Winterlands 4 - Dragonstar (19 page)

Everyone seemed to be watching one another, or watching their own backs.

It's turning into the Winterlands, thought John as he hurried through the wintry dusk.

It's turning into the city in the Otherworld, where no one trusts, and everyone hurries and fears.

It's turning into a world without law.

A woman passed through the square in front of him, and the sight of her stopped John in his tracks. She was gone before he got a better look at her, but his impression was that she was far too well dressed for this disreputable neighborhood. His impression, too, was that none of the beggars, whores, and laborers in the square so much as looked at her, as if she did not really exist.

But she existed. And he knew her: the tall, almost serpentine build, the melon-heavy breasts, the black hair coiled and glittering with jeweled chains. He hadn't seen her eyes and was glad they hadn't been turned his way. He knew—he was positive, as one is positive of things in dreams—that they would be yellow, with horizontal rectangular pupils, like a goat's.

She's out from behind the mirror, he thought, almost queasy with shock.

Walking the streets of the city in a woman's guise, she who was not a woman at all.

The Demon Queen.

The impact of cold, and of brittle afternoon light striking her eyes, was so sharp that Jenny staggered, catching herself against the rough-timbered wall of a house. The smell of privies, of wood smoke, of horses and mud dumped itself over her like water from a bucket, and someone said close by, “Narh, Marbel, I know what he says, but what's he actually done besides sit in the taverns talkin' to his friends and makin' you pay the rent?” Jenny blinked and saw a couple of marketwomen walk past her, their faded gaudy layers of skirts tucked into sashes and their head scarves and veils tied this way and that to give information about neighborhood and marital status.

There was no mistake. She was in Bel.

She looked down at her hands. She still held the catchbottle in one, the stopper in the other. At her feet lay the notched staff she'd carried underground. Her hip hurt her, as it hadn't, she realized, during the time—days? hours? weeks?—she'd been in the bottle. The gnomish trousers she wore were still damp at the knees, from kneeling in the snow at Ernine.

She was definitely in Bel. In the Claekith district, near the river, the smell was unmistakable. Not far from the Dockmarket, in fact. She could see the roofs of Mallena's temple over the houses. Old snow heaped the sides of the lane, mingled with dirty straw and garbage. It was late afternoon—of what day?—and storekeepers were taking in their wares. A smell of garlic and stew from a nearby tavern puffed over her and reminded her that she was ravenously hungry.

Jenny knotted the neck of the catch-bottle back into her sash, and made sure that the hothwais of light, and of warmth, were still wrapped and in her pockets. Then she stooped and picked up her stick. In a poor neighborhood like this one there were enough women who'd had their heads shorn for one crime or another that she wouldn't be much stared at, but she drew up a fold of her plaid over her head, anyway.

Trey is a demon, she thought. And John could be anywhere, alive or dead or in chains in Hell.… First things first, she told herself. As John always says. And though it wasn't likely the Regent's wife would be anywhere in this neighborhood, Morkeleb had told her that demons roved the streets, particularly at night. It would only take one recognizing her, to raise a hue and cry.

So though her hip barely twinged her now, Jenny bowed her back and leaned exaggeratedly on her staff as she limped toward the wider street along the river that would lead her to the city walls. In the days she had been gone from Bel, the plague seemed to have abated, though she saw marks of its aftermath everywhere. A few yellow paper seals still clung half-scraped to the doors of some of the buildings she passed, and many people she saw wore mourning, their hair newly cropped.

But the smoke that filled the air now bore on it the smell of nothing more sinister than cooking, and though this riverside neighborhood was a crowded one, she saw no doors that bore fresh seals. Vendors had returned to the narrow lanes, selling crullers or head scarves, or cups of steaming coffee dispensed from little stoves. A girl drove a donkey past, laden with baskets of last year's dried apples. A small dog barked in a fifthfloor window.

The city was coming back to life.

Jenny reached out with her thoughts. Someone asked a woman selling steamed buns if she was doing well. Yes, she said, she was getting over it, though her husband's death had near broken her heart.…

Her friend said, “Darling, I know … you tried the wine yet? The King's men set up a cask near the Green God's temple.”

“D'you think he was right? The King? About the plague being done?”

“Cragget knows. I wouldn't ha' thought any man could say that for certain, but then I'd have bet money against the King coming back to himself. My niece works in the palace kitchens, and she said he was like a child.”

The King recovered? Jenny shivered as she rounded a corner out of earshot, guessing what had to have happened. And that being the case—if a demon now ruled in Uriens's form—what had become of Gareth? Had he, too, “died,” to be returned to life with some other consciousness looking out from behind his eyes? Polycarp of Halnath had sent her to find Miss Mab in the Deep to begin with: What had become of him? Had he escaped from Bel in time?

“I swear I'm still afraid to go out of the house,” said a young girl to her friend as they both scraped buckets full of the least-filthy snow in the lane, “once the sun's out of the sky.”

“It's the plague,” said her friend, “that drives folk mad.…”

No, thought Jenny, struggling not to quicken her stride as she hobbled toward the flagged embankment of the river. Not the plague. Demons.

And I released the Demon Queen, when I could have kept her out of the world for good.

I have to get word to Gareth. See him, see who and what I'm dealing with. Or is Folcalor only waiting for that?

What, then? Flee from the city? Search for John? Return to the Winterlands? And how long until the demons come there in force, instead of in ones and twos?

How long until they go after Ian? If they're not attacking the Hold already?

The next moon will be the last that the Dragonstar is in the sky, Aohila had said. The Moon of Winds, which would start growing, if Jenny's reckoning was in, within a few days. By what the Demon Queen had said it sounded like the extraordinary power of Folcalor and Adromelech would wane after that—that they were somehow bound to the comet. But even if that was the case, thought Jenny—and the Demon Queen may well have been lying, to give her one more reason to feel that she must get free of the catch-bottle—what mages now remained to fight even the weakened demons that would come forth from the place where Adromelech and his devils had been trapped these thousand years?

One mage at least had to have returned to the demons' power, the “great doctor” Gareth had brought in to “resurrect” Trey. The only mage Jenny knew of still alive in the South was Bliaud. All the others had been taken over by Caradoc, and most of them were dead.

That left Ian, and Miss Mab. And Miss Mab, to all intents, was a prisoner.

Ian …

Folcalor nearly destroyed him. I can't let him face him again.

But she knew she might have no choice.

Before anything, she thought, eat. Whatever else is happening, you'll be able to think more clearly on a full stomach.

She felt in her pockets for coin and of course there was none. When Morkeleb had brought her from the North she had gone straight to the palace, and Gareth's chamberlain had food sent to her immediately, as an honored guest.

She shook her head at herself and sighed. After a lifetime of being known as a sorceress and healer, it was too easy to forget that people weren't going to simply hand her bread and cheese. She knew she could earn the wherewithal to fill her belly by washing dishes or sweeping up the kitchen at an inn, if she found one where the innkeeper was friendly. Keeping away from sight of possible demon-ridden patrons would be trickier, but with her shorn head she could come up with a story that accounted for a desire to remain out of sight.

There was no shortage of inns in Bel, especially in the Dockmarket, but the crowded streets made her nervous. There were taverns, she knew, outside the gates as well, where she would not run the risk of being trapped inside the city walls, if recognized and pursued. Thus she joined the straggle of home-going farmers and dairymaids, making herself as small and old as possible as she passed the disinterested guards. All about her in the crowded lane the talk was of the King's recovery, and of the free wine being given out in the public squares—she'd passed several barrels and any number of drunkards already. She guessed, piecing bits of conversation together, that she hadn't been in the catch-bottle long.

Her soul cringed at the recollection. She had had the Demon Queen at her mercy, and had let her go. Turned her loose in a world already facing demon war.

Morkeleb, she thought, but knew that the dragon would find her soon. As Aohila had said, he'd be scrying for her, seeking her.

And John.

Gareth might know something of John, she thought—if Gareth was still himself. She'd have to find some way of reconnoitering, to see whether it was safe to approach him. Miss Mab was still in the Deep, awaiting the arrival of a gnome who might very well be possessed by Folcalor himself.

Once outside the Dockmarket gate, Jenny felt safer, calmer. She picked the smallest of the several inns that served the cluster of market-gardens near there, turned down a muddy lane that ran beside its stable wall. There was a bare orchard across the track, the trees still beehived in straw, and a gaggle of empty pig-yards by the stable gate. The kitchen door stood open, firelight an amber blessing in an afternoon darkening to indigo cold: A servant in shirtsleeves was scraping leftovers down for the household dogs. Jenny pushed back the plaid from her head and said, “Excuse me,” and the servant straightened up and looked at her.

It was John.

The stillness in the yard lasted for what felt like five minutes; Jenny thought later it was probably only thirty seconds or so. It surprised her, when she thought about it later, that she recognized him at all, for his hair was cropped to a stubble and it, and his grubby whiskers, had been dyed with lampblack. He still had on the spectacles she'd long ago enchanted against breakage or loss, and wore the shabby clothes of a shepherd or a bumpkin. Only when she came closer to him did she see, in the open neck of his shirt, the burned mark that the Demon Queen had left, and a savage half-healed gouge in his left cheek.

He took a step toward her, then hesitated—hating her? Jenny wondered, though curiously without fear. Angry? He has a right to be.…

She stepped toward him, and it seemed then that without any intervening thought or action they were suddenly together in the middle of the yard in each other's arms.

“Gaw, love, how'd you get here?” He pulled back from that first kiss, his hand stroking her cheek, her hair, her shoulder; his eyes—so bright behind the lenses—looking down into her face. “Are you all right? Love, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.…”

She dragged his mouth down to hers again, tears running down her face. She thought the strength of his arm around her ribs as he lifted her off her feet would drive the breath from her lungs.

“Hey, lad!” yelled a voice from the kitchen. “You canoodle on your own time, eh? We got customers.…”

“God save 'em,” muttered John. The dogs he'd been feeding—an immense brindled mastiff and a slightly smaller black bitch—snuffed warily at Jenny's boots when John set her down, then tried to lick her hands. “I got pots to wash if I'm to eat tonight.…”

“Split your dinner with me and I'll help.”

“You've got a bargain, love. Are your hands all right, though?” He took one in both of his, strong fingers probing at the scarred joints that a month ago had been stiff and crooked as wood. Jenny bent and flexed them, to show him; he raised them gently to his lips. “She told me you were dead,” said John softly. “The Demon Queen. I'm glad that you're not.” Their fingers laced together, he led her into the scullery—bowls and platters, steam, garbage, and mice, and the kitchen's amber light roaring through the archway at the side.

Grobe, the landlord of the Silver Cricket, only rolled his eyes when John informed him that this was his wife (“Oh, aye, right …”), but shrugged at her offer of help. “Long as I've got cups to put the ale in when I need 'em, you can split the leavings with whom you choose. We're near out of punch, though—”

“I'll get some started.”

“I'll get some started,” corrected Jenny, who had experience with John's erratic attention span when it came to cooking. She found a scarf and tied it over her head: Gnomish trousers were disregarded among farm women, but a woman with her head uncovered would get unwelcome stares. “You bring me in some kindling.” As Grobe's wife had quite enough to do serving in the ordinary itself, Jenny was welcome in the kitchen, carving slices from the roast on the blackened stone hearth and loading platters with ducks, poults, beef, and fish stew. “I've missed you,” she said, meeting John in the scullery door with a basket of dirty ale-mugs on her hip. “John, I never—”

He put a hand on her shoulder and looked down into her eyes. “Another apology and I'll beat you.” He drew her to him again, kissed her, his mouth tasting of honey mulled with cinnamon. “If we start in like that we'll both be sayin' we're sorry for the rest of the night, if not the rest of our lives—or I will be, anyway. Ian's all right, you know. He was doin' better when I rode out—”

“I've seen him. We rode together to Eldsbouch—”

“We've got three wanting duck,” called out Mistress Gowla through the kitchen door, and John took the ale-cups and disappeared into the scullery while Jenny went to serve up scorched birds and plum sauce.

Only when the supper customers were done and Grobe brought in the last of the platters (“What with the killings in the streets, there's not many will walk after dark.”) were John and Jenny able to retreat to a corner of the kitchen for a meal of meat drippings and bread pudding, honey and ale, the dogs watching every bite with mournful intensity from the warmth of the hearth. “I told Gar to meet me at moonrise, where the east road runs into the trees.” John poured out ale for them both from a boiled leather pitcher. Whatever Mistress Gowla's virtues as a homemaker, Jenny reflected, as an alewife she left a great deal to be desired: The brew was muddy and cloyingly sweet. No wonder the place hadn't many customers once dinner was done. “I don't know if he will. He's that set on not ‘deserting’ the baby Trey's carryin'.… God's granny knows what we'll do about that, because you know it's a demon.”