Knight of the Demon Queen

Demons destroyed trust. You never knew, afterward, where you were with one who had dealings with them. You never knew to whom you were speaking.

Jenny. The ache in his heart overwhelmed him as he looked out across the moor from the tower window and saw the thin gray smudge of smoke rising above Frost Fell. Jenny.

Despite the snow, and the day’s growing cold and darkness, he thought of going there. But though Ian seemed a little better, still he felt uneasy at leaving him. Nor could he put from his mind Jenny’s desperate and dreadful silence, silence from which, apparently, she could not even reach to help her son. Nor could he forget his love. There was a time when he would have gone on harrowing himself, forcing meetings with her, trying stubbornly to cut through the wall around her, but he saw with strange clarity that there was nothing he could do.

He could only trust that wherever she had gone, she would come back.

Puggle and his men returned the following forenoon, frosted to the eyebrows and grumbling. No sign of bandits or wolves, nor of the Iceriders who raided two winters out of three from the lands beyond the mountains. They’d checked with the depleted garrison at Skep Dhû, and the commander—a corporal promoted when all the troops had been drawn off to join Rocklys of Galyon’s attempt to conquer the South—said the same. Corporal Avalloch also reported that yet another message had come from the King’s councilor Ector of Sindestray, ordering him to arrest John Aversin on charges of trafficking with demons and put him to death.

“You think Avalloch’d agree to send a message to this Ector bloke telling him that’s what he’d done?” Muffle inquired from his seat on the big table in the kitchen where the patrol had come to drink hot ale and report.

“I asked him already,” John said, breathing on his spectacles and rubbing them on a towel, for the kitchen was far warmer than any other room in the Hold. “I even pointed out as how it’d be a savin’ of money for the council, in that they wouldn’t always be sendin’ messengers. Avalloch just gave me those fishy eyes and said, ‘I could not do that, Lord Aversin.’

“Anythin’ else?” he added, turning back to Puggle.

“Only sickness,” the corporal said, “over at Werehove Farm.”

Warm as the kitchen was, John felt suddenly cold.

I can heal your son. And, My hand is long.

“Ema Werehove was near frantic when she spoke to us. She said it was nothin’ she’d ever seen nor heard of: fever, and sores on his lips—Druff it is who’s sick—and brown spots that spread if you touch them. Should we ride out to the Fell and fetch Mistress Jenny, d’you think? Your Aunt Jane was tellin’ me all’s not right with her either …”

Puggle’s words washed over him, barely heard.

“Did she say when Druff had been took sick?” John’s voice sounded odd in his own ears, as if it belonged to someone else.

“Night before last, she said. Close to dawn.”

Within hours of his dream of the Demon Queen.

“Where you goin’?” Puggle asked as his thane paused in the doorway only long enough to gather up his winter plaids and his heaviest sheepskin jacket.

“Get Bill to saddle Battlehammer.”

“You’re mad, Johnny,” Muffle protested. “It’s comin’ on to storm before midnight!”

“I’ll ride fast.”

Werehove Farm lay in a tiny pocket of arable land, under the backbone of the Wolf Hills, close by the spreading desolation of Wraithmire Marsh. Aversin shivered as he rode past the marsh, for even in the cloud-thinned sunlight it had a dreary look. No sign now of the fey lights that jigged across the brown pools and root-clotted black streamlets once the sun was down. Nothing but silence, though on five or six occasions John had heard the whisperers calling to him from the marshes at evening, in Jenny’s voice, or Ian’s—once in his father’s.

They live on pain, Gantering Pellus said in his Encyclopedia, and John knew how true this was. Pain and terror and rage, lust and guilt and shame. They drank those emotions like dark nutty Winterlands beer. Cut your wrist in the Wraithmire, and the glowing little whisperers—the stoats and foxes of the Hellspawn, compared to the tigers like the Queen—would come round to drink the blood. Weep there, and you would see them seeping out of the ground to lap your tears.

And they’d tease and twist and lure to increase those intoxicating delights. If humans were not available, they would torment cats or pigs or anything whose blood and fear would warm their coldness, feed their hunger for life.

Maybe the Demon Queen had offered to heal Ian only to sup on the surge of hope and grief and pain her words had brought.

“Cannot Mistress Jenny come?” Ema, matriarch of the Werehove clan, asked, meeting him in the stable yard wrapped in sheepskins and scarves. The light had sickened, and harsh wind yanked at John’s hair and plaids, tore at the woman’s gray braids as she led him toward the thick-walled stone house. “I’d heard she was hurt and not able to do magic as she used. But she’ve still the knowledge of herbs, and sickness, and worse things belike. This is an ill such as we’ve never seen, and it’s eating Druff up alive.”

Druff Werehove, Ema’s oldest son, lay in the loft, his bed set against the chimney. A few candles burned around him, and Winna, his wife, knelt by him bathing his face. As he climbed the loft stairs, John smelled stale blood and sickness. He stopped, looking down at the man—one of his militia, and with his brothers the core of the little farmstead—and felt sickness clutch his own breast. For he was as Puggle had described him: his face was blistered around the mouth and across the nose and forehead, and his arms and breast were spotted with brown. His swollen tongue filled his mouth so that he could barely breathe, and his thick gasping was dreadful to hear.

“He’s burnin’ up.” Winna raised frantic eyes to her mother-in-law. Her hand trembled as she sponged her husband’s face again. “Burnin’ up. And Metty from over Fell Farm, she tells me her girl’s down with this here, too. Cannot Mistress Jenny come?”

“I’ll tell her.” John’s heart shrank up to a coal inside him, a black nubbin of dread. “As soon as I return to the Hold.”

But it was night, and the storm was coming on hard when he crossed the drawbridge again. And in any case he knew whence the sickness came, and how it could be ended.

Muffle met him in the courtyard, wrapped to the eyes in plaids and leaning against the beating wind. “There’s fever in the village,” he said, “two cases of it. Blisters on the face, and brown spots. We sent for Mistress Jenny, but by that time the snow was too bad to get near the Fell.”

“Anyone here down with it?” In John’s mind he saw Ian, writhing and sobbing. Everything seemed to have gone blank within him, beyond thought or reasoning. Only, he thought, I’ll kill her if she’s harmed him. Demon or not I’ll destroy her somehow, though it cost my life.

“Not yet.” The smith led the horse back to the stable, John stumbling behind. They stripped Battlehammer of his saddle by the light of a wavering flare, then John went up the tower stairs two at a time, shedding his wet plaids and sheepskin coat as he went. There was a part of him that did not want to reach the door of his room.

But Ian lay propped in the shadows of the bed, and something altered in the blank blue gaze as John came through the door. “Papa?”

“You all right, Son?” And he cursed himself for the offhand tone in his voice—offhand, as he’d had to be about everything when he was a child Ian’s age and younger, fighting not to let his own father crush him inside.

Ian nodded and let himself be embraced. He started to speak, as if to remark on the cold that still clung to the metal plates of John’s rough leather doublet and to his snow-flecked hair, but then did not. John didn’t know whether this was something the demon had done to him—this trick of reconsideration, of backing down from any speech, as if fearing it would reveal or disarm or obligate him—or whether it was a thing of his years, or perhaps only of his self. Still Ian held onto his arm for a moment, the first reassurance he had sought, his face pressed to the grubby sleeve.

And John fought not to say, Why did you take the poison? Why didn’t you speak to me?

Uncharacteristically it was Ian who broke the silence. He coughed, his voice still barely a thread. “I heard Muffle talking about fever …”

Of course he would. He had a mage’s senses, which could pick up the murmur of voices in the kitchen three floors below.

“Should I get up and go down to the village?”

“In a while.” John sat on the edge of the bed. A protesting meep sounded beneath the quilts, and one of the humped covers moved. John wanted to say, Your mother can handle it, but he let the words go. He suspected Jenny would be helpless against this illness, and Ian also.

In any event this was the first interest Ian had shown in anything since his return to the North.

“It doesn’t sound like any of the fevers I’ve read about in Mother’s books.” Ian sank against the pillows, exhausted by the effort of sitting up, and Skinny Kitty emerged from beneath the comforters to sit on his chest. “Tonight could you bring down from the library what you have about diseases? There has to be some cause.”

“Aye,” John said softly, knowing the cause. “Aye, son. I’ll do that.”

He remained until Ian slept again. It wasn’t long. Even after the boy’s eyes slipped closed John stayed seated beside the bed, holding his hand. Watching the too-thin face in its tangled frame of black hair, the wasted fingers twined with his own. Remembering the child Jenny had borne but had not wanted to raise—the child she had left at the Hold for him when she returned to Frost Fell to meditate, to concentrate, to patiently strive at increasing her small abilities in magic to the level of true power. He saw again the demon fire in the boy’s eyes as Ian was drawn toward the dragon Centhwevir, already under the wizard Caradoc’s control.

Where had these demons been for a thousand years? he wondered, riffling Skinny Kitty’s gray fur. It had been that long since spawn from the Hell behind the burning mirror had destroyed Ernine, that long since the mages of the forgotten city of Prokeps had summoned Sea-wights to aid them in what human magic couldn’t do alone. Fighting wars among themselves and leaving humankind at the mercy of the smaller pooks and gyres, which could be cast out or guarded against with a spell?

Why a thousand years ago?

Why now?

Gently he disengaged his hand from Ian’s and peered into the boy’s face. His son slept calmly, something he had seldom done since he was a child. Skinny Kitty purred drowsily and kneaded with her paws.

I can cure your son.

John blew out the candles by the bed and by the fire’s dim glow crossed the room to seek the steps that led to his library.