Dragonstar

20

The dragons flew together as far as the end of Nast Wall, with the exception of Corvin, who remained in Prokep, guarding the great treasure-hoard within the palace’s crypt. “So much for the greatest scientist an’ loremaster of the star-drakes,” John remarked, a little sadly, as he and Jenny climbed the wide stair to the top of the stone foundation and looked out for the last time over the ruins. “What good’s his lore, an’ all that he’s learned an’ known, goin’ to do anyone now? He’ll sink into his dreams with the gold, an’ stay there forever, contemplatin’ his magic dreams.”

Never mind, said Morkeleb heartlessly, for he did not like the black-and-silver dragon. He waited for them at the top, sparkling like a mirror in the dry desert light and casting no shadow on the stones: barely more than a smoke-wraith himself. We could not have appointed a better guardian for the ether-ring than the great and mighty scientist who devised it. Should any come who might interfere with it, he will soon deal with them. And saying this, he spread his shadowy wings. The other dragons drew near the earth, weightless as flowers: Morkeleb gathered Jenny into his claws, and Centhwevir, an old and surprisingly sweet-natured drake, bore John up. Sometimes during the long flight to the West, Jenny would look across the distance that separated them and see her husband peering eagerly down through the winter clouds, taking notes on what he could see of the countryside beneath.

The star-drakes sang as they flew, making music with their minds. They made a song about defeating the demons, passed from mind to mind with laughing melody like a universe of silver bells, and another about being within the crystals and drawing the ether from the other universe into their own, to power the crystals forever. Sometimes they flew close to one another, enameled colors brilliant against the gray mists of the clouds; sometimes they spread out, until they seemed no larger that gay-hued birds among those towering columns of white and silver. But always the music surrounded them, golden and wild and sweet.

They sang older songs, too, the lore of ancient dragons, of things passed from mind to mind over the centuries, and Jenny heard again of the Dragonshadows who had been with them in the past, invisible and wise. She thought—but she was not sure—that the dragons regarded these creatures as curiosities, almost alien to themselves; creatures almost of jest, to be taken lightly. Yet, in flying, they gave Morkeleb wide berth.

Only when that golden flight came to an end, late in the afternoon on a deserted meadow high above the Clae woods within sight of the city walls of Bel, did Morkeleb speak of the Dragonshadows to her. The other dragons bade Jenny good-bye, their minds shaping Dragonfriend, dragonfriend. They rose into the air, circling, brilliant as flowers in the slanting gold light, and Morkeleb, who had faded in and out of visibility through the day, remained like a silken shadow on the earth. The snow had melted from this place not a day before, and still lay in patches in the shadows of the rocks. In places the thinnest fuzz of green showed among the flattened swathes of last year’s brown grass.

“We’d best be careful how we approach the city,” remarked John, seating himself rather shakily on a rock and pulling his plaids tighter about him. “They’ll have us up as beggars.” And he grinned, bruised and filthy and tattered.

“I’ll speak to Miss Mab with the scrying-stone,” said Jenny. “She will know if all is well, and if the last of the demons have in fact left the Deep. If that’s the case, she’ll send someone to meet us.”

“It twilkin’ better be the case,” grumbled John. He took off his spectacles, looked around for a clean spot on his shirt to clean them with, and resignedly put them back on. “I can tell you now I’m gie wearied of adventures an’ I will not appreciate another loose end to tie up.”

All appears well within the city. Morkeleb settled on his haunches and tucked his wings close to his sides; Jenny could see through him, as if he were wrought of smoky glass. Farmers go about their business in the orchards outside the city gate, and within the walls men raise banners, and put up platforms draped in bright colors. Tables are being set out in the city squares, and tuns of wine brought in wagons to all the fountains. Your little Princeling’s red house-banners still fly from the palace jacks.

“Good,” sighed John. “The way things have gone I was afraid somethin’ else awful had happened, though God knows what it could be after all this. You’ll come to the crownin’ with us?” he added, shading his eyes against the evening sun and squinting up at the dragon. Far off, a cow-bell clinked, tiny in the great silence of the meadow; a dog barked beyond the wood. “I’m to swear allegiance as Thane of the Winterlands, so Badegamus has got to let me bring a guest or two. It’d be the first time a dragon attended the crownin’ of a King—first time anybody knows of, anyway. If nothing else, they’ll serve up a champion lunch.”

Even the prospect of a champion lunch, sniffed Morkeleb, would not reconcile me to the spectacle of poorly writ allegorical plays performed on streetcorners, of hastily rehearsed hymns sung by amateur temple choirs in praise of a young man whose sole virtue seems to be that he is the son of Uriens. Why Kings wish to celebrate their entry into a lifetime of care by smearing oil on their heads, standing all day in a hot robe, and making their subjects all drunk, I have never been able to fathom.

“Well, some would have it you don’t remember a lesson properly unless you been flogged—me old tutor was like that—but they settled on bein’ bored an’ hungry for coronations ’cause the King’s like to carry grudges.” John yawned hugely—looking at him, Jenny thought he didn’t look like he’d slept in days, never mind the shattering chaos they had just come through. Arriving in Prokep with Morkeleb after a journey of a day and a night, she had found John’s tracks, and the bodies of two dead gnomes, but no sign of John or of the demons themselves. She looked forward to hearing what he’d done with them for three days. But it didn’t look like it had been an easy time.

John went on: “Happen the oil on the head, an’ the prayin’—an’ maybe the amateur temple choir, I don’t know—will bring back to the King’s mind that he promised to answer for the lives of his people, when the time comes to really do it. God knows when you’re actually goin’ into battle you need somethin’ to remind you. But our Gar’s had a bit of practice at it now, before takin’ it up as a full-time occupation, so I think he’ll do. The lunch is the most important part,” he added. “There’s no King properly crowned without there’s a lunch to make it official.”

I shall steel my mind with long meditation, replied Morkeleb, to overcome the sorrow of missing the lunch. And turning his diamond eyes on Jenny—the dragon eyes that mortals are cautioned never to meet—he asked, And are you, too, Wizard-woman, gie wearied of adventures?

For now, she said. Though I suspect we will have some, riding back to the Winterlands when this crowning is over.

I was not proposing, said the dragon, to fly away with you on a renewed quest, with your coronation sweetmeats still in your hands. But when summer has passed, or perhaps two summers, and peace lies on the land, will you grant a boon to me, you and your far-venturing Dreamweaver?

For it is true, as you have said, Wizard-woman. I am not a dragon anymore. I have passed beyond a gate of being into an unknown self, and whether I am a Dragonshadow, or some other thing entirely, I now know not. While I watched for the Demon Queen in the Skerries of Light, I returned to the Birdless Isle where the Dragonshadows dwelled—where for years I had waited for them in meditation, seeking the answers to questions concerning my heart. By all the signs there they have been gone for many lives of men, far longer than ever they have gone before. Many nights there I listened across the face of the earth for their thoughts, and found none.

And so I ask you this: Your Dreamweaver has ridden on errantry for pay, for the gnomes in the past and now also for the Demon Queen. What pay will you take, Dreamweaver, to go upon errantry with me, and seek the Dragonshadows through the gates of other Hells?

“Save a dragon, slave a dragon,” John quoted the old spell. “It goes for the children of men as well, y’know.”

Does it? Had Morkeleb had eyebrows, he would have lifted one. I must have been looking in the wrong direction, for I had not observed this phenomenon.

Jenny laughed, and said, “I think you were looking in the wrong direction, my friend—or looking at the wrong men. We bear much study, you know, men and women both. Even the worst of us. Even those of us who do no more than bear our children, and feed our cats, and live quietly among our friends. There is other music than that which dragons make.”

So I am coming to learn.

The dragon spread his wings, and Jenny said, “Yes, my friend. Come to the North in a season or two, when there is peace on the land, and we will go with you through the gates of other Hells.” And, as John had said to the Demon Queen, she smiled at him and said, “Good luck.”

There was a time, she knew, when he would have sniffed at the concept of luck, for luck was not a thing of dragons. But he only looked down into her eyes and said, And you.

He rose in the air, letting the wind take him, and was gone from sight.

“You’re not going to like this, love,” John said two mornings later, as he turned from the door with the servant’s tray of braided breads and honey in his hands. This time the butter was stamped in a fanciful design and embellished with violets, and there was a small copper pot of water, which John set in the fire, and a red bowl of coffee beans. These he dumped into a copper roasting pan, and settled down cross-legged on the hearth in his nightshirt to cook: It was only the most careless host who would have his servants make coffee for guests.

Jenny, sitting up in bed with the blankets around her, put her hands on her hips in an attitude of mock exasperation and said, “What did you accidentally leave behind in Prokep?”

John laughed. “Me innocence.”

“You haven’t been innocent since the day you learned to read.” But she smiled as she said it and, gathering her voluminous nightshirt around her, went to sit beside him on the hearth.

Last night in nightmares she had seen Amayon die again. Waking, she had cried the tears she had not wept at the time, tears she still did not understand. John had held her, rocked her like a child until she’d slept again.

She supposed she would dream it again, and again, until the poison was all worked out of her. She could not tell how long that would be. She still could only work small magic, kindling fires, or a little healing—John’s broken ribs seemed better—for the spells by which she had guided the dragons into the ether-crystals at Prokep had left her exhausted and drained. But that, too, did not trouble her as once it had. The strength was in her, pure and growing like a flower, her own magic, rooted in everything she was and had survived.

Her soul felt at peace. In the plantings of the palace’s Long Garden outside the window, the first flowers of spring were beginning to show. “What won’t I like?”

“I think I’ve figured out what that thing was, that killed Uriens,” John said. “And why.”

Along the garden terraces beyond the window, palace servants in red carried precious carpets, cushions, sprays of hothouse flowers to the banqueting hall. Feasting would begin that afternoon, and carry on all night to celebrate Gareth’s coronation as King of Bel. Lying in bed at the first peep of the chill spring sunshine, Jenny had heard the footsteps of the chamberlains going down to the Temple of Sarmendes in the great Square of the Sun, where people had been waiting since dawn to see the Prince ride in procession, and behind him all the lords of the Realm. Past the wavery glass of the windows Jenny could recognize, by the colors of his fur jacket, the young Prince Tinán of Imperteng, who had arrived the day before to swear allegiance to his new King. He was talking to the tall, black-robed form of the Master of Halnath, the Lord of the Eastern Marches.

John would swear allegiance for the Winterlands, as he had sworn to Uriens after he’d driven Morkeleb from the Realm.

The Realm would begin to heal.

She looked sidelong at John, and raised her eyebrows, and he concentrated for a few moments on stirring the coffee beans—not that he was likely to maintain that concentration, she knew. He was no better a coffeemaker than he was a camp cook.

After a night’s sleep in the Deep of Ylferdun—whence members of Miss Mab’s household had come to meet them in the meadow—several baths and another night’s sleep in Bel, John had lost some of his look of a mad hermit, though he was still red with sunburn and very thin. The hearth glow outlined his long, bent nose, and flashed rosy amber from the lenses of his spectacles as he turned his head. His expression was both bemused and a little sad. He said, “I think it was the Demon Queen.”

Jenny stared at him. “Why would the Demon Queen …?”

“As payment,” said John. “To get me back on the good side of Ector, an’ all them who’d said I was workin’ for her. To let it be seen by all that I slayed the monster that killed the King, rather than me havin’ to kill the King meself, which of course I would have had to do. Because she was the only one in a position to give me back me good reputation. An’ because I think she planned the whole scheme of Folcalor’s defeat, from start to finish.”

“Aohila?”

“I think so.” John shook the pan and dumped the unevenly roasted beans into a mortar to grind: “This was gie easier with an ether-powered grindin’ machine, let me tell you, love.”

He gestured with the pestle. “I think from the moment Folcalor seized Caradoc’s body years ago, an’ started puttin’ together Adromelech’s plan to break free when the Dragonstar came round right, Aohila intended to use whoever came through the mirror. She knew somebody would. Once Folcalor had the dragons an’ the mages behind him, demon magic was the only way to fight Adromelech. Whether Folcalor rebelled against his Hell-Lord or not, one or t’other of ’em was bound to come after the Burning Mirror.”

He went back to grinding the coffee, twisting and crunching the beans in the marble dish. “Aohila tried her damnedest to make me her slave, you remember. An’ when I tricked her, an’ paid off the teind she didn’t think I could pay, she worked out a way of makin’ me think I was comin’ up with this plan of usin’ ether-magic on me own. It was she who put me together with Corvin, remember, so I could learn about ether. An’ I suspect, she who sent the rains to lay the gold dust, when Folcalor’s demons made a try to seize him in Prokep. It wasn’t so much she feared him puttin’ her name in a catch-bottle because her name already was in a catch-bottle. She knew he was a scientist who understood ether—a force the demons neither understood nor could control.”

“That must have been what she was doing when I trapped her,” said Jenny. “Sending the rains, I mean. The times fit.”

She was silent, thinking about the ruin of Ernine. About the burned-out soul-jewels, scattered upon the hills.

The demon commander deserved to be where he was, she thought. Trapped in that silver tiny world, with no company but the vicious Adromelech, for eternity.

Do you like games?

And his shadowy lieutenant had been destroyed, as Caradoc’s curse had required.

“You know,” said Jenny thoughtfully, “I always felt I found that bottle a little … easily. But she’d have to have known that she risked me using it on her.”

“I think she counted on it.” John dumped the ground coffee into the pot, and added too much water too fast. It was always safer to let him make tea, Jenny reflected with an inner sigh. And even then … “She’d have known you had to use it on her, for it to be reprogrammed—spelled with another name”—he corrected the verb he’d picked up in his Otherworld travels—“to trap Folcalor. But she obviously thought you were intelligent enough to see that, alone, she was less of a danger to the world than Folcalor. An’ that you were adult enough not to let your jealousy of her blind you to that fact.”

Jenny was silent again, remembering the eerie silence of the catch-bottle. Remembering her jealous dreams.

They seemed to be part of someone else’s life. But they, too, were a part of her, a part of what made up her magic. She would have to remember that, when next she drew strength from her own soul.

“I think …,” she said slowly, “I think I’ve just been complimented.”

“You have, love.” He leaned across the hearth to kiss her, the steam from the coffee misting his spectacles.

She’d spoken to Ian again that morning, through the white crystal that had been her master Caerdinn’s: a delight beyond anything she could think of, to speak, as a mage, to her mageborn son. “Lucky you,” the boy had said, “being in Bel where it’s spring. We’ve got another storm going, and the snow in the courtyard is a yard deep.” He’d reported that Muffle had dismantled the robot, and though he, Ian, had been able to detect no lingering magic anywhere about the pieces, or in the fragments of the burned-out moonstone, they would be hauled with the first thaw to the quicksands in Toadsuck Bog and sunk.

Meanwhile Adric was being kept away from them. As of yesterday, the boy was trying to convince Muffle to build another robot from scratch.

“But why?” Jenny asked later, when she was dressing to join the procession assembling in the palace hall. “What did Aohila gain? All that was … for what?”

“For exactly what we’re gettin’ out of this, love.” John paused in tying his shirt-points and looked down at her, the linen of his collar-ruffle startlingly white against his sunburned throat. “For a chance to go home an’ know it’ll be safe. For Happily Ever After. The Burnin’ Mirror’s safe in the Ether Henge: There isn’t a chance another demon’ll try to get into her Realm. She’s the Lady of Hell, maybe the only complete consciousness in the place. She has there all she needs. She came out once, to conquer Ernine through Isychros a thousand years ago an’ mix herself in the affairs of humankind, an’ got defeat for her pains. Maybe she learned a lesson.”

“I didn’t think demons could.”

John held out his arm to her, and she took it with a smile. In the plain black robe of a scholar, and a scholar’s close-fitting velvet cap hiding his shorn hair, only the demon-killer sword he wore at his waist marked him as the warrior Thane of the Winterlands. He looked far more like precisely what he’d always wanted to be: a naturalist who’d rather talk to dragons than slay them, a reluctant warrior who’d sooner play the hurdy-gurdy than go to war, and design flying machines and parachutes and better ways of making coffee.

“I didn’t either, love,” he said. “I think, like Morkeleb, we may have been lookin’ in the wrong direction, or at the wrong demons.”

As they stepped outside into the garden, the spring breeze billowed their robes, for Jenny, too, wore the gown of a scholar, marking her true self for all the world to know. Thane and witch, tinker and hunter, they paused on the terrace steps to kiss in the changeable sunlight, partners who had never been quite what others expected them to be.

“Can we really go to seek the Dragonshadows?” she asked, as the trumpets sounded by the palace gates, calling all latecomers to the procession. Down at the end of the garden Badegamus appeared, gorgeous in green-and-purple satin so crusted with jewels that he seemed, in his fluttering mantlings, to be a dragon himself, hastening toward them with all the ribbons fluttering on his staff as he gestured for them to hurry.

“I wouldn’t miss it for the world,” John said with a grin. “Though God knows what we’ll find—not what either of us expects, I daresay. Maybe not even anything Morkeleb expects. And what they’ll think of him I can’t imagine—always supposin’ we find them. He’s not a dragon anymore, as he said, no matter how much he tries to pretend he isn’t interested in humankind or mortal lives. Whatever else he is …”

He shook his head, and finished, “… is what he is.”

“I only hope he may find happiness in so being,” Jenny said softly. “As I have.”

Badegamus reached them, puffing so hard he could only gesture them toward the procession. Tinán, Prince of Imperteng, fairly glittered in his barbaric embroideries; the beautifully arrayed lords of the Islands bowed, looking like a flower garden when the wind passes. The Master of Halnath, like John and Jenny, wore scholar’s robes, his long reddish hair trailing out from beneath his cap; Lord Ector stood beside him, erect and soldierly under thirty pounds of elaborately dagged satin mantlings and fussing over the proper order of procession.

Resplendent in a gown of ancient cut, Gareth led the way through the streets of the ancient city on foot, marking out, square by square, the place whose people he would be answerable for, even at the cost of his life. At each of the gods’ twelve temples he was anointed, and swore before each deity—the Green God of Law, and the Gray God of Learning, the Blue Goddess whose name the city had originally borne and the Many-Colored Lady of the Wastelands, and all the rest—to stand in for the lives of the people, in all things touched by that lord. And before each god the rulers of the great fiefs and marches swore their loyalty: the Master of Halnath, and the Thane of the Winterlands, the Prince of Imperteng, and the lords of the various isles. And the people who followed the procession replied, in a many-voiced cry like the sweeping music of ten thousand blades of grass, “And so we swear.”

Then there would be music and a little pageant by the local guilds and temple choirs singing slightly out of tune, and John and Ector discussing the history of the coronation rite under their breaths just as if Ector hadn’t shoved a torch into a pile of kindling around John’s feet a month ago: “… but accordin’ to Tenantius, if the King is selected before the beginnin’ of the world by the Spirit of Universal Justice …”

“Yes, yes, but in Garuspex’s Rites it says that no King is truly King until he is invested, and therefore …”

Jenny shook her head, and looked at the young man standing before her on the steps of the Temple of Sarmendes, the last born and greatest of the Twelve. Gareth looked pale and haggard still in the red robes of the House of Uwanë, and in spite of the dignity of the day his spectacles flashed in the sunlight. He took the rite too seriously to risk offending any god by a single myopic misstep, no matter what he looked like in front of the people. The hooded priests of Grond and Ankethyes grouped around him, waving censers and mumbling rote invocations in a language that nobody remembered anymore, but when she scanned the crowd on the steps, Jenny saw little Millença with the nurse Danae and Danae’s daughter, Branwen, all watching Gareth with mingled joy and love.

And around them, other people. Gareth’s people, Jenny thought, the way the villagers of Alyn and Great Toby and Far West Riding were John’s people. She could almost match them, face for face—old ladies who were certainly the spiritual sisters of Granny Brown, the rough-faced, smiling Cowans and Bills and Muffles of the world; girls in bright dresses and tight bodices like Mol Bucket, and innkeepers like Gowla and Grobe from the Silver Cricket, and the woman who’d been hawking hot pies in the alley behind Bliaud’s house. She glimpsed Bliaud’s son Abellus, in elaborate mantlings and a truly amazing hat, and Brâk with his scrollwork tattoos.

Weary faces full of hope, or red with free wine. The faces of those who’d come through plague and war and Rocklys’s rebellion, through doubt and confusion and lies. The faces of those who’d lost wives and husbands and children to the plague—some who’d seen them return, only to be cheated and mocked by the demons who’d poisoned even their memories.

They deserved their celebration, thought Jenny. And their time of peace.

It would be good, she thought, to start for the North again. She looked forward to teaching Ian, sensing that he was already a better mage than she and would be better still—that knowledge filled her with joy. To meditate in quiet in the house on Frost Fell, watching the luminous blue borealis ripple through the summer evenings when the birds sang through the hour or two of darkness, and the world smelled as close to God as it was ever likely to get.

To be with her children, and with John, and with herself.

With Morkeleb, too, she hoped—if not to go away adventuring, then to lie, as he had once said, in the thin turf of the downs, and to talk as friends of the endless lore of the star-drakes.

Time is long, she thought as her eyes turned to John once more—“—yes, but if the sceptre only dates back to the reign of Heskooth IV—” he was arguing, oblivious to the priests of Cragget investing Gareth with the keys and hammer of the Orange God in the name of the twenty-seven Guilds of the city. Time is long, and the God of Time, the thirteenth God who dreamed the other Twelve, holds all things in his pockets. And no one knows what he will decide to bring forth.

We all are what we are, and to fear that is to fear the stars in the sky.

The gnomes of the Deep came forward: Sevacandrozardus the King, who was called Balgub among men, in robes that seemed to be plated with gold and gems; the gnomish Wise Ones and the Patriarchs of the noble clans of the gnomes, Miss Mab’s clan of Howeth-Arawan among them; Miss Mab herself, bowing with great dignity to the young man who had visited her in the slums when the dragon drove her and her people forth from the Deep.

Yet another hymn was sung by yet another ill-rehearsed choir. A face in the crowd caught Jenny’s eye: a thin, small man with gray hair and eyes like the diamond labyrinths of the star-fields, and hands gloved in black, to hide his dragon claws. Morkeleb stood in the crowd, elbow-to-elbow with fishmongers and pork-butchers and the girls in their bright dresses and tight bodices, watching the King and watching the King’s people with the fascination of one who has never seen such things before.

A dragon? she thought. Never.

A Dragonshadow?

Or one who was only the sum of what he had once been, and was now only what he was? As are we all, she thought.

The musicians broke into a fanfare, marred by a single out-of-tune hautbois; the children of the Weavers’ Guild Choir lifted their voices in yet another hymn of banal praise. For one moment, across the crowd, Jenny met those diamond eyes.

Then Morkeleb lifted a hand to her, and smiled, and disappeared into the crowd.