saddle by the light of a wavering flare, then John went up the tower stairs two at a time, shedding his wet plaids and sheepskin coat as he went. There was a part of him that did not want to reach the door of his room.
But Ian lay propped in the shadows of the bed, and something altered in the blank blue gaze as John came through the door. “Papa?”
“You all right, Son?” And he cursed himself for the offhand tone in his voice—offhand, as he’d had to be about everything when he was a child Ian’s age and younger, fighting not to let his own father crush him inside.
Ian nodded and let himself be embraced. He started to speak, as if to remark on the cold that still clung to the metal plates of John’s rough leather doublet and to his snow-flecked hair, but then did not. John didn’t know whether this was something the demon had done to him—this trick of reconsideration, of backing down from any speech, as if fearing it would reveal or disarm or obligate him—or whether it was a thing of his years, or perhaps only of his self. Still Ian held onto his arm for a moment, the first reassurance he had sought, his face pressed to the grubby sleeve.
And John fought not to say, Why did you take the poison? Why didn’t you speak to me?
Uncharacteristically it was Ian who broke the silence. He coughed, his voice still barely a thread. “I heard Muffle talking about fever …”
Of course he would. He had a mage’s senses, which could pick up the murmur of voices in the kitchen three floors below.
“Should I get up and go down to the village?”
“In a while.” John sat on the edge of the bed. A protesting meep sounded beneath the quilts, and one of the humped covers moved. John wanted to say, Your mother can handle it, but he let the words go. He suspected Jenny would be helpless against this illness, and Ian also.
In any event this was the first interest Ian had shown in anything since his return to the North.
“It doesn’t sound like any of the fevers I’ve read about in Mother’s books.” Ian sank against the pillows, exhausted by the effort of sitting up, and Skinny Kitty emerged from beneath the comforters to sit on his chest. “Tonight could you bring down from the library what you have about diseases? There has to be some cause.”
“Aye,” John said softly, knowing the cause. “Aye, son. I’ll do that.”
He remained until Ian slept again. It wasn’t long. Even after the boy’s eyes slipped closed John stayed seated beside the bed, holding his hand. Watching the too-thin face in its tangled frame of black hair, the wasted fingers twined with his own. Remembering the child Jenny had borne but had not wanted to raise—the child she had left at the Hold for him when she returned to Frost Fell to meditate, to concentrate, to patiently strive at increasing her small abilities in magic to the level of true power. He saw again the demon fire in the boy’s eyes as Ian was drawn toward the dragon Centhwevir, already under the wizard Caradoc’s control.
Where had these demons been for a thousand years? he wondered, riffling Skinny Kitty’s gray fur. It had been that long since spawn from the Hell behind the burning mirror had destroyed Ernine, that long since the mages of the forgotten city of Prokeps had summoned Sea-wights to aid them in what human magic couldn’t do alone. Fighting wars among themselves and leaving humankind at the mercy of the smaller pooks and gyres, which could be cast out or guarded against with a spell?
Why a thousand years ago?
Why now?
Gently he disengaged his hand from Ian’s and peered into the boy’s face. His son slept calmly, something he had seldom done since he was a child. Skinny Kitty purred drowsily and kneaded with her paws.
I can cure your son.
John blew out the candles by the bed and by the fire’s dim glow crossed the room to seek the steps that led to his library.
Asleep before the hearth, Jenny dreamed of Amayon. Dreams of him—of his love and of the power he’d given her—were so much easier than waking now.
She dreamed of the mirror chamber in the ruins of Ernine in the South, of John standing before the blacked-over doorway of the glass with the seven spikes of crystal and quicksilver that Caradoc had used to dominate and control the dragons. With the spikes lay seven vessels—seashells, snuff bottles, hollowed-out stones—containing the Hellspawned spirits that had possessed the mages: old Bliaud, Ian, the two Icerider children Summer and Werecat, the witch girl Yseult, little Miss Enk the gnomewife … And herself.
She could have sketched from memory every bump and spike and curve of the seashell that prisoned Amayon. It was the only one that she had truly seen. The only thing that she truly thought about.
It, and Amayon’s screams when Aohila had taken those fourteen spirits behind the mirror, to torture them for eternity.
In her mind she heard again Amayon’s desperate pleading, telling her how the mirror demons hated the Sea-wights, how they could never die, could never be free of pain. She had hated John then for giving them over, and the hatred stirred anew, drawing her mind back to its old circular paths.
Drawing it aside from the fact that there should have been eight vessels there, not seven.
Folcalor, Ian had said.
And, I will not go.
In the first second of waking, Jenny thought, Folcalor wasn’t taken. Folcalor wasn’t sent behind the mirror. He was the demon who possessed Caradoc, the rebel demon who started this whole affair …
And then a voice whispered in her mind, Sleepy dreams, Jenny. Sleepy dreams, not plans and schemes. It’s all over now.
She saw John’s eyes looking at her across Ian’s body and wanted only to sleep again.
Snow had piled thick before the house door. She made herself get up and slipped through a tiny passway from the kitchen that let her into the stable. There she fed Moon Horse and mucked out her stall, her numb hands crooked as bird claws around rake and hay fork. The effort exhausted her, and without eating or washing—it seemed too much effort even to boil water for gruel—she returned to her quilts and the comfort of her dreams.
All care for her life seemed to have dried with her menses. The symptoms she had once kept at bay with her spells returned to tear at her, so she could not rest. Blind with migraine, she crept about her few tasks like an old woman, feeding the fire and boiling a little snow water to drink.
In her memories Amayon was still with her. Magic flowed in her veins.
Let your magic go, Morkeleb had said to her, Morkeleb the Black, the dragon of Nast Wall.
Let your magic go.
She hadn’t known then that it would not come back.
In her dreams she saw him, beautiful beyond beauty: the black glittering specter in the darkness of the gnomes’ Deep at Ylferdun, the cold voice like the echo of far-off singing that spoke in the hollows of her mind. Know you not your own power, Wizard-woman? he had asked her once. Know you not what you could be?
And later, when he had begun to change, to become a dragonshadow of smoke and starlight: I would that I
