Fola’s stomach churned.She forced herself to look away.
Two lines of soldiers in bright armour and plumed helms arrayed themselves across from the gate of the curtain wall.They held weapons like ships’ cannon braced on wooden poles.Others stood in front of them with tall, thick shields.
The hand-cannoneers fired, hurling a cloud of smoke and flame at the gates.The roar of the guns pounded at Fola’s ears, followed by the splintering of wood.
The captain of the archers paused to point.‘Target them!’
Arrows bit deep into shields.One of Colm’s punched through the nearest, knocking the man who held it to the ground.The screams and stamping of terrified horses rose from the courtyard just beyond the curtain wall.Why horses?Not a question Fola could hope to answer, ignorant of warfare as she was.She pawed through her pad of spellpaper, mind reeling, focusing on the circles, the runes, the lines.While she searched, the hand-cannons launched another volley.
There!She leaned beside Colm to peer between two crenellations.Arrows clattered against the stone to either side of her.Frog squawked and leapt down from her shoulder, flattening himself in the midst of the archers.Fola winced as a flying chip of stone cut her cheek and tried to estimate the distance—in the chaos and confusion, she second-guessed herself.A delay that gave time enough for a third volley.The gate shuddered and groaned.Soldiers—hundreds, now—streamed across the killing field, some bearing ladders that they raised against the curtain wall.The hand-cannoneers reloaded their guns and levelled them.
Three lines, and a fourth to complete the circle.Spellpaper flashed to silver flame.A tremor shook the earth.The ground beneath the hand-cannoneers burst apart in a geyser of stone.Bodies tumbled through the air, some hurled as high as the top of the curtain wall before falling back to earth.New screams joined the chorus of battle.Some of the hand-cannoneers, caught only by the edge of the explosion, struggled back to their feet, reaching for discarded guns, fumbling to reload and reset.
A small act, but terrible.Fola stared at the twisted limbs and broken earth with churning nausea.Hatred spread like a venom through her mind—for herself, for the fighters she had killed and wounded, for Owyn and Ifan and the other lords of this nightmare realm, for all the wider world and all of its deep, bloodstained history.
The gate of the curtain wall groaned open, just wide enough for two men to ride abreast.A shout went up, and four blasts from a silver trumpet, then cheers from the defenders.Ifan, Count of Glascoed, waving the plain sword of a man-at-arms, rallied a charge of twenty armoured men on horseback into the staggered hand-cannoneers.Lances darted.Swords flashed.Men and horses screamed in the spray of blood.
Ifan’s charge broke the pride of Forgard, then veered to the left, riding down the length of the killing field, carving through ranks of men awaiting their turn at the ladders.Another twenty, led by Gavron and the cyclops Calbog, followed through the gap and rounded to the right.Together, they shattered the momentum of the prince’s assault.
‘Well done,’ Colm said, reaching for another arrow.
Fola shook her head, fighting sickness, feeling as though she was watching the tumult and horror from a point hovering behind her body.The horrors of Ulun and the reaching arms of wraiths at the festival grounds had troubled her, but not broken her as this did.
‘I didn’t know what Ifan was planning,’ she heard herself say.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Colm said.‘You were there, in the right moment.They were waiting for the gates to crack.It would have been a desperate action, then.A last bloodletting before their final retreat to the keep.Now, instead, the walls still stand.See?They’re wheeling back around.The gates will open, let them through, and close again to hold a while longer.’
‘I could just have easily cast the spell at the wrong moment and snapped the legs of Ifan’s horse.’
‘But you didn’t.’Colm loosed his arrow and shrugged.‘So it goes, in battle.’
Fola watched Ifan’s knights pull back behind the gate, followed by Gavron’s—of the forty who had ridden out, eight did not return.More would have died if not for her spell.Fewer, though, on the Parwysh side of the battle, she thought, her gaze drifting to the bloody ruin Ifan had left in his wake.
It was difficult, for her, this valuing of some lives over others because of a conflict, a banner, an idea.Particularly so, it seemed, when her side was winning.
A morose thought.She reached for her spellpaper, began searching for the next circle to cast while trying to find again that firm belief in her purpose here and in the rightness of the Greenwood’s cause.
Frog chirruped and fluttered his wings.A sharp scream split the air.One that Fola knew well—had been listening for all this time, over the clash of steel and the wails of the dying.Like that of an eagle, but louder, to carry over the battlefield.
The questions of the battle—of its brutality and carnage, and the right and wrong of it—became suddenly meaningless.
Besieged
YC 1189
One must wonder, of course, how long such beings have persisted in the world—these fae and fiends which defy classification, which may predate the First Folk themselves.
Archivist Eltan Oora,The Taxonomy of Sapience,YC1098
‘We should be doing more,’ Siwan said.
She leaned at the windowsill, holding the spellpapers Fola had given her flat across her stomach.The sounds of the battle were muted here, on the rear side of Glascoed’s keep.Still, the distant screams of the dying, the clash of steel and the roar of small cannon set Llewyn’s teeth on edge.
How long could they wait?They ought to make use of those spells and flee the battle before it reached them.Thoughts that roiled continually in his mind, but which he would not speak.
Siwan felt responsible for all the horrors that had befallen Parwys—the haunting, and now this civil war.Foolishness, by Llewyn’s reasoning.But he had decided, with Afanan’s death, that his role had changed.Siwan had been no more than an object to the people of Nyth Fran, a means to appeasing the raven fiend they worshipped.And for years she had been little more than an object to him.He wanted to protect her, as he wished his own mother and father had protected him.As though he could reach back in time and right the wrongs done to him, through her.
But that was not fair—to either of them.She deserved to live her own life, on her own terms.That was what Afanan had wanted.He would do what he could to protect and guide her, but the choice, ultimately, had to be hers.If this was the path she had chosen he would not turn her from it, however dangerous, however misguided.
