Sharp are the Teeth of Pearl #1-32 (edited)

As a part of getting back into regular posted and writing on Sharp of the Teeth of Pearl I re-read and (lightly) edited the existing material. I’m posting the whole of the (edited, slightly adjusted in places) parts 1-32 in a single block below for ease of reading.

SHARP ARE THE TEETH OF PEARL

(first/second draft)

ONE

After a week of walking the fields and the woods, the hills and steep valleys, Caewen was growing increasingly suspicious of her shadow.

Not the shadow gliding beside her, stretched against grassy slope or dirt-trod path. That shadow was as close and companionable as it ever had been, a fellow traveller, the two of them together on the road. No, rather, her growing concern was focused on her other shadow. The one she kept in a large leathern purse at her belt. The one that hissed and tsscked. The shadow that occasionally peeped out in the daylight. The shadow that slipped away each night, to wander alone in the darkness–and seemingly, ever more often going about errands of its own purpose.

The creature’s pestering behaviour especially changed dramatically when they crossed the Glinst. There had been a bridge there once, but it was broken and tumbled, just a long series of grey columns in the more pale grey mist. A boat had been needed, and luckily a local family still ran a flat-bottomed ferry across the waters–though they were clearly worried about news they had been hearing, and the mother in particular pressed Caewen for what things she had seen in the north. As soon as she had waved farewell to the ferry, Fetch started up the hissing and tssking more loudly than ever.

“Leave the road,” the shadow whispered. “As soon as the boat-folk are out of sight, leave the road and go north.”

“Why north?” Caewen looked at the long, wending stretch of clay-hued road, banding the hills and making a pleasantly downhill trail until it vanished in the distance, south and east. To the north, the landscape was wild, rugged, and spotted with stone bluffs that were painted with gleaming runnels of water coming down from rainswept blue hills. It looked less pleasant, and it was not in the right direction, and it would take them closer to the wandering armies out of the north. Everything about that way seemed a bad choice.

“There’s things on the road. Secret things, watching. Tssk. Go north and around. They are looking for you. They are already infesting the glens and hills south of here. I have seen them at night. Tsch.”

“Alright.” So she walked a little way, until she was out of sight in a gully that the road passed through, and then cut away from the road, tracing a path through stands of upland beech and hazel, which was not too bad for walking under, though the twisted roots made the ground uneven and there were more boulders than trackways.

After that day, and the further east Caewen went, the more her shadow urgently advised her to turn farther and farther north, taking any goat track or lonely shepherds’ path that might circumvent the broader and plainer roadways that lay down among the coastal ways. She was keenly aware that they were approach a line of blue-tinted hills called the Chaelds, and if she kept on heading north she would arrive at the great bleak lake of Asthe, lapping dim-lit shores of grey sand. The few crofters and upland sheep farmers she had chanced to meet all gave the same advice: keep clear of the lake. There were Goath ships always sailing along the shores, looking for slaves or pillage. And because no villages could survive the depredations of the Goath, there were few or no roads, and the shorelines were swampy and tangled with the rattling-branches a papery-barked sort of tree, much too thickly grown to even walk between. Whereas to the south, market towns like Arlich could have provided a soft bed for a night, and provisions for a dwindling food sack. Caewen was started to get a little tired of hare and foraged late season rose-briar fruit she could get each day. One day, when she realised that she simply couldn’t stomach hard month-old biscuits, greaseless hare and berries, she spent a whole day meticulously collecting beechnuts to roast. Fetch kept telling her to keep moving and not to waste time, but she was so angry at him–and all the torturous paths he kept sending her on–that she remained silent that whole day, and just kept on grimly searching the woods and gathering nuts.

That night she made a big fire and that night she felt full for the first time in days.

It improved her mood in the morning, but only a little.

It seemed at least foolish, and at worst potentially disastrous to wander so far from their goal.

And yet, always, the little shadowy spirit returned from his nightly forays with news that turned them ever northwards. “Tssch. There are soldiers with winter’s banners already along the southern roads.”–“The fisher-villages at the river forks are already overrun”–“War chariots out of Goathland are passing westward.”

And so on.

And every night, Caewen would consult the scarle-bowl under starlight, and the piece of fractured antler would tink against the rim. Always it pointed south-east. The more they circled north-ways, the more desperately the spell-strung bowl tapped a southwards and eastwards chime. They were off-course. Far off courts. Caewen knew it. The scrying bowl knew it. And Caewen the shadow-creature knew it too, and there was more going on than what seemed. The creature was away too long each night. It never used to spend so many hours traipsing through moonlight and grey-mottled night. It never used to spend hours sniffing at the dreams of sleeping farmers and cottagers in the nearby hills. Something was in its mind, and Caewen was near enough to certain that the mottives, whatever they were, had nothing to do with keeping her safe.

Perhaps Dapplegrim had been right all along. Perhaps the shadow should never have been trusted.

###

On the sixth day of the northward trudge, matters grew worse. Caewen started seeing signs of soldiers and scarle. A mass of muddy boot prints going from one place to another. Recently abandoned encampments. An abandoned bit of broken gear or armour on the roadside. A handful of fresh graves dug into the soft soil, all of them unmarked.

More than once she had to rush and hide in the scrub just as the gloomy-winged shapes of draigs appeared out of cloud banks, drifting on cold, hard airs, scouting and hunting. Three times now Caewen noticed a rumour of harsh voices just in time, then dropped and crawled quickly into some convenient mass of brambles or thicket or heather. There she hid, watching and waiting, allowing a band of scarle to pass by. She listened to their strange half-snarl, half-muttered words, and watched them lumber, and smelled their wet-dog smells. If this was a safer path, freer of soldiers from the north, then the south ought to have been aflame with razed hamlets and burned towns. But at night, she saw no evidence of this: looking out from one vantage or another, just the usual smeared scatter of warm and faraway windowlight from distant settlements, scattered like old embers as far as the ocean’s salt-dark shores to the south.

Finally, after having to dodge yet another column of fighting scarle coming down from the mountains, Caewen lost patience. She opened the satchel and looked hard at the squirming darkness within. Two eyes, glossier, but no less dark than the rest of the darkness, blinked back at her.

Caewen lowered her voice to a low and threatening murmur. “If I didn’t know better, Fetch, I’d half suspect you were leading me into a trap. This is madness. We’re walking deeper into Scarle-lands, not further away from them.”

“Tsssch. No. Noooo. I would not do any such thing. You are my warmth and my life’s blood. My breath and my chord, feeding life and protection. What reason would I have to hurt you? Trust me.”

“Hurt?” She frowned. “Well, perhaps not. But mislead? Confuse? Perhaps you don’t want me to find the other fragment of the spell? Why? You might have your own secret reasons. Or perhaps you are afraid of what might happen if I do find it? Or worried that I might be hurt, or killed? I suppose I can imagine of some reasons, if I think about it..”

“No, no. Trrssssa, tssscha. None of that. Nothing like that.”

“If it isn’t like that, then what is it like?”

But the little squirm of shadows just went silent and refused to say anything more.

Caewen didn’t want to get into a loud argument with the demon that was living in her purse. But she did not yet close the purse. Fetch had not explicitly denied that he was misleading her. He had only stated that her suggested reasonings were wrong. The exchange made her even more concerned that perhaps she was being gulled with truthful lies. Familiar spirits, as Fetch was, were bound to truthfulness… but there is truth and then there is truth. Spirits were very good at dancing around a conversation with exactly true misdirection.

It was one of their more irritating traits, Caewen thought. Sometimes they seemed to do it when they didn’t have to, as if they quite enjoyed the riddles and untruth nonsense.

Fed up with Fetch, she drew the bag shut with a jerk of her fingers, and felt a scowl come over her face. She looked at the sky. There were thicker and thicker clouds rolling in, and behind them, a bank of storm-heads so grey and massy that they looked luminously solid. Rain was already in the air, though it was that sort of fine misty rain that isn’t quite sure if it is falling or floating. Her hair and the outside of her clothing was already damp, but she was not soaked at least. Not yet anyway. Thunder broke the silence somewhere far off, over the hills and above the inland sea she guessed. She felt the pressure of a growing chill wind on her face. There was nothing for it. Either she would have to simply ignore her shadow, and risk the possibility that he was speaking the truth–and perhaps discover the southern coastal roads were indeed overrun with soldiers–or she had to press on and trust.

She chose the later, but with a heavy discomfit in her chest.

“I wonder if I ever shall see home again?” She murmured as she stepped out from behind a screen of leaves and looked carefully up and down the trackway for any sign of boggarts or other soldiers of the north. “I wonder if I shall see familiar faces again?” There were some–and one in particular–who were relying on her return. A nasty little knot of regret and fear settled in her chest. She had wandered a long way from her original path. Her reasons for first leaving home were now so distant, they felt barely real.

But there was nothing else for it.

Onward she must go, and so it was onward that she trudged.

###

The sun had softened away westward and the last rays of day were setting the horizon to licks of flame along the under-edges of those heavy clouds that had blown in. It was prematurely dark on the trail now. In those places where trees were thickest, the air itself was a blackness, and all that remained visible of the path was a smudge of off-yellow, languishing in shadow.

Fetch came out from his purse, there being no daylight to blind or hurt him. He was soon leaping and slinking, every part of him feline and vulpine and mink-like all at once. “This way. This way. Tssch.” His voice was a little rustle upon old dead leaves.

“Are you sure?” Caewen stumbled, stubbed a toe through her boot and swore. “Can’t we just camp here?”

Her stopped, turned and looked at her. “Of course not. Far too dangerous. This way.” And he was off again. She followed, grumbling.

He paused. “Best not to make so much noise.”

“I am not a cat. I’m half-blind in this gloom. How am I supposed to–“

A flaring of blue light lit the air. Everything acquired a horrid, dead sort of pallor. Even the earth and the trees looked suddenly as if there were carved of chalk. And there were soldiers everywhere. The handful who were standing nearer-at-hand looked just as surprised as Caewen felt. “Uuuuuh…” she said, mouth open, staring.

Most of the soldiers were human: these had the grey skin, long, pinched features and aquiline noses typical of Sorthemen. They were draped head to toe in chainmail of a dark silvery grey, over-covered in places by a similarly silver-black plate armour. Wherever there was a bit of cuirass, helm or shield showing, it was filigreed with ivy curls of what appeared to be gold that had been tinted crimson by some blacksmith’s art. Behind the men, a mass of boggart-folk lounged around. These were silver-black furred creatures with eyes the colour of rotting cherries. The men and scarles alike all looked up, blinking, surprised. There were also a few low, billowy shapes that Caewen realised were small pavilions. She had stumbled into an encampment. Everyone stared at her. She stated at them. Clearly, they had not been expecting her.

“Feeetch?” said Caewen. “What have you–?”

One of the nearer men–who seemed to have been standing guard–held the freshly lit torch with a blue flame. His expression slid into a concentrating frown, and he spoke, his voice clipped and hard-edged, but thoughtful. “A wandering maid, lone in the wilds. We’ve been told to watch out for a lone maid.” He moved the torch to shine a clearer light on her. Presumably he had lit the flame when he noticed the sound of her stumbling right into their camp. Sorthemen see well in darkness, but not perfectly.

Another guard added: “Sword at her side, a blade of fane-steel. A shadow-thing at her beck and call. Cloak sewn to look like blue flowers. Here now–where’s that bloody horse-beast, then? It’ll be here too.” He looked suddenly afraid.

The first man sniffed once. “Don’t smell it. Best to get her in hand, before the horse-demon turns up.”

Several of the nearer men started moving in her direction.

Caewen took a step back, unsure what to do. Fighting or running both looked hopeless.

She felt the shadow-creature alight gently on her right shoulder, even as the whole camp stirred to movement. The little demon leaned in close to her ear and began whispering strange words, using his tongue to flick little bits of magic into her mind. She responded without even knowing what she was doing. Quietly, Caewen raised her left hand and made a strange gesture with her fingers. Then she spoke seven words, old and strange to her, but full of the whispers of shadows and half-glooms. A power swelled in her chest and broke out, twisting and dancing among the men and boggarts. Some of them started to yell, others fell over, some screamed, some cursed.

“You bitch-daughter!” cried the nearest man “Blood and agers! Where is she?”

“I’m beggared if I know,” said another.

They were waving their arms and weapons, half-stumbling, half-tripping about. It took a moment for Caewen to see that every last one of them had an uncanny film of darkness in their eyes. No matter how much they rubbed at their eyes, or scratched at their faces, the darkness grew only thicker. The darkness seemed to be suffocating their whole faces now. One of the scarle started screaming, “I can’t smell. I can’t smell as anything. Get her! Kill her! Curse-whore!”

“But night-folk can see in the dark,” said Caewen.

“Not through enchanted shadow, such as these little tatters and tatterlings. Tssch.”

There must have been a magician among the troops, because at that moment, Caewen felt another mind pressing against her own. Someone was forming a counterspell and it had a true strength behind it. “What now?”

“What now? What now?” said Fetch. “Run. That way, I suggest. We can’t go back. They’ll expect it, and there’s nowhere to hide behind us, anyways. Tsck.”

There was a relatively clear opening among the men, leading to a way out of the clearing oj the far side. Northwards, of course. But it seemed better than standing around and waiting for the spell to fade. Caewen took off, sprinting and dodging the grasping hands of men and the snarling, sharp-toothed maws of scarle-creatures. Caewen noticed, as she passed, that several of the scarle were lanky and wiry-limbed, with muzzles almost as long as a wolf’s. “They have tracking-boggarts,” she said, with a new irritation. “Running won’t help us once the spell is gone.”

“It will. Trust me. Tssch. Tsk. Run. We’re almost there.”

“Almost where?” screamed Caewen though the harsh draw of her breath. “You lying–” but she found she couldn’t run and yell at the same time and had to pick one or the other.

Running seemed the better choice.

She sprint-stumble-leapt along the rough, benighted ground, soon leaving the clearing, then tearing up a hillside that rose beyond it. At the top, several deer-tracks straggled off in different directions. Caewen was about to take one at random, but Fetch stopped her.

“No. Not that way. The middlemost path. That one. Tsch.”

There was no time to argue. She just had to trust. The feeling of the break-spell was now so strong in her mind that the air felt as if it were about to rupture. All around her she saw a sudden emergence of small nature-spreets and elemental imps–creatures that would normally remain hidden in the earth and trees. Swarms of these minor spirits were suddenly crawling up out of their hiding places, shrieking in tiny piping voices, squirming and writhing. The counterpsell was driving everything that had even an ounce of magic in it mad with pain. Whoever was behind the attack was of a power beyond any magician Caewen had ever tested herself against.

She had moved only about a dozen paces on the narrow track when she felt the magic burst and rupture behind her. The mass of small inconsequential nature spirits that had been flushed from the heather and dirt began flying and skittering about in dizzied circles, crashing into rocks and trees and each other. For Caewen, it felt like a boil being lanced, but right through the skull. At the same moment, the spell of the shadowy eyes was torn apart. Caewen stopped running for a moment, only able to stare dumbly into darkness. Some distance away voices started calling to one another with more purpose, but no less venom.

“Where’d she go?”–“Over there?”–“No”–Find her now!”–“You’ll be skinned and rolled in salt if you don’t find her!”–“Go! Now!”

TWO

As she managed to half-grope a way back to clear thoughts, Caewen glanced around, working her lungs to catch some breath. Exhaustion sat like a ball of pain in every bone, in every joint.

“What are you doing?” hissed Fetch.

She shook her head, trying to clear it. Blinking she looked at the path. It ran through a cutting in the earth here, with walls of fern-clad dirt rising up on either side.

“Their hunting beasts will be here soon. They’ll catch us. They’re too fast.”

“They will if you stand here like a wet beggar in a dead town. Tsssch.”

“Whisper me another spell.”

“What?”

“Another spell. There are banks here. Steep. Can we set a trap? I think we can set a trap.” She looked at the ferns and grasses growing over the walls of soil, and small star-shaped flowers dotted the dark rank growth.

“Tsch. No. Too dangerous.”

“Yes, make it something dangerous.”

“No, tsssk. For you. You’ve drawn too much of yourself. I can only help a little. If you go too far with another spell…” Fetch trailed off, meaningfully.

“I don’t see a choice.”

“Candles and fireflaughts,” hissed the Fetch, angry. But he paused for a few seconds, then spat out a few more of his strange little sounds: chittering noises and soft scurryings and the sounds of a fly struggling desperately, entangled. But somehow, instead of these spidery sounds, what Caewen heard were spidery words.

She listened, and she understood. Caewen reached out and took hold of some darkness between her thumb and forefinger. It felt cool, and slightly slippery, like good quality velvet. It made so much sense to her now. She even wondered how she had never noticed that it was so easy to just pull at a thread of shadow and loosen the whole patch of darkness. Then she drew that shadow-thread, and teased it into a strand, and soon she had it fastened across the path. Again and again, she pulled shadow-gossamers and twisted them, and strung them, making a netlike pattern of dark chords. When she was done, each of the darkness-threads was as sturdy and hard as a steel cable, but glistened with a tarry stickiness.

“Enough,” said the Fetch. “If that doesn’t snarl a pursuer, no other art or charm will save us. Tsssch.”

Her shoulders had slackened now that she was done. She exhaled a long, hard breath out of her chest, pushing hot fog into the cool air. Her ribs twinged at the strain. “Yes. Enough.” The burning in her legs and a-growing stitch in her side stopped her from leaping into another sprint, but she pushed herself to move, jogging on as quickly as she could manage.

As Caewen moved up the next rise in the path, a hunting boggart did indeed come snarling along the path behind her, just as quickly as she’d feared. The thing was moving on all fours, like a bounding wolf. There was a slick reflected light of wetness on its muzzle where hard white teeth shone. Its eyes gleamed a deep and rotten red. But, even as it saw her outlined against the sky, even as it flung itself forward, the beast crashed into the spiderweb of shadows. It thrashed about and screamed in outrage. It was caught. A moment later, another of the creatures arrived and sprung straight into the same trap.

Caewen did not wait about any longer to evaluate how well her spell held them. She stumbled onward, pushing her legs, fighting the pain, crashing through leaves and snapping branches, until she burst out onto a moonlit hillside. Above her, the ground rose upward and northward, all thickly carpeted in grey-silver grass and splodged with heather. But upon the next ridge stood a jumble of huge boulders. It looked as promising a place to hide as anywhere else. Beyond those leaning stones arose only the lightless and jagged ridges of mountainous foothills. Fetch had brought her even farther north than she’d realised. She cursed him under her breath, and swore she would have the truth of it out of him as soon as there was a chance to stop and question the little shadow-thing.

This was not an accident.

This could not be some chance detour.

He was leading her somewhere.

And he had risked both their lives in so doing.

Her suspicions grew more solid as she passed a line of old, rather smallish, standing stones, weathered and tilted at crazed angles. They had been hard to see at a distance, being not much taller than the grass. Each stone was of a dark charcoal hue, shot here and there with little rivulets of a more silvery vein. She had been running so hard that her whole body was steaming in the cold air now. In any other moment, she’d have stopped and wondered at the meaning of the stones.

But cries and yells behind her prodded her aching body sharply forward.

Where before, there had been barely a fickle track in the grass, Caewen was all of a sudden surprised to discover a wide, evenly bricked path at her feet. She had the impression of having arrived–quite unexpectedly–at someone’s house, though there was not a hovel or cottage in sight. The path went boldly uphill, right towards the big pile of stones. A little farther on, several more standing stones marked the earth: these appeared to have been carved of a very dark, very slick stone. Jet, perhaps? Or onyx? Carvings of weirdly fluid creatures twisted all over the surface of the stone faces. Every time Caewen turned her head, she had the distinct impression that she could just glimpse movement, as if the creatures were writhing and squirming in the corner of her eye. Of course, as soon as she looked squarely at the stones, all was still. She experienced an overwhelming urge to just turn around and walk away.

This whole pace felt… not wrong or dangerous exactly… but as if the earth itself were warning her off. It felt as if there was someone or something here that liked privacy.

She looked back downhill, desperately trying to think of some other way out of the situation. No other option presented itself. And the howls and yells were rising up in renewed anger, closer and closer. She felt another counter-spell–this one more elegant and more precise–and the shadow-web spell broke and fluttered away, snapped into pieces by that same mysterious sorcerer in the darkness. This time, she also had a sense that the spell had come from somewhere at a distance. Perhaps the magician had not been in the camp, but was at some other soldier’s encampment nearby? In any instance, her pursuers were catching up. They would be upon her soon.

“Fetch.” She snarl-hissed under her breath at the little demon. “If I survive this night, I will make a hat out of your pelt.”

“Tsssch. Don’t speak too hasty. Run on, Caewen, blood of my heart’s warmth, my life and my breath. Run on. You will see. And maybe, you will thank me later. Tsk. Rather than turn me into a garment, that is. Tssssch.”

“Thank you? Somehow, I doubt it.” But she had no choice. She pressed on, dodging around the unpleasant dolmens where she had to, and avoiding them entirely where she could. Looking up, she was startled to see an inviting orange glow coming from what appeared to be a window in the side of one massive expanse of stone. It had not been visible from further down the hill. The casement had been set cleverly into raw, undressed stone so that it was not easy to see from most angles until quite close. She saw then that the boulders leaned into one another in such a way that they created a hollow within themselves. It struck her that they looked like a group of conspirators, crouched together and touching their heads to whisper. A few more steps and now she could see that the various gaps between boulders had been walled up with bright red bricks, and there were more of the pleasantly aglow windows. It was all cunningly constructed for secrecy, with each window angled and recessed just so. Under the windows and around the feet of the boulders grew gardens full of flowers that were mostly of a velvety black colour, but with small bright yellow centres. Following the path, Caewen came to a door. It was tall, strong and painted a friendly summer-tree shadow tint of blue.

She was considering knocking when a voice called to her.

“Come in, lass. Come in. No point in getting eaten by boggarts on a fine night like this.”

As the voice spoke, Caewen realised with a start–she recognised the speaker.

THREE

“Well? Are you going to stand about like last year’s scarecrow, or will you come in? Make a decision. Be quick about it. There’s a wind out there strong enough to blow the milk out of your tea. Door open? Door closed? Be quick about it.”

Caewen half-expected the door to open on its own, but it did not. She looked over her shoulder. Three feral shapes prowled into view. They were mere silhouettes of darkness, moonlight-limned against a greyer shadowy haze, but their shape was clear enough. The hunting scarle were closing in now. Probably, they had slowed only because they thought she was trapped, and were moving with caution.

Seeing no other choice, Caewen pushed at the door. Although it was a massive, heavy thing–made of old heart-oak and bound with greened copper–it glided on its hinges as softly as the shadow of a feather.

Caewen stepped over the threshold and did not hesitate the shut the door behind her.

“Good,” said the old woman’s voice. “We’ll be safe from intruders and ill-wishers here. None can pass my threshold who are not permitted.”

The space within was well appointed. There were thick rugs and woollen wall hangings. A huge, red brick fireplace occupied one crevice, and gave out a warmth and a glow. Candles stood on every surface, casting small fickle lights that conjured shadows against the walls. Bundles of fragrant herbs hung from hooks where space allowed. There were bookshelves full of old leather and hide-bound works, and even a handful of plants in pots. If it had not been for the tilted angle of the walls and the weird bulges of raw stone, the place would have seemed like a well-to-do house belonging to a well-to-do village matriarch.

“What is this?” said Caewen, knowing that she sounded silly as she asked it.

“Why, it’s my house,” said Cag-Mag. “And my house is what it is. I apologise for the ruse to get you here. You wouldn’t have come on your own, and the matter is urgent.”

Snarling and howling erupted outside. There was scratching at the door and two rot-coloured eyes appeared at one of the windows, peering in. There was a thump as someone tried to break the glass with what looked like a spiked mace: the glass held. The glass panes might as well have been made of iron. Caewen jumped with a start, nonetheless.

“Bah. Don’t mind them. They can’t come in. Well, not uunless I invite them in.”

Caewen returned her gaze to her unexpected host. “But what if I want to leave?”

“We’ll build that bridge after we’ve quarried the stone.” Cag-Mag shrugged. “No point in doing it the other way around.” She was sitting in a plump armchair of red velvet, worn down to a shiny scuff at the usual places of wear. All around her lay, or were scattered, the accoutrements of a comfortable old woman’s living space: basket of yarn, half-finished knitting, a spinning wheel, several warm quilts, tongs for the fire, a pile of neatly cut logs, footstool, quaint little table and all manner of other smaller work-a-day things. Pungent but not unpleasant smells of lanolin and dried lavender stood out on the air. And all the time, Cag-Mag’s shadows played about her. She was not called Cag-Mag Twelve-Shadows for nothing, after all. Admittedly, Caewen found it as difficult as always to actually count all twelve of shadows in one go. Each of them lay in a different direction, and they moved fickly with the flames of the hearth and candles. Now and then, one of the shadows quite entirely gave up mimicking its master, and did its own thing instead. One shadow would give a great big yawn and stretch her arms, whilst Cag-Mag sat still as still. Another shadow scratched her nose, and smacked her lips, whilst Cag-Mag remained just as motionless as a rock.

Caewen looked down at her own shadow, half-expecting it to be cavorting on the rug, or perhaps there would be three shadows, or ten, or a hundred, but none of these things were true. Her shadow behaved exactly as a shadow ought, following Caewen’s in motion and in shape… an always steadfast companion.

“Now,” said Cag-Mag, “Take a seat, and perhaps you can show me that thing you have been carrying about. “It isn’t easy to get a scent of, not easy at all. It’s like trying to find cobwebs by their smell, or remember the smell of summer clover by snuffling one’s nostrils against a pressed flowerhead.”

“You mean the Old Great Spell?” Caewen looked over her shoulder, worried that her voice might have carried outside. The sounds out there were growing angrier. Snarling sounds and growling sounds, but there were sounds of harsh voices now too, and boots stamping and swords being drawn. And there was a faint undercurrent of magic seething outside. Whoever the magician might be among the soldiers, he or she was throwing spells at the walls of this house–although apparently without much success.

“Bah. Don’t mind them. I am the Grand Archimage of Shadows. I will repeat myself, as it seems you are not listening: none will pass my threshold who are not permitted.” Cag-Mag sniffed, deeply, then added, “To your question: No. Not the Old Great Spell. That little trinket in your coin purse. Don’t tell me you still don’t realise? You might as well bring out the ivory statue too, but don’t touch it with your skin. No reason to let him know that we are talking about him, eh? How about we gossip for a bit before he turns up.”

Now Caewen was perplexed. “My coin purse? Fetch, what do you know about this?”

Fetch performed the little fluid movement of the forelimbs that served him as a shrug. “Nothing and less than nothing. Tsssk. Herself of the High Shadows and Sorcery insisted that I bring you. I did not propose it.”

“You probably think he’s betrayed you?”

Caewen nodded. “Hasn’t he?”

“No. And also, yes. But, also, very much no. You will see.” Cag-Mag leaned forward and tapped a forefinger on her little side-table. Its dark oak surface reflected the finger as if it were the darting neck of a pallid heron upon a lightless pond. “Tip out the coin purse. Let’s have a look at it.”

Confused, Caewen unfastened the purse from her belt. Because she was still trembling from the run and fear, it took a bit of effort to unlace the purse properly, but eventually she had it in hand. She pulled at the leather thong a few times, enough to open it wide. There were fewer coins, rings, drab little semi-precious stones and other bits of tradable jewellery than she’d have liked. This was all she had to sustain a long journey by foot, and it wasn’t much. Nonetheless, it still made for a jumbled pile when upended into a heap. Caewen noticed that Cag-Mag didn’t touch anything with her finger. Instead, she picked up a knitting needle and prodded at the things, gingerly. “Ah, there we are. A white fish hiding among the gold and the silver. I wonder how you ever got hold of it though?”

Cag-Mag separated out the bone cloak brooch that always seemed to be on top of everything else whenever Caewen went hunting for coinage at an inn or shop. The brooch was always a nuisance… and suddenly, Caewen wondered: where had she acquired it. The brooch seemed in her memory as if it had always been in the purse. It also struck her that she never ever thought of trading it away, but she couldn’t have ever explained why. It was as if the brooch was a part of her little treasure, immutable and stuck. Whenever she had looked at the thing, it just sort of slipped around the outside of her conscious thought, as if it existed only in a place of shadow-thoughts, somewhere underneath her waking mind. “Oh. I don’t know…” She thought hard. “I didn’t have it before Mannagarm called me… I’d remember that. But I feel I’ve had it forever afterwards. Where did it come from? I think it must have been in the handfuls of treasure I took from the Wisht Folk. But that was so long ago…”

“Strange, hmmm? That it should live with you, and go along with you, barely noticed? I wonder what he did to the Wisht as punishment? They ought have taken better care of it. They ought have never have been so careless as to leave it in some unguarded heap of coins.”

“No. It wasn’t unguarded. It would have been the safest place to hide anything, most of the time. But the old goule-thing had just been killed, and Mannagarm was not fully–“

“He would have been enraged. Oh yes. That would be a sight to see.”

“But what is it?” asked Caewen. She blinked in confusion. “And who would be enraged?”

“Take out the statue now. But don’t touch it mind, like I said.”

She only had one ‘statue’, the little carven figure she had acquired at the Wizard’s Moot. Caewen already well understood the risk of touching it with bare skin, and she was afraid that it might perhaps give off some emanation that enemies could find. She didn’t understand the underlying enchantment. It might have been able to do all manner of things in secret.

Out of caution, she kept it in the same little strongbox where she secreted the fragment of rune-cut antler. Both were wrapped carefully and separately in soft rags of wool and linen to protect them against jostling and scratches. Caewen took out the strongbox and opened it. Magic escaped the box, and she thought she heard noises of astonishment from outside, as if others had sensed the opeening of the box and the flood of old and mysterious sorcery filling the air. The, she took hold of the bundle that concealed the statuette, unrolled it and stood the figure upright on the table. Its stand made a resonant clink against the wood. In all this, Caewen was extremely careful to touch it only with the rags. She closed the box immediately as well. There was no point in further announcing that the Old Great Spell was in her possession. From the sounds outside, it seemed that at least some of the night-folk understood that fact well enough, just from the brief moment.

The old wizardess leaned over, peering closely, studying the statue. All her shadows bent over with her and studied the objects just a closely. They started talking to each other, excitedly, but silently. What words they spoke, Caewen had no notion. Cag-Mag pointed. “It is, I think, third from the right.”

Caewen had to examine the statue closely and carefully to see what Cag-Mag meant. The statue itself was of a bent old man, long-bearded and with a face marred by a lifetime’s wrinkles. Maybe more than a lifetime. He looked older than the hills. Ancient beyond the years of mortal-folk. Around his feet was arrayed a scattering of objects. Cag-Mag was right. Now that Caewen had the cloak brooch and the statue side-by-side, the resemblance was unmistakable. At the old man’s feet, just next to his right boot, was a tiny carven representation of Caewen’s bone brooch. “Huh,” said Caewen, finding that she had little else to say.

“Would you like an explanation?”

“I would love one.”

###

“He is ancient,” said Cag-Mag, “and if he had a name, it is forgotten. He was a mortal man once, and a sorcerer of great power. But do not conjure up in your mind’s eye some vision of an enchanter in silks and velvets: this was long, long ago. Think of a sorcerer robed all in skins and furs, face tattooed and painted, ochre upon his hands, bones and feathers adorning him, a flint dagger at his belt. He used his magic to draw out his life unfathomably long.”

“How long?”

“Very,” replied Cag-Mag. “People called him, even then, the Winter King, and he was honoured and in his lifetime legends were told of him. He lived in an age when there was no iron or steel. Swords were made of bronze then. There were great kingdoms, armies and small cities even, but also builders of stone circles and barrows, and some folk still lived in caves, or followed the beasts and the seasonal berries and fruits, from here to there and back. Those folk–so long ago–what they feared more than anything was death. And they had good reason. They were closer to the gods then, and folk of the mortal earth did not love the gods and goddesses. They had no hope for any manner of god-given afterlife, as cultists and worshippers think themselves entitled to nowadays. Folks did not worship the gods. Folks feared them. So, it was that a great deal of sorcery was expended in the seeking of long life or means to conjure life after death. The ancients build weird palaces under their barrows and deep in their pyramids, and their dead danced and revelled so long in the darkness that they forgot they were dead, and grew new bodies of flesh for themselves. They thought themselves beautiful, perfect creatures, and called themselves not ghosts, but they made up new names for themselves. Names that were weird, and beautiful, and godlike, just as they had become. But he was not one among those dead dancers in the darkness. He did not die… or not in the usual way.” Cag-Mag’s voice grew deeper and more inward. “When he understood that even his great magics could not extend his life forever–when all the others of his sorcerous order had withered down to mere husks of themselves–he made a bargain with Old Night and Chaos. He gave up whatever mortal desires he still clung to, and became solely and utterly hers. And then, only then, at long last: he died.”

“That seems contrary to the whole point making a bargain,” said Caewen.

“I’m not done yet.”

“Alright. Go on.”

“Thank you.” Cag-Mag shifted in her chair. “This story is not done, and neither was he. He died–yes–but, not all of him died. Not entirely. His corpse was cut up with obsidian knives, and his bones were hacked and sanded into objects that retained his old power. And then, once these objects were crafted, he found himself reborn.” She sniffed, waved a hand. “I don’t know how the transference of the soul was achieved, and I don’t want to know. I expect that some unfortunate maid was chosen, and she had little say in the matter. But he was reborn, a babe, just as any babe comes into the world. One imagines it was put into the maid in the usual way too, though I cannot be sure. Honestly, I don’t much want to know.”

Caewen made an uncomfortable noise with her tongue.

“Ah. Don’t worry… there is more. He was born. He grew. He was a child. A callow youth. A grown man. When he came of age, he took up his old bits of bone from his first corpse, and his powers all came back to him. But as before, this new flesh could not live forever. Eventually he must die. Again. And the soul must migrate. Again. And again, his power was put aside in the form of small carven bits of bone. Put aside for the next incarnation of the king to claim, in his due time.” She cleared her throat, looked at a window, frowning. “But here was the trouble. As long as he carried those bone-pieces of old power, as long as those tokens were anywhere near-at-hand, he could not fully die. Not completely. So he always sent them away, for safekeeping, and to allow himself to properly die and to be properly reborn. And so, he dies. And is reborn. Grows to manhood, and recalls his bone relics. And he grows old. Sends away his relics. Dies. Reborn. Dies. Reborn. Dies reborn. You get the gist of it, I presume?”

“I do.”

“Again and again. Over and over. He is born. He grows old. He dies. I doubt very much this is the ‘immortality’ that The Winter King imagined. One would think it might be enough to drive a man insane. One lesson from all this though: do not make bargains with Old Night and Chaos. She hangs goat heads on her market stall, but what she sells is dog meat.” A lazy wave of her thin fingers. “Anyway. Anyway. Where was I? In time, he grew to be the greatest servant of The Goddess of the Night. He commands her armies now. He rules her realms. He governs the lands that she cannot set foot upon. The old agreement still binds her, sitting atop a lifeless rock in a frozen palace of black ice, waited on by dead shades. But–ah ha. And now we come to it–this last time traipsing around the mortal coil, something happened that was unanticipated. He was reborn, and he reached the age when he would traditionally call for his bone relics to be returned… but one of them was missing. That had never happened before. Now, this one missing object is not on its own disastrous: he still has most of his power. But that last object, that missing fragment of power, it is an absent piece of his own soul: he wants it, he craves it, he is looking for it. It gnaws at him. It is always there, biting at him, rankling him.”

They both looked down at the bone cloak brooch, artfully carven, yellowed with age, lying heavily on the polished table.”

“Well,” said Caewen. “Bugger.”

“Yes. Bugger, indeed.”

“So, what do we do with it? Destroy it? Pervert it’s power? Burn it to ash? Grind it to dust? Throw it in the sea? Feed it to a dragon?”

Cag-Mag blinked at her. “Megsty me, lass. Hold your horses a moment.” She rearranged her dress, then said, “What we will do, is dangle it in front of him. Maybe, perhaps, we will even give it back to him. Maybe we will not. We shall see.”

Caewen was shocked. “At what price?”

Cag-Mag smiled. “Free.”

Her stomach knotted up. Unpleasant hot sensations crept up and down her throat. A jagged lump formed there. The hairs on her arms stood up a little. Was this the true betrayal? Was Cag-Mag in league with The Winter King all along?

“No,” said Cag-Mag, evidently reading her thoughts as clearly as a scribe reads a book. At length, Cag-Mag stated, plainly, “I am not betraying you. I am testing you. And, in a roundabout way, I am perhaps helping you also. He will never stop hunting his lost bit of soul. So long as you have the brooch, then the Old Great Spell is also at risk.” She waved a veiny hand. “Yes. Yes. I know all about that too. Luckily, everyone else thinks the other bit, the lost fragment is utterly destroyed. That was why The Queen of Night and Chaos allowed Athairdrost to even so much as keep the half you have now. Everyone else thinks it is nothing more than a curiosity exuding old whispers of useless power. What The Winter King is hunting you for is the brooch, not the rune-cut spell.” A catlike smile spread on her thin lips. Her eyes shone dark and luminous. “But… but… oh ho, we know better.” She winked. Her eyes grew more staid again, though a witch-light still remained there, a sheen of deeper potency behind her words. “So, I bid your shadow-thing to bring you here, to me. So that you may face The Winter King. So that you may stand before him. So that you may say to him: here is what you desire, but it is in my hands, and you may not have it. And so, here in my house, you will be tested. You need to be tested, because if you rstore the Old Great Spell, then it must be in the hands of a person who can resist remorseless, ceaseless, endless power. So.” She shrugged. “What will happen? You will give into the power, the allure, the beauty, the everlasting love of darkness, and hand over the brooch to him? Or you will not? Either way, you will be changed.”

“I’m not sure I like this plan of yours.”

“I’d be deeply concerned if you did like it.”

“I really think we should reconsider. There must be some other–“

But Cag-Mag stiffened and looked up, as if she could see right through the stone boulders that made the walls and roof of her house.

“Too late. He is here.”

FOUR

The door was flung open, banging loudly. Swirls of snow-glittering wind pushed into the cosy room, groping and feeling at the surfaces. Caewen shivered. The fog and thick air looked as if it were full of hands made from darkness and ice. But as the fingers crept closer to where Caewen and Cag-Mag sat, the old witch said simply, “No. Not here. Not in my house.”

The hands lost their animate glitter, and little puffs of dead ice crystal fell to the floor. A man’s outline appeared in the doorway then. There was a voice: not evil, not creaking and bleak, in most ways not wintry at all. It was a calm, plain voice, rounded in its tones and well-practised, melodious, but not cloying. It was the voice of some wandering singer, road-wise, perhaps down on their luck–a person who had seen the world and lived to yearn for a time that was simpler. The voice sounded kind, in its own strange way. It sounded sad. Weary. Wondering. And also, a touch frightened.

“What madman dares to call me like a feral spirit? Who summons me with sorcery? Show yourself.”

“He cannot see us,” said Cag-Mag. “And he cannot hear us. He will see only an empty cave. He cannot hurt us or cast magic upon our flesh, nor upon spirits. His sword cannot touch us. So long as we resist him.”

Caewen was staring, wide of eye, at the darkened doorway. When his questions got no answers, he entered, one step at a time, and that was when Caewen recognised him.

She couldn’t help herself as she fought back a sudden shocked in-breath.

He heard her gasp out loud. His eyes narrowed. He looked around, suspiciously.

“Who lurks here? You stoop to drawing illusions over my sight?” He searched with those dark beautiful eyes, and his face gathered a stormy starkness about features. Although she had not set eyes on him in many long months, there was no question in Caewen’s mind: this was the harper from the Wizard’s Moot. The man who had been lounging with a friend outside his tent. The one that Dapplegrim had kept calling, “Not human,” whenever Caewen found herself drawn to look at him. Now, like then, Caewen felt an immediate and powerful sense of being pulled to him. Before, she had mistaken the feeling for something merely sexual. But it was more than that, she realised. It was the candle’s glorious light in the eyes of a moth. It was the wonderment of stars and moonlight upon a frozen and treacherous sea. It was the lamp-flicker of the luring corpse-candle, far out in the fens and mires.

Oddly, unexpectedly, he was dressed much as he had been when Caewen last saw him, but now, somehow, his attire gave an impression of regality that it had not possessed previously. The clothing had a shimmer to its weave and the edges were stitched with the finest strands of silver. He glittered with each long, slow breath.

And his face.

She felt it again. The urge to just look and gaze on him and sigh a little for lack of any hope that she would ever been close to anything so beautiful ever again.

For his face was beautiful, and full of delicate angles. Deep hollows fell away beneath those cheeks. Lips that could only be described as sensuous had now a blushed shade to them. Each iris was as dark and opaline as a blackened pearl, but lit at the centre by a pupil of pure white. Long ice-blonde hair flowed about his face, stirring as if there was a wind in the cave–which there was not, now that the first rush of charmed storm-winds had settled away. His crown he wore was not of gold, steel or precious stones: but rather a crown made of glass forget-me-nots. The clothing he wore was a mass of drapery and folds: charcoal black and off-chalky white, decorated all along the edges with knot-work and ivy-leafs. Upon his chest was a device, picked out in silver on perfectly black leather cuirass: a winter-bare tree, branches twisting above, roots curling below. From the tree hung a chain, and from the chain, a harp. He had a harp hanging at his side too, ivory and silver and jet. And all about his person were fastened small objects that appear to have been carved from very old bone: rings and bracers, a torc, two earrings, a flower dangling at the end of a ribbon, tied to his sword. Though looking at the sword gave Caewen pause and reminded her a little who this was in the room. Although he was all beauty and handsome grace, the sword was an unmistakably practical object: undecorated steel as dark as the spaces between stars. A single red ribbon fastened to the pommel, and from that ribbon dangled the floral carving.

Caewen felt a sense of longing arise out of the bone cloak brooch, lying as it was on the little table. She felt it reach out and stretch its power out to the man in the doorway. It wanted to rejoin its siblings–it wanted to make the skeleton whole.

He must have felt it too.

He focused his gaze still further and pursed his lips. “Who are you to dangle my own corpse-bone in front of me? This is an insult. I say again: how dare you?”

She felt something more too. It wasn’t just the bone token that felt desire. She did, just as surely, just as strongly. She remembered how at the wizard’s fair Dapplegrim had warned her away from this man. How her companion had seemingly sensed her draw to this man who was not a man. Had Dapple know the truth? Or suspected it? He had been very firm in placing himself between her and the harper at the fair. And now this. Everything about the man was distilled allure. Caewen had imagined that The Winter King lead armies through fear or force of arms, but now she saw a more treacherous power in him. This was a being whose armies would love him, and would love him beyond the measure of their own life, and beyond the ultimate threshold of despair. And Caewen felt that love kindling in her. This was what Cag-Mag meant when she said that this was a test. Caewen had just to say–No–and yet, she could not bring herself to say a word. The struggle within was too great. The purity of the need was too powerful.

I cannot do it, she thought. I will step out of the illusion and reveal myself. I will give myself to him with the bone relic in my cupped palms. I will give him the Old Great Spell too, and tell him there is another half to be found, and it will be his for the taking. But I must not.

She screwed her eyes shut and felt her jaw clench. The pain in her body and mind was close to being beyond bearing.

So she did the only thing she could think to do.

Caewen sang a song of old power. It came to her in tatters of smoke and shadow on the air. It seeped out of the cracks of the stone floor, a rising fog of words. But she spoke not to the air, or the stone, not to the stars, or to the lines of power in the earth. She spoke to her own darkness. She spoke to the unseen and the unfathomable dreaming mind that sleeps within us all. She spoke to her worst desires. She spoke to a hunger for power. She spoke to selfish lust that has no care for how it is satisfied. She spoke to a need to revel in an enemy’s downfall and their pain and abasement. She spoke to the part of her that had guiltily delighted when Mannagarm was trapped in his own schemes. She spoke to the bitter joy she felt in hearing Athairdrost scream in pain as the dead cold hands of his white writhen tore his flesh. She spoke to all the things that a person denies about themselves, and fears about themselves, and knows deep down to be true.

She spoke to her shadow.

Not the Fetch. Her real shadow. The shadow within. Her own true darkness.

At her feet, the shadow responded. It stretched out, as it was a living thing upon the stone floor.

“You want him so much?” said Caewen. “You desire to be his? You need to yield to him, flesh and soul? Then go to him. Get up and go to him. I will not.”

At those words, her shadow did exactly that. It stirred, and it climbed to its feet, as if it had been simply lying down all this time. It grew shape and solidity, and it gathered colour to its flesh. For a moment Caewen was staring in a mirror, but then the image shifted. Where Caewen was untidy, her hair dishevelled, her clothing grey and brown and travel-stained, the Shadow-Caewen was suddenly not these things. She wore an elegant dress made of sapphires and over her shoulders lay a cloak of silvery fur. Her hair was wound and twinned and gloriously combed and shining, forming intricate braid-patterns, heaped up in lustrous coils. Her skin was a perfect and unblemished smoothness. Her eyes glowed with a colour like darkness on fire. And her lips, her perfect lips were as red as sunset after storm. With those perfect lips, she smiled, then the Shadow-Caewen bent down, picked up the brooch calmly between finger and thumb and she stepped out of Cag-Mag’s illusion.

“Hello,” whispered the shadow, quite huskily and with very clear intent set on The Winter King.

He did not quite flinch, but he stopped dead still.

“Give me the corpse-token,” he commanded. It was a tone that expected to be obeyed and there was a deep resonant power in it. No mortal being could have resisted, but the Shadow-Caewen simply held up the brooch and looked at him with a smile. Then, she whispered, “Make me. You might enjoy it. I think I would.”

He moved to raise his sword, but she only laughed and it was a long, clear beautiful sound. “Ah, what webs of joylessness and dour sadness you must weave for yourself. What a cloak of sobriety you wear. I will give you this, freely and of my own volition, without curse or obligation–if you grant me one small favour.”

“And what is that?”

“Take me with you. Keep me at your side. Let me serve you.”

“I have a hundred slaves to serve me however I please.”

“Oh,” she said. “But none like me. None who are your equal. Allow me to serve you. I think you will find it rewarding. We both shall. I am certain of it.”

He did not answer, either yes or no. Instead, he searched his eyes about the cave again. “There are others here. At least one more. Maybe two or three? Some of them are not mortal, I think. Did you summon me, or was it these others?”

“It was one of them, but you can ignore that one. The effort of summoning such a power as yourself, and the effort of keeping this little wall of trickeries and illusions–it is killing her. She has not admitted it yet–but it is killing her. Her heart will give out, soon enough. She is of no import. Not any longer.” Then, narrowing her eyes, catlike, she said, “So?” and looked at him. There was a hungry, playful questioning in her eyes.

At length, he nodded, and held his hand out to her. Perhaps he intended her to hand him the brooch, but instead she swept to his side and took his hand. With the grace of a shadow, she leaned into his chest, breathing deeply. Although he tensed, he put his arm around her waist.

“What is your name?” he asked her.

“Caewen,” she replied.

Then, apparently noticing for the first time, he said, “You have no shadow.”

“I did. But I have cut it loose, and I will leave my shadow here. It is a thin, bloodless creature, unable to embrace life and pleasure. It will come to no good end. My shadow is of no importance. It is as thin as mist and twice as frail. In time, it will die, and then there will be only me. Caewen. There will be no Other-Caewen at all.” With that, she looked over her shoulder and shot a smouldering, contented look at Caewen. Clearly, the Shadow-Caewen could see through the illusion, even if The Winter King could not.

They left the cottage-cave together, stepping through the doorway in one fluid sweep of beautiful silks and chinking sapphires. As they went, Caewen heard The Winter King ask, quite conversationally, “Have you ever ridden a draig?”

A few hard moments passed, brittle and crystalline, like poorly made glass.

Caewen could feel the breath heaving in and out of her ribs. She looked down. She had no shadow. Dimly, she heard sounds outside, as of soldiers and beasts leaving, returning the way they had come, muttering in wonder. No doubt the Sorthemen and hunting boggarts had not expected the young woman they were chasing to emerge like an enchantress in the arms of their king.

“This is not right,” said Caewen, desperately trying to think and catch her breath. A thought struck her. “Is she the shadow, or am I?”

Cag-Mag’s voice was wheezing when it answered. “That remains to be determined.”

FIVE

Caewen wrapped her arms around herself. Her shoulders hunched upon themselves. She experienced a painful need to do something. Cry. Scream. Run around madly. But she couldn’t bring herself to do any of those things. Not anything at all. Not really. Half of her was gone, and the sudden hollowness that had been left behind was awful. She felt as if she might never dream again. She wondered if she would ever again enjoy the feeling of sunlight on her face, or a stir of brisk wind against her skin. Would she ever again idle away at a half-baked thought in her head? Ever again let her mind wander. Her dreaming mind was gone. And her daydreams too. And, she wondered, perhaps the better part of her wonderment too. She found herself a far colder and more empty thing than she had ever imagined possible.

Cag-Mag’s voice came again, but dimmer and less vital than it had been. “By weatherglass and weirdlight, lass, your head’s full of mice.”

Caewen looked at her.

“I’d never have thought of that.” A hard, difficult breath. A bloody colour was entering Cag-Mag’s eyes. Her lips, previously a healthy rose were now as pale as a death-lily. Each intake of air she sucked was a fraction more rasping. “Carving yourself up, so as to not betray your friends and your quest. Impressive, in a way. Foolish, in other ways.” A shrug. “Regardless, I’d not have thought of it.” The shadows that always attended to Cag-Mag were gathering closer, gently stroking her brow, or laying fingers on her sleeve. One was weeping silently.

“You’re dying,” said Caewen.

“I had to draw a lot of myself to keep him from seeing us. More than I thought. I took as much as I might from my shadows. Then I took more, taking deep from within. I misjudged, and so… and so… when I saw how things were… I’ve taken a gamble on you. Megsey me. I may be an archimage of no small craftiness, but the Winter King has at his back the power of a goddess, and a potent one at that. Not one of your everyday local goddesses of the woods and field. No. One of the big ones. Blood from a turnip, my head do ache.”

“You’re dying,” said Caewen again, as if she were trying to say it out loud and believe it herself.

“We all die lass. Some sooner. Some later. I’ve had a good long life. I lived my youth to the fullest.” Dreamily, she added, “I supped my wine and danced my trysts in the twilight, and indulged in a few poorly conceived dalliances too. And then, I grew old, as a person ought. I did not seek to cheat death then, and I hope I will face it with some grace now. The end comes upon us all. Such is birth. Such is life. Such is death.”

“I guess.”

“Believe me, lass, when you lived to my age, you will know the truth of it. We live. We die. No getting out of it… not unless you want to try your hand at some necromantic arts, or make bargains with old gods or goddesses. Not unless you want to make yourself into something less like you and more like him that we just met. Just saying.”

“But, I’ve still no idea what I’m to do. You tricked me a long way off my journey east. I just lost half of myself–what will happen if that other half–her–what if she meets Ode… or Dapplegrim?” A cold shock settled inside her. “They’ll think she’s me.”

“They will. But she will think she’s you too, so it might go all fine and hummery, whatever which-ways it goes.”

“I don’t think it will.”

“No, I suppose not. You’re probably right. Well, I am dying, Caewen. Idle chit-chat isn’t the order of the hour. I can feel the coldness in my limbs. Soon enough I will lay the woman’s song. Great goghendies, it hurts. I don’t recommend over-drawing your life’s blood. It hurts something wicked.”

“Wait–is there a chance you will–“

“Come back as a horrock-o-bones, or some ill-made wight, or nasty skevrel, or mirkin bone-shanks?” She quite relished turning over what Caewen presumed were various names for a witching-ghaist. The thing that can be left behind when a magician drains themself down to death. “No. I have just enough weirdfire and power in my shadowlings,” a gasp for breath… “enough that they will save me from that fate. Otherwise… if not… then perhaps, yes.”

“Isn’t there some healing magic then?” She looked around the house, taking in the shelves and pots, old wood boxes and small wicker chests. “Or a charmed herb?” There were so many rows of recessed shelves, all crammed with diverse occult looking objects.

“What magic has taken away, magic cannot restore. Not without changing me into something I would not want to be, leastways.”

“I don’t know what to do then,” repeated Caewen, feeling pointless as she said it. “There’s too many things now. Too much.”

“Hurmph. If I could tell you, I would. But I don’t know a great deal more than you. Try to remember though: dogs may have four legs, but they follow one path, lass. Stop fretting. Stopping pulling yourself apart with misgivings. Sleep here tonight. Rest up for a few hours. Collect some thoughts. There’s plenty of riches and charmed things to rifle through for an hour or two, if you can’t sleep. A whole life-time’s worth, really. I can’t say what will be useful, and what will not. I have not that foresight, and I’ve half forgotten half of what I have, and haven’t half the mind to chit-chat about the other half neither.” She gave out a small cough that left her lips bloody. “So, above all, what then? How about this–try to remember one last bit of advice from old Cag-Mag: fret a little less and believe in yourself a little more, lass. You’ve already overthrown warlock-lords and princelings. You’ve slain monsters. You’ve walked in bleak places and survived deathly attacks. You do always find a way. You will find the Old Great Spell. You will remake the world, if you want. Or you will scratch out the old glyphs and throw the spell down a dunny-hole, if you want.” She gave another shrug, much weaker now. “It depends what you want.” The blood-flecked cough came again, rasping. “But mark me–megsie me–you’ll do it. Even if it is just by the moth-hole in your coat, you will do it.” A sad, sour look crossed her face. “And it needs to be done. the ancients were right to fear and hate the gods and goddesses. Too long have we poor mortal creatures been their playthings. Something must change in this, or what will be the future of humanity? Slaves and mindless children, overruled by petty, jealous gods forever and ever. It is not right.”

For a time, Cag-Mag struggled to breath. Caewen knelt down nearby, and held her hand. She could feel the papery, wrinkled skin growing colder by the second. Her pulse was failing. “Is there anyone I should tell? A vice-wizard of shadows, or something? A son or daughter? An heir?”

The old arch-witch laughed miserably. “It don’t work like that. The mantle of the archimage ain’t passed on by seniority or rank or bloodline. The shadows choose. Chops me down and turn me into a rocking chair, I don’t know how they chose. But they do.”

“I see. Alright then.”

“Here. I’ve just one last thing to say to you, lean in close.”

She did.

“Closer.”

Caewen leaned even closer, near enough to smell the bodily undertones of Cag-Mag’s breath and skin.

What I have to say is: Ixey pixey, barley straw, nine nips is that law, nip me now, nip me then, nip me when I fart again.” Then she laughed raucously to herself, guffawing. Blood spat from her lips in a fine spray. Some of it landed on Caewen’s cheek. ”I always wanted that to be my last words.”

Caewen stood up, and just sort of stared, mouth agape. She wiped the back of her hand across her face, smearing away the red spatters.

Cag-Mag’s last chuckle rolled out of her, and then her eyes drooped shut and her chest ceased to rise and fall.

It was done.

Her shadows bent down around Cag-Mag, stooping low, and picked her up as if they were carrying a dear friend at a funeral. They then made a procession out of themselves, slowly marching towards the back of the hall. When the reached the wall, they passed right through a tall puddle of gloom that stood there, slipping into it as if there had been a door leading to a tunnel of shadows and cobwebs beyond. Caewen followed after them, but when she reached the wall the shadows and their burden were no longer visible, having merged into the darkness. She put her hand up against the cave wall and felt the cold, gritty stone, more solid than iron. Alone now, Caewen found herself leaning forward, then tilted her forehead into the impassable surface, resting there, eyes closed, breathing hard, quick shallow breaths.

For a long time she stood there, motionless, her head against the rock, eyes screwed tight shut, wanting to cry, yet finding this was impossible.

She was disturbed eventually by Fetch saying, “Tsssch. Really though, if you think about it, her actual last words were I always wanted that to be my last words, which isn’t quite as impressive.”

SIX

Caewen searched around the room, listlessly turning over dusty books and rummaging inside pots, baskets and small lockboxes. An awful absence had entered the place, almost as surely as she felt the absence in her own heart. The emptiness of the house seemed like a morbid reflection of her own state of being. Briefly, she had an irrational desire to take nothing, just 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 what was sensible to do. Though her movements were all rather automatic and without a hint of the old energy she’d once had, so long ago. She searched the space carefully, but without much interest. “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 might 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, giddy, prickling or nasty sort of feeling when she touched the object with the bare skin of a fingertip. 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 pulse 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, I think. Tssssch.”

“Is it safe to carry about?”

“Hhhm… tosh. Safe in the sense that the stone won’t do you harm. Dangerous in the sense that many is a magician who would slit your throat in your sleep to get the stone from you. Just don’t go wearing it as a necklace, yes? Hmm. Tsch.”

Caewen held the stone in both hands and felt a dizziness come over her. It raw living power thrummed. She took a couple backward steps, and leaned into the nearest wall, then let herself slide down until she was sitting on the floor. Still holding the stone. Still staring at it.

The flood came at her 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 with sleeves and fingers.

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 choked-out breathing and sniffling. Finally, the tears eased away. Caewen felt more like an empty wreck of a person than she had even moments ago, having lost half herself. Sitting there, in the half-dark, scoured of whatever that emotional outburst had even been. She looked at the stone and couldn’t bare to think about it.

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 the stone–and the teeth are easy enough to get–I know where Mantie got some–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 on everything else. Just see to my first promise. 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, because you are vastly more thoughtful. I can see what Dapplegrim sees in you. But the thread that makes you a pleasantness and a thoughtfulness also makes you incapable of walking away. You can’t leave 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 inborn vagaries. I could choose to go elsewhere and find a magician who wasn’t given to such reckless fits of heroics. 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 truly 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 remains of you is your 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? I didn’t much like the last one we were in.”

“Oh yes. War 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. Perhaps I will be lucky, and it will be a rather small god. 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.

SEVEN

The next morning arrived on grey paws, creeping and quiet. No bird song hung in the air. The world felt as if it were mourning.

Caewen woke. She ate, blearily, uncomfortably. She gathered the small and collected scavengings of the night before. There was a sizeable pile of coins and precious stones along with a small jewellery box packed with necklaces and the like. Of the jewellery, Caewen noticed in a distant, objective sort of way, that there were several that she would ordinarily have liked to keep for herself and wear. She still liked a pretty thing to put on, even if it didn’t do much to offset her grubby, dirty road-stained appearance. She always wore such things with a sort of happy, resigned half-sadness. As if she were just desperately trying to hold on to some of the normality of a young woman’s life.

But today, though there were necklaces of wonderful hue, crystalline and spun with filaments of gold, or graces with carven silver flowers… none of it stirred anything in her. She looked at them, and realised that she couldn’t quite see the beauty in them any longer. They seemed just… not dull exactly… but, she couldn’t see past the fact that these things were just bits of metal and stone. There was nothing about them that stirred the part of her souls that liked a pretty thing.

This scared her a little, but she wasn’t sure what to make of this new hollowness inside her.

She pushed the thought aside. There was too much to get on with.

So, into her bag went all the gold and jewellery, coins and small ingots of copper and silver.

A seperate drawstring bag held a quite different assortment of treasures–some rings, both plain and set with stones, along with an amulet, three necklaces, a coin made of a strange black metal, and a jet-encrusted circlet. These objects, Fetch thought were enchanted with spells, though he was unsure the precise intent of the magic. So, she took them, but did not dare put them on. There was no way to know what might come of the magic. It might be good, or ill, or indifferent. But chancing weird magics by toying with old and unknown relics was a fool’s game. Mannagarm’s fate alone had taught her that.

It had been a chill sort of lesson and not one easily forgotten.

Finally, last of the all the treasures was the glame stone. It sat alone in the middle of the table, aglow with faint witch-fire, black as coal, red as blood.

She looked at it a long time before picking up as careful as a mother cat with a kitten, then locking it away in the same ivory box that contained the rune-cut bit of antler. The box would keep both objects safe from the prying eyes of the sorcerous. No scryer, nor wandering familiar spirit, nor old god of the earth, sky, stars or sea would see what was inside the ivory box. That was the power of the little keepsake holder, and it was a power that Caewen was very, very grateful for.

After sorting her way through the valuables, she took several bundles of dried leaves, some withered mushrooms, and a jar of grey powder, all of which Fetch claimed had healing properties, if properly prepared before use.

There was a good store of food in the house too, and Caewen set upon making for herself a massive meal out of anything perishable. She ate until she felt fuller than she had in weeks. Blackberries and cream. Fresh bread, crusted on the outside and soft and white within. A slab of yellow butter, melting and begging to be spread on anything and everything. Elderberry cordial. A half dozen eggs, which she poached on Cag-Mag’s stovetop. When she was finally done, she felt momentarily rotund in the gut. The food put her in a lazy mood for the moment too. So much so that she ambled her way around the pantry, picking out everything that was even half-likely to survive a few days on the road. Hard cheese. Salted meats. Dried apples. Rock hard biscuits. A small sack of dates, which she had never seen before, let alone tasted. She ate one, and found it to be cloying in a delightful sort of way. She took also a couple bottles of wine and three gourds of that elderberry cordial.All leftover food Caewen threw out onto the grassy turf outside. Hungry sparrows immediately began searching the discards. Finally, on her way out the door for the last time, she noticed a hefty bronze key hanging on a hook.

“I suppose I should lock the place up? Or it’ll be ransacked by boggarts.”

Fetch tsssked. “If you like… though, I am unsure that we shall ever pass this way again.”

“Still,” she said.

“There we are. Pigheadedness. Tsssch. I’m glad to see you feeling better.”

“Am I though?” Caewen lifted the key and walked outside. As she stood on the threshold stone, she shut the door and locked it. The key went into the bag with the various unidentified magical trinkets.

She looked about. The sun was rather pale and sad. A white disc, barely shining through a hazy, cold sort of cloud. The birds, chittering and flapping, didn’t seem charming to her… just merely noisy and perhaps even a touch bothersome. She cast her gaze over the landscape. If she squinted eastward, Caewen was sure she could pick out the distant glimmer of water. She guessed she was looked at the inland Sea of Asthe. She would need to circle a long way south to get around its shores by whatever trackways she might find.

“Well,” she said, shouldering her bags, “I suppose we had better get walking. It’s a long way that we’ve got ahead of us, and there’s bare enough time.” As she stepped heavily down the hill, she was struck for the first time by her lack of a shadow. She had not noticed it so much, that is, when she had been inside the dimly lit home. It had not bothered her. But here, in the daylight, the absence of a shadow left her feeling somehow naked and a little bit unpleasant all over her skin. The more she dwelled on the loss, the more uneasy she felt.

“Folks are going to think I’m a witch, the moment they see me.”

“Tsssk. You are a witch.”

“I suppose so.” She paused in her stride, just long enough to look over her shoulder, south and west, across hills that rolled away to distant southern oceans: mere scrapes of buttery greyness at the edge of the horizon. “I wonder how the others are faring?”

EIGHT

A long journey by sea is an interminable thing if a person is not born to it. There are some–men and women alike–for whom a life at sea is the only life they will ever want. Strange ports and new peoples. Distant cities passing on hills. Spices and rare furs to trade. Amber and perfume at one port. Gold and silks at another. The thrill of rising on crests of sea-green water, as clear and hard as stained glass, as tall as sharp-crested hills.

But Samakarantha was not one of these.

For him, the hot forests and shady jungles of his home country had always had a stronger call than the sea ever could. He loved the hard light of day on the open grasslands. He loved the cool tumble of stream water on rocks under dappled shade. He loved the sounds of the creatures that roam by land, and the bright birds that fly there. A gull was a raucous and noisome cacophony to his ears, and a pelican was a blundering clown to his eyes. Seals were unpleasant and slick looking, and smelled of fish. And he did not trust the unfathomable depth of the ocean. He did not like to think what vast things of proportions unimaginable might be sleeping, down there, somewhere at the bottom of the sea. The sea held little joy for him. Truth be told, it made him uncomfortable. Even, a little afraid.

But he had set himself upon a journey by sea–however unpleasant–and now he came at last to the end of it. His mind flickered back over remembered days. Immediately after departing the moot, he sailed from Bernoth Town downriver, and then over great distances to the city of Caitroth, built and cut from golden sandstone, and lounging at the mouth of the Blue Osseth. There he called a meeting of Theurgists, and spoke with them. That city was also where the Lady Peloxanna left him, travelling north to her home country–for her homeland had its own threats and troubling rumours, and she decided that she had to return there quickly, upon hearing certain rumours and seeing certain signs in the casting of stones. After Caitroth, he visited the Cities of Coral Stone, and finally, he arrived at Temask. He had no time to venture as far south as Zorith, where the priests of the Western Sun Temple sing their sunset-songs, but he sent messengers to them.

And then, once this was done, he returned to the north.

Over the calm Telaegrian his ship sailed, skating across the waters where the azure drakelings dipped and dived for fish. Then along the coastlines of Sorroscan lands and the Laquahar Kingdoms, and at long last north and farther north, headlong into the freezing salt-spray and choppy waters of The Great Bay. And all of this for the sake of arriving at Old Brae Port: a squat, grey, seagull-stained, washed-up mass of stone and weathered pine-wood, crouched at the edge of a recalcitrant, stormy sort of inlet. Above it all stood a grim and starkly defensible castle. Even in this, the royal residence of Brae, there was little loveliness. A few streaming banners. A mass of flowering honeysuckle, here and there on the walls. That was all.

The ship that carried Samakarantha was a spice-trader out of Emeraltus. She was called the Lessejo em Tellajio: That Which Longs After the Gates of Dawn, to translate rather literally and without much poetry. It was a three-master, narrow, sharp-of-prow and built from a rare wood as dark as mahogany, and twice as strong. Gold paint decorated the carved jungle vines along its gunwales and prow. It was the sort of ship that does not often call at bleak, grey little northern ports.

Already, Samakarantha could see crowds of curious idlers gathering along the piers. As the ship neared. The people gathered and pointed. Watch now by many eyes, the crew seemed to take up some renewed pride in their seamanship, and they tacked and changed course to better match the rising tide with prompt alacrity. At that manoeuvre, the whole leaning flank would have become visible from the city for a gilt-flashing moment. That would have sent a rustle of wonderment through the crowd. The Lessejo em Tellajio was twice as tall as the next-largest warship or trader in view, and almost twice the length as well. Samakarantha could imagine the gasps and mutterings on the piers. Soon enough, the ship came about and turned headlong towards port. Fishermen looked up from labouring in their small, fat-bellied boats, and they wiped their brows, and whistled to one another in amazement. And the Lessejo em Tellajio cut onwards with its path, slicing long wakes of foam into the ice-green seas.

Near the prow, he stood. Robes of chalk and grey flapped around his shoulders and legs, graced here and there with gold. His skin shone in the settling rich sunlight. His eyes gleamed hotly. Many who saw him, thought that an emperor of some southern sun-kissed land had come to visit. But he was no emperor. He was Samakarantha, magus, speaker of rare tales, seeker of truth, and hopefully also, an averter of war, chaos and darkness.

Though that last was yet to be proven, one way or the other.

###

The ship was brought alongside a heavy oaken wharf by use of poles and hooks and ropes. The smash of small waves disturbed seaweed and beds of minute, shiny mussels on the pylons. A few crabs scuttled out of the shadow cast by the tall ship, hiding franticly in cracks, or plopping straight down into the water.

The gangway was hoisted out, and Samakarantha was the first to depart. He breathed the deepest more relieved sigh of his life to be back on land again. It was not the balmly, beautiful land of his home, but it was land nonetheless, solid beneath his feet. For a queasy moment, the stillness of the earth made him question himself, but his balance came back after a handful of slightly wobbly steps. Shrugging his shoulders, clearing his throat, he approached a shore-man who was presently busying himself with ropes and knots. “Has the Gentleman Kob-noggle made himself known?” He was unsure of the pronunciation and so emphasised the syllables a little wrongly perhaps. The name was known to him only in writing. Letters by swift courier vessels, and messages by other more esoteric methods had been sent, and a contract had been struck. A trader by this name was meant to meet Samakarantha, then show him to a pre-arranged residence.

The dockworker just shook his head and shrugged. But barely had Samakarantha said the name, then a very thin man, with wild bedraggled hair and a bit of a stoop, shouldered his way through the crowd, tutting and huffing to himself as he did. His chin was covered in a rather powdery looking blueish stubble. His eyes were alert and always darting about. He bowed at once, tried to take off a cap that he apparently had forgotten wasn’t on his head, then said, “Very good day to you, sir. Very good. I am himself, as you say, Meester Kobnoggle. Finest purveyor of accommodations, leases and domiciles of shorter or longer durations, as required.”

“I see,” said Samakarantha. “I will have my things brought along soon. For now, I am in sore need of a bath and something to eat. I presume that the staff will have hot water over a fire promptly?”

“Ah. Well. I cannot say for sure. They are very experienced staff. Very much so. But when last I imparted to them instructions, I did not think to apprehend and address that point in particular.”

“No doubt hot water can be provided quickly though.”

“Yes. Well. No doubt. Let us proceed. This way. We must take Learys Lane, then along the Slaith, and then to Halikeld Square. Bit of a walk, I’m afraid.”

The uneven cobbles of the first laneway were slippery and protruded into the soles of Samakarantha’s feet, even through boots. On either side, the houses were narrow, gabled to lean over the road, and had a mean, broken-down thinness to them. Slaith was, if anything, worse. Here, children in rags stood in doorways, dirty faced and bright-keen eyed, watching suspiciously as Samakarantha and his companion walked by. Farther along, several men stood about the outside of a decrepit looking temple-house, presumably the home some diminished or long-dead god. Though the men wore robes of red and orange, their garb was filthy and they had the haggard, squint-eyed look of street thugs rather than priests. At the end of the street a dead dog lay in the gutter. It was starting to bloat and attract flies.

“I did make it clear, Mister Kobnoggle, that I am in need of a grand and elegant residence. Further to this point, I am quite capable of paying whatever the price might be. I plan to present myself at court, shortly. I have business with the king and lords of these lands. As such, I grow… hm… concerned at the passing scenery.”

“Well, yes, as it happens, grand residences are somewhat scarce on the ground at this moment. Thegns and lairds are come from all over the Brae Demesnes, and up in the Highfeldjings, and even from the Wild Moors and the weird and witched Yail Valley.” He looked at Samakarantha knowingly. “A place where folk are said to be half-fanes with goat feet. Though I saw one of them Yail-folk and she didn’t look like no goat-footed lass, so there you go then. Who’s to know. But, my point is… my point being that is… the lairds and ladies and other grand folk are all summoned, even from there. Folks say, armies are marching, and a council is called. The consequence though is that grand residences are scarce. At this precise moment.”

Samakarantha adjusted the drape of his robes, settled his shoulders and tried to look on the bright side of this development, whilst not worrying too much about what manner of residence was available. “This is good perhaps. I was afraid I might find a land unwary or asleep. It seems that the king of this palce is aware of the danger?”

“Quite so, or so I gather.”

“Good. But…”

“Yes?”

“When you said that suitable residences are, how did you put it, scarce–?”

“Yes. Well. I have done the best that I could manage. Given the short notice. And given the current occupation of grand houses, more or less, as they say, to the gables.”

“I have already sent you fifteen gold revets in payment, with a promise of another hundred.”

“And still, accommodating your grand magus was… not trifling.”

They entered a square. It was clear that this had indeed once been a fashionable and important corner of the city. The space was wide and well-flagged. At its heart was an old, but richly carved and decorated well. All around the square stood tall brick houses of faded glory, gone all to peeled paint, rotten roofs and decrepitude. Bat guano stained the underside of the eaves. There was no glass in most of the windows. Filthy and grease-stained curtains had been pulled over what must once have been beautiful sunlit nooks. A few listless individuals went about their business. They all shot suspicious glances at the two strangers.

Occupying the entire south end of the square, and quite looming over everything, stood a house in the fashion of a very old and very run-down manor. It still retained most of its windows at least, though few of them were lit. What ornamental shrubs had lined its frontage were dead long ago: all now skeletons of weather-bitten wood and claws of twigs. Oddly though, along with most the glass being intact, so too were the brass fixtures and the hefty iron braces that secured the brickwork. The statues that reclined in niches all possessed their heads. In contrast, all the other houses had had their brass and ironwork stripped, and what decorative carvings they might have once possessed were entirely gone in some instances, or otherwise, the heads had been cut off and stolen, presumably for a quick sale.

“The House of Hissocking Sprent, m’laird, sir. The only grand residence left in the city to be had for rent or purchase. Yours, lock, stock and barrel, so to speak.”

“I hope by the bells that ring in the jungles at dusk that I do not now own this place.”

“Ah. Well. As it happens–um–you do. For the price of the gold you sent, I was able to purchase the House of Hissocking Sprent in its entirety. The owner was not interested in lease-hold or rent. On the sunny side of the egg, that does mean you don’t need to part with any more coin. Such as you might. For a more…” he waved his hand, searching for a word, “…erm, a more salubrious house, as it might be. The staff are paid up for the next sixmonth too. So all-in-all, quite a tidy little investment. You’ll be telling your grandchildren about this purchase, eh?”

“I can imagine. Why is it more intact than the other houses in the vicinity?”

“Ah, you’ve a keen eye, you do. That is on account of everyone hereabouts thinking the house is haunted. Ghaists and demonical beings and suchlike. Nonsense, you ask me. The staff have lived here their whole lives, and they aren’t troubled by notions of freetins and bugahags.” Kobnoggle returned his gaze to the vision of fallen nobility with a self-satisfied smile.

“Haunted,” said Samakarantha.

“Well, I say ‘haunted’, but proundly cursed might be more to the point. But, as I say, nonsense.”

Samakarantha felt a more sombre emotion as he looked at the place, running his eye over the carvings and grey-stained windows. “It was once a beautiful house, was it not?”

“This was once the most beautiful house at the heart of the most fashionable district of Brae. Balls were held here like you can’t imagine. Music never ceased, they say. Day or night, there was always music. But then, certain grand lairds and barons moved their residences elsewhere, and everyone else followed, and… there were rumours about why folks moved away. Things moving about in the darkness. Soft voices heard behind the wainscots. So this square fell into disrepair, and eventually, it fell a little farther than that. But yes. They say it was the most beautiful house in Brae, once.”

“Well.” Samakrantah tried a smile, as much for his own sake as anyone else’s. “Perchance it shall know that glory once again, my friend.”

Kobnoggle looked dubious, but nodded and a-hemmed agreeably all the same.

“Perhaps you can lead the way into my new residence?”

Certainly, Grand Magus, certainly I shall. This way.”

They ascended the stairs, and each step was cracked and worn. The doorway was especially elaborate, having old carings all about its fringe, and in a style not entirely in theme with the rest of the house. When Samakarantha paused to examine it, his guide said, “Well spotted, yet again, Laird Magus. The doorway was taken from an older tower. There are stories about it, but all are fabulous and cannot be credited.”

He looked down, and frowned. The threshold stone was extremely old and worn, to the point that feet had ground a shallow concavity into its surface. It was quite likely also a good deal older than the house. Maybe older than the previous tower. Clearly, some sort of building had stood here for a very long time. Between the carven door and the old stone threshold, there was something uncanny about the entryway. He considered it awhile before saying, “There is magic in this doorway, but it is of a wild, moody sort. Icy and cold. I will not tamper with it. At least, not until I have had time to properly examine its stories and weavings, and ask of it questions and hear its voice.”

Kobnoggle nodded and bit his lower lip. “As it pleases you, Laird Magus. Now, um, this way.”

They entered directly into a grand hall. The space was floored wall-to-wall with ancient, greasy wooden boards, and the walls were stained from white to a mingled eggshell and cream. Paler rectangles indicated where tapestries and paintings had presumably once hung. Doorways led off in various directions. A set of stairs curved upwards, to gloomy floors above.

Dust motes floated like sprites of gold and gossamer. 

In the hall stood three people: a very elderly man and woman, and a younger, though still middle-aged and grizzled man. The elderly couple were dressed as senior servants, and rather oddly, the middle-aged man wore a too-small outfit better suited to a page boy. All their garments gave the impression of having been much mended, and washed and re-washed to a point of inducing a bald shine on the surface of the fabrics.

“Ahem,” said Kobnoggle. “Might I introduce you to the household staff, that is if I may?” He indicated the older man. “Meester Scimminger, chief steward of the house, and holder of the keys to the buttery.” Then turning to the man he asked, “Does the house have a buttery?”

“Not as one might call in working order, no, mi’sir.” came the rasping, dusty reply.

“Ah. Well. Missus Woadmell Scimminger. Lady of the chambers. And beside her, the son of the twain, who is also Scimminger, but he is called I believe, Scithers, that being his personal name. That is, to avoid confusion. Scithers is the house page, and well, scullion, pot-boy, cleaning boy and so on.”

Samakarantha ran an eye over the staff. “I see. Allow me to introduce myself then. I am him they call Samakarantha, born of Mtawu and the Gold Dales. I am Magus of the Twelve Jewels of the Sun. I am counted among the Order of the Dawn Theurgists of Caithroth. I am an initiate of the inner sanctum and secrets of both the Western and Eastern Sun Temples. I have walked the dark paths under the gloom of demon-haunted jungles. I have threaded the maze at Sorcery Tor. I have breakfasted with Pharaoh-Magi and supped wine with the godlings and nymphs of the Grottos of Mycenatainth. I am the teller of stories. The reciter of charms. The droll of the majestic arts. I am he that darkness fears and evil spirits whisper of in terror. I am Samakarantha.”

There was a stretch of silence, then Scimminger said, “Very good, mi’laird. Do you require anything?”

“Ah, well,” cut in Kobnoggle, “I believe that our Grand Magus would be most appreciative of a… um, hot bath.”

“Yes,” said Samakarantha. “That–indeed–I would. But first, I must deal with another matter. This house…” he looked around. “It is in need of a touch of upkeep. It is somewhat below what I was expecting and I have a need to impress upon the lords and monarchs of these lands that I am a man of reckoning. Show me to a room where I might prepare such objects and materials as are required for practice of the majestic art. A large empty room, for preference. And alert me also when the first of my sea-chests arrives at the door. I will be in requirement of it, and soon.”

Scimminger nodded and his velvety wrinkles shuffled around, making and un-making patterns. “If you will follow, m’laird.” He proceeded towards the flight of stairs.

Samakarantha did so. His long and languid strides ate up the space as he trailed after the much shorter and more tottering steps of the steward. After a flight of stairs, and two long hallways, he found himself shown to a long dusty room. Sunlight streamed in through a greasy set of arched windows down one wall. There was no furniture in the space, but darker misshapen splodges among sun-bleached walls made ghosts out of the long-removed furnishings and decorations. The whole house was an echo of memories of a magnificent past.

“This will suffice,” Samakarantha said, looking about himself. “And now, I will await my first sea-trunk. We will postpone a hot bath until after I am done with addressing the state of the house.” As he spoke, a soft coldness seemed to blow through the air, touching his skin. He imagined he could see his breath on the air, despite the muggy half-warmth of the day. He paused. He turned his thoughts and mind about, watchful. “Kobnoggle said the house was haunted, but did not believe it. And yet… and yet.. I think uneasy souls do walk in this house.”

“Many do say as the house is haunted, m’laird.”

“And what do you say?”

“I do not know, m’laird. I has never seen a ghaistie or wullie-de-wisp or suchlike. But then, I do not go about the halls at night, if I can help it. Nor do my wife, nor son.”

“Is that so?” answered the magician. “Hm.” A pause, then he said, “You may go. If I have need of you, I will call.”

“As it pleases you.” And so left the steward on creaking knees, with fine dust trailing off the shoulders and cuffs of his ancient suit of clothing.

NINE

Samakarantha walked to the windows of the room and stood in the warmthless sunlight. The glass panes stretched all the way from floor to ceiling, and although the windows were comprised of hundreds of smallish squares of glass–each enclosed within a leadlight lattice–the whole surface still presented a much needed expanse of daylight in an otherwise dreary house.

He gazed down upon the square outside in silence, passively, as the moments slipped by on spidery feet. At last, he saw the first team of men appear at the westernmost laneway. They were dark of skin, just as he was himself, not like these pallid north-people who lived so close to the shadow of the nightlands. Six sailors carried a massive sea-chest, whilst four sash-bedecked and jaunty gallants walked guard behind. The guards wore coats of brigandine and sported, oiled, ringleted hair along with gold jewellery in abundance. They carried longswords gently over the shoulder, the blades glittering black-and-white in eddying patterns; this was a metal of a rare and secret making from Atroponea. Magpie steel, as it was called, was much prized by sailors, for it did not rust, not even in salt spray.

Samakarantha was preparing in his mind what charms and spell-raisings he might attempt first in this drear house, when something like a cold set of fingers tugged at his sleeve.

He turned, but no one was there

A watchful moment stood out like a prickling of fur on a wild cat. Some dust curled and billowed in the carpeted hall. Samakarantha turned from the window. He walked to the doorway. He stood for a while, listening, searching with his eyes, but nothing more happened. He then yelled out, loudly enough to be heard by the servants downstairs, “Have the chest brought to this room.”

A faint, slightly creaky, “Very good, sir,” answered him from somewhere away down the hall and stairs.

With a renewed focus, the magician went out of the sunlit room. He just outside the doorway, and looked left, then right, and left again. He was certain he had not been mistaken. Something unseen had tugged at his sleeve. There was something–maybe more than one somethings–in this place, hidden just out of earthly vision. Finding that the righthand hall seemed to him to be just a touch more uncanny than the other direction, he walked a little way down the hall to in that direction. This took him away from the main halls and chambers. There was a definite coldness in the air now, and it did not have a wholly natural feel to it. He was about to go on, exploring a little farther, when he heard the heavy thud and clump of boots upon the stairs behind him. He turned around. The men hauling the sea-trunk came into view at the far end of the corridor. The eerie sensation vanished at once. Whatever else was perhaps restless in the house did not like a crowd, it seemed.

He looked over his shoulder, frowned to himself, but decided to turn his attention to the arranging of his belongings.

At least for now.

###

Samakarantha addressed the sailors as they arrived at the top of the stairs, heaving the truunk. “In here, if it may please you.” He waved a hand in the right direction. Once the chest had been eased down upon the dusty floorboards, he handed them all–sailors and guards alike–a gold coin each, then sent them back to the ship. “Bring my other things as time permits, and at the discretion and commandments of your captain. What you have brought already is most valuable to me, and most immediate in my estimations. I thank you, and I am grateful.”

The sailors all bowed and murmured their replies, softly, and mostly in the language of Emeraltus. “As pleases you, as pleases us, magus,” and “Welutu atu, welù-matu aturra.” The words mingled together softly, like a flock of redjays and white starlings, winging among one-another and never quite touching.

He waited for them to depart, and even went back to the windows, so that he might watch as they moved off together across the city square, then finally to vanish in the glooms of the narrow laneway beyond. He felt strange inside. Samakarantha was not used to feeling uncertain, but watching the familiar sailors depart left him feeling just and exactly that.

What would the days ahead bring? Good luck or ill? Hopeful tidings or bad? War or peace? Destruction or life ongoing? Upon which face would fall the coin of fate?

His reflection had stared back at him from the window panes for a good many minutes before he collected his thoughts, and returned to the sea-chest. “Now, let us get about the first of our tasks for this day.”

He opened the chest and took out a large silver platter. This he laid in the middle of the room. Into the platter, he emptied a leather sack containing sand. The sand was white and sparkling and as fine as powder snow. It has been collected from the banks of a stream that wound through the cloud-forests east of his homeland. Those were uncanny jungles: full of weird spirits, and monstrous snake-creatures, huge canopy-dragons that drank nectar from equally huge flowers, and devilets with grass for hair and wood for faces. Once the sand was in place and smoothed flat, Samakarantha removed three silk-wrapped wooden masks. Each of these he nestled down into the sand. Each of the visages was roughly cut, weird in its lines, and vaguely demonic in appearance: heavy browed, tusked with wild pig teeth, thickly lined with wrinkles, and with a thatch of old bristly grass for hair. Once all this was in place, he uncorked a bottle that held water taken from that same river as the sand. This was splashed lightly onto the three faces. And finally, he removed the gong that he had made from the three melted down bronze bells of the forest demons. This, he set on its stand, and once it was ready, he struck it three times. The noise echoed and flung itself into the corners of the room. It dissipated only reluctantly. The windows seemed to shiver. The air grew momentarily hot and humid. A buzz of giant dragonflies arose. Somewhere away in the distance an howler monkey called out. He spoke.

“There was once a magician who thought himself more clever than all the other magicians. He went into the wild and cloud-choked jungles and there he dwelled for a hundred and forty-four days. In that time, he lured and caught three spirits of the forest. He made bargains with them… and he did other things too… undertakings that might ensure their loyalty. He was a fool then. And a fool now. But he is the fool who is a master of three Biloko. Emthesti ifi ifi ishii. Emthesti ifi ifo ishiia lomokulu.”

The masks stirred. Mists and vapours gathered about them. Each began to rise up from the sand, gathering behind itself a form, heavy and hunched, strong-armed, long-fingered, brindled in red and grey, and with a face that was hard and wrinkled, like old polished wood cut into a shape half-way between a human and a forest pig.

 One of them spoke. Its voice was surprisingly soft. It spoke the way rain falls through a canopy: “Ekulu ti fo olarumila?

Samakarantha waved his hand outwards expressively, “Imtafa! Tasuh ti umturaja. Mkalu ti ifi ifo ja-umturajam. Atha! Atha!”

“Iyshee,” they all said in reply. Then they bowed stiffly and shuffled out of the room, their lop-sided gait making them weave side-to-side. Even after they were gone from sight the change in the air remained. A sense of humidity erased the chill. The sunlight streaming through the windowpanes seemed brighter somehow. Faint noises of animals and birds that lived many, many leagues away were audible: but only if one knew what to listen for and strained to hear them. The laughter of the hyaena was barely louder than Samakarantha’s heartbeat. The noise of a raucous grey parrot was no louder than his breath. The roar of a tawny gryphon was no more loud than the noise of his own blood in his ears.

Nonetheless, the sounds made him homesick.

When this was done he planned to go home and maybe perhaps never leave again. Too much wandering in the middle-years of life makes a person unsettled, even a magician.

But the noises faded and then, for awhile, all was stillness.

Slowly, so very slowly, a change grew itself upon the room. It spread like linseed oil spilled across a thirsty and rough-sanded wood grain, seeping outwards in a glisten, adding colour and hue as it crept.

The decorations appeared first at the edges of things. The shapes crept and spread, turning into vines and leaves carved of polished rosewood and dark marble, then moving like real, living vegetation, growing and unfurling, putting out wooden leaves and resplendent flowers that were quickly dyed with inks of red and gold. Mosaic patterns unfolded in azure and purple wherever a surface would support them. Waterlily carvings appeared on the floor. Wondrous, white-feathered egrets stalked out of carven reeds and took up position along the walls, intently watchful for stone carvings of fish and frogs.

Samakarantha walked to the window as a scenery of wetland and humid forests unfolded around him in the room. The windows reshaped themselves into elegant arches, and doors appeared, then opened outwards. A balcony unfolded itself and sprouted railings of darkly polished wood, cut into curls and twists and leaves. The magician took himself out onto the balcony at a stride. A thought occurred to him then: it was perhaps arguable that his Biloko were overdoing the magic. He frowned. He had meant only to put on a slight show in the repairing of the house–draw a little attention even–but this was turning into a weird spectacle. He could feel magic churning up from somewhere deep below. With a shock, he realised that the magic was no longer coming from inside himself. Through inattention and in no way expecting there to be in trouble, Samakarantha had not held a tight grip on the spell. A chill ran down his neck as he realised that the magic had slipped loose, and now it was running feral, drawing–it seemed–on some wellspring of magic that was vastly more powerful, deeper and older than any magic he might ever wield.

But he remained impassive as he stood on the balcony. It would not do for people to think that the spell was outside of his mastery. As it was, folks were gathering in the square below, their upturned, frightened faces gawking and open-mouthed.

He did his best to show them a friendly smile and a nod, even as he felt the magic seethe through him with such force that it made him giddy and a little nauseous.

Left and right, the house grew. Towers sprouted. Windows geminated. Brilliant tiles of malachite green spread over every rooftop like a lawn on dead earth. The walls that had been drab and pigeon-stained were washed with a whiteness as bright and bold as alabaster. Thick living foliage grew from every available inch of soil in the derelict garden beds, and crowded up the walls of the old manor house. And then–to Samakarantha’s horror–the magic spread. Whatever hidden power was fuelling the spell was so great that ripples of it were even now spreading outwards, and these wavelets of magic were lapping upon the surrounding houses. He saw windows being repaired or replaced. Walls were painted. Holes were bricked up and roofs were fixed. Many of the nearer houses grew decorative embellishments too, and a good number also sprouted little garrets and additional sunrooms out the side of their walls, like mushrooms of glass and polished oak. The roads were swept clean. Samakarantha could see the carcass of the dog he had noticed earlier lift off the ground and waft away, carried to whatever place old dead dogs are wont to arrive at in this town.

He did his best not to look startled by all of this.

Then as the magic spread even farther, he did his best not to look terrified.

People below were whispering and pointing. But once they realised that the strange magician had seemingly decided on a whim to repair, rebuild and enlarge every house in the slums by the bay, more than a few of them started to cheer and whistle too.

He showed them another slight bow of the head, something of a smile, and he turned with a sweep of his robes to return to the house.

“Biloko! Biloko!” he cried out. He could not keep the tension from his voice.

A stillness entered the air. It was not an empty stillness. Samakarantha knew that he was being watched by attentive eyes. Something else was here. A thing was was not his to master, and might well perhaps think he was to be mastered instead. The press of the invisible gaze had a massive weight of years behind it, so much so that the feeling of it was quite palpable.

“Amur ifi athamura?” said Samakarantha, wondering. He could just feel the presence of the biloko now. They had crept back into the space in their hidden, secretive habit.

The voices of the biloko came in hissing whispers, darting here and there in their syllables, and leaving an impression of weird jungle visions in his head. “Isker atha sisstha ifa,” they said.

He shook his head.

“Imtafo?”

“”Sissatha ifam bilifu.”

“Tasu,” said Samakarantha. He looked around, now curious. There was indeed some manner of very old magic in the house or perhaps underneath it. The spell had run amok–or so the biloko claimed–because they themselves had not expected such a well of power to sit at the heart of the residence. “Hmm,” he said, more or less to himself. “It appears that the House of Hissocking Sprent may perhaps have something quite unexpected hidden deep in its foundations.”

His thoughts were interrupted by a wavering,”M’laird?” This was directed at him from the shadows of the doorway.”

He did not turn, but allowed a half-glance that way, replying, “Yes?”

Scrimminger emerged into the light, gold and shadow chasing over his wrinkles. “We can’t help but notice, good sir magerious-laird…” and he licked his lower lip, nervously, “that is good sir, the house appears to have thoroughly repaired and replenished itself. Is this you doing?”

“It is.”

“I see,” said Scimminger, visibly taken aback. Whereas his expression had previously been flat, and his voice empty of any emotions beyond boredom and weariness, he now looked as if his mind was just comprehending that this magus from over the oceans was a far cry from being some mere hexpeddler.

“Well?” said the magus.

“Well, uh, only, m’laird, if you plan to do anything quite so drastic, please give us warning, if it pleases you. It gave me and me missus quite a fright, and my poor lad was in the wood cellar fetching wood, and he thought the world was falling down on him. When the dark little room sprouted blazing oil lamps from its walls–well–when that happened, he thought he was dead and gone to the land of ghaists. He came running out in a freetin state, quite drained of blood.”

“I see. Yes. You are quite right. I ought have given forewarning. I will be more forthcoming with my plans in future. Thank you.”

“No, thank you, m’laird.” He paused and then said, “And sir?”

“Hm?”

“If I may, thank you also for extending the enchantment to the poorer folks who live hereabouts. Many of them are already at the door, saying their thanks. There’s many good folks here. Hard working, but fallen on hard times, or born into a bad situation, like, or under the roof of a drunkard, or an ill-tempered landlord. It’s tough to raise your childerings in a house full of holes that lets in the snow and the rats and the biting winds. And thank you for filling their larders too. Some of the mothers have come to the doorstep weeping, and offering their prayers up for your kind soul. There’s many little ones who have lived all their life hungry, who will eat well for a good while, on cause of your generosity.”

Samakarantha was unaware that the magic had filled everyone’s pantries with food. This worried him even more. Common magic had not the power to create real food out of nothing. It could not nourish in that way, but make only illusions and half-seemings. “And our larders are filled too?”

“Quite to brimming, M’laird magus.”

“Hm. Might you bring me a charmed loaf of bread from the larder? I am not hungry, but I wish to inspect it. As a matter of inspecting my workmanship, you see.”

“Ah, yes. Of course. Workmanship.” He did not sound wholly convinced, but hurried away anyway, and was soon back on his uneasy joints, but now carrying a thick crusted cob under one arm.

Samakarantha looked at the bread, turned it over, smelled it and worked some small, quiet spells upon it, testing it. This was real. It was no illusion. A cold dread crept into him now. It was well beyond what he had intended, and well beyond the power of any mortal magician. The biloko had not mentioned the making of food either. It seemed to him that the food had been conjured at the will of something else–a power that was not his own–and was not human. This was the sort of thaumaturgy a god or goddess might perform. Or an arch-demon.

He looked about, studying the walls. He wondered. There was something sentient and wilful in these timbers, and vastly more powerful than he had earlier guessed.

“Is the bread to your satisfaction?” asked Scrimminger, clutching and unclutching his fingers before him.

“It is,” answered Samakarantha, handing back the loaf. However, he kept his expression impassive, allowing only another of his faint smiles. “You may go.”

Scimminger backed out at his elderly limping pace whilst holding the loaf in his fingers, clamped together.

“Well,” said the magus, looking about once he was alone. “I wonder what I have wandered into?”

TEN

Samakarantha spent some time contemplating the strangeness of the house, wondering what perhaps sat at the root of it. In his mind, he turned over various vestiges of old magic he had come across in his travels, places of forgotten eldritch things or lingering powers of the old earth. The feel of this place did not precisely align with anything that he had met before–though there was a feeling in the air that reminded him a little of lonely stone circles and faer creatures, slinking about in the twilight. After approximately an hour spent looking out the windows, thinking, watching the afternoon greys slide gracefully into the first reddish ambers of early dusk, he came to a decision. Before attempting anything else, before sending a message to the king, before announcing himself to the city, before even organising his chests and crates from the ship, before all of this, he must explore and understand the house. There were secrets here, and he needed to fathom at least some of the uncanny nature of the place–at least if he were to remain under the roof. It was dangerous to be so close to something both powerful and unknown. One spell had already gone awry. Who could tell what might happen if he absent-minded spun a little charm-tale in order to light a candle. He might burn down the entire neighbourhood.

So, with this in mind, he left the great window-lit room, bathed in its evening glow and passed into the hallway without, his robes hem-whispering behind him as he walked.

At the doorway, he stood for awhile, before turning right, away from the main staircase. This took him down a long hall. Just a few hours ago the walls had been yellowed with peeling paint, but the corridor was now built of richly carven timbers and painted a heathery purple pattern on its panelling. He paused to examine the carvings and found that they represented scenes of local foliage, thistle, heather, beech, fir, alder and thorn. There were hills and standing stones in the carvings too, and from behind many of these stones peered hairy faces with protrudent lips and huge, round boiled-egg eyes. These faces were only ever just barely visible, and they had a notable ambiguity to them too. On closer examination, each face turned out not to be a face at all: but rather the illusion of a face made of leaves and thorny tendrils, birds nests, eggs and clusters of acorns. They were tricks for the imagination–a glimpsed shape seen out of the corner of the eye that looks like a face, but is not.

“H’mmm,” said Samakarantha, thoughtfully. He kept walking.

The hallway turned several corners–seemingly at random–and passed by so many closed doors that he lost count. At its farthest end, he found a tall glass-and-brasswork frontage and a spiral staircase that twisted its way both up and down. An unpleasant sense of chill air groped its way upwards from below. So, naturally, that is the direction he took. Though as he started his descent, he was surprised to discover that the stairs made silvery metallic ringing noises as he walked on them. It was surprisingly musical.

His uneasy feeling to grew in his stomach and chest, creeping around in his heart. When he paused on a step, he could feel his heartbeat now, and he could hear the thump of it in his ears. The staircase felt too much like walking down into an overwritten bogey-tale for children. The magic was ‘ornate’ for want of a better word. It wanted to be looked at.

The very feeling of it made him uncomfortable.

He descended for several twists of the stairwell, and did not pass any landings or doors. Instead, the stairs went ever down, ever deeper, ever darker. After about a minute of descending, the walls changed. Stone decorations appeared: statues of ancient-looking peoples, most half-naked, or dressed only in scant war-gear. At first, Samakarantha thought they were reclining or lounging, but it did not take him long to realise that the statues were all wounded, and were either dead or dying. Many fallen banners lay about the statues too, marked with symbols he did not recognise. These looked to to be religious, but what cults or orders they might represent eluded him.

The magician soon grew weary of the endless seeming stairs and the sad grotesquery of dying men and women. It was not before time that the descend ended in a deep circular room lined with rough stone. He looked up. The shaft gave the overall impression of being something like a well of enormous size. He wondered if that was precisely what it was: a well dug deep into the earth to draw up… what? Not water. Something else. Power? Darkness? But in that case, who had it excavated?

He looked about.

In one wall, stood a small plain doorway that opened into a marl-pit blackness. As he stood, he noticed a voice drifting in raggedy fragments from beyond the doorway, small, sad and lost. If there were distinct words, he could not make them out clearly, or else they were not in a language he knew.

Samakarantha was about to fall to the habit of calling on magic for light, but he paused. He tasted the words on his lips, unformed and decided against asking for any light or flame. That would be madness. Still, after considering the possibilities, he decided to test the magic in a way that hopefully was not open to some extraordinary madness of sorcery. He spoke to the shadows and the chill air, calmly and carefully. “There was once a man who went wandering in the dark places of a house, and the man was a fool for he had not brought light, nor flame. But then, as luck would have it, he found both torch and a device for the striking of sparks. But, no more or less than this happened in that dark place. He found only what he needed and there was no wildness in the magic.”

He felt the magic thrum and echoe around him, and for a moment he did wonder if even with his careful phrasing had been careless.

Then the magic ebbed away and he saw a slight reflection of light. The strangest part of the experience was that the magic did not drain his mental and physical resources as it ought have. Instead, he felt flushed, warm, a little giddy even, as if he had drunk deep of a rich, fiery spirit.

This was a new danger. Casting magic in a place like this could become addictive and could drive a magician to their own sort of madness. Working spells here could trick a hedge-witch into thinking they were a god.

Going over to investigate the object in the darkness, Samakarantha discovered a torch and flint-box laid carefully out on an oilskin. Both looked ancient beyond years. He took the torch and snapped the lid of the box until the heatless sparks caught and erupted into a guttering flame. Red light fell over everything and in equal measure shadows fought back. It made the room seem like a place dedicated to fire and shadow in equal measure.

Not seeing anything else of interest he turned to the doorway.

Slowly now, he progressed, passing into the dark portal. He could no longer hear the voice that had caught his attention moments earlier. It had now fallen silent.

The room beyond made the magus stop and draw himself up, craning his neck, looking around in wonder. It appeared as if the magic he had worked in the chamber above had seeped down here–or this might instead be where the magic started–and what this room had looked like before, he could not guess. He had no doubt though that this was the heart of the magic in the house.

The room was circular, similar to the well-shaped staircase but larger. Instead of plainly cut and fitted stones, this room was lined with what appeared to be at first glance massively oversized stone columns and lintels. It was only on a second, more careful examination, that Samakarantha realised that the stones were not a part of the room, but that the room had been carved from earth and rock, going in and out and around the stones. The result was a stone circle, old and primeval in its aspect. The circular wall that arose behind the stones was made of a polished black stone, onyx or volcanic glass perhaps. The black sheen of the surface was further made to look like a night sky by thousands of bright white stars made from nodules of dim-twinkling silver. Over all of this, up above in the gloomy distance, great white marble branches spread, twisting and interweaving. Beyond those branches stretched a dome of that same black rock, and this too was decorated with a hundred-thousand stars of silver. The whole edifice of black stone and white stone and silver stars gave out the illusion of a stone circle under a perpetual sky of starry night-time dark.

And yet. Somehow… something lay wrongly against this place. He could not understand what was playing at his mind and had to resolve to think upon it and come back to the feeling of something being not quite correct.

Instead, he took a walk around the inner edge of the stone circle. He breathed in deeply. He tasted the air. He stopped still and closed his eyes, listening and dwelling on the fragrances he detected. He listened intently for echoes of echoes of songs and voices in the darkness too. Just faintly he could smell blood and burnt clay, wet ochre, gritty river sand, rank peat fires and brackish smoke. Beyond these smells, lurked a few last remnants of noise. Voices raised in chorus. Chants in dead tongues. Promises given up to the night sky above.

He opened his eyes.

Magic had been done here. Long-ago magic, full of ritual and the turning of seasons, and heavy with the weight of years. There was a wellspring of power in this place… and still somehow… this was not the end of last house’s secrets. There was something underneath the appearance of this place. And something had passed through here, just ahead of the magus. Something cold and alone and sad. This other sadness: this was certain that this presence was what he had been noticing and tracking, he thought. This other sadness was what he needed to follow for now.

He would come back to the night temple hidden in a well of power.

After a time thinking, wondering, he explored the space holding his red-flame light out high above him, and found another doorway. This one was much smaller, more concealed, and tucked away behind a standing stone on the far side of the room. It led only into a cramped stone passage. He entered the darkness and found himself standing in a tunnel that plunged directly and deeply into the rocky under-heart of the land. And there–in the darkness ahead–he saw a face. She turned to him, eyes wide and wetly glistening. It was a young woman, her hair and skin red in the bloody light of his uncertain torch. But she did not seem to see him. Rather, her eyes looked right through him. She looked startled, as if suddenly afraid. A moment later, she turned abruptly and hurried deeper into darkness. A suggestion of a cloak followed her as she left, but there was no sense that she was fully present. What was she then? Memory. Apparition. Ghost. Illusion. He was not sure where she fell in the varied taxonomies of the unreal and the undead, but she was certainly made of chillness and sorrow.

He firmed his thoughts and set his will. The coldness was pressing against him now, making him shiver. The prickling cold needled itself into his temples, a distracting pain. His ears buzzed a little, as if swarms of invisible gnats were all about his head.

He had to bring every last scrap of his will to bear in order to move a step forward, and another, another. There was a presence here that did not want him here. Waves of misery and pain came at him, washing over and around him, and swelling up the walls. And there was something else too–a sort of vile, pent up rage, frustration and resentment. A desire to inflict harm. There were echoes of sobbing and screaming and mean, nasty laughter too.

At the end of the narrow corridor stood a blind chamber. Roughly hewn from the rock and stained with impressions of rusted rings and hooks, and a few red-grime lines of old corroded chains. The inaudible noises of rage and pain were now painfully sharp in Samakarantha’s mind, and so overwhelming as to make it difficult to think. He was about to retreat to gather his thoughts when a face came wildly, furiously at him out of the dark: bearded and scraggly, big round eyes and thick-lipped. Samakarantha reeled back, startled, looking at the thing, up and down. But as suddenly as it had appeared, it halted what had been a flailing attack. The creature looked as if it were caught between desperately wanting to throttle Samakarantha and finding itself unwilling or unable to do so for some inscrutable reason. He considered it. The thing stank, but not of human odour, rather it smelled of bogs and thick mossy mud. The rest of its body was just as wild as the face, leathery of skin, matted and tangled of hair. And it did not appear to be properly dressed, but wore a sort of kilt made of reeds and thrown-away rags. Its body was small and shrivelled, with long sinewy arms and legs, but also grotesquely pot-bellied. The hands especially looked powerful. Samakarantha recomposed himself. He regarded those hands dispassionately as they reached for his throat again, but paused, unable to close on him. He studied the calluses and the fingers that wrestled with the air just inches from his skin. He examined the fingers, just slightly too long and sharp-nailed to be human. Not quite fingernails. Not quite claws. Something in-between.

The creature kept reaching for the magician’s neck, but never closed its grip: it was frozen, trembling, unable to touch him.

“I’m gunna strangle ye scrawny neck.”

“No, you will not.”

“Arg,” it screamed. “Who are ye to bring yer nasty foreign spreets into my homestead? Who are ye to change the very bones of the house of my ancient dwelling? Ye feculent toad-charmer. Ye ugsome charm-spinner”

“I am he that is called Samakarantha, born of the Golden Dales, magician and wanderer.”

“I’ll magician you, ye piece of rank fly-blown offal.”

“Again, no, you will not.” He regarded the creature. It was a strange thing, human-ish in appearance, but it did not have the look and countenance of the folk who called Brae home. Everything about it was tan or dun coloured: as if it had been buried in a peat bog and left to soak for a thousand years. Even the whites of its eyes were more of an off-white. It’s teeth, when it snarled, were brown, as if stained by drinking endless cups of tannic bog-water. “You are one of the Faer Folk, I think, but, you are not free to roam, are you? No,” he mused, considered the magic that seethed before him. “You are bound. Is that why you cannot hurt me, though clearly you would dearly love to do so. You are chained to this house? Or are you chained to the concealed temple? Or both?” He considered the shape and sounds of the magic. “And you did not make yourself Faer either. It was not a choice. Someone else made your soul into flesh?” More abruptly, he asked, “Where are your bones?”

“There’s nothing fair about me, ye gangrel wussit. Ye hapenny nag-bitten ill-begotten hog-filth. I’m a broonie, and the broonie of this abode. This house is meself, and I am the house. Me ribs are the rafters. Me skull is the attic. How dare ye change my own body without me own leave?”

“No. You had other bones once. Maybe you have forgotten, but I do not think so. Tell me, where are your dead bones? Where are your once-living bones? Where did they bury you?”

The creature paused a long time then, before sniffing and saying, more quietly and with much more misery, “Oh, so that’s how it is, is it? What will ye do, curse me if I don’t tell ye?”

“Where are your bones?” asked Samakarantha again, and this time he let power seep into his voice. The question did not permit silence in reply.

“So ye put the mockings and the geas upon me, do ye? Have it your way. I am buried under the threshold stone, if ye must know. But it won’t do ye any good. The stone is rune-cut and spell-hewn, and no power alive today can lift it. A dragon could not pluck it up from the earth. Me skull and me raw-bones will rot there with the worms til the day the sun turns to ash and boils the seas.”

“I see.” Samakarantha looked into the darkness. “And why are you lurking about here, in this gloom and misery? Down here in the dark. Did you kill her?”

This shook the creature and made it choke. “Kill her? Kill her? The lass. No. No. She was an innocent. A charming innocent of a girl. A maid-of-the chambers. She tended to my wooden bones and timber flesh. She was a beautiful song about the house. She left me my bowl of porridge with a wee lump of butter every night. She put out cream on special days. She said soft thank yous for the work I did about the place. It was she who splashed the barley beer on the stone in the yard. No, no no. Not me. It was him.”

“Him?”

The broonie indicated the darkness with a disdainful thumb. “The laird’s son. Nasty, nasty bit of work, that one. He lured her here, into this hole: a room made for the studies of the other one, the one beyond names, but it had been sealed off long ago. The other one died without finding the truth and then everyone forgot. But he found it. The nasty little greasy haired scion of the family. He discovered the hints and rumours in the old house library, and went looking. So he opened it up, secretly, and he used this place for his fun. He hurt her, badly.” The fat lips snarled and spat. “All just to amuse himself.”

“And what did you do to him?”

A wide toothy smile crept on the creature’s face. “I was asleep. It was the wrong hour of the day for me. When I woke, I felt the misery, knew sharp the pain, but it was too late. I could not save her. To make amends, I hurt him in return. Badly.” He breathed a deep sigh. “Flesh for flesh. Blood for blood. Bone for bone.”

“So now there are two ghosts here.”

“Two ghaists, aye. Caught forever in a last dance of pain.”

“Not forever,” answered Samakarantha. “They are bound by chains of pain and sadness and rage. But chains can be shattered.” He looked around, searching the darkness. “I will have to retrieve certain devices from my belongings first. I have freed similar sorrowful remnants before. It is not beyond my arts. But it will take some time, and it will likely tax me.”

“If you are a warlock of such power as that, and if you can free her, then may it be so. Free her woeful spreet if you can, but not him. He doesn’t deserve it. No. No rest for him. Just her. If you are a goodly man, a kindly man, work your ghaist-layings for her sake only. Let the nasty laird’s son rot in his own misery, forever and ever.”

“No. I cannot.” He shook his head. “They are strung together, twisted up in knots. Can’t you feel that? They pain is so entwined it might as well be a growth of strangler vines all melded into one another.” More solemnly he added, “It is the both of them, or neither of them. That is the choice.”

The broonie shrunk away into the darkness a few steps. He hunched up. His fingers twisted into writhing knots. His face showed starkly in the red light of the torch, though the rest of him was all but swallowed in darkness. “Both or none? Neither or both? Oh, what an awful choice.” For awhile he chewed his lip, then at long last he muttered. “Arg, so do it then, aye. Get it done.” The creature sounded resigned when it said, more softly “Perhaps the misery has gone on too long. The sickly noise of it. It’s made this house sick, right down to its bones, and its bones are my bones. So it’s made me sick too, hasna’t?” His thick, leathery lips turned sour, as if he’d been sucking on limes and shrivelled wild apples. “You will do this?”

“Yes.”

“For what price?”

“None. The house is mine in the letter of the law. I have purchased it. I will not live in a place soaked with the shadows of the pained and the dead.”

A long sniff. “Arh, so, then get it over with. If you think ye are up to it?”

“I am. I will.”

“But once ye are done, ye need to take yerself gone and gusted, and take yer uncanny faraway spreets with ye. They don’t belong here.”

But Samakarantha only shook his head. “And that I cannot do. I have come here, to this city, with tasks in my mind and purpose in my heart. That which I will do, must yet be done.”

“Magicians,” muttered the creature. “Never will say a thing with one word, where ten can be used. Are yer paid by the utterance?”

“Something like that,” said Samakarantha, allowing a momentary smile on his face. “But for now, follow me. I have questions and you will give me some answer.”

“What if I say nae?”

Samakarantha allowed a rather passive smile to form. “I own this house. I am the master of it. You are bound to my chattels just as if you were a rafter or a floorboard, are you not. I would not like to force you. It might break you worse than you are already broken. But, in the end, I think you have no choice, do you. I am master here.”

The broonie only snarled and hissed like some smaller frightened creature of the hedgerows.

“Come.”

Samakarantha left the dark miserable little stone-cut chamber and returned to the temple. The creature followed him with clear reluctance.

“You do not like this place.”

“It is old and evil. It was here before the house. The other one, he whose name shall not be spat or uttered. Aye, he discovered it in his studies. He commanded the hole be dug. He found it.”

“We will return to your nameless sorcerer in good time.”

“The place was asleep before there was murder here? I think I can see that now. And it is not quite awake.”

“Aye.”

“The laird’s son. He unwittingly performed a sacrifice of blood and pain right in the heart of a place of sleeping power.”

The creature was silent.

“And then, rather than close up the place, you committed and sacrifice when you tortured him to death.”

Still, the creature was quiet.

“But the temple is not yet awake, is it? Whatever is asleep here under the stone is not awake. Luckily, there has not yet been a third sacrifice.”

No answer.

“Does anyone else know of this place?”

Finally, the creature spoke. “When the stones awoke, the house grew a mite too weird and uncanny. No one came down here after that. You are the first in long years, aye.”

“It was stupid of you. Killing him here in the darkness. You should have been alert to the power. One more death and something very bad is going to happen, isn’t it?”

“Aye. But I dunno know what, so dunna be bothering to ask me of it. I’ll give you no lies, but I’ll spin you no conjecturations neither.”

“Samakarantha nodded. I see. I will call on you later. After I have performed the rites of the ghost-laying. I have more questions.”

“You can beckon. Canna say if I will come. You can ask ye questions. Canna say if I will answer.”

“No. I think you will. For now, I will lay the unquiet ones to rest. The is the first matter of the day, as it turns out.”

“And here I thought you weren’t planning tae break my will with words.”

“I will not demand audience. I only remind you that a good deed done might warrant some consideration in return.”

The broonie thought long on this, and said, eventually, “Maybe. Maybe. We shall see, aye.”

“Very well. As that may be, as it will be. I will proceed with the working of the art. And then, as you say: we shall see.”

Before he left, the magus took another long look at the place. His eyes narrowed. The scattering of red firelight and shadows on the ground seemed almost like a maze to his eyes. Again, he had a strong sense of being reminded of something, but he could not place precisely what that thing was. There was something both unsettled and unsettling about the temple. The wrongness sat with him like a curl of fog in a deep vale. On the surface it looked exactly as a temple to the Night Goddess ought to look, but he was certain that this was somehow a trick. There was something under the surface. Perhaps, it was not a temple at all. Or not exactly and precisely a temple. It had a sort of upside-down feeling. As if it were an inverse of something or someplace he had known, but could not quite resolve in his thoughts.

But in the end, he had to shrug his shoulders and turn his mind to other matters.

He would think on it in due time. And in due time he would resolve it. Samakarantha knew that he was not a quick or darting thinker–as some folks are–but his mind had a slow power in the grinding way that a desert wind grinds away at a ruin, or a tree will gradually splits stone with its roots. His mind did not dance like a dragonfly, but it was relentless, and in this way he would break down problems that others found unscalable. He would arrive at the truth in time. It was simply a matter of taking the time to ponder.

###

The relief that Samakarantha felt to leave the bleak little chamber behind was stark. Briefly, he courted the idea of having the whole chamber sealed off entirely. But, this would not move him closer to understanding the secrets of the place, and besides, there was a chance that walling the temple off with brick and stone would drive the scrawny faer creature mad. Or… more mad than it already was. There was a connection between the creature and the stones that was not quite full and apparent yet. Regardless, it was an evil place, and even if the ghosts were shown a path to rest, too much blood and pain had already soaked the stones. The rocks remembered the hurting. They were full of noises of misery. So much so, that it felt as if a whole swarm of terrible echoes swirled after him as he walked up the stairs. They seemed to grasp at him and touch him with mist-fingers and ill-made hands, begging and meekly holding at his hems.

He stopped, short.

The pain was far more than what could possibly be the lingering memory of two deaths… no matter how horrid.

He listened. Felt the darkness with his mind. Listened to the silence. Tasted the wet, dripping clay and bloody scent of the place. Yes, he was certain. Something else had died in the dark place beneath the Clay-o-the-Green, and long before the two murders. He was only able to tease apart the different threads of memory and pain now that he had put some distance between himself and the core of the misery. Down below, it had been too mixed up together.

He felt a shiver.

For now at least, there was no point in standing on the stairs and listening to long ago terrors.

He climbed the stairs, going back by the way he had come. As he walked, he set his mind to dwell instead on the ritual and the necessary workings to lay the two ghosts. He considered the objects he would need, and the words that would need to be said. He considered also how to put a boundary around the ritual so that it did not run riot and mad with power.

As he reached the top, a shadow detached itself from the gloom and shambled into view. Samakarantha tensed, momentarily alarmed, but then recognising the manservant, Scrimminger. The house was putting him on edge. The ghost-things and the faer-creature were making him a jumpy, so too the deep sense of malady in the place.

“M’laird?” said the old man.

“Yes?”

Scimminger stopped short and stared down into the darkness of the stairwell. A clear wrinkle of worry came over his expression. “I do not like the cellar in the dark. I never hd. The stones down there, they always seemed worshipful of the Old Night Carlin to me. I did not think the folk of the Sungilt Lands went much in for dealing with her sort.”

“We are not. We do not. Down there, in the dark…” he waved a hand, expressively. “What was this room? The circular chamber? What did it look like, last time you were down there?”

“Just an old round half bricked-up sort of storage place. I always thought it was firstly made for whiskey or wine perhaps. But there is something in the dark, down there. We always left it empty. Even if it weren’t for the ill-feel of the place, it was quite too much of a hassle, going up and down them long curling stairs. Strangest ever whiskey cellar, I ever saw.”

“And the chamber beyond the narrow tunnel?”

But Scimminger paled and would not talk about it, except to say. “That was walled up years ago. A bad place. No one talks about it. A bad, awful place. What, is it open again? Have the bricks fallen down?”

“Yes, it is open now.”

Scimminger grew ever more pale. The lines of his face were so drawn and taut that they looked skeletal. “In that case, m’laid magus, we ought wall it up again,” the servant said, stammering a little around the fringes of his words.

“I think it very likely that we will. But, all in due time. First I will deal with the unseen things that walk there.” He tried a smile, but supposed that his expression probably lost most of its warmth in the half-light of torchlight anyway. “Was there another reason you have come looking for me?”

“Ah, yes, laird magus. There is. There is indeed. A messenger just now arrived from the Castle of Auld Grittlingstone, up yonder. Your trick with the sorcery has been noticed. You are requested. The King himself asks an audience. He messenger said, at once.”

“Well.” He adjusted the fall of his robes. “The problem is that I have already made another promise. I have something else to do first. It ought not take very long, though, if it all goes well. I worry… it was rather a showy way of getting attention, wasn’t it? The repairs and fixings.”

“It was, m’laird.”

“And not what I had intended. Is the king like to be easily offended? Is he the sort to be angry at being shown up by some strange foreigner?”

“I can’t as rightly say, m’laid. I’ve never met him meself.

“Hm. Well. I will not put out oars when fair winds present. Tell the messenger that I will present myself at the very earliest moment possible, within the hour, I hope. But first there is a supernatural matter I must attend and breaking off the workings without completion would be dangerous. I hope the king and court will understand that.”

A dust-heavy shrug. “Again, I can’t as rightly say, although–” He trailed off.

Samakarantha pinched his brow. He could feel an ache at the front of his skull, just growing and simmering with pressure. “Well, it will have to be. Let us return to the upper chambers. I have business first with the lost souls of this house, but I will go immediately to this king of yours the moment I may do so safely.”

“M’laird–if I may–I do not know what kings are like in your lands, but hereabouts, I do wonder… it is perhaps not sensible to make a king wait. Although, I can’t rightly say for certain.”

“Oh, I agree with you. But it would be still less sensible to earn the irritation of the thing that dwells in the stone and shadows down at the roots of this house. I have promised I would perform a cleansing of the haunted air, and so it must be done before all else. I will not break oath so easily, nor so recklessly. The king will have to wait, for the dead and the cursed will not. I will explain this to the king. I can only hope that this is a point he can easily fathom.”

This did not please Scrimminger at all, but he did not protest. He merely pulled at his collar a few times, and swallowed, and at last found some words. “Yes, well, um, very good laird magus. Very good. I will have the message sent.”

He smiled. “Tell him that the king must wait, for the dead and the cursed will not.”

“As you say, m’laird sir.” And though he turned promptly to go off down the corridor, he remained clearly not at all pleased with this new instruction.

Samakarantha followed after him, setting his mind once more to the task of understanding the misery and the sadness in the relentless dark. He needed to know it intimately, in order to tell the right kind of story, with words that will settle, and an intonation that will calm and bring rest, and a tale that will end is a peaceful path to the places where the dead must go.

It would take some thought and skill. And he would likely be utterly spent at the end of it. This worried him a touch too. He would very likely be presenting himself at court with no recourse to his magic at all.

Still, it must be done.

ELEVEN

A little over an hour later, Samakarantha stepped out the front door of Hissocking Sprent. He self-consciously avoided standing on the threshold stone, even briefly, instead stretching his stride across it. The gloomy watchfulness of the house eased away behind him as he crossed the square.

He felt physically scoured. It was the same feeling one gets after running for too long and too far under a hot desert sun. A sort of acidic exhaustion was threaded in his muscles, through bone and marrow. His neck ached. Every movement caused pain. Breathing hurt. But, it was done. The ghosts had been shown a door to the lands of peace beyond, and importantly, the magic had not run wild this time. Having been able to anticipate the slippery slope that led down into the wellspring of power beneath the house, Samakarantha had avoided it, and performed the deed. Although the girl had gone gently, the foul remnant of the lord’s son had not departed willingly. He had been impossible to convince by words alone. In the end, it had come down to sheer imposition of will. This was not the best approach. It was hard on the magician, and so much harsher than words alone for the ghost. So much more cruel. The magus always found himself queasy inside after imposing his will on a dead soul in this way, even one so awful and vicious as the spectre in the dark room. But, it was done now. The bargain was satisfied.

As he walked away, for a short while, Samakarantha did feel an unpleasant prickling on the nape of his neck, as if the eyes of a great beast were on him. But the sensation dwindled the further he moved from the house.

And although the magus tried to keep up a stride, although he did his best to keep his spine straight and his head high, exhaustion got the better of him before long. Soon enough, he was walking slowly, and he could feel a hunch developing in his shoulders.

So it was that in a state of mild fugue and extreme weariness, he made his way over the hard cobbles and up along interlocking chains of narrow alleyways, picking a path uphill.

Folks saw him as he walked. Some whispered to one another on doorsteps. Some leaned out of second or third storey windows to get a better look. A few children gawped. The mood struck him as oddly tense, as if some news or rumour that had nothing to do with himself–the strange magus–had put everyone into a state of fear. He found out the cause of the fear when one young mother with a babe in her arms approach him hesitantly, then curtseyed and said, “Thank you, Laird Magus. Thank you for the fixed roofs and the glass in the windows and the food in the cupboards.”

He stopped, nodded, smiled, then said, “And gratitude and kind will be upon you too, good mother.”

“Will you… that is, good lLaird Magus, may I ask?”

“Go on, good mother. Ask what you will?”

“Are you here to fight them that come out of the dark drear north? The armies, I mean, if it pleases you?”

“There are armies?” he said, with some worry.

“Bleak hosts of the cold and dark. Word arrived this morning. And there are folks coming in from the towns and cottages of the uplands and highlands. They say there is fighting and burning already.”

:”I see. I had hoped… I see. Yes. I have come here to do what I may.”

“Thank you, Laird Magus.” She curtsied again, backed away a step, then returned quickly to her a doorway.

So the armies of the north had been sighted. Matters were moving quicker than he hoped. Too much was still unready and unprepared.

He had only walked a little way father along the cobbled road when three men in grey and brown hauberks appeared at the end of the street. They walked hesitantly, looking about themselves, peering this way and that, pointed at some of the repaired buildings and the flourishing gardens, clearly uncertain. Though, when they spied Samakarantha, they stopped dead and one of them pointed. Another called out, “Hoy! You the foreigner wizard who done all this?”

“I am,” he answered.

A woman’s voice behind him spoke. The tone was urgent and cautious. “Looks like the Dingy Footmen wants you. Watch out then. They aren’t gentle sorts.”

He looked over his shoulder. It was the young mother. She stood in her doorway, chewing her lower lip , rocking her baby, and looking altogether worried. She spoke quietly enough that he could hear her, but the town guardsmen likely could not. “They do as the king demands, but they aren’t gentlemanly. Take care with them.”

“I will,” he said.

He turned back to the men. They approached at a careful step. Each of them carried a short halberd of a sort so common to town guards everywhere. Their livery and badges, which at first looks merely like dirty browns and greys, were marked with three misshapen triangles that turned out to be dustpan coloured moths arranged in a triangular pattern.

Dingy Footmen indeed, thought Samakarantha.

When they were close enough to converse rather than holler, he addressed them again. “Are you to escort me to the king?”

“We are to make sure you come to the king when summoned. Quick smart. No lallygagging about, you hear? He’s not much please that you took your time about the summons.”

“Very good. I am on my way… and although I somewhat suspect that to ‘lallygag’ is a contemptuous term… I have a mind to overlook the usage of any such word. I will therefore consider this to be an honoured escorting by royal guards.”

One of the guards said, “Huh?”

Another man rubbed his nose, sniffed and said, “Be fancy about it, if you like. Same to us, long as you come along.”

“Well then. Come along, I will.”

And with that, the four of them walked the way that would take them from the poor quarters to to the fortress on the hill.

The houses and yards on either side of the road grew steadily more prosperous as they wound ever upwards. The rather squat and brutish looking castle grew in size. What had been a grey and featureless mass of stone at a distance, gathered about itself some details. The stonework varied in colour, subtly, here and there. Arches and carven expanses of stone that had not been visible before now formed themselves into small touches of decoration. The climbing honeysuckle, which had seemed the only splash of colour grew into a vast mass of flowers, as wide across and tall as the side of a hill. Despite the overall grim and brutal appearance of the place, Samakarantha could not help but be a touch impressed by the Castle of Auld Grittlingstone. Or at least, more than he had expected to be. The architecture remained that of barbarians, and what carvings he could see were flat and artless. But there was a sort of grand overbearing air to it all that conveyed very clearly that this was a castle to be reckoned with.

It was certainly defensible, set as it was upon broad tabletop of rock. The cliffs that hemmed the walls had seagulls floating around them, and were spotted with endless little green-grey tussocks growing out of ledges and cracks. The road grew very steep as it ascended to meet the lowest feet of the cliffs, upon which the first gate of the fortress stood. The street here was paved with a slippery sort of shale, presumably to stop attackers from gaining easy purchase, though it would make ascent with wagons difficult too presumably. Perhaps foods and ale were hoisted up by some other means? The exhaustion he was already feeling from the magic, was not helped by the climb. Samakarantha was feeling quite winded by the time they reached those first gates.

The guards seemed to find this amusing.

Seeing the expressions of their faces, he did his best to take up again some semblance of composure. “I am a magician,” he said. “I do not climb slopes for amusement.”

The Dingy Footmen just smirked. One of them suffocated a mild snort.

“Have they no hills where you hail from?” asked another of them.

“Certainly they do. But in my homelands we have discovered the ancient and esoteric art of the stairway.”

They thought that was funny, rather than insulting, which he supposed he should be thankful for. Her did his best to laugh along with them.

At the gates stood more guards in the same dismal grey and brown livery. These men stood about in a loose, slightly anxious crowd. Samakarantha noticed they were all looking in the same direction, mutely, and intent in their expressions. He stopped and looked himself. Except for westward where the fortress stood over them, the view stretched to great distance in every direction, over the rooftops of Brae, past town walls, over hill, woodland and stream. Eastward lay a sprawl of sombre shoreline and beyond that was a sparkle of sunlight on a grey-green ocean. To the south, the lands seemed to roll onward forever, forming deep-gullied vales and hills, quilted by farmland, spotted with dark spinneys, and at last vanishing into a horizon of misty blue ridges.

But it was to the north that the guards stared grimly. Those lands rucked themselves up into a vast highlands that strode higher and higher, ceaselessly, until a vague heathery lilac mountain range occupied the utmost horizon. As Samakarantha searched the landscape, he saw what the guards had spied. A dozen or more columns of smoke were rising into the air. They were not at first easy to see because the sky itself was so leaden with cloud. Most of the fires were very distant. Some were nearer. Some seemed huge, churning out tall billows of the blackest smoke. Some were mere threads of wispier stuff, and might have been bonfires or even perhaps smoke from a large chimney. This might have been true, except that the columns of smoke all had the hard blackness of buildings on fire. Burning stubble off fields, hearths and bonfires, these do not give off smoke that colour. It takes paint and old wood, rugs, dead animals and corpses to conjure that shade of burning. Each tendril of soot twined upwards, to be caught and hang in the upper skies as a heavy layer, still and dead looking, suspended in a line just under the wintry clouds above.

The magician looked down then, at the earth below, near and far. A single road wended out of northern hills, not much more than a ribbon of brown mud. It was the sort of highway meant for a few carts, some donkeys, perhaps a royal train of carriages every few years, maybe a market crowd once a month. It was not a road built to be packed every inch with hoof and wheel and foot. A wide column of shambling, trundling shapes drew along the rutted way from the north: they overspilled the roadway on both sides, trampling grass and shrubs and moving in and out of hedgerows. Most were on foot. Some rode wagons. A handful were on horseback. For a confused moment Samakarantha thought that he was too late and that the armies of the Old Night and Chaos were already in sight, but the calm, grim detachment of the guards suggested this was not the case. He looked again, more carefully, scrutinising the vague shapes he could make out. No one was running about with bundles of arrows. No one was setting pots of pitch alight. No cries of alarm were ringing the walls. There were no soldiers or beasts of war among the wandering trails of humanity that approached Brae.

“There is warring in the north,” he said at last.

The guards who had accompanied him from the city below had also fallen into a quiet contemplation of the scene, wondering, worried. They said nothing, but stood with him and the other men, and they all waited a moment, searching with their eyes, listening with their ears, without words to say in that high, cold place on the parapets. Eventually, one of the men did nod and found something to say. “Them are the folks coming down from the fighting in the north. A trickle came in yesterday, and there were some few the day before, but it’s more now. Many more. Look at them all. How many mouths to feed? And how many will be useful in a fight?” He rubbed his brow and his armour made the rustle-on-steel noise of cloth and mail moving. “Look at ’em. The old. The sick. The young. The weary. The woeful. Not fit to stand and turn spear nor blade on the invaders, or not willing to. The haggard trickle is turned into a haggard torrent.”

Another guard spoke, more quietly. “What are we folk of Brae to do? What will the king do? We don’t have food in store for so many.”

“What can we do?” said another man. “Aye… true enough… there’s not food for so many, but the gates cannot be shut against them. We’ll have corpses piled up against the walls in a week, and with it plague and pestilence. No doubt the king will allow them to pass into the city, but I hope they have some sense and go out the other gate just as soon. Brae is no place for so many. Especially not if the things that follow are close on their heels.”

“True, true,” said the first man. He took out a clay pipe, worked some flame into it and took a few puffs. “Soon enough, it may be that the old and the young of Brae will be going out by the same south gate. No mother with bairns at the hem will want to be trapped in these walls. Not if the tales are true.”

“What are those tales?” asked Samakarantha, already half-knowing the answer.

“Vast armies. Huger than a mind can imagine. And not just coming south out of the Dragon Gates from Sorthe. Weird creatures coming out of the Pass of the Faces too, away in the west. And armies out of Goathland, marching south and east, towards Heathre and Fadenlauf.”

“I see,” said Samkarantha. “I have perhaps arrived in time, I hope, but it will be a close thing.”

“If your arts can turn away the King of the Cold Harpers and his bleak beasties, then I wager you’ll be buried up to your neck in gold.” A shrug. “If you want it.”

“My arts may not be sufficient, in and of their own, but I can bring certain powers and assistances to bear that will be of help. As for the bathing in gold, that I do not want.” He smile, faintly. “Sounds uncomfortable. But, I will do what I may do, and what I can do, and what my will might allow me to master, when the hour comes, when there are night-things at the gates.”

“May the Brightsome Lady have mercy upon us all, if it should come to that.”

There was a muttering of “Aye” among the men, some nodding and some further mumbling of oaths.

This general muttering of agreement was disturbed by one of the town guardsmen, though he did so only reluctantly. “Well, best not delay any longer. The king is waiting, after all.”

TWELVE

The interior of the castle was surprisingly warm. Samakarantha had not realised how cold he had been outside. The blush of heat put a tingling into his chill cheeks, lips and nose. The tips of his fingers prickled. At first he was thankful, and walked gladly through the hearth-warmed halls. But after a time, once the worst of the chill was off him, he even did start to feel a touch suffocated by the heat. Every room had its own well-stoked fireplace, as if the people of this fortress werea afraid of letting in even the slightest draught of cold air. And there was a background smell of aromatics too, thyme and rosemary, and also vinegary smells. It reminded him of a sickroom for an invalid patient, except spread through an entire castle.

Other than the oppressive heat, the castle had an oddly eclectic and cosy feel to its interior. Bright, chaotic rugs and tapestries lined the walls and floors. Several of these, he noted, had been woven in far off lands of desert and sandstone. Brae was not unaccustomed to trade, it seemed. In some spaces, intricate wood panels had been used for walling instead of bare stone, and these were painted in shades of purple and yellow. In some rooms, a riot of paintings in ludicrous gilt frames blotted out every inch of space. Forgotten and ancient suits of armour stood in corners and more than a few taxidermy beasts that Samakarantha did not recognise stood idly about the place too, snarling and baring their claws, or staring glassily into the middle distance. Here was a creature that was fawn-coloured, dappled and goat-like, but sporting a single twisting horn. And here, a fox with tiny deer antlers. In the next room, a great serpent with two stubby fore-claws, a shaggy mane and a horse-like head. A huge hairy cow-like beast with vast curved horns. A deer much larger than the largest war-horse. It seemed the hunting grounds of Braw contained all manner of marvels. And there were also beasts Samakarantha recognised, though their coats and hue were often unfamiliar: bears, wolves, gullions… some had dark shaggy pelts, whilst others had fur as white and blinding as snow beneath a midnight sun. In one room he examined what seemed to be an otter three or four times the size of a large dog. It could easily have killed a child, he suspected, and possibly a grown adult too. In another recess he found what appeared to be a gryphon: but not so large as the great jungle and savannah beasts that were used as mounts by the golden-robed, dark-skinned lords and ladies of the distant south. This gryphon-like beast had been only about the size of a dog in life; it was jet black all over, and instead of the head of an eagle it appeared to have a head more like a very large raven. As they passed onwards, through hall and chamber, Samakarantha noted that the various stuffed beasts were dusty with age. He had the distinct feeling that perhaps a great many years had passed since such things as these had been at liberty in the wildernesses of Brae. He wondered even, a little sadly, if perhaps some of these creatures no longer lived at all, but were long since hunted to oblivion.

At long last, and with quite some sense of relief, they arrived at a waiting place decorated with cloth-of-gold and dark lilac velvet.

A set of massive arched doors stood open at one end, giving out into a large space that could only be a throne room. Although Samakarantha could see little more than rows of pillars and the flicker of fire-cast shadows, the very air had the feel of residing power.

One of the guards said, “Wait here til called.”

Another went out through the archway, into the room beyond, and could be heard to announce, loudly, though in a slightly croaky voice, “Your Grace. Lairds. Ladies. The foreign wizard who has been summoned has now arrived and awaits the pleasure of the court.”

The voice that answered was much thinner and reedier than Samakarantha had expected. “It is no one’s pleasure to wait alone in a hearthless room. Call for him, and make him welcome.”

“Well and good,” said the nearest guard. He reappeared in the archway. “You heard Our Grace. On you get then.” More quietly, he added, “And if you want advice–which I’m sure you don’t–watch your words. Our Grace is sensitive about certain, um, aspects of himself. He will not get himself up into a raging fit, mind–he’s a damnable sight more calm than that–but there are certain thegns and lairds who might take to a more violent offence. A few of them are a little too willing to prove their loyalty.” He raised an eyebrow. “If you catch my meaning.”

“I do. Thank you.”

Samakarantha entered the room. It was large and thronged with as many columns as a forest has trees. The pillars were arranged just as haphazardly as a stand of trees too, which added to the feeling of being in a forest cut from stone. People were gathered in knots at the sides of the room and down the length of it; many wore courtly clothing; a few wore armour of a lordly if slightly parochial style and decoration. At the far end of the room arose a throne, but the throne and the king who sat upon it were not what the magus had anticipated. The throne appeared to be a huge living plant with greyish leaves and purple flowers. It took Samakarantha some moments to realise that it was indeed a gigantic heather, grown into a tangle of branches and stems far beyond the thickness of a natural plant. Whether this was by some secret skill of a clever gardener or by charmed arts, he could not decide. Above and behind the throne, a huge round window allowed sunlight in a wide, pale slant directly down onto the living thrown. Everything was backlit and gold-tinged, including the king. It all had an air of poetry and charm about it–any living thing that grows to that degree of unnatural massiveness and age will acquire a bit of its own magic in time. That the plant appeared to be growing out of cracks in the stone floor, and given that it was in full bloom when the heather outside on the hills and slopes was losing its summer dress of purple–well, this all certainly suggested a touch of some deep, old magic in its roots.

Seated on this wild, living throne was the king. Samakarantha had met many kings and queens in his time. Fiery men or women with raging tempers. Proud warrior-tyrants and hunters. Warrior-poets. Pharaoh-Magi. Vast rotund monarchs who spent every moment laughing and devouring honeyed cakes and fine suet puddings and date tarts. Frail old men afraid of their own ambitious sons. He had met many and spoken with them all and navigated their royal whims in the end.

But what he saw was a thin, fragile creature who looked as if he might be a scarecrow dressed up in finery. At first, it was not even clear that the king was alive, and not a stuffed doll. He was deathly still, half-reclined, half-slumped in the throne and his head was nodded forward so that the face was near invisible. The light from behind did not help, as it hid most of his details. Even so, it was clear, there was not a trace of movement, not even a breath.

Samakarantha looked left and right. Men and women in armour and fine fursts stood about.. These were presumably the closest and more trusted memebrs of the court. He noticed also something he had not expected: a woman in a long, elegant charcoal and burgundy dress. She was handsome in a haughty sort of way, and her eyes and hair had a wonderful dark beauty to them that contrasted starkly against her pale skin. He was sure he recognised her, but, at least for the time being, he had to put her out of mind when he could not bring a name to mind. He turned his full attention back tot he king, cleared his voice, just softly, and said, “Your majesty, your grace, monarch of the hills and the glens, allow me to speak the name by which I am called, and the deeds by which I am known. He bowed low, sweeping intricately emblazoned black and white sleeve-cuffs and robe-hems on the floor. Then he stood again, tall and unmoving.

He thought he saw a slight nod from the wretchedly thin shape. An attendant, who presumably had the job of interpreting any cryptic small movements announced, “The king will hear you.”

“Very good and with much thanks. I am he that is called Samakarantha, born of Mtawu and the Gold Dales. Magus of the Twelve Jewels of the Sun and of the Order of the Dawn Theurgists. Initiate of the Western and Eastern Sun Temples. I am he that they call the Speaker of Golden Stories. I am Arch-Magus and Majerre Resplendent. I have supped with the Pharoh-Magus of Caithroth. I have danced with the doomed jungle nymphs of Utum-Nand. Biut of late.. yes, of late… I have crossed great seas, and stared hard into the glassy depths of visions and premonitions. In all this, and bearing with me such power as I have, so do I come. I have foreseen the war-making of the north, the savagery and the slaughter. And so, I am at your service in this dark hour.”

A thin, whistling voice came then. “Approach.”

He did, crossing the distance in his long strides, his black and white gowns trailing like phantom wings behind him. When he was within about a dozen paces, the king raised a hand, though it clearly took great effort and his hand trembled. The attendant spoke curtly. “Stop. You are near enough.”

At that the king lifted his head. The whole of his face was hidden by a silver mask. It was a beautiful mask, showing a youthful boy’s countenance, with curls of silver hair and joyful lips and clean, clear features. Behind the mask, eyes blinked and took in Samakarnatha.

The magus took into the eyes.

Those were not the eyes of some vain elder, close to death, hiding their ruinous years behind a hammered veil of silver. Those were young eyes. Watery, certainly. Weak, yes. And full of pain, absolutely. But those were the eyes of a boy. The mask was the face he was meant to have.

“How old are you, your majesty,” asked the magician, “if it is not impertinent of me?”

A stir went through the crowd, murmuring and muttering. The attendant sputtered.

However, the king did not stir. “It is not impertinent, nor impolite. It is a cautious and careful question. After all, how would our visitor know anything of me or my burden? We are a small kingdom, far from civilised lands. And how would he unravel anything of me at a glance, as I sit here? I am swaddled like a babe under cloaks of velvet. My face is hidden.” He gave out a rotten sounding breath of rattling air. “I have seen fifteen summers. I am near upon my sixteenth. The doctors and herbmasters say that I am unlikely to see seventeen.”

“What ails you, good monarch?”

“The Writhe.”

At that Samakarantha’s hope dwindled to nothing more than a small, dashed flicker. “Ah. That is an illness I have not met before. I have heard of it though. The affliction is not prone to any cures, be they at the knife of the surgeon, or the cunning of the herb-wife, nor through sorcerous and artful tricks, I gather.”

“No cure is known. No. Many have tried. Many have failed. I do not begrudge them. We are all fate-weirded, and it is my weird. I have accepted this.”

“I see.” He paused a time in thought. “Nonetheless, perhaps in private quarters, at a later time, I might look upon you unmasked and try some charms and spoken incantations. I would not give you false hope.” Here he paused. The deep, unnatural, eternal wellspring of power that lay half-asleep beneath the House of Hissocking SPrent went through his mind. There was that… but how dangerous was it to go back to that source of power over and over? He would think upon it and make a decision when he knew more about the true nature of the power in the earth. For now, he hedged towards caution. “Given what I have heard of the illness, I will not raise false hope… but, small hope is better than none.”

“Is that so? My friend here, the Keeper of Keys does tell me that having a desperate hope can be worse than no hope. He has told me many times. Have you not, Mathion?”

“I have often said that, your grace. A faint hope is only hopelessness dressed up in a tattered gown. It makes the eventual fall all the worse and more bone-breaking.”

Samakarantha allowed a smile, itself small and flighty. “That is a dismal view to take, and in my experience not true. When all we have is hope, hope still brings succour to the soul.”

“Well,” replied the attendant with an unpleasant sort of expression, “We have had different experiences in life. That much is already clear to us both.”

Samakarantha took another look at the others who were gathered near the throne. He was closer now, and could get a better look at them. He saw shining long coats of silvery mail. Polished leathers and scale-armour in golds, reds and greens. More than a few of the men and women possessed something of an elfin cast to their features, with irises of unnatural bronze-red hue and skin that was pale beyond the whiteness of milk. Perhaps it was true that some of the noble houses from the more far flung lands had something fane or awvish in their blood. They certainly looked if as if they might. He noticed then, again, the lady-witch in her ochre and chalk dress, with her dark hair and darker eyes. But her name still escaped him.Unexpectedly, the king was taken with a hacking, wet cough, which shook the otherwise still mood of the room. At last he cleared his throat, and was able to speak: “What is it that you propose you might do for us, magician? I am told that night-terrors and beasts of ancient myth are stalking the north now. Vast armies march under banners woven not of cloth, but of moonlight and darkness. What do you propose?”

“I have some power to bring, if it comes to clash and battle. But also, and more importantly, I have friends and allies. Some that you perhaps have not considered. Already I have sent messages, west and south and east. Already, these last weeks and months I have been visiting courts and palaces, begging and beseeching. How many will come in aid, I do not know. It will depend on the outcome of battles elsewhere, I fear. And that, I cannot predict.”

“So you might bring great aid or nothing at all?”

He smiled in as warm a way as he could. “Or, more likely, something in between. That is the way of it.”

“And what do you require of me, for all of this that you do for us?”

“Free movement in your city. Permission to go beyond your walls and look upon the lands and speak with the refugees who are upon the road. Permission perhaps to range farther. If it is safe to look upon this army of nightland and twilight from a vantage somewhere, I would much like to do so. I would like to assess and study, before they are at the gates.”

The king was considering this when a noise and ruckus started up at the great archway at the other end of the throne room. Raised voices could be heard. There were some scuffling sounds and a frantic cry of, “Hold! Not without the king’s invitation!”

“Damn the king’s invitation.” This voice boomed and echoed. The owner strode into view a moment later. He was tall, at least a good hand over six foot, red-haired, with a massive beard marked by black streaks. His eyes were wet and shining, almost feverish. The armour he wore was not the decorative stuff of the nobles nearer the throne. It was rough and ready, well-used, dirty with dust and blood, and cut here and there with sword strokes that were clearly recent.

“Redthorn,” said the king, quietly enough that Samakarantha had to strain to hear. “My good uncle, cometh.”

Samakarnatha himself moved just slightly to one side and watched this fiery haired man shove and stride his way forward. He was followed by a crowd of equally grim-dressed soldiers. Several carried heavy, bulging hessian sacks that were stained with dark, sticky patches. That seemed likely to presage something unpleasant.

One of the men passed close enough to give the magician a suspicious glare, but Samakarantha just smiled and nodded and said, “Good graces and joys be upon you.”

That got an even darker scowl in return.

“What have we here?” said the red-haired man. “Thegns and knights, lairds and retainers, all standing about, tittering their tongues, clutching their pale hands in knots. Well, I see fools and idiots, all of you. Waiting and mumbling and making plans that will never come to fruit.” He very nearly snarled as he spoke his next words. “Well, you siss-a-ninnes, look on this, and titter and tremble.”

His companions started upending the sacks–right in the middle of the room, immediately in front of the throne–the sacks were emptied and a pile was made. It was heads. At first, Samakarantha thought it was a mix of humans and dogs… or wolves perhaps? But when he looked more carefully he saw that the bestial faces were something else. They were the creatures that the northerners called variously boggarts, or bogles, or bugbears, or scarle. In the south, the creatures were uncommon, and the name used was cynocephalus. This was the word that he said aloud, quietly, and mostly intended for the benefit of his own musing.

There were a few hushed breaths, one or two offended huffs and shock, muffled little cries. A woman shrieked and looked away. One young lord fainted and had to be carried off. A few moments of shocked silence and half-muttering passed. The big man stood like a sunset-red storm cloud in the hall. Finally, getting no response from the boy-king or anyone else, he noticed Samakarantha and turned on him.

He must have caught the magician’s muttered word, because he grinned and said, “Ah, so someone here sees what is before them and names it for what it is? Is the only man here a man from faraway and over the seas? Is a wanderer and vagrant the only person in this hall willing to put a name to the dread beasties before you? Where is the courage of the Court of the Heather Throne? Where are the cries of, Boggart! Boggart! Boggart! When did our ancestral bravery turn to a sour and water-thin meekness.” He waved thick, veiny hand at the pile of heads. Blood was seeping into the rug now, slowly, stickily. “Look on this. Look! I and my outriders surprised this lot, not more than a day’s hard trot from the gates. Their scouting gangs are that close now. And behind them, over the hills, there are ranks upon ranks of these foul beast-things, and other more uncanny monsters and night-tainted humanfolk aside. Where are the arms that need to be arrayed? Where are the knights riding out, with lance at the stirrup and good, strong shield in hand? What do you plan here? What is it? Cower behind walls? Die like miserable rats, starving in a miserable hole?”

Samakarantha, meantime, had stepped closer to the blood-soaked pile and was examining the heap of decapitated heads. He noted that many of the human faces–which he had at first taken for being greyish and ashen from being drained of their blood–actually had a leaden sheen to their complexion. These were Sorthemen, he thought. He had seen a few of that folk at the wizard’s moot over the years: with eyes like black stones and skin like grey pewter. He noted also more than one head was young enough to be counted a child. Fighting and killing in a battle can catch up child drummers and squires, just as anyone else can be caught by an arrow or a spear, but it nonetheless made the magician uncomfortable looking on children’s heads mixed into the heap. He could not help but wonder. The clean cuts that he could see on some of the necks might have been the result of taking a head from an already dead corpse. Or the cuts might have been the result of execution.

“There are a great many dead here. How many did you lose?”

The red thegn glared at him, and looked for a moment as if he was going to refuse to answer. In the end, he said only, “Too many. We need more to go with us on the next foray. Do you volunteer, wizard-man of the south?”

He smiled, pleasantly and in an even, level sort of way. “Perhaps I might. I desire to see for myself the state of things. Though it may depend on when you next go forth.”

The man’s serious expression cracked. He spat a belly roar of a laugh. “The man in the silken robes is more man than all these knights in their dyed and gilt-edged armour?”

“Uncle.” The voice was low and hard, though it was barely more than a whispered hiss.

They all turned to the king.

The boy on the throne was trembling with the effort needed to hold himself upright and speak clearly and strongly. “I do not appreciate this. You make a mockery of loyal lairds and good sword-thegns. You overstep yourself. In the days of my grandfather, you would be thrown from the walls for such insults. If you were not family…”

But the man only frowned. “Perhaps you ought to have me thrown from the walls. Maybe it would put some fear into your useless knights. But then, who would fight your battles for you, your grace? Who would wipe the bloodied crap from your withered arse?”

“I grow weary. Do not test me further, Redthorn. You overstep yourself.”

“And I think you overstep yourself, nephew. I ought have you bent over and walloped with a willow-wand. I am your elder and your uncle too, recall. If your father were alive–“

The king began to outwardly shake all over.

“Sirs,” said Samakarantha, stepping between them and raising his palms. “Your grace. Your lordship. Please, be at peace. Fighting amongst ourselves will only hasten the end. Fewer will be those who can stand against tide. Fewer will be those who can ride out and meet sword with sword.”

Redthorn cast a look at him. “Poor chosen words, magician. No one stands against the tide. The tide comes. The tide goes. None have the power to stop it. Who is to say the armies of the dark and frozen north are not a dark tide? Who is to say that any here might staunch that flood?” He openly spat on the floor. There was crimson mixed in with his spittle. He must be injured inside somewhere. “Ah, hag-blast me and hag-blast all of you. I thought to stoke fires and passions, put some fear into you all. But I see only fear and hesitation.” After a long inward seeming moment, he added, more in thought, “He who hesitates is lost. Is not that the saying? I suppose we shall yet see the truth of it, or not.”

“The advice give to me,” said the king, rasping, “is that it would be unwise to ride out and meet a host whose numbers we do not reckon. The walls of Brae are thick and tall. The walls of the fortress are thicker and taller. We have deep wells for water. We have deep cold stores of food. We have seawalls and towers. The shipping of the port will not easily be cut off, even if there is a siege by land.” Even just this trickle of words left him sounding giddy with exhaustion. He slipped backwards almost immediately, and his attendant, Mathion, moved to take his arm and keep him from slipping off of the throne.

“Go!” said Mathion. He had a sour, angry look for Redthorn. “His grace is done with you. Go now.” The tone did not brook further discussion.

“Come. We’ve nothing to see here but whining, trembling jackdaws.” Redthorn left the room and his soldiers trailed after him. Some muttered. Some limped. Some walked in the pale, shocked silence that can come with too much blood loss. They left the pile of heads where they were.

As the men filed out the door, Samakarantha spoke, directing himself to the attendant and throne. “If I may?”

“Yes, wizard?” said Mathion. Impatience threaded itself through his voice.

“I ask that I might return to my house, for the time being. The spells I raised earlier… these were more powerful and sharper in their edges than I had expected. I am cut and drained like a sick man myself, bleed by razors of unseen power. I will return when called, but for now, I think that I need my own rest. I will ponder also on the matter of the northern armies and whether I might spy on them from afar before going out in person.”

The king said nothing but seemed to give a faint nod. Beside him, Mathion spoke, quietly, “Go if you must. But return when called for.”

“I will go with care and take care to listen with alertness for when the royal voice might call.” He bowed again, deeply, and with a sweep of his linens and silks.

Mathion nodded firmly, then waved him away.

The king did and said nothing.

Samakarantha had lost sight of the soldiers and foot-knights, but he found himself walking in their trail. It was easy enough to see, a bloody criss-cross of footsteps, a damp and crimson trackway, showing the way they had come into the keep, and the way they went back by.

He was dwelling half-in-thought on the red footsteps, and feeling just generally spent, when a presence caught up with him from behind, quite suddenly, almost ghost-like. he stopped as a light hand touched his arm just below the shoulder. When he turned, he found staring at the beautiful face and dark eyes of the lady in charcoal and burgundy.

She smiled and it was a sharp, pleasant smile that lit up her whole expressive mouth. “Arch-magian of Tales, we are well-met in a strange and barbarous place.”

He bowed. The pain in his head was a distraction and he wished that she had not decided to accost him right at this moment. He didn’t have his wits about him. He certainly didn’t have enough spare cleverness of mind to play the dancing games of words that magicians so like to play among themselves. “You have me at a disadvantage,” he said. “I feel certain that we have met, but I cannot bring your name or station to mind. For this, I apologise, good lady sorceress–for I am sure that is what you are?”

“No need for an apology, Arch-magian of Tales. You are of high rank and well known among the mages of the world, and I am not–or was not, when last we met.” That same welcoming smile. “It is true that we have exchanged a few polite words at the moot. Yes. But only in brief and in passing.” She circled him, moving with a graceful touch of her feet to the ground. He noticed that when she stood in a smear of blood, she did not disturb it and no blood came away on her shoes or dress hem, no matter how wet the puddle. “As to my name, I am Sorra, called in before-times the Witch of the Amber Flames, but now I am the elect Arch-magian of Flames, highest in rank of the fire-weavers and flame-bringers… or at least, in duties if not in official recognition.”

“I see. Has something befallen the Grand of Lady of Embers? I am sorry to hear it. She was a kindly, dear old soul. Many nights we supped mulled wine together and spoke the gentle talk of old and longstanding friends. She seemed well enough at the moot, though, perhaps a little…” he struggled for words.

“Askew in the mid?”

“Yes. I suppose that is the way to put it. She didn’t seem herself. But I am sorry to hear she has passed. I will tell a tale for her soul and sing a song to help clear her path of the roots and vines that lie between this world and the place of good rest beyond.”

“I’m sure her soul will appreciate this of you.”

“But you say you are Arch-Magian of Flames?” He would normally maintain a more level tone, but the exhaustion and headache he was feeling allowed too much of his suspicion to come to the surface. “How so? The Broad Table would need to confirm this… but I serve on the Broad Table and I do not recall any such decision.

“Yes. Well, Arch-magian in duty, if not in name. Not yet, anyway.” She continued to walk around him in a circle. It reminded him of the way a lion might circle a lone but dangerous prey-beast, assessing weakness, considering whether to pounce or not. “It is true.: Even her voice seemed catlike, purring a little at the fringes. “There was an unfortunate bit of… mmm… misunderstanding at the Wizard’s Moot, or else I would have assumed the title at the Broad Table. But, in the end, the spirits know what is for the best, and it is the Parliament of Flames will choose the Arch-magian of Flames, just as the Brightsome Spirits choose the Great Brightness Mage and the Parliament of Night-weirds will choose the Arch-sorcerer of Darkness. We have little say in the matter, in the end, do we not? The Broad Table merely confirms the will of the spirits. So it is, and so it ever was.”

“Perhaps. I have always been somewhat of the view that the spirits of our various empyrean and earthly houses are quite aware of ambition and have ambitions of there own. I have noted, over the years, that it is rare that the spirits pick a magician who does not want the title. Although the exact nature of the ambitions of the elemental parliaments has always seemed murky.”

She leaned closer, until he could smell the hot, spiced perfume she was wearing. “Then you must yourself be a man of ambition, to recognise such in others? You hide it so well, Samakarantha of the Many Tales.”

“I have been ambitious, in my time. But youth burns bright sometimes, and the heat of desire can burn low when cooler, more seasoned wisdom takes its place. If we have that good fortune.”

She echoed is own half-suspicious words back at him. “I suppose so.”

They considered each other for a few moments, both quite silent. He noted now that her skin wasn’t so much the white of moonlight or milk, as he had earlier thought–but rather, it was the white of bone after it has been burned clean in a pyre and polished, or the white of frail ash left behind when a fire has burned itself down to coals. And her hair… it was not black, as it seemed from afar, but was so deep a wine-dark red that it had the appearance of blackness in all but the most direct slant of light. She assessed him, just as he was considering her.

It was Sorra who spoke first. “You have a secret.”

“I have many secrets. All magicians do, or they are not very good magicians.”

“Oh no… I mean that you have a very extraordinary secret. Something newfound. Something delightfully powerful. It hangs about you in unseen raiment, this weird cloak of new power. What is it, I wonder?” She tilted her head playfully, and blinked her eyes long and slow, catlike. “What is it that you have discovered Samakarantha, droll-teller and take-spinner?”

“Perhaps you are merely noticing the power I have always kept about me like a cloak?”

She shook her head. “No. I do not think so.”

Now he tried a smile of his own. It was an effort. “Ah, but I am being impolite. You know why I am here in this cold, misery of a place. You heard me lay out my little speech in the court. But why are you here, Sorra, who would-be Arch-magian of Flames?” He added “Of course, I mean, in official appointment, if not already in practice.”

She did not look impressed with that, but said nothing and so he continued.

“What brings you to this grey fortress, in this grey city of Brae, under this grey sky of omen?”

She flinched a little at the word ‘omen’–which Samakarantha made a careful mental note of–but quickly recovered her perfect mask of playful inquisitive cunning. “Why, I am here for just the same reasons as you. You are not the only magician clever enough to read the signs, not the only sorcerer wise enough to listen to rumours whispered by old women in the markets. I am here to aid those who would fight against the darkness. For the darkness comes in a crushing mass, now, does it not? And the fire is the last good light in the endless blackness of Old Night and Chaos, is it not?”

“This is often held to be true, though we may discover other sources of light in our dark hour… I do not doubt.”

Another of her pleasant, slightly too pleasant, smiles came at him. “Yes. Perhaps. Perhaps. So much ‘perhaps’. Quite possibly. Who knows what may come to be? However, I think a lit brand in the hand is worth ten enchanted lights that exist only in boggart-tales told for children. Is not the real more masterful and practical than the unreal?”

Again, he said only, “Perhaps.”

“Hm. I see that I ought to let you go now. You do seem so very, very tired, Samakarantah, Arch-magian of Tales, wanderer of the Golden Dales and speaker of old truths and older lies in the courts of kings and queens and pharaohs.”

“I appreciate your consideration. I am weary. It has been a long journey.” This was true enough, if not exactly and precisely the underlying cause of the present exhaustion.

“I’m sure it has been. But, I would love for us to meet again when you are rested, and perhaps in a better state of mind for the sparring of words. I feel that I have learnt a great deal about you, but you have learnt very little of me, in our conversation. It feels, almost unfair–like a cat playing with a songbird. So, perhaps, when you are rested and more fully sharp in mind–let us take some food and drink together. Of a night or an afternoon. Or even of a morning, though I prefer to sleep late when I can. I will bring the flame in the hearth, if you will bring tales most illuminating.”

He nodded and performed another bow, this time with slightly less of a sweep of his hands. “It would be sensible for us to confer, if we are allies in the matter at hand.”

“Very sensible,” she said, barely above a whisper. “ANd here I expected you to say only, ‘possibly’. But, goodbye for now, Samakarantha, who knows so many tales. We will talk again. I am sure of it.” A pause, just enough for a fraction of a glance and a delectable little flourish of amusement on her lips. “And I am quite sure that you are sure of it to. Even if you pretend nonchalance. You know that you will come seeking me out, in the end.”

“Perhaps,” he said again, with another faint nod.

She left them, sweeping away, trailing her long silken dress of ochre and ash behind her. He had the impression that she was laughing silently to herself as she walked, though he could not say for certain that this was true. It might have been his imagination, or an impression she wanted him to imagine.

He could only turn back to the hallway before him and follow the bloody steps, now congealing and darkening to a tacky brown-black. He step was slower now. The tiredness was thick in his blood and in the wet, red marrow of his bones.

He noticed that charwomen and maids were even now attending to the trail, wiping it away with their mops and pales of water. It struck him that they were washing away the evidence of men who had bleed for these halls, in these halls, and somehow this struck him as a bleak omen, though he could not have explained precisely the underlying meaning of it, not even to himself.

###

Samakarantha was soon enough making his way through the last outer halls of the fortress–still following the bloody footprints–desperately looking forward to sleeping away the remains of the day–when he noticed some clamour and commotion. Guards ran by, fixing their helms hurriedly on their heads. He saw captains and knights hastily taking up swords, only half-armoured in chest-plates and mail coats, and running, hurriedly. The magician caught one of the passing men by the arm. “What is this? Is the enemy already at the gates.”

“Some are saying so, but it ain’t no army. It’s a great demonic beast in the shape of a horse. He has a wee slip of a youth on his back, and the rider is demanding entry into the town. Pikes and spears are being sent.”

“This demonic beast–you said a horse? Is it a horse-ish thing with a skull face and a dappled black and grey pelt?”

The guardsman looked taken aback. “How did you know? Your sorcerous skills, I guess.” He edged back a step.

“Not at all. We’ve met, I think. A long, long way from here. And many months ago. But, we have met. I shall go with you to the gates, though it will tire me sorely. It seems there will be no rest today. Lead on.” He followed as the guardsman scurried ahead of him.

“Is the creature a great foe?” asked the guard, over his shoulder.

“Dapplegrim? He woukld a great foe, I suppose, but luckily not for you or me. He and his lady rider are on our side, as it happens. Or at least they were, last we met. Much time has passed between then and now.”

But the man stopped and shook his head. “Lady? No. It ain’t no lady. It is a thin scrap of a lad on the beast’s back. Not a lady.”

“Are you sure? She dresses in men’s clothing and armour, most of the time, if I remember right.”

“Absolutely, there can be no mistaking it. He ain’t no lady, disguised or not.”

This put Samakarantha’s thoughts immediately to wonder and worry. What had happened to separate Dapplegrim and Caewen? And who was this lad, assuming the guard was not misled? “We had best hurry. Before anyone tries to poke the beast with something pointy. That would not do.”

“Follow me then, your wizardship. We’ll go by the quickest way, good laird-magus.”

And together they hurried through the fortress, then out the great gates at the brow of the hill. It might have just been a trick of the wind, but Samakarantha was half-certain he could hear raised voices from town’s northern gates, even at distance and over rooftops and chimneys.

It also occurred to him that the bloody footprints had come this way already, and now it seemed that the red trail made a path ahead of them, presumably also taking the quickest way to the northern gates. They would have quite the head start because of the wandering little conversation with Sorra. The timing of her little chat had been very poorly chosen–or he wondered–perhaps, very intentionally chosen. If she knew through sorcerous arts or spies that Dapplegrim was near the gates… well… it could be that she wanted some turmoil, or the death of the horse and rider… and so had delayed the man who might be able to calm the situation. But to what end?

“We had best hurry faster,” he said to the soldier, more emphatically now.

And they did.

THIRTEEN

Evening was starting to show the hems of her gown on the horizon, though it would be some time until dusk was full in the air. The day had been bright, the clouds sun-smeared, the air crisp and cool and full of the last rays of fading autumnal half-warmth. The dark green leaves of oaks were all gone, long since blown away to form crisp, dry flaky heaps on the ground. Only a few spots of yellow still dotted elm and beech, willow, poplar and hazel. Each leaf was a fluttering spark of colour in an otherwise drab greyness. And yet, oddly, Caewen noticed the occasional pale yellow-white butterfly pass her by on the cold air, hopelessly seeking flowers. They were quite worn and tattered along the edges of their wings, so that it almost looked as if their wings were made of old worn bits of parchment. She didn’t know the name of the land she passed through, but it seemed to be a place of some natural prettiness and few people. Before very long, she encountered something stranger again than the tatter-winged butterflies who seemed so determined to outlive the change of seasons. It was an unfamiliar species of huge green dragonfly, as long as her forearm. These massive insects ruled the air above the ponds and marshy places she passed, darting and skimming for prey. She paused more than once to watch them. No cold snap had yet killed their summer reign. They dashed about as if they might have been miniature dragons in iridescent coats, over water as black as icy tar, all spotted with yellow leaves the colour of a dragon’s gold.

The chill wind tugged at her hair. She walked on. The evening came, night settled, and she slept the night under an unusually thick hawthorn stand, dry enough and comfortable enough.

The next day, she rose and ate, washed herself in a small stream that was not too far away, and walked on. And so the day passed, and the next and the next.

On the fifth day after leaving Cag-Mag’s house, Caewen found herself alone on a drear country high road that mostly struck a path eastwards. Whenever she stopped to check the bowl of inky water, the charm pointed always in the same direction–though nothing seemed to lie that way but more of the same hills and woods, the occasional cottage, and here and there, some standing stones in scattered little huddles. But, onwards she trudged.

It was sometime in the late afternoon of that same day when she realised she’d not seen a person in hours and not spoken to one in days. The few farmers and cottagers she had chanced to pass in the morning had watched her warily from afar, never approaching or even calling out a halloo. A hushed watchfulness lay upon the land, as if earth and tree and stone alike were waiting for something terrible but unnamable.

Well, good then, she thought. Better for a land and its people to be wary. Not like some of the villages she had chanced upon earlier in her journey. Places like Ode’s village. Ashy places. Ruined places. Sword-cut places. In more than one, if here had been anything left alive that wasn’t a crow or a rat, she couldn’t have named it.

At the thought, she closed her eyes and hugged her cloak tighter about her shoulders. She moved methodically forward, through wet grass, skirting muddy holes in the road, just keeping on walking.

It was about this moment, when she saw another of the old uprights.

There had been quite a few, these last few miles: standing stones and old cromlechs were a common enough sight across the northern lands, but they seemed especially frequent here. She had passed at least half-a-dozen clusters of the tall, thin standing stones, moss-green, lichen-hued. Those had always been arranged in groups, with each stone about as tall as a man, and often set in such a tight circle that they looked conspiratorial.

Caewen was so focused on her own inner world, that she did not notice anything unusual about the stone, as she passed it by–though afterwards she would wonder if she ought to have stopped and examined it more closely.

She was doing her best to forget the last few days. The chase by boggarts. The smoke from burning houses or villages in the far-off distance. Cag-Mag in her fire-lit, gloom-littered cave. The shadows taking her away. And the other thing… her own shadow slipping away… that was the thing she tried to forget most of all.

Of course, she caught herself looking down, looking at the absence of a shadow on the ground beside her. No companion to walk with her. Instead… it was somewhere else… doing other things… what other things? And who or what was it? Herself. Her other self. The other one. The shadow.

This led her to think more deeply about ‘it’ without meaning to or wanting to–the part of her that had decided to get up from the ground, turn from shadow to flesh, walk to the door, and go out into the cold, clear night air with him. The man in the chalk and ebony. The man with the long silvery hair and the beautiful, delicate face… and the eyes like illuminated puddles of moon-upon-water. She told herself she was doing her best not to think about it… about him… but… and yet… her thoughts returned. Ideas and imaginings ran around and around in her head. Distracting. Worrying. Sometimes even, if she were to admit it, ideas that verged on fantasising. Herself. Here. Now. Breathing. Thinking. She was the half that had been left behind–the flesh and blood part–and this half-Caewen, real, solid, grounded, even so, she could not deny that going away with the cold poet-king had its obvious appeal.

She understood why here shadow had gone.

And was perhaps even a little jealous.

The thought gave her a slight shiver that was awful, and at the same time, somehow frighteningly enticing.

Up until now, Caewen had been paying scant attention to her surrounds, the standing stones included. She had barely glanced at them, assuming that they were abandoned relics of a forgotten religion… that is, until she finally noticed a stone with the flowers. The flash of colour caught her eye: red and gold in a heaped mass. She stopped. She looked at it. She wondered if other stones had been decorated, but she simply hadn’t noticed. She left the road and swished through the damp grass to take a look.

The stone was alone, which was somewhat unusual in itself? Mostly she had seen stones in groups, had she not? She circled it, looking up and down the grey, chipped and weathered surface. It seemed much like the other uprights she had passed… except that all about its base were heaps of a thick, frilly gold flower mingled with a velvety red one. She did not recognise either blossom, and could only guess that they were taken from some sheltered glade that still caught the sun’s warmth in the final turning of the season. Perhaps this was the secret of why the butterflies were not all dead of starvation. She wondered if it was adherents to an old religion or simply idle children who had left the yellow and red pile. She had nearly convinced herself that this might be the innocent work of some local farmer’s family, when she spotted the rust-brown blood smears on the stone. They were faint, but definite. Caewen reached out to touch the stone, wanted to try and get a sense for how recently the blood had been fresh, but she started and stepped back when a voice interrupted her, piping up from satchel at her side: “Tssssch. Don’t. No, no, don’t. These stones belong to something that thinks it owns this place. I can feel it, slumbering… dreaming. Tssch. Best not to wake it. Definitely best not to touch its relics. Tscck.”

“I see.” She looked around. Everything was still under the windless cool air. “A god?”

“Or something like a god. Tsssch. Yes.”

She looked again at the rock, but was careful this time not to risk touching it. There were blood stains on the stone… and there were also streaks, very much as if someone had afterwards scrubbed the surface to remove most of the blood. So, perhaps the flowers were left as a part of some manner of cleansing ritual? After the blood had been cleaned away? But why was there blood in the first place? Who left it? And who cleaned it off?

“Do you know what kingdoms lie this way, Fetch?”

A shadowy head, a bit like a cat, something like a mink, poked itself out of the leather pouch it used as a home throughout the daytime. Its fur and eyes seemed congealed from darkness and the light of day clearly troubled it, even with the sun dimmed by trailings of cloud and failing light. “No. Why should I? Tssch. Never come this way in all my existence.”

“I suppose you wouldn’t have.” Looking about the glen, she said, “What’s that? Over there.” Not far off, there was a greasy smudge of black. She walked over to it, gingerly. It appeared to be the remnants of a fire, but it did not look like a campfire. It looked more like a small pyre that had been allowed to burn down. She tapped a boot toe into the ash and turned over a fragment of a deer antler. “Well that’s odd,” she said.

“Tsk. I’ve seen odder.”

“Like what?”

“Well, seeing as you ask, once, I saw this young woman go kicking her foot into the remains of a ritual offering that was clearly leftover by rustic worshippers of some unfriendly god, and she was all alone, and what is more, there were probably crazed hill-folk watching her from the bushes even as she kicked their sacrificial ashes, and it felt very much as if she did not care for her life at all. Tssch. Like that. Very odd, you ask me. Tsch.”

“Ha ha. You’re as funny as Dapplegrim.”

“Twice as funny, if I should but care to try. Tsch.”

Still, it was worth a look about. What had she been thinking earlier, about it being better to be wary? So she did just that, and searched about herself. Darkening woods. A road that stretched muddily in both directions. A few rotund sheep on a hillside, far enough away to look vaguely like grass-fed maggots. All was stillness. All was silence.

“We should keep moving,” she said.

“Tsh. You should, yes. My poor miserable self is forced to go where you go. At least until sundown.”

She crossed back over the grass, leaving another wet, rank trail where she walked, and came back to the road, before turning eastward once more.

As she walked, Caewen drew her blue-and-green cloak tighter around her shoulders and ran a thumb up and down the length of her sword’s hilt. The shiver of the old sorcery’s weft within made her skin prick, but it was reassuring all the same. And not for the first time, she wished that she hadn’t parted ways with her friends. But they had done what had to be done. Someone had to go south to Brae and bring warning of what was coming out of the north. So it was that Dapplegrim and Ode had gone that way. She had to walk her own road, find the Old Great Spell, and perhaps then… do what? Bring some semblance of peace to the world?

Perhaps.

Or perhaps it would all come to ash and cinders.

###

She walked until her calves hurt. Well into dusk and beyond into the settling night. And then she walked some more.

The rhythm of the road left her keenly aware of her own body: the twinge of tendons, the flat dull ache that accompanied each stride. Her feet, hot, sweaty and unpleasant inside their stockings. The boots were rubbing and pinching in more than one place. And to make the evening really miserable, the enclosing night air brought with it a colder, wetter change in the weather.

The first patters of rain were sporadic, but the droplets were a promise of something heavier in the curling black murk that curled down from the hills.

Caewen topped a ridge just as the rains began to fall in wandering curtains. It was not a wind-driven rain, but it was heavy. A sad downpour that soaked everything. Below her, the road went down into a valley, through which ran a grey, choppy river. Luckily, an old stone bridge crossed it, otherwise she’d have been even wetter on the far bank.

By the time Caewen made it to the bridge, her feet were sinking in mud, squeezing out big holes in the sticky road. She considered trying to camp under the bridge, but the river was rising quickly and she didn’t want to fall asleep only to find herself swept away in a sudden flood. A few black, shaggy pines nearby the road offered some shelter, though not much.

“What’s that?” said Fetch, from her side.

“What?” She hadn’t realised he had poked his head out. “There. Isn’t it a light? Tsch.”

She squinted through the grey sheets of shifting rain. The little shadow-thing was right. Far off among the tree trunks, there was an orange glow. It had the look of firelight: either an open fire that was sheltered from the rain, or, she hoped, something more substantial. It looked to be somewhere farther up the road. She debated with herself for a moment whether it was worth the risk to investigate, but, unless soldiers had come unexpectedly out of the north or east, it seemed more likely that the light belonged to a farmhouse or isolated cottage. There seemed nothing else to do but walk.

Her clothing was sticking to her skin in cold wrinkles and slick sheets of fabric by the time she came in sight of the building. It was a large structure, high-peaked in the roof, and strung round with twisted leafless apple trees and grapevines on trellises. A clumsy plank of a signboard hung damply in the torrential rain. Painted upon it was a bright blue, large-eyed dragonish creature eating grapes off a vine. Some sort of little piskie-drake or feral dragonet, she guessed. Perhaps a local species.

“An inn,” said Caewen, as relieved as she had ever been in her life. She hurried up the wooden steps toward the shelter of the door.

As she put a foot on the step, she felt something whisper in her thoughts. She stopped dead, alert but not quite comprehending the feeling on the air. It was Fetch who put the sensation into words.

“Tssch. There’s a magician inside, and a powerful one at that.” He paused, sniffing. She could see his little black liquid eyes blinking, his small nose twitching. “Hard to say what manner of magician. Could be a spy. Or a warlock out of the north. Or worse.”

“Or, it could be a local spell-raiser of no particular threat.”

“Tssch. It’s like you want to be naive.”

“We’ll, we have to chance it. Perhpas you can’t catch cold and die, but I can, and if I’m not frozen dead by morning, I’ll be drowned. And that will do you no good, either, will it? What will you do with a dead sword-witch?”

Fetch replied smugly. “I can think of several uses. You would leave behind a beautiful and most potent corpse.”

But Caewen gave him a sour look and he hunched himself up. “Oh, be that way then. Don’t say as I didn’t warn you.” Rather dejectedly then, Fetch huddled himself down deeper in the satchel, allowing the cover to fold back over him. With his face covered, his voice was muffled, his hissings and snarls more muted.

With no other choice except to go back out into the freezing rain, Caewen lifted her feet, one stair at a time, and using what little warmth and fire was left in her muscles, she dragged herself up the last of the steps and pushed open the door.

Warmth and light met her. She breathed in a mustiness of ale, the brisk hard smell of stout and an inviting aroma of something fatty and stewing. Not a moment later, a woman’s voice called out: “Well, how’s this then? A drowned rat? Didn’t think we’d have any more travellers in from the night this evening. It’s a right royal downpour out there.”

“Don’t I know it.” Caewen did her best to force a smile. “Caught in the storm. Do you have a bed, or even just a place by the fire?”

The owner of the voice was a middle-aged woman who seemed as familiar and comfortable and worn-down as a very old and much-loved family quilt. Indeed, her clothing was quilt-like too, all patches and bits and pieces, but made out of the most remarkable cloth. It looked as if she was in the habit of buying a small square of the most expensive fabric from each passing cloth-merchant, so that she could then make dresses and aprons out of a collection of mad scraps: cloth-of-gold, and brocade, and lace and intricate needlework all lay alongside each other, jarring to look at. It was a magpie’s dream of a dress.

Besides the smells, besides the warmth, one other thing that washed over Caewen: and this was the very same sense of strong enchantment she had picked up on the stairs.

It was much more palpable here. So noticeable, in fact, that she didn’t half wonder if any old non-magician would be able to sense it.

Someone in the room was a magician, and that magician was doing nothing to hide their power. If anything, they were advertising it–practically radiating power. But who? A small gathering of what seemed to be farmers and day labourers lounged by the fireplace. An inn-boy went back and forth with trays. A girl of about Caewen’s own age was sitting at a table by herself eating what looked and smelled to be a fatty mutton and carrot stew. Off in a corner, two rangy men in woodsman’s outfits sat in the shadows and looked at Caewen from under suspicious brows. And of course, there was the innkeeper too… she didn’t seem the sort, but in all honesty, no one in the room looked anything like a wizard or sorceress.

So who was the magician?

Distractedly, Caewen unfastened her cloak. The stitched forget-me-nots rustled and dripped water as she did. It was so wet that it felt as if she had brought the rain in with her, dripping little tassels of water. As the innkeeper had not answered, she repeated herself. “Have you a room, or bed, or anywhere at all to sleep?”

“Oh. Um. We’ve some rooms left.” The innkeeper eyed her, seeming distracted. “Apologies, good traveller. That is a fine cloak… and a very fine sword too. I imagine you will want a room to yourself. You are clearly a lady of consequence.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that. I’m rather inconsequential, in the grand scheme of things. But, I would prefer a private room, if possible. Is a hot bath out of the question?”

“There’s a bathhouse out back. The furnace is still fired and hot.”

“That sounds, honestly, amazing. Alright. So, room, bath and dinner, if I may?”

Caewen walked over to the woman. They vaguely haggled back and forth a little, but Caewen wasn’t in the mood to bicker, and both of them seemed to be arguing over a price largely out of habit. Caewen agreed to a price without much fuss, then dug out her purse and handed over some coins. She had half-forgotten that she still carried a few coins from the treasure of the Wisht Folk, along with a good many other old, weird coins, picked up here and there, found in hidden troves and guarded hoards along the way. The innkeeper looked at each coin, holding them one-by-one in the glow of the nearest candle flame. She lightly tasted a couple of them. “Strange coins, but silver is silver.”

“I’ve travelled a long way.” Another small fragile attempt at a smile. “I hope that does not trouble you.”

“Trouble me? Nonsense. Where would an innkeeper be without weary travellers who’ve come a long way? Certainly, not keeping an inn. I can tell you that.”

“That is true enough, I suppose.” Caewen relaxed a little. Everything seemed ordinary enough so far. Whoever the magician was, perhaps they had no intention of making themselves known after all. For all she knew, the other sorcerer in the room might be half-way to somewhere on their own urgent journey. They might have as little interest in her, as she had in them. “Which way to the bathhouse?”

The woman indicated a way out the back.

The feeling of magic in the air subsided as Caewen left the room.

“Powerful,” whispered the Fetch, the moment they were out of the room. “Very powerful.”

“Yes.” She stopped and looked back into the rectangle of golden light that was the doorway. “If we’re lucky, whoever it is barely noticed us.”

“With your cloak bought at the Wizard’s Moot and woven to look like living forget-me-nots? With your sword of Fane steel and silver, all patterned and wan-shimmering? Tssssch. Naive. Naive. Naive.”

“Don’t forget the demon in my purse. Whoever is the magician will like as not have noticed the demon too.”

“Tssssssk,” came the hissing reply, petulant. “Maybe. But I bet they also noticed you don’t have a shadow. I bet they noticed the missing shadow long before they noticed me hiding in the dark. I am rather good at hiding, tsssch, after all. Shadows–real shadows–tend not to be good at hiding. It’s a strange thing to walk about without one. Tssch.”

She laughed at Fetch then, softly, but the thought did make her anxious all the same. All he had said was true. She did carry with her a cloak and sword and other things that would catch the glance of anyone with half an eye for magic. And her shadow… in time, other folks would notice. And not just mysterious unknown magicians. Even the most unobservant clod of an oaf would spy it, eventually.” She frowned to herself. “And it wasn’t the sort of thing people tended to disregard with a shrug.

###

Caewen took her time enjoying the hot water. It had been an age since she was last able to get really clean. No one else seemed to want to make use of the bath house, which was fine by her. It was a very old building, predating the inn itself, and constructed in the style of ancient Pyreathium. She had no idea the empire had stretched its borders so far north, but there must have been an outpost here, garrison or trading house, long ago. Terracotta mouldings decorated the ceilings. Tiles and blocks of hard polished limestone made up the rest of the interior. There was a steam room, which Caewen did not much care to use, a cold plunge pool which she absolutely did not care use, and a hot water tub, which she most certainly did.

Fetch did not enjoy the humidity. He kept muttering and complaining in a voice just low enough to be difficult to precisely catch–but loud enough to give off a clear sense of his irritation.

Long used to the vagaries of weather on the road, Caewen kept spare clothing and any other items she wanted to keep dry in a tight roll of oiled cloth. The clothing, a small towel and the few other things smelled slightly of aromatic oils, but they were at least dry. She noticed, with irritation, that the towel had a new moth hole in it. No matter what she did, she was unable to rid her pack of the damnable things.

When she was washed, dried and dressed, Caewen heaped her dirty muddy clothing into a basket that she guessed was for washing. She would ask for these to be laundered and dried overnight in front of a furnace, if possible.

The bath house was some distance from the building proper. This meant that once she was done with the bath, dried and dressed, she had to go back outside and cross the short span of wet ground to return to the inn. Pausing at the threshold, she felt the jarring slap of icy outdoor air while hot steam churned at her back. There was a gap of about thirty paces she needed to cross. She took in the view of the darkness, the smell of rain and wet, resinous trees. The whole world seemed to be a mass of dripping noises, quietly, succinctly, drumming out small notes among the leaves, under the eaves of the buildings, against stone and dirt. But… she listened… there was no pattering of raindrops. It was all runoff, trickling and dribbling.

“Rain’s stopped,” observed Caewen.

She looked up at the sky. There was a rent in the clouds. No moonlight, but a few stars flecked the ravine between the cloud banks.

Barely considering if it was a good idea–or even necessary–Caewen dug into her pack and took out the bowl: perfectly round, perfectly black and polished to the same hard gleam as freshly cooled glass.

“Tsch. Really? Wouldn’t you rather just go inside and get some sleep?”

“It’s been a couple days since I last looked into the waters. The moon has been too bright to work by starlight alone. That was the instruction. By starlight alone.”

Fetch sighed. He was exceedingly good at sighing. He could really inject a sense of complete exasperation into the smallest of noises.

Caewen moved a few steps into the darkness, picking a path among some low grassy hummocks and straggly thistles. She found a place that was private enough, but not wholly within the stands of trees that encircled the inn. She knelt down, doing her best to avoid getting wet again from the dripping leaves. This would have to be quick. Distant thunder drummed itself against hillsides. Another squall of rain might come through at any moment. And even without another downpour, the occasional persistent droplet from a leaf or twig fell on Caewen’s face or ran down the inside her collar. She worked quickly, filling the bowl using drinking water from a skin. Stars in sparkling pocks appeared in the blackness of the water at once–and yet, there were too many to be a simple reflection of the sky above. It was a reflection of a sky that overarched someplace else, some other world, some other time.

With fingers groping inside the darkness of her pack, she found the ivory lockbox and carefully took out of it a parcel wrapped in old velvet. With utmost care, Caewen lowered the fragment of the Old Great Spell into the water, where it floated as if it were atop of a puddle quicksilver.

“The fragment shows the way,” said Caewen. The water roiled and swirled until shapes appeared in the rippling shadows of the surface. She stared into the reflections. She saw heaps of age-blackened silver, jewellery in weird coralline shapes, iridescent pearls–and something else. A thing that was huge and ancient and covered in wet scales and barnacles. It heaved and shifted in its slumber. The fragment of antler tinked into the rim of the bowl, three times: tap, tap, tap. “The fragment shows the way,” repeated Caewen. The scrying bowl had indicated roughly the same direction that Caewen had been travelling. That was good. She had not overshot her destination, wherever it was, whatever it was. The view was always in darkness… but the thing in the darkness never changed. It was always there, a lurking menace of something older than old. As always, it gave her an unpleasant feeling just to look at the small bits of coil and scale that were visible.

Another issue of thunder from the sky reminded her that it would be very easy to find herself soaked to the skin again, and she had no more spare clothing.

With a few rapid movements, she put away the fragment, closed the ivory box and tidied away the bowl, tipping the water out in a smooth arc. She was about to return to the inn, when Fetch’s voice snapped at her. “Be still!”

She froze.

In a bare whisper, the little shadow-demon spoke. “Do you feel it? You got the attention of something. Tsssch. Tsk. Foolish.”

She could feel it–a sudden presence in the night air–something inhuman and carrying with it a tight bundle of its own wild, burning power. She strained her eyes, scanning the woods, staring into the darknesses between blacker tree boles. Something moved. A shape… no… two shapes. They prowled this way and that, sniffing at the ground, moving their great heads to and fro. Eyes like firelight glowed in the darkness. What bodies she could make out were something like a dog, and something like a fox that had been stretched upwards, tall and thin and entirely ashy black.

“Fire-things,” said Fetch. He was always terrified of any elemental demon or spirit that was larger than him. Demons were not averse to eating other demons, as it turned out, and he was rather small, as demonical things went. “Back away slowly,” he advised, stark fear in his voice. “Do not break eye contact. Tssssch. Do not give them a reason to think you are prey.”

Caewen did one better. She drew her sword. Witch-light from the blade spilled on the ground and over her arms and skin.

The two sets of pale-fire eyes attended to her at once.

She did take a step backward then, but only to find a better stance. She kept her gaze steadily on the fire-things. She waited. Tested their reaction.

They did nothing. Watching her back. Waiting. One flicked an ear. One narrowed its eyes a little. But that was all.

She took another careful step away, and still the creatures did not move. The, she moved more quickly, a few more steps, and a few more. Caewen was not far from the inn now, but she dared not turn her back to them. With just a few more of her measured, careful movements–never breaking her gaze–she found her way to the rear door. There was a storm-lantern hanging over the back door, and the moment that she was standing within its pool of light, the creatures lidded their eyes, seemingly lost interest, and receded back into the dark woods.

“Those were not feral demons,” said Fetch. “They belong to someone.”

“Our secretive magician, presumably.”

“Tsch. Yes.”

“But who?”

FOURTEEN

In the morning, Caewen dragged herself out of the warm, if slightly scratchy, bed linens with reluctance. She had given up counting the cockerel crows. Somewhere outside the bird had been blustering away with its little lungs for what seemed like hours.

It was with a groggy, half-aware, sleep-gritty vagueness that Caewen went about her usual morning things, dressing and going to the privy, washing and waking herself up with yawns and splashes of cold water. Throughout, Fetch refused to come out of his satchel. He remained with the rest of her gear in the rented little box room with its modest bed and cosy shadows.

All the while there was a sense of something unseen and powerful hanging in the air. Caewen was doing her best to ignore it, but the sensation still crept subtly up and down her skin, prickling her hairs. She wondered if she might not have slept at all, except for simple force of sheer exhaustion.

Towards the end of her morning wanderings and routines, Caewen stopped and looked out a window. The rains had passed and left behind a cloud-stained sky that was such a pale luminous grey that it looked as if a bowl of smoked glass had been placed over the world. It was a moment of beauty.

She looked at the world out there, holding in her body an almost longing wistfulness. Everything seemed so motionless and so peaceful. There was no hint of fighting. No suggestion of sword, fire or screaming in the smoke. The march of armies felt so very far away. She wondered, indeed, if she would ever know that same sense of quiet stillness within herself.

Caewen eventually was able to take her gaze from the window and ease herself downstairs, now on the hunt for breakfast. As she stepped off the last stair, a man in the room looked up at her. He was seated on a long bench, very close to the stairs, but with his broad well-tailored back leaning against the table. He smoked a short, black clay pipe, wore his hair in a curly yellow-brown mass and had two impressive pork-chop sideburns running down to a beardless chin. Each of his thumbs was planted deep in nicely stitched vest pockets. She had seen him last night and taken him for one of the more affluent farmers, but now, looking at him, he wondered if he was too well dressed. His shirt was very delicately striped with dove grey and purple, buttoned with silver, and his coat was a velvety buff leather. The boots he wore were expensive, tall, sturdy and dyed a deep crimson red. A thin brocade like fire ran along the tops of them. At his paunch, a large glinting red stone decorated his belt buckle.

“Ah,” said Caewen, see precisely how things were.

“Have a seat,” the man said. His voice was plain-speaking, amiable even, but there was an edge to it that did not expect to be disobeyed. He patted the bench beside him. “I’ve already had toast and eggs, some white pudding and fried greens, but I’ll order a plate for you. If you are hungry?”

Caewen nodded and sat down beside him, doing her best not to give anything away. Without Fetch, Caewen had very little power to draw on. If she tried to conjure anything too deep in nature, she might drop dead from it. And her sword was upstairs too. Foolish. Naive. Fetch was right. She inwardly–but not very vehemently–cursed the little shadow-thing for staying in the room. Perhaps Fetch had even suspected there was a surprise waiting in the taproom, and so had avoided it. Or perhaps not. He was a lazy little thing. So, not quite sure yet how to navigate the moment, she tried throwing a few words to him, lightly, testing the waters. “Are you a local farmer?”

“No. Of course not. And you don’t think that either. Or you’re a greater fool than any fool I ever met.”

“I see. The spirits in the night-woods? The fire-things?”

“Aye. Those are mine.” He eyed her, but after a moment remembered that he had offered to ask after food. He called for the ale-wife, gave her a breakfast order without consulting Caewen, then turned back to her. “Now, but, here’s my problem: I don’t know what to make of you. What manner of sorceress are you? Whom do you serve? Do you mean to cause trouble in my little corner of the world? You will forgive the direct line of questioning, I hope. I must know what I must know.”

She had not broken her gaze from the man. At least she knew now he was a local, or claimed to be. That made him less likely to be an outright servant of The Winter King. The fire-weirds spoke against service in that direction, too. The sorcerers and witches of Old Night and Chaos tended towards darkness, storm, ice and winter. Though… not all of them… and fires shone just as hot and just as burning in the lands beyond the mist-choked mountains. No doubt there were fire-mages in the north, perhaps just not very many of them. And regardless, he might still be a spy. She spoke with care. “I am something of an accidental magician, and not a very expert one. I serve no one but my own purpose, which I hope is good. I do my best to be so. I certainly do not wish to cause trouble–for you or anyone else–but you may find that trouble is coming. In case you are unaware, there are armies moving in the northern hills. I’ve passed through empty, burned down villages not more than five days hard walk from here. I’ve seen more than a few burnt-out wagons and cottages too. If your corner of the world has any strong walls to hide behind, or spears to take up, then I would suggest you might look to such things… as sensible.”

He nodded, curtly. Ignoring her warning, he said instead. “You know, a smile would do you good. A grim face is a poor travelling companion.”

“I haven’t had many smiling days of late.”

“I suppose not. Mayhaps luck will change that. The land hereabouts is pleasant. And it is peaceful. We’ve no northern hosts here. They fear somewhat to trespass upon my borders. They know me and well are they right to be afraid.” A rolling big-shouldered shrug followed. “You may find it restful to linger here awhile, if your purpose is not too urgent. It might even be sensible to spend some time with us. Let the wars roll on and crash and spend themselves like waves on a beach. For this land of mine is more like a crag of rock, than a sandbar. The waves of war know it, and so they do not trouble us here.” He waved his pipe about rather dismissively, making giddy knots of smoke. “And, by the way–although I appreciate the warning in the spirit in which is was meant–we are already quite aware of the rumours that abound. You need to think it necessary to lecture me. I do not like to be taught things by an out of place girl, barely out of childhood.” He got up and wandered over to the hearth. She wasn’t sure what he was doing at first. He fiddled with his pipe, picking at some ash with his fingertips. Satisfied, he tapped the contents straight onto the hearth stones before stamping out the embers. He really twisted his boot-toe, giving a very clearly intentional impression of snuffing out something unwanted. “Where are you going?”

“East, then some way south, I think. Though I am not sure, as yet.”

“Hm. Rather vague for a purpose. How far? Where to?”

That gave her pause. “I’m really not sure. I’m following a path. I don’t know where the path leads.”

He had to consider her answer. “An honest answer. I expected you to lie. I know that you carry something of potency, and for the sake honesty, I shall reply in kind: I don’t know what it is. An oracle perhaps? Maybe that is what you follow? Or it might be that you are carrying a scrying magus-wrought thing? Or a charmed compass? Such artifices exist, though I have never seen one.” More darkly, he said, “Or mayhaps, it is a tool of war you carry, meant for one side or the other?” A shrug. “Or something else again. Mayhaps you are searching for you long-lost lover, trapped somewhere by a dark enchantress? Isn’t that how the tales go, sometimes?” He returned to her side, and sat down. They sat there, silent, for a few moments, wordlessly regarding each other. This was broken when he looked over his shoulder with a slow twist of his head. “Food cometh, and the stomach stands before all other pleasures and needs.” His smile seemed quite genuine as the plate was placed before Caewen. “Oh, and, two pots of smallbeer, thank you, Elta.”

“Much a pleasure,” said the woman. She smiled. Presumably, the stout, well-dressed magician liked that.

Caewen began to eat. No point in wasting a good hot meal. She ate like a hungry traveller who hasn’t had a good hot meal in a while, and noticed him tutting a little at her manners.

“So, by what ought I call you?” said the man.

“My name is Caewen.”

His eyebrows arched up into his forehead like startled hairy caterpillars. “A name? A real genuine name, by the feel of it in your throat and on the air. How bold of you. How reckless. Well, a name for a name then. I am nothing if not fair in my dealings. About here, they call me Matty Nutch.”

“Thank you,” mumbled Caewen through a half-full mouthful. “Not many magicians answer a name with a name.” She swallowed. “So little trust.”

“Manners, manners.”

“H’m?”

“Talking with your mouth full.”

She gave him what she hoped was a rather under-whelmed look as she popped a piece of the white pudding in her mouth. It was a mixture of fat, egg white and dried grapes, as far as she could tell, and it was delicious. “So,” she said, being sure not to fully empty her mouth first, “to what do I owe the honour of your inquisition?”

“I should think that is obvious enough–though, I suppose it is sensible enough to ask. You are a stranger here, after all. Well, a person of some moderate power and charms is travelling through my little handkerchief of the world. Hereabouts, folks expect me to keep an eye on that sort of thing. That is all. If you are travelling east? Then I will accompany you, at least as far as the Village of Whittawer, where I am expected at a wedding. In this way, you shall have no trouble with folks who might be suspicious of a stranger, and I will have no trouble with a stranger of whom I am suspicious.”

“Seems sensible enough.” She chewed some more, considering this, as he eyed her in his own assessing way. At last she said, flatly, “I don’t see that I have a choice.”

“No. You do not.”

She nodded. “All the same, I should warn you that travelling with me may be dangerous. I have been hunted in the past. I might still be hunted now. I have enemies.”

“Well. All the more reason for me to go along with you. Imagine, what if you wander into some innocent thorp over which I have a duty of protection, and these enemies of yours appear… that would not be a good thing, would it?”

She shook her head, warily.

A broad, somewhat jowly smile crossed his face. “And, Caewen who gives her true name to strange magicians and keeps shadows in her pockets, and yet I note is shadowless herself…” He arched an eyebrow at her, knowingly. “I should warn you. As it happens, I may be dangerous to travel with too–though for entirely other reasons. I have no enemies, you see.” A drink of the ale took him longer than it ought. He was lingering over it. “Or, none that are alive. And he smiled again, jovially, before stuffing his pipe and lighting it with three quick sucks. Caewen noticed that he used no tinder from the hearth, nor taper. The spark simply lit in the bowl of the pipe as he puffed at it. Thin curls of white smoke snaked out of the pipe. They hung on the air like worms of ash. The man then raised his hand and used his a finger to direct the smoke, twisting it around, drawing pictures with it on the air, pinching and pulling it, teasing it out like wool. He did not seem to be making anything in particular, and Caewen had the strong impression that no show was being put on for her benefit. He was simply idling away the time and entertaining himself by making scribblings out of smoke.

###

After breakfast, Caewen collected her gear, pulling on her cloak of flowers and taking up Fetch in his satchel. She told him about the conversation downstairs, though without going into much detail. He seemed perturbed, but at the same time withholding his judgement.

“Tsch. Could be he is just some local self-appoint warder, and he really does intend only to see us out of his land on the far side.” A squirm in the shadowy interior. Two flashes of jet-liquid eyes. “such things are not unknown.” A moment’s pause followed. “And yet…”

“Yes?”

“I didn’t like the feel of those two fire-things. They felt… not savage exactly… or evil… but they had a real menace in them. They know what it is to kill on command. That, I am sure of. Tssssch.”

“Then we had best be careful. I don’t see anything else for it.”

Fetch seemed to agree with a shuffle of his shadowy body, but said nothing.

When she was satisfied she had everything belted and strapped, she went back down to the common room. The clothing from the night before had been rinsed out and dried. There wouldn’t have been time to put it through as proper wash, but rinsed and dried was good enough, and better than Caewen was used to. She gratefully paid for the night, food and service, and strode out into the white, suffused light of midmorning. Matty Nutch was waiting for her, patiently. Since she had last seen him, he had pulled a heavy double-layered walking cape around his shoulders and taken up a big, heavy blackthorn cudgel. The stick was long enough and solid enough to be used as a short staff, but also, quite clearly it served secondarily as a club. He stood in the sunlight, puffing at his pipe, humming small snatches of song under his breath.

She looked about. Behind them, the brown road wended off into the distant west. In the other direction, immediately before them, it plunged into woodland. Behind and in front, it was splodged with shiny grey puddles of rain. It was otherwise empty. Nothing stirred in the woods. The most noise that anything made was a blackbird calling softly, and that was only occasional and shy.

“I don’t see your hound-things?”

“And I don’t see your little demon, but I know it is about your person somewhere.”

Caewen shrugged. “True enough. Shall we?”

He nodded.

They started off, following the road as it twisted eastward and southward and eastward again. At first they walked in a slightly discomfited silence, but Caewen eventually cleared her throat and tried a question. “Are you a chief magician, hereabouts? Or shire-reeve or something like that?”

“Something like that. I have authority, though it is all rather accepted on tacit agreement. Which is to my preference. I wander here and there, keeping an eye on things. These are my people and I like to keep an eye on the lands. Now, may I ask a question?”

“Of course.”

“What did happen to your shadow?”

“Ah,” said Caewen looking down. Where a long slanting greyish phantom of Matty Nutch stretched away behind them, of Caewen there was no trace. “You did notice, didn’t you?”

“Difficult to miss.”

“It went away,” said Caewen, and she found that she could not keep the emotion or the strain from her voice. What was it in her throat, she wondered? Worry. Fear. Sadness. She had been doing her best not to think about it, but she needed to accept that there was a tightly twisting knot of fraught sadness in the back of her mind. Any rope that is pulled too tight and twisted too viciously will eventually break. Having lost herself in her thoughts, she suddenly remembered her travelling companion, and found that he was looking at her, hard and assessing.

“That so? Just, got up and walked away, did it?”

Caewen could not help letting out a small, bleak laugh. “Well, as it happens, that is exactly how it was. We disagreed on… a thing. My shadow found me wanting. It did not want to be with me any longer. So, we parted ways.”

“You must have had a remarkable relationship with your shadow to have such a disagreement.”

“No, in fact, I don’t think I did. I think it was the other way around. If I was on good terms with my own personal darkness, I think perhaps we might not have had such a falling out. But I have always ignored my shadow, and so now I suffer its loss. This can be the way of things, sometimes.”

“Hmm,” said the man, measuring his strides, just as he measured his thoughts.

They walked the rest of the day, stopping for a midday meal, then walking on. The road wound among green, steep-sided hills that were skirted by straggly woods. Once, Caewen was certain she saw several hairy, ugly faces watching them from the tangle-woods, but when she stopped to look again, they were gone. She asked Matty Nutch about it, but he only frowned and shrugged. He genuinely seemed perplexed. “Ain’t no wild-men or dwarfie folk anywhere near here. Don’t know what you saw.” A dismissive shrug. “If you saw anything at all.”

She accepted this and they walked on.

The hills rose up into quite sharp ridges in places, and sometimes formed a clayey peak on which remnants of evil-looking ruins perched. Looking at one rotten tower among jagged walls, she asked, “Who used to live here?”

“Worshippers of an old untamed god. But they were cast down long ago. The folk of the land now give their adoration to brighter and more pleasant spirits and goddesses.”

“Oh, the stones?”

He looked at her, brow suddenly furrowed.

“On the road, I saw a heap of red and gold flowers about the foot of a standing stone. That would be the new, bright gods of the land, then.”

He did not answer. He could not, in fact, keep a look of troubled thought from his eyes.

“That so? The flowers are worshipful gifts for Our Lady of the Dragonets… but, that would be some distance off. I wonder who did that? No one from my village, I think. Well, best not to dwell on it too much. I’ll look into it later. I’m sure it’s nothing.”

“I thought perhaps it was just children playing games.”

“Yes,” he agreed after a time puffing at his pipe. “Yes. Probably just that.”

###

It was getting towards the pewter-stained hour of dusk when they came at last in sight of a collection of warm-glowing windows in the near distance. A jumble of houses nestled themselves together in a hollow beside a curling brook. The abundant thatch of the roofs gave them a shaggy look so that they seemed to Caewen like hairy beasts all settled down to slumber cosily. Between the village and the two walkers on the road, the shadows were all getting towards lilac hues. Moths fumbled about on the air: whispery, tumbling things almost as large as Caewen’s palm. She was at least glad to have arrived at twilight. The absence of a shadow would be less obvious. The man with her knew, obviously, but she didn’t want to put other folks on edge, if it could be avoided.

It was a warm, inviting looking scene, especially with the fire- and candlelight spilling out in golden aprons on the ground and filling up windows. As they approached the village, a few residents who were going about evening chores greeted Matty Nutch enthusiastically. He nodded back, friendly and paternal. Deeper in amongst the houses of Whittawer, a rhythmic rise and fall of noise stirred the air. When Caewen strained to listen, she was able to make out a number of voices raised in a repeating chant. Her companion said nothing about it, but continued onward with a contented expression on his face, his blackthorn staff tapping and scuffing on the dirt.

At about the midpoint of the village, the houses withdrew to permit a rather pleasant little town square. The ground was flagged with big, flat pinkish grey stones. There were old pillars garmented in purplish hairy ivy, remnants of some older shrine perhaps. At the heart of the square was a standing stone: much larger than any Caewen had seen so far. But unlike the others she had passed, this one was not bare rock. A wickerwork effigy had been placed over the top of the stone. It was a cunningly woven and dyed image of a beautiful woman with a long dragonet coiling around her waist and creeping up onto her right shoulder. Her hair was bright with gold leaf, and her dress was a mixture of ochre and yellow sand hues. Around the base of the stone were heaps of red and yellow flowers.

Everywhere at the fringes of the square, men and women stood or sat, chatting idly and drinking quietly from sudsy mugs. An occasional solitary laugh went joyfully up to the sky above, drifting away into the grey sheen of cloud.

A number of girls–all younger than Caewen, but not by much–were the source of the song. They were dancing about the stone and singing, “Blood and gold. In days of old. Blood and gold. In days of old.” This chant was repeated, seemingly without variation.

“Ah,” said Matty Nutch. “It seems the wedding celebrations are starting to get going. The wedding is tomorrow, but we’ll have a pleasant little revel tonight.”

“Is there an inn or resthouse?” asked Caewen, looking about.

“Nonsense. I myself keep a small house here. Nothing too grand, but it has an extra room and an extra bed. You will retire as my guest tonight. I insist.” He looked at her. “I really do.”

Caewen put on her best false happy voice and thanked him.

She then resigned herself to finding a place where she could watch the celebrations without getting involved. She needed rest for the night and an early start–not revels and reels and drinking.  A look about suggested a few out of the way corners, vacant benches and shadowy places to sit and think. The song kept going round and round. “Blood and gold. In days of old. Blood and gold. In days of old.”

After only a little aimless wandering, Caewen was able to settle herself at a table that was empty except for a handful of older women who were watching the dancing. Skipping about the flagstones was long ago in their past, but they nodded and hummed along all the same, seemingly enjoying the tune. Caewen had barely sat down when someone handed her a mug. It smelled of hops with notes of a cool, herblike odour. She tasted it gingerly at first, but found it to be a malty, sour tasting black ale that had an aftertaste of something like mint. It was distinct–certainly–but not unpleasant.

After watching the festivities for a time, one of the elderly ladies seemed to notice that Caewen wasn’t a local for the first time. She extended a smile and introduced herself as Padgette. They spoke a little, and the ladies took turns asking her questions about what she had seen and what news she had. She told them about the armies scouring lands west and north, but they didn’t seem bothered.

With the chant in her head, Caewen started to wonder about the effigy. It was the right size to fit over the stone, but also the right size to capture a person and hold them tightly, assuming a person were forced into the thing by lowering it over them.

“You don’t burn strangers alive do you, by any chance?” said Caewen, half-laughing, whilst not wholly joking.

The old ladies laughed and laughed. “Oh, dearie, no,” replied Padgette. “What a question! Why, we’ve not burned any folks for festive-eves in… oh… at least a hundred years.” A shake of the head. Some tutting. “What a question!”

FIFTEEN

Caewen spent the next hour or so nursing the mug of ale while making the best of the cheeses and dried fruits, honey cakes, roasted nuts and salted breads that were brought out and set upon the trestle tables. She looked around, watchful. After starting in on the ale a little too thirstily, she now found herself feeling its woozy effect. The stuff was stronger than she’d expected. A discomforting thought came over her. She had allowed herself to drink a little too heavily among this crowd of strangers. Where was Nutch? Could she just beg off and go to bed? She looked at the black liquid and its white suds. It might have been her fourth or fifth mug–she had lost count–and though it was still half-full, she pushed the cup away, scraping out a slick, wet mark on the wooden grain of the tabletop.

The events of the evening marched.

The circle of dancers eventually dissolved into a mummery of puppeteers, though it was all achieved via a mingling sort of exchange, like leaves from two autumn storms meeting and wandering away again. The mummers carried a whole slew of fantastical puppets on sticks: some of the creatures were small dragonish things with brightly coloured scales of gold and red and emerald paint, whilst the others, for the most part, were snakes of equally vibrant colours, twisting over the ground, striking, seething and coiling. In amongst the dragons and snakes stalked another thing entirely, a dark mass of rank fur with a deer skull and antlers. Several papery looking clouds of fluttering objects were also being waved about on poles, though Caewen was unsure if they were meant to be storm clouds or something else. If there was a story, Caewen failed to follow it. Things fought. Things died. It was hard to know who was doing what to whom. And, as if it to make it harder to follow, the players performed their whole interweaving daze of steps in a silence that had a strongly sacred air. Even the chatter at the tables died down.

People looked mutely on. Some nodded grimly. A few wept.

Caewen swept a wondering eye over the faces.

Finally, she spotted her host. The man, Matty Nutch, was standing beside a seated couple. Their expressions were nervous and happy, and on their heads they wore massive crowns of brilliant red and gold, similar to the dancers’ wreathes of flowers, but much larger and more elaborate. Matty was talking amiably with another middle-aged man, perhaps a father or relative. It all looked like so many other weddings in so many other villages. The details differed, but they always did, from place to place. The costume and the celebrations, the propitious acts of good fortune, the local delicacies and sweet foodstuffs, the libations and offerings, vows said before gods or goddesses in hope and anticipation. But there was otherwise something much the same in a wedding. It struck Caewen as odd. From the inside a wedding is the most marvellous and unique of days. From the outside, they all start to look rather the same.

At some point the show with the puppets found a end to the narrative, and the mummers went away, sweating from their brows, red-cheeked and puffing. Several of them took long cold draughts of water straight from pitchers before sitting down, exhausted. Caewen had not been following the story, but she gathered the dragonets had won the fighting. Perhaps it was some historical memory twisted through the ever-looping coil of folk-story. Perhaps there had been a lord with dragons for a crest and another with snakes? She leaned over the table and said to the ladies, “I’m sorry if this is a rude question. You don’t have to answer it.” She could hear a slight slur in her words. “What was the play about?”

But the ladies didn’t answer her, or at least not directly. Instead, Padgette tutted her and said, “Such questions. Well, here’s what it is about: you must be careful of snakes if you are going to go walkity-walk off east-a-ways. Heathre has the most poisonous snakes in all the Clay-o-the-Green, and that’s a truth.”

“But, we’ve some of the best herb-men too,” added another of the ladies, her name Bargha. She blinked big watery eyes that were a startling blue, even in the firelight flicker. “And there are good herbmen in Heathre too. It’s not just snakes there.”

“But that of course is on account of having such evil snakes,” replied the first lady, with rather a level tone. “After all, it’s the venomous beasties that make a need for such skill in the herb-arts.”

“True, true,” said the others, all nodding their heads.

“You said, Heathre. I’ve heard of that land. It’s a kingdom, isn’t it? Is Whittawer under the crown?”

“Yes and no,” said Bargha.

“We’re out on the borderlands,” added Padgette, “so it all rather depends. We pay tax when the taxman comes, but he pays respects to our Matty Nutch, and what laws there are in Heathre are not held to be worth much here. We have our own old ways.”

“I see.” Caewen became aware of voices calling for Matty. It was a growing chorus of shouts and cries. “Come on!”–“Show us some sport!”–“Do the trick with your hounds.”–“Be a good’un, Matty. Go on!”

He protested at first, raising his palms, smiling a big, thick smile that swelled up his lips and cheeks. But it was rather obviously a show of polite humility. After only a little more cajoling from the crowd, Matty agreed, nodding and walking with a rolling stride of a gait into the cleared space of the village square.

“Now!” he declared. “Many of you have seen me perform my little illusions for the amusement of children and of course, for those with childlike minds.”

“Ha, ha, he means you, Arksel.” One rough man was elbowing another, to the general laughter of the crowd.

Matty used his hands to gesture downwards, as if he were patting down wool bales. “Now, now. Calm. Calm. A wedding is a rare gift and so I will perform a rare treat. No illusions or dancing flames, oh no. Many of you enjoy the coursing of the hounds, and hunting hares upon the hills. But have you seen the spirits of fire and darkness hunt? Have you seen them chase down prey, and sport with it, here and there, then to shred the uncanny flesh from the uncanny bones?”

Caewen did not like where this was going. Fetch hissed from the satchel where the little spirit had remained in hiding. She adjusted the satchel so that it was sitting higher and she could speak to the shadow-thing without drawing the attention of the old ladies. She felt his weight shift and squirm inside the leather. her voice was a hush. “Do you know what he’s talking about?”

“Tsck. No. But I feel the presence of the ash-hound spirits. They gather and curdle in the darkness. I can feel them.”

Caewen said, “H’m.” She watched on. And she really wished she hadn’t drunk so much.

“Let us begin the show.” Matty bowed and his stomach protruded over his belt unflatteringly. He then proceeded call and whistle until a boy came running with a hessian sack that was heavy with something rather shapeless. This, he set on the ground and opened the mouth so that he could dig around with his hands. From the sack he pulled handfuls of turf. It was dirt mostly, with leaves and pebbles, some moss and bits of stick. The first handful was placed on the ground, and a small mound was formed. The magician added other handfuls of dirt until he had a pile about the size of a small cat. Then he made another similar-sized dirt pile, and another, another, another. All told, he made twelve of these little dirt hills. He rubbed his hands and scraped under his fingernails. His face was alive with excitement. But before doing anything else, he took a chunk of roughly cut chalk from a pocket and used it to draw a big circle, marking out a space that the onlookers all seemed to know by instinct or past experience to keep clear from. They all stepped back and any child who got too close was pulled away, either by a softly spoken mother or a more vocal older sibling. Once done, Matty Nutch returned to the middle of the circle. “Now, for a treat, my friends and fellows. Now for a show, my dear companions. Now for a wedding performance, my good and gracious bride and groom.” He whistled again, but this time he let out a low, eerie noise that made Caewen’s skin feel as if there was something hot and gritty under the surface. The two lanky demons trotted out of the darkness. The emerged from the night like real dogs coming out of dog houses. In the somewhat brighter light of the wedding torches and braziers, Caewen could see that the coats were not furry, like a hound’s, but rough with a thick dusty pelt of ash. The eyes burned just as a hot as the crisp radiance of coals. Their tongues lolled and small flickerings of embers played on each wet red surface and between the yellow teeth.

“And now, the game!” announced Matty. He started to work up a charm, muttering at first, chanting and swaying as the spell gathered pace. The effort caused his face to redden. Stray bits of spittle gathered at the corners of his mouth. His eyes grew bulgy and glaring.

Caewen couldn’t shake the cold feeling that he was looking right at her as he mutter-chanted.

This went on for a time. Magic gathered in veils, thickening the air.

Suddenly, Fetch spoke. “Tsch. I see what he’d done. Nasty sorcery. Nasty. He’s trapped little spirits in his sack, in the dirt clods” said Fetch. “Awful miserable man. Tsssch. He;’s returning them to their bodies.”

The piles of earth all began to shift and reshape. They took up forms, grew legs and feet. Pebbly dark stones became shining eyes. Ears grew and tufty bits of moss trailed away making whiskers and a light fuzz of fur. Each of the dirt piles turned into hares made of earth, twig and stone. Each and every one of the creatures froze, then looked around, clearly startled, unsure where they were, more than a little afraid. The crowd erupted into yells and cries and whoops.

The earth-spirits were jolted by the noise, and started jinking about, sprinting and bolting, they tried to escape. But immediately, it was obvious they could not pass the white chalk circle. The little earth-spirits slammed into the line and careered away, much as if they had hit a wall of brick. The little creatures started making the most awful, miserable mewling noises and plaintive little whimpers. Worse, Caewen was sure she could hear words. The tiny pleading voices were not used to speaking with a hare’s tongue it seemed, and they came out muffled and sad. She realised that Nutch had forced these spirits into the shapes they wore. Whatever they had been before he trapped them was presumably something more human-looking, or at least less animal.

Though the crowd yelled and jeered, the dogs had not moved from their places. Matty Nutch raised a hand. “Behold the vermin of the fields. Behold the hues and spreets that eat at crops and nibble at the roots fruit trees.”

“Nonsense,” spat Fetch, thankfully not loud enough for anyone else to hear.

“Quieter,” warned Caewen.

“Tssch. Nonsense. Those are just little moss-weirds. Harmless. Gentle. On my night wanderings, I’ve had many a yarn with a moss-weird. They’re not a threat to anyone. They certainly don’t harm trees or fields. Liar. Nasty man.”

“And… release!” yelled Matty.

The hounds chased around the circle, snapping and pouncing. The jaws closed again and again. Several of the little spirit-creatures were torn apart, shrieking as they died. A few lasted a little while longer. Three were really persistent, desperate to escape, but the hounds were relentless, and there was no escape. Finally, only one was left. Instead of running into the circle’s edge, or attempting to dodge the dogs, it went straight for Matty and dropped down in front of him. It made a series of little piping noises, and to Caewen’s eyes it was clearly begging and pleading directly with the magician, even as teeth closed on it, then crunched, then shook its life from the earthen flesh.

Only crumbly burning dirt fell on the ground.

A cheer went up.

“What a show!” said Padgette, her eyes glittering. “Puts life back in my heart to see such a thrill.”

Matty was clearly exhausted. He had to mop his neck and face with a kerchief, then accepted the arm of the same boy who had brought out the bag earlier. He was helped to a seat where he drank deeply from a handle of ale. His two dogs went slinking off into darkness again, vanishing, once the spectacle was done.

“Tssch. And is it any wonder that spirits fear humanfolk? Is it any surprise that a demon will try to get the better of its master? Or that a spirit might–“

For a moment, Caewen was too shocked by what she had just seen to realise that Fetch had cut off half-way. “–they would what?” she said, a little hollowly.

“Nothing. Nothing. There are questions and answers, tsch. I am getting ahead of myself. There is no answer if there is no question.”

“I don’t follow?”

“Tsk. It doesn’t matter. Tssssch. Can we leave this place? I want to leave this place.”

Caewen raised her voice, directing it to the ladies. “Do you think anyone would object to me retiring early?”

Bargha answered her. “Oh yes. Good idea. The wedding’s about to start, and you’ll need to be off to bed anyways. No outsiders at the wedding shrine. Rules are being what rules are. Sorry, love.”

“Really, truly, it’s fine by me. I am tired, and I’ve a long day and–“

“Did you enjoy the show?”

Caewen jumped where she sat. The magician had come up right behind her and she hadn’t even noticed. She could not but help notice now that he was a big man, breathing heavily, sweating profusely from his face, eyes bright. For want of a better word, he looked almost aroused to Caewen.

She shifted uncomfortably. “Oh, ah. Yes. It was a sight to see.”

“I would prefer to make sport of darkness demons and fell creatures of shadow, but I’ve gone and caught every last one that I can find for ten miles about our little abode. Not a spirit of darkness or shadow to be found between the wild woods and the long grey river.”

Fetch was notably silent.

“Ah,” said Caewen, weakly.

“You were thinking of sneaking off?”

“Well, that is–“

He smiled that broad, meaty smile. “No, no need to prevaricate.” Each syllable was pronounced deliberately. “I’ll ask the ladies here to show you to my little house. They know the house well enough and can show you to the spare bed.”

“Thank you.”

“I will be, I am sorry to say, otherwise engaged. The wedding will be some hours yet. The shrine is not in the village and the procession takes time.”

“I won’t wait up for you.” She tried to show a pleasant smile, but was certain it came across as more of a rigor mortis grin.

“Of course not,” said Matty Nutch. “No, no. Make yourself at home. Get some rest. I would never want to be a bother.” He leaned closer. In a much lower voice, he added, “I perform that show very seldom these days. It taxes me. But I thought it important to impress a guest such as yourself. Has my performance impressed itself upon you?”

Caewen nodded.

“Good,” he said with some finality. “I do not want you sneaking about at night, You will stay under my watch and sleep the night where you will cause no mischief. I expect you to be gone at dawn. Once you are over the river, you are not of my concern any longer. At that point, the Queen of Heathre can decide what is to be done with you. I can wash my hands of the matter.” He stood up straight, smiled pleasantly, and then turned to the excited little clucking knot of old ladies, asking them to look after Caewen for him. They fawned over him, cooing and giggling like girls in their youth.

The only feeling Caewen had was one of sickness in her stomach and a desire to up and be gone well before dawn.

###

The room that Caewen was taken to turned out to be pleasant enough. The elderly ladies fussed and gossiped amongst themselves, perhaps unaware of their guest’s discomfort, perhaps pointedly ignoring it. Caewen had difficulty telling which.

The bother and chatter would have been irritating even if she hadn’t been in such an uncomfortable mood. She kept quietly, politely protesting tiredness, until eventually, she was left alone. Somewhat to her surprise, the door sported a heavy bolt of flaky black iron on the inside. Caewen slid it shut on instinct, feeling it grind and squeak as she did so. She tested the door. It seemed secure. Nonetheless, Caewen was quite certain that if Matty Nutch wanted to enter the room in the middle of the night, a locked door, secure or not, would make no difference. She decided to push a heavy chest up against the door too. The precaution felt both silly and sensible, as she first positioned the chest on a small rug to muffle the noise, then heaved and shoved the massive thing across the floor. But when it was in place, she had to admit that she did feel better. She had to keep in mind of course that such an obstacle would likely only slow down Nutch, hopefully giving her time to wake up properly. But, still, she felt a bit better.

This done, Caewen made herself ready for sleep. It was a very nice bed. Ornately carven with more of those small dragonets in polished wooden coils, it was topped with a soft feather mattress and softer quilt.

A small, shadowy head poked from her satchel. She had hung the bag by its strap over the end of a chair, so that Fetch looked almost like a wild creature poking its head out of a hollow in a stump. “Tsck. So you plan to sleep tonight?”

A yawn snatched her first word away. She worked her lips around it, and managed to say, “I’m not sure I’ve much choice. Too tired. Will you keep watch?”

“I”m not sure I’ve much choice,” replied Fetch. After a pause, he said, “You know, I can feel your other self. She hasn’t gone very far away–or maybe she has come back again? We should be careful on the road. And maybe tonight too. It could be that nasty sorcerer out there isn’t the biggest danger tonight. You could be cautious.”

She was able to spare a weary smile. “But aren’t I always?”

“No.”

“You’re as bad as Dapple.” She blinked away tiredness. “I wonder how he is doing? Him and Ode should be close to Brae now. I hope they didn’t have any trouble on the way south.”

Fetch leapt down from his perch and stalked a little circle on the floor, like a restless ferret made of shadows and soft, warm darkness. “Your Dapplegrim tends to find trouble where none is looking for him. I imagine they’ve found plenty of trouble.”

“That’s a bit unfair. He’s much more sensible than I am, for one.”

“Tssch. But he’s not very sensible, or else he would not have ended up as your travelling companion. Tssssck. Would he?”

“And what does that make you, Fetch?” She said this even as she peeled off the last of her outer garments and slid under the quilt.

A small, performative sigh crept from the long thin shadow. “Doubly foolish, I suppose. Tsk.”

“But you will keep watch tonight?”

He nodded. “Yes. Of course. After the evening’s little performance, I think I shall be quite alert all night. No aimless wandering off to explore the dreams and the night and the darkness for me tonight, no. Tsch. Tsk. Tsssk.” After a pause, he said, “I shall engage myself in aimful wandering only.”

Caewen smiled at his bad joke, but didn’t think much more of it. She rolled over and immediately found herself struggling against exhaustion and a sense of being dragged down into her own deep, lightless sleep. She tried to think over her plans for tomorrow, but her thoughts were fractured and flimsy. They tattered away and the hollow, warm blackness of sleep took her.

###

For awhile Fetch watched her. He counted her breaths, noting as they slowed and slowed.

When he was sure she was deeply asleep, he turned about where he stood and stretched and shrugged off some of the cramped feeling of being bundled up inside a little bag all day.

He leapt to the windowsill.

The rainclouds had mostly scudded off westward now. Mottled moonlight stained the grey and silver night-world. Noises of nocturnal creatures came subtly to his ears. Small scritchings of mice. The sound of a spider weaving its web. The soft noise of an owl turning its head. Farther off, Fetch could hear foxes and badgers too. And fainter–very faint–a noise not unlike chanting, rising and falling, in ritual intonations.

There was no hint of the magician or his ashen hounds. Either the man and his bound demons were far away, or he had hidden the creatures so well that Fetch could not detect them. He took a risk on the former, and slid sideways through a tiny fraction of a gap between window and frame. On the other side, Fetch breathed deep of the dark, cold air. He felt the moonlight fall and press against his skin like a gentle rush of delight. His small whiskers knew the wafting currents.

All was silent. All was still.

Those who had been left behind, either too elderly or too young to make the trek over benighted fields to the wedding shrine, were all quite still. Sleep had settled in the village.

He has absolutely intended to stay where he was in the small room with Caewen. But the absence of any obvious threat tempted him out into the night. As always he felt the strong draw of the dreams and the shadows. And besides, he did have business that needed attending to.

A pause.

A careful taste of the air, whiskers moving, tail twitching at the tip… the chanting was very far off, and there were so few dreams left here in the village. Dreams of children, playing games, chasing and tagging and climbing trees or doing chores. Dreams of the elderly, remembering their own more youthful age, watching over grandchildren. The rest of the village was absent.

He would be quick, and then return to keep his word to Caewen, and keep watch through the rest of the night. He absolutely wanted to be back in the room when the villagers returned from their nighttime chanting.

So Fetch whisked off into the darkness. He considered dancing in and out of the dreams of the left-behind sleepers, the old ladies and the mothers with their babes, or the children, but he did not expect to find anything of much interest there, and so did not. And he had his other business. That was more urgent. The other ones might grow impatient and depart if he did not keep up the talk and negotiations.

Into the night he moved, bounding and creeping, whispering over grassy moonlit expanses, dodging beneath looming trees, so full of night-shadow they seemed to have been twisted out of huge slabs of raw, featureless wrought iron. He crossed the nearby fields and sheep folds in this way, coming at last to a place where trees stood thicker and more dense. Wilder too.

He spoke to the darkness. “Come out, my friends.” There was a stirring of noise in the underbrush. Dry leaves scrunching underfoot. “Hurry and listen. We have much to speak of, and there and there is little time. I must return to my mistress before very long. She sleeps in a den of wolves. I take a risk, I fear, leaving her for mere minutes and moments. We must speak quickly. Tasssssch. Tsk.”

A face emerged from darkness, round and wild, all shaggy with unkempt hair. Its eyes stared, unblinking. A voice spoke from unlovely lips. “Speak, shadowling. Speak. We will listen.”

SIXTEEN

Despite her urgent desire to be up and gone early, Caewen did not wake until the sun was already well over the horizon. When she did awake, she was surprised at how loud the birdsong was outside. Somewhere a mass of starlings were raising such a musical racket that it was hard to believe she had slept through it. She rubbed her eyes, looked around, and saw Fetch curled up on the seat of a chair, like an indolent cat. “All well?”

“All is well,” said Fetch. “Tsck. “Very well indeed.”

“There were no troubles in the night?”

“None at all.”

She yawned again. “Well, that’s good at least.”

She took her time, washing from a brass basin, dressing, and finally heaving the chest back to its original position. That done, she was able to draw the bolt and step outside. Fetch followed her at her heels, cautiously dancing in and out of her feet. “Stop that. You’re going to trip me up.”

“Tsch. I’m not so clumsy as that.”

“Well, I am. Stop it. I will trip on you.” She looked around the living space. “Where’s our friend Matty?” There was no sign of him. The iron stove had not been lit. There was no sign of someone having breakfasted, though some bread, a few old wrinkly apples, and a chunk of hard white sheep’s cheese was sitting on a couple stoneware plates. Just then, Caewen caught a snatch of a song, hummed low under the breath. It was coming from outside.

She pushed open the front door.

“Hello?”

Matty Nutch was standing outside, looking off in the direction of the climbing sun. Bold rays of light slanted into his face and lit him up like a figure made of gold and garnet and rose quartz. He was aglow with the sun’s light. But when he turned to Caewen, dark purplish bruises sagged under his eyes. He was in the exact same clothing as the night before, more than a bit rumpled, and had clearly not slept at all.

“Do weddings hereabouts always last all night?” asked Caewen.

“No. But the rituals were difficult last night. There is something in the fabric of the world that made the magic taut and cracked. I prevailed, but it was a close thing.”

Caewen half-wanted to ask what the rituals were, and why they were so important for a wedding, but she bit her tongue. She knew better. “I hope the couple are happy. Blessings go with them.”

“Thank you,” said Nutch. Without any preamble, he added, “You will leave now. There is food on the table. Take what you will of it, and get away with you.” She was a little taken aback at the suddenness of it, and he saw that on her face. “A creature flew over my village at dawn. It had vast wings, blotting out the dawn light, and coldness and frost sparkled in its wake. Folks who saw it, screamed, ‘Dragon! Dragon!’ But it was not.”

“A draig-rider?” said Caewen, knowing the answer.

“Out of the north, yes. Some Sorthe knight, I suppose.”

“Perhaps, yes.”

“You sound less certain.”

She said nothing, but frowned, wearing the worry on her face without trying to hide it.

“Perhaps it is a friend of yours? You speak of armies, make feeble noises about warnings… but you might well be a spy yourself. How would we know otherwise?” He looked down then, glaring at her feet. “And take that nasty feral little shadow with you.” He squinted, and spoke more directly at Fetch. “You are lucky you are bound to a fellow magician. It’s against the old laws for me to take you away and boil you down to muck without her leave, and I doubt she would give it to me, even under threat and pain. So, how lucky you for you. I hope you are not mistreating her? Not lying and going about your own business, eh?”

Fetch was still curled up against her ankles. “Tsssch,” he whispered, but said nothing more.

“All the same. Thank you for your hospitality.”

He just shook his head, frowning deeply and broodingly. “If you want to thank me, leave. Go away and leave us be. This is a quiet, pleasant corner of the world. I have worked hard to make it so. We want nothing of shadow-sorceresses and dark magics. Perhaps I ought have had you whipped out of town last night, after all. Believe me, if you linger here too long, I’ll reconsider my earlier decision on the matter. Everything has seemed off, since you turned up. Caewen Unshadow. Caewen Bleak-tongue. Get away with you. Perhaps you will make it to Heathre. Or perhaps not. There is something in the air that tastes of snake-weather to me. They don’t usually come out so late in the season, but there’s definitely a note of it there… bad weather, we’d say. Snake-weather. You might find your footsteps more dangerous than you imagine.”

She returned a silent nod, a small smile, then turned to go back inside–first to collect her travelling gear and then to take what food she could. But as she turned, she paused and found herself saying, “I will go. I mean no trouble. I hope you weather the storm. I really do. These seem like good people. No one deserves to suffer under the boot-heel of soldiers. I hope you have no trouble.”

“Trouble? You are trouble enough, Caewen the Shadowless, more than you seem to understand. I don’t think you realise the weight of what goes along with you. I can see it in you, and I can read it in the dust you leave in your trail. Your heart is so sodden with darkness, I’m surprised you don’t leave squelching puddles of shadow where you walk.” He lost his composure for a moment, and snorted. “Now take your things and go. I am tired, and there is a limit to my patience.”

SEVENTEEN

After the shadow-sorceress had gone, Matty Nutch did not sleep that day. He had too much of a feeling that something unsettling was lurking just out of view. He wandered about the fringes of his little township, circling it three times, and sending out his twin spirits to range and hunt in forms both visible and invisible. After some two or three hours of this watchful unease, he set the ashen hounds to patrol the village boundary before returning alone to Whittawer and his house. With a yawn and a grumble, he pushed open his door and went inside, relieved to feel the warmth of the air and drink in the soft firelight. It took him a good long moment to realise he was not alone.

She was seated comfortably in a chair, still as ice.

Her gaze flicked up and down, taking him in. A smile curved on her lips, playful and full of strange delight.

“You’re back?” Without thinking, he stated, bluntly, “You scrubbed up.”

“Did I?” Long and languid, Caewen got to her feet. The fire died down a little. Shadows deepened. The air grew colder. Matty had a sudden urge to wrap himself in something warm, but resisted, standing his ground, feet planted firmly where they were. He would not be intimidated in his own house. He thought the witch had taken him to heart and left, but it seemed instead she must have just circled around and sneaked back while he wasn’t looking. He would have to deal with her more harshly, it seemed.

]She stood and took a few long steps across the room, trailing a silken dress and cloak behind her. A white fur shawl draped her neck and otherwise bare shoulders. The fur moved with the fluidity of wind through snowy branches. It looked as if the sheer fabric of her garments had been woven of shadow and starlight reflected from snow, then picked out at the hems with small crusts of jewels arranged into shapes of sparkling ice. Suddenly, Nutch was unsure. Where had she got the dress? Perhaps it was only an illusion… or otherwise conjured out of the air? It was a puzzle. And why would she even put it on. She didn’t seem to type to wear the elaborate gowns of an enchantress. Even putting the dress aside, she had clearly bathed and combed her hair and… he began to really doubt his initial impression. She moved differently. Physically, it was clearly the same young woman, but he remembered her as being wary and hard in her movements, perhaps a little anxious and self-conscious. And yet now, she moved with a graceful and assured ease that seemed utterly alien to the young woman Matty remembered.

“I told you to leave. I’ll not hesitate to raise up wizard’s fire, young lady. Get out of my house. Now. This is your absolutely last civil warning. Why would you even dare to return here?”

“Oh. My. An instruction and an order. How civil of you. You know, I think you have been a terrible host, dear one. I am quite put out with your pettiness and your nastiness. You have treated my shadow so poorly.”

“Your shadow?”

“Yes. My shadow.” She said this as if she were surprised at his inability to comprehend. “I admit, she is disobedient.” A twisting little cold curl of a sigh came from those lips. She spoke on as if she were now talking to herself. “And she lacks passion. And there is no elegance in her. Only worry and need and obligation. But I still love her. We are intertwined.”

“Is that so?”

“Very much. Though I know more of her, than she knows of me.”

Now, he thought he was beginning to understand. Fear rouses deep in his gut, a small worm of it, twisting to life. He had heard stories of such things–legends–but never thought cross paths with such a thing. The magician immediately reached out with his will, sending it across the fields and hedgerows, seeking his two spirits. Calling them back. Small words of flame kindled in his mind, taking form. He heard a distant, inaudible baying of reply.

She took a step closer. And though she stared at him, square in the eyes, she said not a word. Though her smile did grow more beautiful and more predatory.

Matty Nutch turned over old rhymes and incantations in his head. He groped for the ashen hounds… they were moving at a sprint, but it was still not quick enough. He could feel them drawing nearer. Still so far away still. He could not yet reach deep into their fiery hearts and draw out enough of their strength and power. Not quite yet.

It was at this moment that Matty realised that Caewen did not have her spirit-thing with her. He could not get a sense of it anywhere nearby at all. Its presence before had been so grating, but now it was nowhere to be felt. His lips were dry. The air of the room seemed weirdly desiccating against his skin. He licked each lip, top and bottom, before saying. “Where is your little shadow demon?” He needed to keep her talking.

She did not answer. Instead, the shape about her neck moved and stirred, then coiled its way around her shoulders. Once it had readjusted itself, the thing raised a delicate, pointed face to blink lazily at him. It was a long, sinuous spirit-creature, something like a cat, something like a mink, but palest white all over. It gave off a cold smell, like snow under moonlight. She saw him looking at it. “My shadow went away with my other pet shadow, unfortunately. I was bereft for a short time. Feath here is for my consolation. A gift from my lover and master.” A smile. “I hope that makes some sense.”

The moon-and-snow spirit mewled a whispery, angry noise.

“Yes, Feath, that is quite so. He has been very unpleasant. She suffered much fear and discomfit at his glance and words and actions. And he has visited awful cruelty on innocents of the earth and stone, moss and air and water. All those poor small spirits over the years. And just for a spot of entertainment? But she is too nice. Too pleasant. Too good in her heart, is my shadow. She does not have it in her to punish such an unpleasant man.”

The hounds were close now. Mere seconds from the door. He raised a hand and made a gesture. Blood welled in his mouth. He tasted it squirming between his gums. He called down a pall of fire and embers, but it just swirled around her, turned aside by a power that hung in the air that he had not even realised was there. The floor was charred and various small flammable objects caught fire. She waved a hand, dismissively, and the flames went out. Before he could raise another spell, she drew herself up and said, “My shadow is too forgiving by half. But I am not forgiving. We are, after all, complimentary, in our way.” A feeling of numbness came over Matty Nutch. He was able to look down before all his muscles started to clench and lock. Thin tendrils of shadow grew out of the floor. Soon they were creeping about his feet and legs. The vines stretched and caressed, growing leaves and dark thorns, and all the while entwining him.

She turned and went to one of the cabinets, opening it casually as if she were planning on taking down cups and bowls for dinner. “Ah, here we are.” She reached into the recess and took out two yellowed mastiff skulls, both covered with red and black runes made out in sharp, angry slashes. “Unkindness of spirits, bound,” she murmured as she put the skulls down on the table. “I release you.” One of the skulls flamed bright blue, and crumbled to dust. “And you.” The other skull did the same, leaving behind a neat pile of fine white ashy stuff.

He felt his hounds snap out of physical existence. They both gave small yelps as they turned to shades and blew away on the wind, howling faintly.

And then she turned her eyes on him.

Beautiful, cold eyes.

EIGHTEEN

The morning passed uneventfully for Caewen.

She walked along the thin and grey-brown stretch of dirt that marked itself out upon the land, curling over the brows of hills and dipping through valleys. The countryside showed signs of pasturing and cropping–old drystone walls and hedgerows laid out in straggly lines–but there were few enough kine or sheep, and fewer cottages. No hint of any tower-house or fortalice crept up on prominent hilltops here. The farther Caewen travelled, the more the land felt like an in-between place, a no-man’s land where one governance had frayed away to nothing before the next could assert itself.

Once the rather unpleasant Matty Nutch was behind her by some hours, Caewen relaxed enough to find her stride on the road and enjoy the long rolling sweep of each step, the crisp air against her skin, the constant noise-speckle of birdsong. It was a calm, low-energy sort of moment. A plain, on-the-surface sort of joy. As long as she didn’t think too deeply about the whole of the world and its troubles, the day was actually quite nice. It took Caewen some reflection to realise that she felt more in the moment than she had in a long time. The part of her that had been always distracted by imaginings and daydreams, with idle plans, anticipations and trepidations, all of this was quiet. Her capacity to feel these things felt dulled, or even perhaps gone away entirely.

It was a strange experience, both freeing and disconcerting in its unfamiliarity.

And a little worrying too. She didn’t want to just lose her capacity for dreaming. To think about it made her feel cold and somehow less than human… but even this worry couldn’t persist for very long. Even that went away, after a time.

Around about noon, a shadow passed over her, and Caewen looked up to see the spread white-and-glacial hued wings of a creature floating away in an eastward direction, nearly following the road. It was too late to hide: the creature must have seen her from a mile off, before she was even aware of it. That it had not landed, suggested she had hopefully just been mistaken for a wandering local on the road, some shepherdess or farmer’s daughter going about their business perhaps. Where the beast had come from, she could not guess, and she what was more, the angle did not allow her to see if it carried a rider. But it definitely seemed to be following the road. Watching the draig glide into the near distance, Caewen experienced a cold sensation, a shivering down into her spine, and a prickling in the small of her back and deep in the pit of her stomach in equal measure.

She watched calmly as it twisted its neck and fixed one of its big black eyes on her. Then it coiled itself up into a rising spiral, flapping higher with big broad strokes, before soaring away, soon  enough vanishing behind the nearest hill-line. Caewen was now certain that she had been able to make out a rider on its back.

She considered moving off the road. The beast had given her an unpleasantly cold sensation as it passed… much more so than what she might expect from some mere Sorthe knight or princeling.

“Tssch. That was her, you know.”

She paused, wondering how she had not immediately understood the same to be true. Probably, deep down. she hadn’t wanted to. “My shadow.”

“Yes. She rides a regal beast and goes hither and thither. You trudge on the ground. Tsch. Tsk. I don’t mean to compare, but she might be making the better of things.”

“Well, we shall see.” Caewen picked up the pace, continuing on her way, barely breaking stride now. She wanted to make up ground.

“You’re not going to leave the road?” asked Fetch. “We could cut across the pine woods, just there. They are dark and pleasant, and full of resin. Even a dragonish beast might have difficulty smelling you.”

 “No.” She had to think why she didn’t feel the fear that she ought to. “I will face whatever I must face. Better sooner than later.”

“Better alive than dead,” countered Fetch. He said nothing more, though he did curl up in the satchel, then set about occupying himself by mewling and hissing with a slightly self-pitying air.

Caewen lost track of how much longer she walked before she started to feel that same sense of cold otherness and wrongness creeping into her fingertips again. Her lips tingled. She squinted into the bright light that sparked against shining green-orange-brown leaves and the wet-dabs of scattered rain-puddles.

“Tssssch,” whispered Fetch, meaningfully, but Caewen kept up her pace, coming over a hill and immediately stopping to look down on the scene before her.

A little way beyond the foot of the downward slope, a pavilion had been erected. It was a silken affair, dyed in the blues and greys of soft shadows. Before the tent, a figure in a resplendent dress lounged in some sort of framework-and-cloth chair. The set up looked similar to the sort of portable furnishings Caewen had seen magician’s using at the Wizard’s Moot, which now seemed so long ago in her mind.

Behind the reclining figure stood two men. Guards perhaps, or maybe servants? Their postures were attentive and alert. Caewen peered more closely. Guards, she guessed? They were armed with longswords at their belts. Three draig lazed behind the tent. One was a large white and silver beast, presumably the same that had flown overhead earlier. Curled up near its belly, like kittens beside a mother cat, were two much smaller, greyer and more drab companions. These two looked more like the draig that had been at the Battle of Owls and Ghosts. She wondered if the two attendants were Sorthemen, but thought perhaps not. There was something about their thin delicate frames and milk-white skin that even from a distance did not look like the grey skinned and steely Sorthe she had previously met.

The tent, beasts and persons were arranged across the road so that there would be no easy way to go around them without being seen. A large sward of short, cropped grass spread north and south. The position had clearly been picked carefully so as to present no practical option, but to walk right up to the camp.

As there seemed nothing for it, Caewen put a step forward, and proceeded as calmly and as watchfully as she was able.

She walked down the sloping road, leaning back a little to counter to the incline to steady herself, but otherwise assuming as much nonchalance as she could. She was aware of the soles of her boots skidding on gravel and pressing for purchase against nodules on the road, even as she could feel the eyes of the woman and her retainers on her. They watched her as she approached, and she looked at them all in turn. Soon enough, Caewen found herself looking–as it were–back at her own reflection, sitting there sprawled on a golden field-chair. The sight of her own face caught in Caewen’s throat, just a little, but unfortunately enough for other’s to notice. Shadow-Caewen’s dress was a mass of rippling folds and elegant silks and drapery, so that it looked as if she were wearing a garment of molten glass stained in silver and white. A spirit of some sort crept about her lap, and she stroked its neck idly. It was snowy and feral looking, with eyes like moonstones, and it gave off the same aura of cunning that Fetch emanated.

The two men were dressed in armour of a silvery white that matched everything else. They were clearly not Sorthe. Their skin was as white as snow. Their eyes were black and foxlike. Down upon their backs and hanging either side of their necks cascaded long locks of dead straight hair that was as glossy and dark as polished obsidian. Small touches of ice fumed and crackled at their feet.  One of them went to collect something and where he walked the grass was frozen.

Caewen arrived without being greeted and without greeting. She and her shadow eyed each other across a gap of a few feet that might as well have been an abyss.

At last, Other Caewen blinked her eyes, yawned, stretched, and said in a voice as soft as darkness. “Welcome. Will you sit awhile? Eat and drink? We have enough to spare.”

“And be poisoned? Or drugged?”

Laughter rang clear and crystalline from a throat that was so much more elegant, flawless and smooth that Caewen’s own sun-roughened neck. “Why would I hurt you, my other? You are mine and I am yours. I do not want you harmed. I but want you back. Rejoined and remade.”

“But with you as the master, I expect.”

“Well, it’s clear enough who you think ought be the master of us.”

“Of course. Should not the more masterful be the master? You are dutiful, my Shadow. And deeply earnest. But there is nothing in you that has the ambition to lead or master anything, let alone yourself. Or me.” The smile did not fade, but grew in its self-assurance. She saw Caewen flicking suspicious glances at the two retainers and their belted swords. “Oh, they are no threat. The Men-of-the-Rime are loyal to our master and lover. They do as I bid, for he has instructed them to be so bound to me.”

One of the men leaned low, close to Other Caewen’s ear, and spoke to her quietly. When he opened his mouth, Caewen saw that his teeth were sharp, like a fox’s. His voice was inhuman too. It was not made of distinct words, but more akin to wind whispering and singing over bare, storm-sculpted rocks.

Shadow Caewen laughed. “Yes,” she said. “My shadow is a wee slip of a thing. Fragile, indeed.”

“Your shadow?” said Caewen, snorting. “You seem to forget who is the shadow and who is flesh.”

“Do I?” said Shadow Caewen. She lit her eyes intensely upon Caewen. “Are you so certain?” A smile like a serpent coiled over her lips. “Look more closely, my dear one, my shadow: do I cast a shadow?”

Caewen looked. She did not. Neither she nor the Other Caewen had shadows, though both were full in the direct cool sun of an autumn day. A frown crossed her brow.

“So what makes you so certain that I am the shadow and you are the flesh? From my perspective, I left my shadow in the cave with the old witch Cag-Mag.” A beautiful, lazy smile followed. An elegant readjustment of herself in her repose rippled through her. “If I was the shadow once, am I that now? In the end, who is shadow and who is flesh might be more fluid than you imagine. Perhaps you ought not have dared to send me away so thoughtlessly. The more thin and joyless and without hope you grow, the more real will I be. The more sleek and joyful and full of hope I become, the more faint and translucent will you be. If I am not already Caewen, if you are not already the Shadow of Caewen, then it will happen soon enough… this will be the truth of it. You know this, I think, my shadow.”

Caewen shook her head, but had nothing to say. She looked at the ground, furrowed her brow, pressed her lips thin, frowned.

But Shadow Caewen spoke on. “Do not think me cruel. Do not think that I have no love for you. I deeply love you as I love myself, for you are me. I want us to rejoin, I want you to return to me in happiness and acquiescence. Already, I am caring for you, helping and aiding. That nasty man, the magician of the hamlet. He was unkind to you. You did not have it in you to deal with him as he deserved, so I have seen to the matter on your behalf.”

Caewen looked up, suddenly and with a sickening feeling in her chest, beating just below the skin. “What do you mean? What have you done?”

Another glorious smile rose and shone. “What have I done? No more than he has done to others all his miserable life.” She considered her fingernails, examining them as if looking for chips or flaws. “I was unkind to him. That is all. And it was no more than he deserved. In this, I think you ought to agree.”

“I do not.”

“Ah, and there is the thin, bleached out morality of my shadow. We shall be wonderful dancers together once we are joined back into a single soul. I might even enjoy the guilt you bring after indulging in such acts as must be done. Perhaps I will beg out master to punish us after we have done such things as to make us feel guilt: there might be a certain pleasure in that, I imagine.” She then seemed to shift in her thoughts, and gestured to the men. One of them brought out a silver jug and two spindly goblets. Into these, he poured a liquid that looked and smelled like wine except that it was the colour of sea foam. In silence, he handed one to Other Caewen. She took it as gracefully as any queen, and said, “Thank you.” He offered the other to Caewen, holding it within her reach to take. “Please,” said Shadow Caewen. “Take it. Drink and feel the warmth and the chill of it. It is a delightful and rare draught. And it will loosen the mind and the tongue. For we have so very much to discuss, you and I, we two who are in truth the one and the same.”

“No,” said Caewen. “Waylay me, or do not. But do not think I will submit to you. Not now. Not ever.”

“My shadow, oh, my shadow! Listen to me. Look at me. I cannot be whole with you walking the world. And you cannot be whole with me in the world either. Why force yourself upon this road of long burden? You are thin and scared. Alone and hollow inside. And here I am, joyful and full of splendour. My life is rich with beauty. Already I have seen such marvels as you could only dream of. Give yourself up to me. Become me. You will live in ceaseless wonderment and find love in the arms of a god made flesh upon the earth.”

“No,” repeated Caewen.

“No? No. You defy me and your fate, but you know that you cannot win. My shadow, I am you. I have all your memories. I know everything you know–deeply and thoroughly. How can you defeat me? Just… all you have to do is give up. Give yourself to me. Peacefully. Wondrously. In awe of me. That is all. Just give up.”

“No.” She shook her head. “I will not. And if you know all my secrets, then you know that the King Who Sings in Winter gathers armies in wanton aggression. There is no threat from the south. The oracles are lies. The foretellings are lies. The prophecies are lies. Why not tell him that? Why not explain to him that there is no need for the death of babies in the arms of their mothers? No need for fire and murder and ashes. Why not explain this all to him, and make the war just stop.”

This disturbed the Other Caewen. She looked away, and it seemed she was genuinely troubled, perhaps even distressed or ashamed. “I have said this to him. He does not believe me. His soothsayers scream at me and call me a liar and a sun-born whore and worse. But he loves me, so he has not sent me away. But if you were to join me and we were to be whole, then we would have the power between us to make him see the truth… we could convince him of this. I am certain. War could be averted. Lives… so many lives, saved.”

Caewen shook her head. “I do not believe you, and I think you do not believe yourself in this either. If the Winter King is surrounded by priests and magicians who want war, he will not be easily convinced otherwise, will he. And not by some bed-warmer he happens to have taken in his chambers.” The words came out with a bit more bite than Caewen had intended.

The Other Caewen flinched a little.

She looked back at Caewen, and her face expressed some sadness. The snow-thing on her shoulders curled and crept like a wisp of hard, white mist shot with sunlight. “Alright. Perhaps I have hope, but hope is better than what you have. You are nothing but a thin shadow made of desperation.”

“Hope? You think I have no hope? Hope is all that is left to me, but do not mistake it for something fragile and precious. Hope is a hard, nasty little stone at the bottom of my soul that reminds me only of everything else that has been lost. What of our own home, so far away? Family? Friends?”

“You speak of Dossel?” And here the Other Caewen laughed a long, soft, sympathetic peal of laughter. It struck Caewen that she herself had never laughed so wildly and with so much abandon in her whole life. “You speak of your brother, Tul? Or do you speak of the people in the village? Or are you sentimental for the company of Asheway the weaver? Or do you mean Gowth, and his fat miller’s hands and greedy miller’s eyes.”

She looked away and down to her left. “Farrowly. You know that as well as I do.”

A snort. “Farrowly? A boy. A tagalong milksop who mooned after us when we were one and the same, and nothing more than a village girl. What madness do you think I would sink to? We might be whole again, and share a bed with a literal god upon the world. But you think of him? The boy cobwebbed in shadows?”

“Perhaps I think only of his sacrifice. And my promise. Your promise, too, if you really are a part of me as you say.”

“Fine.” She waved a dismissive elegance of fingers weaving on the air. “If that is so… then once we are whole, we will beseech our Lord and Master and go to the Castellation of Shadows and release the boy from his gloom. Who do you think it was who laid that curse upon land and people in payment for ill-treatment in the first place? The hand that made the curse, can break it.”

Caewen hunched her shoulders. She couldn’t help a bit of resentment entering her words. “And here I’ve heard that gods are jealous things. Are you so certain that your lover would casually free a man who–“

“Who what–? Say it, if you have the heart and backbone.”

But Caewen only looked at the ground. She felt small. She shifted uncomfortably. Around her, the noises of blackbirds fossicking in the dry wind-blown leaves out in the thick grass made a shush-shush-shush disharmony against the rise and fall of the wind in the scrub and branches.

At last, the Other Caewen sighed. “So be it. I see that I will have no sense from you. It would have been better if you had given yourself up with joy and free will. But I see that the other way is needed.”

“And so you will strike me down? Or set your guards upon me?”

“Always so hasty. Always with such rashness and reactivity. I confess… I do not miss your tendency to act without thinking.” She looked away, up at the sky and the clouds turning over slowly there. “No. The other way is harder, but it is also slower and more care is needed. A ritual is required. Planning and forethought is demanded. The disobedient shadow that has slipped loose must be properly buried, deep, deep in the earth.”

“I will defend myself. I have arts and powers still. You know that. I can lay a fey-stroke on you or a dozen of your soldiers.” Her voice steeled, she added, “Try me.”

“Oh, I do know you, Caewen. I know you so well. It will not come to that. You will get drawn into some nonsense, and distract yourself saving this stranger or that stranger from something that has nothing to do with us… or your quest… and you will exhaust yourself down to nothing. And then you will not be able to set a spell upon a fly. And I will come for you, Caewen, my disobedient shadow. At that moment, when you least expect it, I will come for you. And when I do, you will beg for the other, the more pleasant way.” She was pensive. “But I have offered that, and you have told me ‘no’, and there are old laws that govern these matters. The world is so full of strange old laws. Have you ever wondered, who wrote them? When and where and why? Ah, no matter. In any instance, there is little I can do. I will cry as you are buried alive. But when it is done, when you are finally dead, your ghost will rejoin me and then we will then know wholeness and be happy.” A smile, beautiful as a winter dawn. “And at peace.”

All this time, the Other had remained seated, but now she rose and moved a few steps closer. She reached for Caewen, and her fingers brushed Caewen’s cheek, and ran through the wild locks of her uncombed hair. “I long for you and you long for me. But we will not be apart for very long.”

They stood there for a time, staring at each other across a gap of silence and suspicion.

At last, the other Caewen said, “Well, I think all is said that can be said. Go. I have a mind to dally in the cold sun for a while. It delights me. I will drink some of the clear, icy wines of the northern vineyards, eat delicate pleasant morsels. I give your permit and license upon this road: you may pass. I will not delay or stop you. Now is not the right hour.”

Caewen fleetingly considered throwing a spell at her and the frost-fleshed swordsmen, but she knew in her heart that there was already too much power in the Other One to be easily surprised or overthrown. And besides, what would it achieve? Like as not, they’d both be maimed or killed, if the fight turned to deadly magics. Neither of them had complete advantage, and they both knew it.

Instead, she lifted the cup, which was still full and in her hand, and she held it out and pointedly tipped it onto the dirt road. “A libation for our respective journeys,” she said. “I hope we will find a way to reconcile, but not in the way you want it.” Smiling then, she held the cup out. The Other Caewen looked at her, hard and cold, but took the goblet in the end, holding it casually in her delicate fingers.

Caewen was about to leave, but stopped and said, “I thought you would ambush me and try to take the fragment of the Old Great Spell. But, I think I see now that was a foolish fear. The finding of the other piece lies at the other end of a difficult, lonely road. You do not have it in you to suffer a torturous path, do you? And you would not want anyone else to find and keep the other fragment of spell, and with it the power. So, you will not take it from me and give it to another to quest after in your stead. Perhaps you did take away with you a freedom to luxuriate in idylls, and dream, and enjoy cold sunlight, back when we went our separate ways–but the iron in the soul was left with me, I think.” She looked at the Other Caewen out of the corner of an eye, and she saw the mirror-woman shift uncomfortably under even that fleeting gaze.

Without another word, Caewen walked off. She passed the men with their ice-white skin and long, glossy black hair. Their eyes like wet riverstones watched her as she went. The three Draig regarded her casually, like cats too full of cream to bother with a mouse. Whether they understood anything of what had transpired, Caewen could not tell, but there was something of a keen knowingness in their eyes, so perhaps.

The trudge along the wet, brown mud road felt more wearying than it had before. And all the while she could feel the weight and cold power of the Other Caewen’s gaze, pressing as it did upon her back as she walked, hunch-shouldered.

She had gone maybe a hundred paces down the road when she heard her own voice call to her from behind, clearer and more beautiful than Caewen had ever spoken a word in her life. Caewen stopped to listen, but did not turn around, keeping her eyes fixed on the road ahead, keeping her back to the other self.

“I am permitted by the old laws to give you one last chance. Because I love you… I love you as I love myself… Caewen, please. Listen to me. See sense. You cannot defeat all that lies before you. There are ten thousand soldiers and monsters made of nightmares and chaos coming down from the north, even as he dally here miles and miles from the battle that will be. You are bone-weary. You are desperate for rest. Just reach out to me and accept that respite. The world will be better for it. A quick clean victory for my master will make for a peace afterwards… goodness and kindness will come back into the world. There will be less suffering if the war is over swiftly. Those who resist the onslaught are the ones who are truly responsible for the suffering of their own children and kin, if you think about it. Are they not? It is so much less bloody and easier to simply give up. To do as one is told. To obey.” She paused. Perhaps she saw that she was not achieving much with these words, so changed to a different approach, one last time, a little desperately. “Caewen, a person needs to want something. But look at you. You want nothing but to fix the world. That does not make you a good person, because it does not leave you with enough humanity to be a person. It makes you a good idea. Why keep pretending that you are real?”

Caewen did not answer. The words needled her, getting under her skin and sinking right down into her soul. She desperately wanted to turn around, march back and then to yell and to argue with the Other Caewen until it was she who was the one to give up and accept obedience. But Caewen also felt deep inside herself that if she went back, she would lose any argument, eventually. The mirror-self was too deep and too cunning in her own thoughts: she knew herself too well, so to speak. She would always say what Caewen feared to think.

And so, saying nothing, thinking nothing, she walked onwards and the sense of angered power behind her grew only more palpable and larger.

EDIT

NINETEEN

At the northern gates, day-to-day folk and refugees alike were crowding out of the way, forming huddles to the left and right. They were keeping clear of a stream of guardsmen–many of whom looked rather hastily armed and dishevelled–as they ran through the gates.

Samakarantha followed at a hurried but respectable stride. The man who had come with him, started calling out and waving his arms. “Stand aside. Allow space. Here is a magician! A Grand Magus! Straight from the King’s own court! Stand away.”

There was a raised ring of halberds and pikes, forming a circle. They looked for all the world like steely-headed bullrushes around a little pond, with their brown-tan hafts and polished blades. Above the mass of sunlit points rose a horse-like head, presumably attached to a horse-like body–though that was mostly out of view behind the rows of guards. On the creature’s back was a boy whom Samakarantha did not recognise.

That was unexpected.

“Stand aside,” said the magician, and his voice carried within it an air of authority born of an expectation of obedience. He put no charms into his words. Even if he had wanted to, he could not. He was exhausted almost to the point of collapse. It was taking all his will just to keep himself from finding a nice quiet place to lie down and succumb to the blackness of dreamless sleep. Even had the Winter King himself arrived at the gate, Samakarantha could not have raised a spell against him. It would be at the very least hours, possibly days, before he might dare to work magics again.

Happily, none of this mattered at this precise moment.

It was indeed Dapplegrim. There was no mistaking the skullish face and the dull, deep red of the eyes, faintly aglow. Although the boy kept trying to make himself heard over the yell and clamour of the guards, Dapplegrim himself seemed to be saying nothing at all. He was standing quite still and his expression looked far more exasperated than anything else.

“Be still your blades and lower your arms. This is no enemy.” A few faces looked at Samakarantha, moon-shaped in surprise, mouths open. “Stand aside. Make a path.”

As much from confusion as anything else, the halberdiers did part, though only enough to allow Samakarantha to slip between them.

“Not an enemy? Not an enemy! So says a stranger! So says an outlander! What do you know of our foemen and friends?” The voice was that of a thin, poorly shaved man in a bedraggled grey and rust-hued robe. Some priest or local sorcerer, Samakarantha assumed at a glance–but one on hard times.

He tried for kindness and patience in his voice. “Friend, I know that you enemies are my enemies, and I assure you this creature looks foul but has a good heart.”

“Foul?” said Dapplegrim, all of a sudden. Everyone jumped, including the guards, including the threadbare mage. Presumably, Dapplegrim hadn’t spoken up til now. The halberds all came down again.

The man very nearly spat his next words. “It speaks! It speaks with a cunning tongue. I told you! It is clear to look on. This is a devilry sent out of the north to beguile and trick us. It is a thing of darkness and chaos. Look upon it and despair! Destroy it now!”

“Of course I can speak. Hurm. There just wasn’t anyone among you lot sensible enough to be worth speaking to.” A swish of the tail. “At least until now.”

Samakarantha fixed Dapplegrim with a firm expression and took some steps, moving as close as he could. He experienced a slight falter in his steps, but steadied himself. He then spread his arms, let a beaming smile play on his face and gave out a heartfelt bellyful laugh. “My friend. It is good to see you.” Then turning to the others. “I will avow and avouch for the creature. Any harm it does to you or yours, I invite threefold upon my flesh and mortal cage. So be it, so will it be. Peace be with us, and may peace dance gently upon our path.”

There was some murmuring in the crowd and some shrugs and questioning looks exchanged among the soldiers. The problem that the ragged mage faced was that Samakarantha was already well known. Whoever this vagabond was, he was clearly neither well known nor much well liked. More than one person said things like, “Well… he Magician of Wonders does vouchsafe the beast with an oath… that oath means something, it does,” or, “Personally, you ask me, I do trust him over one of ’em ragged red crows,” or, “He’s already done my family a great turn,” and “True. True. We’ve no reason to think any ill of the southron magus. A good man, he is… even if the beast do look something right quare.” And various other similar sentiments.

But the robbed man just spat on the road and sneered at all of this. “Then the blood is spattered on your brow, weird trick-spinner. Mark me and my words, if words have any meaning at all in this great lie of a world.” He stalked away then, angrily, shoving his way through the crowd and into the city, muttering to himself as he went.

“Ahem,” said Samakarantha to the guards. They shuffled apart again, but did not make a wide enough opening for Dapplegrim to move in the other direction. It was enough for Samakarantha to enter the circle of spear-heads though, which he did.

Once he was standing among the soldiers, and next to Dapplegrim, he extended a hand an bowed, “Well met in distant lands.”

“Well met,” replied Dapplegrim. “Hur.”

The boy said, “Elem tu irrara,” which completely took Samakarantha by surprise. “You speak the language of the Golden Dales?”

“Oh, am I not right in that. I assumed by your dress and manner, that was your home country?”

“It is–but to met a fluent speaker of my tongue here, among these relutelago, I am shocked.”

But at this point, one of the men, a captain by the look of his cloak and gilt-touched helm, interrupted, “Who’s said this is to happen then?” It was not addressed at Samakarantha, but more generally.

It was the guard from the fortress who replied. “A magician, Captain Thraem. From beyond the seas.”

“I can see that, but by what authority does he tell me and my men to stand aside? This is the remarkable magus, I gather. The one who fixed up the Pisspoor? I’ll thank him for a good deed, and a kind heart, just as any of us would do, but… and this is important.. I’m not ordering a monster be let into the city on the word of anyone who isn’t the king.”

“Monster?” said Dapplegrim. He rolled his eyes. “Some people.”

“Oh hush, Dapple,” said the boy. “You’re not making things better.”

The guard who’d come down from the fortress just shrugged and looked at Samakarantha. The man had not been in the audience chamber, and even if he had, he would have been able to say only that Samakarantha had the king’s leave to go about the city. The king certainly hadn’t given him authority to allow monsters into the city. Just as it seemed that perhaps they would have to send a messenger, at that moment, a more wild and louder noise rose from farther up along the cobbled high street. A clattering of hooves was approached. War horns were blasting. Horses could be heard snorting. A loud wailing instrument was playing too, rousing and eerie.

There was a general sound of feet and bodies shuffling to get out of the way.

Unfortunately, Samakarantha felt himself quite able to guess who approached. The situation needed calming, and swiftly. Judging by the loudness of the hooves, they had at most a minute, maybe two, to ask questions and settle things down. Turning about within the ring of steel and old, sweaty leather, he spoke to the boy who still sat there, atop the saddle. “Who are you?”

“Ode.”

“Just Ode?”

“Yes. I do not want my father’s name. I do not know my mother’s. My village is in ashes. And I have earned no other, yet.”

Dapplegrim piped up. “Oh, are we making suggestions? Hur. How about Ode Many-Tongues? Or Ode the Rune-knower? Or,… here’s one that fits… Ode Who You Look at Him and You Think He’s Just a Peasant Boy But Then He Starts Speaking in Weird Dead Languages and It is a Bit Creepy, Isn’t It?” He showed off one of his sharp and toothy smiles.

Samakarantha and Ode and everyone else just sort of stared at Dapplegrim for a moment.

“Well, if I wasn’t already certain you were Dapplegrim I would be certain now,” said the magus.

“Who are you?” said the boy, confused.

“Samakarantha, magus and so on and so forth. Now, my turn. Where is Caewen?”

“Eastwards,” answered Dapplegrim. “Hur. Off on a fool’s errand. Hurm. Much as usual.”

The noise of hooves had clattered to a stop. Iron-shod boots were slapping the flagstones now. 

Samakarantha moved close enough to lay a palm against Dapple’s broad neck. Dapplegrim craned his head enough to look at the magician askance, but didn’t otherwise protest. The boy stared in curious silence. More quietly than before, and leaning close enough to smell the horse-sweat musk of the beast, Samakarantha said, “The city is on edge. Please do not be saying anything more that might worry folks. These knights who approach now, they are suspicious and have also the power to turn you away from the gate. Allow me to speak. I will bring you safely within.”

At that point the circle of guards split apart, rather roughly, as a mass of bloodied, armed knights and scouts broke through them. They shoved and shouldered aside anyone who would not get out of their way. The king’s uncle, Redthorn, was at their head.

“Yield, beast!”

Samakarantha turned to him. He bowed. “Laird Redthorn, well met. There is no need for swords or anger, my good lord of swords and horses. This beast be friend, not foe. He is no threat.” He heard a slight tremor in his own voice. His exhaustion was getting the better of him. “Though I confess, he may look cruel, his nature is kind.”

But the men spread out, weapons ready. Redthorn did not lower the great sword he carried. “I’ll believe that thing is no threat when it’s in chains and irons. I’ve never seen a thing that is more clearly a foul creature come out of the night-lands.” He spat a glob of blood on the stones. “Or I’m a hairy arsed mimic-dog.”

But Samakarantha laughed, as gently as he could manage. He moved directly to stand in front of the man and sword, and laid a hand on the blade, applying just enough pressure to nudge it down until the end did not point straight at his own belly. “My friend and goodly lord: what else would you expect one of my wandering spies to look like? He must pass for a northern beast. There are seemings upon him. That is all.”

“Hurm,” said Dapplegrim. “Quite right.” he flicked an ear. “I’m actually,” he lowered his voice to a whisper, “and you can’t tell anyone this–I’m actually a unicorn.”

“No you’re not.” Redthorn narrowed his eyes. “I’ve hunted unicorns in mountain glen and dell. They don’t talk. Or leastways, not in the tongues of menkind-folk.”

“Ah, well, you see,” said Samakarantha, “desert unicorns do. I will present my friend at the court in his true appearance in good time. But it takes life, blood and effort to remove charms that life, blood and effort laid on him. And I do not have left to me much at this moment. I am spent. Long ago, you see, I stuck the spells so close to the skin of this beast that they might as well be glue. There could be no risk of any enemy seeing through the illusion.”

“And who’s this then,” said Redthorn, clearly not believing a word of this, but going along with it for now. He nodded towards the boy. “A Fane king? A great warrior-wizard from the jungles of the south? Or some boy slipped away from a farmyard where he ought to be mucking out a cowshed?”

“Ah,” said Samakarantha, opting for honesty. “That I do not know. I presume my friend has rescued some waif of a child. I was expecting him to have a different rider.”

“I am Ode,” said the boy, speaking directly at Redthorn. The child gathered himself up, sitting straight until his grey tunic and russet cloak, his rags and his patches, it all looked as if these were royal robes, worn proudly. “I don’t know what’s going on here, but Caewen hoped we might find friends here. Dapplegrim seems to trust this magician… and this must be good enough for me. It ought to be good enough for you too, if he is a man of honour and bright dealings.”

Redthorn flicked him another suspicious glance. “Dapplegrim? Funny name for a desert unicorn.”

Samakarantha smiled. “A spy name only.”

“And Caewen? Who is this?”

“Another of my spies.” He turned back to Dapplegrim. “You were about to tell me where Caewen had gotten herself to? You said, east-aways?”

“Ah. Hurmmm.” But the beast shook his head. “The details are best spoken of in more privacy. Hur. Her journey is more desperate than ours was, and it is perhaps best not to be spoken of where gossips might hear.”

“I see.” Samakaranta readjusted his cloak. “If you will permit me, Lord Redthorn?”

“Eorl.”

“Eorl Redthorn. Yes. If you will permit me, I will take my friend and his charge to my residence.”

“Hissocking Sprent? I heard what you did there.” He finally seemed to relax a little, lowering his sword properly, and letting it lean gently by its tip upon the dirt of the road. The blade was nearly as tall as he was. Though, even as he lowered his weapon, it was noticeable that the narrowed, assessing eyes of an old campaigner never left Dapplegrim. His gaze remained fixed and carefully set. He barely blinked. “If you will forgive my suspicions, I think that you may take this beastie into your house, but not without me and mine going along with you. And the creature will not leave your house again, except under watch and blade. Captain!”

“Aye, Eorl Redthorn?”

“I want six of your men. They will stand watch outside Hissocking Sprent and be sure that this… er… ‘unicorn’ does not leave the house of the sorcerer.” Then, turning to Samakarantha, he added, more flatly, “Do you understand me in this? I am extending to you a great liberty as a mark of respect and honour… and I do this in the hope that I am not mistaken in my judgements. I can only pray that you will not betray this trust, or let innocent folks be taken by this… hm… thing.” Although Redthorn’s grinding, rocky voice could not easily lower to a true whisper, he did his best. “If that is a unicorn of any breed, I am a mimic-dog’s hairy arsed sister. Attend to me, sorcerer. Listen. Look at me, cleanly and in the eyes. I am trusting you, my warlock friend. I do not wish to find my good nature betrayed. Well?”

“I understand perfectly. For all your seeming rancour and uncouth dealings… you are no fool.”

“I am not. And for all your fancy gold-dipped words, you are no idle courtier.”

“We understand one another then, I think.”

“Good. Let us away. The gate should not be blocked for such a length of time. Folks need to come to town. Folks need to leave town.” More quietly, he let loose another harsh half-whisper of a snarl: “I don’t care much what tales you spin to all and sundry–if a lie soothes the frightened mob, then so be it. But you will not lie to me again, warlock.” An incredulous shake of the head. “Unicorn? Spies? What a load of great stenching badger leavings.” He turned to address his soldiers. “Men. With me. Mount up and form two lines. Do not let our dear visitors out of sight. Now, let us be going.”

And so they did.