‘And he cut your arm and got away?’Fola said.
Colm grinned, showing his shovel-wide teeth.‘Not before I tagged him myself.Got in his ribs with a knife.He took it with him.I’ll miss the thing, but he can keep it.With what you’re paying I can afford to replace it, even if it was raw iron.’
Fola frowned at the broad blade still clutched in Colm’s hand.‘You put the twin of that in him and he walked away?’
‘Like I said, stronger than he looked.’
Fola scrubbed a hand through her hair—only realising as she did so that it was wet with at least three or four other people’s blood.She grimaced in disgust and hoped it hid the fear she felt.Not of the haunting, now, but of Mortal Church attention.
Had it been a mistake to let that boy live, in Tarebach?Do the anakriarch and his knights know what I am?Have they, like Medrith, seen through my ruse?
They were spying on her, which meant they thought her some kind of threat.And they would certainly think Siwan a threat.Fiends, fae and undead were all anathema to the Mortal Church.If Torin discovered the girl, he would see it as a sacred duty to destroy her.
The urge to flee tugged at Fola.Maybe she could convince the girl—and Llewyn, if necessary—to come with her to the City.Leave Parwys to its troubles—maybe even resolve those troubles by removing the girl.
‘Well… one good development, and one bad.’
‘Oh?’Colm winced as he flexed his wounded arm, testing the tightness of the bandage.‘How’d your evening go, then?’He looked around the pavilion, at the wounded and at the dead, who the troupers had covered with sheets.‘Not well, by the look of things.’
‘Not well, no,’ she said.‘But I might have cracked the mystery.Or, at least, the first part of it.’
‘Ah.’Colm gestured at the bloody horror around them.‘And this…?
‘Not my fault,’ Fola said.‘But related.’
‘Right.’He watched her for a moment.‘Are you planning to explain?’
Fola blew through her teeth.Hers was not a linear mind—that had always been part of the problem.Evidence and ideas swirled, like motes of dust covered in little hooks, dancing around one another in her mind until they collided and clung together.Enough time, enough swirling and enough collisions, and eventually a theory coalesced.One that seemed clear and true to her, even as she struggled to explain it to others.
The notion of apophatic definition as a means to conjuring the First Folk had arisen from such a process.Her certainty that Siwan was related to the haunting would, hopefully, prove easier to articulate.
She pointed at the backstage tent.‘Remember the girl I saw from the hillock?Raven hair?Mingled powers bright as a beacon?’
Colm nodded.
‘She’s the reason the sky went bat-shit, as you so eloquently put it.There is an ancient fiend bound to her soul.The only thing keeping it under control is a lattice of mixed fae and undead powers—also bound to her soul—anchored to a piece of wood.Without that lattice, it would possess her body, transform her into some kind of monster, and go on a rampage in pursuit of whatever its inscrutable, ancient, fiendish goals might be.Are you tracking so far?’
‘Well enough,’ Colm said.‘I’m assuming the bat-shit sky was because the fiend started breaking free?’
Fola tapped the side of her nose and grinned at him.‘I knew you had a brain in there.Now, the precise mechanics of this aren’t certain—when we’re talking about fiendish and fae powers, they never really are.This is magic older than the First Folk, elusive and poorly studied.What is certain is that the fiend summoned those wraiths to attack the festival, presumably to try and create an opportunity for itself to complete its possession of the girl.But that raises its own slew of questions.
‘First, how did the girl’s soul come to be bound up not just with a fiend, but with the fae and with the undead?I’ve spent decades researching the nature of the soul, and I’ve never encountered or read of anything remotely like this.She wears a wooden medallion around her neck that appears to anchor the undead and fae energies, which suggests some sort of artifice—that someonecreatedthis amalgam of powers, somehow.Her protector, a man called Llewyn, has a sword just like the medallion.There is also a sorceress with the troupe.Maybe one of them was involved, or both.It’s unclear.
‘Second, what is the relationship between the girl, her powers, and the haunting that grips the kingdom?That there must be some relationship is certain.’
‘Why?’Colm pressed.
‘To believe otherwise strains credulity,’ Fola pointed out.‘We came chasing a rumour of powerful undead.We’ve found them here, attacking this festival.What are the odds that there is a second source of powerful undead, entirely unrelated to this one?’
‘But if the fiend is the source of the wraiths, why would it kill the Count of Glascoed and King Elbrech?’Colm asked.
‘The fiend itself has nothing to do with the undead, I think,’ Fola said.‘It was able to call down the wraiths because it is part of the girl, who is also undead.’
Colm cocked his head at her, prodding her for more explanation.
‘I don’t think the fiend controls the wraiths,’ she went on.‘Else it would have directed them more precisely to achieve its aim of taking over the girl’s body, and not just sent them marauding through the crowd.It is its own kind of being, and the wraiths are their own kind of being.The fiend is able to reachthroughthe girl’s undead nature to summon them, but they act on their own.’
She gestured to the palm-shaped bruises that spotted his arms.‘These wraiths attacked folk of common morphology.Anyone with extra arms, or eyes, or horns, feathers, fur, what have you, they left more or less alone.’
