Damon coughed and scratched at the curled tip of his horn.‘We don’t have the budget or the cast size to perform pitched battles, nor to blast a divot in our stage.I admit, though, it’s an omission.Down there, Abal and the Beast-King fought their final battle.Abal called upon the powers of the Old Stones as he never had before, as no king of Parwys would hence.The earth itself opened up to swallow the Beast-King’s army, and waters rushed up from underground to drown them.Abal and the Beast-King duelled on the shores of the newly made lake, until at last the Beast-King was thrown down, his body left to the waters and carrion birds.’
‘Seems silly to fight in a marsh,’ Harwick observed.
‘It wasn’t one at the time,’ Damon said.‘The Windmarsh was made by the waters flowing up from Abal’s Scar.And these hills were once mountains, broken and reduced by the magics Abal and the Beast-King wielded.A battle that not only reshaped the kingdom, but the land itself.’
‘Could this be the cause of the haunting, then?’Spil wondered aloud from behind them, where he and Llewyn took up the rear of their party.‘Plenty of sudden deaths.No proper graves to speak of.’
Harwick, Damon and Siwan all fixed him with quizzical stares.Llewyn only gazed down at the lake, drawn and distant as he had been since their flight from Parwys.
‘From what Fola’s said, it seems a possibility!’Spil said, glaring at all three of his detractors in turn.‘What?I’m not clever enough to solve such a grand, important puzzle?Is that it?’
Fola considered the notion.‘It may be,’ she said.‘Though wraiths this violent are usually born from a desire for justice.If anything, they ought to haunt Galca and the Beast-King’s descendants for leading them to their pointless deaths, not Parwys for defending itself.’
She thought, but did not say, that the haunting had likelier origins in the soldiers Abal had led to their deaths.A suspicion she hoped to confirm with the young Count of Glascoed.
‘Would wraiths understand their fates so well?’Harwick asked.
Fola shrugged.‘What does the common soldier stand to gain by invading the lands of his neighbours?A bit of loot?The vicious thrill to be found in raping and pillaging?Do you think every soul the Beast-King conscripted had such wickedness at heart?Or did most long for their homes, their farms, their families?Only to lose them forever.To die, and to be remembered in history as part of a count of casualties.A footnote in the story of the king who burned their lives to fuel his own ambitions.’
Damon considered this.‘Then why doesn’t every war birth a thousand ghosts?’
‘Who is to say it doesn’t?’Fola replied.
That ended the heady conversation for the day, though from time to time Fola caught Damon gazing at the lake below them as the road descended back towards the marsh and the river beyond.
Spil worried for the horses—they’d walked a full night and a day, resting only briefly for Jareth’s funeral, and had long since begun to flag.The decision was made to continue on to the town of Miggenbrot, just visible from the rise, where they might secure food and lodgings before pressing on to Glascoed itself.Siwan raised the question of Frog’s healing salve, which Fola had administered to Llewyn’s flank, and wondered if she might not have some magic to ease the poor animals.Fola took the opportunity to give a little lecture—the salve took its cost in accelerating the subject’s metabolism.They would allow the horses to plod on a few miles more, but at the cost of a ravenous hunger and bone-deep exhaustion which would see them stable-bound for days.
‘Though I suppose we’ll have to sell them in Miggenbrot before we press on, anyway,’ Fola said off-handedly, and was astonished at the vehement reaction she received.
‘Sell them?For a pittance of what they’re worth!’Spil snapped.‘Midnight could be a noblewoman’s horse.A town like that’ll have no use for her but to pull a cart or turn a winch-wheel.’
‘They’re as much part of the troupe as we are,’ Siwan argued, stroking Mable’s broad chestnut back.‘If we must be delayed while they recover, we’ll be delayed.’
Fola might have easily defeated the first argument with a flourish of her purse.The second struck her close to the heart.They were only horses to her, but clearly not to the people who had lived with them, cared for them, and relied upon them for years.
Only Llewyn seemed not to be offended by her suggestion.He had shown little reaction to anything since their departure from Parwys.Perhaps it was only the pain of his wound.Yet the melancholy that gripped him seemed deeper than physical pain.
The loss of the sorceress Afanan, maybe?On first meeting them, when Siwan’s power had descended on the festival grounds Fola had thought there might be some romantic tie between the two.Both had seemed to care for Siwan as though she were their daughter, and they had leaned on each other for reassurance and support.The question of her fate wove tension in the air.A tension the troupers seemed as yet unwilling to touch.
A loss that Fola could understand, and which she turned her thoughts away from—deliberately and expediently—lest they unwind the mental bandages she had bound tight around her guilt over Colm.
In the end, they agreed to spend two days in Miggenbrot for the sake of the horses, and for Llewyn.More time than Fola felt comfortable wasting.They had twelve days total before the young prince was to be crowned, before Parwys would have its newest king.The queen regent would stand in the way of the Mortal Church’s machinations to the best of her ability while she held power, but Fola had little confidence in Owyn.The boy was scared, his nascent rule unstable.The promise of the haunting’s end, by whatever means, would entice him.
Fola had seen what the Church’s methods had left behind in Tarebach.Ancient knowledge scoured from the world, treated no better than charred bits left behind in the bottom of a cooking pot.Gleaming towers reduced to rubble.The First Folk roads themselves twisted and crumbling, sprouting growths like blackened tumours where the broken energies of enchantment congealed.The fae folk of the rivers and forests vanished like mist.
Yes, the fiends and monsters had been destroyed, but so much beauty with them.Untold knowledge still locked in vaults, and now forever lost.The thought that some key to the language of the First Folk had been hidden in the reaches of Tarebach, only to be burned away by the Mortal Church, had so haunted the archivists of the Labyrinthine Library that hundreds left the City, racing ahead of a storm of destruction and ignorance they had feared would soon be unleashed by the crusade.
That was the price Torin would charge to end the haunting.An annihilation of what magic the kingdom held.The Old Stones and the rituals of the druids.The weapon that had carved Abal’s Scar—though Fola supposed the world might be better off without such weapons, as it was better off without the dread engines of Ulun.The destruction, too, of whatever fae power had birthed Llewyn, and later Siwan.
And not only whatever had made Llewyn and Siwan what they were, but the man and the girl themselves.The annihilation of magic in Parwys would destroy them, too, and all else like them.That, Fola would not allow.Both to protect the knowledge that Siwan’s strange soul promised to yield, and because in the days she had known them Fola had come to like these troupers.The memory of how they had gathered around Siwan in her distress, each lending what little aid they could, had lingered with her.Their strength and compassion born of shared burdens.Now she carried a share of those burdens, and for the first time in her life she belonged to a party of companions.More, she felt these people might be, or at least become, herfriends.A childish sentiment for a woman of her age—she had known them only days, and theirs was a relationship of mutual usefulness, not affection—but a feeling she could not rationalise away.
She had never had friends in childhood.Playmates, yes, but never confidants.Never those who would gather around her, as the troupe had gathered around Siwan.Maybe her childish need persisted, then.A need unfulfilled and lingering, like a wraith’s need for justice.
These feelings presented a complicating factor, but one that only strengthened her desire to see the haunting sorted before Prince Owyn gave in to pressure from the Mortal Church.Thus her sense of urgency stretched those two days in Miggenbrot until they felt like a week not of restful waiting but agonised, torturous delay.
The town itself was little more than a cluster of houses in rows along the banks of the river.People watched them closely as they rode through town—Harwick walked, now, to spare Rusty the burden of his weight—but a young boy gave them ready enough directions to an inn.
‘You folk some kind of nobles, then?’the boy asked, wide-eyed, after Fola tossed him a silver penny for his trouble.
