KNIGHT OF THE DEMON QUEEN
BOOK THREE OF THE WINTERLANDS QUARTET
Barbara Hambly
HarperVoyager
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2000
Copyright © Barbara Hambly 2000
Map © Shelly Shapiro
Cover illustration © Nakonechnyi Jaroslav
Cover design by Andrew Davis © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019
Barbara Hambly asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780008374228
Ebook Edition © October 2019 ISBN: 9780008374235
Version: 2019-10-14
Contents
Copyright
Maps
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
About the Author
Also by Barbara Hambly
About the Publisher
JENNY WAYNEST’S SON Ian took poison on the night of winter’s first snowfall. He was thirteen.
She was dreaming about the demon when it happened. The demon was called Amayon, beautiful as the night and the morning, and she had dreamed of him every night since fall, when his possession of her had ended. While her soul was imprisoned in a pale green crystal, he had inhabited her flesh and done such things as still made her wake weeping, or screaming, or speaking his name out of a longing so desperate she thought she would die of it.
In daylight the grief of his loss, and her shame at that grief, occupied her mind against her will, to the exclusion of all other things. Otherwise she would have seen—she hoped she would have seen—the pain and horror growing in her son’s eyes.
This night there was a part of her that knew where Ian was. In her dream she saw him in the small stone house on Frost Fell—the house that had been her master Caerdinn’s up to the old man’s death. Later Jenny had lived there, until she had gone with Lord John Aversin, Thane of the Winterlands and her lover of ten years, to live at Alyn Hold. Asleep in their bed at the Hold now, she saw their son in the old stone house, saw him descend the stairs from the loft and with a glance, as wizards could, kindle the wood on the hearth.
He shouldn’t be there, she thought. It was past midnight and the snow had been falling since just before dark. He shouldn’t be there.
Rest, Amayon’s voice whispered. Sleepy dreams are better than plans and schemes.
Her consciousness drifted away.
Ever since the magics of the Demon Queen Aohila had taken Amayon from her, Jenny had tried to decide whether the pain she felt was a memory that Amayon had left or whether he spoke to her still. Sometimes she thought that she could hear his voice, gentle and trusting as a child’s, though he was Aohila’s prisoner behind the Mirror of Isychros. At other times she guessed that the coaxing sweetness, the hurtful mocking, were only a poison he’d left to make her suffer. How like him, she thought, and she did not know if she thought it fondly or with hatred.
Maybe both.
People who survived possession weren’t the same afterward.
Her mind returned to her son. He sat beside the hearth, his head bowed, thin fingers twisting at his dark hair.
She remembered her own pain when the demon who’d possessed her had been driven out.
At least he still has magic.
The loss of Jenny’s magic, as a result of the final battle with the demons, had been the worst of all.
You saved them, the sweet soft voice whispered in her mind: like Amayon’s voice, though sometimes it sounded like her own. You fought the demons for your son, and for Lord John, and for the Regent of the Realm. You did just as you ought. Yet you lost everything. How fair is that?
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