Chapter 10
The Druid Queen
Ah, Your Excellence, you are sadly mistaken. The City has no interest in conquest. Why should we? The grace of the First Folk has bestowed us with all we could ever hope to need. That your princes perceive our open gates and invitation to all as a threat shows far more of their character than ours.
Queen Medrith sipped her tea, then held the cup in her lap with both hands, watching and waiting for a response. Fola took the other cup and made a show of inhaling the aroma, though she registered neither its scent or its flavour. The queen had stunned her by seeing so easily through her disguise.
‘There is no Starlit Tower, is there?’ Medrith pressed.
‘There is a Starlit Tower,’ Fola said.
It stood in the heart of the City of the Wise, a spire of spun silver and glass with moving platforms to bear visitors from its base to its highest reaches, up where the air grew thin and the stars shone even in daylight and were bright as glowing coals by night.
She had attended a number of public parties there—and, in the years before her departure, had ridden up to its highest reaches to drink amberwine and mope and stare at the sky.
The stars seemed sympathetic to her disappointment, to the pain of rejection.
Brilliant, but far away, like an untested theory or an unchased dream.
‘Not in Kar,’ Medrith smiled, like a cat with the mouse between its paws. ‘We may be isolated here by the sea and the mountains, but I know something of the outside world. I have never heard of such a place.’
To insist upon the lie was safest. It might frustrate the queen, but Fola intended to leave Parwys as soon as possible.
The Mortal Church had too much presence in the kingdom for her comfort, and an inescapable suspicion gnawed at her that the anakriarch had come not to investigate the haunting, but to hunt her, specifically, for the templars she and Colm had killed in Tarebach.
There was no telling how Medrith and her druids’ circle would feel about the City of the Wise.
Fola was surprised to find that they believed in its existence at all.
To most in such far-flung corners of the world beyond the walls, the City was no more than a legend.
Of course, practitioners of magic, particularly those with the wisdom and skill to understand both the expanse of possibilities and the limits of their own power, were far more likely to believe in its existence.
‘We all keep a few secrets, especially far from home,’ Fola said, setting the cup back on the desk.
Not quite an admission of the lie, but conceding enough, she hoped, to move the conversation forward.
Frog hopped over and dipped his beak in the tea, taking a quick sample in case it was poison and he would need to produce an antidote.
‘My interest is as I stated—I am a scholar of undeath. This haunting seems an anomaly in many ways, and I thought to learn something from investigating it. And, as I regret all such tragedies, I am saddened by your husband’s death. ’
Medrith ran her thumb around the lip of her cup, her attention fixed on Frog, who, having determined that the tea was not poisoned, returned to investigating the bones scattered on her desk with his beak and talons.
‘You have encountered the Mortal Church before,’ she said, then chuckled. ‘Don’t look so surprised. You are not so closed a book as you would like to think.’
‘I have, yes,’ Fola said. ‘Unfortunately.’
Medrith nodded. ‘They are nearly as troublesome a plague as the haunting. The man Jon Kenn was not always one of them. Five years ago, you would have found him a sceptic. A man who considered himself enlightened by his unwillingness to believe in anything.’ She laughed.
‘But lack of belief is, sometimes, little more than lack of conviction. Not a year after the haunting began he started wearing that pendant. He tried to teach my son those foreign ways. My husband was on the point of throwing him out of the castle. Only Owyn’s love for his tutor stayed his hand. ’
‘Love for him?’ Fola cocked her head. ‘At court he seemed cold towards the old scholar, at best.’
All levity faded from the queen’s face. ‘Much has changed in recent days—my son most of all. What do you know of their teachings?’
‘Very little,’ Fola said. It was difficult to care much about the nuances of a belief system that fundamentally wanted you dead. ‘They hunt people like us, for one, and they wish to rid the world of the remnants of the First Folk, for another.’
‘Neither goal is tolerable, to me,’ Medrith said. ‘I doubt they are tolerable to you. I am sure they would like to see your City destroyed—excuse me, your Starlit Tower.’
Fola barked a laugh, despite herself.
The queen smiled. ‘I thought not. You may not trust me enough to be fully honest. But we have a common enemy, and I hope that is enough for us to work together.’
‘My plans may have changed,’ Fola said. ‘It’s foolish to go on exploring a cave once you find it full of vipers.’
‘And if there are children, too, in the cave? Unable to defend themselves? Is it courage, then, to flee?’
That elicited a pang of guilt. Fola did not like to think herself a coward, but neither was she stupid enough to pit herself against a legion of templars. She gestured to the ring of burnt seeds beneath the kettle. ‘You hardly seem a child.’
‘I have some art, but my art is of the living. I know little of the dead. What I do know was long ago exhausted, and yielded nothing of use against this haunting.’ Medrith leaned forward, searching Fola’s eyes.
‘We are all exhausted here. This kingdom was beautiful not long ago.
At peace, save the constant culling of the rimewolves in the north.
In my girlhood there was more joy than sorrow, more laughter than weeping, more pleasure than fear.
But its kings were strong, then, and the Old Stones bright in their power.
‘Much has been lost, despite our best efforts to maintain it.
Then came the plague, nine years ago, and five years after it, the haunting.
Now wraiths ride the wind. Our magic, once powerful, has begun to fade, and those with the power to restore it have refused to do so.
Rebellion stirs in the Greenwood. Too much suffering, for too long.
My husband was killed by the haunting, yes, but also by his own despair. Despair that has infected his son.
‘Despair is a goad towards foolishness, Fola. Not three days after the king’s death, Jon Kenn brought a proposal to my son—not to me, who rules until the boy is crowned, for he knew I would not hear him.
The Mortal Church claims the power to rid Parwys of this haunting.
The unhallowed dead will be returned to their graves, but at what cost?
A ritual, encircling the entire kingdom, that will scour it of all magic.
Any leavings of the First Folk will be rendered inert.
The powers of earth and stone cultivated here will be uprooted. ’
‘Good thing the prince has developed a distaste for his tutor, then.’
The queen shook her head. ‘He isolates himself from all he loves. From me. He treats Ifan of Glascoed with contempt, when they were once the closest of friends. As a hedgehog might skewer its mate on its spines when panicked, fear—of the haunting, of his looming responsibilities—has put Owyn’s hackles up.
After his father is buried, my son will mourn for a fortnight, and then he will be crowned.
He conducts himself well in court, but he is only seventeen, though they would put a spear in his hand in wartime and now a crown upon his head.
For half of his life the kingdom has suffered, but he remembers a happy childhood of peace. ’
Her voice, low and powerful, became strained with grief.
‘I fear what he will do to return to it. What he will give up to unshoulder the burdens he will inherit. If the Mortal Church offers the only path out of this nightmare, he will take it, little understanding or mourning what he concedes. I will not stand idly by and allow him to make such a mistake. Will you, Fola of the Starlit Tower? Oh, I tire of the pretence. Can the City of the Wise allow another kingdom to fall to the Mortal Church? They are a devious, gluttonous worm. How many more lands must they devour before they are strong enough to consume even you?’
Fola sipped her tea while Medrith ran a thumb below her eye, wicking away a tear.
The flavours of the tea were bright and well balanced, with a soothing undercurrent.
Fola knew greenseer leaves; knew their rumoured power to grant wisdom and insight.
Little evidenced, by the City’s study of the plant, but knowledge is rarely a true defence against such simple, false beliefs.
Fear bade Fola flee Parwys and seek the proof for her theory elsewhere.
But compassion bade her stay. Medrith was right.
The Mortal Church was a threat to her, personally, but it was also a threat to this kingdom.
If unopposed, it would grow like a cancer, consuming the world until it threatened even the City of the Wise.