Free Knight of the Demon Queen by Barbara Hambly Page A

picked out those of Gerty and Young Dal, as well as those of their parents, heading south and east, deeper into the Wyrwoods.
    Jenny glanced around her as if taking counsel from the zebra-striped silence of the winter woods. It was two hours’ walk back to the Hold, nearly three to Great Toby. According to Peg, the Alyn militia was out on patrol and might not return until dark. It would be snowing by then, and these tracks would be covered. And the half dozen bandits who’d raided the farm would have rendezvoused with either the gnomes or with the main body of their own gang. In either case someone would have pointed out that the gnomes wouldn’t buy the children.
    As she set out after the tracks, she identified in her mind the three possible camping places they’d make for. Almost due south was a hollow with a spring, thickly covered by trees, that would provide protection against the snow. More easterly lay a cave in the bank where the Queen’s Beck cut under the hills on the edge of the bleak fell country, and north and east of that was a deeper cut protected on three sides by the fells.
    It quickly became clear they weren’t moving south. As she followed the tracks through the quick-falling darkness, Jenny counted footprints and estimated the strength of the party: seven men, two of whom scouted ahead and to the sides in a businesslike fashion. They’d taken Dal’stwo cows, his horse, and to judge by the depth of the tracks, a good deal of food. They were pitifully easy to follow. If they were heading east, Jenny thought, they’d be making for the old Brighthelm Tower in the hills. If northeast, they’d be meeting in either Shern Hollow or the big caves under Wild Man Fell, all customary haunts of bandits. She could overtake them there…
    And what?
    Even as a witch-wife of small powers, before dragon magic had entered her flesh, Jenny had never truly thought she could be enslaved. Killed, possibly. But never carried off like a common woman: raped, sold to the gnomes. She was a solitary woman, alone in the woods with her knife, her halberd…
    … and forty-three years’ knowledge and experience of tracking, of watching, of silence.
    When it became obvious that the bandits were headed due east, Jenny veered away and sought the low ground of a frozen pond deeper in the woods, where nightshade grew in the summer. She found thickets of it buried under the snow, and as darkness gathered and snow began to fall, she harvested handfuls of the dried leaves. In the shelter of an oak tree she made a small fire, and in her drinking cup, the only open vessel she had with her, boiled snow water and the crushed leaves, over and over, until she’d made up a tincture. This she stored in her water bottle, wrapped herself in plaids and coat and cloak beside the fire, and fell to sleep hungry.
    Mother Mag
, she prayed to the One who watched over children,
don’t let them kill them before I get there…
    Look after Ian. Look after John.
    Next morning she found where they’d camped, in the cave by the Queen’s Beck, where she couldn’t have got to them anyway. By now they’d be on their way toBrighthelm Tower. With five prisoners and livestock, the bandits wouldn’t be moving fast. Jenny swung wide to avoid their scouts and eventually reached the tower: a couple of stories of the keep, a broad ring of crumbled stone that had been a court, and a clutch of pine trees that John would never have suffered to grow anywhere close to any defensive position of his.
    Jenny climbed a pine tree and stayed there. The tower would be the first place the scouts would search, and there was no other place close where her tracks would not show in the new-fallen snow. Though she swept behind her with a pine bough and leaped from occasional bare rock to bare rock beneath the trees, she wasn’t sure the deception would pass by daylight.
    But the bandits didn’t arrive until dusk, as the last thin nail paring of the old moon set. Cramped, frozen,