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out by John in the winter evenings. Among and between them were jumbled at random the tools of a scribe—prickers and quills, knives and inkpots, pumice stones—and stranger things besides: metal tubes and tongs, plumb-bobs and levels, burning-glasses and pendulums, magnets, the blown shells of eggs, chips of rock, dried flowers, and a half-disassembled clock. A vast spiderweb of hoists and pulleys occupied the rafters in one corner, and battalions of guttered and decaying candles angled along the edges of every shelf and sill. The room was a magpie-nest of picked-at knowledge, the lair of a tinkerer to whom the universe was one vast toyshop of intriguing side issues. Above the hearth, like a giant iron pinecone, hung the tail-knob of the dragon of Wyr—fifteen inches long and nine through, covered with stumpy, broken spikes.
    John himself stood beside the window, gazing through the thick glass of its much-mended casement out over the barren lands to the north, where they merged with the bruised and tumbled sky. His hand was pressed to his side, where the rain throbbed in the ribs that the tail-knob had cracked.
    Though the soft buckskin of her boots made no sound on the rutted stone of the floor, he looked up as she came in. His eyes smiled greeting into hers, but she only leaned her shoulder against the stone of the doorpost and asked, “Well?”
    He glanced ceilingward where Gareth would be lying. “What, our little hero and his dragon?” A smile flicked the corners of his thin, sensitive mouth, then vanished like the swift sunlight of a cloudy day. “I’ve slain one dragon, Jen, and it bloody near finished me. Tempting as the promise is of getting more fine ballads written of my deeds, I think I’ll pass this chance.”
    Relief and the sudden recollection of Gareth’s ballad made Jenny giggle as she came into the room. The whitish light of the windows caught in every crease of John’s leather sleeves as he stepped forward to meet her and bent to kiss her lips.
    “Our hero never rode all the way north by himself, surely?”
    Jenny shook her head. “He told me he took a ship from the south to Eldsbouch and rode east from there.”
    “He’s gie lucky he made it that far,” John remarked, and kissed her again, his hands warm against her sides. “The pigs have been restless all day, carrying bits of straw about in their mouths—I turned back yesterday even from riding the bounds because of the way the crows were acting out on the Whin Hills. It’s two weeks early for them, but it’s in my mind this’ll be the first of the winter storms. The rocks at Eldsbouch are shipeaters. You know, Dotys says in Volume Three of his Histories —or is it in that part of Volume Five we found at Ember?—or is it in Clivy?—that there used to be a mole or breakwater across the harbor there, back in the days of the Kings. It was one of the Wonders of the World, Dotys—or Clivy—says, but nowhere can I find any mention of the engineering of it. One of these days I’m minded to take a boat out there and see what I can find underwater at the harbor mouth...”
    Jenny shuddered, knowing John to be perfectly capable of undertaking such an investigation. She had still not forgotten the stone house he had blown up, after reading in some moldering account about the gnomes using blasting powder to tunnel in their Deeps, nor his experiments with water pipes.
    Sudden commotion sounded in the dark of the turret stair, treble voices arguing, “She is, too!” and “Let go!” A muted scuffle ensued, and a moment later a red-haired, sturdy urchin of four or so exploded into the room in a swirl of grubby sheepskin and plaids, followed immediately by a slender, dark-haired boy of eight. Jenny smiled and held out her arms to them both. They flung themselves against her; small, filthy hands clutched delightedly at her hair, her skirt, and the sleeves of her shift, and she felt again the surge of ridiculous and illogical delight at being