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XX. Of Dights & Demons

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Thomas placed the three little pyramids on the table. Isabella, the Waits, and Orrels leaned in close to examine them.

“Puzzle boxes,” guessed the sheriff, who then looked to him for confirmation.

He shook his head.

Orrels picked one up and turned it over and over, then held it up between thumb and forefinger to peer at it. “It has these shapes etched into every side. It’s heavier than I’d expected, as if there’s some hidden attachment to the floor. Even lead wouldn’t weigh this much, would it?”

Thomas said, “I don’t know, but I suspect you’re right.”

“Well, if not puzzle boxes, what are they?”

He gestured at the body. “A different demon, in league with this one, called them dights. All I know of them is that if you stand one on its apex and set it to spinning, it will capture the mind of the person nearest it and hollow them out such that a demon like this one can take control, occupy, become them.”

Sheriff Orrels laughed in disbelief. He took the dight he held and tried to spin it. It fell over and rolled off the table. Thomas caught it. “You really ought not to do that.”

“Why, you can’t even make the . . . spinner spin.”

“Nor would I want to,” Thomas replied.

Isabella asked, “To whom has this spinner been applied? Who has fallen victim to it?” Orrels looked at her as if to say Don’t humor him. “Well, I want an example,” she said, then again to Thomas, “Who?”

Ele vos a envoié? echoed in his head as loudly as when he’d first heard it.

“Not this one, but another . . . Sheriff Orrels’s Norman counterpart.”

“What? Passelewe?” asks Isabella. “You can’t be serious.”

Thomas replies, “Who do you suppose sent this creature disguised as one of his guards to carry these off? Where do you think they were being taken?”

No one had an answer for that. Into the uncomfortable silence, Maurin said, “But we report to the man.” He stared at Isabella Birkin for confirmation.

Elias added, “And we see him almost daily. Surely one of us would have penetrated his disguise.”

Of course they didn’t understand. They all thought Thomas was describing glamouring. He would need to elaborate, but then they were going to demand he explain how he knew so much, and what was he going to say: “I lived with them for twenty years though it was only a few months in Ailfion”? No, he wanted to keep everyone from asking more questions about him.

“Osbert,” he said. “You and Geoffrey and the others came across a body on the King’s Way through Sherwood.”

“Oh, that were nothing. Somebody’s joke—just a wet skellington done up in bishop’s garb and covered in soup like.”

He shook his head and held up the dight. “Whoever it was, he’d met one of these. It cored him out. He’d have gone along, looking as normal as anyone if Little John—Reynold—hadn’t put an arrow through him, breaking the bond.”

Orrels made a face of disbelief. “First, I don’t remotely believe you. Second, if what you say is true, you’ve just identified your friend Greenleaf as a murderer. Not the wisest—”

“The bishop of Doncaster is gone missing.”

At this pronouncement everyone turned to face Will Scathelock.

Uncomfortably, he continued, “I learned of it this morning just before the contests. Prior Walter of Felley Priory told me. Doncaster was to have stayed the night with him before the fair. He never arrived. I reported it to Isabella, but we’ve had no time to inquire further.”

Orrels bellowed, “Well, which is it? A jape of some sort, or the bishop of Doncaster? Do I arrest your friend for murder or you for your grotesque flight of fancy? You’re like one of those mad village women who swears she’s flown through the skies with the pagan goddess Diana when we all know she’s gone nowhere at all!” He appeared near-apoplectic.

Thomas set down the dight. Quietly, he said, “I told you, outlaws weren’t the problem now.”

The sheriff leaned on the table while he composed himself. “Is there,” he asked, “not a chance you can demonstrate even one of these things at work as you describe?”

Thomas replied, “You are a danger to yourself, Sheriff. Even did I know how to start one spinning, please God and I would never want to.”

“Which I take to mean that you have seen one of these put to diabolical use.”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“A place far from here that was called Oakmill.” He closed his eyes, knowing there was no avoiding what the sheriff would ask next.

“Who was it used on, then?”

“My wife.” He raised his head and stared Orrels down. For all that he’d tried to lead the talk away from her, Janet remained inextricably bound, woven into the pattern of events forever. He could have explained that she’d escaped, but his point was better made letting them think what they liked.

The silence stretched on until suddenly Geoffrey exclaimed, “Oh, my Lord!” and pointed. They all turned to look.

The Yvag, lying in a pool of black blood, was stirring, its fingers closing and opening. And impossibly the blood seemed to be shrinking, resorbing back into the body.

“But it was dead!”

Scathelock took a step nearer to lean over it. “Look, even its armor is healing. How can that be?” He looked at everyone, finally at Thomas, for an answer.

Thomas turned and crossed the room as if making to leave. “Stop now!” shouted the sheriff. He drew his short sword.

Reaching the stand of pole arms by the door, Thomas grabbed hold of a Danish axe, drew and carried it back through their midst. They all stepped aside as if fearful he might use it on them. Orrels, however, sheathed his sword. Like Will and Maurin, he peered more closely at the creature. It seemed finally that he accepted what was happening.

As he crossed the room, Thomas said, “They have remarkable healing powers, the Yvag do. So, too, their armor. It stitches itself up as if it is a living thing. If you leave this creature alone for an hour it will stand up and walk out of here to report to Passelewe. It’ll be cloaked again in mail under that torn surcoat. First, though, it will kill everyone in here.”

“I don’t understand—you opened up its entire side,” the sheriff said. “How . . . ?” He shook his head, defeated by what he beheld.

“I know. Not sure how I missed all its vitals.” Then as an afterthought added: “It’s not made like us.”

“What is it like, then?” asked Elias.

“Like something bred with an insect, a worm, a creature out of the sea perhaps.”

“But shouldn’t we let it live, then?” he suggested. “I mean, in order to ask it questions. To understand. Surely, it’s one of God’s creatures.”

Again, they had no idea what was occurring even as they looked on. This was resurrection, and they had only one model for that. “If it opens its eyes, the first thing it will do is alert Passelewe that all of you know the truth of him and that you have possession of the dights. If you haul it into a cell to interrogate it, you’ll be overwhelmed by an urge to give it your weapons or to kill those in your company.” He was recalling Old Melrose as Alderman Stroud ordered him to kill Waldroup . . . and hadn’t he almost? Only a misworded command had saved them both. The Yvag knew no mercy, gave no quarter. They thought the universe belonged to them.

No more time to waste. This could all be debated after the fact. He turned back to the creature and lifted the Danish axe. Orrels raised a hand and said, “Wait,” as he strode nearer.

Whether or not the sheriff’s boot brushed the Yvag’s arm, that arm suddenly bent in the wrong direction and its long fingers closed around his ankle with a grip so strong that Orrels cried out and dropped down on one knee. The golden eyes opened and bored into his.

With a shout, Thomas swung the axe so hard that the blade sparked against the stone floor, and the silver-haired, green-gray head shot away toward the cell doors. Black blood sprayed the floor and ran thickly like treacle off the blade.

Isabella and Elias jumped in and dragged Orrels away. He yipped as his ankle twisted free of the creature’s clutch, still inflexible in death. They set him on his stool. He was pale as parchment and sweating.

Thomas laid the axe across the table so that the blade dripped off the side of it, away from them all. He met the sheriff’s pained gaze. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I hope it’s not broken.”

Orrels pinched sweat from his eyelids. “All right,” he answered, “what do we need to stop Passelewe?”


Zhanedd was confused and concerned. The human that knew Nicnevin’s name had eluded both Simforax and Kunastur in the tunnels. The most likely explanation, it seemed initially, was that he had simply outrun them. Reglamoured, Zhanedd let the two of them pursue him. She had more drunken archers and outlaws in The Pilgrim to probe.

Yet, not ten minutes later the same human had emerged from the deep caves in the company of two other mortals as though there had been no pursuit, no one wanting to catch him, no one hunting him at all.

How had he rendered himself invisible to both the guards and Zhanedd? Had these other two hidden him somewhere in the caves? No one had been watching them, so that seemed most likely. She almost regretted being unprepared to stab him on his way out, but he had revealed a true memory of the Queen, and Zhanedd would know more. For instance, when had the remembered event taken place?

Of course it was well established that the Queen took the occasional human plaything. Her personal escort all knew that, when she joined those going out to secure the latest teind, it almost always meant that she was on the prowl for a new toy. They never lasted long. She rode them, usually to death, in the name of getting herself with child. She claimed it was to expand, even revive the line. The Yvagvoja, however (and Zhanedd knew a few), had a different opinion: They suspected Nicnevin to be overcome with the same lust they experienced when bonding with a human conveyance.

Zhanedd had now enjoyed fucking three of the humans in The Pilgrim, and had to admit it was indeed a heady mix—maybe not quite what the Yvagvoja experienced in human guise, but impossible to deny. Zhanedd wondered if, somewhere in the dim past of their so-called faery realm, the Queen had herself been Yvagvoja and had given herself completely to the pleasures of human flesh. Yvag history, with its jumps to new worlds, was so corrupt, so full of blank spaces, including a complete history of Nicnevin.

What Zhanedd knew was that one of Nicnevin’s toys had resulted in Bragrender, that horror. It hardly revived their line.

The human that had contributed to the distorted half-breed must have been dead a century or more by now. So who was this other mortal who’d eluded Passelewe’s two soldiers and Zhanedd, managed to disguise itself and escape? A toy of the Queen’s, but not one of which Zhanedd was aware.

In The Pilgrim, the strange mortal surrounded himself with more armed humans, and they all left together. Zhanedd’s curiosity got the better of her, and in a new shape, she followed them at a reasonable distance. Maybe she should have called for Passelewe’s soldiers again, but this was her initiative. If it paid off, she’d no intention of sharing the glory. Nicnevin had put her in charge—at least, she thought so until being warned off by the call of another Yvag, Tozesđin, who had disguised and entered the gaol where the humans were going. Excitedly, Tozesđin announced that he now possessed all three dights. Zhanedd held back, waited. Being part of such a triumph was better than nothing, though it smarted to think that Nicnevin had only pretended to put Zhanedd in charge of recovering the dights.

And then nothing, no further communication. It seemed Tozesđin had died.

Improbable as that might be, the humans had killed one of them. Perhaps it was simply a “stepping through the wrong gate” scenario, and the idiot Tozesđin had been surrounded, unable to cut a way home.

When was the last time that had happened? Zhanedd could think of no such event. As for humans killing Yvag, it had been a long time since the Queen’s favorite, Ađalbrandr, had been obliterated. To this day she said she regretted him. No one had dared to ask whether she meant she regretted his death or whether she regretted ever entertaining herself with the power-hungry fool. However that translated, no Yvag had perished since the death of Ađalbrandr. Until now.

The Queen had made recovery of the dights sound like the most noble of quests. She had picked Zhanedd for it; she said she had been watching the changelings for as long as there was memory, and Zhanedd had caught her attention. Why and how? Unknown. It made Zhanedd wonder about the identity of the humans from which she’d been taken. Despite the various gender pathways of the Yvag, Zhanedd knew instinctively she’d been a female human.

Then, as Zhanedd waited, the same group she had followed emerged from the gaol, save for the one she’d been following in the first place.


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