Free Knight of the Demon Queen by Barbara Hambly

enslaved mage’s powers to capture and imprison other wizards.
    Why?
    And he was seeking to do it again.
    Why?
    At the Hold, Peg told her Ian and Muffle had ridden out that morning to deal with sickness in the village of Great Toby. “They hadn’t heard over there yet that you wasn’t at the Hold,” the gatekeeper explained apologetically. “The sickness isn’t much—Granny Brown’s rheumatism—so Master Ian said not to trouble you with it.”
    “Thank you,” Jenny said, tucking her halberd against her shoulder and blowing on her hands. Even if Ian and Muffle were a few hours ahead of her, she’d encounter them in Great Toby. It would be near dark by the time she reached the village, and almost certainly snowing again.
    “Would you do me a favor and ask Sparrow to send one of her girls up to the Fell to look after Moon Horse, if I’m not back tonight?” Jenny asked. Diffidently, she added, “John hasn’t returned yet, has he?” For through the gate arch she saw Bill lead Battlehammer across the yard.
    Peg shook her head. “Dan Darrow brought the old boy back yesterday,” she said, turning to follow Jenny’s eyes. “He says His Lordship was there at the half moon; left the horse and went on into the Wraithmire alone. Old Dan said he thought as how John might be tracking something, by the weapons he bore.”
    “The half moon?” Jenny said, and glanced at the sickle of the day moon just visible among the slow-gathering clouds.
    “I don’t like it.” Peg hunched her shoulders in her mountain of wolf hides, plaids, and bright-colored knit-work scarves. “Muffle don’t like it, neither. He’s been pacing over the place at night as if he’d left something somewhere, looking in all the same places.”
    The half moon, Jenny thought, quickening her stride as she passed through the village and over the barrenfields. The road to Great Toby was laid out to avoid a slough, and Jenny knew she could cut nearly an hour off her walk by going through the woods. She moved with instinctive caution, seeking out deadfalls and places where the snow had been rucked and trampled by wild pigs or scoured by last night’s winds. It wasn’t unheard-of for bandits to come this close to the Hold walls, or even for them to raid one of the few isolated farms hereabouts, and she was acutely aware that she no longer had spells of “look over there” to keep her from their sight.
    Even in the days of the kings, gangs of bullies and outlaws had preyed on the farms, hiding in the woods to steal cattle or pigs or to capture the occasional villager to sell as a slave to the gnomes of the mountains. With the return of the King’s troops and the King’s law three years ago, John had for the first time in anyone’s memory been able to make headway against them.
    But with law, the King’s troops had brought more men, insubordinates and hard cases both in the legions and among the serfs of the manors established to feed the garrisons. In the past year, John had been certain that the bandits had entered the slave business in earnest, systematically kidnapping serfs who for the most part had been forcibly relocated to the North anyway.
    Thus when Jenny saw the quick darting of half a dozen foxes away to her left in the white woods and found they’d been feeding on a dead sheep at the end of a long blood trail, the first thing she thought was,
Bandits
. When she followed the trail back to Rushmeath Farm, she knew it.
    House and barn stood open and empty. By the trampled tracks and the blood on the snow Jenny read the tale of the attack: read, too, that it had taken placejust after dawn. Heartsick with dread she searched for Dal and Lyra’s children, knowing that the gnomes had no use for anything but healthy adults in the deep tunnels of their endless mines.
    But she found no trace of the youngsters, queer—no blood, no torn clothing, no sign of wolf tracks hauling a tiny corpse back to a lair. And in the mucked stew of tracks she