Dragon's Bane

XI

At dawn she felt John’s hand tighten slightly around her own.

Two nights ago she had worked the death-spells, weaving an aura of poison and ruin—the circles of them still lay scratched in the earth at the far end of the Rise. She had not slept more than an hour or so the night before that, somewhere on the road outside Bel, curled in John’s arms. Now the drifting smoke of the low fire was a smudge of gray silk in the pallid morning air, and she felt worn and chilled and strange, as if her skin had been sandpapered and every nerve lay exposed. Yet she felt strangely calm.

She had done everything she could, slowly, meticulously, step by step, following Miss Mab’s remembered instructions as if the body she knew so well were a stranger’s. She had given him the philters and medicines as the gnomes did, by means of a hollow needle driven into the veins, and had packed poultices on the wounds to draw from them the poison of the dragon’s blood. She had traced the runes of healing where the marks of the wounds cut the paths of life throughout his body, touching them with his inner name, the secret of his essence, woven into the spells. She had called him patiently, repeatedly, by the name that his soul knew, holding his spirit to his body by what force of magic she could muster, until the med icines could take hold.

She had not thought that she would succeed. When she did, she was exhausted past grief or joy, able to think no further than the slight lift of his ribcage and the crease of his blackened eyelids with his dreams.

Gareth said softly, “Will he be all right?” and she nodded. Looking at the gawky young prince who hunkered at her side by the fire, she was struck by his silence. Perhaps the closeness of death and the endless weariness of the night had sobered him. He had spent the hours while she was in the Deep patiently heating stones and placing them around John’s body as he had been told to do—a dull and necessary task, and one to which, she was almost certain, she owed the fact that John had still been alive when she had returned from the dragon’s lair.

Slowly, her every bone hurting her to move, she put off the scuffed scarlet weight of his cloak. She felt scraped and aching, and wanted only to sleep. But she stood up, knowing there was something else she must do, worse than all that had gone before. She stumbled to her medicine bag and brought out the brown tabat leaves she always carried, dried to the consistency of leather. Breaking two of them to pieces, she put them in her mouth and chewed.

Their wringing bitterness was in itself enough to wake her, without their other properties. She had chewed them earlier in the night, against the exhaustion that she had felt catching up with her while she worked. Gareth watched her apprehensively, his long face haggard within the straggly frame of his green-tipped hair, and she reflected that he must be almost as weary as she. Lines that had existed only as brief traces of passing expressions were etched there now, from his nostrils to the comers of his mouth, and others showed around his eyes when he took off his broken spectacles to rub the inner corners of the lids—lines that would deepen and settle into his manhood and his old age. As she ran her hands through the loosened cloud of her hair, she wondered what her own face looked like, or would look like after she did what she knew she must do.

She began collecting medicines into her satchel once more.

“Where are you going?”

She found one of John’s plaids and wrapped it about her, all her movements stiff with weariness. She felt threadbare as a piece of worn cloth, but the uneasy strength of the tabat leaves was already coursing through her veins. She knew she would have to be careful, for the tabat was like a usurer; it lent, but it had a way of demanding back with interest when one could least afford to pay. The moist air felt cold in her lungs; her soul was oddly numb.

“To keep a promise,” she said.

The boy watched her with trepidation in his earnest gray eyes as she shouldered her satchel once more and set off through the misty silences of the ruined town toward the Gates of the Deep.

“Morkeleb?”

Her voice dissipated like a thread of mist in the stillness of the Market Hall. Vapor and blue morning shadow cloaked the Vale outside, and the light here was gray and sickly. Before her the dragon lay like a dropped garment of black silk, held to shape only by its bonings. One wing stretched out, where it had fallen after the convulsions of the night before; the long antennae trailed limp among the ribbons of the mane. Faint singing still lay upon the air, drawing at Jenny’s heart.

He had given her the way through the Deep, she thought; it was John’s life that she owed him. She tried to tell herself that it was for this reason only that she did not want that terrible beauty to die.

Her voice echoed among the upended ivory turrets of the roof. “Morkeleb!”

The humming changed within her mind, and she knew he heard. One delicate, crayfish antenna stirred. The lids of silver eyes slipped back a bare inch. For the first time she saw how delicate those lids were, tinted with subtle shades of violet and green within the blackness. Looking into the white depths they partly shielded, she felt fear, but not fear for her body; she felt again the cross-blowing winds of present should and future if, rising up out of the chasms of doubt. She summoned calm to her, as she summoned clouds or the birds of the hawthorn brakes, and was rather surprised at the steadiness of her voice.

“Give me your name.”

Life moved in him then, a gold heat that she felt through the singing of the air. Anger and resistance; bitter resistance to the last.

“I cannot save you without knowing your name,” she said. “If you slip beyond the bounds of your flesh, I need something by which to call you back.”

Still that molten wrath surged through the weakness and pain. She remembered Caerdinn saying, “Save a dragon, slave a dragon.” At that time, she had not known why anyone would wish to save the life of such a creature, nor how doing so would place something so great within your power. Cock by its feet...

“Morkeleb!” She walked forward, forgetting her fear of him—perhaps through anger and dread that he would die, perhaps only through the tabat leaves—and laid her small hands on the soft flesh around his eyes. The scales there were tinier than the ends of needles. The skin felt like dry silk beneath her hand, pulsing with warm life. She felt again that sense, half-fright, half-awe, of taking a step down a road which should not be trodden, and wondered if it would be wiser and better to turn away and let him die. She knew what he was. But having touched him, having looked into those diamond eyes, she could more easily have given up her own life.

In the glitter of the singing within her mind, one single air seemed to detach itself, as if the thread that bound together the complex knots of its many harmonies had suddenly taken on another color. She knew it immediately in its wholeness, from the few truncated fragments Caerdinn had whistled for her in a hedgerow one summer day. The music itself was the dragon’s name.

It slid through her fingers, soft as silken ribbons; taking it, she began to braid it into her spells, weaving them like a rope of crystal around the dragon’s fading soul. Through the turns of the music, she glimpsed the entrance to the dark, starry mazes of his inner mind and heart and, by the flickering light of it, seemed to see the paths that she must take to the healing of his body.

She had brought with her the medicines from the Deep, but she saw now that they were useless. Dragons healed themselves and one another through the mind alone. At times, in the hours that followed, she was terrified of this healing, at others, only exhausted past anything she had ever experienced or imagined, even in the long night before. Her weariness grew, encompassing body and brain in mounting agony; she felt entangled in a net of light and blackness, struggling to draw across some barrier a vast, cloudy force that pulled her toward it over that same frontier. It was not what she had thought to do, for it had nothing to do with the healing of humans or beasts. She summoned the last reserves of her own power, digging forgotten strengths from the marrow of her bones to battle for his life and her own. Holding to the ropes of his life took all this strength and more that she did not have; and in a kind of delirium, she understood that if he died, she would die also, so entangled was her essence in the starry skeins of his soul. Small and clear, she got a glimpse of the future, like an image in her scrying-stone—that if she died, John would die within the day, and Gareth would last slightly less than seven years, as a husk slowly hollowed by Zyerne’s perverted powers. Turning from this, she clung to the small, rock-steady strength of what she knew: old Caerdinn’s spells and her own long meditations in the solitude among the stones of Frost Fell.

Twice she called Morkeleb by his name, tangling the music of it with the spells she had so laboriously learned rune by rune, holding herself anchored to this life with the memory of familiar things—the shapes of the leaves of plants, gentian and dog’s mercury, the tracks of hares upon the snow, and wild, vagrant airs played on the pennywhistle upon summer nights. She felt the dragon’s strength stir and the echo of his name return.

She did not remember sleeping afterward. But she woke to the warmth of sunlight on her hair. Through the open Gates of the Deep, she could see the looming rock face of the cliffs outside drenched with cinnabar and gold by the afternoon’s slanted light. Turning her head, she saw that the dragon had moved and lay sleeping also, great wings folded once more and his chin upon his foreclaws like a dog. In the shadows, he was nearly invisible. She could not see that he breathed, but wondered if she ever had. Did dragons breathe?

Lassitude flooded her, burying her like silk-fine sand. The last of the tabat leaves had burned out of her veins, and that exhaustion added to the rest. Scraped, drained, wrung, she wanted only to sleep again, hour after hour, for days if possible.

But she knew it was not possible. She had saved Morkeleb, but was under no illusion that this would let her sleep safely in his presence, once he had regained a little of his strength. A detached thread of amusement at herself made her chuckle; Ian and Adric, she thought, would boast to each other and every boy in the village that their mother could go to sleep in a dragon’s lair—that is, if she ever made it back to tell them of it. Even rolling over hurt her bones. The weight of her clothes and her hair dragged at her like chain mail as she stood.

She stumbled to the Gates and stood for a moment, leaning against the rough-hewn granite of the vast pillar, the dry, moving freedom of the air fingering her face. Turning her head, she looked back over her shoulder and met the dragon’s open eyes. Their depths stared into hers for one instant, crystalline flowers of white and silver, like glittering wells of rage and hate. Then they slid shut again. She walked from the shadows out into the brilliance of the evening.

Her mind as well as her body felt numbed as she walked slowly back through Deeping. Everything seemed queer and changed, the shadow of each pebble and weed a thing of new and unknown significance to her, as if for years she had walked half-blind and now had opened her eyes. At the northern side of the town, she climbed the rocks to the water tanks, deep black pools cut into the bones of the mountain, with sun flashing on their opaque surfaces. She stripped and swam, though the water was very cold. Afterward she lay for a long time upon her spreadout clothing, dreaming she knew not what. Wind tracked across her bare back and legs like tiny footprints, and the sun-dance changed in the pool as shadows crept across the black water. She felt it would have been good to cry, but was too weary even for that.

In time she got up, put on her clothes again, and returned to camp. Gareth was asleep, sitting with his knees drawn up and his face upon them on his crossed arms, near the glowing ashes of the fire.

Jenny knelt beside John, feeling his hands and face. They seemed warmer, though she could detect no surface blood under the thin, fair skin. Still, his eyebrows and the reddish stubble of his beard no longer seemed so dark. She lay down beside him, her body against his beneath the blankets, and fell asleep.

In the drowsy warmth of half-waking, she heard John murmur, “I thought that was you calling me.” His breath was no more than a faint touch against her hair. She blinked into waking. The light had changed again. It was dawn.

She said, “What?” and sat up, shaking back the thick weight of her hair from her face. She still felt tired to death, but ravenously hungry. Gareth was kneeling by the campfire, tousled and unshaven with his battered spectacles sliding down the end of his nose, making griddlecakes. She noted that he was better at it than John had ever been.

“I thought you were never waking up,” he said.

“I thought I was never waking up either, my hero,” John whispered. His voice was too weak to carry even that short distance, but Jenny heard him and smiled.

She climbed stiffly to her feet, pulled on her skirt again over her creased shift, laced her bodice and put on her boots, while Gareth set water over the coals to boil for coffee, a bitter black drink popular at Court. When Gareth went to fetch more water from the spring in the woods beyond the wrecked well house. Jenny took some of the boiling water to renew John’s poultices, welcoming the simplicity of human healing; and the smell of herbs soon filled the little clearing among the ruins, along with the warm, strange smell of the drink. John fell asleep again, even before Jenny had finished with the bandages, but Gareth fetched her some bannocks and honey and sat with her beside the breakfast fire.

“I didn’t know what to do, you were gone so long,” he said around a mouthful of mealcake. “I thought about following you—that you might need help—but I didn’t want to leave John alone. Besides,” he added with a rueful grin, “I’ve never managed to rescue you from anything yet.”

Jenny laughed and said, “You did right.”

“And the promise you made?”

“I kept it.”

He let out his breath with a sigh and bowed his head, as if some great weight that had been pressing down upon him had been lifted. After a while he said shyly, “While I was waiting for you, I made up a song... a ballad. About the slaying of Morkeleb, the Black Dragon of Nast Wall. It isn’t very good...”

“It wouldn’t be,” Jenny said slowly, and licked the honey from her fingers. “Morkeleb is not dead.”

He stared at her, as he once had when she had told him that John had killed the Golden Dragon of Wyr with an ax. “But I thought—wasn’t your promise to John to—to slay him if—if John could not?”

She shook her head, the dark cloud of her hair snagging in the grubby fleece of her jacket collar. “My promise was to Morkeleb,” she said. “It was to heal him.”

Collecting her feet beneath her, she rose and walked over to John once more, leaving Gareth staring after her in appalled and unbelieving bewilderment.

A day passed before Jenny returned to the Deep. She stayed close to the camp, taking care of John and washing clothes—a mundane task, but one that needed to be done. Somewhat to her surprise, Gareth helped her in this, fetching water from the spring in the glade, but without his usual chatter. Knowing she would need her strength, she slept a good deal, but her dreams were disquieting. Her waking hours were plagued with a sense of being watched. She told herself that this was simply because Morkeleb, waking, had extended his awareness across the Vale and knew where they were, but certain understandings she had found within the mazes of the dragon’s mind would not allow her to believe this.

She was aware that Gareth was watching her, too, mostly when he thought she wasn’t looking.

She was aware of other things, as well. Never had she felt so conscious of the traces and turnings of the wind, and of the insignificant activities of the animals in the surrounding woods. She found herself prey to strange contemplation and odd knowledge of things before unsuspected—how clouds grow, and why the wind walked the way it did, how birds knew their way south, and why, in certain places of the world at certain times, voices could be heard speaking indistinctly in empty air. She would have liked to think these changes frightened her because she did not understand them, but in truth the reason she feared them was because she did.

While she slept in the late afternoon, she heard Gareth speak to John of it, seeing them and understanding through the depths of her altered dreams.

“She healed him,” she heard Gareth whisper, and was aware of him squatting beside the tangle of bearskins and plaids where John lay. “I think she promised to do so, in trade for his letting her past him to fetch the medicines.”

John sighed and moved one bandaged hand a little where it lay on his chest. “Better, maybe, she had let me die.”

“Do you think...” Gareth swallowed nervously and cast a glance at her, as if he knew that asleep, she still could hear. “Do you think he’s put a spell on her?”

John was silent for a time, looking up at the gulfs of sky above the Vale, thinking. Though the air down here was still, great winds racked the upper atmosphere, herding piled masses of cloud, charcoal gray and blinding white, up against the shaggy flanks of the mountains. At length he said, “I think I’d feel it, if there were another mind controlling hers. Or I’d like to flatter myself to thinking I’d feel it. They say you should never look into a dragon’s eyes, lest he put a spell on you. But she’s stronger than that.”

He turned his head a little and looked at where she lay, squinting to focus his shortsighted brown eyes upon her. The bare flesh on either side of the bandages on his arms and chest was livid with bruises and pitted with tiny scabs where the broken links of the mail shirt had been dragged through it. “When I used to dream of her, she didn’t look the same as in waking. When I was delirious, I dreamed of her—it’s as if she’s grown more herself, not less.”

He sighed and looked back at Gareth. “I used to be jealous other, you know. Not of another man, but jealousy of herself, of that part other she’d never give me—though God knows, back in those days, what I wanted it for. Who was it who said that jealousy is the only vice that gives no pleasure? But that was the first thing I had to learn about her, and maybe the hardest I’ve ever learned about anything—that she is her own, and what she gives me is of her choosing, and the more precious because of it. Sometimes a butterfly will come to sit in your open palm, but if you close your hand, one way or the other, it—and its choice to be there—are gone.”

From there Jenny slid into deeper dreams of the crushing darkness of Ylferdun and the deep magic she sensed slumbering in the Places of Healing. As if from a great distance, she saw her children, her boys, whom she had never wanted to conceive but had borne and birthed for John’s sake, but loved uneasily, unwillingly, and with desperately divided heart. With her wizard’s sight she could see them sitting up in their curtained bed in the darkness, while wind drove snow against the tower walls; not sleeping at all, but telling one another tales about how their father and mother would slay the dragon and ride back with pack trains and pack trains of gold.

She woke when the sun lay three-quarters down the sky toward the flinty crest of the ridge. The wind had shifted; the whole Vale smelled of sharp snow and pine needles from the high slopes. The air in the lengthening slaty shadows was cold and damp.

John was asleep, wrapped in every cloak and blanket in the camp. Gareth’s voice could be heard in the woods near the little stone fountain, tunelessly singing romantic lyrics of passionate love for the edification of the horses. Moving with her habitual quiet, Jenny laced up her bodice and put on her boots and her sheepskin jacket. She thought about eating something and decided not to. Food would break her concentration, and she felt the need of every fragment of strength and alertness that she could muster.

She paused for a moment, looking around her. The old, uneasy sensation of being watched returned to her, like a hand touching her elbow. But she sensed, also, the faint tingling of Morkeleb’s power in the back of her mind and knew that the dragon’s strength was returning far more quickly than that of the man he had almost slain.

She would have to act and act now, and the thought of it filled her with fear.

“Save a dragon, slave a dragon,” Caerdinn had said. Her awareness of how small her own powers were terrified her, knowing what it was against which she must pit them. So this, in the end, was what she had paid for John’s love, she told herself, with a little wry amusement. To go into a battle she could not hope to win. Involuntarily another part of her thought at once that at least it wasn’t John’s life, but her own, that would be forfeit, and she shook her head in wonderment at the follies of love. No wonder those with the power were warned against it, she thought.

As for the dragon, she had a sense, almost an instinct, of what she must do, alien to her and yet terrifyingly clear.

Her heart was hammering as she selected a scruffy plaid from the top of the pile over John. The thin breezes fluttered at its edges as she slung it around her; its colors faded into the muted hues of weed and stone as she made her way silently down the ridge once more and took the track for the Deep.

Morkeleb no longer lay in the Market Hall. She followed the scent of him through the massive inner doors and along the Grand Passage—a smell that was pungent but not unpleasant, unlike the burning, metallic reek of his poisons. The tiny echoes of her footfalls were like faroff water dripping in the silent vaults of the passage—she knew Morkeleb would hear them, lying upon his gold in the darkness. Almost, she thought, he would hear the pounding of her heart.

As Dromar had said, the dragon was laired in the Temple of Sarmendes, some quarter-mile along the passage. The Temple had been built for the use of the children of men and so had been wrought into the likeness of a room rather than a cave. From the chryselephantine doors Jenny looked about, her eyes piercing the absolute darkness there, seeing how the stalagmites that rose from the floor had been cut into pillars, and how walls had been built to conceal the uneven shape of the cavern’s native rock. The floor was smoothed all to one level; the statue of the god, with his lyre and his bow, had been sculpted of white marble from the royal quarries of Istmark, as had been his altar with its carved garlands. But none of this could conceal the size of the place, nor the enormous, irregular grandeur of its proportions. Above those modestly classical walls arched the ceiling, a maze of sinter and crystal that marked the place as nature’s work timidly homesteaded by man.

The smell of the dragon was thick here, though it was clean of offal or carrion. Instead the floor was heaped with gold, all the gold of the Deep, plates, holy vessels, reliquaries of forgotten saints and demigods, piled between the pillars and around the statues, tiny cosmetic pots smelling of balsam, candlesticks quivering with pendant pearls like aspen leaves in spring wind, cups whose rims flashed with the dark fire of jewels, a votive statue of Salemesse, the Lady of Beasts, three feet high and solid gold... All the things that gnomes or men had wrought of that soft and shining metal had been gathered there from the farthest tunnels of the Deep. The floor was like a beach with the packed coins that had spilled from their torn sacks, and through it gleamed the darkness of the floor, like water collected in hollows of the sand.

Morkeleb lay upon the gold, his vast wings folded along his sides, their tips crossed over his tail, black as coal and seeming to shine, his crystal eyes like lamps in the dark. The sweet, terrible singing that Jenny had felt so strongly had faded, but the air about him was vibrant with the unheard music.

“Morkeleb,” she said softly, and the word whispered back at her from the forest of glittering spikes overhead. She felt the silver eyes upon her and reached out, tentatively, to the dark maze of that mind.

Why gold? she asked. Why do dragons covet the gold of men?

It was not what she had meant to say to him, and she felt, under his coiled anger and suspicion, something else move.

What is that to you, wizard woman? What was it to me that I returned here to save your life? It would have served me and mine better to have let you die.

Why then did you not?

There were two answers. The one she gave him was, Because it was understood between us that if you gave me the way into the heart of the Deep, I should heal you and give you your life. But in that healing you gave me your name, Morkeleb the Black—and the name she spoke in her mind was the ribbon of music that was his true name, his essence; and she saw him flinch. They have said, Save a dragon, slave a dragon, and by your name you shall do as I bid you.

The surge of his anger against her was like a dark wave, and all along his sides the knifelike scales lifted a little, like a dog’s hackles. Around them in the blackness of the Temple, the gold seemed to whisper, picking up the groundswell of his wrath.

I am Morkeleb the Black. I am and will be slave to no one and nothing, least of all a human woman, mage though she may be. I do no bidding save my own.

The bitter weight of alien thoughts crushed down upon her, heavier than the darkness. But her eyes were a mage’s eyes, seeing in darkness; her mind held a kind of glowing illumination that it had not had before. She felt no fear of him now; a queer strength she had not known she possessed stirred in her. She whispered the magic of his name as she would have formed its notes upon her harp, in all its knotted complexities, and saw him shrink back a little. His razor claws stirred faintly in the gold.

By your name, Morkeleb the Black, she repeated, you shall do my bidding. And by your name, I tell you that you will do no harm, either to John Aversin, or to Prince Gareth, or to any other human being while you remain here in the south. When you are well enough to sustain the journey, you shall leave this place and return to your home.

Ire radiated from his scales like a heat, reflected back about him by the thrumming gold. She felt in it the iron pride of dragons, and their contempt for humankind, and also his furious grief at being parted from the hoard that he had so newly won. For a moment their souls met and locked, twisting together like snakes striving, fighting for advantage. The tide other strength rose in her, surging and sure, as if it drew life from the combat itself. Terror and exhilaration flooded her, like the tabat leaves, only far stronger, and she cast aside concern for the limitations other flesh and strove against him mind to mind, twisting at the glittering chain of his name.

She felt the spew of his venomous anger, but would not let go. If you kill me, I shall drag you down with me into death, she thought, or dying, I shall not release your name from my mind.

The strength that was breaking the sinews of her mind drew back, but his eyes held to hers. Her thoughts were suddenly flooded with images and half-memories, like the visions of the heart of the Deep; things she did not understand, distracting and terrifying in their strangeness. She felt the plunging vertigo of flight in darkness; saw black mountains that cast double shadows, red deserts unstirred by wind since time began and inhabited by glass spiders that lived upon salt. They were dragon memories, confusing her, luring her toward the place where his mind could close around hers like a trap, and she held fast to those things of her own life that she knew and her memory of the piping of old Caerdinn whistling the truncated air of Morkeleb’s true name. Into that air she twisted her own spells of breaking and exhaustion, mingling them with the rhythm of his heart that she had learned so well in the healing, and she felt once more his mind draw back from hers.

His wrath was like the lour of thunder-sky, building all around her; he loomed before her like a cloud harboring lightning. Then without warning he struck at her like a snake, one thin-boned claw raised to slash.

He would not strike, she told herself as her heart contracted with terror and her every muscle screamed to flee... He could not strike her for she had his name and he knew it... She had saved him; he must obey... Her mind gripped the music of his name even as the claws hissed down. The wind of them slashed at her hair, the saber blades passing less than a foot from her face. White eyes stared down at her, blazing with hate; the rage of him beat against her like a storm.

Then he settled back slowly upon his bed of gold. The tang of his defeat was like wormwood in the air.

You chose to give me your name rather than die, Morkeleb. She played his name like a glissando and felt the surge of her own rising power hum in the gold against his. You will go from these lands and not return.

For a moment more she felt his anger, resentment, and the fury of his humbled pride. But there was something else in the hoarfrost glitter of his gaze upon her, the knowledge that she was not contemptible.

He said quietly. Do you not understand?

Jenny shook her head. She looked around her once again at the Temple, its dark archways piled high with more gold than she had ever seen before, a treasure more fabulous than any other upon earth. It would have bought all of Bel and the souls of most of the men who dwelled there. But, perhaps because she herself had little use for gold, she felt drawn to ask again, Why gold, Morkeleb? Was it the gold that brought you here?

He lowered his head to his paws again, and all around them the gold vibrated with the whisper of the dragon’s name. It was the gold, and the dreams of the gold, he said. I had discontent in all things; the longing grew upon me while I slept. Do you not know, wizard woman, the love that dragons have for gold?

She shook her head again. Only that they are greedy for it, as men are greedy.

Rose-red light rimmed the slits of his nostrils as he sniffed. Men, he said softly. They have no understanding of gold; no understanding of what it is and of what it can be. Come here, wizard woman. Put your hand upon me and listen with my mind.

She hesitated, fearing a trap, but her curiosity as a mage drove her. She picked her way over the cold, uneven heaps of rings, platters, and candlesticks, to rest her hand once more against the soft skin below the dragon’s great eye. As before, it felt surprisingly warm, unlike a reptile’s skin, and soft as silk. His mind touched hers like a firm hand in the darkness.

In a thousand murmuring voices, she could hear the gold pick up the music of the dragon’s name. The blended nuances of thought were magnified and made richer, distinct as subtle perfumes, piercing the heart with beauty. It seemed to Jenny that she could identify every piece of gold within that enormous chamber by its separate sounding, and hear the harmonic curve of a vessel, the melding voices of every single coin and hairpin, and the sweet tingling locked in the crystal heart of every jewel. Her mind, touching the dragon’s, flinched in aching wonder from the caress of that unbearable sweetness as the echoes awoke answering resonances within her soul. Memories of dove-colored dusks on the Fell that was her home pulled at her with the deep joy of winter nights lying on the bearskins before the hearth at Alyn Hold, with John and her sons at her side. Happiness she could not name swept over her, breaking down the defenses of her heart as the intensity of the music built, and she knew that foi Morkeleb it was the same in the chimeric deeps of his mind.

When the music faded, she realized she had closed her eyes, and her cheeks were wet with tears. Looking about her, though the room was as black as before, she thought that the memory of the dragon’s song lingered in the gold, and a faint luminosity clung to it still.

In time she said. That is why men say that dragon’s gold is poisoned. Others say that it is lucky... but it is merely charged with yearning and with music, so that even dullards can feel it through their fingers.

Even so, whispered the voice of the dragon in her mind.

But dragons cannot mine gold, nor work it. Only gnomes and the children of men.

We are like the whales that live in the sea, he said, civilizations without artifacts, living between stone and sky in our islands in the northern oceans. We lair in rocks that bear gold, but it is impure. Only with pure gold is this music possible. Now do you understand?

The sharing had broken something between them, and she felt no fear of him now. She went to sit close to the bony curve of his shoulder and picked up a gold cup from the hoard. She felt as she turned it over in her hands that she could have chosen it out from a dozen identical ones. Its resonance was clear and individuated in her mind; the echo of the dragon’s music held to it, like a remembrance of perfume. She saw how precisely it was formed, chastened and highly polished, its handles tiny ladies with garlands twined in their hair where it streamed back over the body of the cup; even microscopically fine, the flowers were recognizable as the lilies of hope and the roses of fulfillment. Morkeleb had killed the owner of this cup, she thought to herself, only for the sake of the incredible music which he could call from the gold. Yet his love for the gold had as little to do with its beauty as her love for her sons had to do with their—undeniable, she thought—good looks.

How did you know this was here?

Do you not think that we, who live for hundreds of years, would be aware of the comings and goings of men? Where they build their cities, and with whom they trade, and in what? I am old, Jenny Waynest. Even among the dragons, my magic is accounted great. I was born before we came to this world; I can sniff gold from the bones of the earth and follow its path for miles, as you follow ground water with a hazel twig. The gold-seams of the Wall rise to the surface here like the great salmon of the north country rising to spawn.

The dragon’s words were spoken in her mind, and in her mind she had a brief, distant glimpse of the Earth as the dragons saw it, spread out like a mottled carpet of purple and green and brown. She saw the green-black pelt of the forests of Wyr, the infinitely delicate cloud shapes of the crowns of the tall oaks, fragile and thready with winter, and saw how, toward the north, they were more and more replaced by the coarse spiky teeth of pine and fir. She saw the gray and white stones of the bare Winterlands, stained all the colors of the rainbow with lichen and moss in summer, and saw how the huge flashing silver shapes of eight- and ten-foot salmon moved beneath the waters of the rivers, under the blue, gliding shadow of the dragon’s wings. For an instant, it was as if she could feel the air all about her, holding her up like water; its currents and countereddies,. its changes from warm to cold.

Then she felt his mind closing around hers, like the jaws of a trap. For an instant she was locked into suffocating darkness, the utter darkness that not even the eyes of a wizard could pierce. Panic crushed her. She could neither move nor think, and felt only the acid gloating of the dragon all around her, and, opening beneath her, a bottomless despair.

Then as Caerdinn had taught her, as she had done in healing John—as she had always done within the circumscribed limits of her small magic—she forced her mind to calm and began to work rune by rune, note by note, concentrating singly and simply upon each element with her whole mind. She felt the wrath of the dragon smothering her like a hot sea of night, but she wedged open a crack of light, and into that crack she drove the music of the dragon’s name, fashioned by her spells into a spear.

She felt his mind flinch and give. Her sight returned, and she found herself on her feet among the knee-deep piles of gold, the monstrous dark shape backing from her in anger. This time she did not let him go, but flung her own wrath and her will after him, playing upon the music of his name and weaving into it the fires that scorched his essence. All the spells of pain and ruin she had wrought into the poison flooded to her mind; but, like her fury at the bandits at the crossroads these many weeks ago, her anger had no hate in it, offering him no hold upon her mind. He shrank back from it, and the great head lowered so that the ribbons of his mane swept the coins with a slithery tinkle.

Wrapped in a rage of magic and fire, she said, You shall not dominate me, Morkeleb the Black—neither with your power nor with your treachery. I have saved your life, and you shall do as I command you. By your name you shall go, and you shall not return to the south. Do you hear me?

She felt him resist, and drove her will and the strength of her newfound powers against him. Like a wrestler’s body, she felt the dark, sulfurous rage slither from beneath the pressure of her will; she stepped back, almost instinctively, and faced him where he crouched against the wall like a vast, inky cobra, his every scale bristling with glittering wrath.

She heard him whisper, I hear you, wizard woman, and heard, in the cold voice, the reasonance not only of furious anger at being humbled, but of surprise that she could have done so.

Turning without a word, she left the Temple and walked back toward the square of diffuse light that marked the outer hall at the end of the Grand Passage and the Great Gates beyond.