“What? Why?” Gareth was growing more and more confused.
“More to the point, who?” John asked, propping himself up among his blankets once again.
“These—these people, laborers mostly—smelters and artisans from Deeping out of work, the ones who hang around the Sheep in the Mire all day. There are Palace guards with them, too, and I think more are coming—I don’t know why! I tried to get some sense out of Bond, but it’s as if he didn’t hear me, didn’t know me! He slapped me—and he’s never hit me, Gar, not since I was a child...”
“Tell us,” Jenny said quietly, taking the girl’s hand, cold as a dead bird in her warm rough one. “Start from the beginning.”
Trey gulped and wiped her eyes again, her hands shaking with weariness and the exertion of a fifteen-mile ride The ornamental cloak about her shoulders was an indoor garment of white silk and milky fur, designed to ward off the chance drafts of a ballroom, not the bitter chill of a foggy night such as the previous one had been. Her long fingers were chapped and red among their diamonds.
“We’d all been dancing,” she began hesitantly. “It was past midnight when Zyerne came in. She looked strange—I thought she’d been sick, but I’d seen her in the morning and she’d been fine then. She called Bond to her, into an alcove by the window. I—” Some color returned to her too-white cheeks. “I crept after them to eavesdrop. I know it’s a terribly rude and catty thing to do, but after what we’d talked of before you left I—I couldn’t help doing it. It wasn’t to learn gossip,” she added earnestly. “I was afraid for him—and I was so scared because I’d never done it before and I’m not nearly as good at it as someone like Isolde or Merriwyn would be.”
Gareth looked a little shocked at this frankness, but John laughed and patted the toe of the girl’s pearl-beaded slipper in commiseration. “We’ll forgive you this time, love, but don’t neglect your education like that again. You see where it leads you?” Jenny kicked him, not hard, in his unwounded shoulder.
“And then?” she asked.
“I heard her say, ‘I must have the Deep. They must be destroyed, and it must be now, before the gnomes hear. They mustn’t be allowed to reach it.’ I followed them down to that little postern gate that leads to the Dockmarket; they went to the Sheep in the Mire. The place was still full of men and women; all drunk and quarreling with each other. Bond went rushing in and told them he’d heard you’d betrayed them, sold them out to Polycarp; that you had the dragon under Lady Jenny’s spells and were going to turn it against Bel; that you were going to keep the gold of the Deep for yourselves and not give it to them, its rightful owners. But they weren’t ever its rightful owners—it always belonged to the gnomes, or to the rich merchants in Deeping. I tried to tell that to Bond...” Her cold-reddened hand stole to her cheek, as if to wipe away the memory of a handprint.
“But they were all shouting how they had to kill you and regain their gold. They were all drunk—Zyerne got the innkeeper to broach some more kegs. She said she was going to re-enforce them with the Palace guards. They were yelling and making torches and getting weapons. I ran back to the Palace stables and got Prettyfeet, here...” She stroked the exhausted pony’s dappled neck, and her voice grew suddenly small. “And then I came here. I rode as fast as I dared—I was afraid of what might happen if they caught me. I’d never been out riding alone at night...”
Gareth pulled off his grubby crimson cloak and slung it around her shoulders as her trembling increased.
She concluded, “So you have to get out of here...”
“That we do.” John flung back the bearskins from over his body. “We can defend the Deep.”
“Can you ride that far?” Gareth asked worriedly, handing him his patched, iron-plated leather jerkin.
“I’ll be gie in trouble if I can’t, my hero.”
“Trey?”
The girl looked up from gathering camp things as Jenny spoke her name.
Jenny crossed quietly to where she stood and took her by the shoulders, looking into her eyes for a long moment. The probing went deep, and Trey pulled back with a thin cry of alarm that brought Gareth running. But to the bottom, her mind was a young girl’s—not always truthful, anxious to please, eager to love and to be loved. There was no taint on it, and its innocence twisted at Jenny’s own heart.
Then Gareth was there, indignantly gathering Trey to him.
Jenny’s smile was crooked but kind. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I had to be sure.”
By their shocked faces she saw that it had not occurred to either of them that Zyerne might have made use of Trey’s form—or of Trey.
“Come,” she said. “We probably don’t have much time Gar, get John on a horse. Trey, help him.”
“I’m perfectly capable...” John began, irritated.
But Jenny scarcely heard. Somewhere in the mists of the half-burned woods below the town, she felt sudden movement, the intrusion of angry voices among the frostrimmed silence of the blackened trees. They were coming and they were coming fast—she could almost see them at the turning of the road below the crumbling ruin of the clock tower.
She turned swiftly back to the others. “Go!” she said. “Quickly, they’re almost on us!”
“How...” began Gareth.
She caught up her medicine bag and her halberd and vaulted to Moon Horse’s bare back. “Now! Gar, take Trey with you. John, RIDE, damn you!” For he had wheeled back, barely able to keep upright in Cow’s saddle, to remain at her side. Gareth flung Trey up to Battlehammer’s back in a flurry of torn skirts; Jenny could hear the echo of hooves on the trail below.
Her mind reached out, gathering spells together, even the small effort wrenching at her. She set her teeth at the stabbing pain as she gathered the dispersing mists that had been burning off in the sun’s pallid brightness—her body was not nearly recovered from yesterday. But there was no time for anything else. She wove the cold and dampness into a cloak to cover all the Vale of Deeping; like a secondary pattern in a plaid, she traced the spells of disorientation, of jamais vu. Even as she did so, the hooves and the angry, incoherent voices were very close. They rang in the misty woods around the Rise and near the gatehouse in the Vale as well—Zyerne must have told them where to come. She wheeled Moon Horse and gave her a hard kick in her skinny ribs, and the white mare threw herself down the rocky slope in a gangly sprawl of legs, making for the Gates of the Deep.
She overtook the others in the gauzy boil of the mists in the Vale. They had slowed down as visibility lessened; she led them at a canter over the paths that she knew so well through the town. Curses and shouts, muffled by the fog, came from the Rise behind them. Cold mists shredded past her face and stroked back the black coils other hair. She could feel the spells that held the brume in place fretting away as she left the Rise behind, but dared not try to put forth the strength of will it would take to hold them after she was gone. Her very bones ached from even the small exertion of summoning them; she knew already that she would need all the strength she could summon for the final battle.
The three horses clattered up the shallow granite steps. From the great darkness of the gate arch. Jenny turned to see the mob still milling about in the thinning fog, some fifty or sixty of them, of all stations and classes but mostly poor laborers. The uniforms of the handful of Palace guards stood out as gaudy splotches in the grayness. She heard their shouts and swearing as they became lost within plain sight of one another in territory they had all known well of old. That won’t last long, she thought.
Moon Horse shied and fidgeted at the smell of the dragon and of the old blood within the vast gloom of the Market Hall. The carcass of the horse Osprey had disappeared, but the place still smelled of death, and all the horses felt it, Jenny slid from her mare’s tall back and stroked her neck, then whispered to her to stay close to the place in case of need and let her go back down the steps.