Siwan hopped down from the bed—eliciting a startled squawk from Frog.For a few moments she silently worked the soap into a lather, which she rubbed into Fola’s back.Tension unwound between Fola’s shoulder blades.Even after four years wandering the world, she still got saddle-sore.
‘What’s your interest in me, then?’Siwan asked.‘I mean … you’ve gone well out of your way to help me.What do you stand to gain?’
Reflexively, Fola wanted to challenge the idea that people only did things because they stood to gain something—but that would be disingenuous, in this case.Then again, people tended to react badly when directly told, ‘I would like to study you, academically.’
‘What do you know of the First Folk?’she answered with a question of her own.
Siwan dipped the soap in the water.‘Not much.Mostly myths and rumours.’
‘Us, too,’ Fola said.‘We have some fragments of writing.Some ability to translate from their language.Not enough, even with magical enchantments that usually make it easy to parse and learn a new tongue.Volumes and volumes of books, though, all written in a language we can’t understand.’She remembered her first tour through those labyrinthine halls beneath the Library Tower.Pick a book at random and you were likely to find an inscrutable mess of squiggly symbols and bizarre illustrations.One in a thousand was written in a script anyone left alive could read with anything approaching fluency.A treasure trove of information, locked behind languages lost with the vanishing of those who used them.
‘Sorry to say I don’t read First Folk,’ Siwan said.‘And if you suspect the raven bastard does, I’m equally sorry to say languages aren’t its foremost skill.’
‘No.’Fola chuckled.‘That would be raising the dead, it seems.’
Siwan paused, the bar of soap pressed firmly against the back of Fola’s neck.Not quite in a headspace fit for bleak humour, yet.Possibly never would be.
‘For the last twenty years I have been working on a project,’ Fola went on.‘An idea for how we might unlock all that knowledge in all those books.After all, who better to teach us their language than the First Folk themselves?’
‘You’re looking for First Folk?’Siwan said.‘Aren’t they all gone?’
‘Yes, as far as anyone can be certain of anything.But “gone” doesn’t meaninaccessible, exactly.The dead are gone, too, but they leave traces.Strong memories with a life of their own—ghosts and wraiths.With the right knowledge and the right artifact we can call those memories up, speak with them, learn from them.’And, she did not say, though she remembered the bone pits and flesh machines of Ulun,borrow their power for our own dark purposes.‘My notion is to conjure up the ghosts of the First Folk.The City is full of things they left behind with apparent purpose and intent.Things that mattered to them.It should be possible, then, to use the City as a catalyst, connect to a strong memory, and make contact with one of its builders, if only long enough for a few lessons in First Folk language.’
‘You mean to speak with them the way you spoke with Jareth,’ Siwan said.‘But he was dead.The First Folk didn’t die, did they?Weren’t they immortal, like the fae?’
‘Frankly, we don’t know,’ Fola answered.‘So the myths and legends say.What wedoknow is that the ordinary means of conjuring a ghost don’t seem to work on them.I have theories as to why, and a plan to test them, but… Well, suffice to say not everything in the City is limitlessly available, and my experiments would be costly.The people who decide how to deploy certain resources don’t quite share my enthusiasm for my theories.’
‘I don’t see how any of this relates to me.’Siwan swallowed and shook her head.A tear choked her voice.‘I wish it did.Stones, I wish I knew why any of this was happening.Losing control to the raven fiend is bad enough.’
Fola gave her a moment to collect herself before she spoke again.‘I don’t know precisely how the raven fiend and the wraiths are related, but know this—it has nothing to do with you.’True in one sense—the girl Siwan was not the one conjuring the wraiths—but half a falsehood in another.
Shared suffering could resonate.Two incidents, two seeds of pain, distant in time.Siwan on the sacrificial altar and the wraiths sacrificed for some other, as yet unknown end.The young roots entwining with the ancient.Long-slumbering wrath stirred to wakefulness as the same crime—in spirit, if not in fact—hammered at the world anew.And the raven fiend, a being with powers expansive and ill defined, reaching out to wield that hammer.
Fola twisted slowly, so as not to slosh the water out of the tub, until she could meet Siwan’s eye.Sitting as she was, cross-legged on the bed with a bird in her lap, all her vulnerability was on full display.Fola wished she could comfort her as the troupe had done on the night the wraiths attacked the festival.But they were still little more than strangers, and Fola had little experience mapping such fraught emotional territory.
‘None of this is your fault,’ she said—her best attempt.‘There are powers in this world beyond any understanding or control.You’ve stumbled into one of them.’
‘So what?’Siwan rubbed a tear from her cheek.‘You think the raven fiend can teach you something about the First Folk?Or the ghosts that walk out of the sky when I lose my bloody temper?’
Fola smiled.Maybe ready for bleak humour, after all.Still, best not to push things.This was sensitive ground, and Fola had to put her thoughts into words that would not alienate the girl.Not her strongest of skills.If she had been better at phrasing things as her audiencewantedthem phrased, she might have talked her way past the research board without all this hassle.
‘Conjuring a ghost requires some knowledge ofwhatyou intend to conjure,’ Fola said.‘And there is a difference between calling up the ghost of an ordinary mortal, like Damon, or Spil, or Harwick—of natural, evolved morphology—and someone like Colm, whose lineage descends from First Folk experiments and the like.I theorise that the reason we can’t conjure the First Folk is because they are, in some way we don’t understand, fundamentally different sorts of beings from anything we’ve been able to study.Different from fae, from fiends, from any kind of mortal.’
‘And I am different from every other mortal,’ Siwan said.A harsh cast had returned to her face, like the shadow of a cloud drifting over the sun.
‘In a way that is fascinating and wonderful, yes,’ Fola said.
Siwan paused.‘“Fascinating” I’ve heard before, but “wonderful”?’She shook her head.‘I’m not one of the First Folk.And whatever I am, it happened by accident.What could you possibly learn from that?’
Fola took a deep, slow breath, and glanced at Frog, who had hunkered down on the bed to sleep.
‘Just because something happened by accident doesn’t mean it isn’t good, or important, or a potential source of knowledge,’ she said.‘Think about this, Siwan … There are four types of souls in the world, that we know of—fiend, fae, mortal—with several sub-varieties—and undead.At a glance through my loupe, I see patterns indicative of all four within you.Which means, even if you have nothing to do with the First Folk, you represent a complete picture of everything theyaren’t.Sometimes the only way to understand something you can’t actually study is to study everything it isn’t.Does that make sense?’
Siwan shook her head firmly.Curiosity could only carry one so far against winds of fear and uncertainty.The girl was exhausted.Any more conversation would achieve little.
‘Right.’Fola scrubbed a hand through the tight curls of her hair, flicking out droplets to patter against the floor.‘Anyway, this water’s getting tepid.Your turn.’
She stood, shivering against the autumn chill—there was no hearth in the room, only a metal coil that carried heat up from the fireplace in the commons.The serving folk had left a few sheets of towelling.Fola scrubbed the water from her skin, then wrapped a towel around herself and helped Siwan into the tub.It no longer wafted steam, but was warm enough to be comfortable.Fola felt a little guilty that she had taken the first bath, and briefly considered reheating it with a quick spell.Playing with temperature was dangerous, though, particularly in a timber-framed structure.Her attempt to convey some heat from the radiator to the water would as likely flash it to steam, or burn the inn to the ground—and half the city with it.
