Black dawn (20 page)

Cady was still leaning her head against the tree
trunk, and her eyes were still closed. But she
seemed almost asleep now-and her lips weren't
moving.

Jeanne's eyes followed Maggie's. They were still
narrowed, and her mouth was still tight with some
thing like grim humor. But she didn't say anything.
After a moment she quirked an eyebrow and
shrugged minutely. "Who knows?"

You
know, Maggie thought. At least more than
you're telling me. But there was something else
bothering her, so she said, "Okay, then, what about
that guy who looks like
Delos
's father? Hunter
Redfern
."

"He's a bigwig in the Night World," Jeanne said.
"Maybe the biggest.
It was his son who founded
this place back in the fourteen hundreds."

Maggie blinked. "In
the
what's
?"

Jeanne's eyes glowed briefly, sardonically. "In the
fourteen hundreds," she said with exaggerated pa
tience.
"They're
vampires,
all
right?
Actually,
they're lamia, which is the kind of vampire that
can have kids, but that's not the point. The point
is they're immortal, except for accidents."

"That guy has been alive more than five hundred
years," Maggie said slowly, looking down the path
where Hunter
Redfern
had disappeared.

"Yeah.
And, yeah, everybody says how much he
looks like the old king. Or the other way around,
you know."

Delos
sure thinks he looks like him, Maggie
thought. She'd seen the way Hunter handled Delos,
guiding him as expertly as
Delos
had guided his
horse.
Delos
was
used
to obeying somebody who
looked and sounded just like Hunter
Redfern
.

Then she frowned. "But
how come
he
isn't
king?"

"Oh
. . ."
Jeanne sighed and ducked under a spray
of fir needles that was tangled in her hair. She looked impatient and uneasy. "He's from the
Out
side
, okay? He's only been here a couple of weeks. All the slaves say that he didn't even know about
this place before that.

'
Me
didn't know
. . ."

"Look. This is the way I heard it from the old
slaves, okay? Hunter
Redfern
had a son named
Chervil when he was really young. And when Cher
vil was, like, our age, they had some big argument
and got estranged. And then Chervil ran off with
his friends, and that left Hunter
Redfern
without
an heir. And Hunter
Redfern
never knew that
where the kid went was
hem."
Jeanne gestured
around the valley.
"To start his own little
kingdom
of
Night People
.
But then somehow Hunter found
out, so he came to visit. And that's why he's here."

She finished and stretched her shoulders, looking
down the tree-ramp speculatively. P.J. sat quietly,
glancing from Jeanne to Maggie. Cady just
breathed.

Maggie chewed her lip, not satisfied yet. "He's
here just to visit? That's all?"

"I'm a slave. You think I asked him personally?"
"I think you
know."

Jeanne stared at her a moment, then glanced at
P.J. Her look was almost sullen, but Maggie
understood.

"Jeanne, she's been through hell already. What
ever it is, she can take it.
Right, kiddo?"

P.J. twisted her plaid cap in a complete circle
and settled it more firmly on her head. "Right," she
said flatly.

"So tell us," Maggie said. "What's Hunter
Redfern
doing here?"

CHAPTER
13

I think," Jeanne said, "that he's here to get Delos
to close the
Dark
Kingdom
out Shut up the castle
and come join him
Outside
. And, incidentally, of
course, kill all the slaves."

Maggie stared. 'Kill them all?'

"Well, it makes sense. Nobody would need
them anymore."

"And that's why you were escaping now," Maggie
said slowly.

Jeanne gave her a quick, startled glance. "You're
really not as stupid as you seem at first sight, you
know?"

"Gee, thanks." Maggie shifted on her branch. A
minute ago she'd been thinking how good it would
feel to get away from the twigs poking her. Now she suddenly wanted to stay here forever, hiding.
She had
a very
bad feeling.

"So why," she said, forming her thoughts
slowly,
"does
Hunter
Redfern
want to do this
right now?"

"What do
you
think? Really, Maggie, what do you know about all this?"

Four Wild Powers,
Maggie thought, hearing
De
los
's old teacher's voice in her mind.
Who will
be
needed at the millennium, to save the world-or to
destroy
it.

"I know that something's happening at the mil
lennium, and that
Delos
is a Wild Power, and that
the Wild Powers are supposed to do something-"

"Save the world," Jeanne said in a clipped voice.
"Except that that's not what the Night People want.
They figure there's going to be some huge catastro
phe that'll wipe out most of the humans-and then
they can
take over. And that's why Hunter
Redfern's
here. He wants the Wild Powers on his side instead
of on the humans'. He wants them to help destroy
the human world instead of saving it. And it looks
like he's just about convinced
Delos
."

Maggie let out a shaky breath and leaned her
head against a branch. It was just like what
Delos
had told her-except that Jeanne was an uninter
ested party. She still wanted not to believe it, but
she had a terrible sinking feeling. In fact, she had a strange feeling of
weight,
as if something awful
was trying to settle on her shoulders.

"The millennium really means the end of the
world," she said.

"Yeah.
Our world, anyway."

Maggie glanced at
P.J., who was swinging her thin legs over the edge of a branch. "You still
okay?"

P.J. nodded. She looked frightened, but not unbearably so. She kept her eyes on Maggie's face trustingly.

"And do
you
still want to go to the castle?"
Jeanne said, watching Maggie just as closely.
"Hunter
Redfern
is a very bad guy to mess with.
And I hate to tell you, but your friend Prince Delos
is out for our blood just like the rest of them."

"No, I don't still
want
to go," Maggie said briefly. Her head went down and she gave Jeanne a brood
ing look under her eyelashes. `But I have to, any
way. I've got even more reasons now."

"Such as?"

Maggie held up a finger. "One, I've got to.
get
help for Cady." She glanced at the motionless figure
clinging trancelike to the fir's trunk,
then
held up
another finger. "Two, I have to find out what hap
pened to my brother."
Another finger.
"And, three,
I have to get those slaves free before Hunter
Red
fern
has them all killed."

"You have to
what?"
Jeanne said in a muffled shriek. She almost fell out of the tree.

"I kind of thought you'd react that way. Don't
worry about it. You don't have to get involved."

"I was wrong before. You
are
as dumb
as
you
look. And you are totally freaking crazy."

Yeah, I know, Maggie thought grimly. It's proba
bly just
as
well I didn't mention the fourth reason.

Which was that she had to keep
Delos
from aid
ing and abetting the end of the world.
That was
the responsibility that had settled on her, and she had no idea why it was hers except that she'd been inside his mind. She
knew
him. She couldn't just
walk away.

If anybody could talk to him about it and con
vince him not to do it, she could. She had abso
lutely no doubt about that. So it was her job to try.

And if he was really as evil as Jeanne seemed to
think-if it was true that he'd killed Miles
... well,
then
she had a different job.

She had to do whatever was necessary to stop
him. Distant and impossible
as it seemed, she
would have to kill him if that was what it took.

"Come on," she said to the other girls. "Cady, do you think you can climb down now? And, Jeanne,
do you know a way into the castle?"

The moat stank.

Maggie had been glad to find Jeanne knew a way
into the castle. That was before she discovered that
it involved swimming through stagnant water and climbing up what Jeanne called a
garderobe
but
what was all too obviously the shaft of an old
latrine.

"Just kill me, somebody," Maggie whispered half
way up. She was soaking wet and daubed with un
thinkable slime. She couldn't remember ever being
quite this dirty.

The next moment she forgot about it in her
worry
about Cady. Cady had managed the swim, still doing everything she was told as
if she were
in a trance. But now she was getting shaky. Maggie
wondered seriously whether this sort of activity
was helpful to somebody who'd been poisoned.

When they were
finally at the top of the shaft,
Maggie looked around and saw a small room that
seemed to be built directly into the castle wall. Ev
erything was made of dark stone, with a cold and
echoing feel to it.

"Don't make any noise," Jeanne whispered. She
bent close to Maggie, who was helping support Cady. "We need to go down a passage and through
the kitchen, okay? It's all right if slaves see us, but
we have to watch out for
them."

"We've got to get Cady to a healing woman-"

"I know! That's where I'm trying to take you."
Jeanne clamped a hand on
P.J.'s
shoulder and steered her into a corridor.

More stone. More echoes. Maggie tried to walk
without her shoes squishing or smacking. She was
dimly impressed with the castle itself-it was grand
and cold and so huge that she felt like an insect making her way through the passage.

After what seemed like an endless walk, they
emerged in a small entryway partitioned off by
wooden screens. Maggie could hear activity behind
the screens and
as
Jeanne led them stealthily for
ward, she caught a glimpse of people moving on
the other side. They were spreading white table
cloths over long wooden tables in a room that
seemed bigger than Maggie's entire house.

Another doorway.
Another passage.
And finally
the kitchen, which was full of bustling people. They
were stirring huge iron cauldrons and turning meat
on spits. The smell of a dozen different kinds of
food hit Maggie and made her feel faint. She was
so hungry that her knees wobbled and she had to swallow hard.

But even more than hungry, she was scared. They were in plain sight of dozens of people.

"Slaves," Jeanne said shortly. "They won't tell on
us. Grab a sack to wrap around you and come on.
And,
P.J.,
take off that ridiculous hat."