But it was a valid observation, supported by clear evidence.Not saying anything seemed more rude to her, in fact.Still, she could tell Colm wanted the topic dropped, and likely buried forever, so she dropped it.‘Take as much ointment as you need.Frog can make plenty more.And plenty more gold.’
‘Payment for the botched rescue?’he said, that wry grin returning.
‘If you insist,’ Fola said.‘Or a first instalment on your payment as my guide and bodyguard.We’ll deal with these corpses, then we’re on our way to Alberon, and from there a ship to Parwys.I’d like to put some distance between us and here before we sleep again.’
‘Deal with the corpses?’Colm paused midway through spreading ointment on the skin over his ribs.
‘Yes.’And not by conjuring their ghosts.Rather, she would settle them—whoever they had been in life, they deserved peace in death.She could give them that much kindness.With the tip of her staff Fola scraped two roughly shovel-shaped outlines in the dirt on the roadside, then retrieved her notebook of spellpaper and her cartridge pen of silver-dusted ink.It proved awkward to hold the notebook with her still-stiff left arm.She squatted, placed the notebook on the ground and drew two thaumaturgic circles, each on its own page.She left a finger’s width of each circle unfinished, tore the pages from the book, laid them out on the ground to overlie her dirt-drawings, then closed each circle with a quick slash of her pen.
A flash of white flame traced her designs.The smell of burnt ink lingered in the air.Lines of silvery mist hung over the ground, conveying her spell into the world.With a grunt, she stabbed her staff into the soil and levered free one of the two shovels she had made.Heavy, composed entirely of spellwrought iron, and awkward.Still, it would get the job done.
It would occur to her later, after witnessing a burial in Parwys, that she might have dug the graves with thaumaturgy rather than simply conjuring shovels.Her impulse, in that moment, in that place, was not towards efficiency, but towards doing right by the dead.
‘First you send one of your would-be killers off with a bag of gold,’ Colm said, shaking his head.‘Then you bury his friends.If you’re worried about beasts and plague, we could burn them.’
‘A bit further south we could.’Fola drove her spade into the earth and grimaced as a twinge of pain shot up her burned arm, cutting through the cool numbing of the ointment.‘Up here, though, you bury your dead.This isn’t a proper graveyard, but proper treatment is better than leaving them to the elements, and certainly better than desecration.Better still if we knew what markers to leave, or what rites to perform, but the Mortal Church is a bit of a mystery to me.Hard to know much about people who want to kill you.’
‘It’s all very good of you,’ Colm said.‘But showing kindness to your enemies is a waste, particularly when they’re already dead.’
‘They’re not my enemies any more.’Fola leaned on the shovel, catching her breath and giving the pain in her arm a chance to settle.‘And I’m interested in studying ghosts, not making more, if I can help it.’
She went back to digging, and after a few more minutes Colm picked up the other shovel and joined her.Frog watched from his perch on Fellstar’s saddle, occasionally preening the red feathers of his belly.They dug four graves, none as deep as she’d have liked, but they were injured and tired.There is only so much a body, even bolstered by magic, can manage in a single afternoon.Colm stabbed the templars’ blades into their mounds to mark the graves.He even muttered what sounded to Fola like a prayer, though it was too quiet for her to catch the words, and made a pair of gestures over each mound—first three nested triangles, then a nine-pointed star.
‘I suppose it’s not a kindness for their sake,’ Colm said as night fell, when the last of the bodies was buried.‘It’s to keep their ghosts from haunting us.’
‘It’s both.’Fola shooed Frog off Fellstar’s saddle, then pulled herself up.‘Makes you wonder what went on in Parwys, doesn’t it, to make so many ghosts the king lost his mind.’
With a squawk of annoyance, Frog settled onto her shoulder.She scratched the feathers on the back of his head and turned Fellstar towards the road.Colm retrieved his own horse from the stand of trees where he had hidden it—a deep-chested destrier called Tower, and as much a monster to ordinary horses as Colm was to ordinary men.It would be a long, hard night of riding.Who knew how many people in that common room had caught the rumour of a Citizen and started spreading it—to say nothing of the young templar she had let escape.When word reached the Mortal Church, more would come hunting her, and with more powerful magic.A long, hard night with muscles sore from shovelling and fingers of fire raking down her left arm.
No matter.She could ride through the pain.It would heal, as all things do, in time.
II.The Gwyddien and the Raven Fiend
Nyth Fran
YC 1181
Many believe that fae and fiends predate the First Folk.Others identify them with such beings as the Servants, semi-sapients created to serve a specific purpose, now behaving in bizarre fashion to follow orders that lack coherence without their original context.What is certain is that they are as inscrutable as they are intelligent.
Archivist Eltan Oora,The Taxonomy of Sapience,YC1098
A haunting grows from a tangle of twisted roots.The deepest reach into layers of a forgotten past, long overwritten by more useful stories, believed myth by all but those whose histories drip with pain and rage as they pass from elder’s mouth to child’s ear.The shallowest reach into fresher soil, drawing from injustices still in living, mortal memory.Two pains—old and new—that feed one into the other until the tree sprouts and horror reigns.
In Parwys, that shallow root found anchor in the aftermath of plague, in the Greenwood, in the half-forgotten village of Nyth Fran.
* * *
the Grey Lady whispered in Llewyn’s mind.
He rode towards Nyth Fran, a quiet place sheltered in the northern reaches of the Greenwood, surrounded by craggy wooded hills and cleared fields thick with barley.In those days, plague stalked the kingdom of Parwys, but the sky above Nyth Fran was blue, unmarred by the smoke of corpse-fires.
Llewyn twisted the silver band on his thumb, drawing a small pain. he thought, and knew that she would hear.
The crows watched, black eyes peering from black-feathered faces.They perched on branches that met above the narrow road, skeletal fingers reaching out from the depths of the wood.Not a true road of First Folk make, only a pair of wagon ruts binding one village to the next.At the Grey Lady’s prodding, and with the protection and elision of her glamour, he had met with the steward who served the Count of Glascoed, the lord of the Greenwood.His questions had been answered with confusion and annoyance.The village’s name seemed to pass through the steward’s mind like water through a sieve.
That had convinced Llewyn.There was enchantment here in Nyth Fran.A contorting of the world out of alignment with the Grey Lady’s will.An intrusion that could not be tolerated here, in the heart of her domain.
He had come to uncover that contortion.To serve his purpose as her gwyddien—the purpose he had been taken, and changed, and raised to serve—and twist it back into proper shape, if he could.
