“Anyway. Besides,” Fafmuir continued, “It has been found, but it cannot be used for it is incomplete. One of the Winter King’s client lords has hold of it for now, though only at the Winter King’s sufferance. His name is Athairdrost, and he is a Princeling of Sorthe. Notably, all the four Princelings of Sorthe are absent from the moot this year, despite their usual habit of attending. Odd, that. Or maybe not?” He gave a weak shrug. “As for the Old Great Spell itself… what is it? Why is it of import?” He seemed to be enjoying this one last theatrical ramble, and he took his time to hum and clear his throat. At last, he lowered his voice and said, “In the most ancient of days, when humanfolk first opened their minds to language and thought, they looked about and discovered great magics hidden in the clouds, the sky, the ocean, the earth, the forests and even in the waters that wash through caves below the ground. These were the Old Great Spells. These were world-making spells. Spells that were woven into the fabric of the world before the gods that made the gods had even walked the world. And no being had been able to comprehend them until the minds of men and women fell upon them. Some were used up in trivial and ignorant fashion: a spell to bring food for an empty belly. Others were squandered foolishly. It is claimed by some that the whole race of dragons was brought into being by a long-dead and extraordinarily foolish shaman who used an Old Great Spell to conjure guards for his petty hoard of treasure. That may or may not be true, but it gives some sense of the power of these elder spells. Such spells as these might raise mountains. Reorder dawn, day and dusk. Reshape the lands of the world. Birth a new god. They are pieces of creation that were never quite finished, and need only imagination and the fire of desire and will to bring about… well.. who knows what? Anything. Everything. Nothing.”
“The coming war then…”
“Is a ploy. A mask.” His face was sour. “He does not want conquest. He will want the war over swift and quick. He is searching. Hunting. Hunting. He wants only the missing fragment of the spell, and his lost little piece of power too, if he can find it. But chiefmost, he wants the spell. When the other half is found, Athairdrost will discover that his master’s sufferance is at an end, I suspect, and both pieces will be in the hands of the Winter King. And then? What?” A shrug.
“But you said that a human mind was needed to understand such a spell. The Winter King is not human, surely.”
“He is and he is not. He wears a human form, and he lives inside a human body. He doesn’t conjure a babe out of nothing. When he grows old a newborn is brought to him, and then he dies for a time and creeps, as a spirit, into the babe as it is learning to walk and talk and be. He becomes the child and the child becomes him. That is as human as any god or spirit can be, without giving up their everlasting life.”
“Do you know what does it looks like, then? The old spell. Is it on a piece of parchment? A clay tablet? Is it half of a book?”
“Who knows? Not me.” A wan smile crept over his now deeply grey lips. “And finally. Finally. The final truth for you. I have looked into the fires of the oracle of the bronze head. I have seen your future, Caewen of Drossel. No matter what path you take in this, at the end… whether or not you stop the Winter King from overwhelming the world… whether or not you find the missing piece of his soul… whether or not you find the fractured piece of the Old Great Spell and take the whole spell for yourself… it does not matter. None of this matters for you. His mother, Old Night and Chaos has already noticed you meddling. She is looking for you, and she will find you, and she will have you carried off to her palace in the far north of the world. I have seen it. All of your paths lead to this: in a frozen cell, alone, in darkness. And in that ice and dark, you will die at her pleasure. For her pleasure. It is your fate. It is unavoidable.” His smile was missing some teeth. “Much as I die now. Wotcha, Caewen. Wotcha.”
An awful pale green air exuded out of his nostrils and mouth, and a smell like rancid meat filled the air. Caewen was forced to cover her mouth and moved back from him. His flesh dissolved as she watched, falling away in squirming maggots. He did not cry out, but gave a single shudder, and collapsed. The twisting writhing mass of worms were soon crawling over bone and bare clothing and old dead hair. They dug down, into the soil and carried the remains of Fafmuir into the soil. She had the strong notion that they were carrying his soul down into deep dank soil too.
The death took no more than a minute, and afterwards there was a silence.
Breathing heavily, Caewen stared at the patch of disturbed soil where Fafmuir had been sitting. Her thoughts were still in a place of shock at the suddenness of it. But as she watched a small fluttering shadow passed her ear and landed on the stone. It was a male hedge-sparrow. It took a few jumping steps, and started to sing. A moment later and another bird arrived, a blackbird. Then more sparrows, and a starling. Then a whole warbling chorus of starlings. Then nightingales and wrens and robins and yellowhammers and chaffinches and goldfinches and skylarks and every singing bird of the wilds and fields and woods. Within minutes, there must have been a thousand of them and they sang and sang, a long wailing sad crazed lament for the magician of the dawn chorus.
It went on for an hour or more, and Caewen found herself transfixed throughout, the only witness to the grief of the birds that Fafmuir loved. The only soul who would be able to tell anyone what had happened in the dark, beyond the hills of offerings at the edge of the moot.
She sat there, in darkness, in song, and finally, strangely, she felt tears come to her. She didn’t want to. She hated the birds and Fafmuir, because of how everything had been his fault, but alone in the night, she found that she could not stop herself from weeping.
She hated it.
But it was a relief too. Like allowing a rotten old dam to break, or hard sore pustule to open up. The pent-up emotion inside herself, the tiredness and the exhaustion, the worry and the fear and the anger. It all came out of her in the midst of the sorrowful songs of a thousand birds, singing their dawn chorus in the pitch darkness, before it was even midnight.