‘Papa…’ Her eyes rolled towards him, full of fear and need.‘Please… help me…’
Memory assaulted Llewyn.Pale figures leading him away from home.His hands in theirs, their skin rough as bark, as they lowered him into the grave, saying only that this was his fate.That he was becoming what he must to pay for an ancient service.A service to someone else, payment given unwillingly.
‘You were made, weren’t you, gwyddien?’Afanan said.‘Buried in the roots of a ghost tree, in the deepest heart of the Greenwood.Their coin on your tongue.Her ring on your finger.Reborn with a sword in hand.’
Wet soil had covered his flesh.He had sobbed as the weight of it settled on him, then wailed, begged for his mother and father while his mouth and nose filled with earth until he sputtered.The bite of silver on his finger.The rasp of roots against his skin as they enfolded him, pushing through the earth like the fingers of a cold, grasping hand.The acrid taste of iron turning to fire, while his blood surged with panic until his heart slowed and he descended into death, his mind swirling with visions of the fae.
Then the Grey Lady, calling him back to the mortal world.Condemning him to a life skulking in shadows.A life lived in fragments, confronting nightmare after nightmare.
‘Who traded your life?’Afanan said, her voice raw.‘And for what?’
All reason was gone from the Grey Lady’s voice.She only howled now, full of hatred.
Made for a purpose in the roots of a haunted tree.As Siwan had been given a purpose upon the altar stone.
Llewyn reached for his ring.Slowly, as if in a dream, he pulled it from his thumb.
Silver leaves cut his skin, drawing viscous blood.He felt strength pour out of him.His limbs seemed to fill with lead.A fog rolled through his mind.
Then silence.
Broken by Afanan’s scream.
She buckled and fell to one knee.Her arms shook with the strain of holding the gem aloft.Her ritual had disrupted the raven fiend’s glamour; even without the Grey Lady’s gift, Llewyn could see its bulk stretched tight between the two vessels, the child and the gemstone.
Llewyn stumbled to Afanan’s side.‘What can I do?’
‘Weaken it,’ she gasped.‘However you can.’
Without the Grey Lady’s power flowing from his ring, he had only his ghostwood sword.A blade forged from part of his soul drawn out while he lay buried in the roots of the tree, fading from life to death and back again.A powerful weapon, responsive to his will.As sharp and deadly as he desired.
He struck one blow meant to wound, not to kill.The blade carved through the fiend’s defences, softened as they were by strain and inattention, and pierced distended flesh.
Its howl overwhelmed him, transforming all sound into the buzz of countless wasps.With a reek of ancient rot and a gout of blood as black as the grave, the fiend’s body tore like old, decaying leather.
Afanan reeled backwards as the greater mass of the fiend disappeared, screaming, into her gemstone.The other remnant—its countless legs, a single, frayed wing—snapped back into Siwan’s body, no longer gripped by any ritual.The girl clawed at herself, screaming without voice, her yellow-black eyes bulging.
‘Afanan!’Llewyn cried.‘Help her!’
Afanan tucked the gemstone, which now swirled with a dark, red fog, up her sleeve.She produced another, a feldspar as white as milk, and held it over Siwan’s snarling face.She drew a circle in the air, said a word of power and recoiled.
‘I can’t disentangle them,’ she said, shoulders slumped with exhaustion.‘At best, I could bind it, but even then, a mortal soul will never stand against a fiend.’
A mortal soul.Llewyn took a breath.There was a way through this.A substitution of one terror with another.
Is it better to kill the girl, or to change her?Not for any purpose.Only to save her life.
A life Llewyn would protect, as her father should have protected it.As his own mother should have protected his.Siwan had looked to him when her own father turned a deaf ear to her pain, and he would not look away.He had cast aside the Grey Lady and her purpose—both the cruelty of it, and the comfort of certainty.But the coal of anger he had long buried still burned.
Maybe this was a way to quiet it, at last.
‘Do it,’ he said.
‘She’ll die.Worse than die.We’ll make her a wraith.Something worse than a wraith.An undead soul, twisted by the raven fiend.Something new and terrible.’
‘We’ll make her a gwyddien.Fae power can stand against this fiend.’
