Chapter 31 #3
‘Fine, as long as we’re agreed you’re an idiot and whatever happens to you isn’t my fault.’ She sat cross-legged in the void. ‘Let’s see who comes, assuming your presence hasn’t fouled things up.’
For a time they were alone, but for the aleph.
A less off-putting companion than Jareth’s corpse had been on her most recent foray to this place.
The perfect emptiness held for a few moments longer, with only the whirling of the aleph and the sound of her blood in her ears to mark the passing of time; Ifan was a silent apparition, a mortal ghost in a land meant for the dead.
There appeared a shadow. A dark haze above the mist-grey ground. It coalesced into a figure, details layering in as though being rendered by an artist—broad shapes into clear forms, until at last the tidy details.
A stocky man, shorter than Fola by half the span of her hand, but as broad around as a barrel.
He wore crude armour of padded leather over iron mail, stitched with fetishes of white ghostwood bearing knots and circular inscriptions.
Ancestors of the runes and sigils used in the druids’ magic.
A sword hung at his belt, sheathed in buckskin.
Its pommel was the head of a charging stag, and on his grey-bearded head he wore a crown of silver-studded antlers.
At the sight of the sword—the same as he wore, even as an apparition, upon his hip—Ifan groaned. Not a surprise, then, but a terrible confirmation.
The ghost’s eyes formed last. Black pupils in sickly yellow sclera. Like the girl Siwan’s eyes when she lay in the grip of the raven fiend.
‘Speak.’ The ghost’s voice whispered from the edges of that empty space, rendered by the spell into words Fola and Ifan could understand.
Fola cleared her throat. ‘Who am I addressing?’
The ghost put a hand on its sword. ‘You call an audience, and know not who you call?’ The words were part of the air, and the umbrage in them was a cold wind.
The spell had been written to conjure the most potent ghost it could from the memories attached to the aleph. From that, and the ghost’s bearing, Fola hazarded an educated guess.
‘The Last King of Glascoed,’ she said. ‘Whose name has been forgotten by time, buried without dignity by the conquerors. I would know that name.’
‘Who calls me king?’ The voice from the edges of the void turned hot with rage.
He turned his raven’s eyes on Ifan. ‘This pup, who dresses like one? I am Ynyr the Builder, who laid these stones and secured this land against beast and plague. Who organised the defence of the small folk and brought justice to a forest riven with petty bandits. But no king. There were no kings in Glascoed. Only folk.’
Fola felt herself at a loss. ‘You wear a crown,’ she observed. ‘And a sword.’
‘What crown?’ The hot wind roared, now, pulsing with each syllable.
Ynyr tossed his head, making the studs flash, though there was no obvious source of light.
The antlers grew from his scalp as surely as Damon’s horns.
‘May only those who think themselves better than their fellows wear decoration? The sword was a gift from a craftsman,’ he said, patting the ornamental hilt, ‘who made it for love. I carry it because there are those in this world who deal us violence and so invite it in return. That is all. I am no king. Only a man, well known and well liked.’
‘Then I was misled, good Ynyr,’ Fola said, mind reeling at these revelations.
From the sound of things, before Abal’s conquest the people of Glascoed had kept a society not unlike that of the City.
And they had done so without the First Folk’s many gifts.
A shudder of excitement worked through her.
Here was a discovery worthy of the Library’s highest honours.
People could live in some semblance of a just society, on their own, while enduring the dangers and ravages of the wider world.
A question that had dogged the minds of the City’s philosophers, and here was the beginning of an answer.
Ynyr harrumphed, crossed his broad arms, and regarded her with black and yellow eyes. ‘What is your business with us?’ The storm of his anger had cooled, somewhat, though the words still burned. ‘It is rude to demand someone’s attention and then waste it.’
There were so many questions she wanted to ask him, but the spell would only last so long.
‘An injustice was done to you and yours, long ago,’ Fola said. ‘I would witness it, and understand it, and give you justice if I can.’
‘Ha!’ Ynyr placed his free hand flat against his belly.
‘An injustice? By my count there were three, at least. First the bite of Abal’s blades and the crushing weight of his hammer.
Then he buried us, aye, but not as one ought be buried, with ceremony and honours and a marker to remind the living what you were.
He threw us into the pit and covered us in lye to hide the stink.
Yet even that was not enough. He scoured from our lands of every trace of us he could find—our books, our art—preserving only that which the bastard and his followers fancied or found use for.
Our castles, or this.’ Again, he patted the hilt of his sword.
‘Did all he could to write us out of the world with sword, shovel, and pen.’
‘It is all true, then,’ Ifan said. His flickering expression twisted as though a barb had tangled in his guts. ‘Everything my father said … Stones, Owyn …’
‘Show me how it was.’ Fola ignored the count and met that raven-tainted gaze.
She was right, then. The raven fiend had called these wraiths from out of their ancient slumber.
Old suffering, resonating with the new. Though she could not yet say whether Siwan’s involvement in spurring on the haunting would make it simpler to end, or more complex.
‘Once I know the truth, I can help you find satisfaction.’
‘I know what will satisfy me, child,’ Ynyr said, that hand no longer resting on the hilt, but gripping it ready to draw. He moved towards her. The void around them began to flicker, then fill with a silver haze. ‘But if you wish to see, then see.’