There were more grumblings and mutterings.A quiet, hurried discussion of the impact of Siwan’s episode on the troupe treasury.A pale shadow of what had happened to those unlucky folk in the audience—and a bit gauche to be discussing so soon after, with Fola, a stranger, there.Even Llewyn had the social sense to understand that.But the lives of travelling entertainers were precarious, meandering back and forth from plenty to poverty with the seasons, as townships and villages saw fit to hire troupers for their various entertainments.The coronation of a new king and the ensuing festival, with the largest crowd the kingdom was likely to see for decades, had promised a rare opportunity to pad the coffers.An opportunity the troupe had spent a great deal to pursue—new fabric for costumes, the stage lanterns, painted backdrops for sets, all expenses meant to draw the largest possible audiences from the festival.Now, wasted money, if they became pariahs.Assuming the festival even continued.
Without a word, Fola reached into her satchel and withdrew a purse, which she tossed underhand to Damon.The boy caught it with a loud jingle and a grunt, and staggered backwards from the weight of it.He stared at the purse, then at Fola, then opened the drawstrings.
‘Well…’ he murmured, stupefied.‘Ah… Never mind.’
Harwick and Spil leaned over his shoulders for a look.It was their turn, then, to stare at Fola in open disbelief.
‘Consider it an investment in the girl’s protection, if you’re as yet unwilling to come with me to the City,’ she said.‘As soon as you make up your minds, let me know.My associate and I have rooms at the Garland Inn.Leave a message if I’m not there when you send word.’
‘What makes you think we will?’Llewyn said.Fola’s ability to toss around gold like breadcrumbs might dazzle the others, but he’d not grown up in a world where it held such a hypnotic lure.To him, wealth was just another variety of power, and power was never to be trusted.
She smiled wryly and touched her forehead with the tip of her silver staff.Her bird fluttered up from the corner of the tent where it had been lurking and perched on her shoulder.It stared back at Llewyn, goggle-eyed.
‘I trust you’ve senses enough to come to them, eventually,’ Fola said.‘Just don’t wait too long.Meanwhile, there are more layers to the mystery here, and I’m well and truly intrigued.’
The tent flap swung down as she left them with her gold and her promise of safety, and the evidence of her power—perhaps proof of her ability to fulfil her promise, but to Llewyn’s eye more a warning—charred into the rug beneath their feet.
The Sorceress
YC 1189
There are, in a sense, as many magics in the world as there are persons.
Even a rigid, complex system—such as thaumaturgy—is mediated through the minds of individuals.Through countless conceptions of meaning, each mind a unique semiotic web of analogy and connotation.We do what we can to systematise, but as no one can fully understand the mind of another, no complete accounting of such powers is really possible.
Librarian Arro Sanjiet,Commentary on Restin Lim’s ‘On Thaumaturgy’,YC1002
Fola left the troupers huddled together in their backstage tent and put her loupe to her eye.Siwan still burned like a beacon, even through the muting weight of canvas, but the lattice of fae power had been knitted, and the riot of the undead and the fiend had been quelled.Part of that was her doing—the spell she had written in haste on the rug.Part of it, she suspected, ought to be attributed to the troupers.
There had been an unbidden hitch in Fola’s chest when she entered the tent.The wider world was full of beauty: soaring mountains to rival the Starlit Tower; rivers wide enough to swallow half the City; deep forests full of hidden glades and glimmering fae… to say nothing of the wonders the First Folk had left behind, scattered like a handful of golden coins tossed across a map of the world—treasures waiting to be found.
Nothing, she thought in that moment, more beautiful than what she had seen in that tent.
Perhaps there was something to be said for suffering.A notion, she knew even as it occurred to her, anathema to the thinking of the City.Arno would baulk to hear it.Yet without the depths of horror and despair to which the night had descended, there could be none of the strength, care and kindness that had surrounded Siwan.Simple things.A cup of tea.A gentle hand on a fevered brow.Soft words as the girl roused from troubled sleep.Together forming something more, as the myriad equations of a spell add up to a singular expression of power.A second lattice, protecting Siwan as surely as the one woven to contain the raven fiend.This one not to protect her from an ancient curse, but from the more mundane cruelties of the world.Fear.Hunger.Deprivation.The things the City existed to prevent, prevented here, instead, by a small community, lacking deep magic but making up for it with love and sheer, stubborn goodness.
Fola had never been the object of such affection.In truth, it was difficult to imagine any similar scene transpiring in the City.There would be no occasion for it.Folk faced adversity—Fola had known her share of it, in the form of mockery and rejection letters from the research board—but everything was mediated and mitigated.No sooner had anyone taken ill than their bird heaved up some bespoke medicine.Even a fatal accident—a fall from a tower, or the backlash of a magical experiment—inflicted no real suffering, only the minor inconvenience of rebirth and regrowth.
Without real suffering, could anyone know real comfort?Could mortalkind develop a real capacity to care for one another?
Was there something missing from the souls of City folk?If so, it was something Fola felt an ache for that night, but something too ephemeral to seize upon.A distraction.She had to focus, now.Clues were falling into place, but she still lacked a full picture, and there was one lead left to follow that night before she sought her audience with Ifan, the Count of Glascoed.
Through the loupe, she traced the glimmering, pinkish line that trailed away from the snarled glare of Siwan’s power.It led her from the backstage tent to a wagon at the edge of the troupe’s plot.A mural of a full moon reflected in a lake had been painted on its side, the paint bright and vivid—refreshed recently, by the look of it.The wagon was enclosed, like a little hut on wheels.A silver lock secured its narrow door, vivid and glimmering through Fola’s loupe, secured by magic as much as by pins and bars.
Fola might have broken the lock and the magic seal, but wanted to leave as little trace as possible.The troupers were unlikely to cooperate if they discovered her stealing their secrets.She felt a pang of guilt.Maybe it was better to wait, to give them time to warm up to her, to come around and feel comfortable enough to tell her the whole truth of what Siwan was and how she had been made.
She had waited decades for the research board to come around, and they never had.Why think these troupers will be any different?They had their circle of trust and comfort—why would I ever be invited in?
No.Waiting was too risky.This was information she needed—information the world needed.Siwan might well be the key to unlocking all the mysteries of the First Folk.If Fola succeeded, mortalkind would no longer live baffled in the shadows of their predecessors—whether those shadows were blessings, as in the City, or curses, as in Ulun.Surely a little deception could be justified in such a cause.
‘Keep watch,’ she whispered to Frog.He chirruped, blinked his goggle eyes at her, then fluttered to the top of the wagon.
Fola visually measured the distance from her position to the inside of the wagon, then drew a thaumaturgic circle on her pad of spellpaper.Magic flashed to life, enfolded her in silver fire, then plunged her into darkness and silence.While she held her breath she would remain an insubstantial mist, the material of her body suspended in a state of uncertainty, unaffected by anything—even light and sound.A trick Arno had taught her.It was irresponsible, in his thinking, to send agents into the wider world without the definitive ability to slip out of a locked room or a jail cell.
She counted down, measured distance as a function of time as the spell carried her forward, then exhaled.After such depths of silence, the chirruping of a morning cricket outside thundered in her ears.The dim interior of the wagon was less obtrusive.The only light crept in through the gaps between door and frame and one window covered over with wax paper.Heaped forms filled the small space.Chests piled with boxes and jars, some ornate, some unadorned.Those that stood open held gemstones, some as small as Fola’s fingernail, others as big as her fist.In the dark they seemed no more impressive than oily rocks, but Fola suspected many were cut with fine precision.She was standing in the midst of a hoard unrivalled in Parwys, save perhaps in the royal treasury.
Hadn’t the troupers been complaining of poverty?Which meant this wealth was either unknown to most of them, or understood to be something other than currency.She remembered the white quartz in Afanan’s hands.Remembered, also, the oaths to the ‘old stones’ she had heard again and again in Parwys.Medrith’s magic had drawn on no gems that Fola could see, but there were many paths to power.The druids would not have a monopoly on magic.
All this was curious, but not Fola’s purpose.If she lingered too long and was discovered, whatever inroads she had made with the troupers would be jeopardised.She put her loupe to her eye and traced the pinkish filament of light that had trailed from Siwan to this wagon, through the door, and to a chest at the back of the tiny room.Two more chests were stacked atop it, and three jewellery boxes and a stoppered urn atop those.
