vellum he’d bought from a peddler were in fact Dotys’s Second History and not one of the other ancient authors’ and she wanted to hear about the star.
“Well, anyway, it’s a double-headed comet,” John said, called back from historical exegesis that could easily have taken the remainder of the night. “The first comet showed up in spring, and the second, in the same place in the sky, in fall. The dragon’s head an’ his tail, they said.”
On the southern horizon a pale streak showed where the sun was dozing, and all around them the cornfields of Alyn Village resounded with the twitter and warble of sleepless summer birds. In her dream, Jenny still had magic. She could feel the radiance of it, glowing golden in her bones.
“Accordin’ to my calculations …” He rolled over and grubbed among his books for a much-scratched wax tablet. Only Jenny’s mageborn eyes could have made out the scribbles on it, in the starlight. “… the first head should show itself, the year after next, right there in the Sign of the Dragon …” He put his head close to hers so that she could site along his pointing finger at the cluster of stars hanging low above the toothed black notches of the Wolf Hills. They had been together a dozen years on this particular night, but she still loved the smell of his flesh, and was deliciously conscious of the warmth of his shoulder against hers.
Oh, my love, how could I have turned away from you?
Shadow folded around her, like cradling hands. Morkeleb the Dragon had said to her once, Endure, and she now tried to say to him, I will, my friend. The dream faded away. She became aware that she was underground, in darkness, in the gnomes’ Deep at Ylferdun. That she was dying. Around her the darkness of the Deep was very cold. She was conscious—from what felt like a great distance away—of lying on stone. Gritty dust clogged her throat and her nose, and a small star of cold pain radiated from her left shoulder, pain that no longer seemed to be part of her body. She had been shot with a poisoned arrow, she remembered. Morkeleb had come to save her, whipping down through the passageways of the mines that lay below and to the north of Ylferdun Deep. But it had been a trap, and the gnomes had set off an explosion, caving in the tunnel around him with the blasting powder.
She felt his mind reach out to hers.
Endure till I come. He had said that to her before, when they had parted after the loss of her magic, in those terrible days when she could meet John’s silences and anger with nothing more than silence of her own.
No, she thought now. Morkeleb would try to use magic, the strange powers of a Dragonshadow, to save her and himself. Magic is the heart and the flesh of dragons, and she knew there were demons in the Deep, waiting for him to do just that. In the summer just past she had seen how the demons could use the magic of a wizard as a bridge into that wizard’s mind and flesh, thrusting aside all protective spells as they had never done before. Thus the demon Amayon had entered her. Back when I HAD power, she reflected, without even bitterness, now. The demon lord Folcalor had come close to conquering the Realm of Bel through the wizards he had seized. Had he not, for reasons of his own, chosen to imprison the souls of the mages thus possessed rather than simply drive them out to dissolve, Jenny knew she would never have regained her body and her life.
Better that she herself should die, she thought, than that demons seize Morkeleb’s mind and power to use as their own.
Nightmares pulled her back into darkness. The memory of what Amayon had done with her magic tormented her, acts of cruelty and wantonness. The memory of being trapped in her green crystal prison, feeling the hot brilliant rush of demon magic, pain, and shame. The memory of what the world had looked like when Amayon had been within her mind.
In nightmare she heard, too, Amayon’s screams when John had turned him over to the Demon Queen behind the mirror, to be tormented forever. Felt anew the blasting shock of utter grief, when in killing the wizard Caradoc—in driving Folcalor from his body—her own magic had been seared away to ashes.
Desolation and cold washed over her, the recollection of having nothing left of the power that had been hers.
She wondered, as she sank into deeper darkness, whether death would liberate her from those nightmares. Or was that what death consisted of: helplessly reliving horror, over and over again?
“Jenny my child,” a soft old creaky voice whispered in her ear, “thou art what thou art.” Someone was with her in the darkness, someone whose strength touched that cold, disembodied pain and slowly melted it into nothingness. Someone whose strength kept her from sinking beneath those black waters.
“Past and present and yet to come, this thou art. All of it, fire and water, earth and air. All of magic ariseth from understanding this.”
The voice was familiar, and Jenny thought, Ah.
Her past was clear to her, as clear as the old scars on her back. Caerdinn, the bitter old wander-mage who had taught her spells, had often struck her in his anger, but it was he who had made her a wizard. He who had taught her the uses of power.
She had been a witch-child, knowing from earliest awareness that magic was in her. She could look at a lamp and call flame to its wick, or find her mother’s thimble when the cat had knocked it under the wood-box. She could see in the dark, while others groped and blundered in that gloomy little house in the lower village, beneath the walls of red-bearded Lord Aver’s Hold. Lord Aver had had a prisoner at the Hold when Jenny was small, a black-haired Ice-witch he’d captured in a raid on an Icerider camp one year when those nomads had come raiding down from the North. This Ice-witch was a shaman among those northern nomads, she had told the child Jenny, and had been cast out from her people. She could not go back.
Kahiera Nightraven had been Jenny’s first teacher.
Past and present and yet to come, this thou art …
Sweet incense and warmth slowly returning to the innermost hollows of her flesh. The cold star of poison pain slowly fading. The sweetness of herbs.
The Nightraven had not been a good woman, or an easy teacher. Coldhearted and beautiful, she had laid spells over her captor, so that Lord Aver had loved her even when they fought. His sisters, Jane and Rowan, had hated her like death. When she had disappeared, leaving behind her a son, a puzzled, wary toddler who never quite trusted the world, the spells on Lord Aver had remained: he had never loved another woman, not even his former longtime mistress Hollyberry, the town blacksmith’s wife.
Jenny, too, had been left with a hole in her heart.
It was old Caerdinn, the half-mad and rage-filled old hedge-wizard Lord Aver got for his son John’s tutor, who took Jenny as a pupil when she was thirteen. Caerdinn took her into his crumbling stone house on Frost Fell, and taught her how magic was organized. Showed her how to draw power from the sun and the earth and from her own flesh and bones and blood. How to observe, and to name each tiniest flower and grass blade by its true name so that they would be within her power: how to call power from these true names. How to weave Limitations on each spell, so that cows would not run mad, nor birds forget how to fly, nor thatch roofs take fire two villages away when she summoned Power; and how to harmlessly disperse the power she’d called, after her spells were accomplished, lest it linger in the place where she’d raised it and mix with later spells. This was how Spaeth, his master, had taught him, and all the wizards of their Line back to the shadowy ancient warlock Herne.
All magic comes from understanding, Caerdinn had told her, staring at her with his huge pale blue eyes, like a demented goat’s beneath white brows. He seized her by the shoulder, small hands but terribly strong. The long nails stained yellow with the
