Barbara Hambly - Dragonsbane

Jenny hid her smile at the abrupt checking of his ebullience. “There were notes for the harp as well—not tunes, really. He whistled them to me, over and over, until I got them right.”

She put her harp to her shoulder, a small instrument that had also been Caerdinn’s, though he had not played it; the wood was darkened almost black with age. By daylight it appeared perfectly unadorned, but when firelight glanced across it, as it did now, the circles of the air and sea were sometimes visible, traced upon it in faded gold. Carefully, she picked out those strange, sweet knots of sound, sometimes two or three notes only, sometimes a string of them like a truncated air. They were individual in the turns of their timing, hauntingly half-familiar, like things remembered from childhood; and as she played she repeated the names: Teltrevir heliotrope, Centhwevir is blue knotted with gold … It was part of the lost knowledge, like that from John’s scatterbrained, jackdaw quest in the small portion of his time not taken up with the brutal demands of the Winterlands. Notes and words were meaningless now, like a line from a lost ballad, or a few torn pages from the tragedy of an exiled god, pasted to keep wind from a crack—the echoes of songs that would not be heard again.

From them her hands moved on, random as her passing thoughts. She sketched vagrant airs, or snatches of jigs and reels, slowed and touched with the shadow of an inevitable grief that waited in the hidden darkness of future time. Through them she moved to the ancient tunes that held the timeless pull of the ocean in their cadences; sorrows that drew the heart from the body, or joys that called the soul like the distant glitter of Stardust banners in the summer night. In time John took from its place in a hole by the hearth a tin penny whistle, such as children played in the streets, and joined its thin, bright music to hers, dancing around the shadowed beauty of the harp like a thousand-year-old child.

Music answered music, joining into a spell circle that banished, for a time, the strange tangle of fear and grief and dragonfire in Jenny’s heart. Whatever would come to pass, this was what they were and had now. She tossed back the cloudy streams of her hair and caught the bright flicker of Aversin’s eyes behind his thick spectacles, the pennywhistle luring the harp out of its sadness and into dance airs wild as hay-harvest winds. As the evening deepened, the Hold folk drifted up to the study to join them, sitting where they could on the floor or the hearth or in the deep embrasures of the windows: John’s Aunt Jane and Cousin Dilly and others of the vast tribe of his female relatives who lived at the Hold; Ian and Adric; the fat, jovial smith Muffle; all part of the pattern of the life of the Winterlands that was so dull-seeming at first, but was in truth close-woven and complex as its random plaids. And among them Gareth sat, ill at ease as a bright southern parrot in a rookery. He kept looking about him with puzzled distaste in the leaping restlessness of the red firelight that threw into momentary brightness the moldery rummage of decaying books, of rocks and chemical experiments, and that glowed in the children’s eyes and made amber mirrors of the dogs’—wondering, Jenny thought, how a quest as glorious as his could possibly have ended in such a place.

And every now and then, she noticed, his eyes returned to John. There was in them not only anxiety, but a kind of nervous dread, as if he were haunted by a gnawing guilt for something he had done, or something he knew he must yet do.

“Will you go?” Jenny asked softly, much later in the night, lying in the warm nest of bearskins and patchwork with her dark hair scattered like sea-wrack over John’s breast and arm.

“If I slay his dragon for him, the King will have to listen to me,” John said reasonably. “If I come at his calling, I must be his subject, and if I am—we are—his subjects, as King he owes us the protection of his troops. If I’m not his subject …” He paused, as he thought over what his next words would mean about the Law of the Realm for which he had so long fought. He sighed and let the thought go.

For a time the silence was broken only by the groan of wind in the tower overhead and the drumming of the rain on the walls. But even had she not been able to see, catlike, in the dark, Jenny knew John did not sleep. There was a tension in all his muscles, and the uneasy knowledge of how narrow had been the margin between living and dying, when he had fought the Golden Dragon of Wyr. Her hand under his back could still feel the rucked, hard ridges of scar.

“Jenny,” he said at last, “my father told me that his dad used to be able to raise four and five hundred of militia when the Iceriders came. They fought pitched battles on the edge of the northern ocean and marched in force to break the strongholds of the bandit-kings that used to cover the eastward roads. When that band of brigands attacked Far West Riding the year before last, do you remember how many men we could come up with, the mayor of Riding, the mayor of Toby, and myself among us? Less than a hundred, and twelve of those we lost in that fight.”

As he moved his head, the banked glow of the hearth on the other side of the small sanctum of their bedchamber caught a thread of carnelian from the shoulder-length mop of his hair. “Jen, we can’t go on like this. You know we can’t. We’re weakening all the time. The lands of the King’s law, the law that keeps the stronger from enslaving the weaker, are shrinking away. Every time a farm is wiped out by wolves or brigands or Iceriders, it’s one less shield in the wall. Every time some family ups and goes south to indenture themselves as serfs there, always provided they make it that far, it weakens those of us that are left. And the law itself is waning, as fewer and fewer people even know why there is law. Do you realize that because I’ve read a handful of volumes of Dotys and whatever pages of Polyborus’ Jurisprudence I could find stuck in the cracks of the tower I’m accounted a scholar? We need the help of the King, Jen, if we’re not to be feeding on one another within a generation. I can buy them that help.”

“With what?” asked Jenny softly. “The flesh off your bones? If you are killed by the dragon, what of your people then?”

Beneath her cheek she felt his shoulder move. “I could be killed by wolves or bandits next week—come to that, I could fall off old Osprey and break my neck.” And when she chuckled, unexpectedly amused at that, he added in an aggrieved voice, “It’s exactly what my father did.”

“Your father knew no better than to ride drunk.” She smiled a little in spite of herself. “I wonder what he would have made of our young hero?”

John laughed in the darkness. “Gaw, he’d have eaten him for breakfast.” Seventeen years, ten of which had been spent knowing Jenny, had finally given him a tolerance of the man he had grown up hating. Then he drew her closer and kissed her hair. When he spoke again, his voice was quiet. “I have to do it, Jen. I won’t be gone long.”

A particularly fierce gust of wind shivered in the tower’s ancient bones, and Jenny drew the worn softness of quilts and furs up over her bare shoulders. A month, perhaps, she calculated; maybe a little more. It would give her a chance to catch up on her neglected meditations, to pursue the studies that she too often put aside these days, to come to the Hold to be with him and their sons.

To be a mage you must be a mage, Caerdinn had said. Magic is the only key to magic. She knew that she was not the mage that he had been, even when she had known him first, when he was in his eighties and she a skinny, wretched, ugly girl of fourteen. She sometimes wondered whether it was because he had been so old, at the end of his strength, when he came to teach her, the last of his pupils, or because she was simply not very good. Lying awake in the darkness, listening to the wind or to the terrible greatness of the moor silence which was worse, she sometimes admitted the truth to herself—that what she gave to John, what she found herself more and more giving to those two little boys snuggled together like puppies upstairs, she took from the strength of her power.