‘Keep singing!’Fola shouted, clambering to her feet.She readied her pen and pad of spellpaper and started writing.The same spell she had used to reseal the fiend before.It would have to work—she didn’t have time to devise a new solution.
Damon cleared his throat, then sang again, voice growing full and rich as he gained confidence and Siwan calmed.
‘I never feared till you were gone,
Our love destroyed by winter’s storm.’
Siwan began to weep, tears dipping from her chin to mix with the blood on the roof tiles.Rain, too, began to fall.Fat, heavy droplets, in a slow, steady patter.
A phenomenon Fola would have to contemplate later.She made the last line of her spell.The paper flashed with silver fire, which spiralled out and enfolded Siwan.For a moment, the ghostly wings began to fade, like mist burned away by the sun.Only a moment.
A raven’s scream rent the air—not from Siwan’s mouth, but down from the staring, hateful eye in the clouds.
‘What’s happening?’Damon asked, voice quavering.
‘Don’t stop!’Fola shouted, even as her mind wrestled with that very question.It should have worked.The spell should have rewoven the lattice of fae energies Afanan had sewn to bind the raven fiend’s strength, closing the gaps that Siwan’s anger and grief had torn.Either something was different, or the raven fiend had already won, seizing control of Siwan’s body.
Damon began to sing again, stumbling through the notes, his voice muted by the drumbeat of rain.Spil appeared behind him.
‘What’s going on?’Spil asked, eyes wide with terror.‘Where is Harwick?’
Bleed it.There isn’t time for this.Fola fumbled in her satchel for her thaumaturgist’s loupe, hoping against hope that she had simply misremembered the nature of the weave.
‘Where is Harwick, Damon?’
The boy only shook his head and went on singing.
Fola pressed the loupe to her eye, revealing a whirl of energies like she had never seen.Magic cascaded out from the girl, forming those ghostly wings and falling upwards into the sky.The spell that had bound the fiend was all but broken.Only the faintest thread remained.A thread that grew from the hollow of her throat, from a cord around her neck.
Llewyn had told her of this.A shard broken from his ghostwood blade.Somehow a vessel for Siwan’s soul, and a focus for Afanan’s protective spell.
The same magic shone from Llewyn’s corpse—from his blade, and from a silver ring he wore around his thumb.The ring that had been missing from his hand, though he still reached for it from habit.
‘Do either of you know what that ring is?’she demanded.
‘Tell me what happened to my husband,’ Spil shot back.
‘He’s still alive,’ Fola answered.‘Frog is tending to him.Now, the ring!’
Spil bolted past her, towards the shattered window.Fola spat a curse.
‘Llewyn was wearing it in Nyth Fran when we first met him,’ Damon said, pausing in his song just long enough to answer.‘I was just a kid, then, but I remember it.After they rescued Siwan he had taken it off.’
‘And he never wore it again?’Fola pressed.
Siwan began to stir, her tears drying, the light of rage returning to her eyes.Damon shook his head.
‘Keep singing,’ Fola ordered.‘Don’t stop, whatever happens.You get to the end of that song, you start over.’
Damon nodded, his voice quavering in a moment of terror, then finding the note again.
Fola knew little, but enough to form a hypothesis.She knew that rescuing Siwan had marked a turning point for Llewyn, a departure from whatever life he had led before.The ring, then, was a link to that old life.To the fae power he had served—and which had strengthened him.One he had turned to, in desperation, to more dearly sell his life for Siwan’s escape.
There were safer ways of doing this.Intricate circles that would shield Fola’s mind and body from any fell influence.Tests that would reveal the nature of the ring, and hint at the power behind it—fae in nature, Fola was sure, but that meant very little in real terms.Librarians had written volumes on the fae.All little more than speculation.One thing remained consistent, however—the fae were greedy, jealous, cunning and violent.
Well, she was plenty cunning herself, and there was more danger—to Siwan, to the kingdom and everyone in it—if she waited.
Fola reached through the broken window and tore the ring from Llewyn’s hand.It was too big for her, but as she pulled it over her thumb the band cinched tight.She winced at a sharp pain where silver met flesh, like the bite of a needle, and a presence as cold and hard as a glacier pierced her mind.
