Dragonsbane by Barbara Hambly Page A

his eyes, she saw herself—pitiless blue eyes in a face like a white wedge of bone between the cloud-dark streams of her hair. She remembered when Caerdinn had done this same thing to her, and released Gareth quickly. He turned away, covering his face, his whole body shivering with shock and fright.
    After a moment Jenny said softly, “I’m sorry. But this is the inner heart of magic, the way all spells work—with the essence, the true name. It is true of the Whisperers and of the greatest of mages as well.” She clucked to the horses and they started forward again, their hooves sinking squishily into the tea-colored ooze. She went on, “All you can do is ask yourself if it is reasonable that those you see would be there in the woods, calling to you.”
    “But that’s just it,” said Gareth. “It was reasonable. Zyerne...” He stopped himself.
    “Zyerne?” It was the name he had muttered in his dreams at the Hold, when he had flinched aside from her touch.
    “The Lady Zyerne,” he said hesitantly. “The—the King’s mistress.” Under its streaking of rain and mud his face was bright carnation pink. Jenny remembered her strange and cloudy dream of the dark-haired woman and her tinkling laughter.
    “And you love her?”
    Gareth blushed even redder. In a stifled voice he repeated, “She is the King’s mistress.”
    As I am John’s, Jenny thought, suddenly realizing whence his anger at her had stemmed.
    “In any case,” Gareth went on after a moment, “we’re all in love with her. That is—she’s the first lady of the Court, the most beautiful... We write sonnets to her beauty...”
    “Does she love you?” inquired Jenny, and Gareth fell silent for a time, concentrating on urging his horse through the mud and up the stony slope beyond.
    At length he said, “I—I don’t know. Sometimes I think...” Then he shook his head. “She frightens me,” he admitted. “And yet—she’s a witch, you see.”
    “Yes,” said Jenny softly. “I guessed that, from what you said at the Hold. You feared I would be like her.”
    He looked stricken, as if caught in some horrible social gaffe. “But—but you’re not. She’s very beautiful...” He broke off, blushing in earnest, and Jenny laughed.
    “Don’t worry. I learned a long time ago what a mirror was for.”
    “But you are beautiful,” he insisted. “That is—Beautiful isn’t the right word.”
    “No.” Jenny smiled. “I do think ‘ugly’ is the word you’re looking for.”
    Gareth shook his head stubbornly, his honesty forbidding him to call her beautiful and his inexperience making it impossible to express what he did mean. “Beauty—beauty really doesn’t have anything to do with it,” he said at last. “And she’s nothing like you—for all her beauty, she’s crafty and hard-hearted and cares for nothing save the pursuit of her powers.”
    “Then she is like me,” said Jenny. “For I am crafty—skilled in my crafts, such as they are—and I have been called hard-hearted since I was a little girl and chose to sit staring at the flame of a candle until the pictures came, rather than play at house with the other little girls. And as for the rest...” She sighed. “The key to magic is magic; to be a mage you must be a mage. My old master used to say that. The pursuit of your power takes all that you have, if you will be great—it leaves neither time, nor energy, for anything else. We are born with the seeds of power in us and driven to be what we are by a hunger that knows no slaking. Knowledge—power—to know what songs the stars sing; to center all the forces of creation upon a rune drawn in the air—we can never give over the seeking of it. It is the stuff of loneliness, Gareth.”
    They rode on in silence for a time. The woods about them were pewter and iron, streaked here and there with the rust of the dying year. In the wan light Gareth looked older than he had when they began, for he had lost flesh on the trip, and