“You sent her away?” Gareth gasped, dumfounded.
Jenny nodded, too tired to explain. Thinking about it, she frowned, as something snagged at her mind. But she only asked, “And you?”
He looked away from her and reddened with shame. Part of Jenny sighed in exasperation at this foolishness, so petty after the force of the dragon’s greater seduction; but part other remembered what it was like to be eighteen, and prey to the uncontrollable yearnings of the body. Comfortingly, she touched the skinny arm under the ripped lawn of his shirtsleeve.
“It is a spell she had on you,” she said. “Nothing more. We are all tempted...” She pushed aside the echoing memory of the dragon’s words. “... And what is in our deepest hearts is still not what we are judged on, but rather what we ultimately do. She only uses such spells to draw you to her, to control you as she controls your father.”
They reached the clearing, soggy and dirty-looking, like a garment upon which acid had been spilled, with charred spots and little puddles of gleaming water which still steamed faintly from the smolder they had quenched.
“I know.” Gareth sighed and picked up the bucket from the sodden ground to dip it once more into the well. He moved stiffly from pulled muscles and exertion but didn’t complain of them as he once might have done. On the edge of the well trough, he found his tin cup and dipped water from the bucket to hand to her, the wetness icy against her fingers. She realized with a little start that she had neither eaten nor drunk since breakfast. There had been no time, and now she felt old and exhausted as she took the cup from his hand.
“You just sent her away?” Gareth asked again. “And she went? She didn’t turn herself into a falcon... ?”
“No.” Jenny looked up, as it came to her what it was that had bothered her about the events of the evening. “Morkeleb...” She stopped, not wanting to speak of what Morkeleb had offered to her.
But even so, she thought, she could not have taken on a dragon’s form without his help. His powers had broken through to the powers within her, but her powers were still raw and small. And Zyerne...
“I defeated her,” she said slowly. “But if she’s as shapecrafty as you have said—if she has that kind of strength—I shouldn’t have been able to defeat her, even though my powers have grown.”
She almost said, “Even with the dragon’s powers in me,” but the words stuck on her lips. She felt the powers stir in her, like an alien child in the womb of fate, and tried to put aside the thought of them and of what they might mean. She raised the cup to her lips, but stopped, the water untasted, and looked up at Gareth again.
“Have you drunk any of the water from this well?” she asked.
He looked at her in surprise. “We’ve all been drinking it for days,” he said.
“This evening, I mean.”
He looked ruefully around at the clearing and his own soaked sleeves. “I was too busy throwing it about to drink any,” he said. “Why?”
She passed her hand across the mouth of the cup. As things were visible to a wizard in darkness, she saw the viscid sparkle of green luminosity in the water.
“Has it gone bad?” he asked worriedly. “How can you tell?”
She upended the cup, dumping the contents to the ground. “Where was Zyerne when you came into the clearing?”
He shook his head, puzzled. “I don’t remember. It was like a dream...” He looked around him, though Jenny knew that the clearing, soggy and trampled in the dismal gloom, was very different from the soft place of twilight enchantment if had appeared an hour or so ago.
At last he said, “I think she was sitting where you are now, on the edge of the wellhead.”
Morkeleb had said. They did not think that I could see the death that tainted the meat. Was it Dromar who had remarked that dragons were impossible to poison?
She twisted her body and moved her hands across the surface of the bucket that Gareth had drawn up. The reek of death rose from it, and she recoiled in disgust and horror, as if the water had turned to blood beneath her fingers.
XIII
“But why?” Squatting before the fire on his hunkerbones, Gareth turned to look at John, who lay in his nest of bearskin blankets and ratty plaids a few feet away. “As far as she was concerned, you’d slain her dragon for her.” He unraveled the screw of paper in which they’d brought the coffee up from Bel, decided there wasn’t enough to bother with measuring, and dumped it into the pot of water that bubbled over the fire. “She didn’t know then that Jenny was any threat to her. Why poison us?”
“At a guess,” John said, propping himself with great care up on one elbow and fitting his spectacles to his dirty, unshaven face, “to keep us from riding back to Bel with the news that the dragon was dead before she could get your dad to round up the remaining gnomes on some trumped-up charge. As far as she knew, the dragon was dead—I mean, she couldn’t have seen him in a crystal or a water bowl, but she could see us all alive and chipper, and the inference is a pretty obvious one.”
“I suppose.” Gareth unrolled his turned-up sleeves and slung his cloak around his shoulders once more. The morning was foggy and cold, and the sweat he’d worked up clearing out the well house close to their camp in the ruined tanneries was drying.
“I doubt she’d have poisoned you,” John went on. “If she’d wanted you dead, she’d never have waited for you.”
Gareth blushed hotly. “That isn’t why she waited,” he mumbled.
“Of course not,” John said. “Dead, you’re not only no good to her—if you die, she loses everything.”
The boy frowned. “Why? I mean, I can see her wanting me under her power so I’d no longer be a threat to her, the same reason she put Polycarp out of the way. And if she killed the two of you, she’d need me to back up her story about the dragon still being in the Deep, at least until she could get rid of the gnomes.” He sniffed bitterly and held out his blistered hands to the fire. “She’d probably use Bond and me as witnesses to say eventually that she slew the dragon. Then she’d be able to justify having my father give her the Deep.”
He sighed, his mouth tight with disillusionment. “And I thought Polycarp stretching a bit of cable over a fence sounded like the depths of perfidy.” He settled the griddle over the fire, his thin face looking much older than it had in the jonquil pallor of the daytime flames.
“Well,” John said gently, “it isn’t only that. Gar.” He glanced over at Jenny, who sat in the shadows of the newly cleared doorway of the well house, but she said nothing. Then he looked back to Gareth. “How long do you think your father’s going to last with Zyerne alive? I don’t know what her spells are doing to him, and I know a dying man when I see one. As it is, for all her power, she’s only a mis tress. She needs the Deep for a power base and fortress independent of the King, and she needs the Deep’s gold.”
“My father would give it to her,” Gareth said softly. “And I—I suppose I’m just the contingency plan, in case he should die?” He poked at the softly sizzling cakes on the griddle. “Then she had to destroy Polycarp, whether or not he tried to warn me of her. The Citadel guards the back way into the Deep.”
“Well, not even that.” John lay back down again and folded his hands on his breast. “She wanted to be rid of Polycarp because he’s an alternative heir.”
“Alternative to whom?” Gareth asked, puzzled. “To me?”
John shook his head. “Alternative to Zyerne’s child.”
The horror that crossed the boy’s face was deeper than fear of death—deeper. Jenny thought with the strange dispassion that had lain upon her all that morning and through the previous night, than fear of being subjugated to the enchantress’s spells. He looked nauseated by the thought, as if at the violation of some dark taboo. It was a long time before he could speak. “You mean—my father’s child?”