Loot taken from the conquered people of Glascoed, he did not say, but the implication hung in the air.
‘I intend to cast back nearly a thousand years,’ she answered.‘How many times has the castle been repaired in that time?Or added to?’
His gaze flitted to the new towers and the palisade wall, and he begrudgingly nodded.
‘We anchor our memory in objects,’ she went on.‘Just because an artifact has been passed down and become meaningful to us does not mean it was so meaningful to those who made and used it in its time.Longevity has a way of layering importance on to the mundane.But that,’ she pointed to the aleph, ‘was never meaningless, never unmemorable, to anyone who saw it.’
‘Fair enough, sorceress,’ he said.‘I leave the matter to your expertise.’
Again, so difficult not to like the lad.A humble nobleman could almost sell the lie of nobility—that hierarchy was good, so long as the people who stood at its apex were good.That he stood there thanks to a buried history of brutal violence dispelled the glamour.
‘Stand back,’ she said, kneeling to make the final line.‘Observe, if you wish, though there will not be much to see.’
Chalk scraped over stone, joining two symbols, completing the circle to conjure the memories of Glascoed’s ancient dead.Silver flames leapt from the chalk, curling into a mist that enveloped Fola and hung over the ground.
As that mist swirled, filling the space the circle had defined, a silhouette stepped through: Ifan, his knuckles white around the hilt of his sword, dark eyes wide and bright with terror.
‘I’m sorry, sorceress,’ he blurted.
Before Fola could answer—to call the boy count an idiot and a fool—the mist carried her into darkness.To Siwan, Llewyn and all the rest, she—and Ifan, the dolt—would simply be standing in the circle she had drawn, gazing at nothing, eerily still but for slow, steady breaths.
The darkness resolved into an empty expanse that stretched in all directions.A twilight horizon broken only by the whirling aleph, the focus of her spell, and by the figure of Ifan—hazy, crackling like a flame, for he had stepped into the spell after its magic had begun to work and it had only half-taken.
‘What is this place?’he said, his voice a hollow echo, falling from lips that moved faster than the words.
Fola snarled.‘What do you think you’re doing?’
Ifan had the good sense to look abashed—at least, Fola read that emotion in the strange, shifting surface of his face.‘I know I am a fool, but it is one thing to hear words from a dying man and another to see the truth with your eyes.’
‘What?My report wouldn’t be enough?’She jabbed a finger at him—his form parted around it, as though she prodded mist.She grumbled.‘Well, don’t blame me if things go sideways and you lose your bloody mind.This spell is no little conjuration,My Lord.It deals in memory.In thesoul.’
He dipped his head.‘As you say, sorceress.But I would not go through life unknowing.’
‘Fine, as long as we’re agreed you’re an idiot and whatever happens to you isn’t my fault.’She sat cross-legged in the void.‘Let’s see who comes, assuming your presence hasn’t fouled things up.’
For a time they were alone, but for the aleph.A less off-putting companion than Jareth’s corpse had been on her most recent foray to this place.The perfect emptiness held for a few moments longer, with only the whirling of the aleph and the sound of her blood in her ears to mark the passing of time; Ifan was a silent apparition, a mortal ghost in a land meant for the dead.
There appeared a shadow.A dark haze above the mist-grey ground.It coalesced into a figure, details layering in as though being rendered by an artist—broad shapes into clear forms, until at last the tidy details.
A stocky man, shorter than Fola by half the span of her hand, but as broad around as a barrel.He wore crude armour of padded leather over iron mail, stitched with fetishes of white ghostwood bearing knots and circular inscriptions.Ancestors of the runes and sigils used in the druids’ magic.A sword hung at his belt, sheathed in buckskin.Its pommel was the head of a charging stag, and on his grey-bearded head he wore a crown of silver-studded antlers.
At the sight of the sword—the same as he wore, even as an apparition, upon his hip—Ifan groaned.Not a surprise, then, but a terrible confirmation.
The ghost’s eyes formed last.Black pupils in sickly yellow sclera.Like the girl Siwan’s eyes when she lay in the grip of the raven fiend.
‘Speak.’The ghost’s voice whispered from the edges of that empty space, rendered by the spell into words Fola and Ifan could understand.
Fola cleared her throat.‘Who am I addressing?’
The ghost put a hand on its sword.‘You call an audience, and know not who you call?’The words were part of the air, and the umbrage in them was a cold wind.
The spell had been written to conjure the most potent ghost it could from the memories attached to the aleph.From that, and the ghost’s bearing, Fola hazarded an educated guess.
‘The Last King of Glascoed,’ she said.‘Whose name has been forgotten by time, buried without dignity by the conquerors.I would know that name.’
‘Who calls me king?’The voice from the edges of the void turned hot with rage.He turned his raven’s eyes on Ifan.‘This pup, who dresses like one?I am Ynyr the Builder, who laid these stones and secured this land against beast and plague.Who organised the defence of the small folk and brought justice to a forest riven with petty bandits.But no king.There were no kings in Glascoed.Only folk.’
Fola felt herself at a loss.‘You wear a crown,’ she observed.‘And a sword.’
