Dragonsbane. Barbara Hambly
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around the desiccated mummies of root and pod where they lay in the circles Jenny had traced. Slowly, rune by rune, she worked the healing spells over them, each with its own Limitation to prevent a too-quick healing that might harm the body as a whole, her fingers patiently tracing the signs, her mind calling down the qualities of the universe particular to each, like separate threads of unheard music. It was said that the great mages could see the power of the runes they wrought glowing like cold fire in the air above the healing powders and sense the touch of it like plasmic light drawn from the fingertips. After long years of solitary meditation, Jenny had come to accept that, for her, magic was a depth and a stillness rather than the moving brilliance that it was for the great. It was something she would never quite become reconciled to, but at least it kept her from the resentment that would block what powers she did have. Within her narrow bounds, she knew she worked well.
The key to magic is magic, Caerdinn had said. To be a mage, you must be a mage. There is no time for anything else, if you will come to the fullness of your power.
So she had remained in the stone house on Frost Fell after Caerdinn had died, studying his books and measuring the stars, meditating in the crumbling circle of ancient standing stones that stood on the hillcrest above. Through the slow years her powers had grown with meditation and study, though never to what his had been. It was a life that had contented her. She had looked no further than the patient striving to increase her powers, while she healed others where she could and observed the turning of the seasons.
Then John had come.
The spells circled to their conclusion. For a time silence hung on the air, as if every hearth brick and rafter shadow, the fragrance of the applewood fire and the guttural trickle of the rain, had been preserved in amber for a thousand years. Jenny swept the spelled powders together into a bowl and raised her eyes. Gareth was watching her fearfully from the darkness of the curtained bed.
She got to her feet. As she moved toward him, he recoiled, his white face drawn with accusation and loathing. “You are his mistress!”
Jenny stopped, hearing the hatred in that weak voice. She said, “Yes. But it has nothing to do with you.”
He turned his face away, fretful and still half-dreaming. “You are just like her,” he muttered faintly. “Just like Zyerne …”
She stepped forward again, not certain she had heard clearly. “Who?”
“You’ve snared him with your spells—brought him down into the mud,” the boy whispered and broke off with a feverish sob. Disregarding his repulsion, she came worriedly to his side, feeling his face and hands; after a moment, he ceased his feeble resistance, already sinking back to sleep. His flesh felt neither hot nor overly chilled; his pulse was steady and strong. But still he tossed and murmured, “Never—I never will. Spells—you have laid spells on him—made him love you with your witcheries …” His eyelids slipped closed.
Jenny sighed and straightened up, looking down into the flushed, troubled face. “If only I had laid spells on him,” she murmured. “Then I could release us both—had I the courage.”
She dusted her hands on her skirt and descended the narrow darkness of the turret stair.
She found John in his study—what would have been a fair-sized room, had it not been jammed to overflowing with books. For the most part, these were ancient volumes, left at the Hold by the departing armies or scavenged from the cellars of the burned-out garrison towns of the south; rat-chewed, black with mildew, unreadable with waterstains, they crammed every shelf of the labyrinth of planks that filled two walls and they spilled off to litter the long oak table and heaped the floor in the corners. Sheets of notes were interleaved among their pages and between their covers, copied out by John in the winter evenings. Among and between them were jumbled at random the tools of a scribe—prickers and quills, knives and inkpots, pumice stones—and stranger things besides: metal tubes and tongs, plumb-bobs and levels, burning-glasses and pendulums, magnets, the blown shells of eggs, chips of rock, dried flowers, and a half-disassembled clock. A vast spiderweb of hoists and pulleys occupied the rafters in one corner, and battalions of guttered and decaying candles angled along the edges of every shelf and sill. The room was a magpie-nest of picked-at knowledge, the lair of a tinkerer to whom the universe was one vast toyshop of intriguing side issues. Above the hearth, like a giant iron pinecone, hung the tail-knob of the dragon of Wyr—fifteen inches long and nine through, covered with stumpy, broken spikes.
John himself stood beside the window, gazing through the thick glass of its much-mended casement out over the barren lands to the north, where they merged with the bruised and tumbled sky. His hand was pressed to his side, where the rain throbbed in the ribs that the tail-knob had cracked.
Though the soft buckskin of her boots made no sound on the rutted stone of the floor, he looked up as she came in. His eyes smiled greeting into hers, but she only leaned her shoulder against the stone of the doorpost and asked, “Well?”
He glanced ceilingward where Gareth would be lying. “What, our little hero and his dragon?” A smile flicked the corners of his thin, sensitive mouth, then vanished like the swift sunlight of a cloudy day. “I’ve slain one dragon, Jen, and it bloody near finished me. Tempting as the promise is of getting more fine ballads written of my deeds, I think I’ll pass this chance.”
Relief and the sudden recollection of Gareth’s ballad made Jenny giggle as she came into the room.
The whitish light of the windows caught in every crease of John’s leather sleeves as he stepped forward to meet her and bent to kiss her lips.
“Our hero never rode all the way north by himself, surely?”
Jenny shook her head. “He told me he took a ship from the south to Eldsbouch and rode east from there.”
“He’s gie lucky he made it that far,” John remarked, and kissed her again, his hands warm against her sides. “The pigs have been restless all day, carrying bits of straw about in their mouths—I turned back yesterday even from riding the bounds because of the way the crows were acting out on the Whin Hills. It’s two weeks early for them, but it’s in my mind this’ll be the first of the winter storms. The rocks at Eldsbouch are shipeaters. You know, Dotys says in Volume Three of his Histories—or is it in that part of Volume Five we found at Ember?—or is it in Clivy?—that there used to be a mole or breakwater across the harbor there, back in the days of the Kings. It was one of the Wonders of the World, Dotys—or Clivy—says, but nowhere can I find any mention of the engineering of it. One of these days I’m minded to take a boat out there and see what I can find underwater at the harbor mouth …”
Jenny shuddered, knowing John to be perfectly capable of undertaking such an investigation. She had still not forgotten the stone house he had blown up, after reading in some moldering account about the gnomes using blasting powder to tunnel in their Deeps, nor his experiments with water pipes.
Sudden commotion sounded in the dark of the turret stair, treble voices arguing, “She is, too!” and “Let go!” A muted scuffle ensued, and a moment later a red-haired, sturdy urchin of four or so exploded into the room in a swirl of grubby sheepskin and plaids, followed immediately by a slender, dark-haired boy of eight. Jenny smiled and held out her arms to them both. They flung themselves against her; small, filthy hands clutched delightedly at her hair, her skirt, and the sleeves of her shift, and she felt again the surge of ridiculous and illogical delight at being in their presence.
“And how are my little barbarians?” she asked in her coolest voice, which fooled neither of them.
“Good—we been good, Mama,” the older boy said, clinging to the faded blue cloth of her skirt. “I been good—Adric hasn’t.”
“Have, too,” retorted the younger one, whom John had lifted into his arms. “Papa had to whip Ian.”
“Did he, now?” She smiled down into her older son’s eyes, heavy-lidded and tip-tilted like John’s, but as summer blue as her own. “He doubtless deserved it.”
“With a big whip,” Adric amplified, carried