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Dragon's Bane
Barbara Hambly
Copyright 1985 by Barbara Hambly

CHAPTER I

BANDITS OFTEN LAY in wait in the ruins of the old
town at the fourwaysЧJenny Waynest thought there were
three of them this morning.

She was not sure any more whether it was magic which
told her this, or simply the woodcraftiness and instinct
for the presence of danger that anyone developed who
had survived to adulthood in the Winterlands. But as she
drew rein short of the first broken walls, where she knew
she would still be concealed by the combination of autumn
fog and early morning gloom beneath the thicker trees of
the forest, she noted automatically that the horse drop-
pings in the sunken clay of the roadbed were fresh,
untouched by the frost that edged the leaves around them.
She noted, too, the silence in the ruins ahead; no coney's
foot rustled the yellow spill of broomsedge cloaking the
hill slope where the old church had been, the church sacred
to the Twelve Gods beloved of the old Kings. She thought
she smelled the smoke of a concealed fire near the remains
of what had been a crossroads inn, but honest men would
have gone there straight and left a track in the nets of
dew that covered the weeds all around. Jenny's white

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mare Moon Horse pricked her long ears at the scent of
other beasts, and Jenny wind-whispered to herfor silence,
smoothing the raggedy mane against the long neck. But
she had been looking for all those signs before she saw
them.

She settled into stillness in the protective cloak of fog
and shadow, like a partridge blending with the brown of
the woods. She was a little like a partridge herself, dark
and small and nearly invisible in the dull, random plaids
of the northlands; a thin, compactly built woman, tough
as the roots of moorland heather. After a moment of
silence, she wove her magic into a rope of mist and cast
it along the road toward the nameless ruins of the town.

It was something she had done even as a child, before
the old wander-mage Caerdinn had taught her the ways
of power. All her thirty-seven years, she had lived in the
WinteriandsЧshe knew the smells of danger. The late-