Trust John, Jenny thought, that if he couldn’t make an impression on them on their own grounds, he wouldn’t try to do it on the grounds of Gareth’s ballads, either. They had succumbed to the devil of mischief in him, the devil that had drawn her from the first moment they had met as adults. He had used his outrageousness as a defense against their scorn, but the fact that he had been able to use it successfully made her think a little better of these courtiers of Zyerne’s.
She finished her meal in silence, and none of them saw her go.
“Jenny, wait.” A tall figure detached itself from the cluster of bright forms in the antechamber and hurried across the hall to catch her, tripping over a footstool halfway.
Jenny paused in the enclosing shadow of the stair lattice. From the anteroom, music was already lilting—not the notes of the hired musicians, this time, but the complex tunes made to show off the skill of the courtiers themselves. To play well, it seemed, was the mark of a true gentleperson; the music of the cwrdth and the double-dulcimer blended into a counterpoint like lace, from which themes would emerge like half-familiar faces glimpsed in a crowd. Over the elaborate harmonies, she heard the blithe, unrepentant air of the pennywhistle, following the melody by ear, and she smiled. If the Twelve Gods of the Cosmos came down, they would be hard put to disconcert John.
“Jenny, I—I’m sorry.” Gareth was panting a little from his haste. He had resumed his battered spectacles; the fracture in the bottom of the right-hand lens glinted like a star. “I didn’t know it would be like that. I thought—he’s a Dragonsbane...”
She was standing a few steps up the flight; she put out her hand and touched his face, nearly on level with her own. “Do you remember when you first met him?”
He flushed with embarrassment. In the illuminated antechamber, John’s scruffy leather and plaids made him look like a mongrel in a pack of lapdogs. He was examining a lute-shaped hurdy-gurdy with vast interest, while the red-haired. Beautiful Isolde of Greenhythe told the latest of her enormous stock of scatological jokes about the gnomes. Everyone guffawed but John, who was far too interested in the musical instrument in his lap to notice; Jenny saw Gareth’s mouth tighten with something between anger and confused pain. He went north seeking a dream, she thought; now he had neither that which he had sought nor that to which he had thought he would return.
“I shouldn’t have let them bait you like that,” he said after a moment. “I didn’t think Zyerne...”
He broke off, unable to say it. She saw bitterness harden his mouth, and a disillusion worse than the one John had dealt him beside the pigsty at Alyn. He had probably never seen Zyerne being petty before, she thought; or perhaps he had only seen her in the context of the world she had created, never having been outside of it himself. He took a deep breath and went on, “I know I should have taken up for you somehow, but... but I didn’t know how!” He spread his hands helplessly. With the first rueful humor at himself that Jenny had seen, he added, “You know, in ballads it’s so easy to rescue someone. I mean, even if you’re defeated, at least you can die gracefully and not have everyone you know laugh at you for the next three weeks.”
Jenny laughed and reached out to pat his arm. In the gloom, his features were only an edge of gold along the awkward cheekline, and the twin circles of glass were opaque with the lamplight’s reflection that glinted on a few flame-caught strands of hair and formed a spiky illumination along the edges of his lace collar. “Don’t worry about it.” She smiled. “Like slaying dragons, it’s a special art.”
“Look,” said Gareth, “I—I’m sorry I tricked you. I wouldn’t have done it, if I’d known it would be like this. But Zyerne sent a messenger to my father—it’s only a day’s ride to Bel, and a guest house is being prepared for you in the Palace. I’ll be with you when you present yourselves to him, and I know he’ll be willing to make terms...” He caught himself, as if remembering his earlier lying assurances. “That is, I really do know it, this time. Since the coming of the dragon, there’s been a huge standing reward for its slaying, more than the pay of a garrison for a year. He has to listen to John.”
Jenny leaned one shoulder against the openwork of the newel post, the chips of reflected lamplight filtering through the lattice and dappling her black and silver gown with gold. “Is it so important to you?”
He nodded. Even with the fashionable padding of his white-and-violet doublet, his narrow shoulders looked stooped with tiredness and defeat. “I didn’t tell very much truth at the Hold,” he said quietly. “But I did tell this: that I know I’m not a warrior, or a knight, and I know I’m not good at games. And I’m not stupid enough to think that the dragon wouldn’t kill me in a minute, if I went there. But—I know everyone around here laughs when I talk about chivalry and honor and a knight’s duty, and you and John do, too... But that’s what makes John the Thane of the Winterlands and not just another bandit, doesn’t it? He didn’t have to kill that first dragon.” The boy gestured wearily, a half-shrug that sent fragments of luminosity slithering along the white stripes of his slashed sleeves to the diamonds at his cuffs. “I couldn’t not do something. Even if I did muff it up.”
Jenny felt she had never liked him so well. She said, “If you had truly muffed it up, we wouldn’t be here.”
She climbed the stairs slowly and crossed the gallery that spanned the hall below. Like the stair, it was enclosed in a stone trellis cut into the shapes of vines and trees, and the shadows flickered in a restless harlequin over her gown and hair. She felt tired and cold from holding herself braced all evening—the sly baiting and lace-trimmed malice of Zyerne’s court had stung more than she cared to admit. She pitied them, a little, for what they were, but she did not have John’s brass hide.
She and John had been given the smaller of the two rooms at the end of the wing; Gareth, the larger, next door to theirs. Like everything else in Zyerne’s lodge, they were beautifully appointed. The red damasked bed hangings and alabaster lamps were designed both as a setting for Zyerne’s beauty and a boast of her power to get what she wanted from the King. No wonder, thought Jenny, Gareth distrusted and hated any witch who held sway over a ruler’s heart.
As she left the noise of the gallery behind her and turned down the corridor toward her room, she became conscious of the stiff rustling of her borrowed finery upon the inlaid wood of the floor and, with her old instinct for silence, gathered the heavy skirts up in her hands. Lamplight from a half-opened door laid a molten trapezoid of brightness across the darkness before her. Zyerne, Jenny knew, was not downstairs with the others, and she felt uneasy about meeting that beautiful, spoiled, powerful girl, especially here in her own hunting lodge where she held sole dominion. Thus Jenny passed the open doorway in a drift of illusion; and, though she paused in the shadows at what she saw by the lights within, she remained herself unseen.
It would have been so, she thought later, even had she not been cloaked in the spells that thwart the casual eye. Zyerne sat in an island of brightness, the glow of a nightlamp stroking the gilt-work of her blackwood chair, so still that not even the rose-point shadows of her lace veils stirred upon her gown. Her hands were cupped around the face of Bond Clerlock, who knelt at her feet, and such was his immobility that not even the sapphires pinning his hair glinted, but burned steadily with a single reflection. Though he looked up toward her face, his eyes were closed; his expression was the contorted, intent face of a man in ecstasy so strong that it borders pain.
The room smoked with magic, the weight of it like a glittering lour in the air. As a mage. Jenny could feel it, smell it like an incense; but it was an incense tainted with rot. She stepped back, repelled. Though the touch of Zyerne’s hands upon Bond’s face was the only contact between their two bodies, she had the sickened sensation of having looked upon that which was obscene. Zyerne’s eyes were closed, her childlike brow puckered in slight concentration; the smile that curved her lips was one of physical and emotional satisfaction, like a woman’s after the act of love.