Knight of the Demon Queen

Was that why he had tried to take his own life?

She shrank from the thought, guessing it to be true. Her own pain had blinded her. Her self-absorption in the loss of Amayon had kept her from even asking whether he suffered as badly …

What made her think her own agony was the worst possible?

Did Gothpys croon little rhymes to Ian still, in dreams? Did Ian hate his father for having taken the demon from him?

But even had Jane not been there, she would not have broken his healing sleep to inquire.

“Where’s Adric?” she asked as she turned from the door and descended the stairs to the kitchen again.

“He and Sergeant Muffle went hunting.” Jane’s voice was frosty. “You’re welcome to wait.”

Since this was patently untrue, Jenny thanked her and took her leave, staying only long enough to play a little with Mag by the warmth of the kitchen hearth. Pursuant to her decision to be a spider when she grew up, Mag was currently practicing weaving webs with Aunt Rowe’s yarns; she accepted her mother’s presence as peacefully as she had accepted her various absences, evidently considering this merely another journey. From Sparrow and Bill, Jenny had already heard of the mysterious fever, though there were no further cases of it and those who had been like to die were already on their feet. Curious, she thought, disquieted. On her way back to Frost Fell she resolved to return on the morrow, later in the day when Ian would be awake, though it meant walking home in the dark.

But as she trudged homeward, the flinty dazzle of the snow resolved itself into the wavering firefalls of migraine, and through the following day Jenny was barely able to do more than make sure Moon Horse was watered and fed and stagger back to bed. She dreamed again of the sea bottom and the great weightless graceful shadows of the whalemages passing like dancers overhead. The migraine seemed to have gotten into her dreams as well: fire shimmering in the water among the great columns of rock where Caradoc had died and things appearing and disappearing on the current-sculpted sand of the seafloor below.

The next day she felt better, though lightheaded. She trekked the woods in early morning, digging herbs patiently out from beneath the drifted snow. She could put no magic into them as she’d used to do, but they would have virtue nonetheless. There was peace, too, to be found in the secret tales told her by fox track and rabbit scat in the snow. She returned home and made herself a tisane against the migraine’s return. Lying in bed she heard the shutters rattle with new-risen wind. She stepped to the door and smelled the wind: it would be worse long before nightfall.

So she performed her chores and baked bread and carried in wood to last the afternoon and the night. The small tasks brought peace to her, and she tried to put from her mind what Jane would be saying of her—probably had been saying about her for years—behind her back. In the afternoon she climbed the attic steps with a broom and dust rags, to sweep and cleanse it and make it sweet for the drying of herbs. She relit the candles she’d set up four nights ago and, finding that light insufficient, untied the bundle and set another dozen in place: the darkness in the attic had disquieted her.

She no longer had a wizard’s skills, but, she found, something of a wizard’s awareness remained. And there was something about the attic that made her scalp prickle.

She opened another bundle of candles and saw that five were missing from it. The number skittered in the back of her mind with a sensation like the scratching of rats, catching at her breath. She lit all that remained of the candles and moved the spare bed out of the way; shifting boxes and sacks, her tiredness dissolved and even the ache in her crooked hands retreated before the dread in her heart. The dust on the trunks and bundles had been disturbed already. Thrusting aside two sacks of barley, she found the ghost of a mark on the floor, rubbed out with rags but not rubbed out enough.

It was a single curving line, ending in a sigil she recognized—a sigil she had never before seen in any of John’s books or the books left her by old Caerdinn. But she recognized it still.

She stood, candle in hand, looking down at it, wondering why she knew it, why the sight of it turned her sick.

Then she understood.

The memory of it was not her own. It had been left in her mind by Amayon when he had inhabited her body and her brain. It was one of dozens—ugly and dirty and disquieting, like fruit parings cached in corners by an unwelcome and uncouth guest.

The line was part of a complex power circle designed for the calling of a demon.

Ian.

The thought smote her like the toll of an iron bell.

Folcalor.

I will not go.

Nausea twisted her—nausea and pity and horror—and she scraped and hurled and tore at the boxes, the firkins, the bundles that had been stacked over the place.

Ian, no! Oh, my son …

She found the fragments of a china bowl, not merely broken but stamped and smashed until the clay was powder, ground into the scratched planking of the floor. Powdered, too, were bits of black chalk, as if they’d been crushed and ground under a young boy’s boots … I will not. I will not. I will not. In the darkest corner she found the five candles.

They were unlit.

He had not completed the rite.

Jenny knelt, holding her hands over her mouth, her breath glittering in the soft amber light that filled the attic.

He had not completed the summons of the demon.

Instead, he had gone downstairs and drunk poison in an effort to silence those demands.

Oh, Ian.

She closed her eyes.

Oh, my son.

The Winterlands’ wind screamed across the thatch.

When morning came, Jenny patiently dug the snow from the doors of the kitchen and the stable, wrapped herself in a sheepskin coat and her thick winter plaids, tied her sheepskin cap over her bald scalp, and set out for Alyn Hold. It has to be Folcalor, she thought, as she waded through the drifts on the downhill road through the bog. Gothpys—the demon who had inhabited Ian’s body and heart as Amayon had inhabited hers—was a prisoner behind the Mirror of Isychros. He would not be able to benefit from being summoned even had he had the power to invade Ian’s dreams with the demand.

Folcalor had seduced Caradoc, imprisoned his soul in a jewel, and inhabited his body. He had used the enslaved mage’s powers to capture and imprison other wizards.

Why?

And he was seeking to do it again.

Why?

At the Hold, Peg told her Ian and Muffle had ridden out that morning to deal with sickness in the village of Great Toby. “They hadn’t heard over there yet that you wasn’t at the Hold,” the gatekeeper explained apologetically. “The sickness isn’t much—Granny Brown’s rheumatism—so Master Ian said not to trouble you with it.”

“Thank you,” Jenny said, tucking her halberd against her shoulder and blowing on her hands. Even if Ian and Muffle were a few hours ahead of her, she’d encounter them in Great Toby. It would be near dark by the time she reached the village, and almost certainly snowing again.

“Would you do me a favor and ask Sparrow to send one of her girls up to the Fell to look after Moon Horse, if I’m not back tonight?” Jenny asked. Diffidently, she added, “John hasn’t returned yet, has he?” For through the gate arch she saw Bill lead Battlehammer across the yard.

Peg shook her head. “Dan Darrow brought the old boy back yesterday,” she said, turning to follow Jenny’s eyes. “He says His Lordship was there at the half moon; left the horse and went on into the Wraithmire alone. Old Dan said he thought as how John might be tracking something, by the weapons he bore.”

“The half moon?” Jenny said, and glanced at the sickle of the day moon just visible among the slow-gathering clouds.

“I don’t like it.” Peg hunched her shoulders in her mountain of wolf hides, plaids, and bright-colored knit-work scarves. “Muffle don’t like it, neither. He’s been pacing over the place at night as if he’d left something somewhere, looking in all the same places.”

The half moon, Jenny thought, quickening her stride as she passed through the village and over the barren fields. The road to Great Toby was laid out to avoid a slough, and Jenny knew she could cut nearly an hour off her walk by going through the woods. She moved with instinctive caution, seeking out deadfalls and places where the snow had been rucked and trampled by wild pigs or scoured by last night’s winds. It wasn’t unheard-of for bandits to come this close to the Hold walls, or even for them to raid one of the few isolated farms hereabouts, and she was acutely aware that she no longer had spells of “look over there” to keep her from their sight.

Even in the days of the kings, gangs of bullies and outlaws had preyed on the farms, hiding in the woods to steal cattle or pigs or to capture the occasional villager to sell as a slave to the gnomes of the mountains. With the return of the King’s troops and the King’s law three years ago, John had for the first time in anyone’s memory been able to make headway against them.

But with law, the King’s troops had brought more men, insubordinates and hard cases both in the legions and among the serfs of the manors established to feed the garrisons. In the past year, John had been certain that the bandits had entered the slave business in earnest, systematically kidnapping serfs who for the most part had been forcibly relocated to the North anyway.

Thus when Jenny saw the quick darting of half a dozen foxes away to her left in the white woods and found they’d been feeding on a dead sheep at the end of a long blood trail, the first thing she thought was, Bandits. When she followed the trail back to Rushmeath Farm, she knew it.

House and barn stood open and empty. By the trampled tracks and the blood on the snow Jenny read the tale of the attack: read, too, that it had taken place just after dawn. Heartsick with dread she searched for Dal and Lyra’s children, knowing that the gnomes had no use for anything but healthy adults in the deep tunnels of their endless mines.

But she found no trace of the youngsters, queer—no blood, no torn clothing, no sign of wolf tracks hauling a tiny corpse back to a lair. And in the mucked stew of tracks she picked out those of Gerty and Young Dal, as well as those of their parents, heading south and east, deeper into the Wyrwoods.

Jenny glanced around her as if taking counsel from the zebra-striped silence of the winter woods. It was two hours’ walk back to the Hold, nearly three to Great Toby. According to Peg, the Alyn militia was out on patrol and might not return until dark. It would be snowing by then, and these tracks would be covered. And the half dozen bandits who’d raided the farm would have rendezvoused with either the gnomes or with the main body of their own gang. In either case someone would have pointed out that the gnomes wouldn’t buy the children.

As she set out after the tracks, she identified in her mind the three possible camping places they’d make for. Almost due south was a hollow with a spring, thickly covered by trees, that would provide protection against the snow. More easterly lay a cave in the bank where the Queen’s Beck cut under the hills on the edge of the bleak fell country, and north and east of that was a deeper cut protected on three sides by the fells.

It quickly became clear they weren’t moving south. As she followed the tracks through the quick-falling darkness, Jenny counted footprints and estimated the strength of the party: seven men, two of whom scouted ahead and to the sides in a businesslike fashion. They’d taken Dal’s two cows, his horse, and to judge by the depth of the tracks, a good deal of food. They were pitifully easy to follow. If they were heading east, Jenny thought, they’d be making for the old Brighthelm Tower in the hills. If northeast, they’d be meeting in either Shern Hollow or the big caves under Wild Man Fell, all customary haunts of bandits. She could overtake them there …

And what?

Even as a witch-wife of small powers, before dragon magic had entered her flesh, Jenny had never truly thought she could be enslaved. Killed, possibly. But never carried off like a common woman: raped, sold to the gnomes. She was a solitary woman, alone in the woods with her knife, her halberd …

… and forty-three years’ knowledge and experience of tracking, of watching, of silence.

When it became obvious that the bandits were headed due east, Jenny veered away and sought the low ground of a frozen pond deeper in the woods, where nightshade grew in the summer. She found thickets of it buried under the snow, and as darkness gathered and snow began to fall, she harvested handfuls of the dried leaves. In the shelter of an oak tree she made a small fire, and in her drinking cup, the only open vessel she had with her, boiled snow water and the crushed leaves, over and over, until she’d made up a tincture. This she stored in her water bottle, wrapped herself in plaids and coat and cloak beside the fire, and fell to sleep hungry.

Mother Mag, she prayed to the One who watched over children, don’t let them kill them before I get there …

Look after Ian. Look after John.

Next morning she found where they’d camped, in the cave by the Queen’s Beck, where she couldn’t have got to them anyway. By now they’d be on their way to Brighthelm Tower. With five prisoners and livestock, the bandits wouldn’t be moving fast. Jenny swung wide to avoid their scouts and eventually reached the tower: a couple of stories of the keep, a broad ring of crumbled stone that had been a court, and a clutch of pine trees that John would never have suffered to grow anywhere close to any defensive position of his.

Jenny climbed a pine tree and stayed there. The tower would be the first place the scouts would search, and there was no other place close where her tracks would not show in the new-fallen snow. Though she swept behind her with a pine bough and leaped from occasional bare rock to bare rock beneath the trees, she wasn’t sure the deception would pass by daylight.

But the bandits didn’t arrive until dusk, as the last thin nail paring of the old moon set. Cramped, frozen, and aching with hunger, Jenny heard their voices and the squeak of booted feet in the snow, far off. She found herself holding her breath until they came into sight among the twisted trees of the dale below: the boy and girl were still alive, and little Sunny was a tiny bundle clinging to her father’s bent back.

Even as she breathed a prayer of thanks Jenny wondered, Why keep children alive? They couldn’t have been easy to travel with. Young Dal was eight and barely keeping up; the rope that circled his wrists was being dragged on by a thickset oaf with a beard like a dead dog. Lyra, too, was staggering, her bloodied skirts and her husband’s averted eyes speaking clearly of how the bandits had used her. Jenny shivered with anger, and her hunger and fatigue dissolved.

“They festerin’ better be here soon,” the bandit leader grumbled, making a careful check of the encircling wall while Dead Dog Beard scouted inside the tower. “You, Hero—” He motioned to Dal. “You clear the snow off there.” He pointed to the half-covered remains of the hall at the tower’s foot. “We’re too festerin’ close to Alyn for me.”

“We can see the track from the top of the tower,” a blond-bearded man pointed out soothingly. “We’ll have plenty of time to see a patrol.”

“Well, I didn’t know you could witchfesterin’ motherless see in the dark, Crake. But since you can, you can be the one who keeps witchfesterin’ watch tonight if they don’t show up.”

“Just send me up a bottle of that wine and I’ll watch all you can ask for,” Crake responded.

“Mother Hare’s tits, I’m thirsty.”

“You leave that wine alone,” the leader snarled.

“What, the gnomes ain’t gonna bring their own wine?”

From her post in the pine Jenny listened, coldly calculating what had to be done. She recognized two of the bandits from Balgodorus Black-Knife’s band, whom she’d helped Baron Pellanor of Palmorgin fight last summer. When they finished checking the tower, they sent up a watchman to its top, then proceeded to make themselves comfortable around a fire in the semiopen hall ruins; it was a fairly easy matter for Jenny to creep along a branch to one of the broken-out windows of the tower and down to where the packs—and the wine bottles—were stowed in the jumble of broken rafters and fallen tiles that was the tower’s lowest room. As she poured the nightshade into the bottles, she could hear the bandits outside.

“Can we have the skirt again ’fore the gnomes take her away?”

“You keep your mind on your business and your cod in your britches.”

“You, junior—you’re ten, remember? You think they’ll take that little ’un anyway? They said from ten up.”

“Let’s see. They may want ’em younger. If not, no problem.”

Just after dark the man on watch called out, “Company coming!” and Jenny heard a man’s voice speak out of the darkness, “In whose name are you here?”

“In the name of the King beneath the Sea,” the bandit leader called out. The King beneath the Sea was Giton, boy-husband of the Yellow-Haired Goddess Balyna in Southern legend, but the name could as easily be applied to Adromelech, the Archdemon Lord of the Sea-wights, or his servant Folcalor.

Jenny, crouched in the darkness, held her breath. Having inspected the tower ruin once, the bandits were not disposed to do it again, and any chance sound she might have made was amply covered by the cows and horse they’d penned there. Still her heart pounded as the bandit leader came in and took the wine bottles.

They drank to one another, and to their bargain, the deep, oddly timbred voices of the gnomes bickering over prices and deferring to their human leader about the little girl Sunny. “Well, we can certainly try—” that voice said, and Jenny felt a queer cold stirring of recognition. She knew it, or one like it “—so long as she gives no trouble.”

“You hear that, Sweetlips? You keep your brat quiet and don’t lag behind …”

The wine bottle clinked on a cup.

“Cragget’s balls!” A man staggered through the black doorway and tried to fumble his britches down, then fell to his knees and vomited. Jenny slid her knife from its sheath, took a better grip on her halberd, and settled herself deeper into the dark corner to wait. The man Crake came down the dark stairs from his watchpost above when he heard the other men cursing and puking; Jenny took him from behind, half severing his head before he could reach the door. She listened for a little time more, until all was silence outside, then crept to the door to look.

Dal, Lyra, and their children were clustered in a corner of the firelit shelter, their hands bound behind them to the wrecked beams, staring at the dead men and gnomes strewed between the shelter and the far wall of the open court. Lyra’s face wore a strange, hard, bitter smile. They turned sharply as Jenny appeared in the doorway. “Mistress Waynest!” Dal cried. “Thank God!”

“Did you use magic?” Gerty whispered as Jenny cut their bonds. Her eyes were huge with shock and wonder. “Cousin Ryllis told me you couldn’t use magic anymore.”

“Just because you can’t use magic, you aren’t helpless,” Jenny said softly. “Could I have used magic I would have spared these men. Now quickly, gather up what provision we can and let’s be away from here. They may have been part of a greater band. We must tell Lord John to bring out the militia …”

Lyra, who had gone over to gather up the little sack of money from the hand of a dead gnome, screamed.

The human leader of the gnomes, a man in a long green cloak, sprang from the ground and snatched at her wrist.

Jenny leaped toward her, halberd raised to strike, then halted in her tracks in shock. Lyra had darted clear of the man’s lunge and stood back, gasping and trembling, as he fell, clutching his belly, his whole body convulsing again with the effects of the nightshade. He should be dead, Jenny thought blindly, blankly. He should be dead …

Her mouth was dry and her breathing fast as she stared at that cropped gray head, the beaky nose, the patch over the eye.

Foolish, she thought. He is dead.

The man was crawling toward them, muttering curses and vomiting again though there was nothing in him to bring up. Clinging together, Jenny and Lyra backed away before him, while Dal and the children brought the stock out of the tower, making a wide circuit around the crawling body.

I saw him die in the infirmary tent after the battle at Cor’s Bridge, at summer’s end. The eye now covered with a patch had been pierced by an arrow …

And in the other eye, as Pellanor of Palmorgin raised his head, glared the greenish light of a demon.

Jenny stepped forward with her halberd and struck off his head.

The body continued to crawl toward them.

Jenny and the little family fled into the snow-blanketed night.

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