Winterlands 4 - Dragonstar (17 page)

“And now I can see my princess,” he said, and kissed her again. “Do you feel all right today?”

She nodded. “I just didn't feel good yesterday, but I'm better, like Dolly.”

And Gareth's eyes met the nurse's, over the child's head. “That's good,” he said. “And we'll … we'll make you all better, like Dolly, so you'll never die ever.”

As the nurse led the child from the room, Gareth settled again on his cushioned bench, looking after them with desperate longing in his face. Thinking back over the days just past—the long horror of the night in the prison, the stake and the fire and the despair in the desert—John reflected, Of the two of us, I've had the easier time. I didn't have to make a decision. I didn't have to try to figure out where I was bein' lied to by those I love, with their lives at the stake if I guessed wrong.

But he said gently, as he pushed opened the panel in the wall, “It's only demons that don't die ever, Gar.”

Gareth turned his head. He didn't even seem surprised—not at John's survival, not at his return—and it crossed John's mind belatedly to wonder what Trey—and doubtless others—had told him over the past eight days.

If he screams for the guards, I'm a dead man.

But the young man said nothing, only averted his face quickly, though not quickly enough to conceal his tears. John stepped over to him and took him in his arms, as simply as he would have taken one of his own sons. With a dry sob, Gareth turned in his grip and clung to him, his whole beanpole body shaking with grief. Weeping in desperation and in fear, for perhaps the first time since Trey's death.

John held him for a long time, saying nothing, his head bowed over Gareth's. The long curtains drawn over the doors drowned the room in shadow—now and then voices filtered in from the terrace, and the Long Garden outside. By the look of it the young man had spent hours here alone: The floor around the bed, and the coverlet itself, were littered with the books and scrolls that John knew were Gareth's primary joy. Cups, dishes, writing tablets strewed the small marquetry table, the seat of the chair. There was no sign of Trey's presence, not even of a visit. John wondered how soon after her “resurrection” Gareth had ceased to seek her company and her bed.

“You have to get out of here,” he said gently, when Gareth's sobs ceased and the young man only held to him, rocking a little in his arms. “You know Trey isn't Trey anymore.”

He felt the young man struggle to form the words I don't believe you, and let them trickle away unsaid. The realization must have been growing on him for a week, desperately shoved aside.

At least I was able to get Jenny back. At the cost of dealing with demons—of putting my soul in pawn and endangering God knows how many others …

But I did get her back.

And then like an imbecile lost her …

Trey, he knew, would not be coming back.

“They said you were possessed.” Gareth sat up and fumbled his spectacles straight, then took them off again to wipe his eyes. “That you're in league with demons.”

“D'you think that's true?”

“A dragon rescued you.”

“A dragon rescued you, me hero, once upon a time. I begged this one not to—said I could never hold me head up as a dragonsbane again if he did.… Have you caught Trey at anything?”

Gareth didn't ask, At what ? By the look in his eyes he knew exactly what John was talking about. That was answer in itself.

After a time he said, “Not really. Only I found … this sounds stupid. To suspect Trey … to suspect my wife …” He shook his head and dug around in the purse that hung at his belt for a kerchief to wipe his eyes.

“You know how gentle Trey is, how considerate. You remember when first you came here she lent Jenny a dress, so she wouldn't be mocked by Zyerne and her ladies, even though Zyerne would never have let Trey hear the end of it if she'd found out. But now she'll say things to me, cruel things, things that hurt. Even perfectly normal things for someone else. She'll watch me out of the corners of her eyes, as if she's laughing.”

His jaw clenched hard and he made a business of wiping the tear spots and smudges from his spectacle lenses so as not to meet John's compassionate eyes. He was twenty-four and looked forty, a thousand times worse than he had, John thought, only nine days ago, when he'd come to the prison.

“She disappears for hours at a time, I don't know where she goes. Some of the servants … I've heard rumors … they can't be true. This whole city is a cesspit of rumors now, about this person or that person seen running mad, or being caught drinking blood or running through the streets with dead cats or dead rats strung around their necks like amulets. Trey keeps telling me it isn't true, that she loves me, that I have to trust her, and I keep thinking, I don't know this person. I've never met this woman before in my life.”

His hand tightened frantically on John's sleeve, his shortsighted gray eyes pleading. “But if I don't trust her, what are we? What has our love meant?”

“Your love meant that you were one of the lucky ones in this world,” said John quietly. “Lucky to find love at all, and to know enough not to bugger it up when you did. But it's gone, Gar. Trey is gone. What was it you found?”

Gareth was silent for a long time, his mouth working a little with distaste. Then he said, “The wings of insects. Flies—we had some warm days here, and spring is close. Roaches. The legs of crickets. All laid out along the windowsill in her room. From the garden I'd seen her sitting in the window only a few minutes earlier, and there had been no one else in the room. I found one of the flies, too, crawling around.…” He shuddered.

“You have to get out,” repeated John. Under his hands the young Regent's shoulder bones felt like velvet-covered sticks. “Get out before the thing that's livin' in her body gets you, too.”

“Her child—”

“There is no child. That child died when Trey died. The thing she'll birth will be a demon like herself.”

“No.” Gareth's gray eyes turned bleak and moved aside. “You can't know that. You're only guessing. A child is innocent. I felt her baby move this morning, I felt—”

John put his fingers to the young man's lips. “D'you really believe that?”

Footsteps sounded in the anteroom. John reached the servants' door in one panicky bound and flattened himself into the corridor beyond. Voices murmured on the other side of the painted and gilded paneling, Gareth said, “No, nothing, thank you.”

“You father wishes to see you after dinner, sir. I must say, his reassurances to the people were well received.” The chamberlain Badegamus sounded both tired and relieved. “He's ordered a celebration—free wine in every public square. That should cheer the people, help them forget.” His voice had the ring in it of a man trying to convince himself. “I venture to say things will be better now that he's himself again, sir. And I never thought to see that day—never thought to see it at all. You could have heard the cheering in Halnath. Not that you haven't done wonderful work, sir,” added the chamberlain hastily. “How you've kept the Realm together …”

“Thank you, Badegamus,” said Gareth. “Tell my father I'll be there. But now I just need to rest.”

“Of course, sir. While you're at dinner, shall I have someone tidy up here a little? I understand how you'll have needed to rest, after all the terrible things that have gone on.…”

John wondered, hearing the faint jingling of shoe-bells retreat, whether the stout, meticulously correct chamberlain also had “died” and been resurrected by Bliaud's magic. Once Amayon/Trey came into the palace, such things could have taken place in the dead of night, without a soul knowing.

As they would, beyond the smallest doubt, if Millença went to stay at Bliaud's house.

“You have to get out of here.” John stepped back through the hidden door after silence returned to the room.

“And go where?” Gareth's voice was listless, worn out with struggling, as if it were simpler just to die. John understood the feeling, but wanted to take him by the neck and shake him, anyway. “Flee to Halnath, as I did before? Polycarp urged me to. He—he tried to tell me that Bliaud was in league with demons, that Trey—” He shook his head and looked down at his hands again, turning the ruby ring around his thumb as if it were some complex rite demanding all of his attention. “I couldn't listen. I suppose I should have. I ordered him out of my sight, out of the city. Now they tell me that the Master was in league with the gnomes, kidnapping people and selling them to them.…”

“If the Master was doin' that he'd be here at Court swearin' loyalty to your father an' tellin' Trey how pretty she is,” said John bluntly. “What's this about the gnomes, then? Are there demons in the Deep as well as here?”

“I don't know. No one knows.” Gareth gestured helplessly. “One hears all kinds of things, terrible things. There was a riot in the Dockmarket, and people marched on the Deep of Ylferdun, but the gnomes turned them back. People were killed. My father's meeting with a representative of the King today to—”

More voices, this time on the terrace. Though the curtains were shut, John made a lunge back to the panel and stood close beside it, ready to vanish again, until they passed.

“Here.” Gareth got to his feet, seeming to suddenly piece together John's disguise, his shorn hair, and the circumstances under which they'd spoken last. “You can't stay. They'll kill you if you're seen. I saved the things you asked me to, the bone-and-silver box, and the silver bottle—your spectacles, too, and your sword.” He led the way into the anteroom where the children and their nurse had been, and through it to his library. This chamber, too, was cluttered thick with parchments, books, lamps, and all the paraphernalia of scholarship, pumice and pounce and uncut quills in a crystal vase, untidy in spite of servants' ministrations. Here, too, the curtains were drawn, as if Gareth's battered spirit could no longer tolerate light. At least here the dishes had been taken away.

The spoils of John's adventurings through Hell—duplicate box and bottle, notes and sword—were where John had glimpsed them through Corvin's rememberings, concealed behind the books on a high shelf. Gareth brought a ladder over to get to them, and handed them down one by one. “This wasn't open when I brought it here,” he said worriedly, turning in his hand the box that the un-wizard Shamble had made for John in that stuffy and bug-ridden apartment in the 79th District. The chip of dragonbone on which Shamble had written the Rune of the Gate was still there, but cracked through and charred nearly black.

“Don't worry about it.” John took the box, stuffed his packet of much-crossed and overwritten notes into his ser-vant's red doublet, and looked around the library. One of the small panes of the window out onto the terrace was recently repaired, its frame bright with new putty. “Was that broken, then?” That would be where Corvin pushed through. Tiny, as he'd seen Morkeleb shrink himself to the size of a cat.…

Gareth nodded. “I don't remember—when Trey was … was ill, I think, or just after she … she got better. It's all right. I mean, Badegamus tells me nothing was taken.” He handed him down the sword Shamble had wrought, covered with runes that had no virtue in the world where the League of the White Black Bird were condemned to live and die. Runes for the murder of demons, handed down through generations of sterile magery and rote repetition. Not being a mage himself, John hadn't the faintest idea whether they'd work or not, but the sword balanced well in his hand. He put his own spectacles on and blinked gratefully. Maybe the headache he'd had for days now would go away.

He tuned and regarded his friend for a quiet moment, then asked, “What about Jen?”

The bruised-looking gray eyes avoided his. “I—I don't know. She was here—I spoke to her—the day Trey … Trey was so ill. I was so tired. I hadn't slept, I was half-distracted.…” A quiver ran through him, and he bowed his head, as if expecting anger or blows. After a moment he looked up and went on: “I know I told Badegamus to prepare a room for her, and he told me she went there. But someone said they saw her, that evening, in the First Hall of the Gnomes' Deep, just as the gnomes were closing up the gates. No one has seen her since.”

She is dying … the Demon Queen had said. Dying in the Deep …

So the part about her being in the Deep at least hadn't been a lie.

And Corvin, bad cess to him, had only blinked up from his bed of gold: I cannot see her; I have tried.…

If she had no more magic in her, the dragon should have been able to find her.… Unless she was in some place that was scry-warded. Was the Deep? Or parts of the Deep?

Only ten minutes ago he had said to Gareth, It's only demons that don't ever die.

Why couldn't his heart accept that she was gone?

He glanced at the angle of the sunlight through the slit in the curtains, heard the tread of the guards on the terrace, the creak of battle-harness and mail. Badegamus had come here from the King, who must be back from the market square. That meant more guards about the palace, more servants tending to their duties, more people who were likely to recognize him, spectacles or no spectacles, dye or no dye …

The King would be going in to dinner soon, and bidding his son to his side.

“Meet me at moonrise where the road goes into the woods along the Clae,” said John, forcing the image of Jenny from his mind. First things first. “Bring Millença, and as much money as you can scrape up without callin' attention to yourself. We can hire a nurse in the countryside, where there won't be tattlin' tongues. Have you a place you can go? Not one of the royal manors—Trey and your dad'll have word of it, and find some damn good reason for bringin' you back, an' then you'll never get out.…”

“I won't leave the baby. Trey's baby,” Gareth added, seeing the blank look momentarily in John's eyes. “Trey will be brought to bed in a few weeks. After that I can—”

“That baby's dead.” John hated the words as they came out of his mouth, hated the way those too-soft gray eyes hardened with anger. But there was nothing else that he could say to make Gareth understand. “When Trey gives birth it'll be to a demon like the demon that's livin' in her flesh now. The demon that you see when you look into her eyes.”