Winterlands 4 - Dragonstar (28 page)

Wizard-woman, said his voice in her mind, I did not think ever that I would say so—or feel so. Yet I rejoice with you.

He held out his hand to her, black gloves masking the curved black claws.

She greeted him, Dragonshadow. The word itself the reminder to her that he, too, had moved through the crossroad of possibilities they had shared, and into open country beyond.

“Dreamweaver.” He turned the kaleidoscope gaze upon John, who met his eyes, trusting as no other of humankind did. “I have heard ill report of you from the Black-and-Silver One, who has gone into hiding in the Skerries of Light. He says that you are an insolent mortal and without regard for the greatest mage and loremaster among dragonkind.”

“Made it there safe, did he?” John propped his spectacles with his forefinger, without releasing Jenny's hand. “He has to know—the other drakes have to be warned—that in time the Hellspawn will come after them again. Human magic can defend against 'em, or will be able to, once the Dragonstar sets for the last time, but to be honest I don't know about dragon magic. Dragons are magic, it's the stuff of their bodies an' bones. It'll make 'em a target, once the demons start fightin' amongst 'emselves. The great drakes, the old drakes, might be able to shut 'em out, but what about the young ones, that aren't … aren't what they'll later become? You'd know about that. I don't.”

“Nor do I, Dreamweaver,” the Dragonshadow said quietly. “Nor what danger those star-drakes will be in, who were possessed in the summer: Centhwevir, and Nymr, and young Mellyn, and the rest. For all Corvin's claims of learning in the other world—about these crystals through which he channeled ether-magic, and about how comets are made, and these great all-knowing computers that he speaks of so fre-quently”—sarcasm curled in his voice—“still he knows no other answer than flight, and that answer, only for himself.”

“Well, it has the virtue of workin', anyway,” remarked John. “Trouble is, when it stops workin' you've still got your problem right there up your nose again. Let me get my notes, an' Jen her catch-bottle—an' I wish I'd had time to make a copy of the notes for Polycarp, but there's pages an' pages of 'em, an' I'll be years puttin” em straight … an' then, if you would, I think it's best we got back to the Hold as quick as we can. There's someone there I need to talk to before the first thaw hits.”

First they journeyed to Ernine, on the far side of the Nast Wall, among the burned and ravaged woods. The savage explosions, and unquenchable fire, of Folcalor's attack on the mirror chamber four nights previously had utterly destroyed the stair that had for over a thousand years ascended from the stream-bank to the Hill of the Moon: amid a sodden desolation of burned trees and frozen mud even the doorway that had led into Isychros's chambers had been obliterated, so that Morkeleb had to descend like a black silk kite down through the cleft that had riven the hill above.

The mirror chamber was empty. Walls, floor, and what was left of the ceiling were black with fire, the golden constellations and the many-tailed comet smashed to rubble. Under a thin muck of snow, burned-out talisman jewels crunched beneath Jenny's boots as she and John surveyed the devastated room.

Of the bricked-up archway behind which Jenny had found the catch-bottle, only a heap of broken stone remained. John knelt to scrape in the frozen slush with his fingers; this he did in two or three places before straightening his back and wiping the muddied fingers of his glove on his doublet's leather sleeve.

“No glass,” he said thoughtfully. “They said the mirror bein' made of thunderstone would keep it from destruction, an' it looks like they were right. It was too strong for Folcalor, anyway. Looks like he's carried it off whole, to smash when he's taken Adromelech's powers into himself.”

“Leaving only Aohila herself,” Jenny said softly, “at large in the world.”

John raised his eyebrows. In the sickly snow-light the silver curves of Aohila's spell-lines glinted on his throat. “God knows that's trouble enough.”

They slept the night in an empty manor house in Farhythe, not because Morkeleb was at all weary of flight but because in the high sooty roil of cloud the cold and wet were too bitter to be borne by his two passengers. Whether the inhabitants of the manor had gone to Bel for the assembly of the King's Council, or had fled because of the plague, Jenny did not know. The beds had been stripped from the bedsteads and the windows were fitted over with wooden shutters in place of the expensive glass; it hadn't been precipitate flight. Wood lay cut ready in the shed behind the kitchen, and John made up fires; they ate the remains of the palace luncheon that John—ever mindful from long years of Winterlands patrols—had wrapped up and tucked into the bundles of their clothes. In a bedroom Jenny found a small harp swathed in velvet. It had been untuned to spare the frame, and she could find no key for its pegs. But her hands, a few months ago stiff and twisted claws, flexed almost easily as she ran them over the inlaid pearwood of the soundbox; she met John's eyes and smiled.

On the borrowed sheets she dreamed again of her children, and waking, stole softly out of doors. Fog from the Snakewater and the marshes covered the whole of the land, making the night black as pitch, and even Jenny's mageborn sight had trouble penetrating it. From the cloister that looked out upon the kitchen garden she could see only the dim outlines of first bare hedges, but a voice in her thoughts said, Keep your feet dry, Wizard-woman, and stay where it is warm. In the darkness she saw the diamond glint of eyes, and the moving flicker of the jewels on the ends of his antennae. What brings you from your bed?

In the music of his thoughts she would have heard jealousy or sarcasm, had there been any; anger that she shared that bed with a mortal man, when she could have been the dragon consort of a dragon.

There was none. His joy for her reunion with John had been real.

My friend, she said. And then, I dreamed of my children, and my power is not such that I can see yet into the North. Can you listen so far, to see if all is well in the North Country?

Wizard-woman, I can listen unto the ends of the earth, if so be I dream deeply enough, and long enough. When all this trouble with demons is done with, and the world sleeps in peace once more, I will teach you how this is done. For I think that having once been a dragon, you are capable still of dragon dreams. Their secret is this: that you do not think, ‘I will seek the sounds of bandits, that I may learn if my hus-band's hold is in danger,’ or, ‘Where do the rabbits feed, that I may know if demons are near?’ To dream as a dragon dreams is not to seek, and not to expect. It is merely to observe all, with no one grass blade more important than any other grass blade, nor any meaning attached to anything. Only being, throughout the whole of the universe and all of time.

Jenny thought about this, about the stillness of the fogshrouded night, and the invisible friend hidden in the darkness.

She said, You are not of this world, are you? The dragons. You came from one of those other worlds, that John traveled to, lying somewhere beyond beyond. You traversed Hells, and realms that have no existence beneath the sun and the stars that I know; perhaps you came from one of the many Hells, and not a true world at all.

All worlds are true worlds, my Jenny, said the Dragonshadow.

And the Dragonshadows, who have outgrown their bodies and their magic … what are they?

Morkeleb said, I do not know.

Even though you are one? When you crossed over into that being, did they not tell you?

He said, No. Since I became a dragonshadow I have spoken to no other of my kind, and before, when they still inhabited the Birdless Isle, I thought I knew what they were, and did not ask. It is no unusual thing for them to be gone for a time, though they have been gone now longer than ever I can remember before. I can only be as I am, until upon their return I can ask them what they are.

Are they gods? she asked, and again he said, I do not know. But as for your children …

And in her mind Jenny saw as if in a dream the stumpy tower of Alyn Hold, sticking up on its hill above the grubby ring of its dilapidated walls. The wind scoured the walls with snow in the darkness, and no light shone, but Jenny was aware of the repaired thatch on the kitchens and stables, the new plaster over the places where Balgodorus and his slavetrading bandits had burned, earlier in the winter.

Impossibly, above the screaming of the wind, she heard the breathing of the sleepers within those walls: Ian and Adric, huddled together in their tower bedroom; little Maggie in her cot beside Cousin Dilly, who acted as her nurse. Sour grim Aunt Jane in her cramped room off the kitchen, and Aunt Rowe in the trundle bed beside hers, as if the two sisters of old Lord Aver were young girls still glaring around the corners at their brother's unwanted beautiful witch-wife mistress. For a few moments—or a few hours—Jenny was conscious of every sleeper within those walls, of Bill the yardman and his wife, Betne, of Peg the gatekeeper and her children, of old Cowan in the stables and Sergeant Muffle in the room he'd taken with his wife and children behind the forge. Of scullerymaids and grooms and the half-dozen militiamen dossing on the hall floor around the firepit among straw and rushes that smelled of month-old smoke and dogs. A kind of gentle glow, like the embers of a banked fire, rose to Jenny from their dreams.

And as Morkeleb's consciousness widened, she became aware of the sleeping village outside the walls. Of Father Hiero the priest in the attic loft above the broken-down and disregarded village Temple. Of her own younger sister, Sparrow, and Sparrow's husband and children, and all those other families near whom Jenny had grown up. Of the cows in the byres and the horses in the stalls, and all those near and far whose holdings and families were under the protection of the Thane of the Winterlands, who looked to John Aversin to protect them and be answerable for them, even at the cost of his life.

Farther off she was aware of the bleak woods, deep in snow and thrashing beneath the flail of the wind. Of muskrats in their holes and squirrels rolled tight in the hollows of trees, surrounded by the plunder of the autumn on which they'd been living for months. Of deer in the thickets and fish sleeping in the darkness of the frozen streams, of turtles in the mud and bandits far off in the ruined huts and manors that they'd made into hideouts, scratching fleas and snuffling in drunken sleep. Of the degraded Meewinks in the marshes picking over the bones of the travelers they'd killed, and even the whisperers peeping to one another in the slick-frozen ice of the haunted Wraithmire, frozen themselves and singing keening songs of the comet that hung low and smoldering somewhere beyond the hammering storm.

And in all that dark and storm and sleep, gradually Jenny saw, and heard, and felt something moving, something that crept among the torn-up snow of the woods. She felt the rabbits in their holes startle hammer-hearted from sleep at its smell, and curl down tight into the darkness until it went past. Felt the deer grow still in the thickets, ears pricked forward at the staggering, crashing stride. Like a clumsy shadow it moved, frozen flesh tearing unheeded on broken twigs. A fox sniffed at the drip of black fluid that came away on the spearpoint shards, and hastened the other way.

In the village stables a cow flung up her head and lowed in fright. Behind the church, Father Hiero's dog threw himself to the limit of his chain and barked.

The thing did not enter the byre, nor attempt to come near the church. It had no need of warmth in this bitter night. But Jenny dreamed of it circling the walls of the Hold, circling patiently, and now and then coming close enough to scratch at the gates and at the stones.

She woke, losing her balance and stumbling against the doorframe of the old manor house where she stood. Her feet were numb within her boots. Across the bare kitchen-garden in the fog, Morkeleb, a shadow himself, lay invisible between the bare, invisible orchard trees.

Your children sleep safe, my Jenny. In the dragon's speaking she felt his odd tenderness, and his quest as to what her love was, and why the destinies of these three children—and of all who slept in and about the Hold—drove her so. Since surrendering his magic he had become, she knew, curious about all manner of things that were not things of dragons. But as you see, all is not well in the Winterlands.

They reached Alyn Hold the following day at noon. Morkeleb descended, unseen, through the rending howl of the storm winds to the lane before the Hold's main gate, but had he come down in all his glittering midnight splendor Jenny doubted there would have been anyone outside their houses to see. It was the last night of the Moon of Ice, the time of year when even bandits and Iceriders lay low. Every one of the fifty or so families of Alyn Village would be huddled around their hearths in kitchens crammed with wood, whittling or sewing or mending harness or chairs, doing all those things for which there was little time in the short gorgeous Winterlands summers. Every shutter in the village was bolted tight, and John had to pound on the gate and shout before Peg put her head out the window above it to see who was there.

“All the dear gods, where did you spring from?” gasped the gatekeeper, hanging hard onto the postern door to keep it from being slammed out of her grip by the wind. “How did you get here, in all this storm? You must be that frozen! Where are your horses?”

“Never you mind. We're back now, safe and mostly sound.…” John shook back the hood from his head and looked past Jenny out into the sleety rain, but in the gray halfvisible whirl of the village street, no sign of Morkeleb was to be seen.

Mag, Ian, and Adric fell on their parents like savages as they entered the kitchen. In the Hold, as in the smallest village hut, for most of the winter the life of the household centered around the cooking fires. Sergeant Muffle, sweat-soaked in shirtsleeves, strode in from the forge where he'd been making nails, at the summons of his wife, Blossom, who'd been helping Aunt Jane and the kitchen girls with dinner. Cowan, Bill, and Betne appeared all swaddled up in sheepskins and dripping hay from the stalls they'd been cleaning, with the stable dogs Bannock and Snuff trailing at their heels. It was just as well there was a storm, Jenny reflected. Otherwise the whole village would have put in an appearance as well.