Fallowblade

by Cecilia Dart-Thornton

  Watchmen on the parapets spied the balloon approaching. At the instant they were certain the weathermage was on board they spread the word and bells began ringing all over the city. Even the great bronze bell of Essington Tower pealed out, whose deep voice had not been heard since the end of the Goblin Wars. The city erupted with excitement, and citizens declared the day the most joyful in living memory.

  The balloon alighted in the castle grounds, but instead of retreating to the inner chambers Asrăthiel mounted the stairs to a balcony overlooking the gates. As soon as she appeared before the waiting multitude the mood of anticipation yielded to jubilation. She was greeted with cheers, thunderous applause and a throwing of hats into the air. The streets filled with people blowing horns and whistles, shouting and singing, in an outpouring of emotion. Soon after Asrăthiel disappeared indoors the citizens flocked to the taverns and inns to celebrate. The public houses were packed; the celebrations were wilder than previously, when they had received the news that she was still alive. By sunset, cartloads of ale had been consumed. All-day drinkers spilled out of the inns and into the streets, clutching tankards and jugs. Exuberance and elation proliferated. The merrymakers felt bound together by a sense of camaraderie, now that a shared tribulation was at an end.

  King Warwick said to Asrăthiel, ‘We have all escaped the same prison you were incarcerated in. Our feelings were trapped in the same dungeons. The prayers of the whole kingdom have been answered, in the wake of the shameful bargain we struck to end the war. We all share a great sense of relief.’

  It was Warwick’s desire that Narngalis’s official weathermage should abide at the castle in the care of the royal household after her two-month ordeal, rather than returning straight away to her lodgings. Asrăthiel was happy to do so, because her grandfather remained with her. During her stay she received many visitors—family and friends, admirers and well-wishers, representatives from all kingdoms, including a bearer of good wishes from the new druid primoris in Cathair Rua. People asked her why the goblins had let her go, and she replied honestly that she could not say for certain, but perhaps the wights had tired of her company. People pressed her on how she had passed her days in Minith Ariannath, and how she had been treated and what she had seen; they wanted to hear every last detail, but Avalloc intervened and bade them leave her in peace. Nor did he ask any questions himself, for he was happy just to have her back, and content to let her tell her story at her own pace, if at all, and perhaps also he dreaded what her answers might be. Asrăthiel did not reveal the details of her experiences in Sølvetårn, did not speak of the urisk’s true identity, or of what had happened between herself and the goblin king. With her musings and her secrets, she appeared quite withdrawn by comparison with her usual self.

  The rejoicing spread throughout the Four Kingdoms of Tir, especially after it became known that the goblins would depart from the northern borders at the equinoctial full moon. The exultation was not much dampened by the additional information that kobold law enforcement corps would be left behind. After all, what were a few dwarfish imps compared to the might of the goblin knights? Kobolds could eventually be quelled, with some determination, or so many folk liked to believe. King Warwick resolved that after the goblins were gone he would establish a permanently manned watchtower upon the heights of the Northern Ramparts, equipped with the most excellent spyglasses and with beacon fires ready for the sentries to light as a warning, in case the enemy ever returned, or any other unseelie thing came out of the northern lands.

  Autumn laid rainbows of soft fire across Tir.

  Sunlight slanted into a small courtyard at Wyverstone Castle, shining through the leaves of the birch trees as if they were panes of toffee. Avalloc Maelstronnar waited beneath those leaves, hands clasped behind his back, gazing at the low beds of rosemary, marjoram and thyme laid out in symmetrical patterns. He looked but did not see, his mind being occupied with concern for his granddaughter and conjecturing as to Prince William’s purpose in requesting a private audience that afternoon. Presently the prince appeared, striding through the colonnaded gallery, his dark blue cloak of quilted linen flaring from his shoulders. As the young man stepped out onto the paving of the formal herb garden, the Storm Lord bowed.

  ‘Perhaps, Lord Maelstronnar, you guess the object of this meeting,’ William said after the usual preliminaries. His manner appeared a little awkward, which was not his customary way.

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Avalloc.

  ‘I am come to ask for your blessing. I would fain ask Asrăthiel for her hand in marriage.’

  With a smile and a gracious nod, the weathermage said, ‘You were right, Will. I had guessed your purpose. I know how highly you regard my granddaughter.’

  ‘And how say you, sir?’

  ‘My dear boy, you in your turn must surely guess how well disposed I am to such a connection. Asrăthiel is very fond of you, and I have no doubt you could make her happy. I feel she would be well suited to be Queen of Narngalis when the time comes, for the people love her.’

  ‘And yet I sense some hesitation,’ William said, with a touch of unease.

  ‘If I hesitate at all, it is not from disapproval. Only that I have noted that since her return from her dreadful imprisonment the dear child appears quite abstracted. Her temperament is altered; she is not herself yet. And it is no wonder.’

  ‘I admit, it has not escaped me either,’ said the prince. ‘Who knows what horrors she has witnessed, of which she will not tell us for fear of causing distress.’

  ‘I believe it will take some time,’ the Storm Lord said, ‘before the scars of her ordeal begin to fade. I grant my consent to you and my blessing but, knowing my grandchild so well, I advise you to wait until she has recovered from her trials before making your proposal.’

  This the prince agreed to do.

  After seven days Asrăthiel flew to High Darioneth to visit her uncle and aunt and cousins, and to pay her respects to her mother.

  Jewel continued in her decade-long sleep in the house of Maelstronnar, untouched by time, sheltered by the cupola at the top of the spiral stair. The small room, with its huge windows framed by the stems of climbing roses, trapped warm beams of buttercup-yellow sunlight. The view in every direction was spectacular: sweeping panoramas of mountain, sky and plateau. In this crystalline arbour Jewel’s waiting-women sat peacefully, their voices, in conversation, as soft and low as running water. One was anointing the sleeper’s bare feet with scented creams. As Asrăthiel entered they rose and curtsied, smiling gladly. The damsel exchanged civilities with the women before approaching the big four-posted bed that occupied much of this eyrie.

  There, upon crimson sheets and tasselled bolsters she lay, like a magnificent marble statue painted in delicate colours by the most skilled of artists; Jewel, the mother of Asrăthiel. Jewel’s tresses framed her face like dusky smoke. Fine textured and soft-hued was her skin, brushed with red at the lips and cheeks. Her lids were like the wings of a blue wren. Asrăthiel kissed her mother’s brow and combed her hair, as was her wont. She spoke to her, telling her where she had been and what she had seen, yet omitting events that might upset Jewel, if indeed she could hear. As usual there was no sign that the sleeper was aware of anything at all, but Asrăthiel never ceased to hope.

  ‘One day Father will return,’ she murmured. ‘He will learn of a way to waken you, Mother dear. Then we will all be together once more.’ In her heart she did not believe it.

  For a long time she sat in silence by the canopied couch, her thoughts having turned from visions of her father in the north to pictures of the Argenkindë crossing those same remote lands, travelling further and further away from the four kingdoms. Eventually, with a sigh, she bade farewell to the two waiting-women and descended to the rooms below.

  Fallowblade was back in its cradle above the mantelpiece. After retrieving the golden blade from the battlefield, the Storm Lord had cleansed it of the blood of Gearnach and goblins. His granddaughter stood on the pol
ished floor of the dining hall, looking at the great weapon—the instrument with which she had struck down her eldritch companion, the urisk. She reminisced on all the events that single blow had brought to pass, but did not reach up to touch the heavy scabbard; did not even step towards it. Instead her musings strayed to the silvery blade she had carried from Minith Ariannath; Rehollys, sword of moonlight. Avalloc and William disliked the eldritch weapon, so she kept it in a chest of cedarwood, out of sight.

  For a week the damsel remained at the Mountain Ring, after which she returned to The Laurels in Lime Grove and resumed her duties, for there was much weatherworking to be done, and too few hands to do it. None of the druids had invented anything to take the place of the weathermasters; their much-vaunted oracular workshops had failed to produce anything of greater use than an unreliable method of predicting short-term variations in the weather.

  Asrăthiel’s world had changed.

  It was difficult to accept the changes. War and the advent of the Kobold Watch had altered everything, in ways both subtle and obvious. Most heart-breakingly, her kinsmen were gone. The urisk, too, was gone.

  She missed that one. Sometimes she felt as if he had never existed. Other times she felt as if she had never left his side. Either way, she could take no joy in anything. The world seemed a drear and hollow place, hollower than the cavernous silver mines beneath Sølvetårn, soon to be empty and idle and returned to their original darkness.

  A dazzling wheel of beaten silver, the equinoctial full moon shimmered in the sky on Lantern Eve, Sun’s Day, Otember the thirty-first. Even then Asrăthiel could not quite believe that the goblin knights would really depart. On the following night huge numbers of kobold slaves issued from the northern ranges by night, and crept across the land. The smelly wights with their tapered ears, malignant grins, spreading snouts, barbed tails and long grooves of eyes, began to pop up all over the place, enforcing goblin law with unremitting exactness. In King’s Winterbourne it was officially acknowledged that a new wave of kobolds was furtively infesting the alleyways.

  Too, the trows of Tir returned to their old haunts. As they had set forth, drawn to the outbreak of moon-bright glory beneath the Northern Ramparts, so now they came gliding back. Between sunset and sunrise they passed like shadows, by ones and twos or half-dozens, along byways and hedgerows, with scarcely a sound but for a faint tinkling of silver bracelets. The human citizens of Tir kept their youngest and fairest under close watch, for fear that the Grey Neighbours would steal them.

  It was not until the return of the trows that Asrăthiel finally let go all suspicion of prevarication on the part of the Argenkindë. She gave up all doubt, all hope and dread, and allowed herself to accept the fact that the goblins had departed. Their brief renaissance was indeed over. They had ridden away from the four kingdoms, as they had declared they would, and the halls of the Mountain King stood abandoned; silent save perhaps for the beat of an owl’s wing, the song of draughts through pierced rock, and the soft footfalls of the last trows padding here and there in search of forgotten silver.

  Zaravaz was gone.

  In rifts torn through Asrăthiel’s reality hovered the outline of a tall man with blowing hair; merely a vacuous silhouette of someone who was no longer there. The damsel, chained beneath the burden of forsakenness, wondered how it might have been if she had gone with Zaravaz to the mysterious lands of ice and snow in search of her father. Yet of course, she owed it to her countrymen, to her calling, to her grandfather, to remain and work in Tir . . .

  She was immortal, therefore there was plenty of time, she told herself; plenty of time to go roaming in later years . . . In private, however, she vowed that when Avalloc’s life was over, and when a new generation of weathermasters had arisen to perform the tasks of the old, then, if her father had not returned, she would follow him over the mountains. And if during her quest to seek her father she should chance to meet any of the Glashtinsluight, why then she might enquire after Zaravaz.

  Her longing for his presence was so intense, she felt it drain all blitheness and vigour from her life.

  Since the covenant at the Wuthering Moors and the advent of the punitive Kobold Watch, extensive changes had begun to take place across the four kingdoms. Pastures were left to turn into wild meadows, or else ploughed and planted with Winter root-crops. Pheasants, ptarmigan and partridges grew numerous on the moors, no longer in danger from the arrows of hunters. On the upland slopes, cloud vapours raced against the swift shadows of deer and leaping hares. Forests jubilated with birdsong. Horses, pigs, goats, fowls and cattle had been turned out into the wild places, to roam free. Many, accustomed from birth to domesticity, perished. The strongest survived and banded together in herds or flocks. A new generation was produced; a wild-born, free generation that would prove cleverer and stronger than the preceding one.

  Creative human cooks, utilising beans and nuts, invented new recipes. Butchers, leatherworkers and silkworm farmers went out of business. Nobody was, as yet, daring or foolhardy enough to explore wight-infested caves in search of svartlap, the goblin fabric; fortunately, however, a couple of old herbalists revived the knowledge that the tough and flexible bark of goat willow and paper mulberry made an excellent substitute for leather. Spinners of flax were in great demand. People began trying to harness the power of wind and sun to replace horse power. Druids invented useless clockwork horses. Cunning artisans made solar-powered vehicles that moved slowly and wind-powered ones that moved erratically. Lamps were fuelled by vegetable oils. Some enterprising farmers struck bargains with certain Marauders, hiring the strongest amongst them—who were far more powerful than an average man, if not as shrewd—to be labourers. Blacksmiths ceased to make horseshoes and increased their output of man-driven ploughshares.

  Discomfiting to Asrăthiel, and to a large part of Tir’s human population, was a cult that had grown up amongst adolescents of the four kingdoms. Rebellious schoolgirls were declaring themselves in love with the goblin king, whose reputation for wickedness, prowess and beauty had reached every corner of the land. They claimed they would like nothing better than to meet him, even if they promptly swooned at his feet. Forming little cliques they met in secret to discuss him, draw pictures of him, compose songs, stories and poems about him, act in plays about him, share their dreams of him, and generally ignite the fury of their elders for idolising the enemy.

  ‘I do not know what the world is coming to,’ muttered their parents. ‘We were never so foolish and feckless in our day.’

  Infatuated gentlewomen begged Asrăthiel to tell them every detail about Zaravaz, but she firmly declined. ‘I do not wish to relive the memories of my time in Minith Ariannath,’ she said, for once glad that human beings possessed the ability to tell untruths.

  Despite the fact that women of all ages clandestinely sighed after Zaravaz, and even though it was generally thought that the goblins had left the mountains for good, there remained a strange reluctance on the part of most people to venture to the Northern Ramparts. The memory of lightning-lethal unseelie warriors was fresh in their minds, and the mountains seemed tainted by a lingering terror. Besides, the gwyllion still haunted the high paths, and unknown numbers of trows possibly wandered in the tunnels, and no one could guess how many kobolds continued to infect the underworld. Those who were inquisitive about the Northern Ramparts decided to let the mountains wait awhile.

  Except for one man.

  Prince William was zealous in his efforts to restore his father’s kingdom after the war. He wished to recompense those Narngalish families whose men had fallen in battle; to ensure that the loved ones the soldiers left behind did not suffer from want. Tirelessly he worked towards this goal, and as he did so it came to him that an untapped source of enormous wealth lay within the very borders of his own realm. The goblins had probably taken away with them all their silver and jewels, but they would not have touched any of the gold.

  The caves in which the unseelie knights had been incarcerat
ed were lined with a veneer of gold. It could be harvested and sold, and the proceeds used to help the bereaved families. In addition, there was the gold that had been cast into the pit of the Inglefire. Asrăthiel had told William the tale of the goblin lieutenant, Zorn, and how he had perished in those witchy flames, and how, long ago, before the original Goblin Wars had commenced, the horde had commanded their human slaves to cast great quantities of gold into the weird conflagration. The stories had ignited the prince’s interest in the elusive and legendary pit of werefire, and he was determined to try to retrieve some of that bullion.

  Perhaps, also, he threw himself into his endeavours with some extra zeal, to consume some of his thwarted energy; to divert his attention from the withdrawn, reflective damsel he longed so ardently to love. And perhaps there were elements of anger and hatred behind his plans, for he had witnessed the beauty of Zaravaz, had seen the way the goblin king had gazed upon Asrăthiel, and more than ever he wished to plunder the mountains of their gold and keep some of it for the royal arsenal, that Narngalis might become unconquerable by goblinkind.

  Since the forging of Fallowblade the knowledge of the fire’s whereabouts had been lost, but many people, including William, had heard the madman Fionnbar Aonarán ranting about a pit of flames he had found while roaming in the dark beneath the mountains. The prince made up his mind to mount a gold-gathering expedition to the Northern Ramparts, taking Aonarán as his guide to the werefire.

  When he informed Asrăthiel of his proposal she was dismayed, and begged him to reconsider. ‘Go nowhere with that fiendish creature Aonarán, the deathless one,’ she cried. ‘Whatever he touches he brings to ruin. It is because of him and his schemes that my mother sleeps forever. It is he who freed the horde and caused this war in the first place!’