Chapter 44 #2
Fola pulled herself onto a strange saddle and let the charger—who she would call Weeper—settle beneath her.
Her left arm ached. The break would heal.
If she used magic to speed that healing, it would cost her what little energy she had left—more than the tonic could restore.
Without it, she lacked the spells written into her hand, her last lines of defence.
Frog fluttered down from where he had circled over the fighting and settled again on her shoulder.
She stroked him, absently. Ifan and his three surviving housecarls had charged ahead, galloping down the First Folk Road.
She knew it for a hallucination, but nonetheless felt the eyes of that dead messenger boy on her neck for the rest of the day. A child of the wider world, with only a single life to live and die, slaughtered so pointlessly. A new ghost for Ynyr’s ranks.
Yet only an abstraction, to her. She was sickened, not by the death itself, but by what her reaction to it revealed.
How much death had she seen since leaving Thaumedony?
Arno had been right. She had been in the wider world far, far too long if such suffering could wash over her like a wave and leave such little trace.
She had come to accept it, somehow. Taught herself not to rage and weep over every life snuffed short.
One could hardly chase ambition if one had to linger and grieve for every death along the way.
It was nearly over now, at least. One last wading into the pool of blood and pain, and she could swim free of all this mess, free of the wider world—and maybe even bring something back with her to set things right.
To finally win respect, see her projects flourish, and live the life she had dreamed of.
To say ‘It will be worth it’ did little to ease the pain in her chest.
* * *
As evening fell, they came in sight of Bryngodre’s great oak and green tower, backlit by the setting sun like blood pouring from a wound in the west. Pavilions and campfires dotted the ground before the town walls.
From a vantage atop the grassy barrow of a long-dead king, Colm estimated five hundred fighters, possibly more.
‘Owyn will be in the tower,’ Ifan said. ‘We sneak through under cover of dark, kill him, and seize the hammer. A death to a would-be tyrant, and the beginning of the end of tyranny.’
There was grief in his voice, though he tried to bury it beneath righteous anger.
‘My business is in the dungeon of Castle Parwys,’ Fola said.
Ifan regarded her, his expression cold. ‘Of course. Any aid you may lend is welcome.’
Guilt bit at her. Part of her felt that she ought to see this rebellion through to its end and help to shore up the new Parwys that Ifan and Gavron meant to build.
A better world that would be built on a foundation of blood and bone. Could she say, honestly, that Ifan was better than those he meant to depose? The violence of this rebellion would only plant the seeds of another war of vengeance. Old ghosts satiated, new ones made.
Though her left hand was useless and her forearm ached, she managed to brace her notebook in the crook of her elbow.
She wrote a spell and showed Ifan where to make the final marks.
Frog fluttered to her shoulder and, with a spasm that bulged out his eyes, he vomited up a stub of a thaumaturgist’s pen—thin and only as long as Fola’s thumb.
‘Draw a circle on the ground,’ she said.
‘Be sure all four of you stand within it, then close the spell here and here. If you stand too near the light of a fire, or touch raw iron, or draw attention to yourself with noise, the illusion will break. I only ask that you do what you can to spare Owyn’s life.
If he can be reasoned with, reason with him. ’
Ifan nodded. ‘I will not kill him unless I must. But I fear I will have no choice.’
If there was one fundamental difference between the City and the wider world, it was this—choice. Thaumedony guaranteed the freedom to live as one wanted. The freedom to recover from mistakes, and to forgive the mistakes of others. Parwys could only pile retribution atop of retribution, it seemed.
Save in small acts of great compassion, Fola thought, and recalled the night of the festival, the comfort the troupers had offered Siwan.
They parted ways as the red sunset faded to a deep bruise.
No moonlight, nor a single star, broke through the thick veil of clouds. Fola and Colm rode across country, cutting wide around Bryngodre and the royal encampment. Slow going in the dark, on an unfamiliar horse, while her heart thundered with apprehension and her mind wrestled with guilt.
She could not save Parwys from itself. Even in Ulun, her goals had been simpler—the destruction of the dread engines, which were vile in their own right.
She had not stayed long enough to witness the aftermath, neither the fall of the sorcerer-kings nor whatever would rise to replace them.
She had discovered a horror, broken it, and moved on.
Here … she had stumbled upon a kingdom on the brink of transformation, where people had already confronted the wickedness long hidden in the barrow of history.
Their struggle was to overcome it without becoming what they fought against. Her presence had shifted that process, certainly.
Put weight on the scales in favour of the Greenwood, she could hope.
That had to be enough. It was not her responsibility, not her people, not her history.
Better not to meddle, as Arno had always said. Go into the world, learn what could be learned to the benefit of the City, and return. Anything else was a fool’s errand, a display of incredible arrogance.
She coughed on a sudden burst of laughter. Weeper huffed beneath her. Frog shifted nervously on her shoulder. Colm glanced back from where he rode a few paces ahead, a broad silhouette in the dark.
When had she shied away from arrogance? What was trying to tilt the scales in favour of a better future for this little kingdom, compared to the aspirations that had brought her out into the wider world in the first place?
She imagined herself the most important person to live since the Vanishing of the First Folk.
The person who would begin to unravel the world’s greatest, most intransigent mysteries.
First the nature of the First Folk themselves, then a spell to conjure their souls, and from there an understanding of their purposes, their language, their magic—an unlocking of their every secret, an unfurling of knowledge like nothing in the history of the world.
She was beginning to understand why she had been so much an outcast. Why she could count only a single friend in the vast population of the City—and that friend was Arno, who had taken it upon himself to coordinate a gaggle of the most unruly and unusual people Thaumedony produced.
And why the research board had rejected her proposal over and over again.
How absurd it must have seemed to them the first time, to say nothing of the eighth.
She had not been ostracised or rejected—she had set herself apart. She had given herself an importance above and beyond even the most brilliant of her fellows. Who in their right mind would want to spend any time around someone like that?
Now she would choose not to shoulder Parwys’s burdens because doing so would be too arrogant?
What an absurdity. No. It was arrogant to strike deals with ancient fae.
Just as arrogant to drag a child away from her home and back to the City to further a research agenda that had been rejected as firmly as anything could be rejected.
She was more than willing to meddle—with people’s lives, and with powers she could little control or understand—to serve her own purposes, to further her self-image as ‘Fola, the greatest mind of this era, if not all eras past, present, and yet to come’.
There was something bigger than her at stake here.
A chance for a downtrodden people to build better lives.
Yes, built from bloodshed, and only after unearthing a history of long-suppressed agonies.
Painful, but worthwhile. More profound, perhaps, than any unravelling of the mysteries hidden in the depths of the Library.
After all, what would it say about the nature of mortalkind if they could only be good, and just and compassionate in a City that simplified and eased their lives to the point of triviality?
The wider world held its fair share of darkness, but that only made what lights there were shine all the brighter.
Llewyn had sacrificed everything for a child whose own father would have traded her away.
For the comfortable to be kind was simple.
Far more challenging—far better—to find comfort among the wretched.
She looked to the dark sky. The Grey Lady had said she would bind the raven fiend until the Huntress was freed.
Fola’s sense of urgency was her own, not something born of the deal she had made.
True, she did not know how long the Grey Lady’s protection would hold, but neither did she have any real reason, beyond her own fear and desperation, to think it would fail.
It took some time—her horse was unfamiliar, the ground uncertain, and she had one working arm—to wheel about.
‘What are you doing?’ Colm called to her, as loud as he dared. They had left Bryngodre behind and had looped back towards the road, still keeping a careful distance in case of patrols.
‘I can’t abandon them, Colm,’ she said. ‘I know this isn’t my fight, but I’m choosing it.’
‘It’s a hopeless fight,’ he pointed out.
‘I know.’ She grinned at him, revelling in an unfamiliar relief. The weight of guilt falling away. ‘But helping them is the right thing to do. Their fight matters. And, maybe, with my help it won’t be so hopeless.’
‘With our help, you mean,’ Colm said.
She shook her head. ‘You’ve no obligation to—’
‘Come now, Fola,’ he said, turning his horse. She caught the flash of his broad teeth in the dark. ‘You know better than that.’
Often the scales of fate are weighted unevenly, one side far heavier than the other. In such times, no individual act can hope to shift the balance.
Sometimes—as in Bryngodre, in Parwys—a single choice can be enough to tip the scale.