relationship—still stood down the lane, against the cur-
tain wall. They might regard her with awe, these hard-
working people with their small lives circumscribed by
the work of the seasons, but she knew their lives only a
little less intimately than she knew her own. There was
not a house in the village where she had not delivered a
child, or tended the sick, or fought death in one of the
myriad forms that it took in the Winterlands; she was
familiar with them, and with the long-spun, intricate pat-
terns of their griefs and joys. As the horses sloshed through
mud and standing water to the center of the square, she
saw Gareth looking about him with carefully concealed
dismay at the pigs and chickens that shared the fetid lanes
18 Barbara Hambly
so amicably with flocks of shrieking children. A gust of
wind blew the smoke of the forge over them, and with it
a faint wash of heat and a snatch of Muffle the smith's
bawdy song; in one lane laundry flapped, and in another,
Deshy Werville, whose baby Jenny had delivered three
months ago, was milking one of her beloved cows half-
in, half-out of her cottage door. Jenny saw how Gareth's
disapproving gaze lingered upon the shabby Temple, with
its lumpish, crudely carved images of the Twelve Gods,
barely distinguishable from one another in the gloom, and
then went to the circled cross of Earth and Sky that was
wrought into the stones of so many village chimneys. His
back got a little stiffer at this evidence of paganism, and
his upper lip appeared to lengthen as he regarded the
pigpen built out from the Temple's side and the pair of
yokels in scruffy leather and plaids who leaned against
the railings, gossiping.
"Course, pigs see the weather," one of them was say-
ing, reaching with a stick across the low palings to scratch
the back of the enormous black sow who reposed within.
"That's in Clivy's On Farming, but I've seen them do it.
And they're gie clever, cleverer than dogs. My aunt
Mary—you remember Aunt Mary?—used to train them
as piglets and she had one, a white one, who'd fetch her
shoes for her."
"Aye?" the second yokel said, scratching his head as
Jenny drew rein near them, with Gareth fidgeting impa-
tiently at her side.
"Aye." The taller man made kissing sounds to the sow,
who raised her head in response with a slurping grunt of
deepest affection. "It says in Polyborus' Analects that the
Old Cults used to worship the pig, and not as a devil,
either, as Father Hiero would have it, but as the Moon
Goddess." He pushed his steel-rimmed spectacles a little
higher on the bridge of his long nose, a curiously profes-
sorial gesture for a man ankle-deep in pig-muck.
Dragonsbane 19
"That a fact, now?" the second yokel said with interest.
"Now you come to speak on it, this old girl—when she
were young and flighty, that is—had it figured to a T how
to get the pen gate open, and would be after... Oh!" He
bowed hastily, seeing Jenny and the fuming Gareth sitting
their horses quietly.
The taller of the two men turned. As the brown eyes
behind the thick spectacle lenses met Jenny's, they lost
their habitual guarded expression and melted abruptly into
an impish brightness. Middle-sized, unprepossessing,
shaggy and unshaven in his scruffy dark leather clothing,
his old wolfskin doublet patched with bits of metal and
scraps of chain mail to protect his joints—after ten years,
she wondered, what was there about him that still filled
her with such absurd joy?
"Jen." He smiled and held out his hands to her.
Taking them, she slid from the white mare's saddle into
his arms, while Gareth looked on in disapproving impa-
tience to get on with his quest. "John," she said, and
turned back to the boy. "Gareth of Magloshaldon—this
is Lord John Aversin, the Dragonsbane of Alyn Hold."
For one instant, Gareth was shocked absolutely
speechless. He sat for a moment, staring, stunned as if
struck over the head; then he dismounted so hastily that
he clutched his hurt arm with a gasp. It was as if, Jenny
thought, in all his ballad-fed fantasies of meeting the Dra-
gonsbane, it had never occurred to him that his hero would
be afoot, not to say ankle-deep in mud beside the local
pigsty. In his face was plain evidence that, though he
himself was over six-foot-three, and must be taller than
anyone else he knew, he had never connected this with
the fact that, unless his hero was a giant, he would per-
force be shorter also. Neither, she supposed, had any
ballad mentioned spectacles.
Still Gareth had not spoken. Aversin, interpreting his
silence and the look on his face with his usual fiendish
20 Barbara Hambly
accuracy, said, "I'd show you my dragon-slaying scars to
prove it, but they're placed where I can't exhibit 'em in
public."
It said worlds for Gareth's courtly breeding—and
Jenny supposed, the peculiar stoicism of courtiers—that
even laboring under the shock of his life and the pain o
a wounded arm, he swept into a very creditable salaan;
of greeting. When he straightened up again, he adjusted
the set of his cloak with a kind of sorry hauteur, pushed
his bent spectacles a little more firmly up onto the bridge
of his nose, and said in a voice that was shaky but oddly
determined, "My lord Dragonsbane, I have ridden here
on errantry from the south, with a message for you from
the King, Uriens of Belmarie." He seemed to gather
strength from these words, settling into the heraldic son-
ority of his ballad-snatch of golden swords and bright
plumes in spite of the smell of the pigsty and the thin,
cold rain that had begun to patter down.
"My lord Aversin, I have been sent to bring you south.
A dragon has come and laid waste the city of the gnomes
in the Deep of Ylferdun; it lairs there now, fifteen miles
from the King's city of Bel. The King begs that you come
to slay it ere the whole countryside is destroyed."
The boy drew himself up, having delivered himself of
his quest, a look of noble and martyred serenity on his
face, very like. Jenny thought, someone out of a ballad
himself. Then, like all good messengers in ballads, he
collapsed and slid to the soupy mud and cowpies in a dead
faint.
CHAPTER II
RAIN DRUMMED STEADILY, drearily, on the walls of
Alyn Hold's broken-down tower. The Hold's single guest
room was never very bright; and, though it was only mid-
afternoon, Jenny had summoned a dim ball of bluish
witchfire to illuminate the table on which she had spread
the contents of her medicine satchel; the rest of the little
cubbyhole was curtained in shadow.
In the bed, Gareth dozed restlessly. The air was sweet
with the ghosts of the l
ong-dried fragrances of crushed
herbs; the witchlight threw fine, close-grained shadows
around the dessicated mummies of root and pod where
they lay in the circles Jenny had traced. Slowly, rune by
rune, she worked the healing spells over them, each with
its own Limitation to prevent a too-quick healing that
might harm the body as a whole, her fingers patiently
tracing the signs, her mind calling down the qualities of
the universe particular to each, like separate threads of
unheard music. It was said that the great mages could see
the power of the runes they wrought glowing like cold
fire in the air above the healing powders and sense the
touch of it like plasmic light drawn from the fingertips.
21
22 Barbara Hambly
After long years of solitary meditation, Jenny had come
to accept that, for her, magic was a depth and a stillness
rather than the moving brilliance that it was for the great.
It was something she would never quite become recon-
ciled to, but at least it kept her from the resentment that
would block what powers she did have. Within her narrow
bounds, she knew she worked well. "
The key to magic is magic, Caerdinn had said. To be
a mage, you must be a mage. There is no time for anything
else, if you will come to the fullness of your power.
So she had remained in the stone house on Frost Fell
after Caerdinn had died, studying his books and measur-
ing the stars, meditating in the crumbling circle of ancient
standing stones that stood on the hillcrest above. Through
the slow years her powers had grown with meditation and
study, though never to what his had been. It was a life
that had contented her. She had looked no further than
the patient striving to increase her powers, while she healed
others where she could and observed the turning of the
seasons.
Then John had come.
The spells circled to their conclusion. For a time silence
hung on the air, as if every hearth brick and rafter shadow,
the fragrance of the applewood fire and the guttural trickle
of the rain, had been preserved in amber for a thousand
years. Jenny swept the spelled powders together into a
bowl and raised her eyes. Gareth was watching her fear-
fully from the darkness of the curtained bed.
She got to her feet. As she moved toward him, he
recoiled, his white face drawn with accusation and loath-
ing. "You are his mistress!"
Jenny stopped, hearing the hatred in that weak voice.
She said, "Yes. But it has nothing to do with you."
He turned his face away, fretful and still half-dreaming.
"You are just like her," he muttered faintly. "Just like
Zyeme.,."
Dragonsbane 23
She stepped forward again, not certain she had heard
clearly. "Who?"
"You've snared him with your spells—brought him
down into the mud," the boy whispered and broke off
with a feverish sob. Disregarding his repulsion, she came
worriedly to his side, feeling his face and hands; after a
moment, he ceased his feeble resistance, already sinking
back to sleep. His flesh felt neither hot nor overly chilled;
his pulse was steady and strong. But still he tossed and
murmured, "Never—I never will. Spells—you have laid
spells on him—made him love you with your witcher-
ies ..." His eyelids slipped closed.
Jenny sighed and straightened up, looking down into
the flushed, troubled face. "If only I had laid spells on
him," she murmured. "Then I could release us both—
had I the courage."
She dusted her hands on her skirt and descended the
narrow darkness of the turret stair.
She found John in his study—what would have been
a fair-sized room, had it not been jammed to overflowing
with books. For the most part, these were ancient vol-
umes, left at the Hold by the departing armies or scav-
enged from the cellars of the burned-out garrison towns
of the south; rat-chewed, black with mildew, unreadable
with waterstains, they crammed every shelf of the laby-
rinth of planks that filled two walls and they spilled off
to litter the long oak table and heaped the floor in the
corners. Sheets of notes were interleaved among their
pages and between their covers, copied out by John
in the winter evenings. Among and between them were
jumbled at random the tools of a scribe—prickers and
quills, knives and inkpots, pumice stones—and stranger
things besides: metal tubes and tongs, plumb-bobs and
levels, burning-glasses and pendulums, magnets, the
blown shells of eggs, chips of rock, dried flowers, and a
half-disassembled clock. A vast spiderweb of hoists and
24 Barbara Hambly
pulleys occupied the rafters in one comer, and battalions
of guttered and decaying candles angled along the edges
of every shelf and sill. The room was a magpie-nest of
picked-at knowledge, the lair of a tinkerer to whom the
universe was one vast toyshop of intriguing side issues.
Above the hearth, like a giant iron pinecone, hung the
tail-knob of the dragon of Wyr—fifteen inches lortg and
nine through, covered with stumpy, broken spikes.
John himself stood beside the window, gazing through
the thick glass of its much-mended casement out over the
barren lands to the north, where they merged with the
bruised and tumbled sky. His hand was pressed to his
side, where the rain throbbed in the ribs that the tail-knob
had cracked.
Though the soft buckskin of her boots made no sound
on the rutted stone of the floor, he looked up as she came
in. His eyes smiled greeting into hers, but she only leaned
her shoulder against the stone of the doorpost and asked,
"Well?"
He glanced ceilingward where Gareth would be lying.
"What, our little hero and his dragon?" A smile flicked
the comers of his thin, sensitive mouth, then vanished
like the swift sunlight of a cloudy day. "I've slain one
dragon, Jen, and it bloody near finished me. Tempting as
the promise is of getting more fine ballads written of my
deeds, I think I'll pass this chance."
Relief and the sudden recollection of Gareth's ballad
made Jenny giggle as she came into the room. The whitish
light of the windows caught in every crease of John's
leather sleeves as he stepped forward to meet her and
bent to kiss her Ups.
"Our hero never rode all the way north by himself,
surely?"
Jenny shook her head. "He told me he took a ship from
the south to Eldsbouch and rode east from there."
"He's gie lucky he made it that far," John remarked,
Dragonsbane 25
and kissed her again, his hands warm against her sides.
"The pigs have been restless all day, carrying bits of straw
about in their mouths—I turned back yesterday even from
riding the bounds because of the way the crows were
a
cting out on the Whin Hills. It's two weeks early for
them, but it's in my mind this'll be the first of the winter
storms. The rocks at Eldsbouch are shipeaters. You know,
Dotys says in Volume Three of his Histories—or is it in
that part of Volume Five we found at Ember?—or is it in
Clivy?—that there used to be a mole or breakwater across
the harbor there, back in the days of the Kings. It was
one of the Wonders of the World, Dotys—or Clivy—says,
but nowhere can I find any mention of the engineering of
it. One of these days I'm minded to take a boat out there
and see what I can find underwater at the harbor mouth..."
Jenny shuddered, knowing John to be perfectly capa-
ble of undertaking such an investigation. She had still not
forgotten the stone house he had blown up, after reading
in some moldering account about the gnomes using blast-
ing powder to tunnel in their Deeps, nor his experiments
with water pipes.
Sudden commotion sounded in the dark of the turret
stair, treble voices arguing, "She is, too!" and "Let go!"
A muted scuffle ensued, and a moment later a red-haired,
sturdy urchin of four or so exploded into the room in a
swirl of grubby sheepskin and plaids, followed immedi-
ately by a slender, dark-haired boy of eight. Jenny smiled
and held out her arms to them both. They flung them-
selves against her; small, filthy hands clutched delightedly
at her hair, her skirt, and the sleeves other shift, and she
felt again the surge of ridiculous and illogical delight at
being in their presence.
"And how are my little barbarians?" she asked in her
coolest voice, which fooled neither of them.
"Good—we been good. Mama," the older boy said,