Dragon's Bane

V

“So that’s your Dragonsbane, is it?”

At the sound of Zyerne’s voice. Jenny paused in the stony blue dimness of the hall of the enchantress’s hunting lodge. From the gloom in which she stood, the little antechamber beyond the hall glowed like a lighted stage; the rose-colored gauze of Zyerne’s gown, the whites and violets of Gareth’s doublet, sleeves, and hose, and the pinks and blacks of the rugs beneath their feet all seemed to bum like the hues of stained glass in the ember-colored lamplight. The instincts of the Winterlands kept Jenny to the shadows. Neither saw her.

Zyerne held her tiny goblet of crystal and glass up to one of the lamps on the mantel, admiring the blood red lights of the liqueur within. She smiled mischievously. “I must say, I prefer the ballad version myself.”

Seated in one of the gilt-footed ivory chairs on the opposite side of the low wine table, Gareth only looked unhappy and confused. The dimple on the side of Zyerne’s curving, shell pink lips deepened, and she brushed a corner of her lace veils aside from her cheek. Combs of crystal and sardonyx flashed in her dark hair as she tipped her head.

When Gareth didn’t speak, her smile widened a little, and she moved with sinuous grace to stand near enough to him to envelop him in the faint aura of her perfume. Like shooting stars, the lamplight jumped from the crystal facets of Gareth’s goblet with the involuntary tremor of his hand.

“Aren’t you even going to thank me for coming to meet you and offering you the hospitality of my lodge?” Zyerne asked, her voice teasing.

Because she was jealous of Zyerne’s greater powers, Jenny had forced herself to feel, upon meeting her at the ferry, nothing but surprise at the enchantress’s youth. She looked no more than twenty, though at the lowest computation—which Jenny could not keep herself from making, though the cattiness of her reaction distressed her—her age could not have been much less than twenty-six. Where there was jealousy, there could be no learning, she had told herself; and in any case she owed this girl justice.

But now anger stirred in her. Zyerne’s closeness and the hand that she laid with such artless intimacy on Gareth’s shoulder, so that less than a half-inch of her fingertip touched the flesh of his neck above his collar-lace could be nothing but calculated temptations. From what he had told her—from every tense line of his face and body now—Jenny knew he was struggling with all that was in him against his desire for his father’s mistress. Judging by her expression in the lamplight, Gareth’s efforts to resist amused Zyerne very much.

“Lady—Lady Jenny?”

Jenny’s head turned quickly at the hesitant voice. The stairway of the lodge was enclosed in an elaborate latticework of pierced stone; in the fretted shadows, she could make out the shape of a girl of sixteen or so. Only a little taller than Jenny herself, she was like an exquisitely dressed doll, her hair done up in an exaggeration of Zyerne’s elaborate coiffure and dyed like white-and-purple taffy.

The girl curtseyed. “My name is Trey, Trey Clerlock.” She glanced nervously at the two forms framed in the lighted antechamber, then back up the stair, as if fearing that one of Zyerne’s other guests would come down and overhear. “Please don’t take this wrongly, but I came to offer to lend you a dress for dinner, if you’d like one.”

Jenny glanced down at her own gown, russet wool with a hand like silk, banded with embroideries of red and blue. In deference to custom which dictated that no woman in polite society was ever seen with her hair uncovered, she had even donned the white silk veil John had brought back to her from the east. In the Winterlands she would have been accounted royally clad.

“Does it matter so much?”

The girl Trey looked as embarrassed as years of deportment lessons would let her. “It shouldn’t,” she said frankly. “It doesn’t, really, to me, but... but some people at Court can be very cruel, especially about things like being properly dressed. I’m sorry,” she added quickly, blushing as she stepped out of the checkered darkness of the stair. Jenny could see now that she carried a bundle of black and silver satin and a long, trailing mass of transparent gauze veils, whose random sequins caught stray spangles of light.

Jenny hesitated. Ordinarily the conventions of polite society never had bothered her, and her work left her little time for them in any case. Knowing she would be coming to the King’s court, she had brought the best gown she had—her only formal gown, as a matter of fact—aware that it would be out of date. It had been no concern to her what others thought of her for wearing it.

But from the moment she had stepped from the ferry earlier that evening, she had had the feeling of walking among unmarked pitfalls. Zyerne and her little band of courtiers had been all polite graciousness, but she had sensed the covert mockery in their language of eyebrows and glances. It had angered her and puzzled her, too, reminding her too much of the way the other children in the village had treated her as a child. But the child in her was alive enough to feel a morbid dread of their sport.

Zyerne’s sweet laughter drifted out into the hall. “I vow the fellow was looking about him for a bootscraper as he crossed the threshold... I didn’t know whether to offer him a room with a bed or a pile of nice, comfortable rushes on the floor—you know a good hostess must make her guests feel at home...”

For a moment Jenny’s natural suspicion made her wonder if the offer of a gown itself might be part of some scheme to make her look ridiculous. But Trey’s worried blue eyes held nothing but concern for her—and a little for herself, lest she be spotted in the act of spoiling sport. Jenny considered for a moment defying them, then discarded the idea—whatever gratification it might bring was scarcely worth the fight. She had been raised in the Winterlands, and every instinct she possessed whispered for the concealment of protective coloration.

She held out her hands for the slithery armfuls of satin.

“You can change in the little room beneath the stairs,” Trey offered, looking relieved. “It’s a long way back to your rooms.”

“And a longer one back to your own home,” Jenny pointed out, her hand on the latch of the concealed door. “Did you send for this specially, then?”

Trey regarded her with guileless surprise. “Oh, no. When Zyerne knew Gareth was returning, she told us all we’d come here for a welcome dinner: my brother Bond and myself, the Beautiful Isolde, Caspar of Walfrith and Merriwyn of Longcleat, and all the others. I always bring two or three different dinner gowns. I mean, I didn’t know two days ago what I might want to wear.”

She was perfectly serious, so Jenny repressed her smile.

She went on, “It’s a little long, but I thought it looked like your colors. Here in the south, only servants wear brown.”

“Ah.” Jenny touched the folds of her own gown, which caught a cinnamon edge in the glow from the antechamber’s lamps. “Thank you. Trey, very much—and Trey? Could I ask yet another favor?”

“Of course,” the girl said generously. “I can help...”

“I think I can manage. John—Lord Aversin—will be down in a few moments...” She paused, thinking of the somewhat old-fashioned but perfectly decent brown velvet of his doublet and indoor cloak. But it was something about which she could do nothing, and she shook her head. “Ask him to wait, if you would.”

The room beneath the stairs was small, but showed evidence of hasty toilettes and even hastier romantic assignations. As she changed clothes, Jenny could hear the courtiers assembling in the hall to await the summons for dinner. Occasionally she could catch some of the muted bustling from the servants in the dining hall beyond the antechamber, laying the six cloths and undercover so necessary, according to Gareth, to the proper conduct of a meal; now and then a maid would laugh and be rebuked by the butler. Nearer, soft voices gossiped and teased:

“... well, really, what can you say about someone who still wears those awful smocked sleeves—and she’s so proud of them, too!”... “Yes, but in broad daylight? Outdoors? And with her husband?”... “Well, of course it’s all a plot by the gnomes...” “Did you hear the joke about why gnomes have flat noses?”

Closer, a man’s voice laughed, and asked, “Gareth, are you sure you found the right man? I mean, you didn’t mistake the address and fetch someone else entirely?”

“Er—well—” Gareth sounded torn between his loyalty to his friends and his dread of mockery. “I suppose you’d call him a bit barbaric. Bond...”

“A bit!” The man Bond laughed richly. “That is to say that the dragon has caused ‘a bit’ of trouble, or that old Polycarp tried to murder you ‘a bit.’ And you’re taking him to Court? Father will be pleased.”

“Gareth?” There was sudden concern in Zyerne’s lilting voice. “You did get his credentials, didn’t you? Membership in the Guild of Dragonsbanes, Proof of Slaughter...”

“Testimonials from Rescued Maidens,” Bond added. “Or is that one of his rescued maidens he has with him?”

Above her head. Jenny felt rather than heard a light descending tread on the steps. It was the tread of a man raised to caution and it stopped, as her own had stopped for a moment, at the point on the stairs just behind where the light fell from the room beyond. As she hastened to pull on the stiffened petticoats, she could feel his silence in the entwining shadows of the latticed staircase.

“Of course!” Bond was saying, in the voice of a man suddenly enlightened. “He has to carry her about with him because nobody in the Winterlands can read a written testimonial! It’s similar to the barter system, you see...”

“Well,” another woman’s voice purred, “if you ask me, she isn’t much of a maiden.”

With teasing naughtiness, Zyerne giggled. “Perhaps it wasn’t much of a dragon.”

“She must be thirty if she’s a day,” someone else added.

“Now, my dear,” Zyerne chided, “let us not be catty. That rescue was a long time ago.”

In the general laugh. Jenny was not sure, but she thought she heard the footsteps overhead soundlessly retreat. Zyerne went on, “I do think, if this Dragonsbane of yours was going to cart a woman along, he might at least have picked a pretty one, instead of someone who looks like a gnome—a short little thing with all that hair. She scarcely needs a veil for modesty.”

“That’s probably why she doesn’t wear one.”

“If you’re going to be charitable, my dear...” “She isn’t...” began Gareth’s voice indignantly. “Oh, Gareth, don’t take everything so seriously!” Zyerne’s laughter mocked him. “It’s such a bore, darling, besides giving you wrinkles. There. Smile. Really, it’s all in jest—a man who can’t take a little joking is only a short step from far more serious sins, like eating his salad with a fish fork. I say, you don’t think...”

Her hands shaking with a queer, feelingless anger, Jenny straightened her veils. The mere touch of the stiffened gauze fired a new spurt of irritation through her, annoyance at them and that same sense of bafflement she had feltbefore. The patterns of human relationships interested her, and this one, shot through with a web of artificiality and malice, explained a good deal about Gareth. But the childishness of it quelled her anger, and she was able to slip soundlessly from her cubbyhole and stand among them for several minutes before any of them became aware of her presence.

Lamps had been kindled in the hall. In the midst of a small crowd of admiring courtiers, Zyerne seemed to sparkle bewitchingly under a powdering of diamonds and lace. “I’ll tell you,” she was saying. “However much gold Gareth was moved to offer the noble Dragonsbane as a reward, I think we can offer him a greater one. We’ll show him a few of the amenities of civilization. How does that sound? He slays our dragon and we teach him how to eat with a fork?”

There was a good deal of appreciative laughter at this. Jenny noticed the girl Trey joining in, but without much enthusiasm. The man standing next to her must be her brother Bond, she guessed; he had his sister’s fine-boned prettiness, set off by fair hair of which one lovelock, traildown onto a lace collar, was dyed blue. Beside his graceful slimness, Gareth looked—and no doubt felt—gangly, overgrown, and miserably out of place; his expression was one of profound unhappiness and embarrassment.

It might have been merely because he wasn’t wearing his spectacles—they were doubtless hideously unfashionable—but he was looking about him at the exquisite carvings of the rafters, at the familiar glimmer of lamplit silk and stiffened lace, and at the faces of his friends, with a weary confusion, as if they had all become strangers to him.

Even now. Bond was saying, “And is your Dragonsbane as great as Silkydrawers the Magnificent, who slew the Crimson-and-Purple-Striped Dragon in the Golden Woods back in the Reign of Potpourri the Well-Endowed—or was it Kneebiter the Ineffectual? Do enlighten me, Prince.”

But before the wretched Gareth could answer, Zyerne said suddenly, “My dears!” and came hurrying to Jenny, her small white hands stretched from the creamy lace of her sleeve ruffles. The smile on her face was as sweet and welcoming as if she greeted a long-lost friend. “My dearest Lady Jenny—forgive me for not seeing you sooner! You look exquisite! Did darling Trey lend you her black-and-silver? How very charitable of her...”

A bell rang in the dining room, and the minstrels in the gallery began to play. Zyerne took Jenny’s arm to lead in the guests—first women, then men, after the custom of the south—to dinner. Jenny glanced quickly around the hall, looking for John but knowing he would not be there.

A qualm crossed her stomach at the thought of sitting through this alone.

Beside her, the light voice danced on. “Oh, yes, you’re a mage, too, aren’t you?... You know I did have some very good training, but it’s the sort of thing that has always come to me by instinct. You must tell me about using your powers to make a living. I’ve never had to do that, you know...” Like the prick of knives in her back, she felt the covert smiles of those who walked in procession behind.

Yet because they were deliberate. Jenny found that the younger woman’s slights had lost all power to wound her. They stirred in her less anger than Zyerne’s temptation of Gareth had. Arrogance she had expected, for it was the besetting sin of the mageborn and Jenny knew herself to be as much prey to it as the others and she sensed the enormous power within Zyerne. But this condescension was a girl’s ploy, the trick of one who was herself insecure.

What, she wondered, did Zyerne have to feel insecure about?

As they took their places at the table. Jenny’s eyes traveled slowly along its length, seeing it laid like a winter forest with snowy linen and the crystal icicles of candelabra pendant with jewels. Each silver plate was inlaid with traceries of gold and flanked with a dozen little forks and spoons, the complicated armory of etiquette; all these young courtiers in their scented velvet and stiffened lace were clearly her slaves, each more interested in carrying on a dialogue, however brief, with her, than with any of their neighbors. Everything about that delicate hunting lodge was designed to speak her name, from the entwined Zs and Us carved in the comers of the ceiling to the delicate bronze of the horned goddess of love Hartemgarbes, wrought in Zyerne’s image, in its niche near the door. Even the delicate music of hautbois and hurdy-gurdy in the gallery was a proclamation, a boast that Zyerne had and would tolerate nothing but the very finest.

Why then the nagging fear that lay behind pettiness?

She turned to look at Zyerne with clinical curiosity, wondering about the pattern of that girl’s life. Zyerne’s eyes met hers and caught their expression of calm and slightly pitying question. For an instant, the golden orbs narrowed, scorn and spite and anger stirring in their depths. Then the sweet smile returned, and Zyerne asked, “My dear, you haven’t touched a bite. Do you use forks in the north?”

There was a sudden commotion in the arched doorway of the hall. One of the minstrels in the gallery, shocked, hit a glaringly wrong squawk out of his recorder; the others stumbled to silence.

“Gaw,” Aversin’s voice said, and every head along the shimmering board turned, as if at the clatter of a dropped plate. “Late again.”

He stepped into the waxlight brightness of the hall with a faint jingle of scraps of chain mail and stood looking about him, his spectacles glinting like steel-rimmed moons. He had changed back into the battered black leather he’d worn on the journey, the wolflude-lined jerkin with its stray bits of mail and metal plates and spikes and the dark leather breeches and scarred boots. His plaids were slung back over his shoulder like a cloak, cleaned of mud but frayed and scruffy, and there was a world of bright mischief in his eyes.

Gareth, at the other end of the table, went red with mortification to the roots of his thinning hair. Jenny only sighed, momentarily closed her eyes, and thought resignedly, John.

He strode cheerily into the room, bowing with impartial goodwill to the courtiers along the board, not one of whom seemed capable of making a sound. They had, for the most part, been looking forward to baiting a country cousin as he tried unsuccessfully to ape his betters; they had scarcely been prepared for an out-and-out barbarian who obviously wasn’t even going to bother to try.

With a friendly nod to his hostess, he settled into his place on the opposite side of Zyerne from Jenny. For a moment, he studied the enormous battery of cutlery arrayed on both sides of his plate and then, with perfect neatness and cleanliness, proceeded to eat with his fingers.

Zyerne recovered her composure first. With a silky smile, she picked up a fish fork and offered it to him. “Just as a suggestion, my lord. We do do things differently here.”

Somewhere down the board, one of the ladies tittered. Aversin regarded Zyerne with undisguised suspicion. She speared a scallop with the fish fork and held it out to him, by way of demonstration, and he broke into his sunniest smile. “Ah, so that’s what they’re for,” he said, relieved. Removing the scallop from the tines with his fingers, he took a neat bite out of it. In a north-country brogue six times worse than anything Jenny had ever heard him use at home, he added, “And here I was thinking I’d been in your lands less than a night, and already challenged to a duel with an unfamiliar weapon, and by the local magewife at that. You had me gie worrit.”

On his other side. Bond Clerlock nearly choked on his soup, and John thumped him helpfully on the back.

“You know,” he went on, gesturing with the fork in one hand and selecting another scallop with the other, “we did uncover a great box of these things—all different sizes they were, like these here—in the vaults of the Hold the year we looked out the bath for my cousin Kat’s wedding. We hadn’t a clue what they were for, not even Father Hiero—Father Hiero’s our priest—but the next time the bandits came down raiding from the hills, we loaded the lot into the ballistas instead of stone shot and let fly. Killed one of ’em dead on the spot and two others went riding off over the moor with all these little spikey things sticking into their backs...”

“I take it,” Zyerne said smoothly, as stifled giggles skittered around the table, “that your cousin’s wedding was an event of some moment, if it occasioned a bath?”

“Oh, aye.” For someone whose usual expression was one of closed watchfulness, Aversin had a dazzling smile. “She was marrying this southern fellow...”

It was probably. Jenny thought, the first time that anyone had succeeded in taking an audience away from Zyerne, and, by the glint in the sorceress’s eyes, she did not like it. But the courtiers, laughing, were drawn into the circle of Aversin’s warm and dotty charm; his exaggerated barbarity disarmed their mockery as his increasingly outrageous tale of his cousin’s fictitious nuptials reduced them to undignified whoops. Jenny had enough of a spiteful streak in her to derive a certain amount of enjoyment from Zyerne’s discomfiture—it was Zyerne, after all, who had mocked Gareth for not being able to take jests—but confined her attention to her plate. If John was going to the trouble of drawing their fire so that she could finish her meal in peace, the least she could do was not let his efforts go to waste.

On her other side. Trey said softly, “He doesn’t look terribly ferocious. From Gareth’s ballads, I’d pictured him differently—stem and handsome, like the statues of the god Sannendes. But then,” she added, winkling the meat from an escargot with the special tongs to show Jenny how it was done, “I suppose it would have been a terrific bore for you to ride all the way back from the Winterlands with someone who just spent his time ‘scanning th’encircling welkin with his eagle-lidded eyes,’ as the song says.”

In spite of Zyerne’s disapproving glances, her handsome cicisbeo Bond was wiping tears of laughter from his eyes, albeit with great care for his makeup. Even the servants were having a hard time keeping their faces properly expressionless as they carried in peacocks roasted and resplendent in all their feathers and steaming removes of venison in cream.

“... so the bridegroom looked about for one of those wood things such as you have here in my rooms,” John was continuing, “but as he couldn’t find one, he hung his clothes over the armor-stand, and damned if Cousin Kat didn’t wake in the night and set about it with her sword, taking it for a bandit...”

Trust John, Jenny thought, that if he couldn’t make an impression on them on their own grounds, he wouldn’t try to do it on the grounds of Gareth’s ballads, either. They had succumbed to the devil of mischief in him, the devil that had drawn her from the first moment they had met as adults. He had used his outrageousness as a defense against their scorn, but the fact that he had been able to use it successfully made her think a little better of these courtiers of Zyerne’s.

She finished her meal in silence, and none of them saw her go.

“Jenny, wait.” A tall figure detached itself from the cluster of bright forms in the antechamber and hurried across the hall to catch her, tripping over a footstool halfway.

Jenny paused in the enclosing shadow of the stair lattice. From the anteroom, music was already lilting—not the notes of the hired musicians, this time, but the complex tunes made to show off the skill of the courtiers themselves. To play well, it seemed, was the mark of a true gentleperson; the music of the cwrdth and the double-dulcimer blended into a counterpoint like lace, from which themes would emerge like half-familiar faces glimpsed in a crowd. Over the elaborate harmonies, she heard the blithe, unrepentant air of the pennywhistle, following the melody by ear, and she smiled. If the Twelve Gods of the Cosmos came down, they would be hard put to disconcert John.

“Jenny, I—I’m sorry.” Gareth was panting a little from his haste. He had resumed his battered spectacles; the fracture in the bottom of the right-hand lens glinted like a star. “I didn’t know it would be like that. I thought—he’s a Dragonsbane...”

She was standing a few steps up the flight; she put out her hand and touched his face, nearly on level with her own. “Do you remember when you first met him?”

He flushed with embarrassment. In the illuminated antechamber, John’s scruffy leather and plaids made him look like a mongrel in a pack of lapdogs. He was examining a lute-shaped hurdy-gurdy with vast interest, while the red-haired. Beautiful Isolde of Greenhythe told the latest of her enormous stock of scatological jokes about the gnomes. Everyone guffawed but John, who was far too interested in the musical instrument in his lap to notice; Jenny saw Gareth’s mouth tighten with something between anger and confused pain. He went north seeking a dream, she thought; now he had neither that which he had sought nor that to which he had thought he would return.

“I shouldn’t have let them bait you like that,” he said after a moment. “I didn’t think Zyerne...”

He broke off, unable to say it. She saw bitterness harden his mouth, and a disillusion worse than the one John had dealt him beside the pigsty at Alyn. He had probably never seen Zyerne being petty before, she thought; or perhaps he had only seen her in the context of the world she had created, never having been outside of it himself. He took a deep breath and went on, “I know I should have taken up for you somehow, but... but I didn’t know how!” He spread his hands helplessly. With the first rueful humor at himself that Jenny had seen, he added, “You know, in ballads it’s so easy to rescue someone. I mean, even if you’re defeated, at least you can die gracefully and not have everyone you know laugh at you for the next three weeks.”

Jenny laughed and reached out to pat his arm. In the gloom, his features were only an edge of gold along the awkward cheekline, and the twin circles of glass were opaque with the lamplight’s reflection that glinted on a few flame-caught strands of hair and formed a spiky illumination along the edges of his lace collar. “Don’t worry about it.” She smiled. “Like slaying dragons, it’s a special art.”

“Look,” said Gareth, “I—I’m sorry I tricked you. I wouldn’t have done it, if I’d known it would be like this. But Zyerne sent a messenger to my father—it’s only a day’s ride to Bel, and a guest house is being prepared for you in the Palace. I’ll be with you when you present yourselves to him, and I know he’ll be willing to make terms...” He caught himself, as if remembering his earlier lying assurances. “That is, I really do know it, this time. Since the coming of the dragon, there’s been a huge standing reward for its slaying, more than the pay of a garrison for a year. He has to listen to John.”

Jenny leaned one shoulder against the openwork of the newel post, the chips of reflected lamplight filtering through the lattice and dappling her black and silver gown with gold. “Is it so important to you?”

He nodded. Even with the fashionable padding of his white-and-violet doublet, his narrow shoulders looked stooped with tiredness and defeat. “I didn’t tell very much truth at the Hold,” he said quietly. “But I did tell this: that I know I’m not a warrior, or a knight, and I know I’m not good at games. And I’m not stupid enough to think that the dragon wouldn’t kill me in a minute, if I went there. But—I know everyone around here laughs when I talk about chivalry and honor and a knight’s duty, and you and John do, too... But that’s what makes John the Thane of the Winterlands and not just another bandit, doesn’t it? He didn’t have to kill that first dragon.” The boy gestured wearily, a half-shrug that sent fragments of luminosity slithering along the white stripes of his slashed sleeves to the diamonds at his cuffs. “I couldn’t not do something. Even if I did muff it up.”

Jenny felt she had never liked him so well. She said, “If you had truly muffed it up, we wouldn’t be here.”

She climbed the stairs slowly and crossed the gallery that spanned the hall below. Like the stair, it was enclosed in a stone trellis cut into the shapes of vines and trees, and the shadows flickered in a restless harlequin over her gown and hair. She felt tired and cold from holding herself braced all evening—the sly baiting and lace-trimmed malice of Zyerne’s court had stung more than she cared to admit. She pitied them, a little, for what they were, but she did not have John’s brass hide.

She and John had been given the smaller of the two rooms at the end of the wing; Gareth, the larger, next door to theirs. Like everything else in Zyerne’s lodge, they were beautifully appointed. The red damasked bed hangings and alabaster lamps were designed both as a setting for Zyerne’s beauty and a boast of her power to get what she wanted from the King. No wonder, thought Jenny, Gareth distrusted and hated any witch who held sway over a ruler’s heart.

As she left the noise of the gallery behind her and turned down the corridor toward her room, she became conscious of the stiff rustling of her borrowed finery upon the inlaid wood of the floor and, with her old instinct for silence, gathered the heavy skirts up in her hands. Lamplight from a half-opened door laid a molten trapezoid of brightness across the darkness before her. Zyerne, Jenny knew, was not downstairs with the others, and she felt uneasy about meeting that beautiful, spoiled, powerful girl, especially here in her own hunting lodge where she held sole dominion. Thus Jenny passed the open doorway in a drift of illusion; and, though she paused in the shadows at what she saw by the lights within, she remained herself unseen.

It would have been so, she thought later, even had she not been cloaked in the spells that thwart the casual eye. Zyerne sat in an island of brightness, the glow of a nightlamp stroking the gilt-work of her blackwood chair, so still that not even the rose-point shadows of her lace veils stirred upon her gown. Her hands were cupped around the face of Bond Clerlock, who knelt at her feet, and such was his immobility that not even the sapphires pinning his hair glinted, but burned steadily with a single reflection. Though he looked up toward her face, his eyes were closed; his expression was the contorted, intent face of a man in ecstasy so strong that it borders pain.

The room smoked with magic, the weight of it like a glittering lour in the air. As a mage. Jenny could feel it, smell it like an incense; but it was an incense tainted with rot. She stepped back, repelled. Though the touch of Zyerne’s hands upon Bond’s face was the only contact between their two bodies, she had the sickened sensation of having looked upon that which was obscene. Zyerne’s eyes were closed, her childlike brow puckered in slight concentration; the smile that curved her lips was one of physical and emotional satisfaction, like a woman’s after the act of love.

Not love, thought Jenny, drawing back from the scene and moving soundlessly down the hall once more, but some private satiation.

She sat for a long time in the dark window embrasure of her room and thought about Zyerne. The moon rose, flecking the bare tips of the trees above the white carpet of ground mists; she heard the clocks strike downstairs and the drift of voices and laughter. The moon was in its first quarter, and something about that troubled her, though she could not for the moment think what. After a long time she heard the door open softly behind her and turned to see John silhouetted in the dim lamplight from the hall, its reflection throwing a scatter of metallic glints from his doublet and putting a rough halo on the coarse wool of his plaids.

Into the darkness he said softly, “Jen?”

“Here.”

Moonlight flashed across his specs. She moved a little—the barring of the casement shadows on her black and silver gown made her nearly invisible. He came cautiously across the unfamiliar terrain of the floor, his hands and face pale blurs against his dark clothing.

“Gaw,” he said in disgust as he slung off his plaids. “To come here to risk my bones slaying a dragon and end up playing dancing bear for a pack of children.” He sat on the edge of the curtained bed, working at the heavy buckles of his doublet.

“Did Gareth speak to you?”

His spectacles flashed again as he nodded.

“And?”

John shrugged. “Seeing the pack he runs with, I’m not surprised he’s a gammy-handed chuff with less sense than my Cousin Dilly’s mulberry bushes. And he did take the risk to search for me, I’ll give him that.” His voice was muffled as he bent over to pull off his boots. “Though I’ll wager all the dragon’s gold to little green apples he had no idea how dangerous it would be. God knows what I’d have done in his shoes, and him that desperate to help and knowing he hadn’t a chance against the dragon himself.” He set his boots on the floor and sat up again. “However we came here, I’d be a fool not to speak with the King and see what he’ll offer me, though it’s in my mind that we’ll run up against Zyerne in any dealings we have with him.”

Even while playing dancing bear, thought Jenny as she drew the pins from her hair and let her fashionable veils slither to the floor, John didn’t miss much. The stiffened silk felt cold under her fingers, from the touch of the window’s nearness, even as her hair did when she unwound its thick coil and let it whisper dryly down over her bony, half-bared shoulders.

At length she said, “When Gareth first spoke to me of her, I was jealous, hating her without ever having seen her. She has everything that I wanted, John: genius, time... and beauty,” she added, realizing that that, too, mattered. “I was afraid it was that, still.”

“I don’t know, love.” He got to his feet, barefoot in breeches and creased shirt, and came to the window where she sat. “It doesn’t sound very like you.” His hands were warm through the stiff, chilly satins of her borrowed gown as he collected the raven weight of her hair and sorted it into columns that spilled down through his fingers. “I don’t know about her magic, for I’m not mageborn myself, but I do know she is cruel for the sport of it—not in the big things that would get her pointed at, but in the little ones—and she leads the others on, teaching them by example and jest to be as cruel as she. Myself, I’d take a whip to Ian, if he treated a guest as she treated you. I see now what that gnome we met on the road meant when he said she poisons what she touches. But she’s only a mistress, when all’s said. And as for her being beautiful...” He shrugged. “If I was a bit shapecrafty, I’d be beautiful, too.”

In spite of herself Jenny laughed and leaned back into his arms.

But later, in the darkness of the curtained bed, the memory of Zyerne returned once more to her thoughts. She saw again the enchantress and Bond in the rosy aura of the nightlamp and felt the weight and strength of the magic that had filled the room like the silent build of thunder. Was it the magnitude of the power alone that had frightened her, she wondered. Or had it been some sense of filthiness that lay in it, like the back-taste of souring milk? Or had that, in its turn, been only the wormwood other own jealousy of the younger woman’s greater arts?

John had said that it didn’t sound very like her, but she knew he was wrong. It was like her, like the part of herself she fought against, the fourteen-year-old girl still buried in her soul, weeping with exhausted, bitter rage when the rains summoned by her teacher would not disperse at her command. She had hated Caerdinn for being stronger than she. And although the long years of looking after the irascible old man had turned that hatred to affection, she had never forgotten that she was capable of it. Even, she added ironically to herself, as she was capable of working the death-spells on a helpless man, as she had on the dying robber in the ruins of the town; even as she was capable of leaving a man and two children who loved her, because of her love of the quest for power.

Would I have been able to understand what I saw tonight if I had given all my time, all my heart, to the study of magic? Would I have had power like that, mighty as a storm gathered into my two hands?

Through the windows beyond the half-parted bedcurtains, she could see the chill white eye of the moon. Its light, broken by the leading of the casement, lay scattered like the spangles of a fish’s mail across the black and silver satin of the gown that she had worn and over the respectable brown velvet suit that John had not. It touched the bed and picked out the scars that crossed John’s bare arm, glimmered on the upturned palm of his hand, and outlined the shape of his nose and lips against the darkness. Her vision in the water bowl returned to her again, an icy shadow on her heart.

Would she be able to save him, she wondered, if she were more powerful? If she had given her time to her powers wholly, instead of portioning it between them and him? Was that, ultimately, what she had cast unknowingly away?

Somewhere in the night a hinge creaked. Stilling her breathing to listen, she heard the almost soundless pat of bare feet outside her door and the muffled vibration of a shoulder blundering into the wall.

She slid from beneath the silken quilts and pulled on her shift. Over it she wrapped the first garment she laid hands on, John’s voluminous plaids, and swiftly crossed the blackness of the room to open the door.

“Gar?”

He was standing a few feet from her, gawky and very boyish-looking in his long nightshirt. His gray eyes stared out straight ahead of him, without benefit of spectacles, and his thin hair was flattened and tangled from the pillow. He gasped at the sound of her voice and almost fell, groping for the wall’s support. She realized then that she had waked him.

“Gar, it’s me, Jenny. Are you all right?”

His breathing was fast with shock. She put her hand gently on his arm to steady him, and he blinked myopically down at her for a moment. Then he drew a long breath. “Fine,” he said shakily. “I’m fine, Jenny. I...” He looked around him and ran an unsteady hand through his hair. “I—I must have been walking in my sleep again.”

“Do you often?”

He nodded and rubbed his face. “That is... I didn’t in the north, but I do sometimes here. It’s just that I dreamed...” He paused, frowning, trying to recall. “Zyerne...”

“Zyerne?”

Sudden color flooded his pallid face. “Nothing,” he mumbled, and avoided her eyes. “That is—I don’t remember.”

After she had seen him safely back to the dark doorway of his room. Jenny stood for a moment in the hall, hearing the small sounds of bed curtains and sheets as he returned to his rest. How late it was, she could not guess. The hunting lodge was deathly silent about her, the smells of long-dead candles, spilled wine, and the frowsty residue of spent passions now flat and stale. All the length of the corridor, every room was dark save one, whose door stood ajar. The dim glow of a single nightlamp shone within, and its light lay across the silky parquet of the floor like a dropped scarf of luminous gold.