She began collecting medicines into her satchel once more.
“Where are you going?”
She found one of John’s plaids and wrapped it about her, all her movements stiff with weariness. She felt threadbare as a piece of worn cloth, but the uneasy strength of the tabat leaves was already coursing through her veins. She knew she would have to be careful, for the tabat was like a usurer; it lent, but it had a way of demanding back with interest when one could least afford to pay. The moist air felt cold in her lungs; her soul was oddly numb.
“To keep a promise,” she said.
The boy watched her with trepidation in his earnest gray eyes as she shouldered her satchel once more and set off through the misty silences of the ruined town toward the Gates of the Deep.
“Morkeleb?”
Her voice dissipated like a thread of mist in the stillness of the Market Hall. Vapor and blue morning shadow cloaked the Vale outside, and the light here was gray and sickly. Before her the dragon lay like a dropped garment of black silk, held to shape only by its bonings. One wing stretched out, where it had fallen after the convulsions of the night before; the long antennae trailed limp among the ribbons of the mane. Faint singing still lay upon the air, drawing at Jenny’s heart.
He had given her the way through the Deep, she thought; it was John’s life that she owed him. She tried to tell herself that it was for this reason only that she did not want that terrible beauty to die.
Her voice echoed among the upended ivory turrets of the roof. “Morkeleb!”
The humming changed within her mind, and she knew he heard. One delicate, crayfish antenna stirred. The lids of silver eyes slipped back a bare inch. For the first time she saw how delicate those lids were, tinted with subtle shades of violet and green within the blackness. Looking into the white depths they partly shielded, she felt fear, but not fear for her body; she felt again the cross-blowing winds of present should and future if, rising up out of the chasms of doubt. She summoned calm to her, as she summoned clouds or the birds of the hawthorn brakes, and was rather surprised at the steadiness of her voice.
“Give me your name.”
Life moved in him then, a gold heat that she felt through the singing of the air. Anger and resistance; bitter resistance to the last.
“I cannot save you without knowing your name,” she said. “If you slip beyond the bounds of your flesh, I need something by which to call you back.”
Still that molten wrath surged through the weakness and pain. She remembered Caerdinn saying, “Save a dragon, slave a dragon.” At that time, she had not known why anyone would wish to save the life of such a creature, nor how doing so would place something so great within your power. Cock by its feet...
“Morkeleb!” She walked forward, forgetting her fear of him—perhaps through anger and dread that he would die, perhaps only through the tabat leaves—and laid her small hands on the soft flesh around his eyes. The scales there were tinier than the ends of needles. The skin felt like dry silk beneath her hand, pulsing with warm life. She felt again that sense, half-fright, half-awe, of taking a step down a road which should not be trodden, and wondered if it would be wiser and better to turn away and let him die. She knew what he was. But having touched him, having looked into those diamond eyes, she could more easily have given up her own life.
In the glitter of the singing within her mind, one single air seemed to detach itself, as if the thread that bound together the complex knots of its many harmonies had suddenly taken on another color. She knew it immediately in its wholeness, from the few truncated fragments Caerdinn had whistled for her in a hedgerow one summer day. The music itself was the dragon’s name.
It slid through her fingers, soft as silken ribbons; taking it, she began to braid it into her spells, weaving them like a rope of crystal around the dragon’s fading soul. Through the turns of the music, she glimpsed the entrance to the dark, starry mazes of his inner mind and heart and, by the flickering light of it, seemed to see the paths that she must take to the healing of his body.
She had brought with her the medicines from the Deep, but she saw now that they were useless. Dragons healed themselves and one another through the mind alone. At times, in the hours that followed, she was terrified of this healing, at others, only exhausted past anything she had ever experienced or imagined, even in the long night before. Her weariness grew, encompassing body and brain in mounting agony; she felt entangled in a net of light and blackness, struggling to draw across some barrier a vast, cloudy force that pulled her toward it over that same frontier. It was not what she had thought to do, for it had nothing to do with the healing of humans or beasts. She summoned the last reserves of her own power, digging forgotten strengths from the marrow of her bones to battle for his life and her own. Holding to the ropes of his life took all this strength and more that she did not have; and in a kind of delirium, she understood that if he died, she would die also, so entangled was her essence in the starry skeins of his soul. Small and clear, she got a glimpse of the future, like an image in her scrying-stone—that if she died, John would die within the day, and Gareth would last slightly less than seven years, as a husk slowly hollowed by Zyerne’s perverted powers. Turning from this, she clung to the small, rock-steady strength of what she knew: old Caerdinn’s spells and her own long meditations in the solitude among the stones of Frost Fell.
Twice she called Morkeleb by his name, tangling the music of it with the spells she had so laboriously learned rune by rune, holding herself anchored to this life with the memory of familiar things—the shapes of the leaves of plants, gentian and dog’s mercury, the tracks of hares upon the snow, and wild, vagrant airs played on the pennywhistle upon summer nights. She felt the dragon’s strength stir and the echo of his name return.
She did not remember sleeping afterward. But she woke to the warmth of sunlight on her hair. Through the open Gates of the Deep, she could see the looming rock face of the cliffs outside drenched with cinnabar and gold by the afternoon’s slanted light. Turning her head, she saw that the dragon had moved and lay sleeping also, great wings folded once more and his chin upon his foreclaws like a dog. In the shadows, he was nearly invisible. She could not see that he breathed, but wondered if she ever had. Did dragons breathe?
Lassitude flooded her, burying her like silk-fine sand. The last of the tabat leaves had burned out of her veins, and that exhaustion added to the rest. Scraped, drained, wrung, she wanted only to sleep again, hour after hour, for days if possible.
But she knew it was not possible. She had saved Morkeleb, but was under no illusion that this would let her sleep safely in his presence, once he had regained a little of his strength. A detached thread of amusement at herself made her chuckle; Ian and Adric, she thought, would boast to each other and every boy in the village that their mother could go to sleep in a dragon’s lair—that is, if she ever made it back to tell them of it. Even rolling over hurt her bones. The weight of her clothes and her hair dragged at her like chain mail as she stood.
She stumbled to the Gates and stood for a moment, leaning against the rough-hewn granite of the vast pillar, the dry, moving freedom of the air fingering her face. Turning her head, she looked back over her shoulder and met the dragon’s open eyes. Their depths stared into hers for one instant, crystalline flowers of white and silver, like glittering wells of rage and hate. Then they slid shut again. She walked from the shadows out into the brilliance of the evening.
Her mind as well as her body felt numbed as she walked slowly back through Deeping. Everything seemed queer and changed, the shadow of each pebble and weed a thing of new and unknown significance to her, as if for years she had walked half-blind and now had opened her eyes. At the northern side of the town, she climbed the rocks to the water tanks, deep black pools cut into the bones of the mountain, with sun flashing on their opaque surfaces. She stripped and swam, though the water was very cold. Afterward she lay for a long time upon her spreadout clothing, dreaming she knew not what. Wind tracked across her bare back and legs like tiny footprints, and the sun-dance changed in the pool as shadows crept across the black water. She felt it would have been good to cry, but was too weary even for that.