Knight of the Demon Queen

She saw Ian open a pot that she knew contained monkshood. Saw him dip his fingers into the coarse powder.

Perhaps you’ll find the magic again within your beautiful heart.

The sweet voice lured her back to her dream, where she lay in the great bed in the Hold with John breathing soft beside her. His beaky face was turned away; he was clerkish and shortsighted and middle-aged, and nothing like the great thanes who had ruled the Winterlands before him, save for his scars.

Dreaming, she broke open her own ribs and tore her chest apart, as the demon had suggested. She saw her heart, which in her dream was wrought of a thousand crystals, scarlet and crimson and pink. Dreaming, she lifted it out. Blood gummed her fingers together as she fumbled for its catch, as if her heart were a box. The catch was a diamond, like a single poisoned tear.

Fascinated, she watched her heart unfurl in all directions, as if in opening the box she had somehow folded herself inside it. Within it she was, curiously, once again in the curtained bed with John, in a warm frowst of worn quilts and moth-holed furs. Like mirrors within mirrors she saw the scarred husk of her own body, burned in the final battle when she had pinned the demon-ridden renegade mage Cara-doc with a harpoon beneath the sea: hair burned away, eyelashes burned away—magic burned away.

John lay beside her, twined in the arms of the Demon Queen.

“Don’t wake her,” the Queen whispered, and giggled like a schoolgirl. She was beautiful, as Jenny had never been beautiful: tall and slim, with breasts like ripe melons and coal-black jeweled hair. She traced on John’s bare flesh the silvery marks it had borne when he’d returned from the Hell behind the mirror, marks that could occasionally be seen in the light of the earthly moon. Then she pressed her lips to the pit of his throat, where a small fresh scar lay like a burn.

She laughed huskily when John cupped her breasts in his hands.

“Let him be!”

Jenny’s cry waked her. Like falling through a chain of mirrors, she fell from the imagined tower and imagined bed to the real ones and sat bolt upright, the air icy in her lungs. Beside her, John slept still.

He dreams of her. Rage washed from Jenny all thought of that other dream, the dream of Ian hunting among the ensorceled poison pots at Frost Fell. Laughs at me with her while I sleep.

Her cry had not waked him, and that made her angry, too. Hating him, she rolled from the bed and through the heavy curtains. The tower chamber was cramped and fusty: table and chest and large areas of the floor littered with John’s books. He had a formidable library, laboriously collected from the ruins of crumbling towns, copied, collated, begged, and borrowed. Since summer’s end, when they had returned from the South, John had been reading everything he could get his hands on concerning demons and melancholy and the silent sicknesses of the heart.

As if, Jenny thought angrily, he can cure Ian by reading!

But that was always John’s answer.

His armor lay among the books: a battered doublet of black leather, spiked and plated with iron and chain; dented pauldrons and a close-fitting helm; longsword and shortsword and a couple of fine Southern cavalry blades; spectacles with bent silver-wire frames; and a pair of muddy boots. Rocklys of Galyon, whose machinations to rule the Realm had set in motion last summer’s terrible events, had stripped the Winterlands of its garrisons: John was back riding patrol, as he had done most of his adult life.

He had little time these days to give his son.

And less, Jenny thought, to give to her.

Fingers stiff with scars, she shoved up the latch of the heavy shutters and stood gazing into darkness only a degree less heavy than that in the room. Snow covered the bare fields, the bare moor beyond. The smell of the sky calmed her, dispelled the envenomed miasma of her dreams.

Ian. The dream of him stirred at the edge of her thoughts.

Sleepy dreams. The sweet voice whispered and pulled at her heart. Sleepy dreams, not plans and schemes. Somehow it sounded rational, true in its simplicity, like a nursery song.

When she’d left the bed, the burning heat of the change of life had been warming her flesh, but that fled away now and her limbs were cold. Better to return to bed and the comfort of her dreams.

“Jen?”

The cold from the window must have waked John. Anger and resentment burned her. She wanted to be alone with her wretchedness and her grief.

“You were dreaming of her, weren’t you?” Her voice snapped in her own ears, black ice breaking underfoot and miles of freezing water beneath. She spat the words back at him over her shoulder. She knew that he stood next to the bed, wrapped in one of its shabby furs, long hair hanging to his shoulders as he blinked in her direction, seeing nothing.

And just as well, she thought bitterly. Face and scalp and body scarred by demon fire and poisoned steam, and scarred within by the heats and migraines and malaises of the change of a woman’s life. Better he be half blind and in darkness than see me as I am.

“I can’t help me dreams, Jen.” He sounded tired. They’d fought before going to bed. And yesterday, and the day before.

“Then don’t deny me mine.”

“I wouldn’t,” John retorted, “if dreams was all they were. But you had a demon within you …”

“And you believe them, don’t you?” Jenny swung around, trembling. “Believe those people who say that anyone who has been taken by a demon should be killed? That’s what all those books of yours say, isn’t it?”

“Not all.” There was a warrant out in the South for his life for trafficking with the Demon Queen. Had Rocklys of Galyon not taken the Kong’s troops from the North to fuel her demon-inspired rebellion, he might already have been executed.

“Is that what you want?” She struck at him with her words as if it were he, and not the archdemon Folcalor’s final outpouring of magic, that had robbed her of her power. “To kill me, as the books say? To kill Ian, for something neither of us wanted, for something that happened against our wills?”

He was a man who had grown up keeping his thoughts to himself, and he said nothing now.

“I was taken trying to save him!” she cried into his silence. She had a sweet small voice: gravel veined with silver. It sounded brittle to her now, and shrill. “For trying to save him, for trying to save you, and all these precious people of yours around here! This is what came of it! I hated the demon!”

“Yet you did every damn thing you could to keep me from sending it away behind the mirror.” There was an edge of anger to his quiet words. “And you’ve been mourning it since.”

“You don’t understand.” Jenny had learned that it was possible to hate and love the same thing at the same time.

“I understand that neither you nor my son has eaten nor slept well for months, and that as far as I’ve been able to see you haven’t done a hand’s turn to help him.”

You don’t understand, she wanted to say again. To scream the words at him until he knew what she felt. But instead she lashed at him, “Your son?” How dare he?

And at the same time she thought, Ian, and her mind snatched at shredded images of a boy sitting in despair beside a hearth. She remembered stick-thin white hands tracing away wards from jars on a shelf.

“Well, you never did want him, did you?” The resentment, the buried rage, of all those years of her uncertainty spurted up in his voice. “And if you’d been here in the first place when Caradoc showed up—”

“If you wanted a woman here during the years I was seeking my own magic, John,” Jenny said with harsh and deadly sarcasm, “I can only say you should have convinced one of your regiment of village lightskirts to bear you a child. Any one of them would have.”

“Papa?” The door hinge creaked. A yellow thread of candlelight fluttered, illumined the sturdy eight-year-old in the doorway: face, hands, rufous hair, and bright sharp brown eyes all the mimic of John’s burly father. He’d girded his small sword over his nightshirt: A man must go armed, he liked to say. “Ian’s gone.”

Jenny led them to Frost Fell. The moment her second son, her little ruffian Adric, had spoken, her dream rushed back to her and she knew where Ian was and what he sought. Snow fell steadily as they saddled the horses, Jenny’s scarred fingers fumbling half frozen with buckles and reins until she wanted to scream and strike everyone around her for being so slow. The air was filled with drifting white as they crossed over Toadback Hill, and the horses skidded on the ice of the cranberry bog.

They found Ian outside the little house, unconscious. By the tracks, he’d crawled there in delirium, but the snow already lay over him like a shroud. John and Sergeant Muffle, John’s bailiff and blacksmith and bastard older brother, fed the dying fire in the hearth and dragged the bed over beside it while Jenny worked desperately to mix an antidote, to force saline water down her son’s throat, to induce vomiting and keep him warm. All the while she cursed, for the one thing that would surely drag him back from the shadowlands where he now walked—the magic of her healing—was gone.

Looking up, she saw this, too, in John’s eyes.

“You knew he was here.” He sounded numb, like he couldn’t believe any of this was taking place.

“I saw him in a dream.” Between them the boy’s white face was slack, shut eyes sunk in bistered hollows of pain.

And you didn’t think to mention it to me. She could all but hear his thought. But he only looked away and brought more water to bathe his son’s face. Frantic, Jenny traced the marks of healing, the runes of life, on her son’s forehead and chest and hands. In her mind she drew first the limitations and the power lines, then the summoning of power, the calling of the magic from her bones and her heart, from the stars above the sullen cloud and the water beneath the earth, as she had done all her life.

But it was only words. The sparkly slips of fire that she’d felt in her days of small power and small learning, the great golden river of fire that had been hers when the dragon whose life she had saved had given her the gift of dragon magic, the gorgeous envenomed rainbow of demon power—all these were gone. She was just a middle-aged woman repeating nonsense words in her mind, hoping that her son would not die.

And thinking, in spite of all she could do, of the demon she had lost.

In the black cold before dawn, when John went out to fetch more wood and Sergeant Muffle dozed by the blood-colored pulse of the hearth, Jenny stretched across the furs and wept, whispering a prayer to the God of Women: Do not let him die. Do not let him die.