‘Anything you can do from the saddle, do,’ Fola said.‘I’ll tend to him when we’re out of sight.’
‘There’s an old ruin a short ride beyond Bryngodre,’ Harwick said.‘Used to camp there from time to time back when… Well, before I joined the troupe.Shelter from the cold and wind.We’ll rest there a while.’
They rode in silence for a time after that.The grey blanket of the sky lit with the red of sunset, then darkened and deepened.A brisk wind from the north rolled down the distant mountains and set a chill in Fola’s sweat-stained clothes—the stupid riding dress she’d worn in hopes of speaking with the Count of Glascoed, now torn and frayed.She heard chattering teeth and rustling garments behind her—she was not the only one suffering the onset of the autumn night.
Fola could feel the questions riding beside them—what hunted them?And what had happened to Afanan?—which began to bubble to the surface as the vast, reaching limbs of Bryngodre’s ancient oak appeared out of the twilight.To distract themselves from the cold and their fear, the troupers discussed the other members of their company, where each might have gone in the wake of the troupe’s violent dissolution, and the chances of reunion.
The adrenaline tide that had carried Fola through their mad flight had receded, leaving her limbs leaden and her mind a fog.At the first opportunity she would have Frog brew up enough medicine to bolster them all and knit Llewyn’s injuries.For now, she rode behind Harwick in a drift, which returned her thoughts again and again to Colm.The broad plane of Harwick’s back made it difficult not to think of him, try as she might.Her last glimpse as he faced off against Anwe.The blood dripping down one of his heavy upper arms and soaking the bandage that wrapped the other.
If Colm had been with her by his own, free, independent choice, motivated by belief in her cause rather than desire for her currency, the prospect of his having traded his life for her escape might have fostered simple grief rather than this guilt that left her shrivelled and hollowed out.Or… perhaps not.The impossibility of answering that counterfactual question only deepened the pain.She only wished she could convince herself that he had risked deathfor her, rather than from a duty born of the gold she had given him.
Siwan screamed, shattering Fola’s dour introspection.
Siwan leapt from the saddle, startling Mable and Damon.She ran to the edge of the road, her skirts whirling in a gust of wind that stirred the grass and brush.Another scream tore from her, then became a sob as she fell to her knees beside a humped form half-hidden in the grass and night-time dark.
Comforting the Dead
YC 1189
In death we become our most vicious selves; it is the task of the living to remind us of our virtues.
Archivist Jagh Hud,Death and Undeath,YC948
Jareth had thought death would be different.
The pain had not ended, for one thing.He still felt it.A burning hole through his middle.The spilling and then slow seep of his blood.The sodden fabric of his shirt dragging through the grass as he crawled towards the road and fading hope for help.
Where was that bitch farm girl who’d stabbed him?She must have caught a glimpse of the gold.
Killed for a handful of coins.What an absurd, predictable end.All his promise, all his dreams, extinguished over nothing.
The pain burned, searing through him, its fire fed by memories that replayed themselves again and again.The golden curls bouncing on the back of his mother’s head as she left the Daisy and Drake for the last time—as she lefthimfor the last time.Seeing her again on the stage of The Rose, a woman transformed by wealth and adulation.Only there by her invitation, her first and only gesture that she remembered having borne a son.That idiot boy Damon givinghimnotes and suggestions, when the fool had been no more than a tumbler only a year before.
The girl.Her spray of freckles.The wooden stake she had driven through his spine.
A life ought to mean something.To have a destination, its struggles only the twists and turns on the path to earning that longed-for reward.Ought not to end suddenly, for no reason but an accidental meeting on the road.
Or perhaps that belief was only the product of the stories he had bathed in all his life.A false trust in narratives meant to hold attention and offer reassurance, rather than reveal the truth.
A scream anchored him to the present moment.A scream he knew.
Memory had become clearer to him than sight.When he thought of his mother on that stage, it was as though he were there again, watching her curls gleam in the multicoloured lights—wonders in their own right; The Rose had an old legacy, and rumour told the First Folk themselves had built it.He heard his mother’s voice catching in those distant, perfect rafters and rolling down to every ear in the theatre.Smelled the sweat and perfume of the people around him, felt the plush seat, so much finer than anything he knew from the Daisy and Drake.
But the world around him had become clouded, its sounds muted, its textures vague.Only his own corpse held clarity.In a landscape like smudged, muddy watercolour it stood out with the precision and vibrancy of reality.
His killer, too, would hold that clarity.His pain pulsed at the thought of her.Images of terrible violence flashed through his unsteady mind.A vision of revenge, promising relief from his agony.She deserved to suffer as he suffered.More, for what she had done was a worse crime than simple hurt.A clipping of a rose before its blooming.The burning of an unfinished book.Destruction of a wonder before its chance to become wondrous.
‘It’s Jareth,’ the voice that had screamed said, reminding him again that something existed other than the painful past and mourned-for future.A figure knelt over his corpse: one that resolved slowly, like a blot of ink drying into the semblance of a girl he recognised.With a swell of rage he thought, for a moment, she was his killer.But no.She held a certain sharpness, but not the awful, demanding clarity he knew would mark out the origin of his pain.
He did know her, though.Siwan.Not an innocent.A girl stained by dozens of deaths—accidents, perhaps, but born from her nonetheless.His own death had its origin in fear of her.
Delivering his rage to her would not soothe him, he knew.Yet there was an impulse, and a temptation.
Other figures gradually appeared.He recognised them all, though they were little more than shadowed silhouettes.Only one carried a name, seared into him by resentment and frustration.The boy Damon, who thought so much of himself.A jumped-up tumbler with pretensions to the stage, and none of the gravitas or destiny it required.The boy had been given not only prominent roles, but the influence of authorship, which stung Jareth like nettles.Not the same pain that dwelt at the core of him, but an offshoot of it, sharp with thorns.
‘Poor bastard,’ Damon muttered.
‘Serves him right for running off,’ another voice said.
