Chapter 28 #3
Fola gave her a moment to collect herself before she spoke again. ‘I don’t know precisely how the raven fiend and the wraiths are related, but know this—it has nothing to do with you.’ True in one sense—the girl Siwan was not the one conjuring the wraiths—but half a falsehood in another.
Shared suffering could resonate. Two incidents, two seeds of pain, distant in time.
Siwan on the sacrificial altar and the wraiths sacrificed for some other, as yet unknown end.
The young roots entwining with the ancient.
Long-slumbering wrath stirred to wakefulness as the same crime—in spirit, if not in fact—hammered at the world anew.
And the raven fiend, a being with powers expansive and ill defined, reaching out to wield that hammer.
Fola twisted slowly, so as not to slosh the water out of the tub, until she could meet Siwan’s eye.
Sitting as she was, cross-legged on the bed with a bird in her lap, all her vulnerability was on full display.
Fola wished she could comfort her as the troupe had done on the night the wraiths attacked the festival.
But they were still little more than strangers, and Fola had little experience mapping such fraught emotional territory.
‘None of this is your fault,’ she said—her best attempt. ‘There are powers in this world beyond any understanding or control. You’ve stumbled into one of them.’
‘So what?’ Siwan rubbed a tear from her cheek. ‘You think the raven fiend can teach you something about the First Folk? Or the ghosts that walk out of the sky when I lose my bloody temper?’
Fola smiled. Maybe ready for bleak humour, after all.
Still, best not to push things. This was sensitive ground, and Fola had to put her thoughts into words that would not alienate the girl.
Not her strongest of skills. If she had been better at phrasing things as her audience wanted them phrased, she might have talked her way past the research board without all this hassle.
‘Conjuring a ghost requires some knowledge of what you intend to conjure,’ Fola said.
‘And there is a difference between calling up the ghost of an ordinary mortal, like Damon, or Spil, or Harwick—of natural, evolved morphology—and someone like Colm, whose lineage descends from First Folk experiments and the like. I theorise that the reason we can’t conjure the First Folk is because they are, in some way we don’t understand, fundamentally different sorts of beings from anything we’ve been able to study.
Different from fae, from fiends, from any kind of mortal. ’
‘And I am different from every other mortal,’ Siwan said. A harsh cast had returned to her face, like the shadow of a cloud drifting over the sun.
‘In a way that is fascinating and wonderful, yes,’ Fola said.
Siwan paused. ‘“Fascinating” I’ve heard before, but “wonderful”?’ She shook her head. ‘I’m not one of the First Folk. And whatever I am, it happened by accident. What could you possibly learn from that?’
Fola took a deep, slow breath, and glanced at Frog, who had hunkered down on the bed to sleep.
‘Just because something happened by accident doesn’t mean it isn’t good, or important, or a potential source of knowledge,’ she said.
‘Think about this, Siwan … There are four types of souls in the world, that we know of—fiend, fae, mortal—with several sub-varieties—and undead. At a glance through my loupe, I see patterns indicative of all four within you. Which means, even if you have nothing to do with the First Folk, you represent a complete picture of everything they aren’t.
Sometimes the only way to understand something you can’t actually study is to study everything it isn’t. Does that make sense?’
Siwan shook her head firmly. Curiosity could only carry one so far against winds of fear and uncertainty. The girl was exhausted. Any more conversation would achieve little.
‘Right.’ Fola scrubbed a hand through the tight curls of her hair, flicking out droplets to patter against the floor. ‘Anyway, this water’s getting tepid. Your turn.’
She stood, shivering against the autumn chill—there was no hearth in the room, only a metal coil that carried heat up from the fireplace in the commons.
The serving folk had left a few sheets of towelling.
Fola scrubbed the water from her skin, then wrapped a towel around herself and helped Siwan into the tub.
It no longer wafted steam, but was warm enough to be comfortable.
Fola felt a little guilty that she had taken the first bath, and briefly considered reheating it with a quick spell.
Playing with temperature was dangerous, though, particularly in a timber-framed structure.
Her attempt to convey some heat from the radiator to the water would as likely flash it to steam, or burn the inn to the ground—and half the city with it.
‘I don’t understand it,’ Siwan said when she had situated herself comfortably in the tub.
‘All this talk about the First Folk, and how I fit into it, I mean. But that doesn’t mean I’m saying no.
I need time to think about it, and if I decide to go with you, I’ll need time to explain it all to Llewyn. ’
Fola felt a swell of gratitude towards the girl, so sudden and profound that she found it difficult to form words.
No one—not even Arno, the nearest thing she had to an ally on the research board—had been so ready to actually consider her ideas instead of dismissing them as little more than wild fantasies and dreams.
‘I …’ Fola started working her way towards ‘thank you’, which felt wholly insufficient to convey the swirl of emotion that had suddenly attacked her, when she was interrupted by a heavy knock at the door.
She cinched the towel tighter. ‘Must be a tailor right around the corner,’ she muttered, and opened the door a crack.
Rather than Harwick or Spil with a bundle of new clothes, she found Colm, his own towel wrapped around his waist, droplets of bathwater still clinging to the curled hairs of his chest and tracing the lines of his fresh scars.
She yelped, startling Frog awake.
‘Sorry,’ Colm said. ‘Not my intention to startle you. Just thought …’ He rubbed at the bandaged stump of his left upper arm.
Almost bashfully, if it were possible to imagine him feeling such a way.
‘Well, the other lads are out, and should be out a while longer. Not sure when we’ll get another opportunity as good as this.
Anyway …’ A boyish, half-ashamed, half-excited smile crossed his face.
‘I’m still up if you are, is what I’m saying. ’
‘You’re still injured,’ Fola protested, her eyes lingering on that stump.
He’d kept it out of the bathwater, which was good.
His other injuries had already closed on their own.
Warborn blood … a marvel. Her brief examination of his wounds became an examination of his body, of the slopes of muscle and fat, the angles of his abdominal ligaments like the wings of an inviting arrow.
It was becoming increasingly difficult to think of good reasons not to accept his invitation. ‘And we’ve just bathed, Colm.’
At that, he shrugged, his upper shoulders like mountains shuddering and sending ripples through the foothills.
It was too much. Fola shot Siwan a quick glance.
The girl had hunkered down in the water up to her chin.
She grinned back at Fola and waggled her eyebrows.
Frog, having adjusted his perch and settled back into his sleepy huddle, glared at her, still upset at her for yelping.
‘Bleed it,’ she muttered, and grabbed one of his good arms. They scampered across the hall like two teenagers on their first, secret tryst—Fola’s had been in the Prism Garden, a labyrinth of odd geometric sculptures of twisted glass.
She and Sima, the boy who’d been awkwardly courting her for months—he’d carried books for her and brought her flowers from all over the City despite her total disinterest in them—had found a secluded alcove deep in the labyrinth.
Not the best choice. Being surrounded by their contorted reflections while they fumbled around had added a layer of absurdity to what was already a novel experience.
These environs were far more plain. The bed was too small, and care for Colm’s wounds demanded a slower, gentler pace.
Still, those dainty hands on the ends of his lower arms proved as skilled and knowing as she’d imagined them.
And there was something to be said for having such a powerful body beneath hers, gazing up in pleasure and wonder, his eyes tracing her curves and the silver lines of the enchantments tattooed onto her skin.
Until the height, when the broad, leathery hand of his upper arm pressed flat against her back, holding her on to him as need overcame the aesthetics of the act in a pulsing, desperate rhythm that built and built until, in a shuddering exhalation, it was over.
She lay beside him, afterwards, slick with sweat, listening to the drumbeat of his heart fade from frantic passion to slow, soothing calm.
‘We put that off too long,’ he murmured, and she heard him as much through the rumble of his ribs as the sound of his voice. She murmured agreement, and dozed a while. There was much to do, and danger still on their heels, but it was worth basking in an island of calm while she could.