‘Pray, do not spurn me,’ he would protest. ‘Do not be discomfited! Your efforts are admirable.’
‘Spare me your ridicule,’ the damsel coldly retorted, walking away.
He pursued her. ‘So quick you are to take offence, proud Sioctíne! I was about to compliment you, for you are a diplomat amongst us at this period of conflict, an ambassador for your people.’
Vexed and resentful, the damsel did not deign to give reply.
‘In times of hostility,’ the lieutenant persisted, ‘when humankind takes issue with eldritchkind, it is only reasonable that the representatives of each nation should come together in congress to discuss their differences and grapple with the questions.’
Away she would hasten, but he’d locate her again, eventually, and lead her into some other eloquent snare.
The harasser went even further. Once, catching her off guard, he whispered in her ear, ‘Dwelling here must be a tedious struggle for you. Perhaps, if you become bored, you would like to struggle with someone new?’
On a night when Asrăthiel had again met Zauberin as if by chance, and been forced to bear his suggestive allusions, she made the wrenching decision to cease her liaison with Zaravaz. Her lover’s harsh treatment of human beings had, since the beginning, been driving her to break the bond with him, coupled with ill-defined qualms about whether there was some sort of moral wrongness to such a bizarre eldritch-human union. For certain, much of her uneasiness sprang from the fact that she had been raised to believe that all dalliances outside the covenant of wedlock were unethical. Against all these doubts she had been inwardly contending, day and night. The remarks of the lieutenant pushed her at last beyond the limits of endurance.
At the evening banquet she behaved coolly towards the goblin king, and would not look at him for fear she might change her mind, though they sat side by side.
‘What troubles you?’ he asked at last, when the feast was over and the music beginning. His voice was low, so that none might overhear. His black hair fell down, draping inside and outside the high svartlap collar that flared like the upright petals of a dark flower around his neck.
‘I regret,’ the damsel murmured stiffly, ‘what happens between us in the mornings.’
‘Why?’
There were so many reasons. ‘For a start,’ she replied, fixing her attention on an arrangement of jewellery fruit that adorned the table, ‘amongst my people, such liaison should not be undertaken outside marriage.’
For a suspended moment, it was as if the air had frozen.
‘Oh,’ Zaravaz said loudly, ‘you wish to be married? Why did you not say so?’ He snapped his fingers.
With improbable swiftness, trow-wives placed a wedding veil on Asrăthiel’s head, held in place by a silver chaplet decorated with tiny jewels. Before she could protest, or even move, they had wrapped her in a dress as white as new-fallen snow, covered with ice-fern traceries, festooned with filigree spider webs of silver thread, bordered with silver netting and silver lace, and beaded with seed pearls. Lieutenant Zauberin appeared before them all, solemn and pious in the white robes of a druid, while a band of trows struck up a wedding march on their squeaky fiddles.
The whole enterprise smacked of pantomime buffoonery. As Asrăthiel gaped at Zaravaz, who was suddenly dressed most dashingly in a long frockcoat and a top hat at a rakish angle, a squinting kobold thrust a bunch of crystal flowers into her hand. The goblin king clamped her arm under his elbow and said, ‘Well, lady, are you ready to be wed?’
Asrăthiel wrenched herself free. ‘No!’ she cried, throwing down the bouquet, which smashed to pieces on the floor.
‘Is it Zauberin you object to? We can always abduct a real druid . . . ’
On impulse, Asrăthiel shouted, ‘It is William that I love!’
This deliberate untruth seemed to have an effect. Zaravaz stared at her, and it was as if he wore a mask of iron. Then he strode away.
She did not see him again for three weeks.
During that time the damsel’s attitudes were mixed indeed. She teetered between heartbreak and misery, loathing and longing, despair and anger. At her wit’s end, she had no idea what course to take. Seated at her escritoire she wrote a flood of letters, but all incoming messages had ceased and she feared Zaravaz had blocked them, severing her only access to the outside world. Next it occurred to her that he probably scanned her outgoing messages, and wondered whether they were still delivered to her friends and family, or if it was a waste of time putting pen to paper. She asked the trows, but as usual they did not know, so she searched for Zwist, to beg him for information, but she could not find him or any of the knights. The feast hall was always empty, and the trows brought meals to her in her apartments, but she did not want to eat and left the food untouched on the trays, drinking only a little of the wine.
Some small comfort was to be found in allowing her brí-senses to wander out into the familiar circulation patterns of the atmosphere; tracing paths along the contours of cold fronts and cyclones, measuring the vectors of the winds, detecting the gatherings and dispersals of humidity, apprehending storm cells and the fluctuations of temperature. From time to time great rolling outbreaks of rain and hail let down their mercurial chains across the mountain range, or snow stormed on the loftiest peaks. Eldritch mists and charmed clouds unfurled to drift caressingly along the slopes as gentle as phantasmic lovers.
She slept often, and when not sleeping she roved out alone, carrying food in case she stumbled upon any prisoners of war. None were to be found. The mountains were desolate. Only the wind moved amongst the crags. Even the minor wights seemed to have vanished; no wizened faces peeped from rock crevices. It was as if they had all turned their backs on her except the swift, aristocratic trollhästen, whose complex language of sound and movement she could not understand.
Unexpectedly, early one clear evening in late Sevember, she encountered Zaravaz.
She discovered him on the high crag where stood the telescope the kobolds had made for her, a huge metal tube bolted to the rock and aimed like some weapon towards the stars. As was his wont, the goblin king was leaning on his elbows, resting them on a parapet that overlooked a sheer drop of more than a thousand feet. The breeze lifted his hair in glimmering strands that were black with the blackness of subterranean caverns never touched by sunlight, yet shot with blue opalescence. Asrăthiel fancied that if she touched that hair she’d get her fingers burned.
On beholding him she experienced a spasm of relief, or hurt, and went to stand at his side. Without greeting her or acknowledging her presence in any other way he said, as they studied the night sky together, ‘Telescopes are like time machines. To look into space is to look back in time. By the moment we see a celestial light, the event that caused it is long past.’
Asrăthiel regarded him quizzically. Had she once heard similar words in a dream?
He went on, ‘From the stars come the elements from which this planet, and all things that live are made. If one views the lifetime of Calaldor-Tir as a clock spanning twenty-four hours, the Glashtinsluight would have arisen two minutes before midnight, and the history of mankind would occupy only the last second. Yet in spite of differences we are all fashioned from star-dust.’
‘Who told you that?’ the damsel asked sharply, unsettled. She straightened, stepping back from the parapet.
He, too, stood up. ‘Come hither,’ he said.
Inquisitive yet wary, she obeyed. From his sleeve Zaravaz produced a velvety purse, and from that he extracted an object, which he showed to her. She drew a rapid breath. In the palm of his hand lay a point of convergence. It was as if moonlight was being sucked into this point and condensed to its purest essence, in the form of a mote of dazzling light the size of a cat’s eye.
This concentrate of silver-white, this scintillant, gave off sparkles of reflected radiance, pure, yet flashing with every colour. There could be no doubt—it was the jewel, the heirloom of Asrăthiel’s mother, which she had giv
en to the urisk.
Asrăthiel felt a hand of iron clamp around her heart. ‘What have you done,’ she said slowly, ‘to Crowthistle?’
And Zaravaz, more beautiful than starlight, answered gravely, ‘Ah, Weatherwitch, I thought you would know. Your stroke, given in love not hatred, freed me. What I have done since then, I have done for you. You have my heart in thrall. Do you understand? I am Crowthistle.’
On hearing those words Asrăthiel disbelieved, but only for the space of a heartbeat. Next it was as if she had known all along, for it was so patently obvious. In wonder she stared at the goblin king, and a million questions and memories came crowding into her brain, and she must sit down at once, there on the edge of the world, on that ledge teetering above a thousand-foot drop scoured by blasting gales, so that she might absorb it all.
He rested beside her.
There was so much, then, to be told between them.
Zaravaz spoke again of the mighty curse cast upon him by the greatest of weathermasters. They caught him in a golden cage but they could not destroy him, he was too powerful for that, and there was no time to cast him into the Aingealfyre, for they must work quickly, before he could summon his gramarye; so they imposed upon him the shape and constraints of an urisk, intending that years spent as a domestic wight, mingling with mankind, might conceivably make him sympathetic to the human condition. All curses, nonetheless, no matter how dire, must have a cure. Zaravaz could be released from the enchantment only by the decollatory stroke of Fallowblade—then newly forged—wielded by a human being; a stroke given in freely bestowed love, not in enmity. These terms would seem impossible to fulfil. Indeed, Crowthistle had since waited long, without hope, for the curse—and his neck—to be broken.
Ironically, the same sword that had been forged to destroy goblins was the one object that could return him to his natural state. It was a property of the enchantment that the blade would not put an end to him, but instead free him—albeit agonisingly. For he had suffered from that stroke, and suffered exquisitely.
When they crushed him into that urisk shape, the weather-masters also gifted Zaravaz with a gibing nickname: ‘Crowthistle’. It was the weathermasters’ joke on the defeated King of Goblins, the weed crowthistle being vulgar, hardy, difficult to be rid of, and despised by humankind, a plant that could not be eradicated; hated, prickly and hurtful, yet fair to look upon. Like goblinkind, crowthistle was one of the scourges of humanity. At first Zaravaz took perverse delight in the appellation. Later, it grew onerous.
It was a property of the curse that the urisk could not speak his true name; could not speak, either, of what had befallen him. Worse, he was unable to tell of the cure—not that it would have availed him. He had no reason to hope that any human creature would ever wield Fallowblade to strike the blow of freedom for him.
Having rendered him harmless the weathermasters let him go. They took care to make no song of their deed, nor to preserve it in records, in case human beings should take to harassing urisks. More pertinently, they wanted the goblin king to simply fade into obscurity; they wished to wipe out memories of his name, his existence. They had no need to boast of their deed, not being braggarts. Besides, they surmised that if the story were known amongst unseelie wights, some would put forth great effort to bring about the liberation of the goblin king.
As it happened, the few eldritch creatures who did encounter Crowthistle—such as the Maelstronnar brownie—sensed his latent powers regardless of the disguise; however, there was nothing they could do to free him. In any case, he hated going amongst wights in that ignominious form, so he shunned them, mostly.
After wandering the four kingdoms in a frenzy of wrathful frustration the urisk eventually settled in the Great Marsh of Slievmordhu, because something in his urisk design was attracted to water. Eventually he decided to move on, but as the season of Spring sprinkled colours across the marshes Laoise Heronswood Swanreach married Tréan Connick, and the tale of Álainna Machnamh and Tierney A’Connacht came to the notice of Crowthistle. Tierney A’Connacht had once wielded Fallowblade, the only instrument that could free him. He felt impelled, then, to keep an eye on the family.
‘I knew your mother,’ Zaravaz said to Asrăthiel, high on the windswept mountain crag beneath night’s mantle. ‘I knew her, and her mother Lilith, and her grandmother Liadán. I knew Laoise, the mother of Liadán. I was acquainted with them all, though perhaps they did not know me.’
‘My mother!’ whispered Asrăthiel, who had been listening in silent amazement.
‘Once or twice Jewel saw the truth,’ said Zaravaz. ‘She witnessed my authentic image. She was the only one. Even such a unique curse as that which the weathermasters wrought with all their energies was insufficient to do more than barely overmaster me, and my own strength was still such that the glamour they imposed on me would not always extend to reflections. In water, or polished metal, or silvered glass, my genuine aspect was sometimes revealed, though such revelations were of no help to me. So intense were those images—powerful enough to push through the enchantment—that they often lingered on the surface after their subject, myself, had gone elsewhere. Once, Jewel saw a reflection of me in a pool near where I had been sitting. Another time she perceived my face mirrored in the back of her silver hairbrush, after I had stood for a moment close by.
‘I could tolerate Jewel,’ he said, ‘more than I could bear others of your kind. She and Lilith, I found that I could endure them both.’
Asrăthiel knew this was a compliment of the highest order, from him.
He went on, ‘Out of curiosity and perhaps an absurd shadow of hope—for what else was left to me?—I followed your mother when she migrated from the Marsh to High Darioneth, though she was not aware of my pursuit. In Rowan Green I stayed, despite my contempt for the lives and property of the weathermasters.’
‘Did you ever speak to her, my mother?’
‘We exchanged words.’
‘I miss her so. She sleeps eternally in the house of my grandfather.’
‘Yet if not for the intervention of Crowthistle she would now lie in her tomb.’
‘What can you mean?’ Asrăthiel stared at Zaravaz as if she had never seen him before.
‘They believed she had died, after the mistletoe arrow of Fionnuala Aonarán pierced her. They put her in the ground.’
‘That I know already,’ said the damsel. ‘Agnellus saved her.’
‘Before that,’ said the goblin king, ‘it was myself-as-urisk who, lingering by Jewel’s grave, heard the long slow heartbeat beneath the ground, and knew she lived. I comprehended that this could only be because she had borne an immortal child. Thereafter I instructed a spriggan to steal some ink and take it to a swanmaiden, who took one of her discarded quill-feathers, and wrote down what I had discovered. At my direction a brownie stealthily placed the scroll amongst the papers of the scholar Agnellus.’
‘So it was your doing! My family owes you gratitude indeed!’
The solemn mood of Zaravaz lifted a little, and he twitched an eyebrow, while examining his fingers. ‘If that be so, you have already repaid the debt, Weatherwitch. Yet,’ he appended, ‘it is such a debt that it requires paying over and over.’
Confused about her own unspoken response, Asrăthiel made no immediate reply.
Presently she said softly, ‘You guessed my mother still lived, although she was in her grave?’
‘It was more than a guess,’ said Zaravaz, ‘it was certainty. Many amongst the Glashtinsluight are granted wisdom and insights, stemming from centuries of accumulated knowledge and experience, and from our intimacy with the cosmos.’
‘Then, do you know how to waken her, too?’
Gently he said, ‘Nay, ben drultagh, I do not,’ and Asrăthiel’s face fell. ‘We understand much,’ he continued, ‘but not all.’
‘But surely, as you say, your wisdom is as old as the ages . . . ’
‘Do you doubt me?’ her lover’s tone sharpened. ‘We know of no ba
lm for Jewel’s ailment, for we have never had need to seek physic for humankind.’ He did not add, Rather, the opposite, but the damsel could not prevent that phrase from flashing through her mind. ‘Recall, I saved Lilith by leading Jarrod to her, and Jewel by letting the scholar know she still lived, so that she would be disinterred; now let Arran do his part and find a cure for Jewel, if one exists. If he cannot do that, he hardly deserves her.’
‘Forgive me,’ Asrăthiel murmured. ‘I doubt you not.’
She sat quietly, her arms clasped about her knees, pondering on past meetings with the urisk Crowthistle. As she pictured an evening in the courtyard at Rowan Green, a revelation came to her like a burst of light. It had been during that discussion, when he had said to her, No one is alone, that, without being aware of it, she had fallen in love with him.
Then, he had worn the body of a goat-thing, or the illusion of it. There was never any chance of advancement of their association. They could be no more than friends. Now, on the other hand, matters were very different. Yet perhaps not so different, for although an alien shape no longer disunited them, now an alien mindset kept them apart. She loved him, yes; profoundly, but could never tell him so. His unseelieness was the stamp of doom on any furtherance of their connection.
Digressing to an earlier topic she said, ‘In legend and lore, many shape-curses are ended by decapitation. After I felled you with the stroke of Fallowblade, what happened?’
‘I do not know what occurred at first. Time passed, but I was not conscious of it. When I awoke, lying upon the ground, I inhabited my true form, but you were gone, leaving me with nothing other than some torn urisk weeds and your mother’s jewel. I was not forsaken, however. Word had reached me, long before, that the knights of the Argenkindë had broken free of the golden caves. Already, I had travelled to Sølvetårn, where my graihyn welcomed me most fervently, but I was unable to lead them again unless I recovered my original estate. After you obliged me, I returned to them once more and assumed my rightful station.’
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