Chapter 49 #2
Reason would bid her flee, injured as she was, with no knowing whether Frog yet lived to carry her soul back to the City.
Her pen went to spellpaper—she winced at the pressure on her left arm, bracing the notebook—and she began to write.
But the lines blurred before her aching eyes.
More, she felt a twisting in her gut. An apprehensive guilt, building as she worked her way towards yet another in a long string of violent acts.
She wanted Torin dead. Vengeance for Llewyn. And her hatred redoubled for the moral injury he had dealt her—she had never wanted anyone dead before. If meeting Afanan, Siwan and the troupers had made her somehow better, then Torin had made her worse. Poisoned her with his own hatred.
There had been so much death. How could Parwys heal if they piled corpses atop corpses? It could never mend while Abal’s legacy held power, but neither could it hope for peace so long as its only answer for pain was vengeance.
No. She would prove Arno wrong. She had not lost sight of herself. The world had not leached the goodness of the City from her. If anything, she had found its parallel. Compassion in answer to suffering. She would add no more pain if she could help it.
She looked up from her half-written spell and met the gaze of the anakriarch, who had seen her, and now stood rigidly between her and the gwyddien woman.
Silver fire burned at his temples and in his hands.
He shouted something unintelligible at his knight—the tongue of Tarebach, at a distance, echoing through the ruin—and she lumbered to her feet, favouring her left side.
The knight cast about herself for a weapon and hefted a spar of the shattered tree, as long as Fola was tall, with a broad, jagged edge.
‘What do you want, witch?’ the anakriarch howled up at her. ‘Haven’t you caused enough death and destruction in your short time here?’
That stung her, agitated her guilt and uncertainty—Colm would still be alive, she felt with a sudden, piercing certainty, if she had not dragged him with her to Parwys. Or if she had pried herself away from the promise of Siwan’s secrets and fled when the danger became great.
No. None of the horror was her doing. Even this destruction—the shattering of a relic of the First Folk—had not been her act, but that of the would-be king, driven mad by the long-buried sins of the legacy he would inherit.
‘I struggle to contain a dark power, Anakriarch,’ Fola called down. ‘You glimpsed it on the rooftop of Glascoed Keep. To seal it away, to protect the world from its unleashing, I need that woman you have taken prisoner.’
Torin regarded the gwyddien woman, then Fola.
‘You would have me believe you intend to unmake the power in that monstrous girl?’ He burst out laughing.
‘I know where you are really from, Fola of the “Starlit Tower”. I know what your City does. Hoards the powers of the First Folk. Tries to unravel their secrets—not to destroy them, or to seal them away, but to subjugate them. To make them your own, in the hope that you might, someday, make yourselves beings alike to the First Folk themselves.’
He shook his head. The silver flames grew stronger, more dazzling.
‘You flout mortality, that which equalises us all. You laugh in the face of nature, of order. You reject the virtues within yourselves and supplement your weakness with artifacts you barely understand. And now you say that you mean to unmake this great, terrible power—which resisted even the cleansing fire of the Agion!—rather than fold it into your own ambitions, your own rejection of all that ought to be accepted? Well, sorceress … I do not believe you. With this power, you would sweep over Tarebach and Alberon and swallow everything! You may even succeed in your monstrous aims and become the second coming of the First Folk. But I tell you this … mortalkind will not abide subservience again. We will not bow to undying, eternal masters. That day ended long ago, and despite all your efforts, it will not dawn again.’
Fola felt her blood burning. Here was, personified, the small-mindedness of the Mortal Church. A certainty that had armoured itself against all argument and evidence, against all joy and wonder, care and compassion.
She could scour him from the world with a few flicks of her pen. It would be simple enough to fill the shattered hollow with fire. More difficult to strike at just him, without killing the gwyddien woman, too—to say nothing of any other survivors still trapped beneath the rubble.
And there would be others like him, just behind. She might swat this one hateful fly, but a thousand more swarmed near Afondir, and yet more in the lands to the south and east.
She was tired, and weak, and ready for this all to be over, and found that she hated this man as much for his standing in her way as for what he had done to Llewyn.
A childish feeling. One shameful for anyone of the City.
But there the stakes were never this high, with life and death and the future all hanging in the balance.
‘You fear the unknown too much to try and understand it,’ Fola said. ‘You say yourself your magic is unable to overcome the haunting, yet you will let the horror go on when you might have had a hand in ending it. Let me take the gwyddien. There can be peace here. No more lives need to be lost.’
‘To keep this power from you, I would sacrifice thousands!’ He took a step towards her, his hand raised, arm quivering with exertion, his magic straining at the leash. ‘To me, Anwe! Let’s be done with this.’
Behind him, his knight hefted her makeshift weapon. She grimaced in pain. Her arm faltered, unable to hold the shard of shattered trunk aloft. Its tip bit the earth and Anwe fixed Fola with a slow, considered regard.
‘Let the bitch take her, Torin,’ Anwe said. ‘I’m through.’
The anakriarch whirled on her. ‘You what?’
Anwe planted her weapon in the ground and leaned upon it, every line of her body speaking to pain and fatigue.
The gwyddien woman looked on, like a cat watching prey, unable to strike from beneath the iron chains that bound her, the slow trickle of smoke where it touched her skin and fouled her magic.
‘What’s the point?’ Anwe said. ‘Parwys is in tatters. Unwith’s crusade will sweep through to restore order. We’ve won, Torin. It’s over.’
‘Where is your honour?’ Torin demanded. ‘Where is your industry? Your first virtue is courage, and now your spirit breaks at the last, vital moment? You are no Knight of Action!’
‘Where’s your fucking courage?’ Anwe cut back. ‘Or your temperance? You want to question the tree-devil, eh? From fear and cruelty, it seems to me. Not for any purpose.’
Fola watched them, astonished to have found an ally in the warrior woman, and uncertain of how to proceed.
If her left arm worked, she might have addled Torin’s mind with the circle written there—assuming she could pierce the protection lent by his magic.
Exhausted as he was, it might well be doable.
She tested her fingers, trying to bring her index finger to her thumb, and winced at the jagged pulse up her arm.
No luck, but she could try to write something similar on spell-paper while the templars argued. The spells Arno had gifted to his agents were complex, requiring days of careful line work, but she might manage an approximation.
‘I am your rightful commander,’ Torin insisted, standing tall while Anwe slouched.
‘So long as you hold all the virtues, yes,’ Anwe said with a slow nod.
‘But you failed, didn’t you? You tried to call on all the Agion, and you failed.
So what does that mean, Torin? It tells me there may be some hidden flaw in you.
Some virtue half-turned to vice. I have the right to protect my own soul, and I will not follow a man who may have lost his way. ’
‘Coward,’ Torin seethed. ‘Cretin.’
‘Temperance,’ Anwe snarled back. ‘Moderation. Restraint. The balance of the Iron Mean.’
‘I still hold justice, knight, that should be enough for you.’
‘A mere Knight of Mediation holds no authority over me.’
Torin shook, enraged. He hurled silver fire at Anwe. It struck, washed over her, carried her a dozen paces and hurled her into the gwyddien woman. Knight and fae prisoner fell in a tangle of limbs and a rattle of chains, and Fola saw her opportunity to strike.
Spellpaper flashed into a silver bolt that struck Torin in the back.
He howled and spun about, his eyes dancing wild in their sockets, his arms flailing, his magic careening out in a chaotic storm.
Fola dashed forward, cursing—the spell had been meant to muddle his thoughts, leave him confused and disorientated.
Either it had been ill formed, or his own magic had interfered.
The rubble around her burst and trembled as he lashed out, his waves of silver fire crashing into the ground, casting up shards of stone and shattered tree.
Pain darted up her left arm as she ran, then another pain lanced her side—sudden and sharp, a violent cramp like a knife between her ribs as her body finally gave way to exhaustion.
She needed to write another spell—something definitive this time.
There was no more room for kindness towards this madman who wanted to kill her.
She threw herself behind a pile of rubble, rolled to a stop, screamed at another wave of pain up from her arm and flank and through the whole of her body.
The rubble shook under Torin’s assault as she pawed at her satchel for a flask of Frog’s medicine.
Something to dull the edge of her pain, to give her a moment of focus.