Page 47 of The Tower of the Tyrant

She returned the mask to her face and turned back to the stage.

‘Siwan, wait,’ he pleaded, his hand reaching of its own accord and closing on her arm.

She froze, a shudder working through her.

‘Take your hand off me,’ she said without turning to face him, her voice teetering on the edge of fury.

‘You need to listen,’ he said.

‘No, Llewyn.You need to let me go.’

It would have been a simple thing to open his hand, to let her return to the stage—to the life she had chosen for herself, despite its dangers.A simple thing to let her passion and desire—her own portrait of her self—overrule his anxieties.To let her be the person she chose, no matter how uncomfortable her choices made him.

‘Papa… Please… help me.’

She didn’t understand.He wasn’t afraidofher, only of what might happen to her.The raven fiend was more than a burden she had to carry; it made her a target.The Grey Lady would destroy her as an abomination.Others, like this Fola woman, would seize the power bound to her bones and twist it to their own dark ends.She was too young, and too brave, and too determined to move past the suffering of her childhood.Llewyn loved her for her strength, but the difference between courage and foolhardiness is a fine line: one, in his thinking, she strode past as she walked back to the stage.

Fear is no easy thing to overcome.

‘I can’t,’ he said.

She whirled, her muscles going as tight as bowstrings beneath his hand.The burning yellow of her eyes shone through the dark lenses of her mask.

‘Let me go!’

The words rocked him back on his heels, struck the breath from his lungs and the strength from his arms.His fingers spasmed open and Siwan pulled away, trembling with fury.

‘You are such anarsehole!’she roared.A gust of wind rolled out from her, buffeting him back a step.It carried the must of old bones and crow’s wings.She opened her mouth with other, darker words on her tongue, but the trembling crawled up her shoulders to her jaw and held it shut.

‘No, Siwan, no,’ Llewyn said, breathless, desperate, terrified.How could I have been so stupid.Not now.Not here.Not with that woman in the crowd just paces away.‘Deep breath, girl.Please.’

‘Fuck you,’ she said through teeth clenched vice-tight.She ripped the mask from her face, hurling it away in a spray of torn fabric and feathers, and jabbed a finger at his eye.‘You arsehole.You bastard.You festering pustule.You splinter in my flesh and blade in my neck.’ Her words slurred, the tones of her voice that he so loved shattering into a monstrous raven’s screech.‘I should have given up the girl and torn you to shreds in the forest gwyddien slave bloody child-stealer basta-a-r–’ Another shudder twisted through her, shifting bones out of alignment and rolling back her eyes.A sick smile contorted her face.

‘Never too late,’ she coughed, and collapsed, her body seizing, heels and head drumming the rug floor of the tent.

‘Afanan!’Llewyn screamed, going to his knee by the girl’s side, holding her shoulders down.It had been this bad only once before, five years ago.Afanan had showed him how she calmed it, but in that moment the memory refused to come at his call.

‘Papa …’ He heard her, as surely as he had on the altar.‘Please… help me.’

He had failed her.She deserved a saviour—a real father.He was no better than the coward who had borne her and been willing to trade her life for the promise of safety.No better than his own mother and father, who had given him away without a tear.

‘You should be proud of yourself,’ Afanan had said.How poorly she saw him.

The scent of an unearthed grave filled his nose.Above him, the cawing of unseen crows tore through the growing wind—a chorus soon joined by the moans of the angry dead.

He could only hold Siwan, and stare into her rolling eyes, and scream for help as the power of the raven fiend bound within her unfurled, reached out, and stirred the air.

Festival of Wraiths

YC 1189

Fiends share only one commonality: they are powerful, and yet inscrutable.Difficult to communicate with.Able to comprehend and convey little more than emotion and whim.If the fae are mysterious, powerful predecessors to mortalkind, then fiends are analogous to canines, cetaceans, cephalopods or corvids—those beasts of unusual intelligence—but possessing a capacity for magic unlike anything found in nature.

Archivist Eltan Oora,The Taxonomy of Sapience,YC1098

Unnatural wind tore apart the awning of the pavilion and churned the clouds overhead, swirling them into an inverse funnel.The centre stared down like a black eye, its gaze fixed on the backstage tent.On the girl Siwan the Blackbird, who had just moments ago vanished into that tent.

A number of things had fallen into place since Fola’s conversation with Medrith the day before.