Chapter 33
A Path Forward
You ask how we can have justice without codified laws, without a hierophancy and an order of juris-priests to enforce them.
I posit, rather, that these things—legislative codes and volumes of commentary, officiates and courts—in practice obscure more than they reveal, and bend ‘justice’ towards service to the powerful.
‘Are they all right?’ Siwan asked. Her voice trembled as she clung to Damon’s arm.
Llewyn had always understood magic only as a set of tools.
Gemstones, herbs, and gestures as little more than a hammer, axe and tongs.
As a gwyddien, he had risen from the roots of the ghostwood tree with simple knowledge of such things.
A tool himself—no more than an instrument of the Grey Lady’s will—there had been no point to his knowing more.
He had no answer for Siwan’s question, only his own mounting unease.
Fola knelt with eyes shut while silver mist whirled around her.
Frog hopped nervously on his good foot just outside the circumference of the spell.
On the other side of the circle, Ifan shuddered and twitched.
He spoke at times in a sudden rasp, answering unheard questions.
Colm stood at the circle’s edge, watching them both, ready to rush in—disregarding entirely the consequences of interfering in the spell—if the count’s behaviour seemed any threat to Fola.
The mist burned away. Ifan wailed, buried his head in his hands, and collapsed. Fola’s eyes flitted open. Frog landed on her shoulder and began preening the close-shorn curls of her hair. Colm crossed the circle in three long strides and knelt beside her.
‘It’s over, thank the Stones,’ Damon said. He squeezed Siwan’s arm and released her hand, then went to Ifan’s side. Llewyn joined him, if only to be sure the count was still breathing.
‘He should be all right,’ Fola said, working stiffness from her back and knees. ‘Very stupid to come charging into an active spell, though.’
‘Foolish, perhaps,’ Ifan murmured. ‘But I had to see.’ He ignored Damon’s offered hand and slowly gathered himself, sitting like a scolded child in the ashen remnant of the magic circle.
A shudder seized him. He rose to his knees and began to tear at the buckle of his sword belt. When it came free of his waist, he held it out as though it were a venomous serpent.
‘Take it, lad,’ he said, his voice harsh with anguish and disgust. ‘You’ve as much right to it as I have.’
Baffled, Damon looked to Fola for an explanation. She shrugged.
Ifan thrust the sword flat against Damon’s chest. ‘Take it, bleed you. More honestly held in a mummer’s hand than mine.’
Damon caught sword, scabbard and belt in the crook of his arms. The count stood and stalked off towards his keep.
‘No luck in the negotiations, then?’ Colm asked, watching him go.
‘The dead are firm in their demands, but a firmness built on borrowed strength.’ Fola turned to Llewyn.
He recognised the look in her eye—the same she had worn at the festival grounds while she examined Siwan and soothed the raven fiend.
He clenched his teeth until they ached. ‘We should talk, Llewyn, Siwan.’ Fola glanced at Damon, then at Colm, then at the windows of the keep and towers where the count’s soldiers kept watch.
‘This might be better to discuss without an audience.’
Damon tensed. Colm crossed his lower arms.
‘Nothing against either of you,’ Fola said. ‘But it seems like something Siwan should explain to you herself, rather than something you should hear from me.’
‘Well, I’ll admit to curiosity,’ Colm muttered.
‘Anything you say to me, you can say to Damon,’ Siwan insisted.
There was a tightness in her voice, though she put on a brave face.
Damon’s presence would comfort her. It hurt Llewyn to think she preferred the lad for that purpose, but Afanan had been her confidante, and Afanan was gone.
It had never been Llewyn’s place. But whatever Fola had to say, it would have consequences, and Llewyn wanted time to process them before involving anyone else.
‘Fola is right,’ Llewyn cut in. Siwan glared at him. Still, he held firm. ‘Nothing will stop you from explaining it all to him later, if you choose to.’
‘It’s fine,’ Damon said. He hefted the sword and belt in his arms. ‘I need to sort out what to do with this anyway.’
‘A good blade, by the look of it,’ Colm noted, following Damon towards the keep. ‘Sharper, I wager, than the ones you actors are used to. I can show you how to hurt other people with it instead of yourself.’
The mercenary and the horned youth disappeared around the curve of the keep. Fola sat on one of the wrought stone benches near the World Clock. She scratched idly at the back of Frog’s head, her expression distant and contemplative, then gestured to the bench beside her.
‘What is this about, Fola?’ Siwan said, ignoring her suggestion. ‘Tell me. Now.’
Fola grimaced, took Frog from her shoulder—ignoring a honk of protest—and set him on the back of the bench. ‘At the festival grounds, the raven fiend not only summoned those ghosts, it strengthened them,’ she said. ‘That wasn’t the first time, was it?’
Siwan, already pale, turned as white as the full moon.
Llewyn let his own shock burn through him, then flare to anger.
His fingers settled in the grooves worn into the hilt of his ghostwood blade.
Slowly, he uncurled them, forced his hand to hang idle at his side. ‘Say what you mean to say, sorceress.’
Fola shook her head. ‘I’ve told you before, I want to help.
From what I’ve gathered, none of this is Siwan’s fault.
That said, she is, in part, at the root of the haunting.
Unless you want to carry these secrets to your graves—and the guilt that I’m sure comes with them—you need to tell me the truth. ’
Siwan put her hand on Llewyn’s. Her fingers trembled like a trapped songbird. He ached to take her away from this woman who would drag her back through the worst moments of her life, cutting open old wounds, re-breaking bones.
No matter that the old stitching was frayed and seeping pus, the limbs poorly set and fused crooked, that this hurt might be the first step towards healing.
They hardly knew this sorceress. There was no certainty that her help would be enough to put an end to the nightmare, if she indeed told the truth and meant to help.
He remembered the Grey Lady’s voice and felt the weight of her ring in his pocket.
How many times had she claimed that a child had to die because it had been born with too deep a talent for magic?
That a venerated idol—some leaving of the First Folk, half understood—had to be smashed, though its destruction would shatter the faith of a village?
That a sacred spring had to be defiled, lest the druid who communed with it grow to threatening strength, no matter that the spring fed streams that watered dozens of fields and kept a community from starvation?
In quitting the Grey Lady’s service he had come to believe, as Afanan believed, that no evil was ever necessary. That pain must be reckoned with directly, not dismissed as the means to some good end.
Yet … it was Siwan’s choice. Siwan’s wound.
‘Four years ago …’ Siwan began, halting.
Each word that caught in her throat was a needle to Llewyn’s heart.
‘It happened in Caer Bren, a town not far from here. I was hardly more than a child. Just turned thirteen. We were playing the midsummer festival there, one of half a dozen troupes. One was a company of acrobats. There was a boy among them, about a year my elder. Galway.’ She swallowed, and Llewyn nearly put a stop to the tale, nearly took her in his arms as though she were still that slip of a girl, all bark-rough skin and bones as light as kindling.
If he could take her away from the past, he would.
But the past always lurks but a few steps behind.
She scrubbed a hand across her eyes and pressed on. ‘I took a liking to him, and I thought he took his own to me. Enough to … Well, you don’t need every detail, do you?’
Fola shook her head.
Siwan nodded. ‘Suffice to say, by the fourth day of the festival I thought I was in love. I was very young, and full of romance and stories and songs.’ A slight smile, there, and a hint of a laugh in her voice.
‘Living with actors and bards will do that. And I’d spent the years since leaving Nyth Fran in a fog.
Slowly seeing my way clear of it, finding little candles of happiness again.
Galway was no little candle. He was a first sunrise after the long, dark night. Or so I told myself.’
Another laugh. This one as brittle and sharp as broken glass. ‘Bear in mind, I was thirteen years old at the time.’
Fola answered with her own small, quiet laugh. An understanding passed between them, and Siwan seemed to relax. Fola had suffered her own embarrassments of a similar kind at that age, it seemed, and that was enough to deepen their connection. A connection Llewyn doubted he would ever share in.
At thirteen … Well, it was difficult to say.
He had no notion of how long it took a child buried in the roots of a ghostwood tree to emerge as a gwyddien.
Depending upon how one counted, he had either spent his thirteenth year in that long, painful half-slumber, or awakened, his body bent away from mortal shape and beyond the proportions of his age, and been sent on the hunt.