Winterlands 2 - Dragonshadow (39 page)

It is a trusting Wizard-woman.

“Even so,” said Jenny. She felt the wave of Morkeleb’s cynicism pass over her, as if he’d plunged through a wall of dark water, but he spread wide his wings for balance and drifted toward the ground. The men below jockeyed for position, but Gareth gestured again. A sweep of fugitive sunlight riffled his hair. The storms were definitely breaking. Flying through the passes, Jenny had felt it—the clouds dissolving, the magic that held them failing at last. Morkeleb stretched out his hind-legs and settled on the earth.

“My lord, really!” Ector of Sindestray exclaimed angrily as Gareth walked forward, his hands outstretched.

“Jenny. John.”

“Polycarp get in touch with you?” John asked jauntily. “My lord, this man is under sentence of death …!”

“One of his pigeons came in this morning.” Gareth’s eyes flicked to the demon mark, then away. He looked unhappy. “He said Jenny had vanished. He said he was putting you under guard—” “Ah. You haven’t had the one about us stealing the vial and the seal and the box, then? You’ll get that one tomorrow.”

As he spoke Jenny touched the satchel she had tied around her body, the satchel Morkeleb had given her just before he resumed the form of the dragon. I think it best we have charge of these, instead of Master Polycarp, he had said. They are, after all, Aversin’s, purchased with the costliest of all currency.

“This is outrageous!” insisted Lord Ector. He still wore court mantlings—Jenny couldn’t imagine how he kept them properly folded. “My lord, you’re aware of how demons influence men’s minds! How they take over men’s bodies! You can’t pretend you trust these … people.” Gareth reached out, then drew his hand back without touching the satchel. “Polycarp wrote of these things,” he said. “And of what you did to achieve them.” Ector cleared his throat significantly but Gareth would not meet his eyes. Wind flicked the pink and blue ends of his hair. He had a fresh wound on his cheek, and his thick spectacles had been broken and mended, and there was a hardness to his face, a grim set to his mouth.

“It wasn’t you by any chance who told him to chain me up?”

There was long a dreadful silence. Gareth shuffled—No ballad of old Dragonsbanes, thought Jenny, provided guidance on situations like this—then at length said quietly, “No. But you yourself know all the legends, the histories, involving demons. Polycarp isn’t the only one who favors invoking the penalty, you know.”

John glanced at Ector and said nothing. Gareth flushed.

“I’ve told Polycarp, and others on the council, to wait. That I trusted you.”

John bowed his head, but his mouth was wry. “Thank you. But you really shouldn’t. If it weren’t me, you shouldn’t. And with Jen vanishing as she did I can’t blame him, I suppose, for lockin’ me up. Mind you, I’m not ettlin’ to walk into the rest of it, but I’m workin’ on that.” He propped his spectacles on his nose. “Poly’ll be here … when?”

“Tomorrow,” said Gareth. “They’re taking the Urchins through the Deep of Ylferdun today. Reinforcements from Bel have been sighted—the rain that protected us slowed them down.” Another sweep of sunlight sparkled on the soaked and puddled earth of the camp, and Gareth and every warrior there looked uneasily at the sky.

“Played hob with your harvest, too, I’ll bet.” John shoved back the long hair from his eyes. “They’ll be on us tonight, you know—Rocklys and her lot, I mean.”

“I know. They have to, if they’re to take the bridge. I’m having the men stand to …”

“Nah.” John shook his head. “Let ’em eat their dinners and catch a bit of kip. Nuthin’ll happen till … eighth hour of the night, I’d say. Halfway till dawn.”

“Why halfway?”

“Because that’s when men who’ve been standing to since the eighth hour of the afternoon slack their guard and figure nothing’s going to happen till dawn. That’s when they take a bit of a doze or sneak off to the privy, or start lookin’ about the camp to see who else is on watch they can talk to.”

Lord Ector opened his mouth in indignant protest as Gareth and John brushed past him, side by side. “Have you got flares built up, ready to burn? They can see in the dark as well as in daylight, so the bigger the pyres you can torch the better.”

Gareth nodded. “We’ve kept the wood dry as best we can, and we got oil in yesterday’s convoy. When the clouds clear, we’ll need the light. The moon won’t rise until mid-morning tomorrow, and anyway it’s only three days old.”

“Son,” sighed John, “I can tell you to three-quarters of an inch how far the moon’s waxed since I rode to Ernine. Now show me where you’ve got the Urchins from the first attack. Are they put back together? Good. Jen, d’you feel up to a bit of magic?”

True to John’s prediction, the dragons attacked between midnight and morning. Jenny was dozing in John’s arms in the dugout of Gareth and his father the King, reveling in the peace of being left alone by Caradoc and his spells of intrusion and domination. Curled in the heart of her jewel, she was aware that Folcalor had other fish to fry and assumed her, probably, to be still in Halnath Citadel.

Dimly, very dimly, she seemed to see Caradoc himself, the man who had truly once loved Rocklys, who had sought learning and power and walked along Somanthus’ northwestern strand: a broken, white-haired man sleeping, dazed, in the heart of some far-off jewel. But she felt no pity. Now and then she would reach out through the crystal’s flaw to her body, to feel more closely the warmth of John’s arms, and the tickle of his breath in her hair. Time seemed to her very fragile then, very precious—later she would look back on those moments with an aching longing, as a traveler lost on the winter barrens dreams of warmth. She knew the sentence of death to be a reasonable one, having seen Poly-carp alone in the dimly lit study with Amayon’s prisoning shell. She knew, too, that even the manner of death prescribed was necessary, given the power demons could wield over the dead.

But not John, she thought, closing her hand tight over his. Not John. Then in her mind Morkeleb’s voice said, Jenny. It is now.

She flowed through the fault in the jewel like water. Flowed into her flesh, her bones, her mind. John was already sitting up, hair in his eyes and groping around for his spectacles. “Here we go, love,” he said, and slung around his neck the frosted crystal of the Demon Queen’s seal and a little stone knife to draw the blood for freeing. He gathered her to him, his hands cupping her face, collecting together the night of her hair, and kissed her lips. “You know what to do?” “I know.” There were crossbows stacked in the corner of the room, horn reinforced with steel. The poisoned bolts were so long and heavy she could barely lift the weapons. John slung three of them over his own back, and two over hers. She felt the touch of his hands adjusting the straps; his heart and hers already armored, drawn apart into the fight.

Not good-bye, she thought. Not good-bye.

Above, at ground level, men were shouting, boots pounding by the dugout’s opening. The orange glare of torches flashed and juddered along the wall. The King sat up and called out a woman’s name, confused; Gareth was holding his hands and talking to him gently, telling him that all things were well. “Use them carefully,” John said to her, “but if you get the chance, don’t hesitate for anything. Understand?”

He was talking about Ian. She thought about the drunken, slack-mouthed boy fumbling at the bound bodies of camp whores, tied up for his pleasure; thought about the sickened, weeping child she had sometimes glimpsed, a prisoner as she was a prisoner, in her dreams. “I won’t.”

“Good lass.” He slapped her flank and followed her up the ladder to the slit under the earth-heaped roof. As they made to part he caught her hand; already, against the darkness, the black skeletal shape of Morkeleb had risen. “You haven’t … There isn’t some spell you can lay on me, to keep me from …” He hesitated, then said, without change of expression, “If I die in the fighting, I’m theirs, y’see.”

Jenny hesitated a long time, weighing what she knew of her waning strength against her love for this man. She knew that though destroying his body afterward would prevent his returning as a fetch, if he died in the fighting there would be no way of retrieving his naked soul from the Demon Queen’s hands.

She said, “I can’t. Not and lay the spells I’ll need for the battle.” She didn’t even know if she’d be able to summon sufficient power to protect herself and Morkeleb against the magic of the other dragons. Weaving the wards would take all she had, after laying spells upon the Urchins and these crossbows in the afternoon.

“Aye, well,” he sighed. “I’ll just have to manage to not get meself killed, then.” He kissed her again. “You don’t get yourself killed either, love.”

John caught a soldier outside the trench and handed him the three crossbows, to follow Jenny. They parted in the firelight, John to the squat glittering ball of the Urchin, and Jenny to the smoky shadow of the waiting dragon.

Jenny wove the wards of protection around them, listening for the first beating of dragon wings in the dark.

Put all of your magic into it, whispered Morkeleb’s voice in her mind. Leave none for yourself, none in your flesh, your bones, your heart. It will do you no good in any case, and the demons will take you again through it. That is the secret of the Shadow-drakes.

Jenny said, I can’t. We’ll be in danger…

Trust, said Morkeleb. The whalemages have laid on us spells of warding as well, as good as yours or mine.

Jenny’s hands shook, and the circles of power and energy and Limitation with which she had surrounded herself and him waned in the jumping torchflare. The crossbows hung on their straps from the cable that ringed the dragon’s body, the spiked and terrible shape of them blending with his spines. She tried to call on the dragon within her soul, but since her escape from Rocklys’ camp, it seemed to her that that portion had been left behind. I can’t. Trust.

She thought she saw the flares and torches through his body, as if he were insubstantial, wrought of smoke himself. His eyes, and the bobs on the ends of his antennae, were a glitter of stars in the darkness that thinned away like smoked glass.

But his voice remained strong in her mind. Trust.

She surrendered the last of her magic, pouring it into the spells that would guard them both from delusion and panic. Without it she felt empty, cold, and naked as she climbed onto his back.

His wings unfurled without a sound. He lifted as the fire showed them the first of the attackers. It was Yrsgendl, white and scarlet, with Bliaud on his back. Silently they rose, higher and higher, fading into the dark.

Jenny saw the dragons winging from Rocklys’ camp: pink and green, gold and green, yellow rainbow … blue. Oh my son, she thought, as she hooked her feet hard through the cable and slung the first of the heavy crossbows into the cradle of her arms. Oh my son. Only the discipline of having studied magic let her close her mind.

Yrsgendl plunged, spitting fire and acid onto the camp. From all around the redoubt, from every trench and dugout, arrows spired up, fell back … And a single black heavy javelin slammed up straight and hard from the trundling Urchin that suddenly swung to life, pinning the dragon through the left wing.

It was a lucky shot, taking him through the widest portion of his silhouette against the dark.

Morkeleb plunged from above, and Jenny swung the crossbow to her shoulder and fired downward, and that arrow pierced the younger dragon’s back among the spines. Yrsgendl whipped around, mouth opening in a furious hiss, and Jenny felt/saw the demon illusions shiver and spatter around the wardings laid by the Demon Queen’s vial. She fired again, driving the red dragon down, and a second harpoon from the Urchin knifed upward, burying itself in Yrsgendl’s breast.

Yrsgendl wheeled, heading for the darkness, and again Morkeleb drove him down. Spitting, hissing, Enismirdal and Nymr plunged out of the sky above Morkeleb, but he slithered unseen from beneath their attacks, snapped and fastened on Yrsgendl’s wing, dragging him back. Yrsgendl flapped and fluttered, weakening, and the Urchin, breaking through the damaged redoubt, trundled with surprising speed toward where the injured dragon would fall. Hagginarshildim, green and pink, and the surviving rainbow drake swooped on the machine, but John whipped and dodged, ducking from under the lashing tails, and the rainbow drake tore its own flesh open on the Urchin’s spines. When Hagginarshildim attacked a second time, she received a harpoon in her foreleg; Morkeleb drove her down, too, forcing her to remain at the scene of the action.

Yrsgendl was on the ground, sick with the effects of the drug on the harpoon’s tip. This, Jenny knew, was the tricky part, for the harpoons were tipped not with poison but with a powerful serum of poppy, and the dragons would be able to shake it off quickly. The rainbow drake spat fire at John as he rolled free of the Urchin, dived across the intervening ground to where the red and alabaster shape lay. Jenny saw firelight flash in the crystal seal that John pulled from his doublet.

Then Nymr was attacking, and Morkeleb whipped around to evade, and Jenny saw nothing of what passed below. But a moment later, as her own drugged crossbow bolt sank into the flesh of the blue dragon’s neck, she saw from the corner of her eye a slither of dark-red flame, and as Nymr lashed at Morkeleb, teeth and tail gleaming, Yrsgendl whirled up from below and sank his teeth into the blue dragon’s tail, wrenching and tearing at the flesh.

Jenny heard a dim shrieking in her mind, the cursing and wailing of a demon disembodied, but could not spare a thought to the matter. Nymr was a big dragon, too big to be easily driven into range of the Urchin’s bolts. As he fought, Yrsgendl released him, only to circle and plunge on him from above as Morkeleb held him in combat. By the glinting torchlight Jenny saw who rode the white and scarlet dragon, and her heart stood still. Had she had any magic remaining she would have stretched it forth—

Don’t do it! she thought wildly. Don’t do it!

John unhooked his feet from the braided cable around Yrsgendl’s body, and as the younger dragon fastened for a third time on the spiky ridge of Nymr’s spine, he slid down and caught his footing among the bristling spears.