Knight of the Demon Queen. Barbara Hambly
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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.
“Where’s Adric?” she asked as she turned from the door and descended the stairs to the kitchen again.
“He and Sergeant Muffle went hunting.” Jane’s voice was frosty. “You’re welcome to wait.”
Since this was patently untrue, Jenny thanked her and took her leave, staying only long enough to play a little with Mag by the warmth of the kitchen hearth. Pursuant to her decision to be a spider when she grew up, Mag was currently practicing weaving webs with Aunt Rowe’s yarns; she accepted her mother’s presence as peacefully as she had accepted her various absences, evidently considering this merely another journey. From Sparrow and Bill, Jenny had already heard of the mysterious fever, though there were no further cases of it and those who had been like to die were already on their feet. Curious, she thought, disquieted. On her way back to Frost Fell she resolved to return on the morrow, later in the day when Ian would be awake, though it meant walking home in the dark.
But as she trudged homeward, the flinty dazzle of the snow resolved itself into the wavering firefalls of migraine, and through the following day Jenny was barely able to do more than make sure Moon Horse was watered and fed and stagger back to bed. She dreamed again of the sea bottom and the great weightless graceful shadows of the whalemages passing like dancers overhead. The migraine seemed to have gotten into her dreams as well: fire shimmering in the water among the great columns of rock where Caradoc had died and things appearing and disappearing on the current-sculpted sand of the seafloor below.
The next day she felt better, though lightheaded. She trekked the woods in early morning, digging herbs patiently out from beneath the drifted snow. She could put no magic into them as she’d used to do, but they would have virtue nonetheless. There was peace, too, to be found in the secret tales told her by fox track and rabbit scat in the snow. She returned home and made herself a tisane against the migraine’s return. Lying in bed she heard the shutters rattle with new-risen wind. She stepped to the door and smelled the wind: it would be worse long before nightfall.
So she performed her chores and baked bread and carried in wood to last the afternoon and the night. The small tasks brought peace to her, and she tried to put from her mind what Jane would be saying of her—probably had been saying about her for years—behind her back. In the afternoon she climbed the attic steps with a broom and dust rags, to sweep and cleanse it and make it sweet for the drying of herbs. She relit the candles she’d set up four nights ago and, finding that light insufficient, untied the bundle and set another dozen in place: the darkness in the attic had disquieted her.
She no longer had a wizard’s skills, but, she found, something of a wizard’s awareness remained. And there was something about the attic that made her scalp prickle.
She opened another bundle of candles and saw that five were missing from it. The number skittered in the back of her mind with a sensation like the scratching of rats, catching at her breath. She lit all that remained of the candles and moved the spare bed out of the way; shifting boxes and sacks, her tiredness dissolved and even the ache in her crooked hands retreated before the dread in her heart. The dust on the trunks and bundles had been disturbed already. Thrusting aside two sacks of barley, she found the ghost of a mark on the floor, rubbed out with rags but not rubbed out enough.
It was a single curving line, ending in a sigil she recognized—a sigil she had never before seen in any of John’s books or the books left her by old Caerdinn. But she recognized it still.
She stood, candle in hand, looking down at it, wondering why she knew it, why the sight of it turned her sick.
Then she understood.
The memory of it was not her own. It had been left in her mind by Amayon when he had inhabited her body and her brain. It was one of dozens—ugly and dirty and disquieting, like fruit parings cached in corners by an unwelcome and uncouth guest.
The line was part of a complex power circle designed for the calling of a demon.
Ian.
The thought smote her like the toll of an iron bell.
Folcalor.
I will not go.
Nausea twisted her—nausea and pity and horror—and she scraped and hurled and tore at the boxes, the firkins, the bundles that had been stacked over the place.
Ian, no! Oh, my son …
She found the fragments of a china bowl, not merely broken but stamped and smashed until the clay was powder, ground into the scratched planking of the floor. Powdered, too, were bits of black chalk, as if they’d been crushed and ground under a young boy’s boots … I will not. I will not. I will not. In the darkest corner she found the five candles.
They were unlit.
He had not completed the rite.
Jenny knelt, holding her hands over her mouth, her breath glittering in the soft amber light that filled the attic.
He had not completed the summons of the demon.
Instead, he had gone downstairs and drunk poison in an effort to silence those demands.
Oh, Ian.
She closed her eyes.
Oh, my son.
The Winterlands’ wind screamed across the thatch.
When morning came, Jenny patiently dug the snow from the doors of the kitchen and the stable, wrapped herself in a sheepskin coat and her thick winter plaids, tied her sheepskin cap over her bald scalp, and set out for Alyn Hold. It has to be Folcalor, she thought, as she waded through the drifts on the downhill road through the bog. Gothpys—the demon who had inhabited Ian’s body and heart as Amayon had inhabited hers—was a prisoner behind the Mirror of Isychros. He would not be able to benefit from being summoned even had he had the power to invade Ian’s dreams with the demand.
Folcalor had seduced Caradoc, imprisoned his soul in a jewel, and inhabited his body. He had used the enslaved mage’s powers to capture and imprison other wizards.
Why?
And he was seeking to do it again.
Why?
At the Hold, Peg told her Ian and Muffle had ridden out that morning to deal with sickness in the village of Great Toby. “They hadn’t heard over there yet that you wasn’t at the Hold,” the gatekeeper explained apologetically. “The sickness isn’t much—Granny Brown’s rheumatism—so Master Ian said not to trouble you with it.”
“Thank you,” Jenny said, tucking her halberd against her shoulder and blowing on her hands. Even if Ian and Muffle were a few hours ahead of her, she’d encounter them in Great Toby. It would be near dark by the time she reached the