The first clue had come during the king’s funeral.She had been sweeping the gathered crowd through her loupe from both curiosity and caution.The presence of the Mortal Church in Parwys had surprised her.The haunting might well have drawn other powers, too, and she did not intend to be blindsided again.
Among the little flickers of minor First Folk relics, druidic baubles and the glimmer of magical morphologies in the prince’s entourage and audience, the girl and her father on the hillock had burned as bright as beacons.The silvery fae magic that lit up the father was startling enough, but the daughter had taken Fola’s breath away.
The lens of her thaumaturgist’s loupe did little to extend the reach of her eye, but the girl’s dark hair had been visible enough.It called to mind Medrith’s rumours of a raven-haired girl: a blending of fiend, undead and fae in a mortal body.A new power in the world.Rumours confirmed by what the loupe revealed.A lattice of woven powers.The roiling hatred of the wrathful dead.The glimmering mystique of the fae.A fiend as red as blood and rust, teeming with teeth and eyes.
What had created this singular soul, bearing every powerbutthat of the First Folk?As near to their opposite as could exist, in thaumaturgical terms.Perhaps a means, with time to study it, of defining the First Folk soul by apophasis.Of coming to understand them well enough to compel a response to her summons.Finding their name so that she could write it in the sand.
The possibility drew her like a hound to the fox’s scent.She had followed the girl and her father to the festival grounds.Lyn, the father, had come to warn her off—which only fixed Fola’s determination to have her answers.
So, despite Lyn’s warnings, she had watched Siwan’s performance through her loupe, trying to untangle the threads of power in and around the girl, who shone bright enough to dim the sun.The fae kept to shadowed glens, hidden rivers and deep-sunk caves, far from mortalkind.Yet here these were in a crowded festival, bearing incredible, unprecedented power.Why?To what end?
Possibilities dizzied Fola.She had to convince this girl to return with her to the City.Even if her theory was wrong—even if the souls of the First Folk proved impossible to define by any means—this girl had to be understood.There was nothing like her in the world.
She fought down a swell of guilt—she had promised to pursue a solution to the haunting, and here she was, making plans to rush back to the City.But the girl was connected, certainly.It would be too great a coincidence to find both a potent haunting and so powerful and strange an undead soul in the same place at the same time, if the one was not related to the other.But what was that relationship?Another question she would be better able to answer in the City.More: there was a chance that removing the girl from Parwys might end the haunting altogether.
Questions Fola continued to mull over, as she continued to watch through her loupe, as Siwan left the stage for the backstage tent.Questions struck from her mind, temporarily, when the girl’s power flared and the lattice broke.
An arm of sinuous, boiling power tore through the awning of the backstage tent.It reached up and hooked its taloned hand on a skein in the sky.A furious wind burst to life.With it, the cawing of crows filled the air, as though a murder had descended on the festival.
‘Frog!’Fola shouted at the sky, where her bird wheeled in a panic, his swooping for insects interrupted.‘Find Colm!’
The lout had been with her when she left for the festival grounds, but had disappeared from sight.Presumably into some brothel or drinking hall.She had been too distracted by revelation and possibility to notice.
What was the point of hiring a mercenary if he vanished at the moment of danger?
Fola plunged into the panicked audience, shoving her way through scrambling bodies towards the stage.Through her loupe—held to her eye with one hand while she pushed forward with her staff in the other—that twisted, rage-bright arm still reached up from the tent, holding open the hole it had torn in the world.The faceless, smeared silhouettes of wraiths swam down, their disjointed fingers reaching and skinless jaws open in howls of terrible rage.
Had such a cloud spun over Parwys on the day King Elbrech died, releasing the wraiths that had hounded him to his death?Or over Glascoed while Harlow succumbed to madness?Was this, even now, an attempt on Prince Owyn’s life?
If so, it seemed poorly aimed.Yet Siwan the Blackbird had called down these wraiths.That rage-bright arm had been part of her power.This was undeniable.And Fola would not believe that the haunting and the girl existed side by side, in the same place, at the same time, unrelated to each other.
New questions leapt to the front of her mind—was the girl the cause of Parwys’s troubles, or a symptom?—but she cast them back, to be tended when the danger had passed.
A young man fought free of the panicking mob and sprinted away.He made half a dozen steps before one of his arms hitched upwards at a sickening angle, the joint of his elbow snapping.Dark bruises in the shape of hands showed where the wraith had caught hold of him.For a moment he hung suspended, gasping and sputtering in pain.A figure wreathed in shadow materialised above him and stood in the air, its feet flat against an invisible plane perpendicular to the ground.There was a stink of piss and fear.With a wrenching twist and the pop of bone breaking, the wraith tore the arm in half.
Stunned silence held the crowd for a heartbeat, until the youth’s agonised screams were joined by fresh shrieks of terror.Limbs battered at Fola as people scattered, smashing into one another, tripping over tent pegs and furniture in their desperation to escape.
‘Stay inside the pavilion!’Fola shouted.She dropped her staff, exchanged her loupe for spellpaper and pen, and went to her knees in the mud.The four main supports at the corners of the pavilion would define the bounds of the ward; the rest she could draw by rote.Still, her hand shook and her breath came fast.She kept her left hand free, ready to put index finger to thumb and baffle any wraith that threatened her before she finished.
Around her, screams terminated in shrieks of pain, gurgles, the snapping of bones and tearing of flesh.The must of a graveyard whirled around her, and then the reek of an abattoir.Winds whipped from all directions and tore at the corners of the paper.She kept her head down, drawing line by line, shape by shape, symbol by symbol, fighting a tremor that would ruin the design and the only magic that could save these people.A speck of blood struck her spellpaper—not, fortunately, the design itself, which she finished with a last sweeping line.
The graveyard scent vanished, leaving only the iron reek of blood.She took a deep breath and, for only a moment, gave in to fear and let the tremor shake her hands.Four years of chasing ghosts and wraiths to every corner of the world had made them no less terrifying.She doubted any measure of years would be enough.When the shaking ended, she pinned the spellpaper to the ground with a silver nail, grabbed her staff, stood, and ran for the stage.
As she did, she hazarded one last glance through her loupe.Under the gaze of its lens, lines of prismatic mist extended from her spellpaper and spiderwebbed out towards the four corners of the pavilion.This was the special function of spellpaper: to translate power from text to reality.Much faster than carving the lines in the earth herself, as the druids had done to bury their king.
At the borders of the misty design, along the edges of the pavilion, sparks crackled in the air.Explosions of power as the wrathful dead collided with her ward and were cast away.Each blow was a chance that her spell would fail.A roll of the dice.And each time the dice were rolled, they weighed more heavily against her.The corners of the spellpaper were already singed, tickled by silver flames that would soon enough destroy it, and with it the ward.
‘Stay where you are!’she shouted again at the crowd, who slumped and sprawled in dazed confusion.Some still screamed.Others stared up through the torn awning at the strange whirling cloud.Still others sobbed, clinging to the mangled remains of friends and family.Dozens, at least, lay dead.Fola didn’t have time to count, nor enough healing balm to make a difference.She had to put a stop to the chaos before anything else.
She nearly tripped over the juggler, who had been occupying the crowd and who now cowered at the foot of the stage.She grabbed the man under the arm and hauled his surprisingly light frame to its feet.He stared at her baffled, his dog mask ajar.
‘You’re good at getting people’s attention, right?’she said, then snapped her fingers under the man’s nose until he blinked and nodded.‘Good.Tell these folk that if they leave the pavilion, they’ll be ripped into bloody chunks.Understand?’
He nodded again, then started scrambling on to the stage.She left him there, shouting warnings and instructions to the horrified assembly.
The girl Siwan lay just a pace beyond the entrance to the backstage tent, her back arched, legs juddering and heels drumming on the floor.Her eyes had rolled back and showed only sickly yellow sclera, burning bright and feverish.A rictus grin pulled her face tight against her skull.With every spasm, the lines of her limbs seemed to twist and change, her joints popping out of alignment, then back into place, as though her body were pulled between her natural shape and some other, monstrous form.Lyn held Siwan’s shoulders to the ground as though that could end her suffering.
For a moment, Fola forgot the promise bound up in the girl.The chance for an answer to the world’s great mysteries, to at last understand the powers of the City and spread them to the four corners of the world.
