Winterlands 4 - Dragonstar (27 page)

It said a good deal, Jenny reflected, for Ector that he would make this apology in front of his own men.

“Gaw, no,” said John cheerfully. “You were doin' your duty an' doin' it damn well. I'd've done the same thing meself, if it wasn't me.” And he looked hugely embarrassed, when the white-haired treasurer knelt before him and kissed his hand.

Badegamus returned with more servants and two biers, and palls of velvet and brocade. Gareth kissed his father's hands, and the lips of the dark-haired girl who had been his wife. Then he wiped his eyes and put his spectacles back on, and stood beside the Master of Halnath as servants bore the bodies away.

Only later, when John and Jenny were at last alone in the rooms to which Badegamus escorted them overlooking the Long Garden, did John say, “What the hell was that thing, Jen?”

“Did you kill it?” Servants had brought water for the bath, and made up the fires in the hypocaust beneath the green marble bath chamber. The whole suite smelled of soap and oils, the warmth of steam languorous on the air.

“No. I don't think so. I don't know.” John sat on the chest at the end of the bed, gingerly working his boots off. He'd rinsed the gore from his face and Jenny, as she knelt to help him—for his wounds were stiffening—saw in the curtained chamber's lamplight how his ribs stood out under his flesh, and how small round scars marked his arms, that had not been there before. When she shed her plaids, and began to unlace her bodice, he asked, “Would you like a hand? Or would you like just to be alone, to have a bath and a rest?”

Her eyes met his, knowing what he was asking. And she smiled. “I'd like company in the bath, if you feel up to it.”

His answering smile, and the way his shoulders relaxed, told her his thoughts better than words could. He said, “Mind you, between one thing and another I can't promise you anythin' except that I'll soap your back for you.…”

Rising, she put her hands on either side of his face and kissed his shorn forehead. “All this winter long,” she said, “I have thought how I would trade all the treasures of the gnomes and the spices of the South, only to have you soap my back.”

“That thing that killed the King, now.” John poured out the herbed tisane that a servant had brought, coffee being one of those things that was put aside during mourning. Under gray morning light the Long Garden outside looked wet and cold under a patchy blanket of pocked, half-melted snow, and Jenny could dimly hear the slow tolling of the death-knell for the passing of the King. Through the wrinkled panes of the window's glass, servants and guards visible on the terrace across the garden all wore the black of mourning.

She turned back from the window, and drew around her the robe and the shawl that had come from the palace stores.

John handed her the steaming porcelain cup. “It had me, Jen. I thrust up at it at the last second, but I was stabbin' blind, for it was right on top of me. But I'll take oath it was fallin' already when I stabbed it. That it was dead before it fell.”

“I saw a thing.…” Jenny hesitated. By the light it was the third hour of the morning, and even after the hot bath last night her muscles were board-stiff and ached. John had a whole new set of bruises to go with the old. She couldn't even remember the last time she'd fought full-out with a halberd as she had yesterday—probably not since the siege of Palmorgin in the summer, if then. “A flying shadow, that showed up against that flare of light. I thought at the time it was the demon leaving the King's body.”

“No,” John said decisively. “I saw that one, a silver salamander like the others, whippin' away covered in blood from where the corpse-wight threw him. Could the wight have been called by Goffyer, d'you think, to distract me—an' everyone else in the room—an' keep the King's demon from bein' killed?”

“Maybe,” Jenny said slowly. “Though I'd say it was likelier called into being by Adromelech, to break Folcalor's power in Bel by destroying the tool he was using.”

“Could Adromelech have done that? At this distance, an' trapped in the Henge as he is?” John lifted the silver lid from a tray of pastries: Mourning also forbade jams and confits, but there was, at least, butter and honey, which he attacked like a starving man. “An' if that's the case, why not do it earlier? Why just yesterday? Why take the risk when I was there with the demonkiller blade?”

Jenny only shook her head. “I don't know what Adromelech knows,” she said. “Or how he knows it. He's intelligent,” she said thoughtfully, remembering the gross shining thing as Amayon remembered him, the Lord of Hell who had both loved and tortured Folcalor. “Presumably he has agents in Folcalor's camp, demons who are loyal to him playing lip service to Folcalor as well as those who are openly arrayed against him.”

“I dunno,” John said, licking melted butter off his wrist. In the North, most cows were dry at this time of year; butter in the wintertime, even plainly molded and without its customary southern decoration of flowers, was a delight and a treat. “There's somethin' about that whole fight that just felt … odd. As if what was goin' on wasn't quite what was goin' on. Not,” he added, offering her a piece of cinnamon bread, “that I plan to share me suspicions with Ector, or anyone who's likely to talk to him. It's a change not to worry about which way I'm to run if someone speaks my name.”

They dressed in the somber garments that the servants had brought, Jenny remembering with a pang of grief how Trey had lent her a black and white gown the first night she had dined with the Court, lest she be mocked by Zyerne. John, who could look extremely respectable when he tried, washed the last of the lampblack out of his hair and shaved off his beard, and together they made their way to the great hall, to pay their respects to the King whose law John had all his life served.

“The people will be admitted at noon.” Gareth rose from the cushion where he'd knelt, according to custom, all night: Jenny couldn't imagine he would have slept much, anyway. The great hall—the only portion of the original palace still incorporated into the new—was curtained now in sable hangings, and the warm yellow honeycomb tiles of its floors covered with rush-matting dyed black. Badegamus and the servants must have been busy as squirrels in autumn, thought Jenny, to have accomplished all this since noon yesterday. She would have to seek the old chamberlain out and compliment him on the deep respect his efforts showed to the King he had served for so many years. The chamberlain and the King had been boys together, and Badegamus had loved the King, she knew, very much.

“They're gathering already before the gates. They're very quiet.…”

“My lord?” Danae appeared at the doorway to the left of the dais where the twin biers lay. She, too, was dressed in mourning, her fair hair loosed over her shoulders as was the custom, and only half-hidden by a mourning veil. When she saw John and Jenny she salaamed and made to go, but Gareth signed her to remain, and led the way toward the doorway where she stood.

“The people are very quiet,” said Gareth again. “Those whom Tourneval and the guards went out to arrest yesterday? They're dead.”

“What?” Jenny hadn't expected that, though, she reflected, she should have. “All of them?”

“All the women, and such of the men as weren't warriors. The men have simply disappeared.”

“Oh, that'll make me sleep better at night,” John remarked dryly, and Gareth nodded.

“Brâk and Abellus are checking, speaking to everyone who might know of someone who was resurrected. But it seems to have been a clean sweep. In some cases the disappearances were inexplicable—from rooms that had no other way out, that sort of thing. The people don't know what to make of it.”

“And what are you tellin” em?”

Gareth's pale face colored a little, and he grinned. “Abellus and Polycarp are putting it about that the resurrection spells caused madness in men, and simply failed in others. That the missing men have simply run away, and will be sought. That we'll do the best we can for them.…”

“But I venture to guess,” remarked Jenny, “that the prognosis isn't good.”

“Abellus's brother, Tundal, was one of the men who died,” said Gareth, more quietly. “As was his wife. Abellus is with their children now—he got them out of the household as soon as he began to suspect there was something amiss about the resurrections. They're all right.”

In the withdrawing chamber to the right of the dais, Danae had brought coffee and plain rolls for Gareth, and she watched him with a combination of motherliness and worry while he ate. She did not appear to have slept herself, and when Gareth asked her only said, “I will. I didn't like to leave Milla, as long as she was awake. But now she's sleeping I'll take some rest. My lord.” She knelt to John and kissed his hand. “Thank you for taking us out of the city. I don't know what might have happened to Milla last night, if we hadn't gone.”

“She was lucky to have a friend to care for her.”

When the woman had gone, John asked, “Any news of old Goffyer?”

“The man I sent to the Deep yesterday hasn't returned. It's several hours' ride.”

Hesitantly, Jenny took one of the shallow porcelain cups from the tray Danae had brought and, filling it with clean water from the pitcher in the niche near the door, retired with it to a corner. It felt odd to try to summon power now, as if it were shaped differently within her than it had been before. Gareth's voice and John's faded from her mind. She found herself looking into darkness, as if the cup were filled with ink instead of water, ink that gleamed with pinpoints of flame.

Miss Mab smiled at her, and said, “Child?”

Her eyes were wise and bright and as they had ever been. She was in her usual chambers on the Ninth Level; Jenny could see past her to the terraces above the subterranean waterfalls where she meditated, and a table refulgent with lamps and scattered thick with scrolls. “Are you all right?”

“Thinkst thou a demon could trick an old gnome-wife into folly? We gnomes are like the stone that gives us birth, child—our memories are long. This Folcalor came in the guise of poor Goffyer and treated with Sevacandrozanus our King, telling all manner of tales of demons in Bel. But our King is wary of demons. How not, when he has had me imprisoned all this time, and under watch, just for aiding thy husband in his search for the Mirror of Ernine? When it was suggested by the Patriarch of my family that Goffyer be likewise incarcerated, and Rogmadoscibar his brother also who has been helping him here, both fled after slaying many warriors of the King's guard. There is argument still, and those who have made money from the demons are spreading rumors about what has taken place in Bel, but I do not think thy little Prince need fear that in the end the gnomes will do anything but what they have always done: wait.”

When Jenny relayed this information to Gareth, he looked deeply relieved. “I've sent messengers also to Prince Tinán of Imperteng, asking his presence here in twenty days, to swear allegiance at my crowning. After his defeat in the summer there has been trouble there again, the mountaineers rising in rebellion.” He shook his head, and John asked something about the status of the disputed farmlands since last summer. Behind her Jenny heard their voices drift into talk of the rebels' cause, and which clans in the Trammel Hills had gone to fighting with what hill-tribes, and to what end.

While they spoke, Jenny turned her attention back to the water bowl, and called to mind her elder son's thin face, and the way his thick black hair fell over his forehead, and the bright lobelia-blue of his eyes.

Ian, she called. Ian …

Conjuring into her mind the ash-gray stone of Alyn Hold's walls, against the white of the snow. The amber brightness of the kitchen fire in that huge stone hearth, black iron pokers and hooks and chains arrayed like weapons in an armory, and everyone sitting at the long oak table: John's aunts and cousins and Sergeant Muffle. The howl of the wind around the walls. Ian …

But there was nothing. Her head began to ache, and she wondered if she had overextended already her slight powers. Or was there some other reason, some other danger …?

“If he doesn't come to the crowning,” Gareth was saying, “it will be a declaration of war.”

“Aye, well,” replied John cheerfully, “if we haven't settled Folcalor's accounts in twenty days, I promise you a war with Imperteng isn't going to be your biggest problem, anyway.”

Ector entered, and Badegamus, and other lords. John took Jenny's hand and led her back to the hall, where the members of the Great Houses of the Realm were already being admitted, to walk past the biers of the King and the Lady Trey. Trey's handsome brother was being led away, weeping: Jenny knew that the girl had been everything to him, as she had been to Gareth. He was not the only one to shed tears. What further rumors of yesterday's events had gone about the city Jenny did not know, but the nobles of the Realm all salaamed profoundly as she and John took their places in the line, and afterward this nobleman or that spoke to them, people they had met when they had come south to free the land of the dragon, and who had later entertained them in the feastings that surrounded Millença's naming.

Some were missing, represented by anxious wives or brothers who spoke long to Polycarp in the corner. They left looking troubled still, but comforted. Abellus was there, too, pale-lipped in gorgeously cut black mantlings that seemed incongruous against the weary grimness of his eyes; without being obvious about it, Jenny went to him and looked long into the eyes of the two boys with him, but saw no trace of demons there.

“What will we do?” she asked softly as she and John walked the length of the somberly draped hall with the black-dyed rushes crunching softly underfoot. Between the sable curtains the windows showed only a gray light, and despite the fire that burned on the dais hearth, the huge chamber was icy as a cave. “It is sixteen days, until the Moon of Winds.”

“Sixteen days should be enough,” said John, “if all goes well.” And, when Jenny looked at him in surprise, he tapped the side of his nose and said, “I've got a plan.”

On the steps of the hall a man stood, slim and small with his black garments billowing around him in the wind, his long gray hair a spidery cloud. Diamond eyes went first to Jenny's hand, locked in John's, and then to her face, and she felt that he could see there the afterglow of last night's loving, brazen as a love-bite.