Weatherwitch: Book Three of The Crowthistle Chronicles

by Cecilia Dart-Thornton

  In the year 3491 the mode for everyday wear in High Darioneth tended towards simplicity of design. Women and girls wore sleeveless surcoats that reached to mid-calf. Beneath the surcoat was an ankle-length, long-sleeved kirtle. A belt cinched the two garments at the waist. To keep out the chill of the highlands, women also wore soft leggings beneath their skirts; these were tucked into supple slippers for indoor wear, or boots, or pattens for walking on muddy roads. Their heads were warmly wrapped in the folds of woollen caps and hoods, often lined with fur. Sweeping, fur-lined cloaks draped from their shoulders. The grey and azure raiment of the blue-eyed damsel, however, sported no fur trimmings and was perhaps lighter and less cumbersomely voluminous than that of other women, as if she did not suffer from the cold as greatly as others. Even her hood was pushed back from her head and lay across her shoulders, revealing the pretty cap of velvet. The icy wind, sending shivers through the trees, lifted escaped strands of the damsel’s night-colored hair, and unfurled them along its currents.

  The small boy trotting at her side—the son of her uncle Dristan—was dressed in thick trousers and sturdy boots, a tunic hemmed at mid-thigh and clasped with a narrow belt, a knee-length cloak and a hood of the type called the cucullus, often worn by shepherds and travelers. Beneath the hood his hair, like that of his sister and mother, was as brown as walnuts, glossy and well tended. His cheeks were red with the kisses of the glacial breeze as he made his way along the miry track, now forgetting about his silent tunes and turning his attention to the conversation.

  “Well, if you insist upon hearing yet another story,” the blue-eyed damsel was now saying, as she ducked beneath the overhanging boughs of a beech, “I shall tell you a tale about my father’s impet.”

  “Nay! Asra, prithee do not tell us of the impet,” protested the little boy. “I know all about it. Grandfather has told us many a time. Uncle Arran’s impet never did anything to be much frightened of.”

  “We want a story to make us scared,” the boy’s twin sister affirmed earnestly. She skipped over a stone in the middle of the road. “Tell us about the field called Black Goat, and the wicked things that lurk there.”

  “Your mother would not be well pleased with me, were I to give you nightmares!”

  From the driver’s seat of the traveling-chaise, the children’s mother laughed. “Indeed I would not!”

  “That story would not give us nightmares,” the lad declared boldly.

  “In any case,” reasoned his sister, “everyone is forever telling us about drowners, and how they reach out their long claws and drag unwary children into pools. That demonstrates we are allowed to hear about fearsome things.”

  “My sweet Corisande, people only tell you about drowners in order to warn you against swimming in the wild pools and streams,” said Asrthiel.

  Corisande reflected on this statement for a moment, then her eyes lit up. “If you tell us about goblins we won’t go near the places they dwell,” she ex-claimed. Turning to her brother for support she added, “Will we, Cavalon?”

  “Never,” agreed the lad, shaking his head vigorously. “By talking about dangerous things you are in truth keeping us safe.”

  With the reins held lightly in her hands the children’s mother spoke from her perch. “You know full well that goblins have been extinct since the Goblin Wars ended,” she said, swaying from side to side as the equipage rattled along the rutted track. “Since they are all gone, there is no need to warn children about them.”

  Perceiving that the battle was almost lost, Corisande rested her small, gloved hand coaxingly on Asrthiel’s forearm and peered tragically into her face. “Prithee,” she crooned beseechingly, “Prithee, Asra, tell us a scary tale! We won’t be scared,” she subjoined in a reassuring manner, inadvertently contradicting her own words.

  After glancing down at the hopeful countenances of her twin cousins, Asrthiel relented. “Very well,” she said, heaving an exaggerated sigh, “if you wish, I will tell you some fearsome tale to satisfy your unnatural cravings for dread.”

  “Not too fearsome!” their mother admonished. “Dristan shall call me to question when he returns, if he finds out I allowed you to frighten them from their wits!” The woman was smiling as she spoke: her husband was the mildest of men and in any case, she had complete faith in Asrthiel’s judgement where the children were concerned.

  “Give me a while to think of something,” Asrthiel said to her gleeful cousins. She ran a slim white hand, gloveless, through escaped strands of her hair as she examined a few of the old tales she held in her memory. After choosing one, she reviewed it, making mental notes of ways in which she might doctor the true history, taming the visceral horror of the events that had played out so long ago that they were now no more than tales for children.

  “Goblins it is,” she began, in a tone of deliberate ominousness, and her cousins squealed. “The goblins,” commenced Asrthiel, “as you know, were the most malevolent of all unseelie wights, and they lived in dark, dirty holes deep beneath the ground. They were small and stunted—about the same size as our household brownies. About the same size as you two, in sooth! And they looked somewhat like little men, but they were oh! so ugly, so grotesque that nobody who was unfortunate enough to set eyes on them could mistake them for true men at all. The wars started because the goblins were wicked and cruel, and longed to exterminate humankind. Many battles were fought. One of the greatest was the Battle of Silver Hill, and afterwards the bards made a song of it. . . .”

  Her words danced on invisible waves, amongst tiny golden insects that hovered above the road like spangles of winged light. Sounds of laughter and chattering could be heard from ahead and behind, as the other Mai Day revelers joked and conversed amongst themselves. Tiny bells were ringing, as protection against unseelie forces, and someone was tootling happy tunes on a whistle. The horse clip-clopped onward, pulling its burden; the walkers stepped briskly, and the children became engrossed in the story. With the telling of the tale, time passed unnoticed.

  Long crimson-gilt rays of the setting sun sliced through gaps in the clouds and reached out across the countryside. They emblazoned the westerly facets of the storths and stretched across the valley of the Canterbury Water many miles away to the east, before sliding their tines through the Riddlecombe Steeps and staining the walls of the Great Eastern Ranges, where the Marauder comswarms dwelled. Runnels of water trickled from the heights, finding their way into fractures and fissures. The runnels joined to form rivulets, which in turn became tributaries of underground waterfalls cascading down to subterranean streams. Converging, the streams created a river that flowed eastward beneath the Lake District of Slievmordhu. As it followed the inclines of vast slabs of buried strata, the river ran beneath the Riddlecombe Steeps, under the valley of the Canterbury Water and far, far below the Mountain Ring on its way to the sea. Wights of the water swam therein; some seelie, others wicked. Of the procession that went maying in High Darioneth that same afternoon, perhaps only one was a weathermaster powerful enough to be aware—albeit dimly—of such a great body of water flowing along so many fathoms down beneath their feet.

  The afternoon was waning, and the sky became overcast. Meadow-pipits were settling to roost, and every copse and thicket was raucous with their chatter. Pausing at a crossroads, the convoy’s members lit their lanterns against the gathering gloom. At this point Asrthiel and her family parted from the rest of the reveling Mai Day Eve procession, which turned down a byway leading to a great meadow bordered with flowering hawthorn hedges, glimmering in the dusk like pale galaxies of stars.

  The journey of Asrthiel and her companions took them instead past the meadow, and along lanes hedged by the tangled razor-wire hoops of leafless sweetbriars. Through bare-branched nut-orchards they passed, where chaffinches chased one another from tree to tree, and through apple-orchards whose twigs were punctuated with tiny buds, and over bridges spanning swift, cold streams where water-voles lurked, and past fields lying fallow. Grass-
blades shivered as dormice did some last-minute foraging amongst their roots before nightfall; the countryside teemed with life, and Asrthiel comprehended it keenly, rejoicing in the natural marvels of the world.

  She rested her eyes pensively upon young Corisande and Cavalon, who were laughing in excitement as they embarked upon the annual celebrations, and a sudden wave of nostalgia swept over her. The children’s minds were as yet untroubled by loss and grief, and they were secure in the knowledge that both their parents—as well as numerous other relatives—watched over them, ever solicitous for their well-being. A loving family also surrounded Asrthiel, but her own dear parents were beyond reach. The damsel wondered how it would be for her if her mother’s suspended life were restored, and if her father came home at last, after questing long in the uncharted lands of the north. An ache centered itself beneath her ribs as she pictured her forthright and vivacious mother, Jewel, wrapped by death-like sleep within her glass-walled, rose-entwined bower. Visions of her father also formed: Arran, strong and umber-haired, solemn and steadfast, a man of integrity and wisdom, undemonstrative in public yet unreservedly loving to his closest kindred. She had lost them both in the year she turned ten Winters old, and this year, on the twenty-eighth of Aoust, she would be nineteen. There had been too many Mai Days without her parents, and she sighed, missing them anew.

  “My legs are tired,” said Corisande, breaking into her aunt’s reverie. “Let us climb up into the chaise.”

  “You may do so if you wish,” said Asrthiel. “For myself I prefer to walk.”

  “Why walk when you can ride?” the children’s mother called out. She was teasing, for she knew the answer.

  “I would rather not make poor old Dobbin work any harder than he is doing already, Albiona!” Asrthiel said in reply.

  Albiona said, “Old Dobbin won’t mind—he’s used to it. In any case, you are only a feather’s weight—he’d never notice if you climbed aboard.”

  “He may well be used to pulling loads, but that does not make it fair to use him so. Have you not observed the way he rolls his eyes and flattens his ears when he’s made to step backwards into the shafts?”

  “But he enjoys his labor!”

  “Does he indeed? The language of his body indicates otherwise. See how he plods.”

  “Everyone has to work for their keep,” said Corisande sagely, walking at Asrthiel’s elbow. “He ought to work for his, too.”

  “But what right have we to keep him in the first place?” asked Asrthiel, “to own him? Surely if he were not forced into service for us, he would be away on the grassy plains of the lowlands amongst the wild herds, galloping freely across the meadows, unhaltered, unharnessed, unconfined, feeding on green grass and drinking from clear streams. He does not need us to keep him, and I’m certain he would be happier if we did not.”

  “You are making me feel sorry for Dobbin!” Corisande accused fretfully. “I’ll not want to ride in the chaise any more.”

  “Do as you see fit,” said Asrthiel, twitching the hems of her skirts as she stepped over a fallen pinecone. “However,” she added, “do it with wisdom and compassion, above all.”

  “What use is wisdom when your legs are tired?” groaned the boy.

  “Much use,” answered his cousin. “Dobbin is wise, and I can recall at least one way in which the wisdom of horses has proved beneficial to both equine and human animal.”

  “But horses love people! They enjoy being ridden.”

  “Do they? If left to their own devices, do horses seek out saddles and wriggle their way beneath them? Do they search for metal bits to bite on? The way mankind treats horses can be summed up in one word, which we use when their wild spirits have been utterly defeated and we have made them broken.”

  Albiona had lost her bantering mood. She leaned down from her elevated seat to pour words into Asrthiel’s ear. “Please stop this lecturing, Asra,” she hissed in low tones. “You are upsetting the children. Live and let live, eh? Can you not be satisfied to abide by your own principles without pushing them on others?”

  Right now you are pushing yours onto me! Asrthiel thought, but diplomatically she refrained from saying it aloud. Averting her head so that her aunt would not bridle at the sight of her frown, Asrthiel said, “Everyone has the right to hold their own views, Albi, but intellectual liberty is very different from freedom of conduct. People may believe whatever they wish, on condition that they do no harm to others. Those who judge that mortal creatures should be abused and slaughtered do not own the moral right to act according to those convictions! History teaches that society at large once condoned wife-beating, human slavery, bigotry, witch-burning, the labor of children in mines, and many other practices that are now universally recognized as wrong. If we do not tell people how to act with kindness, if we do not speak up on behalf of reform, then how shall reform happen?”

  “Hmph! Let me inform you, some people are beginning to view you as didactic. Your preaching does nothing to endear you to others.”

  “I hope I have a grander purpose in this world than to win some popularity contest,” Asrthiel replied stiffly. “Of course it is important to me to be accepted and loved, but I am prepared to risk becoming controversial and falling into disfavor and being called a pedant in the cause of justice, though I gain nothing material by my stance.”

  Albiona fell silent, and Asrthiel feared that her aunt had taken insult after all. Though the two women were generally on good terms, a certain tension underlay their relationship. Yet, despite her desire to preserve family harmony, Asrthiel would never apologize for her outspokenness on this topic. If necessary she would give way on every other matter, but not this, the fierce desire to bring equity to all mortal creatures, a passion that seemed fused to the very essence of her existence.

  The damsel had been ardent for this cause from her very earliest child-hood days, when she had begun to observe the wild creatures of mountain, woodland and stream, and marveled at their attributes. Their navigational skills, their speed, their finely honed senses and their elaborate social interactions had astonished and fascinated her. Later, in the lowlands, she had seen birds trapped in cages, beating their wings against the bars in a frenzied effort to be free; and bears forever chained, and dogs beaten until their bones broke, and starving horses straining to pull heavy wagons, and live deer being ripped apart by eager hunters. These acts and worse were accepted as “normal” by people who seemed, in most other respects, quite decent. Her heart had hardened implacably against cruelty and she had toiled to rescue as many creatures as possible, while broadcasting enlightenment far and wide.

  The hedgerow rustled. A startled currawong arrowed across the lane to avoid the party that had disturbed it, and stationed itself in an overlooking spruce tree.

  “Ryence says ‘tis nigh impossible to live without using animals,” said Cavalon.

  “Once I breathed in a midge,” Corisande said. “I could not help it.”

  “And back there, by that mossy stile, I accidentally stepped on a beetle,” her brother said.

  “Well, it is impossible to live at all without causing some harm,” Asrthiel responded, “but that does not give us the right to do it deliberately.”

  “Ryence says it is animal abuse to name a horse ‘Dobbin,’ or a dog ‘Rover,’” Cavalon declared.

  “Cousin Ryence will have his little jests,” murmured Asrthiel.

  “Or a parrot ‘Polly,’” the little boy supplemented. “Or a cow ‘Buttercup’ . . .”

  Breaking her silence Albiona said abruptly from the driver’s seat, “Ho w can it be fitting to make such efforts to save animals when so many destitute persons need assistance?”

  Reluctantly but adamantly her niece replied, “At the risk of appearing disagreeable and being seen to moralize excessively, I put it to you that the world is full of troubles that merit our response, and barbarity towards nonhumans is but one amongst them. We ought to endeavor to relieve distress in all situations, if ‘tis po
ssible.” She was growing tired of having to defend herself.

  Corisande lifted her piping voice. “But Ryence says—”

  “Look there!” cried Asrthiel. “The roof of the Mill is showing between the trees, gleaming in the twilight. Can you see it?”

  Albiona flicked the reins and with a jerk the chaise picked up speed, heading along Old Horse Lane on the last leg of the journey, until at last they arrived at the High Darioneth Mill.

  The Mill was a roomy, three-storied edifice built of stone, with living quarters attached. In the walled yard stood an assemblage of outbuildings including a byre, stables and a kiln. Substantial and imposing, the manufactory nestled below the weir on the millstream. When the chaise approached, the incoming party could hear the rhythmic splashes of the great waterwheel as it turned. Black water, silver-polished, surged down the head-race and through the wooden gates that controlled the flow. As it entered the wheel-pit, it cascaded into the long buckets fastened to the outer perimeter of the mighty wheel, which turned in a direction opposite to the water’s flow. Weighed down, the full buckets sank, spilling their contents at the lowest point of the wheel’s rotation. The water then surged away down the tailrace, returning to the stream at a junction below the mill buildings.