DRAGONSHADOW

BOOK TWO OF THE WINTERLANDS QUARTET

Barbara Hambly

Copyright

HarperVoyager

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1999

Copyright © Barbara Hambly 1999

Map © Shelly Shapiro

Cover illustration © Nakonechnyi Jaroslav

Cover design by Andrew Davis © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019

Barbara Hambly asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008374204

Ebook Edition © October 2019 ISBN: 9780008374211

Version: 2019-10-14

Dedication

For J.W.L.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Maps

Book One: The Skerries of Light

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Book Two: The Burning Mirror

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

About the Author

Also by Barbara Hambly

About the Publisher

Maps

Book One

THE SKERRIES OF LIGHT

ONE

DRAGONSBANE, THEY CALLED him.

Slayer of dragons.

Or a dragon, anyway. And, he’d later found out, not such a very big one at that.

Lord John Aversin, Thane of the Winterlands, leaned back in the mended oak chair in his library as the messenger’s footfalls retreated down the tower stairs, and looked across at Jenny Waynest, who was curled up on the windowsill with a cat dozing in her lap.

“Bugger,” he said.

The night’s first appreciable breeze—warm and sticky as such things were in the Winterlands in summer—brought the grit of woodsmoke through the open window and made the candle flames shudder among the heaped books.

“A hundred feet long,” Jenny murmured.

John shook his head. “Gaw, any dragon looks a hundred feet long if you’re under it.” He pushed his round-lensed spectacles more firmly onto the bridge of his long nose. “Or in a position where you have to think about bein’ under it in the near future. I doubt it’s over fifty. That one we slew over by Far West Riding wasn’t quite thirty …” He nodded to the cold fireplace, where the black spiked mace of the golden dragon’s tail-tip hung. “And Morkeleb the Black was forty-two, though I thought he’d whack me over the back of the head when I asked could I measure him.” He grinned at the memory, but behind the spectacles Jenny could see the fear in his eyes.

Almost as an afterthought he added, “We’ll have to go after it.”

Jenny stroked the cat’s head. “Yes.” Her voice was inaudible. The cat purred and made bread on her knee.

“Funny, that.” John got to his feet and stretched to get the crick out of his back. “I’ve put together every account I can find of past Dragonsbanes—all them old ballads and tales—and matched ’em up as well as I could with the King-lists.” He gestured to the vast rummage that covered desk and floor and every shelf of the low-vaulted study: bound bundles of notes, parchments half copied from waterstained books found in the ruins south of Wrynde. Curillius on The Deeds of the Ancient Heroes, Gorgonimir’s Creatures and Phenomena. A fair copy of a fragment of the old Liever Draiken sent by the Regent of Bel, a connoisseur of both ancient manuscripts and the tales of Dragonsbanes. Notes yet to be copied—he’d jotted them down two years ago—of a dragon-slaying song sung by one of the garrison at Cair Corflyn, all mixed up with wax note tablets, candles, inkwells, scrapers, prickers, pumice, candle scissors, and dismantled clocks. For the fourteen years they’d been together, Jenny had heard John swear every year or two he’d put the place in order, and she knew that the phrase “put together” must not be taken too literally.

Magpie gleanings of learning by a man whose curiosity was an unfilled well; accretions of useful, interesting, or merely frivolous lore spewed back at random by circumstance and the mad God of Time.

“Some Dragonsbanes slay one dragon and that’s that, they’re in the ballads for good,” mused John. “Others slay two or three, and two of those, as far as I can figure ’em, are within ten years of the singletons. Then you’ll get generations, fifty, sixty, seventy years, when the dragons mind their own business, whatever that is, and nobody slays anybody. This is three for me. How’d I get so lucky?”

“The North is being settled again.” Jenny set Skinny Kitty aside and went to stand behind John, her arms around his waist. Through his rough red wool doublet and patched linen shirt she felt the ribs under the hard sheath of muscle, the warmth of his flesh. “It was the cattle herd at Skep Dhû garrison that the dragon hit. There probably hasn’t been this much livestock in the North since the Kings left. It may have drawn this one.”

“Gaw,” he said again, and set his hand over the folded knot of hers. An oddly deft hand for a warrior’s, inkstained and blistered in two places from a chemical experiment that took an unexpected turn. But thick, like his forearm, with the muscle of a lifetime of wielding a sword. In profile his was the face of a scholar. In his reddish-brown hair, hanging loose to his shoulders, the candlelight gilded the first flecks of gray.

He’d been twenty-four when he’d gone against the gold Dragon of Wyr, and his side still hurt like a knife-thrust from the damaged ribs whenever the weather turned. Jenny’s fingers could detect the ridge of the biggest scar he’d taken when he fought Morkeleb the Black in the burned-out Deep beneath Nast Wall. Life is fragile, she thought. Life is precious, and life is short. “How many is the most any Dragonsbane has been able to slay?” she asked, and John half-turned his head to grin down over his shoulder at her.

“Three. That was Alkmar the Godborn. His third dragon killed him.”

In the hour or so that separated them from moonrise, John and Jenny mustered all they would need for the slaying of the Dragon of Skep Dhû, such of them as were stored at the Hold. John’s battle armor, almost as battered and sorry as the doublet of black leather and iron in which he was wont to patrol his lands. Two axes, one a short, single-grip weapon that could be wielded from the back of a horse, the other longer and heavier, a two-handed thing for finishing a creature dying on the ground. Eight harpoons, like boar spears but larger, barbed and massive and written over with spells of death and ruin.

John’s half-brother Muffle, sergeant of the local militia and smith of the village of Alyn, had forged the first two in a hurry, when the Dragon of Wyr had descended on the herds of Great Toby fourteen years ago, and the others had been made a few weeks after that. Jenny had put spells of death on them all. In those days her powers had been small, hedge-witch magics taught her by old Caerdinn, who had once been tutor at Alyn Hold, and she had known little of dragons, only scraps and snippets culled from John’s books. Killing the golden dragon had taught her something of a dragon’s nature, so when Prince Gareth of Magloshaldon, later Regent for the King of Belmarie, had come begging John’s help against the Dragon of Nast Wall, she had been able to weave more accurate spells. Her magic was still, at that time, small.

Now she sat on the wooden platform that John and Muffle had built at the top of the tower for John’s telescope. The eight harpoons lay before her on the planks. Far below she heard John’s voice, and Muffle’s, distant as birdsong but far more profane, as they dragged out cauldrons and wood. She heard Adric’s voice, too, a gay treble—her second son, at eight burly and red-haired and every inch the descendant of John’s formidable, bearlike father: He should be in bed! Beyond a doubt three-year-old Mag was trailing, silent as a marsh fey, at his heels.

For a moment she felt annoyed at John’s Cousin Dilly, who was supposed to be looking after the children, and then let all thought of them slip away with the releasing of her breath. You cannot be a mage, old Caerdinn had said to her, if your thoughts are ever straying: to your supper, to your child, to whether you will have the next breath of air after this one is gone from under your ribs. The key to magic is magic. Never forget that.

And though she had found that magic’s key was something else, in many ways the old man had been correct. Her thought circled, like the power circle she had drawn on the platform around herself and the harpoons, and like the power that came down to her in silver threads from the shape of the stars, her thought took shape.

Cruelty. Uncaring. The quenching of life. The weary welcoming of the final dark.

Death-spells. And behind the death-spells, the gold fierce fire of dragon-magic.

For four years, now, that dragon-blaze had burned in her blood.

Morkeleb, she thought, forgive me.

Or was it not a thing of dragons to forgive?

Morkeleb the Black. The Dragon of Nast Wall.

She summoned the magic down from the stars, out of the air, called it from the core of fire within her that had burned into life when, by Morkeleb’s power, she had been transformed to dragon-kind. Though she had returned to human form, abandoning the immortality of the star-drakes, part of her essence, her inner heart, had remained the essence of a dragon, and she understood power as dragons understood it. Since it was not a thing of dragons to think or care, she did not, as she wove her death-spells, think or care about Morkeleb, who had loved her.

Loved her enough to let her return to human form.

Loved her enough to return her to John.

But after the death-spells were wrought and bound into the harpoons, she sat on the rickety platform above the Hold, her arms clasped round her knees, listening to the far-off voices of her husband and her son and remembering the skeletal black shape in the darkness, the silver labyrinthine eyes.

Morkeleb.

“Mother?”

Starlight showed the trapdoor that opened among the slates of the turret roof, but it did not penetrate the shadow underneath. Mageborn, Jenny was able to see her elder son, Ian, a weedy twelve-year-old, her own night-black hair and blue eyes in John’s beaky face. He stepped onto the steeply slanting roof and made to come down the stairs, and she said, “No, wait there.” The weariness of working the death-songs dragged at her bones. “Let me gather these up and send them on their way.”

Ian, she knew, would understand what she said. Only this year his own powers had started to manifest: small, as any teenager’s were—the ability to call fire and find lost objects, to sometimes see in fire things far away. Ian sat on the trapdoor’s sill and watched in fascination as she drew the glimmer from out of the circles, collecting it like cold spider-silk in her hands. All magic, Caerdinn had taught her, depended on Limitations. Before even beginning to lay down the circles of power, let alone summon the death-spells, she had cleansed the platform with rainwater and hyssop and laid on each separate rough-hewn plank such Words as would keep the vile magics from attaching to the place itself. Spells, too, were required to hold the wicked ferocity of what she had done within a small space, so it would not disperse over the countryside and cause ruin and death to everyone in the Hold, in the village, in the farms that nestled close to the walls. Like a miser picking up pinhead-sized crumbs of gold dust with his fingernails, so Jenny gathered into her palms each whisper and shudder of the death-spells’ residue, named them and neutralized them and released them into the turning starlight.

“Can I help?”

“No, not this time. You see what I’m doing, though?” He nodded. As she worked, she felt, rising through her—as it always rose, it seemed to her, at the most inopportune of times—the miserable flush of heat, the reminder that the change of a woman’s life was coming upon her. Patiently, wearily, she called upon other spells, little silvery cantrips of blood and time, to put that heat aside. “With spells of cursing you must be absolutely thorough, absolutely clean, particularly with spells worked in a high place,” she said.

Ian’s eyes went to John’s telescope, mounted at the far side of the platform; she saw he read her thought. It would not take much, they both knew, for the rail to give way, or John to lose his balance. A fragment of curse, a stray shadow of ill will, would be enough to cause John or Ian or anyone else to forget to latch the trapdoor, or for the latch to stick, so that Adric or Mag, or one of Cousin Rowanberry’s ever-multiplying brood, could come up here …

And even so, the platform was the safest place in all the Hold to work such spells.

As she and Ian bore the harpoons down the twisting stair, Jenny remembered what it had been, to be a dragon. To be a creature of diamond heart and limitless power. A creature to whom magic was not something that one did—well or less well—but the thing that one was: will and magic, flesh and bone, all one.

And not caring if a child fell from the platform.

With the moon’s rising John and Jenny and Ian rode out from Alyn Hold to the stone house on Frost Fell, where Jenny had for so many years lived alone. It had been Caerdinn’s house, and Jenny had lived as the old wizard’s pupil from the time she was thirteen and the buds of power she’d had as a child began to blossom. A single big room and a loft, bookshelves, a table of pickled pine, a vast hearth, and a big bed. It was to this house that John had first come to her, twenty-two and needing help against one of the bandit hordes that had been the scourge of the Winterlands in the days before the King sent his protecting armies to them again. He’d been challenged, Jenny recalled, to single combat by some bandit chief—maybe the one who had slain his father—and had heard that no weapon could harm a man who’d lain with a witch.

But she’d remembered him from her own childhood and his. His mother had been Jenny’s first teacher in the arts of power, a captive woman, an Icerider witch: the scandal when Lord Aver married her had been a nine days’ wonder through the Winterlands. When her son was four and Jenny seven, Kahiera Nightraven had vanished, gone back to the Iceriders, leaving Jenny with no better instructor than Caerdinn, who had hated all Iceriders and Kahiera above the rest. From that time until his arrival at Frost Fell, she had seen Kahiera’s son barely a score of times.

Riding up the fell now, she saw him in her mind as she had seen him then—cocky, quirky, aggressive, the scourge of maidens in five villages … And angry. It was his anger she remembered most, and the shy fleeting sweetness of his smile.

“Place needs thatching,” he remarked now, standing in Battlehammer’s stirrups to pull a straw from the overhang of the roof. “According to Dotys’ Catalogues, villagers on the Silver Isles used to braid straw into solid tiles and peg ’em to the rafterwork, which must have been gie heavy. Cowan”—the head stableman at the Hold—“says it can’t be done, but I’ve a mind to try this summer, if I can find how they did the braiding. If we’re all still alive by haying, that is.” Chewing the straw, he dropped from the warhorse’s back, looped the rein around the gate, and trailed Jenny and Ian into the house. “Garn,” he added, sniffing. “Why is it no matter what kind of Weirds you lay around the house, Jen, to keep wanderers from even seein’ the place, mice always seem to get in just fine?”

Jenny flashed him a quick glance by the soft blue radiance of the witchlight she called and bent to pull from under the bed the box of herbs she kept there. Hellebore, yellow jessamine, and the bright red caps of panther-mushroom, carefully potted in wax-stoppered jars. Jars and box were written around with spells, as the house walls were written, to keep intruders away, but there were two mice dead under the bed nevertheless.

Jenny traced the box with her blunt brown fingertips, automatically undoing the wards she had woven. Calabash gourds from the south contained the heads of water-vipers and the dried bodies of certain jellyfish. Nameless leaves were tied in ensorcelled thread, and waxed-parchment packets held deadly earths and salts. On the other side of the room Ian hunted among the few books still on the shelf; John caught Jenny around the waist, tripped her and tossed her onto the old flattened mattress, grinning impishly as she flung a spell across the room to keep Ian unaware of his parents’ misbehavior …

“Behave yourself.” She wriggled from his grasp, giggling like a village girl.

“It’s been too long since we’ve come here.” He let her up, but held her with one arm on either side of her, hands grasping the rough bedpost behind her back. Though only a little over medium height himself, John was easily a foot taller than she; the witchlight flashed silvery in his spectacles and in the twinkle of his eyes.

“And whose fault is that?” She kept her voice low—Ian was still preoccupied with his search. “I wasn’t the one who made stinks and messes and explosions in quest of self-igniting kindling all spring. I wasn’t the one who had to try to make a flying machine from drawings he’d found in some old book …”

“That was Heronax of Ernine,” protested John. “He flew from Ernine to the Silver Isles in it—wherever Ernine was—and I’ve gie near got the thing working properly now. You’ll see.”

He gathered her hair up in his hands, an overflowing double handful of oceanic night, and bent to kiss her lips. His body pressed hers to the tall, smooth-hewn post, and her hand explored the leather of his doublet, the rough wool of the dull-colored plaid wrapped over his shoulder, the hard muscle beneath the linen sleeve. Ian apparently bethought himself of some ingredient hidden inexplicably in the garden, for he wandered unseeing outside; the scents of the old house wrapped them around, moldy thatch and mice and the wild whisper of summer night in the Winterlands.

The heat of her body’s changing whispered to her, and she whispered back, Go away. It was not just the little cantrips, the knots of warding and change, that turned aside those migraines, those flashes of moodiness, those alien angers. It was this knowledge, this man, the lips that sought hers and the warmth of his flesh against her. The joy of a girl who had been ugly, who had been scorned and stoned in the village streets, who had been told, You’re a witch and will grow old alone.

The knowledge that this was not true.

Later she breathed, “And your dragon-slaying machine.”

“Aye, well.” He straightened from hunting her fallen hairpins, and the hard line returned to crease the corner of his mouth. “That’s near done, too. More’s the pity I spent this past winter tryin’ to learn to fly instead.”

Early in the morning Jenny kindled fire under the cauldrons that Sergeant Muffle had set up in the Hold’s old barracks court. She fetched water from the well in the corner and spent the day brewing poisons to put on the ensorcelled harpoons. In this she accepted Ian’s help, and John’s, too, and it was all John’s various aunts could do to keep Adric and Mag from stealing into the court and poisoning themselves in the process of lending a hand. By the late-gathering summer twilight they were dipping the harpoons into the thickened black mess, and the messenger from Skep Dhû joined them in the court.

“It isn’t just the garrison that relies on that herd,” the young man said, glancing, a little uncertainly, from the unprepossessing, bespectacled form of the Dragonsbane, stripped to a rather sooty singlet, doeskin britches, and boots, to that of the Witch of Frost Fell. His name was Borin, and he was a lieutenant of cavalry at the garrison, and like most southerners had to work very hard not to bite his thumb against evil in Jenny’s presence. “The manors the Regent is trying to establish to feed all the new garrisons depend on those cattle as well, for breeding and restocking. And we lost six, maybe eight bulls and as many cows, as far as we can gather—the carcasses stripped and gouged, the whole pasture swept with fire.”

John glanced at Jenny, who could almost read his thoughts. Fifteen cattle was a lot.

“And you got a good look at it?”

Borin nodded. “I saw it flying away toward the other side of the Skepping Hills. Green, as I said to you last night. The spines and horns down its back, and the barb on its tail, were crimson as blood.”

There was a moment’s silence. Ian, on the other side of the court, carefully propped two of the harpoons against the long shed that served John as a workroom; Sergeant Muffle leaned against the side of the beehive-shaped clay furnace in the center of the yard and wiped the sweat from his face. John said softly, “Green with crimson horns,” and Jenny knew why that small upright line appeared between his brows. He was fishing through his memory for the name of a star-drake of those colors in the old dragon-lists. Teltrevir, heliotrope, the old list said, the list handed down rote from centuries ago, compiled by none knew whom. Centhwevir blue, knotted with gold.

“Only a dozen or so are on the list,” said Jenny quietly. “There must be dozens—hundreds—that are not.”

“Aye.” He moved two of the harpoons, a restless gesture, not meeting her eyes. “We don’t even know how many dragons there are in the world, or where they live—or what they eat, for that matter, when they’re not makin’ free with our herds.” His voice was deep, like scuffed brown velvet; Jenny could sense him drawing in on himself, gathering himself for the fight. “In Gantering Pellus’ The Encyclopedia of Everything in the Material World it says they live in volcanoes that are crowned with ice, but then again Gantering Pellus also says bears are born shapeless like dough and licked into shape by their fathers. I near got meself killed when I was fifteen, findin’ out how much he didn’t know about bears. The Liever Draiken has it that dragons come down from the north …”

“Will you want a troop of men to help you?” asked Borin. In the short time he’d been at the Hold he’d already learned that when the Thane of the Winterlands started on ancient writings it was better to simply interrupt if one wanted anything done. “Commander Rocklys said she could dispatch one to meet you at Skep Dhû.”

John hesitated, then said, “Better not. Or at least, have ’em come, but no nearer than Wormwood Ford. There’s a reason them old heroes are always riding up on the dragon’s lair by themselves, son. Dragons listen, even in their sleep. Just three or four men, they’ll hear ’em coming, miles off, and be in the air by the time company arrives. If a dragon gets in the air, the man going after it is dead. You have to take ’em on the ground.”

“Oh.” Borin tried hard to look unconcerned about this piece of news. “I see.”

“At a guess,” John added thoughtfully, “the thing’s laired up in the ravines on the northwest side of the Skepping Hills, near where the herd was pastured. There’s only one or two ravines large enough to take a dragon. It shouldn’t be hard to figure out which. And then,” he said grimly, “then we’ll see who gets slain.”

TWO

IT WAS A ride of almost two days, east to the Skepping Hills. John and Jenny took with them, in addition to Borin and the two southern soldiers who’d ridden with him—a not-unreasonable precaution in the Winterlands—Skaff Gradely, who acted as militia captain for the farms around Alyn Hold, and two of Jenny’s cousins from the Darrow Bottoms, all of whom were unwilling to leave their farms this close to haying-time but equally unwilling to have the dragon move west. Sergeant Muffle was left in command of the Hold.

“There’s no reason for it,” argued Borin, who appeared to have gotten the Hold servants to launder and press his red military tunic and polish his boots. “There’s been no sign of bandits this spring. Commander Rocklys has put this entire land under law again, so there’s really no call for a man to walk armed wherever he goes.” He almost, but not quite, looked pointedly at Gradely and the Darrow boys, who, as usual for those born and bred in the Winterlands, bristled with knives, spiked clubs, axes, and the long slim savage northern bows. Jenny knew that in the King’s southern lands, farmers did not even carry swords—most of the colonists who had come in the wake of the new garrisons were, in fact, serfs, transplanted by royal fiat to these manors and forbidden to carry weapons at all.

“There’s never any sign of bandits that’re good at their jobs.” John signaled a halt for the dozenth time and dismounted to scout, though by order of the Commander of the Winterlands, roads in this part of the country had been cleared for a bow shot’s distance on either side. In Jenny’s opinion, whoever had done the clearing had no idea how far a northern longbow could shoot.

Borin said, “Really!” as John disappeared into the trees, his green and brown plaid mingling with the colors of the thick-matted brush. “Every one of these stops loses us time, and …”

Jenny lifted her hand for silence, listening ahead, around, among the trees. Stretching out her senses, as wizards did. Smelling for horses. Listening for birds and rabbits that would fall silent at the presence of man. Feeling the air as a wealthy southern lady would feel silk with fingers white and sensitive, seeking a flaw, a thickened thread …

Arts that all of Jenny’s life, of all the lives of her parents and grandparents, had meant the difference between life and death in the Winterlands.

In time she said, quietly, “I apologize if this seems to discount Commander Rocklys’ defenses of the Realm, Lieutenant. But Skep Dhû is the boundary garrison in these parts, and beyond it, the bandit troops might still be at large. The great bands, Balgodorus Black-Knife’s, or that of Gorgax the Red, number in hundreds. If I know them, they’ve been waiting all spring for a disruption such as a dragon would cause to raid the new manors while your captain’s attention is elsewhere.”

The lieutenant looked as if he would protest, then simply looked away. Jenny didn’t know whether this was because she carried her own halberd and bow slung behind Moon Horse’s saddle—women in the south did not customarily go armed, though there were some notable exceptions—or because she was a wizard, or for some other reason entirely. Many of the southern garrisons were devout worshipers of the Twelve Gods and regarded the Winterlands as a wilderness of heresy. In any case, disapproving silence reigned for something like half an hour—Gradely and the Darrow boys sitting their scrubby mounts ten or twelve paces away, scratching under their plaids and picking their noses—until John returned.

They camped that night in the ruins of what had been a small village or a large manor farm three centuries ago, when the Winterlands still supported such things. A messenger met them there with word that the dragon was in fact laired in the largest of the ravines east of the Skepping Hills—“The one with the oak wood along the ridge at its head, my lord”—and that Commander Rocklys had personally led a squadron of fifty to meet them at Wormwood Ford.

“Gaw, leavin’ who to garrison Cair Corflyn, if they get themselves munched up?” demanded John, horrified. “You get back now, son, and tell the lot of ’em to stay put. Do they think this is a bloody fox-hunt? The thing’ll hear ’em coming ten miles off!”

The second night they made camp early, while light was still high in the sky, in a gully just west of the Skepping Hills. Beyond, the northern arm of the Wood of Wyr lay thick, a land of knotted trees and dark, slow-moving streams that flowed down out of the Gray Mountains, a land that had never been brought under the dominion of the Kings. Lying with John under their spread-out plaids, Jenny felt by his breathing that he did not sleep.

“I hate this,” he said softly. “I’d hoped, after meeting Morkeleb—after speaking with him, touching him … hearing that voice of his speak in me mind—I’d hoped never to have to go after a dragon again in me life.”

Jenny remembered the Dragon of Nast Wall. “No.”

He sat up, his arms wrapped around his knees, and looked down at her, knowing how her own experience of the dragon-kind had touched her. “Don’t hate me for it, Jen.”

She shook her head, knowing that she so easily could. If she didn’t understand about the Winterlands, and about what it was to be Thane. “No.” John loved wolves, too, and studied every legend, every hunter’s tale: he’d built a blind for himself so he could sit and watch them for hours at their howlings and their hunts. He’d drive them away sooner than kill them, if they preyed on the cattle. But he’d kill them without compunction if he had to.

He was Thane of the Winterlands, as his father had been. He could no more turn his back on a fight with a dragon than he could turn his back should a bandit chief, handsome and wise as the priests said gods were, start raiding the farms.

Jenny supposed that if a god were to come burning the fields and killing the stock, exposing the people to the perils of these terrible lands, John would read everything he could on the subject, pick up whatever weapon seemed appropriate, and try to take it on.

The fact that he’d never wanted any of this was beside the point.

An hour after midnight he rose for good, ate cold barley bannocks—none of them had been so foolish as to suggest cooking, within a few miles of a dragon’s lair—and armed himself in his fighting doublet, his close-fitting helmet, and iron-backed gloves. Jenny knew that dragons were neither strictly nocturnal nor diurnal, but woke and slept like cats; still, she also knew that most dragons were aground and asleep in the hours just before dawn. She flung a little ravel of witchlight close to the ground, just enough for the horses to see the trail, and led the way toward the razor-backed hunch of the Skepping Hills and the oak-fringed ravine.

Mist swirled around the knees of the horses, floated like rags of silk among the heather. They left Borin on the edge of the heath, to watch from afar. Stretching her senses, Jenny felt everywhere the tingle and touch of magic. Had the dragon summoned these unseasonable mists for protection? she wondered. Would it sense her, sense them, if she raised a counterspell to send them away?

For a star-drake’s body to be simply of one color, she thought, it must be either very young or very old, and if very old, its senses would fill the lands around, like still water that would carry the slightest ripple to its dreams. But this she did not feel. She had sensed Morkeleb’s awareness when she and John had first ridden to do battle with the black dragon under the shadows of the Deep of Ylferdun … The red horns and spikes and tail seemed to argue for a young dragon anyway, but would a youngster be large enough to be mistaken for something a hundred feet long?

She touched John’s wrist and whispered, though they were close enough now to the head of the ravine to need absolute silence, “John, wait. There’s something wrong.”

The ravine before them was a drift of gray mist. His spectacles, framed by his helmet, glinted like the eyes of an enormous moth. In a hunter’s whisper, he asked, “Can it hear us? Feel us?”

“I don’t know. But I don’t … I don’t feel it. At all.”

He tilted his head, inquiring.

“I don’t know. Get ready to run or to charge.”

Then she reached out with her mind, her will, her dragonheart and dragon-spells, and tore the mists from the ravine in a single fierce swirl of chilling wind.

The slice and flash of early light blinked on metal in the oak woods above the ravine, and a second later something came roaring and flapping up from between the hills: green, red-horned, bat-winged, snake-headed, serpentine tail tipped with something that looked like a gargantuan crimson arrowhead and absolutely unlike any dragon Jenny had ever seen outside the illuminations of John’s old books. John said, “Bugger all!” and Jenny yelled, “John, look out, it’s an illusion …!”

Unnecessarily, for John was turning already, sword drawn, spurring toward the nearest cover. Jenny followed, flinging behind her a blast and hammer of fire-spells, ripping up from the heather between them and the riders that galloped out of the woods.

Bandits. The illusory dragon dissolved in midair the moment it was clear that neither John nor Jenny was distracted by its presence, and the bearded attackers in makeshift panoplies of hunting leathers and stolen mail converged on the cut overhang of a streambank that provided the only defensible ground in sight.

Jenny followed the fire-spells with a sweeping Word of Poor Aim, and to her shock felt counterspells whirl and clutch at her. Beside her, John cursed and staggered as an arrowhead slashed his thigh. She felt fire-spells in the air around them and breathed Words of Limitation and counterspells herself, distracting her mind from her own magics. Behind the spells she felt the mind of the wizard: an impression of untaught power, of crude talent without training, of enormous strength. She felt stunned, as if she’d walked into a wall in darkness.

John cursed again and nocked the arrows he’d pulled down with him when he’d dismounted; at least, thought Jenny, casting her mind to the head of the stream that the outlaws would have to cross to get at them, their attackers could only come at them from two sides. She tried to call back the mists, to make them work for her and John as they’d concealed the bandits before, but again the counterspells of the other wizard twisted and grabbed at her mind. Fire in the heather, at the same time damping the fire-spells that filled the cut under the bank with smoke; spells of breaking and damage to bowstrings and arrows …

And then the bandits were on them. Illusion, distraction—Jenny called them into being, worked them on the filthy, scarred, furious men who waded through the rising stream. Swords, pikes, the hammering rain of slung stones, some of which veered aside with her warding-spells, some of which punched through them as if they had not been there. A man would stop, staring about him in confusion and horror—Jenny’s spells of flaring lights, of armed warriors around herself and John taking effect … John’s sword, or Jenny’s halberd, would slash into his flesh. But as many times as not the man would spring back with a cry, seeing clearly, and Jenny would feel on her mind the cold grip of the other mage’s counterspell. Illusion, too, she felt, for there were bandits who simply dissolved as the illusion of the dragon had dissolved …

And through it all she thought, The bandits have a wizard! The bandits have a wizard with them!

In John’s words: bugger, bugger, bugger.

Jenny didn’t know how long they held them off. Certainly not much longer than it would take to hard-boil an egg, though it seemed far longer. Still, the sun had just cleared the Skepping Hills when she and John first saw the bandits, and when the blare of trumpets sliced golden through the ruckus and Commander Rocklys and her troops rode out of the hills in a ragged line, the shadows hadn’t shortened by more than a foot. Jenny felt the other wizard’s spells reach out toward the crimson troopers and threw her own power to intercept them, shattering whatever illusions the rescuers would have seen and attacked. Rocklys, standing in her stirrups, drew rein and fired into the thick of the outlaw horde; Jenny saw one of the leaders fall. Then a great voice bellowed, “Out of it, men!” and near the head of the ravine a tall man sprang up on a boulder, massive and black-bearded, like a great dirty bear.

John said, “Curse,” and Rocklys, whipping another arrow to her short black southern bow, got off a shot at him. But the arrow went wide—Jenny felt the Word that struck it aside—and then battle surged around them, mist and smoke rising out of the ground like dust from a beaten rug. The spells she’d called onto the stream were working now and the water rushed in furious spate, sweeping men off their feet, the water splashing icy on John’s boots and soaking the hem of Jenny’s skirt. Then the bandits fled; Rocklys and her men in pursuit.

“Curse it,” said John. “Balgodorus Black-Knife, damn his tripes, and they had a wizard with ’em, didn’t they, love?” He leaned against the clay wall of the bank, panting; Jenny pressed her hand against his thigh, where the first arrowhead had cut, but felt no poison in the wound.

“Somebody who knew enough about dragon-slaying to know we’d have to attack it alone, together.”

“Maggots fester it—ow!” he added, as Jenny applied a rough bandage to the wound. “Anybody’d know that who’s heard me talk about it, or talked to someone who had. Anyway, it wasn’t me they was after, love.” He reached down and touched her face. “It was you.”

She looked up, filthy with sweat and soot, her dark hair unraveled: a thin small brown woman of forty-five, flushed—she was annoyed to note—with yet another rise of inner heat. She sent it away, exasperated at the untimeliness and the reminder of her age.

“Me?” She got to her feet. The rush of the stream was dying as quickly as it had risen. Bandits slain by John’s sword, or her halberd, or by the arrows of Rocklys’ men, lay where the water had washed them.

“You’re the only mage in the Winterlands.” John tucked up a wet straggle of her hair into a half-collapsed braid, broke off a twig from a nearby laurel bush and worked it in like a hairpin to hold it in place. “In the whole of the King’s Realm, for all I know. Gar”—that was the Regent—“told me he’s been trying to find wizards in Bel and Greenhythe and all around the Realm, and hasn’t located a one, bar a couple of gnomes. So if a bandit like Balgodorus Black-Knife’s got a wizard in his troop, and we have none …”

“We’d have been in a lot of trouble,” Jenny said softly, “had this ambush succeeded.”

“And it might have,” mused John, “if their boy—”

“Girl.”

“Eh?”

“Their mage is a woman. I’m almost certain of it.”

He sniffed. “Girl, then. If their girl had known the first thing about star-drakes, beyond that they have wings and long tails, you might not have twigged soon enough to keep us out of the jaws of the trap. Which goes to demonstrate the value of a classical education …”

Commander Rocklys returned in a clatter of hooves, Borin at her side. “Are you all right?” She sprang down from her tall bronze-bay warhorse, a lanky powerful woman of thirty, gold-stamped boots spattered with mud and gore. “We were saddled and ready to ride to your help with the dragon when Borin charged into camp shouting you were being ambushed.”

“The dragon was a hoax,” John said briefly. He wiped a gout of blood from his cheekbone and scrubbed his gloved fingers with the end of his plaid. “Better if it had been a real drake than what’s really going on.”

Rocklys of Galyon listened, arms folded, to his account. It was a rare woman, Jenny knew, who could get men to follow her into combat; on the whole, most soldiers knew of women only what they saw of their victims during the sack of farmsteads or towns, or what they learned from the camp whores. Some, like John, were willing to learn different. Others had to be strenuously taught. Though the women soldiers Jenny had met—mostly bandits—tended to gang together to protect one another in the war camps, a woman commander as a rule had to be large and strong enough to take on and beat a good percentage of the men under her command.

Rocklys of the House of Uwanë was such a woman. The royal house of Bel was a tall one, and she was easily John’s nearly six-foot height, with powerful arms and shoulders that could only have been achieved by the most strenuous physical training. As a cousin of the King, Jenny guessed she would have been granted a position as second-in-command or a captaincy of royal guards regardless, but it was clear by the set of her square chin that an honorary post was not what she wanted.

For the rest, she was fair-haired, like her cousin the Regent Gareth—though the last time Jenny had seen Gareth, two years ago, he’d still affected a dandy’s habit of dyeing portions of his hair blue or pink or whatever the fashionable shade was that year. Her eyes, like Gareth’s, were a light, cold gray. She neither interrupted nor reacted to John’s tale, only stood with the slight breezes moving the gold tassels on her sword-belt and on the red wool oversleeves that covered her linen shirt. At the end of his recital she said, “Damn it.” Her voice was a sort of husky growl, and Jenny guessed she’d early acquired the habit of deepening it. “If I’d known there was a wizard with them I’d never have called off the men so soon. You’re sure?”

“I’m sure.” Jenny stepped up beside John. “Completely aside from the green dragon, which was sheer illusion—only created to lure John and me—I could feel this mage’s mind, her power, with every spell I tried to cast. There’s a wizard with Balgodorus, and a strong one.”

“Damn it.” Rocklys’ mouth hardened, and for a moment Jenny saw a genuine fury in her eyes. Then they shifted, thoughtful, considering the two people before her: the bloodied and shabby Dragonsbane and the Witch of Frost Fell. Jenny knew the look in her eyes, for she’d seen it often in John’s. The look of a commander, considering the tools she has and the job that needs to be done.

“Lady Jenny,” she said. “Lord John.”

“Now we’re in trouble.” John looked up from polishing his spectacles on his shirt. “Anytime anyone comes to me and says …” He shifted into an imitation of that of the Mayor of Far West Riding, or one of the councilmen of Wrynde, when those worthies would come to the Hold asking him to kill wolves or deal with bandits, “‘Lord John’—or worse, ‘Your lordship.’”

Commander Rocklys, who didn’t have much of a sense of humor, frowned. “But we are in trouble,” she said. “And we shall be in far worse trouble should Balgodorus Black-Knife continue at large, with a witch …” She hesitated—she’d used a southern word for the mageborn that had pejorative connotations of evil and slyness—and politely changed it. “… with a wizard in his band. Surely you agree.”

“And you want our Jen to go after ’em.”

Rocklys looked a little surprised to find her logic so readily followed. As if, thought Jenny, the necessity for her to pursue the renegade mage was not obvious to all. “For the good of all the Winterlands, you must agree.”

John glanced at Jenny, who nodded slightly. He sighed and said, “Aye.” The good of all the Winterlands had ruled his life for twenty-two years, since his father’s death. Even before that, when as his father’s only son he had been torn from his books and his music and his tinkerings with pulleys and steam, and had a sword thrust into his hand.

Four years ago it had been the good of all the Winterlands that took him south, to barter his body and bones in the fight against Morkeleb the Black, so the King would in return send troops to garrison those lost territories and bring them again under the rule of law.

“Aye, love, you’d best go. God knows if you don’t we’ll only have ’em besiegin’ the Hold in the end.”

“Good.” Rocklys nodded briskly, though she still looked vexed. “I’ve already sent one of the men back to Skep Dhû, with orders to outfit a pack-train, Lady Jenny; you’ll ride with twenty-five of my men here.”

“Twenty-five?” said John. “There were at least twenty in the band that attacked us, and rumor has it Balgodorus commands hundreds these days.”

Rocklys shook her head. “My scouts report no more than forty. Untrained men at that, scum and outlaws, no match for disciplined troops.

“If at all possible,” she went on, “bring the woman back alive. The Realm needs mages, Lady Jenny. You know that, you and I have talked of this before. It is only the most appalling prejudice that has caused wizardry to fall into disrepute, so that the Lines of teaching died out or went underground. I am told the gnomes have wizards: that alone should have convinced my uncle and his predecessors to foster, rather than forbid, the study of those arts. Instead, what did they do? Simply crippled themselves, so that four years ago when an evil mage like the Lady Zyerne rose up, no one was prepared to deal with her. That situation cannot be allowed to repeat itself. Yes, Geryon?”

She turned as an orderly spoke to her; John put his hands on Jenny’s shoulders.

“Will you be all right?” she asked him, and he bent to kiss her lips. She tasted blood on his, and sweat and dirt; he must have tasted the same.

“Who, me? With Muffle and Ian and me aunties to defend the Hold if we’re attacked? Nothing to it.” Deadpan, he propped his spectacles more firmly onto the bridge of his long nose. “Shall I send a messenger after you with your good shoes and a couple of silk dresses just in case you want a change?”

“I’ll manage with what I have,” said Jenny gravely. “Borin was right, you know,” she added. “The garrisons may be a nuisance, and the farmers may grumble about the extra taxes, but there hasn’t been a major bandit attack since their coming. I’ll scry you, and the Hold, in my crystal every night—a pity Ian’s powers haven’t grown strong enough yet for him to learn to speak with me through a crystal or through fire. But he’s a fair healer already. And if there’s trouble …” She raised her hand, touched the long hair where it straggled, pointy with sweat, over his bruised face. “Braid a red ribbon into your hair. I’ll see it when I call your image. If I can, I’ll return to you.”

John caught her hand as she would have lowered it and kissed her dirty fingers; and she drew down his in return, pressed her lips to the scruffy leather, the battered chain-mail of his glove. Skaff Gradely and the Darrow boys had come up by this time, arguing all the way with Borin’s fellow messengers, with the spare horses and the baggage, so there was little to stay for.

“Borin will ride with you,” Commander Rocklys said, “and his fellows. Send one of them to me when you’ve come up with these bandits and their wizard. Let us know where you are and if you need troops. I’ll dispatch as many as I can, as swiftly as I can. And bring the woman alive, at whatever the cost. We’ll make it worth her while to pledge her services to the Realm.”

“Even so.” Jenny swung to Moon Horse’s saddle again and adjusted her halberd and bow. She wondered what reward she herself would consider “worth her while” to betray John, to turn against him, to ride with his foes …

Or, she thought, as the twenty-five picked pursuers formed up around her, to leave him and our children and the folk of Alyn Hold to their own devices, when I know there’s a bandit wizard abroad in the lands?

The good of all the Winterlands, maybe.

The good of the Realm, which John considered his first and greatest loyalty.

She lifted her hand to him as she and the men rode off. A little later, as they crested the rise above the ravine and approached the oak woods into which the bandits had fled, she looked back to see Commander Rocklys marshaling her forces to ride back to Cair Corflyn, the garrison on the banks of the Black River, which was the headquarters for the whole network of new manors and forts. John’s doing, those garrisons, she thought. The protection he had bought with the blood he’d shed, dragon-fighting four years ago. His reward.

As the dragon-magic in her veins was hers.

John himself stood, a small tatty black figure on the high ground above the stream, watching her. She lifted her hand again to him, and his spectacles flashed like mirrors as he waved good-bye. The wasting moon still stood above the moors to the west, a pale crescent like a slice of cheese.

Less than three weeks later, before that moon waxed again to its full, a real dragon descended on the farms near Alyn Hold.

THREE

“A HUNDRED FEET long it was, my lord.” Deke Brown from the Lone Steadings, a man John had known all his life, folded his hands together before his knees and leaned forward from the library chair in the flicker of the candlelight. His face was bruised, and there was a running burn on his forehead, the kind John knew was made by a droplet of the flaming acid that dragons spit. “Blue it was, but like as if it had gold flowers spread all over it, and golden wings, and the horns of it all black and white stripes, and maned like a lion. It had three of the cows, and I bare got April and the babies out’n the house and in the root cellar in time.”

In the silence John was very conscious of the hoarseness of the man’s breathing, and of the thumping of his own heart.

No illusion this time. Or a damn good one if it was.

Jenny, wherever you are, I need you. I can’t handle this alone.

“I heard down in the village that Ned Wooley was up here yesterday, from Great Toby.” Brown spoke diffidently, trying to word it without sounding accusing. “They said this thing killed his horse and his mule on the road to the Bottom Farms, and near as check killed him.”

John said, “Aye.” He swallowed hard, feeling very cold inside. “We’ve been makin’ up the poisons and gettin’ ready to go all day. You didn’t happen to see which way it went?”

“I didn’t, no, my lord. I was that done up about the cows. They’re all we’ve got. But April says it went off northwest. She says to tell you she saw it circling above Cair Dhû.”

“You give April a kiss for me.” He knew the ruins of the old watchtower, every ditch, bank, and clump of broken masonry; he’d played there as a child, risking life and soul because blood-devils haunted them at certain times of the year. He’d hunted rabbits there, too, and hidden from his father. At least I’ll be fighting it on familiar ground. “Get Cousin Dilly to give you something from the kitchen, you look fagged out. I’ll be going there in the morning.”

He drew a deep breath, trying to put the thought of the dragon from his mind. “We’ll see about getting you another cow. One of the Red Shaggies is heavy with calf; I could probably let you have the both of them. Clivy writes that red cows give more wholesome milk that’s higher in butter, but I’ve never measured—still, it’s the best I can do. We’ll talk about it when I get back.”

If I get back.

Brown disappeared down the tower stair.

Jenny, I need you.

Behind him a clock chimed the hour, amid a great parade of mechanical lions, elephants, trumpeters, and flying swans. The moon turned its phases, and an allegorical representation of Good thumped Evil repeatedly over the head with a golden mallet. John watched the show with his usual grave delight, then got up and consulted the water-clock that gurgled quietly in a corner of the study.

Not even close.

Shaking his head regretfully, he descended the tower stair.

He passed the kitchen, where Dilly, Rowan, and Jane clustered around Deke Brown, exclaiming over his few bruises and filling him in on what had befallen Ned Wooley—“A hundred feet long, it was, and breathed green fire …”

Ian was in the old barracks court, the firelight under the cauldrons gleaming on the sweat that sheathed his bare arms. Tawny light tongued Jenny’s red and black poison pots, carefully stoppered and arranged along a wall out of all possible chance of being tripped over, broken, or gotten into by anything or anyone. The fumes burned John’s eyes. It was all a repeat of the scene three weeks ago.

He hoped to hell the stuff would work.

“Father.” The boy laid his stirring stick down and crossed the broken and weedy pavement toward him. Muffle and Adric put down their loads of wood and followed, stripped, like Ian, to their breeches, boots, and knitted singlets in the heat; clothed like Ian in sweat. “That messenger wasn’t …?”

“Deke Brown. It hit his farm.”

“Devils bugger it,” Muffle said. He hitched his belt under the muscled roll of his huge belly. “April and the children …?”

“Are fine. April saw the thing to ground at Cair Dhû.”

“Good for April.” John’s half-brother regarded him for a moment, his thick, red-stubbled face eerily like their father’s, trying to read his thoughts. “No word from Jenny?”

John shook his head, his own face ungiving: a holdover, he supposed, from growing up with his father’s notions about what a man and the Lord of Alyn Hold must and must not feel. It would never have occurred to him to beat Adric for showing fear—not that Adric had the slightest concept of what the word meant. And Ian …

Mageborn children feared different things.

“Wherever she is, she can’t come.” The bloody light darkened the red ribbon he’d braided yesterday into his hair. I’ll scry every evening in my crystal … “Or she can’t come in time.”

“I could go to the house on Frost Fell.” Ian wiped his face with the back of his arm. “Mother’s books—old Caerdinn has to have written down how to do …” he hesitated, “how to do death-spells.”

“No.” John had thought of that yesterday.

“I don’t think these poisons are going to work against a dragon unless there are fresh death-spells put into their making.” Returning from the false alarm and ambush, John had cleansed the harpoons with water and with fire, as Jenny had instructed him to do: a necessary precaution given little Mag’s eerie facility with locks, bolts, and anything else she was particularly not supposed to get into. Jenny, he knew, was conscientious about the Limitations she put on the death-spells. It had never occurred to either of them that they’d be needed again so soon. “We need to put death-spells on the harpoons as well.”

“No.” John had thought of that, too. “I don’t want you touching such stuff.”

“But we don’t want you to die!” protested Adric reasonably.

Muffle raised his brows and looked away in a fashion that said, The boy’s got a point.

“Mother uses them.”

“You’re twelve years old, Ian.” John swallowed hard, hoping by all the gods that his own fear didn’t show. “Leavin’ out the fact that certain spells can be too strong for an inexperienced mage to wield—”

“I’m not inexperienced.”

“—you haven’t learned near all there is to know about Limitations, and I for one don’t want to end up havin’ one of me feet fall off from leprosy in the middle of the fight because you got a word wrong.”

Surprised into laughter, Ian looked quickly aside, mouth pursed to prevent it. Like many boys he had the disapproving air of one who feels that laughter is not the appropriate response to facing death, especially not for one’s father. John had suspected for some time that both his sons regarded him as frivolous.

“Now, get back to stirring,” he ordered. “Is that stuff settin’ up at all like it’s supposed to? Adric, as long as you’re down here you might as well stir that other cauldron, but for God’s sake put gloves on … We’ve got a long night.” He stripped off his old red doublet and his shirt and hung both on pegs on the work shed wall. The smell of summer hay from the fields beyond the Hold filled the night. Though midnight lay only a few hours off, the sky still glowed with light. As he pulled on his gloves, John watched them all in the firelit court: his sons, his brother—his aunts, Jane and Rowe and Hol, and Cousin Dilly, coming down with gingerwater and trying to tell Adric it was time for him to go to bed. Seeing them as Jenny would be seeing them, wherever the hell she was, gazing into her crystal. Rowe with her long untidy braids of graying red and Dilly peering shortsightedly at Muffle, and all of them chatting like a nest of magpies—the real rulers, if the truth be told, of Alyn Hold.

She has to know what all this means. He closed his eyes, desperately willing that Jenny be on her way. I’m sorry. I waited as long as I could.

Teltrevir, heliotrope … His mind echoed the fragments of the old dragon-list. Centhwevir is blue knotted with gold. Nymr blue violet-crowned, Glammring Gold-Horns bright as emeralds … Scraps of information and old learning:

Maggots from meat, weevils from rye,

Dragons from stars in an empty sky.

And, Save a dragon, slave a dragon.

Secondhand accounts, most of them a mash of broken half-volumes; notes of legends and granny rhymes; jumbled ballads that Gareth collected and sent copies of. Everything left of learning in the Winterlands, after the King’s armies had abandoned them to bandits, Iceriders, cold, and plague. He’d gathered them painfully from ruins, collated them in those few moments between fighting for his own life and the lives of those who depended on him … Secondhand accounts and the speculations of scholars who’d never come closer to a dragon than the sites of old slayings, or a nervously cursory inspection of torn-up, blood-soaked, acid-burned ground.

Something in there might save his life, but he didn’t know what.

Antara Warlady was supposed to have gotten right up next to the Worm of Wevir by wrapping herself in a fresh-flayed pig hide, according to the oldest Drymarch version of her tale; Grimonious Grimblade had supposedly put out live lambs as bait.

Alkmar the Godborn had been killed by the third dragon he fought.

Selkythar of golden curls and sword of sunlight flashing,

Seeking meed of glory through the dragon’s talons lashing.

Cried he, “Strike again, foul worm, my bloody blade is slashing …”

John shook his head. He’d never sought a meed of glory in his life, and if he ever decided to start, it wouldn’t be by riding smack up a long hill in open daylight as Selkythar had reportedly done, armed with only a sword—well, a shield, too, as if a shield ever did any good against a thirty-foot hellstorm of spitting acid and whirling spikes.

“The boy may be right.” Muffle’s voice pulled him out of his memories of the Dragon of Wyr, of Morkeleb’s black talons sweeping down at him from darkness …

John dipped the harpoon he held into the cauldron and watched the liquid drip off the iron, thin as water.

“Stuff ain’t thickenin’ up,” he sighed. “Maybe I should get Auntie Jane back here. Her gravies always set.”

Muffle caught his arm. “Be serious, son.”

“Why?” John rested the harpoon’s spines on the vat’s edge and coughed in the smoke. “I may be dead twenty-four hours from now.”

“So you may,” replied the blacksmith softly, and glanced across at Ian in the amber glare. “And what then? Four years ago you bargained with the King to send garrisons. Well, they’ve been gie helpful, but you know there’s a price. If you die, d’you think your boys are going to be let to inherit? In the south they’ve laws against wizards holding property or power, and Adric’s but eight. You think the King’s council’s going to let a witch be Regent of Wyr? Especially if they think they can get tax money by ruling here themselves?”

“I’m the King’s subject.” John stepped back from the fire, hell-mouth hot on his bare arms. “And the King’s servant, and the Regent’s me friend. What’re you askin’? That I not fight this drake?”

“I’m asking that you let Ian do what he’s asked to do.”

“No.”

Muffle pursed his lips, which made him look astoundingly like their father. Except, thought John, that their father had never let things stop with pursed lips, nor would he have reacted to No with that simple grimace. The last time John had said a flat-out No to old Lord Aver, at the age of twelve, he’d been lucky his collarbone had set straight.

“In the village they say the boy’s good. He goes over those magic-books in your library like you go over the ones on steam and smokes and old machines. He knows enough …”

“No,” said John. And then, seeing the doubt, the fear for him in the fat man’s small brown eyes, he said, “There’s things a boy his years shouldn’t know about. Not so soon.”

“Things you’d put your life at risk—your people at risk—to spare him?”

John thought about them, those things Jenny had told him lay in old Caerdinn’s crumbling books. Things he’d read in the books that had been part of his bargain with Prince Gareth to fight the Dragon of Nast Wall. Things he read in Jenny’s silence when he surprised her sometimes in her own small study, studying in the deep of night.

He said, “Aye.” And saw the shift in Muffle’s eyes.

“People hereabouts know the magic Jen does for them.” John picked up the harpoon and turned the shaft in his hands. “Or what old Caerdinn did. Birthin’ babies, and keepin’ the mice out of the barns in a bad year, or maybe buyin’ an hour on the harvest when a storm’s coming in. Those that remember me mother are mostly dead.” He glanced up at Muffle over the rims of his spectacles. “And anyway, by what I hear from our aunties, me mother never did the worst she could have done.”

Except maybe only once or twice, he thought, and pushed those barely coherent recollections from his mind.

“People here don’t know what magic really is,” John went on. “They haven’t seen what it can do, and they haven’t seen what it can do to those that do it. You always pay for it somehow, and sometimes other people besides you do the payin’. Gaw,” he added, turning back to the cauldron and dipping the harpoon once more, “this’s blashier than Cousin Rowanberry’s tea. Let’s put some flour in it, see if we can get it thick enough to do us some good.”

Ian’s heart beat hard as he kicked his scrubby pony to a gallop up Toadback Hill.

Death-spells.

And the dragon.

He’d always hated the harpoons with which his father had killed the Dragon of Wyr, two years before he was born. He had instinctively avoided the cupboard in his father’s cluttered study in which they were locked. If he touched the wood he could feel them, even before he realized that he had magic in him. Sometimes he dreamed about them, each barbed and pronged shaft of iron its own ugly entity, whispering in the darkness about pain and cold and giving up.

His mother had wrought well.

Ian shivered.

For the first eight years of Ian’s life he had only seen her now and then, for she’d lived alone with her cats on the Fell, coming to be with his father at the Hold for a few days together. She had told him later—when his own powers had crossed through that wall from dreaming to daytime reality—that in those days her powers were small. She had kept herself apart to study and meditate, to work on what little she had. There was only so much time in her life to give.

And then had come the Dragon of Nast Wall.

His parents had gone away to the south together to fight it, along with the messenger who’d fetched them, a gawky nearsighted boy in spectacles. That boy had turned out to be Prince Gareth, later Regent for the ailing King Uriens of Belmarie. At that time Ian had accepted without question that his father could easily slay a dragon and hadn’t been particularly concerned. As if to confirm him in this opinion, his parents had returned more or less unharmed, and he didn’t learn until much later how close both had come to not returning at all.

After that, Jenny had lived at the Hold. But she still went sometimes to meditate in the stone house on Frost Fell, and it was there that she’d begun to teach Ian, away from the Hold’s distractions. In that quiet house he did not need to be a brother or a nephew or a father’s firstborn son.

Even had Ian not been mageborn and able to see easily in the clear blue darkness, he could have followed the path that led away from the village fields over Toadback Hill. Ruins dotted the far slope, one of the many vanished towns that spoke of what the Winterlands had been and had become. Shattered walls, slumped puddles where wells had been, all were nearly drowned now in the mists that rose from the cranberry bog.

From the hill crest he looked back and saw his father and his uncle by the village gates, talking with Peg the Gatekeeper. The gates were squat and solid, built up of rubble filched from the broken town. Lanterns burned over them, but Ian did not need those dim yellow smudges to see how his father turned in Battlehammer’s saddle, searching the formless swell of the hills, gesturing as he spoke.

He knows I’m gone. Ian felt a stab of guilt. He’d laid a word on Peg, causing her to rise from her bed in the turret and lower the drawbridge to let him pass. This cantrip wasn’t something his mother had taught him, but he’d learned it from one of Caerdinn’s books and had experimented, mostly on the unsuspecting Adric. He knew perfectly well that such magic was an act of betrayal, of violation, and he squirmed with shame every time he did it, but as a wizard, he felt driven to learn.

He was glad he’d practiced it, now.

It was still too dark to distinguish his pony’s hoofprints in the mud. In any case, he guessed his father had no time to search. Nor had he, Ian, any to linger. He shrugged his old jacket closer around him and put his pony to a fast trot through the battered walls, and the rags of bog mist swallowed them.

Death-spells. His palms grew clammy at the thought. In a corner of his mind he knew perfectly well that he might not have the strength to wield them, certainly not to wield the dreadful power he sensed whenever he touched the harpoons. But he could think of no other way to help. Since the coming of that first word of the dragon yesterday, he’d tried desperately to make contact with his mother in the ways she’d told him wizards could, by looking into fire or water or chips of ensorcelled crystal or glass. But he had seen only confusing images of trees, and once a moss-covered standing stone, and water glimmering in the moon’s waxing light.

Remember the Limitations, he told himself, ticking over his mother’s instructions in his mind. And gather up the power circles afterward and disperse them. Don’t work in a house. Don’t work near water …

There had to be something in the house at Frost Fell that he could use to save his father’s life.

Frost Fell was a hard gray skull of granite, rising nearly two hundred feet above waterlogged bottomlands—enough to be free of the mosquitoes that made the summers of Winterlands such a horror. In spring, huge poppies grew there, and in fall, yellow daisies. Most of the other fells were barren of anything but heather and gorse, but Frost Fell boasted a modest pocket of soil at its top, where centuries ago some hardy crofter had cultivated oats. These days it was his mother’s garden, circled like the house in wardings and wyrd-lines. Ian reviewed these in his mind, hoping he’d be able to get past the gate, hoping he could open the doors. Triangle, triangle, rune of the Eye … The last two times he’d been there she’d simply stood back and let him do it, so there was a chance …

Light burned in the house.

She’s back! Exultation, and blinding relief. A dim glow of candle flame, like a stain on the blue bulk of shadow. The rosy flicker of hearth-fire glimpsed through half-open doors. He wrapped the pony’s rein hastily around the gate, ran up the path. She’s back, she’ll be able to help!

It wasn’t until his foot was on the step that he thought, If it was Mother, she’d have ridden at once to the Hold.

And at that moment, he saw something bright on the step.

He stopped and knelt to look at it. Like a seashell wrought of glass, thin as a bubble, broken at one end. A little beyond the broken end lay what appeared to be a blob of quicksilver, glistening on the wet stone in the reflected candle-glow.

“Go ahead.” A deep, friendly voice spoke from within the house. “It’s all right to touch it. It’s perfectly safe.”

Looking up Ian saw a man sitting by his mother’s hearth, a man he’d never seen before. Big and square and pleasant-faced, he was clothed like the southerners who came from the King’s court, in a short close coat of quilted violet silk lined with fur, and a fur-lined silk cap embroidered with violets. Expensive boots sheathed his calves and a pair of black kid gloves lay across his knee, and in his pale fingers he turned a jewel over and over, a sapphire dark as the sea. Ian knew he had to be a wizard, because he was in the house, but he asked, “Are you a mage, sir?”

“I am that.” The man smiled again and gestured with his finger to the frail glass shell, the bead of quicksilver on the step. “And I’m here to help you, Ian. Bring that to me, if you would, my boy.”

Ian reached toward it and hesitated, for he thought the quicksilver moved a little on the stone of the step. For an instant he had the impression that there were eyes within it, looking up at him. Bright small eyes, like a lizard or a crab. That it had its own name, and moreover that it knew his. But a moment later he thought, It has to be just the light. He carefully scooped the thing up in his hand.

FOUR

ALKMAR THE GODBORN, greatest of the heroes of antiquity (it was said), slew two dragons while serving the King of Ernine—though according to Prince Gareth there was a late Imperteng version of the legend that said four—using a lasso made of chain and an iron spear heated red-hot, which he threw down each dragon’s throat. Must have been on a cable, thought John, though of course Alkmar had been seven and a half feet tall, thewed like an ox, and presumably had a lot of time to spend at throwing practice.

For someone a thumb’s breadth under six feet and thewed like a thirty-eight-year-old man who’s spent most of his life riding boundary in cold weather, other strategies would probably be required.

John Aversin flexed his shoulders and listened, hoping to hell Sergeant Muffle and the spare horses were keeping absolutely quiet in the base camp at Deep Beck. Was three and a half miles far enough?

Morning stillness lay on the folded world of heather and stone, broken only by the hum of mosquitoes and bees. Even the creak of his stirrup leather seemed deafening, and the dry swish of Battlehammer’s tail.

Interesting that the greatest hero of legend was described as throwing something at the dragon, rather than nobly slicing its head off with a single blow of his mighty sword and to hell with Selkythar and Antara Warlady and Grimonious Grimblade, thank you very much.

Battlehammer snuffled and flattened his ears. Though the wind blew south off the ruins of Cair Dhû, if the stallion could smell the dragon from here, could the dragon smell them?

Or hear them, in the utter absence of the raucous dawn chitter of birds?

Dragonsbane. He was the one who was supposed to know all this.

John flexed his hands. The walls of the gorge still protected him, and the purl of the stream might conceivably cover the clack of Battlehammer’s hooves. The problem with dragons was that, mostly, nobody knew what worked.

He slid from the saddle, checked the girths, checked the harpoons in their holsters. Lifted each of the warhorse’s four feet to make sure he hadn’t picked up a stone. That’s all I’d need. While he did this, in his mind he reviewed the ruins. He’d checked them a few months ago; there couldn’t have been much change. The dragon would be lairing in the crypt.

He’d have to catch it there, before it got into the air.

Stair, hall, doorway, doorway … How fast did dragons move? Morkeleb had come out of the dark of Ylferdun Deep’s great markethall like a snake striking. Broken walls, the drop of a slope, everything tangled with heather and fallen masonry. Ditches invisible where weeds grew across them … What a place for a gallop. At least he knew the ground.

He settled his iron cap tighter on his head, the red ribbon still fluttering in his hair. Jen, I’m in trouble, I need you, come at once.

Though he supposed if she scried him now she’d get the idea without the ribbon.

He propped his spectacles again, dropped his hand back to touch the first of the harpoons in their holsters, and took a deep breath.

“Strike again, foul worm,” he whispered, and drove in his heels.

At five hundred yards, they knew you were coming, upwind, downwind, dark or storm. That seemed to be the consensus of the ballads. Maybe more than five hundred. Maybe a lot more.

Battlehammer hit open ground at a dead gallop and John watched the walls pour toward him: broken stone, stringers of outwalls, craggy pine and dwarf willow spreading around the ground. Everything broken now and burned with dragon-acid and the poisons of its breath. He saw it in his mind, slithering up those shattered stairways. A hundred feet long … God of the Earth, let them be wrong about that …

It was there in the riven gate. Centhwevir is blue knotted with gold. Fifty feet in front of him, rising on long hind legs to swing that birdlike head. Blue as gentian, blue as lapis and morning glories, iridescent blue as the summer sea all stitched and patched and flourished with buttercup yellow, and eyes like twin molten opals, gold as ancient glass. The beauty of it stopped his breath as his hand went back, closed around the nearest harpoon, knowing he was too far yet for a throw and thinking, Sixty feet if it’s an inch …

Centhwevir is blue knotted with gold.

The thing came under the gate and the wings opened and John threw: arm, back, thighs, every muscle he possessed. The harpoon struck in the pink hollow beneath the right wing where the skin was delicate as velvet, and he was reining Battlehammer hard away and angling for distance, catching up another weapon, swinging to throw for the mouth.

Alkmar, if you’re there among the gods, I could use the help …

That one missed as the snakelike neck struck at him, huge narrow head framed in its protective mane of black and white, primrose and cyan. Battlehammer screamed and fell and rolled, lifted from his feet by the hard counterswipe of the dragon’s tail, and John kicked free of the stirrups and tumbled almost by instinct. Yellow-green acid slapped the heather at his feet, the stiff brush bursting into flame.

Battlehammer. He could hear the horse scream again in pain but didn’t dare turn to look, only scooped up four harpoons from the ground—as many as he could reach—and ran in.

Keep it under the gate. Keep it under the gate. If it stays on the ground, you’ve a chance.

The star-drake struck at him again, head and tail, spitting acid that ignited in the air. John flung himself under the shelter of a broken wall, then rolled clear, coming in close, fast, striking up at the rippling wall of blue-and-golden spikes. The heather around them blazed, smoke searing his eyes. The dragon snapped, slashed, drove him back, slithered free of the confining walls. He struck with the harpoon, trying to hold it; talons like gold-bladed daggers snagged his leg, hurling him off balance. He struck up with the harpoon again as the head came down at him, teeth like dripping chisels, the spattering sear of blood.

Blind hacking, heat, fighting to get free. Once he fell and rolled into an old defensive ditch only seconds before the spiked knob at the end of the dragon’s tail smote the earth. He was aware he was hurt and bleeding badly and didn’t know when or how it had happened. Only pain and the fact that he couldn’t breathe. He drove in a second harpoon, and a third, and then there was that great terrible leathery crack of wings, and he saw sunlight through the golden membranes, shining crimson veins, as the dragon lifted, lifted weightless as a blown leaf. Desperate, John flung himself for the shelter of a fallen wall and rather to his surprise found he couldn’t stand up.

Buggery damn.

He threw himself under the stone a second before the acid drench of fire poured on top of him: smoke and suffocation, poison. Mind clouded, he fought and wriggled farther into the crack, tallying where he could go from here, how he could get away and wait for the poison to work. Would the flour he’d used to thicken it keep it from doing its job? Pain in his calf and thigh and dizzying weakness told him where he’d been slashed. He fumbled from his pocket one of Jenny’s silk scarves, twisted the tourniquet around his leg, and then fire, acid, poison streamed down again on the stone above him. Smoke. Heat.

It’ll tear the stone away from the top …

He had a belt-ax and pulled it free, cut at the claws that ripped down through the stone and roots above his head. A huge five-fingered hand, eighteen inches across, and he struck at it with all his strength, the blood that exploded out scorching his face. Above him, above the protecting stones, he heard Centhwevir scream, and the stones caved on top of him, struck by that monstrous tail.

Damn it, with all that poison in you, you should at least be feeling poorly by now!

The wall above him gave way. Darkness, pain, fire devouring his bleeding flesh.

Stillness.

His hold on consciousness slipped, as if he clung to rock above an abyss. He knew what lay in that abyss and didn’t want to look down.

Ian’s face, wreathed in woodsmoke and poison fumes, glistening with tears. He couldn’t imagine shedding tears for his own father, not at twelve, nor at sixteen when that brawling, angry, red-faced man had died, nor indeed at any other time. The dreams shifted and for a time the smoke that burned his eyes was that of parchment curling and blackening in the hearth of Alyn Hold. The pain was the pain of cracked ribs that kept him from breathing, as he watched that big bear-shape black against the hall fireplace where his books burned: an old copy of Polybius he’d begged a trader to sell him, two volumes of the plays of Darygambe he’d ridden a week out to Eldsbouch to buy …

His father’s brawling voice. “The people of the Hold don’t need a bloody schoolmaster! They don’t want some prig who can tell them about how steam can turn wheels or what kind of rocks you find at the bottom of the maggot-festerin’ sea! What the hell good is that when the Iceriders come down from the north or the black wolves raid in winter’s dead heart? This is the Winterlands, you fool! They need someone who’ll defend ’em, body and bones! Who’ll die defendin’ ’em!”

Beyond him in a wall of blurred fire—all things were blurred in that chiaroscuro of hearthlight and myopia—John’s books burned.

In the fire he saw still other things.

A distant vision of a tall thin woman, black-haired, frost-eyed, standing on the Hold’s battlement with a gray wolf at her side. Wind frayed at the fur of her collar, and she gazed over the moors and streams of that stony thankless desolation that had been the frontier of the King’s realm. His mother, though he could not remember her voice, nor her touch, nor anything about her save that for years he had dreamed of seeking her, never finding her again. One of the village girls had been her apprentice, skinny, tiny, with a thin brown face half-hid in an oceanic night of hair and a quirky triangular smile.

He seemed to hear her voice speaking his name.

“The poison won’t keep him down for long,” she seemed to be saying. “We have to finish him.”

It wasn’t the blue and gold dragon she was talking about. It was the first dragon, the golden dragon, the beautiful creature of sunlight and jewel-bright patterns of purple and red and black.

And she was right. He’d been hurt in that first fight, too, in the gully on the other side of Great Toby. She’d brought him to with those words. There was no way of knowing whether the poisons would kill a dragon or only numb it temporarily. He still didn’t know. Now as then, he had to finish the matter with an ax.

It took everything he had to drag himself back to consciousness. The mortar that had held together the wall above him had perished with time. Acrid slime leaked through, staining the granite; bits of scrub and weed smoldered fitfully. His body hurt as if every bone were broken, and he felt weak and giddy, but he knew he’d better get the matter done with if he didn’t want to go through all this again.

Body and bones, his father had said. Body and bones.

Maggot-festering old bastard.

He brought up his hand and fumbled at his spectacles. The slab of stone that had knocked him out had driven the steel frame into the side of his face, but the glass hadn’t broken. The spell Jenny had put on them worked so far. He drew breath and cold agony sliced from toes to crown by way of the belly and groin.

No sound from outside. Then a dragging rasp, a thick scratching, metal on stone.

The dragon was still moving. But it was down.

No time. No time.

It took all his strength to shift the stone. Acid burned his hands through the charred remains of his gloves. Broken boulders, knobs of earth rained in his eyes. He got an elbow over the granite foundation, inched himself clear, like pulling his bones out of his flesh in splinters.

The ax, he thought, fighting nausea, fighting the gray buzzing warmth that closed around his vision. The ax. Jenny, I can’t do this without you.

The sunlight was like having a burning brand rammed through his eyes into his brain. He waited for his head to clear.

Centhwevir lay before him, fallen among the ruins, a gorgeous tesselation of blue and gold. Striped wings spread, patterned like a butterfly’s: black blood leaked from beneath one of them. A wonderment of black and white fur pillowed the birdlike head: long scales like sheet-gold ribbons, horns striped lengthwise and crosswise, antennae tipped in glowing, jeweled bobs. Spikes and corkscrews and razor-edged ridges of scales rose through it along the spine, glistened on the joints of those thin deadly forepaws, on the enormous narrow hindquarters, down the length of the deadly tail. It was, John estimated, some sixty-five feet in length, with a wingspan close to twice that, the biggest star-drake he had ever seen.

Music returned to his mind through a haze of exhaustion and smoke. Delicate airs and snippets of tunes that Jenny played on her harp, fragments of the forgotten songs that were the true names of the dragons. With them the memory of Jenny’s ancient lists: Teltrevir heliotrope; Centhwevir is blue knotted with gold …

Ancient beings, more ancient than men could conceive, the foci of a thousand strange legends and broken glints of song.

Wings first. He forced his mind from his own sickened horror, his disgust at himself for butchering such beauty. A dragon could in a few short weeks destroy the fragile economy of the Winterlands, and there was no way of driving a dragon away as one could drive away bandits or wolves. Jenny was right. The dragons would seek to feed on the garrison herds. Bandits and Iceriders would be watching for any slackening in the garrison’s strength. To drive the King’s men, and the King’s law, out; to have the lands as their own to prey on once more.

Moving as in a dream he found his ax, worked it painfully from beneath the rocks that had protected him. The stench of burned earth and acid numbed him. He could feel his hands and feet grow cold, his body sinking into shock. Not now, he thought. Damn it, not now!

Centhwevir moved his head, regarded him with those molten aureate eyes.

John felt his consciousness waver and begin to break up, like a raft coming to pieces in high seas.

Rock scraped. A slither of falling fragments on the other side of the old curtain wall.

Muffle! John’s heart leaped. You disobeyed and came after me! I could kiss you, you great chowderheaded lout!

But it was not the blacksmith who stood framed, a moment later, against the pallid morning sky.

A man John had not seen before, a stranger to the Winterlands. He seemed in his middle fifties, big and broad-shouldered, with a calmly smiling face. John thought, through a haze of crimson agony that came and went, that he was wealthy. Though he did not move with a courtier’s trained grace, neither had he the gait of a man who fought for his living, or worked. The violet silk of his coat was a color impossible without the dye-trade of the south. The curly black fur of his collar a southerner’s bid for warmth. His hair was gray under an embroidered cap, and he bore a staff carved with a goblin’s head, a white moonstone glowing in its mouth.

If this was a hallucination, thought John giddily, trying to breathe against the sinking cold that seemed to spread through his body, it was a bloody precise one. Had the fellow fallen out of the air? Did he have a horse cached somewhere out of sight? He carried a saddlebag at any rate, brass buckles clinking faintly as he picked his way down the slope. Halfway down the jumble of the broken wall he paused and turned his head in John’s direction. He did not appear to be surprised, either by the dragon, dying, or by the broken form of the man.

Though the distance between them was probably a dozen yards, John could see in the set of his shoulders, in the tilt of that sleek-groomed head, the moment when the stranger dismissed him. Not important. Dying, and to be disregarded.

The stranger walked past him to the dragon.

Centhwevir lashed his tail feebly, hissed and moved his head. The man stepped back. Then, cautiously, he worked his way around to the other side—Yes, thought John, irritated despite the fact that he was only half-conscious. That ball of spikes on the end of the tail isn’t just to impress the she-dragons, you stupid oic. Was this a dream?

He couldn’t be sure. Pain grew and then seemed to diminish as images fragmented through the smoke. He saw his father again, belting him with a heavy wooden training-sword, yelling, “Use the shield! Use the shield, damn you!” A shield the child could barely lift … Probably a dream. He wasn’t sure what to make of the image of that prim gentleman in the violet silk coat sliding a spike from the saddlebag, holding it up to the sun. Not a spike, but an icicle with a core of quicksilver … Now where would he have gotten an icicle in June?

John’s mind scouted the trail of something he’d read in Honoribus Eppulis about the manufacture of ice from salt, trying to track down the reference, and for a time he wandered in smoky hallucinations of vats and straw and cold. So cold. He came out with the music of Jenny’s harp in his mind again and saw he hadn’t been unconscious for more than a moment, for the gentleman in purple was standing on the dragon’s neck, straddling its backbone. Wan moorland sunlight caught in the frost-white icicle as the man drove it into the back of the dragon’s skull.

Centhwevir opened his mouth and hissed again—Missed the spinal cord, you silly bugger. John wanted to go over and take it from him and do it right. It’s right there in front of you. Hope you’ve got another one of those.

But the stranger stepped away, tucked his staff beneath his arm, and took from his bag things John recognized: vials of silver and blood, wands of gold and amethyst. The paraphernalia of wizardry. I thought Jen said you were a girl. Of healing. Centhwevir lay still, but his long spiked tail moved independently, like a cat’s—Dammit, the poison would have worked!—as the man spread a green silk sheet upon the ground and began to lay out on it a circle of power. Despairing, feeling his own life seeping away, John watched him make the spells that would call back life from the frontiers of darkness.

No! John tried to move, tried to gather his strength to move, before he realized what a stupid thing that would have been. Dammit, no! It was a moot point anyway, since he couldn’t summon the strength to so much as lift his hand. He felt the hopeless urge to weep. Don’t make me do all this again!

Was this hell? Father Anmos, the priest at Cair Corflyn, would say so. Some infernal punishment for his sins, that he had to go on slaying the same dragon over and over? And would the gent in the violet coat come over and heal him next, and hand him his ax and a couple of harpoons and say, Sorry, lad, up and at ’em. Was he going to resurrect Battlehammer? What had poor Battle-hammer done to deserve getting killed over and over again in the same fight with the same dragon through eternity?

This ridiculous vision occupied his mind for a time, coming and going with the braided golden threads of that remembered music—or was the mage in the heather playing a flute?—and with the thought of darkness and of stars that did not twinkle but blazed with a distant, steady light.

Then from a great distance he seemed to see Ian, standing where the unknown wizard had stood at the top of the broken wall.

Can’t be a hallucination, John found himself thinking. That’s his old jacket he’s wearing—the sleeve was stained with poisons from last night.

At the dragon’s side, the wizard held out his hand.

Ian jumped lightly down from the wall, strode across the scorched and smoking ground without a blink, without a hesitation, grimy plaid fluttering in the morning breeze. The dragon raised its head, and the mage smiled, and John thought suddenly, Ian, run! Panic filled him, for no good reason, only that he knew this man in his embroidered cap was evil and that he was saving the dragon’s life with ill in mind.

The dragon sat up like a dog on its haunches: its brilliant, bloodstained wings folded. Its injured foot it held a little off the ground. John could see where the slash had been stitched together again. The wizard who had saved its life set aside the flute of bone and ivory.

It was said that if you saved a dragon’s life it was your slave. It was true that when Jenny had saved the life of Morkeleb the Black, the Dragon of Nast Wall, she had done so by means of the dragon’s name. That music, salvaged from ancient lore, had given her power. Save a dragon, slave a dragon …

Ian, go back!

He tried to scream the words, and his breath would not come.

Ian, no!

John raised himself on his elbows, then his hands. It was as if every cord and muscle of his flesh tore loose. Ian …!

The boy paused, as if he’d heard his voice. Turning, he walked over to where John lay and stood looking down at him, and his bright sapphire eyes were no longer his own eyes, no longer Jenny’s. No longer anything human.

With a smile on his face that was almost friendly, he kicked John in the side as a man would kick a dying dog that had bitten him.

Then he walked away.

When John’s eyes cleared, he saw the dragon Centhwevir lowering himself to the earth, saw the strange wizard settling himself a little uneasily among the bristling ridges of the dragon’s back. He stretched down a hand and helped Ian up behind him. Like a dream of cornflowers and daffodils, like lapis and golden music, the star-drake spread his wings.

“Ian …” It was like falling onto a harrow, but John tried to make himself crawl, as if he could somehow reach them, somehow snatch his son back.

The moonstone flashed in the wizard’s staff. The dragon loosed its hold on the world, like the wind taking a kite. Weightless and perfect in its beauty it rose, and John tried and failed to call his son’s name, though what he thought that would accomplish he knew not.

He only knew that the dragon was taking his son.

A dream, he thought, seeing again Ian’s face and the flame of hell in those blue eyes. It has to be a dream.

Darkness took him.

FIVE

“DAMN YOU, JOHN.” Jenny Waynest sank back on the straw tick and covered her mouth with her hands. She was trembling. “Damn you.” For a moment more the images glowed in the fire’s core: the blue and gold dragon stretched dying in its blood, the crumpled form of the man in his battered doublet of black leather and iron plate. Then they faded.

Ian, she thought. Ian must have come. Mages cannot see mages, in fire, water, stone, unless they consent to be seen. Goddess of Earth, let it be that I can’t see now because Ian has come.

Ian was already a good enough healer that it might be just possible for him to save a man’s life. To stop bleeding, anyway; to keep the lungs drawing air. To keep the cold of shock from reaching the heart. John would have forbidden him to follow, but knowing Ian there was a good chance that he had.

She closed her eyes, trying to breathe, trying to abate the shaking that racked her flesh. God of the Earth, help him …

Voices came to her through the window behind her head. Soldiers in the courtyard. “By the gods, I thought he had us last night.”

“Not a chance.” A southerner’s voice, one of the surviving dozen of the twenty-five who’d ridden with her from the Skepping Hills. “He’s just a robber, when all’s said.”

But he wasn’t. Or more properly, someone in his band was more than just a robber’s follower. And it was abundantly clear that John’s information concerning the band’s numbers—and capabilities—was far more accurate than Rocklys’. Well, the southerners would learn—if they lived long enough.

Smoke from breakfast fires stung Jenny’s nostrils, reminding her of her hunger. They had been at Palmorgin, the largest of the new fortified manors in the deeps of the Wyrwoods, when Balgodorus turned and attacked. Fortunately there had been surplus grain in the storerooms. That probably had a good deal to do with the bandit’s choice of target, though Jenny wasn’t sure. They’d have to have known she was following them, and their goal, it was clear, was to eliminate her; to knock magic from John’s—and Rocklys’—armory of resources. Then, too, the fine southern swordblades, arrowheads, and spears stored at Palmorgin made it a target. Early summer—before the harvest was in—was a hard time for bandits as for everyone else. The families from the outlying farms had managed to bring in the remnants of last year’s oats and barley, and a handful had rescued pigs, cows, and chickens, but Palmorgin’s lord Pellanor had nevertheless confiscated the lot and put everything under armed guard. After a week of siege, and no help in sight, Jenny was glad the elderly baron had taken this precaution.

Things were bad enough without starvation.

With her mind she walked from the storeroom where she slept down the corridor, past the guard and out onto the parapet that ran around the whole of the manor’s outer wall. Testing and listening, smelling at every mark of ward and guard she had put on the place, to see if counterspells had probed them in her few hours of sleep since last night’s attack. She’d have to make the walk in person as soon as she got up, but this probing had on a dozen occasions alerted her to trouble spots that she might not have reached for an hour or more: fires starting in the stables or under the kitchen roof, spells of sleep or inattention muttering to the guards.

Balgodorus’ witch was good.

And under her mental probes, Jenny heard other voices. Women in the kitchen, chatting of commonplaces or gossiping of those not present—“She’s been carrying on with Eamon like a common whore …” “Well, what do you suppose her mother was? And Eamon’s wife with child!” None of them dared to speak of what filled all their minds: What if Balgodorus breaks the gate?

There were women in the eastern villages, women who had been through Balgodorus’ raids, who still wore masks and would do so until they died. Those were the ones who had been deemed not pretty enough or strong enough to be sold as slaves in the far southeast.

Somewhere a child laughed, and a small girl patiently explained to a playmate the only correct rules for Hide-the-Bacon. Many bandit troops killed children as a matter of course: too expensive to feed. Balgodorus’ was one of these.

Ian …

Jenny forced herself to concentrate.

Walls, kitchen, barracks. “Three years sweating it out in this godsforsaken wilderness, build this wall and clear that field and drink that cow-piss they call wine hereabouts.” A man’s voice, almost certainly one of the conscripts sent north from the King’s lands in Greenhythe or Belmarie. “And for what? If the folk here had the sense Sister Illis gave to goats they’d have moved out a hundred years ago …”

Jenny sighed. Sister Illis was the southern name they gave to the Many-Colored Goddess. As for the sentiment, it was a common one among serfs who’d been uprooted from their villages and forcibly relocated. There were things that ending happily ever after did not address, and one of them was how everything got paid for.

“One of them’s got to have gotten through.” Very clearly she heard the Baron Pellanor’s scratchy voice. At the same time she saw him in her mind, a tall, stringy, graying man of about her own age wearing serviceable back and breast-plate armor and a cloak of red wool, the color of the House of Uwanë.

So Grand John Alyn must have been, she thought, once upon a long-ago time. Another king had sent that ten-times removed ancestor north to govern and protect those who dwelled between the Gray Mountains and the bitter river Eld. A prosperous land it had been in those days. Caerdinn had told her of a land of rich barley and oats, of sheep and shaggy-coated cattle; a land of endlessly argumentative scholars, of strange heresies that sprang up among the silver miners in the Gray Mountains and the Skepping Hills; of ingenious weavers and bards and workers in silver and steel. That ancient king had told Grand John Alyn, Hold the land, defend the law, protect my people with your life.

And King Uriens—or rather Prince Gareth, who ruled in his father’s mental absence—had given charge of these lands in the southeastern Wyrwoods to Pellanor, a minor cadet of the Lords of Grampyn, after twenty-seven years’ service in arms.

“I don’t know, m’lord,” said a man-at-arms. “The bandits got men all through the forest. They got Kannid and Borin …”

Jenny saw Pellanor lift a hand and turn his face away. Borin had been sent for help four days ago. Yesterday his burned and emasculated body had been dumped in the open ground sixty feet from the gates. It was a difficult shot with an arrow, but after ten or twelve tries one of the men-at-arms had finally been able to kill him.

“Can’t that witch-lady get a word to the Commander at Corflyn?” another soldier asked the baron. “With a talking bird, like in the stories?”

The Baron sighed. “Well, Ront, I’m sure if Mistress Jenny could do such a thing she would have, days ago. Wizards can get word to one another, but as far as I know there aren’t any other wizards at Corflyn now.”

There aren’t any other wizards, Jenny thought wearily, in the whole of the Winterlands. Nor have there been for many years. Only herself. And Ian, not yet sufficiently versed in power to speak through crystal or fire.

And this woman in Balgodorus’ band.

It was time to get up.

She opened her eyes. The fire had burned down low in the brazier, a jewel-box huddle of ember and coal. The heat seemed suddenly unbearable—she whispered the rush of it aside, dissolved with a Word that mimicked the echoes of youth.

John, she thought, staring again into the blaze’s blue-glowing core. John.

The ruined walls of Cair Dhû formed themselves once more before her, sharp and tiny as the reflections in a diamond. Fumes of smoldering heather veiled her sight. John lay close to the broken mess of acid-scorched wall. The warhorse Battlehammer, bleeding from flanks and sides, stood over him, head down, favoring his right hind leg when he moved.

No dragon remained. Nor was there any sign of what had happened to it, neither bones nor tracks of dragging. But John wounded it, she thought, baffled. Wounded it unto death.

Somehow it had prevailed. It had won.

Then she saw Battlehammer raise his head, and from smoke and ruin Sergeant Muffle appeared, glancing warily about him, ax at his belt and his big hammer in hand, his own mount and a packhorse led by the reins.

Four years ago Cair Corflyn had been only a circle of broken walls, a stronghold for whatever bandit troop was powerful enough to hold it. In the twenty-two years he’d been Thane of the Winterlands, John Aversin had led three attacks against it, and it was there that his father had been killed.

The inhabitants of the current gaggle of thatch-roofed taverns, bordellos, shops, and shacks that circled Corflyn’s new gates didn’t take much notice of John and Muffle. Having left Battlehammer at Alyn Hold to recuperate (“You’re the one who should be recuperating!” Muffle had scolded), he was mounted on his second-string warhorse, Jughead, a skillful animal in battle or ambush but hairy-footed, bony as a withy fence, and of a color unfashionable in the ballads. John’s scuffed and mended gear, iron-plated here and there and with jangling bits of chain-mail protecting his joints, was stained and old, and the plaids over it frayed. And Sergeant Muffle looked exactly what he was: a fat backcountry blacksmith.

The guards at the gate recognized them, though. “You did it, didn’t you?” asked a hard-faced boy of not too many more than Ian’s years. John had heard they recruited them as young as sixteen off the docks and taverns of Claekith, and drunk out of the slums. “Killed the dragon that cut up the Beck post so bad? Killed it by yourself? They say you did.”

“They’re lyin’, though.” John slid painfully from Jughead’s back and clung for a moment to the saddle-bow until the grayness retreated from his vision. “God knows where the thing is now.”

Commander Rocklys was waiting for him; he was shown directly in.

“Thunder of Heaven, man, you shouldn’t even be on your feet!” She crossed from the window and caught his arm in her heavy grip, to get him to a chair. “They say you slew the dragon of Cair Dhû …”

“So everybody’s tellin’ me.” He sank into the carved seat, annoyed with the way his legs shook and how his ribs stabbed him under the plaster dressing every time he so much as turned his head. His breath was shallow from the pain. “But it’s a filthy lie. I don’t know where the beast is, nor if it’ll be back.”

A middle-aged chamberlain brought them watered southern wine in painted cups. With her back to the window that overlooked the camp parade ground it was hard to read Rocklys’ expression, but when John was finished she said, “A wizard. Damn. Another wizard. A man … You’re sure?”

“No,” said John. “No, I’m not sure. I was far gone, and the very earth around me smoking, and some of what I saw I know wasn’t real. Or if it was, then me dad sure fooled the lot of us at his funeral.” Rocklys frowned. Like his sons, she disapproved on principle of frivolity under duress. “But Muffle tells me he saw no dragon when he reached the place an hour later and found me out colder than a sailor after a spree.”

“And your son?”

John’s jaw tightened. “Well,” he said, and said nothing more. The Commander shoved away from the wall with her shoulders and went to a cupboard: she took out a silver flask and poured a quantity of brandy into his empty wine cup. John drank and looked out past her for a time, at two soldiers in the blue cloaks of auxiliaries arguing in the parade ground. Father Anmos and the cult flute player emerged from the shrine of the Lord of War, heads shrouded in the all-covering crimson hoods designed to blot out any sight or sound detrimental to the god’s worship. Raised in the heresy of the Old God, John wondered who the god of dragons would be, and if he prayed for the return of his son whether it would do any good. He felt as if barbed iron was lodged somewhere inside him.

“Muffle doesn’t know. I don’t know. Ian …”

He took a deep breath and raised his head again to meet her eyes. “Adric—me other boy, you know—tells me Ian set off just after midnight for Jenny’s house to get death-spells to lay on the dragon; somethin’ I’d forbade him to do.” He forced himself to sound matter-of-fact. “By the tracks next mornin’—or so says Jen’s second cousin Gniffy, and he’s a hunter—there’d been someone at the house, a man in new boots that looked like city work, who went off with Ian. Gniffy lost the tracks over the moors, but it’s pretty clear where they ended up.”

His jaw tightened, and he looked down into the cup, trying not to remember the look in Ian’s eyes.

“Ian’s powers aren’t great. At least that’s what Jen tells me. For me, anybody who can light a candle by just lookin’ at the wick is far and away a marvel, and I wish I could do it. She says he’ll never be one of the great ones, never one of those that can scry the wind or shift his shape or call down the magic of the stars. Which is no reason, she says, why he can’t be a truly fine middlin’-strong wizard.”

“Of course not.” Rocklys set down the flask. “And by the Twelve, the world has more use for a well-trained and competent mediocrity than for half a cohort of brilliant fools. Which is why,” she added gently, “I wish you had left your boy here.”

“Well, be that as it may,” sighed John. “Even if he’d been here, Ian would have stolen a horse and run away home at first word of the dragon, so it would all have come out the same.” He ran his fingers through his hair. The red ribbon was still braided in it, faded and stained with blood. “But who this is, or if he’s in league with Balgodorus as well … I take it you’ve no word from Jen?”

The Commander shook her head. Her eyes were troubled, resting on John’s face. He must, he thought, look worse than he supposed.

“I got one message two weeks ago: Balgodorus seemed to be heading for the mountains. He has a stronghold there. I’ve sent search parties in that direction but they’ve found nothing, and frankly, in the Wyrwoods, unless you know what you’re looking for you’re not going to find it. You know those woods. Thickets that have been growing in on themselves since before the founding of the Realm; ranges of hills we’ve never heard of, swallowed in trees. They may be untrained scum, but they know the land, and they’re rebellious, tricky, stopping at nothing …”

Her face suddenly set, grim anger in her eyes. “And some of the southern lords are as bad, or nearly so. Barons, they call themselves, or nobles—wolves tearing at the fabric of the Realm for their own purposes. Well”—she shook her head—“at least the likes of Balgodorus don’t pretend allegiance and then make deals behind the Regent’s back.”

“Two weeks.” John gazed into the dab of amber fluid at the bottom of his goblet. Two days’ ride from Alyn, with Muffle scolding all the way. Ian had been gone for five days.

Old Caerdinn returned to his mind, as he had on and off since the strange mage’s appearance. A vile old man, John remembered, dirty and obsessed. He had been John’s tutor as well, and a quarter of the books at Alyn Hold had been dug from ruins by that muttering, bearded old bundle of rags, or bargained from any who had even the blackest scraps of paper to sell. He—and John’s mother—were the only other wizards John had ever heard of north of the Wildspae, and they had hated one another cordially.

Had Caerdinn had other pupils? Pupils whose wizardry was stronger than Jenny’s, maybe even stronger than Jenny’s human magic alloyed with the alien powers of dragons? This woman of Balgodorus’, or the person who had taught her. The man with the moonstone in his staff?

Somehow he couldn’t see the gentleman in the purple coat taking instruction from a toothless dribbling old beggar, much less meekly letting Caerdinn beat him, as Jenny had done.

But there were other Lines of magic. Other provenances of teaching handed down in the south, in Belmarie or the Seven Isles. And as Rocklys had said, though their magic was very different from human magic, there were wizards also among the gnomes.

He sighed again and raised his head, to meet Rocklys’ worried gaze. “I have to believe that I saw at least some of what I think I saw,” he said simply. “I was flat on my back for three days after the fight, and it rained during that time. Gniffy had a look round but he said the tracks were so torn up, he couldn’t be sure of anything. But Centhwevir’s gone. And Ian’s gone.”

“Of this Centhwevir I’ve heard nothing.” Rocklys walked to the niche in the wall, where in former centuries commandants had put the closed shrines of the gods. She had a shrine there to the Lord of War, and another to the Lord of Law, but where in the south he’d seen little charred basins of incense, and the stains of proffered wine and blood, was only clean-scrubbed marble. The rest of the niche held books, and his eye ran over the titles: Tenantius’ Theory of Laws, Gurgustus’ Essays, The Liever Regulae, and Caecilius’ The Righteous Monarch. On the table before these books was a strongbox of silver pieces, and beside it a small casket containing half a handful of gems. He remembered the complaints that had come to him from the mayors of Far West Riding and Great Toby, how the King’s commissioners demanded more to pay for the garrison than even the greediest thane ever had.

“Of this new wizard …” She shook her head. “Can Jenny have been mistaken? Or might the man you saw have been some kind of … of illusion, as the dragon was?”

“And be really this woman?” John shook his head. “But why? Why go to the trouble to fool me?”

“In any case,” said the Commander, “all of this convinces me—well, I was convinced before—that we must establish this school I’ve spoken of, this academy of wizards, here in Corflyn. I hope now that when she returns, Jenny will agree to come here and teach others. We can’t go on like this.”

“No.”

Save a dragon, slave a dragon … The old granny-rhyme drifted back through his mind, and the bodies he’d found the last time Balgodorus had raided a village.

And as he heard the words again he saw the wizard in his violet coat and embroidered cap mounting Centhwevir’s back, holding out his hand to Ian.

His ribs ached where the boy’s boot toe had driven in.

The Commander turned from the neglected shrines, the books of the Legalist scholars, very real distress on her face. “It isn’t just bandit mages who are the danger. You know that! Look at the gnomes, operating what amount to independent kingdoms at the very heart of the King’s Realm! Buying slaves, too, clean against the King’s Law, no matter what they swear and claim! They have wizards among them, and who knows what or who they teach. Look at lords like the Master of Halnath, and the Prince of Greenhythe, and the merchant princes of the Seven Isles! Look at Tinán of Imperteng, claiming that his ancient title to the lands at the base of the mountains is equal in rank to that of the King himself!”

John propped his spectacles on his nose. “Well, accordin’ to Dotys’ Histories, it is.”

“What kind of argument is that?!” Rocklys demanded angrily. “The revolt of the Prince of Wyr, four hundred years ago, broke the Realm in two! That should never have been permitted. And Prince Gareth—though I have nothing but respect for him as a scholar and an administrator—is letting it happen all over again!”

“Our boy Gar’s not done so very ill,” John pointed out quietly. “For one coming new to the game and untaught, he’s doing gie well.”

He smiled a little, remembering the gangly boy with the fashionable green streaks in his fair hair, broken glasses perched on the end of his long nose, delivering himself of an oratorical message from the King before collapsing in a faint in the Alyn Hold pigyard. Comic, maybe, thought John. But it had taken genuine courage to sail north to an unknown land; genuine courage to ride overland from the harbor at Eldsbouch to Alyn Hold. The boy was lucky he hadn’t had his throat slit for his boots on the way.

Maybe luckier still that he’d set out on his journey when he had. In those days the witch Zyerne had been tightening her grip on the old King’s mind and soul, draining his energy and looking about her for a new victim.

“That’s exactly my point!” Rocklys drove her fist into her palm, her face hard. “His Highness the Prince is untaught. And inexperienced. And he’s making mistakes that will cost the Realm dear. It will take years—decades—to repair them, if they can be repaired at all. His …” She stopped herself with an effort.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “He’s your friend, as he is my cousin. I suppose I can’t get over my memories of him prancing along with his friends, wearing those silly shoulder-banners that were all the rage, and toe-points so long they had to be chained to his garters. You’re not going to go seeking Jenny?” She came over to him and rested a big hand on his shoulder. John realized he was so tired it would cost him great effort to stand, and his hands were growing colder and colder around the painted rim of the cup.

“I’ll ride on back to the Hold,” he said. “Jenny’ll know Ian’s gone, and something’s gie wrong. She’ll be on her way back to the Hold as fast as she can.”

“I thought mages couldn’t scry other mages.”

“Nor can they. So she’ll know I haven’t been next or nigh Ian in five days, and that I’ve got meself out of bed and down here before my cuts have fair scabbed. She’ll put two and two together—she’s good at that kind of addition, is Jenny. And it’s as well,” he added, setting the cup aside and rising cautiously from his chair. “For in truth, she can’t return too soon for comfort.”

“And if she doesn’t return?” asked Rocklys. “If this bandit chief and his tame mage have found a way to imprison or destroy her?”

“Ah, well.” John scratched the side of his long nose. “Then just us standin’ off a couple of wizards, and a dragon, and all … I’d say we’re in real trouble.” He took three steps toward the door and fainted, as if struck over the head with a house beam.

SIX

WAIT FOR ME, you idiot! thought Jenny furiously, and let the images in the fire fade. WAIT FOR ME! She wondered why the Goddess of Women had seen fit to cause her to fall in love with a blockhead.

Moonlight streamed through the window, just tinged now with the smoke of far-off fires. Somewhere beyond the walls a whippoorwill cried. Jenny drew her plaid around her shoulders and wished with all that was in her that she could slip over the palisade, summon Moon Horse from her patient foraging in the woods, and ride for Alyn Hold as fast as she could go.

Or if all that were not possible—and it was not, not without leaving close to three hundred people to die—she wished that at least she knew what was going on.

Silence cupped Palmorgin manor in its invisible hand. Even the guards had nothing to say, focused through their exhaustion on the open ground beyond the moat. This was the dead hour of night that Balgodorus favored for his attacks. Mosquitoes whined in the darkness, but worn down as she was even the spells of “Go bite someone else” scraped at her, like a rough spot on the inside of a shoe after the tenth or twelfth mile.

No sign of Centhwevir. Under the best of circumstances it wasn’t always possible to scry dragons, for their flesh, their very essence, was woven of magic. But over the past seven days, she had scried the outposts along the fell country, scried the towns of Great Toby and Far West Riding, scried Alyn itself.

No burned ground. No tangles of stripped and acid-charred bones.

And at the Hold, no mourning. But she saw Aunt Jane and Aunt Rowan and Cousin Dilly weeping; saw Adric sitting alone on the battlements, looking out to the south. And John, after his brief interview with Rocklys, had refused to remain in bed, had instead dragged himself next morning back onto his horse and taken the road for home, Muffle behind him scolding all the way.

Ian.

Something had happened to Ian.

Wait till I get there, John. This can’t last.

She slipped from the room.

Women and children slept rolled in blankets along the corridor outside her door. She picked her way among them, drawing her skirts aside. Pale blue light glowed around the door handles of other storerooms, warding away touch with spells of dread. Warding away, too, every spell of rats and mold and insects, leaks and fire, anything and everything Jenny could think of.

In the archway that led onto the palisade she nodded to the guard, and the night breeze lifted the dark hair from her face. Balgodorus’ tame mage hadn’t stopped with illusion. As she passed the roofs of the buildings around the court, Jenny checked the faint-glowing threads of ward-signs, of wyrds and counterspells. In some places the fire-spells still lingered, the wood or plaster hot beneath her fingers. She scribbled additional marks, and in one place opened one of the several pouches at her belt and dipped her finger into the spelled mix of powdered silver and dried fox-blood, to strengthen the ward. She didn’t like the untaught craziness of those wild spells, without Limitations to keep them from devouring and spreading where their sender had no intention of letting them go.

There had been other spells besides fire. Spells to summon bees from their hives and hornets from their nests in furious unseasonal swarms. Spells of sickness, of fleas, of unreasoning panic and rage. Anything to break the concentration of the defenders. The palisade and the blockhouses were a tangle of counterspells and amulets; the smelly air a lour of magic.

How could anyone, she wondered, born with the raw gold of magic in them, use it in the service of a beast like Balgodorus: slave trader, killer, rapist, and thief?

“Mistress Waynest?” Lord Pellanor appeared at the top of the ladder from the court below. He carried his helm under his arm, and the gold inlay that was its sole decoration caught the fire’s reflection in a frivolous curlicue of light. Without it his balding, close-cropped head above gorget and collar looked silly and small. “Is all well?”

“As of sunset. I’m just starting another round.”

“Can she see in?” asked the Baron. “I mean, look with a mirror or a crystal or with fire the way you do, to see where to plant those spells of hers?”

“I don’t think so.” Jenny folded her arms under her plaid. “She might be able to see in a room where I’m not, despite scrywards I’ve put on everything I can think of. She’s strong enough to keep me from looking into their camp. She’s laying down spells at random, the way I’ve done: sickness on a horse or a man, fire in hay or wood, foulness in water. And she wouldn’t know any more than I do how much effect those spells are having.”

The Baron puffed his breath, making his long mustaches jump. “Where would she have learned, eh?” He started to bite his thumb against evil, then glanced at her and changed the gesture to simply scratching his chin. “I … er … don’t suppose the man who taught you might still be about?”

Jenny shook her head.

“You’re sure?”

She looked aside. “I buried him. Twenty-five years ago.”

“Ah.”

“I was the last of his students.” Jenny scanned the formless yards of open ground below. They had fought, daily, over that ground, and daily, nightly, those ragged filthy foul-mouthed men had come back, with ladders, with axes, with brush to try to burn the gates or rams to try to break them. There were, she guessed, nearly twice as many bandits as there were defenders of fighting strength. They attacked in shifts.

Even now she could see the twinkle of lights from their camp and smell its stink on the breeze. Eating, drinking, resting up for another attack. Her bones ached with fatigue.

“He was very old,” she went on, “and very bitter, I suppose through no fault of his own.” She remembered the way his stick would whine as it slashed through the air, and the bite of the leather strap on her flesh. The better, he said, for her to remember her lessons. But she’d felt his satisfaction in the act of punishment alone, the relief of a frustration that ate him alive. She had wept for days, at the old man’s lonely death. She still did not know why.

“He remembered the last of the King’s troops, marching away to the south. That must have been the final garrison from Great Toby, because the others had gone centuries before that. He said his own teacher left with them, and after that he could only work at the books his teacher left. There was no one else in the north who could teach properly—not healing, not magic, not music. Nothing. Caerdinn was too young to follow the legions south, he said. Then the Iceriders came, and everything changed.”

Pellanor cleared his throat apologetically, as if it were up to him to defend the decision of the man whom history knew as the Primrose King. “Well, Hudibras II was faced with a very difficult situation during the Kin-Wars. And the plague struck hardest among the armies. Your teacher seems to have learned enough on his own to have taught you well.”

Jenny thought of all those things she’d learned in the south that Caerdinn hadn’t known, the holes in his knowledge she’d struggled with all her life. Spells that could have saved lives, had she known them. But Pellanor had done her no harm, and didn’t understand, so she only said, “So he did.”

Had the old man’s anger stemmed from that ancient desertion? she wondered, as she moved on into the corner turret. Under her touch the rough-dressed stone walls, the heavily plastered timbers, felt normal—no new spells embedded like embers within. Or had his rage at her been because she was herself untalented, born with only mediocre powers, when he considered himself fit to have instructed the great?

Had the masters of those ancient Lines truly had some method of raising small powers such as hers—and his—to primacy? Or was that just some fantasy of his own?

The fact remained that her greater powers had come from contact with the Dragon of Nast Wall. That dragon-magic she sent out now, flowing like thin blue lightning through rock and wood, thatch and tile, listening as dragons listened, sniffing and tasting for that other wizard’s spells.

There. Summonings of rats, and fleas—good God, did that mage-born imbecile know nothing about the spread of plague? Another fire-spell … No, two. One under the rafters of the main hall. Another in the air in the courtyard, a stickiness waiting for someone to walk by. She probed at them, encysted them in Limits, pinched them dead.

Irresponsible. Foolish, insane. Bandit-magic. Like Balgodorus himself, uncaring what ill he caused as long as he got what he wanted.

Jenny renewed the Weirds on the turret and hastened, her soft sheepskin boots soundless on the rough dirty plank floors, to the places where the flea-spells had taken hold.

They were badly wrought, drifting patches of them scattered like seeds through the stable, through the kitchen corridor used as a barrack for Rocklys’ men, and the dormitory set up among the arches under the main tower. It took Jenny weary hours to trace them down, to neutralize the knots and quirks of hunger and circumstance that would draw vermin to those places in swarms. They weren’t strong enough to do any real damage under most circumstances, but still too strong to neglect. The foul, pissy smell of rodents was in any case stronger everywhere in the manor than she liked. A dangerous smell, with so many people crowded so close.

Did Balgodorus think he was immune? Did he think his tame mage’s unhoned powers were up to combating full-scale plague?

As she traced the Runes and Circles and Summonings over and over, on walls and floors and furniture; as she called forth the power of the stars, of the earth, of water and moon-tide and air; as she wrought magic from her own flesh and bones and concentration, Jenny wanted to slap that ignorant, selfish, arrogant bandit-witch until her ears rang. Whatever Caerdinn’s failings, he had started his teaching with Limitations. The old man’s tales had been filled with well-meaning adepts whose cantrips to draw wealth to the deserving had resulted in the deaths of moneyed but otherwise innocent relatives, and whose fever-cures slew their patients from shock or chill.

The short summer night was nearing its end when she finished. The warriors who’d watched around the courtyard fire had sought their rest. Somewhere in the dormitory a child cried out in her sleep, and Jenny heard a second child’s whispering voice start a story about a wandering prince in exile, to beguile her sister back to sleep. The quarter moon stood high above the parapets: the Gray God, the mages’ God of the High Faith. Jenny leaned her back against the stone arch and looked up at that neat white semi-circle, glowing so brightly that she could see the thin edge of light around the remainder of the velvety disc.

Listening as dragons listened, she felt the souls of Balgodorus’ camp, a mile or so distant in the rock-girt clearing by Gan’s Brook. Spirits like filthy laundry, grease-slick and reeking from short lifetimes of brutality, rape, and greed. She could scent the very blood of the camp horses and dogs.

So the star-drake had smelled John’s blood as he’d ridden to meet it.

Had Ian ridden out after John?

He must have. She’d scried John and Muffle, at least until the bandits had attacked the manor again and she’d had to abandon her vision of the battle and turn to her own battle. Stumbling with exhaustion, she’d returned in time to see the confused vision of fire and blood that was the actual combat. Had Ian been there, she would have seen nothing. But had he followed? The wonder was that Adric hadn’t found a way to get himself into trouble as well.

So what had happened?

Her mind returned, troubled, to the vision she’d had of John, only a few hours ago. John in that patched red robe of threadbare velvet he wore after a bath, sitting in his study once again, with every book on dragons and dragon-slaying that he owned heaped around him, his silly clocks chiming and whirling soundlessly in the dark at his back. He read, it seemed to her, with a concentrated, desperate energy, as she’d seen him read when he was trying to course out some half-remembered clue tossed to the surface of the magpie-nest of his memory.

Trying to find something before it was too late.

And at last, just as she let the vision fade, he took off his spectacles and sat with head bowed: weariness, desperation, and terrible knowledge in his immobile face.

He had found what he sought, whatever it was.

Wait for me.

She opened her eyes. Her head throbbed, but there was one more thing yet to do tonight.

She heard the breathing of Balgodorus Black-Knife’s men, unseen in the misty eaves of the woods. Like a dragon, she smelled their blood. But in this dead hour of night, it was a good guess that the bandit-mage, whoever it was, slept.

Jenny hitched her plaids up over her shoulder and climbed the stair to the parapet again.

Pellanor was returning from his own rounds, craggy face drawn with strain. Jenny didn’t know when the man slept last. He helped her fetch a rope and wrapped it around a post while she drew the signs of power in the air and on the stonework and wove about herself and the rope the signs of Look-Over-There. Even another wizard might easily miss her. Her mind still weaving those silvery webs about herself, she girdled up her faded blue skirts and let herself down over the wall.

She carried a long dagger and a short dagger, and her halberd slung over her back: slung also, awkward beside the weapon, was the small harp she’d borrowed from Pellanor. “Be careful,” Pellanor whispered, when she knew he wanted to say Come back soon. In her absence anything could befall.

But this was something that had to be done.

Crossing the moat was easy. The bandits had been heaving rocks and dirt, broken trees and beams into it for weeks to provide their scaling ladders with footing. As she came under the trees of the woods that drew close to the wall at this point, she passed between two watchers, a woman and a man, ugly leathery brutes crouched like wolves waiting beside water for prey. Even if she had not been mageborn, she thought she would have been able to smell them in the dark. She’d walked one night to the edge of Balgodorus’ camp, perhaps a mile and a half down the rough-sloping ground. Seen the shimmer of ward-sigils and elf-light that fenced the place, guarding it as her own guarded Palmorgin’s walls.

The clearing she sought tonight was half a mile from the bandit camp and long known to her. An ash tree stood in it, ruinously old, the sole survivor of some long-ago fire. The rock by which it grew could have been a natural one, unless you looked at it from a certain angle and realized it had been hewn into the shape of a crouching pig. There was a hollow in the top that collected dew. Around this hollow Jenny traced a circle with her fingers, her eyes slipping half-closed.

She formed in her heart the power of the moon, when it should lie one day closer to its dying than it lay tonight. The turning stars, white and cold and ancient. With her fingers she braided the moonlight, slippery-cold as heavy silk, and with a little spoon of crystal and silver drawn from her pocket she dipped up dew from the grass. Spiderweb and milkweed she bound into the spells and brushed them with the spoon-back into the air again: a whispering of longing and of pain. With the shadows of her hair she painted runes into the darkness, and from the pale starflash made sigils of pallid light.

Her knee braced on the rock, she slipped the harp free of its casing: balanced it in her arm as she had balanced her children when they were babies. There were barely strings for her two hands. The spells she wove she had learned from the Dragon of Nast Wall, and scarcely knew what emotion she wove into tomorrow’s moonlight, tomorrow’s stars, as she had woven it last night into the slant of tonight’s milky shadows.

Hunger for what was gone forever. Heart-tearing sweetness glowing in the core of a bitter fruit. A hand curved around the illusion of fire or a jewel; books hidden long in the earth.

For two weeks she had come, while the silver coin of the moon swelled to fullness, then was clipped away bit by bit: the Gray God covering over with his sleeve the white paper he wrote on, they said, that men could not read what would work their ruin. For two weeks she had made this song of dreams of grief. Then in the silence that followed the song she waited.

Far off to her right one of the watchers around the manor swatted a gnat and cursed.

The stars moved. The moon rode high, singing its triumph. Bones and body ached. Moreover, the grief of the spell, as is the way of spells without words, was her own. Thin mists no higher than Jenny’s knees stirred among the trees, and in time she smelled the change in the air that spoke of dawn.

She drew a mist about herself, and the changeable illusion of dreams. Like a deer wrought of glass, she picked her way back through thickets and dew-soaked ferns, through the dell where fey-lights danced among the mushrooms and the ringed stones. Those who crouched on picket, squinting across open ground to the new stone walls, the trash-filled moat and ruined outbuildings, didn’t see her when she paused between them, looking at Pellanor’s Hold.

A rough square of stone walls, perhaps sixty yards to the side, floating in a milky drift of mist. Turrets at each corner and a blockhouse on the west. Gate and gatehouse. Stables and granaries. Three hundred and fifty people—men, women, and children …

A gift, as Balgodorus would see it, of good southern weaponry and steel, of slaves for the selling and grain to feed his troops. And Jenny herself, a mageborn weapon in the Law’s hand.

As this girl, whoever she was, was Black-Knife’s weapon.

And against that she saw the burned-out havoc of Cair Dhû; Adric huddled alone among the sheepskins of the big curtained bed he and his brother shared. John in his study with his spectacles in his hand, reading one passage over and over, two times, three times, in the light of the candles, and then slowly leaning his forehead down on his hand.

She closed her eyes. She had only to whistle up Moon Horse and ride.

That fleck of light on the parapet would be Pellanor, waiting for her sign below to let down the rope.

Dawn rinsed the blackness over the walls with the thinnest pallor of gray.

Jenny sighed and wrapped invisibility around her. Like a shred of mist she moved among the ruins of the village, past the bandit watchers, to the beleaguered Hold once more.

SEVEN

“MAGGOTS FROM MEAT, weevils from rye.

Dragons from stars in an empty sky.”

John Aversin sat for a long time with the second volume of The Encyclopedia of Everything in the Material World open before him:

“Dragons come down out of the north, being formed in the hearts of the volcanoes that erupt in the ice. The combination of the heat and the cold, and the vapors from under the earth, give birth to eggs, and the eggs so to the dragons themselves. Being born not of flesh, they are invulnerable to all usages of the flesh …”

Among the green curlicues, gold-leaf flowers, and carmine berries of the marginalia could be found enlightening illuminations of perfectly conical mountains spitting forth orange dragon eggs as if they were melon seeds, accompanied by drawings of hugely grinning and rather crocodilian dragons.

“Teltrevir, heliotrope,” whispered Jenny’s voice in his mind and behind it the braided threads of music from her harp, the tunes that were joined to those names. “Centhwevir is blue knotted with gold. Nymr sea-blue, violet-crowned; Gwedthion ocean-green and Glammring Gold-Horns bright as emeralds …”

And each tune, each air, separate and alien and haunting. John closed his eyes, exhaustion grinding at his flesh, and remembered a round-dance he’d seen as a child. Its music had been spun from the twelfth of those nameless passages. The twelfth name on Jenny’s list was Sandroving, gold and crimson. The girls had called the dance Bloodsnake. He could still whistle the tune.

Dotys had more to say. “The star-drakes, or dragons as such things are called, dwelt anciently in the archipelagoes of rock and ice that string the northern seas westward from the Peninsula of Tralchet, islands called by the gnomes the Skerries of Light. These skerries, or reefs, of rock are utterly barren, and so the dragons must descend to the lands of men to hunt, for they are creatures of voracious appetite, as well as archetypes of greed and lust and all manner of willfulness.”

And they live on what between times? thought John.

On the corner of his desk Skinny Kitty woke long enough to scratch her ear and wash, then returned to sleep with her paw over her nose. In the cinder darkness beyond the window a cock crowed.

He touched the sheaf of parchment that the young Regent had sent him. The old ballads had been copied in beautiful bookhand by a court scribe. It was astonishing what coming to power could do for obsessions previously sneered at by the fashionable.

“‘For lo,’she quoth, ‘do dragons sing

More beautifully than birds.’”

Who in their right mind would, or could, make up a detail like that?

“Southward-flying shadows of fire.”

“From isles of ice and rock beneath the moon.”

A candle guttered, smoking. John looked up in surprise and groped around until he found a pair of candle scissors to trim the wick. The sky in the stone window frame had gone from cinder to mother-of-pearl.

His body hurt, as if he’d been beaten with lengths of chain. Even the effort of sitting up for several hours made his breath short. Most of the candles had burned out, and their smutted light stirred uneasily in the networks of experimental pulleys and tackle that hung from the rafters. It would soon be time to go.

“… isles of ice and rock …”

The other volume lay in front of him also. The partial volume of Juronal he had found in a ghoul’s hive, near what had been the Tombs of Ghrai; the volume he had read on his return, two nights ago, as he searched for that half-remembered bit of information that told him what had become of Ian and why he could wait no longer to embark on his quest for help.

North, he thought. He took off his spectacles and leaned his forehead on his hand. Alone. God help me.

The key to magic is magic! Jenny flinched away from the hard knobbed hands striking her, the toothless mouth shouting abuse. The dirty, smoky stink of the house on Frost Fell returned to her through the dream’s haze. Caerdinn’s cats watched from the windowsills and doors, untroubled by the familiar scene. The key to magic is magic! The old man’s grip like iron, he dragged her from the hearth by her hair, pulled the old harp from her hands, thrust her at the desk where the books lay, black lettering nearly invisible on the tobacco-colored pages.

The more you do, the more you’ll be able to do! It’s laziness, laziness, laziness that keeps you small!

It isn’t true! She wanted to shout back at him, across all those years of life. It isn’t true.

But at fourteen she hadn’t known that. At thirty-nine she hadn’t known.

In her dream she saw the summer twilight, the beauty of the nights when the sky held light until nearly midnight and breathed dawn again barely three hours later. In her dream she heard the sad little tunes she’d played on her master’s harp, tunes that had nothing to do with the ancient music-spells handed down along the Line of Herne. Like all of Caerdinn’s knowledge, those spells of music were maddeningly ambiguous, fragments of airs learned by rote.

In her dream Jenny thought she saw the black skeletal shape of a dragon flying before the ripe summer moon.

The key to magic was not magic.

Out of darkness burned two crystalline silver lamps. Stars that drank in the soul and tangled the mind in mazes of still-deeper dream. A white core of words forming in fathomless darkness.

What is truth, Wizard-woman? The truth that dragons see is not pleasant to the human eyes, however uncomfortably comprehensible it may be to their hearts. You know this.

The knots of colored music that were his true name.

The kaleidoscope of memory that she touched when she touched his mind.

The gold fire of magic that had flowed into her veins.

Plunging herself, dragon form, into the wind …

Mistress Waynest …!

This love you speak of, I do not know what it is. It is not a thing of dragons …

Mistress, wake up!

“Wake up!”

Gasping, she pulled clear of the mind-voice in the shadows. Raw smoke tore her throat; the air was a clamor of men shouting and the frenzied screams of cattle and horses in pain. “What is it?” She scrambled to a sitting position, head aching, eyes thick. Nemus, one of Rocklys’ troopers, stood beside her narrow bed.

“Balgodorus …”

As if it would or could be anything else. Jenny was already grabbing for her halberd and her slingstones—she slept clothed and booted these days—trying to thrust the leaden exhaustion from her bones. Her mind registered details automatically: mid-morning, noise from all sides, concerted attack …

“—fire-arrows,” the young man was saying. “Burning the blockhouse roof, but there’s a storeroom in flames …”

Fire-spells.

“… as if the animals have all gone mad …”

Curse, thought Jenny. Curse, curse, curse …

The stables were in flames, too. She had no idea of the nature of the spell that had been put on the animals, but the horses, mules, and cattle were rushing crazily around the central court, charging and slashing at one another, kicking the walls, throwing themselves at the doors. Bellowing, shrieking, madness in their eyes. The smoke that rolled over the whole scene seemed to Jenny to be laden with magic, as if something foul burned and spread with the blaze.

Damn her, she thought, who taught that bitch such a spell?

Scaling ladders wavered and jerked beyond the frieze of palisade spikes. Arrows filled the air. On the north wall men were already being stabbed at and hacked by the defenders within. Slingstones cracked against the walls and an arrow splintered close to Jenny’s head. Someone was bellowing orders. She got a brief glimpse of Pellanor in his steel-plated armor swaying hand-to-hand at the top of the wall with a robber in dirty leathers, as she sprang down the steps to the court.

“Watch out, m’lady!” yelled another soldier, racing along the catwalk. “Them horses is insane!”

Curse it, thought Jenny, trying to concentrate through exhaustion and the blurring blindness of a too-familiar migraine, trying to snatch the form and nature of the spell out of the air. There were panic-spells working, too, a new batch of them …

She banged on the shutters of the storerooms where the children hid during attacks. “It’s me, Jenny Waynest!” she called out. “One of you, any of you …”

The shutters cracked. A girl’s face showed in the slit.

“The names of the cows,” said Jenny. She’d have to do this the hard way, with Limitations, not a counterspell. “Quick.”

The girl, thank God, didn’t ask her if she was insane, or if she meant what she said. “Uh—Florrie. Goddess. Ginger. You want me to point out which is which? They’re moving awful fast.”

“Just the names.” Jenny already knew the names of the horses. “Give me a minute; I’ll be back. Be thinking of all of them.” She sprinted across the court, two cows and a mule turning, charging her. She barely reached the stair at the base of the east tower before them, leaped and scrambled up out of their reach, drew a Guardian on the stonework. Smoke poured like a river from under the eaves of the workrooms between the east tower and the north, but it was better than trying to get past the melee in the court. Jenny swung herself up, darted across the roof, forming counterspells to the fire as she ran and thanking the Twelve that the roof beneath her feet was tile. A man’s body plunged from above, spraying blood.

Get the danger contained, thought Jenny. Madness-spells, fire-spells, get those taken care of first.

And then, by the Moon-Scribe’s little white dog, you and I have a reckoning, my ill-instructed friend.

The Limitations quieted the maddened animals, exempting them one by one from the spell. It made Jenny’s head ache to concentrate amid the chaos, the smell of smoke and the fear that any moment the bandits would come over the wall.

From the top of the west wall Jenny picked out Balgodorus himself, a tall man, strong enough to dominate any of his men, dark and with a bristling beard. Men were rallying around him now, ready for another attack. They wound their crossbows, milled and shouted among themselves, working up their anger. Balgodorus was saying something to them, gesturing at the walls …

“Probably telling them about all the food and wealth we have in here,” muttered Pellanor, his voice hollow within his steel helm as he came to Jenny’s side. He was panting hard and smelled of sweat and the blood that ran down the steel.

Balgodorus gestured to the woman who stood near him.

Jenny said softly, “That’s her.”

“What?”

“The witch. She’s wearing a skirt, and unarmed. Bandit-women dress as men. Why else would she be at the battle? I’ll need a rope.” Jenny strode along the palisade, dark hair billowing in a crazy cloud behind her, Pellanor hurrying after. “I don’t suppose there’s a scaling ladder still standing.”

On all the walls the defenders were panting, resting their spears and their swords against the palisade, wiping sweat or blood from their eyes. Children ran along the catwalk with water; a man could be heard telling them sharply to get back indoors and bar themselves in. Below, in the court, the horses stamped, restless at the smell of smoke and blood, and all around could be heard the faint, frenzied squealing of the mice, the cats, the rats still under the influence of the mad-spell.

“Great Heaven, no!”

She felt for her stones and sling, shrugging her shoulder through the halberd’s strap. “Go back. They’re gathering for another try.” She stepped over a dead bandit, kilting up her skirts.

“You can’t seriously think of leaving in the middle of an attack! You’ll be slaughtered!” Jenny had never used spells of illusion in or near the Hold, for fear of the effects they might have on the watchers on the wall, or on the counterspells against illusion with which she’d so carefully ringed the fortress. Last night she had renewed those counterspells after a scout told her there was untoward movement around the bandit camp. She’d had only time for a quick, disquieting glimpse of John, who should have been flat on his back in bed, loading provisions into that horror of an airship he’d built last spring. Muffle had been with him—Muffle, for love of the Goddess, knock some sense into his head!

“An attack is the only time she’ll be concentrating on something else.” Jenny found the rope down which Pellanor had let her climb two nights ago, still coiled just inside the door of the north turret. She checked the land below, and the ruined and trampled fields that lay to the east. No bandits in sight on that side of the keep. Arrows littered the ground, floated in the moat like straws. A single body, the legacy of an attack three days ago, bobbed obscenely among the half-sunk timbers and boughs.

“Whatever you do, hold them now,” she said. “This shouldn’t take long.”

“What if she uses more spells?” asked the Baron worriedly. “Without you to counter them …”

“I’m counting on her to do just that,” said Jenny. “It will give me a better chance at her. Hold fast and don’t let anyone panic. I can’t return until after the attack is driven off, but that shouldn’t be long.” She slithered under the dripping, charred spikes of the palisade, hanging onto the rope. “I’ll be watching.”

“May the gods of war and magic go with you, then.” Pellanor saluted and snapped his visor down again. “Damn,” he added, as the noise rose from the other side of the fortress. “Here they come.”

Jenny dropped, playing the rope out fast, thankful that she and John still worked out against one another with halberd and sword. Still, she was forty-one and felt it. No sleep last night and precious little the night before, and when she did sleep, she saw in her mind what John was doing with that monstrosity he’d built …

She pushed away the images, her frantic fear and the desire to break her beloved’s legs to keep him in bed until she got there, forced her thoughts to return to spells of protection, of concealment, as she ran for the fields. Broken crops offered some concealment from the men she could hear shouting beneath the walls.

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