the Grey Lady chided.
‘Show me!’Llewyn roared, touching his ring.
The air above Siwan bubbled, then burst, revealing the raven fiend.Taloned feet gripped the edges of the flat granite surface.Its rippling, distended mass balanced on bone-thin legs.Three sets of desiccated wings reached for Siwan.It threw back its head and opened wide its jagged beak.The cawing of countless crows sounded from the trees, and as one they descended upon Llewyn.
Beaks and claws tore for his eyes.He tucked his head and ran towards the altar, digging the anatase from his pocket.He broke the black crystal and hurled it behind himself, releasing the bound spirit of fire within.Light and heat burst to life, and the crows retreated, singed and terrified.
The raven fiend howled, turned its hundred eyes back to Siwan, and reached for her with shredded wings.
Llewyn struck at the fiend as he reached the altar, hoping the ritual had weakened the fiend’s defences.Pale ghostwood, willed to razor sharpness, rebounded from the roiling, devouring red of the fiend’s flesh.One of its eyes swivelled towards him.It swept its wings outwards and hurled a wind that carried Llewyn to the edge of the clearing.He landed hard on his side.Something cracked in his ribcage.He staggered to his feet, gasping against pain that shot down his right flank.Overhead, the crows wheeled and gathered.
the Grey Lady urged.
Her command echoed in his mind, a bolt of lightning searing up from the silver band on his thumb.
And for what purpose, he wondered,is Siwan being made?
But there was no choice.No way he could see to save her.Better to end her misery and to avenge her.First upon the raven fiend, then upon her father, and the village that had chosen to consume her.He went to the corpse of the old man and pried the hammer from his skull.
‘Be gone, gwyddien!’Trefor screamed, voice gummed by tears and terror.‘She is my daughter.Do you think I would give her up if it was not necessary?This is how we protect ourselves!’
Pain seized Llewyn’s side.His pulse pounded behind his eyes.Fire roared in his chest.He remembered his mother watching him—saying nothing,doingnothing—as he was taken away to the taste of iron and the smell of wet earth.
Trefor dropped his arms and backed away, casting about for some means to defend himself.Llewyn, with ghostwood sharp in hand, ran him through.
The old woman gasped and buckled as the full weight of the ritual fell upon her.Siwan’s voice rose in turn.The raven fiend stretched out its malformed wings and beat the air.Siwan rose with it, hovering above the stone, her back arched and black hair wild as feathers in the wind.
‘You fool!’the old woman screamed.‘If the ritual fails now it will have her anyway, not as a servant but as a puppet!It will escape wearing her twisted skin!’
The raven fiend’s massive, distended body shrank towards Siwan, bit by bit, as it began to crush itself into the narrow frame of her bones.Her eyes rolled, black pupils in yellow sclera, the same as the crows that wheeled over the clearing.
The crows wheeled once more, then dived, their beaks open and talons out.
‘You have brought doom on us all, gwyddien!’the old woman wailed.‘You have unleashed a devil more wicked even than—’
Her last word was swallowed by a burst of pressure, like rolling thunder.Leaves crackled and spun as the crows scattered, battered and tossed by a sudden rush of wind.Afanan strode into the clearing, a cracked topaz in one hand.The other held a square of malachite.She muttered a word and drew a shape in the air with the stone, which then shattered.Roots reared up at the old woman’s feet.She screamed as they bound her, then gagged her and held her down.
‘You should have waited for me,’ Afanan called.With a turn of her wrist she produced another gem, as black as the depths of the sea.She drew a circle in the earth with her feet, then stood at its heart and shouted a word like splitting stone.The raven fiend screamed and buckled.The bulk of its body, not yet vanished into Siwan, stretched taut, as though dragged by invisible hands towards Afanan and the gem she held.
the Grey Lady said.
Llewyn could not convince her; could not collect his thoughts to form any argument.There was only the searing impetus rising from his ring, the fire of his rage, and the fiend, and his terror.He readied his sword to strike.
‘If you kill it, the girl will die!’Afanan strained against the effort of her ritual.‘I can draw it out of her.She’ll live, if you let me do this.’
the Grey Lady seethed.
Llewyn hesitated.Siwan’s cries had deepened to a ragged croak, like a crow’s imitation of a frightened child.
