Not love, thought Jenny, drawing back from the scene and moving soundlessly down the hall once more, but some private satiation.
She sat for a long time in the dark window embrasure of her room and thought about Zyerne. The moon rose, flecking the bare tips of the trees above the white carpet of ground mists; she heard the clocks strike downstairs and the drift of voices and laughter. The moon was in its first quarter, and something about that troubled her, though she could not for the moment think what. After a long time she heard the door open softly behind her and turned to see John silhouetted in the dim lamplight from the hall, its reflection throwing a scatter of metallic glints from his doublet and putting a rough halo on the coarse wool of his plaids.
Into the darkness he said softly, “Jen?”
“Here.”
Moonlight flashed across his specs. She moved a little—the barring of the casement shadows on her black and silver gown made her nearly invisible. He came cautiously across the unfamiliar terrain of the floor, his hands and face pale blurs against his dark clothing.
“Gaw,” he said in disgust as he slung off his plaids. “To come here to risk my bones slaying a dragon and end up playing dancing bear for a pack of children.” He sat on the edge of the curtained bed, working at the heavy buckles of his doublet.
“Did Gareth speak to you?”
His spectacles flashed again as he nodded.
“And?”
John shrugged. “Seeing the pack he runs with, I’m not surprised he’s a gammy-handed chuff with less sense than my Cousin Dilly’s mulberry bushes. And he did take the risk to search for me, I’ll give him that.” His voice was muffled as he bent over to pull off his boots. “Though I’ll wager all the dragon’s gold to little green apples he had no idea how dangerous it would be. God knows what I’d have done in his shoes, and him that desperate to help and knowing he hadn’t a chance against the dragon himself.” He set his boots on the floor and sat up again. “However we came here, I’d be a fool not to speak with the King and see what he’ll offer me, though it’s in my mind that we’ll run up against Zyerne in any dealings we have with him.”
Even while playing dancing bear, thought Jenny as she drew the pins from her hair and let her fashionable veils slither to the floor, John didn’t miss much. The stiffened silk felt cold under her fingers, from the touch of the window’s nearness, even as her hair did when she unwound its thick coil and let it whisper dryly down over her bony, half-bared shoulders.
At length she said, “When Gareth first spoke to me of her, I was jealous, hating her without ever having seen her. She has everything that I wanted, John: genius, time... and beauty,” she added, realizing that that, too, mattered. “I was afraid it was that, still.”
“I don’t know, love.” He got to his feet, barefoot in breeches and creased shirt, and came to the window where she sat. “It doesn’t sound very like you.” His hands were warm through the stiff, chilly satins of her borrowed gown as he collected the raven weight of her hair and sorted it into columns that spilled down through his fingers. “I don’t know about her magic, for I’m not mageborn myself, but I do know she is cruel for the sport of it—not in the big things that would get her pointed at, but in the little ones—and she leads the others on, teaching them by example and jest to be as cruel as she. Myself, I’d take a whip to Ian, if he treated a guest as she treated you. I see now what that gnome we met on the road meant when he said she poisons what she touches. But she’s only a mistress, when all’s said. And as for her being beautiful...” He shrugged. “If I was a bit shapecrafty, I’d be beautiful, too.”
In spite of herself Jenny laughed and leaned back into his arms.
But later, in the darkness of the curtained bed, the memory of Zyerne returned once more to her thoughts. She saw again the enchantress and Bond in the rosy aura of the nightlamp and felt the weight and strength of the magic that had filled the room like the silent build of thunder. Was it the magnitude of the power alone that had frightened her, she wondered. Or had it been some sense of filthiness that lay in it, like the back-taste of souring milk? Or had that, in its turn, been only the wormwood other own jealousy of the younger woman’s greater arts?
John had said that it didn’t sound very like her, but she knew he was wrong. It was like her, like the part of herself she fought against, the fourteen-year-old girl still buried in her soul, weeping with exhausted, bitter rage when the rains summoned by her teacher would not disperse at her command. She had hated Caerdinn for being stronger than she. And although the long years of looking after the irascible old man had turned that hatred to affection, she had never forgotten that she was capable of it. Even, she added ironically to herself, as she was capable of working the death-spells on a helpless man, as she had on the dying robber in the ruins of the town; even as she was capable of leaving a man and two children who loved her, because of her love of the quest for power.
Would I have been able to understand what I saw tonight if I had given all my time, all my heart, to the study of magic? Would I have had power like that, mighty as a storm gathered into my two hands?
Through the windows beyond the half-parted bedcurtains, she could see the chill white eye of the moon. Its light, broken by the leading of the casement, lay scattered like the spangles of a fish’s mail across the black and silver satin of the gown that she had worn and over the respectable brown velvet suit that John had not. It touched the bed and picked out the scars that crossed John’s bare arm, glimmered on the upturned palm of his hand, and outlined the shape of his nose and lips against the darkness. Her vision in the water bowl returned to her again, an icy shadow on her heart.
Would she be able to save him, she wondered, if she were more powerful? If she had given her time to her powers wholly, instead of portioning it between them and him? Was that, ultimately, what she had cast unknowingly away?
Somewhere in the night a hinge creaked. Stilling her breathing to listen, she heard the almost soundless pat of bare feet outside her door and the muffled vibration of a shoulder blundering into the wall.
She slid from beneath the silken quilts and pulled on her shift. Over it she wrapped the first garment she laid hands on, John’s voluminous plaids, and swiftly crossed the blackness of the room to open the door.
“Gar?”
He was standing a few feet from her, gawky and very boyish-looking in his long nightshirt. His gray eyes stared out straight ahead of him, without benefit of spectacles, and his thin hair was flattened and tangled from the pillow. He gasped at the sound of her voice and almost fell, groping for the wall’s support. She realized then that she had waked him.
“Gar, it’s me, Jenny. Are you all right?”
His breathing was fast with shock. She put her hand gently on his arm to steady him, and he blinked myopically down at her for a moment. Then he drew a long breath. “Fine,” he said shakily. “I’m fine, Jenny. I...” He looked around him and ran an unsteady hand through his hair. “I—I must have been walking in my sleep again.”
“Do you often?”
He nodded and rubbed his face. “That is... I didn’t in the north, but I do sometimes here. It’s just that I dreamed...” He paused, frowning, trying to recall. “Zyerne...”