Chapter 21
The Huntress
In some ways, the fae are more confounding than fiends.
Something which is entirely alien can, after all, be dismissed as incomprehensible.
But something which at times seems to fit known patterns, only to violate them at unexpected turns, strains and unsettles the mind.
Fae have courts, domains and politics, and it is thus tempting to say they are kindred to mortals.
Long study, however, reveals courts that resemble no familiar hierarchy, domains that exist irrespective of geographic barriers and distance, and politics fixated on concerns that are as often whimsical nonsense as they are abominable horror.
The world around Llewyn grew distant, fading into a blur like a hastily painted backdrop, save that girl, her ring, and the hand of the youth who pointed back the way Llewyn had just come. He caught Damon by the arm.
‘Llewyn? What …?’ Damon demanded, pulling against his grip. ‘You’re hurting—’
‘All three of you, go back to camp,’ he said, the words falling from him without thought.
Only one thing mattered. Whatever guilt he felt for those who had died as a consequence of Siwan’s curse, his shame at considering, however briefly, returning to the Grey Lady’s fold far outweighed it.
‘Get horses. Take Siwan. Find the woman Fola at the Garland Inn.’
Damon shook his head, the paper flower Siwan had tucked into his curls finally coming loose and drifting to the ground. ‘Why? And I thought you didn’t trust—’
‘I don’t trust her,’ Llewyn said. ‘But she is powerful, and she might be able to keep you safe long enough to get away from here.’
‘What are you talking about, Llewyn?’ Tula demanded.
‘That which I feared most,’ he said, but an explanation would take too long.
Even he could not see through the girl’s glamour, but he knew the signs—had kept vigil for them these eight years.
‘You need to trust me in this. The troupe must disperse. Scatter. Take Siwan to Fola, and from there to anywhere she might be safe. The City, if you must. Just away from here and from any place Jareth might have known. If anything by the name and description of the Silver Lake Troupe remains in the world, you will all be hunted down and slaughtered.’
‘Llewyn, I—’ Damon protested gain.
‘Just go,’ Llewyn hissed, and hefted his ghostwood blade, no longer a walking stick, now a sword, curved and wickedly sharp. ‘And be quick. You can do nothing here.’
He could hardly hope to do anything—only delay and, with any luck, redirect attention.
He took the hammer from his belt and cut away the rags that bound its head, revealing a flat face and wedged back suited for stonework.
Llewyn kept his grip near the end of the handle, far away from the raw iron’s rough, dark surface.
Harwick’s confusion at last hardened into fear. He put a heavy hand on Damon’s shoulder. ‘Come, lad. You know what he was, once. We do as Llewyn says.’
Damon let himself be led away. Tula muttered under her breath, but followed. Llewyn could little blame them. He had demanded that they shatter the semblance of family they had found together and dissolve their lives, and offered no coherent reason. But there wasn’t time.
He had little grasp of his own age, of how much time had passed while he slept in the roots of his ghostwood tree, a sword in its sheath awaiting the Grey Lady’s need. Yet he knew this one—this monster in the guise of a girl—had served far longer.
She left the youth and approached. Her eyes were two pale flecks of ice above a spray of freckles, first scrutinising Llewyn’s face, then the wooden sword in his white-knuckled hand, then the hammer.
A knife would have been better, or a sword, but raw iron was coveted in Parwys and an old hammer was all he had been able to buy with what little coin he had scraped together.
Not that better armament would make much difference.
The dog padded at her side, nearly as tall as Bess’s shoulder, its own gaze yellow, wild and hungry.
A glamour could hide much, but struggled to veil the eyes.
Llewyn had spent little time in the company of other gwyddien. They were solitary tools. Yet he knew this one. The finest blade in the Grey Lady’s armoury. A woman with a rimewolf at her side, known only as the Huntress.
It had always been destined to end this way, from the moment he tore the Grey Lady’s ring from his thumb.
Perhaps he should have taken Siwan further afield, into Galca, or Alberon, or further south to Salus or Tarebach—countries that were only words to him.
Yet the Grey Lady’s domain paid little mind to mortal maps and borders.
Her territory abutted every shadowed glade, every moonlit bough.
And he had, himself, been lost, and alone, and afraid of a world he understood only through a fractured, distorted lens.
Afanan and her troupe had given Siwan a good life, and there was no telling whether years of desperate flight would have kept her safer than years of comfort, kindness, and the next best thing to family.
The Huntress’s ice-flake eyes drifted up to meet his gaze.
‘She is surprised to find that you carry your ring,’ she said, her voice young and bright.
Llewyn had imagined it would be crueller, hardened by time and violence.
She pointed at his pocket with her ghostwood blade. ‘Put it on. She would speak with you.’
Though only moments ago Llewyn had considered the ring—as though putting it on could undo the consequences of his rebellion—now it terrified him.
For eight years his thoughts had been his own.
He had found the strength to defy her once, but she had not been expecting it, then.
If he let her back in, she might bind him to her service or fill his mind with torturous horror.
The Huntress frowned. Through her glamour, she seemed no more threatening than an impatient child, yet he felt the ferocity roiling underneath. ‘You do not understand, it seems,’ she said. ‘You can neither save yourself nor the abomination you saw fit to unleash upon the world.’
‘She is only a child,’ Llewyn said, echoing Afanan, feeling the powerlessness of the words as they fell from his tongue.
No world existed in which he convinced the Grey Lady to divert her course.
Yet the longer they talked, the more time Damon and the others had to reach the camp, convince the troupe to dissolve, and spirit Siwan away to Fola.
Who knew what use the sorceress would have for her.
Llewyn trusted only that it would be better than death.
‘Why not find a way to destroy the fiend without destroying her?’
‘Put on the ring,’ the Huntress snapped. With a flick like a damselfly’s wing, the white wood of her blade flattened and narrowed to a razor edge.
The dog stalked towards him, jowls peeled and hackles high.
Llewyn took a slow step backwards. If he fled, little would stop the Huntress from finding Siwan.
Yet if he stood and fought, he had no hope of survival, let alone victory.
The Huntress had her rimewolf and whatever other powers the Grey Lady had granted her—at the very least, the same minor skill with magic that Llewyn had once possessed.
He cast about for anything he might turn to his advantage. A group had gathered at the edge of the nearby beer garden to watch, anticipating the drama of a duel. One of their number wore a farrier’s apron with a tack hammer hanging from his belt.
In the further corners of the kingdom, folks still made horseshoes from iron dug from the earth.
Llewyn was sure the king and his druids conjured their own metal for such mundane uses, reserving raw, true iron for the steel of the swords and spears sent north to face down packs of rimewolves on the tundra of Cilbran. But there was a chance, however slim.
‘Looking for a place to run, Llewyn?’ The Huntress sneered. ‘There is nowhere in this world where she will not find you. If you cooperate, if you put on the ring, she may forgive enough to grant you a quick death.’
‘Is she so desperate to speak with me?’ Llewyn said. There, a thin trickle of dark smoke rose from an open space on the other side of the beer garden. He began to circle, taking slow steps to put himself between the Huntress and the farrier’s shop.
‘She would have what is hers,’ the Huntress said. ‘Even if only to destroy it.’
She put fingers to her lips and whistled.
Her monstrous dog charged, its claws tearing divots in the earth, a growl burning in its throat.
Llewyn swung his hammer in a rising arc, hoping to smash the beast’s jawbone.
Too-intelligent eyes caught his motion. At the last moment, it shut its slavering maw and turned.
The hammer slammed into the dog’s shoulder.
It staggered back a step and screamed in pain and rage.
The stink of burnt flesh filled the air and tufts of bloodied white fur, torn free of the rimewolf’s body and the reach of the Grey Lady’s glamour, clung to the chisel head of the hammer.
Llewyn turned and ran, hoping the blow would infuriate the beast and draw it after him. Hoping, too, that the Huntress would not simply abandon her pursuit of him in favour of Siwan, the greater prize.
The little gathering of bystanders in the beer garden shouted in alarm and scattered as the duel they had come to spectate threatened to engulf them.
The rimewolf howled, which turned those shouts of alarm into screams of panic, then splintering wood as the beast barrelled through tables and chairs after Llewyn.