Barbara Hambly - Knight of the Demon Queen

He set off through the snow-choked thickets, John at his heels. Every tree they passed, every frozen pond they skirted, John noted, remembering the way so he could come back and do something—he wasn’t sure what—about the demon gate. He had packed also as much clean parchment and paper as he could, had drawn from memory what he remembered of the route Aohila had shown him in dreaming, and had made note of Amayon’s remark last night about gates that would admit only tiny spawn, not great ones.

He didn’t know what any of it meant or might mean, but someone, sometime, would.

The mists that always hung over the Wraithmire thickened, making it hard for him to get his bearings; Amayon stopped twice and waited for him, knee-deep in swirling white vapor. John followed carefully, reflecting that it would be exactly like the demon to lead him thus onto thin ice, for the amusement of watching him lose toes to frostbite when his boots got soaked. Then through the fog a warm wind breathed, alien and frightening, and on it drifted a smell John knew he’d scented before hereabouts: sand and sourness, and something like burning metal.

The light altered.

The squeak of the snow turned to the crunch of pebbles underfoot.

And a thing rose up before them in the mists, with a blunt stupid head on a long neck balanced by a blunt heavy tail. Between tail and head were tall haunches and two long legs, like a sort of flabby featherless hairless bird, saddled and bridled like a horse.

A creature of Hell, regarding him with a black dead porcelain-shiny eye.

The hot wind breathed the mists away. Dust stung Aversin’s nostrils, burned his eyes.

Black harsh mountains stained with rust scraped a colorless sky. Something like a cloud moved across it, curling and uncurling with a floppy, obscene motion, running against the wind.

Amayon smiled, and John knew it was because the demon tasted his fear.

“Welcome to Hell,” the demon said.

IT TOOK JENNY most of the day following the storm to dig out. In this she was helped by her sister Sparrow and Sparrow’s husband and Bill, the yardman from the Hold, who came up with milk, cheese, and dried apples and to make sure she was well. “Aunt Umetty seems to think as you’d laid in the corner all this time and would need feedin’ with a spoon,” the sallow, lanky little servant said with a grin.

Jenny, who had convinced herself that everyone in the Hold and the villages round about would stone her on sight, returned the smile shakily and said, “I hope you brought a spoon.”

After days of sleep, of migraines and troubled dreams, the company made her feel better, more alive. Ian was better, Bill reported, though he slept a good deal, which wasn’t to be marveled at, poor lad. Bill hoped as Mistress Jenny wouldn’t be moved to do herself a harm, having had traffic with demons same as her boy. He said that John had ridden out by himself this very morning, as his father had used to do sometimes, then asked what Jenny thought of prospects for spring.

Though Jenny quivered a little at the thought, she walked over to the Hold the following morning, a tiny brown-and-white figure in the bleak vastness of the snow-choked cranberry bog. As Bill had predicted, she found Ian asleep.

“And I’ll not have you wake him,” Aunt Jane, who had insisted on walking up to the boy’s room with her, said. A big woman with thick dark hair slashed now with gray, Aunt Jane had never liked Jenny, though for years the two women had existed in a state of truce. Jane had said many times—as reported to Jenny over the years by various people whose business it wasn’t—that no good ever came of mixing with witchery, meaning that she had passionately loved her brother Lord Aver and had hated Kahiera Nightraven.

It was Kahiera that Jenny saw now in Jane’s eyes, as they stood together in the doorway of Ian’s room.

Icewitch and sorceress, an outcast of her own people and a battle captive of Lord Aver, Nightraven had been Jenny’s first teacher in the arts of magic when Jenny was a child; she had been the only one in the world who understood. Jenny had been five when that tall cold beautiful woman had been brought to the Hold, and for six years she had tagged at her sable skirts. Every word and spell and fragment of lore that came from those pale lips she had memorized, and she had seen how the witch used her magic, and her wits, to ensnare her captor. Leaving him at last—leaving their son—she had laid on Lord Aver spells such that he had never loved another woman.

And all this was still in Jane’s resentful eyes.

Ian looked peaceful, curled on his side in the bed that the boys shared, its curtains drawn against the chilly forenoon light. He was terribly thin, Jenny saw, guilt prodding and twisting at her heart, but he did not seem to be tormented by the dreams that had tortured her.

Was that why he had tried to take his own life?

She shrank from the thought, guessing it to be true. Her own pain had blinded her. Her self-absorption in the loss of Amayon had kept her from even asking whether he suffered as badly …

What made her think her own agony was the worst possible?

Did Gothpys croon little rhymes to Ian still, in dreams? Did Ian hate his father for having taken the demon from him?

But even had Jane not been there, she would not have broken his healing sleep to inquire.

“Where’s Adric?” she asked as she turned from the door and descended the stairs to the kitchen again.

“He and Sergeant Muffle went hunting.” Jane’s voice was frosty. “You’re welcome to wait.”

Since this was patently untrue, Jenny thanked her and took her leave, staying only long enough to play a little with Mag by the warmth of the kitchen hearth. Pursuant to her decision to be a spider when she grew up, Mag was currently practicing weaving webs with Aunt Rowe’s yarns; she accepted her mother’s presence as peacefully as she had accepted her various absences, evidently considering this merely another journey. From Sparrow and Bill, Jenny had already heard of the mysterious fever, though there were no further cases of it and those who had been like to die were already on their feet. Curious , she thought, disquieted. On her way back to Frost Fell she resolved to return on the morrow, later in the day when Ian would be awake, though it meant walking home in the dark.

But as she trudged homeward, the flinty dazzle of the snow resolved itself into the wavering firefalls of migraine, and through the following day Jenny was barely able to do more than make sure Moon Horse was watered and fed and stagger back to bed. She dreamed again of the sea bottom and the great weightless graceful shadows of the whalemages passing like dancers overhead. The migraine seemed to have gotten into her dreams as well: fire shimmering in the water among the great columns of rock where Caradoc had died and things appearing and disappearing on the current-sculpted sand of the seafloor below.

The next day she felt better, though lightheaded. She trekked the woods in early morning, digging herbs patiently out from beneath the drifted snow. She could put no magic into them as she’d used to do, but they would have virtue nonetheless. There was peace, too, to be found in the secret tales told her by fox track and rabbit scat in the snow. She returned home and made herself a tisane against the migraine’s return. Lying in bed she heard the shutters rattle with new-risen wind. She stepped to the door and smelled the wind: it would be worse long before nightfall.