Perhaps Mab had been right, she thought, as she turned her face from the ghastly choke of the steam and wiped it with one gloved hand. There were worse evils than the dragon in the land—to be slain by it might, under certain circumstances, be construed as a lesser fate.
The voices of the men came to her from the other side of the camp as they moved about preparing supper; she had noticed that neither spoke very loudly when they were anywhere near the edge of the Rise. John said, “I’ll get this right yet,” as he dropped a mealcake onto the griddle and looked up at Gareth. “What’s the Market Hall like? Anything I’ll be likely to trip over?”
“I don’t think so, if the dragon’s been in and out,”
Gareth said after a moment. “It’s a huge hall, as Dromar said; over a hundred feet deep and even wider side to side. The ceiling’s very high, with fangs of rock hanging down from it—chains, too, that used to support hundreds of lamps. The floor was leveled, and used to be covered with all kinds of booths, awnings, and vegetable stands; all the produce from the Realm was traded to the Deep there. I don’t think there was anything there solid enough to resist dragon fire.”
Aversin dropped a final mealcake on the griddle and straightened up, wiping his fingers on the end of his plaid. Blue darkness was settling over Tanner’s Rise. From her small fire. Jenny could see the two of them outlined in gold against a background of azure and black. They did not come near her, partly because of the stench of the poisons, partly because of the spell-circles glimmering faintly in the sandy earth about her. The key to magic is magic—Jenny felt that she looked out at them from an isolated enclave of another world, alone with the ovenheat of the fire, the biting stench of the poison fumes, and the grinding weight of the death-spells in her heart.
John walked to the edge of the Rise for perhaps the tenth time that evening. Across the shattered bones of Deeping, the black skull-eye of the Gates looked back at him. Slabs of steel and splintered shards of burned wood lay scattered over the broad, shallow flight of granite steps below them, faintly visible in the watery light of the waxing moon. The town itself lay in a pool of impenetrable dark.
“It isn’t so far,” said Gareth hopefully. “Even if he hears you coming the minute you ride into the Vale, you should reach the Market Hall in plenty of time.”
John sighed. “I’m not so sure of that, my hero. Dragons move fast, even afoot. And the ground down there’s bad. Even full-tilt, Osprey won’t be making much speed of it, when all’s said. I would have liked to scout for the clearest route, but that isn’t possible, either. The most I can hope for is that there’s no uncovered cellar doors or privy pits between here and the Gates.”
Gareth laughed softly. “It’s funny, but I never thought about that. In the ballads, the hero’s horse never trips on the way to do battle with the dragon, though they do it from time to time even in tourneys, where the ground of the lists has been smoothed beforehand. I thought it would be—oh, like a ballad. Very straight. I thought you’d ride out of Bel, straight up here and on into the Deep...”
“Without resting my horse after the journey, even on a lead-rein, nor scouting the lay of the land?” John’s eyes danced behind his specs. “No wonder the King’s knights were killed at it.” He sighed. “My only worry is that if I miss my timing by even a little, I’m going to be spot under the thing when it comes out of the Gates...”
Then he coughed, fanning at the air, and said, “Pox blister it!” as he dashed back to pick the flaming mealcakes off the griddle. Around burned fingers, he said, “And the damn thing is, even Adric cooks better than I do...”
Jenny turned away from their voices and the sweetness of the night beyond the blazing heat of her fire. As she dipped the harpoons into the thickening seethe of brew in her kettle, the sweat plastered her long hair to her cheeks, running down her bare arms from the turned-up sleeves of her shift to the cuffs of the gloves she wore; the heat lay like a red film over her toes and the tops of her feet, bare as they often were when she worked magic.
Like John, she felt withdrawn into herself, curiously separated from what she did. The death-spells hung like a stench in the air all around her, and her head and bones were beginning to ache from the heat and the effort of the magic she had wrought. Even when the powers she called were for good, they tired her; she felt weighed down by them now, exhausted and knowing that she had wrought nothing good from that weariness.
The Golden Dragon came to her mind again, the first heartstopping instant she had seen it dropping from the sky like amber lightning and had thought. This is beauty.
She remembered, also, the butchered ruin left in the gorge, the stinking puddles of acid and poison and blood, and the faint, silvery singing dying out of the shivering air. It might have been only the fumes she inhaled, but she felt herself turn suddenly sick at the thought.
She had slaughtered Meewinks, or mutilated them and left them to be eaten by their brothers; she remembered the crawling greasiness of the bandit’s hair under her fingers as she had touched his temples. But they were not like the dragon. They had chosen to be what they were.
Even as I have.
And what are you. Jenny Waynest?
But she could find no answer that fitted.
Gareth’s voice drifted over to her from the other fire. “That’s another thing they never mention in the ballads that I’ve been meaning to ask you. I know this sounds silly, but—how do you keep your spectacles from getting broken in battle?”
“Don’t wear ’em,” John’s voice replied promptly. “If you can see it coming, it’s too late anyway. And then, I had Jen lay a spell on them, so they wouldn’t get knocked off or broken by chance when I do wear them.”
She looked over at the two of them, out of the condensing aura of death-spells and the slaughter of beauty that surrounded her and her kettle of poison. Firelight caught in the metal of John’s jerkin; against the blueness of the night it gleamed like a maker’s mark stamped in gold upon a bolt of velvet. She could almost hear the cheerful grin in his voice, “I figured if I was going to break my heart loving a magewife, I might as well get some good from it.”
Over the shoulder of Nast Wall the moon hung, a halfopen white eye, waxing toward its third quarter. With a stab like a shard of metal embedded somewhere in her heart. Jenny remembered then that it had been so, in her vision in the water.
Silently, she pulled herself back into her private circle of death, closing out that outer world of friendship and love and silliness, closing herself in with spells of ruin and despair and the cold failing of strength. It was her power to deal death in this way, and she hated herself for it; though, like John, she knew she had no choice.
“Do you think you’ll make it?” Gareth nattered. Before them, the ruins of the broken town were purple and slate with shadow in the early light. The war horse Osprey’s breath was warm over Jenny’s hand where she held the reins.
“I’ll have to, won’t I?” John checked the girths and swung up into the saddle. The cool reflection of the morning sky gleamed slimily on the grease Jenny had made for him late last night to smear on his face against the worst scorching of the dragon’s fire. Frost crackled in the weeds as Osprey fidgeted his feet. The last thing Jenny had done, shortly before dawn, had been to send away the mists that seeped up from the woods to cloak the Vale, and all around them the air was brilliantly clear, the fallow winter colors warming to life. Jenny herself felt cold, empty, and overstretched; she had poured all her powers into the poisons. Her head ached violently and she felt unclean, strange, and divided in her mind, as if she were two separate people. She had felt so, she recalled, when John had ridden against the first dragon, though then she had not known why. Then she had not known what the slaughter of that beauty would be like. She feared for him and felt despair like a stain on her heart; she only wanted the day to be over, one way or the other.