Dragon's Bane

IV

In the days that followed. Jenny was interested to notice the change in Gareth’s attitude toward her and toward John. For the most part he seemed to return to the confiding friendliness he had shown her after she had rescued him from the bandits among the ruins, before he had learned that she was his hero’s mistress, but it was not quite the same. It alternated with a growing nervousness and with odd, struggling silences in his conversation. If he had lied about something at the Hold, Jenny thought, he was regretting it now—but not regretting it enough yet to confess the truth.

Whatever the truth was, she felt that she came close to learning it the day after the rescue from the Meewinks. John had ridden ahead to scout the ruinous stone bridge that spanned the torrent of the Snake River, leaving them alone with the spare horse^and mules in the louring silence of the winter woods. “Are the Whisperers real?” he asked her softly, glancing over his shoulder as if he feared to see last night’s vision fading into daytime reality from the mists between the trees.

“Real enough to kill a man,” Jenny said, “if they can lure him away from his friends. Since they drink blood, they must be fleshly enough to require sustenance; but, other than that, no one knows much about them. You had a narrow escape.”

“I know,” he mumbled, looking shamefacedly down at his hands. They were bare, and chapped with cold—as well as his cloak and sword, he had lost his gloves in the house of the Meewinks; Jenny suspected that later in the winter the Meewinks would boil them and eat the leather. One of John’s old plaids was draped on over the boy’s doublet and borrowed jerkin. With his thin hair dripping with moisture down onto the lenses of his cracked spectacles, he looked very little like the young courtier who had come to the Hold.

“Jenny,” he said hesitantly, “thank you—this is the second time—for saving my life. I—I’m sorry I’ve behaved toward you as I have. It’s just that...” His voice tailed off uncertainly.

“I suspect,” said Jenny kindly, “that you had me mistaken for someone else that you know.”

Ready color flooded to the boy’s cheeks. Wind moaned through the bare trees—he startled, then turned back to her with a sigh. “The thing is, you saved my life at the risk of your own, and I endangered you both stupidly. I should have known better than to trust the Meewinks; I should never have left the camp. But...”

Jenny smiled and shook her head. The rain had ceased, and she had put back her hood, letting the wind stir in her long hair; with a touch of her heels, she urged The Stupider Roan on again, and the whole train of them moved slowly down the trail.

“It is difficult,” she said, “not to believe in the illusions of the Whisperers. Even though you know that those whom you see cannot possibly be there outside the spell-circle crying your name, there is a part of you that needs to go to them.”

“What—what shapes have you seen them take?” Gareth asked in a hushed voice.

The memory was an evil one, and it was a moment before Jenny answered. Then she said, “My sons, Ian and Adric.” The vision had been so real that even calling their images in Caerdinn’s serving-crystal to make sure that they were safe at the Hold had not entirely banished her fears for them from her mind. After a moment’s thought she added, “They have an uncanny way of taking the shape that most troubles you; of knowing, not only your love, but your guilt and your longing.”

Gareth flinched at that, and looked away. They rode on in silence for a few moments; then he asked, “How do they know?”

She shook her head. “Perhaps they do read your dreams. Perhaps they are themselves only mirrors and, like mirrors, have no knowledge of what they reflect. The spells we lay upon them cannot be binding because we do not know their essence.”

He frowned at her, puzzled. “Their what?”

“Their essence—their inner being.” She drew rein just above a long, flooded dip in the road where water lay among the trees like a shining snake. “Who are you, Gareth of Magloshaldon?”

He startled at that, and for an instant she saw fright and guilt in his gray eyes. He stammered, “I—I’m Gareth of—of Magloshaldon. It’s a province of Belmarie...”

Her eyes sought his and held them in the gray shadows of the trees. “And if you were not of that province, would you still be Gareth?”

“Er—yes. Of course. I...”

“And if you were not Gareth?” she pressed him, holding his gaze and mind locked with her own. “Would you still be you? If you were crippled, or old—if you became a leper, or lost your manhood—who would you be then?”

“I don’t know—”

“You know.”

“Stop it!” He tried to look away and could not. Her grip upon him tightened, as she probed at his mind, showing him it through her eyes: a vivid kaleidoscope of the borrowed images of a thousand ballads, burning with the overwhelming physical desires of the adolescent; the raw wounds left by some bitter betrayal, and over all, the shadowing darkness of a scarcely bearable guilt and fear.

She probed at that darkness—the lies he had told her and John at the Hold, and some greater guilt besides. A true crime, she wondered, or only that which seemed one to him? Gareth cried, “Stop it!” again, and she heard the despair and terror in his voice; for a moment, through his eyes, she saw herself—pitiless blue eyes in a face like a white wedge of bone between the cloud-dark streams of her hair. She remembered when Caerdinn had done this same thing to her, and released Gareth quickly. He turned away, covering his face, his whole body shivering with shock and fright.

After a moment Jenny said softly, “I’m sorry. But this is the inner heart of magic, the way all spells work—with the essence, the true name. It is true of the Whisperers and of the greatest of mages as well.” She clucked to the horses and they started forward again, their hooves sinking squishily into the tea-colored ooze. She went on, “All you can do is ask yourself if it is reasonable that those you see would be there in the woods, calling to you.”

“But that’s just it,” said Gareth. “It was reasonable. Zyerne...” He stopped himself.

“Zyerne?” It was the name he had muttered in his dreams at the Hold, when he had flinched aside from her touch.

“The Lady Zyerne,” he said hesitantly. “The—the King’s mistress.” Under its streaking of rain and mud his face was bright carnation pink. Jenny remembered her strange and cloudy dream of the dark-haired woman and her tinkling laughter.

“And you love her?”

Gareth blushed even redder. In a stifled voice he repeated, “She is the King’s mistress.”

As I am John’s, Jenny thought, suddenly realizing whence his anger at her had stemmed.

“In any case,” Gareth went on after a moment, “we’re all in love with her. That is—she’s the first lady of the Court, the most beautiful... We write sonnets to her beauty...”

“Does she love you?” inquired Jenny, and Gareth fell silent for a time, concentrating on urging his horse through the mud and up the stony slope beyond.

At length he said, “I—I don’t know. Sometimes I think...” Then he shook his head. “She frightens me,” he admitted. “And yet—she’s a witch, you see.”

“Yes,” said Jenny softly. “I guessed that, from what you said at the Hold. You feared I would be like her.”

He looked stricken, as if caught in some horrible social gaffe. “But—but you’re not. She’s very beautiful...” He broke off, blushing in earnest, and Jenny laughed.

“Don’t worry. I learned a long time ago what a mirror was for.”

“But you are beautiful,” he insisted. “That is—Beautiful isn’t the right word.”

“No.” Jenny smiled. “I do think ‘ugly’ is the word you’re looking for.”

Gareth shook his head stubbornly, his honesty forbidding him to call her beautiful and his inexperience making it impossible to express what he did mean. “Beauty—beauty really doesn’t have anything to do with it,” he said at last. “And she’s nothing like you—for all her beauty, she’s crafty and hard-hearted and cares for nothing save the pursuit of her powers.”

“Then she is like me,” said Jenny. “For I am crafty—skilled in my crafts, such as they are—and I have been called hard-hearted since I was a little girl and chose to sit staring at the flame of a candle until the pictures came, rather than play at house with the other little girls. And as for the rest...” She sighed. “The key to magic is magic; to be a mage you must be a mage. My old master used to say that. The pursuit of your power takes all that you have, if you will be great—it leaves neither time, nor energy, for anything else. We are born with the seeds of power in us and driven to be what we are by a hunger that knows no slaking. Knowledge—power—to know what songs the stars sing; to center all the forces of creation upon a rune drawn in the air—we can never give over the seeking of it. It is the stuff of loneliness, Gareth.”

They rode on in silence for a time. The woods about them were pewter and iron, streaked here and there with the rust of the dying year. In the wan light Gareth looked older than he had when they began, for he had lost flesh on the trip, and lack of sleep had left permanent smudges of bister beneath his eyes. At length he turned to her again and asked, “And do the mageborn love?”

Jenny sighed again. “They say that a wizard’s wife is a widow. A woman who bears a wizard’s child must know that he will leave her to raise the child alone, should his powers call him elsewhere. It is for this reason that no priest will perform the wedding ceremony for the mageborn, and no flute player will officiate upon the rites. And it would be an act of cruelty for a witch to bear any man’s child.”

He looked across at her, puzzled both by her words and by the coolness of her voice, as if the matter had nothing to do with her.

She went on, looking ahead at the half-hidden road beneath its foul mire of tangled weeds, “A witch will always care more for the pursuit of her powers than for her child, or for any man. She will either desert her child, or come to hate it for keeping her from the time she needs to meditate, to study, to grow in her arts. Did you know John’s mother was a witch?”

Gareth stared at her, shocked.

“She was a shaman of the Iceriders—his father took her in battle. Your ballads said nothing of it?”

He shook his head numbly. “Nothing—in fact, in the Greenhythe variant of the ballad of Aversin and the Golden Worm of Wyr, it talks about him bidding farewell to his mother in her bower, before going off to fight the dragon—but now that I think of it, there is a scene very like it in the Greenhythe ballad of Selkythar Dragonsbane and in one of the late Halnath variants of the Song of Antara Warlady. I just thought it was something Dragonsbanes did.”

A smile brushed her lips, then faded. “She was my first teacher in the ways of power, when I was six. They used to say of her what you thought of me—that she had laid spells upon her lord to make him love her, tangling him in her long hair. I thought so, too, as a little child—until I saw how she fought for the freedom that he would not give her. When I knew her, she had already borne his child; but when John was five, she left in the screaming winds of an icestorm, she and the frost-eyed wolf who was her companion. She was never seen in the Winterlands again. And I...”

There was long silence, broken only by the soft squish of hooves in the roadbed, the patter of rain, and the occasional pop of the mule Clivy’s hooves as he overreached his own stride. When she went on, her voice was low, as if she spoke to herself.

“He asked me to bear his children, for he wanted children, and he wanted those children to be mine also. He knew I would never live with him as his wife and devote my time to his comfort and that of his sons. I knew it, too.” She sighed. “The lioness bears her cubs and then goes back to the hunting trail. I thought I could do the same. All my life I have been called heartless—would that it were really so. I hadn’t thought that I would love them.”

Through the trees, the dilapidated towers of the Snake River bridge came into view, the water streaming high and yellow beneath the crumbling arches. Before them, a dark figure sat his horse in the gloomy road, spectacles flashing like rounds of dirty ice in the cold daylight, signaling that the way was safe.

They made camp that night outside the ruined town of Ember, once the capital of the province of Wyr. Nothing remained of it now save a dimpled stone mound, over grown with birch and seedling maple, and the decaying remains of the curtain wall. Jenny knew it of old, from the days when she and Caerdinn had searched for books in the buried cellars. He had beaten her, she remembered, when she had spoken of the beauty of the skeleton lines of stone that shimmered through the dark cloak of the fallow earth.

As dusk came down, they pitched their camp outside the walls. Jenny gathered the quick-burning bark of the paper birch for kindling and fetched water from the spring nearby. Gareth saw her coming and broke purposefully away from his own tasks to join her. “Jenny,” he began, and she looked up at him.

“Yes?”

He paused, like a naked swimmer on the bank of a very cold pool, then visibly lost his courage. “Er—is there some reason why we didn’t camp in the ruins of the town itself?”

It was patently not what he had been about to say, but she only glanced back toward the white bones of the town, wrapped in shadow and vine. “Yes.”

His voice dropped. “Is there—is there something that haunts the ruins?”

The corners of her mouth tucked a little. “Not that I know of. But the entire town is buried under the biggest patch of poison ivy this side of the Gray Mountains. Even so,” she said, kneeling beside the little dry firewood they had been able to find and arranging the birchbark beneath it, “I have laid spells of ward about the camp, so take care not to leave it.”

He ducked his head a little at this gentle teasing and blushed.

A little curiously, she added, “Even if this Lady Zyerne of yours is a sorceress—even if she is fond of you—she would never have come here from the south, you know. Mages only transform themselves into birds in ballads, for to change your essence into the essence of some other life form—which is what shapeshifting is—aside from being dangerous, requires an incredible amount of power. It is not something done lightly. When the mageborn go, they go upon their two feet.”

“But...” His high forehead wrinkled in a frown. Having decided to be her champion, he was unwilling to believe there was anything beyond her powers. “But the Lady Zyerne does it all the time. I’ve seen her.”

Jenny froze in the act of arranging the logs, cut by an unexpected pang of a hot jealousy she had thought that she had long outgrown—the bitter jealousy other youth toward those who had greater skills than she. All her life she had worked to rid herself of it, knowing it crippled her from learning from those more powerful. It was this that made her tell herself, a moment later, that she ought not to be shocked to learn of another’s use of power.

Yet in the back of her mind she could hear old Caerdinn speaking of the dangers of taking on an alien essence, even if one had the enormous power necessary to perform the transformation and of the hold that another form could take on the minds of all but the very greatest.

“She must be a powerful mage indeed,” she said, rebuking her own envy. With a touch of her mind, she called fire to the kindling, and it blazed up hotly beneath the logs. Even that small magic pricked her, like a needle carelessly left in a garment, with the bitter reflection of the smallness of her power. “What forms have you seen her take?” She realized as she spoke that she hoped he would say he had seen none himself and that it was, in fact, only rumor.

“Once a cat,” he said. “And once a bird, a swallow. And she’s taken other shapes in—in dreams I’ve had. It’s odd,” he went on rather hastily. “In ballads they don’t make much of it. But it’s hideous, the most horrible thing I’ve ever seen—a woman, and a woman I—I—” He stumbled in his words, barely biting back some other verb that he replaced with, “—I know, twisting and withering, changing into a beast. And then the beast will watch you with her eyes.”

He folded himself up cross-legged beside the fire as Jenny put the iron skillet over it and began to mix the meal for the cakes. Jenny asked him, “Is she why you asked the King to send you north on this quest? To get away from her?”

Gareth turned his face from her. After a moment he nodded. “I don’t want to betray—to betray the King.” His words caught oddly as he spoke. “But sometimes I feel I’m destined to do so. And I don’t know what to do.

“Polycarp hated her,” he went on, after a few moments during which John’s voice could be heard, cheerfully cursing the mules Clivy and Melonhead as he unloaded the last of the packs. “The rebel Master of Halnath. He always told me to stay away from her. And he hated her influence over the King.”

“Is that why he rebelled?”

“It might have had something to do with it. I don’t know.” He toyed wretchedly with a scrap of meal left in the bowl. “He—he tried to murder the King and—and the Heir to the throne, the King’s son. Polycarp is the next heir, the King’s nephew. He was brought up in the palace as a sort of a hostage after his father rebelled. Polycarp stretched a cable over a fence in the hunting field on a foggy morning when he thought no one would see until it was too late.” His voice cracked a little as he added, “I was the one who saw him do it.”

Jenny glanced across at his face, broken by darkness and the leaping light of the flames into a harsh mosaic of plane and shadows. “You loved him, didn’t you?”

He managed to nod. “I think he was a better friend to me than anyone else at Court. People—people our age there—Polycarp is five years older than I am—used to mock at me, because I collect ballads and because I’m clumsy and can’t see without my spectacles; they’d mock at him because his father was executed for treason and because he’s a philosopher. Many of the Masters have been. It’s because of the University at Halnath—they’re usually atheists and troublemakers. His father was, who married the King’s sister. But Polycarp was always like a son to the King.” He pushed back the thin, damp weeds of his hair from his high forehead and finished in a strangled voice, “Even when I saw him do it, I couldn’t believe it.”

“And you denounced him?”

Gareth’s breath escaped in a defeated sigh. “What could I do?”

Had this. Jenny wondered, been what he had hidden from them? The fact that the Realm itself was split by threat of civil war, like the Kinwars that had drawn the King’s troops away from the Winterlands to begin with? Had he feared that if John knew that there was a chance the King would refuse to lend him forces needed at home, he would not consent to make the journey?

Or was there something else?

It had grown fully dark now. Jenny picked the crisp mealcakes from the griddle and set them on a wooden plate at her side while she cooked salt pork and beans. While Gareth had been speaking, John had come to join them, half-listening to what was said, half-watching the woods that hemmed them in.

As they ate, Gareth went on, “Anyway, Polycarp managed to get out of the city before they came for him. The King’s troops were waiting for him on the road to Halnath, but we think he went to the Deep, and the gnomes took him through to the Citadel that way. Then they—the gnomes—bolted up the doors leading from the Deep to the Citadel and said they would not meddle in the affairs of men. They wouldn’t admit the King’s troops through the Deep to take the Citadel from the rear, but they wouldn’t let the rebels out that way, either, or sell them food. There was some talk of them using blasting powder to close up the tunnels to Halnath completely. But then the dragon came.”

“And when the dragon came?” asked John.

“When the dragon came, Polycarp opened the Citadel gates that led into the Deep and let the gnomes take refuge with him. At least, a lot of the gnomes did take refuge with him, though Zyerne says they were the ones who were on the Master’s side to begin with. And she should know—she was brought up in the Deep.”

“Was she, now?” John tossed one of the small pork bones into the fire and wiped his fingers on a piece of corncake. “I thought the name sounded like the tongue of the gnomes.”

Gareth nodded. “The gnomes used to take a lot of the children of men as apprentices in the Deep—usually children from Deeping, the town that stands—stood—in the vale before the great gates of the Deep itself, where the smelting of the gold and the trade in foodstuff’s went on. They haven’t done so in the last year or so—in fact in the last year they forbade men to enter the Deep at all.”

“Did they?” asked John, curious. “Why was that?”

Gareth shrugged. “I don’t know. They’re strange creatures, and tricky. You can’t ever tell what they’re up to, Zyerne says.”

As the night deepened, Jenny left the men by the fire and silently walked the bounds of the camp, checking the spell-circles that defended it against the blood-devils, the Whisperers, and the sad ghosts that haunted the ruins of the old town. She sat on what had been a boundary stone, just beyond the edge of the fire’s circle of light, and sank into her meditations, which for some nights now she had neglected.

It was not the first time she had neglected them—she was too well aware of the nights she had let them go by while she was at the Hold with John and her sons. Had she not neglected them—had she not neglected the pursuit of her power—would she be as powerful as this Zyerne, who could deal in shapeshifting at a casual whim? Caerdinn’s strictures against it returned to her mind, but she wondered if that was just her own jealousy speaking, her own spite at another’s power. Caerdinn had been old, and there had been nowhere in the Winterlands that she could turn for other instruction after he had died. Like John, she was a scholar bereft of the meat of scholarship; like the people of the village of Alyn, she was circumscribed by the fate that had planted her in such stony soil.

Against the twisting yellow ribbons of the flames, she could see John’s body swaying as he gestured, telling Gareth some outrageous story from his vast collection of tales about the Winterlands and its folk. The Fattest Bandit in the Winterlands? she wondered. Or one about his incredible Aunt Mattie? It occurred to her for the first time that it was for her, as well as for his people, that he had undertaken the King’s command—for the things that she had never gotten, and for their sons.

It’s not worth his life! she thought desperately, watching him. / do well with what I have! But the silent ruins of Ember mocked at her, their naked bones veiled by darkness, and the calm part of her heart whispered to her that it was his to choose, not hers. She could only do what she was doing—make her choice and abandon her studies to ride with him. The King had sent his command and his promise, and John would obey the King.

Five days south of Ember, the lands opened up once more. The forests gave way to the long, flat, alluvial slopes that led down to the Wildspae, the northern boundary of the lands of Belmarie. It was an empty countryside, but without the haunted desolation of the Winterlands; there were farms here, like little walled fortresses, and the road was at least passably drained. Here for the first time they met other travelers, merchants going north and east, with news and rumor of the capital—of the dread of the dragon that gripped the land, and the unrest in Bel due to the high price of grain.

“Stands to reason, don’t it?” said a foxlike little trader, with his cavalcade of laden mules behind him. “What with the dragon ruining the harvest, and the grain rotting in the fields; yes, and the gnomes what took refuge in Bel itself hoarding the stuff, taking it out of the mouths of honest folk with their ill-got gold.”

“Ill-got?” asked John curiously. “They mined and smelted it, didn’t they?” Jenny, who wanted news without irritating its bearer, kicked him surreptitiously in the shin.

The merchant spat into the brimming ditch by the roadside and wiped his grizzled reddish beard. “That gives them no call to buy grain away from folks that needs it,” he said. “And word has it that they’re trafficking regular with their brothers up in Halnath—yes, and that they and the Master between them kidnapped the King’s Heir, his only child, to hold for ransom.”

“Could they have?” John inquired.

“Course they could. The Master’s a sorcerer, isn’t he? And the gnomes have never been up to any good, causing riot and mayhem in the capital...”

“Riot and mayhem?” Gareth protested. “But the gnomes have been our allies for time out of mind! There’s never been trouble between us.”

The man squinted up at him suspiciously. But he only grumbled, “Just goes to show, doesn’t it? Treacherous little buggers.” Jerking on his lead mule’s bridle, he passed them by.

Not long after this they met a company of the gnomes themselves, traveling banded together, surrounded by guards for protection, with their wealth piled in carts and carriages. They peered up at John with wary, shortsighted eyes of amber or pale blue beneath low, wide brows, and gave him unwilling answers to his questions about the south.

“The dragon? Aye, it lairs yet in Ylferdun, and none of the men the King has sent have dislodged it.” The gnome leader toyed with the soft fur trim of his gloves, and the thin winds billowed at the silk of his strangely cut garments. Behind him, the guards of the cavalcade watched the strangers in deepest suspicion, as if fearing an attack from even that few. “As for us, by the heart of the Deep, we have had enough of the charity of the sons of men, who charge us four times the going price for rooms the household servants would scorn and for food retrieved from the rats.” His voice, thin and high like that of all the gnomes, was bitter with the verjuice of hate given back for hate. “Without the gold taken from the Deep, their city would never have been built, and yet not a man will speak to us in the streets, save to curse. They say in the city now that we plot with our brethren who fled through the back ways of the Deep into the Citadel of Halnath. By the Stone, it is lies; but such lies are believed now in Bel.”

From the carts and carriages and curtained litters, a murmur of anger went up, the rage of those who have never before been helpless. Jenny, sitting quietly on Moon Horse, realized that it was the first time she had ever seen gnomes by daylight. Their eyes, wide and nearly colorless, were ill-attuned for its glare; the hearing that could catch the whispers of the cave bats would be daily tortured by the clamor of the cities of men.

Aversin asked, “And the King?”

“The King?” The gnome’s piping voice was vicious, and his whole stooping little body bristled with the raw hurt of humiliation. “The King cares nothing for us. With all our wealth mewed up in the Deep, where the dragon sits hoarding over it, we have little to trade upon but promises, and with each day that passes those promises buy less in a city where bread is dear. And all this, while the King’s whore sits with his head in her lap and poisons his mind as she poisons everything she touches—as she poisoned the very heart of the Deep.”

Beside her. Jenny heard the hissing of Gareth’s indrawn breath and saw the anger that flashed in his eyes, but he said nothing. When her glance questioned him, he looked away in shame.

As the gnomes moved out of sight once again into the mists, John remarked, “Sounds a proper snakes’ nest. Could this Master really have kidnapped the King’s child?”

“No,” Gareth said miserably, as the horses resumed their walk toward the ferry, invisible in the foggy bottomlands to the south. “He couldn’t have left the Citadel. He isn’t a sorcerer—just a philosopher and an atheist. I—don’t worry about the King’s Heir.” He looked down at his hands, and the expression on his face was the one that Jenny had seen in the camp outside Ember that night—a struggle to gather his courage. “Listen,” he began shakily. “I have to...”

“Gar,” said John quietly, and the boy startled as if burned. There was an ironic glint in John’s brown eyes and an edge like chipped flint to his voice. “Now—the King wouldn’t by any chance have sent for me for some other reason than the dragon, would he?”

“No,” Gareth said faintly, not meeting his eyes. “No, he—he didn’t.”

“Didn’t what?”

Gareth swallowed, his pale face suddenly very strained. “He—he didn’t send for you—for any other reason. That is...”

“Because,” John went on in that quiet voice, “if the King happened to send me his signet ring to get me involved in rescuing that child of his, or helping him against this Master of Halnath I hear such tell of, or for his dealings with the gnomes, I do have better things to do. There are real problems, not just money and power, in my own lands, and the winter closing in looks to be a bad one. I’ll put my life at risk against the dragon for the sake of the King’s protection to the Winterlands, but if there’s aught else in it...”

“No!” Gareth caught his arm desperately, a terrible fear in his face, as if he thought that with little more provocation the Dragonsbane would turn around then and there and ride back to Wyr.

And perhaps, Jenny thought, remembering her vision in the water bowl, it might be better if they did.

“Aversin, it isn’t like that. You are here to slay the dragon—because you’re the only Dragonsbane living. That’s the only reason I sought you out, I swear it. I swear it! Don’t worry about politics and—and all that.” His shortsighted gray eyes pleaded with Aversin to believe, but in them there was a desperation that could never have stemmed from innocence.

John’s gaze held his for a long moment, gauging him. Then he said, “I’m trusting you, my hero.”

In dismal silence, Gareth touched his heels to Battlehammer’s sides, and the big horse moved out ahead of them, the boy’s borrowed plaids making them fade quickly into no more than a dark, cut-out shape in the colorless fogs. John, riding a little behind, slowed his horse so that he was next to Jenny, who had watched in speculative silence throughout.

“Maybe it’s just as well you’re with me after all, love.”

She glanced from Gareth up to John, and then back. Somewhere a crow called, like the voice of that melancholy land. “I don’t think he means us ill,” she said softly.

“That doesn’t mean he isn’t gormless enough to get us killed all the same.”

The mists thickened as they approached the river, until they moved through a chill white world where the only sound was the creak of harness leather, the pop of hooves, the faint jingle of bits, and the soughing rattle of the wind in the spiky cattails growing in the flooded ditches. From that watery grayness, each stone or solitary tree emerged, silent and dark, like a portent of strange events. More than all else. Jenny felt the weight of Gareth’s silence, his fear and dread and guilt. John felt it, too, she knew; he watched the tall boy from the comer of his eye and listened to the hush of those empty lands like a man waiting for ambush. As evening darkened the air. Jenny called a blue ball of witchfire to light their feet, but the soft, opalescent walls of the mist threw back the light at them and left them nearly as blind as before.

“Jen.” John drew rein, his head cocked to listen. “Can you hear it?”

“Hear what?” Gareth whispered, coming up beside them at the top of the slope which dropped away into blankets of moving fog.

Jenny flung her senses wide through the dun-colored clouds, feeling as much as hearing the rushing voice of the river below. There were other sounds, muffled and altered by the fog, but unmistakable. “Yes,” she said quietly, her breath a puff of white in the raw air. “Voices—horses—a group of them on the other side.”

John glanced sharply sidelong at Gareth. “They could be waiting for the ferry,” he said, “if they had business in the empty lands west of the river at the fall of night.”

Gareth said nothing, but his face looked white and set. After a moment John clucked softly to Cow, and the big, shaggy sorrel plodded forward again down the slope to the ferry through the clammy wall of vapor.

Jenny let the witchlight ravel away as John pounded on the door of the squat stone ferry house. She and Gareth remained in the background while John and the ferryman negotiated the fare for three people, six horses, and two mules. “Penny a leg,” said the ferryman, his squirrel-dark eyes darting from one to the other with the sharp interest of one who sees all the world pass his doorstep. “But there’ll be supper here in an hour, and lodging for the night. It’s growing mortal dark, and there’s chowder fog.”

“We can get along a few miles before full dark; and besides,” John added, with an odd glint in his eye as he glanced back at the silent Gareth, “we may have someone waiting for us on the far bank.”

“Ah.” The man’s wide mouth shut itself like a trap. “So it’s you they’re expecting. I heard ’em out there a bit ago, but they didn’t ring no bell for me, so I bided by my stove where it’s warm.”

Holding up the lantern and struggling into his heavy quilted jacket, he led the way down to the slip, while Jenny followed silently behind, digging in the purse at her belt for coin.

The great horse Battlehammer had traveled north with Gareth by ship and, in any case, disdained balking at anything as sheer bad manners; neither Moon Horse nor Osprey nor any of the spares had such scruples, with the exception of Cow, who would have crossed a bridge of flaming knives at his customary phlegmatic plod. It took Jenny much whispered talk and stroking of ears before any of them would consent to set foot upon the big raft. The ferryman made the gate at the raft’s tail fast and fixed his lantern on the pole at its head; then he set to turning the winch that drew the wide, flat platform out across the opaque silk of the river. The single lantern made a woolly blur of yellowish light in the leaden smoke of the fog; now and then, on the edge of the gleam. Jenny could see the brown waters parting around a snagged root or branch that projected from the current like a drowned hand.

From somewhere across the water she heard the jingle of metal on metal, the soft blowing of a horse, and men’s voices. Gareth still said nothing, but she felt that, if she laid a hand upon him, she would find him quivering, as a rope does before it snaps. John came quietly to her side, his fingers twined warm and strong about hers. His spectacles flashed softly in the lanternlight as he slung an end of his voluminous plaid around her shoulders and drew her to his side.

“John,” Gareth said quietly, “I—I have something to tell you.”

Dimly through the fog came another sound, a woman’s laugh like the tinkling of silver bells. Gareth twitched, and John, a dangerous flicker in his lazy-lidded eyes, said, “I thought you might.”

“Aversin,” Gareth stammered and stopped. Then he forced himself on with a rush, “Aversin, Jenny, listen. I’m sorry. I lied to you—I betrayed you, but I couldn’t help it; I had no other choice. I’m sorry.”

“Ah,” said John softly. “So there was something you forgot to mention before we left the Hold?”

Unable to meet his eyes, Gareth said, “I meant to tell you earlier, but—but I couldn’t. I was afraid you’d turn back and—and I couldn’t let you turn back. We need you, we really do.”

“For a lad who’s always on about honor and courage,” Aversin said, and there was an ugly edge to his quiet voice, “you haven’t shown very much of either, have you?”

Gareth raised his head, and met his eyes, “No,” he said. “I—I’ve been realizing that. I thought it was all right to deceive you in a good cause—that is—I had to get you to come...”

“All right, then,” said John. “What is the truth?”

Jenny glanced from the faces of the two men toward the far shore, visible dimly now as a dark blur and a few lights moving like fireflies in the mist. A slightly darker cloud beyond would be the woodlands of Belmarie. She touched John’s spiked elbow warningly, and he looked quickly in that direction. Movement stirred there, shapes crowding down to wait for the ferry to put in. The horse Battlehammer flung up his head and whinnied, and an answering whinny trumpeted back across the water. The Dragonsbane’s eyes returned to Gareth and he folded his hands over the hilt of his sword.

Gareth drew a deep breath. “The truth is that the King didn’t send for you,” he said. “In fact, he—he forbade me to come looking for you. He said it was a foolish quest, because you probably didn’t exist at all and, even if you did, you’d have been killed by another dragon long ago. He said he didn’t want me to risk my life chasing a phantom. But—but I had to find you. He wasn’t going to send anyone else. And you’re the only Dragonsbane, as it was in all the ballads...” He stammered uncertainly. “Except that I didn’t know then that it wasn’t like the ballads. But I knew you had to exist. And I knew we needed someone. I couldn’t stand by and let the dragon go on terrorizing the countryside. I had to come and find you. And once I found you, I had to bring you back...”

“Having decided you knew better about the needs of my people and my own choice in the matter than I did?” John’s face never showed much expression, but his voice had a sting to it now, like a scorpion’s tail.

Gareth shied from it, as from a lash. “I—I thought of that, these last days,” he said softly. He looked up again, his face white with an agony of shame. “But I couldn’t let you turn back. And you will be rewarded, I swear I’ll see that you get the reward somehow.”

“And just how’ll you manage that?” John’s tone was sharp with disgust. The deck jarred beneath their feet as the raft ground against the shoals. Lights like marsh candles bobbed down toward them through the gloom. “With a mage at the Court, it couldn’t have taken them long to figure out who’d pinched the King’s seal, nor when he’d be back in Belmarie. I expect the welcoming committee ...” he gestured toward the dark forms crowding forward from the mists. “... is here to arrest you for treason.”

“No,” Gareth said in a defeated voice. “They’ll be my friends from Court.”

As if stepping through a door the forms came into visibility; lanternlight danced over the hard gleam of satin, caressed velvet’s softer nap, and touched edges of stiffened lace and the cloudy gauze of women’s veils, salted all over with the leaping fire of jewels. In the forefront of them all was a slender, dark-haired girl in amber silk, whose eyes, golden as honey with a touch of gray, sought Gareth’s and caused the boy to turn aside with a blush. One man was holding a cloak for her of ermine-tagged velvet; another her golden pomander ball. She laughed, a sound at once silvery and husky, like an echo from a troubled dream.

It could be no one but Zyerne.

John looked inquiringly back at Gareth.

“That seal you showed me was real,” he said. “I’ve seen it on the old documents, down to the little nicks on its edges. They’re taking its theft a bit casually, aren’t they?”

He laid hold of Cow’s bridle and led him down the short gangplank, forcing the others to follow. As they stepped ashore, every courtier on the bank, led by Zyerne, swept in unison into an elaborate Phoenix Rising salaam, touching their knees in respect to the clammy, fish-smelling mud.

Crimson-faced, Gareth admitted, “Not really. Technically it wasn’t theft. The King is my father. I’m the missing Heir.”