Chapter 19
A Convergence at Cross Purposes
While the notion underlying the proposal is intriguing, as it has been since the first time it crossed our desk, intrigue alone is not sufficient to demand use of the one limited resource which this board is tasked to delegate.
Perhaps sufficient experimentation in this eighth, freshly proposed direction may yield deeper knowledge of the soul’s nature, and even the nature of the First Folk themselves.
Perhaps. And perhaps battering one’s head with a hammer may, by a happy accident of scrambling one’s thoughts, yield the same.
Alas, many notions are intriguing, but we remind the applicant again that one must constrain one’s efforts to the possible.
Though our interest is high, our confidence is not, and we must, sadly, reject this proposal.
Despite a night without sleep, an exhilarating energy coursed through Fola.
She felt transported back to the early days of her research, freshly educated, the world alive with possibilities.
Days performing simple experiments with her meagre student’s allocation of thaumacite.
Nights spent plumbing the Library’s infinite depths, trawling for texts that might yield the next scrap of useful information.
A constant series of new discoveries all supported by a scaffolding of pitch-black tea.
And here, in Parwys, she had made the most vital discovery of all.
Fola would easily convince Arno and the board to back her project once she brought Siwan back to the City.
In a decade, perhaps two, she and Siwan together would untangle the puzzle-knot of the First Folk’s nature, making it possible, for the first time, to reach out to their souls, wherever they had vanished to.
To converse with them, as one might converse with a conjured ghost. After which, no mystery they had left behind would go unsolved.
It would take time, of course, to convince Siwan and Llewyn to accompany her, even if Afanan made good on her promise to help.
In the meantime, Fola had made a promise of her own to the people of Parwys.
Siwan’s episode the night before had revealed not only clues relevant to Fola’s broader research project, but to the more immediate matter of the haunting.
The next piece of the puzzle lay with young Ifan of Glascoed, one of the first witnesses to the haunting’s vengeance.
She remembered Puli the clock-mender’s tale of Harlow’s death, and Ifan’s madness in its aftermath—wandering his halls with a drawn sword, shouting challenges at the dark, convinced that his father’s illness had arisen from a curse of the undead. Told as much in a dream.
Others might have dismissed the rumour as no more than that—a fanciful tale of a mad nobleman.
But the undead could, indeed, infect the dreams of mortals.
The wraiths might well have told Ifan the origin of their grudge against the nobility of Parwys, though he may not understand it fully himself.
Together, they might tease out the meaning of those dreams, and with it the cause of the haunting—and the key to ending it.
Buzzing with excitement, Fola nearly proceeded from the Silver Lake pavilion directly to the castle.
Good sense caught up with her, however, and forced a detour to the Garland Inn.
The serving girl who met her in the voluminous foyer stared in astonishment at the blood and grime that spattered her clothing.
Fola requested a hot bath and the girl hurried off, muttering under her breath that she had never in her life heard of such a display in such a fine establishment—two bloodied patrons in a single night!
Fola climbed the stairs to her room, Frog fluttering ahead of her, leaping from banister to banister and goggling at the swooping ceilings.
Back home, a hot bath could be summoned at the turn of a dial.
Here, she had to wait for a cauldron to boil and the copper tub to be hauled up two flights of stairs.
A preposterous waste of time and human labour.
She found Colm sprawled out on his bed in their lavish rooms, his bloodstained shirt and trousers replaced by a pair of loose pants, a blanket that had fallen halfway off the bed with his tossing and turning, and two empty bottles of what she took, at a glance, for very expensive wine.
The wound to his gut he had suffered in Tarebach had faded to a pink, puckered scar.
The fresher cut on his upper arm, dealt the previous evening, still seeped red into his bandage, despite Frog’s ointment.
As it did whenever she glimpsed him in such a state, Fola’s pulse quickened and her thoughts flitted to those hands, with their callouses, brushing against her skin …
She slammed the door and he started, blinking sleep from his eyes.
‘Thought you were headed to see young Count Ifan?’ he murmured, shuffling the blankets to cover his legs and a bit more of his belly.
‘Like this?’ She gestured to her ruined outfit and sweat-slicked hair.
In her flustered state, she’d stupidly used her left arm, which twinged, still aching and blistered from having put Llewyn to sleep.
‘I’d as likely be tossed in a dungeon as admitted to see the count if I showed up at court drenched in blood. ’
Colm grunted and stretched all four of his arms. Fola forced her eyes away from his shoulders and hoped he hadn’t noticed her blush.
She stepped behind the privacy screen near the wardrobe and riffled through her clothes—the two dresses she’d acquired for court, plus two spare sets of her preferred outfit of comfortable trousers, sensible shirt, and long coat with ample pockets for her notebook, pens and any other materials or tools she might need.
Surely the young count would not be offended by her forgoing ostentation in favour of practicality.
Then again, if she wanted him to take her seriously, she needed to appear as a fellow member of his class, not a strangely dressed adventurer from a far-flung land.
With a sigh, she withdrew the second of her two dresses, a deep forest green stitched with golden leaves. Conveniently similar, she realised, to the colours of County Glascoed. She brushed lint from the dress, then hung it from the privacy screen.
‘Colm, I need a bath,’ she said.
He grumbled, but she heard a rustling of sheets and the clink of a wine bottle rolling across the floor.
It was one thing to glimpse him half-naked; for him to do the same to her would be a profound embarrassment.
A genuinely odd dynamic, in the sum total of her experience.
In the City, at the baths reserved for such things, one might openly take note of another’s beauty without reservation, and might in turn appreciate a lingering, admiring gaze.
Either gesture might eventually lead to a pleasant tumble—or a longer commitment, if that proved desirable to all parties.
Or not, with no offence taken either way.
Colm was the first person in Fola’s life whom she could not bear to imagine looking at her as an object of attraction.
Not from any kind of disgust or disinterest. Quite the opposite, in fact.
But the ethical ramifications … She was his employer, and that ruined all the fun.
It would be like one of the members of the research board offering to take her to bed.
An offer she might accept based purely on the presumption that doing so might improve the chances of her next proposal.
Layers of anonymity and unspoken taboo prevented such a thing from ever happening.
Absurd though it might seem, her ability to provide Colm with gold gave her power over him in much the same way, and she couldn’t allow her sexual interest to muddy the waters between them.
She heard the door open, the thunk of the tub being set in place, then the slosh of it filling with water.
The door shut, leaving her in silence, and she breathed a sigh of relief.
She began peeling bloodstained garments from her skin and tossing them on the floor.
Frog dutifully hopped over and began to devour her discarded clothes with gulping, violent jerks of his head.
Ordinary nightjars used their wide beaks as nets to capture the insects that were their prey; Frog used his to force whatever raw material Fola provided him down his gullet, into the mysterious engine within every Bird of the City that, at a thought, could perform the most complex alchemy conceivable.
The birds, too, were a mystery that countless archivists had dedicated lifetimes to unravelling, to no avail.
Fola counted them among the many, many questions better posed directly to the First Folk, once her research made that possible.
She did her best to wipe off the worst of the grime with a hand towel, then stepped out from behind the screen to find Colm, his vest only half-buttoned, standing behind the haze of steam rising from the copper tub.
He looked up at her, his face straining to hold a blank expression.
Fola stared back, fighting the urge to cover herself and layer humiliation atop embarrassment.
‘Get out,’ she said through clenched teeth.
Colm nodded sharply and walked directly to the door.
Fola winced as it slammed. She stood there a moment, cursing herself for not calling out before walking into the middle of the room entirely naked and also covered in blood and dirt, then lowered herself, grumbling, into the soothing warmth of the tub.
Frog cocked his head at her and tried to chirrup around a mouthful of bloody clothes.
‘Shut up,’ she muttered, and hunkered deeper into the water, as though it might sluice away her shame and confusion with all the rest of the muck.
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