Daemons!

The next day, Orpaan showed Crispin the trickster women’s house. It was about three miles down the road, and if Crispin had kept going that night, he couldn’t have missed it. It was like an estate house straight out of the heartland, complete with a garden greener than anything else in the Wraithwaste. Orpaan insisted that the trickster women would know if they entered the barrier of oaks around the garden; Crispin was willing to risk it, to see if Rae was there, to get her back, but with Orpaan at his side, he dared not. They slunk all the way around the house and garden, keeping to the pines. No one came out or went in. But the presence of daemons was so concentrated that sometimes Crispin could hardly see for the shimmering of the air. The house gave off an aura of impregnability completely at odds with its comfortable, affluent appearance. Without having so much as glimpsed a trickster woman, Crispin knew they were horribly dangerous.

And they had Rae... !

Still, there was nothing further he could do now, and the day was only half-gone. In gratitude to Orpaan, he offered to take him fishing. Unbelievably, the child—the Wraith, as he and Jacithrew called themselves—did not know what fishing was. Crispin took him to the brook—to a spot well upstream from the daemon dell—and showed him, with string and bent thorns. They had to talk in whispers so as not to disturb the demogorgons that lived in the water. Crispin winced to think how often he and Rae had splashed unheedingly through the Wraithwaste streams.

They caught nothing, but it did not dampen Crispin’s spirits. Now that he had seen the house of trickery, he knew his enemy, and he felt that rescuing Rae might after all be within the realm of possibility. He tried not to think about spending another night with Jacithrew Humdroner in the claustrophobia-inducing underground house.

Orpaan too seemed content. As they walked back in the twilight, he grabbed Crispin’s hand and grinned. Crispin felt a surge of liking for the boy. It was Orpaan who had put Crispin to bed and brought him food; it was Orpaan who had answered his questions and showed him the house of trickery. What could Crispin ever do to reciprocate? Since he was already planning one rescue, perhaps he could just make it wholesale, and carry Orpaan off, too. Jacithrew was as dangerous as the trickster women in his own way.

But when they entered the clearing, all such thoughts were driven out of his mind by the sight of the old Wraith out in the open, upended inside a chaotic mass of wood and leather like a duck feeding on the bottom of a river. Clankings, tappings, and swears replaced the usual silence.

Crispin gaped, his suspicion that the old man was dotty becoming a certainty. He began to grow angry. What did the old loon think he was doing? All the bits of machinery that had lain about the root room were now arranged on the ground in the center of a stubby framework pod. Its leather wings stretched all the way across the clearing. Jacithrew was banging about with a hammer, singing to himself, as happy as a sandboy. When he heard their steps he bobbed upright, beaming. “See!” he shouted. “See, my flying machine!”

“Hannah helped him get the bits we couldn’t make,” Orpaan whispered, tugging at Crispin. “He says we’re going to fly away from here. He says we’re going to fly far, far away from the trickster women. But I thought he forgot. He hasn’t worked on it in ages.”

“It’ll never work!” Crispin said later, after he had persuaded the old man to leave his engineering for the night and come below ground for something to eat. He felt like a father to both of them. That should have been amusing, but it wasn’t. “You’re madder than a blue jay!”

The old hermit cackled. Inside his beard, his lower lip was poochy and soft. “You shall see yourself proved wrong-oh-wrong-oh, my boy! Tomorrow is the time! I am delighted”—from his seat on a tree stump stool, he made a bow—“to have a larger audience for my maiden flight than I anticipated.”

Crispin stared. “When you want to, you can talk like a fucking scholar.”

Jacithrew’s eyes were cloudy. He reached down, scrabbled in the pan of roasted hazelnuts, and stuffed several into his mouth. The pair’s food was left by Hannah, one of the trickster women, at the fork of the road. It was better than any Crispin had ever eaten. When he saw chicken soup and hazelnuts, his estimation of the trickster women had risen several notches. It had taken a great deal of self-restraint not to finish off the nuts as soon as he took them out of the fire. Courtesy! Courtesy! he thought, watching crumb-filled saliva drool down Jacithrew’s beard.

Jacithrew seemed to have decided that Crispin was worth talking to. Or perhaps—more likely—he did not know who he was talking to. On and on he went. On and on. Nine-tenths of his ramblings were pure nonsense; but he did not seem to mind argument. He even seemed to enjoy it. And even though the old Wraith was mad, Crispin could not resist challenging his absurd theories.

“My machine is of the soundest construction,” Jacithrew said proudly. “It will bear me up. I am light. And my daemons are as strong as any the pale bitches can catch.”

He waved a hand at the corner of the room, where the low-hanging roots shimmered in the bright light of the daemon glares. At least three very powerful daemons were squatting there, invisible. Another—Kankeris—guarded the door in the tree overhead. Seeing that one briefly materialize had given Crispin an understanding of the “shimmering trees” which he had noticed elsewhere in the Wraithwaste. Under each of those trees, he guessed now, had been a root room, the home of Wraiths.

Hopefully, better balanced Wraiths than these. Crispin did not like to think that Jacithrew and Orpaan were representational of their race—that living in the Waste was enough to drive even the natives mad.

The fire cast a feverish red light on Jacithrew’s face. Given the heating power of the daemon glares, Crispin could not see why Jacithrew had insisted on lighting the hearth. Orpaan huddled at Crispin’s feet, arms wrapped around his leg, thumb in mouth.

“I shall fly over the tops of the trees,” Jacithrew said. “I shall fly all the way south to the land of the Painted Nomads.”

“The Red Nomads,” Crispin said. “Izte Kchebuk’ara.”

“Yes, Kchebuk’ara. Yes, that’s it. I can’t stay here any longer! A Wraith does not live on charity from pale people.”

Crispin ate another hazelnut. “You’ll kill yourself. I examined your machine, and it looks all right—I mean, it has wings and everything—but it can’t work!”

Jacithrew pouted.

“I don’t know anything about airplanes, but I know you can’t just jump off a tree and expect to fly,” Crispin said relentlessly. “It doesn’t make the least bit of sense. If that was the way it worked, everyone would be flying instead of walking!”

“Ah,” Jacithrew said with a big smile. “But everyone does not have my daemons. Have you seen my daemons? Sueras!” He clapped his hands. “Amanse! Gelfitus! Fremis!”

They materialized as they came to him, shambling hand over hand through the clutter like skinny apes. The largest, Fremis, which had crimson-and-cream-dappled skin, would have been fifteen feet tall if it had been able to stand up under the low ceiling. Amanse was a female with green hair. They filled the room with their long limbs, draping themselves over Jacithrew’s lap, over his shoulders, knotting themselves around his feet, chittering nonsense. Crispin froze, terrified that one of them would touch him. His skin prickled all over with anticipation of the shock.

Jacithrew grinned, his face framed by a circle of blue arm. Orpaan sleepily cuddled Amanse’s green-tressed head. She licked the child’s arm with a pink tongue, and Crispin wanted to sweep him out of danger. How did the Wraiths do it? In their natural state daemons were wild, dangerous creatures—but these were as tame as dogs! And they were uncollared! Millsy’s beasts had been child-sized; these were giants; and the Wraiths weren’t even tricksters! Crispin’s old daemon bites, from the time Millsy had tried to make him a trickster, ached hellishly.

The ability is in the blood, Millsy had said. It’s in the blood.

Did Wraiths have trickster blood, one and all, men and women? How could that be?

Jacithrew called the daemons’ names aloud again, sending them back to their corner. Crispin breathed out.

“You’re mad!” he said to Jacithrew. “Mad, mad, mad! And you talk nonsense! You’re so arrogant! If it weren’t for the trickster women you wouldn’t even be alive! I don’t see your people keeping you in food and necessities.”

Jacithrew sat up straighter. “You think the pale bitches do it for me? They do it for the child.”

“Can’t argue with that!”

“I’m not a fool, you know,” Jacithrew said with a crafty gleam in his eyes. “There’s a reason I keep the brat around! If he were older, they’d have left us both to die in the wilderness. Pale women care nothing for Wraiths.”

“Wraiths, it seems, care less!”

“My people are dying,” Jacithrew said faintly. Crispin thought he was going to cry. “They have destroyed us. It has taken ten thousand years, but they have finally accomplished their goal. Ah!” He sat up straight. “But when the bells toll, they will die! All of them, as one!”

Is he a cultie? Crispin thought disbelievingly. “Where did he hear that?” he muttered to Orpaan.

“There was a girl said it,” Orpaan whispered back. “A girl with the tricky ladies that came to visit us. Her name was Sarah.”

“Where is she now?”

“Buried in the forest. We buried her.”

“What?”

“She died. She was all eaten.” Orpaan scowled.

Crispin thumped Jacithrew on the knee. “Old man! Old man! Have the—the pale bitches—ever threatened you and Orpaan? You see, my girl—” He had not yet mentioned Rae to Jacithrew. But if the old man hated the trickster women as much as he said he did, perhaps he would help Crispin against them. “They have her—”

But Jacithrew had not heard a word. As was his habit, he had slowly worked himself up to an outburst, and now there would be no stopping him. He spat freely as he talked. “Ferupians have ruined my people. Anything they offer us now is no more than an insult. They have pushed us back and back. Ah! My people are living all on top of each other among the dead trees. Our tribes have been torn apart. We have forgotten everything we once knew. We flee from their armies, and die at the hands of their common folk if we try to leave the Waste. Useless! Therefore, I say: we were born in the Waste, and we will die with the Waste. Ferupe has been our death, but we will be Ferupe’s death when the bells toll. Ah!”

“If you hate all Ferupians that much, why don’t you hate me?” Crispin asked angrily. Orpaan moaned.

Jacithrew wiped his mouth. Saliva gleamed on his chin. “You are not Ferupian!”

“Not Ferupian? My father was a native of Linhe Domain. An Easterner. Easterners are snow-white under their tans, and their hair is as pale as the sun—I’m a bit of a mishap, all right, but I’m as Ferupian as they come.”

Jacithrew laughed. He reached out and traced a wet trail on Crispin’s arm with his finger. “That is what you think. Let me tell you a secret, boy-oh boy-oh! Pale people hate dark ones. You can’t trust them. Have you made the mistake of trusting them before? I see you have. But I know about the outside world. Hannah told me. And she is dark, too, she is! She knows! The Ferupians and the Kirekunis have carved the world into halves between them. Ravening white monsters, they are as heartless as the wind! And you have made the mistake of trusting them!”

Crispin rubbed between his eyes. When he was six years old, Anuei had said to him in a moment of anger: If I could do one thing for you, my son, I would take my blood out of your veins. Crispin had never forgotten that. The words echoed in his mind, and his mother’s face gave way to the faces of girls from the east, the west, the north, the south, the heartlands, the capital. Blood out of my veins. Plump and slender, fair-haired and dark, tanned faces and winter-pale, and all of them white as the insides of figs underneath their clothes. Limbs intertwining with his. Blood in my veins.

He hadn’t made love to a stranger since his early teens. With Prettie’s eyes on him, it wouldn’t have felt right. Now Prettie was dead, and all of those girls melded into the only other girl, into Rae. It had been pitch-black night the only time they touched. But in memory he could see her breasts lolling from her dress and taste her tiny nipples.

He opened his eyes. Madness shone in Jacithrew’s black-currant pupils.

“If you knew what I know, you’d be the happiest man alive,” Crispin said, smiling.

Jacithrew let out a strangulated shriek and launched himself off his stool. Crispin had to stop himself from laughing as he fended the old man off. The only danger was that Jacithrew would call his daemons, and he was clearly too confused and angry now to do that. “Fly now,” Crispin taunted. “Fly! Fly through the roof, why don’t you!”

Love and hate. Dark and fair. Rae!

In his struggles Jacithrew kicked the fire. It collapsed, and a rain of sparks flew up into the wall. Orpaan cried miserably, “No, no, no,” and hit at Crispin’s legs. Crispin let go of Jacithrew. Propelled by his own momentum, the old Wraith staggered halfway across the root room, stumbled on the base of the central ladder, and collapsed. Crispin wrapped an arm around Orpaan. “It’s all right! All right! He’s not hurt!”

Orpaan clung to him, weeping frantically. Jacithrew lay prone, fingering the bottom rung of the ladder. Suddenly he bounced upright. Tears mixed with smiles on his face. “Come on! Bring the child! We can get my flying machine up into the tree!”

“No!” Crispin said.

Orpaan tugged frantically at him. “We’ve got to do what he says! Got to! Come on!”

Suddenly Crispin felt exhausted. “Suit yourself then. All right.” He passed his hand over his face. What’s to be done?

Jacithrew was already halfway up the ladder. “Ropes!” he shrilled. “They’re in my bed! Find the ropes! Bring them! Quickly, quickly!”

Searching in Jacithrew’s bed, which was in the brightest part of the dazzling room, Crispin thought: I can’t stay here any longer. Gonna rescue her and get out of this ferret hole. He may knife me in my sleep tonight, not because he remembers we quarreled, but just because he thinks for a moment that I’m someone else! How many people has he really been talking to, all the time I thought he was talking to me?

From above, Jacithrew shouted shrilly. “Come on, my children! What are you waiting for?”

“Please,” Orpaan whispered.

Crispin saw tears shining on the boy’s cheeks. He was crying soundlessly. In the daemon glares, his face looked like a carving of wet teak.

Crispin scooped him into his arms. “Your head!” Orpaan sobbed, too late. A root-knot caught Crispin in the top of the skull, and he saw stars.

“Help me find those ropes,” he said over the ringing in his ears. “We don’t want your dadda to do himself in trying to climb that tree.”

“He’s not my dadda,” Orpaan sobbed. “My dadda’s dead!”

Fresh air! Fresh air! Crispin thought desperately as they rooted in Jacithrew’s reeking blankets. Fresh air! The night outside was cold and clear and dizzy with daemons snapping, darting, chasing each other, filling the space between the earth and the stars with their own particular brand of terminal confusion. What’s to be done?

A frost had struck the forest during the night. The front garden looked as though it had been coated with sugar.

Rae stood under a yew, holding a cup of hot tea, watching Sally and Millie, on the other side of the bare potato patch, yank winter artichoke roots out of the earth. She had offered her help, but they had refused. They were talking so softly that although the garden was as quiet as the rest of the Waste (the trickster women apparently hadn’t bothered to entice birds and animals to inhabit their patch of reclaimed flora) Rae could only just hear the buzz of their voices. She knew they were talking about her.

All around the potato patch, boughs rustled in the hint of a breeze. She shivered and thanked the Queen that she had not been sleeping outside. After only a few days in Holstead House, the ordeal of the past couple of weeks was coming to seem more and more like a nightmare. And indeed, her nights were full of memories. The blood spurting out of her rude captor’s eye mingled with the flames spurting from the windows of her room. The murdered man’s shriek became the voice of an Apocalypist calling to her. Sister . . . sister . . . And then it was Crispin calling while she fled from him, weeping, guilty, through the forest. Rae, where is my ray of light?

It had all happened. But it seemed implausible that it had happened to her. She, Rae Ash (not Rae Clothwright, not anymore) wasn’t made of such resilient stuff. Look how readily she had trusted her life to Crispin. A complete stranger! If she had been stronger, she would have taken responsibility for herself. Look how he had deserted her at the first sign of difficulty—as all her road companions had, all her life. No man could be depended on. Yet she had kept hoping, to the point of risking her life. What if he’d decided to leave her stranded in the middle of the Waste? What if Anthea, Liesl, Hannah, Mother, and the twins hadn’t been there to save her?

But perhaps she had been guided here. Perhaps transcendence had finally pushed her to a place where she could have the peace she needed if enlightenment were to blossom in her. The trickster women did not flaunt their wealth, but they were as well-heeled as Valestock’s richest daemonmongers. The Fewman brothers; Riddlebird; Gurrey; they, and perhaps three others, were each worth more than any heartlands squire. So, apparently, were the trickster women. The sheer numbers of priceless objects laid out haphazardly in the dusty drawing room told Rae that here she would not have to worry about making a living. Anthea’s “working girls” were ladies, or as good as, after all.

And—her frivolous side briefly reasserted itself—it stood to reason that there must be a few bolts of good material somewhere in the house. Perhaps she would even be able to do something about the women’s lackadaisical style of dress. Just because you were not on parade before hundreds every day was no reason to neglect your appearance! (Rae herself had spent an hour before the mirror this morning. After two weeks without soap, the state of her hair and skin was deplorable. She longed for rouge and hair oil.)

How would she dress them? For Anthea, dusty pastel hues. For Hannah—it would be a challenge to find colors that would set off her dark skin, and Rae hadn’t seen enough of her to know what jewelry would suit, but she would love to get the chance to make her over. She could be beautiful. For Liesl—dark colors, certainly; but what material? Velvet, perhaps. For the twins—

She looked across at the winter artichoke bed, where the two fair girls were dawdling over their task.

Chance would be a fine thing!

Well, it’s no business of theirs whether I gather artichokes or not—

She sauntered around the potato patch, and feeling their eyes on her, got down on her knees and started systematically digging the knobbly roots out of the clods of earth.

“Here.”

Millie, who was slightly taller and had a scattering of acne on her chin, tossed a trowel across the fallen stems.

“Thanks.” Rae smiled. Without looking up, she knew the twins were watching her, unmoving.

“You’ve done this before, haven’t you? Most people don’t know what to look for. They get stones in with the ‘chokes.” Sally’s voice held the hint of a sneer.

Rae sat back on her heels. “Where I grew up, we children had to do the gardening. We were the only ones who did any work.”

“Where did you grow up?”

“Plum Valley Domain.”

“That’s a long way from here.”

Rae tossed a double handful of artichokes into the bucket.

“You’re spoiling your dress,” Millie remarked after a moment. “You’ll have to wash it yourself, you know.”

“I’m pretty familiar with the way things are done here, I think,” Rae said amicably.

“That’s what you think,” Sally sniggered.

“‘Choke sap is so hard to get out,” Millie said.

Rae brushed earth off the brown wool. Its serviceableness frustrated her beyond words. “I’ll manage.”

“You talk like a Wraith,” Millie said.

“What’s a Wraith?” Rae asked.

“No,” Sally said. “She talks like a man.”

“Oh, my, that’s what it is!”

Both of them laughed. Rae winced. She was no match for the two of them. The only way she knew how to meet sniping was with silence, and she did so.

“You know what’s going to happen to you, don’t you,” Millie said suddenly.

“No, I don’t.” Rae looked up, alarms ringing inside her head.

“Huh. Just as I thought. We were different; we guessed. That’s why we didn’t—”

Sally elbowed her twin.

Millie flushed. “Me and Sal grew up on a farm. Near Valestock. That was before we ran away.”

“Why?”

“We were different. We always knew that.”

I always knew that, too, Rae thought with sudden bitterness.

“The thing that makes us different, it’s a kind of—of—”

“Strength,” Sally said.

“Yes. You have to have it. To do what Liesl and Anthea and Hannah do. You can’t be one of us unless you have it.”

The obvious implication was that Rae didn’t. She felt bruised. Why did they hate her? She had tried to be friendly. Her nails were packed full of dirt. She picked up a broken bit of stem and scraped. The silence of the garden, which for all its greenness contained no living things except insects, was unbearable. “How old were you when you ran away?” she asked them. It seemed the most innocuous question possible.

When Sally spoke there was wariness in her voice. “What do you want to know that for?”

“I—I don’t know.”

“Because we aren’t telling you!” They held on to each other’s arms, shaking. “We can’t tell you that, so stop asking!”

Why are they afraid? Rae wondered in confusion.

“Girls.”

Rae had never been so relieved to hear Liesl’s deep voice. She stumbled to her feet, dropping the trowel and her lapful of ‘chokes, and turned. Liesl was holding something that looked like two yards of expensive silver lame scrunched up in one hand. It would have made an attractive bodice, though there wasn’t enough for a whole dress. She jerked her head. “Rae. Come with me.”

Rae cast a glance around the potato patch. She felt like a wild deer brought to bay: no way to escape.

Liesl frowned. “Don’t be afraid. I’m giving you a chance at the real thing. Whatever Anthea has shown you, it was just pussyfooting around. I know she hasn’t taken you into the Waste.”

Where was Anthea? Rae’s protector, the only one of them who stood wholeheartedly behind her—

“If you refuse... It’s a responsibility,” Liesl said. “Some of us can handle it. The rest”—she looked at the twins and smiled unexpectedly—“let their prey get away, and have to stay home and dig the garden.”

“Oh, Liesl,” Millie said, and laughed. “That’s not fair!” After a minute Sally joined in, giggling hysterically. They clung to each other.

“Go on, take her then!”

“We don’t want her!”

“Leave us alone!”

“You’re so mean, Leeze!”

Liesl laughed and blew them a kiss. She started off across the potato patch, then looked back impatiently at Rae. “I thought you were coming?”

Rae gulped and followed her, stumbling across the potato rows.

Women are truer, they never accept you on face value, the way men do, she thought desperately. They see deeper, straight to your weaknesses, and before they accept you they’ve got to make you feel like nothing, like a child! Oh, I pray I’m not wrong about them, I pray it’s worth it in the end to be humiliated like this—

Tears pricked her eyes. Was she wrong? Did Liesl, Sally, and Millie really hate her? But if Lies! hated her, why was she “giving her a chance at the real thing”?

“Hurry up,” Liesl said from the blinding, blurry greenness ahead.

Liesl and Rae came through the Waste to the daemons’ dell in a matter of twenty minutes. Today there were no daemons picnicking on the grass; in fact the place was nearly deserted. Liesl lowered herself cross-legged to the ground, hid her piece of silver cloth inside her coat, and buttoned it. Her eyes were the color of blue chalk. Red holly berries glowed like frozen fireworks over her head, only a little brighter than her hair. “There’s a good-sized one in the water. A Jaseras. Go look.”

Rae moved cautiously to the edge of the pool. The surface was like smooth black rock. Tiny daemons circled above the water, slowed down by the cold, their wings layered veils. “I don’t see it.”

“It’s lying low. It’s eaten. That’s why everything is so quiet. The little ones won’t come back out until it’s gone. That makes your task easier.”

“Couldn’t you show me how it’s done first?” Rae said desperately. “And then I’ll do it? I mean, I’ve never seen—”

“Daemons are not like fancywork, girl,” Liesl snapped. “One chance is all you get. There’s no unpicking.”

“I don’t even know how to begin!”

“Right, then!” Liesl folded her hands on her crossed ankles. “You have to listen for it. You’d never have got this far into the forest unless you had some kind of an affinity for them. They’d have driven you mad otherwise. But now you have to listen with your whole self, not just your ears. That’s important. When you hear a red, round, oily mmm like a Jaseras, call to it by name... Jaseras... Jaseras... like that.” Liesl’s voice was meandering. “And summon it. Summon it. Summon it.”

“How do you know its name?”

“Practice.”

“But—but—I mean—why do they even have names?”

“They are their names. You’ll hear. You’ll see. In a better world we would merely be witnesses to their names... ”

She fell silent. Her lips moved as if she was chewing. She looked suddenly old.

Rae shivered and knelt on the bank.

“Jaseras?” she said, with a feeling that she was making herself ridiculous by taking part in this game. “Jaseras! Are you there?”

It all happened in the space of a few seconds, and afterward, she was not the same person ever again. Such moments of personal flux are rare, and it is even rarer to know them as they happen. Rae did. She smelled the scent you got in a smithy where men were forging iron, and knew the world had changed forever. The air crackled. Tiny fingers tugged her hair. Small daemons were gathering around her head, diaphanous wings drifting across her vision. She had no attention to spare to brush them away. “Slow smooth powerful one,” she whispered, the words coming from she knew not where. “Jaseras. Body of beauty.”

She knew, as if she could see into the water (but the knowledge had nothing to do with sight) that the daemon had thrust himself out of his rock cranny under the bank, unlidding his dark eyes, that he was paddling toward the surface, responding to the sound of his name. As he came closer, her world loosened at the seams, and opened up. There was a genuine connection between daemons and humans, something stranger and stronger by far than the connection between friends, or between man and woman, a resonance of blood, a forgotten instinct—and she had just remembered it. It was like feeling the person you loved most in the world coming toward you. Patterns of fiery light formed in her skull, burning so bright that the world before her eyes paled: tendrils of light reaching toward each other, melding. When she joined with the daemon she would no longer have to endure the distractions and demands with which her body constantly assailed her. She would dematerialize.

Nothing life offered could be so sweet as that freedom. Who would be human?

Jaseras sounded.

The tiny daemons scattered, chittering, as his sleek head thrust through the surface. He must have been at least ten feet tall when he stood on solid ground. His face was more beautiful than any man’s, his hair floated on the water like black weed, his spine was finned like a trout’s, his skin was the color of red rose petals. She wanted to touch him.

Slowly, so slowly that the moment seemed to last hours, he reached out of the water and took her hand. His skin was wet but not slimy, soft but not clammy. Her hand was completely hidden in his fingers.

“Now get up,” she heard Liesl saying, from a great distance. “Stand up, girl! Make him follow you!”

How did Liesl expect her to move? She knew instinctively that movement would shatter the communion. Jaseras’s power pulsed through her, an electrical, sexual buzz that came in waves as he rested his elbow on the bank and rubbed his cheek against her arm. She couldn’t have moved for the life of her.

“Rae!”

That wasn’t Liesl, was it?

“Hist! Rae! Up here!

A familiar voice. Whispering. Rae suspected she wouldn’t have been able to hear it if not for the daemon. Physically connected to Jaseras’s power, her senses were sharpened tenfold.

With a great effort, she focused on the woods at the top of the other side of the dell.

Nothing moved.

“Now, Rae! Here!” Liesl shouted, and Rae felt the length of silver lame hitting her back and sliding to the ground. Jaseras flinched. She kissed his fingers, she would swallow him whole if that would make him stay with her—

“Rae, I’m here! Dammit, girl! Just give me some kind of signal! I’ll deal with her, but I—I have to know if you’re on her side! If you are—you’re not, are you? You’re not!?”

“This is the hard part, Rae!” Liesl’s voice had taken on an oddly pleading tone.

“Rae, in the name of the Queen! Give me a sign—” Crispin was pleading with her, too, in the only way he knew how, with anger. He must think she could not hear him. Was he readying himself to attack Liesl even now? He must not do that.

She sat back on her heels. “Crispin, where are you? I can’t see you!” Her voice was as loud as a child’s cry, and wavery, petulant. The connection with Jaseras broke. She clapped her hand over her mouth.

She was back in her own body, huge, awkward, cold. Physical sensation roared through her, destroying the fine points to which Jaseras had tuned her senses. Her feet had gone to sleep. She opened her eyes and found that she had sprawled over into the grass. Liesl was standing above her. “Get away!” she shouted at the forest. “This is not your place, Wraith! Jaseras!”

The big daemon splashed out of the water in a rainbow of transformation. His legs split into a fan of feathers. His arms stretched into wings of translucent skin. His face elongated and stiffened into a beak. He rose into the air and dived between the pines, shrieking gloriously.

Rae screamed, “Jaseras! Oh, my love!”

And the daemon faltered, reeled through the air, and fell in a muddle next to her. He smelled of burnt leather. Liesl choked and staggered back. Up in the pines, there was the noise of somebody—actually, it sounded like two or three somebodies—getting away. Rae gathered Jaseras into her arms. She did not have even to try for communion with him, not this time—he sucked her in. His power pulse boomed like thunder, terrifyingly erratic. Crispin. Jaseras. Cris. Jaseras. Jaseras—

Silence descended on the dell.

Liesl pulled Rae roughly to her feet. “How I hate them!” Her low voice was trembly with loathing. “Forever interfering in our business! The Waste is ours, not theirs! All they know how to do is destroy our work, the sly, black shadows?” She shook her fist at the brown face of the forest above the waterfall. Her voice cracked. “You have never, not once, done anything which might encourage me to respect you!”

Rae gathered Jaseras to her breasts, trying to support his trailing wings and his water-slick body. He was transforming into human-form again, slowly, as if invisible hands were remolding his body from the outside. He was very heavy. She couldn’t feel the pulse of his power anymore.

“Leave it,” Liesl said. “He’s dead.”

Revulsion washed through Rae. She dropped the demogorgon and scrambled backward.

“Yes, I know.” Roughly, Liesl pulled her to her feet, well away from the corpse. It was as corporeal as any dead bird, though no one could have mistaken it for a bird.

“We have to bury him,” Rae said shakily. “Don’t we? Shouldn’t we do something?”

Liesl pulled her to her feet. “No. There’s nothing we can do. It’s best to leave them for the carrion-eating daemons. That way, their deaths are of some use.”

“Don’t you care?” Rae heard her voice scaling toward hysteria.

Liesl stuck her hands into the pockets of her coat. “I know what you’re thinking, Rae. There are far too many of them, and nonetheless one could mourn each one as a lover. But if you think grief is intolerable, try guilt. We ship out hundreds of them every year, and each one that goes into captivity would be better off dead.”

“I don’t understand why he died. He flew up—and then—”

“The Wraiths killed him out of sheer spite. They are no better than wild beasts.”

Liesl spoke as if she knew Jaseras’s killers from long experience. Yet it had definitely been Crispin up in the pines. Then, Liesl could not know it had been he. Logic helped Rae regain a little self-control.

“Who are they? The Wraiths?”

Without warning Liesl started toward the edge of the dell. Rae scurried after her.

“They lived in this forest before it was ever part of Ferupe. Before there was a Ferupe. They have daemon blood. A lot of it, even today. It’s possible to civilize them, but even then you can’t trust them.” They started up the side of the dell. Rae’s feet slipped on the exposed roots; her dress hampered her movement. “Our sister Hannah is a Wraith,” Liesl said. “You must remember that. Don’t treat her the way you would treat anyone else, because she’ll take advantage of you. That’s how they are.”

They were walking through the dead pines now. Liesl held a broken branch out of Rae’s way.

“You didn’t do too badly,” she said abruptly. “Even if the Wraiths hadn’t come, I would have had to step in—you weren’t in any condition to follow through on your initial overture to him. But you established communion in such a way as to make me think that you have talent.”

Rae’s heart swelled. In the back of her mind, she was appalled that so qualified an approval, from one she mistrusted, could make her happy. But she had forgotten what it was like to be approved of. The word encouragement had not been part of Madame Fourrière’s vocabulary.

“Thank you,” she stammered.

Liesl laughed. “You don’t trust me. You’re wise. But listen now”—her face went serious—“you would do well not to trust Anthea, either. She may act like your own mother, but she’s a daemon in disguise.”

“What?”

“Oh, not literally.” Liesl’s mouth quirked. “I mean that she is extremely charismatic, in such a way as to deceive the unwary. When a new girl comes to the house, Anthea isn’t straight with her, the way I’m being with you now—she tries to draw her in by making this seem a far nicer place than it is. You’d think she would know better after the number of failures we’ve had. But in fact she doesn’t have the wisdom which comes with age. She’s much younger than she looks. How old do you think she is?”

“Sixty?” Rae hazarded. “Seventy?”

“She’s a year younger than I am. I’ll be twenty-eight this summer. There’s no such thing as an ancient trickster woman, Rae. Mother is only forty. The twins are thirteen. You’d never have guessed that, would you? But some of us have aged faster than others. Like Anthea.”

There was no way Anthea could be only nine years older than Rae. It was impossible. The sun of her success with Jaseras went in. “You’re just trying to get me on your side!” she blurted. “You and Anthea hate each other! That’s obvious! Why should I believe a word you say?”

“Why should you believe a word she says? In the name of the Queen, follow through, Rae,” Liesl said irritably. “Of course I want to get you on my side. For your own good. I don’t hate Anthea, in fact I love her dearly, I’m merely trying to tell you the truth about her. She’s afraid of losing her authority. But in fact she never had any. There’s no use in looking to her for protection. The rules are the rules, and none of us have any say in that matter. Anthea did at one time, but she couldn’t hold out long enough to make the rest of us accept her as Mother’s successor. And for years now Mother has been too much lost in her mind to enforce her will.”

Rae shuddered. Up ahead, greenness glimmered through the denuded pines. They crossed the road, a sandy strip like a winding slot in the pines, into the garden.

“Is it all too much for you? There are traders coming from Valestock next week,” Liesl said. “You still have the option of leaving with them.”

Back to Valestock? Never. Crispin... He had come for her, he had come, as she had feared he would not. But she was no longer sure she wanted to leave to go with him.

Her communion with Jaseras had changed her outlook entirely, coloring everything a slightly different shade. Certain things, such as communing with daemons again, had taken on new importance. Other things no longer had much importance to her at all. Her gratitude to the trickster women had been replaced by the need to root through their secrets and extract anything else that might be as wonderful as what she had experienced this afternoon (no matter how badly it had ended). Liesl’s apparent straightforwardness made her perversely eager to find out what the red-haired woman was still hiding. “I’d rather stay,” she said definitely.

“Very well,” Liesl said. “Maybe you’ll change your mind.”

Gingerly, Crispin touched the bite on his arm. “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.”

He and Orpaan sat with their backs against a pine from which the bark was peeling in long, threadlike pieces. Orpaan was weaving the threads into triangular mats. “He’ll like these,” he said. “He might be able to use them for the flying machine. To make it more comfy.”

When Orpaan said he, he meant one person: the madman Jacithrew. Crispin did not answer. He had had all he could stomach of Jacithrew and the flying machine. His arm burned as if a hundred fire ants had all stung him in the same spot. Oil and salt. That helped, he remembered. If he only had some. And the foul smell of the daemon’s death clung to his clothes and skin; only a good wash would get rid of that, and washing was a forgotten luxury.

He looked over at Orpaan. Even if the child, like Jacithrew, could trick daemons, how was it that he could kill them? Millsy had not been able to do that, nor had he implied that any tricksters could. Orpaan hadn’t even struck out at the daemon, just slithered in front of Crispin and stood his ground, his little fists clenched.

Crispin closed his hand over the child’s fluffy head and turned Orpaan’s face gently upward. The small fingers fell still on the bark weaving. Eyes empty of deception met Crispin’s. “Orpie,” Crispin said, “it’s important. Please tell me. How did you make that daemon stop attacking us?”

“Because you didn’t.” Orpaan blinked. His eyelids were almost purple. With his skinny body he bore a resemblance to a naked bird.

“I said how, not why,” Crispin said.

“You were fighting it all wrong. If I hadn’t been there, you would’ve got hurt.” Orpaan spoke fast, but Crispin was coming to understand his oddly stressed accents. “I had to.”

“I couldn’t’ve done what you did, Orpie. No way. Who taught you?”

“Nobody taught me. ‘M a Wraith. Wraiths know daemons.”

“Am I a Wraith?”

“No! He thinks so, but you’re not!”

“Could you teach me to do what you did?”

Orpaan appeared to think deeply. “Maybe,” he allowed at last. “But your blood’s probably wrong.” Crispin held his breath.

Trickery was in the blood. And blood could not be changed. But mightn’t there be a chance? Everything was different in the Waste. Anything could happen.

“One time, Hannah told me—she told me if I wanted, me and her could share our blood with her sisters, and make them stronger. I don’t like them, I didn’t want to. I s’pose—maybe—I like you. I could do it for you.”

“Could you?”

“Maybe! I dunno! She said it would hurt!”

Orpaan was avoiding Crispin’s eyes and fiddling furiously with his pine bark. Nevertheless, Crispin couldn’t help pressing him. The pain in his arm needled at his patience.

“Orpie. Where are the rest of the Wraiths? I haven’t seen any shimmer-trees anywhere around here.”

“Cause there aren’t any around here. Too close to the tricky ladies!”

“Then why do you and Jacithrew live here, on your own?”

“Just cause—cause—cause they give us stuff. Stuff for me. They’re sorry for me!”

But not sorry enough to take you to live with them! Crispin thought. Not even Hannah, although she’s one of you!

He had disliked the trickster women without even meeting them. Now he had seen one, and it had done nothing to improve his opinion of them. The redhead had looked like a farmwife in that sack of a dress, with her man’s boots. And she’d dressed Rae the same way! Jacithrew had implied that the trickster women had as much money as minor royalty—so why didn’t they use it? Crispin had always envisioned trickster women—when he’d envisioned them at all—as dryad-like creatures scarcely dressed at all in veils and jewels, speaking in lovely flutelike voices, floating through the trees with daemons trailing behind them like lovesick troubadours. The reality was not only less appealing, it was downright distasteful. And the way she had been speaking to Rae ... ! Crispin had nearly plunged down into the dell. Only Orpaan’s urgent warnings held him back.

She’s got daemons! the little boy had hissed, his eyes showing white around the irises. She could kill you just like that!

But there were so many invisible daemons in the dell, thick as feathers from a burst pillow. Which of them “belonged” to the red-haired woman? Millsy’s tame daemons couldn’t have killed anyone. How much stronger were hers?

When he saw that big one rise from the water and transform into a bird, he knew. He had tried to fend it off with his knife, but it just dematerialized wherever he touched it. He couldn’t fight air. Meanwhile it had pecked him badly. If Orpaan hadn’t done whatever he had done, Crispin would undoubtedly have been killed.

“Stop messing with my hair!” Orpaan shouted, wrenching away.

“Sorry.” Crispin sighed and stood up. There were no explanations. There never were. “Let’s take you home.”

Maybe he should just forget about Rae! Better forget her than die trying to rescue her! It was becoming harder and harder to remember the world outside the Waste. If he didn’t move on soon, his mind might warp like Jacithrew’s.

Orpaan tugged at him. “Will get your girl back,” he promised. “They’re trying to make her tricky, but we won’t let them! We’ll get her!”

His voice was sad as only an eight-year-old’s can be, vibrating so much with misery that it was almost comical. But he wasn’t playing for effect. A child raised in isolation has no sense of theater. Crispin knew Orpaan would be deeply hurt if he laughed. Instead, he bent and swept the little boy into his arms. Orpaan made a small noise and buried his head in Crispin’s shoulder.

“You know what, squire,” Crispin said. “I could use your help when I go to get her. You’re more of a match for those bitches than I am.”

What he really wanted to say was: I’m not going to leave you. Not ever.

“Yeah. I’ll help.” Orpaan sighed and dug his fingers into Crispin’s neck. “Carry me.”

“Wriggle round, then. Piggyback. Ouch, don’t grab my arm like that! Shit. Are you holding on?” He felt Orpaan nodding. “Here we go then!”

It was a walk of perhaps three miles through the forest to the clearing where Jacithrew’s pine stood. Crispin was wearier than he thought, and his arm ached. He had to put Orpaan down before they had gone half a mile. Neither of them suggested using the road. Even in the company of a child who was a “native” of the Wraithwaste in every sense of the word, Crispin felt as if he were sneaking through enemy territory, surreptitiously observed.

Daemons according to the Greek idiom, signify either Angel, or the Soul of Men... the Souls of Sain, and Spirits of Angels.

—H. More