Fola sighed.‘Another lead.Flimsy as the rest, but worth chasing down, I suppose.’
She told him of the rumours of a haunting in Parwys, and of her encounter with the Church templars—skirting around Colm’s timely intervention.She had initiated this conversation precisely toavoidthinking about him.Also, Arno would unleash a fusillade of teasing the moment she admitted to any kind of sexual interest in a man with magical heritage.
‘Fola, I say this with all respect and love for you,’ Arno said when she had finished, his voice grave and hands folded so tightly his knuckles had turned as white as plum blossoms.‘You need to come home.’
Fola spluttered, as effectively as an ethereal body could splutter.‘I haven’t found what I need, yet.If I come home now, it will be four years of wasted effort!’
‘Four years is too long to be gone, Fola,’ Arno said gently.‘And not wasted—what you did in Ulun may not bring more knowledge to the City, but however distasteful I might find it, many will see it as a worthy achievement.One that people will recognise.’
‘Enough to give me the thaumacite I need for my research?’Fola countered.
Arno shook his head.He paused in their conversation and turned to his heron, whispering little reassurances until it cautiously picked its way back to him, one step at a time.
‘Likely not, Fola,’ he said, gently scratching beneath his heron’s beak.‘Your project has been rejected eight times.The prudent thing would have been to move on.No matter what you find out there, I doubt you will convince the board.’
‘Because they’re a bunch of stone-headed, self-absorbed idiots,’ Fola snapped.‘My project is sound, Arno.We ought to be able to speak with the First Folk just as I am speaking to you now, as I’ve spoken to dozens of ghosts—as any half-competent necromancer can!It’s just a matter of refining the spells, which I can do either by experiments with thaumacite, or by investigating death and undeath—not subjects easily found in the City.’
‘All the same, it is past time for you to come home,’ Arno said.‘You’re exhausted, Fola, and frustrated.You acted rashly in Ulun.Your judgement is clouded.’
She waved a hand dismissively.‘If anything goes wrong, Frog will fly right back to the City.I’ll be home, a bit worse for wear, in a fresh little body, ready to head out again in a few years.’
‘And if they capture Frog?’Arno pressed.His heron made a soft, purring noise and hopped back onto his desk, where it watched Fola with a narrowed, suspicious eye.‘Your bird is not invulnerable, Fola, and you cannot be reborn if he does not return to the Tree.More, we do not understand the birds and the Tree well enough to predict how so long away, at such great distance, might affect them.Frog’s magic may begin to fail.’
Fola thought of that acrid stink that had settled in the healing ointment Frog produced.It still healed well enough, though, and she had no reason to doubt his other powers.He was a bug-eyed idiot, but he always had been.
‘I’m not coming back empty-handed,’ Fola said firmly, finally.‘I’m going to Parwys, to find the root of this haunting.And if that doesn’t give me what I need, I’ll chase down the next rumour, and the next, until I’m satisfied.Maybe when I’ve exhausted this half of the world, I’ll swing through the City for a cup of tea on my way to Goll.How does that sound?’
Arno leaned towards her, extending his hands with open palms.A gesture of invitation, of reconciliation.The kind you offered to an unruly child in need of calming.‘Fola, I’m trying to help you see reason.Come home.You want your life to mean something, I understand that, but there are other projects of importance.Why risk your life—your singular, immortal life, the great gift of the City—chasing this theory into such danger?You could lend your mind to research more likely to succeed.Insisting so stubbornly on a single path will not win anyone to your cause.To be honest, while I still sympathise with you, I am, myself, beginning to doubt, and I am tempted to send agents out to retrieve you, for your own good.An extreme measure I would prefer to avoid.’
She rankled at that, as much for the truth of his words as for his tone—as though he were trying to coax a child into accepting the adult point of view.It was childish to spend her life obsessed with a project that had been so thoroughly rejected.An obsession that had made her a laughingstock.
No.Their rejection had never been only of her project—they had rejected her, for as long as she could remember.The only solution was to prove to the board, her detractors, and every bastard who had ever covered their mouth to hide a chuckle as she passed that she was correct, and they had all been wrong to turn their backs and laugh.
‘Don’t condescend to me,’ she snapped, and brought her fist down on the desk to drive home her next point.
Which was very stupid.The moment her ethereal hand passed through solid wood, nausea to rival the worst of her seasickness ripped through her.Her astral projection shattered, rebounding her back to her dingy shipboard cabin.
She gagged, lunged for the waste bucket, and heaved up her guts.Again.And this time, without the pleasure of a few cups of rum beforehand.
‘Fola!’Colm called, rapping a knuckle on the cabin door.‘You all right in there?’
She wiped her mouth and leaned against the wall.‘Bloody fine!’she shouted.
No.Not all right at all.Angry, exhausted, and—despite herself—homesick.But burn the Tree and slaughter the Birds if she was going to admit defeat.
* * *
At last, their ship put in at Ispont, a bustling little harbour town of bright flags and busy docks.They spent the night at an inn, where she sold a few of Frog’s gold nuggets for a handful of coins: one gold royal, two silver pennies, and six tin bits.She fed Frog each denomination of currency, enabling him to manufacture as much as she might need in perfect facsimile, so long as he were fed a sufficient diet that could be broken down and magically reconstituted into gold.Which meant, more or less, anything at all.
Brief investigation in the common room over a respectable three—and only three—glasses of wine yielded little beyond more rumours of the haunting.No one would claim to be a first-hand witness, though many knew a brother’s shipmate’s cousin or a sister’s friend who had seen one of the ghosts.The rumours did, however, take on a new facet.King Elbrech, it was said, had died, killed by the vengeful dead in his own castle.
In one sense, this lent Fola an advantage.The king’s heir would be desperate to end the haunting—both to defend himself against it and to salve the fresh wound of his father’s death—and likely to give her whatever resources she needed.Yet it was difficult for her to take satisfaction in a boon that came only because of someone else’s suffering.
‘You seem bothered,’ Colm observed the next day, while they rode for the city of Parwys, capital of the kingdom, following the First Folk Road.‘Were you hoping for more?We’ve just arrived, and few people in these corners of the world are willing to yield up their secrets to strangers.’
‘I’m notbothered,’ Fola said, watching Frog swoop back and forth overhead, his belly a flash of red against the blue sky.The idiot bird didn’t need to hunt or eat—save to ingest raw material for transmutation to suit her needs—but he liked to stretch his wings now and then.‘We’ve already determined that there are ghosts.Now the question is why, and that’s made complicated by this notion that the dead killed the king.Naturally occurring wraiths only harass or attack whoever they hold responsible for their deaths, or try to end whatever suffering created them.After they’ve had satisfaction, they go away.’
‘So the haunting should be over, then?’Colm shrugged.She tried not to stare at the shifting geometry of his chest and shoulders.‘Back to hunting down fresh rumours, I suppose.I’ll stick around to watch your back, if you’ll have me.’
