Chapter 32
Memory
The gods have gone. Let the same be said of the masters.
A wave of memories crashed over the rocky shore of Fola’s mind, carving it with moments as the wave rolled back to sea.
Pillars of smoke rose throughout the forest to join a black cloud that hung over all of Parwys, trapped by the wall of mountains that guarded the kingdom from the frigid winds off the Rime Sea.
A mother rocked her bloated child, the boils at her own armpit, neck, and groin burning like coals as she sang softly.
‘All the tears were spent,’ a voice whispered in Fola’s ear—not Ynyr, but a young woman, breathless and strained through fluid-filled lungs. ‘I chose to die with a song, but it hung so heavy in the air …’
A father sprawled over fresh graves, sobbing and reeking of whisky. Then, later, kicking the barrel out from beneath his feet—the noose drawn taut, a few jerks, then stillness.
‘Death came to my house. It hounded and tore my boys, twisted the girl babe up until she wailed herself out, withered their mother, but laid not a claw on me. Why? Better me than them … or with them, at least …’
Harlow, Count of Glascoed, did what he could—Fola saw men in beaked masks wearing the silver stag as they went from village to village, carting away the dead—but King Elbrech did nothing. His aid was only for his own city and the southern lands from which he took his wealth.
‘Dinnae e’en send his druids,’ came the brittle voice of an old woman. ‘We folk of the wood turned elsewhere for sanctuary. To older, darker corners, but for all their darkness, near at hand.’
No matter the scene that flashed before Fola—young lovers sharing a deathbed; a child wandering aimless, too weak to bury his father; bodies piled like cordwood and burned in forest clearings—every eye, even those of the corpses, was black in a sea of yellow.
Hundreds, thousands of injustices. Dead with no living to remember them. Buried in unmarked graves or burned, against honour and custom, to defend from plague.
‘Aye, their king failed them.’ Ynyr’s voice crept through Fola’s mind, crackling like the flames of burning corpses. ‘Why have him, then, if he lends no aid in desperate times?’
More than enough wrath to fill the Greenwood with countless wraiths. But even a neglectful king cannot be blamed for a plague. Who were the wraiths to avenge themselves against? The foul air that carried death from house to house? The world itself ?
‘I remember these days,’ Ifan’s voice echoed. ‘I was a boy. They were dark times, but there have been other plagues. Worse plagues. And kings who did still less than Elbrech. You cannot tell me the haunting was born here.’
‘Not born,’ Fola said, while a young woman, pale and shivering with fever, her dress fouled with pus, flung herself into the Afoneang. ‘But this is part of it. Fertile enough to sprout your foot soldiers. But I would see the root. What injustice created you, Shade of Ynyr?’
Ynyr appeared on the banks, where the woman had knelt before giving herself to the river. His raven-eyes fixed on her. A hand like ice seized her brow.
* * *
A light rain trickled. The soft blue of the sky showed through clouds like fraying fabric.
Behind them, the godsroad arched high above the Afoneang, touching down at a little circle of houses.
The last members of their party had joined there.
The ‘mayor’ of Miggenbrot—little better than a king, to Ynyr’s thinking, though at least a king chosen by the people he ruled—had brought a dozen strong youths bearing arms.
Ynyr understood their caution. Word had spread, even to the deep reaches of the Greenwood, of the violence Abal had visited in the west. He had found some weapon in a barrow, or in a First Folk ruin, or beneath a standing stone, and the mere threat of it had been enough to cow the hard folk of Cilbran.
Or so the rumours said, anyway. Ynyr was not one given to rumour.
He would see what there was to see, and hear what Abal had to say, and decide then how to proceed.
‘You need not come arrayed for war,’ Barwon muttered.
He rode a black courser, taller at the shoulder than Ynyr’s rouncy.
A slight man with dark hair, pale skin and no gifts of the gods to speak of—two arms, two eyes, no horns or tail.
Plain, but handsome, and good with words.
Ynyr had known his mother well. A bricklayer who had helped to build the keep to defend against those petty bandits who would have made themselves the kings and lords of Glascoed.
But the youth had left the Greenwood, spurred by the itch of curiosity.
Now he had returned, Abal’s message in hand, apparently some kind of courtier to the freshly made king of Parwys and would-be master of all its neighbours.
‘I’ve dealt with violent men, lad,’ Ynyr said, playing a finger on the antlered pommel of his sword.
A gift from the smiths of Caer Palu for leading the charge against that bastard Neulin and chasing him back to his little holdfast in the northern wood.
A sword for cutting the legs out from would-be kings, with a core of raw iron to protect against glamour and sorcery.
‘Arms help to clarify things. Show that we won’t be taken easily, should he have a mind to take us. ’
Barwon shook his head, tossing his black curls, and the courser whickered beneath him. ‘A couple of hundred half-armed men won’t dissuade Abal if he means violence. You’ll only put him in a sour mood.’
‘He’s already put me in one,’ Ynyr growled. ‘Your mother would be ashamed to hear you suggest we ought to meet this man on our knees.’
‘I might be young, Ynyr,’ Barwon said sharply, ‘but I have seen more of the world than you. There are kings already in Galca and Alberon. This is how things are, and will be. No more villages clinging to survival. No more councils of old men and fools deciding how best to deal with the monsters that roam the wood. After two hundred years of hemming and hawing and cringing at the shadows the gods left behind, better men than you have taken on the burden of rebuilding civilisation. We need efficiency and leadership —real leadership—to make the world safe for mortalkind.’
‘I don’t know anything about that, boy,’ Ynyr cut back.
‘Maybe we don’t want to be civilised. Maybe we like our hemming and hawing.
Maybe our cringing isn’t from fear of the gods, but from a wisdom that warns against meddling with their leavings.
We have our ways, and they are good ways, and we mean to defend them if we must.’
‘You will see, old man,’ Barwon said. ‘The world is changing. There are empires already in the far corners. We must change with it or be swept aside.’
Before Ynyr could answer, Barwon spurred his courser to canter a few paces forward, to ride with the young folk who led the column with their bows at the ready. On the off chance of game, they had said, but also to scout against an ambush.
Ynyr shifted in his saddle, uncertain. He often was. Others had said this was what made him a natural leader, needing neither crown nor threat of force to move people in the right direction. A willingness to question, and to think, and to reconsider.
These were the things he knew. Once, in his great-great-grandfather’s time, mortalkind had lived in the shadows of the gods.
Towering beings, at once terrible and wondrous, whose affairs had defined the boundaries of the world.
Whose wonders had brought health and plenty; whose horrors had cast folk down into disease and death.
The road beneath him, straight and true through the grassy hills on the west bank of the Afoneang (not yet a marshland, Fola noted, and the road followed the natural slopes of the hills instead of twisting above and against them) was one of their lesser works.
The bark-skinned monsters that plagued the Greenwood, and against which he had first led folk in arms, were a lesser horror.
Many such gifts and horrors had been left behind when the gods departed for their new world.
The crystal globe was another: an object of fascination and worship for the people of Glascoed, which Ynyr had built his keep to protect and defend.
He was not so certain of the thing’s importance, but knew that placing it behind heavy walls would dissuade those who might do violence—whether to desecrate it, or to destroy it, or in some mad act of veneration.
That had been his decision, and he had mustered hundreds of men across seven years to raise the keep.
Was that not the act of a king, of sorts?
Was not his mobilisation of an army, first against the fae monsters and then against the bandits, not likewise the act of a king?
Ynyr could see the reasoning that had brought Barwon into line behind Abal.
To make sense of the world, to rebuild it in their own image rather than limping along, reacting to what the gods had abandoned, would require organisation.
The greater the scale of that organisation, the more sense could be made, the more rebuilding done, but the more complex and difficult it would be.
Visiting villages, appealing to councils, swaying people one by one, could only accomplish so much so quickly.
Ynyr had to admit his own frustrations. He wasted so much time in pointless arguments with the foolish and ill informed who nonetheless thought their perspectives as valuable and needed as those of folk who bloody well knew their business.
The way of kings was faster, more efficient, more powerful at scale. Better, then, to manage a vast domain.