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silken pictures were gone from the flame. She pressed her lips taut, forcing herself to listen without speaking, knowing it was and could be none of her affair. She could no more have told him not to go—not then, not now— than he could have told her to leave the stone house on Frost Fell and give up her seeking, to come to the Hold to cook his meals and raise his sons.
    John was saying, “Tell me about this drake.”
    “You mean you’ll come?” The forlorn eagerness in Gareth’s voice made Jenny want to get up and box his ears.
    “I mean I want to hear about it.” The Dragonsbane came around the table and slouched into one of the room’s big carved chairs, sliding the other in Gareth’s direction with a shove of his booted foot. “How long ago did it strike?”
    “It came by night, two weeks ago. I took ship three days later, from Claekith Harbor below the city of Bel. The ship is waiting for us at Eldsbouch.”
    “I doubt that.” John scratched the side of his long nose with one scarred forefinger. “If your mariners were smart they’ll have turned and run for a safe port two days ago. The storms are coming. Eldsbouch will be no protection to them.”
    “But they said they’d stay!” Gareth protested indignantly. “I paid them!”
    “Gold will do them no good weighting their bones to the bottom of the cove,” John pointed out.
    Gareth sank back into his chair, shocked and cut to the heart by this final betrayal. “They can’t have gone...”
    There was a moment’s silence, while John looked down at his hands. Without lifting her eyes from the heart of the fire, Jenny said softly, “They are not there, Gareth. I see the sea, and it is black with storms; I see the old harbor at Eldsbouch, the gray river running through the broken houses there; I see the fisher-folk making fast their little boats to the ruins of the old piers and all the stones shining under the rain. There is no ship there, Gareth.”
    “You’re wrong,” he said hopelessly. “You have to be wrong.” He turned back to John. “It’ll take us weeks to get back, traveling overland...”
    “Us?” John said softly, and Gareth blushed and looked as frightened as if he had uttered mortal insult. After a moment John went on, “How big is this dragon of yours?”
    Gareth swallowed again and drew his breath in a shaky sigh. “Huge,” he said dully.
    “How huge?”
    Gareth hesitated. Like most people, he had no eye for relative size. “It must have been a hundred feet long. They say the shadow of its wings covered the whole of Deeping Vale.”
    “Who says?” John inquired, shifting his weight side-ways in the chair and hooking a knee over the fornicating sea-lions that made up the left-hand arm. “I thought it came at night, and munched up anyone close enough to see it by day.”
    “Well...” He floundered in a sea of third-hand rumor.
    “Ever see it on the ground?”
    Gareth blushed and shook his head.
    “It’s gie hard to judge things in the air,” John said kindly, pushing up his specs again. “The drake I slew here looked about a hundred feet long in the air, when I first saw it descending on the village of Great Toby. Turned out to be twenty-seven feet from beak to tail.” Again his quick grin illuminated his usually expressionless face. “It comes of being a naturalist. The first thing we did, Jenny and I, when I was on my feet again after killing it, was to go out there with cleavers and see how the thing was put together, what there was left of it.”
    “It could be bigger, though, couldn’t it?” Gareth asked. He sounded a little worried, as if, Jenny thought dryly, he considered a twenty-seven foot dragon somewhat paltry. “I mean, in the Greenhythe variant of the Lay of Selkythar Dragonsbane and the Worm of the Imperteng Wood, they say that the Worm was sixty feet long, with wings that would cover a battalion.”
    “Anybody measure it?”
    “Well, they must have. Except—now that I come to think of