He shook his head.The silver flames grew stronger, more dazzling.‘You flout mortality, that which equalises us all.You laugh in the face of nature, of order.You reject the virtues within yourselves and supplement your weakness with artifacts you barely understand.And now you say that you mean to unmake this great, terrible power—which resisted even the cleansing fire of the Agion!—rather than fold it into your own ambitions, your own rejection of all that ought to be accepted?Well, sorceress… I do not believe you.With this power, you would sweep over Tarebach and Alberon and swallow everything!You may even succeed in your monstrous aims and become the second coming of the First Folk.But I tell you this… mortalkind will not abide subservience again.We will not bow to undying, eternal masters.That day ended long ago, and despite all your efforts, it will not dawn again.’
Fola felt her blood burning.Here was, personified, the small-mindedness of the Mortal Church.A certainty that had armoured itself against all argument and evidence, against all joy and wonder, care and compassion.
She could scour him from the world with a few flicks of her pen.It would be simple enough to fill the shattered hollow with fire.More difficult to strike at just him, without killing the gwyddien woman, too—to say nothing of any other survivors still trapped beneath the rubble.
And there would be others like him, just behind.She might swat this one hateful fly, but a thousand more swarmed near Afondir, and yet more in the lands to the south and east.
She was tired, and weak, and ready for this all to be over, and found that she hated this man as much for his standing in her way as for what he had done to Llewyn.A childish feeling.One shameful for anyone of the City.But there the stakes were never this high, with life and death and the future all hanging in the balance.
‘You fear the unknown too much to try and understand it,’ Fola said.‘You say yourself your magic is unable to overcome the haunting, yet you will let the horror go on when you might have had a hand in ending it.Let me take the gwyddien.There can be peace here.No more lives need to be lost.’
‘To keep this power from you, I would sacrifice thousands!’He took a step towards her, his hand raised, arm quivering with exertion, his magic straining at the leash.‘To me, Anwe!Let’s be done with this.’
Behind him, his knight hefted her makeshift weapon.She grimaced in pain.Her arm faltered, unable to hold the shard of shattered trunk aloft.Its tip bit the earth and Anwe fixed Fola with a slow, considered regard.
‘Let the bitch take her, Torin,’ Anwe said.‘I’m through.’
The anakriarch whirled on her.‘You what?’
Anwe planted her weapon in the ground and leaned upon it, every line of her body speaking to pain and fatigue.The gwyddien woman looked on, like a cat watching prey, unable to strike from beneath the iron chains that bound her, the slow trickle of smoke where it touched her skin and fouled her magic.
‘What’s the point?’Anwe said.‘Parwys is in tatters.Unwith’s crusade will sweep through to restore order.We’ve won, Torin.It’s over.’
‘Where is your honour?’Torin demanded.‘Where is your industry?Your first virtue is courage, and now your spirit breaks at the last, vital moment?You are no Knight of Action!’
‘Where’s your fucking courage?’Anwe cut back.‘Or your temperance?You want to question the tree-devil, eh?From fear and cruelty, it seems to me.Not for any purpose.’
Fola watched them, astonished to have found an ally in the warrior woman, and uncertain of how to proceed.If her left arm worked, she might have addled Torin’s mind with the circle written there—assuming she could pierce the protection lent by his magic.Exhausted as he was, it might well be doable.She tested her fingers, trying to bring her index finger to her thumb, and winced at the jagged pulse up her arm.
No luck, but she could try to write something similar on spell-paper while the templars argued.The spells Arno had gifted to his agents were complex, requiring days of careful line work, but she might manage an approximation.
‘I am your rightful commander,’ Torin insisted, standing tall while Anwe slouched.
‘So long as you hold all the virtues, yes,’ Anwe said with a slow nod.‘But you failed, didn’t you?You tried to call on all the Agion, and you failed.So what does that mean, Torin?It tells me there may be some hidden flaw in you.Some virtue half-turned to vice.I have the right to protect my own soul, and I will not follow a man who may have lost his way.’
‘Coward,’ Torin seethed.‘Cretin.’
‘Temperance,’ Anwe snarled back.‘Moderation.Restraint.The balance of the Iron Mean.’
‘I still hold justice,knight, that should be enough for you.’
‘A mere Knight of Mediation holds no authority over me.’
Torin shook, enraged.He hurled silver fire at Anwe.It struck, washed over her, carried her a dozen paces and hurled her into the gwyddien woman.Knight and fae prisoner fell in a tangle of limbs and a rattle of chains, and Fola saw her opportunity to strike.
Spellpaper flashed into a silver bolt that struck Torin in the back.He howled and spun about, his eyes dancing wild in their sockets, his arms flailing, his magic careening out in a chaotic storm.Fola dashed forward, cursing—the spell had been meant to muddle his thoughts, leave him confused and disorientated.Either it had been ill formed, or his own magic had interfered.The rubble around her burst and trembled as he lashed out, his waves of silver fire crashing into the ground, casting up shards of stone and shattered tree.
Pain darted up her left arm as she ran, then another pain lanced her side—sudden and sharp, a violent cramp like a knife between her ribs as her body finally gave way to exhaustion.She needed to write another spell—something definitive this time.There was no more room for kindness towards this madman who wanted to kill her.She threw herself behind a pile of rubble, rolled to a stop, screamed at another wave of pain up from her arm and flank and through the whole of her body.The rubble shook under Torin’s assault as she pawed at her satchel for a flask of Frog’s medicine.Something to dull the edge of her pain, to give her a moment of focus.
She felt something wet and warm.Blood.The pain in her side.Not an ache from a complaining muscle.Her fingers trembled.The pile of rubble shook.Part of its face sloughed away.A piece of the shattered tree, launched by Torin’s crazed flailing, had pierced just below her left rib.Now that she knew it was there, she felt it—the sharp pain at the surface, the duller, agonising space it occupied within, and the searing scrape of it against her muscles every time she moved.
Her breath came quicker, hitched on the left side of her chest.A heaviness in her lung, which spasmed as she tried, slowly, carefully, to fill it.
Fear settled in.A bone-deep, dreadful certainty.
By every power of the City, she hoped Frog was still alive.
Torin screamed.Fola gritted her teeth, braced her notebook against her leg, and wrote as fast as she could.A spell to seal her wound, first, then she would need another to strike back at Torin, and another after that to deal with Anwe.The design swam before her eyes.She blinked, struggled to focus.The pen felt at once heavy and loose in her grasp as her hand grew numb.
