The Grey Lady
YC 1189
Despite the fog of mystery that surrounds them, this is known—the fae are fickle, and those who deal with them come to know regret.
Archivist Eltan Oora,The Taxonomy of Sapience,YC1098
The broken remains of the door still swayed on its hinges.Fola slowed her stride, readied the circle written into her left hand—the middle finger, for killing.She would take no chances here for mercy’s sake.She wished Colm were with her, but he had leapt two storeys from their place on the tower onto a battlement and taken off running.A more direct route to Siwan’s aid, though one Fola could not follow.
A howl of pain cut the air.She rounded the doorway.Her eyes fell on Harwick, who lay on his back in a pool of blood from a deep cut to his collar.She thought she saw a breath.Frog fluttered down to him and began to spread a balm onto his wound.
Through the shattered ruin of the lone window she saw Siwan.It might have been more a relief to find her dead.
Siwan knelt on the rooftop over the corpse of a dead templar, his long neck purple and his head hanging askew.Her body seemed to swell with every breath, as though something within her was struggling to tear free.Her sickly gaze burned with yellow fire.Behind her, the sky had turned to a black sea.Darker than night, starless, with the staring eye of a fiend for its moon.
Torin the anakriarch was slumped against the ruined window.The mangled ruin of his arm hung limp, skewered by one of Colm’s arrows.The third templar, the beast of a woman who had nearly bested Colm, faced Siwan.Blood seeped from a wound in her thigh.The shadow hands of wraiths seized her tabard, her arms, her armour.
With a shriek of terror, the templar woman grabbed Torin and threw him over her back, paying no mind to his wounded arm.She leapt from the rooftop.Fola heard the thump of her landing and a shout of pain.
She heard Colm shout, too, and glimpsed him as he dropped from the stable roof to the ground in pursuit.
Not her contest, now.She had worse than templars to contend with.
Siwan arched her back and screamed.A burst of fetid wind battered Fola.A dark shadow began to form at the girl’s back.Something like wings.Two, then a third, and a fourth.
And then Damon, behind her, his eyes wide and sword in hand.
‘Stay back!’Fola shouted, and lunged into the wind.She dived to the rooftop and began to drag herself through rivulets of blood.‘Don’t touch her!’
Damon recoiled, but remained on the roof, caught in a tension between fear and a desire to do anything at all to help Siwan.
Who may already have been destroyed.
There are things in the world that strain the rigidity of understanding.To a thaumaturgist, fiends and fae both were such things.Alien to the City, often hostile when found, and different in fundamental nature from mortalkind.Sublime and terrible, they confounded all that was known of magic.The very things that made Siwan so useful to Fola’s research—the First Folk, too, confounded mortal understanding—now made it impossible for her to know, even to estimate, how much time the girl had left.
‘Siwan!’she shouted, swallowing her gorge—the air stank with the voided bowels of the dead, and every gust carried a reek like the breath of a carrion crow.‘Try to calm yourself!You have to take back control!’
The girl only shrieked again.Her ghostly wings fanned the air.Fola cursed and flattened herself against the roof tiles.She might use the circle in her hand to muddle the raven fiend’s mind as well as Siwan’s, and give herself a moment to close the distance.Behind Siwan, Fola saw Spil bent nearly double, his hands covering his face as he pushed against the wind, trying to reach Damon.
Damon, who Siwan loved in return, and who the fell wind did not touch.
There was no knowing how long Siwan’s influence over the fiend’s power would last, how long her feelings for the boy would protect him.But a sinking realisation in her gut told Fola that none of them would live long if the raven fiend were not stopped here, now, in the next few moments.
‘Damon!’Fola screamed into the wind.‘Try to calm her!’
It was a ludicrous request.The comforting hand might provoke wrath or rage as it touched a raw, bloody wound.Their relationship was only budding.Navigating such a sudden loss, such fierce grief, might have posed a challenge even without the horror of the raven fiend.Fola might have doomed Damon to a sudden, violent death at his young love’s hands.
There was no choice.Not if Siwan—to say nothing of all the hopes Fola had invested in her—were to survive.
Damon stepped closer, still gripping his sword.‘Siwan!’he called.To no avail.Her eyes burned.Her wings churned the air.Her grief thundered into the darkening sky.
He hesitated for a moment, then sheathed the sword and began to sing.Cautiously, his voice thin and uncertain.
‘You came to me at summer’s dawn,
When all the world was bright and warm…’
His voice trailed off.Fola knew the song—Siwan had sung it from the stage, just before losing control to the raven fiend.It did not seem wise to remind her of that day, yet the boy knew her better than Fola did.More, while Damon sang, the ghostly wings ceased to beat.The wail that filled the air faded.Siwan cocked her head, expectant.
