A soft voice behind them said, “Please don’t be angry with him, Gareth.”
Zyerne stood there, in plum-colored silk so dark it was nearly black, with knots of pink-tinted cream upon her trailing sleeves. Her mead-colored eyes were troubled. “You did take his seal, you know, and depart without his permission.”
John spoke up. “Bit of an expensive slap on the wrist, though, isn’t it? I mean, there the dragon is and all, while we’re here waiting for leave to go after it.”
Zyerne’s lips tightened a little, then smoothed. At the near end of the King’s Gallery, a small door in the great ones opened, and the Chamberlain Badegamus appeared, quietly summoning the first of the petitioners whom the King had acknowledged.
“There really is no danger to us here, you know. The dragon has been confining his depredations to the farmsteads along the feet of Nast Wall.”
“Ah,” John said comprehendingly. “That makes it all right, then. And is this what you’ve told the people of those farmsteads to which, as you say, the dragon’s been confining his depredations?”
The flash of anger in her eyes was stronger then, as if no one had ever spoken to her so—or at least, thought Jenny, observing silently from John’s side, not for a long time. With visible effort, Zyerne controlled herself and said with an air of one reproving a child, “You must understand. There are many more pressing concerns facing the King...”
“More pressing than a dragon sitting on his doorstep?” demanded Gareth, outraged.
She burst into a sweet gurgle of laughter. “There’s no need to enact a Dockmarket drama over it, you know. I’ve told you before, darling, it isn’t worth the wrinkles it will give you.”
He pulled his head back from her playful touch. “Wrinkles! We’re talking about people being killed!”
“Tut, Gareth,” Bond Clerlock drawled, strolling languidly over to them. “You’re getting as bad as old Polycarp used to be.”
Under the paint, his face looked even more washedout next to Zyerne’s sparkling radiance. With a forced effort at his old lightness, he went on, “You shouldn’t grudge-those poor farmers the only spice in their dull little lives.”
“Spice...” Gareth began, and Zyerne squeezed his hand chidingly.
“Don’t tell me you’re going to go all dull and altruistic on us. What a bore that would be.” She smiled. “And I will tell you this,” she added more soberly. “Don’t do anything that would further anger your father. Be patient—and try to understand.”
Halfway down the long gallery, the Chamberlain Badegamus was returning, passing the small group of gnomes who sat, an island of isolation, in the shadow of one of the fluted ornamental arches along the east wall. As the Chamberlain walked by, one of them rose in a silken whisper of flowing, alien robes, the cloudy wisps of his milkwhite hair floating around his slumped back. Gareth had pointed him out to Jenny earlier—Azwylcartusherands, called Dromar by the folk of men who had little patience with the tongue of gnomes, longtime ambassador from the Lord of the Deep to the Court of Bel. Badegamus saw him and checked his stride, then glanced quickly at Zyerne. She shook her head. Badegamus averted his face and walked past the gnomes without seeing them.
“They grow impudent,” the enchantress said softly. “To send envoys here, when they fight on the side of the traitors of Halnath.”
“Well, they can hardly help that, can they, if the back way out of the Deep leads into the Citadel,” John remarked.
“They could have opened the Citadel gates to let the King’s troops in.”
John scratched the side of his long nose. “Well, being a barbarian and all, I wouldn’t know how things are done in civilized lands,” he said. “In the north, we’ve got a word for someone who’d do that to a man who gave him shelter when he was driven from his home.”
For an instant Zyerne was silent, her power and her anger seeming to crackle in the air. Then she burst into another peal of chiming laughter. “I swear, Dragonsbane, you do have a refreshingly naive way of looking at things. You make me feel positively ancient.” She brushed a tendril of her hair aside from her cheek as she spoke; she looked as sweet and guileless as a girl of twenty. “Come. Some of us are going to slip away from this silliness and go riding along the sea cliffs. Will you come, Gareth?” Her hand stole into his in such a way that he could not avoid it without rudeness—Jenny could see his face color slightly at the touch. “And you, our barbarian? You know the King won’t see you today.”
“Be that as it may,” John said quietly. “I’ll stay here on the off chance.”
Bond laughed tinnily. “There’s the spirit that won the Realm!”
“Aye,” John agreed in a mild voice and returned to the carved bench where he and Jenny had been, secure in his established reputation for barbarous eccentricity.
Gareth drew his hand from Zyerne’s and sat down nearby, catching his mantlings in the lion’s-head arm of the chair. “I think I’ll stay as well,” he said, with as much dignity as one could have while disentangling oneself from the furniture.
Bond laughed again. “I think our Prince has been in the north too long!” Zyerne wrinkled her nose, as if at a joke in doubtful taste.
“Run along, Bond.” She smiled. “I must speak to the King. I shall join you presently.” Gathering up her train, she moved off toward the bronze doors of the King’s antechamber, the opals that spangled her veils giving the impression of dew flecking an apple blossom as she passed the pale bands of the windowlight. As she came near the little group of gnomes, old Dromar rose again and walked toward her with the air of one steeling himself for a loathed but necessary encounter. But she turned her glance from him and quickened her step, so that, to intercept her, he would have to run after her on his short, bandy legs. This he would not do, but stood looking after her for a moment, smoldering anger in his pale amber eyes.
“I don’t understand it,” said Gareth, much later, as the three of them jostled their way along the narrow lanes of the crowded Dockmarket quarter. “She said Father was angry, yes—but he knew whom I’d be bringing with me. And he must have known about the dragon’s latest attack.” He hopped across the fish-smelling slime of the gutter to avoid a trio of sailors who’d come staggering out of one of the taverns that lined the cobbled street and nearly tripped over his own cloak.
When Badegamus had announced to the nearly empty gallery that the King would see no one else that day, John and Jenny had taken the baffled and fuming Gareth back with them to the guest house they had been assigned in one of the outer courts of the Palace. There they had changed out of their borrowed court dress, and John had announced his intention of spending the remainder of the afternoon in the town, in quest of gnomes.
“Gnomes?” Gareth said, surprised.
“Well, if it hasn’t occurred to anyone else, it has occurred to me that, if I’m to fight this drake, I’m going to need to know the layout of the caverns.” With surprising deftness, he disentangled himself from the intricate crisscross folds of his mantlings, his head emerging from the double-faced satin like a tousled and unruly weed. “And since it didn’t seem the thing to address them at Court...”
“But they’re plotting!” Gareth protested. He paused in his search for a place to dump the handful of oldfashioned neck-chains and rings among the already accumulating litter of books, harpoons, and the contents of Jenny’s medical pouch on the table. “Speaking to them at Court would have been suicide! And besides, you’re not going to fight him in the Deep, are you? I mean...” He barely stopped himself from the observation that in all the ballads the Dragonsbanes had slain their foes in front of their lairs, not in them.