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?”