She was only a child, strained to the point of breaking.Perhaps the cause of the haunting, but not its agent, surely.No one would subject herself tothis.Whatever her relationship to the haunting, and whatever knowledge might be gleaned from her later, in that moment Fola’s only impulse was to ease her pain.
‘Afanan!’Lyn’s eyes snapped up to Fola, at first relieved, then outraged and full of violence.‘You!’He scrambled to his feet, leaving his daughter’s side—despite his denials, the evidence of their relationship was obvious.Her head pounded the earth in rhythm with the thumping of her heels.As Lyn stood, he menaced Fola with his cane.The pale wood of it grew and flowed like water for an instant before settling into a thin blade with a single sharpened edge.‘Get away from her.’
Fola put up her hands, trying to be as non-threatening as possible.‘We don’t have much time before the dead tear us all to pieces.I can help her.’
‘Stay back.’Lyn turned his head to call towards the entrance on the far side of the tent.‘Afanan!’
‘Whoever you’re calling for, she isn’t here,’ Fola said gently, stepping forward.‘I am, and I can fix this.Let me help.’
‘And put your geas on her while you do so?’Lyn snarled.‘Bind her power to your whim?She’s a child, not a weapon.’
They didn’t have time for this.Distant screams echoed from throughout the festival.That her ward still held was practically a miracle.‘You’re afraid for your daughter, I understand.’She’d give him one more chance to cooperate.‘But fighting with me won’t help her.Please.’
‘She will not be used as I was,’ Lyn rasped, and stepped forward to strike.
Fola twisted her left wrist and pressed her index finger to her thumb.There was a moment of resistance—all fae folk, even the weakest pixie, had some residual protection from magic—before heat lanced down her forearm as the spell took hold.
Lyn collapsed mid-stride.He fell onto a folding desk that topped under his weight, burying him in scraps of fabric and costume jewellery.Fola flexed her hand and winced.Redness blossomed between her knuckles, and a few shallow, fractal burns traced down her arm.The blistered mess she’d made of it in her fight with the templars on the road had onlyjusthealed.
No time to nurse annoyance.She knelt beside the girl Siwan, whose spasms had worsened while her father resisted Fola’s help.
Clearly, the girl was not in control.The storm of wraiths was not of her making, and not her intent.Whose, then?
Through the lens of her loupe, the war that raged within Siwan was one of the most fascinating and most terrifying things Fola had ever seen.
Two distinct powers—one identical to that which marked the girl’s father, the other a riotous chaos that put Fola in mind of a fast-spreading cancer—battled within Siwan’s body.The first was localised above her heart in the shard of pale wood she wore on a silver chain.The same pale wood that formed her father’s odd, shape-changing weapon.Fae energies spiderwebbed out from there, a shimmering mist that enwrapped her body in thin lines that bent and snapped as the other, stranger power within her surged and fought free.Already the rage-bright arm had broken loose, and rose from a hole in the web.
Fola had read a great deal about fiends; had studied a few bound by agents of the Library and brought back.This was such a creature, she was sure, though she had never before seen one in the wild.Some inscrutable monster from a time before the First Folk’s ascendancy.Her loupe showed it as a red mist that gathered in shapes reminiscent of eyes, of feathers, of tooth-filled beaks and pus-heavy tumours.Power that boiled, seething and pushing against the fraying bonds of fae magic.
One tendril of red mist spiralled away from the riotous mass, as thin as a fishing line, twisting through the air in the direction of the troupers’ camp.A clue, maybe, to what had caused Siwan to lose control.A part of the puzzle Fola would leave for later.
The girl lay on a simple rug that covered the floor of the tent, which was both good and bad.Good, because it was easier to write with precision on textiles than to carve a spell into the earth.Bad, because the earth was a better conductor of magic, and the rug might go up in flames as the energies of Fola’s spell flowed through it.Spellpaper could translate the spell into thaumaturgic mist—as it had for the ward outside—but detail would be lost in the translation.Detail that would mean the difference between success and failure, between subduing the fiend and shattering the girl’s mind.
‘Bleed it,’ Fola muttered.She put pen to rug and drew a wide circle around the girl, leaving plenty of room for the intricate, spiralling design.The fiend’s energy was in a state of transference—attempting to fight its way out of the spell that had contained it.Fola drew quenching and settling functions in sequence to weaken the fiend, then compression to force it back into the girl’s body.A nurturing function written in parallel and focused on Siwan herself, rather than the fiend, would bolster the girl’s strength and, hopefully, stop the tremendous energies at play from tearing her apart.Siwan’s fae nature left Fola uncertain of how effective that element of the spell would be; while thaumaturgy had a firmer grip on the fae than the First Folk, they were slippery and inconstant, and her own knowledge had many gaps.To say nothing of the fact that Siwan was, at least partially, undead—a power the fiend fed upon and added to its own.There wasn’t time to worry, fuss or experiment.Fola drew the spell as best she could, then closed the circle.
Silver fire traced the lines of her spell, leaving a purple after-image.Siwan groaned and arched her back, her distended joints shuddering as they rolled back into proper alignment.Then she collapsed, with a final wheezing gasp, and lay unmoving as though asleep.Fola exhaled slowly, put down her pen, and flexed her fingers, which had gone tight with the effort and strain of writing such a complex spell in such a hurry.Wisps of smoke and the acrid scent of burning textiles wafted from the rug.Fola smothered the embers with her coat before they could catch, then put her loupe to her eye.
The riotous red of the fiend seemed to slumber, its wings folded up, the pustules and boils shrunken.Only one of countless eyes remained open, staring back at Fola in fury.The rage-bright arm lay curled against Siwan’s throat, withered almost to nothing.Only the strange, wiry tendril still reached out from the binding web of fae power, suspended in the air and tracing a path out of the tent.
The moaning undead and screams of their victims had quieted.Phantom winds no longer whipped the world.Fola did not need to step outside the tent to know that the strange inverted vortex no longer stared down.She slumped in relief, stowed her loupe, and fetched out her bottle of balm for the mild burns on her left hand.Where is Frog?There were dozens of injured, and she would need him to manufacture heaps of the stuff if she was going to be any help.
Lyn groaned and rolled on to his back with a rattle of disturbed detritus.‘Siwan,’ he mumbled, pressing a hand to his head.He lurched upright, found his feet and scooped up his pale wooden sword, his hand finding the handle without so much as a glance in its direction.
‘She’s fine,’ Fola said, keeping her voice calm, though her hand twitched, ready to muddle his mind again.‘It’s passed.’
His gaze flitted to the symbol scarred into the rug, then to his daughter.‘What did you do?’
‘A bit of magic to quiet the fiend,’ Fola explained.‘She’ll sleep for a while, I wager, but wake up none the worse for wear.’
Reassurance that did little to relax him.He sprang to his feet and levelled his sword.‘Get away from her.Spread your fingers.No more tricks.’
Fola put up her hands, stood, and took a step back.‘I don’t mean any harm,’ she said.It rankled to be ordered about, but there was far more at stake here than her sense of self-importance.
‘You were watching us from the procession this morning, and then you show up here,’ Lyn said.‘Why did you want to speak with her?’
A sobbing shriek sounded from outside, near the stage.
‘A full explanation would take more time than we have,’ Fola said.Much as she wanted answers, she wasn’t likely to get them from Lyn in this hostile state, and the wraiths had left wounded in need of care.‘You and I can discuss your daughter later.Right now, those people need our help.’
