Read Online Dragonsbane by Barbara Hambly - Free Book Online Page A

looked across at Gareth and saw him gazing around him in a kind of hurt bewilderment at the desolation through which they rode: at the barren downs with their weed-grown lines of broken walls; at the old boundary stones, lumpish and melted-looking as spring snowmen; and at the stinking bogs or the high, bare tors with their few twisted trees, giant balls of mistletoe snagged weirdly in their naked branches against a dreary sky. It was a land that no longer remembered law or the prosperity of ordered living that comes with law, and sometimes she could see him struggling with the understanding of what John was offering to buy at the stake of his life.
    But usually it was plain that Gareth simply found the halts annoying. “We’re never going to get there at this rate,” he complained as John appeared from the smoke-colored tangle of dead heather that cloaked the lower flanks of a promontory that hid the road. A watchtower had once crowned it, now reduced to a chewed-looking circle of rubble on the hill’s crest. John had bellied up the slope to investigate it and the road ahead and now was shaking mud and wet out of his plaid. “It’s been twenty days since the dragon came,” Gareth added resentfully. “Anything can have happened.”
    “It can have happened the day after you took ship, my hero,” John pointed out, swinging up to the saddle of his spare riding horse, Cow. “And if we don’t look sharp and scout ahead, we are never going to get there.”
    But the sullen glance the boy shot at John’s back as he reined away told Jenny more clearly than words that, though he could not argue with this statement, he did not believe it, either.
    That evening they camped in the ragged birches of the broken country where the downs gave place to the hoary densities of the Wyrwoods. When camp was set, and the horses and mules picketed, Jenny moved quietly along the edge of the clearing, the open ground above the high bank of a stream whose noisy rushing blended with the sea-sound of the wind in the trees. She touched the bark of the trees and the soggy mast of acorns, hazelnuts, and decaying leaves underfoot, tracing them with the signs that only a mage could see—signs that would conceal the camp from those who might pass by outside. Looking back toward the fluttering yellow light of the new fire, she saw Gareth hunkered down beside it, shivering in his damp cloak, looking wretched and very forlorn.
    Her square, full lips pressed together. Since he had learned she was his erstwhile hero’s mistress, he had barely spoken to her. His resentment at her inclusion in the expedition was still obvious, as was his unspoken assumption that she had included herself out of a combination of meddling and a desire not to let her lover out of her sight. But Gareth was alone in an alien land, having clearly never been away from the comforts of his home before, lonely, disillusioned, and filled with a gnawing fear of what he would return to find.
    Jenny sighed and crossed the clearing to where he sat.
    The boy looked up at her suspiciously as she dug into her jacket pocket and drew out a long sliver of smoky crystal on the chain that Caerdinn had used to hang around his neck. “I can’t see the dragon in this,” she said, “but if you’ll tell me the name of your father and something about your home in Bel, at least I should be able to call their images and tell you if they’re all right.”
    Gareth turned his face away from her. “No,” he said. Then, after a moment, he added grudgingly, “Thank you all the same.”
    Jenny folded her arms and regarded him for a moment in the jumpy orange firelight. He huddled a little deeper into his stained crimson cloak and would not meet her eyes.
    “Is it because you think I can’t?” she asked at last. “Or because you won’t take the aid of a witch?”
    He didn’t answer that, though his full lower lip pinched up a bit in the middle. With a sigh of exasperation, Jenny walked away from