She glared at the bird.Should have left you behind.A ludicrous thought, given how useful Frog had been.Not just as her sole companion, but the source of her finances and, in more desperate times, medicines, and even a thin gruel that served well enough for subsistence despite possessing all the culinary qualities of paste.Besides, if she had tried leaving him in the City in a cage, he’d have chewed through the bars and followed her anyway.He responded to her needs, but she could no more control him than she could a wild animal, and his powers—like all the magics of the City—lay far beyond any mortal’s understanding.
Bleed it.She took another swallow of wine, felt the sickly sweetness of it on her tongue, and grinned.
‘Any interest in employment as my guide?’she asked the teamster.
He drained off the last of his ale, set down the horn, and shook his head firmly.‘None whatsoever.I left Parwys for a reason.That wraith set his gaze on me, and I’ll not go back just to be torn asunder.’
‘Fair enough.’Fola stood and waved over to the barboy.‘Bring my helpful friend another ale, and whatever he wants to eat.’
‘Much obliged,’ the teamster said, toasting her with his empty cup.Fola toasted back, then turned her attention to the four-armed man in the corner of the room.Frog fluttered up from the table and landed on her shoulder.By the maps she had taken from the Library, it was a long way to Parwys.A great distance for a woman to travel alone on the roads of the wider world, ripe as they were with bandits and the wicked.Even a woman with ample means of self-defence could benefit from the company of a large, dangerous man—if only for a single night.
She chuckled to herself, took another sip of wine, and ambled across the room.
* * *
She woke alone, late in the morning, with a pounding headache and a pang of disappointment.For a while she lay in the rough linens of the inn’s finest room—decent, as such roadside establishments of the wider world went, but little more than a closet compared to any accommodation in the City—and tried to sort through the fragments of the night before.Her conversation with the teamster was the last clear, sharp recollection.After that, she could remember bumping into a table full of darkly dressed, angry-looking men—whose upset she mollified by buying a round of the rotgut they were drinking—then slumping into a chair at the four-armed man’s table.He was a mercenary, she recalled.Though she could not remember precisely how she had learned this, nor anything else they had talked about.Clearly, she had ordered a few more glasses of wine.
His name started with aC, she was fairly certain.Beyond that, mostly she remembered his wide smile and his hands—two larger and thick with callouses, two smaller, almost dainty.
Ah, well.Dwelling on him only deepened her sense of disappointment.One more in a long, long string of lonely mornings.Another rejection to layer atop countless others.Forty-six years, even when most were lived in the comfort of the City, lent plenty of time to develop a thick skin for such things.
She kicked her way free of tangled sheets, dressed for the road, and settled her account with the innkeeper before departing—a hefty sum, paid with a few lumps of alchemised gold.The innkeeper fetched a set of calipers from behind the bar and pinched each gold lump.His eyes grew wider and his mouth hung lower as each one deformed as gold ought to.Before he could ask after their origin, Fola was in the stable mounting Fellstar, the horse she had taken from Ulun.
Her failure to seduce the four-armed mercenary had little to do with the parade of failures that had set her on her journey.Still, as she made her way north on the First Folk Road, her fresh disappointment stirred up painful memories—efforts to win collaborators to her project, or to secure the resources she needed, all ending in rejection and frustration.She let Fellstar walk at a leisurely pace down the forest road while she grasped for any recollection of their conversation.It would be nice to know precisely how she had fumbled things.
Frog squawked and dug his talons into her shoulder.The sound and the sudden pain drew her attention to the present, and to the rustling of leaves ahead of her, where three men were emerging from a thick stand of trees.One held an arrow set to his bowstring.The others carried drawn swords, their blades glinting in the dappled light of early afternoon.
Fear was not new to her.Even in the City of the Wise, where she had been raised in a comfort unimaginable to all but the wealthiest and most powerful of the wider world, there had been fear.A different kind, though.Fear of failure, of rejection.Fears that settled in the gut and held there, burning with a slow flame.Not the sudden lightning strike of adrenaline that darted through her now.That was a newer sensation, known only a few times in the last four years.
Focus rushed in after fear and washed away the wistful thoughts that had distracted her all morning.Her hand went to the sackcloth-wrapped staff she kept holstered in her saddle.
‘Now now, none of that,’ said one of the men—balding, with a beard cut close to his jaw, chain mail showing under his black tabard, and a bare sword in his hand.He wore an iron medallion around his neck.Fola knew its device from Arno’s warnings before she left the City: the nested triangles of the Mortal Church, representing the three tiers of their holy ideals.Ideals for which they had waged terrible war across the continent.Often to expand their territory, and just as often to decide, with the edge of a blade, how shared ideology ought to be understood and manifested in the world.
One point of doctrine that had remained consistent, Arno had explained, was hatred for Thaumedony and its Citizens.
‘I have no quarrel with you,’ she said, the words falling from her mouth while her mind sought the best way through her predicament.Fellstar stamped and whickered.None of the men ahead of her were mounted.
She risked a glance behind.Two more: a man and a woman on foot.The woman held a bow.She could surge ahead and risk the arrows.It might mean the end of her journey, but Frog would likely escape.And with him, the fragment of her soul he carried.
Frog squawked again.His weight shifted on her shoulder as he flatted his wings against his body.Birds of the City took all manner of forms, and Frog happened to resemble a nightjar.Like a real nightjar, he responded to stress by camouflaging himself as a tree branch.Not a particularly effective disguise, in this instance, given that he was perched on her shoulder and had already been seen.
It felt far from wise to trust her future to the flights of arrows and her fool of a bird.Fellstar tossed his head in agitation, sensing her fear.She was not a strong rider—had never, in fact, sat on a horse before leaving the City.If she tried to charge her way free of this situation she might be thrown, stunned, and left defenceless.
‘You are a Witch of Thaumedony,’ the bald templar said.‘You were heard to admit as much.Our standing orders are to arrest your kind and bring you to the Iron Citadel for interrogation.If you will not come, we will hurt you.Ideally not to the point of death, but the anakriarchs can learn some things from your corpse.’His grin was cruel and venomous.‘I think I would enjoy testing my blade and virtue against your wicked arts.’
Fola cursed herself.As the man took another step closer, she recalled him from the night before.One of those angry bastards at the table she had stumbled into.A table not far away, where her words would have carried—first while she fished for rumours, and later during the now-forgotten conversation with the four-armed mercenary.
In some corners of the world the City of Thaumedony was held in high regard, or at least rumours and legends of it were.Some considered it a beacon of hope, even if only as a myth to aspire to.A place without the cruelties of kings and lords, nor famine, nor disease, where folk lived in freedom and comfort.The home of sorcerers who, tales told, had driven fell monsters into the sea, quelled blight and pestilence, and broken ancient curses.Tales Fola had encountered soon after leaving the City, and which had inspired her to lend aid when she could, even when it distracted from her quest.
But here in Tarebach, dominated by the Mortal Church and its Iron Citadel, she ought to have been more careful.Ought to have looked for iron medallions before so much as alluding to her origins.Certainly before offering to hire a startlingly attractive and capable-seeming mercenary to escort her north, and then, once she had investigated the rumours that drew her there, back east, to Thaumedony, to the City.
Colm.That was the four-armed mercenary’s name.Odd how, in a panic, her mind was finally able to dredge up some memory of their conversation.
After four years she should have been better at navigating the dangers of the world.These templars had overheard her, but had lain in ambush on the road rather than taking her from the inn.Perhaps they had feared the mercenary, and preferred the advantages of an ambush to the chaos of a tavern brawl.Perhaps they fearedher.She could use that.
A choice to make, then.She had weapons of her own—some lethal, some less so.
‘Let me pass, and I will not harm you,’ she said, to buy herself time to think.
