Dragonsbane - Barbara Hambly

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the cloudy streams of her hair and caught the bright flicker of Aversin’s eyes behind his thick spectacles, the pennywhistle luring the harp out of its sadness and into dance airs wild as hay-harvest winds. As the evening deepened, the Hold folk drifted up to the study to join them, sitting where they could on the floor or the hearth or in the deep embrasures of the windows: John’s Aunt Jane and Cousin Dilly and others of the vast tribe of his female relatives who lived at the Hold; Ian and Adric; the fat, jovial smith Muffle; all part of the pattern of the life of the Winterlands that was so dull-seeming at first, but was in truth close-woven and complex as its random plaids. And among them Gareth sat, ill at ease as a bright southern parrot in a rookery. He kept looking about him with puzzled distaste in the leaping restlessness of the red firelight that threw into momentary brightness the moldery rummage of decaying books, of rocks and chemical experiments, and that glowed in the children’s eyes and made amber mirrors of the dogs’—wondering, Jenny thought, how a quest as glorious as his could possibly have ended in such a place.

      And every now and then, she noticed, his eyes returned to John. There was in them not only anxiety, but a kind of nervous dread, as if he were haunted by a gnawing guilt for something he had done, or something he knew he must yet do.

      “Will you go?” Jenny asked softly, much later in the night, lying in the warm nest of bearskins and patchwork with her dark hair scattered like sea-wrack over John’s breast and arm.

      “If I slay his dragon for him, the King will have to listen to me,” John said reasonably. “If I come at his calling, I must be his subject, and if I am—we are—his subjects, as King he owes us the protection of his troops. If I’m not his subject …” He paused, as he thought over what his next words would mean about the Law of the Realm for which he had so long fought. He sighed and let the thought go.

      For a time the silence was broken only by the groan of wind in the tower overhead and the drumming of the rain on the walls. But even had she not been able to see, catlike, in the dark, Jenny knew John did not sleep. There was a tension in all his muscles, and the uneasy knowledge of how narrow had been the margin between living and dying, when he had fought the Golden Dragon of Wyr. Her hand under his back could still feel the rucked, hard ridges of scar.

      “Jenny,” he said at last, “my father told me that his dad used to be able to raise four and five hundred of militia when the Iceriders came. They fought pitched battles on the edge of the northern ocean and marched in force to break the strongholds of the bandit-kings that used to cover the eastward roads. When that band of brigands attacked Far West Riding the year before last, do you remember how many men we could come up with, the mayor of Riding, the mayor of Toby, and myself among us? Less than a hundred, and twelve of those we lost in that fight.”

      As he moved his head, the banked glow of the hearth on the other side of the small sanctum of their bedchamber caught a thread of carnelian from the shoulder-length mop of his hair. “Jen, we can’t go on like this. You know we can’t. We’re weakening all the time. The lands of the King’s law, the law that keeps the stronger from enslaving the weaker, are shrinking away. Every time a farm is wiped out by wolves or brigands or Iceriders, it’s one less shield in the wall. Every time some family ups and goes south to indenture themselves as serfs there, always provided they make it that far, it weakens those of us that are left. And the law itself is waning, as fewer and fewer people even know why there is law. Do you realize that because I’ve read a handful of volumes of Dotys and whatever pages of Polyborus’ Jurisprudence I could find stuck in the cracks of the tower I’m accounted a scholar? We need the help of the King, Jen, if we’re not to be feeding on one another within a generation. I can buy them that help.”

      “With what?” asked Jenny softly. “The flesh off your bones? If you are killed by the dragon, what of your people then?”

      Beneath her cheek she felt his shoulder move. “I could be killed by wolves or bandits next week—come to that, I could fall off old Osprey and break my neck.” And when she chuckled, unexpectedly amused at that, he added in an aggrieved voice, “It’s exactly what my father did.”

      “Your father knew no better than to ride drunk.” She smiled a little in spite of herself. “I wonder what he would have made of our young hero?”

      John laughed in the darkness. “Gaw, he’d have eaten him for breakfast.” Seventeen years, ten of which had been spent knowing Jenny, had finally given him a tolerance of the man he had grown up hating. Then he drew her closer and kissed her hair. When he spoke again, his voice was quiet. “I have to do it, Jen. I won’t be gone long.”

      A particularly fierce gust of wind shivered in the tower’s ancient bones, and Jenny drew the worn softness of quilts and furs up over her bare shoulders. A month, perhaps, she calculated; maybe a little more. It would give her a chance to catch up on her neglected meditations, to pursue the studies that she too often put aside these days, to come to the Hold to be with him and their sons.

      To be a mage you must be a mage, Caerdinn had said. Magic is the only key to magic. She knew that she was not the mage that he had been, even when she had known him first, when he was in his eighties and she a skinny, wretched, ugly girl of fourteen. She sometimes wondered whether it was because he had been so old, at the end of his strength, when he came to teach her, the last of his pupils, or because she was simply not very good. Lying awake in the darkness, listening to the wind or to the terrible greatness of the moor silence which was worse, she sometimes admitted the truth to herself—that what she gave to John, what she found herself more and more giving to those two little boys snuggled together like puppies upstairs, she took from the strength of her power.

      All that she had, to divide between her magic and her love, was time. In a few years she would be forty. For ten years she had scattered her time, sowing it broadcast like a farmer in summer sunshine, instead of hoarding it and pouring it back into meditation and magic. She moved her head on John’s shoulder, and the warmth of their long friendship was in the tightening of his arm around her. Had she forgone this, she wondered, would she be as powerful as Caerdinn had once been? As powerful as she sometimes felt she could be, when she meditated among the stones on her lonely hill?

      She would have that time, with her mind undistracted, time to work and strive and study. The snow would be deep by the time John returned.

      If he returned.

      The shadow of the dragon of Wyr seemed to cover her again, blotting the sky as it swooped down like a hawk over the autumn dance floor at Great Toby. The sickening jam of her heart in her throat came back to her, as John ran forward under that descending shadow, trying to reach the terrified gaggle of children cowering in the center of the floor. The metallic stink of spat fire seemed to burn again in her nostrils, the screams echoing in her ears …

      Twenty-seven feet, John had said. What it meant was that from the top of the dragon’s shoulder to the ground was the height of a man’s shoulder, and half again that to the top of its tall haunches, backed by all that weight and strength and speed.

      And for no good reason she could think of, she remembered the sudden shift of the boy Gareth’s eyes.

      After a long time of silence she said, “John?”

      “Aye, love?”

      “I want to go with you, when you ride south.”

      She felt the hardening of the muscles of his body. It was nearly a full minute before he answered her, and she could hear in his voice the struggle between what he wanted and what he thought might be best. “You’ve said yourself it’ll be a bad winter, love. I’m thinking one or the other of us should be here.”

      He was right, and she knew it. Even the coats of her cats were thick this fall. A month ago she had been troubled to see how the birds were departing, early and swiftly, anxious to be gone. The signs pointed to famine and sleet, and on the heels of those would come barbarian raids from across the ice-locked northern sea.

      And yet, she thought … and yet … Was this the weakness of a woman who does not want to be parted from the man she loves, or was it something else? Caerdinn would have said that love clouded the instincts of a mage.

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