Knight of the Demon Queen (16 page)

And,
Did you think you were his slave?

Jenny pondered those words as they passed under the gatehouse of Eldsbouch and took once more the overgrown trail south.

“Obviously, our bodies were slaves,” Ian said, pulling his plaids more closely around his face as ice-laden winds ripped through the sparse trees. Returning to the inn after his near drowning, he had slept almost twelve hours. Waking, he’d wrought weather spells against the coming storm but Jenny wouldn’t have laid money on how long they’d hold.

At least until we reach Alyn Hold
, she prayed to Ankithis, father of storms. Once again, she felt naked, unable to protect herself with anything other than hope and trust in the gods. She had no idea whether this would be enough.

“Somehow,” Ian went on, “I don’t think that’s what he meant.”

“Nor do I.” Jenny glanced back over her shoulder for a glimpse of King Mick and his sons dragging their net one last time through the violent waters of Migginit Bay. There was still no sign of the animate corpse. She tried to hope that the worms and the fish had completed their interrupted repast, but her dreams would not permit her this comfort. “I was Folcalor’s prisoner in the crystal. I—the real part of me—was never his slave.”

“Would we have been later?”

Jenny shivered in the plaids the whales had retrieved for her from the sea. “I thought that being his prisoner was the worst that could happen,” she said at last. “Seeing
what Amayon did—feeling what he did—to and with my body. Not being able to do anything about it.”

Ian looked away.

She leaned from Moon Horse’s saddle to touch Ian’s wrist, letting him know that she understood. “Now I wonder if your father didn’t get us out before the worst.”

“It will be all right with him, won’t it?” Ian glanced back at her, eyes dark and shy under the shadows of his curiously jutting brows. “You going away—going back to Frost Fell …?”

Jenny sighed. Even on the road, dreams of Amayon still came to her: dreams of his passion for her, of the passion for life, of the brilliance of magic and power that she had felt when he had inhabited her flesh. Possession by a demon was not a simple matter, not merely alienation from one’s own body while another personality ruled it. Since true death had not severed soul from flesh, the bonds of feeling were strong—strong enough, in most cases, that if exorcism was performed within the first few days, the displaced soul would return. The soul retained the shape of the flesh, as Jenny had found out in the crystal. Hold the hand of her body toward fire, and Jenny, in her crystal, would feel the warmth.

That had been one of the horrors of her imprisonment. It was one of the worst parts of the dreams.

And, it seemed, it had been one of Caradoc’s consolations.

“We come together and we move apart,” she said in time. “It happens all through life. I was hurt—I was badly hurt—in that final battle, and I’m still hurting and angry. And I was taking my anger out on your father for things that probably aren’t his fault.”
Like lying with the Demon Queen?
the anger in her soul whispered.
Like
going to her instead of coming to me, in the plague?
“I will always be a part of his life. A part of yours.”

He looked down at his hands for a moment, clumsy in their worn gloves on his mare’s reins. “Does that mean yes or no?”

“It does,” Jenny agreed gravely, and he glanced up quickly and laughed.

They camped that night in the ruins of what had been first a fortified manor house, then an inn. The walls had been rebuilt a little, and it was a favorite camping place for the few merchant pack trains that wound their way between Alyn Hold and the sea. The old kitchen still had most of a roof on it, and it was here that they bedded down, kindling a small fire in the brick hearth and tying their horses near. Ian’s drained powers had recovered enough to let him set a ring of ward signs around the outbuilding walls, but Jenny and he both agreed that sitting awake in shifts that night wouldn’t be a waste of their time.

She dreamed of Amayon again that night, and of Folcalor, crouched somewhere in darkness. Somewhere close, she thought. Caradoc had spoken of a wizard whose body the demon now rode—if he’d been telling the truth. But her magic was gone, and she could not search her dreams as she used to. She dreamed, too, of John, lying asleep in a hollow place of bare red-black rock, his drawn sword under one bandaged hand and his spectacles clutched protectively in the other. She thought he looked exhausted—thin and haggard and filthy—and where his sleeves were pushed up over his forearms and his torn shirt hung open to show his chest, she could see the marks drawn on his flesh by the Demon Queen.

When she woke, consumed with the heat of her changing body, she knew she would sleep no more that night and told Ian to rest. The boy sorely needed it; he was unconscious in moments and muttered in his sleep words she could not understand. Whether he spoke of his own demon Gothpys or of Folcalor she could not tell, nor did she ask him in the morning. Again and again she tried to conjure recollection of her dreams of Folcalor: where he had been and what things had surrounded him that might lead her to his hiding place or give her a clue as to the body he now wore.

But beyond the fact that he was in a place of darkness, she could see nothing. There were jewels there, she thought: enormous jewels on his many rings, but jewels also like the sapphire and peridot and smoky quartz in which she and the other mages had been imprisoned. But there were so many of them in the hammered silver dish at his side—handfuls—that they could not be prisons for the souls of mages. There were not that many mages in the world.

In the morning Ian was able to scry the territory for signs of bandits or Iceriders and to see in his crystal that all was well at the Hold.

Why cripples?
Jenny wondered as she saddled Moon Horse again and helped Ian strap up the packs.
Why the old as well as the young?

They planned to lie that night at the Dancing Cow in Far West Riding, from which spot—weather permitting— they should be able to reach the Hold by the following night. But when they stopped at sunset, still an hour or two from the small isolated settlement, for Ian to scout the country ahead of them in the scrying stone that had been Jenny’s, the boy’s eyes widened sharply. “There’s trouble,” he said.

“Where?” Jenny leaned forward instinctively then sat back, furious and hurt, remembering that she could call nothing in the crystal’s heart. “What?”

Ian looked up. “Far West Riding,” he said. “Bandits. They’re attacking the main gate. I guess Grynne hadn’t gotten it shut for the night yet; it looks like the gate’s still open. And they’re trying to get over the wall in that place where the mortar’s no good.”

“John told them to fix it last spring,” Jenny moaned.

“But why would bandits attack Far West Riding?” He stared down at the crystal again, angling it to the sliver of witchlight he’d called in the fading dusk. They’d stopped just below the crest of Whitelady Hill, in the bare miles of what had been farmland, and the snow that stretched behind them was broken here and there by blue-brown ridges of half-ruined stone walls and lines of long-dead trees. “There’s nothing there except the inn and Father Drob’s temple and a couple of farms.”

“Look at the Hold.” Jenny glanced beyond him to the thick yellow-gray sky above the hill. No smoke yet.

“I can’t see it.” The blue feather of light brightened, shining coldly in the eyes of their horses. Moon Horse turned her long ears inquiringly, sensing the trouble in Ian’s voice. Ian’s horse was the one John called “the Stupider Roan,” to distinguish it from its marginally less blockheaded brother, and would not have sensed trouble had a regiment of goblins danced around it in a circle. “Nothing.” Ian looked apologetic. “I’m tired, Mother. It could be only that. I didn’t do well yesterday, either. I kept losing the images…”

“Or something’s happening there,” Jenny said, her voice hard. “Something someone doesn’t want you to see. Can you see anything?”

Ian shook his head. Scry wards frequently worked by deception—for instance, showing any mage who sought to view a place what that place had looked like at some other time than the present. But just as often they simply blocked any perception at all. And scrying was a skill new to Ian since he’d been possessed, and one that he could not utilize consistently.

It had taken Jenny years of practice before she was able to see where and what she willed every time.

But coupled with the attack on Far West Riding, this failure was far too pat to be chance. “They’ll be watching the road,” she said. “Check the countryside around the town.”

“Marcon’s farm,” Ian said after a moment—and he didn’t, Jenny noticed, have any trouble seeing that. “They’re burning the thatch on the house and the barn. I can’t see … There. Marcon and Lylle and the children are all right, hidden in the cave. The fields south of the town look clear.”

“We’ll go in that way, then.” Every fiber of Jenny’s nerves prickled and screamed with the knowledge that something was happening at the Hold. Siege, probably, by bandits who’d gotten hold of scry wards at the very least. Her mind raced to the certainty that Muffle and the greater force of the Hold’s strength would make for Far West Riding the minute they knew.
Yes
, she thought,
there
, as smoke plumed up into the sky. That would bring Muffle.

And the Hold would be attacked.

In the dead of winter? Madness.

Or some very, very good reason to do so now.

A chill of foreboding in her heart, she swung onto Moon Horse’s back and urged the tired mare around the side of the hill and down toward the burning farm.

*  *  *

They swung wide to avoid the bandits attacking Far West Riding’s outlying farms and came upon the town itself through the freezing, black, and windy night. Ian called the weather, howling gale and driving sleet, and the defenders, who were still mostly indoors and could keep their bowstrings dry, gained an advantage. Ian laid, too, spells of panic on men and horses: illusions of armed warriors and attacking wolves that distracted the robbers until they were felled by arrows or stones. Exhausted from the summoning of the whalemages and the steady, grinding effort of working the weather for days, Ian was by this time barely able to summon power at all. But there was no single body of attackers, no overall commander or coordinated thrust, so it was easy enough for one band or another to retreat, cursing and floundering in snow.

Whipped and frozen by the storm winds, Ian and Jenny entered the inn of the Dancing Cow, the largest building of the town, in which most of the inhabitants had taken refuge. Dolly, its proprietor, pressed food and hot cider on them, but Jenny would take little. “We’ll be moving on tonight,” she said shortly. “We need horses, if you can spare them.” She glanced sidelong, worried, at her son, who slumped on a bench before the fire, face ghastly white.

He looked up, however, and made John’s thumbs-up sign of readiness to go on, and gave her the flicker of a smile.

“Whatever you need,” the innkeeper said. She was a big woman and at times like these wore a man’s mail shirt, looted from some long-ago robber, that she had adapted to her full-breasted form—she was the town blacksmith as well as the innkeeper. “My Jeb tells me
we’ve rounded up five of the robbers’ horses already, and they’re main fresh. One of ’em’s my stallion Sun King that Balgodorus Black-Knife stole year before last.”

“Black-Knife,” Jenny said softly. “I thought so.”

The storm was growing less. Ian could possibly have brought it back in force, but to do so would have slowed their own journey as well as inconvenienced the bandits, and in any case Jenny was fairly sure Muffle and the Alyn Hold militia were still advancing toward Far West Riding’s relief. Moreover, calling storms was a dangerous exercise for novices. Often, once summoned, storms would not be dismissed, and their force would build and cause great destruction. An hour after midnight she and Ian set off once again on the rutted and broken military road, riding as swiftly as they dared on borrowed horses, starflashes of blue light running along the ruts and potholes before them and turning the steadily falling spits of snow to diamonds.

In the dead dark before morning they met Sergeant Muffle on the road with a dozen of the men of Alyn Hold, heavily armed with spears and bows.

“Jenny!” Muffle spurred his thick-limbed mount through the muck to her and leaned from the saddle to clasp her hands. “And Ian! We saw smoke at sunset. Far West Riding, Bo here says.” He gestured to the young brother of the priest of the green god at the West Riding temple.

“Bandits attacked the gates.” Jenny pushed back her hood and drew down the plaids that protected her face. The white-and-brown wool cracked with ice from her breath.

“Bandits? At this time of year? Are they insane?”

“No,” Jenny said. “What they are at the moment is probably attacking the Hold.”

Her brother-in-law cursed and swung his horse around as if he would ride back immediately, then wheeled again. “Ian?” he said. “You’re a wizard, you’ll be able to see…”

And the boy shook his head. “I can’t,” he said, his breath a blue-white glitter in the witchlight. “I’ve tried four times since we set out from the Dancing Cow, and I can’t. Mother says it sounds like a scry ward.”

“Cragget blast ’em! They can’t get past the walls, though.” His heavy face creased with anger.

“They can,” Jenny said, “if they’ve magic enough to sound and look like you in the dark and the storm.”

Ian scried back behind them to Far West Riding and the countryside round about. Though he saw a dozen or more bandits hiding from the cold, there were no signs of organized regrouping. Therefore Muffle and his riders turned their horses and made in a body for the Hold again, slowed by the swollen drifts, the trees that had blown down on the road. Jenny’s hands and feet ached from the cold, and her eyes smarted with the slash of the wind. Beside her Ian clung to his saddlebow, and she wondered where John was tonight.

At the hour when in summertime the sun would have stood high above the trees already, a kind of gray glimmer began to water the darkness, and Jenny made out the rolling shapes of the fells. This bleak country was her home ground, and she identified each ridge and humped shoulder of stone by its name, familiar even under the blanket of snow: Cair Gannet, Cair Dag, Skep Tor, the Sleeper. Standing stones crowned their crests, a reminiscence of those who had dwelled there before the kings, and broken bridges guarded the way over ice-locked becks.