Owyn shook his head, as incomprehensible an answer as Fola could have asked for.With another curse she tucked her loupe into her satchel, drew her pad of spellpaper, braced it in the crook of her broken arm, and turned back towards the tower in the moment it imploded.
The walls of the tower bowed inwards, then burst.The tree split and unfurled like an opening flower.Its trunk fell in great limp slabs.Fola stood transfixed by the sight, until a wave of force hurled her backwards into the wall of the barn.She landed on her broken arm and screamed.Winds whipped the air, tore at the thatched and shingled roofs that yet stood in Bryngodre.The ground leapt and shook beneath the pummelling blows of fallen branches, bark and stone.
She struggled to her feet, mind clouded by pain and astonishment.Clouds of dust swirled and settled.The tower’s collapse had ended, it seemed, and reshaped Bryngodre into a maze of ruins.She had lost sight of Owyn entirely, but the barn still stood.Ifan, at least, had survived.
‘Colm!’she cried out, and staggered uphill, towards the torn-open remnant of the tower.Its silhouette through the dust was like an old, rotted stump ripped apart by titanic hands.She picked her way over fallen branches as wide around as a human torso, thankful for the obscuring layer of dust over everything.It let her believe the odd, wet lumps she passed were something other than the remains of mortal bodies.
This was idiotic.There was no way that anyone within the tower had survived its falling.
‘Colm!’she shouted again, a note of panic in her voice that she did not yet feel.
She ought to quit this place, find a horse, ride east as hard as she could until she reached the City of the Wise.
She trudged upwards, and was struck by a baffling emptiness at the notion that Frog, too, had been lost.
‘Frog!’She looked at the sky, half expecting him to wheel down, goggled-eyed and terrified, to alight on her shoulder and disguise himself against a danger that had already passed.
The Great Tree might grow her a new bird—so she assumed; as far as she knew no bird of Thaumedony had died before.Had she lost, in her foolish desperation, the safeguard of her mortal life?
‘Bleed it,’ she said, the words meant to dam away a slow-seeping grief that threatened to paralyse her.‘No.They’re still alive.’
They had to be.
She might still save Siwan if she left Parwys at haste and brought the girl with her.Even without the Grey Lady’s cooperation, there had to be a way to keep the raven fiend in check.Yet she found herself clinging to hope: that Colm and the gwyddien woman lived; that this could all end as she had envisioned.Her triumphant return to the Library, Colm behind her, wearing his wide grin, Siwan safe and ready to cooperate with her research.
The red brick tunnel into the tower was a splintered ruin, its far end splayed outwards like a misfired cannon.Fola picked her way past it, through the rubble of the tower up to a place where the trunk had split and fallen to form a saddle between jagged, dangerous slopes.
From that vantage, she looked down into the chamber of the tree.The First Folk magics that had created that vast space tucked within the fabric of the world were gone.What remained was only a squat, round tower wearing vast splinters of wood like a hideous crown.The Old Stones themselves were nowhere to be seen, nor was the altar—both had likely been pulverised by the violent unravelling of their own power.She swept the blasted ruin at the bottom of the hollow for any sign of Colm, or the gwyddien woman, or even Queen Medrith.Any sign at all thatsomeonehad survived; an anchor for her hope to cling to.
Movement caught her eye—a shifting mound of debris, then a hand.A dust-coated figure pulled itself from a hollow in the rubble.Then another, larger, broad-shouldered.Both were dressed in ragged, bloodstained robes.They reached down and, visibly straining, pulled up a third figure, this one wrapped in loops of chain.
The anakriarch.His surviving knight.And with them, a prisoner stolen from the fallen druids—the gwyddien Huntress Fola had been sent to save.
They were as injured as she was, if not more, by the way the knight slumped to sit, breathing slow and heavy.
Yet they were two, and she was alone.She lacked her staff, and her left arm was broken, depriving her of the last-ditch weapons she so loathed and yet felt so vulnerable without.She had only pen and spellpaper, but exhaustion chased any clever spell from her mind.Thaumaturgy left open wide possibilities, but as the body is limited by pain and fatigue, so too is the mind limited in spellcraft.If she struck swiftly and definitively, she might kill the templars before they noticed her, but if the spell was imprecise—a hair too powerful, or its aim uncertain—she might kill the gwyddien woman, too.
Reason would bid her flee, injured as she was, with no knowing whether Frog yet lived to carry her soul back to the City.
Her pen went to spellpaper—she winced at the pressure on her left arm, bracing the notebook—and she began to write.But the lines blurred before her aching eyes.More, she felt a twisting in her gut.An apprehensive guilt, building as she worked her way towards yet another in a long string of violent acts.
She wanted Torin dead.Vengeance for Llewyn.And her hatred redoubled for the moral injury he had dealt her—she had neverwantedanyone dead before.If meeting Afanan, Siwan and the troupers had made her somehow better, then Torin had made her worse.Poisoned her with his own hatred.
There had been so much death.How could Parwys heal if they piled corpses atop corpses?It could never mend while Abal’s legacy held power, but neither could it hope for peace so long as its only answer for pain was vengeance.
No.She would prove Arno wrong.She had not lost sight of herself.The world had not leached the goodness of the City from her.If anything, she had found its parallel.Compassion in answer to suffering.She would add no more pain if she could help it.
She looked up from her half-written spell and met the gaze of the anakriarch, who had seen her, and now stood rigidly between her and the gwyddien woman.Silver fire burned at his temples and in his hands.He shouted something unintelligible at his knight—the tongue of Tarebach, at a distance, echoing through the ruin—and she lumbered to her feet, favouring her left side.The knight cast about herself for a weapon and hefted a spar of the shattered tree, as long as Fola was tall, with a broad, jagged edge.
‘What do you want, witch?’the anakriarch howled up at her.‘Haven’t you caused enough death and destruction in your short time here?’
That stung her, agitated her guilt and uncertainty—Colm would still be alive, she felt with a sudden, piercing certainty, if she had not dragged him with her to Parwys.Or if she had pried herself away from the promise of Siwan’s secrets and fled when the danger became great.
No.None of the horror was her doing.Even this destruction—the shattering of a relic of the First Folk—had not been her act, but that of the would-be king, driven mad by the long-buried sins of the legacy he would inherit.
‘I struggle to contain a dark power, Anakriarch,’ Fola called down.‘You glimpsed it on the rooftop of Glascoed Keep.To seal it away, to protect the world from its unleashing, I need that woman you have taken prisoner.’
Torin regarded the gwyddien woman, then Fola.‘You would have me believe you intend to unmake the power in that monstrous girl?’He burst out laughing.‘I know where you are really from, Fola of the “Starlit Tower”.I know what your City does.Hoards the powers of the First Folk.Tries to unravel their secrets—not to destroy them, or to seal them away, but to subjugate them.To make them your own, in the hope that you might, someday, make yourselves beings alike to the First Folk themselves.’
