Then the dragon Morkeleb raised his head, and for a time she looked into his eyes.
They were like lamps, a crystalline white kaleidoscope, cold and sweet and burning as the core of a flame. It struck her with a sense of overwhelming shock that she looked into the eyes of a mage like herself. It was an alien intelligence, clean and cutting as a sliver of black glass. There was something terrible and fascinating about those eyes; the singing in her mind was like a voice speaking to her in words she almost understood. She felt a calling within her to the hungers that had all of her life consumed her.
With a desperate wrench, she pulled her thoughts from it and turned her eyes aside.
She knew then why the legends warned never to look into a dragon’s eyes. It was not only because the dragon could snag some part of your soul and paralyze you with indecision while it struck.
It was because, in pulling away, you left some shred of yourself behind, snared in those ice-crystal depths.
She turned to flee, to leave that place and those tooknowing eyes, to run from the singing that whispered to the harmonics of her bones. She would have run, but her booted foot brushed something as she turned. Looking down to the man who lay at her feet, she saw for the first time that his wounds still bled.
X
“He can’t be dying!”- Gareth finished laying a heap of fresh-cut branches beside the low fire and turned to Jenny, his eyes pleading with her. As if. Jenny thought, with what power was left in her numbed mind, his saying could make it so.
Without speaking, she leaned across to touch the icecold face of the man who lay covered with plaids and bearskins, so close to the flickering blaze.
Her mind felt blunted, like a traveler lost in the woods who returned again and again to the same place, unable to struggle clear.
She had known that it would come to this, when first she had taken him into her life. She should never have yielded to the mischief in those brown eyes. She should have sent him away and not given in to that weak part of herself that whispered: I want a friend.
She stood up and shook out her skirts, pulling her plaid more tightly around her sheepskin jacket. Gareth was watching her with frightened dog eyes, hurt and pleading; he followed her over to the heap of the packs on the other side of the fire.
She could have had her fill of lovers. There were always those who would lie with a witch for the novelty of it or for the luck it was said to bring. Why had she let him stay until morning and talked to him as if he were not a man and an enemy whom she knew even then would fetter her soul? Why had she let him touch her heart as well as her body?
The night was dead-still, the sky dark save for the white disc of the waxing moon. Its ghostly light barely outlined the broken bones of the empty town below. A log settled in the dying fire; the spurt of light touched a spangle of red on the twisted links of John’s mail shirt and glimmered stickily on the upturned palm of one blistered hand. Jenny felt her whole body one open wound of grief.
We change what we touch, she thought. Why had she let him change her? She had been happy, alone with her magic. The key to magic is magic—she should have held to that from the start. She had known even then that he was a man who would give his life to help others, even others not his own.
If he had waited for Zyerne...
She pushed the thought away with bitter violence, knowing Zyerne’s magic could have saved him. All day she had wanted to weep, not only with grief, but with anger at herself for all the choices of the past.
Thin and plaintive as a child’s, Gareth’s voice broke into her circle of stumbling self-hate. “Isn’t there anything that you can do?”
“I have done what I can,” she replied wearily. “I have washed his wounds and stitched them shut, laid spells of healing upon them. The dragon’s blood is a poison in his veins, and he has lost too much blood of his own.”
“But surely there’s something...” In the brief gleam of the fire, she could see that he had been weeping. Her own soul felt cold now and drained as John’s flesh.
“You have asked me that seven times since it grew dark,” she said. “This is beyond my skills—beyond the medicines that I have—beyond my magic.”
She tried to tell herself that, even had she not loved him, even had she not given up the time she could have spent studying, it would still have been so.
Would she have been able to save him, if she had not given him all those hours; if she had spent all those early mornings meditating among the stones in the solitude of the hilltop instead of lying talking in his bed?
Or would she only have been a little bleaker, a little madder—a little more like the worst side of herself—a little more like Caerdinn?
She did not know, and the hurt of that was almost as bad as the hurt of suspecting that she did know.
But she had only her own small powers—spells worked one rune at a time, patiently, in the smallest increments of thought. She slowed and calmed her mind, as she did when she worked magic, and realized she could not cure him. What then could she do for him? What had Mab said, when she had spoken of healing?
She ran her hands through her long hair, shifting the weight of it from her face and neck. Her shoulders hurt with cramp; she had not slept in two nights, and her body ached.
“The most we can do now is keep heating stones in the fire to put around him,” she said at last. “We must keep him warm.”
Gareth swallowed and wiped his nose. “Just that?”
“For now, yes. If he seems a little stronger in the morning, we may be able to move him.” But she knew in her heart that he would not live until morning. Like a whispering echo, the vision in the water bowl returned to her, a bitter nightmare of failed hope.
Hesitantly, Gareth offered, “There are physicians up at Halnath. Polycarp, for one.”
“And an army around its walls.” Her voice sounded very cold to her own ears. “If he’s still alive in the morning... I didn’t want you to risk putting yourself once again where Zyerne might reach you, but in the morning, I think you should take Battlehammer and ride back to Bel.”
Gareth looked frightened at the mention of Zyerne’s name and at the thought of possibly facing her alone, but he nodded. Jenny was interested to note, in some detached portion of her tired soul, that, having sought all his life for heroism, while Gareth might now flinch from it, he did not flee.
She went on, “Go to the house of the gnomes and fetch Miss Mab here. The medicines of the gnomes may be locked away in the Deep, but...” Her voice trailed off. Then she repeated softly, “The medicines of the gnomes.”
Like pins and needles in a numbed limb, the hurt of hope renewed as a sudden wash of agony. She whispered, “Gareth, where are John’s maps?”
Gareth blinked at her uncomprehendingly, too preoccupied for the moment with his own fears of Zyerne to realize what she was getting at. Then he gave a start, and hope flooded into his face, and he let out a whoop that could have been heard in Bel. “The Places of Healing!” he cried, and threw his arms around her, sweeping her off her feet. “I knew it!” he shouted, with all his old forlorn cockiness. “I knew you could think of something! You can...”
“You don’t know anything of the kind.” She fought free of him, angry at him for expressing what was already surging through her veins like a swig of cheap brandy. She brushed past him and almost ran to John’s side, while Gareth, gamboling like a large puppy, began to ransack the camp for the maps.