Knight of the Demon Queen Read Online Free PDF Page A

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’sdim 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