Chapter 13 #4
Trick sighed, his entire face sagging in resignation, and tossed the make-up rag onto Roni’s desk. ‘All right. Hand me one of those masks. I’m not going out there naked.’
Siwan’s song returned to one final refrain. She held the last note, imbuing it with an aching yearning for a better world, full of better, kinder men, while she played through the melody one final time. The note faded. Silence held for a long, slow breath before the audience burst into applause.
Siwan took a deep curtsy, then plucked a few testing notes and tweaked the tuning of her gittern.
‘Go!’ Llewyn snapped at Trick, who was tying a motley mask—a dog wearing a floppy hat—to his face. Siwan beamed at her audience, who had begun to demand a second song. Trick flounced on to the stage beside her, already tossing colourful balls in high, lazy arcs.
‘One more round of applause for Siwan the Blackbird!’ Trick cried. ‘The lovely lady requires a moment of repose, but I’m sure she will be right back with another wonderful song!’
Siwan spun to glare at him through the darkened lenses of her mask.
He managed, somehow, to shrug in the middle of juggling and jab his chin in Llewyn’s direction, then shot his own glare at the musicians sitting at the foot of the stage, who hastily gathered up their instruments and stumbled into the familiar upbeat rhythms of ‘The Ploughman’s Jig’.
Siwan hesitated a moment longer, her knuckles white around the neck of her gittern, then walked to join Llewyn backstage, each step carefully measured to conceal her fury.
‘What?’ she snapped.
There was no formulation of words that could convince her. Few, if any, that would not stoke her smouldering fury.
‘There’s a sorceress in the crowd,’ Llewyn said. ‘She caught sight of us on the hill this morning. She’s taken an interest in you.’
Siwan tossed her hair and planted a hand on her hip. ‘Some women like pretty girls.’
‘Not that kind of interest. Whether as an agent of the Grey Lady, or for her own reasons, she’s fixated on you, and she knows you’re more than you seem.
She’s a danger. I hate it, Siwan, I really do, but she’s connected you to the troupe.
We have to leave. As soon as we possibly can. Gather your things.’
She stared back at him, the lenses of her mask catching his reflection in the lantern light, casting it back at him like an accusation. ‘If you’re afraid of her, you can go. I’ll be sad, but you were never comfortable in the troupe anyway.’
‘You’re not understanding—’
‘I understand perfectly well,’ she snapped.
‘I feel little twinges of it, too, you know. Echoes.’ She pulled the chain around her neck, uncovering the palm-sized shard of ghostwood she always wore, broken from the end of his sword.
‘We’re tied together, Llewyn, by this. When their eyes are on you I feel that itch on the back of your neck.
I know you’re meant for shadows. For the forest. Not the stage.
But I am, Llewyn. I’m not fully mortal, but I’m not fully gwyddien either.
This is where I belong. My home. Even if it isn’t yours. ’
‘Not fully gwyddien, not fully human, and more than both, lest you forget,’ Llewyn said, his patience strained.
That very moment the sorceress Fola might be on her way towards the backstage tent, her strange staff and the markings on her hands readied to unleash unknown, terrible powers.
‘You may have forgotten what you are, but that woman out there has an inkling. We need to get away from her.’
‘What I am?’ Siwan tore the mask from her face. Her yellow eyes burned, brighter than the lanterns. Anger gave the angles and planes of her face a menacing, shadowed cast. ‘And what is that, Llewyn? A singer. But she doesn’t care about that, does she? Nor do you.’
‘Of course I do,’ Llewyn protested. This wasn’t how he’d wanted the conversation to go, yet a sinking feeling in his gut told him that it had been an inevitable end.
His fear and her frustration had stirred old resentments to the surface, swallowed time and again for the sake of harmony and politeness.
‘But you can’t forget what you carry. What it can do. You were young, but—’
‘I haven’t forgotten,’ she seethed, baring her teeth.
‘But you won’t let me be anything else, will you?
I’ll always be that child on the altar, victim to the monster looming overhead.
And you’ll always be the gwyddien taking off his ring, the Grey Lady never more than a pace from catching up with you. ’
‘Siwan—’
‘I don’t want to hear this, Llewyn,’ she said firmly. ‘I don’t want to talk about this. Not ever again. Afanan and I have a handle on it. Trust us, and let that be enough. Now we’ve left poor Trick out there to juggle for a full five minutes, and I’ve two more songs to sing.’
She returned the mask to her face and turned back to the stage.
‘Siwan, wait,’ he pleaded, his hand reaching of its own accord and closing on her arm.
She froze, a shudder working through her.
‘Take your hand off me,’ she said without turning to face him, her voice teetering on the edge of fury.
‘You need to listen,’ he said.
‘No, Llewyn. You need to let me go.’
It would have been a simple thing to open his hand, to let her return to the stage—to the life she had chosen for herself, despite its dangers.
A simple thing to let her passion and desire—her own portrait of her self—overrule his anxieties.
To let her be the person she chose, no matter how uncomfortable her choices made him.
‘Papa … Please … help me.’
She didn’t understand. He wasn’t afraid of her, only of what might happen to her.
The raven fiend was more than a burden she had to carry; it made her a target.
The Grey Lady would destroy her as an abomination.
Others, like this Fola woman, would seize the power bound to her bones and twist it to their own dark ends.
She was too young, and too brave, and too determined to move past the suffering of her childhood.
Llewyn loved her for her strength, but the difference between courage and foolhardiness is a fine line: one, in his thinking, she strode past as she walked back to the stage.
Fear is no easy thing to overcome.
‘I can’t,’ he said.
She whirled, her muscles going as tight as bowstrings beneath his hand. The burning yellow of her eyes shone through the dark lenses of her mask.
‘Let me go!’
The words rocked him back on his heels, struck the breath from his lungs and the strength from his arms. His fingers spasmed open and Siwan pulled away, trembling with fury.
‘You are such an arsehole!’ she roared. A gust of wind rolled out from her, buffeting him back a step. It carried the must of old bones and crow’s wings. She opened her mouth with other, darker words on her tongue, but the trembling crawled up her shoulders to her jaw and held it shut.
‘No, Siwan, no,’ Llewyn said, breathless, desperate, terrified. How could I have been so stupid. Not now. Not here. Not with that woman in the crowd just paces away. ‘Deep breath, girl. Please.’
‘Fuck you,’ she said through teeth clenched vice-tight.
She ripped the mask from her face, hurling it away in a spray of torn fabric and feathers, and jabbed a finger at his eye.
‘You arsehole. You bastard. You festering pustule. You splinter in my flesh and blade in my neck.’ Her words slurred, the tones of her voice that he so loved shattering into a monstrous raven’s screech.
‘I should have given up the girl and torn you to shreds in the forest gwyddien slave bloody child-stealer basta-a-r–’ Another shudder twisted through her, shifting bones out of alignment and rolling back her eyes. A sick smile contorted her face.
‘Never too late,’ she coughed, and collapsed, her body seizing, heels and head drumming the rug floor of the tent.
‘Afanan!’ Llewyn screamed, going to his knee by the girl’s side, holding her shoulders down. It had been this bad only once before, five years ago. Afanan had showed him how she calmed it, but in that moment the memory refused to come at his call.
‘Papa …’ He heard her, as surely as he had on the altar. ‘Please … help me.’
He had failed her. She deserved a saviour—a real father. He was no better than the coward who had borne her and been willing to trade her life for the promise of safety. No better than his own mother and father, who had given him away without a tear.
‘You should be proud of yourself,’ Afanan had said. How poorly she saw him.
The scent of an unearthed grave filled his nose. Above him, the cawing of unseen crows tore through the growing wind—a chorus soon joined by the moans of the angry dead.
He could only hold Siwan, and stare into her rolling eyes, and scream for help as the power of the raven fiend bound within her unfurled, reached out, and stirred the air.