The Iron Tree: Book One of The Crowthistle Chronicles

by Cecilia Dart-Thornton

  He walked to the door and looked out, scanning surroundings veiled in a shimmer of silver-gray rainfall. When satisfied no one else was in the proximity of the cottage, he returned to Lilith’s side.

  “Behold,” he said, and he put both hands into the fire.

  Instinctively Lilith squealed, jumping forward to pull him away.

  “No,” he said gently, withdrawing his hands and spreading them out to show her. “See? There is no hurt.”

  She studied his hands with awed eyes. The palms were calloused, the skin amber from the sun, but no sign of scorching marred them. The fine, bronze hairs on the backs of his hands gleamed faintly, brushed by firelight.

  A second time Jarred submerged one of his hands in the flames. He held it there.

  “Cool, it is,” he said, a look of wonder illuminating his comely features. “Cool and soft like flowing silk or tepid water. I can feel the pressure of a soft energy slipping between my fingers.”

  He subtracted his forearm. “It is a wonderful thing. Always, unknowing, I have been able to do this. Yet preconceived ideas are more potent than we know. All my life I believed fire would burn me as it burned others. Therefore when fire accidentally touched me, I thought I felt pain, never noticing I sustained no mark.”

  “Indeed, a wonderful thing,” said Lilith, “everything I could wish for, that my love should be armored in gramarye! But you must wear the bone amulet, not I. It will divert suspicion if ever you are seen to miraculously recover from some injurious occurrence. Better to have people think you wear a powerful charm than know you are the heir of a malign lord.”

  It came to Jarred with greater force that he was in a singular situation. He was utterly unlike anyone he had ever known. “This virtue of mine,” he said, turning his hands over and staring at them, “has only been owned by two men before me—the enchanter who invented it, or stole it, or conjured it out of some eldritch realm, and my father. My father! If I could but encounter him now, I should have so many questions to ask. Once it was my primary goal to track him down, and even though other dreams have altered my path, still that desire burns in me. One day I shall return to Ashqalêth to visit my mother, and then I will quiz her instead.”

  “And I will go with you,” said Lilith, “for I long to meet her!”

  Wakening to his newfound, far-reaching strengths, Jarred felt driven to explore them further. He climbed the tallest tree of the islands, spread wide his arms, and jumped. Fly he did not; he fell, but neither did his bones snap. Uprushing twigs and boughs threshed him as he passed, but when he landed he sprang to his feet unscathed, unjarred, laughing aloud in exaltation.

  He dipped himself beneath the most profound water, slipping down among translucent suspensions of tourmaline to discern the subaqueous world of waving weed gardens haunted by fishes and eels, where the ground was a sump of gelatinous mire and the sky a lens through which bars of light struck, leaning, like translucent shards of quartz. He swam, his copper-dark hair streaming behind him as if on the wind.

  He breathed, and drowned not.

  In mystic underwater purlieus he espied small, pointed faces, pale as snowdrop flowers, green haired. Among deeping crypts he met with a gloomy horse watching him from hooded eyes. Too, he caught flashes of drowners and other water wights—first they tried to entrap him with their weed weavings and the windings of their long green hair, but soon they learned enough to leave him alone, and after that they hid themselves from his sight.

  By these investigations he came to know it fully: he was inviolable; he was lord of fire, air, and water—and more.

  On a time, he questioned Eolacha.

  “Mistress Arrowgrass, what do the carlins know of the bygone Lord of Strang?”

  She deliberated a moment, then replied, “He arose in days of yore, a mortal man possessed by the relentless desire to wield gramarye. Throughout the generations of men, some are afflicted with such yearning. Yet only the weathermasters are born with true puissance of the blood, and that is different from the power of the immortals.

  “However, should a man pursue knowledge with sufficient zeal and cunning, it is possible for him to learn certain ancient secrets, therefore exercising some part of gramarye according to his will.

  “Such a man was Janus Jaravhor, your grandsire, who as a young man came from over the Fire Mountains and caused the Dome to be raised as his dwelling place in Orielthir.

  “In his pursuit of higher and deeper aspects of the arcane, he studied a wealth of antique lore. He sent his servants to scour the Four Kingdoms and beyond, searching for knowledge that they must bear back to him at the Dome. They obeyed. However, there came a time when his henchmen failed to return with anything new. Then, unsated, he went out himself, often in disguise, journeying across mountain and fen, through deserts and wild places, delving into valleys and caverns, infiltrating village, town, and city. Over the years, his repository of wisdom grew steadily, until the libraries and escritoria of Castle Strang became so laden and filled with curiosities and mysteries of great moment they seemed to draw power to themselves. It is said they appeared to lie submerged beneath a layered mist of gramarye, illumined erratically by flickerings like white serpents of light.

  “It so happened that the accumulation of these abilities was like a wind fanning the blaze of his flaws and failings. Where once he had been demanding, he became insatiable; his desire for stewardship turned to tyranny, his acquisitiveness to rapaciousness, his callousness to cruelty.

  “Yet the vault containing the world’s knowledge has an infinite capacity, while the days of mortal humankind are finite. In the end he never gained possession of the one prize he truly sought. That is all I know.”

  Jarred bowed his head.

  “I thank you for your words, Mistress Arrowgrass,” he said.

  Although audience to the happiness of her stepgranddaughter, Eolacha could not wholeheartedly enjoy the prospect of her marriage. She felt impelled to take Lilith aside, saying in tones of sincerest compassion, “My weary heart tells me Jarred’s immunity might not extend to you, a gariníon. By marrying, you may well be sealing your doom, bringing the curse on yourself.”

  “I am aware of that possibility,” replied Lilith. “My eyes are open. But Jarred is my life. To send him away would be to end my days. How should I exist without him?”

  Eolacha nodded. She turned her ancient face away, that Lilith might not read it.

  “And,” the carlin suggested, “Jarred is the only man who can father your curse-free child.”

  A carnation tint tinged Lilith’s cheeks. “In sooth,” she said, “you read me well. Yet I loved him before that fact was made plain to me.”

  “You did, a muirnin, you did indeed.”

  “How singular,” mused Lilith in unconscious echo of MacGabhann’s words. “’Tis as if some force steered him here to the marsh, he of all people. Mayhap the druids have the right of it. Mayhap fate lays out our paths ahead of us, and we have no choice but to follow.”

  The eyes of Eolacha transmuted from innocuous buttons to sparks. “Never fall for the cant of druids!” she said forcefully. “There is no such thing as predestiny. There is only our own choice, what we are making of ourselves.”

  “How then is this chance against impossible odds to be explained?”

  “I do not believe in fate, but other factors might be in play,” said the carlin. “Gramarye may be at work here, or instinct. Perchance something in the bones of your betrothed, something of Janus Jaravhor, called to some residual trace of Álainna Machnamh in your own blood. Who can tell?”

  Autumn and Winter waned. Spring took their place, and the wedding day of Jarred and Lilith approached. It was to be celebrated two sevennights after Garland Day.

  Traditionally, Garland Day was celebrated with enthusiasm in the Great Marsh of Slievmordhu. By the calendar of Tir, the big sun, the orb of Summer, shone from Garland Day to Lantern Eve. After Lantern Eve in Otember, it had shrunk sufficiently to become Grianan, the
Winter Sun. On Garland Day—called Beltane in other regions—the lean and blue-faced Cailleach Bheur would throw her staff under a holly tree or a gorse bush and turn into a gray standing stone. She was reborn each Lantern Eve and walked the wild places with her staff in hand, smiting the land to suspend growth and induce cold and snow, for it was the object of this powerful hag of eldritch to aid the land with regeneration through slumber. She was also the protectress of certain animals: deer, swine, wild goats, wild cattle, and wolves, and the guardian of wells and streams. Few human beings had ever seen her, only those whom she selected to be carlins. When Eolacha had been chosen, she had encountered the hag as if by chance, fishing in a remote pool of the marsh. Yet it had not been by chance.

  On the morning of Garland Day, Lilith and her friends went out before dawn. They brought home copious quantities of wild marsh marigolds, the “Maiflowers,” and twined them about two wicker hoops joined at right angles to form a sphere. This year they had drawn the lot of making the Wildflower Garland. To others had fallen the labor of making the crown-shaped Garden Garland, the boat-shaped Waterflower Garland, and—most difficult to create—the pyramidal Weedflower Garland. Those who fashioned the latter must don pigskin gloves to shield their hands from the tiny, painful barbs of nettles and crowthistle.

  When all four floral decorations were completed, they were each threaded onto their own pole, which, held horizontally, was carried about the walkways of the marsh town on the shoulders of children. Much singing accompanied this progress, and at each house the bearers stopped to display their garland, thus bringing good fortune to the householders. In return, the children were given coins, to be later shared among the poorer folk of the marsh. During the door-knocking, the garlands became cumulatively unkempt and flaccid. Their procession around the town could be detected by tracing the trails of scattered blossom.

  When this spectacle was over, the wilting garlands were suspended in the center of the cruinniú while families played games and danced on the shore. As afternoon deepened, the flowers, dying but still lovely, were hung on the prows of four boats and taken to the four corners of the marsh, where with full ceremony they were cast overboard in the confidence that this would bring good luck in fishing, and abundance to the marsh.

  The wedding of Lilith and Jarred was to take place on a Love’s Day in Mai. Five days before, early on Sun’s Day morning, Eoin went off in a boat with his friend Suibhne Tolpuddle. They had announced their intention to voyage to the distant environs of Glassmere, there to fish for the elusive giant pike. Remote Glassmere, unpopulated by mortal men, was reputed to be a wightish haunt, but this did not trouble the lads.

  “We’ll risk it,” Eoin said brashly, “won’t we, Siv? We have enough amulets, thumb bells, salt, hypericum leaves, and cold iron on board to sink us. A giant pike or two will be a fine dish for a wedding feast!”

  “Tolpuddle neglects to maintain his boat in proper order,” warned his father. “The timbers are rotten, and it leaks.”

  “Then we might have to be bailing a bit.”

  “That place is thought to be haunted by Luideag,” warned his father. Luideag, also known as the Rag, was a deadly feminine wight as vile in her aspect as she was pernicious. “If you must invade eldritch dominions,” he said, “do not be attracting attention to yourselves.”

  “Are you thinking we do not know our lore?” Eoin replied disarmingly.

  Like any mortal child of Tir, Eoin had been taught the lore of wights: if a man, woman, or child should encounter one, they might gain a degree of immunity by showing no fear, no matter what strange or terrible events happened. If a human being should meet a wight’s gaze, it would become possible for the creature to seize power over him, but with some wights, such as trows, as long as a person steadily looked at them without meeting their eyes, the wights could not vanish.

  Woe betide he who divulged his true name to any malicious wight, because instantly it would have power over him. Conversely, if human beings could find out a wight’s true name, they might obtain mastery over it. As with mortalkind, some wights were clever, others foolish. It was possible for a cunning man to trick the foolish or the naïve-possible even to catch one of the smaller wights as long as he kept his eye on it without blinking and never loosened his grip. If caught, most wights were bound to grant a wish, or tell where their gold was hidden, if they had any.

  Possessing all this knowledge and more, humankind was still not safe. The lesser wights of unseelie ilk could be warded off with salt and charms, whistled tunes and skilled rhyming, but the greater could only be repelled by strong gramarye, such as that wielded by weathermasters, the more powerful carlins, some sorcerers, and, supposedly, druids.

  “Even if no unseelie wights harass or otherwise delay you, you will not have time to return from Glassmere before the wedding,” admonished Eolacha.

  Eoin laughed off the fears of his household and set off with Tolpuddle, saying, “Two days there, two days back, and a full day to fill our tub with pike. Five days, and we shall be back in plenty of time to see our Lily wed!”

  “How pale the boy looks,” Eolacha murmured to Earnán as they waved farewell to the pike-fishers. “Trammeled rage does exhaust vitality.”

  If Eoin’s visage seemed less florid than usual, Suibhne Tolpuddle did not recognize it. Nor did he note that Eoin’s behavior was becoming unusually reckless and foolish. The eel-fisher’s son unwisely stood in the boat bellowing out a raucous tavern song as Tolpuddle rowed them along aqueous, willow-tapestried corridors toward Glassmere.

  “Once on a time a bogie claimed a field of Farmer Brown’s,

  A fruitful field, both rich and flat, with neither ups nor downs.

  The farmer thought it quite unfair the wight should steal his prize—

  They argued long, they argued loud, then reached a compromise.

  “‘You keep the field on one condition,’ cunning Bogie said,

  “You’ll plowh and sow and weed and hoe from dawn till day is dead,

  And when above this bonny field the harvest sun does shine,

  The produce we’ll divide in two, and one part shall be mine.’

  “The farmer had no choice but to accept the bogie’s deal.

  Against the edict of a wight there can be scant appeal.

  When Springtime came around, he said, ‘’Tis time to sow the crops—

  Which half would you like, bogie-man? The bottoms or the tops?’”

  Tolpuddle joined in with a rousing refrain, as abundant in volume and enthusiasm as it was lacking in rhyme and rhythm:

  “‘Bottoms!’ said the bogie. ‘Bottoms, bottoms, bottoms!

  ’Tis bottoms, bottoms, bottoms,’ said the bogie!”

  Eoin sang on:

  “So Farmer Brown he planted corn. The crop grew fine and tall

  And ripened till the farmer said, ‘’Tis time to cut it all.’

  He whet his scythe and mowed the field from daybreak unto night,

  Then took the tops away and left the hind parts for the wight!”

  Lustily Tolpuddle yodeled:

  “Stubble and roots, stubble and roots,

  All the bogie got was stubble and roots!”

  It was Eoin’s turn to trumpet, off-key:

  “The bogie said, ‘This bargain has not worked to my advance.

  I won’t be rooked again,’ quoth he. ‘Next time I’ll take no chance.’

  When Springtime came, the farmer said, ’Tis time to sow the crops—

  Which half would you like, bogie-man? The bottoms or the tops?’”

  Rowing vigorously, Tolpuddle roared:

  “‘Tops!’ said the bogie. ‘Tops, tops, tops!

  ’Tis tops, tops, tops,’ said the bogie!”

  “So Farmer Brown he planted turnips,” Eoin resumed.

  “Large grew they, and stout.

  They fattened till the farmer said, ’Tis time to pull them out!’

  So with his trusty pick he dug the field with all his might
,

  Then carted off the bottoms, left the top parts for the wight.”

  “Stalks and leaves! Stalks and leaves!” sonorously intoned Suibhne. “All the bogie got were stalks and leaves!”

  The boat began to rock wildly. Losing his balance, Eoin sat down with a thump.

  Tolpuddle laughed. “A good song that is!” he cried cheerfully.

  Wide of countenance was this youth, some said moonfaced. His eyes were small and piglike, his cheeks as round and rosy as ripe apples. Amongst his fellows, he was affectionately nicknamed Slow Suibhne. His comprehension markedly lacked swiftness, but his amiable disposition more than indemnified the deficiency.

  Through the day they voyaged, taking care to avoid certain deep and ominous reaches where trees, weeping with mosses, leaned over blackgreen waters. Such waterscapes suggested the presence of unseelie incarnations. Come evening, the boatmen found themselves paddling across a wide and dreamy mere. The moon had not yet risen, but starlight and a faint glimmer from the water allowed them to see. Long-haired willows tapestried the shores. Amongst their tangled roots, club rush and gypsywort mingled with water avens and valerian. At the lakeside, a fox materialized, lowered its muzzle, and drank.

  Tolpuddle was letting a net drag in the water while Eoin took his turn to row. As the moon rose, Eoin steered for the shore and they passed under the eclipse of the willows.

  “Odds fish, this net grows heavy!” said Tolpuddle in surprise.

  “Well, pull it in,” said Eoin irritably. “I have enough labor hauling your pudding-stuffed guts against the water without hauling a laden net as well.”