‘Do I hear you rightly?’he asked, the words sounding as though from afar, spoken by another voice, so deep was his astonishment.‘Ifan believes his treason will cure the land?’
‘For years he acted on mere belief,’ she answered.‘Now he knows.We have parleyed with the wraiths, Owyn, with the ancient people whose ghosts rage at the injustices that are the foundation of this kingdom.For the haunting to end, so too must the rule of Abal’s line.’
All the strength fell from Owyn’s sword arm.The tip of his blade bit through the Salusian rug at his feet.‘That is madness,’ he insisted—to himself as much as to Fola.‘Nothing more than a story.An excuse for his treason.’
Yet the wraiths howled around his tent, as they had howled against the scaffolds and rising walls of his father’s tower.Voices that neither his mother, nor Jon Kenn, nor Uli Boar-arm, nor anyone else had been able to hear.
‘The wraiths came for Ifan’s father, too,’ Fola said, as though he had spoken those terrible thoughts aloud.‘They thirsted for the blood of Barwon the Betrayer, and found it in his heirs.Yet Ifan has been untroubled by the haunting since he began to help the people of the Greenwood.’She stepped towards him, her pale, silver-flickering eyes fixed on his.‘Their hatred of your ancestor is greater.But if you made amends, as Ifan has, if you gave them what justice you can, I believe that would be enough.’
‘What justice?’Owyn shook his head.‘I will be king.Justice will be mine to decide and dispense.’
Fola scoffed.‘Law and punishment, maybe.Not justice.’
Owyn’s anger flared.His grip tightened on his blade, though he left it lowered.Let her think herself safe and wander close.She may be no more than an apparition, but that, too, may have been a lie—at least in part.If she were bound to this thing, even if only in shadow, then she must feel at least the shadow of any wound he dealt it.
‘Abal was no hero, Owyn,’ Fola went on, drawing another step nearer.‘He was a tyrant.That hammer was no instrument of liberation, but of conquest.He shattered this land with it to better rebuild to his whim.’
‘Lies,’ Owyn spat, though something in him—something buried deep—resonated with her words.A sense of wrongness that had lingered with him since his father’s death.Like a cancer gnawing at his bones, growing with every howl of the wraiths, with every brush of his hand against the red crystal of Abal’s Hammer.He remembered his blood spilling upon the altar within the unsettling vastness of the Green Tower.A fierce shake of his head did little to banish the image, or his doubts.‘I have read the histories, witch.You, who have been in this kingdom less than a fortnight, would deign to tell me they are all false?’
‘A story written to bury a painful past.Hearing the truth… It is not easy, Owyn, and harder still to accept it.But if you want this haunting to end, it is necessary.’Was that quaver a note of pity in her voice?Or only a flaw in the apparition?‘There are people in the wood who still remember.Court historians have told one tale, but in the villages, the shadowed edges of the realm, they tell another.And the dead remember well.’
Now it was Owyn’s turn to scoff.‘One myth for those with the strength to rule, and another for those who resent that strength.For this, for some supposed sin of my ancestor—generations ago!—I am to die?’
‘I am here to offer you another way, Owyn.’He resented her familiarity less this time, though with her every word she threatened his rule.‘Give up your crown.Destroy Abal’s Hammer.Dissolve the kingdom.Return its lands to the people who live on them, as the land belonged to them in the days after the First Folk’s Vanishing, before Abal’s conquest.Do this, as Ifan has done what he can to seek justice, and there will be no need for any more death.If you fight, if you defeat Ifan and put the rebellion to the sword, it will only strengthen the haunting.Every slain rebel will beget another ghost to besiege you.’
A tremor worked through him.She was offering relief from the burden.From the weight thrust upon him by his father’s cowardice and death.
There was a moment—though he would not realise it until later, thinking back—when the howling of the wraiths was silent.
But it was impossible.A king did not give up his crown.Not in a time of great danger, when the kingdom needed him most, faced with a threefold threat of rebellion, the grasping claws of neighbours, and old powers beyond the understanding of the deepest druidic lore.He was no coward.No weakling.
He had chosen his mother’s path, not his father’s.
‘And what of those who die in the chaos of my abdication?Will they not haunt me just the same?’Owyn shook his head.With his free hand he gestured to the map spread upon the table.‘Someone will wear the crown, witch.Someone will sit the throne and wield this hammer.If I refuse it, without an heir, all will fall to chaos.My uncle might raise Cilbran and press my mother’s claim.Eurion of Afondir will turn his wealth towards a bid for independence.And Galca and Alberon would send armies over the Afondra and ships into the Roaring Bay by next spring’s end.Even if you tell the truth and the haunting ends, I spare my kingdom only to doom it.’
‘Just because your land ceases to be a kingdom, that does not mean its people will not defend it,’ Fola argued, and what remained of the slight hope she had given him crumbled to nothing.
‘Those with power will not give it up,’ Owyn said.‘And those who lack it will not be able to seize it before they are conquered.You are naive, witch, if you think otherwise.’
She shook her head slowly.She reminded him, then, of his mother.Powerful in her own right.Certain of the proper course.But unable, in the end, to prevent the onrush of tragedy.
‘This is your only option, Owyn,’ she said, and he ground his teeth.
‘I am not “Owyn” to you,’ he snapped.
She snapped back.‘I am trying to save your life,Your Highness.’
Was she?There could be no knowing.If Ifan had betrayed him, who could he trust?
‘The churchmen have promised me a solution of their own,’ Owyn said, his eyes drifting towards Abal’s Hammer, remembering the anakriarch’s medallions and the witch’s staff encircled, smouldering as its magic burned away.‘As costly as yours, maybe.Or maybe less.An end to the haunting, at least, which would leave me king and my kingdom intact.’
‘And in thrall to the Mortal Church—’
‘Better that than put to the sword.’
For the second time, her ghostly features took on a clear expression.Righteous indignation.Frustration, Owyn supposed, that this boy king had not been so easy to twist around her finger.
‘I have read my share of tales, witch,’ Owyn said, levelling his sword to threaten her again.‘I do not know what game your Starlit Tower plays against the Mortal Church, nor why you have seen fit to make my kingdom your arena, but I know when I am being manipulated.I will not be your tool, nor will I be theirs.’He strode forward, forcing the apparition back a step.As he spoke, he felt a swell of confidence—a certainty that had been hollowed out of him since his father’s death.‘I will find my own way forward.’
