Chapter 42
The Grey Lady
Despite the fog of mystery that surrounds them, this is known—the fae are fickle, and those who deal with them come to know regret.
The broken remains of the door still swayed on its hinges.
Fola slowed her stride, readied the circle written into her left hand—the middle finger, for killing.
She would take no chances here for mercy’s sake.
She wished Colm were with her, but he had leapt two storeys from their place on the tower onto a battlement and taken off running.
A more direct route to Siwan’s aid, though one Fola could not follow.
A howl of pain cut the air. She rounded the doorway. Her eyes fell on Harwick, who lay on his back in a pool of blood from a deep cut to his collar. She thought she saw a breath. Frog fluttered down to him and began to spread a balm onto his wound.
Through the shattered ruin of the lone window she saw Siwan. It might have been more a relief to find her dead.
Siwan knelt on the rooftop over the corpse of a dead templar, his long neck purple and his head hanging askew.
Her body seemed to swell with every breath, as though something within her was struggling to tear free.
Her sickly gaze burned with yellow fire.
Behind her, the sky had turned to a black sea.
Darker than night, starless, with the staring eye of a fiend for its moon.
Torin the anakriarch was slumped against the ruined window.
The mangled ruin of his arm hung limp, skewered by one of Colm’s arrows.
The third templar, the beast of a woman who had nearly bested Colm, faced Siwan.
Blood seeped from a wound in her thigh. The shadow hands of wraiths seized her tabard, her arms, her armour.
With a shriek of terror, the templar woman grabbed Torin and threw him over her back, paying no mind to his wounded arm. She leapt from the rooftop. Fola heard the thump of her landing and a shout of pain.
She heard Colm shout, too, and glimpsed him as he dropped from the stable roof to the ground in pursuit.
Not her contest, now. She had worse than templars to contend with.
Siwan arched her back and screamed. A burst of fetid wind battered Fola. A dark shadow began to form at the girl’s back. Something like wings. Two, then a third, and a fourth.
And then Damon, behind her, his eyes wide and sword in hand.
‘Stay back!’ Fola shouted, and lunged into the wind. She dived to the rooftop and began to drag herself through rivulets of blood. ‘Don’t touch her!’
Damon recoiled, but remained on the roof, caught in a tension between fear and a desire to do anything at all to help Siwan.
Who may already have been destroyed.
There are things in the world that strain the rigidity of understanding.
To a thaumaturgist, fiends and fae both were such things.
Alien to the City, often hostile when found, and different in fundamental nature from mortalkind.
Sublime and terrible, they confounded all that was known of magic.
The very things that made Siwan so useful to Fola’s research—the First Folk, too, confounded mortal understanding—now made it impossible for her to know, even to estimate, how much time the girl had left.
‘Siwan!’ she shouted, swallowing her gorge—the air stank with the voided bowels of the dead, and every gust carried a reek like the breath of a carrion crow. ‘Try to calm yourself! You have to take back control!’
The girl only shrieked again. Her ghostly wings fanned the air.
Fola cursed and flattened herself against the roof tiles.
She might use the circle in her hand to muddle the raven fiend’s mind as well as Siwan’s, and give herself a moment to close the distance.
Behind Siwan, Fola saw Spil bent nearly double, his hands covering his face as he pushed against the wind, trying to reach Damon.
Damon, who Siwan loved in return, and who the fell wind did not touch.
There was no knowing how long Siwan’s influence over the fiend’s power would last, how long her feelings for the boy would protect him. But a sinking realisation in her gut told Fola that none of them would live long if the raven fiend were not stopped here, now, in the next few moments.
‘Damon!’ Fola screamed into the wind. ‘Try to calm her!’
It was a ludicrous request. The comforting hand might provoke wrath or rage as it touched a raw, bloody wound.
Their relationship was only budding. Navigating such a sudden loss, such fierce grief, might have posed a challenge even without the horror of the raven fiend.
Fola might have doomed Damon to a sudden, violent death at his young love’s hands.
There was no choice. Not if Siwan—to say nothing of all the hopes Fola had invested in her—were to survive.
Damon stepped closer, still gripping his sword. ‘Siwan!’ he called. To no avail. Her eyes burned. Her wings churned the air. Her grief thundered into the darkening sky.
He hesitated for a moment, then sheathed the sword and began to sing. Cautiously, his voice thin and uncertain.
‘You came to me at summer’s dawn,
When all the world was bright and warm …’
His voice trailed off. Fola knew the song—Siwan had sung it from the stage, just before losing control to the raven fiend.
It did not seem wise to remind her of that day, yet the boy knew her better than Fola did.
More, while Damon sang, the ghostly wings ceased to beat.
The wail that filled the air faded. Siwan cocked her head, expectant.
‘Keep singing!’ Fola shouted, clambering to her feet. She readied her pen and pad of spellpaper and started writing. The same spell she had used to reseal the fiend before. It would have to work—she didn’t have time to devise a new solution.
Damon cleared his throat, then sang again, voice growing full and rich as he gained confidence and Siwan calmed.
‘I never feared till you were gone,
Our love destroyed by winter’s storm.’
Siwan began to weep, tears dipping from her chin to mix with the blood on the roof tiles. Rain, too, began to fall. Fat, heavy droplets, in a slow, steady patter.
A phenomenon Fola would have to contemplate later. She made the last line of her spell. The paper flashed with silver fire, which spiralled out and enfolded Siwan. For a moment, the ghostly wings began to fade, like mist burned away by the sun. Only a moment.
A raven’s scream rent the air—not from Siwan’s mouth, but down from the staring, hateful eye in the clouds.
‘What’s happening?’ Damon asked, voice quavering.
‘Don’t stop!’ Fola shouted, even as her mind wrestled with that very question.
It should have worked. The spell should have rewoven the lattice of fae energies Afanan had sewn to bind the raven fiend’s strength, closing the gaps that Siwan’s anger and grief had torn.
Either something was different, or the raven fiend had already won, seizing control of Siwan’s body.
Damon began to sing again, stumbling through the notes, his voice muted by the drumbeat of rain. Spil appeared behind him.
‘What’s going on?’ Spil asked, eyes wide with terror. ‘Where is Harwick?’
Bleed it. There isn’t time for this. Fola fumbled in her satchel for her thaumaturgist’s loupe, hoping against hope that she had simply misremembered the nature of the weave.
‘Where is Harwick, Damon?’
The boy only shook his head and went on singing.
Fola pressed the loupe to her eye, revealing a whirl of energies like she had never seen.
Magic cascaded out from the girl, forming those ghostly wings and falling upwards into the sky.
The spell that had bound the fiend was all but broken.
Only the faintest thread remained. A thread that grew from the hollow of her throat, from a cord around her neck.
Llewyn had told her of this. A shard broken from his ghostwood blade. Somehow a vessel for Siwan’s soul, and a focus for Afanan’s protective spell.
The same magic shone from Llewyn’s corpse—from his blade, and from a silver ring he wore around his thumb. The ring that had been missing from his hand, though he still reached for it from habit.
‘Do either of you know what that ring is?’ she demanded.
‘Tell me what happened to my husband,’ Spil shot back.
‘He’s still alive,’ Fola answered. ‘Frog is tending to him. Now, the ring!’
Spil bolted past her, towards the shattered window. Fola spat a curse.
‘Llewyn was wearing it in Nyth Fran when we first met him,’ Damon said, pausing in his song just long enough to answer. ‘I was just a kid, then, but I remember it. After they rescued Siwan he had taken it off.’
‘And he never wore it again?’ Fola pressed.
Siwan began to stir, her tears drying, the light of rage returning to her eyes. Damon shook his head.
‘Keep singing,’ Fola ordered. ‘Don’t stop, whatever happens. You get to the end of that song, you start over.’
Damon nodded, his voice quavering in a moment of terror, then finding the note again.
Fola knew little, but enough to form a hypothesis.
She knew that rescuing Siwan had marked a turning point for Llewyn, a departure from whatever life he had led before.
The ring, then, was a link to that old life.
To the fae power he had served—and which had strengthened him.
One he had turned to, in desperation, to more dearly sell his life for Siwan’s escape.
There were safer ways of doing this. Intricate circles that would shield Fola’s mind and body from any fell influence.
Tests that would reveal the nature of the ring, and hint at the power behind it—fae in nature, Fola was sure, but that meant very little in real terms. Librarians had written volumes on the fae.
All little more than speculation. One thing remained consistent, however—the fae were greedy, jealous, cunning and violent.
Well, she was plenty cunning herself, and there was more danger—to Siwan, to the kingdom and everyone in it—if she waited.