s coming. The Citadel is under siege.”

Silent in the corner of the hearth to which she had retreated, Jenny heard the sudden shift in the boy’s voice, like the sound of a weakened foundation giving under strain. Looking up, she saw his too-prominent Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed.

There was some wound there, she guessed to herself, some memory still tender to the touch.

“That’s—that’s one reason so few of the King’s champions could be spared. It isn’t only the dragon, you see.” He leaned forward pleadingly. “The whole Realm is in danger from the rebels as well as the dragon. The Deep tunnels into the face of Nast Wall, the great mountain-ridge that divides the lowlands of Belmarie from the northeastern Marches. The Citadel of Halnath stands on a cliff on the other side of the mountain from the main gates of the Deep, with the town and the University below it. The gnomes of Ylferdun were our allies against the rebels, but now most of them have gone over to the Halnath side. The whole Realm is split. You must come! As long as the dragon is in Ylferdun we can’t keep the roads from the mountains properly guarded against the rebels, or send supplies to the besiegers of the Citadel. The King’s champions went out …” He swallowed again, his voice tightening with the memory. “The men who brought back the bodies said that most of them never even got a chance to draw their swords.”

“Gah!” Aversin looked away, anger and pity twisting his sensitive mouth. “Any fool who’d take a sword after a dragon in the first place …”

“But they didn’t know! All they had to go on were the songs!”

Aversin said nothing to this; but, judging by his compressed lips and the flare of his nostrils, his thoughts were not pleasant ones. Gazing into the fire, Jenny heard his silence, and something like the chill shadow of a wind-driven cloud passed across her heart.

Half against her will, she saw images form in the molten amber of the fire’s heart. She recognized the winter-colored sky above the gully, the charred and brittle spears of poisoned grass fine as needle-scratches against it, John standing poised on the gully’s rim, the barbed steel rod of a harpoon in one gloved hand, an ax gleaming in his belt. Something rippled in the gully, a living carpet of golden knives.

Clearer than the sharp, small ghosts of the past that she saw was the shiv-twist memory of fear as she saw him jump.

They had been lovers then for less than a year, still burningly conscious of one another’s bodies. When he had sought the dragon’s lair, more than anything else Jenny had been aware of the fragility of flesh and bone when it was pitted against steel and fire.

She shut her eyes; when she opened them again, the silken pictures were gone from the flame. She pressed her lips taut, forcing herself to listen without speaking, knowing it was and could be none of her affair. She could no more have told him not to go—not then, not now—than he could have told her to leave the stone house on Frost Fell and give up her seeking, to come to the Hold to cook his meals and raise his sons.

John was saying, “Tell me about this drake.”

“You mean you’ll come?” The forlorn eagerness in Gareth’s voice made Jenny want to get up and box his ears.

“I mean I want to hear about it.” The Dragonsbane came around the table and slouched into one of the room’s big carved chairs, sliding the other in Gareth’s direction with a shove of his booted foot. “How long ago did it strike?”

“It came by night, two weeks ago. I took ship three days later, from Claekith Harbor below the city of Bel. The ship is waiting for us at Eldsbouch.”

“I doubt that.” John scratched the side of his long nose with one scarred forefinger. “If your mariners were smart they’ll have turned and run for a safe port two days ago. The storms are coming. Eldsbouch will be no protection to them.”

“But they said they’d stay!” Gareth protested indignantly. “I paid them!”

“Gold will do them no good weighting their bones to the bottom of the cove,” John pointed out.

Gareth sank back into his chair, shocked and cut to the heart by this final betrayal. “They can’t have gone …”

There was a moment’s silence, while John looked down at his hands. Without lifting her eyes from the heart of the fire, Jenny said softly, “They are not there, Gareth. I see the sea, and it is black with storms; I see the old harbor at Eldsbouch, the gray river running through the broken houses there; I see the fisher-folk making fast their little boats to the ruins of the old piers and all the stones shining under the rain. There is no ship there, Gareth.”

“You’re wrong,” he said hopelessly. “You have to be wrong.” He turned back to John. “It’ll take us weeks to get back, traveling overland …”

“Us?” John said softly, and Gareth blushed and looked as frightened as if he had uttered mortal insult. After a moment John went on, “How big is this dragon of yours?”

Gareth swallowed again and drew his breath in a shaky sigh. “Huge,” he said dully. “How huge?”

Gareth hesitated. Like most people, he had no eye for relative size. “It must have been a hundred feet long. They say the shadow of its wings covered the whole of Deeping Vale.”