Knight of the Demon Queen Read Online Free PDF Page B

there were nothing in the space at all. No light trickled in with the cold—Jenny had no idea what time it was. With the wind rising and dense cloud covering the stormy sky, it could have been dawn or twilight or midnight. Her candle glow touchedthe herbs, homey comforting bundles, like an upended forest over her head.
    Yet there was something wrong. Jenny stood, candle in hand, listening, trying to sense what exactly it was.
    Her dream?
she thought.
Folcalor?
    She had the sense of having had another dream, or some other awareness while she dreamed—eternally and repetitively—of Aohila, of Amayon, of John’s betrayal. Closing her eyes, she walked back in her mind to the mirror chamber, as she’d seen it in her dream, and it seemed to her for a little time that she could hear something else, some voice whispering…
    It seemed that as she stood in the mirror chamber, looking at John in his flame-scarred and grubby doublet with the fourteen prisoned Sea-wights around his feet, someone or something was standing behind her. Someone that she knew with a hideous intimacy.
    Someone who had hurt her and had laughed at her while she wept.
    She knew if she turned around she would see him—it. And the sight would destroy her, because the horrible thing she would see would be herself: a woman capable of causing her own child’s suicide, a woman who had betrayed the man she loved a thousand times.
    Go downstairs and dream again by the fire.
    You do need to rest.
    In that mirror chamber in her heart she turned around. And of course there was nothing there but shadows.
    She opened her eyes. Her single candle flame bent and flickered in the draft, the heavy rafters she had known since girlhood taking on sinister weight and darkness overhead. There was a bundle of candles under the spare bed, candles she’d made five summers ago, and she tookhalf a dozen and lit them, looking carefully around her for any sign of the wrongness she felt.
    But the light seemed to dispel whatever it was that had troubled her. The room was as it had always been: a big open space beneath the tall slant of the thatch. Spare bed, bundles of candles, bags of dried corn and barley spelled a year ago against mice. Blankets and quilts and old coats, snowshoes and boots. The sense she had had, of wrongness and evil, seemed to have folded itself away into a shadow.
    And maybe a shadow was all it had been.
    Storm winds smote the house, and all the candle flames bent and jittered with it.
More snow
, Jenny thought.
    But the thought didn’t bring with it the urge to sleep again, merely a reflection that with her hands twisted as they were, it would take longer to wield the shovel to dig herself clear. She opened the window long enough to pull the shutters closed and bar them, then made her choices among the dried herbs, gathering the little bundles and holding them in her skirt. As an afterthought she looked for a clean skirt, a clean shift, a clean bodice from the chest of spare clothes, then went downstairs to tidy the kitchen.
    Behind her she thought the shadows whispered, but she did not look back.

CHAPTER THREE
    John’s study was a round chamber at the top of the tower that in his father’s time had doubled as a depot for emergency food stores and a lookout post in bad weather. Wide windows faced the cardinal points and made the place almost impossible to heat. As a child, John had fallen into the habit of studying there, away from his father’s eye, and hiding his books among the grain sacks.
    Now a lifetime’s plunder of learning stacked desk, worktable, and the plank shelves that filled every available inch of wall space. Candles—or the slumped, exhausted remains of them—sprouted like fungi among the dilapidated volumes, stalagmites of tallow bearding every shelf, corner, and lamp stand. Scrolls, parchment, piles of papyrus drifted every horizontal surface like dried leaves. The rafters were a spiderweb of experimental hoists and pulleys, the shelves