Spil barked a laugh, and Damon grinned.‘Do we look it?’
The boy shrugged, defiant in the face of unexpected mockery.‘The last folk to come that way was nobles, is all.’Sides, who else but nobles can be tossing these away?’He waggled the penny.
‘Fair point, lad,’ Harwick said, reaching down to tousle the boy’s hair; the boy, unamused, went on glaring at Damon.
‘These nobles who came through,’ Fola asked.‘Was one a young man with dark hair?Pale?’
‘Aye,’ the boy muttered.‘Young Count Ifan.Y’think we don’t know our own princes here?’
‘He’s a lip on him, this one,’ Spil said, smiling.
Fola heaved a sigh of relief.She’d feared Ifan would travel the long way—through Forgard and Afondir—as he had when coming to court.Haste on her part would mean little if she beat the man she needed to speak with in a race to his own house.That he chose such an uncommon and dangerous route raised other questions, however.Queen Medrith had suggested he left court to put down the rebellion in his lands, but Fola suspected that the rebellion itself was only a ruse, and that the young count’s errand had less to do with loyalty to the kingdom and more to do with the haunting.The wraiths had sent him dreams, the story went, after his father’s death four years ago.Sparking a madness that had faded since, though this supposed ‘rebellion’ had arisen in its wake.
He had left mere hours after wraiths had descended on the festival, after all.More, the haunting had struck first in Glascoed, claiming Ifan’s father.And, from what Fola had gleaned, Llewyn and Siwan had their origins in the county’s forested reaches.Fola had never been a particularly linear thinker—she blamed a great deal of her repeated failures with the research board on her inability toexplicitlyconnect the dots of her ideas.Her thought process was more holistic, like a spell.The magic circle drawn, the symbols in place, the connections made, but amounting to little until that final stroke of the pen.A stroke she felt certain would fall in Glascoed after a word with young Ifan.
* * *
A change came over Llewyn as the First Folk Road led into the Greenwood.
His sullen streak had continued through their two days in Miggenbrot.He had left the room he shared with Harwick, Damon and Spil only to eat scanty meals before disappearing again.Harwick had tried to draw him into the impromptu performance the other troupers put on in the small, rickety common room.There was no real need for them to perform.Fola had paid handsomely for the two rooms, which would normally have gone to house barge workers waiting for wagons of ore down from the mountains or the pale, prized ghostwood from the forest.
Nevertheless, Damon had stood up before the gathered locals and riverfolk with their mugs of beer and cups of whisky and begun reciting ballads with no accompaniment, telling folk and faerie tales.The kind grandparents in places like Parwys spun for children to warn them away from harm.Tales of wicked wolves in the woodland shadows, of fiends awake only by moonlight, of witches that dwelt in old First Folk ruins and gobbled children up.Of the Beast-King, the ancient enemy, who still stalked the nightmares of the good people of Parwys.
When he tired, Spil got up to do some juggling, and Harwick wagered a silver penny against a tin bit that he could arm-wrestle any man in the town to a standstill.He soon progressed to such feats of strength as dangling delightedly shrieking children from his arms.Siwan stood on a bench and, accompanied by a local fiddler, led the crowd in a round of rowing chants and fisherfolk’s ditties and, as the night progressed and the children were herded off to bed, the kinds of bawdy songs one would expect in a dockside inn.
After terror, grief and flight, the troupers had found comfort in normalcy.Fola joined in on the songs she knew, or could learn, but otherwise watched them, reviewing her notebook or feeding scraps from her stew to Frog—now free of his bundle and limping about the tabletop, his wounded leg healed and a fresh little talon growing like a spring bud.She indulged in precisely one glass of wine and tried not to let it remind her of an inn like this one in the wilds of Tarebach.By the end the troupers all seemed tired, but refreshed, and went to their beds laughing and singing snatches of song.
Save Llewyn, who seemed no better when Fola saw him the next day.He seemed a dry branch, drained of life.Drawn inwards, he had roused only once when Siwan stood to sing, and, when she finished, rose and retreated to his room.The only clue Fola had to explain what ailed him was the regular brushing of his forefinger against his thumb, touching a line of slightly smoothed, slightly paler flesh where he must once have worn a ring.
She had glimpsed such a ring below the second knuckle of the thumb in Jareth’s memories of his death, on the hand of the freckled girl who had killed him.
On the day they left Miggenbrot, as the rushing of the river Afoneang receded behind them to be replaced by the voices of warblers and woodpeckers singing their autumn songs, Llewyn’s melancholy grew into a sharp, creeping anxiety.Despite his bruised ribs he rode alert on Midnight’s back.One of Llewyn’s hands hovered on the hilt of his ghostwood blade while he watched the treeline.
‘Worried about bandits?’Fola ventured.She, Damon and Spil had decided to walk to spare the horses.
‘Something like that,’ Llewyn muttered.
‘If they tried us they’d be in for a nasty surprise, eh?’Fola said.‘No.I think it’s something else.Something that’s been bothering you since we left Parwys.’She hesitated.Death was a difficult subject to discuss, foreign as it was to the City.Ghosts were easier than heartbreak.‘Afanan?’she said.
Llewyn shook his head, then brushed his finger along that circle of smoothed skin on his thumb.He glanced towards Siwan, who was tossing jokes down to Damon from Mable’s back.‘What do you intend for her?’
‘Exactly what I said,’ Fola answered.‘To take her back to the City, where she will be safe, and where her power can be studied.’
‘So that you can use it,’ he said flatly.
Frog wobbled and pawed at her neck with the soft nub that had budded to replace the foot he had lost to Torin.A sensation that made Fola’s skin crawl, but she couldn’t find it in herself to make him stop.Seeing him injured had rekindled her affection for the bird.
‘I’ll not lie,’ she said.‘It is a new power, like nothing I have seen, and I have made it a point these last few years to see as much as possible.But the more it is understood, the better it can be made safe.You must want that.’
‘I do,’ Llewyn said.‘But try as I might, I do not trust you.’
‘You came to me for help,’ Fola pointed out.‘Odd way to show distrust.’
‘I had little choice, after Afanan…’ Again the finger swept the absence of his ring.Here, then, was the heart of what troubled him.
‘You’ve yet to tell me what happened to her, and why you came for help,’ Fola pointed out.‘I’ll say this, Llewyn—I’m not invulnerable.Killing me is difficult, particularly doing so in a way that will amount to more than a delay.’Though—and she did not say this, quite purposefully—with Frog wounded and having difficulty flying, her ability to survive an ordinary death had become less certain than she would like.‘But Icanbe killed.I will be better able to protect us all the more I know about whatever hunts you.’
Llewyn’s grip on his sword tightened.His gaze darted to the forest.She waited for an answer, but he only watched the shadows between the trees.
