26 Barbara Hambly
clinging to the faded blue cloth of her skirt."/ been good—
Adric hasn't."
"Have, too," retorted the younger one, whom John
had lifted into his arms. "Papa had to whip lan."
"Did he, now?" She smiled down into her older son's
eyes, heavy-lidded and tip-tilted like John's, but as sum-
mer 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 lan'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, look-
ing 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
Dragonsbane 27
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 Winter-
lands 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 lan, 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 waBs of
the cupboard my granddad used to store winter clothes
28 Barbara Hambly
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 fanners. 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 comers 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 ofMagloshaldon, 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."
Dragonsbane 29
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 admis-
sion, 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 Dra-
gonsbane," 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,
30 Barbara Hambly
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: marsh-
devils 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 practi-
cality 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 comer 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 cham-
pions 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-
Dragonsbane 31
ridge that divides the lowlands ofBelmarie from the north-
eastern 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 ofYlferdun 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 cham-
pions went out..." He swallowed again, his voice tight-
ening 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 com-
pressed 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
32 Barbara Hambly
bumingly 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 indig-
nantly. "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 looke
d down
Dragonsbane 33
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 ofDeeping
Vale."
"Who says?" John inquired, shifting his weight side-
ways in the chair and hooking a knee over the fornicating
sea-lions that made up the left-hand arm. "I thought it
came at night, and munched up anyone close enough to
see it by day."
"Well..." He floundered in a sea of third-hand rumor.
"Ever see it on the ground?"
Gareth blushed and shook his head.
"It's gie hard to judge things in the air," John said
kindly, pushing up his specs again. "The drake I slew here