Chapter 49
Freedom
The City provides shelter, sustenance and security, without cost and without mortal effort. What, then, can be of value to us?
The tower began to break while Fola half-dragged Ifan and pushed Owyn ahead of her through the tunnel.
The prince cackled quietly, still clutching Abal’s Hammer to his chest. The ground leapt beneath their feet.
A rumble like thunder chased their heels, punctuated by sharp cracks and the scream of metal tearing.
They burst through the doorway as one of the great oak’s branches fell, like the arm of some fae giant reaching down to crush Bryngodre.
Fola herded Owyn and Ifan away from the tower and into an empty stable.
Ifan collapsed onto a pile of straw, his bruise-mottled head bobbing on the edge of unconsciousness.
Medrith’s guards and Owyn’s housecarls had not been kind to their captive traitor, and Ifan had spent the last of his strength in his effort to save Owyn.
Fola kept a worried eye on him while she scrawled a hasty spell on the support beams of the stable and the wall that faced the collapsing tower.
Owyn pressed himself to that wall and set one of his wide, wild eyes to a knothole.
His mouth hung open, his lower lip quivered, the corners turned up in a manic smile.
‘This’ll put an end to it,’ he murmured to himself. He pressed his empty hand to his ear and his expression twisted into anguish. ‘I’ll have quiet, at last.’
Fola did not have time to unravel the prince’s madness.
The gwyddien woman was still inside that tower, as were—to her knowledge—Colm and Frog.
Thoughts swirled through her on a winding current of fear.
She forced herself to focus on the spell until it was finished.
Her scrawls burned away in a flash of silver flame, leaving the stable’s supports both stronger and more flexible, hopefully able to withstand a blow from any debris of the tower’s collapse.
Owyn turned his gaze skywards and blinked rapidly, then stared. He pushed off from the wall and bolted from the stable.
‘Owyn!’ Fola dashed after him and only managed to catch the fluttering end of his cloak, pulling him up short. He whirled on her, menaced her for a moment with Abal’s Hammer—no longer pulsing with magic, only a strange, inert shape of reddish glass. He looked again to the sky.
‘It should be over,’ he snarled, then pounded the side of his head with his palm. ‘But I still hear them! Why won’t the sky clear? Why won’t the wailing end?’
He swung the hammer in a wide arc, as though to strike again at the tower.
Its stones had lost their green shadows and begun to bow inwards.
Dark cracks that glowed with a cold, eerie starlight spiderwebbed the tree.
The sight seized Fola with a sudden awe.
Here was a relic of the First Folk, a rival even to the great constructs of the City of the Wise, shattering.
A thing she doubted anyone had witnessed before.
She had sabotaged the dread engines of Ulun, but the ancient powers that had driven them remained intact.
Here, she would witness the unleashing of long-bound energies on a scale unimaginable.
Bryngodre might very well be rendered a crater, a rival to Abal’s scar. Burn it, the kingdom might be reduced to ash.
And Colm was still inside the tower. As was the woman Fola had agreed to rescue, in exchange for Siwan’s life. To say nothing of her bird—her only insurance, here in the wider world, against the finality of death.
‘I did what you wanted!’ Owyn roared. ‘Now leave us in peace!’
Fola pressed her thaumaturgist’s loupe to her eye, half from sheer curiosity, half from a slow-building recognition that she was not done, yet, with the tower.
For Colm, for Siwan and for herself, she would have to plunge back into the chaos.
Her hope that she might be able to make some sense of the destruction was dashed immediately.
To even begin to describe the dance of powers, the fraying of so complex a weave as the green tower and the Old Stones, would have taken months of study. She had only moments.
Nothing for it, then, but to plunge into the maelstrom blind.
She seized Owyn by the collar of his shirt. He looked at her, stunned, as though he had forgotten she was even there.
‘Stay in the stable with Ifan,’ she insisted. ‘I’ll be right back.’
It was its own sort of madness to trust the prince as caregiver for his wounded, half-conscious enemy, but she had no choice. She gave Owyn a shove back towards the mouth of the stable. He just went on staring at her, confused and incredulous, the hammer hanging limp in his hand.
‘Bleed it,’ she muttered. ‘Just don’t get yourself killed.’
Owyn shook his head, as incomprehensible an answer as Fola could have asked for. With another curse she tucked her loupe into her satchel, drew her pad of spellpaper, braced it in the crook of her broken arm, and turned back towards the tower in the moment it imploded.
The walls of the tower bowed inwards, then burst. The tree split and unfurled like an opening flower.
Its trunk fell in great limp slabs. Fola stood transfixed by the sight, until a wave of force hurled her backwards into the wall of the barn.
She landed on her broken arm and screamed.
Winds whipped the air, tore at the thatched and shingled roofs that yet stood in Bryngodre.
The ground leapt and shook beneath the pummelling blows of fallen branches, bark and stone.
She struggled to her feet, mind clouded by pain and astonishment. Clouds of dust swirled and settled. The tower’s collapse had ended, it seemed, and reshaped Bryngodre into a maze of ruins. She had lost sight of Owyn entirely, but the barn still stood. Ifan, at least, had survived.
‘Colm!’ she cried out, and staggered uphill, towards the torn-open remnant of the tower.
Its silhouette through the dust was like an old, rotted stump ripped apart by titanic hands.
She picked her way over fallen branches as wide around as a human torso, thankful for the obscuring layer of dust over everything.
It let her believe the odd, wet lumps she passed were something other than the remains of mortal bodies.
This was idiotic. There was no way that anyone within the tower had survived its falling.
‘Colm!’ she shouted again, a note of panic in her voice that she did not yet feel.
She ought to quit this place, find a horse, ride east as hard as she could until she reached the City of the Wise.
She trudged upwards, and was struck by a baffling emptiness at the notion that Frog, too, had been lost.
‘Frog!’ She looked at the sky, half expecting him to wheel down, goggled-eyed and terrified, to alight on her shoulder and disguise himself against a danger that had already passed.
The Great Tree might grow her a new bird—so she assumed; as far as she knew no bird of Thaumedony had died before. Had she lost, in her foolish desperation, the safeguard of her mortal life?
‘Bleed it,’ she said, the words meant to dam away a slow-seeping grief that threatened to paralyse her. ‘No. They’re still alive.’
They had to be.
She might still save Siwan if she left Parwys at haste and brought the girl with her.
Even without the Grey Lady’s cooperation, there had to be a way to keep the raven fiend in check.
Yet she found herself clinging to hope: that Colm and the gwyddien woman lived; that this could all end as she had envisioned.
Her triumphant return to the Library, Colm behind her, wearing his wide grin, Siwan safe and ready to cooperate with her research.
The red brick tunnel into the tower was a splintered ruin, its far end splayed outwards like a misfired cannon. Fola picked her way past it, through the rubble of the tower up to a place where the trunk had split and fallen to form a saddle between jagged, dangerous slopes.
From that vantage, she looked down into the chamber of the tree.
The First Folk magics that had created that vast space tucked within the fabric of the world were gone.
What remained was only a squat, round tower wearing vast splinters of wood like a hideous crown.
The Old Stones themselves were nowhere to be seen, nor was the altar—both had likely been pulverised by the violent unravelling of their own power.
She swept the blasted ruin at the bottom of the hollow for any sign of Colm, or the gwyddien woman, or even Queen Medrith.
Any sign at all that someone had survived; an anchor for her hope to cling to.
Movement caught her eye—a shifting mound of debris, then a hand.
A dust-coated figure pulled itself from a hollow in the rubble.
Then another, larger, broad-shouldered. Both were dressed in ragged, bloodstained robes.
They reached down and, visibly straining, pulled up a third figure, this one wrapped in loops of chain.
The anakriarch. His surviving knight. And with them, a prisoner stolen from the fallen druids—the gwyddien Huntress Fola had been sent to save.
They were as injured as she was, if not more, by the way the knight slumped to sit, breathing slow and heavy.
Yet they were two, and she was alone. She lacked her staff, and her left arm was broken, depriving her of the last-ditch weapons she so loathed and yet felt so vulnerable without.
She had only pen and spellpaper, but exhaustion chased any clever spell from her mind.
Thaumaturgy left open wide possibilities, but as the body is limited by pain and fatigue, so too is the mind limited in spellcraft.
If she struck swiftly and definitively, she might kill the templars before they noticed her, but if the spell was imprecise—a hair too powerful, or its aim uncertain—she might kill the gwyddien woman, too.