She glared at the side of the road, hugging herself tight.He fought down the urge to defend himself.Things were still fragile between them after their last, disastrous argument.More, a part of him knew that she was right.His life had been a parade of betrayals—beginning when his own family gave him up to the Grey Lady.
Until, somehow, he had found a way to trust Afanan.She had been good, truly.Compassionate in a way he could hardly countenance, even towards those who by right ought to have been her enemies.Even towards a raven fiend.Kinder than any mortal had cause to be.
In all likelihood, that kindness had made her hesitate in a fateful moment during her duel with the Huntress.Llewyn cleared his throat to quash a sudden swell of grief and guilt.
‘Not everyone, no,’ Llewyn admitted.‘But some people are.’
‘Not Fola,’ Siwan said pointedly.
Llewyn worked his jaw.Afanan had told him to trust Fola.To take Siwan to the City.The part of him that had seen the good in her—that felt her absence as an ache behind his ribs—wanted to trust.Another part, older and stronger, reminded him of all the cruelty the Grey Lady had dealt—and forced him to deal—in the cause of her twisted, incomprehensible vision of justice.
The gates loomed ahead.A second curtain wall, higher and made of red brick, stood behind the wooden palisade, while the castle itself loomed higher still—a round turreted tower at the heart of two layers of fortification.A watchman appeared on the palisade rampart and called down to Fola for her name and business in the castle.They would be inside before Llewyn could navigate through this argument in the way it needed.
‘We’ll talk of this later,’ he said.
Siwan huffed, shook her head, and took a quick step ahead of him to walk beside Damon.
‘I’ll say this, though,’ Llewyn muttered under his breath, appending a final point to their argument.One he might voice to her later, though now he worried about pushing her too much and upsetting her.‘If Fola’s so worth trusting, why hasn’t she explained her business with the count?Nor her solution to the haunting?’
While Fola made her case to the watchman for an audience, Llewyn’s finger traced the pale, smooth band of skin on his thumb, and a small weight of silver pulled at his pocket.
He didn’t like secrets.Didn’t like lies and glamour.As far as he was concerned, they were the Grey Lady’s tools, and he’d have nothing more to do with them.
A wicket gate swung open.Fola led their company into the outer courtyard.Llewyn had never set foot within a castle before.The Grey Lady’s domain skirted the edges and shadowed alleys of cities, not the heart of mortal fortifications.If she’d had any business with kings or counts, she’d have sent an older, more powerful agent than he.
The palisade wall encircled a flattened hilltop.Structures of mortared stone roofed with slate stood against the walls, some with chimneys trickling smoke, others with wide doors that marked them out as stables.Stone towers surveyed the approach to the castle as well as this outer courtyard, which would become a killing field should an enemy army breach the palisade.
‘Those towers are younger than the rest of it,’ Harwick observed, scratching at his jaw.He always seemed slightly ashamed when he drew on his experiences as a mercenary before joining Afanan’s troupe.‘And the palisade’s newer still.Some of those logs were felled within the year.The inner curtain wall stood alone to defend the castle when old Harlow died.’
‘Ifan has been building fortifications?’Spil said, astonished.‘Against what?’
‘There are rumours of rebels in the forest,’ Damon ventured.
Colm made a puzzled grunt.‘The young count’s either an idiot or a coward if he’s spent this much effort shoring up his defences instead of hunting down a few bandits and rebels.Maybe he thinks the walls will be some help against the haunting?’
This last was a question for Fola.She shook her head.‘They wouldn’t be.But kings and princes have spent more effort on more foolish things.’
One of the watchmen led them through the barbican and gatehouse, a dark and narrow passage lit by a single lantern and the light falling from murder holes overhead.Llewyn blinked against the sun as they emerged into the inner courtyard.
Fola gasped in sudden excitement.At first, Llewyn was unsure what had drawn such a reaction.This courtyard seemed little more impressive than the strip between the palisade and curtain wall: a field of tamped earth and sod, some fifty paces across.The castle keep at its heart was only a plain cylindrical tower, with machicolations protruding near the top to give it the look of an inverted bell.The watchman guiding them, seeming amused at Fola’s reaction, told them to wait while he went to announce their arrival to the count.
‘Take all the time you need,’ Fola said, walking slowly across the field towards a patch of courtyard where a strange design had been worked into the ground with stones and pieces of cut glass.Above it, something shimmered.
What Llewyn took at first for a heat mirage—or, he thought with a spike of fear, like the glamour of the raven fiend above its altar—was in fact an armillary sphere made from perfectly translucent crystal, like ice formed of purest water.It hovered above the strange design of glass and stones.The same intangible force that held it aloft also moved it.Its uncountable components swept past one another silently.Rings and discs orbited a central globe the size of Llewyn’s fist, some bearing arms that themselves held smaller globes with their own satellites.These, too, held even smaller re-creations of the armillary sphere, some no larger than the head of a pin.And even these contained smaller re-creations, each subordinate sphere an impossibly precise imitation of the whole.All worked of the same perfectly translucent glass, so that each component could be perceived with perfect clarity through all the layers that contained it.At first the deeper layers moved too quickly for him to track, but as he studied them, they slowed.Time itself bent to the need of his eye.It was only a matter of focusing one’s attention to the proper speed and distance.
A sudden vertigo seized Llewyn.He felt that the thing had swallowed him, burying his awareness in a puzzle too vast for his mind to contain.No matter how long he stared, another, deeper layer presented itself.Globes riding the orbital arms of globes, every satellite the heart of its own system.Impossible, surely.There must be a base layer too small to be further reduced.Desperation pressed in on him from outside—a need to find that foundation, to reduce dizzying regression to something tangible, some outflow from some first mover.
A hand fell on his shoulder and returned him to his body.He stood in an unfamiliar courtyard, but beneath a sky he knew, on solid ground.The shimmering armillary was no larger than his head, not the all-devouring, all-encompassing infinity he had perceived.A grounding fact that only made it stranger, and in its strangeness horrifying.
‘Are you all right?’Siwan said, squeezing Llewyn’s shoulder.‘You went pale for a moment.Paler than usual, I mean.’
Damon doubled over and retched.Siwan moved to comfort him, but he waved her off and wiped at his mouth.
‘What is it?’Siwan wondered aloud, turning back to the thing.She knitted her brow, but did not become lost in it, as Llewyn had been.Likewise, Spil, Harwick and Colm examined it with a detached interest.An odd curio, to them, and nothing more.
‘An aleph,’ Fola said.She gazed into its depths, unfazed.‘After the First Folk roads, perhaps the second most common sort of artifact they left behind.There is one in the City itself, and a few dozen more that the archivists have catalogued based on rumours and reports.This one will be a new addition to that list.’
‘Hardly an answer,’ Spil muttered, annoyed.‘What’s an “aleph”, then?’
