The Bitterbynde Trilogy

by Cecilia Dart-Thornton

  ‘I am able to survive on my own. I have been taught how to find food in the wilderness. This ring I wear, engraved with leaves, has some charm on it, although whether it is strong enough to ward off the Wild Hunt I do not know. I tell you, I must go, and it must be alone and speedily. I am sure that Tamhania’s ruin was brought about for the purpose of destroying me or flushing me out of my refuge. My guess is, if such strong forces have been sent against me, wielding the powers of both sea and fire, there are those who will wish to know whether they have succeeded in their mission. Immortal, they will not rest until they are certain of it. Perhaps even now they have learned that I live, and that I walk in this forgotten place. It is possible that as we speak they are drawing nigh. I dare not stay in one place for too long. Haste is imperative.’

  ‘But Your Ladyship is to be Queen-Empress!’ Viviana burst out in amazement. ‘What is this talk of pursuit and danger? The Dainnan shall guard you. His Imperial Majesty shall be your protector. There can be no greater security than that.’

  ‘There is no security against that which threatens me. Do you think mortal arms and wizards’ charms can stand against the most malign and feared of eldritch princes? Can the Dainnan blow an island apart?’

  ‘I beg to differ, ma’am. Tamhania was a sleeping volcano. It might have awoken at any time. It destroyed itself with its own life-spirit. I’ll warrant the three hoodie crows, great and malevolent though they doubtless are, would not be mighty enough to marshal the elements of heat and pressure.’

  ‘Perhaps not, but Huon’s birds set the machinery in motion.’

  ‘Huon’s birds?’ repeated Caitri. ‘My lady is mistaken. Huon commands no birds—at any rate, not in any tale I have heard. His terrible riders and horses and hounds are what he hunts with. Sometimes he enlists spriggans to ride crouching on the cruppers of the fire-eyed shadow-steeds, but no birds. The Crows did not fly at the behest of the Antlered One.’

  ‘You are indeed very learned!’ exclaimed Rohain between astonishment and doubt.

  ‘My mother taught me much. She is wise in eldritch lore. Besides, in all of Master Brinkworth’s tales there was never a mention of hoodie crows flying with the Wild Hunt.’

  ‘Tarry!’ said Rohain quickly. ‘Say no more. Your words discomfit me. I thought I knew my enemy, but once again I am thrown into chaos and confusion. If Huon did not send the birds, then what did?’

  ‘I know not, but I do know they might sniff you out,’ said Caitri. ‘Spriggans will, at any rate. They have crafty noses and can trace trails in the same way hounds course after scent, only better. I think they might know the scent of you. They ravaged your chamber at the Tower. And by now, they must know your looks.’

  ‘Indeed they must,’ agreed Rohain. ‘I fear I betrayed myself in the marketplace of Gilvaris Tarv. These are two problems I do not know how to resolve.’

  ‘That stytchel-thyme all over the garden has a perfume strong enough to cover any odour,’ Caitri pointed out. ‘You might journey incognito, if masked with the fragrance of it.’

  ‘Caitri, do not encourage Her Ladyship to pursue her wild goose chase!’ said Viviana.

  ‘Nothing can sway me,’ said Rohain. ‘I will go to Huntingtowers.’

  ‘But the Wild Hunt issues from that place!’

  ‘Usually at the full of the moon, they say. By my reckoning, we are very early in the month of Duileagmis. The old moon has almost faded. The new moon is yet unborn.’

  Viviana sighed deeply. ‘Well then, if you must, m’lady. And if there is anything I can do to keep you safe, I shall do it. So, if ’tis disguise you’re after, I can help.’

  ‘’Tis not more than six or seven leagues due west of here, by my reckoning,’ said Viviana, trying to recall the maps her governess had pinned upon the walls of the nursery, ‘that horrible place, I mean. A swift all-day’s walk.’

  In the lonely cottage above the ocean, the courtier had finished dyeing her mistress’s golden hair brown, using a crudely made concoction of boiled tree-bark. Now she set about stitching a half-mask for Rohain’s eyes and forehead. Viviana was never one to be unprepared. The versatile chatelaine had come through the shipwreck, still tied to her waist-girdle. From its chains dangled various chatelettes made from rustproof materials: brass scissors, a golden etui with a manicure set inside, a bodkin, a spoon, a vinaigrette, a needle-case, a small looking-glass, a cup-sized strainer for spike-leaves, a timepiece that had stopped, and whose case was inlaid with ivory and bronze, a workbox containing small reels of thread, an enameled porcelain thimble and a silver one, silver-handled buttonhooks and a few spare buttons—glass-topped, enclosing tiny pictures—a miniature portrait of her mother worked in enamels, several rowan-wood tilhals, a highly ornamented anlace, a penknife, an empty silver-gilt snuff-box, and a pencil. Only the notecase had been ruined by the salt water.

  ‘’Tis a wonder all that motley didn’t pull you down like a millstone,’ remarked Caitri.

  ‘I carry my caul,’ Viviana said demurely, returning a needle to its horn case, which was set about with cabuchons. ‘M’lady, with this half-mask over your eyes, and the lower part of your face well-kohled with chimney-soot, you will look like some filthy country itinerant, begging your pardon. Whether you are lad or wench none will discern, if we bundle you in enough rags. And with a little stytchel-thyme rubbed on, any creature that sees you or catches your scent won’t be any the wiser.’

  She cocked her head to one side and gazed critically at Rohain. ‘I must admit, it seems a shame, ma’am, to spoil a beauty of the rarest sort—for upon my word, never was such a fair face seen at Court or anywhere else for that matter. ’Tis no wonder His Imperial Majesty was smitten.’

  ‘Mistress Wellesley!’ remonstrated Caitri, now schooled in etiquette. ‘How boldly you speak before Her Ladyship!’

  ‘Speak plainly before me always, please,’ said Rohain absently, her mind on other matters. ‘You should both know I always require frankness and do not consider it an impropriety.’ She tweaked a lock of her tangled hair over her face to examine its new colour.

  ‘Well, if ’tis frankness you are after, my lady,’ said Viviana, ‘let me speak my mind now that those other ladies are no longer fluttering about you—sain them, I hope they may be safe on land. I do believe you are a lost princess who’s slept for a hundred years and been awoken.’

  Rohain laughed. ‘Thank you for your kind words. I would it were so, but I fear it is not. I would augur that I am by birth greatly inferior to royalty.’

  ‘What exactly do you hope to find at Huntingtowers, m’lady?’ asked Caitri.

  ‘I do not know.’

  ‘And if you find nothing?’

  ‘I will keep searching. I have no choice. I am driven.’

  Caitri seemed about to say something else, but thought better of it.

  That night the snuffling and sniffing sounds came again around the cottage, and a tapping at the window, soft and insistent. A wordless, muttering drone started up. The three sleepers woke and sat still, not moving so much as a toe. They held their breath until they could hold it no longer, and then expelled it in long, silent sighs, fearful that even the slightest noise would betray them.

  Toward dawn, the sounds ceased.

  In the morning Rohain bade farewell to her companions. Her sense of loss and desolation was magnified by this parting. Always, the burden of guilt associated with the destruction of the island oppressed her; inwardly she lamented for Edward and Thomas, for Alys and Master Avenel and all the other friends she had lost to the violence of fire and water.

  She trudged alone to the top of the cliffs and halted, turning to look back at the brooding expanse of the sea. Beneath a leering sky, it was striped with many shades of gray from ashen to lead. The symmetrical cones of the presumably dormant Chimneys stood sentinel, waves outlining their shores with froth. Two petrels winged across the sky. Far below, the cottage looked tiny, like a mantelshelf ornament. After a few more steps it was lost to view altogethe
r. Stunted tea-tree scrub grew on the cliff top, spiking the air with the tang of eucalyptus. In the far distance a disused Mooring Mast stood, a dark web sketched against smudged skies.

  This is not the first time I have trodden this path, thought Rohain, without knowing why.

  The sharp smell of thyme permeated her disguise—her clothes and knapsack, the brown and lusterless hair combed close about her face to obfuscate her features, the half-mask across her eyes and brow, her roughly kohled jaw. In a mustard-coloured kirtle and snuff-coloured surcoat, a plain leather girdle and an oilskin cloak and taltry, she bore no resemblance to an elegant Court lady. Her slenderness was lost beneath bulky folds.

  Is it my fate to go always disguised?

  Under the oddly-hued sun, whose face had been transformed by the death of Tamhania, it seemed to Rohain that she no longer moved in the world she had known. Duileagmis, the Leafmonth of Spring, put forth a bounty of darling buds whose colours appeared altered by the stained atmosphere. Greenish flowers bestarred bilious marram grasses, their perfumes dust-clogged. Rohain stooped swiftly. With a knife obtained from the cottage on the cliff, she sliced at some vegetation, hacking off scurvy-grass and the fleshy leaves of samphire. She had recognised this wild food from Thorn’s teachings. Chewing some, she tucked the rest into her belt.

  Once again, she looked back toward the ash-fogged sea. From this angle it gave the illusion of rising up in a broad band, higher than the land on which she stood. As she hesitated, she spied a movement in the scrub. It issued from behind a dune and made off in the direction of the cottage. The thing had a wightish look, no doubt of it. At the same time, dark dots in the southern sky swelled, proving themselves not to be the sea-eagles she had at first taken them for.

  Stormriders!

  A desire for concealment gripped her. She dashed for cover in a tea-tree thicket. The company of riders swept over, following the shoreline at a low altitude. Thrice they circled the vicinity of the cottage, swooping in close over the roof.

  There was little doubt that the Relayers were scouring the coast for survivors of Tamhania’s disaster. Rohain hoped fervently that Viviana and Caitri, wherever they were, would wave down the Stormriders and be taken to safety at the Tower on eotaur-back. But wights were abroad too, it was plain. Even in daylight they were on the move. The creature from behind the dune had headed away with a purposeful air that boded ill. She and her companions had not left the bountiful cottage a moment too soon. As soon as the Stormriders had flown away, Rohain hurried onward.

  Farther inland, coastal vegetation gave way to lightly wooded hills. Here grew hypericum with its yellow cymes. Hurriedly she gathered it by the armful for its wight-repellent properties, binding the bunches with twine to hang them about her person alongside the stytchel-thyme. Looking up from her work, she made out the distant trapezium of an apparently flat-topped mountain dominating the murky horizon.

  On she went. Under her feet, little tracks were born, ran dipping and climbing through the trees and faded among the turf. Among the bushes, leaves stirred. There came a faint, metallic ching. Rohain halted.

  ‘Come forth,’ she ordered loudly.

  More rustlings and a brittle snap were followed by the appearance of Viviana and Caitri from a clump of callistemons.

  ‘You stepped on a twig,’ Caitri accused Viviana.

  ‘And I did not!’

  Rohain said, ‘Ever since I left the cliff-tops I have been hearing you two following me. A herd of oxen might have progressed more quietly. You have no woodcraft whatsoever, and Viviana’s chatelaine rings like all the bells of Caermelor. I hoped you might give up. I wished you might attract the attention of those Stormriders and go with them. Turn back now, while you are yet far from Huntingtowers.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘This is to be no picnic in the King’s Greenwood.’

  Sulkily, the two damsels glared at their mistress. They did not reply.

  ‘Those who walk at my side do so at their peril!’ fumed Rohain. She then fervently besought them to leave her, in an exchange that lasted a goodly while—time they could ill afford—but they were adamant in their refusals.

  It occurred to Rohain that she might easily abandon them and slip away on her own, drawing off the Hunt. She did not entertain the thought for long. Two untutored maidens, roaming out here without even the benefit of her limited knowledge of survival in the wilderness, must surely perish. Either way, there seemed scant hope of saving the lives of these faithful companions. There was no choice—she must accede at last to their wishes.

  ‘Well,’ she said briskly, ‘if you are prepared to meet your dooms at such an early age, who am I to stop you? Be it on your own heads. But move discreetly. We are looked for.’

  ‘We spied the Stormriders,’ said Viviana. ‘Here is your elixir, m’lady.’

  ‘Worse things than Stormriders are abroad,’ replied her mistress, accepting the vial and rehanging it around her neck. ‘Come. The wind is in the west. We only have to keep our backs to it.’

  Chains pulled down Rohain’s heart. She foresaw the spilling of the blood of her loyal friends, and guilt flooded her conscience. When she faced the direction of Huntingtowers, an undefined fear also began to take root.

  As they hastened along the way, to thrust aside dread she pointed out useful wildflowers, and in a low voice imparted knowledge gleaned from Thorn in the wilderness.

  ‘In tales, adventurers merely stroll along through wood and weald, pulling wild berries and nuts off the hedges,’ said Caitri.

  ‘Yes, I have noticed that,’ said Rohain. ‘Obviously, they only go adventuring in Autumn, the season of ripe fruits.’

  ‘And they do not die of cold,’ added Viviana. ‘In tales they merely lie down to sleep wrapped in their cloaks, even on bitter nights, with no fire or Dragon’s Blood to warm them.’

  ‘Sheer fiction,’ said Rohain firmly.

  White umbels of wild carrot nodded in the breeze, alongside the pinkish-green bells of bilberry. The travellers passed banks of pimpinella, sporting its flat-topped flower heads like lacy plates.

  ‘Common centaury,’ instructed Rohain, indicating a herb. ‘A bitter tonic can be made from an infusion of the dried plants. Dock leaves for nettle stings. Loosestrife for henna dyes, pretty hemlock, all lace and poison. Poppies for torpid illusions.’ She astonished herself with her own erudition. ‘Here’s chicory. The leaves can be eaten, the roots roasted.’

  ‘’Tis a veritable pantry out here,’ marvelled Viviana. ‘A pharmacopeia.’

  ‘In sooth,’ affirmed Rohain, ‘but most of it does not taste very nice.’

  Everywhere in this pathless land, Spring wildflowers nodded, but there was no time to stop and examine them closely. Instead, Rohain was compelled to rush across the face of the land under unfriendly skies, toward the very bastion of all things unseelie.

  ‘I feel a certain nostalgia for life on the road,’ she said, brushing with her fingertips the leaves of an overhanging elder-bough.

  ‘You are bold and brave, my lady,’ said Caitri.

  ‘Mayhap. I am bold but I can be craven, I’m free but I’m caged, I’m joyful but I grieve, Caitri, like everyone else. But do not call me by my title now, or even by my name—we might be overheard.’

  ‘What name will you be called instead, my la—my friend?’ stuttered Viviana.

  ‘I wish to be called Tahquil. ’Tis a name I heard once, at Court, and did not mislike. It will suffice.’

  ‘A strange-sounding, foreign name. It has the ring of Luindorn.’

  ‘Indeed, I believe it originates from that country. I heard tell it means “Warrior”, in feminine form. And warrior I must become. I intend to fight on, despite that fate throws turmoil at me again and again. Whether I will be defeated, I cannot guess.’

  After a brief halt for an unappealing meal of cold porridge and samphire leaves, the three companions followed a flowery ridge up wooded slopes and over a shoulder of the hills into rank meadows that once ha
d been well-tended farmlands. Abandonment had made wild the overgrown hedges, the deep brakes of flowering briars. Choked drainage-dikes provided a haven for marsh pennywort, bog asphodel, sedges, and rushes. Under the hedges grew foxgloves and tall spikes of wound-wort—‘A styptic, used to staunch the bleeding of injuries,’ observed Rohain—and white deadnettles, whose dry hollow stems she collected in a bunch.

  ‘Used in concoctions?’ inquired Viviana.

  ‘Used to make whistles.’

  As she scanned the landscape for provender, words of Thorn’s came back to Rohain-Tahquil. He had said, there is no need to hunger or thirst in the lands of Erith … When all else fails, there is always Fairbread.

  The thought brought reassurance.

  Later in the afternoon, tattered clouds began to move across the sun’s face. A wind gusted, blowing up leaves and dust in sudden spurts. A few spots of dirty rain spattered down. Worse than bad weather, uneasiness crept over the travellers—a cooling of the blood. Rohain-Tahquil shivered, the nape of her neck prickled. Time and time again she would whirl rapidly, knife in hand, only to face emptiness. Yet she could swear she had sensed something following behind. She kept the knife ready in her hand.

  By unspoken agreement, the companions kept under shelter as much as possible, creeping cautiously from tree to tree or scuttling quickly across open glades. Always their heads turned this way and that as if they expected to see dark shapes of an antlered horseman and other fell manifestations watching them from the shadows or from the skies, ready to spur forward and ride them down.

  Ever ahead loomed the low, flat-topped trapezium of the cauldron-mountain, dark through the haze. The closer they approached it, the heavier was the hush that fell on the landscape. Back along the coast, magpies and larks had warbled their pure bell-tones. From every bush and tree had issued shrill twitterings and pipings. As they pushed farther inland, the birdsong had diminished without the travellers noticing. Now they became aware of a quietude eased only by the murmur of the wind in the leaves.

  Acid rain came sluicing down in drowning sheets, hissing in the dust until it made mud of it, before settling down to a steady patter and trickle. Made corrosive by the oxidation of atmospheric nitrogen and brimstone gases from the eruption, water dripped down the collars of the walkers’ oilskins, off the edges of their fishermen’s taltries, and into their eyes.