She turned and looked back, to see John standing on the root-buckled pavement between the barren apple trees behind her. Past him, she glimpsed the caravan of horses in the court below. Trey and Gareth holding the horses’ heads as they snorted and fidgeted at the scent of the dragon. For a moment, the memory of John’s body and John’s voice overwhelmed her—the crushing strength of his muscles and the curious softness of his lips, the cold slickness of a leather sleeve, and the fragrance of his body mixed with the more prosaic pungence of woodsmoke and horses that permeated his scruffy plaids.
She was aware, too, of the desperation and hope in his eyes.
She saw the hope fade, and he smiled. “Go if you must, love,” he said softly. “I said I wouldn’t hold you, and I won’t. I’ve known it for days.”
She shook her head, wanting to speak, but unable to make a sound, her dark hair swirled by the wind of the dragon’s wings. Then she turned from him, suddenly, and ran to the battlements, beyond which the dragon lay waiting in the air.
Her soul made the leap first, drawing power from the wind and from the rope of crystal thought that Morkeleb flung her, showing her the way. The elements around the nucleus of her essence changed, as she shed the shape that she had known since her conception and called to her another, different shape. She was half-conscious of spreading her arms against the wind as she strode forward over the edge of the battlement, of the wind in her dark hair as she sprang outward over the long drop of stone and cliff and emptiness. But her mind was already speeding toward the distant cloud peaks, the moon, the dragon.
On the walls behind her, she was aware of Trey whispering, “She’s beautiful...”
Against the fading day moon, the morning’s strengthening light caught in the milk-white silk of her spreading wings and flashed like a spiked carpet of diamonds along the ghost-pale armor of the white dragon’s back and sides. But more than of that, she was conscious of John, Dragonsbane of ballad and legend, watching her with silent tears running down his still face as she circled into the waiting sky, like a butterfly released from his hand. Then he turned from the battlements, to the court where the horses waited. Taking the rein from the stunned Gareth, he mounted Battlehammer and rode through the gateway, to take the road back to the north.
XVIII
They flew north together, treading the woven roads of the sky.
The whole Earth lay below her, marked with the long indigo shadows of morning, the bright flash of springing water, and the icy knives of the glaciers. She saw the patterns of the sea, with its currents of green and violet, its great, gray depths, and the scrum of white lace upon its surface, and those of the moving air. All things were to her as a dragon sees them, a net of magic and years, covering the Earth and holding it to all the singing universe in a crystal web of time.
They nested among the high peaks of Nast Wall, among the broken bone ends of the world, looking eastward over the gorges where the bighorn sheep sprang like fleas from rock to rock, past dizzying drops of green meltwater and woods where the dampness coated each tree in pillows of emerald moss, and down to the woods on the foothills of the Marches, where those who swore fealty to the Master dwelt. Westward, she could look past the glacier that lay like a stilled river of green and white through the gouged gray breakers of the cliffs, past cold and barren rocks, to see the Wildspae gleaming like a sheet of brown silk beneath the steam of its mists and, in the glimmering bare woods along its banks, make out the lacework turrets of Zyerne’s hunting lodge among the trees.
Like a dragon, she saw backward and forward in time; and like a dragon, she felt no passion at what she saw.
She was free, to have what she had always sought—not only the power, which the touch of Morkeleb’s mind had kindled in her soul, but freedom to pursue that power, released from the petty grind of the work of days.
Her mind touched and fingered that knowledge, wondering at its beauty and its complexity. It was hers now, as it had always been hers for the taking. No more would she be asked to put aside her meditations, to trek ten miles on foot over the wintry moors to deliver a child; no more would she spend the hours needed for the study of her power ankle-deep in a half-frozen marsh, looking for frogwort for Muffle the smith’s rheumatism.
No more would her time—and her mind—be divided between love and power.
Far off, her dragon’s sight could descry the caravan of horses, making their antlike way along the foothills arid into the woods. So clear was her crystal sight that she could identify each beast within that train—the white Moon Horse, the balky roans, the stupid sorrel Cow, and the big liver-bay Battlehammer—she saw, too, the flash of spectacle lenses and the glint of metal spikes on a patched old doublet.
He was no more to her now than the first few inches upon the endless ribbon of dragon years. Like the bandits and the wretched Meewinks—like his and her sons—he had his own path to follow through the labyrinth patterns of darkening time. He would go on with his fights for his people and with his dogged experiments with rock salts and hot-air balloons, his model ballistas and his quest for lore about pigs. One day, she thought, he would take a boat out to the rough waters of Eldsbouch Cove to search for the ruins of the drowned breakwater, and she would not be waiting for him on the round pebbles of the gravel beach... He would ride out to the house beneath the standing stones on Frost Fell, and she would not be standing in its doorway.
In time, she knew, even these memories would fade. She saw within herself, as she had probed at the souls of others. Trey’s, she recalled, had been like a clear pool, with bright shallows and unsuspected depths. Zyerne’s had been a poisoned flower. Her own soul she saw also as a flower whose petals were turning to steel at their outer edges but whose heart was still soft and silky flesh.
In time, it would be ail steel, she saw, breathtakingly beautiful and enduring forever—but it would cease to be a flower.
She lay for a long time in the rocks, motionless save for the flick of her jeweled antennae as she scried the colors of the wind.
It was thus to be a dragon, she told herself, to see the patterns of all things from the silence of the sky. It was thus to be free. But pain still poured from some broken place inside her—the pain of choice, of loss, and of stillborn dreams. She would have wept, but there was nothing within dragons that could weep. She told herself that this was the last time she would have to feel this pain or the love that was its source. It was for this immunity that she had sought the roads of the sky.
The key to magic is magic, she thought. And all magic, all power, was now hers.
But within her some other voice asked, For what purpose? Afar off she was aware of Morkeleb, hunting the great-homed sheep in the rocks. Like a black bat of steel lace, he passed as soundlessly as his own shadow over the snowfields, wrapping himself in the colors of the air to drop down the gorges, the deceptive glitter of his magic hiding him from the nervous, stupid eyes of his prey. Magic was the bone of dragon bones, the blood of their blood; the magic of the cosmos tinted everything they perceived and everything they were.
And yet, in the end, their magic was sterile, seeking nothing but its own—as Zyerne’s had been.
Zyerne, Jenny thought. The key to magic is magic. For it Zyerne had sacrificed the men who loved her, the son she would have borne, and, in the end, her very humanity—even as she herself had done!
Caerdinn had been wrong. For all his striving to perfect his arts, in the end he had been nothing but a selfish, embittered old man, the end of a Line that was failing because it sought magic for magic’s sake. The key to magic was not magic, but the use of magic; it lay not in having, but in giving and doing—in loving, and in being loved. And to her mind there rose the image of John, sitting beside Morkeleb in the high court of the Citadel. Having so little, we shared among ourselves to make any of it worth having... the consequences of not caring enough to do it would have been worse...