Twelve standing stones encircled the centre of that strange, small world.Looping designs carved into their faces pulsed with light, the same that filled the leaves that crowned the tower’s tree.Queen Medrith, the druidess, stood within their circle with her hands raised high, her iron hair whipped free from its ornamental bundling by a phantom wind.Prince Owyn, her son, sprawled on the altar before her.Something beneath him glowed, a heartbeat in rhythm with the light of the stones.
The queen and her son were not alone.A handful of druids encircled the ring of stones, heads bowed, arms upraised, voices a quiet, constant susurrus like wind through autumn leaves.Another figure guarded a captive wrapped in iron chains.A woman with skin oddly textured like Llewyn’s, that blistered and trickled smoke where the chains touched.
The gwyddien woman.The Huntress Fola had been sent to find.
Nearer was the broad-armed captain of Owyn’s housecarls, one hand on his sword hilt.He stood guard over the two surviving templars, still mud-caked and bloodied from their own mad flight from Glascoed.And with them, his shoulder in the grip of that housecarl’s other hand, was Ifan, his face mottled with fresh bruises and trickles of blood.
Every eye had fixed on the druid queen and her son—save the gwyddien woman.Fola felt her feverish gaze, and could only begin to guess why she had been brought to this pocket world—to serve as part of the queen’s ritual, or only to keep her close?It would have been better for Fola if the woman had been left in the dungeons of Parwys.Saving one captive from this bizarre place would be challenge enough.Saving two, on opposite sides of the circle of stones, one beaten near to a stupor and the other weighed down with chains, might prove impossible.
She set her mind to the problem and motioned for Colm to wait.He shifted uneasily, his lower arms gripping his swords tight while the upper held an arrow to his bow.She hated the prospect, but a sudden storm of violence might be their best chance.A conjured threat—a rolling ball of flame, or a lightning cloud, or the shattering earth she had woven against Forgard’s hand- cannoneers—and a few javelin-thick arrows might sow enough chaos for Fola to cover their escape.
She put pen to paper, began to envision the lines of the spell she would write.But violence set her teeth on edge and turned her stomach, even still.Every yielding to the evils of the world was a wound to her self.Yet yield she would, she decided.She set her jaw, put pen to spellpaper, and began to write.
‘Be ready,’ she told Colm, trusting the murmurings of the druids to cover her whispers.‘Go for the gwyddien.I don’t have a way to deal with raw iron chains.I’ll get Ifan out of here.You’ll know—’
‘Owyn!’Ifan cried, throwing himself against the housecarl’s grip.The man grunted and cuffed the side of Ifan’s head.Ifan stared up at him, fresh blood spilling from his lip.‘Uli,’ he said, mush-mouthed, ‘can’t you see what she’s doing to him?You swore to protect him.’
‘You’re one to speak of vows, traitor,’ the housecarl snarled.
Ifan shook his head.‘All I’ve done, I’ve done for the people of this kingdom.’He jabbed his chin at the queen.‘All she has done, from the moment she wed King Elbrech, was towards this moment.A restoration of this tower.So that she can crush the people of this land, like the kings and druids of old.’
There was the heavy, wet sound of a fist striking bloody flesh.‘I said quiet, dog.’
Ifan sagged and took a shuddering breath.‘Why did the last three kings of Parwys refuse this?Elbrech, to whom you swore, who raised you from nothing.Look now at his son.See what his mother will make him suffer.For what?Ask yourself that, Uli.For what?’
‘The haunting’s end,’ the housecarl said, but the conviction of his voice had cracked, and he now looked not at his prisoner, but at the scene upon the altar.The prince, crushed beneath an invisible weight.The hammer pulsing beneath him.The druidess queen, arms raised and voice high in the grip of ecstatic power, despite the suffering of her son.
How often do we, as Medrith did, sacrifice our future—our happiness, our children—in a vain grasp for some half-remembered glory, and for the safety it promises, long lost to the unyielding march of time?
Fola hesitated, the spell all but written save two final lines.There was cruelty here, but these were only people.Folk who might become better if given a chance to, if they were not crushed from all sides by the pressures of their world.She had spoken with Queen Medrith, had admired her strength and enjoyed her wit.She could see the pain in the housecarl’s eyes as he watched what his queen had become.Even the templars—the anakriarch and his hulking hound woman—seemed fragile in the presence of the tower’s ancient, incomprehensible magic.They were none of them inherently vile.Not deserving of so final a consequence as death.She remembered the templars on the road, who she and Colm had killed.Remembered the guilt that ate at her while she buried their bodies.Had any of these folk been born in the City—if they had onlytravelledthere—they would have become good, Fola was certain.
Yet not all were made wicked by the world.There were those who rose to meet its horrors with grace and kindness.Two of them needed her now.If she were to save Ifan and Siwan—and, seemingly, the prince—she could no more delay than let compassion and heartache dull her.She made the final lines, cursed Arno and his terrible, prescient warnings, and hurled the silver fire of her spell through the circle of stones.
She might have to do harm, but she would not so casually kill if she could help it.
One of the druids shouted in alarm.Silver flames condensed in the air between mother and son, then exploded, unfurling wind and force that carried Owyn off the altar and hurled Medrith into the nearest of the Old Stones.The gale spun outwards, stirred up the ancient loess soil of the floor, and filled the air with blinding, biting sand.
‘Now!’Fola ducked her head to shield her face and sprinted across the chamber, already drawing another spell.Simple—she had no time for something complex—but not lethal, at least directly.The housecarl, Uli, had forced Ifan prone and planted a knee on his back.He looked around frantically and menaced the air with a sword that looked no more than an overlong knife in his massive hand.Fola’s spell flashed into being.It carved through the sandstorm and hammered Uli with a vector of force, lifting and hurling him into the whirling veil.
Fola grabbed Ifan’s arm and dragged him to his feet.‘Get out of here!’she shouted over the roar of the conjured storm.
Lightning burst overhead, turning sand to bullets of molten glass that shattered on the ground at their feet.Ifan put his bloody cheek to Fola’s and shouted in her ear over the peal of thunder, ‘Where’s Owyn?’
‘I’ll find him!’Fola shouted back.
Ifan pulled away, shaking his head.He twisted his arm free of her grip and plunged into the storm, towards the altar.Fola swore and followed his blurred silhouette.Another fork of lightning burned through the air, and she glimpsed Medrith, a blossoming staff in her hand.Near her stood the two templars in their stained robes, wearing crowns of cold fire, and a looming figure that must have been Colm, though the light faded before she could make out more.
She nearly bowled into Ifan as she emerged into the centre of the storm, where the wind and whirling grit were lesser.Ifan knelt beside the altar over Owyn’s unconscious form.Abal’s Hammer lay beside them, still glowing with eerie light, seeming to cast a bloody aura onto the particulate in the air.Ifan’s hands curled, caught between making a fist and reaching out in comfort.Owyn murmured and stirred awake.
‘Owyn,’ Ifan said, his voice gentle.He took the prince by the shoulders and helped him sit up.Owyn grimaced in pain, and, when he realised who knelt over him, stared wide-eyed in fear and confusion.Then he shut his eyes and groaned.
‘Where’s your dagger, Ifan?’he murmured.‘I’m ready for it.Stones, I want it.’
Ifan flinched, and seemed unable to find words to respond.
‘You need to get out of this tower,’ Fola said.‘Both of you.’
‘Sorceress…’ the prince said.‘You warned me.Told me what this truly was.This kingdom…’ He reached for Abal’s Hammer, settled his fingers on its haft.Tension ran through Ifan’s shoulders, and Fola felt a touch of it herself.‘This weapon…’ Owyn went on.He smiled, coughed a sickly laugh.‘I felt it all while I lay on the altar.The weight of every life snuffed out by this… thing.’
