Dragonshadow

Dragonsbane, they called him. Slayer of dragons. Or a dragon, anyway. And, he'd later found out, not such a very big one at that. Lord John Aversin, Thane of the Winterlands, leaned back in the mended oak chair in his library as the messenger's footfalls retreated down the tower stairs, and looked across at Jenny Waynest, who was curled up on the windowsill with a cat dozing in her lap. "Bugger," he said. The night's first appreciable breezewarm and sticky as such things were in the Winterlands in summerbrought the grit of woodsmoke through the open window and made the candle flames shudder among the heaped books. "A hundred feet long," Jenny murmured. John shook his head. "Gaw, any dragon looks a hundred feet long if you're under it." He pushed his round-lensed spectacles more firmly onto the bridge of his long nose. "Or in a position where you have to think about bein' under it in the near future. I doubt it's over fifty. That one we slew over by Far West Riding wasn't quite thirty ..." He nodded to the cold fireplace, where the black spiked mace of the golden dragon's tail-tip hung. "And Morkeleb the Black was forty-two, though I thought he'd whack me over the back of the head when I asked could I measure him." He grinned at the memory, but behind the spectacles Jenny could see the fear in his eyes. Almost as an afterthought he added, "We'll have to go after it." Jenny stroked the cat's head. "Yes." Her voice was inaudible. The cat purred and made bread on her knee. "Funny, that." John got to his feet and stretched to get the crick out of his back. "I've put together every account I can find of past Dragonsbanesall them old ballads and talesand matched 'em up as well as I could with the King-lists." He gestured to the vast rummage that covered desk and floor and every shelf of the low-vaulted study: bound bundles of notes, parchments half copied from waterstained books found in the ruins south of Wrynde. Curillius on The Deeds of the Ancient Heroes, Gorgonimir's Creatures and Phenomena. A fair copy of a fragment of the old Liever Draiken sent by the Regent of Bel, a connoisseur of both ancient manuscripts and the tales of Dragonsbanes. Notes yet to be copiedhe'd jotted them down two years agoof a dragon-slaying song sung by one of the garrison at Cair Corflyn, all mixed up with wax note tablets, candles, inkwells, scrapers, prickers, pumice, candle scissors, and dismantled clocks. For the fourteen years they'd been together, Jenny had heard John swear every year or two he'd put the place in order, and she knew that the phrase "put together" must not be taken too literally. Magpie gleanings of learning by a man whose curiosity was an unfilled well; accretions of useful, interesting, or merely frivolous lore spewed back at random by circumstance and the mad God of Time. "Some Dragonsbanes slay one dragon and that's that, they're in the ballads for good," mused John. "Others slay two or three, and two of those, as far as I can figure 'em, are within ten years of the singletons. Then you'll get generations, fifty, sixty, seventy years, when the dragons mind their own business, whatever that is, and nobody slays anybody. This is three for me. How'd I get so lucky?" "The North is being settled again." Jenny set Skinny Kitty aside and went to stand behind John, her arms around his waist. Through his rough red wool doublet and patched linen shirt she felt the ribs under the hard sheath of muscle, the warmth of his flesh. "It was the cattle herd at Skep Dhu garrison that the dragon hit. There probably hasn't been this much livestock in the North since the Kings left. It may have drawn this one." "Gaw," he said again, and set his hand over the folded knot of hers. An oddly deft hand for a warrior's, inkstained anHambly, Barbara is the author of 'Dragonshadow' with ISBN 9780345421883 and ISBN 0345421884.