The Bitterbynde Trilogy

by Cecilia Dart-Thornton

  The ship heeled. Viviana staggered at her mistress’s elbow. She looked pale.

  ‘Come into the chartroom, m’lady. If the air or the ground should become bumpier, there is a goodly chance of being tossed overboard.’

  The courtier sidled like a crab across the deck, fell against a wall, and tiptoed back with involuntarily quick, light steps. Rohain watched in surprise. Personally, she found it little effort to compensate for the ship’s movement.

  The chartroom was lit by oil-lamps on hooks, sunflowers of light that swayed in a rhythmic dance with the shadows. Thomas Learmont, called the Rhymer, the Most Noble Duke of Ercildoune, Marquess of Ceolnnachta, Earl of Huntley Bank, Baron Achduart, and Royal Bard of Erith (to name only his principal titles) scratched his red goatee. He was poring over a map, alongside Aelfred, the ship’s navigator. Lamplight glanced off the Bard’s shoulder-length silken hanks of hair, turning them wine red against the robin’s-egg blue velvet of his raiment. Around his neck coiled a torque of gold with sapphire eyes; the bardic snake-sigil.

  At their first meeting, Rohain had almost mistaken him for Sianadh, not having expected to see red hair at Court, after all she had heard of the place. This man with the neatly trimmed pique-devant beard and dapper mustaches was not Sianadh, although he matched her lost friend in height and girth. The features of his freckled face were strong and pronounced, the eyes deepset and hooded beneath bushy eyebrows. Winged keys were stitched in gold all over his costume. A demicloak swung from his left shoulder, fastened by a zither-shaped brooch. True Thomas, as he was commonly called, had not questioned Rohain concerning the story she had told to Roxburgh. He was no fool, either; shrewdness dwelt behind those twinkling eyes. But for whatever reason, he took her at her word, for now.

  The Bard’s pale eyes now turned toward the visitor. He bowed and kissed the back of her hand.

  ‘My lady.’

  She curtsied. ‘Your Grace.’

  ‘Thirty-four hours should see us at the Lofties, given that this fair westerly keeps up. We sail by night and day.’ He turned to his apprentice, a downy-chinned youth in the Bard’s blue-and-gold livery. ‘Toby, is the rosewood lute restrung?’

  ‘Yes, Your Grace,’ said Toby, handing it over.

  The Royal Bard appreciatively stroked the shiny rosewood and plucked a few strings, which gave out soft, bell-like notes.

  ‘Good.’ He handed the instrument back to the apprentice. ‘See that it is kept tuned. As I do not have to remind you, new strings stretch, particularly in the changeable airs at these altitudes. Gerald, bring supper and wine. Roll up your maps, Master Aelfred—the lady and I shall dine here anon, with the captains. But first we shall stroll together on deck, if that is to m’lady’s liking.’

  ‘My servant tells me I am likely to be tipped overboard.’

  ‘There is little chance of that for the duration of the next watch, m’lady,’ said Aelfred with a bow. ‘The ship will be passing over smooth and level territory. Turbulence is improbable.’

  ‘Then I accept Your Grace’s kind invitation,’ said Rohain, exulting yet again in her newfound powers of speech.

  Quarreling over the best perches, the birds settling in the treetops beneath the hull made noise enough for a dawn chorus. The celestial dome arching high overhead glowed softly with that luminous, aching blueness that is only seen at twilight, and then rarely. The rigging stood out in ruled black lines against it. The moon, just over the half, floated, bloated like a drowned fish.

  ‘What a strange time of night—or day,’ mused Rohain politely as they stepped along the gently canting deck. ‘Is it day or night, I wonder? The moon and the sun are in the sky both at once. Birds carol as though they greet the morning. It is a between time—neither one nor the other; a border-hour.’

  Her companion offered her his arm and she reached past the wide perimeter of her petticoats to rest her hand lightly on his lace-cuffed wrist. The Duke of Ercildoune, Royal Bard and Rhymer to the King-Emperor, was a man of courtesy and learning. She had warmed to him at their first meeting.

  ‘Speaking of borders,’ said the Bard, ‘puts me in mind of a very old tale. May I tell it you? There are few pleasures greater, it seems to me, than indulging in storytelling on such an evening, at such an altitude.’

  ‘I would be honoured, sir, to be told any tale by the Bard of the King-Emperor.’

  He inclined his head in a gesture of dignity and courtesy.

  ‘There was once a fellow,’ he began, ‘named Carthy McKeightley—a braggart who took to boasting that he could best any wight in a contest of wit. These brash words eventually came to the ears of Huon himself …’

  Panic seized Rohain. She struggled to conceal it.

  ‘And,’ Ercildoune continued, gazing out over the starboard side without noting her distress, ‘being of a sporting nature, the Antlered One challenged McKeightley to play at cards with him, a challenge which McKeightley, to uphold his words, must accept. To make it interesting, the life of the loser would be at stake.

  ‘“Be certain!” said Huon the Hunter, lowering his great antlers threateningly. “If I outwit you, your life shall be forfeit, whether you be within your house of rowan and iron or without it. If you run I shall come after you with my hounds, the Coonanuin, and I swear that I shall take you.”

  ‘To this, McKeightley blithely agreed.’

  The storyteller paused. Having recovered her composure, Rohain smiled and nodded.

  ‘Wily as McKeightley was,’ said Ercildoune, ‘Huon was craftier. The game lasted for three days and three nights, and at the end of it the unseelie wight was the winner.

  “Now I shall devour you,” he said.

  ‘But McKeightley jumped up and fled to his house, locking the rowan-wood doors and windows with iron bolts. It was no ordinary house, built as it was of stone, with walls four feet thick. Every kind of charm was built into it.

  ‘The Antlered One came to the door like a dark thundercloud, with eyes of lightning, and said, “McKeightley, your iron bars will not stay me. You have pledged me your life, whether you bide outside your house or within it. I will devour you.”

  ‘With that, he struck a mighty blow on the door. Every hinge and lock in the place shivered to pieces and the door burst apart, for Houn is one of the few Lords of Wickedness so mighty that he can thwart the law of gramarye and cross thresholds uninvited. But when the mighty Huon strode in, McKeightley was nowhere to be seen.

  ‘“You cannot hide,” laughed the unseelie lord. “My servants will sniff you out.”

  ‘“Oh, I am not hiding,” said a voice from somewhere near the chimney. “After such a long game I am hungry. I am merely sitting down to dinner.”

  ‘“Not before I eat,” said the Antlered One.

  ‘“I fear I cannot invite you to join me,” said the voice. “There is not enough room for a big fellow like you here in the walls where I now dwell, neither within my house nor without it.”

  ‘Huon gave a howl of rage and disappeared with a thunderclap!’

  ‘But how clever!’ said Rohain with a smile. ‘Did McKeightley spend the rest of his days living in his walls?’

  ‘No, for he had, in fact, outwitted the Antlered One and so had won the contest. He possessed a sort of immunity from the creature from then on, and his boastfulness became legendary. He infuriated a good many more folk of many kinds, but surprisingly, lived to a ripe old age; overripe, really, almost rotten.

  ‘The wrath of Huon was, however, formidable, and upon other mortals he wrought vengeance for this trick. I always air this geste when Roxburgh wishes to dispute my tenet that the brain is mightier than the thew. Do you not agree the tale indicates, my lady, that wit wins where muscle fails?’

  ‘Why yes. The walls—how astute!’

  ‘Yea, verily,’ said the Bard, nodding his head. ‘Walls and borders and marches are strange situations—neither of one place nor the other.’

  Rohain looked up at the sky, now colourless. To the west, cumulus clouds
converged, boiling in some disturbance of the upper atmosphere. She half-expected to see dark shapes sweep across them, howling for blood.

  ‘Pray, tell me of the Unseelie Attriod,’ she said in a low voice. ‘Where I come from, they will not even speak of it, believing that the mere mention brings ill fortune.’

  ‘They may be right,’ replied Thomas of Ercildoune, ‘under some circumstances; for things of eldritch mislike being spoken of and have ways of listening in. But I’ll vouch we are safe enough here, mark you! In times past the Unseelie Attriod was the anathema of the Royal Attriod, of which I am currently a member, as you must be aware. An Attriod, of course, consists of seven members, one of whom leads and two of whom are the leader’s second-in-command.’

  He slid a jeweled dagger from a sheath at his belt and with the point scratched a pattern on the upright panels of the poop deck.

  ‘This is how an Attriod is shaped. If the leader is placed at the top and the others in a triangle, with four along the base, a very strong structure will be created—a self-supporting, self-contained framework with the leader at the pinnacle, at the fulcrum, from which he can see afar. It may be seen as an arrowhead, if you like. Each member must contribute particular talents to the whole, such that when locked into position, the structure lacks nothing. As Roxburgh and I now stand at the left and right shoulders of the King-Emperor, so, in macabre travesty, Huon the Hunter and the Each Uisge, the most malign of all waterhorses, once long ago flanked their leader.’

  ‘Who were the others?’

  ‘They were four terrible princes of unseelie: Gull, the Spriggan Chieftain; the Cearb who is called the Killing One—a monster who can shake the ground to its roots; Cuachag of the fuathan; and the Athach, the dark and monstrous shape-shifter. That is—or rather, was the Unseelie Attriod, whom some called the Nightmare Princes.’

  ‘What of their leader?’

  ‘The Waelghast was struck down. They are leaderless now, and scattered. Many centuries ago, the Waelghast made an enemy of the High King of the Faêran, but eventually it was a mortal who struck the deciding blow, putting an end to the power of that Lord of Unseelie.’

  For a few moments a thoughtful silence hung between them.

  ‘Yet these Hunters are not the only scourges of the skies, sir,’ said Rohain at last. ‘Mortal men can be as deadly. Do pirates frequent these regions?’

  ‘None have been sighted. If we encounter them ’twill be they who have the worst of it, for this frigate is heavily armed and those who sail in her are not unskilled in warriorship.’

  ‘There is a place …’ Rohain hesitated.

  ‘Aye?’ prompted the Bard.

  ‘There is a place in the mountains, a deep and narrow cleft. The sun rises over a peak shaped like three standing men. To the west stands a pile of great, flat stones atop a crag. As the sun’s light hits the topmost stone, it turns around three times. Pirate ships shelter in that place.’

  Ercildoune revealed no reaction to this astonishing news, not by the merest facial twitch.

  ‘A ravine, you say, between the Old Men of Torr and one of those unlorraly formations in stone they call a cheesewring,’ he replied, ‘of which there are said to be several in the Lofties. This knowledge may prove to be of great use. How you came by it is your own affair, my dear. Be assured, it will be acted upon. But let us speak no more of wickedness. Let us to the cabin—the night grows cold.’

  Just before they bent their heads to pass through the low door, Rohain saw the Bard glance over his shoulder toward the northern horizon. It was a gesture that was becoming familiar to her since her arrival at Court. The awareness of strange and hostile forces gathering in Namarre was never far away. It was always felt, even if not voiced.

  Besides Captain Heath of the thriesniun, another Dainnan sailed aboard the frigate Peregrine. He was the ship’s captain, a skyfarer with the Dainnan kenning of ‘Tide’. These two took supper with Ercildoune and their lady guide, dining in the Ertish manner, with total disregard for forks.

  Conversation in the captain’s mess was dominated by the kindly Bard, who was never at a loss for words. As she grew to know him better, Rohain noted some indefinable similarity between him and the Duke of Roxburgh.

  ‘How describe they us, in the Sorrow Isles?’ he asked her.

  ‘With words of praise, sir. The name of Thomas, Duke of Ercildoune, is well-known and highly regarded.’

  ‘And no doubt many an anecdote is told thereof.’

  ‘All are tales of chivalry.’

  ‘And musicianship?’

  ‘Most assuredly!’

  ‘Since Thomas of Ercildoune is spoken of, perhaps you are aware of the geas he carries with him,’ subjoined Sir Heath.

  ‘Is it true, then?’ asked Rohain, recalling one of Brinkworth’s histories concerning the Royal Bard. ‘I feared that to ask about it would appear discourteous.’

  ‘Yes, ’tis true,’ answered the Bard. ‘I never utter a lie. This virtuous practice, if virtuous it can be called, is a bitterbynde I have sworn to, and shall never break.’

  ‘Such a quality,’ said Rohain, ‘must be as a two-edged sword, for while His Grace’s word is trusted by all, he likely finds himself in an unenviable position when obliged to comment upon the charms of a noblewoman whose aspect has not been graced by nature.’

  The Dainnan captains grinned.

  How glibly the words came to Rohain’s lips! By rights, she thought, her tongue ought to have rusted from disuse. Wordsmithing came very easily, considering that she had been for so long mute. With the birth of a new persona, she could become whomsoever she pleased. But what manner of woman was she, this Rohain of the Sorrows? Given the power of speech, she had already used it to lie and flatter, to vent anger. Could this be the character that memory had suppressed?

  ‘Zounds, you are sympathetic!’ The Bard smiled broadly at his demure guest. ‘Indeed, when it comes to flattery, I am not in the contest. As for hawking my own wares, exaggerated boasting is impossible—only in song and poesy have I license to give rein to fancy. Over the years, I have learned to avoid awkward dilemmas. Never was I a liar or a braggart, but I have come to be of the opinion, since I was gifted with this bitterbynde, that a little white lying, like a little white wine, can be good for one’s constitution. Unfortunately, I am incapable of it.’ He reached for the rosewood lute, and as an afterthought added, ‘Of course, there is a curb on truth as there is on every facility of man. That is, one can only speak the truth as one believes it oneself. If you were to tell me a lie and I were to believe it, I should repeat it to another as a veracity.’ He plucked a string of the instrument. ‘I am for some song—what say you? I have one that I think shall please you.’

  ‘I should like to hear it!’ exclaimed Rohain.

  Experimentally, the Bard strummed a few chords, then began to sing:

  ‘One holds to one’s ritual customs, one’s intricate, adamant code;

  One’s strictly correct with one’s manners, in line with the mode.

  Real ladies are frugal when dining; to bulge at the waist would be vile!

  Their forms must be slender as willows; of course, it’s the style.

  One’s speech is quite blissingly novel—’tis far from colloquial brogue!

  And common folk don’t understand it; they’re not in the vogue.

  One’s raiment’s expensively lavish and drives ev’ry suitor quite mad.

  One’s tailors are paid to keep up with each glorious fad.

  One’s hairstyles defy all description; each strand is coiffed right to the end.

  One needs to put up with the anguish to be in the trend.

  We carefully choose whom to cherish with fine and fastidious passion;

  ’Tis seemly for one to be seen with the doyens of fashion!’

  Between each verse he led a facetious chorus of fal-lal-lals in which, after the first time around, everyone joined, masters and servants alike. The song concluded amid general merriment.

&nbs
p; Later, talk among the Dainnan captains turned to weightier matters, such as the strength and numbers of the rebels in the unquiet north. Rohain could only listen in growing consternation, untutored as she was in the ways of warfare.

  ‘And how do their tactics serve the barbarians of Namarre?’ asked Sir Heath.

  Ercildoune replied, ‘Reports say they are but loosely organised under their several chieftains. They shun pitched battles. Instead they use their speed and horsemanship to ride swiftly from location to location, assailing isolated detachments, intercepting convoys and plaguing columns on the march. Until they feel confident of winning, they try to avoid fullblown conflict.’

  ‘I have heard additionally,’ said Sir Tide, ‘that their light horsemen also use the classic tactics of feigned flight, luring our troops into ambushes or doubling back at a prearranged position and charging the pursuers.’