The pain burned, searing through him, its fire fed by memories that replayed themselves again and again. The golden curls bouncing on the back of his mother’s head as she left the Daisy and Drake for the last time—as she left him for the last time. Seeing her again on the stage of The Rose, a woman transformed by wealth and adulation. Only there by her invitation, her first and only gesture that she remembered having borne a son. That idiot boy Damon giving him notes and suggestions, when the fool had been no more than a tumbler only a year before.

  The girl. Her spray of freckles. The wooden stake she had driven through his spine.

  A life ought to mean something. To have a destination, its struggles only the twists and turns on the path to earning that longed-for reward. Ought not to end suddenly, for no reason but an accidental meeting on the road.

  Or perhaps that belief was only the product of the stories he had bathed in all his life. A false trust in narratives meant to hold attention and offer reassurance, rather than reveal the truth.

  A scream anchored him to the present moment. A scream he knew.

  Memory had become clearer to him than sight. When he thought of his mother on that stage, it was as though he were there again, watching her curls gleam in the multicoloured lights—wonders in their own right; The Rose had an old legacy, and rumour told the First Folk themselves had built it. He heard his mother’s voice catching in those distant, perfect rafters and rolling down to every ear in the theatre. Smelled the sweat and perfume of the people around him, felt the plush seat, so much finer than anything he knew from the Daisy and Drake.

  But the world around him had become clouded, its sounds muted, its textures vague. Only his own corpse held clarity. In a landscape like smudged, muddy watercolour it stood out with the precision and vibrancy of reality.

  His killer, too, would hold that clarity. His pain pulsed at the thought of her. Images of terrible violence flashed through his unsteady mind. A vision of revenge, promising relief from his agony. She deserved to suffer as he suffered. More, for what she had done was a worse crime than simple hurt. A clipping of a rose before its blooming. The burning of an unfinished book. Destruction of a wonder before its chance to become wondrous.

  ‘It’s Jareth,’ the voice that had screamed said, reminding him again that something existed other than the painful past and mourned-for future. A figure knelt over his corpse: one that resolved slowly, like a blot of ink drying into the semblance of a girl he recognised. With a swell of rage he thought, for a moment, she was his killer. But no. She held a certain sharpness, but not the awful, demanding clarity he knew would mark out the origin of his pain.

  He did know her, though. Siwan. Not an innocent. A girl stained by dozens of deaths—accidents, perhaps, but born from her nonetheless. His own death had its origin in fear of her.

  Delivering his rage to her would not soothe him, he knew. Yet there was an impulse, and a temptation.

  Other figures gradually appeared. He recognised them all, though they were little more than shadowed silhouettes. Only one carried a name, seared into him by resentment and frustration. The boy Damon, who thought so much of himself. A jumped-up tumbler with pretensions to the stage, and none of the gravitas or destiny it required. The boy had been given not only prominent roles, but the influence of authorship, which stung Jareth like nettles. Not the same pain that dwelt at the core of him, but an offshoot of it, sharp with thorns.

  ‘Poor bastard,’ Damon muttered.

  ‘Serves him right for running off,’ another voice said.

  ‘No one deserves this, Spil,’ Siwan murmured gently.

  One of the other figures—as broad as a barn and nearly as ugly—walked past his corpse and surveyed the path he had crawled in agonising, lurching spasms.

  ‘Had the same thought I did, it seems,’ the big figure said. Harwick: his name bubbled up from the murky pool of memory. A pleasant afternoon spent with a deck of cards and a bottle of fine gin, courtesy of a well-entertained innkeeper. ‘Met someone up there who didn’t want to be met, maybe.’

  And then a woman who resolved with almost perfect clarity. He did not know her name, but he knew her face, knew those generous, terrible hands that had filled his with gold and set him on the path towards his death. If not for her, he would not have felt the swell of hope that left him vulnerable. Who can say—his killer might have taken his hospitality and parted ways with him come morning if not for the tempting gleam of gold.

  This one … Lashing out at her might not heal him, but it would let him feel something other than the constant, radiating pain.

  The pain burned brighter, filled him, narrowed his focus until all became echoes but his corpse and the woman standing over it, wearing guilt as a mask over her complicity. It filled his being, pulled him taut. A bowstring nocked and ready.

  ‘We have time to bury him,’ the woman said. She began to gather stones, placing them around his body in a rough circle. ‘This kingdom is haunted enough.’

  The others stood and watched.

  ‘Our pursuer could be close behind,’ another voice said—Llewyn. Sound carried memory better than sight.

  ‘He died by violence, and in agony,’ the woman said, placing another stone. ‘If you abandon him like this, he will become a wraith.’

  ‘And piling some stones is enough to prevent that?’ asked Siwan.

  ‘Doesn’t it lessen your own hurts when another person recognises them?’ the woman answered. ‘It comforts the dead to know they are not forgotten, that the living feel an echo of their pain. He was your friend. Would you deny him a decent burial just because he stole a few coins and fled in a panic?’

  A sentiment which only stoked Jareth’s rage. How could they, the living, with their dreams not forever shattered, ‘feel an echo’ of a fraction of his pain? It was insulting. Like the scattered, obligatory applause of a tavern audience more interested in their drinks and conversation.

  ‘She’s right,’ another of the silhouettes said—thin and dark, and hanging on Harwick’s arm, with an expression mournful enough to be almost believable. ‘However much a bastard he was in the end, he was one of us. We owe him a proper send-off.’

  Harwick grunted, and the two went off with Siwan to gather more stones. Llewyn muttered a curse and slumped to the ground, wincing and holding his side, his own hurts overruling what sympathy he might have felt for the dead. Llewyn could always be counted on not to flatter.

  The boy Damon muttered something, cast about the field, selecting rocks, scratching at them with the edge of his belt knife, discarding them, until he found one that satisfied him. He knelt over the stone and went on scratching with his knife. Meanwhile, the woman who had doomed him with her gift of gold began drawing in the dirt while Harwick, Spil and Siwan continued gathering stones.

  It was better than being left open to the elements and beasts. Better than the indignity of bloating under the sun and withering to rotten leather and bleached bone. They offered him a gesture towards dignity.

  But only a gesture! A barrow of hastily piled stones would do little against a determined scavenger, nor against the seep of rain and grasping fingers of rot. No better than half-hearted congratulations after a poor performance. No more dignified than acting upon an improvised stage of crates and tabletops. An ignoble end to an ignoble life, and a life that should have been so much more!

  The pain burned brighter. Wrath consumed him, drove him to reach down. A grasping hand to seize the throat of this woman who he knew, with that small part of his mind still capable of anything but anger, was not truly responsible for his death. But who lay within reach. Whose suffering might soothe him for a moment.

  Harwick placed a stone on Jareth’s body, beginning to bury him. The woman shook her head and removed the stone. ‘Only a circle,’ she said. ‘I will do the rest.’

  Jareth reached down, could feel his wrath working upon the world, gathering strength, ready to rip and tear.

  ‘You would give him a king’s burial?’ Spil said with a note of confusion inflected with awe, surveying the spiral she had carved in the dirt.

  Jareth stayed his hand.

  ‘Better than piled stones, no?’ the woman said. ‘I saw how the druids did it.’

  There was a moment of quiet but for Damon’s scraping at the flat stone he had chosen.

  ‘Isn’t it blasphemy?’ Spil said at last.

  ‘He played a king upon the stage, where he was most alive and most himself,’ Damon said, not looking up from his work. ‘Let him be buried as one.’

  Words that cracked Jareth’s heart, letting him return, for a moment, to himself. Harwick, Spil and Siwan stood aside, watching as the woman finished her drawing.

  The woman hesitated a moment, the rock she had been scrawling with poised to make a final line. She put her finger to something bundled against her chest and brought it away dribbling blood, then knelt beside Jareth’s body.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Siwan demanded.

  ‘The dead who die like this do not want only to be remembered,’ the woman answered.

  With her own blood she drew a design on Jareth’s back—the back of his corpse; he had observed all of this from a strange position, drifting in the air, as though watching a performance on a distant stage through muddy opera glasses. She closed the circle of blood, and he felt at once a sudden inward pull, as though afflicted by a new gravity that drew him not towards earth, but towards her.

  There was a blurred moment. A smear in the record of his memory, and then he saw with eyes that were not his eyes, the colours of the world no longer dulled by death, but different, also, from how he remembered them from life. His mind reeled in panic, reached out, and found himself bound within a body as though he were alive again. A body that was not his own.

  A thought that was not his thought filled his mind.

  Panic swelled within him. He should have suspected she was a sorceress, like Afanan. She meant to bind him to one of these stones and use his soul for a weapon. He had let his guard down for a moment, disarmed by the kindness of her lies.

 

  He was a howling wind of terror and outrage. He could feel her body as once he had felt his own. The chill breeze on her cheek. The scent of earth and grass; even the stink of his own corpse. And, along with all her other senses, he felt the strength of her limbs.

  There. He seized upon that strength, tried to twist her arms, her hands to her own throat and rip and tear and—

  Silence. Darkness. Again a disembodied spirit, now bound in a void absent all sensation.

  Then a voice.

  He roared, thoughts lent volume by anger and grief.

  Fola demanded again, and he felt a surge of compulsion. Some spell she worked to bend him to her will. Or perhaps only a need to unburden himself. To share his pain, even with this witch-woman who tortured him in death.

  He called the memory to mind. Not his final memory—there were, afterwards, the blurred and agonised hours dragging himself towards the road on weakening arms, pulling legs behind that preceded the rest of him into death—but the sharpest, the most painful. The burning seed at the core of him.

  The girl. Her freckle-splashed face. So innocent. So unassuming. And then the spike bursting from his belly, the spray of his blood. A glimpse of her monstrous wolf, and then of her face, changed now. Sharper. Rougher. Freckles and innocence replaced by shallow, uncaring cruelty.

  The memory hurt too much. He felt it changing him, twisting him into nothing but gnashing teeth and a hand grasping desperately for vengeance.

  Fola told him.

  The memory faded, and then sensation blurred again and he was free, floating in the air beside his corpse. The others gathered around. Harwick placed the last stone to complete the ring around him, then stood back and folded Spil’s hand into his. Spil leaned his head on Harwick’s broad shoulder. Siwan and Damon, too, held hands, but more subtly, still in that first nervous blush of a new relationship. Llewyn sat and watched, his breathing laboured, while Fola drew the final line of her spell.

  The ground within the ring of stones began to ripple, then to heave, the surface breaking open with a scent of moss, of clover and wild flowers and sprouting trees, of rich loam and peat and all the bounty of good soil. Earth roiled up, as though boiling, to cover Jareth’s body in a barrow like that of an ancient king. The weight of it settled on Jareth’s soul. A comforting blanket against the cold of the void.

  Guilt caught in him as his wrath faded. In its place, more memories bubbled up. Watching Siwan fumble at the gittern, her face scrunched up in concentration, her little fingers too small and soft to firmly hold the strings. The night when the takings at the inn they’d played had been so poor that the innkeeper had no way to pay them but by opening an old, unwanted cask of bitter cider that Jareth, Trick and Harwick drained in a night of laughter and bawdy songs. The day when he had caught Damon behind the wagon with a playbook of How Soft Blows the Eastern Wind? gesticulating grandly and practising Polon’s opening soliloquy. The boy had turned bright red in embarrassment, but after a burst of surprised laughter Jareth had sat him down and worked him through the lines, helping him draw out the deeper meanings of the text.

  Damon stepped forward now, the flat stone he had been carving balanced between his upturned hands. He laid it gently on the face of the barrow and pressed it into the earth, then read:

  ‘Here lies Jareth of the Silver Lake Troupe, who deserved a kinder death, a longer life and a grander stage.’

  They stood a while longer in silence, then began sharing their own stories. Fragments of who he had been, carried in these disparate, other souls, reassembled for a moment. While they laughed and wept and held mournful, sombre quiet, Jareth found himself wondering where the other troupers were—not from resentment of their absence, but a sense of incompleteness. Ayden, Mirelle, Trick, Roni and Tula. Afanan. They held pieces of him, too. He would have liked to see them once more, here at the end.

  At last they returned to their horses. They rode east, the same path he had hoped to travel back to Afondir. Back to The Rose. To the dream he had dreamed since childhood. Now forever unfulfilled.

  He saw her, then. His mother. Golden curls full of stage light. But this time, he caught her eye. She turned, looked down upon him from the stage, smiled, and knelt, and extended a hand.

  An end to one life. To one dream.

  He reached out to her and felt himself begin to fade.

  IV. Companions in Misery

  Cracks in the Kingdom

  YC 1189

  Indeed, the cultivation of virtue ought to be its own reward, as the Heresiarch so wisely observes in her treatise. What a blessing it is, then, that in addition to providing moral certainty, civilisation and a future for mortalkind beyond the shadow of the First Folk, the virtues convey as well the blessings and powers of the Venerated Agion.

  Wari the Younger, Pedagogue of the Mortal Church, Condemnation of the Interrogatory Heresy, YC 773

  There was a temptation to take satisfaction in the carnage as Torin surveyed the southern gatehouse of Parwys City. The heavy oaken doors had been blasted apart, leaving little more than splintered planks. Corpses lay nearby, covered in bloodstained sheets. He had arrived too late to examine them, and it would be gauche to pry beneath those coverings, though he wondered at these accounts of a wooden sword carving through steel armour.

  Some of the bodies, even beneath their coverings, were badly distorted; the fury of a rimewolf’s jaws left little more than mangled remnants. A handful of the Count of Cilbran’s retinue, experts in such sport, had been tasked with hunting the beast down. It had struck without warning, shrouded in sorcery to appear as an ordinary—if overlarge—dog; so the surviving gate guards claimed, anyway. A fae monster. Another remnant of a world better left behind.

  Torin could not have orchestrated a more useful sequence of events if he had tried—save for the hour he had spent heaving out his guts after suffering a blow from the sorceress Fola’s staff. A cruel weapon. Its strange power had wrung his stomach dry, twisting and squeezing until he lay in an exhausted heap, an acidic stink buried deep in his nostrils and a crust of vomit speckling his mouth. Thank the blessed Agion that he had managed not to shit himself in the process.

  No matter. Anwe had recovered the hateful thing. It would soon be redeemed in service to the Church.

  Returning to the castle, he met Anwe in the courtyard. Jon Kenn, the balding scholar and the prince’s tutor, tended to her most severe wounds: a deep slash from collarbone to left shoulder; a bite torn from her right thigh. The minor injuries had already clotted and begun to scab. A deep tankard of beer and a platter of cheeses and dried meats waited on the bench beside her.

  ‘You saw what it did to the gate?’ Anwe said, licking crumbs of cheese from her fingers. She winced as Jon Kenn applied a gritty paste to her wounded shoulder.

  ‘I did,’ Torin said, dismounting. A stable boy appeared and took his reins. He worked stiffness from his back and shook his head. ‘It baffles me, Anwe. It must connect to the horrors last night, but I do not yet see how.’

  ‘My prisoner might tell you,’ Anwe said with a cruel grin. ‘Might take some convincing, though.’

  A thrill shot through Torin. He sighed to keep Anwe from noticing. ‘It would be easier if Orn would wake,’ he said. ‘I do not know enough to put the questions effectively. Besides, the queen—on behalf of the prince, of course—has taken charge of your “prisoner”. I doubt she will grant me access, let alone the freedom to question as I must. She clings to her magic and her power, even at her kingdom’s expense.’

 

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