Chapter 25
The First Folk Road
A ghost is little more than an impression left upon the world of some strong, unfulfilled desire. Often, but not always, for revenge. What desire is more potent, and more terrible when unfulfilled, than the need for justice?
Fola sagged in her saddle, letting Harwick guide their horse, listening to the swish of hooves through the marsh.
They made slow progress following the submerged silhouette of the First Folk Road, a shadow beneath silty, ankle-deep water.
The road itself was sound, as were all the First Folk roads.
Dirtied, perhaps, or buried beneath landslides or rising waters—as this one was—but sound.
There were First Folk roads that had become bridges over chasms after quakes rent the earth.
Though to the eye little more than well-built roads of fine material, their magic preserved them through eons of time and the contortions of the world they bound as it shook itself apart.
Sleepily, Fola wondered what the point of them had been—partly to keep her mind from wandering to Colm and other, more painful questions.
The First Folk were capable of far more direct means of transportation.
There were doors in the City that opened into other lands, some beyond the horizon of the sea—some into other worlds, the librarians who studied them speculated.
There were moving platforms, too, such as those that bore one up to the observatory high atop the Starlit Tower, so near the sky that it turned dark even in daylight and the world below bent as though distorted by an ill-made lens.
Yet the First Folk had made roads which had to be traversed by foot, or by horse, or by wagon.
Were these some earlier expression of their capability, after they had attained certain skill with magic but not yet risen to the heights that would forge the City?
A step along the way to true mastery of the world and its powers?
There were volumes upon volumes of texts in the depths of the Labyrinthine Library, at the very heart of—and spiralling deep, deep below—the City.
Volumes that surely revealed the history she now wondered at absently, in a half-dream, all but carried off to sleep by the warmth of the horse beneath her and rocked by its steady gait.
Volumes written in the language of the First Folk, all but inscrutable even after a thousand years of study. Thus, her project: to conjure the minds of the First Folk from wherever they had vanished, to put these and countless other questions to them directly.
She must have dozed, for one moment they still travelled through the silty mire of the Windmarsh and the next the road lay plain beneath them, bricks of white stone sloping upwards through the air, high over jagged hills.
A startling transition that filled her with vertigo as she gazed down at the distant ground below.
She blinked against the light of afternoon, trending towards evening.
Frog, still bundled against her chest, breathed gently.
The last leagues of the Windmarsh stretched to the east. The road disappeared again beneath their waters, only to reappear at the banks of a broad river—the Afoneang.
The road arched into a brilliant, gleaming bridge over the river, which flowed down from the mountains to the north towards the southern sea.
At the foot of those mountains, strangely isolated from the flow of the river, a lake glittered in the late afternoon light.
‘Abal’s Scar,’ Damon said, bringing his and Siwan’s mount up beside Fola and Harwick. ‘The wound in the world by which the kingdom was forged. Awe-inspiring, every time I see it.’
‘Oh?’ Fola said, curiosity burning away her drowsiness. ‘I don’t recall it from that play you lot put on.’
Damon coughed and scratched at the curled tip of his horn.
‘We don’t have the budget or the cast size to perform pitched battles, nor to blast a divot in our stage.
I admit, though, it’s an omission. Down there, Abal and the Beast-King fought their final battle.
Abal called upon the powers of the Old Stones as he never had before, as no king of Parwys would hence.
The earth itself opened up to swallow the Beast-King’s army, and waters rushed up from underground to drown them.
Abal and the Beast-King duelled on the shores of the newly made lake, until at last the Beast-King was thrown down, his body left to the waters and carrion birds. ’
‘Seems silly to fight in a marsh,’ Harwick observed.
‘It wasn’t one at the time,’ Damon said. ‘The Windmarsh was made by the waters flowing up from Abal’s Scar. And these hills were once mountains, broken and reduced by the magics Abal and the Beast-King wielded. A battle that not only reshaped the kingdom, but the land itself.’
‘Could this be the cause of the haunting, then?’ Spil wondered aloud from behind them, where he and Llewyn took up the rear of their party. ‘Plenty of sudden deaths. No proper graves to speak of.’
Harwick, Damon and Siwan all fixed him with quizzical stares. Llewyn only gazed down at the lake, drawn and distant as he had been since their flight from Parwys.
‘From what Fola’s said, it seems a possibility!’ Spil said, glaring at all three of his detractors in turn. ‘What? I’m not clever enough to solve such a grand, important puzzle? Is that it?’
Fola considered the notion. ‘It may be,’ she said. ‘Though wraiths this violent are usually born from a desire for justice. If anything, they ought to haunt Galca and the Beast-King’s descendants for leading them to their pointless deaths, not Parwys for defending itself.’
She thought, but did not say, that the haunting had likelier origins in the soldiers Abal had led to their deaths. A suspicion she hoped to confirm with the young Count of Glascoed.
‘Would wraiths understand their fates so well?’ Harwick asked.
Fola shrugged. ‘What does the common soldier stand to gain by invading the lands of his neighbours? A bit of loot? The vicious thrill to be found in raping and pillaging? Do you think every soul the Beast-King conscripted had such wickedness at heart? Or did most long for their homes, their farms, their families? Only to lose them forever. To die, and to be remembered in history as part of a count of casualties. A footnote in the story of the king who burned their lives to fuel his own ambitions.’
Damon considered this. ‘Then why doesn’t every war birth a thousand ghosts?’
‘Who is to say it doesn’t?’ Fola replied.
That ended the heady conversation for the day, though from time to time Fola caught Damon gazing at the lake below them as the road descended back towards the marsh and the river beyond.
Spil worried for the horses—they’d walked a full night and a day, resting only briefly for Jareth’s funeral, and had long since begun to flag.
The decision was made to continue on to the town of Miggenbrot, just visible from the rise, where they might secure food and lodgings before pressing on to Glascoed itself.
Siwan raised the question of Frog’s healing salve, which Fola had administered to Llewyn’s flank, and wondered if she might not have some magic to ease the poor animals.
Fola took the opportunity to give a little lecture—the salve took its cost in accelerating the subject’s metabolism.
They would allow the horses to plod on a few miles more, but at the cost of a ravenous hunger and bone-deep exhaustion which would see them stable-bound for days.
‘Though I suppose we’ll have to sell them in Miggenbrot before we press on, anyway,’ Fola said off-handedly, and was astonished at the vehement reaction she received.
‘Sell them? For a pittance of what they’re worth!’ Spil snapped. ‘Midnight could be a noblewoman’s horse. A town like that’ll have no use for her but to pull a cart or turn a winch-wheel.’
‘They’re as much part of the troupe as we are,’ Siwan argued, stroking Mable’s broad chestnut back. ‘If we must be delayed while they recover, we’ll be delayed.’
Fola might have easily defeated the first argument with a flourish of her purse. The second struck her close to the heart. They were only horses to her, but clearly not to the people who had lived with them, cared for them, and relied upon them for years.
Only Llewyn seemed not to be offended by her suggestion. He had shown little reaction to anything since their departure from Parwys. Perhaps it was only the pain of his wound. Yet the melancholy that gripped him seemed deeper than physical pain.
The loss of the sorceress Afanan, maybe?
On first meeting them, when Siwan’s power had descended on the festival grounds Fola had thought there might be some romantic tie between the two.
Both had seemed to care for Siwan as though she were their daughter, and they had leaned on each other for reassurance and support.
The question of her fate wove tension in the air.
A tension the troupers seemed as yet unwilling to touch.
A loss that Fola could understand, and which she turned her thoughts away from—deliberately and expediently—lest they unwind the mental bandages she had bound tight around her guilt over Colm.
In the end, they agreed to spend two days in Miggenbrot for the sake of the horses, and for Llewyn.
More time than Fola felt comfortable wasting.
They had twelve days total before the young prince was to be crowned, before Parwys would have its newest king.
The queen regent would stand in the way of the Mortal Church’s machinations to the best of her ability while she held power, but Fola had little confidence in Owyn.
The boy was scared, his nascent rule unstable.
The promise of the haunting’s end, by whatever means, would entice him.