Dragonstar

6

For close to a thousand years—according to John’s copy of the third volume of Juronal, admittedly incomplete—the Realm of Ernine had dominated the meadowlands along the River Gelspring and the prairies that stretched east to the sunrise. In those days the city of Bel had been a fishing village, subservient to the vassal kings of the Seven Islands, whose true wealth lay in trade from the south. Through Ernine, amid its luxuriant hinterland of crops and cattle, had flowed the gnomes’ silver from the Deep at Droon, and the furs of the northern forests; the Kings had raised palaces there pillared in the golden sandstone of the eastern deserts, and the priests worshiped unremembered gods in marble temples open to the sky. Long after Ernine had fallen to raiders from the steppe, a second city was built on the low knees and foothills above the Gelspring: Its foundations stood on the more ancient stone, but few recalled what it had been named or how it had met its end.

Descending with the dragon through the pink-gold radiance of morning, Jenny Waynest could make out the outlines of this second city’s temples, tangled in brush and thickets of pine all powdered with snow. She’d seen them before only at night, when in the autumn Moon of Sacrifice John had come here to pay his teind to the Demon Queen, the tithing that would purchase back his soul.

On that occasion Jenny had been too shaken, too sick from the wresting-away of her own demon, to remember much of the city’s appearance. But she recognized now the long stair-way that curled up the low hill’s flank, and that inconspicuous cave under the vines. She’d sat on the marble step at the top, shivering uncontrollably in the autumn night, hating John and hearing Amayon scream in her mind. Above the stair a hollow square of pillars crowned the hill, their decorated capitals broken and white as the lingering snow patches among the brown of last year’s sodden bracken.

This, the Master of Halnath had told her, had been the temple of the Moon-God Syn, who was worshiped in the North in the form of a black sow.

After long days underground Jenny’s eyes ached in the glory of morning light. Everything seemed to sparkle and shout with color, even in these leaden weeks of granny-winter. Rowanberries on branches a hundred feet away blazed like fire. Wood that to ordinary view would have been silver-gray appeared to her as a mottling of a thousand subtle hues, lavender and snuff and cobalt. Among the bare trees she glimpsed broken pillars, pink porphyry and marble, and the flash of ice in what had once been ornamental fountains and ponds.

Morkeleb spread his dark wings to circle above the Temple hill, Jenny leaning from his back. She traced the descending stairs and the courtyard near at hand with its frozen pool. “Would the mages—this Arch-Seer the demons spoke of—have come up by the main stair to attack Isychros?”

The palace stood on the hill in those days. In her mind she saw the stair as it had been in her earliest dream of the place—her earliest dream of Amayon. Saw the rich pillars of sandstone and marble that ringed what had then been the Queen’s Court, where ladies wove bright-colored cloth and sang among the colonnades. Isychros was the King’s Mage, helping the Most High Lord Ennyta to keep his vassals on a leash by means of scrying and cantrips and blackmail. The chambers cut from the hillside were traditionally given to the Court Mage.

Had the dragon walked those courts? she wondered. Climbed that long footworn stair in human guise? How long had he been in the custom of walking in the shape of humankind?

“Would there be a back way in?” she asked. “When Isychros took over power in Ernine, with both mages and dragons at his beck, I can’t imagine even an Arch-Seer coming at his stronghold from the front.”

Images shifted in her mind. She saw the palace again as it existed in Morkeleb’s memory, like an image painted on silk and hung before present reality. Strange-shaped roofs with painted rafter-ends rose above red-flowering trees whose names she did not know. The shape of the land had not changed much, though the profusion of flowers spoke of warmer summers. Ernine spread farther down the Gelspring Valley than the city that had subsequently covered the spot. The pillared hall that reared on the hillcrest above the Court Mage’s chambers—where the Moon-God’s temple later would stand—had wide windows on all walls glazed in small panes of clearest glass, so that the building glittered like a heap of diamonds. Jenny smelled the cook fires of the town, and heard an ass bray far off.

“Any wager you like,” said Jenny, shifting her balance between the spiked scales of the dragon’s shoulders. “There was a stair coming down to his quarters from the hall above. That was the library, wasn’t it, with all those windows? Were I Court Mage it’s what I’d have. By the foliage it rains a good deal here.”

And she felt the ripple of Morkeleb’s amusement as he banked low over the tops of the bare trees. It is a thing of men, to put themselves in danger by leaving a back way into their dwellings, only to avoid a little water. See where there was a fountain even in those days, hard by the stair? It was out of that water the Sea-wights came, when the mages of the city of Prokep reached a bargain with Adromelech, to drive back Aohila’s demons behind the mirror.

Wind snapped in the baggy folds of the trousers Miss Mab had brought Jenny in the mines, and in the thick fluttering ends of the plaid she’d worn down from the North. After the warmth below the ground the air stung her face. Morkeleb turned above the higher flank of the mountain, and Jenny saw behind the jumbled roofs of glowing red and gilt the exquisite manicured wilderness of the garden, and all around its edges the workaday buildings of stables, servants’ quarters, kitchens.

They would have come in through the kitchen gate—the path up from the town was even in those days much overgrown with trees. She could see where the back ways among the storage quarters provided a safe, quick route from the kitchen to the library.

Then she was seeing the ruin again, the palimpsest of old walls and foundations cloaked in leafless vines.

“There,” she said, pointing. “If a way down to the Court Mage’s quarters existed from the library, it would have been somewhere there.”

When the forehead of the palace hill had been cut back, to build the later crypt of the Temple of Syn, the sealed door of the Court Mage’s quarters had been covered over by a wall. Only the subsequent razing of Syn’s city had opened the way again. Jenny and Morkeleb picked their way down the curving slope that turned into the old sandstone stair, and from there descended to the door behind its curtain of blackened vines flanked by the faded ghosts of frescoed gazelles still dimly visible on the face of the rock. Jenny’s own footsteps, and John’s, scuffed the corridor’s dust.

The doorway from the corridor into the round mirror chamber had been bricked shut in ancient times, the brickwork later stove in by who knew what impulse of foolishness and greed. The hothwais Jenny carried shed a wan light, in which the stars painted on the ceilings of corridor and chamber seemed to dance.

A second set of tracks obscured those she and John had left last autumn. John’s again, and recent. There was no mistaking the patched boots.

He’d been here—why? Morkeleb had said he’d been in Bel. When she’d gone to the Hold only a few weeks ago, Sergeant Muffle—John’s blacksmith and muster-chief and illegitimate brother—had told her John had gone scouting in the Wraithmire marshes, after first burning his workroom and taking with him only a few days’ food. He’d left his horse with old Dan Darrow at the marshes’ edge, had gone into the snowy mire on foot. Only ten days ago Jenny had talked to Darrow himself, and the old farmer had been sure of what he saw. Given the nature of the Wraithmire, and Dan’s watchfulness of those evil lands, he’d have seen John’s tracks emerging from the marsh, and he hadn’t.

It was conceivable—barely—that in a few weeks John could have reached Belmarie on horseback. But there had been no word of him in the countryside between. And even such a turn of cross-country speed didn’t explain why he’d come here, of all places, before going to Bel and being arrested, sentenced to death, and rescued … by another dragon, according to Morkeleb.

So what had he been doing here?

Visiting the Demon Queen? Jealousy stirred in Jenny’s heart like steam on a winter bog. For months now her dreams had been a torment of fantasies of John’s infidelity, of John lying in the Demon Queen’s arms.…

The mirror stood silent where last Jenny had seen it, its glass painted over black. Framed by the pinkish-blue alien metal of a thunderstone, the long glass itself—a pane some six feet tall by a foot and a half wide, three times the size of any that Bel’s craftsmen could produce nowadays—seemed enigmatic under its coating of black enamel, a shut door through which it was possible only to guess at sounds. In the bright light of the hothwais it looked harmless enough. By lantern light it had seemed to smoke or steam. A piece of paper, charred nearly to illegibility, still clung to the matte glass: the sigil Miss Mab had made for John, by which he had passed through into Hell.

Jenny shivered, remembering the silver marks on his flesh, the burn at the pit of his throat. The Queen had marked him, as if claiming him as her own. Deeper still was the shadow that lurked in the back of his eyes Curious, Jenny thought, stepping close to the glass. She had never actually seen the Queen, though she felt as if she knew her well. Now she realized that the image she had of her—tall and black-haired, slender and coldly beautiful—she had only from her own dreams, in which John and the Queen lay together and giggled their derision of Jenny herself. At one time those dreams had been so real, she had been unable to separate them from reality, and had hated John for the pictures that arose out of her own mind.

Perhaps the hatred had sprung in part from the Demon Queen taking Jenny’s own demon Amayon away, to torture forever behind the Mirror.

She put out her hand to the black glass, not daring to touch, and thought, He is THERE.

And remembered again how it had felt, to love Amayon.

All those things the demon had whispered to her—his love for her, his need for her, the trust and dependence he placed on her love … Even as they rang false and absurd in her mind, her heart pinched with the poison of that clinging, childlike profession of absolute love.

She turned her head and saw Morkeleb, falcon-sized in the darkness of the round chamber, hanging close to her shoulder with wings spread like a hawk in the air. The hothwais of light made him sparkle, as if carved by a master-craftsman of jet. His eyes caught the light, and the jewel-like bobs on the ends of his antennae flickered in the dark.

The touch of his mind on hers was warm as the comforting pressure of a hand.

Why is it so hard to believe that demons lie? she asked him. It is their nature to lie.

It is their nature to be believed, replied the dragon. And he called on a spell of light, blazing to fill all the chamber. On the other side of the room, a door showed up, which the shadows had hidden before.

Jenny crossed the room to it, walking wide around the mirror. Everywhere she felt the malice of demons. She had assumed—she did not know why—that the circular chamber in which the Burning Mirror stood was the farthest it was possible to penetrate into the hill. When she had gone there with John to pay his teind, and turn over to the Demon Queen the demons they had extracted from the minds of the possessed mages, her powers had already burned away. The door was bricked shut, the lintels remaining but the bricks painted like the rest of the wall. Only magelight would have shown it up, or a mage’s ability to see in the dark.

Morkeleb shifted in size, as a shadow alters with the retreat of light. But his claws and muscle were no shadow. He tore the brickwork as if it had been dry wattle. Jenny flinched at the noise of rubble and mortar crashing to the floor and she glanced back at the mirror as if she expected something to come forth angry. Absurd, she thought. If it has held them all these years, why expect they could emerge now? Behind the broken wall a stair ascended, narrow and deeply worn. The sandstone was pitted, and stained black in great pools and dribbles. Walls and stair were charred, as if swept with fire.

They tried this first, she thought, quite calmly, standing at the foot of the stair. The wizards who sought to defeat Isychros’s dragons and demons. Rubble blocked the ascent no more than a few yards above her. Only after the Arch-Seer—whoever he was—failed to destroy the mirror did they call on the Sea-wights for help. They, or those of their friends who survived them.

This she knew as if she had heard their ghosts telling of their hopeless attack in the dark of the stair.

She stepped through the crack Morkeleb had made, and held the hothwais up, to shed its unveiled light in every corner and cranny.

Just where the lowest step and the wall came together a silver bottle was wedged. Shadow would hide it when torches were borne down the stairs, or carried in from the mirror crypt itself. After the Arch-Seer and his mages attacked Isychros here, she thought, Isychros must have had little leisure to ascend to the library. And after Isychros’s defeat the two daughters of the King who succeeded their father must only have wished to have the whole place sealed, with everything inside.

A catch-bottle, the demons had called the thing Folcalor sought. Surely the same object that Caerdinn had told her of, the trap inscribed with the true name of its intended victim, woven with certain spells. It would draw the soul into it like smoke.

She picked the bottle up. It was just larger than the hollow of her hand, and very light. The silvery bulb of it was a globe, the thin neck stoppered tight with something that looked like a crystal, embedded in a petaled rose of hard crimson wax.

We know she was never trapped in it. The name within it will still be the same. The spells will be waiting.

Her heart pounded in her chest, so that she could scarcely breathe.

Aohila.

The Demon Queen.

The dream of her returned, snake-like and sinuous in John’s arms. Laughing at Jenny, and making him laugh at her. Saying things like old, and ugly, and spent. Heat rose in Jenny’s flesh, the heat and the nausea and the wavering shadows of migraine reminding her that the Demon Queen was right.

It was only a dream, she reminded herself. Only a dream, and MY dream at that. But every time she thought of the silvery serpent whorls and spirals of power on John’s flesh, which showed up when the angle of the moonlight was right, every time she thought of the scar in the pit of his throat, as if a white-hot jewel had been pressed between the small points of his collarbone, she remembered those jealous dreams. He had never said so, but Jenny guessed that Aohila spoke to him in dreams, as Amayon sometimes spoke to her.

She knew what it was that Amayon said. Knew the dreams that Amayon sent.

And Folcalor is coming, she thought. Coming with spells of new power, to open the mirror. To trap the Demon Queen and devour her, as Adromelech, his own master, had for untold ages devoured and regurgitated him. Folcalor would eat her power before turning upon Adromelech to become the Sea-wights’ lord. And from there, to hold sway over all the Realms of humankind, turning them into their hunting-ground and larder.

And woe to any, thought Jenny, who were in the way when the demons fought their war of vengeance and power and pain.

She untied her sash and knotted a loop of it around the silver bottle’s neck, not sure exactly what she would do. As long as Aohila was within the Burning Mirror she was safe, from Jenny at least. Whether Folcalor would be able to pursue her into her own Hell, Jenny did not know.

She went back into the mirror chamber and stood before the black-painted glass.

Amayon is in there, she thought again.

And then, with a sudden flinch of horror, JOHN may be in there. Morkeleb had spoken of the rumors in Bel, that the demons had sent a dragon to save him from the stake. Aohila had controlled dragons before, a thousand years ago. Was it inconceivable that she could exercise that power again? True, Jenny had seen no trace in the corridor of anyone coming or going after John’s second visit, but would there be other ways into the Hell behind the Mirror? The urge overwhelmed her to call out Aohila’s name, to demand …

What?

It is the nature of demons to lie.

She closed her eyes for a time, silently praying only, Let him not be dead.

Give us another chance.

Then she drew her plaid close about her, and walked from the mirror chamber, Morkeleb drifting behind her like a shadow out into the light.

The Lords of Ylferdun Deep established watch posts throughout these northeastern foothills, Morkeleb said, at the very fringe of their realm. Whatever might become of the roads of men, the gnomes do not permit their tunnels to decay. If Folcalor comes to Ernine, it will be through one of these. Especially if, as we suspect, he now wears the guise of a gnome.

The dragon found a cave in the foothills that had been carved out as a stable for a villa whose very foundations had crumbled away. Snow lay thick outside, but the place was protected from wind and the hothwais of warmth quickly filled the smallest of the surviving rooms. Morkeleb glided away, like a great raven among the trees to hunt, and Jenny scouted for squirrel hordes and cattail roots, and for enough dried bracken, buried beneath the snow of the thickets, to make a bed and a fire.

She knew better than to treat with demons in any fashion, neither to bargain with them nor listen to anything they said. The silver bottle nudged her hip bone whenever she bent or moved, reminding her again and again of its presence. It was still as cold as it had been when she picked it up, for it would not warm with the warmth of her body. She could not rid her mind of the image of the Burning Mirror, could not rid her thoughts of the impression that when she had stood before it, with the silver bottle at her belt, that behind the mirror, Aohila had looked out at her.

And said … what?

And thought … what?

She cooked and ate the rabbit Morkeleb caught, and lay down to sleep, exhausted. Miss Mab’s spells had saved her life, and to some extent healed her body, but exertion and cold still took their toll on her far more quickly than she was used to. She slept like a dead woman, and the darkness of the mirror chamber followed her into her dreams.

She was back there again, watching as John set out the things he had been ordered to bring back for the Moon of the King’s Sacrifice. A dragon’s tears, contained in a bottle wrought of glass and alabaster that the tears would dissolve before they could be used. The softly shining hothwais that held the light of a star, rather than the iron thunderstone that the Queen had mistakenly thought was a piece of a star. An arrowhead stained with blood.

And like a thirteenth doughnut or a flower seller’s giftposy, John had added to his tithe smaller bottles, or stones, or shells, sealed with red wax. Eight glass spikes filled with something silver that moved like mercury in the wavering light of the lantern. Though the night had been silent, when Jenny had sat there in truth, in her dream she could hear the demons inside screaming. They knew what they were going to.

Amayon’s sobs especially rang in her mind. I never meant to harm you, Jenny my darling! Not you, not anyone! You don’t understand what they do to you—Folcalor, and Adromelech.…

If anyone could have saved me, it would have been you, my Jenny, my beloved.

And by that wavery glow John’s face was grim and quiet, the smudges of sleeplessness very dark under his eyes.

It’s the Moon of Sacrifice, love, he said to the mirror. And here I am.

In Jenny’s dream the mirror wasn’t black, but showed the Hell beyond. A suggestion of pillars in darkness, a whisper of marble and gold. Instead of John’s reflection, Jenny saw the Demon Queen, quietly beautiful, combing her long black hair. Meeting John’s eyes and smiling, complicit as a lover. And you, beloved? she said, in a voice like roses and smoke.

John came back here after leaving the North. Why?

He had walked into the Wraithmire on foot, and three weeks later, in the worst season for traveling, had emerged in Ernine, not a hundred feet from the Mirror of Isychros. When he was in trouble, a dragon—or something that looked like a dragon—saved his life.

In her dream, Jenny turned and fled the room. But it didn’t keep her from seeing him still. He walked slowly toward the mirror, pressed his palms to the glass. On her side the Demon Queen did likewise, palms pressing. Lips pressing. Jenny ran down the corridor, endlessly long now, desperate with grief. The pounding of her heart sounded louder in her ears, but still she could see John standing against the mirror, and still she could hear the Queen’s deep syrup-dark voice, murmuring words of love. Lightning flashed in the mouth of the tunnel, and Jenny ran toward that light, heart and mind bleeding-raw.

She had been a dragon and had returned to mortal humanity for John’s sake. She had had the form and the magic of those beautiful alien creatures, and had said to Morkeleb, Return me to being what I was.

Nothing can ever return to being what it was, had been his reply.

And then he had asked her—had asked another being, for the first time in his life—Is this what you truly want?

From that asking, he had not been able to return, either.

He was walking away from her, flying away through the columns of the clouds, through the flare of the lightning. Jenny ran down the miles of corridor with its painted gazelles, gasping for breath, desperate to catch him, her heart pounding louder and louder, or perhaps it was the crash of the thunder.

But when she opened her mouth to cry out, she cried, John …!

JENNY …!

Light speared her eyes and she woke. Lightning outlined the mouth of the cave—in wintertime? Then darkness, but as she fumbled for the hothwais under the bracken another white glare illuminated the whole wall of snow-clotted bramble that fronted the cave and outlined Morkeleb’s bony black shape in the tunnel he’d dug through it. Jenny scrambled to her feet, nearly fell when her sore hip protested, and limped to the dragon’s side.

“Folcalor …”

It must be, I think.

She pulled her plaid closer around her, followed the dragon out through the snowy bracken, into the dark of the woods. Red light drenched the night’s darkness, wildfire burning in Ernine. Morkeleb caught Jenny up in his claws, flattened his wings to his sides, and glided like some strange curving snake through and among the bare trees. There was a sort of bench of land above the valley in which the old city lay, just clearing the tops of the trees below, and from there Jenny looked across the dark lacework of bare crowns and snowy earth to the Temple of the Moon. Fires roared in the leafless trees around that tall knee of rock. Against the crazy orange glare Jenny could see broken columns, shattered walls, and it seemed to her that the shape of the hill itself had altered. The sky had been clear when she had lain down to sleep, marked with the fat pale crescent of a sinking day-moon. Now a pall of cloud roofed it to the horizon, split by lightning again and again, levin-fire that struck always at the same place.

Smoke-wisp shrieks whirled away on the wind. Her hand closed around one of Morkeleb’s spines.

Nothing came down from the watch posts nearby, the dragon said. That I will swear.

And Jenny saw the flicker of his memory, of lying in the cave-mouth while she herself slept. Listening, with the starlight-fine net of his dragon-senses spread over the whole of the mountainside. She saw through his eyes that first flare of lightning from Ernine, heard that first crash of thunder. Felt the searing unheard cacophony of demon magic and demon rage.

“The gnomes could have had some old way, straight into the Citadel of Ernine.”

Men were more trusting in those days, then.

Her mind on her own jealous dreams, Jenny replied softly, “Even so.”

And she heard/saw in Morkeleb’s mind the memories of other Deeps, delved before Ylferdun: the Great Droon and the Lesser Droon, tunnels reaching everywhere, turrets on the mountainsides not too far from Ernine. Miss Mab had led John to this place by those hidden roads, when first he sought the Demon Queen. There were any number of gates.

A whirlwind rose up, trees creaking as their roots were pulled about in the earth. Fragments of twig and branch smote her out of the dark. Lightning blasted once more, and she saw that the whole side of the hill, where the Temple of Syn had stood, was split as though with a monstrous ax; fire spouted up through the cleft, sparks rivering into the wind. Shadows thrashed among the sparks, dissolved in smoke. Demons? Manifestations of some other sort of power? Voices yammered, a howling very different from the screams of before, and in Jenny’s mind she made words of them, from the memories of when Amayon had dwelled within her, and understood those sounds.

Terrible words, curses and evil laughter, hatred and pain. Spells that made her want to cover her ears, pull her mind away. She felt Morkeleb’s disgust, like a dark ripple of anger, and the spines of his joints bristled like the hair of an angry dog.

A booming crash, rocks and earth and fragments of masonry bounding out in a cloud of earth as the hillside split again. The glare made Jenny cover her eyes, and blink blinded for moments after. Dark shapes outlined in fire circled the city, moving like a whirlwind: She saw them in yellows and greens against her shut eyelids for a time as she crouched against the dragon’s side, his invisible shadow covering them both. Near them a tree exploded into flame, showering her with burning fragments. When she opened her eyes again the first thing she saw was the stumps of pillars uprooted and hurled into the air, dragging hunks of foundation on their feet. All the clouds that swirled so thick about the city were rimmed in thin, deadly blue. In the heart of that chaos the whirlwind gathered itself, a dense column of red-shot smoke. It revolved slowly, burning shapes—souls? ghosts? demons?—visible in the circling wall of smoke, even at that distance, clear and small as if she still dreamed.

Slowly at first, then faster, the cyclone moved away toward the east. The ground steamed where it tore through the snow. Jenny clung to Morkeleb, watching it pass through the wooded bottomlands, spreading fire through the bare ice-locked trees. Deer fled crazily before it across the snow. The burning crown of it remained in sight for a long time, stretching up to join the red-lit lour of cloud.

Trembling, Jenny crouched against the dragon’s dark body. The silence that lay upon the city was dreadful after the crashing and the shrieks. Smoke from the burning trees mixed with the steam from puddles of snowmelt, until everything blurred in a shifting cauldron of fog and through it she thought she heard voices still.

Magic hung in the air. Not dissipating with the passing of the whirlwind but, it seemed to her, growing stronger. She passed this thought, this question, without even forming it into words into Morkeleb’s mind, and the dragon’s reply came to her: No. It is not over.

Something was still in Ernine.

Some terrible malevolence beaded like water from the wet choke of the air. Darkness waiting, watching as the firelight sank to embers and died.

Blue light flickered on the brow of the broken hill.

She is here. Jenny’s hand went to the catch-bottle at her belt.

She is here. And if she survived that attack by Folcalor, she will be at her weakest.

She cast her mind out over the hillside, the dragon’s senses twining with hers until she could not have said whether she heard with her own ears or his. She breathed, scenting like a beast for the smell of demons, a stink like scalded iron and blood. She smelled the burned flesh and hair of animals trapped by the fire, rabbits roasted sleeping in their holes and squirrels burned up in their nests; smelled the vast gritty stench of smoldering trees.

But she did not smell demons, or hear their whispering laughter.

Only that thin light that wasn’t really light burned purplish on the hill’s savaged crest. She followed the cliff’s edge to the path that led to the hill where the palace had stood. Morkeleb followed without a sound. The Demon Queen was there, and she was alone.

The whole of the hill’s top, where first the palace with its diamond-windowed library had stood and later the Temple of Syn, was sheared off and charred as if sliced by a monstrous blade. Pillars, walls, trees thicker than a man’s body, all swept away into heaps of smoking rubble on the hill’s flanks. What was left of the dead grass and wiry leafless ivy had burned under the snow, and the whole of the hilltop glistened with smoking patches of water, with smoldering sheets of ash and cracked paving-blocks tilted and thrown about on their sides. Vapors rose from the gaping clefts in the hill itself, and against that fume the Demon Queen burned with a sicklied light.

She looked human, precisely as she had appeared in Jenny’s jealous dreams. Tall and slender and heartrendingly beautiful, with her long black hair lifting around her as if she floated in water rather than in air. She had marked the ground all around her with charred circles of fire, embers still flickering in the sigils of power she had laid down, and the air was marked, too, in pale rising rings of blue-burning light. Beyond the circles the earth was dotted with gray shards of what Jenny at first thought was broken glass, burned nuggets of ash. Only when she picked one up and saw the rough facets of fire-scored crystal did she understand.

The heat that filled her was more terrible than the worst the change of her womanhood could do. She recalled the family she had rescued from slave-dealers in the woods of the North only weeks ago, Dal and Lyra from Rushmeath Farm, and their children: people she knew, children she had helped to birth. Saw the faces of the crippled Layla Gorge and her frail niece, Ana, whose family had wanted gnomes’ silver more than it had wanted them.

The Demon Queen still gazed east. Only mageborn eyes could still have distinguished the red flicker of the retreating whirlwind. Her attention was focused there, and toward that diminishing light she made the gestures and passes of power, as if summoning great events infinitely far away.

She hid from Folcalor, thought Jenny, trembling still with anger. Hid and waited until he went east. Only thus could she summon power from a distance without him trapping her through her own spells. All this went through her mind in a single word, knowledge like a drop of molten glass, and she crept forward, the red wax stopper of the catch-bottle cold even through the leather of her glove. She moved silent, fearing that the Queen would hear the beating of her heart. Fearing that the waves of her rage would heat the very air around her, and warn Aohila of her presence.

But the Demon Queen only traced signs in the air, over and over, and they hung smoking in the cold for a few moments before dissolving. Like her hair, her garments drifted about her, thin veils of what sometimes appeared to be fire, sometimes smoke. But her white feet pressed the ground. They were large, the feet of a tall woman. Jenny saw the nails were curved and black like Morkeleb’s claws.

She is calling all her power, Jenny thought. Calling it, and directing it on Folcalor. Like a small cat hunting she shifted herself up the hillside through the steaming puddles, the burned and perished gems. Her hand around the catch-bottle grew cramped and cold, and exhaustion gnawed at her bones. The longer she waited, the more Folcalor in his turn, wherever he was, would be weakened. Her whole being concentrated upon stillness, as she had in those days when she was only a Winterlands hedge-witch, relying on her slender powers to keep herself safe from bandits and the Iceriders who came down in bad winters from the North. She smelled rain, though there was no rain in the sky; sometimes also the burning tang of desert dust. Then these things were gone, and all she smelled was burning and death.

At last Aohila lowered her arms. She stood straight and tall, staring into the east, her dark hair floating about her like kelp. Only a rim of embers outlined the riven hill. Huge stillness covered the silent ruin of the city. Overhead the clouds broke, and stars gleamed coldly through.

Jenny brought the catch-bottle from the folds of her plaid and, as if even at that distance, Aohila had heard the rustle of her clothing, the Demon Queen turned. Her gold eyes widened, and she raised her hand, and in that instant Jenny pulled the stopper from the bottle.