And here, in Parwys, she had made the most vital discovery of all.Fola would easily convince Arno and the board to back her project once she brought Siwan back to the City.In a decade, perhaps two, she and Siwan together would untangle the puzzle-knot of the First Folk’s nature, making it possible, for the first time, to reach out to their souls, wherever they had vanished to.Toconversewith them, as one might converse with a conjured ghost.After which, no mystery they had left behind would go unsolved.
It would take time, of course, to convince Siwan and Llewyn to accompany her, even if Afanan made good on her promise to help.In the meantime, Fola had made a promise of her own to the people of Parwys.Siwan’s episode the night before had revealed not only clues relevant to Fola’s broader research project, but to the more immediate matter of the haunting.The next piece of the puzzle lay with young Ifan of Glascoed, one of the first witnesses to the haunting’s vengeance.She remembered Puli the clock-mender’s tale of Harlow’s death, and Ifan’s madness in its aftermath—wandering his halls with a drawn sword, shouting challenges at the dark, convinced that his father’s illness had arisen from a curse of the undead.Told as much in a dream.
Others might have dismissed the rumour as no more than that—a fanciful tale of a mad nobleman.But the undead could, indeed, infect the dreams of mortals.The wraiths might well have told Ifan the origin of their grudge against the nobility of Parwys, though he may not understand it fully himself.Together, they might tease out the meaning of those dreams, and with it the cause of the haunting—and the key to ending it.
Buzzing with excitement, Fola nearly proceeded from the Silver Lake pavilion directly to the castle.Good sense caught up with her, however, and forced a detour to the Garland Inn.The serving girl who met her in the voluminous foyer stared in astonishment at the blood and grime that spattered her clothing.Fola requested a hot bath and the girl hurried off, muttering under her breath that she had never in her lifeheard ofsuch a display in such a fine establishment—two bloodied patrons in a single night!
Fola climbed the stairs to her room, Frog fluttering ahead of her, leaping from banister to banister and goggling at the swooping ceilings.Back home, a hot bath could be summoned at the turn of a dial.Here, she had to wait for a cauldron to boil and the copper tub to be hauled up two flights of stairs.A preposterous waste of time and human labour.
She found Colm sprawled out on his bed in their lavish rooms, his bloodstained shirt and trousers replaced by a pair of loose pants, a blanket that had fallen halfway off the bed with his tossing and turning, and two empty bottles of what she took, at a glance, for very expensive wine.
The wound to his gut he had suffered in Tarebach had faded to a pink, puckered scar.The fresher cut on his upper arm, dealt the previous evening, still seeped red into his bandage, despite Frog’s ointment.As it did whenever she glimpsed him in such a state, Fola’s pulse quickened and her thoughts flitted to those hands, with their callouses, brushing against her skin…
She slammed the door and he started, blinking sleep from his eyes.
‘Thought you were headed to see young Count Ifan?’he murmured, shuffling the blankets to cover his legs and a bit more of his belly.
‘Like this?’She gestured to her ruined outfit and sweat-slicked hair.In her flustered state, she’d stupidly used her left arm, which twinged, still aching and blistered from having put Llewyn to sleep.‘I’d as likely be tossed in a dungeon as admitted to see the count if I showed up at court drenched in blood.’
Colm grunted and stretched all four of his arms.Fola forced her eyes away from his shoulders and hoped he hadn’t noticed her blush.She stepped behind the privacy screen near the wardrobe and riffled through her clothes—the two dresses she’d acquired for court, plus two spare sets of her preferred outfit of comfortable trousers, sensible shirt, and long coat with ample pockets for her notebook, pens and any other materials or tools she might need.Surely the young count would not be offended by her forgoing ostentation in favour of practicality.Then again, if she wanted him to take her seriously, she needed to appear as a fellow member of his class, not a strangely dressed adventurer from a far-flung land.
With a sigh, she withdrew the second of her two dresses, a deep forest green stitched with golden leaves.Conveniently similar, she realised, to the colours of County Glascoed.She brushed lint from the dress, then hung it from the privacy screen.
‘Colm, I need a bath,’ she said.
He grumbled, but she heard a rustling of sheets and the clink of a wine bottle rolling across the floor.It was one thing to glimpse him half-naked; for him to do the same to her would be a profound embarrassment.A genuinely odd dynamic, in the sum total of her experience.In the City, at the baths reserved for such things, one might openly take note of another’s beauty without reservation, and might in turn appreciate a lingering, admiring gaze.Either gesture might eventually lead to a pleasant tumble—or a longer commitment, if that proved desirable to all parties.Or not, with no offence taken either way.Colm was the first person in Fola’s life whom she could not bear to imagine looking at her as an object of attraction.Not from any kind of disgust or disinterest.Quite the opposite, in fact.But the ethical ramifications… She was hisemployer, and that ruined all the fun.
It would be like one of the members of the research board offering to take her to bed.An offer she might accept based purely on the presumption that doing so might improve the chances of her next proposal.Layers of anonymity and unspoken taboo prevented such a thing from ever happening.Absurd though it might seem, her ability to provide Colm with gold gave her power over him in much the same way, and she couldn’t allow her sexual interest to muddy the waters between them.
She heard the door open, the thunk of the tub being set in place, then the slosh of it filling with water.The door shut, leaving her in silence, and she breathed a sigh of relief.She began peeling bloodstained garments from her skin and tossing them on the floor.Frog dutifully hopped over and began to devour her discarded clothes with gulping, violent jerks of his head.Ordinary nightjars used their wide beaks as nets to capture the insects that were their prey; Frog used his to force whatever raw material Fola provided him down his gullet, into the mysterious engine within every Bird of the City that, at a thought, could perform the most complex alchemy conceivable.The birds, too, were a mystery that countless archivists had dedicated lifetimes to unravelling, to no avail.Fola counted them among the many, many questions better posed directly to the First Folk, once her research made that possible.
She did her best to wipe off the worst of the grime with a hand towel, then stepped out from behind the screen to find Colm, his vest only half-buttoned, standing behind the haze of steam rising from the copper tub.He looked up at her, his face straining to hold a blank expression.Fola stared back, fighting the urge to cover herself and layer humiliation atop embarrassment.
‘Get out,’ she said through clenched teeth.
Colm nodded sharply and walked directly to the door.Fola winced as it slammed.She stood there a moment, cursing herself for not calling out before walking into the middle of the room entirely naked and also covered in blood and dirt, then lowered herself, grumbling, into the soothing warmth of the tub.
Frog cocked his head at her and tried to chirrup around a mouthful of bloody clothes.
‘Shut up,’ she muttered, and hunkered deeper into the water, as though it might sluice away her shame and confusion with all the rest of the muck.
* * *
Fola woke with a crick in her neck where it had draped against the rim of the tub.A panicked glance out of the window told she had slept the morning away.Apparently she no longer possessed her youthful capacity to manage both a productive day and a busy night.She rose from the tepid water, towelled off, and threw on her dress.If she hurried, she might make the castle just as court adjourned, the ideal time to corner the Count of Glascoed.
She allowed herself only one glance at Colm as she left the inn.He was seated at the bar in the common room, staring into a mug.She could manage a trip to the castle and a chat with the young count on her own.Bleed it.I managedeverythingon my own forfour years before I met the oaf.He’d proven capable, but was nothing more to her than a useful appendage—or four useful appendages, she supposed.Maybe five.Yet that, too, was a disgusting way to think of another person—only in terms of theiruse.
She glowered at the absurd grapevines on their courtyard trellis and crossed the old quarter of Parwys towards the castle gates, her dress swishing around her legs and Frog bobbing along, perched atop her silver staff.The ghost of Arno’s laughter followed her.He’d predicted that the complexities of the world beyond the walls would challenge and change her.Had declared, in fact, that none of his agents ever returned the same.‘The greater sacrifice is not time away from the City,’ he had said.‘It is that, on returning, the City’s wonders are never so simple and bright again.’
Thus far, she had risen to the challenge, doing the right thing whenever possible.That the most difficult moral puzzle so far centred around her attraction to a mercenary in her employ would have struck Arno to the ground with fits of hilarity.
She quickened her pace, slipping through the crowded streets.The sooner she ended the haunting in Parwys, the sooner she could return home.And who knew?If she extended an invitation to Colm to join her in the City, he just might accept.Once he was no longer her employee, and her ability to generate currency at a whim no longer muddied the waters between them, things would be much, much simpler, whether he shared her interest or not.
That line of reasoning concluded, she returned her attention to the world around her, and she noted with astonishment that the gates of the castle were shut.Court ought to have adjourned less than an hour ago, which meant there should still be nobles and retainers milling about, gossiping and negotiating in shadowed corners.She claimed a meeting with the queen—true enough, as she owed Medrith a report on the events of the prior night, assuming their arrangement still held after the terse end of their conversation—and was ushered into a foyer by a servant and left to wait.She grumbled at the inefficiencies of court decorum and paced the length of the foyer, her eyes drifting across the portraits of Parwys’s uninterrupted lineage of kings, from Abal on down to the late King Elbrech.Each portrait was captioned by a plaque listing the deeds of the king, including his additions to the castle’s sprawling footprint.
Before long her boredom eroded her excitement and transformed into frustration.The horror that had gripped the festival grounds would have disquieted the prince, yet he ought to have assembled his court to find a way to aid the injured and address the threat to his kingdom, not dismissed it early.Something was amiss.After four years in the world beyond the walls, she knew enough to deduce as much, though exactlywhatlay well beyond her powers of reasoning.
‘Ah, Fola,’ Queen Medrith said, appearing through a doorway at the end of the foyer.Delicate white blossoms dotted the sprouts that grew from her staff—a new development, though what it signified, Fola could not guess.‘If you’re here to tell me of what transpired in the night, I’m afraid your visit will have been wasted.There isn’t a soul in Parwys who’s yet to hear of it, I’m sure.’
