the snow-covered humps of bramble and hackweed that filled the sheltered ground. No one could tell him now whether the flooding had come first and the infestations of whisperers later, or whether the lands had been abandoned to the water when those glowing, giggling things had begun to haunt the nights.
In either case it hadn’t surprised him to learn that a gate of Hell was located there.
A man named Morne had had a house hereabouts—before the marshes had spread this far—and had farmed a little. One afternoon Nuncle Darrow came to the Hold saying that Morne’s wife had cut her husband and then their four children to pieces with a carving knife. Old Caerdinn and Jenny had exorcised the woman, but they didn’t know whether they’d succeeded, for after they were done with their spells the woman turned the knife on herself.
The house still stood. John could distinguish its pale shape among the half-dead trees in the gloom. None of the neighbors had torn it down, not even for the bricks and the dressed stone.
He dismounted cautiously and led Battlehammer into the labyrinth of hummocks and ice. In the graying twilight he found where animal tracks turned aside in fear of the whisperers but saw no mark, no sign of the Hellspawn themselves.
He made sure Battlehammer was stoutly tied to a sapling before reaching into his coat for the ink bottle. It felt heavy in his hand, and for a time he stood, wondering if there were any way whatsoever he could accomplish the bidding of the Demon Queen without the help of the thing inside.
But he couldn’t. He simply didn’t know enough. So he pulled off his glove, took three flax seeds from the pouch at his waist, and held them ready between thumb and forefinger. Only then did he pull the stopper from the bottle.
A momentary silvery glitter played above the hole, like a very tiny flame.
And Jenny stood before him.
Jenny beautiful, as she had been when first he’d seen her at Frost Fell: black hair like night on the ocean, blue eyes like summer noon. Smiling and relaxed and filled with the joy of living, with daffodils in her hands.
John held the flax seeds above the bottle’s mouth and said, “You take that form ever again, and I swear to you I’ll seal this thing with you in it and bury it in the deepest part of the sea.”
“Darling, how serious you’re being!” It wasn’t Jenny anymore; it never had been, in the way faces and identities shift and merge in dreams. A slim boy stood before John, fourteen or fifteen years old. Like Jenny he was black haired and blue eyed, with long lashes and red pouty lips in an alabaster face. He wore plain black hose and a coat of quilted black velvet, just as if the world were not frozen all around them; his little round cap was sewn with garnets. “Could it be you’re jealous? Do you suspect those legions of men she had weren’t entirely because she was allegedly possessed? We can’t force anyone to do anything that’s truly against their secret natures in the first place, you know.”
“No,” John returned mildly. “I don’t know that. In fact, what I do know is that the lot of you are liars who couldn’t ask straight-out for water if you were dyin’.”
The boy shrugged. “Well, I’m sure you’ll go on believing whatever makes you comfortable.” He held out his exquisitely kid-gloved hand. “I’m Amayon.” And, when John did not react, he added, “Jenny’s Amayon.”
“And my servant,” John pointed out maliciously and for a fleeting instant saw the flare of rage and piqued pride in those cobalt eyes. “I trust Her Majesty told you your duties an’ all.”
“Tedious bitch.” Amayon yawned elaborately, though John had already seen that the demon did not breathe. “I suppose you know she uses the mucus of donkeys as a complexion cream? You haven’t, I hope, been taken in by that antiquated lust spell she throws over everyone she encounters.”
“Like the one you used on Rocklys’ cavalry corps?” John returned, refusing to be goaded.
“Oh, darling, did Jenny tell you that was me?” The demon simpered, but he was watching John’s eyes. “How very simple of her.”
Not for nothing, however, had John grown up his father’s son, his heart and his face a fist closed in defense. He merely regarded Amayon without expression, and the demon shrugged and smiled.
“Well, I’m sure if it makes you feel better to believe that … The gate’s this way, Lordship.” He threw a mocking flex into the title. “Generally only the small fry can leak through, but Her Reechiness has given me a word.”
“Do you hate that animal?” he added, raising delicate brows at Battlehammer, who stood, ears flat to his neck and muscles bunched, regarding him as he would have a snake.
“Should I?”
“It’s up to you, of course, Lordship. But unless there’s some reason you’d like to see him die, I suggest you don’t bring him with us. Your mistress has made arrangements.”
“Ah,” John said. “Thinks of everythin’, she does.” And he dropped the seeds into the bottle.
It was Aversin’s intention simply to keep the demon where he couldn’t do mischief while he took Battlehammer to the nearest farm, which was old Dan Darrow’s walled enclave in the bottomlands adjacent to the Mire. But with the snow and the wind, and his exhaustion from a sleepless night, it took him nearly two hours to reach the place.
“’Twill be black as pitch by the time you get back to the Mire,” the farmer protested when John explained that he wanted the loan of a donkey and a boy to lead it back to the farm again.
A little uneasily, he acceded to the patriarch’s invitation to spend the night. He was conscious of the demon bottle around his neck as he sat at supper with the Darrow clan and their hired men and women, watching the old man’s fair-haired grandchildren tumble and play before the hearth. He guessed that Amayon was perfectly aware of his surroundings; he had no business, he thought, bringing even a bottled demon into a house where there were children.
When he slept, he dreamed again and again of a rat, or some huge insect, creeping up the frame of each child’s bed, demon light glittering in its berry-blue eyes. Reaching toward them …
He woke at the touch of a hand on his neck.
The Darrow farm was a big place, but simple and rustic. John had bedded down among the men of the household in the loft, on blankets and straw tickings spread around where the chimney came through from the floor below. They’d have put the King himself there, had he come calling. Remembering that demons had spoken to Caradoc in his dreams, offering him greater power and wider wisdom if he would but open a gate for them, he’d tied the red ribbon that held the ink bottle in a knot up close to his throat so it couldn’t be slipped off over his head while he slept.
Sure enough, as he opened his eyes he felt a man’s hands fumbling with the ribbon and heard the slow thick breathing of a sleeper near his face, not the short breaths of a man nervous about robbing a guest. John caught the sleepwalker by wrist and shoulder and flung him bodily onto as many men as he could; there were shouts and curses, and by the thread of dim hearthlight that leaked up through the ladder hole at the far end of the loft he saw his attacker bound to his feet, eyes blank, knife in hand.
The attacker—a huge stablehand named Browson who’d helped unsaddle Battlehammer—lunged at him, but men were scrambling up, grabbing, clutching. Shouts of “Murder!” and “Bandits!” barked through the dark. Another of the hired men grabbed Browson and threw him down, and then Dan Darrow and his two sons-in-law swarmed up the ladder in their nightshirts. “Browson, what in Cragget’s name are you at?”
Browson was blinking, stupid with sleep and scared. He saw the knife in his own hand and dropped it in terror.
John fumbled his spectacles on as one of the men said, “He pulled steel on His Lordship here, sir!”
“I didn’t! I didn’t do nuthin’, sir!” Browson gasped. Darrow’s eyes grew flinty, for it wasn’t an unheard-of thing for bandit gangs