“And her?” Dromar jabbed one stumpy finger, laden with old-fashioned, smooth-polished gems, at Jenny. “She is a witch. What surety have we that she will not go snooping and spying, delving out our secrets, turning them against us, defiling them, poisoning them, as others have done?”
The gnome woman frowned down at Jenny for a moment, her wide mouth pursed up with thought. Then she knelt beside her again and pushed the writing things across the table at Dromar. “There,” she said. “Thou may draw the maps, and put upon them what thou will, and leave from them what thou will.”
“And the witch?” There was suspicion and hatred in his voice, and Jenny reflected that she was getting very tired of being mistaken for Zyerne.
“Ah,” said Miss Mab, and reaching out, took Jenny’s small, scratched, boyish brown hands in her own. For a long moment she looked into her eyes. As if the small, cold fingers clasping hers stirred at the jewel heap of her dreams, Jenny felt the gnome woman’s mind probing at her thoughts, as she had probed at Gareth’s, seeking to see the shape of her essence. She realized that Miss Mab was a mage, like herself.
Reflex made her stiffen. But Mab smiled gently and held out to her the depths of her own mind and soul—gentle and clear as water, and stubborn as water, too, containing none of the bitterness, resentments, and doubts that Jenny knew clotted the comers of her own heart. She relaxed, feeling as ashamed as if she had struck out at an inquiry kindly made, and felt some other own angers dissolving under that wise scrutiny. She felt the other woman’s power, much greater than her own, but gentle and warm as sunlight.
When Miss Mab spoke, it was not to Dromar, but to her. “Thou art afraid for him,” she said softly. “And perhaps thou should be.” She put out one round little hand, to pat Jenny’s hair. “But remember that the dragon is not the greatest of evils in this land, nor is death the worst that can befall; neither for him, nor for thee.”
VII
In the week that followed. Jenny returned many times to the crumbling house in the Dockmarket. Twice John accompanied her, but John, for the most part, spent his days in the King’s Gallery with Gareth, waiting for a sign from the King. His evenings he spent with the wild young courtiers who surrounded Zyerne, playing dancing bear, as he called it, and dealing as best he could with the slow torture of waiting for a combat that could cost his life. Being John, he did not speak of it, but Jenny felt it when they made love and in his silences when they were alone together, this gradual twisting of the nerves that was driving him nearly mad.
She herself avoided the Court for the most part and spent her days in the city or in the house of the gnomes. She went there quietly, wrapped in spells to conceal her from the folk in the streets, for, as the days ground by, she could feel the ugly miasma of hate and fear spreading through the streets like poisoned fog. On her way through the Dockmarket quarter, she would pass the big taverns—the Lame Ox, the Gallant Rat, the Sheep in the Mire—where the unemployed men and women who had come in off the ruined farms gathered daily, hoping for a few hours’ hire. Those in need of cheap labor knew to go there to find people who would move furniture or clean out stables for a few coppers; but with the winter storms making the shipping scarce and the high price of bread taking all the spare funds to be had, there were few enough who could afford to pay even that. None of the gnomes still living in the city—and there were many of them, in spite of the hardships—dared go by the Sheep in the Mire after noontime, for by that hour those within would have given up hope of work that day and would be concentrating what little energy they had on getting drunk.
So Jenny moved in her shadowy secrets, as she had moved through the lawless Winterlands, to visit the Lady Taseldwyn, who was called Miss Mab in the language of men.
From the first, she had been aware that the gnome woman was a more powerful mage than she. But, rather than jealousy and resentment, she felt only gladness that she had found someone to teach her after all those years.
In most things, Mab was a willing teacher, though the shape of the gnomes’ wizardry was strange to Jenny, alien, as their minds were alien. They had no Lines, but seemed to transmit their power and knowledge whole from generation to generation of mages in some fashion that Jenny did not understand. Mab told her of the healing spells for which the Deep was famous, of the drugs now sequestered there, lost to them as surely as the dragon’s gold was lost, of the spells that could hold the soul, the essence of life, to the flesh, or of the more dangerous spells by which the life-essence of one person could be drawn to strengthen the crumbling life of another. The gnome woman taught her other spells of the magic underground—spells of crystal and stone and spiraling darkness, whose meaning Jenny could only dimly comprehend. These she could only memorize by rote, hoping that with later meditation, skill and understanding would come. Mab spoke also to her of the secrets of the earth, the movement of water, and how stones thought; and she spoke of the dark realms of the Deep itself, cavern beneath cavern in endless succession of hidden glories that had never seen light.
Once, she spoke of Zyerne.
“Aye, she was apprenticed among us Healers.” She sighed, putting aside the three-stringed dulcimer upon which she had been outlining to Jenny the song-spells of their craft. “She was a vain little girl, vain and spoiled. She had her talent for mockery even then—she would listen to the Old Ones among us, the great Healers, who had more power at their command than she could ever dream of, nodding that sleek little head others in respect, and then go and imitate their voices to her friends in Deeping.”
Jenny remembered the silvery chime of the sorceress’s laughter at dinner and the way she had hurried her steps to make Dromar run after her if he would speak.
It was early evening. For all its cold, the great hall of the gnomes’ house was stuffy, the air stagnant beneath its massive arches and along the faded pavement of its checkered corridors. The noises of the streets had fallen to their dinnertime lull, save for the chiming of the clock towers all over the city and one lone kindling-peddler crying his wares.
Mab shook her head, her voice low with remembrance of times past. “She was greedy for secrets, as some girls are greedy for sweets—covetous for the power they could give her. She studied out the hidden ways around the Places of Healing so that she could sneak and spy, hiding to listen in darkness. All power must be paid for, but she took the secrets of those greater than she and defiled them, tainted them—poisoned them as she poisoned the very heart of the Deep—yes, she did poison if—and turned all our strength against us.”
Jenny shook her head, puzzled. “Dromar said something of the kind,” she said. “But how can you taint spells? You can spoil your own magic, for it colors your soul as you wield it, but you cannot spoil another’s. I don’t understand.”
Mab glanced sharply at her, as if remembering her presence and remembering also that she was not one of the folk of the gnomes. “Nor should thou,” she said in her soft, high voice. “These are things that concern the magic of gnomes only. They are not human things.”
“Zyerne seems to have made them human things.”
Jenny moved her weight on her heels, easing her knees on the hardness of the stone floor through the shabby cushion. “If it is, indeed, from the Places of Healing that she learned the arts that have made her the most powerful mage in the land.”
“Pah!” the gnome mage said in disgust. “The Healers of the Deep were more powerful than she—by the Stone, I was more powerful!”