Weatherwitch: Book Three of The Crowthistle Chronicles

by Cecilia Dart-Thornton

  Until as nature clad me, there I stand,

  The willing victim to a wandering hand.”

  Asrthiel doubled over in laughter, heedless, now, that anyone might hear. She was young, and glad of an opportunity to abandon herself to frolic-someness.

  Her jollity was interrupted when her lady’s maid poked her head around the door. “Is aught amiss, m’lady?”

  Suddenly the urisk was nowhere in sight, but Asrthiel fancied she could hear an echo of mocking laughter in the outer darkness. “No! No!” the weathermage said, between gasps. “Nothing at all, Linnet.”

  “There is a good fire going in the parlor.”

  “I thank you.”

  “Would you like me to make some tea with supper?”

  “No, thank you.”

  The servant curtseyed and retreated into the house, closing the door. When Asrthiel turned back she saw the wight sitting cross-legged on the pavement. His mood had changed once more, as the sky changed, and the weather. He was quiet now, and seemed pensive; she was reluctant to disturb him, and refrained from speaking. A movement attracted her attention; a small asp, the color of jade, slithered out of a chink in the wall nearby. As the reptile slid past the urisk’s knee, it seemed to become aware of his presence and reared up, gazing at the wight with bright glass spherules of eyes. The urisk extended his hand in invitation, whereupon the asp glided onto his palm and traveled all the way up his arm. It coiled on his shoulder, flicking its tongue at his ear and curly hair as if quite at ease. After withdrawing his hand the urisk seemed to barely notice this passenger. He remained silent, staring straight ahead as if brooding, while the snake investigated the upper seams of his waistcoat, climbed up and down his other arm and generally made free with his person. Asrthiel watched, fascinated. She presumed the urisk had forgotten she was present, but at the end of a minute or two he murmured, “I will make an experiment.”

  Asrthiel started. For an instant she thought the wight was talking to the viper, but he was regarding her; directly addressing her. He murmured, “Let me tell you something, mist-maiden, frost-friend, storm-sister.”

  Lifting its narrow head, the jade-green serpent made its forked tongue flicker like a flame. The urisk hesitated, then made as if to continue speaking, but uttered no word. He appeared to be waging some inner battle. Asrthiel waited, holding her breath in case even the slight hiss of an exhalation should drown out his impending revelation. Presently the wight shook his head and said, “Well then, perhaps you will never know. But it will do you no harm.” Fie touched his fingers to the ground. The serpent wriggled down his ragged sleeve onto the flagstones and slipped away.

  “What would you like to tell me?” Asrthiel softly asked.

  A series of curious looks passed rapidly across the creature’s face; some indefinable expression followed by rage, bitterness, and finally cynicism. Eventually he said cuttingly, “Look to your own affairs. Your servant comes to nursemaid you.”

  Footsteps approached the door, which swung open. Once again Linnet put out her head. “Supper is ready, m’lady.” The maid’s attention seemed fixed on Asrthiel’s feet. It came to the damsel that she was wearing no shoes. Feeling nonplussed by the urisk’s behavior and overcome by confusion at having so carelessly highlighted her uncommon resistance to the cold, she stammered, “Oh, I will come in directly.”

  He was nowhere. After scanning the apparently empty close, Asrthiel went into the house. The back of her neck prickled as she stepped over the threshold. While she sipped her tea she repeatedly wondered what the urisk had been trying to say, and why he could not say it.

  After supper she stole once again into the courtyard, inquisitive about the object the urisk had tossed onto the flagstones. It turned out to be nothing more than a worthless fragment of slate.

  A quiet mouse happened to be foraging on the pavement beneath the fountain’s lip. It continued to go about its business after the damsel retired into the house and went upstairs to her bedchamber. Like a handful of cobwebs and mist coalescing to form a living creature, the goat-legged wight reappeared from the shadows. The mouse reared on its hind legs and sniffed the air. Overhead, strands of tenebrous cloud blew away from the vista of the heavens. Falling silver flooded the courtyard with soft but brilliant light. His eyes downcast, the urisk paced back and forth as if deep in thought, or indecisive, or angry. Once he glanced up at the high window of Asrthiel’s bedchamber, from which lamplight streamed forth between the curtains. As he looked down again his gaze happened to alight on an unlit ground-floor window.

  The slender lead cames framing one of the glass panes enclosed the portrait of a ghost.

  Or not a ghost, but something else—a insubstantial image; a chimera; a reflection in the pane. A face, delineated by astral radiance, which appeared to hover there in the shadow-backed glass.

  It was a masculine face, pale and confoundingly handsome, framed by long hair blacker than wickedness. The stars of the firmament seemed snagged in that pouring of coal-gleaming hair. The eyes, of some color that was elusive in the starlight, were chips of diamond, or perhaps slivers of steel, outlined with lashes of a darkness so intense they might have been rimmed with cosmetic antimony.

  Here, instead of the reflection of a curly-mopped wight with stubby horns, was the very vision that Asrthiel’s mother, Jewel, had witnessed long ago when she dwelled in the Great Marsh of Slievmordhu; the unnerving, ephemeral but preternaturally lingering reflection in the pool beside the old black stump where this same urisk had been wont to sit. It was, too, the image that nine-year-old Asrthiel—then Astriel—had glimpsed by starlight, mirrored in her silver hairbrush. Unknown to her, the elusive urisk had been watching as she dressed her hair, and had departed the moment before she glanced over her shoulder.

  In the courtyard of The Laurels the wight scowled at the image in the window, and the image scowled back. His gaze lit upon the fragment of slate lying on the ground. He snatched it up, drew back his arm and with a flick of the wrist sent the stone spinning through the pane with one swift accurate motion. Startled by the crash and tinkle of shattering glass, the mouse darted into hiding.

  When Giles came running out to see what had caused the ruckus, the courtyard was deserted and the wind was blowing sad tunes through the jagged hole in the window.

  Miles above Asrthiel’s lodgings in King’s Winterbourne, at the upper limits of the troposphere, the high-latitude southerly airstream blew fine skeins of tiny ice-crystals northward over the ranges.

  Beneath the mountains the grave-cold underworld was dark, with a darkness so intense as might cause the very stones to bleed. Somewhere down there the persistent burrower kept on at its delving, but there was, at last, a difference.

  Something lay ahead.

  At last, something. What blocked the thing’s path was a mystery, but a kind of subliminal premonition was vibrating through the substrata; a pre-science of unusual danger. The thing that lurked there was truly terrible.

  Danger meant little to the delving traveler, whose senses were mostly numb. Like an automaton it shifted rocks, seeking paths and scrabbling its way through the maze, sometimes unintentionally doubling back on its unmapped and obsessively pursued journey. It cared little that the suffocating pinches and gasping vaults of this subterranean realm were barely illuminated by the occasional strange lights of wights’ little mining lamps. Though some of its mental faculties had dried up, there in its tomb, it possessed a sharp navigational memory. It had learned to memorize tunnels and dry watercourses and shafts and adits and all the underworld cavities in their various shapes and directions, so that it could recognize them even if the wights’ mining activities altered their dimensions, which made it possible to continue, more or less, moving in the same direction, scratching and scraping with its damaged digits.

  What did the worm-pale, sight-deprived, mutilated burrower hope to achieve by this?

  On becoming aware of this portent of extreme peril in its path, if any-thing it delved a
little faster and more keenly, now that something else lay ahead after all the monotony; some goal to interrupt the tedium of never-ending darkness, and abrasive surfaces, and sour molds, and eldritch miners with their unintelligible witterings, and coldness, and dampness, and loneliness, and the eternal drip-drip of mineral-filtered water. The burrower’s brain held pictures of warm, yellow sunlight and blue sky. It remembered its name, although somewhere back in distant caverns it had forgotten the reason why it spent its time digging and seeking underground, and solving labyrinthine puzzles. Nonetheless it never lost its sense of purpose, even when the purpose itself had long ago come loose and fallen out of its memory to lie, forsaken, at the roots of the mountains.

  It occurred to the burrower that miniature miners no longer worked nearby; this section of the underworld was blind and blank—devoid of twinkling lights and activities and sounds. The small creatures of eldritch had deserted the region. Abstractedly the burrower wondered whether the fear’s source was such a hub of horror that even supernatural creatures were afraid to stray close.

  Milky rock lined the walls; pallid crystal veined with gold, visible because of a watery luminosity that strained itself out of some fluorescent rocks. Sometimes, noises of agonized squealing and groaning came barreling out of the dimness, the only ruptures in the heavy silence. Yet they sounded very far off.

  Also the smell of the air had changed. The burrower sniffed. It was a familiar scent, yet unnameable; some odor once familiar, known long ago. . . . The sense of menace grew so intense that even the burrower, with its nerves scoured to nubs, suddenly shuddered with fear. Alarmed, it tried to turn back.

  Too late.

  A feeling of being dragged along, an unbearable sensation of being pulled, had seized hold of the digger. The creature had ventured too near and, enslaved by a nameless force, was being drawn towards the source of the danger. All the weakness in the burrower’s spirit was called to by the terrible strength buried amongst rocks and ores at the heart of the mountains.

  And then the slave cleared away a heap of rocks, heaved aside a pile of boulders, and arrived at a partition of mica that appeared, in the faint radiance, to be paper-thin. Destiny waited on the other side. Its fist punched the wall—a bundle of bone and sinew, encased in scorched parchment skin—and broke through!

  Instantly, slim spindles of strange brilliance, dazzlingly clear, shot forth from the opening. The burrower screamed in ecstasy; screamed to feel its eyeballs skewered by the light-spears of an avenging host on wings of bright silver. Sheer, lustrous whiteness flooded its head.

  Every finger on the hand that had dealt the blow tingled as if a million pins sizzled in the flesh. Delight and excruciating pain arced through the burrower’s body. Faster, urgently, it scrabbled at the fist-sized hole in the mica screen, tearing away sharp flakes, enlarging the aperture. All the while the pain-pins spiking its flesh burned like ice, and stung, and harped on the throbbing wires of its heart, and pulled taut every nerve, so that it screamed repeatedly in terror and exhilaration even as it continued to tear at the rock with the remnants of its nails.

  It seemed the light itself—thin bars of pure silver splendor, translucent, like the rays of some glaring, alien moon—was singing long, high notes with the voices of an eldritch choir that never needed to draw breath. It shimmered ethereally in long diagonals, like virgin ice lit from within by some numinous force, accompanied by a deep, deep rumbling as of distant thunder reverberating underground, pitched so low that the ear could not hear it, but the bones, from heel to skull, resonated to the vibrations. . . .

  The burrower ripped frantically at the broken rocks, blood streaming from its eye sockets, showering itself with debris, heedless of the pouring dirt and gravel, as in a frenzy of dread and excitement it thrust its body forward, levered itself on its arms, and burst right through the fragile interface of mica into the other cavern. . . .

  The Invitation

  Where are the children of Springtime, fresh garlands atop their bright hair

  All clothed in the green of new grasses, who danced in the raindrop- rinsed air?

  Where is the gladness of morning; the sun rolling up like a drum,

  When the wind from the east brings a promise of legends and greatness to come?

  Where are the saplings of Summer, the maidens and youths in their prime

  Who fearlessly ran through the meadows, paid no heed to the passing of time,

  Rejoiced in strength, passion and beauty, and tasted youth’s marvelous days,

  While the sun at high noon burned so fiercely, all shadows must flee from its rays?

  Where are the reapers of Autumn, the wisdom-honed goodmen and wives

  Who gathered at harvest-time tables, recounting the tales of their lives,

  With wine cups a-brim at their elbows, and toddlers a-perched on their knees

  While afternoon light warmed the window, as mellow as honey from bees?

  Where are the dotards of Winter? The doddering greybeards and crones

  Who linger alone on the stairway, while flesh shrinks from withering bones?

  They shiver and shake in the evening, they yearn for sleep as darkness grows

  Till Winter’s cold hand comes a-stealing, to wrap them in shimmering snows.

  —“SEASONS OF THE HUMAN HEART,” BY ALEYN CILSUNDROR-SKYCLEAVER, BARD OF THE WEATHERMASTERS

  Time was spinning numerous threads for its tapestry, some to be woven together, some to entangle or fray, others merely to perish and pass away. Held in Winter’s enchantment, the lands of Tir appeared locked in a stasis. Appearances, however, are inclined to deceive. Even beneath voiceless mountains, outwardly as motionless as death, unimaginable forces may be at work.

  At Bucks Horn Oak in Narngalis the men who had long ago numbered amongst the comrades of Jarred Jaravhor, son of Jovan, spent drowsy hours nodding beside stoves of glowing coals, contented as they lived into their autumnal years, well cared for by their kindly liege-lord, the son of their original employer. Several guests enjoyed the duke’s hospitality this Winter, amongst them the wandering savant Almus ‘Declan of the Wildwoods’ Agnellus, accompanied by his bookish assistant. The Duke of Bucks Horn Oak, being fond of learning, was proud to play host to a gentleman scholar of Agnellus’s reputation. On Midwinter’s Eve the ex-druid had deliberately made a short excursion into the wilderness, hoping to meet the Cailleach Bheur, the blue-faced wight who walked over the frozen ground at this season. Every year he tried to find her, as yet with no success. The sage was tough and resilient, able to withstand the extremes of harsh climate. His long-suffering assistant, however, was the latest in a string of proteges who found it almost impossible to keep up with the old man’s zeal and his unquenchable thirst for knowledge.

  Further south at High Darioneth, the Miller family thrived, welcoming yet another infant into the new generation, while up on Rowan Green the weathermasters put forth their senses and explored the intricacies of the atmosphere. During the Midwinter festivities Ryence Darglistel, who despite being middle-aged declared he would never be too old for child’s play, indulged in his usual pranks. From time to time Avalloc Maelstronnar sat by the bedside of Jewel, his sleeping daughter-in-law, keeping her company de-spite the fact she never stirred, his thoughts straying to bygone times, wondering if she would ever waken, wondering whether he would ever see his eldest son again. The councilors of Ellenhall discussed the deteriorating reputation of their kindred amongst the populace of Slievmordhu, but no matter what measures they took to redress the lies that were being broadcast, the resentment, fueled by paid sources, continued to grow.

  To the west, in Grïmnørsland, a large family of peddlers had returned home for the Winter, the roads being too bleak and hostile for traveling. In society’s higher echelons, the family of King Thorgild Torkilsalven spent much of the season in the capital city of Trøndelheim, where the princes Hrosskel, Halvdan and Gunnlaug passed their days in study, or Winter sports, or wassailing with comrades. Occas
ionally they traveled to various locations throughout the countryside, or entertained guests. Most often those guests included Crown Prince Kieran of Slievmordhu, Princess Solveig’s future husband and Prince Halvdan’s closest friend.

  If the rest of Tir seemed locked in an icy stasis Cathair Rua, by comparison, boiled in a lidded ferment. Undercurrents seethed. Hidden influences pervaded and intimations persuaded. Rumors flew back and forth like shuttlecocks in a fast game.

  King Uabhar had seized control of the old rubble-strewn site where Castle Strang had stood. He commanded that a summer palace be raised there; a country seat he intended to give to his eldest son upon the occasion of his marriage.

  Only a handful of caretakers frequented the Red Lodge on one of the three city hilltops, chief headquarters for Slievmordhu’s Knights of the Brand. As so often recently, King Uabhar had sent his elite corps of knights away on maneuvers. Aware that Conall Gearnach and his knights resisted the tide of ill-feeling against the weathermasters, High Commander Risteárd Mac Brádaigh had recommended their removal until such time as the king’s plans were ready to be acted upon. Although the Winter was bitter, the knights were sent into remote locations to practice large-scale tactical exercises carried out under simulated conditions of war.

  Meanwhile, in the eastern marches of Slievmordhu, a comswarm of Marauders huddled in draughty caves, coughing in the smoky atmosphere and chewing on dried meats. During Winter they avoided life on the road. They were waiting for Spring. Cooped as they were in close quarters, with little to do save keep the fires stoked and avoid the Spawn Mother, they quarreled often. Now and then one of their number would be slain in a fight, and there would be fresh meat for dinner instead of dried. The shrill-voiced Scroop and lopsided Grak spent many anxious moments sneaking out of everyone else’s way and making themselves as inconspicuous as possible. Scroop put all three of his eyes to good use keeping watch for trouble.