Chapter 49 #3
She felt something wet and warm. Blood. The pain in her side.
Not an ache from a complaining muscle. Her fingers trembled.
The pile of rubble shook. Part of its face sloughed away.
A piece of the shattered tree, launched by Torin’s crazed flailing, had pierced just below her left rib.
Now that she knew it was there, she felt it—the sharp pain at the surface, the duller, agonising space it occupied within, and the searing scrape of it against her muscles every time she moved.
Her breath came quicker, hitched on the left side of her chest. A heaviness in her lung, which spasmed as she tried, slowly, carefully, to fill it.
Fear settled in. A bone-deep, dreadful certainty.
By every power of the City, she hoped Frog was still alive.
Torin screamed. Fola gritted her teeth, braced her notebook against her leg, and wrote as fast as she could.
A spell to seal her wound, first, then she would need another to strike back at Torin, and another after that to deal with Anwe.
The design swam before her eyes. She blinked, struggled to focus.
The pen felt at once heavy and loose in her grasp as her hand grew numb.
Disbelief and an aching sadness warred within her.
She had been so stupid, for so long. Sacrificed everything—unending life, infinite luxury and comfort, every dream of mortalkind fulfilled again and again and again—for what?
A futile grasping for respect she could never hope to earn.
There was a flaw in her. A greed for recognition.
Exactly the same hideousness that pervaded the wider world had buried its claws in her heart. Dissatisfaction. Desire.
Mortal traits. There were needs even a City built to fulfil every want could not provide.
She would never be respected. Never be recorded among the great and noteworthy of the Archive, no matter her brilliance.
Instead, she would die forgotten, flung to a far corner of the world, on the very threshold of the greatest discovery in a thousand years.
Worse, she would fail Siwan. Fail to keep her promise to Llewyn. She recalled his words: ‘That girl is the best part of me.’ Well, now he was dead, and Colm was dead, and soon Fola would be, too. Who was left to see her safely to the City? To free her from the raven fiend?
She remembered, one last time, the troupers gathered around Siwan at the festival grounds. The scent of blood still in the air. Screams fading on the wind. Nevertheless, they had held her, and cared for her, and tried to make her whole.
Damon was still alive. So was Spil, and—she chose to believe—Harwick. And, somewhere, Trick, Tula, Ayden and Mirelle. Maybe Fola would fail, and maybe Siwan would never reach the City, but they would not fail her. The people who loved her would see her through.
She could place her hope in that thought, however frail.
Fola wept, and laughed, and Torin screamed in rage. He rounded the pile of rubble that had shielded her, the silver fire now burning in his crazed eyes. A finger swept towards her, and magic followed with it. She watched—unwilling, even in death, not to witness and try to understand.
There was a blur. Then the wet thump of stone striking flesh, the crunch of a breaking skull. Torin, half his head crushed by a hurled block of the broken tower, toppled sideways and lay limp, no more than a sack of bones wrapped in meat.
Fola tried to comprehend his sudden death, but foundered. Her thoughts were little more than waves breaking against her consciousness. Soft, inconstant forms that faded away as soon as they took shape.
It must have been Colm. That was the only explanation, and one that filled her with a sudden, thankful joy. If Colm lived, that meant Frog might live, which meant she might not be about to die in a troublingly permanent fashion.
‘Colm?’ she wheezed, alarmed at the weakness of her own voice. She had to help him find her, she decided. Unsure of why, feeling only a profound, definite longing. An effort to stand left her woozy and shivering with a fresh, dull jab of pain in her flank.
She shut her eyes. Moments passed. One? A dozen? Time slipped through her. So many things were becoming like water. She managed to open them again, saw a figure standing over her, felt a gentle relief and smiled.
It was not Colm. Only two arms. Thin shoulders. A woman. Naked and haloed in moonlight.
Not Anwe, either, who was nearly as broad as Colm. Afanan?
The woman knelt. Her skin was rough, like bark, and scorched in strange rectangular patterns.
She reached one blood-soaked hand—red to the elbow—towards Fola’s satchel where it lay beside her on the ground.
The hand emerged a moment later, bearing something small and silver, which she slipped on to her thumb.
Llewyn’s ring, Fola realised, uncertain of what that signified. Unable to make sense of anything, any more.
A tremor worked through the woman. An animal frisson. The quivering of a sapling in the wind. She looked down at Fola with eyes as dark as the night sky, each glimmering with a single star.
‘She will make good on your bargain,’ the woman said. ‘Die well, knowing this.’
The woman walked away. Fola tried to watch her go, but her head refused to turn. Vaguely concerned, she tried to lift her arm, and found that it would only flop weakly against the shattered wood and stone beneath her.
Ah, well. She was too tired, she supposed. It had been quite some time since she had slept. She closed her eyes and leaned back against her pillow of rubble.
There was a voice, deep and rumbling, calling her name. The shadow of wings.
No matter. She would investigate when she had slept and regained her strength. She smiled slightly, remembering a day not long ago, in an inn, after a bath. Small, supple hands, and their large, calloused twins. Cradling her. A kiss.
Memories broke like waves against her mind. She let them swallow her and carry her away.