In time she got up, put on her clothes again, and returned to camp. Gareth was asleep, sitting with his knees drawn up and his face upon them on his crossed arms, near the glowing ashes of the fire.
Jenny knelt beside John, feeling his hands and face. They seemed warmer, though she could detect no surface blood under the thin, fair skin. Still, his eyebrows and the reddish stubble of his beard no longer seemed so dark. She lay down beside him, her body against his beneath the blankets, and fell asleep.
In the drowsy warmth of half-waking, she heard John murmur, “I thought that was you calling me.” His breath was no more than a faint touch against her hair. She blinked into waking. The light had changed again. It was dawn.
She said, “What?” and sat up, shaking back the thick weight of her hair from her face. She still felt tired to death, but ravenously hungry. Gareth was kneeling by the campfire, tousled and unshaven with his battered spectacles sliding down the end of his nose, making griddlecakes. She noted that he was better at it than John had ever been.
“I thought you were never waking up,” he said.
“I thought I was never waking up either, my hero,” John whispered. His voice was too weak to carry even that short distance, but Jenny heard him and smiled.
She climbed stiffly to her feet, pulled on her skirt again over her creased shift, laced her bodice and put on her boots, while Gareth set water over the coals to boil for coffee, a bitter black drink popular at Court. When Gareth went to fetch more water from the spring in the woods beyond the wrecked well house. Jenny took some of the boiling water to renew John’s poultices, welcoming the simplicity of human healing; and the smell of herbs soon filled the little clearing among the ruins, along with the warm, strange smell of the drink. John fell asleep again, even before Jenny had finished with the bandages, but Gareth fetched her some bannocks and honey and sat with her beside the breakfast fire.
“I didn’t know what to do, you were gone so long,” he said around a mouthful of mealcake. “I thought about following you—that you might need help—but I didn’t want to leave John alone. Besides,” he added with a rueful grin, “I’ve never managed to rescue you from anything yet.”
Jenny laughed and said, “You did right.”
“And the promise you made?”
“I kept it.”
He let out his breath with a sigh and bowed his head, as if some great weight that had been pressing down upon him had been lifted. After a while he said shyly, “While I was waiting for you, I made up a song... a ballad. About the slaying of Morkeleb, the Black Dragon of Nast Wall. It isn’t very good...”
“It wouldn’t be,” Jenny said slowly, and licked the honey from her fingers. “Morkeleb is not dead.”
He stared at her, as he once had when she had told him that John had killed the Golden Dragon of Wyr with an ax. “But I thought—wasn’t your promise to John to—to slay him if—if John could not?”
She shook her head, the dark cloud of her hair snagging in the grubby fleece of her jacket collar. “My promise was to Morkeleb,” she said. “It was to heal him.”
Collecting her feet beneath her, she rose and walked over to John once more, leaving Gareth staring after her in appalled and unbelieving bewilderment.
A day passed before Jenny returned to the Deep. She stayed close to the camp, taking care of John and washing clothes—a mundane task, but one that needed to be done. Somewhat to her surprise, Gareth helped her in this, fetching water from the spring in the glade, but without his usual chatter. Knowing she would need her strength, she slept a good deal, but her dreams were disquieting. Her waking hours were plagued with a sense of being watched. She told herself that this was simply because Morkeleb, waking, had extended his awareness across the Vale and knew where they were, but certain understandings she had found within the mazes of the dragon’s mind would not allow her to believe this.
She was aware that Gareth was watching her, too, mostly when he thought she wasn’t looking.
She was aware of other things, as well. Never had she felt so conscious of the traces and turnings of the wind, and of the insignificant activities of the animals in the surrounding woods. She found herself prey to strange contemplation and odd knowledge of things before unsuspected—how clouds grow, and why the wind walked the way it did, how birds knew their way south, and why, in certain places of the world at certain times, voices could be heard speaking indistinctly in empty air. She would have liked to think these changes frightened her because she did not understand them, but in truth the reason she feared them was because she did.
While she slept in the late afternoon, she heard Gareth speak to John of it, seeing them and understanding through the depths of her altered dreams.
“She healed him,” she heard Gareth whisper, and was aware of him squatting beside the tangle of bearskins and plaids where John lay. “I think she promised to do so, in trade for his letting her past him to fetch the medicines.”
John sighed and moved one bandaged hand a little where it lay on his chest. “Better, maybe, she had let me die.”
“Do you think...” Gareth swallowed nervously and cast a glance at her, as if he knew that asleep, she still could hear. “Do you think he’s put a spell on her?”
John was silent for a time, looking up at the gulfs of sky above the Vale, thinking. Though the air down here was still, great winds racked the upper atmosphere, herding piled masses of cloud, charcoal gray and blinding white, up against the shaggy flanks of the mountains. At length he said, “I think I’d feel it, if there were another mind controlling hers. Or I’d like to flatter myself to thinking I’d feel it. They say you should never look into a dragon’s eyes, lest he put a spell on you. But she’s stronger than that.”
He turned his head a little and looked at where she lay, squinting to focus his shortsighted brown eyes upon her. The bare flesh on either side of the bandages on his arms and chest was livid with bruises and pitted with tiny scabs where the broken links of the mail shirt had been dragged through it. “When I used to dream of her, she didn’t look the same as in waking. When I was delirious, I dreamed of her—it’s as if she’s grown more herself, not less.”
He sighed and looked back at Gareth. “I used to be jealous other, you know. Not of another man, but jealousy of herself, of that part other she’d never give me—though God knows, back in those days, what I wanted it for. Who was it who said that jealousy is the only vice that gives no pleasure? But that was the first thing I had to learn about her, and maybe the hardest I’ve ever learned about anything—that she is her own, and what she gives me is of her choosing, and the more precious because of it. Sometimes a butterfly will come to sit in your open palm, but if you close your hand, one way or the other, it—and its choice to be there—are gone.”
From there Jenny slid into deeper dreams of the crushing darkness of Ylferdun and the deep magic she sensed slumbering in the Places of Healing. As if from a great distance, she saw her children, her boys, whom she had never wanted to conceive but had borne and birthed for John’s sake, but loved uneasily, unwillingly, and with desperately divided heart. With her wizard’s sight she could see them sitting up in their curtained bed in the darkness, while wind drove snow against the tower walls; not sleeping at all, but telling one another tales about how their father and mother would slay the dragon and ride back with pack trains and pack trains of gold.