The Bitterbynde Trilogy

by Cecilia Dart-Thornton

  The festoons of lead-ropes, saddles, saddlebags, stirrups, surcingles and girths, reins, bits and bridles, martingales, cruppers, and breastplates about his ears were disturbed only by a scuttling of serpiginous rock-lizards that were in the habit of basking daily on the outer walls. Cool air brushed the back of his hand like lily-petals.

  Three youths entered the gatehalls silently, two of them pulling their taltries up over their heads and tightening the drawstrings. They carried a horn lantern. The third was clad richly in black velvet edged with silver braid, colors denoting a Son of the Seventh House, for he was the heir of the Storm Chieftain. The noble youth wore a high-collared doublet, belted at the middle; full sleeves were slashed to show a lining of gleaming jet satin beneath a cloak that swung to meet turned-down boots just below the knees. Relayer uniform besported a V-shaped embroidery from shoulder to waist to shoulder in the colors of the House, and epaulets starred to indicate squadron status. The belt buckle was cast in the form of the zigzag Stormrider device, which, with its motto, “Arnath Lan Seren”—some relic of a dead language—was also emblazoned on the left side of the chest, over the heart. Two daggers were slung from his belt, in ornamented sheaths, black leather embossed with silver. The young lord’s long, walnut-brown hair was combed smoothly back and bound tightly into a club with cords of black and silver. His taltry, thrown back daringly, was edged with tiny diadems like the glints in dominite rock and sported a sable plume. Shining boots rang on stone as he approached the gate and carefully unwrapped a heavy package he carried, a blue metal box whose lid he opened. Two lustrous ingots gleamed dully in moonlight.

  Grod Sheepshorn, a lanky servant-lad with a receding chin, laughed nervously in his throat.

  “Go on, Spatchwort,” he said to his friend, “you be first since you are the clever one.”

  “It matters not who is first.”

  So saying, Lord Ustorix tossed the silvery bars over the edge of the platform, out into the chasm of night.

  From behind distant mountains the moon continued to rise, the stars slid imperceptibly across black glass. To the south, ink-dark waters stretched to the head of the bay. The sound of waves on the shore far below was carried upward on a salt wind. Horses nickered faintly, and hooves drummed in the meadows. The two silvery bars hung motionless, four hundred feet off the ground, level with the doorsill’s rock shelving.

  “Pure alt four hundred sildron ingots, I see,” said Grod Sheepshorn with an exaggerated bow to his superior. “Enough to forge hoof-crescents for half a squadron! Worth a gold piece or two to the guards for the borrowing, eh, my lord?”

  “Worth none of your business,” the aristocrat said coldly. “Let’s see you boys perform, now.”

  “First the wager,” demanded Tren Spatchwort. He stood half a head shorter than Sheepshorn, wiry and lithe.

  “One gold eagle each if you do it. Nothing if you don’t. Maybe a broken neck.”

  “Wha—one eagle?” stammered Spatchwort. “But my lord said three!”

  Ustorix rounded on the menial, teetering on the edge of civility.

  “Well do I recall the agreement. One for the first attempt, two for the second.”

  “But there was nothing said about a second—” Sheepshorn broke off and turned away. When he turned back, he was grinning. The grin did not reach his eyes. He bowed stiffly.

  “Is my life worth twenty shillings?” He laughed. “Hey for two sovereigns! My lord knows that we can do the trick once, twice, countless times! For us it is easy! True, Spatchwort?”

  The smaller youth nodded uneasily.

  Sheepshorn flung off his cloak. Measured strides brought him to the back wall of the gatehall. With a lunge, he broke into a run, straight toward the gate, where the sildron bars hung side by side several feet from the edge. His soft boots made no noise on the dominite floor. There would be no noise as his body hurtled down through four hundred feet of space—perhaps a slight disturbance when it encountered the ground below. The nameless watcher seized a martingale and gripped it fiercely. Having reached the platform, the servant-boy flung himself out and up. His leap brought him to the hovering bars. His feet planted firmly, one on each bar, the boy skated through the air, leaning back slightly, carried by his own momentum. It was a daring act, an act of great skill—for a second, as he slowed, he teetered on the brink of losing balance and life, caught it again, and stopped.

  His friend Spatchwort whistled nervously through his teeth. Ustorix said nothing.

  Squatting on his precarious perch, Sheepshorn tied the sildron bars to his boots. When he stood, he grinned again with his eyes—posed, poised like a dancer.

  “Now look at me!” he crowed softly, so softly, on the breeze. Noise would bring discovery. “I can walk on the air, like a wizard.”

  A rush of exhilaration had accompanied success. His confidence rose. Lifting a boot, he took a careful step, then another, almost swaggering. Lightly he bobbed in nothingness as he returned to the doorsill and simply stumped back inside.

  Blandly, Lord Ustorix handed over the gold coin to the erstwhile performer, who, suddenly conscious of finishing an entertaining display in style, swept him a deep and ingratiating bow. Perhaps his cynicism was lost on the noble youth; perhaps not. Ustorix showed no sign.

  The sildron ingots having been untied and returned to their gravity-defying position in space, it was Spatchwort’s turn. Moonlight accentuated the two gray wells of eyes in his pale face as he made his run. He stumbled before reaching the platform but recovered well to make the leap, and like Sheepshorn before him, he gained foothold and glided away as if on some invisible cushion. Triumphant, he slowed to a halt and fished a rope out of his pocket to tie on the bars so that he could walk. Then he looked down.

  Presently the young lord called in a low tone, “Playing statues is not part of the game. This bores me.” He drew out a dagger and started cleaning his fingernails with it.

  “Tie them on, Tren, just tie them on,” came Sheepshorn’s urgent whisper.

  After a minute, the boy in the air moved. He moved as if he were made of crystal and the dark were a tightening vise.

  He moved, and he fell.

  The hidden watcher caught his breath. A dislodged stirrup clattered to the floor near his shoulder, but the noble and the servant made no response. Spatchwort had caught hold of a sildron bar as he fell and now hung there by one hand. He simply hung, as if he had no strength or will left. An image of his own recent past formed in the watcher’s mind. Sheepshorn pulled a coil of rope from a wall-hook, unwinding it rapidly.

  “Catch hold when I throw to you,” he called. As he prepared to throw, Ustorix took the rope out of his hands and tossed the entire coil out the gate.

  “What are you doing?” Sheepshorn’s face blazed with anger and disbelief.

  “Let him hang there awhile longer. Give him a chance to prove himself by pulling himself up on top of the bar.”

  “No one could do that. It is not possible. The ingot is too small.”

  “Imagine if the unstorm came now and blew off his taltry.” Ustorix smiled. “What a joke! They wouldn’t want to use this gate for a thousand years!”

  Sheepshorn grabbed a second rope and held firmly to it, tossing one end out toward the dangling figure. Spatchwort reached for it but missed. At the second try he caught it, and Sheepshorn reeled him in like a fish. Ustorix was laughing silently. Spatchwort collapsed, trembling, on the floor. Sheepshorn lassoed the hovering ingot and drew it in.

  “You didn’t succeed,” said the Son of the House, regaining his customary coolness, “so you haven’t earned your reward. This time. However, you have another chance.”

  “How gracious of you, my lord,” replied Sheepshorn with eyes of flint.

  Lord Ustorix drew two rectangular plates of a dull blue metal from his cloak and clipped them onto the upper surfaces of the sildron ingots. The container for sildron had been made from the same stuff.

  “Andalum!” cried Sheepshorn. “Not and
alum!”

  “Hush—do you desire discovery? This will be easy for you, as you boasted. It is no more difficult than what you have just done, and it will earn you two more gold eagles each. I want to see it.”

  “But if we should somersault, if the andalum should come between the sildron and the ground, we should fall.” Sheepshorn opened his hands palms up in a gesture of honest astonishment.

  “Of course you would, but it shall not happen—why should it?”

  “My lord, we have never practiced with real sildron before, as you know.” An edge of real fear had crept into the servant’s voice. “We have only practiced with wheelboards, and with ice in Winter. What we have done is no mean feat. But to do it with an andalum surface could be suicide. We never agreed to this.”

  Ustorix shrugged. “I will leave now.”

  “No, wait.” Sheepshorn licked his lips nervously. His eyes were very bright, as bright as coins.

  “Cur, you do not honor me sufficiently,” hissed Ustorix, now irritable.

  “I am sorry, my lord—prithee wait, my lord. I will do this.”

  Ustorix threw the ingots into the air. One came down and settled at its usual height, about two inches above the floor. The other crashed on the floor, the blue side facing down. He flipped it over casually and pushed them both out of the gate. They hovered. Sheepshorn walked to the back wall. He prepared to run, to build up speed for that final leap off the ledge.

  To fall four hundred feet would take four and a half heartbeats, but it would seem longer until, accelerating to meet the cobblestones at 980 miles per hour, the descending note of a scream was cut off. This realization apparently illuminated Sheepshorn. He softly swore an oath and propped, shuddering, against the wall.

  Ustorix shrugged.

  Cramp seized the eavesdropper’s leg, and he shifted minimally. The forgotten stirrup, by his foot, rang against stone. Heads turned.

  “Methinks I heard a sound there before.”

  Crouched, heart pounding, the nameless one saw them draw back the curtains of harness and tack, peering down at him.

  “What is this?” Ustorix’s tone dripped with the acid of disgust.

  Spatchwort uneasily choked out, “It’s an ill-made thing that goes about with one of the menials, my lord. A half-wit and a mute.”

  “From whence?”

  “They say he’s a peddler’s son who was caught in a cave-in near Huntingtowers during that tremor in Autumn, or else some servant’s get, abandoned on the road.”

  “What’s it doing here, spying on us? Hey, Poxface, what do you think you’re doing? Come out of there.”

  As the discovered youth scrambled to obey, the lift-shaft rattled. In its remote depths, a cage began to ascend shakily. But before it hove into view, a deep voice boomed through the gatehall. Breathing hard, two men stood at the top of the stairwell—the dun-robed Chief Steward of the Household and the Master at Swords, cloaked in scarlet.

  “Damn my eyes,” uttered the former quizzically.

  “What brings you here, my lord Ustorix?” inquired Mortier, Master at Swords. “Do these louts trouble you? Something fell to the courtyard below this gate, and voices were heard up here. Others follow now, to investigate.”

  Ustorix paused a moment before replying. He eyed the spy reflectively.

  “My dear teacher, this creature here has stolen sildron from the treasury. Two of my servants discovered him, but instead of returning the sildron, they decided to play games with it. I was about to put a stop to all that when one of the common, blood-beggared scoundrels elected to try and kill himself.”

  “Commendable action on your part, my lord, I’m certain your father will be proud to hear it.” The Master at Swords bowed graciously.

  The lift-cage rose up in the shaft and bumped to a stop. The lift-keeper pulled back the folding iron grid, and several men strode forth. Mortier peered more closely at the disfigured youth.

  “Most interesting,” he murmured nasally. “I was not aware of this boy. Take him away. Assuredly he shall be well punished.”

  And he was.

  He had known what Grethet, his keeper, would say:

  “Who beat you? Did they see you? Did they see it is not only your face that is so repulsive?”

  Early, she had informed him of the loathliness of his flesh. He had gone to great pains to conceal the skinny frame from which he himself now always averted his gaze, but in the end his punishers had not bothered to uncover more than his back and shoulders for the whipping. A severe lashing, it cut deep and bloodily. The wounds began to weep and brought on a fever.

  For weeks he lay ill in the darkness of the candle-store, with only the spiders to hear his moans of agony. Grethet would come in to wash his wounds with herbal decoctions and impatiently pour water into the parched and choking well of his mouth. In his delirium he thought himself trapped in the stories he had heard in the servants’ kitchens, his liver being torn out over and over beneath some lonely mere, drowning in his own blood.

  Eventually he recovered, but the scars remained.

  When a Windship was due in before dawn, he used to creep out of a crumbling window and seat himself upon a narrow roof-gutter, buffeted by the breeze. In that hour, the ground and trees were black. The eastern horizon, between dark gray shoals of clouds, was singed brownish orange like burnt toast, fading to the palest lemon farther up the sky, blending to dilute, ethereal blue, which in turn shaded gradually to the deep, rich hue of the night sky overhead, still dark, still hung with stars.

  Beyond Isse Harbor, along the world’s edge, the auburn singe deepened.

  Birds uttered uneasy, sporadic sounds from the trees and the duck-pond far below. Their quacks and trills increased in proportion to the strength of the iron glow in the east, whose warm facade was smudged by cloud floatlets as a smith’s ruddy countenance is smirched by soot and ash. Above, the profound blue drained from the sky and the stars dissolved.

  Burnt orange transmuted to pastel gold. A surprising ribbon of rose pink unrolled. Against the horizon, lacy foliage was pricked by unbearable motes of gold. The sea turned from black to gray green. A line of fire ran along the world’s rim, and the sun rose, to slide away from the ground, a silver coin through the wolf-gray clouds. Out of the south, half on fire, a sailing ship would come dipping and gliding through the air.

  The world depended on the properties of sildron for many purposes.

  Eotaurs’ beautiful swanlike wings were used mainly for maneuvering, the species having been bred, over hundreds of years, from the original tiny bird-horses to a ridable size. However, their greater bulk now required sildron to become airborne. Sildron, like magnetized iron, possessed invisible properties so strange and powerful that it seemed almost eldritch.

  Diverse cargoes were brought from the outlands by Waterships. Some were destined for the Tower, others must travel farther inland. At Isse Harbor, freightage that was too large or inexpensive or heavy for thoroughbred Skyhorses was offloaded to heavily guarded road-cart caravans or hauled up on ropes to the Windship Dock 112 feet above ground level, at the seventh story. There it was loaded onto the mighty sildron-raised vessels. Eotaurs and carrier pigeons were not the only sky-travelers to come and go at the Tower, although they were the swiftest. The grandest of all, the Windships had the capacity to carry passengers and large cargoes.

  The wind bellied their sails as it did for any Watership, but swaying treetops were their waves, birds their fish, mountains their reefs, the diurnal pulse of light and dark their tide, and clouds their foam. Sildron gave them lift, sildron pushed against the ground to power their small, unstable propellers.

  This silvery metal shod and girded the eotaurs, it lifted and propelled the vessels of the sky. All the wealth of the Windship lines and the status of the twelve Stormrider Houses, the glory, the power, the skills, passed from generation to generation in traditions going back many centuries, all depended upon that most costly and rare of metals, even though it exerted no force ag
ainst water and could not cross the sea.

  It was so precious that it was the property only of kings and nobles. Watching the Windships go by in the skies, the most lowly of servants at Isse Tower often wondered what it would be like to go voyaging in them, up there where the clouds drifted like pillowy featherbeds, their scalloped borders gilded by sunshine, where it seemed that a voyager might sail on without a care, without pain, and the past would not matter.

  His entire history was forgotten, gone without a trace. What took its place, always, was an aching sense of loss. Sometimes, when not too weary to ponder at all, he wondered who it was that peered out from his eyes and listened with his ears. Sometimes he conjectured about who his parents had been and where they might be now, and whether they had abandoned him because he was mute and malformed. Brand Brinkworth had once told of a legendary prince who had longed for the perfect wife and whose wizard had fashioned a maiden for him out of a mass of beautiful flowers. Later, the servants had speculated on one another’s origins had they been created from some fleshless material, mostly guessing “weeds” or “dung,” and the foundling wondered, in the cold recesses of his reverie, whether such a misfit as he had never been born but had been shaped or raised up out of starless depths by some raving and witless magician.

  Often he tried to convey to Grethet the many questions about his beginnings. She seemed unable or unwilling to understand, slapping him away impatiently. He knew only that he was imprisoned here by his need to survive and that in this fantastic Tower he had come among a proud people who scorned excessive displays of joy or sorrow, excitement or fear, but who, beneath the iron bands they imposed, seethed with hidden turmoils.

  Taunts and blows made life painful. Loneliness was his only companion. But certain things made it bearable—the sound of the wind crooning in the battlements, the days when vapors blanketed the world far below and he stood on an island in the clouds, the nights when rain pattered on the outer walls, the songs of birds on the morning breeze, the tok-tok-tok of the moss-frog whose call was reputed to improve the flavor of cellared wine, the salt sea-breeze tasting of far-off adventures, the sight of the Greayte Southern Star like a green firework burning low in the night sky, the warm, friendly noses of goats, hounds, and capuchins, glimpses of eotaurs and the mighty Windships that crossed the airs, stories told by the kitchen fire.