“He pox-sure heard your father’s knights coming, didn’t he?” John added cynically.
Gareth looked unhappy. Jenny nudged her mare gently and took a step or two closer to the clock tower, casting her senses wide over all the Vale. Through the broken webs of branches overhead, the massive darkness of the westward-facing cliffs of Nast Wall could be seen. Their dizzy heights towered like rusted metal, streaked with purple where shadows hit; boulders flashed white upon it like outcroppings of broken bone. Above the line of the dragon’s burning, the timber grew on the flanks of the mountain around the cliffs, up toward the mossed rocks of the cirques and snowfields above. The ice-gouged horns of the Wall’s bare and ragged crest were veiled in cloud now, but beyond its hunched shoulder to the east a thin track of smoke could be seen, marking the Citadel of Halnath and the siege camps beneath it.
Below that wall of stone and trees, the open spaces of the Vale lay, a huge well of air, a gulf filled with pale, sparkly sunlight—and with something else. Jenny’s mind touched it briefly and shrank from that living consciousness that she sensed, coiled like a snake in its dark lair.
Behind her, she heard Gareth argue, “But the dragon you killed up in the gully in Wyr didn’t know you were coming.” The very loudness of his voice scraped her nerves and made her want to cuff him into silence. “You were able to get around behind it and take it by surprise. I don’t see how...”
“Neither do I, my hero,” John cut in softly, collecting Cow’s reins in one hand and the charger Osprey’s lead in the other. “But if you’re willing to bet your life Jen’s wrong, I’m not. Lead us on to the famous Rise.”
On the night of the dragon, many had taken refuge in the buildings on Tanner’s Rise; their bones lay everywhere among the blackened ruin of crumbled stone. From the open space in front of what had been the warehouses, it had once been possible to overlook the whole thriving little town of Deeping, under its perpetual haze of smoke from the smelters and forges down below. That haze was gone now, burned off in the dragon’s greater fire; the whole town lay open to the mild, heatless glitter of the winter sunlight, a checkerwork of rubble and bones.
Looking about her at the buildings of the Rise, Jenny felt cold with shock, as if she had been struck in the pit of the stomach; then, as she realized why she recognized the place, the shock was replaced by horror and despair.
It was the place where she had seen John dying, in her vision in the water bowl.
She had done divination before, but never so accurately as this. The precision of it appalled her—every stone and puddle and broken wall was the same; she remembered the way the looming line of the dark cliffs looked against the sky and the very patterns of the bones of the town below. She felt overwhelmed by a despairing urge to change something—to shatter a wall, to dig a hole, to clear away the brush at the gravelly lip of the Rise where it sloped down to the town—anything to make it not as it had been. Yet in her soul she knew doing so would change nothing and she feared lest whatever she did would make the picture she had seen more, rather than less, exact.
Her lips felt stiff as she spoke. “Is this the only point in the town this far from the Gates?” She knew already what Gareth would reply.
“It had to be, because of the smell of the tanneries. You see how nothing was built near it. Even the water tanks and reservoirs were put up in those rocks to the north, rather than here where the better springs were.”
Jenny nodded dully, looking out toward the high rocks to the north of the town where he was pointing. Her whole soul was crying No! No...
She felt suddenly hopeless and stupid, overmatched and unprepared and incredibly naive. We were fools, she thought bitterly. The slaying of the first worm was a fluke. We should never have been so stupid as to presume upon it, never have thought we could do it again. Zyerne was right. Zyerne was right.
She looked over at John, who had dismounted from Cow and was standing on the rocky lip of the Rise where the ground fell sharply to the dale below, looking across toward the opposite rise of the Gates. Cold seemed to cover her bones like a vast, winged shadow blocking the sun, and she heeled Moon Horse gently over beside him. Without looking up at her, he said, “I figure I can just make it. The Temple of Sarmendes is about a quartermile along the Grand Passage, if Dromar was telling the truth. If Osprey and I go full-pelt, we should just about be able to catch the dragon in the Market Hall, just within the Gates. Saying he’s able to hear me the minute I start down the Rise, I should still be able to catch him before he can get out into the air. I’ll have room to fight him in the Market Hall. That will be my only chance.”
“No,” Jenny said quietly. He looked up at her, eyebrows quirking. “You have another chance, if we ride back now to Bel. Zyerne can help you take the thing from behind, deeper in the caves. Her spells will protect you, too, as mine can not.”
“Jen.” The closed wariness of his expression split suddenly into the white flash of teeth. He held up his hands to help her down, shaking his head reprovingly.
She made no move. “At least it is to her advantage to preserve you safe, if she wants the dragon slain. The rest is none of your affair.”
His smile widened still further. “You have a point, love,” he assented. “But she doesn’t look to me like she can cook worth a row of beans.” And he helped her down from her horse.
The foreboding that weighed on Jenny’s heart did not decrease; rather, it grew upon her through the short afternoon. She told herself, again and again, as she paced out the magic circles and set up her fire in their midst to brew her poisons, that water was a liar; that it divined the future as crystal could not, but that its divinations were less reliable even than fire’s. But a sense of impending doom weighed upon her heart, and, as the daylight dimmed, in the fire under her simmering kettle she seemed to see again the same picture: John’s shirt of chain mail rent open by claws in a dozen places, the broken links all glittering with dark blood.
Jenny had set up her fire at the far end of the Rise, where the wind would carry the smoke and the vapors away from both the camp and the Vale, and worked throughout the afternoon spelling the ingredients and the steel of the harpoons themselves. Miss Mab had advised her about the more virulent poisons that would work upon dragons, and such ingredients as the gnome wizard had not had among her slender stocks Jenny had purchased in the Street of the Apothecaries-in the Dockmarket in Bel. While she worked, the two men prowled the Rise, fetching water for the horses from the little well some distance into the woods, since the fountain house that had served the tanneries had been crushed like an eggshell, and setting up a camp. John had very little to say since she had spoken to him on the edge of the Rise; Gareth seemed to shiver all over with a mingling of excitement and terror.
Jenny had been a little surprised at John’s invitation that Gareth join them, though she had planned to ask John to extend it. She had her own reasons for wanting the boy with them, which had little to do with his expressed desire—though he had not expressed it lately—to see a dragonslaying close at hand. She—and undoubtedly John as well—knew that their departure would have left Gareth unprotected in Bel.