Dragonstar

9

Cords of wood heaped the first ten feet of the little walkway in which John stood and he didn’t hesitate for so much as a second. He caught up a billet from the top of the nearest one, flung it straight and hard at the southerner’s head, and bolted back across the wood-court without even waiting to see whether it reached its target. The incoming guards who’d stopped Polycarp in the outer gate hadn’t closed it behind them. John shot through like a startled hare, fled down the Cooksway, dodged into the first turning he saw.

This part of Bel, around behind the old palace, was a dilapidated neighborhood where the town houses of the nobility of a century ago had been largely abandoned for more spacious and showy quarters on the other side of the palace hill. Merchants had bought the town houses, and turned the great halls into warehouses and shops. Artisans rented the upper floors, and pigs and chickens dwelt in the stables and courtyards. The great Temple of the Purple Goddess of the Hearth had fallen into decay and lingerie sellers had set up barrows in its forecourt. It was a quarter of narrow streets and small squares that at one time had been private gardens. John dodged around as many corners as he could, ducked into a shop selling wool and leather and out by another door, took refuge in a carriageway leading back into a courtyard where laundry was being boiled in a cauldron long enough to drag his baggy, striped trousers and goatskin jacket from the wicker hamper and pull them on over the crimson tunic and hose.

Not that that’ll get me much, he thought. He’s seen me in this as well.…

“Here, what you doing?” the laundress demanded, coming down the carriageway with her stirring-paddle leveled like a lance. “You can’t change clothes here.”

John returned to the street, looked quickly around, and saw, at the next turning, the southerner talking to a man whose yellow cloak and extravagant plumed hat John recognized as belonging to the wizard Bliaud’s younger son, Abellus. John turned, fast, and headed the other way, discarding the wicker basket down the first cellar he passed. The neighborhood with its back-looping streets was confusing, but it was small, and John worked his way out to the city wall, and along it to one of the cramped and squalid streets of the Dockmarket, where weavers and day laborers lived two families to a room, and where every corner boasted a tavern or an establishment that dealt in old clothes. He had little money—most of the gems in the red velvet robe Corvin had given him had turned out to be glass and paste—Of course no dragon would give away real gems, you nit, he’d reflected bitterly when the moneylender had broken this news to him—and couldn’t spare any of it, but bought himself a thirdhand coat of green wool, anyway, and left the goatskins behind. Then he found a tavern, and settled himself in the darkest corner of its ordinary, to wait for the search to pass to other quarters.

He wasn’t sure whether Amayon would be able to locate him once the demon knew he was in Bel, but it was critical, now, that he get himself, and Gareth, and Gareth’s daughter out of the city at once.

And after that, he reflected, keeping as wary an eye on the tavern door as was possible without putting on his spectacles, the Old God’s grandmother only knows how we’re going to deal with the demons here, let alone what’s going to happen if Folcalor breaks the Henge at Prokep.

In time, the line of pale winter sunlight visible through the doors rose up the faces of the gray narrow buildings across the lane. It was time to get out of there and see if he couldn’t get himself out the gate and back to the Silver Cricket Inn without being arrested. If Gareth was to meet him at moonrise—some two hours after midnight—he had to make arrangements for horses and food with what little money he had.…

He’d also pledged Gowla and Grobe, owners of the Silver Cricket, that he’d help serving ale in the ordinary tonight to pay for his lodging.

Thus it was that John Aversin was crossing the fountain square by the Dockmarket gate just before sunset of a chill and cloudy afternoon. Wind rose cold again off the sea, and ravens quarreled with pigs over garbage in the lanes. The farmers who’d brought chickens and milk into the city were leaving now, and the lane before the eastern gate was a choke of jostling backs and baying asses. Torches were being lit around the gate, and the air was gritty with the smoke of suppers cooking. Despite the King’s asseveration that all the city was in festival, there was little laughter or song. A few butts of wine had been broached before the Temple of Mallena, but the voices of those who came to dip into them were harsh and uneasy as the ravens. Men still in mourning shouted, now and then, standard praises of the King. Women haggard with hunger or grief carried water back to their rooms. Sometimes one would speak to John from a doorway, or give him a painted smile.

Everyone seemed to be watching one another, or watching their own backs.

It’s turning into the Winterlands, thought John as he hurried through the wintry dusk.

It’s turning into the city in the Otherworld, where no one trusts, and everyone hurries and fears.

It’s turning into a world without law.

A woman passed through the square in front of him, and the sight of her stopped John in his tracks. She was gone before he got a better look at her, but his impression was that she was far too well dressed for this disreputable neighborhood. His impression, too, was that none of the beggars, whores, and laborers in the square so much as looked at her, as if she did not really exist.

But she existed. And he knew her: the tall, almost serpentine build, the melon-heavy breasts, the black hair coiled and glittering with jeweled chains. He hadn’t seen her eyes and was glad they hadn’t been turned his way. He knew—he was positive, as one is positive of things in dreams—that they would be yellow, with horizontal rectangular pupils, like a goat’s.

She’s out from behind the mirror, he thought, almost queasy with shock.

Walking the streets of the city in a woman’s guise, she who was not a woman at all.

The Demon Queen.

The impact of cold, and of brittle afternoon light striking her eyes, was so sharp that Jenny staggered, catching herself against the rough-timbered wall of a house. The smell of privies, of wood smoke, of horses and mud dumped itself over her like water from a bucket, and someone said close by, “Narh, Marbel, I know what he says, but what’s he actually done besides sit in the taverns talkin’ to his friends and makin’ you pay the rent?” Jenny blinked and saw a couple of marketwomen walk past her, their faded gaudy layers of skirts tucked into sashes and their head scarves and veils tied this way and that to give information about neighborhood and marital status.

There was no mistake. She was in Bel.

She looked down at her hands. She still held the catch-bottle in one, the stopper in the other. At her feet lay the notched staff she’d carried underground. Her hip hurt her, as it hadn’t, she realized, during the time—days? hours? weeks?—she’d been in the bottle. The gnomish trousers she wore were still damp at the knees, from kneeling in the snow at Ernine.

She was definitely in Bel. In the Claekith district, near the river, the smell was unmistakable. Not far from the Dockmarket, in fact. She could see the roofs of Mallena’s temple over the houses. Old snow heaped the sides of the lane, mingled with dirty straw and garbage. It was late afternoon—of what day?—and storekeepers were taking in their wares. A smell of garlic and stew from a nearby tavern puffed over her and reminded her that she was ravenously hungry.

Jenny knotted the neck of the catch-bottle back into her sash, and made sure that the hothwais of light, and of warmth, were still wrapped and in her pockets. Then she stooped and picked up her stick. In a poor neighborhood like this one there were enough women who’d had their heads shorn for one crime or another that she wouldn’t be much stared at, but she drew up a fold of her plaid over her head, anyway.

Trey is a demon, she thought. And John could be anywhere, alive or dead or in chains in Hell.… First things first, she told herself. As John always says. And though it wasn’t likely the Regent’s wife would be anywhere in this neighborhood, Morkeleb had told her that demons roved the streets, particularly at night. It would only take one recognizing her, to raise a hue and cry.

So though her hip barely twinged her now, Jenny bowed her back and leaned exaggeratedly on her staff as she limped toward the wider street along the river that would lead her to the city walls. In the days she had been gone from Bel, the plague seemed to have abated, though she saw marks of its aftermath everywhere. A few yellow paper seals still clung half-scraped to the doors of some of the buildings she passed, and many people she saw wore mourning, their hair newly cropped.

But the smoke that filled the air now bore on it the smell of nothing more sinister than cooking, and though this riverside neighborhood was a crowded one, she saw no doors that bore fresh seals. Vendors had returned to the narrow lanes, selling crullers or head scarves, or cups of steaming coffee dispensed from little stoves. A girl drove a donkey past, laden with baskets of last year’s dried apples. A small dog barked in a fifth-floor window.

The city was coming back to life.

Jenny reached out with her thoughts. Someone asked a woman selling steamed buns if she was doing well. Yes, she said, she was getting over it, though her husband’s death had near broken her heart.…

Her friend said, “Darling, I know … you tried the wine yet? The King’s men set up a cask near the Green God’s temple.”

“D’you think he was right? The King? About the plague being done?”

“Cragget knows. I wouldn’t ha’ thought any man could say that for certain, but then I’d have bet money against the King coming back to himself. My niece works in the palace kitchens, and she said he was like a child.”

The King recovered? Jenny shivered as she rounded a corner out of earshot, guessing what had to have happened. And that being the case—if a demon now ruled in Uriens’s form—what had become of Gareth? Had he, too, “died,” to be returned to life with some other consciousness looking out from behind his eyes? Polycarp of Halnath had sent her to find Miss Mab in the Deep to begin with: What had become of him? Had he escaped from Bel in time?

“I swear I’m still afraid to go out of the house,” said a young girl to her friend as they both scraped buckets full of the least-filthy snow in the lane, “once the sun’s out of the sky.”

“It’s the plague,” said her friend, “that drives folk mad.…”

No, thought Jenny, struggling not to quicken her stride as she hobbled toward the flagged embankment of the river. Not the plague. Demons.

And I released the Demon Queen, when I could have kept her out of the world for good.

I have to get word to Gareth. See him, see who and what I’m dealing with. Or is Folcalor only waiting for that?

What, then? Flee from the city? Search for John? Return to the Winterlands? And how long until the demons come there in force, instead of in ones and twos?

How long until they go after Ian? If they’re not attacking the Hold already?

The next moon will be the last that the Dragonstar is in the sky, Aohila had said. The Moon of Winds, which would start growing, if Jenny’s reckoning was in, within a few days. By what the Demon Queen had said it sounded like the extraordinary power of Folcalor and Adromelech would wane after that—that they were somehow bound to the comet. But even if that was the case, thought Jenny—and the Demon Queen may well have been lying, to give her one more reason to feel that she must get free of the catch-bottle—what mages now remained to fight even the weakened demons that would come forth from the place where Adromelech and his devils had been trapped these thousand years?

One mage at least had to have returned to the demons’ power, the “great doctor” Gareth had brought in to “resurrect” Trey. The only mage Jenny knew of still alive in the South was Bliaud. All the others had been taken over by Caradoc, and most of them were dead.

That left Ian, and Miss Mab. And Miss Mab, to all intents, was a prisoner.

Ian …

Folcalor nearly destroyed him. I can’t let him face him again.

But she knew she might have no choice.

Before anything, she thought, eat. Whatever else is happening, you’ll be able to think more clearly on a full stomach.

She felt in her pockets for coin and of course there was none. When Morkeleb had brought her from the North she had gone straight to the palace, and Gareth’s chamberlain had food sent to her immediately, as an honored guest.

She shook her head at herself and sighed. After a lifetime of being known as a sorceress and healer, it was too easy to forget that people weren’t going to simply hand her bread and cheese. She knew she could earn the wherewithal to fill her belly by washing dishes or sweeping up the kitchen at an inn, if she found one where the innkeeper was friendly. Keeping away from sight of possible demon-ridden patrons would be trickier, but with her shorn head she could come up with a story that accounted for a desire to remain out of sight.

There was no shortage of inns in Bel, especially in the Dockmarket, but the crowded streets made her nervous. There were taverns, she knew, outside the gates as well, where she would not run the risk of being trapped inside the city walls, if recognized and pursued. Thus she joined the straggle of home-going farmers and dairymaids, making herself as small and old as possible as she passed the disinterested guards. All about her in the crowded lane the talk was of the King’s recovery, and of the free wine being given out in the public squares—she’d passed several barrels and any number of drunkards already. She guessed, piecing bits of conversation together, that she hadn’t been in the catch-bottle long.

Her soul cringed at the recollection. She had had the Demon Queen at her mercy, and had let her go. Turned her loose in a world already facing demon war.

Morkeleb, she thought, but knew that the dragon would find her soon. As Aohila had said, he’d be scrying for her, seeking her.

And John.

Gareth might know something of John, she thought—if Gareth was still himself. She’d have to find some way of reconnoitering, to see whether it was safe to approach him. Miss Mab was still in the Deep, awaiting the arrival of a gnome who might very well be possessed by Folcalor himself.

Once outside the Dockmarket gate, Jenny felt safer, calmer. She picked the smallest of the several inns that served the cluster of market-gardens near there, turned down a muddy lane that ran beside its stable wall. There was a bare orchard across the track, the trees still beehived in straw, and a gaggle of empty pig-yards by the stable gate. The kitchen door stood open, firelight an amber blessing in an afternoon darkening to indigo cold: A servant in shirtsleeves was scraping leftovers down for the household dogs. Jenny pushed back the plaid from her head and said, “Excuse me,” and the servant straightened up and looked at her.

It was John.

The stillness in the yard lasted for what felt like five minutes; Jenny thought later it was probably only thirty seconds or so. It surprised her, when she thought about it later, that she recognized him at all, for his hair was cropped to a stubble and it, and his grubby whiskers, had been dyed with lampblack. He still had on the spectacles she’d long ago enchanted against breakage or loss, and wore the shabby clothes of a shepherd or a bumpkin. Only when she came closer to him did she see, in the open neck of his shirt, the burned mark that the Demon Queen had left, and a savage half-healed gouge in his left cheek.

He took a step toward her, then hesitated—hating her? Jenny wondered, though curiously without fear. Angry? He has a right to be.…

She stepped toward him, and it seemed then that without any intervening thought or action they were suddenly together in the middle of the yard in each other’s arms.

“Gaw, love, how’d you get here?” He pulled back from that first kiss, his hand stroking her cheek, her hair, her shoulder; his eyes—so bright behind the lenses—looking down into her face. “Are you all right? Love, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.…”

She dragged his mouth down to hers again, tears running down her face. She thought the strength of his arm around her ribs as he lifted her off her feet would drive the breath from her lungs.

“Hey, lad!” yelled a voice from the kitchen. “You canoodle on your own time, eh? We got customers.…”

“God save ’em,” muttered John. The dogs he’d been feeding—an immense brindled mastiff and a slightly smaller black bitch—snuffed warily at Jenny’s boots when John set her down, then tried to lick her hands. “I got pots to wash if I’m to eat tonight.…”

“Split your dinner with me and I’ll help.”

“You’ve got a bargain, love. Are your hands all right, though?” He took one in both of his, strong fingers probing at the scarred joints that a month ago had been stiff and crooked as wood. Jenny bent and flexed them, to show him; he raised them gently to his lips. “She told me you were dead,” said John softly. “The Demon Queen. I’m glad that you’re not.” Their fingers laced together, he led her into the scullery—bowls and platters, steam, garbage, and mice, and the kitchen’s amber light roaring through the archway at the side.

Grobe, the landlord of the Silver Cricket, only rolled his eyes when John informed him that this was his wife (“Oh, aye, right …”), but shrugged at her offer of help. “Long as I’ve got cups to put the ale in when I need ’em, you can split the leavings with whom you choose. We’re near out of punch, though—”

“I’ll get some started.”

“I’ll get some started,” corrected Jenny, who had experience with John’s erratic attention span when it came to cooking. She found a scarf and tied it over her head: Gnomish trousers were disregarded among farm women, but a woman with her head uncovered would get unwelcome stares. “You bring me in some kindling.” As Grobe’s wife had quite enough to do serving in the ordinary itself, Jenny was welcome in the kitchen, carving slices from the roast on the blackened stone hearth and loading platters with ducks, poults, beef, and fish stew. “I’ve missed you,” she said, meeting John in the scullery door with a basket of dirty ale-mugs on her hip. “John, I never—”

He put a hand on her shoulder and looked down into her eyes. “Another apology and I’ll beat you.” He drew her to him again, kissed her, his mouth tasting of honey mulled with cinnamon. “If we start in like that we’ll both be sayin’ we’re sorry for the rest of the night, if not the rest of our lives—or I will be, anyway. Ian’s all right, you know. He was doin’ better when I rode out—”

“I’ve seen him. We rode together to Eldsbouch—”

“We’ve got three wanting duck,” called out Mistress Gowla through the kitchen door, and John took the ale-cups and disappeared into the scullery while Jenny went to serve up scorched birds and plum sauce.

Only when the supper customers were done and Grobe brought in the last of the platters (“What with the killings in the streets, there’s not many will walk after dark.”) were John and Jenny able to retreat to a corner of the kitchen for a meal of meat drippings and bread pudding, honey and ale, the dogs watching every bite with mournful intensity from the warmth of the hearth. “I told Gar to meet me at moonrise, where the east road runs into the trees.” John poured out ale for them both from a boiled leather pitcher. Whatever Mistress Gowla’s virtues as a homemaker, Jenny reflected, as an alewife she left a great deal to be desired: The brew was muddy and cloyingly sweet. No wonder the place hadn’t many customers once dinner was done. “I don’t know if he will. He’s that set on not ‘deserting’ the baby Trey’s carryin’.… God’s granny knows what we’ll do about that, because you know it’s a demon.”

“I know.” Jenny looked wonderingly across at him, thin and unshaven and haggard-looking, as if he’d been living on jackrabbit for a week, which apparently he had. In the firelight she could make out bruises, too, fading almost to nothing now. She had come so near to losing him, she reflected wonderingly. Had come so near to losing herself. “Everywhere the dead are walking: Pelannor of Palmorgin in the North, and Trey here … even Caradoc, the real Caradoc, took a corpse to dwell in, and I fear will be haunting the woods near Alyn, trying to trap Ian.”

“Ah.” He nodded, as if putting together two accounts of the same event. “That’s what that was, then. I had a—a vision of it. Of somethin’ lurkin’ about outside the Hold, tryin’ to get in. Sendin’ evil dreams. As I had a vision of you, love, hurt an’ in the Deep, an’ of the old King an’ Trey.”

“Ian knows to be on his guard,” said Jenny, her mouth full of duck scraps. “Muffle put the whole of the village on the alert, that there would be some attempt on him.”

“Good for Muffle! And for you, love.” He touched her hand again, as he had a dozen times during supper—as her foot had sought his, her knee had pressed his knee, beneath the table, craving and delighting in merely the warmth of his flesh and his bones. “Gar has to be warned. Not just about Trey, but … Jen, the Demon Queen’s got out from behind the mirror.”

“I know.” Jenny felt her face get hot with shame. “John, I—I let her out. I had her trapped—in this”—she held up the silver catch-bottle—“and I let her out.”

His eyes held hers for a long time in the low orange glare of the hearth. Then he sighed and shook his head and said, “First time I’ve ever seen her properly dressed, all kitted out in black velvet with yellow stripes to her skirt.… I wonder where she got it? Not that she couldn’t go about this neighborhood wearin’ only that sort of veil thing she does, but she’d be stopped with offers every ten feet, and not so much as a purse on her to put the money in. And then I came in here, and almost convinced meself it wasn’t her after all, maybe for that reason. But it was her, walkin’ through the square like she’d leased a house here—which I wouldn’t put past her.”

Chin on palm, John listened to Jenny’s account of her injury in the mines of Ylferdun, and what she had heard in the tunnels there, and all that it had led to, listened with the firelight glare touching glints in the half-seen silvery marks on his face and throat. The light slipped and flickered as his jaw muscles tightened, but he said calmly, “She was right, you know, love. About it bein’ more important for you to come back here and warn us than to keep her tied down in that bit of a jar. We’re already hip-deep in demons, anyway. I’m surprised you found the bottle, given that Folcalor thought he’d need spells an’ that to get past whatever glamours the Queen kept on the place.”

“I knew where to look,” said Jenny. “I guessed where it had to be. And I had a hothwais, to give proper light. Though now that you mention it, it does sound odd. This Star-Juggler must have gone in through the back way, through the old library—probably smuggled in by loyalists within the old High King’s Court—and been killed on the threshold of the mirror chamber. He could easily have been trapped on the stairs. When the chamber was bricked up—”

“Aye,” said John softly. “But the thing is, that catch-bottle wasn’t Folcalor’s first weapon of choice, was it? You said you heard the demon in the mines ask, Any luck with the dragon? ”

“I think—I’m not sure—that I was shot with a poisoned arrow, rather than being killed outright, to lure Morkeleb down into the mines.” Jenny tore off another piece of bread and drizzled honey over it. She had been in the catch-bottle, she estimated, about a day and a half, and had watched through most of the previous day in Ernine with only the few rabbits Morkeleb had killed. “They set off an explosion of blasting powder to trap him there. Maybe to kill him, maybe as a way to maneuver him into using his magic, either to save himself or to save me, so that the demons in the mines could take him. They’ve lost the dragons that they had—Centhwevir and Nymr and the others. And Morkeleb is the most ancient of all, a mage among them and a loremaster. The lore and spells in his mind would give them power over her.”

“That it would,” agreed John, and spun the catch-bottle on its round end, like a top, among the muddle of gravy-soaked trenchers and dribbles of honey on the table. Beside the fire the dog-mastiff gave a muffled snore in his sleep. “But it might not have been Morkeleb they spoke of, though he’d be that miffed if he heard me say he wasn’t foremost in their thoughts. I was sent to Hell and back—two or three times, in fact—to fetch a man named Corvin, who turned out to be a dragon: who turned out to be a dragon in whose mind Aohila had established herself, as Amayon established himself in yours. And far as I can tell, he considers himself the most ancient mage an’ loremaster of ’em all an’ a scientist to boot, so there! You’ve said as how you understand the demon-speech because Amayon left a shadow of himself—like a footprint, or fruit peels in a corner—in your mind. D’you know Amayon’s true name?”

Jenny blinked at him and said, “Yes.” It was not something she had thought of before, but the question brought it forward in her mind. An ugly name, not music like a dragon’s name, but a wicked little cluster of barbed glass hatreds that it fouled her even to consider.… But his name. Its name. And she understood with disgusting intimacy every one of those hates, and wondered how she could ever have loved or pitied him.

“I think the dragon they spoke of was Corvin, not Morkeleb,” said John. “And I think Aohila sent me to fetch him, not from hate or vengeance, but just to keep him out of the way of Folcalor’s goons. So that they couldn’t trap him, and prise Aohila’s true name out of his mind. Failin’ that—since he was in Prokep with me—they hit Ernine, tryin’ to find the catch-bottle, or to take Aohila by main strength, which obviously didn’t work. Did they get the mirror?”

“I don’t know.”

“It’d pay us to go to Ernine and check. Is Morkeleb nearby?”

“Not that I know of. I think he will be soon. He’ll be scrying for me, searching for me.…”

John opened his mouth to ask something, then closed it. Remembering that John’s anger at her during the darkness that followed her release from the demon had taken the form of jealousy of Morkeleb, Jenny inquired matter-of-factly, “Is this dragon Corvin nearby?”

John shook his head. “Gone off to the Skerries of Light.” He threw the remains of the trenchers to the mastiffs and carried the cups into the scullery. Worrying still about his feelings, Jenny dipped a jar full of what hot water was left from the copper by the fire, and followed. It was freezing cold in the scullery and dark: she took a rushlight from the box and stuck it into the holder near the sink, and kindled it with a glance. But when John spoke, it was in his usual tone. “Corvin knows the danger he’ll be in if Folcalor does break the Henge—he, and the other dragons who were possessed before. They don’t miss the demons, as humans do.…”

He paused apologetically, and Jenny made a resigned gesture and a wry smile, not pretending that she hadn’t missed Amayon nearly to the point of madness. A rueful glance passed between them, like a mutual head shake and shrug: Goose and gander, love.

“But the demons know their names, which for creatures of magic is dangerous in a different way than it is for us.” He sopped the rag in the hot water, washing the ale-cups while Jenny scooped sand from the bucket to scour the last of the pots. “He’s got until the full moon, if Dotys’s account of the comet is to be trusted. Say just over two weeks.”

“It is,” said Jenny. “At least, Aohila told me much the same in the catch-bottle, if she was telling the truth. She said the spells work best in the full of the moon. Since they destroyed so many of their soul-crystals attacking the mirror in Ernine, I’m guessing they’ll wait until the full moon to try again. It’s cutting it close for them, with the Dragonstar growing fainter each night.”

“Damn them.” John hurled his washrag into the basin, the murky light of the dip flashing off his specs. “Brâk warned me about that in the summer. Brâk was the leader of the escaped human slaves who were hidin’ out in the Tralchet mines, you remember, when I went callin’ on the gnomes up there. Brâk warned me about Goffyer, too—the Lord of the Twelfth Deep, an’ a mage who was obviously in league with the demons long before Folcalor took him over bodily. Brâk didn’t know what was afoot, but he warned me to fight to the death if Goffyer came at me with opals in his hand.”

“He had a bowl of jewels in my dream.” Jenny shook the scouring sand into a second bucket and wiped out the pots. “Folcalor was driven from Caradoc’s body in the sea. He could have used any water as a gate, to get to Goffyer. You say the mages of Prokep were astronomers, who used their own knowledge of the Dragonstar to trap the demons. Some of that knowledge may have remained in the library at Halnath. But if, as you say, the Master has been taken …”

“We’ll have to do somethin’ about that, yes,” said John. He dried his hands, his eyes bright with a faraway gleam. “But as it happens, we don’t need to go up to Halnath to learn about the Dragonstar’s nature. I’ve got notes about the whole thing—what it is, what it’s made of, how it works—in me jacket.”

They banked the fire, turned the mastiffs into the yard, and went out themselves, barring the kitchen door behind them. The Dragonstar stood barely visible above the black line of the stable roof, so clear that each of its multiple tails stood out like an infinitely tiny thread of fire. Through Jenny’s glove, John’s gloved fingers were strong and warm, steadying and reassuring, as if he could support her through flood and fire and world’s end. She felt as if she’d come home.

Ridiculous, given the peril they stood in and the horror she was certain they’d have to face. But she wanted to laugh and dance.

“First thing to do is make sure Gar is safe,” said John as they stepped out into the inky lane. “Gar and his daughter, and get Polycarp away from the dungeons … they can’t just murder the Master of Halnath in his cell without a major war breakin’ out, and I don’t think Folcalor’s willin’ to risk that until he’s had a crack at the Henge in Prokep. Though with demons it’s hard to tell what they’ll do. But those things done—”

“I like the way you say that.”

He shoved her, like a schoolboy nudging a mate, and she shoved him back.

“Those things done, we can see what we can do about finding Corvin, and putting Aohila’s name back into your little catch-bottle.”

“If it’s Aohila we need most to trap,” said Jenny thoughtfully.

“Who else did you have in mind, love?”

“Folcalor.”

“And wherever are we to get …?” He thought about it a moment, and said, “Oh, aye. Yes.” That was, Jenny reflected, one of the things she loved most, and had missed most, about John. You didn’t need to explain much.

They walked for a time in silence down the lane, the stars of springtide glittering sharp through breaking clouds. “I was afraid for you,” said John out of the dark. “I missed you something desperate, I wanted you … an’ you’d have been gie interested in the Hells I saw, an’ the Otherworld.… But all the time I kept hopin’ you’d be all right. That you’d … that you’d forgive me. Because I did act like a right bastard.”

“You acted like a man who was afraid,” said Jenny softly.

“Afraid? I was dissolvin’! What I don’t understand is … and you can tell me this is none of my business if you want to … you said you took on dragon form again, of yourself, with Ian’s help, when the demons attacked the Hold.” He stopped in the alley along the stable wall, holding her hands in his. Moonlight glimmered a little on the dirty snow, made silver rounds of his spectacle lenses and diamonds of his breath. “What I don’t understand is, why did you come back after that? After what I said, and what I did …”

Jenny put her fingers to his lips. “When I made my choice five years ago—when Morkeleb first offered me the power of dragon form—my choice was a real one. I knew that to be human is to have what humans have, which is the near-certainty of occasional pain. And that there is a kind of pain that comes from loving, that doesn’t come from any other thing in the living world. I chose to be human, John, something very few people can truly choose.”

He shook his head and said, “No, love. We all choose it, sooner or late.”

“Maybe,” said Jenny. “But having chosen, I would no more have called on Morkeleb to change me back—to run away from pain—than you would have called on the Demon Queen when you were at the stake. It is not what I am.”

“And what are you, love?”

And she smiled. “What I am.”

Then as they turned to go, Jenny paused in her stride, something catching at her mind, half-remembered like a dropped glove. Something she’d left in the kitchen … done in the kitchen …

She looked straight across the lane at the bare ground of the orchard, at a wisp of the straw someone had unwrapped from around the first of the pear trees and left in a corner in the snow. The straw burst into flames, causing John, a halfpace ahead of her, to whip around, sword in his hand like a conjurer’s penny. He looked at the burning straw, looked at her, as she turned her eyes to the yellow flag of fire again and quenched it. Even above the moss-smell and the dung-smell and the piss-smell of the neighborhood, the wisp of fresh smoke was a touch of perfume.

John said, “Ah, love,” and, sheathing his sword, put his two hands on the sides of her face and kissed her again, gentle and deep as the stir of spring beneath winter’s ice.