Once the haunting was dealt with, Fola would need to convince Siwan to leave everything she knew and travel half the breadth of the world.The promise of the City’s protection would only go so far, and people in the wider world tended to doubt tales of its wonders and easy luxury.As Fola well knew herself, little seeds of curiosity could sprout into a powerful crop of motivation.
‘Unfortunately, it’s difficult to do my kind of work without involving the gentry.Kings go to great lengths to keep their people ignorant and frightened.’Fola shrugged.‘Of course, folk magic can hold as many true secrets as court sorcery.But those in power always pilfer what they can use from their subjects, and suppress what they do not understand or cannot control.A witch may be freer with her knowledge to help her community, but shy from sharing her secrets with a stranger.’
‘Like Afanan,’ Siwan said.
A quiet settled over the party as they made their way up Glascoed’s switchbacked streets.
‘Wily as Afanan is, she’s likely to turn up,’ Damon said softly.‘Maybe already beat us to the palace.Magicked herself here while we plodded along like idiots.’
A hopeful, comforting thought.One that, by Llewyn’s dour expression and the wounds Colm had suffered, Fola considered no more substantial than the wind.
‘Well,’ Colm said, trying to lighten the mood, ‘I doubt the young count will be receptive until after we’ve had baths and some fresh clothes.Reeking as we are, we won’t make it past the gate guard.’
Fola begrudgingly agreed, and soon they had secured two rooms and a pair of copper tubs at the Cracked Ladle.Much as she wanted to throw herself into bed with Colm at the first opportunity, Fola took the smaller of the two rooms with Siwan.Her libido could endure another night’s delay, and she wanted the opportunity to spend some time with the girl.As far as Fola was concerned, if Siwan proved willing to return with her to the City, then Llewyn had no right to stop her.
After a brief meal of stew and brown bread in the empty common room, Colm claimed the first bath in the men’s tub, citing his wounds and bloodstains.Frog vomited up a fresh handful of pennies and royals.Despite some initial disgust—it was one thing to watch Fola handle medicines and money the bird had hawked up, another entirely to touch such things themselves—Spil, Damon and Harwick took the money and went hunting for fresh clothes.Fola doubted that Glascoed would yield the sort of quick-fingered tailors who served the court of Parwys, but they didn’t need to put on a convincing display of wealth and prestige, only simple dignity.Llewyn accompanied them at Siwan’s insistence.
‘To keep him from brooding,’ Siwan explained.‘Without anything to do he’ll just stare out of the window and worry all afternoon.’
One of the stablehands brought up the copper tubs, soon followed by a bucket brigade of two serving women who filled it with steaming water.Fola tipped all three with a gold royal each, to wide-eyed thanks.Better to start rumours of the wealthy, eccentric lady come to town than give them a chance to wonder at Colm’s injuries, or the odd texture of Llewyn and Siwan’s skin and the sharp angles of their features.
Siwan gestured to the tub with a sardonic smile.‘Age before beauty.’
Fola barked a laugh.‘Just for that, Iwilltake the first bath.’
It was no match for the bath she’d had at the Garland Inn, and nothing compared to the bath houses of the City.A few sprigs of dried lavender and leaves of mint floated in the water, and a bar of tallow soap had been tied by a hemp rope to one of the tub’s handles.Fola sighed and set to scrubbing three days’ worth of grime from her arms.
‘That good, eh?’Siwan asked.She had taken up a perch on one of the two beds beside the room’s narrow window.Frog stood on the headboard near her, balancing on his hale leg and holding the regrowing nub against his body while he preened around his new tail feathers.Siwan absently scratched the back of his head, eliciting a pleased chirrup.
‘This is nothing,’ Fola said, gesturing to the bathwater with the bar of soap.‘In the City, there are pools of all kinds, cold and hot, available to all at any time of day.Waters that seep into your body and leave you energised.Others that lull you to the edge of a pleasant sleep while holding you aloft.Even one that simulates the waves of the sea.’She laughed.‘People don’t only bathe in that one.I don’t know how it started, but there’s a whole cadre of folk who’ve taken to standing atop wooden planks and riding the wave while it curls and breaks.’
Siwan cocked her head.‘Why?’
‘For fun,’ Fola said.‘That’s the main reason people do things, where I come from.Fun, or fulfilment.Some folks work, but mostly because they find meaning in it.We have everything we need.’She gestured to Frog, and to her full purse on the bedside table.‘The City provides, freeing us up to explore and experiment and find all kinds of new ways to spend our time.Like making music, only without the threat of starvation if we fail to find a new crowd every night.’
‘There are musicians here who do not starve,’ Siwan said defensively.‘Performers on The Rose stage of Afondir live like princes, it’s said.’
Memories of Jareth’s ghost bubbled up: of his glimpse of his mother on that stage, and his burning desire to join her.Fola lowered herself deeper into the tub.Thatwas what the folk here considered ‘a great stage’.Well made, she supposed, with a sweeping roof to carry voices and music to the balconies and back seats.Nothing compared to any of the amphitheatres or pavilions scattered throughout the City.
‘How many get the chance to perform there?’
Siwan glared at her.
‘Not many, I wager,’ Fola went on.‘Less than a hundred in a generation.Probably less than a thousand people in your trade live comfortably in this kingdom.In the City, no artist starves, nor has to divert time or attention away from her art and towards survival.’
‘There can’t be audience enough for all of them,’ Siwan argued.Frog cocked his head at her as she stopped scratching him and held her hands stiffly in her lap.People did not like to hear these things, Fola had learned.Whether from envy, or frustration with their own lot in life, or simple disbelief that the world could be any way other than what they had known, most folk reacted with hostility to tales of the City’s bounty.If every rumour of the City were believed, rather than discounted as an impossible dream, there would be an endless stream of pilgrims to those ever-open gates until every land stood empty and every king was left without a kingdom.
And then, perhaps, the City would begin to spread.With that many people, the bare fraction who joined the Library would transform from a scant, eccentric club to an army numbering tens of thousands.Progress in thaumaturgic research would accelerate by leaps and bounds.Mastery to rival the First Folk would be in reach.Eventually all the world might be transformed into a reflection of the City, with enough for all, and justice maintained less by the sword than by the excision of those threats, fears, pressures and hatreds that bred cruelty and violence.
A world worth suffering through a few years of deprivation, danger and sub-par baths to build.And with Siwan’s help, on returning to the City, Fola’s project might progress.The First Folk’s souls might be reached, their knowledge gleaned.The wonders they had left to the City might be better understood, and reconstructed, and brought to places like Parwys, that could sorely benefit from them.
‘You are right,’ Fola said.‘There are only so many people in the City, and not every artist will find popularity.There are those with audiences of thousands, and those who play only in the street for the occasional passer-by.I’ll not claim there are no resentments.No dreams unfulfilled.No musician who does not wish to walk a stage she does not yet have enough support to access, nor artist who does not wish more eyes found delight in his paintings, nor writer who hopes his words will find more ready minds.’
She felt that little needle of pain in her own heart.Substitute ‘artist’ with ‘researcher’ and ‘audience’ with ‘approval by the research board to utilise vast quantities of thaumacite’, and she could be describing herself.‘Not every person can be held in equal esteem, after all,’ she went on.‘People only like to look at diamonds because not every stone in the world is a diamond.Popularity will always be a rarefied thing.The difference is that, in the City, none of these folk need do anything but pursue that dream, nor worry about anything but making their work the best it can be.There is no scarcity of food, or shelter, or good clothes and small luxuries to distract and complicate that pursuit.’
‘It sounds wonderful,’ Siwan said, but by the girl’s posture and expression Fola could see that she did not really believe.It was so difficult to explain these things to those who had never seen them.When you have only ever known a world of constant struggle and competition, not for regard and achievement but for base survival, it was difficult to envision anything else.And there was always that implicit question: ‘If the City is so great as all that, why did you leave?’
Fola sighed again and held out the bar of soap.‘Scrub my back, would you, and then take your turn before the water gets too cold.’
