The Bitterbynde Trilogy

by Cecilia Dart-Thornton

  At the last, one of them sang a song—not a bawdy song, for once, but a ballad about a maid who dressed herself as a boy in order to follow her true love into battle. The pirates listened, hiccuping and belching. Soon, sentimental tears salted the rum.

  At various times during these tales, the deformed youth floated in and out of uneasy sleep. Snippets of stories concerning unseelie wights, monsters, and legendary warriors mingled with the whistling breath of the cabin boy, adrift in slack-jawed slumber on his shoulder.

  He woke fully, later, to find that most of the lanterns had gone out or been extinguished. Men reclined or slumped, snoring, in a variety of positions about the patchy dimness of the sweltering deck, which was redolent with the reek of their bodies and rancid fat. The cradle of the ship rocked gently, incessantly, in crosscurrents.

  The big, red-haired sailor called Sianadh was sitting opposite, his back to the hull’s timbers. A lantern spilled a rose petal of light on a paper he held in his hand. He was gazing at it intently. The youth did not move a muscle. He studied the sailor’s face, alert to any twitch that might indicate the man was turning his head. Could pirates read? This one must have that ability. Or was it a map he was holding so carefully? At last the man folded the paper and slipped it inside an inner pocket of his rabbit-skin jerkin. The crinkle-edged blue eyes slid sideways and pinned the lad. He started, jolting the somnolent cabin boy’s head, which slumped down onto his knee.

  “Oho, so ye be awake, be ye, mo reigh? Ye did not see that,” the pirate said softly, soberly. “Foolish of me to bring it out here. But it is gone now, and ye saw nothing.”

  The lad shook his head vigorously. The blue gaze did not leave him. It studied him as intently as it had studied the map. “Ye be mute, be ye not?”

  A nod for reply.

  “I had wondered. I never heard ye cry out, even when we came in over the rail—even when your shipmates were slain. I thought ye were too tough, too tough to cry like a babe. And I still believe that, now. There’s more to ye than meets the eye, mo reigh. Ye do not wear the uniform of the lemonlegs. Ye be not one of theirs, are ye? Ye did not belong on that benighted clipper. And that straw-thatch I saw when your taltry blew off, aloft—ye be Talith, be ye not? Color like that, so bright, right to the scalp, cannot be false. Talith—that be rare. Where be your people?”

  The lad shrugged.

  “Ye wear the brown of a drudge. Topsy-turvy are ye—brown garments, lemon hair! Topsy-turvy in more ways than one. Ye be not what ye seem, eh? I knew that as soon as I clapped eyes on ye.”

  The youth gazed back helplessly. Aside from the young servant Caitri, nobody had ever spoken to him like this before—not that he could remember—not even Keat Featherstone, so personally, as though he were worthy, worthy of notice and opinion. It was stirring and frightening. What did this bull of a man see when he looked at him? What in Aia was he talking about? Suddenly he wanted to reach out and clutch that knotty shoulder, to shake him, shake answers out of him. What is Talith? What do you see? What am I? Who am I? But he restrained himself, staying as rigid as canvas in a stiff wind.

  And that did not go unnoticed, either, but was misinterpreted.

  “Do not distress yourself. I shall not give away your secrets if ye do not give away mine. Shake on it.”

  The red-haired man held out a calloused palm, and they shook hands.

  “Good.” But Sianadh looked troubled.

  “As thick as most of this sgorrama crew is, this be a Windship, mo reigh, and quarters are cramped.… You should get away, if you have a chance.”

  Spargo rolled over in a hammock and fell out on top of Hogger. The ensuing racket distracted the lad’s attention, and when he looked again, Sianadh was nowhere to be seen.

  The crew of the Windwitch woke like thirty soreheaded bears to a breakfast of lukewarm spike, ship’s bread, and half-cooked, stolen bacon doled out by Poison—himself not in the best of moods from having had to get up earlier than the rest. Captain Winch and the first mate, the purple-veined Cleaver, shouted orders. The two new lads were sent aloft, where they were kept busy.

  In the stillness of predawn, the mountains rang with the liquid warblings of magpies, heralds of morning in the wilderness.

  As the sun’s first ray edged between the three pinnacles to the east, a tremendous noise of crunching reverberated through the ravine, as of massive grindstones grating against one another. On a nearby crag towered a pile of gigantic, flat rocks. The topmost rock was turning around by itself. Three times it wheeled laboriously around its own axis, and then it ceased and gave no other sign but seemed an ordinary stone, unbudging. The lad from Isse Tower glanced at his companion for confirmation that his eyes had not deceived him. The cabin boy, however, with his eyes tightly shut, was engaged in vomiting over the yardarm.

  Down on the decks a large party unwittingly mimicked the action of the queer stones, toiling around the capstan to raise the anchor. Soon the Windship was under way. Morning came on still and hot—it was Grianmis, the Sunmonth, and almost Meathensun. Clotted-cream clouds sailed past, level with the ship. Higher up, puffy pillows floated. Sometimes the ship would pass under a cloud archway or between two towers; sometimes she would sail into them, and then cold, clammy mist would fold in closely, blanketing out sunlight and bringing the world to an end at the taffrail. There seemed not a breath of wind, and all the power of the propellers was needed. As soon as the brig was under way, the two boys were sent to attend the prisoners and clean the fetid mess deck.

  The first mate sauntered by.

  “No talking to the prisoners,” he rasped, spying the cabin boy handing tankards to the men from the Tarv. His piggy eyes snapped wide as he seemed to notice the other lad for the first time.

  “By my pizzle! What manner of beast is this? Poison, do not let it near the galley again. It is not only ugly, it is filthy.”

  The lad looked down at himself. His clothes and arms were stiff with dried blood and gravy. It was the blood of the Tarv’s crew. Captain Chauvond and the others were in the same state, but Cleaver ignored them. He sneered, spat at the lad’s feet.

  “You insult the eyes of Captain Winch with your ugliness and dirtiness. At least wash! There is a pail in your hand. Use it!”

  The lad blinked. It was a pail of lukewarm spike, but he did not feel inclined to argue. Then he froze, the pail still in his hands. Formless dread gripped his heart like a black hand. He dared not turn his head but hunched himself imperceptibly farther into the thick, baggy folds of his tunic, as if he could curl himself up inside it and disappear. Grethet’s voice in the back of his head said:

  Don’t let them see you. You are deformed. There’s no knowing what might happen. Do not let them see you.

  “I said wash! Are yer deaf as well as dumb and ugly?”

  Behind the lad’s back, the cabin boy coughed nervously. Captain Chauvond, straining against his chains, shouted his fury. They were all behind the lad’s back, the crew of the Tarv. Only Cleaver stood before him. The lad set down the pail, undid his belt. Slowly he began to raise the hem of his tunic over his head. Cleaver’s sudden intake of breath hissed in the silence like a flaming arrow plunged into water. The lad could not see his face through the brown fabric.

  “Stop! Cover yourself!”

  Obeying, the lad could not fathom the strange look in Cleaver’s eyes. It might have been shock or horror. It might have been the look of a wolf entering its den to find a rabbit waiting there. It might have been delight. He walked around the lad in a circle, viewing him from all sides as a buyer might view a slave in the market.

  “Back straight! Shoulders back!” The first mate gave a bark of laughter. “Get topside, you!”

  Avoiding the poorly aimed kick, the lad dropped the pail and fled up the companionway. Cleaver followed, crowing.

  The air was pure up there—like pale blue wine, its crystal cup made to ring with bird-chorus from all sides. Majestic folds of land clothed in dark green plunged toward mist-fille
d hollows. The Windwitch sailed, straight and level, on a white thistledown ocean among island mountains, but the lad could not see their beauty now. He saw only scarred and bearded faces gathering around, staring dourly at him without an ounce of compassion. Searching frenziedly for Sianadh, he saw him standing by the taffrail, curiously idle. And what could one man do against twenty-nine, even if he had taken pity on a peculiar waif?

  “What have we here, me buckos?” the first mate crowed triumphantly.

  “We know not, Cleaver. What have we here?” The crew, unenthusiastically diverted from their soreheadedness, peered at the lad.

  “I seen worse sights than that in the city,” said one.

  “I seen worse sights than that when Fenris gets up for first watch,” said another.

  There was a clear line of sight to Sianadh at the taffrail. He was taking something out of a knapsack and buttoning it in a back pocket of his belt. He wore a long leather tunic over his shirt.

  “You ain’t seen this at first watch,” said Cleaver, gleefully savoring the suspense. “Haul up your tunic, dogface.”

  All at once the past two days of terror and humiliation culminated. Hot, white hatred gushed through the lad. He struck Cleaver a blow across the face and darted through the wavering crowd to the side of the deck away from Sianadh, climbing up to perch on the rail and gripping a rope for balance.

  Two hundred and fifty feet below, the rumpled forest swayed dizzily and white birds flew. Mauve whales of mountains swam on the horizon. It would be so good, when he flew. He would spread his wings and soar to greet those whales. But no—to breathe the air of such freedom brought breathlessness. Losing all could not be worth that fleeting moment and never would be.

  The passing moments seemed to slacken speed. Cleaver opened his mouth in a long, enraged bellow, crimson snakes streaming from his nose. A man had climbed up on the opposite rail. Another laughed that this was good sport. The crowd, fleering and braying like farmyard animals, surged forward. The lad prepared to jump. At the same moment, something huge out of the sky smacked into him and knocked him overboard, and he was not flying. He was falling.

  4

  THE FOREST

  Tree and Trickery

  Pale rings of smoke come floating through the trees,

  Clear voices thread like silver on the breeze,

  And as I look towards the west I grieve,

  For in my heart, I’m crying out to leave.

  MADE BY LLEWELL, SONGMAKER OF AURALONDE

  Like the waters of a narrow channel gushing out into a broad river, time slowed. Falling seemed to take a long while and evoked imperative, primeval responses; his limbs flailed in a vain quest for a hold on solidity; his blood surged in a dark tide, and the bellows of his lungs worked to suck in the air stolen by the vertical gale that tried, too, to steal flesh from bone.

  The thing from out of the sky that had knocked him overboard was falling with him. It had somehow hooked itself around him and was bawling in his ear, but the sounds soared out of reach as soon as they left its mouth and were lost in the scream of air. The lad grabbed hold of it. It was solid. He kept his eyes tightly shut lest they should be blown from their sockets or lashed by the hair whipping around his face. He abandoned himself to utter terror.

  A pressure began to evolve in answer to the pull of the ground—a gradual, inexorable push, strengthening. The deafening rush of air softened. Its thrust from below slackened off. The descent was slowing. The lad opened his eyes just in time to see a mass of foliage rushing up, the forest-sea, to drown in.

  “Take hold! Take hold!”

  And then there were cold leaf-needles and stinging twigs giving way, snapping and cracking, but the sky-divers were slowing yet and bouncing down through the higher branches. The lad clung to the red-haired man with his left hand and reached out with his right, grasped a bough, and felt it wrenched up from his hand, grasped another, let go of Sianadh, and dangled there, then fell sprawled on top of a third bough and hung on grimly to its corrugated rind.

  Having lost ballast, Sianadh, cursing, was now lifting skyward, towed by his belt. Crashing up through arboreal galleries he shouted and thrashed; every spray or sprig he grabbed broke off, for he was too far from the trunk and too near the top to reach durable sprouts. Needles tumbled in a green rain.

  The lad’s perch swayed gently, rocking him comfortingly. Gazing up, he saw the Ertishman come to a halt six feet above the topmost fronds of the tree. There was no sign of the pirate vessel.

  “Spikes and spurs! I cannot reach the knapsack on my back. I stowed a rope in there, for all the good it will do me.”

  Sianadh kicked like a drowning swimmer and drifted slightly to the right.

  “This belt will cut me in half. I’m hung like a carcass on a doch butcher’s hook!”

  A soft updraft, rich with the clean tang of resin, brought a traveling cloud of fluffy white seeds. It blew the struggling man yet farther away, out into an airy lacuna where no trees reached. From the bluest of skies, sunshine prickled in gold pins. Birds warbled and chirruped. Rocked in a perfumed bower, sheltered within bearded curtains of greenery far above the ground, the lad felt rinsed through by waves of relief and tranquillity, the legacy of aftershock, marred only by his concern for the man to whom he owed his freedom.

  “Bide where ye be!” Sianadh’s voice called. The upper airs had pushed him toward the cupola of a towering fir. He waited until he was directly above it, then unfastened his buckle and dropped, hanging by one hand from the belt. His boots flicked foliage.

  “Curse Cleaver and his sudden fad for cleanliness. I won this wormhide belt at Crowns-and-Anchors, in Luindorn, and I’ve never owned a better. The buckle’s a dragon, real silver—only one I’ve ever seen like it. If I could save it, I would, not to mention the moon-slag stowed in it, but—”

  He interrupted himself with a mighty roar as he released his grip and hurtled down. After a few splintering crashes, silence came down like a steel weight. The purple belt, having bobbed higher, pirouetted away.

  A volley of murmured oaths issued from the direction of the fir. Then, louder, “Climb down as far as you can go without setting foot on the ground. Danger lurks below. Wait for me.”

  The mumblings resumed, emanating from farther and farther down.

  The lad sighed, gave up his perch, and began to negotiate a way to descend, aware for the first time of the stinging scratches and bruises donated by his introduction to the spruce. His clothes hung in tatters. The tree whispered and swayed. Its boughs sprouted at arithmetical intervals from the stem—regularly spaced, if a little too far apart for comfort. The climber passed an empty bird’s nest. Farther down, a second nest cradled three young rosellas who watched him quietly with round, enigmatic lenses. Squirrels scampered.

  So this was freedom.

  But, being free of overseers and sharp tongues, should he now place himself within the power of this stranger who kept company with cutthroats and was likely one himself? The lad hesitated, looking down. The ground was too far away to be seen. What a giant of a tree! Surely it would reach a third of the height of the Tower. His hands were sticky—here and there resin had exuded from the bark and solidified into dripping chunks of honeyed amber. He began again to descend.

  This Sianadh, whoever he was, had risked his life and deserted his ship, for obscure reasons. It would be well to reach the forest floor early and elude him, vanishing into the understory. But then, the understory was probably monopolized by creatures with their own ways of making things vanish. Be the man trustworthy or not, throwing in his lot with Sianadh seemed the safer plan, if he stayed wary. Perhaps this was not freedom after all. Perchance that vision was only a vanity.

  Butter-yellow bundles of feathers darted after clouds of tiny flies. The presence of insects perhaps meant that he was nearing the ground. It was harder. here, to keep from falling; the lower boughs were so much fatter, impossible to grip, wider than the yardarms of the Windwitch. And twenty feet from
the forest floor, the stair of horizontal boughs came to an end. Cascades of perfumed lilacs grew all around, flowering pale mauve, white, and dusky pink. The lad crawled along a great arm of the spruce until its tapered point dipped politely beneath his weight, lowering him until he was able to jump down into the lilac-sea, whereupon it sprang up out of reach and waved farewell. Beneath his feet, the ground sloped steeply and seemed to pendulate like the deck of a ship.

  “Where be ye, chehrna?”

  It was not difficult to judge the man’s direction from the sounds of snapping twigs as he pushed through long, fragrant clusters of starry mauve flowers.

  “Lilacs blossoming in Summer,” he said worriedly when the lad found him, “’Tis not lorraly. Something of eldritch taints here. Are ye hale. chehrna?” The blue eyes squinted under bushy brows. His skin and clothing had not been gently treated by his descent, and he looked to be a wild ruffian just emerged from a tavern brawl. Remarkably, the knapsack remained intact.

  The lad nodded. Sianadh took the rope from his knapsack and, using the skian, cut a length of it to use as a belt. The lad’s own pathetic bundle of belongings had been confiscated upon his discovery on the Tarv, and he had never seen it again.

  “I took a good look at the lie of the land whilst I dangled above like a great gawping fish on a hook. We must strike out northeast, keeping the high ground to our left. Come, let us not linger here. Already we will have attracted too much attention.”

  He stepped out decisively; the youth followed. Sweat dripped from beneath his taltry, irritating his scratched face.

  There were no paths. Or, if there were, they were false—narrow and winding, backtracking, leading nowhere, petering out. Insects droned in the humidity. Green light filtered through multilayered leaf screens, shutting out the sky.

  Once they had left the lilac thickets the undergrowth became sparser and the straight columns of trees crowded closer together, their tops soaring out of sight. A curious twilight reigned. Sianadh consulted a compass often and muttered to himself, his eyes darting from right to left. Bushes rattled. Sometimes small animal shapes started up nearby and fled, squeaking. Orange toadstools squatted. Tiny, bright-eyed birds squabbled among low shrubs, and a spiny echidna dug among the fibrous roots of an ancient mountain ash. Painted honeyeaters upside down in mistletoe said, “George-ee,” and, “Kow-kow-kow.”