Knight of the Demon Queen. Barbara Hambly

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      That got a laugh, as he’d hoped it would, and those men who’d had their swords in hands stashed them beneath their blankets again. Even Darrow, who wasn’t one to endanger his family by leaving a suspected traitor unhanged, relaxed.

      But John spent the remainder of the long night awake, pinching himself when he felt in danger of falling asleep. Twice or thrice, when he did drift off, he dreamed again about the blue-eyed rat that sniffed and scrabbled about the beds where Dan Darrow’s little grandchildren slept.

      “And that was your idea of a joke?” he asked when Darrow—who had himself accompanied him to the edge of the Wraithmire with a donkey laden with supplies—disappeared between the snowy deadfall hummocks, leaving Aversin alone.

      Amayon flickered into view out of the smoke from the newly opened ink bottle. “Oh, don’t be squeamish.” He pouted. “I wouldn’t have harmed the little bastards. You’ve said yourself a thousand times that that youngest boy needs to be thrashed more often.”

      John studied the elfin face, the innocent eyes in their dark fringes of lash. Just enough like Ian, he realized, to twist at the grief he felt about his son. The voice melodious, sweet and childlike. But he knew that Amayon no more looked like this than the Demon Queen looked like the woman he saw in his dreams.

      He slipped the straps of food sacks and water satchels over his shoulders, flexing his knees to test the balance of the load. One sack contained other things: bits of silver and dragonbone, whatever he could find in Jenny’s workbox that wouldn’t add too much weight. “And I suppose Browson needs to be hanged, for attackin’ a guest?”

      “They wouldn’t have hanged him.” Amayon gestured airily. “Now come along. Her Poxship went to a great deal of trouble to get you a beast worthy of you, so we’d better get through the gate before it wanders away.”

      He set off through the snow-choked thickets, John at his heels. Every tree they passed, every frozen pond they skirted, John noted, remembering the way so he could come back and do something—he wasn’t sure what-about the demon gate. He had packed also as much clean parchment and paper as he could, had drawn from memory what he remembered of the route Aohila had shown him in dreaming, and had made note of Amayon’s remark last night about gates that would admit only tiny spawn, not great ones.

      He didn’t know what any of it meant or might mean, but someone, sometime, would.

      The mists that always hung over the Wraithmire thickened, making it hard for him to get his bearings; Amayon stopped twice and waited for him, knee-deep in swirling white vapor. John followed carefully, reflecting that it would be exactly like the demon to lead him thus onto thin ice, for the amusement of watching him lose toes to frostbite when his boots got soaked. Then through the fog a warm wind breathed, alien and frightening, and on it drifted a smell John knew he’d scented before hereabouts: sand and sourness, and something like burning metal.

      The light altered.

      The squeak of the snow turned to the crunch of pebbles underfoot.

      And a thing rose up before them in the mists, with a blunt stupid head on a long neck balanced by a blunt heavy tail. Between tail and head were tall haunches and two long legs, like a sort of flabby featherless hairless bird, saddled and bridled like a horse.

      A creature of Hell, regarding him with a black dead porcelain-shiny eye.

      The hot wind breathed the mists away. Dust stung Aversin’s nostrils, burned his eyes.

      Black harsh mountains stained with rust scraped a colorless sky. Something like a cloud moved across it, curling and uncurling with a floppy, obscene motion, running against the wind.

      Amayon smiled, and John knew it was because the demon tasted his fear.

      “Welcome to Hell,” the demon said.

       Chapter 5

      It took Jenny most of the day following the storm to dig out. In this she was helped by her sister Sparrow and Sparrow’s husband and Bill, the yardman from the Hold, who came up with milk, cheese, and dried apples and to make sure she was well. “Aunt Umetty seems to think as you’d laid in the corner all this time and would need feedin’ with a spoon,” the sallow, lanky little servant said with a grin.

      Jenny, who had convinced herself that everyone in the Hold and the villages round about would stone her on sight, returned the smile shakily and said, “I hope you brought a spoon.”

      After days of sleep, of migraines and troubled dreams, the company made her feel better, more alive. Ian was better, Bill reported, though he slept a good deal, which wasn’t to be marveled at, poor lad. Bill hoped as Mistress Jenny wouldn’t be moved to do herself a harm, having had traffic with demons same as her boy. He said that John had ridden out by himself this very morning, as his father had used to do sometimes, then asked what Jenny thought of prospects for spring.

      Though Jenny quivered a little at the thought, she walked over to the Hold the following morning, a tiny brown-and-white figure in the bleak vastness of the snow-choked cranberry bog. As Bill had predicted, she found Ian asleep.

      “And I’ll not have you wake him,” Aunt Jane, who had insisted on walking up to the boy’s room with her, said. A big woman with thick dark hair slashed now with gray, Aunt Jane had never liked Jenny, though for years the two women had existed in a state of truce. Jane had said many times—as reported to Jenny over the years by various people whose business it wasn’t—that no good ever came of mixing with witchery, meaning that she had passionately loved her brother Lord Aver and had hated Kahiera Nightraven.

      It was Kahiera that Jenny saw now in Jane’s eyes, as they stood together in the doorway of Ian’s room.

      Icewitch and sorceress, an outcast of her own people and a battle captive of Lord Aver, Nightraven had been Jenny’s first teacher in the arts of magic when Jenny was a child; she had been the only one in the world who understood. Jenny had been five when that tall cold beautiful woman had been brought to the Hold, and for six years she had tagged at her sable skirts. Every word and spell and fragment of lore that came from those pale lips she had memorized, and she had seen how the witch used her magic, and her wits, to ensnare her captor. Leaving him at last-leaving their son-she had laid on Lord Aver spells such that he had never loved another woman.

      And all this was still in Jane’s resentful eyes.

      Ian looked peaceful, curled on his side in the bed that the boys shared, its curtains drawn against the chilly forenoon light. He was terribly thin, Jenny saw, guilt prodding and twisting at her heart, but he did not seem to be tormented by the dreams that had tortured her.

      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.

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