Barbara Hambly - Knight of the Demon Queen

Jenny glanced around her as if taking counsel from the zebra-striped silence of the winter woods. It was two hours’ walk back to the Hold, nearly three to Great Toby. According to Peg, the Alyn militia was out on patrol and might not return until dark. It would be snowing by then, and these tracks would be covered. And the half dozen bandits who’d raided the farm would have rendezvoused with either the gnomes or with the main body of their own gang. In either case someone would have pointed out that the gnomes wouldn’t buy the children.

As she set out after the tracks, she identified in her mind the three possible camping places they’d make for. Almost due south was a hollow with a spring, thickly covered by trees, that would provide protection against the snow. More easterly lay a cave in the bank where the Queen’s Beck cut under the hills on the edge of the bleak fell country, and north and east of that was a deeper cut protected on three sides by the fells.

It quickly became clear they weren’t moving south. As she followed the tracks through the quick-falling darkness, Jenny counted footprints and estimated the strength of the party: seven men, two of whom scouted ahead and to the sides in a businesslike fashion. They’d taken Dal’s two cows, his horse, and to judge by the depth of the tracks, a good deal of food. They were pitifully easy to follow. If they were heading east, Jenny thought, they’d be making for the old Brighthelm Tower in the hills. If northeast, they’d be meeting in either Shern Hollow or the big caves under Wild Man Fell, all customary haunts of bandits. She could overtake them there …

And what?

Even as a witch-wife of small powers, before dragon magic had entered her flesh, Jenny had never truly thought she could be enslaved. Killed, possibly. But never carried off like a common woman: raped, sold to the gnomes. She was a solitary woman, alone in the woods with her knife, her halberd …

… and forty-three years’ knowledge and experience of tracking, of watching, of silence.

When it became obvious that the bandits were headed due east, Jenny veered away and sought the low ground of a frozen pond deeper in the woods, where nightshade grew in the summer. She found thickets of it buried under the snow, and as darkness gathered and snow began to fall, she harvested handfuls of the dried leaves. In the shelter of an oak tree she made a small fire, and in her drinking cup, the only open vessel she had with her, boiled snow water and the crushed leaves, over and over, until she’d made up a tincture. This she stored in her water bottle, wrapped herself in plaids and coat and cloak beside the fire, and fell to sleep hungry.

Mother Mag, she prayed to the One who watched over children, don’t let them kill them before I get there …

Look after Ian. Look after John.

Next morning she found where they’d camped, in the cave by the Queen’s Beck, where she couldn’t have got to them anyway. By now they’d be on their way to Brighthelm Tower. With five prisoners and livestock, the bandits wouldn’t be moving fast. Jenny swung wide to avoid their scouts and eventually reached the tower: a couple of stories of the keep, a broad ring of crumbled stone that had been a court, and a clutch of pine trees that John would never have suffered to grow anywhere close to any defensive position of his.

Jenny climbed a pine tree and stayed there. The tower would be the first place the scouts would search, and there was no other place close where her tracks would not show in the new-fallen snow. Though she swept behind her with a pine bough and leaped from occasional bare rock to bare rock beneath the trees, she wasn’t sure the deception would pass by daylight.

But the bandits didn’t arrive until dusk, as the last thin nail paring of the old moon set. Cramped, frozen, and aching with hunger, Jenny heard their voices and the squeak of booted feet in the snow, far off. She found herself holding her breath until they came into sight among the twisted trees of the dale below: the boy and girl were still alive, and little Sunny was a tiny bundle clinging to her father’s bent back.

Even as she breathed a prayer of thanks Jenny wondered, Why keep children alive? They couldn’t have been easy to travel with. Young Dal was eight and barely keeping up; the rope that circled his wrists was being dragged on by a thickset oaf with a beard like a dead dog. Lyra, too, was staggering, her bloodied skirts and her husband’s averted eyes speaking clearly of how the bandits had used her. Jenny shivered with anger, and her hunger and fatigue dissolved.

“They festerin’ better be here soon,” the bandit leader grumbled, making a careful check of the encircling wall while Dead Dog Beard scouted inside the tower. “You, Hero—” He motioned to Dal. “You clear the snow off there.” He pointed to the half-covered remains of the hall at the tower’s foot. “We’re too festerin’ close to Alyn for me.”

“We can see the track from the top of the tower,” a blond-bearded man pointed out soothingly. “We’ll have plenty of time to see a patrol.”

“Well, I didn’t know you could witchfesterin’ motherless see in the dark, Crake. But since you can, you can be the one who keeps witchfesterin’ watch tonight if they don’t show up.”

“Just send me up a bottle of that wine and I’ll watch all you can ask for,” Crake responded.

“Mother Hare’s tits, I’m thirsty.”

“You leave that wine alone,” the leader snarled.

“What, the gnomes ain’t gonna bring their own wine?”

From her post in the pine Jenny listened, coldly calculating what had to be done. She recognized two of the bandits from Balgodorus Black-Knife’s band, whom she’d helped Baron Pellanor of Palmorgin fight last summer. When they finished checking the tower, they sent up a watchman to its top, then proceeded to make themselves comfortable around a fire in the semiopen hall ruins; it was a fairly easy matter for Jenny to creep along a branch to one of the broken-out windows of the tower and down to where the packs—and the wine bottles—were stowed in the jumble of broken rafters and fallen tiles that was the tower’s lowest room. As she poured the nightshade into the bottles, she could hear the bandits outside.

“Can we have the skirt again ’fore the gnomes take her away?”

“You keep your mind on your business and your cod in your britches.”

“You, junior—you’re ten, remember? You think they’ll take that little ’un anyway? They said from ten up.”

“Let’s see. They may want ’em younger. If not, no problem.”

Just after dark the man on watch called out, “Company coming!” and Jenny heard a man’s voice speak out of the darkness, “In whose name are you here?”

“In the name of the King beneath the Sea,” the bandit leader called out. The King beneath the Sea was Giton, boy-husband of the Yellow-Haired Goddess Balyna in Southern legend, but the name could as easily be applied to Adromelech, the Archdemon Lord of the Sea-wights, or his servant Folcalor.

Jenny, crouched in the darkness, held her breath. Having inspected the tower ruin once, the bandits were not disposed to do it again, and any chance sound she might have made was amply covered by the cows and horse they’d penned there. Still her heart pounded as the bandit leader came in and took the wine bottles.

They drank to one another, and to their bargain, the deep, oddly timbred voices of the gnomes bickering over prices and deferring to their human leader about the little girl Sunny. “Well, we can certainly try—” that voice said, and Jenny felt a queer cold stirring of recognition. She knew it, or one like it “—so long as she gives no trouble.”