Knight of the Demon Queen (11 page)

Aching in every limb and joint, he began his slow descent of the mountain.

“He said there was aught he had to do.” Sergeant Muffle turned back from the milky brightness of the doorway into the gloom of the smithy where Jenny had sought him out. “He wouldn’t say where he was bound. But he burned his work shed before he left.”

“
John
burned the work shed?” Jenny had heard from Bill, when he’d helped dig the snow from her doorway, that the shed had burned. She had grieved for John, knowing how he loved all those half-made projects, how he’d sought the length and breadth of the Winterlands for metal and springs and silken cord.

She put out her hand half blindly to touch one of the roof posts that surrounded the low brick forge, the warmth and amber light beating gently up against her face. And she saw her own shock, her own fear at the implications of such a deed, reflected in the smith’s small bright brown eyes.

“And none have seen him.” John’s brother picked up again the pot he’d been repairing when Jenny came into the forge and set it over the horn of the anvil to tap and file the patch smooth. “Not since Dan Darrow took him to the borders of the Wraithmire.”

“Wait a minute.
That’s
the last anyone saw of him? That was eight days ago.”

The new moon, chill and thin, stood high in the afternoon sky above the Hold.

Across the court, Bill and Ams Puggle were deep in conference with Dal. One or two others of the little Alyn garrison clustered around, gesturing and muttering. Jenny could catch an occasional oath or a question about the number of gnomes in the slave-buying band and if they’d said anything about who their master was. Dal held out something that was passed around among the men— probably one of the gold pieces with which the bandits had been paid.

Pellanor
, Jenny thought.
Pellanor of Palmorgin. Dead these three months…

“I put the word to old Dan to keep mum about it, and he has, pretty much. But there’s been talk nonetheless. Nobody knows what to make of it.” Muffle turned the pot to the light to see how even the join was, then went back to work with his rasp. He’d been the town bully as a child, Jenny recalled, and always Lord Aver’s favorite. “Come indoors, Jen, you look froze through. The children will delight to see you.”

Aunt Jane, too?
But her heart ached at the thought of little Mag and Adric…

“And do
you
know what to make of it?”

Muffle’s eyes slid sideways to her, and his heavy mouth set. Then a slight shadow darkened the smithy door, and Ian said, “Mother?”

While everyone in the Hold had crowded around Lyra and Dal and the children, cold and exhausted after two nights of hiding in the woods, Jenny had hung back. She still felt stung by the chilled animosity in Aunt Jane’s eyes—and no wonder, she thought. John’s eldest aunt was ferociously protective of all three of her nephew’s
children. Of course she would blame Jenny for Ian’s attempted suicide and try to keep her from him if she could.

Jenny had felt apprehensive at the idea of meeting John, and more so at the thought of speaking again to Ian.

Now all her apprehension melted as her son stepped forward and caught her in his arms.

“Don’t be angry,” he said, hugging her tight. His voice was desperate in her ear. She saw he stood an inch taller than she, and the arms that crushed her to him had the beginnings of a man’s strength. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry…”

“If you say that again, I’ll put you over my knee!”

He laughed, the release of it shaking his whole body. It was the first time she’d heard him laugh since the summer, and it turned his face from a ghost’s to that of a living boy again, and that boy only thirteen. She laughed, too, looking into the sea-blue eyes.

Then her laughter faded. “It was Folcalor, wasn’t it?” she asked.

His face grew still.

“In your dreams?”

His mouth flinched, and he looked away. Beside the door Muffle stood silent, watching them with wary eyes as if he had seen them suddenly transform from people he knew—his brother’s wife and son—to something uncanny, speaking a language only they fully understood.

“Yes,” Ian said. “I think so. Yes.” And he met her gaze again.
“Love can’t wait, so open the gate,”
he rhymed, with a faint flush of shame tinging his dead-white cheeks. “It sounds so stupid when I say it, but it comes to me just as I’m drifting off to sleep. And it sticks in my mind.
Love can’t wait, so open the gate.
As if by
opening the demon gate, I’ll have all the love I’ll ever want. I’ll never be lonely again.”

The love I never gave him.
She looked, mute, into her son’s face. But there was no blame there, or even thought about why he felt unloved. It was just a part of him that he accepted and dealt with as best he could.

“It makes a whole lot more sense when you’re asleep,” he added apologetically. “And it … it got so strong. Sometimes it’s just a whispering, and other times it seems like it’s the only thing real in the world. And it won’t leave me alone.” His voice sank to a whisper. “I was so afraid. And I felt … I felt so empty…”

“After the demon left?”

Ian nodded, his face crimson now.

Jenny touched his cheek. “Ian, I did, too. I do still, sometimes. In spite of everything.”

His eyes flicked to hers, then away—understanding and thanking her for her understanding.

“Do you know where he is?” she asked gently. “What he looks like now?”

Her son shook his head. “I see him but I can’t really see him.” He glanced at her and she nodded. “Just the whispering. It was worse before. I could see how the gate was to be made, where the power would source from. That’s when … That’s what … I woke up from a dream and found myself in the house on the Fell, up in the attic, writing things on the floor.” The words blurted from him in terror and in shame, an admission he had kept and hidden. “I swear I didn’t … I’d been dreaming about having power. About being able to do anything. And then I woke up, and I was there, with the chalk in my hand…”

He shuddered and averted his face again, and Jenny caught his hands. The fingers were chill as frozen sticks.

“I didn’t want to go back. I knew what he’d do to me if he came through the gate, and I didn’t want to go back to being what I was.”

“No.” Jenny put up her hand, stroked his hair, as black and coarse as hers had been. “Ian, I think I would have done the same thing.”

“No, you wouldn’t,” Ian said. “Because you’d have been stronger. You could have gotten rid of him.”

And she laughed, bitterly, remembering her own desolation of sleep and despair. “Thank you for the compliment, but believe me, I don’t deserve it. I don’t.”

Their eyes met again and held.

At length she said, “So you rubbed out all the marks?”

He nodded. “I couldn’t … I was just afraid the next time he’d get me all the way through the rite. I hadn’t been sleeping … I was so tired.” His mouth tightened. “You don’t think it was—was Folcalor that Father tried to contact? Because I’d hear him whispering to others sometimes—Folcalor, I mean. Reaching out to others. And Father…”

He held his thin hands out toward the heat of the forge. Outside in the yard Aunt Jane had joined the group around Dal and was giving them the benefit of her advice. Adric, sword at belt, was there, too, clearly trying to talk the men into letting him ride patrol with them.

“I went into his study, on the night of the storm, and found his books all spread out over the study table. Everything he had about the Hellspawn: how to summon them, how to speak to them, how to protect himself from them when they’d been summoned. I went to the window and looked out, and I could see candlelight through the cracks around the work shed door.”

“Folcalor wouldn’t have any use for your father,”
Jenny said. “I’m fairly sure the demon he called was Aohila, the Queen behind the Mirror.” And she kept her voice level with an effort, against the hot spurt of jealousy that flared through her. And hard on the heels of her jealous anger, she thought,
He has no magic. The ward lines he drew wouldn’t protect him.

“Who else was Folcalor summoning, do you know?” Jenny asked after a time. “Who else was he trying to speak to?”

Ian shook his head. “If he’s tried to reach me, he must be trying to reach Master Bliaud as well.”

She recalled the little gray-haired wizard from the South fussing ineffectually around the mule train in the courtyard at Corflyn Hold. Already the demon had been in him, imitating the old man’s mannerisms so his sons would not suspect. Later, after the demons had been driven out, Jenny had worked with the old man to restore and heal the other mages. He’d drawn sigils of healing on her forehead, lips, and eyelids in the thin blue-white powder John had obtained from the Demon Queen.

But there had been no healing.

“And I heard him…” Ian said slowly. “I heard him calling Master Caradoc’s name. I thought I had to be mistaken, because Master Caradoc is dead. But…”

“Calling him?” An icicle seemed to have formed somewhere behind her heart. “Calling him how?”

“Differently,” Ian said. “Singing to him.
Loved you so long, raise your voice in a song…
Something like that. It was a love song, like—” He stammered and left the words unsaid, so Jenny finished for him.

“Like Amayon used to sing to me.”

Ian nodded, the sudden woodenness of his face telling her that Gothpys had sung such songs to him. They were
beautiful beyond mortal music and erotic past the ability of mortal flesh to withstand.

“
‘Sing to me, love,’
he keeps saying.
‘Sing to me.’
But I know Master Caradoc is dead. You killed him beneath the sea, and the crystal that—that held his soul.”

“We smashed
a
crystal,” Jenny said quietly, all her dreams of the dark seafloor returning: the weightless beauty of the whalemages drifting among the columns of rock, the silver flicker of demons down below…

Searching for something.

Closing her eyes, she could see Caradoc’s face again, framed in the floating curtain of his silver hair, green demon light streaming from his eyes, fire pouring from his mouth. He raised his hand, and in his hand was the staff of his power, with its carven goblin head that held a moonstone in its mouth.

Then from the court a voice cried “Mama!” And Adric and Mag pelted over the snow-grimed cobbles and threw themselves into Jenny’s welcoming arms.

    Standing just clear of the trees, the moon was a segment of a silver orange, so bright that a frail wedding ring of light limned the whole of its velvet disc. John drew his decayed plaid close around him and shivered, but only thin snow dusted the ground, and there was no wind.

The stars were yet the stars before midwinter, even to the Wanderers where they camped among the Watcher’s jeweled belt loops, and the White Dog’s rough wet fur.

“Don’t you yet know how it is with the Hellspawn and time?” Amayon’s jeer held its usual edge of impatient contempt. He had resumed the shape of a pretty youth, though the blue eyes were the same, and the black grapevine curls. “We’ll still be beautiful—not to
mention continent and in possession of all our wits— when you’re lying crippled with arthritis in bed wondering if anyone will come in time to get you to the chamber pot. The God of Time has no authority over us.”

“Well, you don’t know that yet, now do you?” Hands stuck behind the buckle of his sword belt, John gazed at the marshes around him. Not the Wraithmire—he’d never seen willows like these growing anywhere north of the Black River. “That’s the tricky thing about the God of Time.” Though the mountain wall to west and south was cloaked to its toes in snow, the ice that scummed the edges of the pools thinned over the centers, where a little open water gleamed black, like the pupil of a cataract-dimmed eye.

What had been a chapel surrounded them. The roofless, isolated pillars and the bone-white glimmer of shattered statuary in elongated arches told John clearly enough that they were no longer in the Winterlands, even had it not been obvious from the stars. “You want to think about goin’ into the fancy fish business, bringin’ things down from the Winterlands to Ernine like this—I take it we are in Ernine?—without the moon a day older on the way? I have it that you pay as much for a salmon in Greenhythe—half spoiled and poor to begin with—as you’d pay for a trained huntin’ dog up north, where we get so sick of salmon we use ’em for pig food…” He forced his voice to show nothing but a Northman’s bland practicality, unwilling to give Amayon the satisfaction of knowing his shock and wonderment, the shaken disorientation that came in the aftermath of stepping from the demon mist to find himself in his own world again and not a day later than he’d walked out of it.

He certainly felt as if he’d tramped and done battle for the best part of ten days, the last two virtually without
water or food. The shining things, the rock slugs and once, terrifyingly, a many-legged creature of wings and mouths and spines … Had those fights been like the tortures he’d undergone in the Hell behind the mirror, illusion only, for the amusement of the Demon Queen? Gingerly he parted the ripped and blood-crusted linen of his sleeve to see the rough bandage still on his arm, a souvenir of that final attack. The flesh was sore underneath, but not until he nudged the dressing aside and looked at the scabbing wound did he understand that the things that had happened to him in Hell had actually taken place.

Amayon snickered and mimicked the movement with an exaggerated mime of fear, concentration, bumpkin astonishment. “I wish you could see your face,” he jeered.

John scratched the graying auburn stubble on his jaw. “Just as well I can’t,” he agreed mildly and, kneeling, scrubbed the filth from his hands in one patch of snow and scooped up the cold white crystals from another to eat. “And to spare you further sight of it, I think it’s the inkwell for you, me bonny boy, and I’ll find me own way into town.”

“No!” the demon cried. “Stop it!” But John dropped the flax seeds into the bottle.

Better to be safe than sorry
, he thought, unshipping from his shoulder the goatskin bag that contained his own silver vessel of the enchanted water and hanging it from the high limb of an oak. Despite whatever spells Aohila had placed on Amayon to make him serve John, he wouldn’t put it past the demon to betray him and take the vessel of water for himself, to trade to the Queen for his freedom.