Free Knight of the Demon Queen by Barbara Hambly Page B

and aching with hunger, Jenny heard their voices and the squeak of booted feet in the snow, far off. She found herself holding her breath until they came into sight among the twisted trees of the dale below: The boy and girl were still alive, and little Sunny was a tiny bundle clinging to her father’s bent back.
    Even as she breathed a prayer of thanks Jenny wondered,
Why keep children alive?
They couldn’t have been easy to travel with. Young Dal was eight and barely keeping up; the rope that circled his wrists was being dragged on by a thickset oaf with a beard like a dead dog. Lyra, too, was staggering, her bloodied skirts and her husband’s averted eyes speaking clearly of how the bandits had used her. Jenny shivered with anger, and her hunger and fatigue dissolved.
    “They festerin’ better be here soon,” the bandit leader grumbled, making a careful check of the encircling wall while Dead Dog Beard scouted inside the tower. “You,Hero—” He motioned to Dal. “You clear the snow off there.” He pointed to the half-covered remains of the hall at the tower’s foot. “We’re too festerin’ close to Alyn for me.”
    “We can see the track from the top of the tower,” a blond-bearded man pointed out soothingly. “We’ll have plenty of time to see a patrol.”
    “Well, I didn’t know you could witchfesterin’ motherless see in the dark, Crake. But since you can, you can be the one who keeps witchfesterin’ watch tonight if they don’t show up.”
    “Just send me up a bottle of that wine and I’ll watch all you can ask for,” Crake responded.
    “Mother Hare’s tits, I’m thirsty.”
    “You leave that wine alone,” the leader snarled.
    “What, the gnomes ain’t gonna bring their own wine?”
    From her post in the pine Jenny listened, coldly calculating what had to be done. She recognized two of the bandits from Balgodorus Black-Knife’s band, whom she’d helped Baron Pellanor of Palmorgin fight last summer. When they finished checking the tower, they sent up a watchman to its top, then proceeded to make themselves comfortable around a fire in the semiopen hall ruins; it was a fairly easy matter for Jenny to creep along a branch to one of the broken-out windows of the tower and down to where the packs—and the wine bottles— were stowed in the jumble of broken rafters and fallen tiles that was the tower’s lowest room. As she poured the nightshade into the bottles, she could hear the bandits outside.
    “Can we have the skirt again ’fore the gnomes take her away?”
    “You keep your mind on your business and your cod in your britches.”
    “You, junior—you’re ten, remember? You think they’ll take that little ’un anyway? They said from ten up.”
    “Let’s see. They may want ’em younger. If not, no problem.”
    Just after dark the man on watch called out, “Company coming!” and Jenny heard a man’s voice speak out of the darkness, “In whose name are you here?”
    “In the name of the King beneath the Sea,” the bandit leader called out. The King beneath the Sea was Giton, boy-husband of the Yellow-Haired Goddess Balyna in Southern legend, but the name could as easily be applied to Adromelech, the Archdemon Lord of the Sea-wights, or his servant Folcalor.
    Jenny, crouched in the darkness, held her breath. Having inspected the tower ruin once, the bandits were not disposed to do it again, and any chance sound she might have made was amply covered by the cows and horse they’d penned there. Still her heart pounded as the bandit leader came in and took the wine bottles.
    They drank to one another, and to their bargain, the deep, oddly timbred voices of the gnomes bickering over prices and deferring to their human leader about the little girl Sunny. “Well, we can certainly try—” that voice said, and Jenny felt a queer cold stirring of recognition. She knew it, or one like it “—so long as she gives no trouble.”
    “You hear that, Sweetlips? You keep your brat