A Phantom in the Night
YC 1189
I have travelled the length and breadth of the world beyond the walls, I have discoursed with madmen and listened to the ravings of philosophers, witnessed the strength of peasants, and the weakness of kings.
Odd the Bard,Odd’s Almanac of the World Beyond the Walls,YC296
The voices of the dead howled against the walls of Owyn’s tent.Words that held no meaning, spoken in tongues not voiced in generations.The light of his lamps and the heat of the iron brazier held back the night shadows as a riverbank holds back a flood.If he looked too long into the dark, lines of shadow became staring eyes, grinning skulls, the tendrils of monstrous limbs.So he stared at the map on the table before him, at the lines on paper that defined the kingdom he would soon inherit, and the blood-red hammer that weighed it down.
He wished his mother had joined him.Jon Kenn might have held the stewardship for a few days.If she were here, now, she might have some spell, some secret art to calm him.
If she had such a power, she would have used it to comfort his father in his last days.Owyn would not bear these burdens, nor the torment of the voices.
With a groan, he buried his ears in his palms and squeezed shut his eyes, but despite the heat of the flames he felt a creeping cold around his neck.The fire wrote red images through his eyelids.His father, silhouetted in the rain and moonlight and flash of lightning, tumbling into madness, then into the dark.
Did that fate await him, too?
Other phantoms dogged him.Memories of days hunting the Greenwood when he was hardly old enough to draw a bow, and Ifan little older.The baying of dogs, bright laughter and the huntsman’s pipes by night, Uli Boar-arm bellowing a forester’s song by the fire while he and Ifan sang along in their reedy, adolescent voices.Later, his journey to Glascoed after the death of Harlow.The last time he had ridden this road.A futile effort to comfort Ifan, who had only clung to his father’s sword and stared into the fire with red-rimmed, haunted eyes.
Much as Owyn was doing now.
He heard himself cackling, reached out, and tightened his grip around the cold angles of the hammer’s hilt.Cold even in the furnace heat of the brazier.Slick, like ice, and ill-shaped for the human hand.The weapon of his ancestors, and of powers older still.The Old Stones, and the First Folk, and maybe stranger, darker things that lurked in the woods.Like the fae he hunted now.The root of this haunting, which had somehow twisted Ifan’s grief into open rebellion.
His mind ached.Too many people, too many powers, at too many cross purposes.He was not yet king, and already the crown was too great a burden.He understood his father more and more.That leap into the darkness no longer seemed a terrible, inscrutable mystery.
He opened his eyes, intent to send for a physician—or at the very least a flagon or two of wine; anything at all to send him to sleep—but the words crumbled.Terror seized him so completely that he could issue only a thin, voiceless whine.There, across the table, stood a figure drawn in silver light and clinging shadow.
His sword rasped from its sheath.He levelled it, ready to lunge forward and thrust, though his arm shook and firelight glimmered on the blade as it trembled in his hand.Its core was raw iron; it could banish the apparition, at least, if not kill it.
‘There’s no need to fear, Your Highness,’ the figure said.‘I am no wraith.Only come, by my art, with a message.’
Recognition crept in.Her ghostly form stripped away the dark shade of her skin, and she appeared dressed in trousers and a blouse rather than the fine gown she had worn to court.But the voice, with its odd accent and haughty air, could belong to none other than the sorceress Fola.
‘You?’he said, first in shock, then in outrage.‘You!How did you get in here?’
‘That would take some time to explain, and I would spend what moments we have on more important conversation.’
‘Tell me, or I will run you through!’Owyn snarled.
She shimmered like moonlight on a rippling pond.‘I do not know you well, Your Highness,’ she said.‘But we have spoken, and that is enough to send a projection to you with some effort.What you see is like a ghost, though of a living woman, seated in a circle not far from here.There are things we must discuss, and I thought an invitation into your tent unlikely.Nor did I think it wise to sneak through a camp of two thousand armed men when I had other, less dangerous means at my disposal.’
‘So you have spies in my court?Or do you watch me from afar, by spellcraft?’he demanded, stepping around the table and menacing her with his sword.She shrank back a step, which lent him confidence.He ought to already have summoned the two housecarls stationed at the door to the tent.But information was the ruler’s first and most potent weapon: one of his father’s many lessons, while he had still been master of his own mind.
A weapon blunted when so many voices told so many tales, and none of them fitted in a way that made sense.
‘Do you think a small army can traverse any country without its people noticing?’she said.‘As I said, Your Highness, time is short, and I am here for a reason.’
‘What reason?’
‘You have gathered this army to seek Ifan of Glascoed,’ she said.‘You think him a traitor.And you are correct.Since his father’s death four years ago, in the first days of the haunting, he has worked against the interests of the crown.Though not, I would argue, against the interests of your people, or of your person, Owyn.’
A strange relief swept through him.The question of Ifan’s loyalty, at least, was settled.There was no more confusion there.Only grief and rage.Familiar feelings, now.
He noted, also, the shift in Fola’s tone.Before, he had been ‘Your Highness’.Now she called him by his name, as none save his mother—and Ifan—would dare.‘You collude with my enemies, and now you taunt me with riddles.A traitor to the crown is a traitor to the kingdom and to the person of the king.’
‘I told you that I came to Parwys to unravel the mystery of the haunting,’ she went on, as though her speech were rehearsed—a soliloquy upon the stage, rather than a conversation with a king-in-waiting.‘But rather than seeking my answers among the powerful, I ought to have spoken with the common folk.Some, in Glascoed, have long known the truth of this kingdom’s founding, and that truth is the seed that has sprouted into the chaos that now tears apart your realm.From the day of his father’s death, Ifan has been seeking that truth.He found it, and ever since has worked towards the salvation of the people of this land.A salvation he believed would cost him dearly.’
While she spoke, Owyn studied her face.The flickering of the firelight and the shifting of the silver mist that defined her figure made it difficult to read her expression.
