said a voice like the crackling of autumn leaves; the snap of a twig underfoot; the breaking of thin ice on the surface of a stagnant pond.
‘He is dead, but I am not a thief,’ Fola said, trusting that the entity would hear her words.‘You know of the girl Siwan?’
Images tore through Fola’s mind: a clearing; a stone; a child; a monster of wings and distended flesh.
Fola winced as foreign memories filled her mind.‘I can bind the fiend,’ she said.‘But the seal was woven from fae power, and with Llewyn’s death that power dwindles.Can you strengthen it?’
The voice seemed genuinely confused.
‘I won’t do that,’ Fola said.
The icy sensation in her mind deepened; the pain in her thumb sharpened.
‘You’re right.’Frustration burned hot.A feeling Fola had come to identify with looming mistakes.Too sharp a word, too aggressive an argument.The kinds of things that would alienate other people.‘I’ll find a way to save both.Which is why I’m talking to you.’
‘Thenyoudoom the world,’ Fola snapped.There wasn’t time for this.‘Whatever you fear in her, it is happeningnow.’
Damon’s voice faltered, missing a note and stumbling over a lyric.Fola glared at him, motioned for him to keep singing.Siwan’s wings flickered.Her tears flowed freely, now.The rain plastered Fola’s hair to her scalp.
Another rush of sensations, of images—not memories, now.Impressions of the being that had invaded her mind through Llewyn’s ring.She saw a tree towering over the Greenwood, its bark as white as bleached bone.Its roots tunnelled through the earth, sprouting shoots—ghostwood trees; gwyddien—and its branches cradled the moon.Its leaves were red as blood, its fruit a thousand staring eyes.Some dozen fixed on Fola, for she warranted only a small measure of attention.
the voice snarled.
‘Then why are we arguing?’Fola challenged.‘Make me kill the girl, as you want.’
There was a silence at that, though in the vision a few more of the Grey Lady’s eyes turned towards Fola, twisting on their branches.
‘However powerful you once were, you are fading.Llewyn broke away from you.Churchmen bested your huntress.You fear Siwan because you are too weak to oppose her—nothing more than a mortal girl with a fragment of an old fiend’s power.I can save you from her.She’ll be no threat to you in my City.But I need your help.Either you restrain the fiend, or she becomes the monster you fear.’
the Grey Lady seethed.
‘Then what do you want?’Fola demanded.‘Revenge against the churchmen?They killed your huntress, and Llewyn.’
More images, and the burning pain of manacles on her wrists.Visions of a dark room, walled in stone, lit by a single candle whose light gleamed on an iron knife in Torin’s hand.A knife that reached for her eye and pierced her as the vision ended.
The fruits of the Grey Lady wept, as a child might weep for a lost, beloved toy.There was something hideous in that grief.The Huntress had been a child once, as Llewyn had been a child.However long she had served the Grey Lady, it had not been of her own volition.
‘I’ll free her,’ Fola said, masking her anger, focusing on how the Grey Lady would understand her meaning.Words, like history, can be contorted by perspective.And there was one other thing the Library’s accounts of the fae agreed upon—a bargain bound them as surely as raw iron.‘Help me save Siwan’s life, and I’ll free your huntress.’
‘If she’s dead, I will avenge her.What do you say?’
Grief flared to rage.Cold fire burned from those countless eyes.They all, it seemed, stared into the deepest corners of Fola’s mind.
‘No manipulation.I mean what I say.’
The fires went out.The countless eyes turned away on their branches.
‘Good.’Fola pulled off the ring and winced.The oak leaves stamped in the surface protruded through to the inside of the band, their edges sharp.One had cut her.She sucked blood from her thumb as the black clouds overhead thinned to an ashen grey.The yellow, lidless eye closed.Siwan’s wings faded away to nothing, and she collapsed.
