Chapter 16
The Sorceress
There are, in a sense, as many magics in the world as there are persons.
Even a rigid, complex system—such as thaumaturgy—is mediated through the minds of individuals.
Through countless conceptions of meaning, each mind a unique semiotic web of analogy and connotation.
We do what we can to systematise, but as no one can fully understand the mind of another, no complete accounting of such powers is really possible.
Fola left the troupers huddled together in their backstage tent and put her loupe to her eye.
Siwan still burned like a beacon, even through the muting weight of canvas, but the lattice of fae power had been knitted, and the riot of the undead and the fiend had been quelled.
Part of that was her doing—the spell she had written in haste on the rug.
Part of it, she suspected, ought to be attributed to the troupers.
There had been an unbidden hitch in Fola’s chest when she entered the tent.
The wider world was full of beauty: soaring mountains to rival the Starlit Tower; rivers wide enough to swallow half the City; deep forests full of hidden glades and glimmering fae …
to say nothing of the wonders the First Folk had left behind, scattered like a handful of golden coins tossed across a map of the world—treasures waiting to be found.
Nothing, she thought in that moment, more beautiful than what she had seen in that tent.
Perhaps there was something to be said for suffering.
A notion, she knew even as it occurred to her, anathema to the thinking of the City.
Arno would baulk to hear it. Yet without the depths of horror and despair to which the night had descended, there could be none of the strength, care and kindness that had surrounded Siwan.
Simple things. A cup of tea. A gentle hand on a fevered brow.
Soft words as the girl roused from troubled sleep.
Together forming something more, as the myriad equations of a spell add up to a singular expression of power.
A second lattice, protecting Siwan as surely as the one woven to contain the raven fiend.
This one not to protect her from an ancient curse, but from the more mundane cruelties of the world.
Fear. Hunger. Deprivation. The things the City existed to prevent, prevented here, instead, by a small community, lacking deep magic but making up for it with love and sheer, stubborn goodness.
Fola had never been the object of such affection.
In truth, it was difficult to imagine any similar scene transpiring in the City.
There would be no occasion for it. Folk faced adversity—Fola had known her share of it, in the form of mockery and rejection letters from the research board—but everything was mediated and mitigated.
No sooner had anyone taken ill than their bird heaved up some bespoke medicine.
Even a fatal accident—a fall from a tower, or the backlash of a magical experiment—inflicted no real suffering, only the minor inconvenience of rebirth and regrowth.
Without real suffering, could anyone know real comfort? Could mortalkind develop a real capacity to care for one another?
Was there something missing from the souls of City folk?
If so, it was something Fola felt an ache for that night, but something too ephemeral to seize upon.
A distraction. She had to focus, now. Clues were falling into place, but she still lacked a full picture, and there was one lead left to follow that night before she sought her audience with Ifan, the Count of Glascoed.
Through the loupe, she traced the glimmering, pinkish line that trailed away from the snarled glare of Siwan’s power.
It led her from the backstage tent to a wagon at the edge of the troupe’s plot.
A mural of a full moon reflected in a lake had been painted on its side, the paint bright and vivid—refreshed recently, by the look of it.
The wagon was enclosed, like a little hut on wheels.
A silver lock secured its narrow door, vivid and glimmering through Fola’s loupe, secured by magic as much as by pins and bars.
Fola might have broken the lock and the magic seal, but wanted to leave as little trace as possible.
The troupers were unlikely to cooperate if they discovered her stealing their secrets.
She felt a pang of guilt. Maybe it was better to wait, to give them time to warm up to her, to come around and feel comfortable enough to tell her the whole truth of what Siwan was and how she had been made.
She had waited decades for the research board to come around, and they never had. Why think these troupers will be any different? They had their circle of trust and comfort—why would I ever be invited in?
No. Waiting was too risky. This was information she needed—information the world needed.
Siwan might well be the key to unlocking all the mysteries of the First Folk.
If Fola succeeded, mortalkind would no longer live baffled in the shadows of their predecessors—whether those shadows were blessings, as in the City, or curses, as in Ulun.
Surely a little deception could be justified in such a cause.
‘Keep watch,’ she whispered to Frog. He chirruped, blinked his goggle eyes at her, then fluttered to the top of the wagon.
Fola visually measured the distance from her position to the inside of the wagon, then drew a thaumaturgic circle on her pad of spellpaper.
Magic flashed to life, enfolded her in silver fire, then plunged her into darkness and silence.
While she held her breath she would remain an insubstantial mist, the material of her body suspended in a state of uncertainty, unaffected by anything—even light and sound.
A trick Arno had taught her. It was irresponsible, in his thinking, to send agents into the wider world without the definitive ability to slip out of a locked room or a jail cell.
She counted down, measured distance as a function of time as the spell carried her forward, then exhaled.
After such depths of silence, the chirruping of a morning cricket outside thundered in her ears.
The dim interior of the wagon was less obtrusive.
The only light crept in through the gaps between door and frame and one window covered over with wax paper.
Heaped forms filled the small space. Chests piled with boxes and jars, some ornate, some unadorned.
Those that stood open held gemstones, some as small as Fola’s fingernail, others as big as her fist. In the dark they seemed no more impressive than oily rocks, but Fola suspected many were cut with fine precision.
She was standing in the midst of a hoard unrivalled in Parwys, save perhaps in the royal treasury.
Hadn’t the troupers been complaining of poverty?
Which meant this wealth was either unknown to most of them, or understood to be something other than currency.
She remembered the white quartz in Afanan’s hands.
Remembered, also, the oaths to the ‘old stones’ she had heard again and again in Parwys.
Medrith’s magic had drawn on no gems that Fola could see, but there were many paths to power.
The druids would not have a monopoly on magic.
All this was curious, but not Fola’s purpose.
If she lingered too long and was discovered, whatever inroads she had made with the troupers would be jeopardised.
She put her loupe to her eye and traced the pinkish filament of light that had trailed from Siwan to this wagon, through the door, and to a chest at the back of the tiny room.
Two more chests were stacked atop it, and three jewellery boxes and a stoppered urn atop those.
It took some creative balancing of boxes atop other boxes—and more muscle than she was accustomed to expending—to free the chest. It, too, was locked and sealed.
Through the loupe, a knot of power clung to the leather latch.
She could not fit her entire body into the chest, and there was no way to slip just one hand in, grasp what she sought, and pull it out.
The same magic that made it possible to walk through a wall made it impossible to grab anything on the other side until the spell had ended—at which point, it was vital that every part of one’s body was no longer inside any solid object.
She could untangle the knot, but it would take time, and Afanan might return to the wagon at any moment.
Fola glanced over her shoulder. She was still alone.
If she kept a keen ear open for Frog’s warning call, she could hide or slip out of the wagon before anyone caught her.
Probably. It was impossible, after all, to say for certain what another sorceress, wielding unfamiliar magic, could and could not do.
The wise thing would have been to put things back as she had found them, retreat for now, and return later—maybe during the troupe’s next performance, if they held one. Four years was a very long time in the wider world. What was one day more?
Well … it was one more day. And the troupe might decide to cut and run. She had just given them more money than they’d hoped to earn here, and the horrors of the previous night would draw unwanted attention.
She opened her pad of spellpaper and began to write.
‘I thought to find you here,’ Afanan said.
Fola whirled to face the door, her blistered right hand and her staff raised and ready. Afanan stood in the doorway, which had somehow opened silently, and showed her empty palms.
‘Frankly, I couldn’t imagine who else might have slipped my first line of wards,’ Afanan went on, as though Fola were not threatening her. ‘We have a great deal more to say to each other, I think. Things it may be easier to say without Llewyn and Siwan to hear.’