Knight of the Demon Queen Read Free

one knew why.
    In his hands—hands of human flesh, she saw, small and stubby and crusted thick with rings—he held thesapphire in which Ian’s soul had been imprisoned, the sapphire Jenny had herself cast into the River Wildspae when she’d returned her son’s soul to his flesh.
    The demon looked at her and smiled.
        In the morning John’s aunts arrived. His father’s bossy brood of sisters—Jane and Rowan and Umetty— and Rowan’s daughters Dilly and Rowanberry, and Muffle’s mother Holly, who had been old Lord Aver’s mistress for years, lived at the Hold in their assorted states of spinsterhood and widowhood, running the Winterlands as they had run it in John’s father’s time. Aunt Jane brought eggs and a milk pudding, and brandy to bathe her great-nephew’s hands and feet; Rowan and Dilly brought clean sheets and pillows. They wrapped the boy and put hot bricks about him to warm him, pushing Jenny aside as if she were a scullery maid. Though it was quite clear that he heard nothing, Aunt Umetty told the boy endless stories that she generally told to her dogs, and she sang him the little songs she sang to them.
    Jenny retreated to a corner of the hearth, willing herself not to be seen. She understood why Ian had taken the poison, and she thought about taking it herself. They all seemed very distant from her. Certainly they seemed less real than her memories of what it had been like to be beautiful and powerful and able to do exactly as she pleased. She knew that this was not right, yet she could not do anything about this part of her thoughts.
    Snow fell again in the afternoon and drifted high against the stone walls. The grooms who’d come with the aunts brought shovels from the stable and labored to keep the yard clear. Jenny wondered once or twice,
Why
Folcalor?
Then the darkness that pressed her heart overcame her again, and she retreated to sleepy dreams.
    The following day Ian opened his eyes. He said, “Yes,” and, “No,” in a blistered whisper when John spoke to him, no more inflection in his voice than it had had since the demon had been driven out of him. Then the wind came up in the afternoon, flaying the land and driving the snow into drifts. It was best, John said, propping his spectacles more firmly on his long nose, that they go soon, for he knew bandits were abroad even in the bitter world of winter.
    While the grooms brought out the other horses, with the wind tearing manes and plaids and blankets, Jenny took her mare Moon Horse from the stable and saddled her. There was a great boiling of people in the yard just then, and John was entirely occupied with making sure Ian was wrapped warm. Jenny had no magic anymore, but long years of living in the Winterlands with only slight powers had taught her to see when people turned their heads. As aunts and grooms and John and Muffle rode out of the yard, she led Moon Horse back into the stable and unsaddled her, and from the little attic window she watched them ride away across the moor. Snow filled their tracks before they were even out of sight.
    In the ballads of the great heroes, she thought, watching them go—Alkmar the Godborn or Selkythar Dragons-bane or Öontes of the Golden Harp—the heroes frequently sustained injuries in slaying the dragon or overcoming the cave monsters or outwitting the evil mage. So they must, for there is no sacrifice unless blood is shed. But they survived and came home, and everything was as it was before, only happier.
    No desolation. No regret. No wounds that cannot heal.
    Part of her thought,
Oh, John
.
    And another whispered Amayon’s name.
    She went down the ladder and built up the fire in the hearth again and found food the aunts had left. She made herself a little soup but didn’t eat it. She only sat, wrapped in a quilt, watching the fire and seeing nothing in it but flame and memory.
    Sleepy dreams, not plans and schemes.
    She slept and dreamed of the demon still.

CHAPTER TWO
    “Lord