‘What crown?’The hot wind roared, now, pulsing with each syllable.Ynyr tossed his head, making the studs flash, though there was no obvious source of light.The antlers grew from his scalp as surely as Damon’s horns.‘May only those who think themselves better than their fellows wear decoration?The sword was a gift from a craftsman,’ he said, patting the ornamental hilt, ‘who made it for love.I carry it because there are those in this world who deal us violence and so invite it in return.That is all.I am no king.Only a man, well known and well liked.’
‘Then I was misled, good Ynyr,’ Fola said, mind reeling at these revelations.From the sound of things, before Abal’s conquest the people of Glascoed had kept a society not unlike that of the City.And they had done so without the First Folk’s many gifts.A shudder of excitement worked through her.Here was a discovery worthy of the Library’s highest honours.People could live in some semblance of a just society, on their own, while enduring the dangers and ravages of the wider world.A question that had dogged the minds of the City’s philosophers, and here was the beginning of an answer.
Ynyr harrumphed, crossed his broad arms, and regarded her with black and yellow eyes.‘What is your business with us?’The storm of his anger had cooled, somewhat, though the words still burned.‘It is rude to demand someone’s attention and then waste it.’
There were so many questions she wanted to ask him, but the spell would only last so long.
‘An injustice was done to you and yours, long ago,’ Fola said.‘I would witness it, and understand it, and give you justice if I can.’
‘Ha!’Ynyr placed his free hand flat against his belly.‘An injustice?By my count there were three, at least.First the bite of Abal’s blades and the crushing weight of his hammer.Then he buried us, aye, but not as one ought be buried, with ceremony and honours and a marker to remind the living what you were.He threw us into the pit and covered us in lye to hide the stink.Yet even that was not enough.He scoured from our lands of every trace of us he could find—our books, our art—preserving only that which the bastard and his followers fancied or found use for.Our castles, or this.’Again, he patted the hilt of his sword.‘Did all he could to write us out of the world with sword, shovel, and pen.’
‘It is all true, then,’ Ifan said.His flickering expression twisted as though a barb had tangled in his guts.‘Everything my father said… Stones, Owyn…’
‘Show me how it was.’Fola ignored the count and met that raven-tainted gaze.She was right, then.The raven fiend had called these wraiths from out of their ancient slumber.Old suffering, resonating with the new.Though she could not yet say whether Siwan’s involvement in spurring on the haunting would make it simpler to end, or more complex.‘Once I know the truth, I can help you find satisfaction.’
‘I know what will satisfy me, child,’ Ynyr said, that hand no longer resting on the hilt, but gripping it ready to draw.He moved towards her.The void around them began to flicker, then fill with a silver haze.‘But if you wish to see, then see.’
Memory
YC 1189 / YC 1180 / YC 237
The gods have gone.Let the same be said of the masters.
Ynyr the Builder, speech to the Council of Villages,YC221
A wave of memories crashed over the rocky shore of Fola’s mind, carving it with moments as the wave rolled back to sea.Pillars of smoke rose throughout the forest to join a black cloud that hung over all of Parwys, trapped by the wall of mountains that guarded the kingdom from the frigid winds off the Rime Sea.
A mother rocked her bloated child, the boils at her own armpit, neck, and groin burning like coals as she sang softly.
‘All the tears were spent,’ a voice whispered in Fola’s ear—not Ynyr, but a young woman, breathless and strained through fluid-filled lungs.‘I chose to die with a song, but it hung so heavy in the air…’
A father sprawled over fresh graves, sobbing and reeking of whisky.Then, later, kicking the barrel out from beneath his feet—the noose drawn taut, a few jerks, then stillness.
‘Death came to my house.It hounded and tore my boys, twisted the girl babe up until she wailed herself out, withered their mother, but laid not a claw on me.Why?Better me than them… or with them, at least…’
Harlow, Count of Glascoed, did what he could—Fola saw men in beaked masks wearing the silver stag as they went from village to village, carting away the dead—but King Elbrech did nothing.His aid was only for his own city and the southern lands from which he took his wealth.
‘Dinnae e’en send his druids,’ came the brittle voice of an old woman.‘We folk of the wood turned elsewhere for sanctuary.To older, darker corners, but for all their darkness, near at hand.’
No matter the scene that flashed before Fola—young lovers sharing a deathbed; a child wandering aimless, too weak to bury his father; bodies piled like cordwood and burned in forest clearings—every eye, even those of the corpses, was black in a sea of yellow.
Hundreds, thousands of injustices.Dead with no living to remember them.Buried in unmarked graves or burned, against honour and custom, to defend from plague.
‘Aye, their king failed them.’Ynyr’s voice crept through Fola’s mind, crackling like the flames of burning corpses.‘Why have him, then, if he lends no aid in desperate times?’
More than enough wrath to fill the Greenwood with countless wraiths.But even a neglectful king cannot be blamed for a plague.Who were the wraiths to avenge themselves against?The foul air that carried death from house to house?The world itself ?
‘I remember these days,’ Ifan’s voice echoed.‘I was a boy.They were dark times, but there have been other plagues.Worse plagues.And kings who did still less than Elbrech.You cannot tell me the haunting was born here.’
‘Not born,’ Fola said, while a young woman, pale and shivering with fever, her dress fouled with pus, flung herself into the Afoneang.‘But this is part of it.Fertile enough to sprout your foot soldiers.But I would see the root.What injustice created you, Shade of Ynyr?’
Ynyr appeared on the banks, where the woman had knelt before giving herself to the river.His raven-eyes fixed on her.A hand like ice seized her brow.
* * *
A light rain trickled.The soft blue of the sky showed through clouds like fraying fabric.Behind them, the godsroad arched high above the Afoneang, touching down at a little circle of houses.The last members of their party had joined there.The ‘mayor’ of Miggenbrot—little better than a king, to Ynyr’s thinking, though at least a king chosen by the people he ruled—had brought a dozen strong youths bearing arms.
Ynyr understood their caution.Word had spread, even to the deep reaches of the Greenwood, of the violence Abal had visited in the west.He had found some weapon in a barrow, or in a First Folk ruin, or beneath a standing stone, and the mere threat of it had been enough to cow the hard folk of Cilbran.Or so the rumours said, anyway.Ynyr was not one given to rumour.He would see what there was to see, and hear what Abal had to say, and decide then how to proceed.
