Winterlands 4 - Dragonstar (30 page)

Things are as they are, Wizard-woman. And things being as they are, the only thing that I can do is go to the Skerries of Light to warn my nestmates— it was the first time she had heard him speak of relationship, or comradeship, with the others of his kind—of the danger they are in, and speak to them of your Dreamweaver's plan. I will return in a fortnight, to bear you and your Dreamweaver south again, time and to spare to be there ere the demons come to that place.

Blessings … And the word could not encompass all that she wished for him, the shining glory of fortune and hope that she poured into his mind. It surprised him—she could feel it—as the understanding of love had once surprised him.

And blessings on your nestmates, Centhwevir Blue-and-Golden, and Nymr the Blue, on my lovely green-and-gold Mellyn and Enismirdal and Yrsgendl and the others that were saved from the demons.

Morkeleb said, Blessings upon you and yours, and she felt the hesitancy of his musical thoughts, and knew that he had never blessed anyone before.

His blessing was like a double-handful of chiming stars.

He turned upon the wind, and flew away through the dark afternoon toward the west.

“How long's this storm been blowin'?” John was asking as Jenny came back into the kitchen. Several more people had arrived, Blossom and Aunt Hol and Muffle's daughter Cobweb and old Granny Brown, all of them talking at once and offering advice to Peg about what belonged in the pie.

“This's the second day,” Aunt Rowe said, without even a pause at her loom.

“Anyone else had any dreams?”

“If they have,” said Muffle, “they're keepin'it to themselves.”

John nodded thoughtfully, and glanced at Jenny across Mag's bent red head. “Someone will,” he said.

The someone was Aunt Jane.

She had always disliked Jenny, having seen what loving a witchwife had done to her brother. During the weeks of Jenny's estrangement from John, Jane had said cruel things about Jenny, both to John and to Ian, and to other women in the village as well. So Jenny was surprised, the next day, when she and Ian were sorting dried herbs in the loft above the kitchen, to hear Jane's heavy step creak on the ladder, and the woman's deep voice call out, “Mistress Jenny?”

Jenny and Ian worked in near-darkness—night-sighted as mages are—but as Jane's red coif appeared above the trapdoor, Jenny kindled the wicks of the two iron lamps that hung on the wall near the great warm column of the kitchen chimney. “Thank you,” said Jane, as Ian came to help her—unnecessarily but politely—up the last few rungs. “Might I speak to your mother a bit alone, sweeting?” And she turned to Jenny, her square, heavy face uncomfortable in the wavery glow. The worst of the storm had abated during the night, but winds still scoured across the heath, and the day was very cold. This room, and the kitchen beneath it, were some of the few in the Hold that were genuinely warm, and shirts and petticoats were hung here to dry beneath rafter-loads of smoked meats and cheeses, fare on which the Hold folk lived most of the winter. The vast, dim attic smelled of rosemary and onions and clean linen, and smoke from the kitchen below.

“I think I've had the dream you spoke of in the kitchen yesterday afternoon,” Jane said. “The dream of taking Ian out somewhere away from the Hold, into the woods.”

“To find something only he could find?” Jenny brought over a firkin of raisins for her to sit on, and settled herself beside one of the smooth-scrubbed marble slabs where apples were dried in the fall.

“In a manner of speaking.” Jane folded her big brown hands. “I dreamed there was a woman, a—a lady, hurt by bandits and needing help, but fearing to let any grown woman or man come near to her. It didn't feel like it had aught to do with stupid ruses, like Mol Bucket's necklace—not that those were real pearls, any more real than the kisses Gosbosom bought with them. But I saw this hurt lady plain, a sweet, decent woman, and needing healing, huddled out there in the storm. And I knew—and I think this is what made me know this was a sent dream after all—I knew that our John would fall in love with her. I saw them together, and him holding her hands, and looking at her with the eyes of love. And that was when I woke, and knew this was telling me what … what I wanted to hear.”

Jenny was silent, looking into the older woman's apologetic dark eyes. Downstairs she dimly heard the thump of Aunt Rowe's loom, and Dilly's voice telling Mag a story in the kitchen. John was at the castle forge, engaged on a project with Muffle that even before breakfast had covered both men with soot and grime and the dust from the vaults beneath the Hold, where John had unearthed the debris of some curious old projects of his own. John had burned his workroom, before riding forth on his errantry for the Demon Queen. The things he had dragged out to work on with Muffle were years old, covered with mildew and rust.

In any case, Jenny reflected, Jane would not have spoken to John about that dream. Not to Muffle, certainly, nor to any other in the Hold. “Thank you,” she said simply. “That was clever of you, to read the deception in something that … that unobvious.”

Jane sniffed, and got to her feet. “I may not be clever like my nephew,” she said, with her wry toothy smile, “but I've lived long enough to know that a man who holds out candy in one hand usually has a rope in the other.” She added grudgingly, “And I know John'll never love any but you.”

And you know a woman would understand that dream, thought Jenny, and a man, not—or not in this way. She said, “Where was this woman lying hurt?”

“In your old house,” she said. “On Frost Fell.”

Ian rode out to Frost Fell alone the following morning, when the winds finally sank away. From the attic of the small stone house, where she had watched John vanish into winter's first snowfall, Jenny listened for her son, sitting beside the hole where the steep stair ascended. She had scried the storm's ending just before dawn, and had taken the road over the crest of Toadback Hill under cover of the final flurries of blowing sleet. As the wind calmed, snow began to fall, a thin dusting that covered her tracks. Just after that, Bill and Sergeant Muffle went out to cut brush in the cranberry bog, which, John pointed out, was actually the logical place to ambush someone bound for Frost Fell. Between the bog and the Fell itself, there was no cover.

So the ambush would have to be here in the house.

Jenny smelled Caradoc when he entered, coming in through the old stable where Ian would not see his tracks. Her nape prickled. It was here, in early summer, that the demon-possessed wizard had waited for Ian. All those months ago—a lifetime, it felt like. And to this house Ian's dreams of despair had driven him after the loss of his demon, when he feared Folcalor's will would bend him to open a demon gate, as Bliaud had been bent. Even without Folcalor dwelling in his mind anymore, Caradoc would remember this place, as Jenny remembered the Sea-wights' Hell.

Fool, she thought, listening to the faint, squelching thumps in the kitchen below. The stench of rotting flesh drifted up to her despite the afternoon's bitter cold. When he had taken the corpse of a dead sailor for his body, Caradoc had spoken of bargaining with Folcalor, of “making what he could” of the situation and of his knowledge. Is this your idea of rescue? he had demanded.

Trapped in the moonstone, Caradoc had some power, weak and attenuated but possibly, Jenny reflected, almost as strong as her own small gifts were now. What he would do, or might do, with the greater powers that were Ian's, if he should kill the boy and use a demon spell to enter his body, she could only imagine.

Years ago the man had been trapped by Folcalor through his vanity, his lust for greater powers than he had. And it was only a matter of time, thought Jenny, before he was trapped so again. It was clear to her he had not changed his belief in his own cleverness.

Silence below, a waiting silence. Jenny, crouched close to the top of the attic stair, waited also. And touched, at her belt beneath the thick sheepskins of her coat, the silver catchbottle that had held, for a short time, the Demon Queen. This never left her. Folcalor had too many agents in this world.

Had the rebellious demon seized the Burning Mirror, as John had said in the ruins of the mirror chamber in Ernine? Jenny had watched Aohila from almost the moment of Folca-lor's departure, until she'd trapped her. She didn't think the Demon Queen had had the opportunity to move the mirror herself.

And where was she now? What would she do, with the ten days until the setting of the Dragonstar returned the powers of the demons to what they had been for the past thousand years?

Would she go to the Skerries of Light, as Morkeleb feared? Would the Dragonshadow encounter her there, in that solitary world of rocks and birds and shining water? And would he encounter her before she could destroy Corvin, or seize him as she had seized him before?

Below her Jenny heard stealthy creaking, as if Caradoc leaned his weight on one of the bent-willow chairs for support. Her quick ears picked up the crunch of hooves on the frozen road up the Fell. She didn't move—didn't dare. If he was able, within his borrowed body, to send out dreams, he had sufficient use of the corpse's senses to detect her movements in the attic. She could not count on his being distracted by his prey's coming. Her sore hip was stiff from sitting in one position and her back ached. She hoped she wouldn't stumble when it came time to leap down the stair.

John's right, she thought wryly. We're both getting too old for this.

The light squeak of snow as Ian dismounted. His soft, husky alto: “Is anyone there?”

“Here!” gasped a reply, startlingly woman-like, hushed and pleading. “Dear gods …”

The squeak of the iron door hinges. Ian's boots on the flagstoned passage floor. “Where are you? Are you all right?”

“Here! Kitchen … oh, please … I am dying.…”

“Smells to me like you're gie dead already,” said John, from the kitchen door.

Jenny was on her feet and down the stair, halberd in hand, as Caradoc whirled. She lashed out with a counterspell that completely failed to block whatever Word of pain and confusion he laid on John—John gasped, staggered, and Jenny cursed at her own weak uncertain powers, and stepping forward, whacked Caradoc hard behind the knees as he tried to rush John in the kitchen doorway. The wizard collapsed with a grunt and struck the floor, and from beneath the ragged gown he wore gusted a still fouler graveyard stench.

“Bitch!” Caradoc gasped, struggling to stand and clearly unable to do so. “Damn you black, you whore-hag!” A line of brownish fluid trickled from under the hem of the robes, and Caradoc raised a face that was bloated, discolored, sunken with rot. The eyes remained to him, and the tongue, though it was swollen so that his speech was distorted. The hair that surrounded the horrible visage was brown, what little was left of it, so Jenny knew he'd transferred the talisman moonstone at least once, from the original blond sailor's corpse to another, and who knew how many besides? “You see what you've done?”

“Little enough, given what you deserve,” John remarked, and pulled up a bench—warily—to sit. He still looked a trifle gray around the lips with the shock of whatever pain-spell Caradoc had thrown at him, but he had his sword in hand, and Jenny was willing to bet he could carve the animate corpse to collops before another such spell could be laid.

“What I deserve?” Caradoc's glottal voice was thick with genuine indignation, rage, and self-pity. “For being enslaved by demons—for only trying to preserve my life …?”

“For bein' bone-stupid enough to call on Folcalor in the first place.” John propped his spectacles with the back of one mailed knuckle. “Without which piece of poor judgment we wouldn't none of us be in the fix we're in now. Not to mention what you've tried to do to me son. You all right, Ian?” He raised his voice to a yell.

“I'm fine.” Ian appeared in the doorway, and drew back with a wince at the horror on the floor between his parents.

“Stay back for now,” ordered Jenny. “Watch the front of the house.”

“You can't blame me for trying to save my own life,” repeated Caradoc sulkily.

“But you aren't trying to save your life,” pointed out Jenny, still holding her weapon ready. “Your life is perfectly preserved, within that moonstone. And at least a residuum of your powers. You are trying to steal my son's powers—and to murder him, to take his place in his body.”

“That's preposterous.”

“It's also beside the point,” remarked John. “Because you're not goin' to be able to do it, even if it is why you did all that shadow-show with the dreams an' tryin' to get folk to open the Hold gates an' all. You know it's only a matter of time before Folcalor finds you, or one of the demons workin' for Adromelech, or Aohila for that matter—you know she's out from behind the mirror? I thought not. Or till wolves catch up with you, or a warm spell brings on maggots to finish you off an' you spend the next couple centuries trapped in that moonstone under a dead tree somewhere, tryin' to talk some bandit into killin' a traveler an' haulin' the corpse to where you can use it, which'll be a pretty complicated set of instructions to get across in a dream. Now I have a bargain for you, if you like.”

“Piss on you.”

“Bit cold in here, isn't it, love?” He glanced over at Jenny. “Shall I build a fire here in the stove? Thaw things out a bit?”

And he flinched, as if at the stab of migraine.

“All we have to do is wait, Caradoc,” pointed out Jenny. “Folcalor will find you. Don't tell me you don't believe that he can, or that you're cleverer than he. He can't let you remain free. He wants the talisman jewel that contains your soul, so that he can use it as a weapon against Adromelech: fodder for his spells against the Henge, as I would have been, and Ian. As all those other poor souls have been, that he's been buying from the gnomes.”

“If you know that,” said Caradoc petulantly, “you can't blame me for—”

“You've known that from the start,” Jenny cut him off. “And you can't bargain with him. You know his name, his true name, the inner heart of him. You had him living within your brain. You are the only mage who can trap him.” She took the catch-bottle from her belt, held it up, gleaming in the grayblue morning light from the kitchen door. “In this.”