“Tight,” Gareth said gloomily. “Halnath is built on a series of cliffs—the lower town, the upper town, the University, and the Citadel above that, and the only way in is through the lower town. Spies have tried to sneak in over the cliffs on the mountain side of the city and have fallen to their deaths.” He readjusted his cracked spectacles. “And besides,” he went on, “Zyerne knows as well as we do that Halnath is the only place we can go.”
“Pox.” John glanced over at Jenny, where she sat against the alien curves of the dragon’s complicated shoulder bones. “For something that was never any of our business to begin with, this is looking worse and worse.”
“I could go,” Trey ventured. “The troops would be least likely to recognize me. I could tell Polycarp...”
“They’d never let you through,” John said. “Don’t think Zyerne doesn’t know you’re here, Trey; and don’t think she’d let you off because you’re Bond’s sister or that Bond would risk Zyerne so much as pouting at him to get you off. Zyerne can’t afford even one of us returning to the gnomes with word the dragon’s left the Deep.”
That, Morkeleb said thinly, is precisely our problem. The dragon has NOT left the Deep. Nor will he, until this Zyerne is destroyed. And I will not remain here docile, to watch the gnomes carrying on their petty trafficking with my gold.
“Your gold?” John raised an eyebrow. With a swift gesture of her mind Jenny stilled Morkeleb again.
Nor would they allow it, she said, for the dragon alone. It would only be a matter of time until their distrust of you mastered them, and they tried to slay you. No—you must be freed.
Freed! The voice within her mind was acrid as the stench of vinegar. Freed to be turned like a beggar onto the roads? The dragon swung his head away, the long scales of his mane clashing softly, like the searingly thin notes of a wind chime. You have done this to me, wizard woman! Before your mind touched mine I was not bound to this place...
“You were bound,” Aversin said quietly. “It’s just that, before Jenny’s mind touched yours, you weren’t aware of it. Had you tried to leave before?”
I remained because it was my will to remain.
“And it’s the old King’s will to remain with Zyerne, though she’s killing him. No, Morkeleb—she got you through your greed, as she got poor Gar’s dad through his grief and Bond through his love. If we hadn’t come, you’d have stayed here, bound with spells to brood over your hoard till you died. It’s just that now you know it.”
That is not true!
True or not, Jenny said, it is my bidding, Morkeleb, that as soon as the sky grows light, you shall carry me over the mountain to the Citadel of Halnath, so that I can send Polycarp the Master to bring these others to safety there through the Deep.
The dragon reared himself up, bristling all over with rage. His voice lashed her mind like a silver whip. I am not your pigeon nor your servant!
Jenny was on her feet now, too, looking up into the blazing white deeps of his eyes. No, she said, holding to the crystal chain of his inner name. You are my slave, by that which you gave me when I saved your life. And by that which you gave me, I tell you this is what you shall do.
Their eyes held. The others, not hearing what passed between their two minds, saw and felt only the dragon’s scorching wrath. Gareth caught up Trey and drew her back toward the shelter of the gateway; Aversin made a move to rise and sank back with a gasp. He angrily shook off Gareth’s attempt to draw him to safety, his eyes never leaving the small, thin form of the woman who stood before the smoking rage of the beast.
All this Jenny was aware of, but peripherally, like the weave of a tapestry upon which other colors are painted. Her whole mind focused in crystal exactness against the mind that surged like a dark wave against hers; The power born in her from the touch of the dragon’s mind strengthened and burned, forcing him back. Her understanding of his name was a many-pointed weapon in her hands. In time Morkeleb sank to his haunches again, and back to his sphinx position.
In her mind his voice said softly, You know you do not need me, Jenny Waynest, to fly over the mountains. You know the form of the dragons and their magic. One of them you have put on already. The other I might put on, she replied, for you would help me in that, to be free of my will. But you would not help me put it off again.
The deeps of his eyes were like falling into the heart of a star. If you wished it, I would.
The need in her for power, to separate herself from all that had separated her from its pursuit, shuddered through her like the racking heat of fever. “To be a mage you must be a mage,” Caerdinn had said.
He had also said, “Dragons do not deceive with lies, but with truth.” Jenny turned her eyes from those cosmic depths. You say it only because in becoming a dragon, I will cease to want to hold power over you, Morkeleb the Black.
He replied. Not ‘only,’ Jenny Waynest. Like a wraith he faded into the darkness.
Though still exhausted from the battle at the Gates, Jenny did not sleep that night. She sat upon the steps, as she had sat awake most of the night before, watching and listening—for the King’s men, she told herself, though she knew they would not come. She was aware of the night with a physical intensity, the moonlight like a rune of molten silver on every chink and crack of the scarred steps upon which she sat, turning to slips of white each knotted weed-stem in the scuffed dust of the square below. Earlier, while she had been tending to John by the fire in the Market Hall, the bodies of the slain rioters had vanished from the steps, though whether this was due to fastidiousness on Morkeleb’s part or hunger, she wasn’t sure.
Sitting in the cold stillness of the night, she meditated, seeking an answer within herself. But her own soul was unclear, torn between the great magic that had always lain beyond her grasp and the small joys she had cherished in its stead—the silence of the house on Frost Fell, the memory of small hands that seemed to be printed on her palms, and John.
John, she thought, and looked back through the wide arch of the Gate to where he lay, wrapped in bearskins beside the small glow of the fire.
In the darkness she made out his shape, the broadshouldered compactness that went so oddly with the whippet litheness of his movements. She remembered the fears that had driven her to the Deep to seek medicines—that had driven her first to look into the dragon’s silver eyes. Now, as then, she could scarcely contemplate years of her life that did not—or would not—include that fleeting, triangular smile.
Adric had it already, along with the blithe and sunny half of John’s quirky personality. Ian had his sensitivity, his maddening, insatiable curiosity, and his intentness. His sons, she thought. My sons.
Yet the memory of the power she had called to stop the lynch mob on these very steps returned to her, sweetness and terror and exultation. Its results had horrified her, and the weariness of it still clung to her bones, but the taste that lingered was one of triumph at having wielded it. How could she, she wondered, have wasted all those years before this beginning? The touch of Morkeleb’s mind had half-opened a thousand doors within her. If she turned away from him now, how many of the rooms behind those doors would she be able to explore? The promise of the magic was something only a mageborn could have felt; the need, like lust or hunger, something only the mageborn would have understood. There was a magic she had never dreamed of that could be wrought from the light of certain stars, knowledge unplumbed in the dark, eternal minds of dragons and in the singing of the whales in the sea. The stone house on the Fell that she loved came back to her like the memory of a narrow prison; the clutch of small hands on her skirts, of an infant’s mouth at her breast, seemed for a time nothing more than bonds holding her back from walking through its doors to the moving air outside.