Chapter 35
Rebellion
As always, Your Excellence, you pose such fascinating questions.
This one, I think, no one could ever hope to answer.
All demand justice, but when pressed, few can define it.
Blood for blood, a life for a life? Pain returned in kind?
But can we collect every drop of spilled blood in measuring cups, to ensure repayment in full, and no more?
Have we some definite measure for pain, that we may return to the criminal only as much as he meted out?
To say nothing of assigning guilt. Has the starving man who steals a loaf of bread (a strange notion to me, I must admit) committed a crime, or merely exacted his own variety of justice?
Such vengeful thinking merely reduces us all to misery.
Fola had tried to project confidence after the séance, but conjuring up Ynyr’s ghost and confronting the crimes that lay at the foundation of Parwys had left her drained.
She spent some time with Siwan, watching Colm run Damon through swordplay drills until the boy’s hands and arms were decorated with fresh bruises.
Colm caught her eye and winked, which tempted her to lure him away to their room.
But Siwan’s grin while she watched Damon flail his practice sword, his expression grave and his wild hair tied back behind his horns, deterred her.
The girl needed the distraction more than Fola did. So she took a late afternoon meal to her chambers and puzzled over the problems that yet stood between her and the end of the haunting, until Frog’s wheezing snores and the weight of her eyelids lulled her to sleep.
She woke early in the morning to find Colm beside her.
She traced the ridges of his shoulder and the canyon of his spine with the tip of her finger.
He woke with a shiver and a smile, and things progressed from there.
Now that she had the energy for it, Fola wasn’t about to pass up a second round of the best sex she’d had in years—nor a third.
The problems of Parwys would wait through the morning.
After, while sunlight slanted through the window and they lay in a haze of pleasure and a perfume of sweat, she marvelled at his scars.
Even the stump of his severed arm, which had wept blood only days ago, was now little more than a pinkish weal beneath its bandage.
Skin and flesh had grown to seal the edges of Spil’s sutures.
One might have believed a proper doctor had been involved from the beginning.
Colm chuckled, the rumble reverberating through the cavern of his chest, along his ribs and into her cheek. One of his small hands tweaked her nose.
‘Studying me like a First Folk artifact,’ he said.
Heat blossomed in her face at the accusation, however playful. She nestled into him, prying her gaze away from his miraculous healing to refocus on the deep amber of his eyes. ‘I’ll admit it’s nice when my area of research and personal interests align.’
He barked a laugh, nearly bouncing her head off of his chest. ‘Almost as nice, I wager, as meeting someone who didn’t cringe in fear at their first sight of me.
Folk in Tarebach, Alberon and Salus see a seven-foot, four-armed monstrosity and piss themselves.
It’s like their blood carries their ancestors’ memories of the Warborn and the days after the Vanishing. ’
‘Are there many people like you?’ Fola asked, thrilled, and trying not to overly show it.
Until now, she’d accepted his hesitancy to broach the subject, but …
Well, Arno used to say she had a tendency to shove her fingers into conversational cracks and pry for any titbit she found interesting.
She would tread carefully here, not only to prove Arno’s characterisation wrong, but because she genuinely didn’t want to upset Colm.
After a thoughtful minute, he shrugged—still a gesture that fascinated and stirred her, with all its complexity of musculature.
‘It was just my mother and me, growing up. I’ve told you a bit about her already.
We had a farm outside this little town called Ereba.
She liked growing things. The smell of wet soil.
Earth on her hands. And she was good at it.
Northern Tarebach is no easy country to farm.
Hard ground, not enough rain. But she provided for us, and then some.
Enough for us to buy nice things from town.
Tools. Plenty of livestock—even a little dog who helped with the sheep a bit, but was mostly my companion.
Good clothes, when we could afford them. ’
Pain crept in and left him silent for a moment.
He took a long breath and gently squeezed her shoulder.
‘A few hundred years ago, the churchmen fought a war against themselves.
Their way of answering a handful of questions, I guess, once they got sick of arguing.
One of those questions was about people like me—or like Llewyn and Siwan.
About anyone touched by the First Folk, or the fae, or what have you.
Until then, the Church believed it was their holy duty to kill anyone like us they could find.
‘The churchmen who won the war disagreed—and good for them, but winning a war doesn’t scour away long-held hatreds, does it?
The church can change its teachings, but if your da, and his da, and his da all believed and lived by something different, it might not matter much.
Even though my mother hung the triangle and the nine-pointed star over our door, even though we went to receive blessings of the Agion at the temple in Ereba on midsummer and wintersnight, plenty of folk still thought of us as monsters.
One day they decided to act on those thoughts. ’
‘I’m sorry,’ Fola said. The afterglow had well and truly faded. ‘I shouldn’t have asked.’
‘It’s fine.’ Colm’s other small arm scratched at his chin.
‘She was no fighter, but she took plenty of them with her. I ran away after that. Leaned into what they thought of me. Learned violence. Sold it. Fantasised about going back for my revenge.’ He scoffed.
‘Never really did except, I guess, in that clearing where I found you. Got a taste of it there. Maybe I’ll get another taste before we’re done, what with those templars hanging around the royal court. ’
For all the humiliation Fola had suffered, and all the isolation that had followed, her life in the City had been a frolic in paradise compared to what so many people beyond its walls endured.
Llewyn and Siwan had been transformed by uncaring fae and fiends, used as little more than currency by those who should have protected them.
The actor Jareth had been born into misfortune and killed in a chance encounter on the road.
Now Colm, orphaned by old prejudices that those in power would rather pretend had been eradicated.
Arno’s warnings had prepared her to witness cruelty, poverty, even starvation—but so much of it fell on children.
These stories would haunt her, she knew, long after she returned to the City.
She would carry the beauty of the wider world with her.
Among the relics and natural wonders, the kindness and strength of its people.
The way the troupers formed a nest of protection around Siwan, and the girl’s bravery in the face of the horrors that dogged her.
But that beauty carried traces of hurt—could not, in some cases, exist except in response to it.
Was it even worth trying to put things right here in Parwys?
The sins of the kingdom’s past had clawed free of the grave.
Let them have their justice. Let them tear down what had been built on a foundation of blood and bone.
Lives would be lost—many innocent—but maybe Arno was right.
Maybe she had let herself become too involved.
In Ulun, she had nearly spent her life to dismantle an engine of horror and degradation that no half-decent person could tolerate.
Here … would it really be wrong to let Ynyr and his wraiths have their vengeance?
Thus far, they had not hurt any but those who had profited from the injustices against them, even if at a remove of generations.
The thought of it left a hard pit in her stomach. A nausea like she had felt after shattering that templar’s skull in the clearing. No matter that it had been an act of self-defence; that Colm would have died if she had done nothing.
But what could she do? Lead folk to the City?
Thaumedony’s gates stood open to all, but half of those she told of its wonders refused to believe her.
Enduring the pressures and deprivations of the wider world created space for great compassion, but also hardened people and made it impossible to imagine that life might be lived any other way.
‘Come back to the City with me,’ she said, the words bursting out of her. I may not be able to save everyone, but bleed it, I will save everyone I can.
Colm grinned, showing his shovel-shaped teeth. ‘I figured that was already the plan.’ He held up his severed arm. ‘After this, nothing less would feel like enough compensation.’
A crass joke, but one that nonetheless sent a wash of relief through her like a spray of mist tamping down a fire.
But the fire still burned.
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