She hitched her shawl up over her shoulders, a thin and glittering spiderweb of South Islands silk, the thick masses of her hair lying over it like a second shawl. Cold seemed to breathe through the window at her back.
Gareth went back to pacing, his hands shoved in the pockets of the old leather hunting breeches he’d put on to go burgling.
“But she didn’t know its name, did she?”
“No,” replied Jenny. “And in that case...” She paused, then frowned, dismissing the thought.
“What?” John wanted to know, catching the doubt in her voice.
“No,” she repeated. “It’s inconceivable that at her level of power she wouldn’t have been taught Limitations. It’s the first thing anyone learns.” And seeing Gareth’s incomprehension, she explained. “It’s one of the things that takes me so long when I weave spells. You have to limit the effect of any spell. If you call rain, you must specify a certain heaviness, so as not to flood the countryside. If you call a curse of destruction upon someone or something, you have to set Limitations so that their destruction doesn’t come in a generalized catastrophe that wipes out your own house and goods. Magic is very prodigal in its effects. Limitations are among the earliest things a mage is taught.”
“Even among the gnomes?” Gareth asked. “You said their magic is different.”
“It is taught differently—transmitted differently. There are things Mab has said that I do not understand and things that she refuses to tell me about how their power is formed. But it is still magic. Mab knows the Limitations—from what she has told me, I gather they are more important in the night below the ground. If she studied among the gnomes, Zyerne would have to have learned about them.”
John threw back his head and laughed in genuine amusement. “Gaw, it must be rotting her!” He chuckled. “Think of it, Jen. She wants to get rid of the gnomes, so she calls down a generalized every-worst-curse she can think of upon them—and gets a dragon she can’t get rid of! It’s gie beautiful!”
“It’s ‘gie’ frivolous,” Jenny retorted.
“No wonder she threw fire at me! She must be that furious just thinking about it!” His eyes were dancing under his singed brows.
“It just isn’t possible,” Jenny insisted, in the cool voice she used to call their sons back from skylarking. Then, more seriously, “She can’t have gotten to that degree of power untaught, John. It’s impossible. All power must be paid for, somehow.”
“But it’s the sort of thing that would happen if it hadn’t been, isn’t it?”
Jenny didn’t reply. For a long time she stared out the window at the dark shape of the battlements, visible beneath the chilly autumn stars. “I don’t know,” she said at last, stroking the spiderweb fringes other gauze shawl.
“She has so much power. It’s inconceivable that she hasn’t paid for it in some fashion. The key to magic is magic. She has had all time and all power to study it fully. And yet...” She paused, identifying at last her own feelings toward what Zyerne was and did. “I thought that someone who had achieved that level of power would be different.”
“Ah,” John said softly. Across the room, their eyes met. “But don’t think that what she’s done with her achievement has betrayed your striving, love. For it hasn’t. It’s only betrayed her own.”
Jenny sighed, reflecting once again on John’s uncanny ability to touch the heart of any problem, then smiled a little at herself; and they traded a kiss in a glance.
Gareth said quietly, “But what are we going to do? The dragon has to be destroyed; and, if you destroy it, you’ll be playing right into her hands.”
A smile flicked across John’s face, a glimpse of the bespectacled schoolboy peeking out from behind the complex barricades raised by the hardships of the Winterlands and his father’s embittered domination. Jenny felt his eyes on her again—the tip of one thick reddish brow and the question in the bright glance. After ten years, they had grown used to speaking without words.
A qualm of fear passed over her, though she knew he was right. After a moment, she drew her breath in another sigh and nodded.
“Good.” John’s impish smile widened, like that of a boy intent on doing mischief, and he rubbed his hands briskly. He turned to Gareth. “Get your socks packed, my hero. We leave for the Deep tonight.”
IX
“Stop.”
Puzzled, Gareth and John drew rein on either side of Jenny, who sat Moon Horse where she had halted her in the middle of the leaf-drifted track. All around them the foothills of Nast Wall were deathly silent, save for the trickle of wind through the charred trunks of what had once been woods to either side of the road and the faint jingle of brass as Osprey tugged at his leading-rein and Clivy began foraging prosaically in the sedges of the ditchside. Lower down the hills, the woods were still whole, denuded by coming winter rather than fire; under the pewter-gray trunks of the beeches, the rust-colored underbrush lay thick. Here it was only a tangle of brittle stems, ready to crumble at a touch. Half-hidden in the weeds near the scorched paving stones of the road were the blackened bones of fugitives from the dragon’s first attack, mixed with shattered cooking vessels and the silver coins that had been dropped in flight. The coins lay in the mud still. No one had ventured this close to the ruined town to retrieve them.
Up ahead in the weak sunlight of winter, the remains of the first houses of Deeping could be seen. According to Gareth the place had never been walled. The road ran into the town under the archway below the broken clock tower.
For a long while Jenny sat listening in silence, turning her head this way and that. Neither of the men spoke—indeed, ever since they had slipped out of the Palace in the small hours before dawn, Jenny had been acutely conscious of John’s growing silence. She glanced across at him now, where he sat withdrawn into himself on his riding horse Cow, and remembered for the dozenth time that day Zyerne’s words—that without her assistance, neither he nor Jenny would be capable of meeting the dragon Morkeleb.
Beyond a doubt John was remembering them, too.
“Gareth,” Jenny said at last, her voice little more than a whisper, “is there another way into the town? Some place in the town that is farther from the Gates of the Deep than we are now?”
Gareth frowned. “Why?”
Jenny shook her head, not certain herself why she had spoken. But something whispered across her nerves, as it had all those weeks ago by the ruins of the nameless town in the Winterlands—a sense of danger that caused her to look for the signs of it. Under Mab’s tutelage she had become more certain of trusting her instincts, and something in her hated to go closer than the ruined clock tower into the sunlight that fell across Deeping Vale.
After a moment’s consideration Gareth said, “The farthest point in Deeping from the Great Gates would be the Tanner’s Rise. It’s at the bottom of that spur over there that bounds the town to the west. I think it’s about a halfmile from the Gates. The whole town isn’t—wasn’t—much more than a quarter-mile across.”
“Will we have a clear view of the Gates from there?”
Confused by this bizarre stipulation, he nodded. “The ground’s high, and most of the buildings were flattened in the attack. But if we wanted a lookout on the gates, you can see there’s enough of the clock tower left for a...”
“No,” Jenny murmured. “I don’t think we can go that near.”
John’s head came sharply around at that. Gareth faltered, “It can’t—it can’t hear us, can it?”
“Yes,” Jenny said, not knowing why she said it. “No—it isn’t hearing, exactly. I don’t know. But I feel something, on the fringes of my mind. I don’t think it knows we’re here—not yet. But if we rode closer, it might. It is an old dragon, Gareth; it must be, for its name to be in the Lines. In one of the old books from the Palace library, it says that dragons change their skins with their souls, that the young are simply colored and bright; the mature are complex of pattern and the old become simpler and simpler again, as their power deepens and grows. Morkeleb is black. I don’t know what that means, but I don’t like what I think it implies—great age, great power—his senses must fill the Vale of Deeping like still water, sensitive to the slightest ripple.”