The Bitterbynde Trilogy

by Cecilia Dart-Thornton

  The goshawk watched them from the branch of a she-oak. He had caught a quail and was mantling its limp form, covering it up with the twin fans of his outspread wings. After a time he folded himself together again, stood on one leg, gripped his prey in the talons of the other, and began to thoroughly pluck the little corpse. Efficiently he tore the skin away and drove his hooked upper beak into the flesh, closed the two halves of his beak like a pair of scissors, and tugged off a bite-size chunk of bloody meat, gulping it down whole.

  “Your hawk—you do not fly it?”

  “Errantry does not hunt at my command, only to feed himself.”

  “And he comes back to you? Does not return to the wild? It is extraordinary.”

  Thorn made no reply. Somewhere in the dusk, crickets whirred their last memories of a lost Summer.

  “Had we a vessel of clay or metal,” mused Diarmid, “we might have collected the sap of maples to boil on the fire. And with your arrows, we might have brought down a squirrel or two.”

  “Why chase after one’s supper when there is plenty to hand that does not flee? We do not starve.”

  “And save the steel barbs for wights, eh?”

  “I prefer my hide in one piece.”

  “Your longbow—I have not seen its like before.”

  “It was made under my direction, by the Royal Bowyer to the Dainnan.”

  “May I see it?”

  Thorn passed the bow across, and the Ertishman studied it closely.

  “An unusual design,” he said. “The limbs are not round, but rectangular in section.”

  “Yet wide enough to compensate against torque as the bow is drawn.”

  “Not straight-limbed—a recurve bow, with a sculptured handgrip and arrow-rest.”

  “Made to fit my right hand.”

  “This material fitted along the bow’s back—what is it?”

  “Laminations of horn and whalebone behind the yew. They improve performance and prevent it from breaking. It draws a hundred and forty pounds to twenty-eight inches and will send a broad-head over seventeen hundred and sixty yards.”

  “A land mile—good sooth! Impressive indeed. In Tarv they tell of a champion of old who could achieve nine hundred, but I thought it a mere wives’ tale. I should envy to see this done.”

  “Maximum flight is only a measure.” Thorn held up an arrow more than a cloth-yard long and squinted along the shaft to check for warping. “The effective range of this bow as a weapon is no more than two or three furlongs.”

  “But it must be over six feet in length—is that not overlong for a hunting bow?”

  “Its height matches my own—two inches above six feet.”

  “Surely it must prove difficult to carry through the tangling trees.”

  “Its measure is a personal preference.”

  “I thought the Dainnan used crossbows.”

  “For weaponry in dense-wooded country, aye. But the longbow is lighter and more rapid in fire. In open country, archers may stand shoulder to shoulder, needing much less room than crossbowmen.”

  “And I note your darts are balanced with goose quills. Is it true what they say, that the arrows of the Royal Family and the Royal Attriod are fletched with the feathers of peacocks?”

  “It is true.”

  Diarmid digested this information in silence, caressing the polished moon-crescent of the mighty bow with gentle hands. Then he said:

  “How long is it, sir, since you were at Caermelor? What can you tell me of the preparations of the Royal Legions to do battle with the northern hordes, should they push down into Eldaraigne?”

  Thorn seated himself between his companions with his back against a tree-bole, and stretched out his long legs toward the fire.

  “I can tell you that the King-Emperor does indeed intend to send battalions northward as preparation against invasion. The Dainnan are everywhere at this time—even scouting in Namarre to pick up what information they can regarding this Namarran brigand Chieftain who is said to have arisen, who seems to have the power to unite the disparate factions of outlaws and outcasts—indeed, it is thought that he must be a wizard of great power, to draw even the fell creatures of eldritch to his aid—that, or he promises them great reward, such as the sacking of all humanity, save only his own supporters. If so, he is sadly deluded, for unseelie wights would as soon turn on him as on the rest of humankind.”

  “Never before in history has man been allied with the unseelie,” Diarmid said gravely.

  “Never.”

  “And are there as many as it is rumored, sir, answering to that northern call?”

  “I know not the numbers of which rumor speaks. But yes, there are many. The Forest of Tiriendor was ever a favored haunt of things eldritch. One of them watches us now.”

  Diarmid stiffened, motionless as a stone’s shadow.

  “’Tis only a urisk,” said. Thorn, smiling, “a seelie thing. It dwells by this pool, as it has dwelled for many lives of men.”

  They followed his gaze across the water. The remains of the day reflected up from the mere into dusky shadows, forming an outline of a slight, goat-legged manlike creature with stubby horns protruding from his curly hair. He sat with his arms about his hairy knees, staring at his observers with a mournful look.

  “They crave human company,” Thorn explained dismissively, “but their appearance drives men away.”

  <>

  Diarmid relayed Imrhien’s question. She was rewarded with Thorn’s attention, which caused her heart to flop over like a gasping fish.

  “I do,” he said.

  <>

  “The Caermelor Road lies some two miles to the north of here,” the Dainnan replied to Diarmid’s translation. “Lady, do you think it would speed our journey to go that way, along a clear path? For certain, your skirts receive too much attention from bushes and briars. But the main Road holds added peril for mortals—it is a focus for unseelie spite. Besides, my work is not yet quite finished, and it takes me from the beaten track onto other roads, those that may not be so obvious at first—animal trails, watercourses, the paths of the sun and stars.”

  “I’ll warrant the eye of a Dainnan sees many roads,” said Diarmid.

  After about twenty minutes, the tubers were lifted out and put on a platter of leaves to be peeled and eaten, after which the loaves were ready also. Firm and nutty, their substance was satisfying.

  “If we stay south of the Road, we must pass through Mirrinor,” Diarmid said between mouthfuls. “I fear it may be more perilous than the Road itself.”

  “Mirrinor, Land of Still Waters—perilous, yes, but I have passed through it before, unscathed, and intend to do so again. My business takes me there. Also, it is a land of great beauty.”

  After she had eaten, an irresistible drowsiness overcame Imrhien. The fire’s warmth seemed to soften her very bones. With one last glance at the mossy place where the urisk remained sitting in his loneliness, she lay down on Thorn’s cloak and instantly fell asleep. The last words she heard were Diarmid’s—“I shall keep first watch.”

  Discordant sounds began the morning—shrill whistles, plaintive screams, and ear-piercing cackles. Errantry was greeting the sun. After calling, he began to preen on his perch, arranging his contour-feathers neatly with his bill. His tawny plumage was strikingly barred and mottled, his eyes gold-orange disks ringed with black, centered with darkness like twin eclipses of the sun.

  A silver-clasped horn lay on its side in the grass. From its mouth spilled fat blueberries. Beside it, a rich tumble of golden-orange persimmons, their glossy leaves still attached. Two leftover loaves lay on a curl of bark, dark with wood-ash. The sun was sailing, sending diagonal shafts down through the trees. The urisk was gone, and so was Thorn, as she had known he would be. No one had woken Imrhien to bid her take a turn at keeping watch. She considered it very gentlemanly and guilt-
provoking of them and went downstream to bathe. When she returned, Diarmid was sitting up, yawning.

  “Fair device!” he exclaimed, his eyes alighting upon the container of blueberries. “This horn is wrought more cunningly than any I have seen.” He picked it up, turning it in his hands. Berries scattered like beads of lapis lazuli. “Its aspect is antique,” he murmured to himself, “yet it is as unblemished as if newly made. Such curious and exquisite craftsmanship! Methinks this is some family heirloom, perhaps fashioned during the Era of Glory.”

  After he and Imrhien had broken their fast, Thorn returned. He looked unweary. Stepping out of the woods dressed in the subtle green brown of Dainnan garb, he seemed part of the Autumn morning, and as comely.

  “Good morrow, sleepyheads. Half the day is gone—we shall have to run like the very deer to catch up with the sun.”

  He broke some seed-pods from boughs overhead and passed them to Diarmid, along with his knife.

  “The seeds of the tallow tree have a waxy coating that lathers in water like soap. My blade is sharp enough for a close shave. The tree does not grow everywhere—pods should be carried.”

  Foam-faced, Diarmid leaned over the pool, trying to see his wavering reflection. He nicked his chin and cursed.

  <>

  Imrhien took the knife from the Ertishman’s hand and scraped his jaw clean. They buried the blackened remnants of the fire in the cooking pit and set off.

  Motes of sunlight pelted down like sparks. Flames of trees tapered upward. The three travelers were dwarfed by these towering, heatless infernos, like tiny salamanders crawling through a blaze of glory. Always, Imrhien’s thoughts dwelled on Thorn, their intensity tempered only by an ever-present thin blue trickle of grief for loss, which ebbed and flowed at random, as grief will.

  For the next few days, Thorn was rarely to be seen. At one moment he would be walking beside them, matching their strides with his long legs and explaining the forthcoming section of the route or pointing out some new source of food. At the next he would be gone, melting silently into the woodland, not to return for hours. It seemed to Imrhien that when he was present, the sun smiled and the breeze laughed, and when he was gone shadows hung drearily on the trees and, in desolation, no birds sang. At times the goshawk Errantry rode at his shoulder—at other times the bird could be seen through the filigree of leaves overhead, a dark speck high up and far away. Errantry was a brilliant aerobatic flier; like all raptors, a proficient hunter.

  Like jewel boxes were the tall trees of Tiriendor, like towering cones of variegated glass. Now and then a gust would release all the loose leaves simultaneously from their many tiers. Snapping free at the same instant from upper and lower ranks, they would shower down at a constant rate, a curtain of falling scraps of color. In the midst of flying leaves, Imrhien tilted back her head and gazed in awe.

  Thorn said, “There is a word for that—fallaise.”

  Would that my mouth could utter it.

  “A useful term,” he said, caught ethereally in a shaft of amber light. “It might describe a fall of gauze, jewel-stitched, or a flock of bright birds descending, or a mantle of wind wafting stars, bits of a rainbow caught in a torrent, a burst of fiery sparks against the night, a thrown scattering of gems …”

  And glints of sunlight netted in blowing hair.

  This close, there was about him a fragrance of hyacinths, blue as the quintessence of evening, wild as the sky before a storm. Again Imrhien turned away lest he recognize the consuming intensity of her emotion.

  With fierce determination, Diarmid noted everything the Dainnan taught them, taking pride in locating the fruits of the forest and delight in collecting them, to eat along the way or to be tied up in Imrhien’s voluminous overskirt and shared later. In this, at last, a tenuous link formed between Imrhien and her reluctant companion.

  “Mark you the quandion tree,” the Dainnan instructed as he strode along, “its red fruits and their kernels may be eaten. An infusion of the roots is used against travel weariness, decoction of the outer wood is drunk for sickness of the chest, bark shavings are soaked and the liquid applied to itches, paste of the seeds is rubbed on wounds.”

  Thorn often pointed out certain useful plants growing among others or certain birds of beauty in the trees. More often than not, Imrhien and Diarmid would stand puzzling at masses of seemingly undifferentiated or uninhabited foliage until the Dainnan plucked a leaf or the bird hopped along a branch. After that, they would perceive what he had indicated, and it became easier to do so as their eyes became attuned to the shapes and colors of the forest.

  “Many things are hard to see unless you know how to observe. You will learn. The forest at first seems empty to many folk, but after a time your eyes will be drawn to plants that can give you sustenance—they will seem to leap out at you.”

  And that was true enough.

  A fierce thunderstorm struck, but the bruising of the air had forewarned of it. Thorn was away on one of his reconnaissances. Diarmid and Imrhien sheltered together under an overhanging rock in a hillside, the Ertishman uneasy with this ungentlemanly proximity, his sense of propriety offended.

  When the rain abated, Thorn appeared, dry save for some droplets caught in his hair like crystals in a web of darkness. He offered his hand to Imrhien, to help her out of the shelter. Unexpectedly, lightning seared along her arm. Thunder roared in her temples. The storm that had raged outside seemed as nothing to the one within.

  At nights, by the fire, she and Diarmid demonstrated the handspeak to their mentor. An eager student, he only had to be shown each sign once and he would remember it. Then the Dainnan and the Ertishman would often fall to discussing the relative merits of archery equipment, the complexities of design, and the finer technical points.

  Wights, half-glimpsed and surreptitious, snuffled through bushes or darted across their path by day and glared from beyond the circle of firelight by night—mostly trooping wights, seelie and unseelie: gray trows, tiny siofra, hyter sprites. There were deer or goats with an uncanny look of knowingness in their eyes, and some solitaries—puckles and madcaps. Once or twice the sound of spinning wheels came from somewhere beneath the roots of trees, and strange singing.

  “In your wanderings, do they not trouble you, the wights?”

  “I know all their tricks. All of Roxburgh’s knights must know their nature and, in particular, be able to have the Last Word. It is part of the Dainnan Trial, to be well learned in eldritch lore.”

  “The Trial—is all they say about it true? Is it so difficult?”

  “No man is accepted into the Dainnan who does not know the lore of medicinal plants and survival in the wilderness. He must know in advance the location and identity of food plants, and the seasons and conditions of their ripening. Eldritch lore, Erithan history, the Twelve Books of Rhyme, tests of skill and strength and endurance, knowing the stars’ names and how to tell the time by them as well as by the sun and moon—all these are part of the Trial. I surmise ’twould be not unpleasant to you, to become one of the Brotherhood.”

  “Indeed, sir. Prithee tell me more—I would hear about the Nine Vows to which the Brotherhood is bound.”

  “Even so, my friend. As you surely know, a Dainnan warrior must never lie, and must remain faithful to his pledged word even in the face of death. He must honor and protect women. He must take no property by oppression, or fall back before nine fighting men. A Dainnan must not look for personal revenge, even if all his kindred were to be killed. But if he himself were to harm others in the course of his duty, that harm is not to be avenged on his people.

  “Before any man is taken into the Dainnan, he must leap into a hole in the ground, up to his middle, with a shield and a hazel rod in his hands. Nine men stand at the distance of sixteen paces from him and hurl their spears at him all at the same time. If he is wounded by one of them, he is not thought suitable to join with the Dainnan. If he passes that trial, his hair is fastened up and he must run throu
gh the woods of Eldaraigne with the Dainnan knights following after him to try if they can wound him. Only the length of a bough is permitted between himself and themselves when they start out. If they catch up with him and inflict injury upon him, he is not allowed to join them, or if his spears have trembled in his hand, or if the twig of a tree has undone the plaiting of his hair, or if he has been sundered from something of his own flesh—a torn piece of skin or a hair caught on a twig—or if he has cracked a dry stick under his foot while running.

  “After that again, he will not be accepted among the Dainnan until he has leaped over a staff the height of himself, and ducked under a barrier the height of his knee, and taken a thorn out of his foot with his fingernail, all the while running his fastest. But if he has done all these things, then he is fit to be given a name from the wild places of the land, and to join Roxburgh’s knights.

  “It is good wages the Dainnan get, and a great many things along with that. The Brotherhood is served by a great retinue of bards, physicians, minstrels, messengers, armorers, falconers, austringers, bowyers, cooks, door-keepers, cup-bearers, and huntsmen, besides the best serving-women in Eldaraigne, who work year-round making raiment of dusken at Sleeve Edhrin. But as excellent as the pay is, the hardships and the perils to be borne are greater. For it is the duty of the Brotherhood to prevent strangers and robbers from beyond the seas from entering Eldaraigne, and it is exacting work enough in doing that. An active life it is, full of delights and dangers.”

  When he had heard this, Diarmid fell quiet and thoughtful.

  Images of the tall Dainnan would not let Imrhien sleep easily, after the first night. The knowledge that he lay on the other side of the fire was a torment that kept her wakeful despite an aching need for rest after a hard day’s walking. At first she had been shy with him, afraid to meet his eyes lest she should read the familiar disgust there. But when at last she braved a glance, she witnessed no disgust, only perhaps a hint of guarded curiosity and eyes that were, more often than not, crinkled with good humor. After that she had continued to avoid his gaze lest he should read what lay in her own thoughts. How he would laugh, should he learn she was under his spell. How even Diarmid the grim-faced would laugh.