Dragonshadow by Barbara Hambly

Author:Barbara Hambly
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Beneath a camouflaging plaid, John and Jenny passed the telescope back and forth and watched Rocklys and her men march into the fort with the setting of the sun.

Mailshirts made a muffled leaden ringing when the drums and pipes fell silent. In the back of her mind Jenny heard Caerdinn’s harsh angry voice: A great gray snake of men, with banners on its spine, they were. Marching away to the south. Leaving us to our foes, and to poverty and ignorance afterward. Leaving us without law.

Rocklys rode ahead on her big stallion, and the smoky light made her helmet plumes and cloak dark as blood. John touched Jenny’s arm and pressed the spyglass into her hand. Through it she saw the man who rode at the Commander’s side.

Square-jawed, strong-built, his face was settled into lines of arrogance, the arrogance of money that has always bought unquestioning obedience. A fair match for Rocklys, if she had taken him. Merchants wanting to be aristocrats, she said in scorn … A maid of the House of Uwanë was perhaps the only thing he couldn’t buy. On his hair he wore an embroidered cap; gloves of embroidered leather protected his hands.

The man who’d taken Ian.

Jenny shut her eyes. She should, she knew, feel only pity for the man himself, whatever fragments of his consciousness might still remain. She’d seen what even small wights did to and with those they possessed.

But she could feel no pity. You arrogant, greedy bastard, she thought, knowing she was being unjust, for he must have been as hungry for craft as she. You heard the demon whispering in your dreams, promising power if you just did one simple rite…

Didn’t you know? Couldn’t you guess?

Or didn’t you want to know? Did you think you could control the situation, as you controlled all of your life before?

Her jaw ached and she realized her teeth were clenched.

“There.” John nudged her. “Look.”

The column was interrupted for a space, where prisoners walked, hands bound up to wooden yokes set over their necks. Women and children mostly, with the alabaster-fair skin, coarse bl1ack hair, and low flattened cheekbones of the Iceriders. But nearer the front, where Rocklys and the southerner Caradoc rode side by side, two prisoners rode bound on horses, a boy and a girl. Through the spyglass Jenny saw the silver chains, the sigils and wards that lashed their wrists to the saddlebows.

So John’s mother Nightraven must have been brought to Alyn Hold, a prisoner of Lord Aver’s spear.

Those, she thought, and not the protection of the farms, were the reason for Rocklys’ pursuit of the band.

As Yseult must have been Rocklys’ motive in convincing Jenny to seek Balgodorus, while Caradoc took Ian.

To found the Dragon Corps.

Only after the last of the army passed through the thick-planked double gate of the fort, and the gate shut behind it, did the two watchers move. Stealthy as hunters, they wriggled their way down the slope and into the trees, concealed under every ward-spell and guard and Word of Invisibility that Jenny could conjure around them.

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