"To come here to risk my bones slaying a dragon and end
up playing dancing bear for a pack of children." He sat
on the edge of the curtained bed, working at the heavy
buckles of his doublet.
"Did Gareth speak to you?"
His spectacles flashed again as he nodded.
"And?"
John shrugged. "Seeing the pack he runs with, I'm not
surprised he's a gammy-handed chuff with less sense than
my Cousin Dilly's mulberry bushes. And he did take the
risk to search for me, I'll give him that." His voice was
muffled as he bent over to pull off his boots. "Though I'll
wager all the dragon's gold to little green apples he had
no idea how dangerous it would be. God knows what I'd
have done in his shoes, and him that desperate to help
and knowing he hadn't a chance against the dragon him-
self." He set his boots on the floor and sat up again.
"However we came here, I'd be a fool not to speak with
the King and see what he'll offer me, though it's in my
mind that we'll run up against Zyerne in any dealings we
have with him."
Even while playing dancing bear, thought Jenny as she
drew the pins from her hair and let her fashionable veils
slither to the floor, John didn't miss much. The stiffened
silk felt cold under her fingers, from the touch of the
window's nearness, even as her hair did when she unwound
116 Barbara Humbly
its thick coil and let it whisper dryly down over her bony,
half-bared shoulders.
At length she said, "When Gareth first spoke to me of
her, I was jealous, hating her without ever having seen
her. She has everything that I wanted, John: genius, time
... and beauty," she added, realizing that that, too, mat-
tered. "I was afraid it was that, still."
"I don't know, love." He got to his feet, barefoot in
breeches and creased shirt, and came to the window where
she sat. "It doesn't sound very like you." His hands were
warm through the stiff, chilly satins of her borrowed gown
as he collected the raven weight of her hair and sorted it
into columns that spilled down through his fingers. "I
don't know about her magic, for I'm not magebom myself,
but I do know she is cruel for the sport of it—not in the
big things that would get her pointed at, but in the little
ones—and she leads the others on, teaching them by
example and jest to be as cruel as she. Myself, I'd take
a whip to lan, if he treated a guest as she treated you. I
see now what that gnome we met on the road meant when
he said she poisons what she touches. But she's only a
mistress, when all's said. And as for her being beauti-
ful. .." He shrugged. "If I was a bit shapecrafty, I'd be
beautiful, too."
In spite of herself Jenny laughed and leaned back into
his arms.
But later, in the darkness of the curtained bed, the
memory of Zyeme returned once more to her thoughts.
She saw again the enchantress and Bond in the rosy aura
of the nightlamp and felt the weight and strength of the
magic that had filled the room like the silent build of
thunder. Was it the magnitude of the power alone that
had frightened her, she wondered. Or had it been some
sense of filthiness that lay in it, like the back-taste of
souring milk? Or had that, in its turn, been only the worm-
Dragonsi>a»»e 117
wood other own jealousy of the younger woman's greater
arts?
John had said that it didn't sound very like her, but
she knew he was wrong. It was like her, like the part of
herself she fought against, the fourteen-year-old girl still
buried in her soul, weeping with exhausted, bitter rage
when the rains summoned by her teacher would not dis-
perse at her command. She had hated Caerdinn for being
stronger than she. And although the long years of looking
after the irascible old man had turned that hatred to affec-
tion, she had never forgotten that she was capable of it.
Even, she added ironically to herself, as she was capable
of working the death-spells on a helpless man, as she had
on the dying robber in the ruins of the town; even as she
was capable of leaving a man and two children who loved
her, because of her love of the quest for power.
Would I have been able to understand what I saw tonight
if I had given all my time, all my heart, to the study of
magic? Would I have had power like that, mighty as a
storm gathered into my two hands?
Through the windows beyond the half-parted bedcur-
tains, she could see the chill white eye of the moon. Its
light, broken by the leading of the casement, lay scattered
like the spangles of a fish's mail across the black and silver
satin of the gown that she had worn and over the respect-
able brown velvet suit that John had not. It touched the
bed and picked out the scars that crossed John's bare
arm, glimmered on the upturned palm of his hand, and
outlined the shape of his nose and lips against the dark-
ness. Her vision in the water bowl returned to her again,
an icy shadow on her heart.
Would she be able to save him, she wondered, if she
were more powerful? If she had given her time to her
powers wholly, instead of portioning it between them and
him? Was that, ultimately, what she had cast unknowingly
away?
118 Barbara Hambly
Somewhere in the night a hinge creaked. Stilling her
breathing to listen, she heard the almost soundless pat of
bare feet outside her door and the muffled vibration of a
shoulder blundering into the wall.
She slid from beneath the silken quilts and pulled on
her shift. Over it she wrapped the first garment she laid
hands on, John's voluminous plaids, and swiftly crossed
the blackness of the room to open the door.
"Gar?"
He was standing a few feet from her, gawky and very
boyish-looking in his long nightshirt. His gray eyes stared
out straight ahead of him, without benefit of spectacles,
and his thin hair was flattened and tangled from the pillow.
He gasped at the sound of her voice and almost fell, grop-
ing for the wall's support. She realized then that she had
waked him.
"Gar, it's me, Jenny. Are you all right?"
His breathing was fast with shock. She put her hand
gently on his arm to steady him, and he blinked myop-
ically down at her for a moment. Then he drew a long
breath. "Fine," he said shakily. "I'm fine, Jenny. I..."
He looked around him and ran an unsteady hand through
his hair. "I—I must have been walking in my sleep again."
"Do you often?"
He nodded and rubbed his face. "That is... I didn't in
the north, but I do sometimes here. It's just that I
dreamed..." He paused, frowning, trying to recall.
"Zyeme..."
"Zyeme?"
Sudden color flooded his pallid face. "Nothing," he
mumbled, and avoided her eyes.
"That is—I don't
remember."
After she had seen him safely back to the dark doorway
of his room. Jenny stood for a moment in the hall, hearing
the small sounds ofbedcurtains and sheets as he returned
to his rest. How late it was, she could not guess. The
Dragonsbane 119
hunting lodge was deathly silent about her, the smells of
long-dead candles, spilled wine, and the frowsty residue
of spent passions now flat and stale. All the length of the
corridor, every room was dark save one, whose door stood
ajar. The dim glow of a single nightlamp shone within,
and its light lay across the silky parquet of the floor like
a dropped scarf of luminous gold.
CHAPTER VI
"HE'LL HAVE TO listen to you." Gareth perched him-
self in the embrasure of one of the tall windows that ran
the length of the southern wall of the King's Gallery, the
wan sunlight shimmering with moony radiance in the old-
fashioned jewels he wore. "I've just heard that the dragon
destroyed the convoy taking supplies out to the siege
troops at Halnath last night. Over a thousand pounds of
flour and sugar and meat destroyed—horses and oxen
dead or scattered—the bodies of the guards burned past
recognition."
He nervously adjusted the elaborate folds of his cer-
emonial mantlings and peered shortsightedly at John and
Jenny, who shared a carved bench of ebony inlaid with
malachite. Due to the exigencies of court etiquette, formal
costume had been petrified into a fashion a hundred and
fifty years out of date, with the result that all the courtiers
and petitioners assembled in the long room had the stilted,
costumed look of characters in a masquerade. Jenny
noticed that John, though he might persist in playing the
barbarian in his leather and plaids among the admiring
younger courtiers, was not about to do so in the presence
120
Dragonsbane 121
of the King. Gareth had draped John's blue-and-cream
satin mantlings for him—a valet's job. Bond Cleriock had
offered to do it but. Jenny gathered, there were rigid sar-
torial rules governing such matters; it would have been
very like Bond to arrange the elaborate garment in some
ridiculous style, knowing the Dragonsbane was unable to
tell the difference.
Bond was present among the courtiers who awaited
the arrival of the King. Jenny could see him, further down
the King's Gallery, standing in one of the slanting bars of
pale, platinum light. As usual, his costume outshone every
other man's present; his mantlings were a miracle of com-
plex folds and studied elegance, so thick with embroidery
that they glittered like a snake's back; his flowing sleeves,
six generations out of date, were precise to a quarter-inch
in their length and hang. He had even painted his face in
the archaic formal fashion, which some of the courtiers
did in preference to the modem applications of kohl and
rouge—John had flatly refused to have anything to do
with either style. The colors accentuated the pallor of
young Clerlock's face, though he looked better. Jenny
noted, than he had yesterday on the ride from Zyeme's
hunting lodge to Bel—less drawn and exhausted.
He was looking about him now with nervous anxiety,
searching for someone—probably Zyeme. In spite of how
ill he had seemed yesterday, he had been her most faithful
attendant, riding at her side and holding her whip, her
pomander ball, and the reins of her palfrey when she
dismounted. Small thanks. Jenny thought, he had gotten
for it. Zyeme had spent the day flirting with the unre-
sponsive Gareth.
It was not that Gareth was immune to her charms. As
a nonparticipant. Jenny had an odd sense of unobserved
leisure, as if she were watching squirrels from a blind.
Unnoticed by the courtiers, she could see that Zyeme
was deliberately teasing Gareth's senses with every touch
122 Barbara Hambly
and smile. Do the magebom love? he had asked her once,
back in the bleak Winterlands. Evidently he had come to
his own conclusions about whether Zyeme loved him, or
he her. But Jenny knew full well that love and desire were
two different things, particularly to a boy of eighteen.
Under her innocently minxish airs, Zyeme was a woman
skilled at manipulating the passions' of men.
Wry? Jenny wondered, looking up at the boy's awk-
ward profile against the soft cobalt shadows of the gallery.
For the amusement of seeing him struggle not to betray
his father? Somehow to use his guilt to control him so
that one day she could turn the King against him by crying
rape?
A stir ran the length of the gallery, like wind in dry
wheat. At the far end, voices murmured, "The King! The
the folds of his mantlings again. John rose, pushing his
anachronistic specs a little more firmly up on the bridge
of his nose. Taking Jenny's hand, he followed more slowly,
as Gareth hurried toward the line of courtiers that was
forming up in the center of the hall.
At the far end, bronze doors swung inward. The Cham-
berlain Badegamus stepped through, stout, pink, and
elderly, emblazoned in a livery of crimson and gold that
smote the eye with its splendor. "My lords, my ladies—
the King."
Her arm against Gareth's in the press. Jenny was aware
of the boy's shudder of nervousness. He had, after all,
stolen his father's seal and disobeyed his orders—and he
was no longer as blithely unaware of the consequences
of his actions as the characters of most ballads seemed
to be. She felt him poised, ready to step forward and
execute the proper salaam, as others down the rank were
already doing, and receive his father's acknowledgment
and invitation to a private interview.
The King's head loomed above all others, taller even
Dragonsbane 123
than his son; Jenny could see that his hair was as fair as
Gareth's but much thicker, a warm barley-gold that was
beginning to fade to the color of straw. Like the steady
murmuring of waves on the shore, voices repeated "My
lord... my lord..."
Her mind returned briefly to the Winterlands. She sup-
posed she should have felt resentment for the Kings who
had withdrawn their troops and left the lands to ruin, or
awe at finally seeing the source of the King's law that
John was ready to die to uphold. But she felt neither,
knowing that this man, Uriens of Bel, had had nothing to
do with either withdrawing those troops or making the
Law, but was merely the heir of the men who had. Like
Gareth before he had traveled to the Winterlands, he
undoubtedly had no more notion of those things than what
he had learned from his tutors and promptly forgotten.
As he approached, nodding to this woman o
r that man,
signing that he would speak to them in private, Jenny felt
a vast sense of distance from this tall man in his regal
crimson robes. Her only allegiance was to the Winterlands
and to the individuals who dwelt there, to people and a
land she knew. It was John who felt the ancient bond of
fealty; John who had sworn to this man his allegiance,
his sword, and his life.
Nevertheless, she felt the tension as the King
approached them, tangible as a color in the air. Covert
eyes were on them, the younger courtiers watching, wait-
ing to see the reunion between the King and his errant
son.
Gareth stepped forward, the oak-leaf-cut end of his
mantlings gathered like a cloak between the second and
third fingers of his right hand. With surprising grace, he
bent his long, gangly frame into a perfect Sarmendes-in-
Splendor salaam, such as only the Heir could make, and
then only to the monarch. "My lord."
King Uriens II of Belmarie, Suzerain of the Marches,
124 Barbara Hambly
High Lord ofWyr, Nast, and the Seven Islands, regarded
his son for a moment out of hollow and colorless eyes set
deep within a haggard, brittle face. Then, without a word,
he turned away to acknowledge the next petitioner.
The silence in the gallery would have blistered the paint
from wood. Like black poison dumped into clear water,
it spread to the farthest ends of the room. The last few
petitioners' voices were audible through it, clearer and
clearer, as if they shouted; the closing of the gilded bronze
doors as the King passed on into his audience room
sounded like the booming of thunder. Jenny was con-
scious of the eyes of all the room looking anywhere but