I.The Wider World
The Haunting of Parwys
YC 1189
Madness is the natural condition of the monarch;
fear, rather, the king seeming sane.
Odd the Bard,Odd’s Almanac of the World Beyond the Walls,YC296
A sapling may live on shallow roots.But for a haunting to grow into such terror as gripped Parwys, it must drink from the depths.From horrors as near the world’s foundation as it can reach.
Roots to tear up the cornerstones of a castle.
* * *
‘Your Highness.’
The touch on his shoulder, more than the voice, woke Owyn son Elbrech of the House of Abal, crown prince of Parwys, from the half-sleep that so often plagued him.There were voices enough in the castle, by night.Guardsmen and servants whispering in the halls.The rumble of his father’s roars echoing down from the unfinished tower.And on the worst nights, when sleep came most reluctantly, the low, rattling moan through the lead and glass of his chamber windows.
‘It is your father, Your Highness.’Jon Kenn leaned across his bed.The light of his lantern cast his eyes in deep shadow and filled the white cloud of his beard with a glow like fire.A dull glint traced the three nested triangles etched into the pendant of raw iron that hung from his neck.Sweat beaded in the creases of his bald pate, despite the chill of early autumn in the air.‘You must come, and swiftly, at your mother’s insistence.’
A wordless roar tumbled through the castle, followed by the flicker of lightning and crash of thunder.Wind and rain battered at the windows, sending rivers running between cells of coloured glass.
‘To the tower?’Owyn murmured, swinging his legs from beneath the warm comfort of his bedding.Fear gnawed through the fog of interrupted sleep.Jon Kenn placed a white rimewolf fur about his shoulders.‘In this weather?’
A gust of wind whistled through the gap in the windows.A keening wail, also wordless.Only the wind.Not the voices of the ghosts his father railed against and that kept them both from sleep.
‘That is precisely why we must hurry, Your Highness,’ the old scholar said.‘Your father refuses to come down, no matter how your mother pleads.She fears he will catch ill, if he is not caught up by a gust of wind and thrown into the sea.’
‘And she thinks I will do a better job of convincing him?’Owyn stuffed his stockinged feet into his boots and frowned up at Jon Kenn.‘He never listened to me before he went mad.Why would he listen to me now?’
‘Let today be the day,’ Jon muttered.He might have said more, but the king’s voice boomed down, muffled and stripped of meaning by layers of timber and stone.His eyes went to the corner of the ceiling, as though to pierce through the castle and observe his master’s distress.
‘He’ll calm down,’ Owyn said.‘He always does.’
Despite his effort to mask it, the disquiet pounding through Owyn made his voice quaver.He felt a sudden need for Ifan, his boyhood friend, now the Count of Glascoed.Ifan had endured much the same terror—had survived it, though it had claimed his own father.He would make a better comfort, and a better counsellor, than Jon Kenn.
Twice more the king’s howls reached them as they traversed Castle Parwys.The narrow passageways and unadorned brick of the old wing spilled into the audience hall, the great contribution of King Abal the Protector himself.Each king since had added to the castle: most a turret, or a wing of bedrooms, transforming it over centuries into a sprawling display of architectural styles and tastes.Presiding over an era of peace and prosperity, Owyn’s father had sought to make his contribution a lasting, irrefutable testament to his reign.A great stone tower fitted with broad windows, built to loom high over the Roaring Bay, tall enough for the gaze of the king to sweep across the far reaches of the kingdom.
A door bracketed in raw iron led up the spiralling stair of the unfinished tower.Owyn shuddered as he passed through it.In his childhood, such precautions had been unnecessary.Until the haunting, Parwys had had little cause to guard itself against magic.In truth, magic had been a boon to Abal’s house.The Old Stones, the druids who wielded them, and the great weapon left by the First Folk had formed the foundation of Parwys’s safety from monsters and grasping neighbours alike.
Rainwater formed waterfalls on the stair.Not thirty steps up, they passed the first window.The wind had torn away one of the boards covering the unfinished glasswork.Now it reached through the gap and whipped at the white fur around Owyn’s shoulders.He leaned on the hardwood railing, braced his other hand against the far wall, and took each step with deliberate care, the soles of his boots slick on the wet stone.Raised voices echoed down: his mother’s and his father’s, and that of Uli Boar-arm, the head of his father’s housecarls.Owyn hastened his pace as much as he dared.
‘Do… not hear… Uli?’the king roared, the wind stealing away half of his words.‘Are… deafened?Is your mind… stone?’
‘Owyn!Take care!’Jon Kenn’s voice chased Owyn’s quickening steps.
‘Your Majesty, there is only the wind!’Uli’s voice rumbled.Owyn was near enough, now, to hear their speech clearly.‘The storm grows in strength.It will pull this tower down around our heads!’
‘That it will, Uli!’A harsh, sobbing laugh echoed down the stair.‘And not this tower only, but all of Parwys, save the deepest, oldest roots of this castle and the Old Stones themselves.’
‘Please, Elbrech.’Owyn heard the tears in his mother’s voice.‘You will catch your death.Come down from there, at least out of the rain and wind.’
‘You don’t fear the storm, Medri,’ the king shouted, his anger fierce and pointed.‘You fear what my father and his father knew, and what I know.You fear that no king of Parwys will ever lift that hammer again!’
Owyn rounded the final turn of the stairwell as lightning flashed, outlining his father, a broad-shouldered silhouette in a wind-tossed dressing gown.The king leaned against the tread-wheel of a crane.In the darkness the crane seemed some great, crouching beast—a monster of the First Folk’s make, come to roost on the scaffolding of the unfinished tower.The king stared along its arm at the rainscoured city below.
