but nobody asked me." He grinned and added, "I'm sorry
you were disappointed."
Gareth grinned back. "I suppose it had to rain on my
birthday sometime," he said, a little shyly. Then he hes-
itated, as if struggling against some inner constraint.
"Aversin, listen," he stammered. Then he coughed as the
wind shifted, and smoke swept over them all.
"God's Grandmother, it's the bloody cakes!" John swore
and dashed back to the fire, cursing awesomely. "Jen, it
isn't my fault..."
"It is." Jenny walked in a more leisurely manner to
join him, in time to help him pick the last pitiful black
lump from the griddle and toss it into the waters of the
marsh with a milky plash. "I should have known better
than to trust you with this. Now go tend the horses and
let me do what you brought me along to do." She picked
up the bowl of meal. Though she kept her face stem, the
touch of her eyes upon his was like a kiss.
CHAPTER IV
IN THE DAYS that followed. Jenny was interested to
notice the change in Gareth's attitude toward her and
toward John. For the most part he seemed to return to
the confiding friendliness he had shown her after she had
rescued him from the bandits among the ruins, before he
had learned that she was his hero's mistress, but it was
not quite the same. It alternated with a growing nervous-
ness and with odd, struggling silences in his conversation.
If he had lied about something at the Hold, Jenny thought,
he was regretting it now—but not regretting it enough yet
to confess the truth.
Whatever the truth was, she felt that she came close
to learning it the day after the rescue from the Meewinks.
John had ridden ahead to scout the ruinous stone bridge
that spanned the torrent of the Snake River, leaving them
alone with the spare horse^and mules in the louring silence
of the winter woods. "Are the Whisperers real?" he asked
her softly, glancing over his shoulder as if he feared to
see last night's vision fading into daytime reality from the
mists between the trees.
"Real enough to kill a man," Jenny said, "if they can
75
76 Barbara Hambly
lure him away from his friends. Since they drink blood,
they must be fleshly enough to require sustenance; but,
other than that, no one knows much about them. You had
a narrow escape."
"I know," he mumbled, looking shamefacedly down at
his hands. They were bare, and chapped with cold—as
well as his cloak and sword, he had lost his gloves in the
house of the Meewinks; Jenny suspected that later in the
winter the Meewinks would boil them and eat the leather.
One of John's old plaids was draped on over the boy's
doublet and borrowed jerkin. With his thin hair dripping
with moisture down onto the lenses of his cracked spec-
tacles, he looked very little like the young courtier who
had come to the Hold.
"Jenny," he said hesitantly, "thank you—this is the
second time—for saving my life. I—I'm sorry I've behaved
toward you as I have. It's just that..." His voice tailed
off uncertainly.
"I suspect," said Jenny kindly, "that you had me mis-
taken for someone else that you know."
Ready color flooded to the boy's cheeks. Wind moaned
through the bare trees—he startled, then turned back to
her with a sigh. "The thing is, you saved my life at the
risk of your own, and I endangered you both stupidly. I
should have known better than to trust the Meewinks; I
should never have left the camp. But..."
Jenny smiled and shook her head. The rain had ceased,
and she had put back her hood, letting the wind stir in
her long hair; with a touch of her heels, she urged The
Stupider Roan on again, and the whole train of them moved
slowly down the trail.
"It is difficult," she said, "not to believe in the illusions
you see cannot possibly be there outside the spell-circle
crying your name, there is a part of you that needs to go
to them."
Dragonsbane 77
"What—what shapes have you seen them take?" Gar-
eth asked in a hushed voice.
The memory was an evil one, and it was a moment
before Jenny answered. Then she said, "My sons. lan and
Adric." The vision had been so real that even calling their
images in Caerdinn's serving-crystal to make sure that
they were safe at the Hold had not entirely banished her
fears for them from her mind. After a moment's thought
she added, "They have an uncanny way of taking the
shape that most troubles you; of knowing, not only your
love, but your guilt and your longing."
Gareth flinched at that, and looked away. They rode
on in silence for a few moments; then he asked, "How
do they know?"
She shook her head. "Perhaps they do read your
dreams. Perhaps they are themselves only mirrors and,
like mirrors, have no knowledge of what they reflect. The
spells we lay upon them cannot be binding because we
do not know their essence."
He frowned at her, puzzled. "Their what?"
"Their essence—their inner being." She drew rein just
above a long, flooded dip in the road where water lay
among the trees like a shining snake. "Who are you, Gar-
eth of Magloshaldon?"
He startled at that, and for an instant she saw fright
and guilt in his gray eyes. He stammered, "I—I'm Gareth
of—of Magloshaldon. It's a province of Belmarie..."
Her eyes sought his and held them in the gray shadows
of the trees. "And if you were not of that province, would
you still be Gareth?"
"Er—yes. Of course. I..."
"And if you were not Gareth?" she pressed him, hold-
ing his gaze and mind locked with her own. "Would you
still be you? If you were crippled, or old—if you became
a leper, or lost your manhood—who would you be then?"
"I don't know—"
78 Barbara Hambly
"You know."
"Stop it!" He tried to look away and could not. Her
grip upon him tightened, as she probed at his mind, show-
ing him it through her eyes: a vivid kaleidoscope of the
borrowed images of a thousand ballads, burning with the
overwhelming physical desires of the adolescent; the raw
wounds left by some bitter betrayal, and over all, the
shadowing darkness of a scarcely bearable guilt and fear.
She probed at that darkness—the lies he had told her
and John at the Hold, and some greater guilt besides. A
true crime, she wondered, or only that which seemed one
to him? Gareth cried, "Stop it!" again, and she heard the
despair and terror in his voice; for a moment, through his
eyes, she saw herself—pitiless blue eyes in a face like a
white wedge of bone between the cloud-dark streams of
her hair. She remembered when Caerdinn had done this
same thing to her, and released Gareth quickly. He turned
away, covering his face, his whole body shivering with
shock and fright.
After a moment Jenny said softly, "I'm sorry. But this
is the inner heart of magic, the way all spells work—with
the essence, the true name. It is true of the Whisperers
and of the greatest of mages as well." She clucked to the
horses and they started forward again, their hooves sink-
ing squishily into the tea-colored ooze. She went on, "All
you can do is ask yourself if it is reasonable that those
you see would be there in the woods, calling to you."
"But that's just it," said Gareth. "It was reasonable.
Zyerne..." He stopped himself.
"Zyeme?" It was the name he had muttered in his
dreams at the Hold, when he had flinched aside from her
touch.
"The Lady Zyeme," he said hesitantly. "The—the
King's mistress." Under its streaking of rain and mud his
face was bright carnation pink. Jenny remembered her
Dragonsbane 79
strange and cloudy dream of the dark-haired woman and
her tinkling laughter.
"And you love her?"
Gareth blushed even redder. In a stifled voice he
repeated, "She is the King's mistress."
As I am John's, Jenny thought, suddenly realizing
whence his anger at her had stemmed.
"In any case," Gareth went on after a moment, "we're
all in love with her. That is—she's the first lady of the
Court, the most beautiful... We write sonnets to her
beauty..."
"Does she love you?" inquired Jenny, and Gareth fell
silent for a time, concentrating on urging his horse through
the mud and up the stony slope beyond.
At length he said, "I—I don't know. Sometimes I
think..." Then he shook his head. "She frightens me,"
he admitted. "And yet—she's a witch, you see."
"Yes," said Jenny softly. "I guessed that, from what
you said at the Hold. You feared I would be like her."
He looked stricken, as if caught in some horrible social
gaffe. "But—but you're not. She's very beautiful..." He
broke off, blushing in earnest, and Jenny laughed.
"Don't worry. I learned a long time ago what a mirror
was for."
"But you are beautiful," he insisted. "That is—Beau-
tiful isn't the right word."
"No." Jenny smiled. "I do think 'ugly' is the word
you're looking for."
Gareth shook his head stubbornly, his honesty forbid-
ding him to call her beautiful and his inexperience making
it impossible to express what he did mean. "Beauty—
beauty really doesn't have anything to do with it," he said
at last. "And she's nothing like you—for all her beauty,
she's crafty and hard-hearted and cares for nothing save
the pursuit of her powers."
"Then she is like me," said Jenny. "For I am crafty—
80 Barbara Humbly
skilled in my crafts, such as they are—and I have been
called hard-hearted since I was a little girl and chose to
sit staring at the flame of a candle until the pictures came,
rather than play at house with the other little girls. And
as for the rest..." She sighed. "The key to magic is magic;
to be a mage you must be a mage. My old master used
to say that. The pursuit of your power takes all that you
have, if you will be great—it leaves neither time, nor
energy, for anything else. We are born with the seeds of
power in us and driven to be what we are by a hunger
that knows no slaking. Knowledge—power—to know
what songs the stars sing; to center all the forces of cre-
ation upon a rune drawn in the air—we can never give
over the seeking of it. It is the stuff of loneliness, Gareth."
They rode on in silence for a time. The woods about
them were pewter and iron, streaked here and there with
the rust of the dying year. In the wan light Gareth looked
older than he had when they began, for he had lost flesh
on the trip, and lack of sleep had left permanent smudges
of bister beneath his eyes. At length he turned to her again
and asked, "And do the magebom love?"
Jenny sighed again. "They say that a wizard's wife is
a widow. A woman who bears a wizard's child must know
that he will leave her to raise the child alone, should his
powers call him elsewhere. It is for this reason that no
priest will perform the wedding ceremony for the mage-
bom, and no flute player will officiate upon the rites. And
it would be an act of cruelty for a witch to bear any man's
child."
He looked across at her, puzzled both by her words
and by the coolness of her voice, as if the matter had
nothing to do with her.
She went on, looking ahead at the half-hidden road
beneath its foul mire of tangled weeds, "A witch will
always care more for the pursuit of her powers than for
her child, or for any man. She will either desert her child,
Dragonsbane 81
or come to hate it for keeping her from the time she needs
to meditate, to study, to grow in her arts. Did you know
John's mother was a witch?"
Gareth stared at her, shocked.
"She was a shaman of the Iceriders—his father took
her in battle. Your ballads said nothing of it?"
He shook his head numbly. "Nothing—in fact, in the
Greenhythe variant of the ballad ofAversin and the Golden
Worm of Wyr, it talks about him bidding farewell to his
mother in her bower, before going off to fight the dragon—
but now that I think of it, there is a scene very like it in
the Greenhythe ballad of Selkythar Dragonsbane and in
one of the late Halnath variants of the Song of Antara
Warlady. I just thought it was something Dragonsbanes
did."
A smile brushed her lips, then faded. "She was my first
teacher in the ways of power, when I was six. They used
to say of her what you thought of me—that she had laid
spells upon her lord to make him love her, tangling him
in her long hair. I thought so, too, as a little child—until
I saw how she fought for the freedom that he would not
give her. When I knew her, she had already borne his
child; but when John was five, she left in the screaming
winds of an icestorm, she and the frost-eyed wolf who
was her companion. She was never seen in the Winter-
lands again. And I..."
There was long silence, broken only by the soft squish
of hooves in the roadbed, the patter of rain, and the occa-
sional pop of the mule Clivy's hooves as he overreached
his own stride. When she went on, her voice was low, as
if she spoke to herself.
"He asked me to bear his children, for he wanted chil-
dren, and he wanted those children to be mine also. He
knew I would never live with him as his wife and devote
my time to his comfort and that of his sons. I knew it,
too." She sighed. "The lioness bears her cubs and then
82 Barbara Hanbly
goes back to the
hunting trail. I thought I could do the
same. All my life I have been called heartless—would
that it were really so. I hadn't thought that I would love
them."
Through the trees, the dilapidated towers of the Snake
River bridge came into view, the water streaming high and
yellow beneath the crumbling arches. Before them, a dark
figure sat his horse in the gloomy road, spectacles flashing
like rounds of dirty ice in the cold daylight, signaling that
the way was safe.
They made camp that night outside the ruined town of
Ember, once the capital of the province of Wyr. Nothing
remained of it now save a dimpled stone mound, over
grown with birch and seedling maple, and the decaying
remains of the curtain wall. Jenny knew it of old, from
the days when she and Caerdinn had searched for books
in the buried cellars. He had beaten her, she remembered,
when she had spoken of the beauty of the skeleton lines
of stone that shimmered through the dark cloak of the
fallow earth.
As dusk came down, they pitched their camp outside
the walls. Jenny gathered the quick-burning bark of the
paper birch for kindling and fetched water from the spring
nearby. Gareth saw her coming and broke purposefully
away from his own tasks to join her. "Jenny," he began,
and she looked up at him.
"Yes?"
He paused, like a naked swimmer on the bank of a
very cold pool, then visibly lost his courage. "Er—is there
some reason why we didn't camp in the ruins of the town