Dragonstar

15

Do you trust this wizard? asked Morkeleb, three days later when Jenny rode out again to Frost Fell in the clear cold westering light. The wind that had set over from the sea on the morning of Ian’s visit to the stone house on the Fell had blown, chill but steady, driving back the storms from the North: Last night Jenny had guessed what it meant. In dreams she’d seen them, beautiful shapes like silk and bones, skimming over the beryl ocean, and in her mind she’d heard the music that was their names.

Centhwevir Blue-and-Golden, had said the old list, which had made no sense at the time, and with the list, the gay brilliant threnody of a tune; Nymr is blue, violet-crowned …

Other music, which she’d learned in her days of possession, in her days of union with the demons that had ridden these creatures, these star-drakes, these magical wanderers through space and time. The curious bass sonorities of the true name of Yrsgendl White-and-Scarlet, the minor twirls and twists of pink-and-green Hagginarshildim, the beautiful soaring dance of Mellyn. When she had saved these creatures, these souls, from the grasp of the demons, she had seen what no one in all John’s lore or all the tales of the Line of Herne had ever spoken of: how all these airs blended together, into a single entity a thousand thousand years long and more.

And they were coming here.

An hour after noon she saddled Moon Horse, and rode out to the Fell alone.

And there she saw them, winging down from the pale cloud-streaked sky, like a V of butterflies but flying fast, a bright-colored arrow whose tip was silver and black. They broke formation and hovered, flowers floating on the clear air. Their voices reached down to her, unearthly music in her mind. Dragonfriend … dragonfriend … silver bells and falling water and blue crystal chimes deep as night.

Well with you … well.…

She held up her hands to them: Blessing, she said. Blessing.

They settled to the ground. Seven of them she knew, even the rainbow-colored youngling whose name had only begun to form—Byrs, she thought it was—he had had no name in the days of the demons, though that was only six months ago. The eighth, black and silver with eyes like green opal, settled a little apart, and she said to him, Corvin NinetyfiveFifty? And heard in her mind the light voice, human-sounding like Morkeleb’s was.

This was the name I was called, in the Otherworld. And you will be the Lady Jenny, Lord Aversin’s wife.

Yes, said Jenny. I am John’s wife. Thank you beyond what I can say, for saving his life.

She had known Morkeleb was among them, invisible, when she first saw them flying, and indeed he melted into being, like a razor-armored snake wrought of shadows: he touched her mind and smiled.

Do you trust this wizard? he asked.

He has no reason to lie, she said, and hoped that Caradoc, lying in a guarded tower frozen now in buckets of snow, could not cast his mind this far, to hear their words. Betraying us would put him back into the hands of those who would use his soul for kindling-wood, if nothing worse. She must ask Centhwevir, she thought, if his mind was linked with Caradoc’s still in dreams. Ask Yrsgendl whether Bliaud had ever tried to speak to him with the remnants of the demon-forged link. Their answers might tell her how much danger Corvin stood in, of being retaken by Aohila.

Mellyn, who had been her own dragon, reached out a shy thought to her, like a cat bumping her nape from the back of a chair. The young jere-drake—a female who had not yet taken on the characteristics of a bearing matron—did not form her thoughts into human words, having not been in the practice of taking human form, but their music made Jenny want to dance.

He knows what Folcalor would do with him, with the moonstone that holds his soul, should he gain possession of it. He knows that his only hope is to trap Folcalor, and work for his defeat. Beyond that, no.

And she shivered, drawing her plaid close about her, thinking about the stench of Caradoc’s current corpse as Bill and Muffle had dragged it by sledge from Frost Fell to the Hold. About the way those sticky, bulging eyes had followed her, when she’d drawn the protective circle around it in the disused dungeon beneath the southeast tower. John and the others had hauled in buckets of snow for three days now to dump over the corpse, in the unheated stone chamber (“There was this vid I saw in the Otherworld, about this creature that they kept frozen in ice like this, till some chap threw a magic blanket over it and it all melted.…”).

I trust your son is nowhere within those walls.

My son sleeps in the house of my sister in the village; his brother and sister with him. It had cost John and Jenny both a good deal of uneasiness, deciding whether to keep their children where they themselves could defend them—but where Caradoc would almost certainly know their whereabouts—or to conceal them at a distance, trusting in Ian’s skill of dealing with emergencies. Jenny guessed that in the ghoul-mage’s weakened condition he could not spread out his awareness to the village, but she wasn’t sure. Every villager and every inhabitant of the Hold had been instructed not to speak the children’s true names (“Have everyone call me Alkmar Thunderhand,” requested Adric breathlessly); Jenny hoped that this would serve.

At least I trust Adric is still there, she added drily. Though he begged to see this thing that John and Muffle are creating, this “robot” as John speaks of it. This had been not the least of the reasons for the final decision.

Robot, sniffed Corvin, the dark ripple of his scorn slapping like a little wave against her mind. Pah.

As for Caradoc, I think he still believes himself smarter than either Folcalor or Adromelech, capable of double tricking them, of playing off one against another to his own ends. This vanity above all else makes him a perilous ally; this arrogant belief that he understands all things about the situation, and is more clever than everyone else involved.

They are amazing creatures, humans. The black dragon shifted his weight on his haunches, and all his bristling scales sparkled with the fading afternoon light. How much greater is their variety than among dragons; how astonishing the beliefs they convince themselves are true. CAN he summon the Hellspawn, in the state that he is in?

That I do not know, for I do not know how much magic remains to him in the decaying flesh of a non-mage’s corpse. Yet I do not doubt Folcalor listens for him, and also whatever demon agents Adromelech commands who walk this world. And as she spoke the warring demons’ names, she felt the whisper of uneasiness among the dragons, handing the shared memories of their possessions back and forth among them, a deadly sound in Jenny’s mind, like the hissing of tide over rocks. Perhaps we should ask, can he conceal himself from them, and for how long? Did you see the Demon Queen near the Skerries of Light?

The dragon Corvin bristled at her name, and in the music of his anger Jenny heard, despite himself, the winding threnody of fear.

I saw a thing that hung above the waters like blue mist shot with lightning, said Morkeleb. Yet when I turned my eyes upon it, it dissolved and fled away. Birds fled from certain of the isles, where we later found a stench and the marks of strange tracks, and some among us heard the whispering of her voice in dreams. He glanced sidelong at the black-and-silver dragon, who lashed his tail uneasily.

Jenny guessed that Corvin had discovered what John had learned: that once the Demon Queen marked a man—or a dragon—with her silvery signs, she had access to his dreams wherever he fled.

We must travel on, said Morkeleb. The winds of the winter are strong. We cannot hold them at bay forever, and we have far to go. Have you read through your Dreamweaver’s notes, concerning all he has learned of the demons? For these are things that we must know, if we are to escape their notice and their power.

I have read through what he has written, said Jenny, and indeed, for three days, while John and Muffle worked at putting the “robot” together and testing its cables and joints, she had done little else. The notes were made on every kind of paper imaginable, on scraps of vellum purchased from Father Hiero in the village and the papyrus-reed paper brought north by the last trader to the King’s garrison at Caer Corflyn two years ago, and sheet after sheet of something John called plast, which he’d acquired in the Otherworld, and all of it in John’s cramped tiny bookhand, which fortunately Jenny had learned, too, from the same sour old hedge-wizard who had taught John.

The notes spoke of marvels, of Hells and worlds unimaginable; of gates and traps and monsters. Sketch after sketch in John’s cockeyed scribble: carry-beasts and demonettes and things like wheels of fire. Doorways in rock, wells hidden in canyons of stone; runes and sigils and the tracks of nameless beasts. Things that had to be computers, and long lines of the symbols in which they spoke. Charts of ether-crystal relays. Facts about not only the Dragonstar, but other stars of Heaven as well.

Sketches of faces—the friends who had looked after him in that alien Otherworld. An old man with a mole on his nose. A fat, bearded man with something that looked like spectacles wrapped around his face. A rangy, slightly potbellied woman with kindly eyes, combing her long hair.

Jenny felt Morkeleb’s mind enter hers, touching and drinking all that she had read, in one great brilliant draught. Thus it was, she understood, that dragons passed lore on to one another, like great single pictures or tapestries, to be recalled and told over in detail later, over the course of months or years. And in his taking from her, she glimpsed the endless, bottomless, starless wells of the old dragon’s lore, roads going back and back into time beyond the world, tales learned and never forgotten, spells mastered and compared and put aside. Visions and dreams and fragments of memory clear as jewels emerging from that darkness, so that all John’s journeyings, all John’s notes, were swallowed up in the dragon’s greater journeyings like a drop in the sea.

She stared, wonderingly, into that vista of dark treasure-rooms, and from its midst Morkeleb looked back at her, as if from the threshold he held out his hand.

It was beyond human comprehension.

Turning away from dragon form, she had turned away from this.

And for a moment they regarded each other, in understanding and regret.

Then Morkeleb said, Thank you, Wizard-woman. What you have given me is something I do not think a dragon would have seen or understood. As for the rest, there will be time for us to trade lore, you and I.

I am what I am, thought Jenny, watching as the dragons lifted from the Fell and circled like brilliant birds in the evening light. I could not choose other than what I chose. Yet she felt the regret, a little, as she raised her hand to them, understanding that in her short human span she could not absorb a hundredth of Morkeleb’s lore, not even if she lived to deep old age.

But we all are what we are.

She returned to the stable of the little stone house, where she had left Moon Horse in her usual stall. The west wind had failed, and the storm clouds were scudding gray from the north by the time Jenny reached the Hold again.

In the blacksmith’s shop off the main courtyard, John and Muffle were fitting the central gear-box onto John’s robot, a sort of iron basket that would hold Caradoc’s moonstone talisman and, joined to it by silver wires, the smallest of the succession of gears that would power the machine’s six limbs.

“In the movie the robot was made to look like a human bein’,” said John, spectacles glaring back the flame of the forge. John had explained that the spell of tongues that Aohila had laid upon him in the Otherworld had only worked with direct human speech, not whatever caused sound to come from the animate pictures alternately called movies and vids—he’d had to guess a great deal of what was happening and why. “God knows why they made it look human. There wasn’t a hope of foolin’ anybody about what it was. But I tried that, too, back when I first tried to build a mechanical man when I was twelve, and the thing wouldn’t even balance, let alone walk, always supposin’ I could have powered it somehow.”

He tapped the robot with one booted foot. “I never did get that right in later attempts. This’ll at least move about.”

And it probably would, thought Jenny uneasily.

Even as dragons stayed aloft in flight by the magic of their minds, rather than by any physical manipulation of wings and air, so the robot was supported by a pair of wood-and-iron wheels that held up, at the end of a short stake, the egg-shaped iron basket that housed the gear-relays and the moonstone that held Caradoc’s soul. A knot of pulleys and gears multiplied whatever force the magic of the moonstone would generate to the limbs, which were hollow steel, the lightest and strongest alloy John had been able to obtain over years of trading with the gnomes.

Familiar with John’s experiments, Jenny remembered these limbs. They’d originally been part of a system of ballistas that John had alleged would hurl stones from the highest castle turrets without danger to those who operated them. Their pulleys and springs had been rearranged, and they’d been fitted with round wooden feet, padded in leather to give them traction on the stones of the floor. A fifth limb supported John’s youthful masterpiece, the five-fingered steel hand whose wheels and pulleys mimicked the arrangement of human tendons and joints. A sixth limb, also projecting upward, sported a simple iron pincer: Jenny had seen John and Muffle working on it the previous day.

“We figured he’d need more than one hand,” Muffle explained. He and John were like a couple of soot-black devils, unshaven, half-naked in the shop’s dense heat and streaky with sweat. Jenny was hugely reminded of Ian and Adric, when the boys were engaged in one of their messier pranks. Both men were grinning like schoolboys let loose in a candy shop. Jenny knew neither had had more than a modicum of food or sleep in days and knew that neither cared.

“The thing takes a deal of oilin’, see,” added John. “The hand, especially, just about every time it moves. The pincer’ll do to daub goose-grease on it, an’ work a polishin’ cloth.”

“A lot depends on how much weight Caradoc’s able to shift just by magic from within the moonstone,” put in Muffle, pointing with his pliers. “How much friction he can push against. D’you have any idea, Jen?”

She shook her head. “How much of magic lies in the flesh, and how much in the mind, I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t think anyone does. Nor do I know how strong Caradoc’s powers actually were, when it was just his own mind in his flesh; nor whether his long possession by Folcalor increased his abilities or lessened them.”

“Well, he couldn’t have had much magic as a human, could he?” John turned back to crimp the clamps that held the basket among the nest of gears. Firelight gleamed on the Demon Queen’s marks, traced on his bare shoulders and arms. “You’ve said that’s what Folcalor tempted him with, wasn’t it? More power?”

“But that doesn’t mean Caradoc’s power was weak.” Jenny smiled with wry understanding. “There isn’t a mage in the world who wouldn’t risk his soul—or her soul—trying to secure more. We’re stupid that way.”

And John looked down at her and grinned, and wiped the sweat from his face, leaving a long streak of grime. He’d risked his own life too many times hunting for rare books not to understand. “Could you see, Jen, when you were inside the talisman? See an’ hear?”

“After a fashion.” Jenny perched herself on the corner of the saw-bench, and shrugged out of her sheepskin jacket, for the low vaults of the ceiling trapped the heat like an oven and with the failure of the daylight a dozen torches had been kindled around the walls. She frowned, trying to remember the weird timelessness of her green crystal prison, of feeling her body and being unable to control it. Of feeling Amayon dwelling in her mind.

She tried to separate those memories from the exhilaration of power, from the deadly sweetness of Amayon’s constant presence, the whispering voice that assured her of his love even when he made her do hideous things. Some memories were still hard to sift: Was it her own delight that she remembered, in being utterly without responsibilities, without consequences to any action she took? Or was that, like the recollection of his name, only something he’d left behind?

She shook her head, pulling away from the shame and despair she’d felt in the wintertime, healing now but still close beneath the surface of her mind.

“It wasn’t exactly sight, or precisely hearing,” she said. “But I did know what was going on around me. But then, I saw and heard through my own eyes and ears as well. In the talisman I could feel sensations of the body from which I was separated. What it would be like once the body is dead, I don’t know.”

“Seems like a gie lot of trouble to me.” Muffle knelt, holding up a water-filled glass lantern to throw magnified light into the egg-shaped seat so that he could hook up the twisted wire cables. “Can’t be that painful to die, can it? I mean, within the talisman.”

He spoke jestingly, but the glance he gave her from under his sparse reddish eyebrows was serious, and Jenny spoke seriously in reply.

“That also I don’t know,” she said. “I have no idea what Caradoc felt when I speared his body beneath the sea, when the demon went out of it and ceased to keep it alive. The Whalemages sent fish to devour the body, with him alive still in the moonstone talisman. He was there, he must have seen it, as well as felt it. It’s no wonder,” she added thoughtfully, “he won’t forgive me that. But I think he fears death for the same reason that the demons do: because it is a state that he cannot control, and he cannot be in control. No more than any of us does he know what lies beyond. He does not and will not surrender his power over himself.”

“Is that such a bad thing?” inquired Muffle, after a little silence and a few scatological comments addressed to the pulleys. “It’s what kept you alive in the talisman, isn’t it? What kept our Johnny alive in the Hell behind the Mirror.”

“I suppose it depends on the lengths you’ll go to, to stay alive.”

Cousin Dilly came in, sleet beading her long dark braids, to tell them supper was ready in the kitchen: All three said, “We’ll be there in a few minutes,” and immediately forgot all about eating as they started hooking up, and testing again, the final adjustments on the pulleys and cables.

For days now Jenny had watched the thing take shape, her deep misgivings alternating with excitement and interest at this bizarre and curious machine. Years of watching John tinker with mechanical clocks, with flying machines, with selfpropelling sleds and steam-opening doors had given her some familiarity with the workings of such devices, but she had never seen anything remotely like this.

She saw, too, how John’s journeyings through another world had sharpened his judgment of mechanical efficiency, and wondered what direction—if they survived the next week—his future experiments would take.

In the ice-cold deeps of the night they dragged the sled bearing Caradoc, propped in one of the kitchen chairs from the Frost Fell house, across the courtyard from the old stable to the forge. Ice-winds were well and truly blowing down from the north by then, and after the heat of the forge the southeast tower dungeon, and the courtyard in between, were like frozen marble.

Stiff-frozen and barely smelling at all now, Caradoc’s eyes could not even narrow as he studied the insect-like robot, with its round tiny body and its mismatched limbs. On top, between the two arms, John had set a bulbous wooden sounding-box made from portions of two mandolins, covered with tuning-keys to stretch and adjust the strings of catgut and wire within. “It’ll take you a while to learn to sound ’em,” said John apologetically. “It’s the best we could do at short notice, understand. But it won’t rot, an’ you won’t have to keep on goin’ from body to body.”

The muscles of the dead face twitched against the ice that held them. Jenny could almost hear him thinking, I would not have to keep going from body to body if I could have the body of a mage.…

But even that, she thought, might not be true. There were few enough mageborn, whose human magic could animate the flesh of a corpse and keep it from rotting once death occurred. And none that she knew of who could displace a living mage from his body, and take his place.

But she did not know how to say so to Caradoc without offense. And, in any case, she thought, looking at those glinting, angry eyes, she doubted that he would believe her. He would rather believe the world was conspiring to victimize him, when he’d made only a reasonable request.

They dragged him into the storeroom beside the blacksmith shop, where the cold still gripped, to ensorcel the catch-bottle. Jenny set candles around the Circle of Power, and the outer Circle of Ward, as the animate corpse clasped its dead hands around the silver bottle, and bent frozen lips to whisper Folcalor’s secret name into its neck.

But the wizard spoke nothing aloud. Within the circles Jenny had drawn, Caradoc drew others, though he was barely able to command his decomposed muscles, and fell and staggered like a drunken man. He marked these circles with sigils she recognized as demonic, and the power she felt in the still cold air of the room seemed to creep along her skin. From the Ward-Circle she had drawn around herself and John she watched the wizard sway, clinging to the back of the chair, and the candle flames burned blue, the darkness creeping in between them. More than ever, now, she was glad she had kept Ian out of the ghoul-wizard’s sight. She wished for her son’s power, and for the knowledge he had of demons, to check what she could not of Caradoc’s sorceries. But not at the cost of the risk she sensed he would run, to be in the same room—or even the same fortress wall—with this unstable and unnatural thing.

At last, Caradoc set the bottle down, and made passes with his hands over it. Then he beckoned her forward. “It is accomplished,” he whispered. He seemed to melt into the chair, and let Jenny unmake the circles, and call back the Limitations and Boundaries of the spells. She could hear a horrible gurgling sound from him, though he did not breathe, and once he turned to her and snapped, “Oh, for the love of the gods, woman, hurry up!”

“So the trap is set.” John stepped carefully from the unmade Circle of Ward, and crossed to pick up the bottle as Muffle peeked cautiously around the door.

“It should fetch him, if he can be fetched.” Caradoc’s voice was little more than a gluey slur. The spells had clearly drained him of what energy and power he possessed—energy and power that kept the corpse moving in a semblance of life. “And I warn you both, there’s a curse upon my death, a curse sourced in my death. Curse … the one who destroys the moonstone.” He mumbled like a drunken man, head jerking on the dissolving muscles of the neck.

“Where’d you get the thing, Jenny?… old magic, old power … Star-Juggler was the greatest of them all. Only needed the name … Once you seal him in it, what then, eh? Folcalor … he’s powerful—tricky. Bottle … needs power—constant source. He escapes, you’ll be in trouble.” He cocked an eye up at John mockingly. “Or had you thought?”

John’s glance crossed Jenny’s, and in his eyes she saw her own thought: He’s heard of the catch-bottle, but he doesn’t know how it works. Doesn’t know it’s a double trap.

That means Folcalor doesn’t know, either.

And if Folcalor doesn’t know, neither does Adromelech.

Both drew a long breath, and let it out, words unsaid.

“Bargain wisely,” muttered Caradoc as Muffle came forward and together the brothers prepared to drag the sledge back through the door to the forge’s heat. “Can’t hold him yourself … have to sell it … Adromelech. Bargain wisely, and after, you’d better run fast.”

They sent Muffle away, though Jenny, listening, could hear his breath and the beating of his heart in the wood-store just the other side of the smithy. She drew the signs of ward and guard all around the corpse on its sledge, and the spider-like robot in the corner of the smithy; set marks of Limitation in the corners, marks of ritual cleansing to keep ill influences away during the transfer of the moonstone talisman from the body of the corpse into the egg-shaped chamber in the robot’s heart. As she laboriously drew out the lines defining what the spells could not do, aligning and focusing the powers of the heavens and the earth with the unexplored magic of her altered body, the corpse on its chair moved its head a little and mumbled. Caradoc’s powers were too depleted—or his vehicle too far gone—to be understood clearly, but she heard anger and impatience, and once she caught the words “—needless palaver … wasting time …”

She went on as if she had not heard. But her heart misgave her, that any wizard would disregard the spells that kept magic within its proper bounds, only for his own convenience. With full darkness the storm-winds had risen in earnest, and she felt as if the shop were a bubble of light, adrift in hammering blackness, a tiny hell in which John, and she, and Caradoc of Somanthus were forever trapped. Sitting on a milking stool within Caradoc’s circle, arms folded around his drawn-up knees, John watched Jenny work in silence. Now and then the firelight would flash on his spectacles as he turned his head to watch the door or to look at the robot, as if wondering whether he should be party to the extension of Caradoc’s life. As always it was difficult to read his face.

But he had made a bargain, and when Jenny said, “I am done. The room is as clean and as safe as I can make it,” he stood up and matter-of-factly took up the butchering knife he’d brought in with him. Caradoc watched his approach with cynical calm, and in Jenny’s mind she heard a whisper:

Remember, my girl, a curse is on the one who smashes the moonstone. A curse of ill fate and dying, and all his loved ones dying with him. You know how strong a source is the death of a mage. And I assure you, if the moonstone ends up buried or locked in a strongbox or thrown in the sea, believe me I’ll scream for Folcalor to come fetch me.

And Jenny said to him, It takes a traitor to fear treachery everywhere he looks.

In her mind, Caradoc laughed. Gods save me from a good man doing what he thinks is his duty, girl. There’s no treachery he’ll stick at.

John and Jenny had both assisted at enough pig slaughterings and deer hunts to find the moonstone within the corpse quickly and easily. If Caradoc felt anything, or thought anything, when they dug through the frozen flesh, he gave no sign of it; Jenny wondered if he had withdrawn that portion of his senses, or whether the dead meat was simply too cold to be anything but numb. John washed the stone in a pail of herbed well-water before seating it in the egg-shaped chamber among the pulleys and wheels that controlled the robot’s limbs, and closed the tiny latches.

Then he and Jenny rinsed their hands and arms, shivering in the water’s cold, and John dragged sledge and corpse and chair into the storeroom next door again. A coffin and winding-sheet waited there, to make the poor remains fit for burial once spring warmth thawed the ground. Afterward he came back and stood by the forge’s outer door, listening to the howling winds of the night as Jenny called back the power from the corners of the room and dispersed the magic of the wards. The thick tallow work-candles had burned low in their sockets by then, amid brown winding-sheets of dribbled wax. Shadow clung around the massive trusses of the roof-beams like cobweb, and loomed across the rough-cast plaster of the walls in distorted echoes of anvil, saw, and hanging racks of tools.

In the midst of it all, in the cleared space beyond the forge, the robot sat, a curious and monstrous shape, like a great insect. The pincers and the hand, rising up out of its center, extended stiff as the arms of a corpse. On top of the egg-shaped talisman chamber the voice-box with its many tuning-pegs gleamed dully of polished wood, mute and sinister. Between the chinks of the talisman chamber’s lattice, the moonstone glinted, like a malignant eye.

But all was silent. After his effort at charging the trapbottle with Folcalor’s name, Caradoc was too weary, his powers too drained, to make the fine-balanced wheels turn or to set in motion the pulleys and pistons of the robot limbs. Wrapping herself in her plaid for the dash across the snow-choked court to the kitchen, Jenny turned back to regard the thing, remembering her own days of imprisonment, helpless within a jewel.

Remembering the shattered crystal fragments that had littered the temple hill in Ernine.

At least she had known, in the time of her imprisonment, that her body still lived. That there was hope to return to it, even a desperate hope against terrible odds.

Her hand slid into John’s, and felt the flesh of his strong fingers icy cold. “I never said thank you,” she whispered. “For saving me as you did. For driving the demon out. For letting me return to my body again, even ravaged as it was. For doing all you did.”

He pushed her plaid back, to ruffle her barely grown hair and kiss her forehead. “They never do say, in the legend, whether the Sleepin’ Princess wanted to be waked from her dreams or not, love. Maybe they were better dreams than her life had been, an’ the first thing she did comin’ out of ’em was to slap Prince Charmin’s handsome face for him.”

“As I did?” Jenny put up her hand and laid it along his cheek, bristly with the fine, rusty stubble that was beginning to powder gray.

“We all do as we must, love.” His lips brushed hers. “I’m just glad you’re back. I’ll keep this,” he added, more loudly, holding up the silver bottle on the end of the red ribbon he’d tied around its neck, and closed the door between them and the thing in the forge. “It’s a sennight yet, till the Moon of Winds,” he said more quietly. “If Morkeleb comes in the next day or two, we should be in Prokep well in time. One way or another we’ll get this into Adromelech’s hands, though Caradoc’s right: It’ll take some gie wise bargainin’ not to come to grief ourselves.”

Jenny would have spoken. But John laid a hand on her lips and, pulling his doublet close around him, opened the door into the whirling night. “Aunt Rowe said she’d have a bath sent up to our room for us,” he said. “I think we deserve it. Let’s hope the water’s still hot.”

With an end of her plaid wrapped over John’s shoulders, they leaned and groped and stumbled their way across the courtyard to the lights of the kitchen, barely to be seen in the mealy scour of the snow. But Jenny could not rid her mind of the black spiky shape of the robot, crouching in the dark blacksmith shop. After bathing, and washing John’s back, and lying together in the curtained warm dark of the bed, she dreamed of it: dreamed that the white moonstone eye watched her still.