Dragon's Bane

III

They set forth two days later and rode south through a maelstrom of wind and water.

In the days of the Kings, the Great North Road had stretched from Bel itself northward like a gray stone serpent, through the valley of the Wildspae River and across the farm and forest lands of Wyr, linking the southern capital with the northern frontier and guarding the great silver mines of Tralchet. But the mines had flagged, and the Kings had begun to squabble with their brothers and cousins over the lordship of the south. The troops who guarded the Winterlands’ forts had been withdrawn—temporarily, they said, to shore up the forces of one contender against another. They had never returned. Now the gray stone serpent was disintegrating slowly, like a shed skin; its stones were torn up to strengthen house walls against bandits and barbarians, its ditches choked with decades of detritus, and its very foundations forced apart by the encroaching tree roots of the forest of Wyr. The Winterlands had destroyed it, as they destroyed all things.

Traveling south along what remained of the road was slow, for the autumn storms swelled the icy becks of the moors to white-toothed torrents and reduced the ground in the tree-tangled hollows to sodden, nameless mires. Under the flail of the wind, Gareth could no longer argue that the ship upon which he had come north would still be waiting at Eldsbouch to waft them south in relative comfort and speed, but Jenny suspected he still felt in his heart that it should have been, and, illogically, blamed her that it was not.

They rode for the most part in silence. Sometimes when they halted, as they frequently did for John to scout the tumbled rocks or dense knots of woodland ahead. Jenny looked across at Gareth and saw him gazing around him in a kind of hurt bewilderment at the desolation through which they rode: at the barren downs with their weedgrown lines of broken walls; at the old boundary stones, lumpish and melted-looking as spring snowmen; and at the stinking bogs or the high, bare tors with their few twisted trees, giant balls of mistletoe snagged weirdly in their naked branches against a dreary sky. It was a land that no longer remembered law or the prosperity of ordered living that comes with law, and sometimes she could see him struggling with the understanding of what John was offering to buy at the stake of his life.

But usually it was plain that Gareth simply found the halts annoying. “We’re never going to get there at this rate,” he complained as John appeared from the smokecolored tangle of dead heather that cloaked the lower flanks of a promontory that hid the road. A watchtower had once crowned it, now reduced to a chewed-looking circle of rubble on the hill’s crest. John had bellied up the slope to investigate it and the road ahead and now was shaking mud and wet out of his plaid. “It’s been twenty days since the dragon came,” Gareth added resentfully. “Anything can have happened.”

“It can have happened the day after you took ship, my hero,” John pointed out, swinging up to the saddle of his spare riding horse. Cow. “And if we don’t look sharp and scout ahead, we are never going to get there.”

But the sullen glance the boy shot at John’s back as he reined away told Jenny more clearly than words that, though he could not argue with this statement, he did not believe it, either.

That evening they camped in the ragged birches of the broken country where the downs gave place to the hoary densities of the Wyrwoods. When camp was set, and the horses and mules picketed. Jenny moved quietly along the edge of the clearing, the open ground above the high bank of a stream whose noisy rushing blended with the sea-sound of the wind in the trees. She touched the bark of the trees and the soggy mast of acorns, hazelnuts, and decaying leaves underfoot, tracing them with the signs that only a mage could see—signs that would conceal the camp from those who might pass by outside. Looking back toward the fluttering yellow light of the new fire, she saw Gareth hunkered down beside it, shivering in his damp cloak, looking wretched and very forlorn.

Her square, full lips pressed together. Since he had learned she was his erstwhile hero’s mistress, he had barely spoken to her. His resentment at her inclusion in the expedition was still obvious, as was his unspoken assumption that she had included herself out of a combination of meddling and a desire not to let her lover out of her sight. But Gareth was alone in an alien land, having clearly never been away from the comforts of his home before, lonely, disillusioned, and filled with a gnawing fear of what he would return to find.

Jenny sighed and crossed the clearing to where he sat.

The boy looked up at her suspiciously as she dug into her jacket pocket and drew out a long sliver of smoky crystal on the chain that Caerdinn had used to hang around his neck. “I can’t see the dragon in this,” she said, “but if you’ll tell me the name of your father and something about your home in Bel, at least I should be able to call their images and tell you if they’re all right.”

Gareth turned his face away from her. “No,” he said. Then, after a moment, he added grudgingly, “Thank you all the same.”

Jenny folded her arms and regarded him for a moment in the jumpy orange firelight. He huddled a little deeper into his stained crimson cloak and would not meet her eyes.

“Is it because you think I can’t?” she asked at last. “Or because you won’t take the aid of a witch?”

He didn’t answer that, though his full lower lip pinched up a bit in the middle. With a sigh of exasperation. Jenny walked away from him to where John stood near the oilskin-covered mound of the packs, looking out into the darkening woods.

He glanced back as she came near, the stray gleams of firelight throwing glints of dirty orange on the metal of his patched doublet. “D’you want a bandage for your nose?” he inquired, as if she’d tried to pet a ferret and gotten nipped for her trouble. She laughed ruefully.

“He didn’t have any objections to me before,” she said, more hurt than she had realized by the boy’s enmity.

John put an arm around her and hugged her close. “He feels cheated, is all,” he said easily. “And since God forbid he should have cheated himself with his expectations, it must have been one of us that did it, mustn’t it?” He leaned down to kiss her, his hand firm against the bare nape of her neck beneath the coiled ridge of her braided hair. Beyond them, among the ghostly birches, the thin underbrush rustled harshly; a moment later a softer, steadier rushing whispered in the bare branches overhead. Jenny smelled the rain almost before she was conscious of its light fingers upon her face.

Behind them, she heard Gareth cursing. He squelched across the clearing to join them a moment later, wiping raindroplets from his spectacles, his hair in lank strings against his temples.

“We seem to have outsmarted ourselves,” he said glumly. “Picked a nice place to camp—only there’s no shelter. There’s a cave down under the cut of the streambank...”

“Above the highest rise of the water?” inquired John, a mischievous glint in his eye.

Gareth said defensively, “Yes. At least—it isn’t so very far down the bank.”

“Big enough to put the horses in, always supposing we could get them down there?”

The boy bristled. “I could go see.”

“No,” said Jenny. Gareth opened his mouth to protest this arbitrariness, but she cut him off with, “I’ve laid spells of ward and guard about this camp—I don’t think they should be crossed. It’s almost full-dark now...”

“But we’ll get wet!”

“You’ve been wet for days, my hero,” John pointed out with cheerful brutality. “Here at least we know we’re safe from the side the stream’s on—unless, of course, it rises over its bank.” He glanced down at Jenny, still in the circle of his arm; she was conscious, too, of Gareth’s sulky gaze. “What about the spell-ward, love?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. “Sometimes the spells will hold against the Whisperers, sometimes they don’t. I don’t know why—whether it’s because of something about the Whisperers, or because of something about the spells.” Or because, she added to herself, her own powers weren’t strong enough to hold even a true spell against them.

“Whisperers?” Gareth demanded incredulously.

“A kind of blood-devil,” said John, with an edge of irritation in his voice. “It doesn’t matter at the moment, my hero. Just stay inside the camp.”

“Can’t I even go look for shelter? I won’t go far.”

“If you leave the camp, you’ll never find your way back to it,” John snapped. “You’re so bloody anxious not to lose time on this trip, you wouldn’t want to have us spend the next three days looking for your body, would you? Come on, Jen—if you’re not after making supper, I’ll do it...”

“I’ll do it, I’ll do it,” Jenny agreed, with a haste that wasn’t entirely jest. As she and John walked back to the smoky, sheltered campfire, she glanced back at Gareth, still standing on the edge of the faintly gleaming spellcircle. His vanity stinging from John’s last words, the boy picked up an acorn and hurled it angrily out into the wet darkness. The darkness whispered and rustled, and then fell still again under the ceaseless pattern of the rain.

They left the folded lands of rock hills and leaping streams for good after that and entered the ruinous gloom of the great Forest of Wyr. Here crowded oaks and hawthorn pressed close upon the road, catching the faces of the travelers with warty, overhanging boughs and dirty moss and their horses’ hooves with scabrous roots and soggy drifts of dead leaves. The black lattices of bare branches above them admitted only a fraction of the pallid daylight, but rain still leaked through, pattering in an endless, dreary murmur in the dead fern and hazel thickets. The ground was worse here, sodden and unsteady, or flooded in meres of silver water in which the trees stood, knee-deep and rotting; and Aversin remarked that the marshes of the south were spreading again. In many places the road was covered, or blocked with fallen trees, and the labor of clearing it or beating a path through the thickets around these obstacles left them all cold and exhausted. Even for Jenny, used to the hardships of the Winterlands, this was tiring, and the more so because there was no respite; she lay down weary at night and rose weary in the bleak grayness before dawn to travel on once again.

What it was to Gareth she could well imagine. As he grew more weary, his temper shortened, and he complained bitterly at every halt.

“What’s he looking for now?” he demanded one afternoon, when John ordered their fifth halt in three hours and, armed with his heavy horn hunting-bow, dismounted and vanished into the choking tangle of hazel and blackthorn beside the road.

It had been raining most of the forenoon, and the tall boy drooped miserably on the back of The Stupid Roan, one of the spare horses they’d brought from the Hold. The other spare. Jenny’s mount, John had christened The Stupider Roan, a name that was unfortunately apt. Jenny suspected that, in his wearier moments, Gareth even blamed her for the generally poor quality of the Hold’s horseflesh. The rain had ceased now, but cold wind still probed through the very weave of their garments; every now and then a gust shook the branches above them and splattered them with leftover rain and an occasional sodden oak leaf that drifted down like a dead bat.

“He’s looking for danger.” Jenny herself was listening, her nerves queerly on edge, searching the silence that hung like an indrawn breath among the dark, closecrowded trees.

“He didn’t find any last time, did he?” Gareth tucked his gloved hands under his cloak for warmth and shivered. Then he looked ostentatiously upward, scanning what sky was visible, calculating the time of day, and from there going on to remember how many days they had been on the road. Under his sarcasm she could hear fear. “Or the time before that, either.”

“And lucky for us that he didn’t,” she replied. “I think you have little understanding of the dangers in the Winterlands ...”

Gareth gasped, and his gaze fixed. Turning her head quickly, Jenny followed his eyes to the dark shape of Aversin, his plaids making him nearly invisible in the gloom among the trees. With a single slow movement he had raised his bow, the arrow nocked but not yet pulled.

She tracked the trajectory of the arrow’s flight to the source of the danger.

Just visible through the trees, a skinny tittle old man was stooping arthritically to scrape the dry insides from a rotting log for kindling. His wife, an equally lean, equally rag-clad old woman whose thin white hair hung lankly about her narrow shoulders, was holding a reed basket to receive the crumbling chips. Gareth let out a cry of horror. “NO!”

Aversin moved his head. The old woman, alerted also, looked up and gave a thin wail, dropping her basket to shield her face futilely with her arms. The dry, woody punk spilled onto the marshy ground about her feet. The old man caught her by the arm and the two of them began to flee dodderingly into the deeper forest, sobbing and covering their heads with their arms, as if they supposed that the broad-tipped iron war arrow would be stopped by such slack old flesh.

Aversin lowered his bow and let his targets stumble unshot into the wet wilderness of trees.

Gareth gasped, “He was going to kill them! Those poor old people...”

Jenny nodded, as John came back to the road. “I know.” She understood why; but, as when she had killed the dying robber in the ruins of the old town, she still felt unclean.

“Is that all you can say?” Gareth raged, horrified. “You know! He would have shot them in cold blood...”

“They were Meewinks, Gar,” John said quietly. “Shooting’s the only thing you can do with Meewinks.”

“I don’t care what you call them!” he cried. “They were old and harmless! All they were doing was gathering kindling!”

A small, straight line appeared between John’s reddish brows, and he rubbed his eyes. Gareth, Jenny thought, was not the only one upon whom this trip was telling.

“I don’t know what you call them in your part of the country,” Aversin said tiredly. “Their people used to farm all the valley of the Wildspae. They...”

“John.” Jenny touched his arm. She had followed this exchange only marginally; her senses and her power were diffused through the damp woods, and in the fading light she scented danger. It seemed to prickle along her skin—a soft plashing movement in the flooded glades to the north, a thin chittering that silenced the small restive noises of fox and weasel. “We should be moving. The light’s already going. I don’t remember this part of the woods well but I know it’s some distance from any kind of camping place.”

“What is it?” His voice, like hers, dropped to a whisper.

She shook her head. “Maybe nothing. But I think we should go.”

“Why?” Gareth bleated. “What’s wrong? For three days you’ve been running away from your own shadows...”

“That’s right,” John agreed, and there was a dangerous edge to his quiet voice. “You ever think what might happen to you if your own shadow caught you? Now ride—and ride silent.”

It was nearly full night when they made camp, for, like Jenny, Aversin was nervous, and it took some time for him to find a camping place that his woodsmanship judged to be even relatively safe. One of them Jenny rejected, not liking the way the dark trees crowded around it; another John passed by because the spring could not be seen from where the fire would be. Jenny was hungry and tired, but the instincts of the Winterlands warned her to keep moving until they found a place that could be defended, though against what she could not tell.

When Aversin ruled against a third place, an almost circular clearing with a small, fem-choked spring gurgling through one side of it, Gareth’s hunger-frayed temper snapped. “What’s wrong with it?” he demanded, dismounting and huddling on the lee-side of The Stupid Roan for warmth. “You can take a drink without getting out of sight of the fire, and it’s bigger than the other place was.”

Annoyance glinted like the blink of drawn steel in John’s voice. “I don’t like it.”

“Well, why in the name of Sannendes not?”

Aversin looked around him at the clearing and shook his head. The clouds had parted overhead enough to admit watery moonlight to glint on his specs, on the water droplets in his hair when he pushed back his hood, and on the end of his long nose. “I just don’t. I can’t say why.”

“Well, if you can’t say why, what would you like?”

“What I’d like,” the Dragonsbane retorted with his usual devastating accuracy, “is not to have some snirp of a silk-lined brat telling me a place is safe because he wants his supper.”

Because that was obviously Gareth’s first concern, the boy exploded, “That isn’t the reason! I think you’ve lived like a wolf for so long you don’t trust anything! I’m not going to trek through the woods all night long because...”

“Fine,” said Aversin grimly. “You can just bloody well stay here, then.”

“That’s right! Go ahead, abandon me! Are you going to take a shot at me if I try to come after you and you hear the bushes rustle?”

“I might.”

“John!” Jenny’s cool, slightly gravelly voice cut across his next words. “How much longer can we travel without lights of some kind? Clouds are moving up. It won’t rain, but you won’t be able to see a foot ahead of you in two hours.”

“You could,” he pointed out. He felt it, too, she thought—that growing sensation that had begun back along the road; the uneasy feeling of being watched.

“I could,” she agreed quietly. “But I don’t have your woodsmanship. And I know this part of the road—there isn’t a better place ahead. I don’t like this place either, but I’m not sure that staying here wouldn’t be safer than showing up our position by traveling with lights, even a very dim magelight. And even that might not show up signs of danger.”

John looked about him at the dark woods, now barely visible in the cold gloom. Wind stirred at the bare boughs interlaced above their heads, and somewhere before them in the clearing Jenny could hear the whisper of the ferns and the rushing voice of the rain-fed stream. No sound of danger, she thought. Why then did she subconsciously watch with her peripheral vision; why this readiness to flee?

Aversin said quietly, “It’s too good.”

Gareth snapped, “First you don’t like it and then you say it’s too good...”

“They’ll know .all the camping places anyway,” Jenny replied softly across his words.

Furious, Gareth sputtered, “Who’ll know?”

“The Meewinks, you stupid oic,” snapped John back at him.

Gareth flung up his hands. “Oh, fine! You mean you don’t want to camp here because you’re afraid of being attacked by a little old man and a little old lady?”

“And about fifty of their friends, yes,” John retorted. “And one more word out of you, my hero, and you’re going to find yourself slammed up against a tree.”

Thoroughly roused now, Gareth retorted, “Good! Prove how clever you are by thrashing someone who disagrees with you! If you’re afraid of being attacked by a troop of forty four-foot-tall septuagenarians...”

He never even saw Aversin move. The Dragonsbane might not have the appearance of a hero. Jenny thought, but he nevertheless had the physical reflexes of one. Gareth gasped as he was literally lifted off his feet by a doublehandful of cloak and doublet, and Jenny strode forward to catch John’s spike-studded forearm. With softness as definite as an assassin’s footfall, she said, “Be quiet! And drop him.”

“Got a cliff handy?” But she felt the momentum of his rage slack. After a pause he pushed—almost threw—Gareth from him. “Right.” Behind his anger he sounded embarrassed. “Thanks to our hero, it’s well too dark now to be moving on. Jen, can you do anything with this place? Spell it?”

Jenny thought for a few moments, trying to analyze what it was that she feared. “Not against the Meewinks, no,” she replied at last. She added acidly, “They’ll have tracked you gentlemen by your voices.”

“It wasn’t me who...”

“I didn’t ask who it was.” She took the reins of the horses and mules and led them on into the clearing, anxious now to get a camp set and circled with the spells of ward before they were seen from the outside. Gareth, a little shamefaced at his outburst, followed sulkily, looking at the layout of the clearing.

In the voice of one who sought to mollify by pretending that the disagreement never happened, he asked, “Does this hollow look all right for the fire?”

Irritation still crackled in Aversin’s voice. “No fire. We’re in for a cold camp tonight—and you’ll take the first watch, my hero.”

Gareth gasped in protest at this arbitrary switch. Since leaving the Hold, Gareth had always taken the last watch, the dawn watch, because at the end of a day’s riding he wanted nothing more than to lie down and sleep; Jenny had always taken second; and John, used to the habits of wolves who hunted in the early part of the night, took the first. The boy began, “But I...” and Jenny swung around to look at them in the somber gloom.

“One more word out of either of you and I will lay a spell of dumbness upon you both.”

John subsided at once. Gareth started to speak again, then thought better of it. Jenny pulled the picket rope out of the mule Clivy’s pack and looped it around a sapling. Half to herself, she added, “Though God knows it couldn’t make you any dumber.”

Throughout their meager dinner of dried beef, cold cornmeal mush, and apples, Gareth remained ostentatiously silent. Jenny scarcely noticed, and John, seeing her preoccupied, said little to her, not wanting to disturb her concentration. She was not sure how much he felt of the danger she sensed in the woods all around them—she didn’t know how much of it was only the product of her own weariness. But she wove all her concentration, all her abilities, into the spell-circle that she put around the camp that night: spells of ward that would make their campsite unnoticeable from the outside, that would thwart the eye of any who were not actually within the circle. They would not be much help against the Meewinks, who would know where the clearing was, but they might provide a delay that would buy time. To these she added other spells against other dangers, spells that Caerdinn had taught her against the blood-devils and Whisperers that haunted the Woods of Wyr, spells whose efficacy she privately doubted because she knew that they sometimes failed, but the best spells that she—or anyone to whom she had spoken—knew.

She had long suspected that the Lines of magic were thinning and that every generation attenuated the teaching of magic that had been passed down from the old times, the times before the Realm of Belmarie had united all the West under itself and the glittering worship of the Twelve Gods. Caerdinn had been one of the mightiest of the Line of Heme, but, when she had first met him at fourteen, he was already very old, feeble, and a little crazy. He had taught her, trained her in the secrets of the Line passed from master to pupil over a dozen generations. But since his death she had found two instances where his knowledge had been incorrect and had heard of spells from her Linekindred, the pupils’ pupils of Caerdinn’s master Spaeth Skywarden, which Caerdinn had either not bothered to teach her, or had not known himself. The spells of guard against the Whisperers that had more and more come to haunt the Wyrwoods were ineffective and sporadic, and she knew of no spell that would drive them or the blood-devils out of an area to render it safe for humans again. Such things might reside somewhere in a book, written down by the mage who discovered them, but neither Jenny, nor any mage she had met, had known of them.

She slept that night uneasily, exhausted in body and troubled by strange shapes that seemed to slide in and out through the cracks in her dreams. She seemed to be able to hear the whistling clutter of the blood-devils as they flitted from tree to tree in the marshy woods across the stream and below them the soft murmurs of the Whisperers in the darkness beyond the barrier of spells. Twice she pulled herself painfully from the sucking darkness of sleep, fearing some danger, but both times she only saw Gareth sitting propped against a pile of packsaddles, nodding in the misty blackness.

The third time she woke up, Gareth was gone.

It had been a dream that woke her; a dream of a woman standing half-hidden among the trees. She was veiled, like all the women of the south; the lace of that veil was like a cloak of flowers scattered over her dark curls. Her soft laughter was like silver bells, but there was a husky note in it, as if she never laughed save with pleasure at something gained. She held out small, slender hands, and whispered Gareth’s name.

Leaves and dirt were scuffed where he had crossed the flickering lines of the protective circles.

Jenny sat up, shaking back the coarse mane other hair, and touched John awake. She called the witchlight into being, and it illuminated the still, silent camp and glowed in the eyes of the wakened horses. The voice of the spring was loud in the hush.

Like John, she had slept in her clothes. Reaching over to the bundle of her sheepskin jacket, her plaids, her boots and her belt that lay heaped at one side of their blankets, she pulled from its pouch the small scrying-crystal and angled it to the witchlight while John began, without a word, to pull on his boots and wolfskin-lined doublet.

Of the four elements, scrying earth—crystal—was easiest and most accurate, though the crystal itself had to be enchanted beforehand. Scrying fire needed no special preparation, but what it showed was what it would, not always what was sought; water would show both future and past, but was a notorious liar. Only the very greatest of mages could scry the wind.

The heart of Caerdinn’s crystal was dark. She stilled her fears for Gareth’s safety, calming her mind as she summoned the images; they gleamed on the facets, as if reflected from somewhere else. She saw a stone room, extremely small, with the architecture of some place halfdug into the ground; the only furnishing was a bed and a sort of table formed by a block of stone projecting from the wall itself. A wet cloak was thrown over the table, with a puddle of half-dried water about it—swamp weeds clung to it like dark worms. A much-bejeweled longsword was propped nearby, and on top of the table and cloak lay a pair of spectacles. The round lenses caught a spark of greasy yellow lamplight as the door of the room opened.

Someone in the corridor held a lamp high. Its light showed small, stooped forms crowding in the broad hall beyond. Old and young, men and women, there must have been forty of them, with white, sloped, warty faces and round, fishlike eyes. The first through the doorway were the old man and the old woman, the Meewinks whom John had nearly shot that afternoon.

The old man held a rope; the woman, a cleaver.

The house of the Meewinks stood where the land lay low, on a knoll above a foul soup of mud and water from whose surface rotting trees projected like half-decayed corpses. Squat-built, it was larger than it looked—stone walls behind it showed one wing half-buried underground. In spite of the cold, the air around the place was fetid with the smell of putrefying fish, and Jenny closed her teeth hard against a queasiness that washed over her at the sight of the place. Since first she had known what they were, she had hated the Meewinks.

John slid from his dapple war horse Osprey’s back and looped his rein and Battlehammer’s over the limb of a sapling. His face, in the rainy darkness, was taut with a mingling of hatred and disgust. Twice households of Meewinks had tried to establish themselves near Alyn Hold; both times, as soon as he had learned of them, he had raised what militia he could and burned them out. A few had been killed each time, but he had lacked the men to pursue them through the wild lands and eradicate them completely. Jenny knew he still had nightmares about what he had found in their cellars.

He whispered, “Listen,” and Jenny nodded. From the house she could detect a faint clamor of voices, muffled, as if half-below the ground, thin and yammering like the barking of beasts. Jenny slid her halberd from the holster on Moon Horse’s saddle and breathed to all three mounts for stillness and silence. She sketched over them the spells of ward, so that the casual eye would pass them by, or think they were something other than horses—a hazel thicket, or the oddly shaped shadow of a tree. It was these same spells upon the camp, she knew, that had prevented Gareth from finding his way back to it, once what must have been the Whisperer had led him away.

John tucked his spectacles into an inner pocket. “Right,” he murmured. “You get Gar—I’ll cover you both.”

Jenny nodded, feeling cold inside, as she did when she emptied her mind to do some great magic beyond her power, and steeled herself for what she knew was coming. As they crossed the filthy yard and the strange, muffled outcry in the house grew stronger, John kissed her and, turning, smashed his booted foot into the small house’s door.

They broke through the door like raiders robbing Hell. A hot, damp fetor smote Jenny in the face as she barged through on John’s heels, the putrid stink of the filth the Meewinks lived in and of the decaying fish they ate—above it all was the sharp, copper-bright stench of newshed blood. The noise was a pandemonium of yammering screams; after the darkness outside, even the smoky glow of the fire in the unnaturally huge hearth seemed blinding. Bodies seethed in a heaving mob around the small door at the opposite side of the room; now and then sharp flashes of light glinted from the knives clutched in moist little hands.

Gareth was backed to the doorpost in the midst of the mob. He had evidently fought his way that far but knew if he descended into the more open space of the big room he would be surrounded. His left arm was wrapped, shieldlike, in a muffling tangle of stained and filthy bedding; in his right hand was his belt, the buckle-end of which he was using to slash at the faces of the Meewinks all around him. His own face was streaming with blood from knife-cuts and bites—mixed with sweat, it ran down and encrimsoned his shirt as if his throat had been cut.

His naked gray eyes were wide with a look of sickened, nightmare horror.

The Meewinks around him were gibbering like the souls of the damned. There must have been fifty of them, all armed with their little knives of steel, or of sharpened shell. As John and Jenny broke in. Jenny saw one of them crawl in close to Gareth and slash at the back of his knee. His thighs were already gashed with a dozen such attempts, his boots sticky with runnels of blood; he kicked his attacker in the face, rolling her down a step or two into the mass of her fellows. It was the old woman he had kept John from shooting.

Without a word, John plunged down into the heaving, stinking mob. Jenny sprang after him, guarding his back; blood splattered her from the first swing of his sword, and around them the noise rose like the redoubling of a storm at sea. The Meewinks were a small folk, though some of the men were as tall as she; it made her cringe inside to cut at the slack white faces of people no bigger than children and to slam the weighted butt of the halberd into those pouchy little stomachs and watch them fall, gasping, vomiting, and choking. But there were so many of them. She had kilted her faded plaid skirts up to her knees to fight and she felt hands snatch and drag at them, as one man caught up a cleaver from among the butcher’s things lying on the room’s big table, trying to cripple her. Her blade caught him high on the cheekbone and opened his face down to the opposite comer of his jaw. His scream ripped the cut wider. The stench of blood was everywhere.

It seemed to take only seconds to cross the room. Jenny yelled, “Gareth!” but he swung at her with the belt—she was short enough to be a Meewink, and he had lost his spectacles. She flung up the halberd; the belt wrapped itself around the shaft, and she wrenched it from his hands. “It’s Jenny!” she shouted, as John’s sword strokes came down, defending them both as it splattered them with flying droplets of gore. She grabbed the boy’s bony wrist, jerking him down the steps into the room. “Now, run!”

“But we can’t...” he began, looking back at John, and she shoved him violently in the direction of the door. After what appeared to be a momentary struggle with a desire not to seem a coward by abandoning his rescuers, Gareth ran. They passed the table and he caught up a meat hook in passing, swinging at the pallid, puffy faces all around them and at the little hands with their jabbing knives. Three Meewinks were guarding the door, but fell back screaming before the greater length of Jenny’s weapon. Behind her, she could hear the squeaky cacophony around John rising to a crescendo; she knew he was outnumbered, and her instincts to rush back to fight at his side dragged at her like wet rope. It was all she could do to force herself to hurl open the door and drag Gareth at a run across the clearing outside.

Gareth balked, panicky. “Where are the horses? How are we...?”

For all her small size, she was strong; her shove nearly toppled him. “Don’t ask questions!” Already small, slumped forms were running about the darkness of the woods ahead. The ooze underfoot soaked through her boots as she hauled Gareth toward where she, at least, could see the three horses, and she heard Gareth gulp when they got close enough for the spells to lose their effectiveness.

While the boy scrambled up to Battlehammer’s back, Jenny flung herself onto Moon Horse, caught Osprey’s lead-rein, and spurred back toward the house in a porridgey spatter of mud. Pitching her voice to cut through the screaming clamor within, she called out, “JOHN!” A moment later a confused tangle of figures erupted through the low doorway, like a pack of dogs trying to bring down a bear. The white glare of the witchlight showed Aversin’s sword bloody to the pommel, his face streaked and running with his own blood and that of his attackers, his breath pouring like a ribbon of steam from his mouth. Meewinks clung to his arms and his belt, hacking and chewing at the leather of his boots.

With a screaming battle cry like a gull’s, Jenny rode down upon them, swinging her halberd like a scythe. Meewinks scattered, mewing and hissing, and John wrenched himself free of the last of them and flung himself up to Osprey’s saddle. A tiny Meewink child hurled up after him, clinging to the stirrup leather and jabbing with its little shell knife at his groin; John swung his arm downward and caught the child across its narrow temple with the spikes of his armband, sweeping it off as he would have swept a rat.

Jenny wheeled her horse sharply, spurring back to where Gareth still clung to Battlehammer’s saddle on the edge of the clearing. With the precision of circus riders, she and John split to grab the big gelding’s reins, one on either side, and, with Gareth in tow between them, plunged back into the night.

“There.” Aversin dipped one finger into a puddle of rainwater and flicked a droplet onto the iron griddle balanced over the fire. Satisfied with the sizzle, he patted cornmeal into a cake and dropped it into place. Then he glanced across at Gareth, who was struggling not to cry out as Jenny poured a scouring concoction of marigold simple into his wounds. “Now you can say you’ve seen Aversin the Dragonsbane run like hell from a troop of forty four-foot-tall septuagenarians.” His bitten, bandaged hands patted another cake into shape, and the dawn grayness flashed off his specs as he grinned. “Will they be after us?” Gareth asked faintly. “I doubt it.” He picked a fleck of cornmeal off the spikes of his armbands. “They’ll have enough of their own dead to keep them fed awhile.”

The boy swallowed queasily, though having seen the instruments laid out on the table in the Meewinks’ house, there could be little doubt what they had meant for him.

At Jenny’s insistence, after the rescue, they had shifted their camp away from the garnered darkness of the woods. Dawn had found them in relatively open ground on the formless verges of a marsh, where long wastes of icescummed, standing water reflected a steely sky among the black pen strokes of a thousand reeds. Jenny had worked, cold and weary, to lay spells about the camp, then had occupied herself with the contents of her medicine satchel, leaving John, somewhat against her better judgment, to make breakfast. Gareth had dug into his packs for the bent and battered spectacles that had survived the fight in the ruins up north, and they perched forlornly askew now on the end of his nose.

“They were always a little folk,” John went on, coming over to the packs where the boy sat, letting Jenny finish binding up his slashed knees. “After the King’s troops left the Winterlands, their villages were forever being raided by bandits, who’d steal whatever food they raised. They never were a match for an armored man, but a village of ’em could pull one down—or, better still, wait till he was asleep and hack him up as he lay. In the starving times, a bandit’s horse could feed a whole village for a week. I expect it started out as only the horses.”

Gareth swallowed again and looked as if he were going to be ill.

John put his hands through his metal-plated belt. “They generally strike right before dawn, when sleep is deepest—it’s why I switched the watches, so I’d be the one they dealt with, instead of you. It was a Whisperer that got you away from the camp, wasn’t it?”

“I—I suppose so.” He looked at the ground, a shadow crossing his thin face. “I don’t know. It was something ...” Jenny felt him shudder.

“I’ve seen them on my watch, once or twice... Jen?”

“Once.” Jenny spoke shortly, hating the memory of those crying shapes in the darkness.

“They take all-forms,” John said, sitting on the ground beside her and wrapping his arms about his knees. “One night one even took Jen’s, with her lying beside me... Polyborus says in his Analects—or maybe it’s in that halfsignature of Terens’ Of Ghosts—that they read your dreams and take on the forms that they see there. From Terens—or is it Polyborus? Or maybe it’s in Clivy, though it’s a bit accurate for Clivy—I get the impression they used to be much rarer than they are now, whatever they are.”

“I don’t know,” Gareth said quietly. “They must have been, because I’d never heard of them, or of the Meewinks, either. After it—it lured me into the woods, it attacked me. I ran, but I couldn’t seem to find the camp again. I ran and ran... and then I saw the light from that house...” He fell silent again with a shudder.

Jenny finished wrapping Gareth’s knee. The wounds weren’t deep, but, like those on John’s face and hands, they were vicious, not only the knife cuts, but the small, crescent-shaped tears of human teeth. Her own body bore them, too, and experience had taught her that such wounds were filthier than poisoned arrows. For the rest, she was aching and stiff with pulled muscles and the general fatigue of battle, something she supposed Gareth’s ballads neglected to mention as the inevitable result of physical combat. She felt cold inside, too, as she did when she worked the death-spells, something else they never mentioned in ballads, where all killing was done with serene and noble confidence. She had taken the lives of at least four human beings last night, she knew, for all that they had been born and raised into a cannibal tribe; had maimed others who would either die when their wounds turned septic in that atmosphere of festering decay, or would be killed by their brothers.

To survive in the Winterlands, she had become a very competent killer. But the longer she was a healer, the more she learned about magic and about life from which all magic stemmed, the more she loathed what she did. Living in the Winterlands, she had seen what death did to those who dealt it out too casually.

The gray waters of the marsh began to brighten with the remote shine of daybreak beyond the clouds. With a soft winnowing of a thousand wings, the wild geese rose from the black cattail beds, seeking again the roads of the colorless sky. Jenny sighed, weary to her bones and knowing that they could not afford to rest—knowing that she would have no rest until they crossed the great river Wildspae and entered the lands of Belmarie.

Quietly, Gareth said, “Aversin—Lord John—I—I’m sorry. I didn’t understand about the Winterlands.” He looked up, his gray eyes tired and unhappy behind their cracked specs. “And I didn’t understand about you. I—I hated you, for not being what—what I thought you should be.”

“Oh, aye, I knew that,” John said with a fleet grin. “But what you felt about me was none of my business. My business was to see you safe in a land you had no knowledge of. And as for being what you expected—Well, you can only know what you know, and all you knew were those songs. I mean, it’s like Polyborus and Clivy and those others. I know bears aren’t born completely shapeless for their mothers to sculpt with their tongues, like Clivy says, because I’ve seen newborn bear cubs. But for all I know, lions may be born dead, although personally I don’t think it’s likely.”

“They aren’t,” Gareth said. “Father had a lioness once as a pet, when I was very little—her cubs were born live, just like big kittens. They were spotted.”

“Really?” Aversin looked genuinely pleased for one more bit of knowledge to add to the lumber room of his mind. “I’m not saying Dragonsbanes aren’t heroic, because Selkythar and Antara Warlady and the others might have been, and may have gone about it all with swords in golden armor and plumes. It’s just that I know I’m not. If I’d had a choice, I’d never have gone near the bloody dragon, but nobody asked me.” He grinned and added, “I’m sorry you were disappointed.”

Gareth grinned back. “I suppose it had to rain on my birthday sometime,” he said, a little shyly. Then he hesitated, as if struggling against some inner constraint. “Aversin, listen,” he stammered. Then he coughed as the wind shifted, and smoke swept over them all.

“God’s Grandmother, it’s the bloody cakes!” John swore and dashed back to the fire, cursing awesomely. “Jen, it isn’t my fault...”

“It is.” Jenny walked in a more leisurely manner to join him, in time to help him pick the last pitiful black lump from the griddle and toss it into the waters of the marsh with a milky plash. “I should have known better than to trust you with this. Now go tend the horses and let me do what you brought me along to do.” She picked up the bowl of meal. Though she kept her face stem, the touch of her eyes upon his was like a kiss.