Dragonshadow. Barbara Hambly
shape in the darkness, the silver labyrinthine eyes.
Morkeleb.
“Mother?”
Starlight showed the trapdoor that opened among the slates of the turret roof, but it did not penetrate the shadow underneath. Mageborn, Jenny was able to see her elder son, Ian, a weedy twelve-year-old, her own night-black hair and blue eyes in John’s beaky face. He stepped onto the steeply slanting roof and made to come down the stairs, and she said, “No, wait there.” The weariness of working the death-songs dragged at her bones. “Let me gather these up and send them on their way.”
Ian, she knew, would understand what she said. Only this year his own powers had started to manifest: small, as any teenager’s were—the ability to call fire and find lost objects, to sometimes see in fire things far away. Ian sat on the trapdoor’s sill and watched in fascination as she drew the glimmer from out of the circles, collecting it like cold spider-silk in her hands. All magic, Caerdinn had taught her, depended on Limitations. Before even beginning to lay down the circles of power, let alone summon the death-spells, she had cleansed the platform with rainwater and hyssop and laid on each separate rough-hewn plank such Words as would keep the vile magics from attaching to the place itself. Spells, too, were required to hold the wicked ferocity of what she had done within a small space, so it would not disperse over the countryside and cause ruin and death to everyone in the Hold, in the village, in the farms that nestled close to the walls. Like a miser picking up pinhead-sized crumbs of gold dust with his fingernails, so Jenny gathered into her palms each whisper and shudder of the death-spells’ residue, named them and neutralized them and released them into the turning starlight.
“Can I help?”
“No, not this time. You see what I’m doing, though?” He nodded. As she worked, she felt, rising through her—as it always rose, it seemed to her, at the most inopportune of times—the miserable flush of heat, the reminder that the change of a woman’s life was coming upon her. Patiently, wearily, she called upon other spells, little silvery cantrips of blood and time, to put that heat aside. “With spells of cursing you must be absolutely thorough, absolutely clean, particularly with spells worked in a high place,” she said.
Ian’s eyes went to John’s telescope, mounted at the far side of the platform; she saw he read her thought. It would not take much, they both knew, for the rail to give way, or John to lose his balance. A fragment of curse, a stray shadow of ill will, would be enough to cause John or Ian or anyone else to forget to latch the trapdoor, or for the latch to stick, so that Adric or Mag, or one of Cousin Rowanberry’s ever-multiplying brood, could come up here …
And even so, the platform was the safest place in all the Hold to work such spells.
As she and Ian bore the harpoons down the twisting stair, Jenny remembered what it had been, to be a dragon. To be a creature of diamond heart and limitless power. A creature to whom magic was not something that one did—well or less well—but the thing that one was: will and magic, flesh and bone, all one.
And not caring if a child fell from the platform.
With the moon’s rising John and Jenny and Ian rode out from Alyn Hold to the stone house on Frost Fell, where Jenny had for so many years lived alone. It had been Caerdinn’s house, and Jenny had lived as the old wizard’s pupil from the time she was thirteen and the buds of power she’d had as a child began to blossom. A single big room and a loft, bookshelves, a table of pickled pine, a vast hearth, and a big bed. It was to this house that John had first come to her, twenty-two and needing help against one of the bandit hordes that had been the scourge of the Winterlands in the days before the King sent his protecting armies to them again. He’d been challenged, Jenny recalled, to single combat by some bandit chief—maybe the one who had slain his father—and had heard that no weapon could harm a man who’d lain with a witch.
But she’d remembered him from her own childhood and his. His mother had been Jenny’s first teacher in the arts of power, a captive woman, an Icerider witch: the scandal when Lord Aver married her had been a nine days’ wonder through the Winterlands. When her son was four and Jenny seven, Kahiera Nightraven had vanished, gone back to the Iceriders, leaving Jenny with no better instructor than Caerdinn, who had hated all Iceriders and Kahiera above the rest. From that time until his arrival at Frost Fell, she had seen Kahiera’s son barely a score of times.
Riding up the fell now, she saw him in her mind as she had seen him then—cocky, quirky, aggressive, the scourge of maidens in five villages … And angry. It was his anger she remembered most, and the shy fleeting sweetness of his smile.
“Place needs thatching,” he remarked now, standing in Battlehammer’s stirrups to pull a straw from the overhang of the roof. “According to Dotys’ Catalogues, villagers on the Silver Isles used to braid straw into solid tiles and peg ’em to the rafterwork, which must have been gie heavy. Cowan”—the head stableman at the Hold—“says it can’t be done, but I’ve a mind to try this summer, if I can find how they did the braiding. If we’re all still alive by haying, that is.” Chewing the straw, he dropped from the warhorse’s back, looped the rein around the gate, and trailed Jenny and Ian into the house. “Garn,” he added, sniffing. “Why is it no matter what kind of Weirds you lay around the house, Jen, to keep wanderers from even seein’ the place, mice always seem to get in just fine?”
Jenny flashed him a quick glance by the soft blue radiance of the witchlight she called and bent to pull from under the bed the box of herbs she kept there. Hellebore, yellow jessamine, and the bright red caps of panther-mushroom, carefully potted in wax-stoppered jars. Jars and box were written around with spells, as the house walls were written, to keep intruders away, but there were two mice dead under the bed nevertheless.
Jenny traced the box with her blunt brown fingertips, automatically undoing the wards she had woven. Calabash gourds from the south contained the heads of water-vipers and the dried bodies of certain jellyfish. Nameless leaves were tied in ensorcelled thread, and waxed-parchment packets held deadly earths and salts. On the other side of the room Ian hunted among the few books still on the shelf; John caught Jenny around the waist, tripped her and tossed her onto the old flattened mattress, grinning impishly as she flung a spell across the room to keep Ian unaware of his parents’ misbehavior …
“Behave yourself.” She wriggled from his grasp, giggling like a village girl.
“It’s been too long since we’ve come here.” He let her up, but held her with one arm on either side of her, hands grasping the rough bedpost behind her back. Though only a little over medium height himself, John was easily a foot taller than she; the witchlight flashed silvery in his spectacles and in the twinkle of his eyes.
“And whose fault is that?” She kept her voice low—Ian was still preoccupied with his search. “I wasn’t the one who made stinks and messes and explosions in quest of self-igniting kindling all spring. I wasn’t the one who had to try to make a flying machine from drawings he’d found in some old book …”
“That was Heronax of Ernine,” protested John. “He flew from Ernine to the Silver Isles in it—wherever Ernine was—and I’ve gie near got the thing working properly now. You’ll see.”
He gathered her hair up in his hands, an overflowing double handful of oceanic night, and bent to kiss her lips. His body pressed hers to the tall, smooth-hewn post, and her hand explored the leather of his doublet, the rough wool of the dull-colored plaid wrapped over his shoulder, the hard muscle beneath the linen sleeve. Ian apparently bethought himself of some ingredient hidden inexplicably in the garden, for he wandered unseeing outside; the scents of the old house wrapped them around, moldy thatch and mice and the wild whisper of summer night in the Winterlands.
The heat of her body’s changing whispered to her, and she whispered back, Go away. It was not just the little cantrips, the knots of warding and change, that turned aside those migraines, those flashes of moodiness, those alien angers. It was this knowledge, this man, the lips that sought hers and the warmth of his flesh against her. The joy of a girl who had been ugly, who had been scorned and stoned in the village streets,