Dragonstar

10

“There’s someone there,” whispered Jenny, in the breath-soft murmur of hunters in the Winterlands, whose life depends upon not being heard. Under the sigh of the wind in the pine trees, and the distant sursurrance of the unseen river, this wasn’t difficult. She strained her ears, extended her senses toward the dark blot against the dark of the trees. “A woman …”

She made her own heart quiet, listened beneath the soughing of the boughs. Putting aside the voice of the river, and each sound of the still winter night. Scenting the cloaked forms as a fox scents rabbits. “Herbed soap, no perfume. A child is with her, sleeping. Two children.” And whimpering with cold and fear in their sleep.

“The nurse.” John’s voice was no more than a thread in a mingled skein of tree rustlings. “Danae. And at a bet the nurse’s child. Anything else?”

Meaning, Jenny knew, any demons watching the place. She half-shut her eyes, closing out the sea roar of the wind in the trees and the leathery creak of the branches. Closing out the scents of coming rain, of wet vegetation, of smoke and sewage discernible even at five miles’ distance from the city itself. Demons could wait in perfect silence, but the human bodies they wore would breathe, and their boots would creak and their clothing rustle. She heard none of these things. Moreover, the nurse’s breathing, though the tense breath of wakefulness, was reasonably deep, not shallow with panic.

“I don’t think so.”

“Well, I’ll scream and point at you if you’re wrong.”

He whistled softly twice, just loud enough to sound over the wind, and walked toward the inky huddle of cloaked forms against the snow. Jenny heard him call out softly, “Danae,” and saw the pale oval of the woman’s face against the ruffles of her hood. A knife glinted. She’d been holding it out of sight beneath the cloak. But she didn’t attack, only held it ready, watching John with her whole body tense. “Where’s the Prince?”

“I don’t know, my lord.” Her voice trembled with the cold, but she spoke as evenly as she apparently could. “I waited for him as long as I dared. But when I saw the Lady Trey returning from supper, I thought it best … I could not help overhearing …” She looked quickly aside, and shifted the knife in her gloved hands. Struggling, Jenny guessed, against speaking ill of the mistress who had for years been her dear friend.

In a quieter voice she said, “He asked me if I thought she had changed. Trey—the Lady Trey, I mean.” And her other arm tightened protectively around the children sleeping within the all-blanketing cloak.

Jenny remembered Danae from Millença’s naming-feast, almost three years ago. A cousin of both Gareth’s and Trey’s, she was of the country nobility, barely a step above the wealthy yeomen farmers whose wide manors in districts like Nearhythe and Istmark were little kingdoms in themselves. She’d been married to one of the palace guards, a younger son of one of the lesser houses; her daughter Branwen had been barely six months old when he had died, in the fighting when the witch Zyerne had been trying to break the Citadel of Halnath.

Without her elaborately starched coif, Danae looked younger, though now her shoulders had a weary stoop to them even when she straightened up, like one who has carried too heavy a load for too long. Her voice, deep for a woman’s and with the slight accent of the West, was tired. “And she has changed, lord. Since her illness—or since she recovered, I should say, for when she was very bad, when we all thought we would lose her, she was … she was still … still herself, if you know what I mean.”

“Aye,” murmured John. “Aye, I know exactly what you mean.”

“It isn’t that she isn’t pleasant with me,” Danae hastened to add. “Afterward, I mean. Nor concerned for the child, especially now that the poor thing’s started having these … these little sick spells. But she’s short with the maids. Try as she will, she can’t help that it angers her, that the children have taken against her. Not just poor little Milla, that might be expected, with this sickness they now say she has, but Branwen, too.”

“And you?” John asked softly.

Jenny saw Danae turn her face from him again. With the rising moon still tangled in the thick of the trees, and clouds coming in, the nurse must be struggling even to make out sight of him. Then Danae put away her knife and stood, John sheathing his sword to help her, for she was cramped with long sitting in the cold. There was a whisper of metal sliding, and a glimmer of yellow lantern light. By the thready glow of her lantern Danae studied John’s face, not reassuring, Jenny thought, with his black beard and the savage half-healed wound on his cheekbone. Then she asked, “Is it … do you know if it’s a catching sickness, that the child has, lord?”

“Nay,” said John, “I don’t know. I don’t think so.” He reached down to touch the child Branwen’s round face. “D’you have a horse?”

Danae shook her head. “I thought it better … Prince Gareth said to take the girls out without being seen, and wait for him—and for you—here. There’s a hunting-box that belonged to his mother—Queen Lyris—about four miles from here, where the river bends. The keeper’s cottage is kept stocked with wood and food, though there hasn’t been a keeper there this winter. I was afraid one of the grooms would send Trey word if I took out a horse so late, after the gates of the palace were shut.”

“Likely they would. I’m just glad you were able to get out the city gates.”

Danae shook her head and said, “If you have money, or a jeweled ring, that isn’t hard.”

“You didn’t really send the plague, did you?” asked the girl Branwen, when John took the lantern and held it close to Millença’s face. Jenny saw the child move, and she must have opened her eyes: John looked at her long and steadily. Whatever he saw in the child’s sleepy eyes must have reassured him, for he moved more easily as he looked into Branwen’s face, then Danae’s. Then he straightened up and snapped his fingers twice, once at shoulder height and once at waist height, an old signal that he and Jenny had used for years between them when patrolling the Winterlands, to say at a distance that all was well.

Branwen followed these proceedings with curiosity, then willingly accepted the lantern John handed her as he drew his sword and gently lifted Millença into his other arm. “Prince Gareth said you didn’t.”

“I’m glad he believes in me,” remarked John, glancing around him at the woods as Danae gathered up the small bundle of the girls’ belongings. “Nobody else seems to. And I did get a bit worried when they were tyin’ me to that stake.”

“If you didn’t send the plague,” Branwen persisted, “why did the demons send the dragon to save you? I watched from the South Tower balcony. Mother told me not to, and I had to stay in my room afterward. But I’m glad I saw the dragon.”

“Not near as glad as I was, believe me.”

Jenny followed at a distance as the little party moved off into the woods, sometimes keeping in sight of the bobbing firefly of lantern light, sometimes tracking them only by the sound of the nurse’s boots in the crust of snow between the trees. The wind blew harder and the cold deepened, piercing Jenny’s sheepskin jacket and plaids like a thousand burning needles, until her body ached with it and her fingers grew numb in her gloves. Once Branwen said, “I’m cold, Mother,” but Milla, wrapped tight under John’s decrepit cloak, never complained. Never said a word.

What did she think, wondered Jenny, about the mother she had lost? About the woman who came to her one day wearing her mother’s face and her mother’s garments and her mother’s hands, whom she knew was not her mother? Who looked at her with demon eyes?

Jenny shivered at the wary silence of that child who had already learned so young not to trust. Her own daughter, Mag, was a year younger. Silent, too, but her silence had a different quality: She’d learned already that to find out things it was sometimes necessary only to keep completely still and wait.

Three or four times, while Jenny lay in Miss Mab’s small warm enclave in the mines, she had asked Morkeleb to scry the Hold, to tell her if all things were well there with Ian and Adric and Mag. She remembered the fire again, blazing out of the straw at her calling, and wondered if, when next she gazed into standing water, she would be able to see her children herself?

What of all the children in the city, she thought, who had had the same thing happen to them? To pass through the grief at a parent’s illness, helpless witnesses to a mother’s or a father’s helpless prayers for a dying spouse—and then to see that dying parent come back to life and to KNOW something had changed.

She thought of what a demon-parent would do to a child—would do to the survivor spouse, who hoped against frantic hope that all would be well with the beloved one—and her stubbly hair prickled on her head with rage. She understood demons now and understood what they did, to amuse themselves. Tears were a different entertainment than blood. Many demons preferred them.

Do you like games? the Queen’s voice whispered again in her mind.

“… said he would speak to Lord Bliaud about the matter.” Danae’s soft voice flickered back to Jenny on the raw whip of the wind. “But when I looked out into the court, I saw Lord Bliaud among those around Lady Trey, and no sign of Prince Gareth. It’s true that since his father’s recovery he has kept more to his own rooms, and I refuse to believe those who say it’s jealousy. My lord Gareth hasn’t an envious bone in his body, and so many times I’ve heard him speak of his father’s illness. He’d never begrudge his return, to being the man he was.…”

And John, his sword in hand, watched and listened to the darkness around them, above and past that murmuring voice, and the thrashing snarl of the winds. Jenny, whose ears were sharper, listened farther, and detected nothing but the bitter sounds of the night.

All was darkness and cold at the hunting-box, a rustic longhouse built of logs and decorated with elaborate peasant-style carving after the fashion popular among the very rich. John remained with Danae and the children at the foot of its front stair while Jenny flitted through the single shadowy hall of the downstairs, the myriad attic chambers above, then across the stable-yard to the keeper’s cottage and the stables themselves. There was no sign of demons, no smell or whisper of them anywhere, not even in the covered well in the center of the yard. Jenny marked the corners of the buildings and the rails of their galleries with sigils of protection and inconspicuousness, still not at all certain that she had the power within her to make them work, though afterward she felt the familiar exhaustion of having called power.

But it was unfamiliar power, and could have been only her imagining, and the cold. She incorporated, too, for the first time in her spells a sigil of sourcing from the Dragonstar comet itself, weaving its little signs of iron and ice, of two tails and dual nature—details John had given her on the long walk from the city walls—like an improvisatory rill on her harp. “Why does it take so LONG?” demanded Branwen, when Danae and the children walked past her to the keeper’s cottage. Danae shook her daughter by the shoulder in horror at this lapse of manners, but Jenny laughed.

“It’s like a great lady applying face-paint,” she explained, standing back from the light of the lantern as they passed her. “One cannot hurry.”

The child halted to look up at her and sighed with grownup exasperation. “I know. Mother always tells me that when I use her paints.”

Jenny would have liked to go into the cottage with them, for the night was icy. Instead, she crossed to the gallery that circled the main longhouse, and sheltered there from the wind, the hothwais of heat cradled in her hands. Watching the woods, and scenting the night. She would have liked to sit still, eyes shut, and let her mind drift, seeking Morkeleb’s awareness as she guessed he sought hers. She had had no time, since she had emerged from the catch-bottle, to hunt for him so. In the city she had not dared take her attention from watchfulness, wariness. And when she had left the city, she had found John.

Morkeleb would be seeking her, she knew, and would find her in time. The danger of demons was still too great to take her attention from each separate moan of the night-wind, each individual scent. She thought, I am here, my friend, and his image came to her mind briefly, shearing his way through the blackness of the clouds, or rising above them, through the billowing columns of moon-edged vapor, silver light flashing on his wings.

In time, John emerged from the cottage door, crossed through the yard to her, leaning hard on the wind. He stopped to scan the gallery, though in the pitch-black darkness it was a wonder he could see even the outline of the longhouse; Jenny spoke the words of light, hesitantly, in her mind, and was rewarded with a thin blue radiance that flickered along the gallery’s carved railing from ward to ward, then at once died.

John’s boots made barely a sound on the halved logs that made up the steps.

“It’s no gie wonder a great realm like Ernine fell to pieces and couldn’t defend itself against foes that were no more than the Icerider tribes are to us.” He groped his way along the gallery, and Jenny threw an end of her plaid around his shoulders as he joined her on the rustic bench on which she’d been sitting, and crouched close over the hothwais. He wore a coat of green wool, like a merchant’s, and an assortment of scarves tucked around his neck, under a sorry hand-me-down cloak that smelled of dogs. “It’s clear to me we need to send someone out here to keep guard over ’em, an’ everyone I think of I think, What if they’re a demon these days? ”

He passed her a substantial chunk of cheese wrapped around in a couple of hot griddle cakes, and a handful of dried apricots. Despite the supper they had shared a few hours ago, the cold and the walk and the setting of the ward-signs had left Jenny ravenous.

“I don’t even trust those little girls, though Danae swears she’s kept ’em both at her side since first Milla started havin’ her sick fits … which’ll be no more than a pinch of dried tansy in her food. Branwen says, I’m cold, Mama, an’ I think, Is that the kind of thing a little girl would say when she’s cold? Why doesn’t Milla complain of the cold? This all looks very suspicious to me. It’s enough to send you barkin’ mad.”

“And it did,” Jenny said softly, and their eyes met with the same ruefulness of shared folly, of disaster somehow survived.

“Aye, well,” said John. “That it did. But accordin’ to Danae, Gar’s been missin’ since he said he’d go speak to Bliaud, who I’ll swear is demon-ridden these days.…”

“He is,” said Jenny. “He’s the one who’s been raising the dead in the town.” She pulled her coat tighter about her, thinking of the long walk back to the city in the predawn’s icy cold. “But I think Danae and the girls are safer here than either of us would be if you or I tried to go back to Bel to look for Gareth alone.”

On the walk back to Bel, with the slow gray of winter dawn creeping between leafless wind-combed trees, John asked Jenny for more details of all that had happened that winter: How close had Folcalor’s baskets of jewels lain to the inhabited Warrens of the Deep; how many of the burned-out husks of them had scattered the split and smoking hillslope in Ernine? Was she sure it was Caradoc she and Ian had spoken with on the crumbling breakwater at Eldsbouch, and not a demon?

“It was Caradoc,” said Jenny. “Squidslayer and the Whalemages brought me Caradoc’s staff—do you remember it? A demon’s head carved in wood, with a moonstone in its mouth. Caradoc’s soul was imprisoned in that moonstone. When I took the staff from the ocean it burst into flames, soaking wet as it was, and I let it fall again. Presumably it fell into the corpse of a drowned sailor—there had been a shipwreck only days before on those rocks—and with the moonstone inside it, that sailor’s corpse first tried to drown Ian, then escaped into the wastes.”

Jenny kept her voice even, but the recollection of the sailor’s rotting eyes disturbed her profoundly, the memory of how the worms had moved beneath his wet clothes. “I spoke to him. It was Caradoc.”

“He’ll have his work cut out for him, dodgin’ wolves.” John tucked his gloved hands into his armpits. “An’ him doin’ that good an imitation of carrion. What do we do if we can’t find the jewel containin’ Bliaud’s soul anywhere in his house? Always supposin’ we make it that far. He was rid of one demon, an’ let another in of his own free will, remember.”

“You don’t understand what it’s like.” Jenny hugged close to John under the shared wrap of her plaid. “I’m not saying that to mitigate what Bliaud did, or to argue that we give him clemency beyond reason. But … when you’ve had a demon within you, there’s a part of you that wants it back. I’m fairly sure that I would, but I can’t be absolutely positive that I’d turn Amayon away if he took me unawares.”

“Meanin’ if we find a jewel in Bliaud’s house, an’ somehow manage to force the current demon out of him … he might still take on the next one he meets, even after the Dragonstar’s gone from the sky. They’ll no longer be able to force their way in past a mage’s ward-spells then, but that doesn’t mean they can’t seduce a mage the way they seduced Caradoc.”

“They need our bodies,” Jenny said quietly. “Magic is partly a thing of the mind, but a good deal of its essence lies in human flesh, and in the flesh of some more than others. Now that Rocklys is defeated, and her corps of mages and dragons is broken up, there are fewer mages than ever for demons to seek. Sometimes when I slept in the Deep, after I was wounded, I would dream of Ian in danger, dreadful dreams.”

“It’s a two-edged weapon,” said John, and they paused to rest in the lee side of a house near the road, until the barking of the dogs in the farmyard drove them on. “Magic, I mean. If it isn’t demons comin’ after a mage for his power, it’ll be a King, you know. Or a friend. Or the part of your soul that thinks it’s entitled to whatever fate’s denyin’ you that week. You can only do what you can.”

Maybe Morkeleb had the right idea, reflected Jenny, when he’d surrendered his power, and moved on to something else.

For his part, John told Jenny more of the Hells through which he had traveled on errantry for the Demon Queen: Hells that looked like Paradise, where the butterflies spat poison and the milkweed-puffs sowed twisting hookworms into human flesh; Hells where gales scoured barren cliffs and flames burned in ravines forever; Hells where the voices of the dead cried from the darkness. Hells where shining things roved, that devoured human and demons alike. And beyond those Hells, a world of human beings where the dragon Corvin had hidden himself for unimaginable years, masquerading as a scientist and shifting from identity to identity as the people around him aged, and he did not. “There’s no magic there, but there’s this thing called ether, this sort of … of power that made lights in the darkness for everyone, an’ hot water to bathe in, an’ computers an’ Personal Ambient Sound Systems that’re enough to drive you screamin’.…”

“What are computers?”

“I dunno, really,” said John. “It was all in writin’, which I didn’t understand, of course—nor the language, bar what was spoken to me. Everyone there seemed to set great store by ’em, though, an’ it was out of one that I found out all that guff about what the Dragonstar’s actually made out of. I took notes.…” He patted the front of his ragged coat, which bulged with his customary wad of drawings and jottings, and tried to keep his cloak from tangling his feet in the wind. “I’ll be years figurin” em out. I copied things you’d want to know of, too, love—the sigils of the gates from world to world, an’ what was writ on the silver bottles an’ boxes that Aohila used for a soul-trap. Some of it’s demon magic, but other things you might be able to make work. It’ll come in gie handy,” he added, “when you and I go back there together to have a look about.”

They entered the city with the farmers who brought dried apples and thin winter milk to the markets. The day was a foul one, and spits of sleet stung Jenny’s face; there would be little, she guessed, for anyone to sell or buy. She and John divided as they neared the gate, and passed through this crowd some thirty feet apart, watching each other’s backs. Now and then Jenny would see a face in the streets that made her flinch inside, demon-eyes burning in a human countenance.

Could there be people who did not know, who could not see? Apparently—Jenny had to remind herself that most people did not have her gruesome wealth of experience. Even after the King’s reassurances of yesterday, the men and women in the streets looked frightened and cold, and clumped to whisper outside the doors of the shops. When she reached out to touch their conversations, Jenny heard muttering about people who had disappeared, or tales of random murders. Everywhere she felt the fear and mistrust, and the panic smoke-whiff of rumor. A child had killed both her parents, in the neighborhood of the Temple of Cragget, and afterward threw herself in the icy river. A woman had gone to the palace to petition the King, and had not been seen again. People whispered of demons, of who was in league with them, and who was not, or probably was not.…

Being a member of the old Greenhythe nobility, the wizard Bliaud had a town house in the quiet districts south of the river. Dwellings there stood in their own walled grounds, and even the shops had trees growing beside them, to shade their doors in summer. Jenny asked a girl hawking hot pies in one of the mews that ran behind the great houses; the girl looked at her strangely and said, “Don’t go to him, sweetheart. I went—I paid him everything I had, to bring my boy back from the plague. But when they come back, they ain’t the same. Death takes whom She wills, and I’ve learned now it’s best to let Her be the judge of it, not me. When they come back, they ain’t the same.”

“Aye,” whispered John, when he and Jenny reunited briefly in an alleyway. “And we want to be careful, because I suspect at least one of Bliaud’s sons is demon-ridden, too, or in league with ’em, anyway. Abellus, the one with all the hats. Anyroad, he was with this tattooed southern feller who tried to catch me in the palace. I didn’t go up and look close, but watch out.”

They divided again, making their way around two sides of a quiet square where an enormously tall fountain stood bearded fantastically in icicles. Their goal was the alley that backed the stables of several town villas, Bliaud’s among them. While still in the nearly empty shopping arcade that fronted all four sides of the square, Jenny heard the measured tread of feet in the nearby lane: chair-bearers, and the armed footmen who habitually protected the rich from those who were desperate and poor. Looking back, she saw a covered chair emerge from the Avenue of Limes that led toward the palace precincts, borne by eight gnomes and guarded by eight more in mail that bristled with spikes. She glanced across the square and caught John’s eye for the fleetest moment as he melted out of the shadows of the opposite arcade; they both hastened their steps.

Jenny didn’t think for a moment that either of them doubted what gnome would be visiting whom at this early hour of the day.

Or why.

As she passed a woman bundled in a red coat selling coffee from an urn on her back, Jenny overheard her mutter to a customer, “You can’t tell me they don’t have men working in their mines. My cousin’s husband claims my cousin died of the plague, but I’ve heard they’re buying slaves.…”

The alley was puddled with dirty snow and slick with dropped straw and frozen horse dung. She and John counted back gates. Most of the servants would be turned out to prepare for visitors in the front part of the house. Another time, Jenny thought, she’d have to try operating the gate’s bolt by magic, as she’d used to do, but wasn’t sure enough of her powers, or of how great a strain she’d have to put on them in the immediate future, or of what Bliaud could detect. She listened at the stable gate until she heard the voices dim away toward the kitchen, then John boosted her over as if they were children going to thieve apples. She slipped the bolt, and let him inside.

Like most of the great town villas, this one was separated from its stables by the snow-covered square of a kitchen garden, onto which looked the kitchen, laundry, stillroom, dovecote, and offices. A strip of orchard lay beyond, and greenhouses for forcing grapes.

Jenny’s scalp prickled at the disorder she saw in the stables and in the garden as she and John ducked and crept from hedge to hedge, freezing into hiding as servants emerged to hurry along the paths toward the house. The dirt everywhere, the stinks of garbage and of stalls weeks uncleaned, were more than the slovenliness of a household in upheaval. Being deathless, and having no care for the humans they rode, demons are careless. They are lazy, shrugging away the tedious chores that hold starvation and sickness and sores and bugs at bay. Why keep a body from being consumed with festering flea bites if one can always possess another? Why take time to grow food to eat, or to clean away stable waste? If the horse stumbles from thrush, well, there are other horses.

Around the dovecote a dozen birds lay dead. At first glance Jenny might have attributed this to rats or a dog, except that their heads had all been wrung from their bodies, the snow pink with blood.

The house was rank with demons.

And there was neither cat, nor dog, nor even evidence of mice and rats to be seen.

Servants were carrying trays of sweetmeats and wine to the main block of the house, three storeys of tall-ceilinged reception chambers, of glass windows warm with candlelight in the gray bluster of the overcast morning. A dilapidated wing stretched back from it, half-timbered wood rather than stone, and isolated by overgrown trees from both the outer world and from the servants’ portion of the property. From the unkempt orchard Jenny reached with her thoughts into that wing, calling on the power that she had felt all night taking shape inside her.

Nothing. In the main house, shadows crossed back and forth over the windows, and she could now and then catch fragments of voices. A human voice, and a gnome’s, but speaking in the tongue of the demons. No sound in the long, narrow wing; no sound but a single sleeper’s stertorous breath.

A small door looked out into the shaggy wilderness of bushy hedges: John slipped his knife under the bolt. Once Jenny heard what she thought was the crunch of a footfall in the orchard behind them, but looking back saw only a servant hunting for last autumn’s windfalls. One of the few, she guessed, unpossessed by demons in that house. She wondered what sort of rumors the girl passed among the neighbors. The smell of the wing struck her like that of a shambles, a stink of blood and filth, of old smoke and chamber pots either uncleaned or unused.… The place was freezing cold, too.

The room they entered from the garden was clearly Bliaud’s workroom, the smallest chamber at the end of the wing. Windows on three sides admitted clear snowy light that bathed the paraphernalia of a scholar and a naturalist. Flowers pressed or dried strewed the long tables under the windows, reminding her of John’s study at the Hold. Bunches of herbs hung on strings close by the hearth where the rising warmth would desiccate them, and jars containing the embryos of birds or pigs, preserved in brandy or honey, stood on shelves. Cupboards of books. Pestles and mortars and sieves of hair or bolting-cloth; bone knives; pots of gum or charcoal; a green glass jar of quills.

But all of it dusty and disused. The specimen jars were broken or opened, the curiosities within them rotting in the air. Jars of various types of poisons stood open on one worktable, with a scatter of packing-straw. Beyond that, little looked as if it had been used for months. Directly beneath the room’s central lamp stood a small table, a chair thrust back from it with such violence that it had tipped on its side, never picked up. On the table a porcelain bowl held blood, clotted with exposure to air but still fairly fresh. Jenny recalled a vision she had had—when? Back at her home in Frost Fell, during those hellish winter weeks of sickness and grief and self-pity?

A vision of a man’s hand, dipping into a basin of blood and bringing out the little glass shells in which the Sea-wights hid themselves.

Blood in the bowl, peace in your soul.

She had heard the demon Folcalor whisper that simple, logical-sounding rhyme.

Blood in the bowl, all will be whole.

“He may have meant it for the best,” she breathed, looking up into John’s impassive face. “Bliaud, I mean. He may have seen the plague break out, and have thought that he could make a bargain with Folcalor, to obtain the power to fight it.”

“Aye.” John’s expression did not change. It was for precisely that reason, Jenny recalled, he had twice treated with the Demon Queen.

And what had Caradoc thought when he first opened the demon-gate? What rhyme had Folcalor sung to him?

Gareth lay in the room beyond.