A tremor shook the earth.Frog choked on a squawk and fluttered his wings as Fola wheeled her arm for balance.Colm put his broad palm on her back to steady her.
‘Do they have earthquakes in Parwys?’she hissed at him, even as a strange light drew her gaze to the top of the hill.Pale starlight suffused the leaves of the great oak that rose from the green tower at the heart of Bryngodre.A glow at once terrible and beautiful as it grew in intensity.Despite all her learning, she could not find the colour to name it, but she remembered it from the vision Ynyr had shown her.It was the colour of the power conjured by Abal’s Hammer that had shattered hills and birthed the Windmarsh.
Ifan meant to speak with Owyn.From what Fola understood, Owyn would be key to the magic of Abal’s Hammer, and therefore whatever was going on in the tower.
‘Stay close,’ she whispered, and set off at a crouching run.She heard a muffled string of curses behind her, then the shuffle of Colm’s booted feet through the trampled grass.
They wound their way through the shadows between the tents, which thinned and sharpened in the growing light from the tree.The guards on watch had paused in their patrols, leaving gaps that Fola slipped through like thread through a needle’s eye.Colm clutched the arrows in his quiver to stop them from rattling and kept at her heels.Despite the distraction, the gate to Bryngodre was still flanked by guards, so they went over the wall.Fola drew a circle, winced at the flash of silver flame—if they were to draw an unwanted eye, it would be now—then scrambled up the new-made trellis of conjured vines, hissing under her breath when she had to put weight on her left arm.Colm merely leapt, caught the top of the wall and pulled himself over.They dropped into a shadowed corner behind a house.
The closer confines and harsher angles of the town proper carved up the light pouring from the great tree.Lanes as bright as dawn separated deep pools of darkness.In one of those lanes, even a chance glimpse from the corner of the eye would tear through the glamour Fola had woven around herself and Colm.
‘Fola, this is madness,’ Colm whispered in her ear.‘It’s two of us against an army.Ifan may already be dead.’
He might well have been.But something was happening, here.She had seen the power of the Old Stones and Abal’s Hammer in Ynyr’s memories.A power that had been reawakened.
Curiosity drew her on, but more than that.Looking at the tree and the green tower, Fola saw a reflection of the Grey Lady as she had appeared in her mind, a pale tree looming over the Greenwood.The light was the light of Abal’s Hammer, which had made the wraiths that arose in answer to Siwan’s pain.There were resonances, here.Threads of magic uniting ancient evil through the timeless, shadowed roots of fae power to the agonies of a child.Magic only glimpsed, hardly understood, woven by a raven fiend to dire, incomprehensible ends.
Afanan and Llewyn had thwarted those ends by magic of their own, but as much by their love for Siwan.They had built a nest for her in their troupe with people who saw past the evil put upon her.Who embraced her for whoshewanted to be, not who she had been made by the callous cruelty she had suffered.Fola had witnessed that love on the night of the festival, and it had touched her heart more deeply than all the City’s bounty and wonder.
That was worth saving, no matter the danger she had to face.
Ynyr and his wraiths wanted an end to Abal’s line, did they?Well, what about an end to Abal’s power?Maybe she could appease them here, now, by disrupting this ritual.She had broken ancient magic in Ulun; she could do it again, and maybe no one else would need to die.Then on to Parwys, to free the Huntress and fulfil her promise to the Grey Lady, to disentangle Siwan once and for all from this place and all its horrors.
‘It’s about more than Ifan now,’ Fola murmured.She looked Colm in the eye.Even in the shadows she saw his fear.He had followed her this far, through pain and the threat of death.Had been handsomely paid to do so, until he wasn’t.Even without the promise of coin, he had followed, lent aid, faced blades and arrows and strange magic—or had that been only for the promise of a greater compensation, a life with her in the City?
The wider world and all its complexity and deprivation made it so difficult to know why other people did what they did.Made it nearly impossible, to Fola’s endless frustration, to untangle herself from complicity.Arno had warned her—that it would change her, corrupt her, leave her with scars that even death and rebirth could never heal—but she had brushed him off and insisted on her right to leave.In the end, of course, he had been right.About everything.
‘I can’t ask you to follow me into this.’She eased Frog from her shoulder, and with a flick of her wrist she sent him fluttering to Colm.Despite the bird’s warbled protest and flapping wings, he settled on Colm’s broad shoulder.Frog fixed her with a bug-eyed stare—at first annoyed, then afraid—and flattened himself into a poor imitation of a branch.‘Just keep that stupid bird alive,’ she said.‘And get him back to the City, no matter what happens to me.’
‘You lost the right to give me orders when you quit paying me,’ Colm said, grinning beneath the fear in his eye.‘I’m with you, Fola.Through the end of it, wherever that leads.’
‘No you’re not,’ she insisted.‘I can die and walk away from it.You can’t.’
He shrugged and widened his grin.
‘Fine,’ she said.‘But if things take a turn, you get Frog the fuck away from here.You make sure he and Siwan make it back to the City.Agreed?’
He agreed, and Fola turned her mind to the problem of reaching the tower.It would help that almost every eye in Bryngodre remained fixed on the glowing leaves.She had to squint to look at them straight on, which meant few folk in the town would be open-eyed and attentive for intruders.Gently, she tried her left hand, to see if the mind-muddling spell might be an option, but so much as wiggling her thumb sent a bolt of pain up her arm.She chanced a peek around the corner of the alley towards the tower.One guard stood before the wooden door, his back turned to the road, his halberd planted and his left hand shading his eyes.The door stood shut.
She drew her pad of spellpaper and started writing.‘You get that door open.I’ll deal with the guard.’
Colm nodded.A moment later, pad of paper braced in the elbow of her broken arm and pen hovering ready for the final line, she sprinted into the light.The cobblestones gleamed like polished gems.The whitewashed walls of the cottages were as bright as glacial snow.Every other sense told her she must be rushing towards a blast furnace, but there was neither heat nor wind, only an eerie, night-time stillness.Torches still burned, but seemed like poor drawings of fire.The glow washed out the light they ought to have cast.The clouds overhead were full of dark shadows and bright peaks, a field of mountains in the sky illuminated by an earth-bound sun.
Growing up in Thaumedony had inured Fola to a great deal of the world’s strangeness, but this stirred up fears so primal she could not name them.Her stomach clenched.Sweat dripped into her eyes.Each breath came shorter than the last as she forced unwilling legs to run towards that maddening light.
Around her, people fell to their knees.Screams rose from the streets and homes of Bryngodre.The stones of the tower seemed alive, now, with serpents of living shadow.For a moment, Fola let herself hope that the guard at the tower door would simply let them pass, too awe-struck and afraid to act.Yet he whirled, wide-eyed, at the sound of her pounding feet and, without so much as a challenge, brought his halberd down.
Fola threw herself to the side, landed badly and rolled.Chips of a shattered cobblestone peppered her as the halberd sparked against the street.She scrambled to her feet, gritted her teeth against a dart of pain up her injured arm, and scrawled the last line of her spell.Spellpaper flared, its white fire all but invisible in the glare of the tree.The guard crumpled like a puppet with cut strings.She felt a sudden spike of fear that, in his agitated state, the magic meant to knock him unconscious had stopped his heart.Fola knelt, saw that he still breathed, and felt a wash of relief.
Absurd.The man had tried to kill her.The night sky burned brighter than a forge.Yet she was who she was, and the tension in her unwound ever so slightly.
‘Fola!’Colm roared, his face a washed-out mask of terror.He had heaved open the tower door, a black void in the endless bright.
She ran after him, arm throbbing, lungs heaving, legs loose and shaky.They left the door open—better the risk of pursuit than the certain doom of being trapped inside the tower with their enemies.Frog warbled where he clung to Colm’s vest, his bugged-out eyes ruining any attempt to disguise himself.While they ran down the red brick tunnel, Fola scribbled another glamour to replace the spell that had shrouded them through the camp, which had burned away in their mad dash through the dazzling light.
They reached the end of the tunnel and were faced not with the cramped confines of a stone tower but the horizons of another world.A sky wreathed in mist and lit by starlight without stars, stretching further than the circumference of Bryngodre’s palisade, bounded by walls textured like the rough bark of an old oak.A scent of peat—herbal, with a tinge of rot—wafted down from the soaring, impossibly distant ceiling.
The rational part of Fola floundered to fit the tower, the tree, the light, this space to some paradigm of thaumaturgy.She had visited such places before.There were many doors in the City that led to pockets in the fabric of the world.This was deeper than any of them.A root of magic sunk into the foundation stones of the earth.Older than anything in the City of the Wise, she felt, though could not say why.Ancient to those who had raised the Starlit Tower and laid the roads that knitted the world.An ancestor of the Great Tree at the City’s heart, its power turned towards violence instead of rebirth.
