Free Dragonsbane by Barbara Hambly Page A

wilderness of trees.
    Gareth gasped, “He was going to kill them! Those poor old people...”
    Jenny nodded, as John came back to the road. “I know.” She understood why; but, as when she had killed the dying robber in the ruins of the old town, she still felt unclean.
    “Is that all you can say?” Gareth raged, horrified. “You know ? He would have shot them in cold blood...”
    “They were Meewinks, Gar,” John said quietly. “Shooting’s the only thing you can do with Meewinks.”
    “I don’t care what you call them!” he cried. “They were old and harmless! All they were doing was gathering kindling!”
    A small, straight line appeared between John’s reddish brows, and he rubbed his eyes. Gareth, Jenny thought, was not the only one upon whom this trip was telling.
    “I don’t know what you call them in your part of the country,” Aversin said tiredly. “Their people used to farm all the valley of the Wildspae. They...”
    “John.” Jenny touched his arm. She had followed this exchange only marginally; her senses and her power were diffused through the damp woods, and in the fading light she scented danger. It seemed to prickle along her skin—a soft plashing movement in the flooded glades to the north, a thin chittering that silenced the small restive noises of fox and weasel. “We should be moving. The light’s already going. I don’t remember this part of the woods well but I know it’s some distance from any kind of camping place.”
    “What is it?” His voice, like hers, dropped to a whisper.
    She shook her head. “Maybe nothing. But I think we should go.”
    “Why?” Gareth bleated. “What’s wrong? For three days you’ve been running away from your own shadows...”
    “That’s right,” John agreed, and there was a dangerous edge to his quiet voice. “You ever think what might happen to you if your own shadow caught you? Now ride— and ride silent.”
    It was nearly full night when they made camp, for, like Jenny, Aversin was nervous, and it took some time for him to find a camping place that his woodsmanship judged to be even relatively safe. One of them Jenny rejected, not liking the way the dark trees crowded around it; another John passed by because the spring could not be seen from where the fire would be. Jenny was hungry and tired, but the instincts of the Winterlands warned her to keep moving until they found a place that could be defended, though against what she could not tell.
    When Aversin ruled against a third place, an almost-circular clearing with a small, fern-choked spring gurgling through one side of it, Gareth’s hunger-frayed temper snapped. “What’s wrong with it?” he demanded, dismounting and huddling on the lee-side of The Stupid Roan for warmth. “You can take a drink without getting out of sight of the fire, and it’s bigger than the other place was.”
    Annoyance glinted like the blink of drawn steel in John’s voice. “I don’t like it.”
    “Well, why in the name of Sarmendes not?”
    Aversin looked around him at the clearing and shook his head. The clouds had parted overhead enough to admit watery moonlight to glint on his specs, on the water droplets in his hair when he pushed back his hood, and on the end of his long nose. “I just don’t. I can’t say why.”
    “Well, if you can’t say why, what would you like?”
    “What I’d like,” the Dragonsbane retorted with his usual devastating accuracy, “is not to have some snirp of a silk-lined brat telling me a place is safe because he wants his supper.”
    Because that was obviously Gareth’s first concern, the boy exploded, “That isn’t the reason! I think you’ve lived like a wolf for so long you don’t trust anything! I’m not going to trek through the woods all night long because...”
    “Fine,” said Aversin grimly. “You can just bloody well stay here, then.”
    “That’s right! Go ahead, abandon me! Are you going to take a shot at me if I try to come after you