The tower of the tyrant, p.15
The Tower of the Tyrant, page 15
‘You didn’t sleep,’ Llewyn pointed out.
She glared at him. ‘I can go a night without sleep.’ But a crack formed in her facade of confidence. ‘Did Afanan say …?’
He nearly lied.
‘She didn’t, did she?’ Siwan shook her head. ‘Then what are you worried about? It’s been years, Llewyn. I’m getting a handle on things. If Afanan thinks it’s safe, then it’s safe, yeah?’
‘I’m not so sure,’ he grumbled. The sorceress knew more of magic than he did, but less of the powers that hunted them. She had not heard the Grey Lady howling for Siwan’s death. She had not been the one to find the threat in Llysbryn. She only knew of it from his report after he had dealt with it quietly and quickly, denying it the chance to strike. More, she did not fear for Siwan as he did. Did not feel every danger to her in the marrow of her bones. The girl had not looked to her on the altar stone—she had looked to him.
Again, Siwan rolled her eyes, as though there were no reason at all for his worry. ‘Who would know better? Who that we could trust, anyway? Come on. Watch the procession with me, then I promise I’ll sleep away the afternoon.’ She folded her hands behind her back and stepped past him for a better look at the road below. ‘Have to be fresh for tonight, after all.’
‘For tonight?’ At first, her meaning escaped him. She had done her part already, helping Roni sew the costumes and dress the sets for the troupe’s performance. There might be some minor tear in need of mending, or a last-minute prop to be thrown together, but …
Realisation struck like an iron bolt to the eye.
‘No.’
Her shoulders stiffened. ‘It’ll be fine. Roni and I finished the mask. Clouded lenses, like we talked about. With that, a hood and a cape, no one will take me for anything but another eccentric troubadour.’
‘Any one of these people may be an agent of the Grey Lady in disguise,’ Llewyn whispered, casting around them, hoping the nearing procession would draw all attention from the others on the hillock. ‘We can never be sure, no matter how well Afanan’s eye pierces glamour.’
‘Or yours? Or mine?’ Siwan muttered. ‘Between the three of us, we would see something. Besides, it’s been years and she hasn’t sent anyone.’
‘Eight years is the blink of an eye, to her,’ Llewyn said. ‘And she knows we’ll be alert.’ He hated this topic of conversation. Hated how much it agitated his own fear and old anger, to say nothing of how it put fire to Siwan’s. But perhaps she had cooled too much. She needed to remember the dangers that lurked in the shadows between the trees. He would not always be able to remember them for her. ‘Even if she has no agent in the crowd, there may be hedge wizards, druids, sorcerers without Afanan’s kindness, who might see you as a means to deepening their own power. Why take the risk? For what? To stand on a stage and sing a song?’
‘Yes!’ She spun to face him, her cloak whirling around her knees. ‘Exactly that! It’s what I want, Llewyn! And I’m good at it! Everyone says so. Only you’re too bloody frightened to see it. I’ll not spend my whole life mending burst seams and sewing costumes.’
It was an old argument, now. A year after Nyth Fran, she had picked up Ayden’s gittern and begun to strum, and the old bard had laughed and gently placed her fingers to form her first chords. At the time, Llewyn had been pleased to see the dark cloud that had hung about her finally breaking. When Mirelle had started teaching Siwan to sing, Llewyn had thought little of it; even sat nearby with his pipe to listen, enjoying the mingled warmth of tobacco and her little, learning voice. And then she had said she wanted the stage.
She stared up at him, bristling and defiant, daring him to push back. Her shoulders, as slight as sparrow’s wings, rose and fell in steady anger. Did she want him to drive the wedge between them deeper? Would that make it easier to do as she willed, despite his fears, despite the pain it would cause him?
Light caught the silver chain around her neck, exposed by her sudden turn. He could not see, but he could feel—always, like a limb severed yet still alive—the shard of ghostwood that hung from it, hidden by her cloak. The cage of her fractured soul. The talisman he had made for her, to save her from the raven fiend and to change her life forever.
His answer to her pleading voice, her desperate eye gazing up from the altar stone.
He turned away, back to the procession.
‘No answer?’ Siwan pressed. ‘So I’ll do as I want, then?’
A slow breath, to let the embers of his anger cool. The procession drew nearer now. He could make out the prince on his white charger, the black train of his cloak spilling behind his saddle, his gold circlet marking his office. A woman—his mother, the queen, Llewyn presumed—rode beside him.
‘You finished the mask?’ It had been Roni’s idea. A proposed compromise the last time this argument had nearly torn them apart.
‘Yes. Of course. No one will see my eyes, if anyone is even looking for them. There are plenty of oddities in the world, Llewyn. Even without the mask, even if my eyes and my face were on full display, most people would see no more than another descendant from the First Folk’s experiments.’
He knew that for false. Had learned it for certain, three years ago in Llysbryn. And that had been no agent of the Grey Lady, only an itinerant druid with too keen an eye and too open a face. He had recognised Siwan—if not for what she was, exactly, then at least for the power she carried. Llewyn had seen the surprise, then the greed in his eyes. The sprouting of a dark purpose in his heart.
Someday, someone else would be looking, and would see, Llewyn knew. Someone he and Harwick could not deal with quietly—as they had the druid, stalking him to his camp in a glade off the road. Someone not even Afanan could defend against. The echoes of the Grey Lady’s voice clung to him. Her rage. Her desperation. She was patient, but unforgiving, and he had been far from the most powerful of her gwyddien.
He let his gaze drift along the king’s oaken coffin, borne on an open carriage, to the nobles and courtiers following behind the prince. A sea of black and grey silk beneath fluttering banners. Downcast faces riding in silence. Bowed heads leaning towards neighbours to exchange a few whispered words. A gathering of sober dignity, save one woman.
She rode further back in the column, with the minor courtiers, with no standard or device save a silver staff. The hulking mountain of a man—four-armed and dour-faced, and even more darkly complexioned than she was—ought to have drawn Llewyn’s eye first, but there was something about the woman. She held herself tall in the saddle, sweeping her gaze over the crowds to either side of the road with a curious, bemused expression, as though there was something absurd about this gathering of thousands to mourn the death of the king.
The woman’s gaze found his. Llewyn started, as he still did, eight years later—but there was no longer any glamour to protect him from such unwanted intimacy with strangers. The woman reached for something in her pocket and brought it to her eye. It glinted in the morning light, like glass.
‘Well?’ Siwan pressed. ‘Will you put up a fuss, or accept that I’m going to perform whether you agree or not?’
He made himself look away. If the woman had some sort of spyglass, she might pick him out from the crowd atop the hillock. She was a sorceress, he was certain, by her staff, bearing and sensitivity to his gaze. Clearly not someone overly constrained by courtly manners. Not the sort of person whose attention he wanted.
Siwan went on, the frustration in her voice becoming more pronounced and louder, drawing a few annoyed glances from others in the crowd. ‘It’ll be a small crowd, tonight. Safer, I suppose, if that matters. And I’ll wear the bloody mask. Stones, Llewyn, say something.’
‘We should go,’ he said, reaching for her hand.
She snatched it away. ‘It’s only started!’
‘Go with me now, and you can sing tonight.’
‘Oh? You’re giving your permission?’
‘I’m saying I won’t put up a fuss.’
She shook her head in disbelief. ‘Why does everything have to be a battle?’
Words that twisted his heart. ‘Siwan, please.’
With a sigh, she stalked down the slope. ‘Fine.’ She headed back towards the midnight blue pavilion that marked the Silver Lake stage, bedecked in white flags like a full moon shattered into fragments. Llewyn allowed himself one last glance at the procession. The sorceress was still there, but he saw no glimmer of her spyglass. She leaned in her saddle towards the four-armed giant beside her, exchanging words Llewyn might once have gleaned with a cracked stone and a word of magic.
Afanan had plenty such stones, but Llewyn could no more use them than vanish in plain sight, any longer.
Whoever the woman was, he had given her no reason to think him any more than an ordinary man having a spat with his daughter. Yet the druid in Llysbryn had seemed little danger, when first he came to their performance at the inn. It was only on his return the next night, and the night after—his gaze not on the tumblers and players, but on the musician’s pit, where Siwan sat with her gittern—that Llewyn recognised the threat he was.
As Llewyn turned to follow Siwan, a nightjar called nearby, annoyed that the crowd upon the hillock had disturbed its bedding down for the day. He yawned, sympathetic, and rolled back his shoulders. They never used to ache, before.
Siwan disappeared into the backstage tent as soon as they reached the camp—either to put some finishing touches on her dress for the performance, or simply to get some privacy from him after their argument. Llewyn wanted sleep, but he wanted an outlet for his worries more. He lingered in front of the stage, in the audience’s pit, and watched the hillock.
Cheers wafted on the breeze, then faded as the tail of the funeral procession passed. Soon after, four figures approached the Silver Lake stage. Three were men grown. Harwick, the strongman, was as wide as a wagon wheel. His husband Spil, in contrast, was thin as a reed. They walked together, Spil’s hand disappearing entirely into Harwick’s meaty fist. Jareth followed behind them, an actor only a few years from middle age, with golden hair and chiselled features that seemed half a fae glamour. Ahead of them ran Damon, a lad just this side of boyhood. Ram’s horns grew from his mop of curly hair.
‘Llewyn!’ Damon called. ‘Did you see Prince Owyn? Stones, he had a severe look about him. Hard to believe we’re of an age.’
Damon was the rising star of the Silver Lake Troupe. Afanan had found him as an urchin on the streets of Glascoed, and adopted him into the troupe only a year before Llewyn met her in Nyth Fran. He’d started as a tumbler, but Llewyn had watched him draw from a deeper well of talent as he grew. Under Afanan’s tutelage he had learned to read and write, and now he not only performed in the troupe’s plays—though more often sidekicks or villains, while golden-haired Jareth took on the heroic roles—but wrote them and devised the set pieces.
Damon and Siwan had become fast friends—and were becoming more than that to each other, now that they were nearing adulthood. His expansiveness and skill inspired her. She had told Llewyn as much last time they had argued about her desire to perform on stage. And he wanted for her what Damon had—that confidence, that blossoming into his place in the world. But Damon was not stalked by the same dangers that would follow Siwan all her life. There was no risk, to him, in attention. No danger that someone in the audience might see him not as a talented performer, but as a tool to be taken and wielded, or as an abomination to be destroyed.
‘Also, I didn’t know the House of Abal were black of hair,’ Damon mused. ‘None of the histories I read bothered to mention it.’
He perched his chin on the crook between thumb and forefinger and narrowed his eyes at Jareth.
Jareth glared back and tossed his golden mane. ‘Do not tell me to wear dye.’
‘It would be more authentic,’ Damon pointed out.
‘Oh?’ Jareth snarled. ‘Which do you prefer, Damon? Authenticity, or having both horns on your head, rather than snapped off and shoved up your arse?’
‘Now, now, boys,’ said Spil, interposing his reed-thin body between the two youths. ‘The dye wouldn’t dry before tonight, anyway, and we won’t have time to find a replacement for the Beast-King of Galca if you impale Damon on his own horns.’
Jareth visibly chafed at being called ‘boy’, let alone being lumped in with Damon.
‘I’m irritated,’ he declared. ‘I’ll need to sleep the rest of the afternoon if I’m to be any use tonight. Harwick, see that no one wakes me.’
Harwick nodded a solemn promise, then rolled his eyes as soon as Jareth’s back was turned.
‘The trouping life would be so pleasant if not for the egos of actors,’ Harwick mused in his rumbling voice. ‘Present company excepted, of course.’
Spil poked Harwick in the ribs.
Damon laughed. ‘Of course. I think of myself more as a playwright, anyway.’
‘Oh!’ Spil put the back of his hand to his forehead and mimed fainting. ‘The lad betrays our noble art! Cruel defection! And for what?’
‘Respectability?’ Harwick ventured.
That elicited another poke to the ribs.
‘Jareth may be a ponce,’ Spil said. ‘But he’s right that we all need sleep.’ He tugged at Harwick’s hand and made for their tent. ‘Come along, dear.’
‘Harwick,’ Llewyn interrupted. ‘I need your help with something.’
‘Ach, another barrel to move?’ The strongman rubbed his ox-wide shoulders and winced. He offered Spil an apologetic smile, then turned to follow Llewyn. ‘Well, let’s be quick about it, then.’
Damon offered his help, too. But much as the boy cared for Siwan, Llewyn did not want to involve him. Despite a hard beginning, he had an innocence about him. One that would be soiled by Llewyn’s fears. Llewyn insisted he get some sleep—if King Abal would be well rested for the evening, his enemy the Beast-King should be, too.
‘All right then,’ Damon said. He tugged at the lock of hair behind one of his horns. ‘Before you go, I wanted to ask, on Siwan’s behalf … Well, she desperately wants to perform tonight, but says you wouldn’t let her—’
‘We’ve already discussed it,’ Llewyn said, with a deepening of the ever-present itch of fear on the back of his neck. ‘She can play, so long as she wears the mask.’
Damon’s eyes lit up. A grin split his boyish face. ‘Excellent!’ He beamed. ‘Where is she? I mean, she might want stage coaching.’ He coughed, awkward in his excitement.
Llewyn nodded towards the backstage tent, and Damon scampered off to celebrate with Siwan.
‘Where’s that barrel, then?’ Harwick said, stifling a yawn.
Other members of the troupe were returning from the procession. Tula and Trick, the contortionist and the tumbler, were engaged in some argument about royal burial practices as they made for their tent. Ayden and Mirelle, the troupe’s musicians and the two oldest members of their company—excepting, perhaps, Afanan herself, whose age was something of a mystery—ambled down the hillside and greeted Llewyn and Harwick with a wave. Llewyn drew Harwick to the edge of the camp.
‘There’s no barrel,’ Llewyn admitted.
Harwick sighed. ‘Of course there isn’t. Is this about Siwan performing tonight?’
‘More than that. Did you see the sorceress in the funeral procession?’
‘Queen Medrith?’
‘No. Further back. With the silver staff and the eyepiece. There was a four-armed hulk of a man beside her.’
Harwick frowned. ‘What of her?’
‘She was watching the hillock,’ Llewyn said. ‘She may have seen Siwan.’
‘From the road?’ Harwick rubbed the side of his face. ‘Llewyn … you need sleep. It was a long night. You don’t like being around so many people. You’re worried. I understand. But this isn’t like Llysbryn.’
‘How not?’ Llewyn bristled. ‘If anything, this is more dangerous. A court sorceress rather than a hedge druid.’
‘A court sorceress who has yet to attend one of our performances,’ Harwick pointed out. ‘What makes you think she will?’
‘I’m telling you, she was watching the hillock.’
Harwick bulled over that point. ‘And what do you suggest we do? Stalk her back to her rooms in the castle or the merchant quarter? I was never an assassin, Llewyn. Just a soldier, and that was a long time ago.’
At Llysbryn, Harwick had been hesitant. A decade, he had said, since he’d killed a man. In the end he hadn’t done the killing, only emerged from the edge of the druid’s glade to distract his attention while Llewyn crept up behind.
Still, the strongman’s face had gone sallow and his eyes had drawn distant while the druid’s blood pooled. ‘It was necessary,’ Llewyn had told him, hearing an echo of the Grey Lady in his own voice. ‘He had designs on Siwan.’
‘I’m not so sure,’ Harwick had said, his voice cold and quiet. ‘Not so sure at all.’
Once, Llewyn might have handled such threats on his own. Shadow and glamour would have concealed him. A broken piece of quartz might have stifled the sound of his footsteps. Another gemstone to carry whispers to his ear. Now he had little more than the strength of his arm and his ghostwood blade. Not enough, without help.
Harwick grimaced. A flicker of the shamed expression he had worn over the druid’s corpse traced his face. ‘If Siwan is in such danger, why not tell Afanan? She’s better able to protect her than we are.’
Because Afanan was, herself, a sorceress, and she still possessed the stone that imprisoned the greater half of the raven fiend. After eight years, she had yet to reveal what she intended to do with it. Yes, she was kind, and Llewyn had far more friendly memories of her than frightening. She ate and drank and joked with the troupe—treated them as a mother hen might treat rambunctious chicks—and it was easy to forget her power to call flame and lightning from the air with a snap of her fingers and a broken gem. But Llewyn would not forget the wraith in the woods of Nyth Fran, bound to her geas and sent to stalk him.
She seemed one of the better people he had known. But the Grey Lady, too, thought herself good, and viewed at a certain angle, her cruelties might seem beneficent. Llewyn better trusted Harwick, who acknowledged old sins and old pains. He better trusted a murderer on the road, in truth. With the nakedly wicked, one could count on a certain measure of honesty.
