Then she felt his mind closing around hers, like the jaws of a trap. For an instant she was locked into suffocating darkness, the utter darkness that not even the eyes of a wizard could pierce. Panic crushed her. She could neither move nor think, and felt only the acid gloating of the dragon all around her, and, opening beneath her, a bottomless despair.
Then as Caerdinn had taught her, as she had done in healing John—as she had always done within the circumscribed limits of her small magic—she forced her mind to calm and began to work rune by rune, note by note, concentrating singly and simply upon each element with her whole mind. She felt the wrath of the dragon smothering her like a hot sea of night, but she wedged open a crack of light, and into that crack she drove the music of the dragon’s name, fashioned by her spells into a spear.
She felt his mind flinch and give. Her sight returned, and she found herself on her feet among the knee-deep piles of gold, the monstrous dark shape backing from her in anger. This time she did not let him go, but flung her own wrath and her will after him, playing upon the music of his name and weaving into it the fires that scorched his essence. All the spells of pain and ruin she had wrought into the poison flooded to her mind; but, like her fury at the bandits at the crossroads these many weeks ago, her anger had no hate in it, offering him no hold upon her mind. He shrank back from it, and the great head lowered so that the ribbons of his mane swept the coins with a slithery tinkle.
Wrapped in a rage of magic and fire, she said, You shall not dominate me, Morkeleb the Black—neither with your power nor with your treachery. I have saved your life, and you shall do as I command you. By your name you shall go, and you shall not return to the south. Do you hear me?
She felt him resist, and drove her will and the strength of her newfound powers against him. Like a wrestler’s body, she felt the dark, sulfurous rage slither from beneath the pressure of her will; she stepped back, almost instinctively, and faced him where he crouched against the wall like a vast, inky cobra, his every scale bristling with glittering wrath.
She heard him whisper, I hear you, wizard woman, and heard, in the cold voice, the reasonance not only of furious anger at being humbled, but of surprise that she could have done so.
Turning without a word, she left the Temple and walked back toward the square of diffuse light that marked the outer hall at the end of the Grand Passage and the Great Gates beyond.
XII
When Jenny came down the steps of the Deep she was shaking with exhaustion and an aftermath of common sense that told her that she should have been terrified. Yet she felt curiously little fear of Morkeleb, even in the face of his treachery and his wrath. Her body ached—the power she had put forth against him had been far in excess of what her flesh was used to sustaining—but her head felt clear and alert, without the numbed weariness she felt when she had overstretched her powers. She was aware, down to her last finger end, of the depth and greatness of the dragon’s magic, but was aware also of her own strength against him.
Evening wind dusted across her face. The sun had sunk beyond the flinty crest of the westward ridge, and though the sky still held light, Deeping lay at the bottom of a lake of shadow. She was aware of many things passing in the Vale, most of them having nothing to do with the affairs of dragons or humankind—the skreak of a single cricket under a charred stone, the flirt of a squirrel’s tail as it fled from its hopeful mate, and the flutterings of the chaffinches as they sought their nighttime nests. Where the trail turned downward around a broken pile of rubble that had once been a house, she saw a man’s skeleton lying in the weeds, the bag of gold he had died clutching split open and the coins singing softly to her where they lay scattered among his ribs.
She was aware, suddenly, that someone else had entered the Vale.
It was analogous to sound, though unheard. The scent of magic came to her like smoke on the shift of the wind. She stopped still in the dry tangle of broomsedge, cold shreds of breeze that frayed down from the timberline stirring in her plaids. There was magic in the Vale, up on the ridge. She could hear the slither and snag of silk on beech mast, the startled splash of spilled water in the dusk by the fountain, and Gareth’s voice halting over a name...
Catching up her skirts. Jenny began to run.
The smell of Zyerne’s perfume seemed everywhere in the woods. Darkness was already beginning to collect beneath the trees. Panting, Jenny sprang up the whitish, flinty rocks to the glade by the fountain. Long experience in the Winterlands had taught her to move in utter silence, even at a dead run; and thus, for the first moment, neither of those who stood near the little well was aware of her arrival.
It took her a moment to see Zyerne. Gareth she saw at once, standing frozen beside the wellhead. Spilled water was soaking into the beech mast around his feet; a halfempty bucket balanced on the edge of the stone trough beside the well itself. He didn’t heed it; she wondered how much of his surroundings he was aware of at all.
Zyerne’s spells filled the small glade like the music heard in dreams. Even she, a woman, felt the scented warmth of the air that belied the tingly cold lower down in the Vale and sensed the stirring of need in her flesh.
In Gareth’s eyes was a kind of madness, and his hands were shaking where they were clenched, knotted into fists, before him. His voice was a whisper more desperate than a scream as he said, “No.”
“Gareth.” Zyerne moved, and Jenny saw her, as she seemed to float like a ghost in the dusk among the birch trees at the glade’s edge. “Why pretend? You know you; love for me has grown, as mine has for you. It is like file in your flesh now; the taste of your mouth in my dreams has tormented me day and night...”
“While you were lying with my father?”
She shook back her hair, a small, characteristic gesture, brushing the tendrils of it away from her smooth brow. It was difficult to see what she wore in the dusk—something white and fragile that rippled in the stirrings of the wind, pale as the birches themselves. Her hair was loosened down her back like a young girl’s; and, like a young girl, she wore no veils. Years seemed to have vanished from her age, young as she had seemed before. She looked like a girl of Gareth’s age, unless, like Jenny, one saw her with a wizard’s eye.
“Gareth, I never lay with your father,” she said softly. “Oh, we agreed to pretend, for the sake of appearances at Court—but even if he had wanted me to, I don’t think I could have. He treated me like a daughter. It was you I wanted, you...”
“That’s a lie!” His mouth sounded dried by fever heat.
She held out her hands, and the wind lifted the thin fabric of her sleeves back from her arms as she moved a step into the glade. “I could bear waiting no longer. I had to come, to learn what had happened to you—to be with you...”
He sobbed, “Get away from me!” His face was twisted by something close to pain.
She only whispered, “I want you...”
Jenny stepped from the somber shade of the trail and said, “No, Zyerne. What you want is the Deep.”
Zyerne swung around, her concentration breaking, as Morkeleb had tried to break Jenny’s. The lurid sensuality that had dripped from the air shattered with an almost audible snap. At once, Zyerne seemed older, no longer the virgin girl who could inflame Gareth’s passion. The boy dropped to his knees and covered his face, his body racked with dry sobs.