‘I don’t think he hated her,’ Llewyn said.‘But the safety of his village was more important to him than she was.In the end, she may have meantsomethingto him, but she did not mean enough.’
‘She was sacrificed to the fiend,’ Fola said, recalling her first and final conversation with the sorceress Afanan.‘The one that now possesses her.’
Llewyn seemed startled, then nodded slowly, perhaps wondering how she had deduced so much so quickly.She could not bear to tell him that it was a common pattern.Not dissimilar from what she had encountered in Ulun.Even without Afanan’s help, she would have arrived at the same conclusion before long.
‘How did you save her from it?’she asked.
Another moment of hesitation.There was some growing trust between them, but only a thin vine, easily snapped.He laid his ghostwood blade across his lap and touched the broken tip.‘With this.It holds a piece of my soul.I broke off a fragment, and Afanan put Siwan’s soul within it, to hide something of her beyond the reach of the fiend.She wears it around her neck and grows sick when she is parted from it.Afanan worked a spell to bind the fiend, but as you have seen, it is imperfect.’
He meant what she had seen at the festival grounds, when Siwan’s power called down the full force of the haunting.But Fola had also seen, through her loupe, the complex lattice of powers woven into the girl’s body and mind, how the fiend’s power had pushed against it and nearly unravelled all.These revelations went some distance to explaining the various threads, but not far enough for her to trace the pattern entirely.
‘Llewyn,’ Fola ventured.‘This may seem an insensitive question, but what, exactly, are you?’
He bristled at that, his fingers curling around the wooden blade in his lap.‘This, too, may seem insensitive, Fola,’ he replied.‘You are powerful, and skilled in magic, and that makes you useful to me.You have shown that you will help to contain the fiend within Siwan, should the need arise.And I believe that your agenda runs counter to that of my enemies.So we will stay in your company, and I will tell you things that will aid in your defence of the girl.But I will not share my own weaknesses with you, nor give you enough to bend Siwan to your will.’
‘That isn’t my intention,’ Fola snapped, and felt a fool for it at once.
‘Of course not.’Llewyn scoffed.‘You serve a benevolent purpose.But that is no safeguard at all.If anything, it makes you more difficult to trust than if your motives were more selfish.’His finger brushed his absent ring.‘Benevolence is often a glamour cast over cruelty.What better justification for a singular evil than the greater good?What comfort is it to the wretched that their suffering serves some higher purpose?’
‘Whatever you believe about me, you are wrong.’Fola could feel the argument twisting her, making her more desperate to win than to be right.An old, familiar feeling.One that had presaged some of her worst mistakes.She took a deep breath, trying to calm herself.‘Was what I did for Jareth some exploitation of the weak to serve my agenda?’
Llewyn took a moment to answer.‘You want to think of yourself in a certain way,’ he said.‘As did I, for a long time.You do things to support that image, perhaps, or to plant it in the minds of others.But you may well do cruel things if you think that they are righteous.’
‘With that kind of thinking, there can be no trust between people at all!’Fola took another breath and fought to quiet her voice.It was the dead of night, and here she was almost shouting while people slept around her.Poor proof of her compassion.‘If you can believe neither my words nor my deeds, then there can be no communication between us.Only a constant fencing of manipulation and deceit while we each pursue our selfish ends, hoping to extract more than we give away ourselves.’
‘You have just described the way the world works, Fola,’ Llewyn said.
‘Not my world,’ Fola said.
Llewyn shook his head.‘Did you walk into the royal court and announce your intent to take whatever ancient powers you might find back to your City?You revealed yourself to us swiftly enough, but we are little threat to you.Do not pretend that the truth is anything but one tool you use, insofar as you use it.One among many.’
That stung, because it was fair.Truth and deception were coins she had spent equally.Yet there was a difference between adisguiseand alie, wasn’t there?The latter was meant to undermine the truth.The former was only a means to slip through situations where the truth became inconvenient.‘I only hide because to reveal what I am would make what I need to do impossible.’
‘Then if you did intend harm to Siwan, you would not tell me,’ Llewyn said.‘You have just admitted as much.’
‘What about Afanan?’Fola blurted, and regretted it as his expression hardened.His grief was too raw, the argument too heated, to bring her into it.Fola would have shut down any conversation that wandered into her abandonment of Colm.Yet determination to defend herself and win the argument burned away her compassion.‘She offered you and Siwan shelter and kindness.A place in her little family.I saw how you all gathered around Siwan, to care for her after she lost control in Parwys.Why?What dark agenda was Afanan secretly pursuing by creating that?’
‘Afanan tried,’ he said, then paused, his expression pained and thoughtful.‘But Jareth’s betrayal revealed how fragile those bonds truly were.And now, without her, the troupe is shattered.’His fingers traced the edge of his sword.The fire between them crackled.A log broke, and fell, casting up another whirl of sparks.Another crack sounded, this one from the forest.
Llewyn came alert.He unfolded into a crouch, readied his sword, and slunk away from the fire.Fola’s heart thundered in the sudden quiet.Instinctively, she reached for her staff, then swallowed a curse at its absence.Her pen and notebook of spellpaper were near enough at hand, but without any idea of what she might be facing—of what had stoked such fear in Llewyn—she had no idea what sort of spell to write.She scrawled a few hasty lines by firelight, preparing the basic structure of a dozen different possibilities.
Another crack, and a low, rumbling groan.Fola peered into the dark between the trees, made all the darker against the glow of the fire.She crept away from the circle of light, unsure of where Llewyn had gone, hoping her vision adjusted to the dark before an arrow—or something worse—came flying out of the woods to skewer her.
A shadow moved against the underbrush.Broad and hulking, bracing itself against a tree with one arm, another held across its chest, cradled by a third…
‘Wait!Llewyn!’Fola shouted.A flood of relief swept her to her feet—giddiness to see him alive, and a sudden weightlessness as guilt fell from her shoulders.‘It’s Colm!’
Llewyn emerged from a fold of shadow at the edge of the forest, his ghostwood blade easing towards the earth.Damon, Harwick, Spil and Siwan sprang awake, Fola’s shouts of surprised elation taken for an alarm.
‘Bloody hell,’ Colm grumbled as he stumbled into the clearing.‘You couldn’t have stayed another day in Miggenbrot?’
He smiled, which became a wince.Fola wanted to throw herself at him, to apologise with an embrace for her abandoning him.But the extent of his wounds made her hesitate.His left upper arm, which he held cradled against his chest, had been severed just below the wrist.A dirty bandage wrapped the stump where his hand had been.
‘How did you get away?’Fola asked.When she had left Colm, he had been badly wounded, struggling to keep the templar Anwe from cutting him to ribbons.
‘Blind luck.’His eyes flitted to Llewyn for a moment of uncertainty—soon masked by the return of his usual grin.‘It was chaos.I ran off while the templar was distracted.’
‘Your bodyguard?’Damon said when he’d wrapped his head around the situation.‘Stones, you look like you’ve been wrestling an armoury.’
