Fola returned her attention to Colm.She conjured a bandage from another pile of leaves and set about wrapping his wound.
‘I’m sorry,’ she managed through a hitch in her throat.
‘Don’t be,’ Colm said.‘It comes with the job.’
‘Hang the job,’ she snapped.‘You don’t work for me any more.’
He was quiet for a moment.‘I’m sorry, it might be that concoction you made me drink, but I’m having a hard time making sense of that.’
‘I hired you to guide me to Parwys, and you did,’ she said.‘I didn’t hire you to get cut to ribbons on my behalf.’She tied off his bandage, perhaps a bit too tightly by his pained expression.‘You’ve done far more than I asked.’
‘So,’ he said, a slight smile creeping across his face.‘Our contract is through?’
Is he so giddy to be rid of me?She couldn’t blame him, after what she had put him through.‘Yes,’ she said with a twinge of regret.What had begun as an initial attraction and an arrangement of convenience had become a true friendship—the second she had ever known, after Arno—and she’d always held on to the possibility of something more.Now that her usefulness as an endless font of currency was at an end, he would disappear from her life.‘Consider your employment at an end.’
‘Good.’
One of his small hands cupped her cheek.Gently he brought her face to his, pressing his forehead to hers, his dark eyes seeming vast enough to swallow the world.
‘What are…?’Her breath escaped her.A needy pulse worked up from her belly until at last she leaned the last finger’s width and pressed her lips to his.They were rough and chapped—a sign of dehydration, not good with all the blood he had lost—but soon the warmth that flooded her eased away her worries.When at last they parted she stared at him, wide-eyed, in total bafflement.
‘About time, eh?’he said with an impish grin.He kissed her again, more quickly.‘I’ve been waiting since that first night in Tarebach.Only you turned all standoffish after you hired me.I thought you’d been turned off by how I dealt with those templars, but you explained it all clearly enough on the ship from Alberon.Well… clearly enough on a bottle and a half of rum.’
Hazy memories of their first meeting resurfaced, along with a vague recollection of a half-articulate rant aboard the ship that had carried them to Parwys.Does that mean…?And here I thought he’d been with me all this time for my purse.
‘Ah, right,’ she stammered.‘I… Well, I forgot.’
He burst out laughing.She shut him up with another kiss and lost herself in the release of a long tension within her—the end of the war between desire and morality.A blissful moment, until he winced and pulled away from her.
‘Glad you’re as excited for this as I am,’ he whispered.‘But I might need the night to recuperate before I’ll be ready for much more.’
She pouted, trusting that he would take it as she meant it—not disappointment in him, only in the delay.A chuckle and another kiss on her cheek told that he had understood.
There were hours left to the night.Damon and Harwick returned, reported that Colm’s trail had been cleared, and there was no sign of anyone on the road behind.This did not satisfy Llewyn, who, it seemed, would remain awake and watchful, but at least he made no further argument for their fleeing through the night.The rest returned to their bedrolls—Spil and Harwick snuggled up tight, Damon and Siwan a chaste distance apart in the youth and inexperience of their relationship.Fola pressed herself as firmly as she dared against Colm’s bandaged chest while he wrapped his lower arms around her.The slow rhythm of his breathing lulled her swiftly to the edge of sleep.
‘Fola,’ he whispered.‘One more thing.’
‘Hmmm?’she murmured, snuggling her head into the space between his chest and his chin.He smelled as good as she’d imagined he would—even under three days of sweat and dust, the faint bloody scent of his wounds, and the acrid tang of Frog’s ointments, there was a very pleasant musk.
‘That hulking templar wasn’t the one who took my arm,’ he went on, and Fola’s drowsiness burned away like mist.‘It was another.A slip of a girl, I thought, with a rimewolf at her heel.Burst into my duel with the templar.Took my arm off with a flurry as quick as lightning.’He bent his head to her ear, lowered his voice to a rumble no louder than the hum of a bumblebee.‘She had a sword just like Llewyn’s.White wood, flexible, sharper than anything.
‘Whatever she was, it’s whatheis.And she was bloody dangerous.’
‘What happened to her, and to the templar?’Fola asked.
‘Couldn’t say.I slipped away while they fought.Felt a good bit like I’d wind up dead if I stuck around.’
Eventually, Colm’s breathing became a gentle rumble, joining the chorus of Harwick’s snores and the others’ quiet slumbering breaths.Yet Fola remained awake.
She thought of what Llewyn had told her before Colm interrupted their conversation.Siwan had been saved from the altar of the raven fiend, her soul shielded by Llewyn’s fae power.And Llewyn was not the only one of his kind.There were others like him, who, it seemed reasonable to presume, were hunting him—and hunting Siwan.Hence his years in hiding with the troupe, his furtive glances at the forest, and his desperate willingness to attach himself to Fola despite a near total distrust of her.He had lost the protection of one sorceress and now sought it from another, though, paranoid fool that he was, he refused to give her the information she would need to provide it.
More, the raven fiend’s resonance with the undead—the way it had empowered them at the festival grounds—must have something to do with Siwan’s own fae and undead nature, which she shared with Llewyn.A consequence of anchoring her soul to a piece of his sword.There might be a clue to ending the haunting there, if Fola could better grasp what, exactly, Llewyn was.
But it was late, and Llewyn had been agitated enough before Colm appeared and kindled all his fears afresh.So Fola snuggled into Colm’s chest, feigned sleep, and let her mind turn over everything she knew and everything she could reasonably theorise, fighting the urge to stare at Llewyn where he stood and kept watch over them all.
Questions and Answers
YC 1189
