Caewen looked around, listlessly turning over dusty books and rummaging inside clay pots, baskets and small lockboxes. An awful absence had entered the place. She had an irrational desire to set fire to the house, and watch it burn like the wooden pyre of a dead pagan king. But she didn’t.
She did what was sensible to do, and searched the space carefully and without joy or interest in what she was seeing. “Does any of this look useful to you, Fetch?”
“Tsssch. Much of this is… tsch, hmmmm… idiosyncratic. That athame-blade will leave a nick as deadly as any poison, but if you carry it on a full moon it will attract unpleasant ghaists. That glass bauble has the heady air of a summer solstice trapped inside, but what would be done with it, I do not know. That is a bag of dried fireflies. That pot has a rare sort of frog tadpole swimming around in it. Tssch. But what are its uses?” The little scrap of shadow and glistening darkness shook its head and moved its shoulders in a shrug as it slunk in a circle like a restless cat.
Caewen kept rifling through things. She collected anything that looked valuable on the little side-table. But some items of gold, silver or gemstone she left: either because Fetch said, “No, not that,” or just simply because she got a strange nasty sort of feeling when she touched it with the skin of her fingertips. About half-way along one cluttered shelf Caewen opened a latched box and found a large red-black jewel inside, nestled down in a generous heap of velvet. “Oh,” she said, recognising it at once.
She picked up the stone carefully, and felt the blood-warming tingle of power. “Is this what I think it is?”
Fetch twitched his nose and sniffed. He darted and jumped from surface to surface, until he was close enough to stretch out and taste the stone with a small lick of his grey-black tongue. “If you think it is a glame stone, then yes, you are correct. Tssch. Rare and powerful, and rather undecided in its proclivities. Not good. Not evil. Just a deep well of power in the shape of a pretty polished rock. That is one to keep. Tssssch.”
Caewen clutched it in both hands and felt a dizziness come over her. She leaned back into the nearest wall and let herself slide down until she was sitting on the floor.
The flood came as a gradual building up of emotion, somewhere distant and upstream. It was like an icewall breaking and letting loose a lake that had been pent up for years and years. The tears came without her thinking, without even really knowing why. Why now. Why here. After so long. She sobbed into her hands, clutching the stone, wiping her eyes and nose messily.
Fetch paced back and forth around her feet, swishing his tail, clearly agitated. He tried to say something several times, but each time, he was drowned out by another wave of emotion and sniffling. Finally, the tears eased. Caewen felt like an empty wreck of a person, sitting there, scoured of whatever that emotional outburst had even been.
Fetched nosed her, gently. “Why?” he said, worried.
“This is all I left home looking for. A glame stone and a handful of dragon teeth. That would be enough to do what I needed to do. And here I am. I have it, but now I have so much else to think about instead. But Farrowly is still waiting. Sitting in darkness and coldness. Alone. And here I am. Maybe I should just give up. Take this and go home. Save a friend. Be happy.”
“But you won’t. Tssch.”
She glared at the little shadow-demon. “Save him?”
“No. Be happy. I don’t know you as well as I might, Caewen, daughter of turnip growers, but you are vastly more pleasant to serve than Mannagarm ever was. I can see what Dapplegrim sees in you. But the thread that makes you a pleasantness also makes you incapable of walking away, and leaving great problems to other folks. It’s not in your nature.” Tssch. “More fool you, I suppose. Or perhaps, more fool me. You’ve no choice in your vagaries. I could choose to go elsewhere and find a magician who is given a little more to inaction. But I do not. And you cannot.”
“Fools both, then.”
Fetch nodded.
“But who’s to say I didn’t send my morals away with the Winter King? Who’s to say that part of me is not gone, and dancing in the moonlight somewhere?”
“That is not the part of you that severed itself and departed. You know this as truely as I do. The darkness within is not the seat upon which nestles the hard necessity of just doing what’s right. Tssssch. In truth, it might be all that is left of you is morality. Hard and unbending and joyless.”
She sniffed and wiped away some of the wetness in her eyes and the moisture under her nose. “I hope not. I hope I have something else.”
“Then at least you have that, hope. Hope and pigheaded righteousness. There are worse things to carry into battle.”
“Will there be a battle?”
“Oh yes. That cannot be averted now, though I have no doubt you will try. Tsch.”
She nodded. “I will try. Although–“
“Yes, warmth of my heart’s warmth? What think you, mistress of my toils?”
She eyed him crookedly and almost told him not to call her ‘mistress’, but gave up and said instead, “I have decided I do not have much love for gods and goddesses. I think I will do my best to just plain murder the next one I meet. After all, one has to start somewhere. I said that once, didn’t I?”
“There we are,” said Fetch, with more animation. “That’s the Caewen I know and fear. Hope and pigheaded self-righteousness.”
She looked around. “I suppose I should keep looking through things.”
But fetch nuzzled into her, twisting like a cat wanting a scritch under the chin. “Perhaps, tsssch, some sleep first? The house remains secure against intrusion, and you are more in need of sleep than magical gewgaws. At least, for the time being.”
“Yes. You’re right.” She absently scratched him along the chin and neck, like a cat.
And he absently purred.
AUTHOR’S NOTE: There are some references in this segment that might be confusing. I have expanded the first volume substantially and added a whole plot thread involving Farrowly. The emotional breakdown will make more sense if you’ve read the new draft. I promise.