Chapter 46 #2
A part of him hoped for failure. Surely the druids would choose a different king if the Old Stones rejected him. Someone more worthy. Better able to endure the hard decisions demanded by such dark times.
The pain became a fire in his bones. Every step like dragging his feet through boiling mercury.
A dark tunnel defined the scope of his vision.
Only his mother’s head and shoulders, leading him inwards.
Blood pulsed behind his ears, and a rushing wind filled them, drowning out all sound.
In the silence, he heard the howling of the dead.
The same voices that had driven his father to his death, and had dogged him ever since.
The hammer felt as heavy as lead and as slick and cold as ice.
It wanted to slip through his fingers. To fall to the earth and shatter, and with it shatter all hope for Parwys’s future.
Alberon would rush across the river. Galca storm over the mountains.
Salus send ships into the Roaring Bay. His kingdom—his father’s kingdom—would fall.
Unless he found the strength to seize this hammer, hold it fast and bring it down. To crush them without mercy. To carry the pain that seared through him so that he might inflict it on his enemies. As Abal had done.
The howling in his mind redoubled. A chorus of voices in a language he could not speak, but whose meaning was clear. Anger. Grief. A depthless hunger for revenge.
He remembered—as he took those final steps, his every joint and sinew of his body taut and agonised—the ghostly visitation of Fola the sorceress.
She had warned him, hadn’t she? Told him that his kingdom was founded on pain such as this.
That the wraiths that howled in his mind and lurked in the shadowed corners of his tent were the spirits of its victims. That to rule, he had to be willing to make more.
More dead. More ghosts. More horrors to gaze down from the blackened sky, to reach out with tearing hands and scream.
No pain inflicted on the world ever ends. It can be quieted. Smothered. But always an ember, a last breath, remains. In the hearts of those who remember. In the anguished spirits of the dead.
‘It is not too much,’ he heard his mother snarl.
She was arguing with someone. One of the other druids was insisting that they stop the ritual, that they slow the pace of Owyn’s inward journey. There was a reason, he said, that attunement took place over a fortnight. Each day, another step nearer the altar.
‘We do not have time,’ Medrith said. ‘He must shoulder the burden now, or there will be no more kingdom to defend, no more burden to shoulder. Do you doubt the strength of my son?’
The air itself pressed against him, as though he was wading through a thickening fog.
Each breath was a labour. The hammer had grown heavier and the edges of the braided haft dug into him, pressing through the meat of his palms, grinding against the bones of his fingers.
Pain and fear became panic, an urge to turn and flee, to lay down pain and power.
Medrith turned to him. He saw in her eyes a reflection of his own fear. She, too, had lost his father—her husband. Who had refused this rite, this power, when he rose to the crown. Who had thrown himself from his unfinished tower rather than shoulder it and face the haunting.
‘Come, Owyn,’ she said. ‘My prince. My king. Not much further now. Be strong.’
She led him inwards, her eyes fixed on his as she walked backwards towards the altar. They widened, drifted from his gaze to peer over his shoulder. There was some commotion, heard only as a distant echo.
‘Wh–’ His dry throat seized and his swollen tongue refused to form the words. He began to turn his head.
‘Focus on the next step, my son,’ she said. ‘It will be over soon, and the kingdom will be strong again. For the first time in three generations, we will wield the Old Stones in their fullness. We will bury these ghosts beneath our power.’
She reached for his hand, her fear burning into fury, then stopped herself. She gestured for speed and quickened her pace.
He would not fail as his father had failed.
He took another step and swallowed the scream that rose to his withered throat.
And then, as though dark clouds had parted for the sun, the pain was gone.
The narrowing of his vision faded and left him dazzled by light and colour.
There was his mother, standing on the far side of the black, flat-topped altar, smiling at him.
Beautiful, kind, full of love. The green of her dress like a field after spring rain.
Sound rushed in next, as the whirlwind in his ears slowed to silence.
‘Owyn!’ An impossible voice soared through the vaulted, starlit confines of the tower.
‘We are nearly finished, my son,’ Medrith said. ‘You need only step onto the altar and raise Abal’s Hammer high.’
‘Owyn!’ That voice again. Thick and swollen, but familiar. ‘Your father refused this! Your grandfather refused this! They knew what it was, and wanted no part!’
‘Shut him up!’ the queen snapped.
The hammer was still heavy in Owyn’s hand, dragging at him.
He glanced towards the door to the tower in time to watch Uli Boar-arm pound his fist into Ifan’s stomach, driving the breath from his lungs.
The anakriarch and his hulking womanknight stood by—Torin’s eye looked past Owyn to the gwyddien in chains.
‘Step onto the altar, Owyn,’ his mother said with a forced calm, then, yelling in full fury at Ifan and the priests, ‘I will brook no interference! Stay where you are, or by these stones, I will break you!’
‘What are you doing here?’ Owyn wondered aloud.
The words scraped at his throat, breaking the uncanny peace that had settled on him.
Pain filled his joints again. Ifan might tell him what had happened at Glascoed—and he must have some reason for riding in pursuit.
There was so much Owyn did not know. He was struck anew by the eeriness of the space within the tower, of its far horizons so improbably vast. Its light was harsh and cold and constant, owing its existence to neither lamp or star.
The oil-slick surface of the hammer’s hilt cut into him like sharpened ice.
A memory arose of a childhood visit to Glascoed, with his father.
The king’s purpose had been to discern the state of the county—Owyn’s had been to visit with Ifan, his only friend of near age and near status.
That day, while they waited in the courtyard for the hunt master to ready their ponies and hounds, Owyn had gazed into a strange artifact.
It too, had been made of glass, like Abal’s Hammer.
A whirling construct that seemed to possess an infinite depth.
The longer he stared, the larger the space within it seemed, the more complex the structure, the more varied the shapes the armatures could take in their eternal dance.
That memory struck him now, and conjured a profound sense of his own perspective—the fact that the world he saw was but one image among countless others receding into the infinite past and the limitless future.
Only one shape of the aleph. Necessarily limited by his position in time, his place in history, his role in the world.
‘Owyn,’ his mother snapped, the calm facade of her compassion breaking. ‘The altar.’
He knew nothing, he realised. Nor, in truth, did his mother, for all her power. The world was vast. Its horizons infinite, and folded back upon themselves, layer over layer.
A bizarre realisation to strike him at the moment before he ascended to kingship, before he inherited the power that had forged Parwys—and crushed whatever had come before.
Or, perhaps not so bizarre. Perhaps his father had felt much the same and taken a step back before he, in ignorance, left the world more broken than he found it.
‘I should talk with Ifan,’ he rasped, and made to turn.
His mother seized his wrist, her hand a manacle. ‘Speak with him when this is done,’ she snarled. ‘Or stove in his head as a traitor, it matters not to me. You carry Abal’s blood. You will attune and restore this kingdom.’
Medrith pulled. Owyn stumbled towards her, into the altar, and fell to lie across it.
The moment his feet left the ground, a pulse shook the space within the tower.
The cold light flared hot, for an instant.
The ground heaved. The distant walls trembled.
A cascade of dust fell from the sky of roots overhead, some of it bright like a shower of green stars.
Light filled the Old Stones, too, tracing their ancient carvings.
Owyn groaned and tried to stand, but the weight on his shoulders had fallen across his back, as though the Old Stones themselves lay across the altar, pinning him down.
Their light became as blinding as noon. A matching glow rose beneath him, where he lay across the hammer.
Its head and haft pressed against his chest. First as cold as ice and hard as iron, then warm, then as hot as a coal taken from the flame.
There were no thoughts. No memories. No introspection. Only the terror and pain of a child betrayed, and used, and denied any say in his future. He looked at his mother, at her arms raised and head thrown back in rapture, silhouetted in the stunning light.