He tried to pull me further out of the water. “Do you think you could walk if I supported you? I could probably carry you, but I’m afraid of dropping you with the floor so slippery.”
“Help me up.” Although all my joints ached excruciatingly, I could actually stand. I checked my throat for fang marks and my chest for a hole and found nothing. But my red velvet jacket streamed with water, now as thoroughly ruined as my new suit.
“But why did you come down now?”
“Just now, fifteen minutes ago, I felt a sudden certainty that whatever was going to happen was over. Whether the demon would go or stay, or you would live or die-and when I reached the cellars, most of the brimstone was gone.”
We proceeded slowly up a long slope, out of the standing water, me half collapsed against Joachim and both his arms around me. Abruptly I stopped, and he stopped with me. “Oh, no,” I said. “I’ve broken the agreement by coming back to life. The demon must still be here.”
“Is he?” asked Joachim, very low in my ear.
I took a breath and managed to find enough words of the Hidden Language to probe for evil. There was none. When I had walked down this corridor into the cellars, the air had been so permeated with evil I had barely been able to move. Now there was nothing but abandoned store rooms whose floors flowed with icy water. I probed further. There was no evil mind in the castle, not even the oblique touch of the demon when he had been hiding from me. He was indeed gone.
“It’s all right,” I said, fairly complacently considering that I was now shivering so hard I had trouble speaking through chattering teeth. “I thought I’d done the negotiations right. The demon killed me and went back to hell without either the Lady Maria’s soul or mine.”
“Let’s keep moving, then,” said Joachim gently.
We staggered on to the foot of the stairs. A big silver crucifix leaned against the open cellar door. Here Joachim did have to carry me, lifting me with a grunt over his shoulder. “Thank you for bringing me back to life,” I gasped.
“I had nothing to do with it. The saints had mercy on you and interceded with God for a miracle.”
I had my own ideas about who had enough influence with the saints to bring that about, but it was too hard to argue. Joachim carried me up the cellar stairs to the courtyard.
The sky was dark, except for some faint streaks of light in the east. Swung across Joachim’s shoulder, I took as deep a breath as I could of the cold winter air.
As we came into the courtyard, I saw a swirl of faces, of people I had believed thirty miles away, and heard a sudden incoherent murmur of voices. This was all too confusing to me in my present state, so I let my eyes fall shut again. Joachim paused, and the voices were all around us.
“He’s alive!” he said in a tone of command that carried over all the rest. “Now, in the name of God, step back and let us pass!”
They fell silent, and Joachim strode on, while I wondered without much curiosity what had happened.
But when we reached my chambers, he had to turn and bend down so that I could reach out and touch the magic lock with my palm to free the spell. With the demon gone, my locks should be safe after this, and I would be able to write letters without the paper being permeated with the supernatural influence of a demon who had been rummaging through my possessions.
Inside, Joachim pulled my drenched clothes off and wrapped me in blankets while he found me some pajamas. He pulled my bed close to the fire and knelt to rekindle the blaze. As I fell among the pillows, I saw that his clothes too were filthy and soaking.
“I’m afraid you’ve ruined your new vestments coming for me,” I said. At the moment it seemed inexpressibly sad that he had done so.
But he shook his head and smiled. “I’ll go change and come right back to sit with you. I want to make sure you don’t develop pneumonia.”
“What day is it?”
“It’s dawn of New Year’s day, the morning after you went to meet the demon.”
“I think I’ll go to sleep now,” I said indistinctly, feeling warm waves of sleep breaking over me as I slowly stopped shivering. “But I think when I wake up I’m going to be very hungry.”
IV
I had of course done everything wrong. I thought about this with pleasant detachment some twenty-four hours later, from what seemed a great distance, lying comfortably propped up in a warm bed with the sun pouring through my windows, eating cinnamon crullers and drinking scalding tea. My breakfast tray was decorated with holly.
Joachim had gone to celebrate morning service in the chapel, but I had managed to wake up enough to speak briefly to him before he left and to order my breakfast. Everyone, it turned out, was home again.
The first place I had gone wrong was in being too frightened for months to admit the obvious to myself, that a demon was loose in Yurt. Nothing else, not even a master wizard, could have repeatedly broken my magic locks as though they were cobwebs, or filled the cellars with such a powerful sense of evil that even a first-year wizardry student would have felt it. I should have realized at once what was happening, rather than waiting until it brought a dragon down on us.
My second mistake was going down alone to face the demon, when I could no longer ignore its presence. With the duchess’s assistance, I doubtless could have persuaded the Lady Maria to stay safely inside, at least for a few days, and the knights to delay their attack. That should have given me enough time to send a message to the City, to ask for help from one of the experts in demonology. Someone else might have been able to persuade the demon to leave in return for far less than a human life. In retrospect, this had probably not been one of the “little problems” that Zahlfast had said I would have to solve on my own.
Finally, even if it was going to take a human life to return the demon to hell, I should have demanded at least a short period of grace. If I had had a day or two before what had almost been my death, I might have been able to use my own natural charms to win many more kisses from the queen.
Gwen came in at this point in my deliberations. She did not meet my eyes. “I’d like about that much again,” I said, handing her the empty breakfast tray.
She took it with a little duck of the head, not with a saucy look, not even with the smile an elderly uncle might deserve. I realized she had not said anything or even looked at me directly when she brought me my food originally. She was treating me with the same reserve she showed the king.
“You can talk to me, Gwen,” I said, holding onto my end of the tray until she had to look up. “I’m not so weak that I must have absolute silence.”
Her eyes were very wide when they finally met mine. “Excuse me, sir, I don’t want to seem rude,” she said hesitantly. “But- I never knew anyone who miraculously returned from the dead before.”
I hadn’t either, of course, but I saw no reason that she should treat me with awe on that account. “That has nothing to do with me personally,” I said hurriedly. “It was the chaplain’s prayers that worked the miracle.” I realized I was as anxious as Joachim to disavow any personal merit-with the important distinction that he was wrong to do so and I was right.
“But how did you know I was dead?” I asked when she remained silent. “Were you out there in the courtyard last night-or I guess it was night before last?” She stared at me without speaking, so I smiled and said, “All right, Gwen, I’ll ask you something simpler. Sit down-you can bring the chair closer than that! How about if you tell me why all of you left the duchess’s castle to come back here?”
She examined one of her thumb nails with apparent fascination but spoke clearly. “We realized something was wrong when our chaplain took the queen’s stallion from the duchess’s stables. The stable boys couldn’t stop him. They ran to tell the constable, and he told the king. Nobody could imagine why he’d done it. They asked me if I knew anything, since I had just been up for the chaplains’ trays a few minutes’ earlier, and when I said that you’d been with him, they realized that you were gone too.”