The Bitterbynde Trilogy

by Cecilia Dart-Thornton

  Yet, a creation such as he, how could he but know he was admired by all who beheld him? Surely he must be accustomed to it.

  When he was not with them, she would curse herself for acting like some simpering palace courtier, some silly, smitten wench. What did she know of him? Only that he was, to the eye, like water to the desert. This was not love—it was infatuation. She would not be shy, she would not go to the opposite extreme, either, and be cold to him, a game played by many a lusty lad or lass among the Tower servants—she would play no games at all. Never had she done so, and there was no reason to begin now.

  When he returned, all rational thought lay in ruins, all plans in confusion, smashed by one slow turn of his raven-black head. Then she cursed the day she had first set eyes on him, the day the worm of hopeless yearning had begun its gnawing and all promise of peace had fled forever.

  The land sloped ever downward. Brooks and streams became more numerous, and after four days they came to Mirrinor.

  8

  MIRRINOR

  Wights of Water

  We’re calling. Come hither, we want you to follow

  Down where we dance in the water-green hollow.

  We’ll sweep you to carelessness, wrap you in dreams and

  Your land-chains we’ll sever. You’ll stay here forever.

  Fair dancers, sweet voices you gleam and you glisten.

  Don’t call me, don’t beckon, I’ll turn and not listen

  You’d trap me and drown me and wrap me with bindweed,

  Sink deep in green hollows. Don’t call me, I’ll not heed.

  Your dancing’s entrancing, my feet must start gliding

  Out to the green water where lilies are riding

  In your arms entwine me, come take me I’m crying,

  My breath leaves my body, I’m sinking, I’m dying.

  “THE DROWNERS,” A FOLK SONG

  Mirrinor—it was the Place of Islands, the Land of Still Waters, where every lake was strewn with islands and every island strewn with lakes. Indeed, it was hard to tell whether the region was mostly above water or below it. Tall snow—mint trees grew profusely in Mirrinor, evergreens reflecting deep into the sky-filled lakes, slender white pillars rising straight up, two hundred feet high, their streamers of peeling bark draping down to touch the ground. Festooned were the snowmints with long vertical blue-green leaves, volatile with peppermint. And leaning out from the rims of meres, golden willows wept golden tears to drift among waterlilies and rushes. Frogs loved Mirrinor, and blink-fast dragonflies in resplendent livery, and small midges and gnats and shy green water-snakes and Culicidae and strange, strange things that lived underwater and sneaked around its margins.

  The travelers came to the shore of a sheet of water and looked out across its mirrored surface to the far islets.

  “We cannot cross all this water,” Diarmid said. “We shall have to go back to the Road. It passes through the northern fringes of this land, crossing over stout bridges.”

  Thorn did not reply. He had paused for an instant beside a plant growing out of the water in a dense, tidy clump. Its sturdy, erect stems each carried a heart-shaped, shiny green leaf, and the flowers, vivid blue, were packed densely on a spike growing from the base of each leaf.

  “Spargairme,” he murmured, reaching out and lightly brushing a spike. “Pickerel weed, in the common tongue. A fair bloom of the water gardens.”

  There did not appear to be anywhere to go, besides along the lake’s willow-lined shores, but soon Thorn was leading the way seemingly on top of the still waters, along a narrow, natural causeway hitherto concealed: a grassy path raised just above the level of the lake. The Dainnan, surefooted, soon outstripped his followers. Imrhien had picked up her ruined skirts and was endeavoring to walk as swiftly as possible without losing her balance and falling among the swaths of silver silk spreading wide on either side. How deep was the water? As deep as the sky was high? Looking down, she could see only the blue heavens, where clouds drifted. It seemed she walked between two skies. And what lurked in those depthless depths? What wights waited there, flexing long, cold, bony fingers? At her back, Diarmid impatiently muttered something under his breath. Ahead, the Dainnan had already disappeared among the leaves of an island. Her hands being occupied, Imrhien could not speak to the Ertishman.

  In the next instant there came a mighty splash, and she whirled, wide-eyed, to see that Diarmid had disappeared. Ripples spread out, sparkling, across the lake. Imrhien dropped to her knees, straining to see past the shining surface, plunging her arm in up to the shoulder, fingers outstretched, searching.

  Suddenly he burst upward in an explosion of spray, gasping, shaking weeds from his hair and eyes, spitting muddy water. Then, to her astonishment, he actually stood up and waded back to the causeway. Rising to her feet. Imrhien turned and saw that Thorn had returned and come up with them.

  “Some of these meres are quite shallow,” he remarked, “fortunately.”

  “Doch!” cursed Diarmid. “The money-pouch slipped from my neck and is lost in the mire.”

  “Do not distress yourself,” said Thorn.

  Not wishing to increase Diarmid’s discomfiture, Imrhien did not stare at his dripping hair and clothes. Instead she hastened along the causeway in Thorn’s wake, hiding her amusement—Diarmid had made a comic picture, after all—and they reached the small island.

  There grew paper reeds, whose tall, graceful dark green stems were topped by mop heads of pendulous threadlike foliage. Concealed among them, a boat. Carvel-built, clean-lined, and painted green, she was an exquisite little craft. Her high prow bore a modest carving of a winged toad, and a name was written on her side, but Imrhien could not decipher the runes.

  “She is called Llamhigyn Y Dwr,” said Thorn, as if he could read Imrhien’s thoughts, “Waterleaper.” His marvelous smile pierced like a spear straight through her heart, only more painfully. She wondered how long she could endure.

  They launched the boat and climbed aboard. Diarmid seized the oars and began to row mightily, as though the water were his foe and he were beating it. His sodden clothes stuck to his back. Seated in the bows, Imrhien snatched a glance over the mercenary’s heaving shoulders, toward Thorn, standing spear-straight and relaxed at the tiller, scanning the waterscape with hawk’s eyes.

  As softly as breath, the goshawk Errantry glided in to alight on, the carven prow, gripping the carved wooden waterleaper with his strong, scaly feet and spreading his wings to their full span for a moment before folding them. The momentum of his flight gently rocked the boat. He rode with them, his eyes shuttered by the milky translucence of his nictitating membranes. A long, vaned primary molted from his wing tip and drifted down to lie lightly on the water.

  Now and then, Thorn spoke quietly to the rower. “Pull a little to port.… Now straight.… A snag there—to starboard.” He scarcely needed to touch the tiller. In this manner, the little boat moved across the waters of Mirrinor with her silver wake trailing after in an ever-widening V.

  A matching V of wild geese went honking by overhead, and then the boat entered a network of leafy channels among wooded islets. Here, in backwaters, the small bright green disks of duckweed floated decoratively on the water, a short root hanging from each disk. Pillarlike snowmints soared straight up on either side. Beneath the long, pale curtains of their bark the dark fronds of brake-ferns pushed up, crowding to the edge. Willow leaves floated like the torn and jaundiced pages of antique books. Dragonflies, blue and gold, skimmed over the bright yellow flowers of brass buttons spreading on the surface. Leapfrogging juvenile waterleapers kept pace with their namesake, then scampered away as though they tired of the game.

  From time to time the trees parted, and through gaps between islands, wider expanses of water could be seen. Like great mirrors lying on their backs, or windows looking onto some deep, upsidedown world, they imaged black swans drifting on their reflections in perfect symmetry, high above drowned cloud formations. Lying back against th
e lofty curve of the prow, Imrhien trailed a fingertip in the water and felt the wonder of this beauty like an ache in her bones, for all beauty was Thorn’s, and all she saw seemed part of him.

  The Dainnan took a turn at rowing. Diarmid stood stiffly at the tiller, determined to steer faultlessly if it became necessary. Thorn was so close now to Imrhien, an arm’s length. To distract her thoughts, she turned her gaze away and looked out over the side of Waterleaper, as she had often gazed from the raft with Sianadh. The oars moved rhythmically, making scarcely a sound. Here, the water was very deep. She had been looking down at them for the space of several heartbeats before she saw them, as if viewed through clouded green glass, looming out of obscurity—the towers and belfries and gables of a drowned city far below. The boat glided over the dim rooftops, a bird in the city’s refracted skies, and it seemed to Imrhien that from out of the depths she heard the profound tolling of a bell.

  On they voyaged, and there came never a breath of wind to ruffle the surface of the lakes. All was still and calm. Later, Imrhien volunteered to take a turn at rowing, to prove she was no useless encumbrance of a passenger—and, for a space, to have Thorn at her back, lest he should come to read too much in her eyes and his kindness turn to contempt. Diarmid refused her offer, affronted, as if it were in had taste that a girl should presume to a job he considered a man’s, as if this reflected on his own ability to propel the boat. Thorn overruled him.

  “Take the oars if you would, lady.”

  She was clumsy at first, but the skeptical glances of the Ertishman at the tiller hardened her resolve. Soon she had mastered the art of it and sent the little boat sculling along, if slowly, at least in a straight line. Long-legged insects walked over the water, held up by surface tension, and concealed frogs began a bink-tonk chorus, calling to mind the moss-frogs spuriously or genuinely bettering the wine in the cellars of Isse Tower. Gelatinous whiteness gleamed from reedy inlets; great, silent rafts floated there, woven from bulrushes. Packed tightly into these rafts lay scores of semilucent eggs, each as large as a melon.

  The sun began to subside in the west. Birds piped from every bush. Errantry spread his wings and sped aloft with a hushed whirr.

  A sagittate flock of swans winged its way out of the south and alighted on open water. With arched necks, admiring their reflections, they paddled to an island nearby and climbed out, waddling up onto the sedges to shake themselves. It was difficult to see them under the curtains of leaves, but they appeared to cast off their feathers like cloaks. Soon a flock of dark-haired girls clustered where the swans had stood. They moved off together into the trees, the echoes of their voices wafting like music out over the water.

  “Mortals also must find a roosting-place for the night,” said the Dainnan. “If you have blistered your hands to your satisfaction, lady, you may allow me to take the oars now. Captain, stay on course. We make for that craggy tor, the Isle of Findrelas.”

  Imrhien shipped the oars and exchanged places with Thorn. The boat rocked—he steadied her, catching her by the waist with an arm of steel and whipcord. From the points of contact between them, the jolt of energy seared her again. Her face burned, but then, whichever side of her was turned toward Thorn was always suffused with heat and the far side was always cold—it was as though he were a fire to her.

  The saw-toothed crag of Findrelas was a larger island than its neighbors. Waterleaper made landfall on its northern shores.

  After they had disembarked, Thorn tied the boat’s painter to the bole of a snowmint.

  “Made fast, she’s more likely to be here in the morning,” said Thorn, hoisting his baldric over his shoulder. “There are thieves about, over lake and under.”

  “Should we not haul the boat right out of the water, to make the task less easy for thieves?” asked Diarmid. “We might conceal it beneath these bushes.”

  “A boat like this must not be left high and dry. If she were to leave her element, her timbers would shrink. The next time her hull entered the water, it would leak.”

  “In sooth, sir, my knowledge lies not in nautical matters. But this may prove useful,” said Diarmid, retrieving a wooden, brass-studded bailing-bucket from stowage under one of the seats. “We must make camp farther inland,” he went on, “away from the water’s marge. Many egg-rafts lie anchored there. Culicidae Vectors will appear in great numbers at dusk.”

  “What you say is true,” Thorn acknowledged, “but no place on Findrelas, in Mirrinor, is far from water.”

  They trod now on a mosaic of fallen leaves like painted tiles in tints of richest ocher, terracotta, copper, and bronze. Again Thorn led the way, stepping lightly, stopping at whiles to break off certain seed-bearing stems or leaves or strips of bark, which he tucked in a belt-pouch.

  “Quandion, star boronia, the resin of snowmints—medicinal plants. And guardians against mosquitoes.”

  His students took careful note of the characteristics of the plants, for later identification. A campsite was found on a low rise, surrounded by russet thickets of golden abelias.

  “Here shall we make our fire,” said the Dainnan, “but there is much to be done first.”

  The fernlike foliage of the surrounding swamp cypresses had deepened to rich bronze-red at this season. Among their twisted roots, bright leaves lay like sparks smitten from Autumn’s anvil. Farther from the campsite, the trees opened out on a wide pool edged with bulrushes and the ensiform leaves of water-flags. The pool was choked with blue, pink, and white waterlilies and a water-fern whose shiny leaves, spread flat on the water like four-petaled pansies, were stamped with a scalloped center of umber, bordered with bright green and limned by a thin line of scarlet.

  “In the water, supper awaits,” said Thorn, throwing off his tunic and shirt. “Corms of waterlilies, rhizomes of bulrushes, spores of nardue.”

  “That is women’s work,” Diarmid objected. “Lend me the bow, sir, and I will hunt for meat.”

  “If by ‘women’s work’ you mean it is not dangerous,” replied Thorn, “then you are mistaken. Be aware of what might well lurk beneath this pretty surface.”

  “I do not fear water wights. And I have been beneath Mirrinor’s waters before, without trouble.”

  “What, then, would you hunt? Eldritch beasts cannot be eaten.”

  “There is lorraly game in Mirrinor.”

  “The only game worth the chase are deer—and they are not to be found here.”

  “I have seen otters. I am told they make good stew.”

  “You would hunt otters? Then let me not hinder you.” Thorn thrust his unstrung longbow and quiverful of arrows into the Ertishman’s hands. “Go.”

  Although he smiled, the Dainnan’s tone, always hitherto laughing and lighthearted, had turned cold like a sudden storm, and as perilous—yet it held not anger, but contempt.

  Diarmid hesitated. “I would not leave you weaponless, at the mercy of the unseelie.”

  “Fear not for me, my friend—I do not need weapons to survive.”

  “And the girl …”

  “I have two arms.”

  Diarmid met the other’s cool stare, then dropped his gaze.

  “Tomorrow. I shall hunt tomorrow.” He relinquished the longbow and arrows.

  “As it please you.”

  Thorn pulled off his boots and was soon up to his middle in the icy water. So smooth, so perfect, was the musculature of his arms and shoulders that he seemed not to be of flesh, but carved of wood the color of honey. With the midnight shower of his hair cascading down his back to meet the water, and the quatrefoil leaves of nardue brushing his sides as he waded among the bulrushes, he appeared like some eldritch incarnation that had arisen to entrap maidens with his beauty and drown them in long, tangling weeds. For one chilling moment, the watching girl felt terror. Diarmid plunged in after the Dainnan. Her fear past, Imrhien did not linger but left them to dive for these delicacies and went off carrying Thorn’s hatchet to gather firewood and bring it to the chosen site.

/>   Her shoulders ached from the unaccustomed effort of rowing, and the oars had blistered her hands, but the wooden bailing-pail from Waterleaper made it easier to carry small kindling. Placing it on the ground beside her pile of wood, she caught a movement at the corner of her eye and looked up to see an unexpected sight so far away from farmlands—a white cow ambling out from a stand of golden abelias. A lovely little cow she was, with round ears, very friendly looking, but Imrhien was taking no chances. She continued chopping wood with the iron hatchet, showing no unease, feigning unconcern. The cow lowed softly, halted, and regarded her reproachfully with large and liquid eyes, its udder distinctly distended. Since it stood between her and the pool where her two companions were diving, Imrhien was considering whether to remain where she was or throw the pail at the cow and make a dash for safety, when Thorn returned with Diarmid.

  “Do not keep her waiting too long,” smiled the Dainnan. Dripping wet, he threw down his shirt, which was tied in a bundle and full of lumpy objects. “She is in need of milking.”

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  “She is of the Gwartheg Illyn. Her milk will be sweet.”

  As soon as Imrhien put down the iron hatchet and emptied the pail of kindling, the white cow approached, as though offering herself to be milked. Imrhien had milked goats at the Tower—this was not much different. The creamy liquid jetted forth easily, and before long the pail was brimming. Meanwhile Diarmid, using his new-learned Dainnan trick of fire-making, had caused a few flames to begin to flicker among the kindling. The Dainnan carried a tinderbox, but Diarmid had entreated him to demonstrate the stick-twirling art of making fire without flint or steel and now practiced it at every opportunity. Imrhien had mastered it also.

  Tentatively the girl stroked the neck of the little cow. Then a voice called, clear and loud through the twilight. A tall figure in green stood on a crag above the lake. She chanted out: