The Bitterbynde Trilogy

by Cecilia Dart-Thornton

  ‘Who but a callow maid swimming in the depths of folly would believe the highest of the high would take a mortal to his very wife? To how many transactions most preposterous has Vahquil been drawn by her vanity?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘The swan prevaricates as deliberately as she mispronounces!’ accused Caitri. ‘She speaks in questions, with may and might. She has truly said nothing.’

  ‘Betimes, union between mortal and immortal has occurred,’ went on Whithiue, ‘often under duress, begat by the stealing of cloaks or skins. All such unions have been doomed to tragedy—has Vahquil not heard?’

  ‘I will hear no more.’ Tahquil-Ashalind stoppered her ears with her fingertips. ‘Go! Avaunt, swanmaiden! Once you were kind to me, as I thought, but now I see that you wanted only to facilitate my passage into the spider’s lair. You are faithless.’

  ‘Whisthaey! Vahquil mistakes Whithiue,’ sighed the lovely wight, ‘for swan speaks only to aid hapless human, to peel waterweeds from her obscured eyes. All that swan has done has been in goodwill. If Vahquil has no gratitude for Whithiue, it is a sadful thing.’ And, gracefully folding her cloak about her, she withdrew.

  ‘Dost thou now perceive Angavar’s intent?’ softly asked the Crown Prince, drawing near.

  But Ashalind, sick to the heart and choked with emotion, could not reply. Against grief, she closed her eyes. When she opened them the oak wood and its denizens had disappeared and the colonnaded chamber was reinstated. Withered leaves and golden dust strewed the marble floor. Only she and Caitri remained there with Tully. Riven, the marquetry dressing-table lay in ruins upon the floor, its looking-glass smashed to smithereens.

  The echo of an injunction bled away in the shadows:

  ‘Anon thou shalt seek again, Elindor.’

  In hollow halls and shady dells

  In oak woods blue with silent bells

  On hilltops under cloudy skies

  By well and water, stone and rise,

  By brakes of thorn and hazelnut

  The tall Gates stand forever shut.

  FOLK SONG OF LUINDORN

  9

  ANNATH GOTHALLAMOR

  Part II: The Eagle and the Raven

  In your dark eyes translucent moonbeams glimmer

  And, running swiftly, silver horses shimmer.

  But dawn’s whey-pallored light shows you are leaving.

  Of pleasure and contentment you’re bereaving

  Me. Here I wait, shrouded by midnight’s curtain.

  I wait. This sunless place is so uncertain

  I cannot know if ’tis a dream I’m seeing,

  And even shadows from themselves are fleeing.

  LOVE-SONG OF TAVISCOT

  In the rose-window library of Annath Gothallamor Tully perched cross-legged on a carpet, a meadow of ripe hay-gold and cornflower-blue. He was playing his syrinx. In a chair by a leaded casement as tall as a spear, its panes standing open to the night, Caitri was seated. She sang:

  ‘And where shall ye belong if not at home?

  Devoid of native heath and doom’d to roam?

  The rover’s footsteps quicken as he turns

  Towards the hearthstone, where the home fire burns.

  Mere shelter may be varied frequently,

  But home is where the heart knows it to be.

  A wanderer may roam throughout his days

  In pathless lands or winding roads and ways,

  But in his secret thought, will always yearn

  Towards the home to which he would return.’

  ‘Ah, Caitri,’ sighed Ashalind presently. ‘Pray do not sing those verses. The Langothe is ever present and those words arouse it in me as a bellows awakens coals to flame. Only by delving into these antique books have I been able to divert my thoughts from sorrow and yearning. Poring over their pages is the single activity that can sometimes distract me from our present plight. Even sleep troubles me with heinous dreams.’

  She twisted the enamelled bracelet on her wrist. It was beginning to look worn and barbaric, especially compared to the sumptuous exquisiteness of the Faêran jewellery dripping from every garment.

  On their solid gold pedestals the nine lamps threw their light up to the ceiling, causing the stone tracery and heavy bosses to flicker indecisively. Lamplight spun in stripes off the gilt spines of the books stacked on the octagonal table. On the lectern, another book lay spread-eagled. Ashalind, seated in the X-framed chair, perused it.

  ‘Here,’ she said, indicating, ‘I see an illumination depicting a man with a smiling face and another with a weeping face. Between them lies a single red rose, which they are both observing. How may two people look at the same object and react so variously? What can it mean?’

  Her companions were as baffled as she. In silence, she read on.

  ‘With what confidence,’ asked Caitri of the air, ‘might we trust the words of the swanmaiden, or of the Prince? No doubt both are truthspeakers—they have no option. But skilled are they in prevarication. They speak in questions and riddles. They palter and evade. Centuries of practice have made them experts.’

  ‘True,’ nodded the urisk, who by dint of keeping company with mortals had by now largely lost his habitual manner of speech.

  ‘And what of the moving pictures shown in the pool?’ Caitri continued. ‘I do not give much credence to the ones purportedly showing the demise of the King-Emperor and his Queen. I know for a fact that they were riding horses along the strand when the dreadful Nuckelavee came upon them.’

  ‘Give credence to the looking-pool, lass,’ advised Tully. ‘It displays the truth. ’Tis the passing on of words that twists veracity. Tales are apt tae alter with the telling. Spoken stories are likely tae be embroidered upon, if ye get my meaning. The fanciful addition of horses happened in much the same fashion as the spurious notion of the Faêran allergy tae iron.’

  Caitri said, ‘What do you mean? Are you saying that the Strangers do not fear iron, that it is not anathema to them?’

  ‘Aye. ’Tis no lie. Cold iron is the bane o’ wights but ’tis naught to the Faêran. They can wark wi’ it as they wark wi’ gold or sildron any ither metal. In the Dark Years the myth grew up amongst mortalkind, springin’ from our hatred of the cold burning-metal. The Faêran were sleeping, never present tae refute the lie even had they bothered tae do so. The tale gained popularity, since it served the purpose of lending a tad o’ superiority to iron-handling mortalfolk.’

  ‘Knowledge is power, I have heard it said,’ reflected Ashalind. ‘Had I known the truth long ago, matters might have been different. It was only the sight of Thorn wielding iron that convinced me he was of mortal blood and not of the Faêran.’

  ‘Then ye’re a canny lass, for the Righ Ard made reet coofs o’ the rest o’ unsuspecting Erith!’ chuckled Tully. ‘Who’d hae guessed the King o’ the Mortals was in truth the King o’ the Realm!’

  ‘What about the other wights? Did they not know his true identity?’

  ‘Some did, I suppose, some didnae. I, for one, didnae. And those that were told, seelie or unseelie, were sworn not to reveal the knowledge tae mortal men, lest the Empire be torn asunder.’

  ‘King Angavar is so powerful,’ said Caitri. ‘Why does he not make a new Gate?’

  ‘Some things are impossible, even for the High King of the Fair Realm,’ Ashalind said levelly. She returned to her book, and Tully to his reedy music.

  A sad wind lamented around the gables of Gothallamor, speaking a hollow language. Presently Ashalind said, ‘I have found the answer to the riddle of the two faces and the rose! The weeping man used to own a garden, the fairest and most extensive in Aia. Now, all that remains for him to gaze upon is this one flower. As for the laughing man admiring the rose, he once was blind.’

  ‘Riddles, riddles,’ mused Caitri. Her eyes strayed to the open window and the illustriousness of the stars, sewn like burning pearls on the ceiling of the sky. Below the window the tumbled roofs of Annath Gothallamor gave onto the High
Plain, whereon movement could be faintly descried.

  ‘There has come no unstorm,’ she remarked, ‘since we have been in this place.’

  ‘The Fithiach has banned the shang from the vicinity of Annath Gothallamor,’ explained Tully, ‘because it waukens images of Men. While he is present at the fortress, the unstorm never comes.’

  ‘Herein is an odd thing,’ said Ashalind, reading from her book, ‘a poem, written about this very fortress. Tully, what does this mean—Riachadh na Catha?’

  ‘Why, ’tis the auld kenning for the High Plain,’ said the urisk, ‘and its meaning is the Plain of War, or the Battlefield of Kings.’

  Ashalind raised her head to the gold lettering inscribed on the archway over the bookshelves:

  Is Truth So Hard To Find?

  ‘Riachadh na Catha,’ she repeated, slowly. She closed the book.

  Tully’s reed-music wove a thin wire of melody through soft dunes of starlight sifting through lilac panes. It was a tune Ashalind had heard before, one whose words she could never forget. Once Thorn had sung her this song beneath the luxuriant eaves of the Forest of Glincuith, having crowned her with a garland of flowers …

  The west wind is my caress,

  Raindrops my kisses on thy mouth.

  Clouds race at my bidding, sunshine is my blitheness.

  My heartbeat is the tide, my wrath, the tempest.

  Mist is my mantle, starlight my diadem,

  Frost is my sword, fire, the passion of my heart.

  Night and silver water am I,

  Autumn bounty and the garlands of Spring.

  The long leaves of the woodlands blow in my hair.

  Temperate as Summer, I,

  Grim as Winter, and as perilous.

  The words were imbued with new meaning now. Where was Thorn-Angavar, and did he think of her? Were the words of the swanmaiden true? Had his desire to enjoy her been no more than a passing whim? Such a notion was heartbreaking; yet far worse than his indifference would be his anger. Doubtless it had by this time come to his knowledge that she, Ashalind-Rohain, had lit the flame in Tamhania’s Beacon and ushered in the three Crows of War. She, and no other, had been to blame for the destruction of the Royal Isle. Who could blame Thorn-Angavar if this had aroused his ire and cancelled his ardency?

  Perhaps she ought to be grateful that he had merely chosen to neglect searching for her, trusting that she had perished in the conflagration of Tamhania. Worse might have occurred: he might have sought her out for punishment.

  Nevertheless he had sent out for her after all, as the wights had made clear. Of course—like Morragan he must have learned, eventually, that in some way she was the key to his Realm. How terrible his wrath would be on receiving this knowledge, on realising too late that the key had actually been within his grasp before Ashalind, still guarding the secret, had slipped through his fingers. Indifference or anger; these were to be expected. After all, the proclamations of Pod and others were historically correct, by all accounts: any union between mortal and immortal was doomed to tragedy.

  But how had Morragan first discovered that the intruder at Huntingtowers was in fact a mortal who had entered Erith by way of a Gate? A Gate which, as it turned out, had eluded the words of his own geas and might yet provide passage to the Fair Realm?

  The urisk finished his tune with a long and plaintive note that declined into silence.

  ‘Tully,’ Ashalind said into the quietude, ‘pray tell me all you have found out about the Prince’s discovery of me, for that mystery remains and I would fain solve it.’

  ‘That is mickle,’ fluted the goat-man, laying aside the instrument. ‘My ears have been waggling, I have been mingling aboot, catching up on a’ that I hae missed during decades of solitude.’

  He began to recount all he had learned.

  After Ashalind’s presence had been detected in Huntingtowers, after she had escaped and been hunted down and—as it was believed—had perished in a cave-in of the old mines, and after the fleeing duergar had been apprehended with a swatch of golden fibres half plaited into a whipcord—after all these events, some spriggans happened to set eyes on the skein of hair. When they approached it, they sniffed its scent and remembered it, saying, ‘This hair is of a mortal who visited the traverse beneath Hob’s Hill a thousand years since. How came she here? Long ago her bones ought to have moldered to dust!’

  For the spriggans were Scrimscratcherer and Spiderstalkenhen, the very spriggans who had escorted Ashalind through the halls of Carnconnor when she went to rescue the children of Hythe Mellyn.

  Their news was carried at once to Morragan. One of his knights came before the Raven Prince, bearing the abundance of gilded threads, bowing low on his knee. When the Prince took up the tresses, a sudden hope awakened in his eyes—hope for the first time in the midst of immortal despair, that most appalling of all despairs.

  He said, ‘If the spriggans have the right of it, the maid who owned these locks is none other than Ashalind na Pendran, daughter of Niamh, who with her family and the city of Hythe Mellyn, journeyed to the Realm, there to dwell forever. How has she come to Erith? For certain, she was within the Realm at the time of Closing, that much I know. She has come through by a Gate from our world to this. To regain her is to regain a way back to the Realm. It may be there is now hope of an end to exile. She must be discovered!’

  To the Unseelie Princes he said, ‘Find the spy!’

  ‘Your Royal Highness,’ answered Huon, ‘after the spy fled from my fortress the Cearb made the rocks to quake, crushing her covert. Doubt not, the wench lies dead in the old mines.’

  ‘Then bring me her corpse,’ commanded the Prince. But by that time it was too late. There was no sign of a cadaver, at least not a recent one; a barrow-load of human bones was dug up, but they belonged to miners of yore. It was thought that the bold wench had been scratched up and eaten by wolves, but Morragan questioned the wolves and interrogated the wights and the birds and the beasts of the wild and none had seen a mortal maiden with yellow hair, either dead or alive, save for those folk of the Talith already known and accounted for across the lands. Wights were sent abroad to scour the countryside near and far, with no success. The spy had vanished from the knowledge of men and wights and Faêran.

  ‘If the maid lives she will seek the High King,’ said Morragan to the first among his knights. ‘But ere she finds him, she shall come to me. And let it not be made known outside this circle why she is sought, for if there is a way back, that knowledge must be withheld from all who are not my steadfast allies!’

  There, for a time, the situation remained. Morragan’s knights of Faêrie and their servant wights and the Unseelie Attriod began a Vigil across Erith, watching for any sign of the Talith maiden. Meanwhile in Isse Tower a servant worked with his taltry tied over his ugly head, concealing the cropped stubble of his outlandish locks.

  At the commencement of this Vigil, Morragan vowed to divert Angavar’s attention to one place, in order to draw him from the knowledge of Ashalind’s presence, as a cliff-swallow’s aerial acrobatics draw the predator from its nest eggs. To this end, his wightish servants began allying themselves with the malcontents who were already arousing sedition in troubled Namarre. They stirred up unrest among the outlaws, furtively urging the chieftains of their bands to unite, to rise against the Empire. The wights made grandiose allusions to eldritch aid and the assistance of a powerful wizard, in return for the warm corpses and almost-corpses of their hewn enemies when battle was joined. The Namarrans were led to believe that their hordes might crush the Legions and pour down from the north to overrun all countries and unseat the King-Emperor. Enticed by visions of glory and wealth, the brigands joined together in a rough semblance of an army. Morragan-as-Wizard put forth the Call and the Mustering commenced.

  It was a lengthy business, since its main purpose was not to hasten war but to prolong pre-war manoeuvres. By means of forays and raids, Morragan’s eldritch côterie intended to keep Angavar-as-Jam
es occupied, to keep the Royal Attriod guessing, to ensure that the Empire’s focus was directed towards affairs at the Namarran border. Besides, full-scale conflict was not the wightish way. Like cats, they excelled at skulking, sudden strikes, and ambush in the dark, rather than the direct assaults typical of hounds and men.

  This temporising served its purpose. No suspicion entered Angavar’s thought. The secret of the damsel from the Gate remained with Morragan and the foremost among his knights. Not even the Unseelie Attriod was given to know it. As for the two spriggan sentries who had recognised the scent of the hair, Morragan had them imprisoned in the lowest dungeon of Huntingtowers where, deep in compost, they enjoyed the finest worms and slothfulness, season after season.

  The Vigil continued.

  And this uneasy situation would not have altered, but for a day in Uvailmis of the following year—the same day as the freeing of the nygel. In the marketplace of Gilvaris Tarv, Gull, the Spriggan Chieftain, had been lurking, bent on causing mischief among merchants and cheats. He had spied the yellow hair of Imrhien—as she was then—spilling from under her hood. He summoned others and they gave chase, but the carlin Ethlinn Bruadair outwitted the spriggans.

  Fearing to inform Huon and the Prince of their failure, the spriggans mounted their own search, keeping watch on the house of the carlin. Again the wights lost track of the yellow-hair—it seemed she somehow melted from under their long and sensitive noses and they could not locate her again in Gilvaris Tarv. She had eluded capture as before, but now Morragan knew for sure that she lived. By the colour of her hair he knew it, for the few Talith who remained in Erith could be accounted for, and would not be wandering the markets of Tarv. It only remained for the Raven Prince to claim her before she could be claimed by Angavar, should her existence come to the knowledge of the Faêran King.

  Meanwhile, a mute girl and her Ertish friend languished in a gilf-house by the river, were rescued and began an ill-fated journey to Caermelor. Travelling in the wilderness under Thorn’s protection, Ashalind remained, for a time, safe.