Knight of the Demon Queen. Barbara Hambly

saw John’s eyes looking at her across Ian’s body and wanted only to sleep again.

      Snow had piled thick before the house door. She made herself get up and slipped through a tiny passway from the kitchen that let her into the stable. There she fed Moon Horse and mucked out her stall, her numb hands crooked as bird claws around rake and hay fork. The effort exhausted her, and without eating or washing-it seemed too much effort even to boil water for gruel—she returned to her quilts and the comfort of her dreams.

      All care for her life seemed to have dried with her menses. The symptoms she had once kept at bay with her spells returned to tear at her, so she could not rest. Blind with migraine, she crept about her few tasks like an old woman, feeding the fire and boiling a little snow water to drink.

      In her memories Amayon was still with her. Magic flowed in her veins.

      Let your magic go, Morkeleb had said to her, Morkeleb the Black, the dragon of Nast Wall.

      Let your magic go.

      She hadn’t known then that it would not come back.

      In her dreams she saw him, beautiful beyond beauty: the black glittering specter in the darkness of the gnomes’ Deep at Ylferdun, the cold voice like the echo of far-off singing that spoke in the hollows of her mind. Know you not your own power. Wizard-woman? he had asked her once. Know you not what you could be?

      And later, when he had begun to change, to become a dragon-shadow of smoke and starlight: I would that I could heal you, my friend, but this is not possible: I, who destroyed the Elder Droon and brought down the gnomes of Ylferdun to ruin, I cannot make so much as a single flower prosper when frost has set its touch upon it.

      She saw him again, as she had seen him last: near invisible, beautiful, a ghost of peace and stillness, flying away to the North. Not sleepy dreams, she thought, but clarity, an acceptance of time and change.

      Waking she felt still the deep peace of his presence. Wind screamed around the walls and in the thatch, and the cold draft streaming from the attic reminded her that in summer she’d gathered herbs and dried them on the rafters, herbs to ease the ill of other women’s change: primrose and pennyroyal and slippery elm.

      She worked the door open enough to scrape some snow into a pan, which she put on the hearth to boil. She wedged herself through the cranny to the stable and pitched fodder for Moon Horse again and cleaned her stall, shivering in the colder atmosphere of the stable but glad to have the care of another creature to occupy her thoughts. Returning to the kitchen, she checked the water, touched a candle to the flame, and dragged herself up the attic stair.

      It was cold up there. The window through which she’d watched John depart three days ago was unshuttered, cold seeping through the glass as if there were nothing in the space at all. No light trickled in with the cold—Jenny had no idea what time it was. With the wind rising and dense cloud covering the stormy sky, it could have been dawn or twilight or midnight. Her candle glow touched the herbs, homey comforting bundles, like an upended forest over her head.

      Yet there was something wrong. Jenny stood, candle in hand, listening trying to sense what exactly it was.

      Her dream? she thought. Folcalor?

      She had the sense of having had another dream, or some other awareness while she dreamed—eternally and repetitively—of Aohila, of Amayon, of John’s betrayal. Closing her eyes, she walked back in her mind to the mirror chamber, as she’d seen it in her dream, and it seemed to her for a little time that she could hear something else, some voice whispering …

      It seemed that as she stood in the mirror chamber, looking at John in his flame-scarred and grubby doublet with the fourteen prisoned Sea-wights around his feet, someone or something was standing behind her. Someone that she knew with a hideous intimacy.

      Someone who had hurt her and had laughed at her while she wept.

      She knew if she turned around she would see him—it. And the sight would destroy her, because the horrible thing she would see would be herself: a woman capable of causing her own child’s suicide, a woman who had betrayed the man she loved a thousand times.

      Go downstairs and dream again by the fire.

      You do need to rest.

      In that mirror chamber in her heart she turned around. And of course there was nothing there but shadows.

      She opened her eyes. Her single candle flame bent and flickered in the draft, the heavy rafters she had known since girlhood taking on sinister weight and darkness overhead. There was a bundle of candles under the spare bed, candles she’d made five summers ago, and she took half a dozen and lit them, looking carefully around her for any sign of the wrongness she felt.

      But the light seemed to dispel whatever it was that had troubled her. The room was as it had always been: a big open space beneath the tall slant of the thatch. Spare bed, bundles of candles, bags of dried corn and barley spelled a year ago against mice. Blankets and quilts and old coats, snowshoes and boots. The sense she had had, of wrongness and evil, seemed to have folded itself away into a shadow.

      And maybe a shadow was all it had been.

      Storm winds smote the house, and all the candle flames bent and jittered with it. More snow, Jenny thought.

      But the thought didn’t bring with it the urge to sleep again, merely a reflection that with her hands twisted as they were, it would take longer to wield the shovel to dig herself clear. She opened the window long enough to pull the shutters closed and bar them, then made her choices among the dried herbs, gathering the little bundles and holding them in her skirt. As an afterthought she looked for a clean skirt, a clean shift, a clean bodice from the chest of spare clothes, then went downstairs to tidy the kitchen.

      Behind her she thought the shadows whispered, but she did not look back.

       Chapter 3

      John’s study was a round chamber at the top of the tower that in his father’s time had doubled as a depot for emergency food stores and a lookout post in bad weather. Wide windows faced the cardinal points and made the place almost impossible to heat As a child, John had fallen into the habit of studying there, away from his father’s eye, and hiding his books among the grain sacks.

      Now a lifetime’s plunder of learning stacked desk, worktable, and the plank shelves that filled every available inch of wall space. Candles-or the slumped, exhausted remains of them-sprouted like fungi among the dilapidated volumes, stalagmites of tallow bearding every shelf, corner, and lamp stand. Scrolls, parchment, piles of papyrus drifted every horizontal surface like dried leaves. The rafters were a spiderweb of experimental hoists and pulleys, the shelves a ramshackle graveyard of disemboweled clocks. A telescope, built by John according to accounts he’d found in a volume of Heronax, stood before the eastern window, the gnome-wrought crystal lenses pointed at the quadrant of the sky where six hundred years ago Dotys had predicted the rising of a comet at last summer’s end.

      Unerringly John picked from the disarray an onyx bottle that had once contained silver ink. Terens had described such a thing in Deeds of Ancient Heroes in writing of the villainous Greeth Demon-caller, who had been dismembered alive on orders of Agravaine III. John tied a red ribbon around it-why red? he wondered-and put it in his pocket. From a cupboard he took five new candles—marveling a little that he could find five unburned-and Volume VII of Gantering Pellus’ Encyclopedia and finally from the litter of the desk, a piece of black chalk.

      Gantering Pellus strongly recommended that experiments concerning demons not be conducted under roofs that would ever again shelter humans. In fact, he’d strongly recommended that such experiments not be conducted at all. For whoso speaketh with the Spawn of Hell, even in their dreams, the encyclopediast wrote, is never after to be trusted in any congress with men. It is the whole art and pleasure of such wights to cause suffering. They are cunning beyond human