The Bitterbynde Trilogy

by Cecilia Dart-Thornton

  They turned then to the north and followed the ridge top until they came to the next pele tower. The wind had risen again, and wisps of dark cloud began to move in from the southwest. Under a marbled sky, the Twenty-ninth Keep loomed, a square, buttressed fortress of verdigrised stone. At its top some crenellations still remained—perhaps even some part of its roof. Certainly the south wall, facing the travelers, had well withstood the ravages of time and tempest. Starved arrow-slits squeezed themselves between massive stones, some of which, higher up, jutted out to form slight ledges on which entrepreneurial plants had taken root. The stonework was fretted all over with vines.

  The Twenty-ninth Keep straddled the narrowest part of the ridge. On either side of it the ground fell away in a sheer drop—the only way past was through.

  The travelers halted at the doorless archway, which was curtained by vines that had lost most of their foliage. Only shriveled, dry leaves remained clinging and small oval fruits—apple-berries. The wind rattled the vine-stems and soughed eerily high in the chinks of broken stone. There was no other sound.

  The Ertishman squinted up at a weather-blurred inscription over the entrance.

  “By My Name Shall Ye Know Me,” he read slowly. “Could this be some riddle?”

  “No riddle,” Thorn said. “Those who built the towers were wont to scrape epigrams above the doors. Such sayings are scribbled upon every border keep.”

  Diarmid eyed the broken threshold—a garden of weeds, strewn with rubble.

  “I shall go first,” he said, a little too loudly and quickly.

  Drawing his skian, he stooped under the curtain of basketwork and entered. Imrhien came after, with Thorn following at her back. She saw him glance briefly over his shoulder.

  The interior was gloomy and bitterly cold. Shafts of gray light emanated from places where mortar and stone had fallen away to reveal the outside world, a vista of racing sky. The vines had run rampant overhead, growing and dying over many seasons, falling in under their own weight so that they formed a dense network of desiccated, blackened sticks and yellowing tendrils. Untidy birds’ nests, abandoned, decorated the walls.

  The pitted floor displayed decorations of another sort—it was scattered profusely with human skulls and dismembered skeletons. These lay, pallid and stained, on top of the dark red-brown splashes that covered the floor and streaked the walls. Stepping carefully among the bones so as not to rattle them, the intruders came warily to another archway that gave on to an inner room decorated similarly to the first.

  On the far side of this yawned a further opening, dark enough to be black even against the twilight of the inner chamber. A stench oozed from it, and a sense of a presence, a consciousness brooding, knowing.

  Diarmid stepped through.

  Imrhien had scarcely set foot beside him when a hoarse yell cracked the silence like an egg, and a yolk-yellow brilliance flooded their eye sockets. When their vision adjusted they made out a short, thickset old goblin with long, prominent teeth. His skinny fingers, armed with talons like eagles, were wrapped around a spitting firebrand in one hand and a pikestaff in the other. Grisly hair streamed down his shoulders. He glared at the intruders with large eyes of a fiery red color. His feet were clapped into metal boots, his domed head jammed into a dull red cap. They saw, at his back, a sooty fireplace, a chopping block, and an axe. On a stone table, a bantam rooster crouched dismally in a wicker cage.

  “An Ertishman!” cried the wight. “And me cap in need o’ new color! All the redder for’t, carrot-beard.”

  Veins bulged on Diarmid’s neck and temples. He thrust his chin forward, aggressively. With a few well- or ill-chosen words, the goblin had aroused the mercenary’s ire. This seemed to bring out a formidable and hitherto unrecognized talent in the taciturn young man.

  “Why cam’ ye by my door?” The redcap brandished his pikestaff menacingly.

  “It lay in my road,” Diarmid replied evenly, weighing the skian in his hand and the words in his head. The wight spat contemptuously at the knife.

  “Yer cold iron afears me not. I sha’ fling stones upon ye.”

  “I’d rather you flung loaves,” countered the man.

  “I wish’t ye were hangin’ up on yonder battlement!”

  “And a good ladder under me,” Diarmid parried instantly.

  “And the ladder for to break!”

  “And for you to fall down.”

  The advantage was, for now, with Diarmid—he had pronounced the Last Word. The wight gnashed his teeth, fuming and stamping, at a loss for utterance. Inspiration dawned on his filthy brow like a marsh-light rising from the fens.

  “I wish’t ye were in the sea!”

  “And a good boat under me.” The Ertishman remained undaunted.

  “And the boat for to break!”

  “And for you to be drowned.”

  “But I wish’t ye were in the lake!”

  “And I swimming,” said Diarmid, his zeal blazing now.

  “And the water frozen.”

  “And the smith a-hammering at it.”

  “And the smith to be dead!”

  “And another smith instead!”

  This was a master-stroke—the Ertishman’s line had rhymed with the wight’s, beating it hands down. The redcap’s face transmuted from scarlet to puce. His chest swelled as if it were about to burst. It was obvious that despite the apparent imminence of defeat, he was still scratching for words. Like overripe plums, his eyes popped and rolled in his head, finally alighting on his axe. Brutality was ever a ready defense for the slow-witted.

  “I will hack you with my axe!”

  “You’ll only chop stone,” said Diarmid with a sudden sidestep to show how swiftly he could react.

  “I will fight ye anon.”

  “Aye, and not long till I defeat you.”

  The goblin stood stuttering, openmouthed, dribbling and dumbfounded. Vanquished.

  The Ertishman could not resist this opportunity to add one final triumphant insult.

  “Giff, gaff, your mouth’s full of chaff.”

  It was too much. His malignant adversary gave a bellow of rage ending in a hysterical shriek, and the torch went out. In that last gleam, Imrhien had seen Thorn striding forward. She thought he spoke a word, but she could not be sure. As soon as the light vanished, Imrhien made for the wicker cage. She could see nothing, but her seeking hand fell upon it. She tucked it under her arm and ran for the far wall, where an exit surely must exist. Heart-stoppingly, she came up against cold, slippery stones and felt along them blindly, colliding with someone.

  “’S death,” swore Diarmid, “is that you, wench?” His hand closed around her arm, propelling her sideways.

  Whether it was having the Last Word that saved them, they did not stop to discuss. Moments later they pushed past a heavy drapery of foliage to emerge on the north side of the Twenty-ninth Keep. The sun was beginning to descend. Forty yards farther on, the three travelers followed its example—for here, as Thorn had indicated, the gradient was amiable. As they slithered down the slope, the bantam rooster jounced and jolted in its cage under Imrhien’s arm. When they reached the valley floor, the travelers did not pause but put as much distance as possible between themselves and Alderstone Edge before nightfall.

  The wind had buffeted them all the way down the ridge side, and it did not cease its gusting. They found shelter on the lee side of a stack of boulders and soon had a fire going whose vigor matched that of the turbulent airs. There they reclined in relief and great merriment.

  Diarmid recounted his battle of words and the way he had triumphed He waxed eloquent in front of the responsive half of his audience of four. The cockerel, a black one with copper and green tail-feathers, sat glumly in the cage. Imrhien was loath to release it until they were farther from the Edge. Errantry sat with hunched shoulders, eyeing the rooster with utmost contempt. With a slight spasm, he regurgitated a pellet of unrecognizable parts of rodents.

  “You should have seen h
is face, Longbow!” Diarmid enthused. “And you might have heard the clashing of those teeth from miles away! I can only surmise that his previous victims panicked at the sight of him and could not collect their thoughts, for ’tis not hard to outspeak one with the wit of a flea. Besides, I am practiced at that sparring—when I was a lad, I used to trade words with my—with my uncle.” He sobered at his own words, remembering.

  <> Imrhien, too, remembered.

  “He always won. Ertishmen are famous for their skill with words; Finvarna is the birthplace of most of the greatest bards. But the Bear could outspar even his own countrymen.”

  “This man you speak of is lost to you?” asked Thorn, regarding their faces gravely.

  Diarmid nodded, his heart too full now for words.

  After a few moments, Thorn said, “As we entered the keep I looked back and saw in the sky nine Stormriders, far south, heading west. It is unusual for so many to ride together. There are momentous stirrings in the world—the sooner we reach the city, the better.”

  Not the better, the worse—for I shall lose you then, thought Imrhien, and she recalled also the vengeful wizard’s henchmen and the eastsiders who might hunt her for her knowledge of Waterstair. Might these pursuers have found their way to Caermelor by land, sea, or air? Or might they have sent messages to spies already in the Royal City?

  For supper there were bunya nuts, lillypilly berries, brown-capped mushrooms that had pushed up between the roots of trees, and apple-berries that the travelers had plundered in passing, up on Alderstone Edge. On greenwood spits, the mercenary roasted two pigeons he had brought down with the longbow—for the loss of three arrows, to his chagrin.

  “We ought to dine on the cockerel,” he mused, eating a pigeon’s heart. “What did you save it for if not for that?”

  Imrhien pushed a few grass-heads and luckless worms through the cage’s slats.

  <>

  She would not let him have the bird.

  Beyond the shelter of the rocks a tide of leaves swept past in a sudden gust. Above the towering summit of the Edge thunderclouds were building—turbulent currents boiling within their dark hearts. Tenebrous and menacing their roots, brilliant white their heads, where the strong winds blew away the ice crystals to flatten the tops and make anvils of them. To the west, Thunder Mountain’s lofty peak seemed to have accumulated its own mass of grim, iron-gray vapors.

  A long drawn howling came down the wind, treacherously switching directions—not a howling of hounds, but a deep ululation that might have been generated in the throat of some unimaginably immense, wild creature. Like the boubrie’s bellow it was clearly not human. It carried its own complaining unharmonies, to raise the flesh on one’s scalp like fingernails scraping on slate.

  “The Hooper?” Diarmid asked overcasually as the howling faded.

  “A brother of it. In this part of the country it is the Howlaa that helpfully warns of storms. Also belatedly, in this case.”

  In the gloom to the west, a jagged thread of white light like molten wire appeared for an instant, linking the roiling clouds with the tip of Burnt Crag. Thunder rolled and crashed in the distance. A blast of wind hooked around the boulders and snatched at the fire, sending fountains of sparks into the night. Plump raindrops fell, one or two, and expired in a hiss of steam.

  “We must seek shelter,” said the Dainnan, kicking dust onto the fire. With a practiced movement he detached the bowstring and slipped the coil beneath his shirt.

  Sky-hammers boomed on nearer cloud-anvils, and the ground trembled. A bloom of sheet lightning illuminated the land with stark blue-white. In that instant, it revealed an unexpected and ghastly sight. Not a hundred paces away from their encampment, a mighty boulder hung in the black sky, as though frozen in the very moment of its flight. Lightning’s illusion was shattered when, with a deafening blast, the chunk of mountain crashed down almost upon the travelers. Dirt and pebbles sprayed everywhere. The ground quaked.

  “This way!” Thorn shouted. Imrhien’s ears rang with such clamor that she could scarcely make out his words, but in another flash-frozen moment she saw him with all his gear, and the goshawk on his shoulder, moving away. She grabbed the rooster’s cage and went after. The Ertishman was not far behind.

  A swath of crackling blue light showed that the first gigantic missile had burst apart, and a second was being hurled up into the air from a distance. Dangerously close, a third crag crashed, along with a hail of smaller ones the size of human heads. Rain began to fall in sparse, heavy drops. The travelers made haste, dodging among outcrops and weedy hillocks and piled slabs until they struck a track, deeply cloven into the ground, that led downhill. On either side, the banks rose up, high over their heads. The walls of rock blocked out the storm’s flares, but not the tremendous blasts of thunder and thrown rocks, and not the deluge. Still the track burrowed down, narrowing, until the walls arched over, forming a tunnel that dived under the hill.

  It was pitch black.

  “Wait! I can see nothing,” said Diarmid, to Imrhien’s intense relief—in the dark, she was truly mute.

  “Halt here,” Thorn’s voice, reassuring, from shadow in shadow. “Soon, you will see.”

  Vision slowly cleared. They stood in a roughhewn tunnel inclining down toward the innards of Erith. That they could see at all was a mystery, until Imrhien noticed the luminous ears of fungus growing on the walls, the same kind she had seen growing at Waterstair.

  “We must penetrate deeper,” said the Dainnan, “in case the inaccuracy of the Foawr collapses the entrance over our heads.”

  They walked several yards farther down the adit and then stopped to rest. Through the rock walls, the bass vibrations of the battle outside could be felt. The ground thrummed.

  “The Foawr.” Diarmid slumped wearily against a wall. “Who can outspeak those giants? For they have heads of granite and tongues of basalt, the wit of a flea upon a flea and, I surmise, the knowledge of no more than three words—and those most likely in some thick and cloddish language. Not that a man could get close enough to speak to them.”

  “Not that they are much aware that Men exist,” added Thorn. “This vale is one of their battlegrounds. Storms rouse them to fight, but they do so for no reason other than that they have always done so.”

  “Then, Longbow, when the storm passes, will they make peace?”

  “Maybe.” Another crash brought pebbles showering from the ceiling. “Maybe not. They are blind to reason and may rouse at whim.”

  The cold of underground, where sunlight never reached radiant fingers to warm stone and rock and bring dawn to endless night, seeped out of the clammy walls and into Imrhien’s blood. The rooster looked half-dead in its prison. Somehow, the spontaneous act of rescuing it had engendered in her a burdening responsibility for its life; she ardently desired that it might live. It kicked feebly when she took it from the cage and held it wrapped against her body. The icy, oddly reptilian feet scratched her, but after a few moments its struggles subsided and it lay quiescent. Thorn’s cloak seemed to have qualities of gramarye, for she fancied its fabric radiated warmth. Its owner drew the garment around her shoulders, flicking a fold over the bird.

  “Chanticleer has the best bed of all, this night,” Thorn said with a swift smile that twanged Imrhien’s senses like bowstrings.

  The bird stank of stale fowl-manure. Her arms, enfolding it, were grimy and scratched, wrapped in ragged sleeves. Her dress was nothing but dirty tatters, and her face and hair must present a spectacle similar to Diarmid’s—smudged, bedraggled, unkempt. The last time she had washed had been days ago in Mirrinor, splashing cold water over herself, for it was not safe to plunge into those eldritch pools to bathe. How Thorn remained unbesmirched—by some Dainnan trick or perhaps some wizard’s art—was a conundrum.

  “Take a drop of this.” The Dainnan unstoppered a red crystal phial and offered it to Imrhien. “It will keep
the cold from you.”

  She tasted the contents and passed the phial to Diarmid. The Ertishman swigged and nodded.

  “That’s a draft to warm the cockles of the heart, no doubt of it. What is it? For it is neither ale nor mead nor sack nor malmsey nor any cider or spirit that I have tasted.”

  “It is nathrach deirge, called also Dragon’s Blood—an elixir of herbs.”

  “What tongue is it that sometimes you speak, sir? I have never heard it.”

  “It is an ancient one.”

  “Ah, yes of course. A Dainnan must be learned in many tongues.”

  Time stretched out through the darkness. Wrapped in Thorn’s cloak, with the elixir coursing warmly through her veins, Imrhien began to drowse. Just as she was about to drift away she thought she heard a knocking or tapping some way off. Too tired to care, she was soon asleep.

  Her slumber was profound—a deep black pit that sucked the light out of its surroundings, so that no dreams could float above the chasm; a fathomless mine-shaft sunk into the hard layers separating the sunny, living, wind-tossed world from the carious world of grave stillness, eternal silence, and unrelenting cold.

  Imrhien’s eyes flew open.

  The long call that had jolted her to wakefulness dwindled away, then broke out again. Harmonics bounced off the limestone walls and ran up and down the adit, crossing and recrossing each other in a cacophony of ear-splitting reverberations.

  The rooster was crowing.

  Imrhien clapped her hands over her ears.

  “Cursed fowls!” groaned Diarmid. “Is a man not permitted some rest?”

  The girl tried to hush the cockerel. It fluttered from her grasp and leaped onto her head, where its feet became entangled in her hair. It crowed a third time, then quietened, making little noises in its throat. In pain, the girl batted at the bird, which jumped awkwardly to the floor. Blood ran down her forehead and into her eye, from where its spur had pierced her scalp. A couple of feathers descended lazily in the light of the fungi.