Jenny said softly, “But she is calling you. She called you that first night we were in her hunting lodge. Had she done so before?”
“I—I don’t know.” He looked shaken and in and very frightened, as he had when Jenny had probed at his mind, as if looking at things that he did not want to see. Trey, who had gone to take a spill from the fire and was lighting the small ivory lamps on the edge of John’s desk, shook out her taper, went quietly over to him, and got him to sit down beside her on the edge of the curtained bed.
At length Gareth said, “She might have. A few months ago she asked me to dine with her and my father in her wing of the palace. I didn’t go. I was afraid Father would be angry at me for slighting her, but later on he said something that made me wonder whether he’d even known about it. I wondered then. I thought...” He blushed still more hotly. “That was when I thought she might have been in love with me.”
“I’ve seen loves like that between wolves and sheep, but the romance tends to be a bit one-sided,” John remarked, scratching his nose. “What prevented you from going?”
“Polycarp.” He toyed with the folds of his mantlings, which caught a soft edge of brightness where the angle of the lamplight came down past the curtains of the bed. “He was always telling me to beware of her. He found out about the dinner and talked me out of going.”
“Well, I don’t know much about magic and all that, but just offhand, lad, I’d say he might have saved your life.” John braced his back against the desk’s edge and fingered a silent run of melody up the hurdy-gurdy’s keys.
Gareth shook his head, puzzled. “But why? It wasn’t a week before he tried to kill us—me and my father both.”
“If that was him.”
The boy stared at him, slowly-growing horror and realization in his face. He whispered, “But I saw him.”
“If she could take the shape of a cat or a bird, putting on the form of the Master of Halnath wouldn’t be beyond her—Jen?” He glanced across the room to where she sat silent, her arm resting across one up-drawn knee, her chin upon her wrist.
“She wouldn’t have taken on his actual being,” she said quietly. “An illusion would have served. Shapeshifting requires enormous power—but then, Zyerne has enormous power. However she did it, the act itself is logical. If Polycarp had begun to suspect her intentions toward Gareth, it would dispose of and discredit him at once. By making you the witness. Gar, she removed all chance of your helping him. She must have known how bitter a betrayal it would be.”
Numbly, Gareth whispered, “No!” struck by the horror of what he had done.
Trey’s voice was soft in the stillness. “But what does she want with Gareth? I can understand her holding the King, because without his support she’d—she wouldn’t exactly be nothing, but she certainly wouldn’t be able to live as she does now. But why entrap Gareth as well? And what does she want with Bond? He’s no good to her... We’re really only a very minor family, you know. I mean, we haven’t any political power, and not that much money.” A rueful smile touched one comer of her lips as she fingered the rose-point lace of her cuff. “All this... One must keep up appearances, of course, and Bond is trying to marry me off well. But we really haven’t anything Zyerne would want.”
“And why destroy them?” Gareth asked, desperate concern for his father in his voice. “Do all spells do that?”
“No,” Jenny said. “That’s what surprises me about this—I’ve never heard of a spell of influence that would waste the body of the victim as it holds the mind. But neither have I heard of one holding as close as the one which she has upon your father, Gareth; nor of one that lasts so long. But her magic is the magic of the gnomes and unlike the spells of men. It may be that among their secrets is one that will hold the very essence of another, twining around it like the tendrils of a morning-glory vine, which can tear the foundations of a stone house asunder. But then,” she went on, her voice low, “it is almost certain that to have that kind of control over him, at the first, she had to obtain his consent.”
“His consent?” Trey cried, horrified. “But how could he? How could anyone?”
Gareth, Jenny was interested to note, said nothing to this. He had seen, however briefly, on the road in the north, the mirror of his own soul—and he also knew Zyerne.
Jenny explained, “To tamper that deeply with another’s essence always requires the consent of the victim. Zyerne is a shapeshifter—the principle is the same.”
Trey shook her head. “I don’t understand.”
Jenny sighed and, rising to her feet, crossed to where the two young people sat side-by-side. She put her hand on the girl’s shoulder. “A shapeshifter can change someone else’s essence, even as she can change her own. It requires enormous power—and first she must in some fashion obtain the victim’s consent. The victim can resist, unless the shapeshifter can find some chink of consenting, some hidden demon within—some part of the essence that wills to be changed.”
The deepening darkness outside made the lamplight even more golden, like honey where it lay over the girl’s face. Under the shadows of the long, thick lashes. Jenny could read both fear and fascination, that half-understanding that is the first whisper of consent.
“I think you would resist me if I tried to transform you into a lapdog, had I the power to do so. There is very little of the lapdog in your soul. Trey Clerlock. But if I were to transform you into a horse—a yearling filly, smokegray and sister to the sea winds—I think I could obtain your consent to that.”
Trey jerked her eyes away, hiding them against Gareth’s shoulder, and the young man put a protective arm around her as well as he could, considering that he was sitting on the trailing ends of his extravagant sleeves.
“It is the power of shapeshifting and the danger,” Jenny said, her voice low in the silence of the room. “If I transformed you into a filly. Trey, your essence would be the essence of a horse. Your thoughts would be a horse’s thoughts, your body a mare’s body; your loves and desires would be those of a young, swift beast. You might remember for a time what you were, but you could not find your way back to be it once again. I think you would be happy as a filly.”
“Stop it,” Trey whispered, and covered her ears. Gareth’s hold about her tightened. Jenny was silent. After a moment the girl looked up again, her eyes dark with the stirred depths of her dreams. “I’m sorry,” she said, her voice small. “It’s not you I’m afraid of. It’s me.”
“I know,” Jenny replied softly. “But do you understand now? Do you understand what she might have done to your father, Gareth? It is sometimes less painful to give over striving and let another mind rule yours. When Zyerne first came to power she couldn’t have acquired that kind of hold over you, because you would not come near enough for her to do it. You hated her, and you were only a boy—she could not draw you as she draws men. But when you became a man...”
“I think that’s loathsome.” It was Trey’s turn to put a protective arm around Gareth’s satin shoulders.
“But a damn good way to keep her power,” John pointed out, leaning one arm across the hurdy-gurdy resting upon his knees.
“I still can’t be sure that this is what she did,” Jenny said. “And it still wouldn’t explain why she did the same thing to Bond. I would not know for certain until I could see the King, speak to him...”
“God’s Grandmother, he’ll scarcely speak to his own son, love, let alone me or thee.” John paused, listening to his own words. “Which might be a good reason for not speaking to me or thee, come to that.” His eyes flickered to Gareth. “You know. Gar, the more I see of this, the more I think I’d like to have a few words with your dad.”