“My profoundest gratitude,” he said, and performed a supremely graceful Dying Swan, the like of which had not been seen in the Winterlands since the nobles of the Kings had departed in the wake of the retreating royal armies. “I am Gareth of Magloshaldon, a traveler upon errantry in these lands, and I wish to extend my humblest expressions of...”
Jenny shook her head and stilled him with an upraised hand. “Wait here,” she said, and turned away.
Puzzled, the boy followed her.
The first bandit who had attacked her still lay in the clay muck of the roadbed. The soaking blood had turned it into a mess of heel gouges, strewn with severed entrails; the stink was appalling. The man was still groaning weakly. Against the matte pallor of the foggy morning, the scarlet of the blood stood out shockingly bright.
Jenny sighed, feeling suddenly cold and weary and unclean, looking upon what she had done and knowing what it was up to her yet to do. She knelt beside the dying man, drawing the stillness of her magic around her again. She was aware of Gareth’s approach, his boots threshing through the dew-soaked bindweed in a hurried rhythm that broke when he tripped on his sword. She felt a tired stirring of anger at him for having made this necessary. Had he not cried out, both she and this poor, vicious, dying brute would each have gone their ways...
... And he would doubtless have killed Gareth after she passed. And other travelers besides.
She had long since given up trying to unpick wrong from right, present should from future if. If there was a pattern to all things, she had given up thinking that it was simple enough to lie within her comprehension. Still, her soul felt filthy within her as she put her hands to the dying man’s clammy, greasy temples, tracing the proper runes while she whispered the death-spells. She felt the life go out of him and tasted the bile of self-loathing in her mouth.
Behind her, Gareth whispered, “You—he’s—he’s dead.”
She got to her feet, shaking the bloody dirt from her skirts. “I could not leave him for the weasels and foxes,” she replied, starting to walk away. She could hear the small carrion-beasts already, gathering at the top of the bank above the misty slot of the road, drawn to the bloodsmell and waiting impatiently for the killer to abandon her prey. Her voice was brusque—she had always hated the death-spells. Having grown up in a land without law, she had killed her first man when she was fourteen, and six since, not counting the dying she had helped from life as the only midwife and healer from the Gray Mountains to the sea. It never got easier.
She wanted to be gone from the place, but the boy Gareth put a staying hand on her arm, looking from her to the corpse in a kind of nauseated fascination. He had never seen death, she thought. At least, not in its raw form. The pea green velvet of his travel-stained doublet, the gold stampwork of his boots, the tucked embroidery of his ruffled lawn shirt, and the elaborate, feathered crestings of his green-tipped hair all proclaimed him for a courtier. All things, even death, were doubtless done with a certain amount of style where he came from.
He gulped. “You’re—you’re a witch!”
One corner other mouth moved slightly; she said, “So I am.”
He stepped back from her in fear, then staggered, clutching at a nearby sapling for support. She saw then that among the decorative slashings of his doublet sleeve was an uglier opening, the shirt visible through it dark and wet. “I’ll be fine,” he protested faintly, as she moved to support him. “I just need...” He made a fumbling effort to shake free of her hand and walk, his myopic gray eyes peering at the ankle-deep drifts of moldering leaves that lined the road.
“What you need is to sit down.” She led him away to a broken boundary stone and forced him to do so and unbuttoned the diamond studs that held the sleeve to the body of the doublet. The wound did not look deep, but it was bleeding badly. She pulled loose the leather thongs that bound the wood-black knots of her hair and used them as a tourniquet above the wound. He winced and gasped and tried to loosen it as she tore a strip from the hem of her shift for a bandage, so that she slapped at his fingers like a child’s. Then, a moment later, he tried to get up again. “I have to find...”
“I’ll find them,” Jenny said firmly, knowing what it was that he sought. She finished binding his wound and walked back to the tangle of hazel bushes where Gareth and the bandit had struggled. The frosty daylight glinted on a sharp reflection among the leaves. The spectacles she found there were bent and twisted out of shape, the bottom of one round lens decorated by a star-fracture. Flicking the dirt and wetness from them, she carried them back.
“Now,” she said, as Gareth fumbled them on with hands shaking from weakness and shock. “You need that arm looked to. I can take you...”
“My lady, I’ve no time.” He looked up at her, squinting a little against the increasing brightness of the sky behind her head. “I’m on a quest, a quest of terrible importance.”
“Important enough to risk losing your arm if the wound turns rotten?”
As if such things could not happen to him, did she only have the wits to realize it, he went on earnestly, “I’ll be all right, I tell you. I am seeking Lord Aversin the Dragonsbane. Thane of Alyn Hold and Lord of Wyr, the greatest knight ever to have ridden the Winterlands. Have you heard of him hereabouts? Tall as an angel, handsome as song... His fame has spread through the southlands the way the floodwaters spread in the spring, the noblest of chevaliers... I must find Alyn Hold, before it is too late.”
Jenny sighed, exasperated. “So you must,” she said. “It is to Alyn Hold that I am going to take you.”
The squinting eyes got round as the boy’s mouth fell open. “To—to Alyn Hold? Really? It’s near here?”
“It’s the nearest place where we can get your arm seen to,” she said. “Can you ride?”
Had he been dying, she thought, amused, he would still have sprung to his feet as he did. “Yes, of course. I—do you know Lord Aversin, then?”
Jenny was silent for a moment. Then, softly, she said, “Yes. Yes, I know him.”
She whistled up the horses, the tall white Moon Horse and the big liver-bay gelding, whose name, Gareth said, was Battlehammer. In spite of his exhaustion and the pain of his roughly bound wound, Gareth made a move to offer her totally unnecessary assistance in mounting. As they reined up over the ragged stone slopes to avoid the corpse in its rank-smelling puddles of mud, Gareth asked, “If—if you’re a witch, my lady, why couldn’t you have fought them with magic instead of with a weapon? Thrown fire at them, or turned them into frogs, or struck them blind...”
She had struck them blind, in a sense, she thought wryly—at least until he shouted.
But she only said, “Because I cannot.”
“For reasons of honor?” he asked dubiously. “Because there are some situations in which honor cannot apply...”
“No.” She glanced sidelong at him through the astonishing curtains of her loosened hair. “It is just that my magic is not that strong.”
And she nudged her horse into a quicker walk, passing into the vaporous shadows of the forest’s bare, overhanging boughs.
Even after all these years of knowing it, she found the admission still stuck in her throat. She had come to terms with her lack of beauty, but never with her lack of genius in the single thing she had ever wanted. The most she had ever been able to do was to pretend that she accepted it, as she pretended now.
Ground fog curled around the feet of the horses; through the clammy vapors, tree roots thrust from the roadbanks like the arms of half-buried corpses. The air here felt dense and smelled of mold, and now and then, from the woods above them, came the furtive crackle of dead leaves, as if the trees plotted among themselves in the fog.