Letter from Archivist Tan Semn to Hierophant Adhamha III of Goll,YC1166
Llewyn picked over the ruin of the Silver Lake stage, gathering up torn pennants and shattered lanterns, salvaging what could be saved and clearing away the rest.It was nearly noon, and watchmen from the city had long since come to cart the corpses away.
He paused beside one of the tent poles.A loose string of bunting fluttered from it in the noon breeze.The white flags—sewn by Roni and Siwan only days before—were speckled with droplets and slashes of red.He caught hold of the end of the string, tore it down, and added it to the pile of refuse to be burned.
This was not the first time the raven fiend had reached out from Siwan to wreak havoc upon the world.Though four years ago, in Caer Bren, had not been this dire.A weed of doubt, its roots never fully dug away, sprouted in him.None of this was Siwan’s fault.The nightmare was the product of generations of cruelty and violence in Nyth Fran, a callous willingness to trade innocent lives for comfort and safety.Yet she carried the echo of that evil with her, and it was growing stronger.
‘Come away from there, Llewyn.’Afanan’s voice drew him back to the present moment.She stood at the edge of what had been the audience pit.Harwick, Spil, Tula and Damon had long since torn down the stage and carried it away to the more southerly end of the festival grounds.There, they would attempt to revive their trade.Fola’s donation had been generous, but the troupe was nonetheless unwilling to abandon even the slimmest chance to perform before the largest and most enthusiastic crowd to gather in their lifetimes.
Assuming anyone would return.
Llewyn took down the pole and carried it across his shoulders as he followed Afanan back to the wagon.The hastily bundled blue and white drapery of the pavilion—stained and torn, but salvageable—overflowed the wagon’s bed, which had been packed with trunks full of the troupe’s various supplies.He shoved the tent pole into place beside the other three and whistled.With a snort and a grunt, Mable and Rusty, the two draught horses, began to pull.The wagon creaked and groaned as its wheels began to roll over the trampled earth of the festival ground.
They made their way through the daytime crowd, thinned first by the terrors of the night and then by the natural rhythm of such festivities.Before long they had reached their new site at the far southern end of the grounds, an hour’s walk to the city gates.An attempt to distance themselves from the horrors.
No one beyond their trusted circle—save Fola—could prove a connection between the Silver Lake Troupe and the haunting, yet their stage had stood at the epicentre, and coincidence served well enough as proof for dark rumours.When the festivities ended and this gathered audience dispersed to the four corners of the kingdom, any infamy born here would spread like wildfire and leave no safe place in all of Parwys.
Harwick and Spil had finished reassembling the stage—little more than a collection of wooden pallets bolted together and hidden beneath drapery.Only the stage floor itself had required any real craftsmanship.It was an object of great pride for Harwick, who had built it from scraps assembled over a course of years, carefully cut to fit together like a jigsaw puzzle, then sanded and lacquered to form an even, sure surface for the performers.Damon and Siwan sat on the edge of it now, their feet dangling just above the trampled grass.Siwan still huddled beneath a blanket, her face drawn and deep, dark bruises under her troubled eyes.Damon tried to cheer her with little tricks of sleight of hand, and a smile cut through the cloud around her from time to time.While Llewyn and Afanan guided the horses and cart into camp, Damon disappeared a little bird of folded paper into one palm, then reappeared it in the other and dropped it to fall in a lazy, fluttering spiral into Siwan’s lap, prompting a smile and brief applause.
‘You are troubled, Llewyn,’ Afanan said.‘You needn’t be.’
She scratched Rusty behind the ear and let the horse gently lip the fingers of her other hand while they waited for Harwick.The strongman would get testy if they parked the wagon wherever they pleased.Llewyn watched Damon produce another square of paper—this one an old, yellow strip of broadsheet—which soon, by subtle folding, became a convincing daisy on a short stalk with a tiny leaf.Siwan, her laughter bright as though her troubles were but a memory, accepted the flower with a bow at the waist, then tucked it between Damon’s ear and his horn.
‘It was worse than four years ago,’ Llewyn said.‘And it was bad enough, then.’
‘There were more people about,’ Afanan said lamely, her voice betraying how little she thought of the excuse.
‘That isn’t what I mean, and you know it.In Caer Bren it was just a little shaking, the yellow in her eyes, some spots of blood in the sclera… This time, it was like she was back on the altar.’
Then, he had acted on impulse.Long stretches of his life as a gwyddien had been spent in hibernation nestled in ghostwood roots, awake only when called to serve the Grey Lady’s ends.A rhythm that had obscured his sense of time’s passing and rendered him little more than an extension of the Lady’s will.Yet a kernel had survived in the depths of his mind—a vestigial self that clung tight to those few memories of life before he was taken, and buried, and changed.The scent of his mother.A vague, calming face smiling down.First steps in a garden of fragrant herbs and wild flowers, the sun warm on his face, a butterfly flitting, settling on white petals, its wings like iridescent sails in the afternoon light.
And then the interruption.Rough, cold hands on his arms.The bite of silver and taste of iron.The smell of blood-wet earth.The agony of roots piercing and growing into his flesh.And the coal of anger that had smouldered within him.
He had defied the Grey Lady and saved Siwan to avenge that remembered self.
For eight years now he had lived as though he were a mortal man, building a semblance of a life.But taking off his ring had not returned his humanity, nor the vaporous years that had slipped by in glimpses and gasps while he slept and served.Had, in truth, only replaced enslavement to the Grey Lady’s whims with an inescapable fear of her.A sense that any fell wind might carry her voice, any songbird might watch with her eyes, that her servants might lurk beneath the roots of any stand of trees he passed—ready to snatch him back and destroy the girl he had failed to slay.
‘What if we did not truly save her?’Llewyn said, the thought so terrible he could only voice it as a whisper.‘What if we only delayed the inevitable?’
Afanan studied him a moment.‘What if the Grey Lady was right, you mean?’
The words stung, but he could conjure nothing in defence.‘Siwan is dangerous.You must admit that.’
‘Is she?’Afanan prodded.‘She told me about your conversation after you pulled her from the stage.You wanted to flee with her.Tear her away from everything she knows and everyone she loves.Who wouldn’t be angered?What young girl wouldn’t lash out?’
‘Her “lashing out” is not like that of other girls,’ Llewyn argued.‘Dozens were killed.’
‘And do you think that you and her, alone on the road, would make for more stability?’Afanan shook her head in disbelief.Her voice was harsh, quite different from her usual gentle banter.The events of the previous night had troubled her, too, though she did not show it as easily as he did.‘Your fears and her stubbornness,’ she went on, ‘clashing constantly like flint and steel, with no buffer between you.Parwys would be lucky to face onlyoneoutburst of the raven fiend a week.’
Guilt grew easily from fear.Afanan was right.The events of the night were as much his fault as Siwan’s.His efforts to protect her put others in danger.But if he did nothing, the Grey Lady would find them and kill them both.
Siwan’s laughter drew Llewyn from those dark corners of his mind where cobwebs of the Grey Lady’s voice still clung.Damon had put aside simple sleight of hand and taken to gambolling about the field before the stage, showing off the acrobatic stunts that had been his contribution to the troupe before he found his talent for drama.He turned a series of cartwheels and came up with hands full of dandelions and meadow daisies to match the paper flower still lodged safely in the brown curls behind his ear.Siwan accepted the childish bouquet with a mock bow, then planted a kiss on the lad’s forehead before he could react.He blinked in surprise, then turned another routine of flips and spins to distract from his rising blush while she laughed again, as clear as a songbird in the stillness of morning.
‘She’s only a child, Llewyn, whatever else she is,’ Afanan said softly, the venom gone from her voice.‘She deserves whatever chance we can give her to live the life she wants to live.And she has the best chance with the people who love her and care for her.We can protect her together.’
‘Even if that chance puts all your lives at risk?’Llewyn argued, though he hated himself for it.It was the Grey Lady’s voice, her line of thinking.
‘A calculation we need not make much longer.’He heard again the uncharacteristic harshness in her voice.Perhaps, hearing him speak this way, she was wondering about him in much the same way he was wondering about Siwan—how far could a gwyddien really stray from its master’s influence?Another fraught question, and no hint of an answer.‘Good fortune has brought us the woman Fola,’ Afanan went on.‘If any power in the world can rid Siwan of the fiend’s curse, it will be found in the City of the Wise.’
