Weatherwitch: Book Three of The Crowthistle Chronicles

by Cecilia Dart-Thornton

  “I am ready,” he announced, “to test the artifact from the Dome of Strang.”

  Avalloc, Dristan, Asrthiel and the carlin Lidoine Galenrithar accompanied the aging savant to a wild and uninhabited corner of the mountain plateau, near the steep chasm where the Snowy River broke through the Mountain Ring and thundered down in savage cataracts over the border into Grïmnørsland.

  “We must carry this thing well away from the dwellings of humankind,” Agnellus had warned. “There is no knowing how far its influence might reach.”

  They gathered on an open tract of smooth, green sward starred with tiny alpine flowers and dappled with the shadows of fast-moving clouds. Drifts of thistledown went gusting past like crowds of tiny, fleeing ghosts—perhaps the airborne seeds of crowthistle. On rafts of vapor high above and close by, the frosted tips of the mountains glittered. They hung in the sky as pristine as white jewels rinsed in rainwater.

  From somewhere near the river, a kingfisher uttered a note.

  “I must advise you,” Agnellus told his companions, “that if anything strange happens you must on no account believe your eyes. Do not panic, but stand fast.”

  With that, he threw the Comb to the ground, articulating the Word.

  The nineteen sharp prongs stuck into the turf, and the Comb stood up right. At once a silvery forest, weird and mysterious, sprang up all around the weathermasters. The tree boles resembled the tines of the Comb, their bark whorled, engraved, chased, and twisted. The company was enclosed within a landscape of argent trunks and glimmering whispering leaves. Smoky shadows or shadowy smoke roiled, as if alive, between the trees. Other movements hinted at entities moving deep in the woods; possibly a glimpse of a slender horn, or a pearly hoof, or inscrutable eyes watching. The sibilance of whispering and the murmur of the wind was all around, so that the weathermasters were completely disoriented, as if they found themselves in an unearthly world, a place that existed on another plane entirely. A certainty of imminent peril seized them, laced with astonishment and curiosity.

  Then came a feeling deep in the bones, like a thrummin g vibration so low as to be inaudible, striking the universal note of terror. It entered the soles of the feet, climbed up through the limbs, and seized control of every bodily organ, seeping finally to the brain, where it sent rapid shoots along primordial pathways of utmost fear and madness. Those who were its prey experienced heightened awareness of every detail in their illusory surroundings. All seemed to threaten horror and death; the trees to crush with their boughs, the leaves to gust into every orifice and suffocate, the horns to pierce, the hoofs to trample, the wind to exhale poison, the shadows to dissolve everything they touched, leaving no sign aught had ever existed. . . .

  Agnellus bent down and picked up a thing that lay glinting on the ground, and in an instant the forest had completely disappeared, and he was putting the Comb back in his pocket.

  The audience stood stunned.

  “That,” said Avalloc quietly, voicing the opinions of all, “is an extraordinary object.”

  Looming above the weathermasters, the mountains—so magnificent, so formidable, they seemed like the very ramparts of the world—ranged out to the south and the north. Mystically blue were their steeps, as if veiled in translucent blue-dyed gauzes. Somewhere beneath the northern ranges the busy burrower continued to delve, as ever, pushing forward persistently in the dark.

  Amongst the numerous species of subterranean wights, the coblynau were famous for manifesting extravagant displays of labor and producing nothing. Many underworld caverns were illuminated by tiny lanterns grasped by milling throngs of these diminutive manlike beings. Each of the wights was about eighteen inches in height, with skinny limbs, disproportionately large hands and feet, and stout, bulbous trunks. Their faces were wide-mouthed and grotesque, their noses elongate. In shape, their ears resembled those of donkeys. Their pupils were large, dark and gleaming, filling the whole eye so that no whites showed, like the orbs of dogs and horses. Cheerfully they bustled back and forth, carrying picks and shovels and crow-bars across their shoulders, or pushing barrows, or lugging buckets on poles.

  If any human intruder ever caught them unawares, the coblynau would recover from their surprise in time to trick the spy with their simple catch-phrase, “Ooh, Mathy, what’s that behind ye?” As soon as the intruder took his attention off the wights, they vanished. A moment later, if the visitor turned back, not one of the miners was to be seen. Only their miniature tools lay where they had been discarded, haunted by a fading memory of sniggering and twittering. It would have been useless to try to catch them a second time. The supernatural creatures were now aware of the spy, and would be gone in a puff of dust before he could so much as wink an eye.

  As the black-handed burrowing foreigner moved on, the wights boldly emerged behind its back, even before it was wholly out of sight, and returned to their ceaseless, useless travail. Although these small folk seemed very occupied with the business at hand, their buckets and barrows were empty of ore, and, despite all the wielding of picks and shovels, not one of the little miners had been actually digging. There was no tangible sign of their work.

  The coblynau vacuously playacted, the fridean scrabbled furtively, and unnameable underground dwellers shot away from the edges of vision with abnormal speed. Ignoring these manifestations, shunned by them, the anonymous burrowrer dug relentlessly on. It had no way of knowing it was heading straight towards the location of one of Tir’s greatest secrets.

  Princes

  Knights of the Red Lodge, knights of the Burning Brand,

  Bright helms a-glinting, sworn to defend our land.

  Hark ye the trumpets, hark ye the singing;

  Songs of high glory on the wind winging.

  Knights of the Red Lodge triumph are bringing.

  Spears rank on rank, gay pennants blowing,

  Splendid the colors flashing and glowing.

  Mighty the horsemen, sword-blades a-ringing.

  See, from our footprints red roses springing!

  Matchless in courage, loyal and handpicked,

  Skillful with swordplay, dauntless in conflict.

  Ours is the victory, ours is the plunder.

  Knights of the Red Lodge riding like thunder.

  —A BATTLE SONG OF SLIEVMORDHU’S RED LODGE

  Before she set out to take up her new post at King’s Winterbourne, Asrthiel climbed the stairs to the rose-wreathed glass cupola where her mother lay in a charmed sleep. She seated herself beside the couch and sang a lilting song, as was her custom from time to time. Then she leaned and kissed that immaculate brow, whispering, “Farewell, dearest. I am going away, but I will come back often and visit you.”

  Lingering a while longer, loath to depart immediately, she reflected on the step she was about to take; the new pathway that was opening before her feet. Her life, until this moment, had been sheltered by the mountainous bastion of High Darioneth and succored by the dependable comfort of the weathermaster families. Now she was to set out on her own. Her excitement at the possibility of future adventure was tinged with her never-fading sorrow at her parents’ misfortunes. This moment would have been so much more rewarding had they been there to proudly acknowledge her achievements.

  A convoy of coaches carried Asrthiel’s relatives and friends, including several Councilors of Ellenhall, from High Darioneth to their destination, the capital city of Narngalis. Along the winding Mountain Road they traveled, through a changing landscape: precipitous fern gullies alive with falling water; towering forests where crescent-shaped leaves fluttered down in sporadic showers, in whose clearings charcoal burners stoked their fires and the axes of timber-getters rang; hillsides covered with a patterned knot-work of grapevines; fields of yellow stubble dotted with hay bales like fresh-baked loaves of bread. Hawthorn hedges, blood-spattered with early-ripened fruit, bordered dandelion-freckled pastures stretching away to grassy ridges in the middle distance.

  As for the new weathermage to the ki
ng, she traveled to her post in a small sky-balloon. Its name was Lightfast. The fabric of its envelope was woven from plant fibers—not as strong and light as spidersilk—and it had been custom-built to carry no more than three people. The other two aboard were her own chosen crew-members; not weathermasters but robust, eager youths from the plateau who wanted to see the world.

  “When I abide in King’s Winterbourne,” Asrthiel had said to her grand-father long before her departure, “I will not keep horses. As you know I dislike harnessing any sort of animal to haul me about when I can just as easily walk. This will have the added benefit of reducing my expenses, for the cost these days of maintaining stables and a carriage, not to mention the wages of coachman and grooms, is not inconsiderable.”

  “My dear child,” Avalloc had said somewhat testily, “it will be looked upon as eccentric if you walk about the city streets. All the highborn city ladies have their own carriages, or at least their own chairs.”

  “I would not mind traveling the city streets in a chair,” said Asrthiel, “for chairs are borne by men, who have a say in the matter of whether or not they will do the job. But I will not have a carriage.”

  “Well, you might get away without employing horse-power while you abide in the city and its precincts, but you will have to hire a post chaise, I daresay, whenever you return home to visit us. We cannot spare balloons and crews to ferry you. To walk from King’s Winterbourne to High Darioneth would take weeks, and the roads are dangerous. Surely you are not suggesting that you make such journeys on foot!”

  “When I travel long distances I will do so in my own aerostat, with my own crew. And before you remind me, dear Grandfather, of the cost of lightweight envelopes and sun-crystals, let me point out that I have a way of offsetting that cost.”

  She opened her hand, which had been clenched. There on her palm lay a concentrate of silver-white, a mote of dazzling light the size of a cat’s eye. It was as if moonlight were being sucked into this scintillant and condensed to its purest essence. The jewel from the Iron Tree gave off sparkles of reflected radiance, pure, yet flashing with every color.

  “As you know, Grandfather, my mother gave me this,” said Asrthiel. “It is an heirloom, but I understand she was never fond of it. She would not mind if I sold it. I have never seen or heard of its like. I daresay it is valuable and will bring a good price. Some noble family will wish to own it.”

  Avalloc looked long and hard at his granddaughter. “No,” he said at last, “you must keep the jewel. You are right—your mother never cared for it, even though she was its namesake. Yet I perceive that in your heart you think of this stone as a memento of her days of wakefulness, and you will grieve a little if it is lost to you. Let your sky-balloon be a parting gift from me.”

  The damsel thanked him joyfully, and kissed his grizzled cheek, and put away the ornament.

  Asrthiel’s luggage was not abundant, consisting mainly of books packed into canvas bags and loaded onto Lightfast. She had taken lodgings in King’s Winterbourne, at a large house in Lime Grove, on the east side. The building, known as The Laurels, belonged to Mistress Draycott Parslow, an elderly woman who had stumbled across good fortune in her later years. The widow now dwelled in a small but comfortable cottage on the grounds, having decided to let her house to “a tenant of good propriety.”

  By the time the overland convoy had arrived in the city, Asrthiel had already alighted at The Laurels in order to supervise the unloading of her belongings. She was to be assisted in her new position by a small domestic workforce and an even smaller clerical staff: a personal maid, a butler, the two stalwart lads of her balloon-crew, who could act as chair-bearers and even as bodyguards if necessary, and a secretary to tally up accounts and write letters. Provender for the household would be provided by Mistress Draycott Parslow’s cooks. Leaving her household staff at the lodgings to prepare everything according to her specifications, the Storm Lord’s granddaughter ordered her chair to be brought around to the front door. Her four bearers, two crewmen and two footmen, conveyed her down the gravel driveway and out the gates of the estate, turning off Lime Grove into Eastcheap and continuing along Great Castle Street, to Wyverstone Castle where the other members of her weathermaster coterie were bound.

  The City of King’s Winterbourne occupied an area of approximately three square miles; almost twx> miles from east to west, one and a half miles from north to south. Housing a population of about one hundred thousand, it had long since expanded beyond the limits of its original walls, with their twelve gateways. The civil precincts clustered along the northern banks of the River Thyme, with a small settlement across the river in Southborough. The Port of King’s Winterbourne was always busy with river traffic from Grïmnørsland and outlying regions of Narngalis, and ferrymen continually plied their trade. Winterbourne Bridge spanned the broad river, carrying on its back Walk wood Street, the main thoroughfare. It was constructed of stone, and eight of its twenty arches sheltered huge waterwheels that powered water pumps and corn mills. After Walkwood Street crossed the Thyme and plunged through the heart of Southborough it split in two, becoming the Mountain Road that ran south and the River Road heading east.

  In the city’s west lay the inns of court and chancery, hostels for lawyers and students, the colleges of history, music and art, the public library, the museum, and Westleigh Sanctorum. Magnificent as these buildings were, it was not for them that King’s Winterbourne was famed, but for its palaces of basalt. There were, throughout the city, more palaces than in the other three capitals put together. Aristocrats had built them for use as townhouses, ensuring that they were spacious enough to quarter the entire retinue of a noble family, which might comprise as few as two hundred or as many as eight hundred liveried servants. Other buildings of prominence included the many guildhalls scattered throughout the municipality, and the imposing Asylum for Lunatics, tucked away at the edge of town. The trades had bestowed their names upon many of the thoroughfares: Threadneedle Street, Carter Lane, Candlewick Way, Cornhill, Cordwainer Row. To the east stood the only three fortified buildings in the city: the Tower of King’s Winterbourne, Essington Tower and Wyverstone Castle, the chief residence of the royal family. It was within the latter, amidst barbicans and turrets of battlemented stone, that the large company of weathermasters attended a welcoming celebration given by King Warwick, in honor of Asrthiel’s new appointment as resident weathermage.

  Grand and dignified was Wyverstone Castle, its magnificence matched by the somber splendor of the royal family and courtiers. Although the fabrics were sumptuous, their raiment was designed with relative simplicity and restraint. They favored dusky hues and intense sable, contrasting with vivid flashes of jewels, brocade, or embroidery; or rich, lively colors crawling with the intricate scrolls of black work. In particular, Narngalis fashion inclined towards dark violaceous tints of heather, lavender and hyacinth, accentuated by the contrasting pink-purple of martagon, fuchsia and damson.

  Older noblewomen customarily wore the gabled headdress, or soft veils of lace encircled with elegant chaplets of silver wire, rather than the strenuous steeples and butterfly hats of the Slievmordhuan court, the horned headgear of Grïmnørsland, or the plumed turbans of Ashqalêth. Younger woman adorned their heads with jeweled cauls, their hair hanging down their backs. Men hatted their long locks with capuchons in myriad varying designs, complete with attached scarves, pleats, or folded brims.

  Many of King Warwick’s knights were present at his court at this time. Remote of demeanor and steely-eyed were they; clad in chain mail and cloaks of deepest indigo. Their tabards of velvet and silk brocade were lined with linen, and appliqued with heraldic designs. These warriors, Companions of the Cup, were as honorable and learned as they were stern and battle-ready. Highly esteemed, they were popularly considered the best knights in Tir.

  At the welcoming feast the revelers lacked for naught to divert and sustain them, and the festivities lasted throughout the night. Performers entertain
ed the diners between each course. Asrthiel sat at the right hand of William, eldest son of King Warwick of Narngalis, a comely young man with merry eyes and light brown-gold hair whose shining strands draped across his shoulders. He was dressed in a calf-length doublet of flowing pattern, beneath which his white linen shirt showed at the neck. His sleeves v/ere tight, concluding with a long cuff over the backs of his hands. The loose white linen undersleeves appeared in small puffs along the back seam, which was not stitched but held together at wide intervals with buttons and loops. The Crown Prince had not accompanied his brother Walter on the hunting trip to Grïmnørsland the previous Spring, despite being as fond of outdoor recreation as any of his peers. He had, instead, been attending to matters of state. He was assiduous and earnest by nature, and desired to learn as much as possible about the management of the kingdom so that Narngalis might continue to profit from equitable and merciful government, and that by excellent statesmanship he might uphold the honor of the family name when it came to be his turn to rule. William often attended Privy Council meetings with his father, who valued his opinion and encouraged him to exercise his judgment.

  The Crown Prince and Asrthiel had last seen one another at Rowan Green, during her coming-of-age celebration, but since their childhood they had been often in each other’s company. Visits between King’s Winter-bourne and Rowan Green occurred several times a year for various reasons, including festivals, conferences, weddings or funerals, or when Asrthiel or Avalloc accompanied an aircrew to the capital city on a weather-taming mission. High Darioneth was, after all, part of Narngalis, and it was natural for Wyverstone Castle and Ellenhall to associate frequently. During their acquaintance William had never made a secret of his high regard for the Storm Lord’s granddaughter. She was aware his esteem had turned to love a year or two since, and she loved him in return, although not in the way he hoped; rather as a sister loves a brother. It pained her to be the inspiration of anyone’s suffering; she could only hope that the passage of time would modify his partiality.