The Bitterbynde Trilogy

by Cecilia Dart-Thornton

  A movement caught Tahquil’s attention. Slowly, she began to subside behind the edge. Gabbling broke out above her head—there had been spriggans in the shadows of the High Plain. She hastened down the stair. When she reached the shelf, Tully pushed her into a crevice. Creaking voices called from above and stones rattled down. Tighnacomaire whinnied. Precariously close to the shelf’s border, he curvetted, his small hooves balancing deliberately. The spriggans on top of the cliff watched him, gibbering argumentatively, then withdrew.

  ‘Whisht!’ exclaimed Tully. ‘A close shave, that.’

  For Tahquil, words would not form. She choked on them, as speechless as the duergar’s lash had once made her. She strove for sanity, half wishing the Langothe would take her instantly, so that she would not have to wait for its slow-wearing effect to grind her down.

  When at last she was capable of utterance, she asked, in a bleak monotone, ‘How shall I cross the Plain? There is scant cover.’ It was the first time she had spoken since hearing the swanmaiden’s tidings.

  ‘Strong-sinewed swans will hoist feeble friend’s slight weight,’ said Whithiue. ‘Sea-folk will surrender a wide fish-net. Four swans seizing hems have strength for ferrying human freight from here to Fell Fortress, flying fast.’

  Scarcely comprehending the enormity of this tardily offered privilege, Tahquil nodded. She felt removed from the scene, as though she gazed down a long tunnel at the three wights on this precipitous aerial perch among the night glitter. Reason stood there alongside them, but she was disconnected from it. Tully’s reply to Whithiue seemed to come from a room behind a wall.

  ‘It cannae be done. The Hunt would find ye, or else watchers on the ground would look up and see the shape o’ ye outlined by the constellations. The lass wants tae creep intae Gothallamor, not be dragged there in chains. Twa prisoners in there is enow—what’s the use o’ three?’

  ‘How is she to secure her sisters?’ Whithiue now looked exasperated. ‘What’s a scatter-witted half-sensible human fit for? Her fancy’s wandering, frantic. Who wists whether stolen wenches survive? Such a scheme is futile, certainly set for failure. Cease following such folly.’

  Doggedly, Tahquil said, ‘You must help me. Take me in secrecy to this Fortress. I will not be thwarted. I must find my friends before I perish.’ She was dully aware that Whithiue looked insulted, Tully puzzled and Tighnacomaire vague. Deep in thought, the urisk stroked his straggly goatee.

  ‘Tharr’s the Icepipes,’ suggested Tighnacomaire abruptly, ‘the burrows undarr the Plain.’

  ‘Never heard o’ them,’ declared Tully. ‘Might they be tunnels o’ Fridean delving?’

  ‘Nat Fridean. Icepipes warr made by atherrs.’

  ‘Such subways are sealed from swan’s scholarship, veiled from her wisdom,’ murmured Whithiue.

  ‘Those who fly high see ainly surfaces,’ sagely quoted the nygel. ‘Waterr seeks the underr places and the secret.’

  ‘Ye’re no’ clashin’ on aboot underground streams are ye?’ hooted Tully. ‘The lass can hardly traipse through tunnels filled with water.’

  ‘Streams arr lower. Icepipes arr high and dry. Men made them, cleverr men, long ago. Wizarrds of Namarre.’

  ‘How shall I find a way to these Icepipes?’ asked Tahquil.

  ‘Wait,’ said Tighnacomaire. ‘I seek.’

  He jumped away. As though the steep cliffs were level parklands, he crossed them swiftly and without faltering, his hooves finding secure footholds where none were apparent.

  Evernight glistened on. The southerly breeze brought a distant croaking of frogs.

  Tighnacomaire returned not a fly’s wing-beat too soon. A commotion was developing at the cliff top above. Spriggans had congregated there again. Their spindle-shanked shapes ranged along the skyline like gesticulating hieroglyphs. Some were shouting, while others had already started down the stair.

  ‘Ride now,’ said Tighnacomaire. After scrambling onto his back Tahquil was borne away from the rumpus, along a narrow ledge, until they veered around an outflung spur of rock and the spriggans disappeared from view. Tighnacomaire’s sinews bunched and released rhythmically. Beneath his legs, chasms plunged and great holes gasped, filled only by eerie winds. The stars were sparks struck from his hooves. Somehow, he clung to the cliff side and at length arrived at a vertical fissure, deeply cloven, dark and silent. Warily, he poked his nose around a tall boulder and sniffed. Then he stepped through.

  Darkness sealed Tahquil’s eyes like tar. She felt the waterhorse under her, moving forward. At the sound of a voice she started and would have fallen had she not been fastened on.

  ‘Och, where’s a light fa’ the lass?’

  Reflected sound waves mocked Tully’s words.

  Unexpectedly, light blasted out. It stripped Tahquil’s eyes of tar, peeled them like onions, divested them, it seemed, of eye hatches, of lenses, of cornea, of retina, until they were seared sightless with a white blindness.

  As swiftly as it had appeared, this glare vanished. The urisk, who had posed the light question, uttered a short, explosive word.

  ‘A wee bit stark, that,’ he added.

  This time he uncovered the glowing rock of Tapthartharath more slowly. A slim ray shot out under the lip of the stone cover. It bounced off a plane, zigzagged back and forth between multitudinous facets and splintered into a billion and three fragments.

  ‘Oh,’ sighed Tahquil, raising her awed head from the waterhorse’s neck.

  ‘Oh, oh, oh …’ the echoes murmured.

  From every angle, rainbows dazzled. Wide and high was the Pipe itself, perhaps eighty feet from floor to vault and fifty feet from wall to wall. Here was a duct massive enough to accommodate ranks of a dozen horsemen bearing tall standards.

  The inclinations of the wall, ceiling and floor of this tube took the warm tangerine-amber radiations of the Hot-Heart of Tapthartharath and multiplied them to uncountable repeated images, splitting them prismatically into subtle component hues. It was like being inside a wizardly kaleidoscope, but in fact the Pipe was the eaten-out heart of a crystal of unimaginable dimensions; a majestic splendour, yet hard, cold and merciless.

  Tighnacomaire stepped now from a wide band of greyish rock—granite or basalt—which had lined the inside of the aperture; an outer casing in which the enormous hollow crystal of the underplain was housed. As his hooves touched the cut-mineral floor it chimed—not the dull thunk of a spoon tapping the bubble of a fine glass goblet and resting there, inhibiting the resonances—quite the contrary. Sympathetic vibrations rushed away from the point of contact, across the floor and up the walls, to flow across the upper choirs, crossing and recrossing, acting upon each other to produce new frequencies of nuance and penetration, and all these ringing notes, clear as water, pulsated against each other in a long, swelling chord.

  Tighnacomaire halted, uncertain.

  The last note faded, like a reminiscence of the stirring of the jewellery air. The crystal waited.

  ‘Cannat walk in silence,’ stated Tighnacomaire.

  ‘Silence, silence, ence, ence,’ sang the vaults, sending off sparkles like pieces struck from the sky, the sea, the sun, fire, ice.

  ‘Risk it,’ said Tahquil. (Iskit, iskit.)

  Tully held high the Hot-Heart and they went forward into a song, a net of rainbows, a web of glory.

  It was not unpleasant. Never did the insistent decibels rise to a painful level, nor did the soft illumination of Hot-Heart produce intense beams. Even when they sprang off the facets at their most concentrated, the beams were rods of amber, or scarlet resin, or bolts of gold silk—not swords. Darkness fell away and fled before the interlopers, then closed in behind. They moved in their own orb of radiance, crisscrossed by spokes of astonishing colours. Deep beneath the High Plain they pushed on.

  Presently, the nygel stopped again. The last patters of his and Tully’s hooves rang off into the crouching darkness in front and to the rear.

  ‘Light draws attention,’ remarked T
ighnacomaire. (Tenshun, shun.)

  ‘Indeed!’ Tully snapped shut the stone lid, breaking off the rose-marigold effulgence at its stem. Blackness slammed down; an iron curtain.

  They went forward, through a pitchiness so solid it seemed tangible.

  Of course, the wights had needed no luminescence to see by; they had provided it solely for Tahquil’s benefit. Yet, none of them had earlier considered the danger they invited upon themselves. Perhaps in the nygel’s case this was understandable—his mind was a bell-jar full of dragonflies darting at their own reflections. And Tahquil, for her part, was verging on delirium. Tully, with the commonsense of a common domestic wight, should have known better. Conceivably, some enchantment in the chant of crystal, some oblique spell zinging off the obliques, something occult in the dark occlusions had laid hands upon his eldritch senses and dulled them, lulled them, culled them, gulled them.

  Annulled them.

  Tahquil nodded, drooping on the waterhorse’s back. Indeed, when they first entered this place she had, in a confused way, feared instant detection, trusting only that Tighnacomaire, with his sharper instincts, would be able to turn and flee at the first sign of peril, and so outrun it. As they penetrated further into the Icepipes and nothing untoward occurred, she began to relax, turning her muddled thoughts to what obstacles might lie at the journey’s end and how the Fortress might be entered and what might be found therein. Ideas rambled incoherently through her mind, in tablature. She could not pin them down, could not make sense of them. In this state, she was unprepared for the encounter.

  The cavern filled with the susurrations of Tighnacomaire sniffing through the velvet pockets of his nostrils.

  ‘Waterr,’ he whispered. ‘I smell it. And what else—’

  The dark exploded.

  A clamour went up on all sides. The brief flare of an ignition revealed that, straight ahead, the floor ended. A thin bridge, suspended from above on slender diamond fingers, arched over the chasm. From the centre of this span poured a scrawl of spriggans, brandishing weapons. In their haste they jostled one another. One fell over the side, his fast-receding shrieks overlaying the wild shouts of his fellows.

  The nygel whirled to face the direction from which he had come. A second time, he stamped. His hooves ignited sparks. The flash illuminated haemorrhages of yelling wights exuding from cracks in the walls, cutting off the escape route. Their noise fed itself back into the crystal, amplifying with each circuit, drilling through Tahquil’s ears. Under her, the nygel spun like a compass needle. Dizzy, she braced herself for the onslaught. Would these enemies attempt to wrench her from Tighnacomaire’s sticky hide, flaying her in the process? Or would they merely spear her as she sat on his back? Death never seemed inviting, yet at this instant, neither did it appear entirely unwelcome. Her head jerked back as the nygel surged. He bolted. His haunches gathered. He jumped. The ground dropped away, her stomach flew to her gullet. Her arms and hair flew up over her head as she and the horse plummeted like iron weights. In front of her nose, her ragged shirt fluttered invisibly. Her blood thundered with fear and exhilaration. They were falling together into the chasm.

  There was no time to scream, no breath for it. The terrible, whistling wind of their falling ripped it from her lungs. She was a rag doll on horseback, diving into a well.

  Violently they smashed into something like a slab of adamant. Water filled Tahquil’s skull like hemlock wine.

  Pressure clamped down, roaring. Red bubbles popped and fizzed in her eyes. The nygel was drowning her again. Her arms flailed vainly. Tides sloshed in her head. Her brain swam like a frightened frog, and a band of steel tightened across her chest. Her consciousness dwindled to a golden pinprick, yet that tiny point burned bravely and was not yet extinguished.

  And then the pressure reversed, crumpling her against the nygel’s shoulders and neck. Fluid streamed from Tahquil like a garment. Sweet air swirled in freely. Tahquil lay along the spine of the waterhorse, sobbing, deprived of sight and hearing, shuddering with the hoarse rasps of her panting and the racking coughs.

  When these subsided, she lay quietly in darkness. There seemed to be no movement. The only sound was a gurgling, a whisper of liquid brushing against stone. She was up to her neck in water.

  A long time afterwards, the darkness paled. Dimly, the head and ears of Tighnacomaire took shape. Beyond them, an ashen glimmer dawned. As it strengthened, Tahquil made out walls racing along at a staggering rate, and close above, a ceiling going by in a blur. They were not motionless after all, but travelling at enormous speed, propelled by the current of an underground stream. A low archway framed the source of light. Towards this they hurtled.

  ‘Fear natt!’ lisped Tighnacomaire, regenerating a vestige of her faith in him. Suddenly, the archway had them in its pincers. The current shoved them through. Suspended in midair, Tahquil closed her eyes.

  They were falling once more, but it was only a short drop. It took them plunging down a hurrying sluice into a stream, deep and clear, flowing under the open skies of Darke. Tighnacomaire began to swim with the flow, angling towards land. Three hundred yards downstream, he climbed out on the shore, depositing his rider gently beneath the eaves of a coppice of unusual night-poplars. Leaves like coins of swarthy silver fluttered down.

  Tahquil, sodden, weakened further by the aftermath of terror, lay dazed and ill, shivering, wretched. The stream, gurgled and babbled, flowing quickly beneath leaning willows and black alders. Glossy ribbons of starlight laced it. The poplars of Darke let their shining leaves drift down, winking bright and dark; leaves that thrived on nebulae of opalescent starfire instead of sunshine’s golden downpour.

  As in a dream, Tahquil saw Whithiue glide from the trees. The swanmaiden spread her white arms and between them stretched a space from which the stars had been erased. A warm snow fell on the prone form of Tahquil. It enveloped her in cosiness. Her limbs quieted. She slept.

  Down the violet wind slid syrinx melodies, wild as foxes, mad as love, strange as awakening.

  Whithiue sat nearby with her knees drawn up, hands clasped around them. She stared at Tahquil, her head cocked to one side.

  ‘Friend is speckless, spick and span,’ she said. ‘Washed by fresh water.’

  Indeed, the muck with which Tahquil had been disguising her scent was gone, and the waters under the High Plain had rinsed the dirt out of the roots of her brown-dyed tresses. Her locks now lay long and damp all around, in spirals and thick swathes, frosted by the starlight.

  ‘Fair friend is valiant, faithful,’ said the swanmaiden, observing the true colour growing from Tahquil’s scalp. ‘Vahquil of fulvous hair,’ she mispronounced.

  Boobooks called across the night. A stumpy bough became a tawny frogmouth, which spread owl’s wings like painted fans and flapped away. Every detail of Darke appeared startlingly clear to Tahquil’s eyes. The night was no longer murky, but luminous. The shadows’ unlikely mysteries lay revealed.

  Tully was perched between the spurs of a poplar. Like swanmaidens, urisks were associated with water. In domestic situations, they usually haunted their own pool. Tully had come through the underground stream unscathed. Now, he did not even look wet. Only one droplet, caught in the curls of his hair, shone pellucid; a fragile tear. A spider knitted a web between his stubby horns.

  ‘They ken that we’re here, noo,’ he said grimly. ‘They’ll have spied ye on the horse’s back. They’ll have issued an alert, lass—their eyes’ll be all aboot, on stalks, and they’ll come for ye any time noo.’ He squinted up at the veil of stars, as though hearing already the howl and thunder of the Hunt.

  ‘I might run like the wind with ye, acrrass the High Plain,’ said a man, or the semblance of one. Tahquil did not recognise him at first. ‘But they wad catch us befarr we gat halfway,’ Tighnacomaire continued.

  It had been several days since he had taken his man-shape. In this form he lay on his side, idly scraping up a dirt wall across an ants’ trail, to flummox them.


  ‘So,’ said Tully gently, ‘your quest is at an end, mistress. Ye cannae make it tae the grand fortress.’

  White hares gambolled on the mouse-fur lawns of Darke, beneath the spray of silver lights from distant worlds and suns. Far off, voiced over and over, a kind of signal or summons echoed repetitively—Ai-ee! Ai-ee! Laughter, sometimes shrill and maniacal, sometimes low and coarse, wound through the night-forests. Heartbroken wailing and lamenting followed.

  Tahquil said in a flat tone, ‘If only to see Viviana and Caitri once more, or to know what has become of them, I will remain here and await the Hunt. Unprotesting, I will let them take me. There is no other way.’ Careful, even now, not to thank the wights, she added, ‘You have all been most kind.’

  She lowered her lashes, shutters against the world.

  The swanmaiden viewed the girl through half-lidded bird’s eyes. She said, ‘Vahquil has fed on Fairbread, seed-fruits of Faêrie. She has voyaged with waterhorse, seen with eldritch viewpoint. Has worn on her finger special circle of strong, shining sorcery. Has sustained healing spell from horned hearth-faun. Vahquil-sister shares wight-ways. See, she’s washed stainless.’

  Whithiue stood up. She wrung her azalea hands, then lightly trod a few paces back and forth. For only the second time, the swanmaiden was not wearing the precious cloak of ebony feathers. Her gown seemed fashioned of mist and cobwebs. It was cinched at the waist with a girdle of flashing garnets. Her fabulous hair streamed along the light southerly breeze. She spoke again, hesitantly, her words aimed directly at Tahquil.

  ‘Scorn surrender! Fly hence, to Fell Fortress. Wights won’t hinder, won’t waylay swan. Friend will venture forth in security. Settle within high walls. Have certainty, swan will visit subsequently, to withdraw feather-cloak. Have certainty, should feathers be spoiled or scattered, vengeful hostility of swan’s family will follow forever.’