Chapter 3 #2
Her heart hurt for the young templar. His life had been hard.
Whatever bad choices he had made, he had, in her estimation, already suffered enough punishment.
She tossed the purse. It thumped on the white brick of the road beside him.
‘Take that to pay your way. Follow the First Folk Road south and east. It’ll take you to the City. ’
The young templar stared at her, uncomprehending. And after all that effort to learn the regional dialect …
Colm barked a laugh that turned into pained coughing. He cleared his throat. ‘Bastard tries to kill you, and you pay him for the service.’
The young templar cringed, which stabbed Fola with guilt. What was the point of leaving the City if not to carry its goodness with her, rather than letting the world strip it away?
‘Listen,’ she told the young templar. ‘These people you’re with—they’re dangerous, and they’re wrong about basically everything.
They say the City I’m from is a nest of demons and evil magic.
It’s not. It has its share of meanness, but it’s the only truly safe place in the world.
They’ll give you whatever you need, and almost everything you could ever hope for.
They’ll accept you, no question, because you couldn’t possibly threaten them, and they’ll always have more than enough to take in a scared kid off the road. ’
‘If it’s as good as all that, then why’d you leave?’ Colm muttered.
She ignored him. ‘Whatever led you to working with that jackass,’ she pointed to her headless would-be killer, ‘it doesn’t matter.
The City doesn’t care who you are, or where you’ve come from, or what you’ve done.
It, and its people, will welcome you and take care of you. You’d be a fool to go anywhere else.’
The templar—the kid—snatched the purse and bolted for the trees.
Heading west, rather than south and east. Fola felt a pang of betrayal, shook her head and stood, then snapped at Frog and pulled back her left sleeve.
The burns could have been worse, given the amount of resistance the templar’s magic had lent him.
Still, the fat blisters on her joints and the rounded fractal pattern of burns down her forearm made her wince.
She fetched a small bottle from her satchel.
Frog leaned down and vomited up a clear, viscous fluid until the bottle was full.
She slathered the ointment on her burns and the chafed skin of her wrists.
Its coolness blunted the edge of her pain, though she wrinkled her nose at the scent of mint and lye.
She flexed her injured arm, testing the motion of her fingers. Twinges, but nothing immobilising. The blisters and scars remained, but would heal.
‘Catch.’ She tossed the bottle. Colm snatched it from the air with one of his smaller, lower arms, uncorked it, sniffed, and made a face.
‘Sorry,’ Fola said. ‘It didn’t used to smell like that.’
The dominant scent of Frog’s early batches had been peppermint, but it had gotten worse the further they had travelled from the City.
Now, it mostly smelled of acrid lye and something like long-decaying leaves.
‘You’ll reek till you can get a bath,’ she went on.
‘But you needed one anyway, even before all that.’ She gestured to the splatter of blood and brain that coated his face and shoulder.
Colm peeled off his vest with a grimace. She felt an unbidden flutter at that. The way his musculature all connected up, with two sets of arms and shoulders, above a stomach that seemed all one slab of muscle …
She gritted her teeth and focused on his wounds. The stab to his gut hadn’t been as bad as Fola feared. Come to mention it, the cut on his arm had stopped bleeding entirely, and the slash down his rib seemed little more than a cat-scratch.
‘I’ve known some women aroused by violence,’ Colm said with a quirk to his lips. ‘Didn’t take you for one.’
‘I … What …?’ Fola glared at him. ‘How bad are your injuries?’
He winced as he rubbed a dab of ointment on his stomach. ‘We’re a hardy folk, my people. Glad for the ointment, if it speeds things, but I’d have lived.’
His words were like a puzzle piece slotting into place.
‘Warborn,’ Fola said, excited and only half-thinking.
She had suspected: what little was known of the Warborn told of many limbs and enormous stature.
A people recorded more in rumour than in writing, crafted by the First Folk for some ancient, long-forgotten war, gifted with strength and resilience far beyond any natural mortal.
Regret swept in as Colm’s expression soured.
‘I only mean … that’s your lineage,’ she said. ‘I’d guess, anyway.’
‘That was a long, long time ago,’ Colm said.
‘Yes, but …’ Fola swallowed the rest of that sentence. Arno had said countless times that half the reason she couldn’t convince anyone to work with her, let alone back her projects to the board, was because of her careless tongue.
But it was a valid observation, supported by clear evidence. Not saying anything seemed more rude to her, in fact. Still, she could tell Colm wanted the topic dropped, and likely buried forever, so she dropped it. ‘Take as much ointment as you need. Frog can make plenty more. And plenty more gold.’
‘Payment for the botched rescue?’ he said, that wry grin returning.
‘If you insist,’ Fola said. ‘Or a first instalment on your payment as my guide and bodyguard. We’ll deal with these corpses, then we’re on our way to Alberon, and from there a ship to Parwys. I’d like to put some distance between us and here before we sleep again.’
‘Deal with the corpses?’ Colm paused midway through spreading ointment on the skin over his ribs.
‘Yes.’ And not by conjuring their ghosts.
Rather, she would settle them—whoever they had been in life, they deserved peace in death.
She could give them that much kindness. With the tip of her staff Fola scraped two roughly shovel-shaped outlines in the dirt on the roadside, then retrieved her notebook of spellpaper and her cartridge pen of silver-dusted ink.
It proved awkward to hold the notebook with her still-stiff left arm.
She squatted, placed the notebook on the ground and drew two thaumaturgic circles, each on its own page.
She left a finger’s width of each circle unfinished, tore the pages from the book, laid them out on the ground to overlie her dirt-drawings, then closed each circle with a quick slash of her pen.
A flash of white flame traced her designs.
The smell of burnt ink lingered in the air.
Lines of silvery mist hung over the ground, conveying her spell into the world.
With a grunt, she stabbed her staff into the soil and levered free one of the two shovels she had made.
Heavy, composed entirely of spellwrought iron, and awkward. Still, it would get the job done.
It would occur to her later, after witnessing a burial in Parwys, that she might have dug the graves with thaumaturgy rather than simply conjuring shovels. Her impulse, in that moment, in that place, was not towards efficiency, but towards doing right by the dead.
‘First you send one of your would-be killers off with a bag of gold,’ Colm said, shaking his head. ‘Then you bury his friends. If you’re worried about beasts and plague, we could burn them.’
‘A bit further south we could.’ Fola drove her spade into the earth and grimaced as a twinge of pain shot up her burned arm, cutting through the cool numbing of the ointment.
‘Up here, though, you bury your dead. This isn’t a proper graveyard, but proper treatment is better than leaving them to the elements, and certainly better than desecration.
Better still if we knew what markers to leave, or what rites to perform, but the Mortal Church is a bit of a mystery to me.
Hard to know much about people who want to kill you. ’
‘It’s all very good of you,’ Colm said. ‘But showing kindness to your enemies is a waste, particularly when they’re already dead.’
‘They’re not my enemies any more.’ Fola leaned on the shovel, catching her breath and giving the pain in her arm a chance to settle. ‘And I’m interested in studying ghosts, not making more, if I can help it.’
She went back to digging, and after a few more minutes Colm picked up the other shovel and joined her.
Frog watched from his perch on Fellstar’s saddle, occasionally preening the red feathers of his belly.
They dug four graves, none as deep as she’d have liked, but they were injured and tired.
There is only so much a body, even bolstered by magic, can manage in a single afternoon.
Colm stabbed the templars’ blades into their mounds to mark the graves.
He even muttered what sounded to Fola like a prayer, though it was too quiet for her to catch the words, and made a pair of gestures over each mound—first three nested triangles, then a nine-pointed star.
‘I suppose it’s not a kindness for their sake,’ Colm said as night fell, when the last of the bodies was buried. ‘It’s to keep their ghosts from haunting us.’
‘It’s both.’ Fola shooed Frog off Fellstar’s saddle, then pulled herself up. ‘Makes you wonder what went on in Parwys, doesn’t it, to make so many ghosts the king lost his mind.’
With a squawk of annoyance, Frog settled onto her shoulder.
She scratched the feathers on the back of his head and turned Fellstar towards the road.
Colm retrieved his own horse from the stand of trees where he had hidden it—a deep-chested destrier called Tower, and as much a monster to ordinary horses as Colm was to ordinary men.
It would be a long, hard night of riding.
Who knew how many people in that common room had caught the rumour of a Citizen and started spreading it—to say nothing of the young templar she had let escape.
When word reached the Mortal Church, more would come hunting her, and with more powerful magic.
A long, hard night with muscles sore from shovelling and fingers of fire raking down her left arm.
No matter. She could ride through the pain. It would heal, as all things do, in time.