Aneirin

By the time Aneirin finally buried the last of his family’s relics, the moon was out, which was probably the only thing that kept Aneirin from spending the night on the Slopes, because after spending the day putting his family to rest, Aneirin didn’t think he could concentrate enough to make the lightfist that Rees had taught him. He started back to Ganlin Hall in the mostly-dark, barely able to put one foot in front of the other. Between his fingers was his mother’s translucent ivory amulet. Though he had tried three times, he hadn’t been able to bring himself to bury it. The last time, he had actually dug it back up and hugged it to his heart before breaking into tears again.

Everyone. Everyone dead except one bitter old man. Aneirin had waffled between trying to escape Bryda with his life and infiltrating the Spyre and killing everyone there. Hell, all he would have to do is tell Auldhund Commander Guto that the Vethyles and Norfelds had killed his entire family before his eyes and the Auldhunds would do his work for him.

Of the two options, the last made the most sense. The Unmade had backed the Ganlins for centuries, ever since Nerys Ganlin and Wulmaer the Red had formed the first bond of the Old Order since the fall of Ariod, breaking the taboo and granting the Auldhunds the same freedoms as the Aulds of the Spyre. If the Auldhunds found out the Vethyles had killed the family that was responsible for freeing them, they wouldn’t stop until the debt had been repaid.

Aneirin replaced the rotten leather of the necklace’s thong with the sturdy string that cinched the base of his shirt, then lowered the necklace over his neck. He wasn’t sure, but he thought he felt an odd tingle in his stomach, almost as if his mother had put her hand there to ease the hurt and loneliness.

That thought threatened tears again, and Aneirin quickly tucked the necklace under his clothes and headed for the Hall.

As he was exiting the grove that now protected the entrance to the mines, he noticed that Nerys’s aspen tree didn’t look quite right. Frowning, he paused and gave it another look, touching its surface in the moonlight.

He cried out when his aunt’s face moved under his hand, becoming a trunk again, then a face, then a trunk, then a face…

Agonized, Aneirin glanced at the others, expecting whatever enchantment that had spawned here to finally be decaying, an instance of Function not strong enough to be permanently anchored in Form, but the other trees appeared totally stable. Frowning, he looked back at Nerys Ganlin’s tree.

The Sheet-Charmer of Broketoe. The one Ganlin Auldin who had never been tested—because she refused, and because the Auldhunds took her side when Wynfor and the others tried to force her—so she had been assigned an arbitrary rank of eight-three, just above Rees and just under Wynfor. She was a legend as much because she had defeated Thibault and his tszieni as for the fact that she had done it entirely with cloth. For the last three centuries, she’d rarely left Ganlin Hall, preferring to stay at home making tapestries. She had been one of the few aside from Agathe and Rees who would stand up to Wynfor when the old man was being unreasonable, and it was a well-known secret in Ganlin Hall that aside from big family dinners, she refused to be found in the same room with the man—a rumor about selling her to the Auld of Nefyti to spare his own life.

Aneirin watched his aunt’s image fluctuate for another five minutes before it disappeared entirely. He frowned, waiting for the next in line to do the same, but the faces in the trees all remained steady. Just Nerys had faded…

Disquieted, suddenly once again fully aware that he was alone in the dark, surrounded by death and silence, an inexplicable enchanted grove moving of its own accord above him, Aneirin hurried back to Ganlin Hall by moonlight.

He was rounding the side of the main building, intending to head into the back to avoid the huge, empty rooms and their burns and bloodstains, when he heard thumping emanating from one of the ground-level windows in the basement section. Aneirin froze, listening.

The thumping continued, desperate and frenzied.

It was Nerys’ room. Small and cramped, she had been offered the suite of a full Auldin, but she had refused, preferring instead to sleep in the basement, across the hall from the weaving supplies and the seamstresses’ room.

Heart beginning to pound out of control, now, Aneirin broke into a run. He hit the back door hard enough to throw it open into the opposite wall, then barreled through the halls to the basement staircase. He started to hear the thumping again at the base of the stairs, and by the time he was standing in the narrow hall outside Nerys Ganlin’s room, it was a crazed ruckus that could have come from ten men.

Aneirin hesitated, suddenly aware of the fact he was all alone—the final survivor of the massacre that happened here two months ago. It could be anyone inside, and here he was just going to barge in thinking Nerys was somehow still alive and camped out in her room after months. The tree’s odd flickering face had brought his guard down.

Swallowing hard, Aneirin wove another illusion through the air around himself. And, oddly, it seemed it took him much less time to complete the change in Function than usual, almost as if his veoh was more concentrated.

But that had to be fear talking. He could barely hear through the pounding of his heart against his eardrums.

He stayed there for several minutes, listening for voices. If it was several men riffling through Nerys’ things, be they scavengers or Vethyles, they would have to speak to each other eventually.

But they didn’t. For ten minutes, the wood-on-stone thumping came—random and not rhythmic, the sound of a struggling thing—without a single voice to add to the crazed fray. Eventually, Aneirin put his hand on the door, praying Nerys hadn’t gotten Rees or Agathe to put some nasty smart enchantment on it to keep out intruders.

When nothing happened, not even a tingle of veoh, Aneirin turned the knob and pushed.

At the first squeak of the hinges, the thumping stopped.

“Hello?” Aneirin said softly, stepping inside. He reached out, trying to sense aggressive spells, but in a place like Ganlin Hall, where Aulds a hundred times more powerful than he had been weaving spells for millennia, it was like trying to raise a torch in a foggy room. The entire place reeked of veoh, making his calves and the beds of his toenails itch.

Aside from a bed, a bundle of tapestries against the wall, a clothes chest, and a giant loom that took up most of the living space, the room was empty. Nothing was out of place, and all was quiet and still in the dim moonlight streaming through the window near the ceiling.

Seeing that there was nothing in the room that could have been making that noise, Aneirin grew cold. He immediately stepped away from the door, just in case there was a Vethyle strong enough to cast one of Rees’s illusions inside.

When nothing happened, he tentatively whispered into the open doorway, “Aunt Nerys?”

Silence.

“It’s me, Aneirin.”

Suddenly, the heavy wooden chest at the foot of the bed started to flail, the thick steel banding straining with the force of whatever was locked inside.

“Aunt Nerys!” Aneirin cried, rushing to the chest and to kneel in front of it. He looked for some sort of key, but could find none. “Are you in there?!”

More struggling.

Gagged, then? Whoever put her in there would have thrown away the key, so Aneirin centered himself and began pouring his veoh into the lock. He found a weak enchantment holding the lid in place, and was able to overwhelm the spell with his own.

The moment the chest came open, however, it wasn’t his aunt that rushed out. It was a metal shirt, seemingly woven of strands of steel, flying at his face as if possessed.

“Mmph!” Aneirin screamed, as it tried to stuff itself down his throat and battered at the sides of his head. “Aunt Nerys, it’s me!” He grabbed the shirt in a fist and tore it away from his face with great effort, shoving it aside so he could breathe. When he saw the inside of the trunk, however, he was shocked to see that it was empty. He blinked. “Aunt Nerys?”

The shirt brought Aneirin’s attention back to the problem at hand, as it had started to wrap itself around his wrist, constricting like a snake.

“Ow, ow!” Aneirin cried, trying to throw it off. His hand had already gone numb. “Nerys, it’s me, your nephew. Aneirin Ganlin. I’m here to help. I survived the attack, too!”

The metal shirt tightening on his forearm went still, then slowly loosened. The front of it swung away from his wrist and turned to ‘face’ him, and Aneirin got the chilling sensation that the shirt was ‘looking’ at him. It continued to ‘stare’ at him for a moment, then slipped from his wrist entirely, flopping onto the floor and crawling eerily towards the pile of tapestries in one corner of the room.

“Aunt Nerys?” Aneirin asked the shirt, nervously keeping his distance. He had heard of enchanted shirts that had at one time or another saved her life, but this didn’t seem enchanted. This seemed…alive.

Inching like a worm, the shirt crawled over to the pile of tapestries and slapped it, making an odd, hollow resounding thump, like the head of a drum. The shirt ‘turned’ back to ‘face’ Aneirin and then pointedly repeated the procedure several times, causing a wave of goosebumps to roll down Aneirin’s back at the intelligence he saw there.

That, he thought, taking a step back, is not natural.

The shirt hit the cloth pile again, insistently, and it took Aneirin a moment to refocus enough to realize that the cloth in the pile hadn’t actually sounded like cloth at all…

Frowning, Aneirin went over to the bundle—careful to keep the shirt at arm’s-length—and crouched beside the mass of cloth. What had first appeared to be a pile of rolled and folded tapestries was not quite right, almost like the cloth was ballooned out from some great inward pressure. Gingerly, he reached out and touched it.

The cloth might as well have been solid steel for all the give it had in it. Wrapped in layer after layer were Nerys’ tapestries that she had woven for Ganlin Hall, most of which contained Auldhunds or scenes from before the fall of Ariod to three hundred years ago, during the days of the Auldhund Emancipation. And, now that he was looking, it was roughly ten feet long and four feet wide, easily big enough for a person to be hiding within.

“Aunt Nerys?” Aneirin whispered, reaching for a stray corner of the hard shell of fabric.

He yanked his hand back when the cloth tightened under his touch, rewrapping itself even more firmly than it had been before.

Aneirin’s heart began to hammer, realizing there was only one Auldin in the world who could enchant cloth—to anyone else with the power to do so, it would kill them from the multitude of tiny breaks in Form with every movement of the material.

Which meant he wasn’t the only one.