Dragon's Bane

XVIII

They flew north together, treading the woven roads of the sky.

The whole Earth lay below her, marked with the long indigo shadows of morning, the bright flash of springing water, and the icy knives of the glaciers. She saw the patterns of the sea, with its currents of green and violet, its great, gray depths, and the scrum of white lace upon its surface, and those of the moving air. All things were to her as a dragon sees them, a net of magic and years, covering the Earth and holding it to all the singing universe in a crystal web of time.

They nested among the high peaks of Nast Wall, among the broken bone ends of the world, looking eastward over the gorges where the bighorn sheep sprang like fleas from rock to rock, past dizzying drops of green meltwater and woods where the dampness coated each tree in pillows of emerald moss, and down to the woods on the foothills of the Marches, where those who swore fealty to the Master dwelt. Westward, she could look past the glacier that lay like a stilled river of green and white through the gouged gray breakers of the cliffs, past cold and barren rocks, to see the Wildspae gleaming like a sheet of brown silk beneath the steam of its mists and, in the glimmering bare woods along its banks, make out the lacework turrets of Zyerne’s hunting lodge among the trees.

Like a dragon, she saw backward and forward in time; and like a dragon, she felt no passion at what she saw.

She was free, to have what she had always sought—not only the power, which the touch of Morkeleb’s mind had kindled in her soul, but freedom to pursue that power, released from the petty grind of the work of days.

Her mind touched and fingered that knowledge, wondering at its beauty and its complexity. It was hers now, as it had always been hers for the taking. No more would she be asked to put aside her meditations, to trek ten miles on foot over the wintry moors to deliver a child; no more would she spend the hours needed for the study of her power ankle-deep in a half-frozen marsh, looking for frogwort for Muffle the smith’s rheumatism.

No more would her time—and her mind—be divided between love and power.

Far off, her dragon’s sight could descry the caravan of horses, making their antlike way along the foothills arid into the woods. So clear was her crystal sight that she could identify each beast within that train—the white Moon Horse, the balky roans, the stupid sorrel Cow, and the big liver-bay Battlehammer—she saw, too, the flash of spectacle lenses and the glint of metal spikes on a patched old doublet.

He was no more to her now than the first few inches upon the endless ribbon of dragon years. Like the bandits and the wretched Meewinks—like his and her sons—he had his own path to follow through the labyrinth patterns of darkening time. He would go on with his fights for his people and with his dogged experiments with rock salts and hot-air balloons, his model ballistas and his quest for lore about pigs. One day, she thought, he would take a boat out to the rough waters of Eldsbouch Cove to search for the ruins of the drowned breakwater, and she would not be waiting for him on the round pebbles of the gravel beach... He would ride out to the house beneath the standing stones on Frost Fell, and she would not be standing in its doorway.

In time, she knew, even these memories would fade. She saw within herself, as she had probed at the souls of others. Trey’s, she recalled, had been like a clear pool, with bright shallows and unsuspected depths. Zyerne’s had been a poisoned flower. Her own soul she saw also as a flower whose petals were turning to steel at their outer edges but whose heart was still soft and silky flesh.

In time, it would be ail steel, she saw, breathtakingly beautiful and enduring forever—but it would cease to be a flower.

She lay for a long time in the rocks, motionless save for the flick of her jeweled antennae as she scried the colors of the wind.

It was thus to be a dragon, she told herself, to see the patterns of all things from the silence of the sky. It was thus to be free. But pain still poured from some broken place inside her—the pain of choice, of loss, and of stillborn dreams. She would have wept, but there was nothing within dragons that could weep. She told herself that this was the last time she would have to feel this pain or the love that was its source. It was for this immunity that she had sought the roads of the sky.

The key to magic is magic, she thought. And all magic, all power, was now hers.

But within her some other voice asked, For what purpose? Afar off she was aware of Morkeleb, hunting the great-homed sheep in the rocks. Like a black bat of steel lace, he passed as soundlessly as his own shadow over the snowfields, wrapping himself in the colors of the air to drop down the gorges, the deceptive glitter of his magic hiding him from the nervous, stupid eyes of his prey. Magic was the bone of dragon bones, the blood of their blood; the magic of the cosmos tinted everything they perceived and everything they were.

And yet, in the end, their magic was sterile, seeking nothing but its own—as Zyerne’s had been.

Zyerne, Jenny thought. The key to magic is magic. For it Zyerne had sacrificed the men who loved her, the son she would have borne, and, in the end, her very humanity—even as she herself had done!

Caerdinn had been wrong. For all his striving to perfect his arts, in the end he had been nothing but a selfish, embittered old man, the end of a Line that was failing because it sought magic for magic’s sake. The key to magic was not magic, but the use of magic; it lay not in having, but in giving and doing—in loving, and in being loved. And to her mind there rose the image of John, sitting beside Morkeleb in the high court of the Citadel. Having so little, we shared among ourselves to make any of it worth having... the consequences of not caring enough to do it would have been worse...

It had been John all along, she thought. Not the problem, but the solution.

Shadow circled her, and Morkeleb sank glittering to the rocks at her side. The sun was half-down the west and threw the shimmer of the blue glacier light over him like a sparkling cloak of flame.

What is it, wizard woman?

She said, Morkeleb, return me to being what I was.

His scales bristled, flashing, and she felt the throb of his anger deep in her mind. Nothing can ever return to being what it was, wizard woman. You know that. My power will be within you forever, nor can the knowledge of what it is to be a dragon ever be erased from your mind.

Even so, she said. Yet I would rather live as a woman who was once a dragon than a dragon who was once a woman. On the steps of the Deep, I killed with fire, as a dragon kills; and like a dragon, I felt nothing. I do not want to become that, Morkeleb.

Bah, Morkeleb said. Heat smoked from the thousand razor edges of his scales, from the long spikes and the folded silk of his wings. Do not be a fool. Jenny Waynest. All the knowledge of the dragons, all their power, is yours, and all the years of time. You will forget the loves of the earth soon and be healed. The diamond cannot love the flower, for the flower lives only a day, then fades and dies. You are a diamond now.

The flower dies, Jenny said softly, having lived. The diamond will never do either. I do not want to forget, and the healing will make me what I never wanted to be. Dragons have all the years of time, Morkeleb, but even dragons cannot roll back the flow of days, nor return along them to find again time that they have lost. Let me go.

No! His head swung around, his white eyes blazing, his long mane bristling around the base of his many horns. I want you, wizard woman, more than I have ever wanted any gold. It is something that was born in me when your mind touched mine, as my magic was born in you. Having you, I will not give you up.

She gathered her haunches beneath her and threw herself out into the void of the air, white wings cleaving the wind. He flung himself after, swinging down the gray cliffs and waterfalls of Nast Wall, their shadows chasing one another over snow clefts dyed blue with the coming evening and rippling like gray hawks over the darkness of stone and chasm. Beyond, the world lay carpeted by autumn haze, red and ochre and brown; and from the unleaved trees of the woods near the river, Jenny could see a single thread of smoke rising, far off on the evening wind.

The whiteness of the full moon stroked her wings; the stars, through whose secret paths the dragons had once come to the earth and along which they would one day depart, swung like a web of light in their unfolding patterns above. Her dragon sight descried the camp in the woods and a lone, small figure patiently scraping burned bannocks off the griddle, books from a half-unpacked box stacked around him.

She circled the smoke, invisible in the colors of the air, and felt the darkness of a shadow circling above her.

Wizard woman, said the voice of the dragon in her mind, is this truly what you want?

She did not reply, but she knew that, dragon-wise, he felt the surge and patterns of her mind. She felt his bafflement at them, and his anger, both at her and at something within himself.

At length he said, I want you, Jenny Waynest. But more than you, I want your happiness, and this I do not understand—I do not want you in grief. And then, his anger lashing at her like a many-tailed whip. You have done this to me!

I am sorry, Morkeleb, she said softly. What you feel is the love of humans, and a poor trade for the power that the touch of your mind gave me. It is what I learned first, from loving John—both the pain and the fact that to feel it is better than not to be able to feel.

Is this the pain that drives you? he demanded.

She said. Yes.

Bitter anger sounded in his mind, like the far-off echo of the gold that he had lost. Go, then, he said, and she circled down from the air, a thing of glass and lace and bone, invisible in the soft, smoky darkness. She felt the dragon’s power surround her with heat and magic, the pain shimmering along her bones. She leaned into the fear that melted her body, as she had leaned into the winds of flight.

Then there was only weariness and grief. She knelt alone in the darkness of the autumn woods, the night chill biting into all the newly healed wounds of her back and arms. Through the warty gray and white of the tree boles, she could see the red glow of fire and smell the familiar odors of woodsmoke and horses; the plaintive strains of a pennywhistle keened thinly in the air. The bright edge of color had vanished from all things; the evening was raw and misty, colorless, and very cold. She shivered and drew her sheepskin jacket more closely about her. The earth felt damp where her knees pressed it through her faded skirts.

She brushed aside the dark, coarse mane of her hair and looked up. Beyond the bare lace of the trees, she could see the black dragon still circling, alone in the sounding hollow of the empty sky.

Her mind touched his, with thanks deeper than words. Grief came down to her, grief and hurt, and rage that he could feel hurt.

It is a cruel gift you have given me, wizard woman, he said. For you have set me apart from my own and destroyed the pleasure of my old joys; my soul is marked with this love, though I do not understand what it is and, like you, I shall never be able to return to what I have been.

I am sorry, Morkeleb, she said to him. We change what we touch, be it magic, or power, or another Iffe. Ten years ago I would have gone with you, had I not touched John, and been touched by him.

Like an echo in her mind she heard his voice. Be happy, then, wizard woman, with this choice that you have made. I do not understand the reasons for it, for it is not a thing of dragons—but then neither, any longer, am I.

She felt rather than saw him vanish, flying back in the darkness toward the empty north. For a moment he passed before the white disk of the moon, skeletal silk over its stern face—then he was gone. Grief closed her throat, the grief of roads untaken, of doors not opened, of songs unsung—the human grief of choice. In freeing her, the dragon, too, had made his choice, of what he was and would be.

We change what we touch, she thought. And in that, she supposed, John—and the capacity to love and to care that John had given her—was, and forever would be, Morkeleb’s bane.

She sighed and got stiffly to her feet, dusting the twigs and leaves from her skirts. The shrill, sweet notes of the pennywhistle still threaded the evening breeze, but with them was the smell of smoke, and of bannocks starting to burn. She hitched her plaid up over her shoulder and started up the path for the clearing.