Weatherwitch: Book Three of The Crowthistle Chronicles

by Cecilia Dart-Thornton

  Chohrab’s knight stoically took the weapon and began his gruesome task, while the tears of the firmament fell down, and the skies mourned. The warrior hewed off the heads of the sleepers, and their blood mingled with the rainwater, flowing into the fescue and ferns, while those who witnessed this deed could not help but groan and sigh, as if they were in agony, each time a sword-stroke fell. It was impossible for them to comprehend the enormity of the atrocities being carried out before their eyes. Some of the observers turned their faces away and wept, their tears unnoticed in the deluge of the crying storm.

  “Load the remains on covered carts, and carry them far from here, to some remote location,” the King of Slievmordhu ordered his men. “Bury them. Let heavy stones be piled upon their graves.”

  Uabhar contrived, with the utmost cunning and ruthlessness, to have those who had witnessed the slaughter murdered immediately thereafter, that no whisper of what had occurred could enter into public knowledge. He bade them drink a toast to victory over the weathermasters, but Chohrab’s personal butler had been made to surreptitiously mix wolfsbane with the wine. Shortly after the cups were raised on high and the liquor downed to the last drop—at the king’s insistence—the doomed drinkers experienced numbness, giddiness, and severe restriction of breath. They fell to the ground gasping, under the pitiless eye of Uabhar, who looked on as their heartbeats slowed and eventually ceased.

  Mac Brádaigh was the only onlooker permitted to survive, other than Chohrab, who, a whimpering wreck, could speak no sense at all, and had developed a form of delirium. Mac Brádaigh slew the desert king’s butler and his doughty executioner as well, stabbing them both in the back. The Paladin was the last to die, he having been the misguided agent of most of the other killings. The king of Slievmordhu had it bruited about that the dead had all fallen in battle against the weatherlords, and no one dared illuminate the inconsistencies in this story. It was a bloody night, a darkness of smoke and death and storm. Raw red gore mingled with the black rainwater swirling in ditches and gutters.

  Thereafter, Uabhar was confident that he would be safe from possible reprisals, at least until he achieved his great ambition, after which he would be all-powerful, and no man would dare accuse him. To his knowledge, all witnesses had been accounted for.

  Yet there was one other who had seen.

  At sunset on the previous day, the aged itinerant, Cat Soup, had stowed away on a wagon departing northwards from Cathair Rua. He had hoped to make his customary journey to King’s Winterbourne in relative comfort, because lately his feet had been mightily sore. The wagon, however, had turned off the main road one league from the city, and struck out to the east along a narrow track leading deep into the countryside. Cat Soup deduced he had erred in his judgment, and had boarded a conveyance heading for some smallholding in a rural area. This circumstance, though not uncommon for a vagabond such as he, did not suit him. As soon as he reached this conclusion he slipped out from beneath the tarpaulin and began to make his way, hobbling, back to the metropolis.

  There were unaccountable disturbances in the weather, which had earlier promised fair. The beggar sensed rain in the air. His joints ached, and a fractious wind niggled at his garments. He was glad of the oilskin cloak on his back, which he had stolen from a careless patron at a horse-race meeting that day—it was the very reason he was making a quick exit from Cathair Rua, in case the cloak’s owner should stumble upon him.

  As he made his painful way back to the royal city, trudging over the bracken-covered hills, he became aware that a fire had broken out atop the hill of the Red Lodge. Indeed, it looked as if the knights’ stronghold itself were burning. This fact piqued his curiosity, and he plodded a little faster, spurred also by the sight of rain-clouds massing overhead. Some while later several troupes of horsemen thundered past, quite close, so that the old man quailed and hid behind the mossy trunk of a great oak tree that had fallen, several decades ago, amongst the ferns and nettles. A crowd of tiny grigs pinched him and pulled his hair for a while before scampering off, but he curled up and covered himself with the travel-stained oilskin.

  Beneath stars and gathering clouds and veils of smoke the horsemen were gathering on a nearby hillside. Druids appeared amongst them, and laden wagons were driven up. Then more fires were kindled. Rough winds sprayed brilliant bursts of sparks through the darkness. The old man saw all this from afar, and wondered at it. “Trouble is afoot,” he muttered to himself. He was torn between risking danger by creeping forward to investigate, and simply continuing on his path to the city. For a few moments he hesitated. Cat Soup had never been one to plunge headlong into peril; he had lived for so long by avoiding it. On the other hand, knowledge was power; he had often profited by spying, by learning other people’s secrets. In the end his inquisitiveness bettered him, and he scurried towards the bonfires on the ferny hill.

  One advantage of being a miserable beggar was that people rarely noticed you. Cat Soup, aided by his mottled garb, excelled at being unobtrusive. Thus it came to pass that he succeeded in stealing close enough to the scenes of royal felony to see everything, while remaining unobserved.

  He witnessed it all; the mages of Rowan Green and the Shield Champions overcome by the fumes, their sleeping forms being dragged before the two kings, the exchange between Uabhar and Chohrab and the hideous denouement.

  That the noble company of weathermasters and knights should be slain in cold blood seemed so incredible that for an instant the beggar entertained the notion he had contracted some fever, and was hallucinating. Revolted and terrified by the spectacle, he decamped with all speed, heedless of his aching feet. He rushed through the wind and rain, slithering and slipping, throwing himself flat on the ground whenever lightning smote the hills like weapons of steel, lighting the landscape with its cruel blue glare.

  “Halt! Who goes there?” an Ashqalêthan knight shouted at him above the storm’s noise, but Cat Soup crouched, cowering, beneath his cloak, hidden by the deluge and darkness, until he heard a second voice say, “ ’Twas merely a coney. Do not dally.” Whereupon the paladins rode away.

  The ancient beggar dared not move. He scarcely dared to breathe. Water was running into his nostrils, but it could not wash away the stench of death.

  He had seen it all. What now was he to do?

  Far away to the north, in the village of Silverton that night, Asrthiel planted her feet firmly on a mound of slippery scoria, and steadied herself. The weathermage, heedless of the local curfew, had quietly left her lodgings and fared forth, yet again, during the lightless hours. She had special dispensation in her position as weathermage to the king, and she feared no unseelie killers that visited in the dark. Besides, if the mysterious assassins should come tonight she would be able to steal a look at them at last, and perhaps blast them with a fireball or two to prevent them from wreaking harm.

  The slag-heap, though old, had not coagulated much over the time since the ore had been smelted out of it. It was treacherous; still liable to give way and send her careering down. Over the years, dirt and dust had sifted into the nooks between the loose cinders, but few plants would take root in this vitreous aggregate. Only the weed crowthistle was hardy enough; here and there a prickly leaf stubbornly poked through.

  Throughout those northern regions, curious mists had begun rising between sunset and sunrise, coiling in and out of the forests and pouring along the ground. They turned Silverton’s river valley into a nebulous dreamscape, a flowing cloud-river that never rose high enough to obscure the sky. The vapours were supernatural; of that the weathermage was certain, for her brí-senses were numb to them and could not penetrate to their essence. She had never encountered such imperviousness before; it was a surprise, and an unpleasant one. Such phenomena, she conjectured, were probably connected with the unknown scourge. Still searching for answers to the enigmatic killings, she was putting forth her weather-senses to ascertain if she could pick up any clues from the atmosphere, when all at once a terrible shock
went through the brí, as of some catastrophe. Immediately she knew that some kind of unprecedented turmoil had erupted in the troposphere towards the south. The patterns shifted in violation of natural laws. It was as though some careless weathermaster had inflicted sweeping changes, affecting every component of the meteorological system, yet too vast to be the act of a single mage. So violent and abnormal was the tumult that Asrthiel had to assume it was due to some mighty accumulation of weather-working.

  Reeling from the impact, the damsel barely kept her balance on the rocky heap. She struggled to regain her poise, both physical and mental, at a loss as to what had caused the anomaly. What could have happened? Perhaps some-thing had gone awry with her senses. They might have been overloaded; maybe she had been too intent on extracting the maximum amount of information from her surroundings. Or else some phenomenon she had never encountered in her lifetime had occurred somewhere in the world; the near-collision of a comet or meteorite, for example, or a particularly strong and sudden bursting open of the world’s crust beneath one of the great oceanic trenches. Asrthiel felt unaccountably frightened, and also, suddenly, terribly alone and vulnerable. With all her heart she longed for High Darioneth. She had never been this homesick before. . . .

  After slithering her way down from the heap with all speed, she ran towards her lodgings, hoping that a message from Avalloc would soon arrive from the nearest semaphore station to explain this new mystery.

  On the damp and dreary morning after the betrayal of the weathermasters, while the bodies were still being carted to their graves, a meeting of three men convened around a small table in a thick-walled chamber. It was then that the Druid Imperius discovered the truth.

  “Where are the Councilors of Ellenhall?” he demanded of Uabhar. “What have you done with them?”

  Wearing an expression of smug satisfaction, Uabhar informed the elderly sage of their fate, while Commander Mac Brádaigh leaned back in his chair and privately smirked.

  On hearing of the deaths of the weathermasters Virosus could not contain his wrath. He jumped up with alacrity, astonishingly nimble for his age. Leaning across the table, he pushed his face into Uabhar’s. “You are mad!” he shrieked, disregarding all royal protocol. “What of the vengeance of the Maelstronnar and his granddaughter, eh? What of the response of the populace if they find out? You are forsworn, Uabhar, forsworn and condemned for what you have done!”

  “What I have done?” Uabhar said nastily. His attention seemed abruptly riveted on his embroidered sleeve, and he began ripping threads out of it. “You have misheard, druid. Perhaps you are getting deaf in your dotage, in which case I will forgive you for your offensive accusation. I remain a man of honor. I kept my word. It was not I who ordered the execution of the weathermasters, but Chohrab Shechem.”

  The primoris said, “Beware how you equivocate with me, my Liege—” he spat out the latter word as if it were some venomous insult “—for I am in a strong position. If I make known your secret, you will bear the blame. What would your sons do if they knew, eh? How would the peers of the realm react? They might rise against you!”

  But Uabhar coolly replied, “If you make this issue public, druid, you will bear the blame along with Chohrab, for it was your fell noxasm, your Leaves of Sleeping, that brought about the weathermasters’ downfall. By which you will see,” he went on, paying no heed to the expression of hatred twisting the raddled visage of the primoris, “that your fate, ha ha, is closely bound to mine. If I fall, you fall with me. You have a choice: ’to fly with me or die with me,’ as the saying goes. Choose to fly, and when I am High King we will both govern the Four Kingdoms in our different ways—you by fear of death, me by justice and fear of pain.”

  Virosus’s lust for power was strong, and he possessed common sense enough to know which side of his bread was buttered. He was also cunning enough to wish to distance himself from whole event. “So be it,” he said after a pause. “I will not betray your black deeds, and I will support your invasion of the west and north kingdoms, but from this moment I will have no more truck with you in person, and—” he stood up as straight and tall as his hunched posture would allow, pointing a bony finger at his sovereign like a weather vane that has swung about to accuse the wind “—for your perfidy, Uabhar, I will pronounce a curse upon the house of Ó Maoldúin—a curse to endure for all time.”

  Mac Brádaigh, who had been lolling back and savoring the scene, sat upright and blanched conspicuously. After a moment’s shock, Uabhar uttered a forced laugh. “Much good will it do,” he sneered. “Lord Luck is on my side, and Lord Destiny also, and well you know it.”

  Without another word the Druid Imperius swept out of the room.

  After the noise of his departure had dwindled, the king gave the table such a shove that it crashed over on its side. “I am closer to the Fates than the druids!” he roared, “and when I am High King I will destroy all the Sanctorums!”

  But the Druid Imperius went straight to his strongrooms and collected his druids’ hexing equipment. These shamanic tools, supposedly imbued with magickal powers bestowed by the Fates, comprised an assortment of fetishes and charms, totems and talismans, statues and idols. Accompanied by his unquestioning assistant, Acerbus, Virosus took a chariot out across the moors and fens, to an ancient lakeside Oratorium. There he drew circles on the ground, and painted signs on the air, and called out to the Fates, and made such ceremonies as the druidic lore-books stipulated, and more. Having bound all the good fortune of Uabhar’s dynasty into four wooden statuettes—a star, a twibill, a cat and a wheel—he tied up the objects in a bag and cast them into the deep, black lake, which was haunted by unseelie fuathan, so that the objects could never be retrieved by mortal men.

  “As these charms rot away, so will the House of Ó Maoldúin!” screamed the Druid Imperius. He kept his promise, however, and breathed no word of the weathermasters’ demise to anyone.

  Many leagues from Silverton, the strange storm at Cathair Rua had petered out. Half dead with terror and the sweltering fever to which he had now truly become subject, Cat Soup finally managed to evade the forces of authority and smuggle himself aboard yet another wagon. It turned out that this one was indeed bound for King’s Winterbourne, and as it rattled out through the city gates, the beggar privately vowed that he would never return to the red metropolis in the south.

  Not far from the walls of Slievmordhu’s capital, the vagrant’s conveyance jolted past a certain spot that appeared superficially to be no different from any other leaf-embowered avenue of the highway. If any of the wagoners had peered into the rain-filled roadside ditch, however, they would have beheld a pale lily floating on the water, amidst delicate green traceries of duckweed and bladderwort. It was no pond-flower, however, but a face; that of Ryence Darglistel’s slain prentice, Cador, who had been intercepted by Uabhar’s soldiers on his way to Orielthir. The lad’s lifeless form was suspended in the water, while loose petals of may-blossom and sweet-briar drifted down from the greenery that rustled above to alight upon his marbled cheek.

  As for the other messenger, Queen Saibh’s man, Fedlamid macDall, his mount had stumbled while galloping through the rain, and he had been flung to the ground. As he searched, calling for his steed, he had stepped upon a Stray Sod and been doomed, for the nonce, to wander lost. Soon afterwards he had come to the attention of a passing company of trows, who had abducted him, for they were attracted to human beings with yellow hair and wanted him for their own. MacDall’s horse found its way back to Cathair Rua two days later, and when the queen saw it she wept, but would not say why.

  No messenger had succeeded in arriving at Orielthir to warn King Thorgild of Uabhar’s crimes. No willing man was able to tell him the truth, and no man who might have done so was willing.

  Uabhar dispatched his own courier to Thorgild Torkilsalven, claiming that the weathermasters were safe and hale. That being the case—he wrote—Thorgild had accomplished his mission of escorting them to Cathair Rua and
might now return to Grïmnørsland with an untroubled mind, being refreshed from his sojourn at the site of the Summer Palace.

  “My liege begs me to inform you that your majesty’s Shield Champions will soon follow,” the courier said. “They will not be far behind your entourage.”

  The good monarch of the west kingdom harbored many suspicions, but he was convinced that even Uabhar would not stoop to scathing the beneficent lords of the elements. Furthermore, he trusted that the power of the mages and his own knights was sufficient to repel any who tried to do them ill. Numerous urgent duties of state beckoned him to return to his home. Casting many a backward glance, he and his retinue struck out for their native land.

  As for Conall Gearnach, Uabhar sent a message to him also. Even though the Commander-in-Chief of the Knights of the Brand could not learn of the executions, he would be certain to hear stories of siege and imprisonment. The high-principled but quick-tempered knight would inevitably be furious beyond reason when he learned how roughly the weathermasters had been treated, after he had promised them safety. His fury would be exacerbated by the news that Uabhar had burned down the famous Red Lodge, the home of his chivalry. Guessing that Gearnach would become unmanageable and troublesome should he return at that time to Cathair Rua, Uabhar decided to impose a cooling-off period. Gearnach’s orders were to leave Orielthir without delay, take a company of knights, and strike out for the remote Southeastern Moors. The king issued these instructions on the pretext that unseelie wights were reported to be gathering on the moors in great numbers. It was necessary, the king declared, for Gearnach to gauge whether this mustering of malign forces would pose any threat to Slievmordhu.

  Suspecting foul play, Gearnach was sorely tested when he received this command. Like all the Knights of the Brand he regarded keeping one’s word of honor as the highest benchmark to which anyone could aspire, and he had sworn the oath of fealty to his sovereign, promising to protect and obey him. Yet he had uttered that vow before he began to understand the base nature of Uabhar.