The Bitterbynde Trilogy

by Cecilia Dart-Thornton

  A murmur of surprise ran through the gathered Household of the Isse Tower. Heligea’s grin of triumph eclipsed the scowl of dismay her brother tried to conceal with a low bow.

  The sun, at the keypoint of its arch, hung at the centre of the sky’s dome. The Imperial Flight, a fleet of some three score mighty Skyhorses, burst from an upper gatehall. Banking to the southwest, they formed an arrowhead and passed away to the distance like charcoaled galleons slowly sinking beneath an azure ocean.

  5

  CAERMELOR PART III

  Fire and Fleet

  If you are the lantern, I am the flame;

  If you are the lake, then I am the rain;

  If you are the desert, I am the sea;

  If you are the blossom, I am the bee;

  If you are the fruit, then I am the core;

  If you are the rock, then I am the ore;

  If you are the ballad, I am the word;

  If you are the sheath, then I am the sword.

  LOVE SONG OF SEVERNESSE

  Viviana and Caitri rode pillion. They had no experience in riding sky, and onhebbing the eotaur flying-gear was too delicate an art for beginners to master. The sliding of andalum chain-plate along the inner courses of the sildron girth-strap to gain or lose altitude took skill born of practice. For the duration of the illicit skyride that had so disjointed the nose of her brother, Heligea—who had secretly practiced for years—had onhebbed like a professional. Rohain, however, had exhibited the clumsiness of the novice. Yet this was not the reason Rohain now rode sideways behind Thorn, her arms encircling the wood-hardness of his waist, watching the world dissolve into the flying thunderwrack of his hair.

  She leaned against him, almost paralyzed by the exquisite sensation. Later, she could not recall much of that ride save an impression of a storm-whipped shore and a seashell tossed on a dark tide.

  Three miles out from Caermelor, the riders heard distant trumpets blare. Watchmen on the heights had recognised their approach. A mile from the city, the cloud of hugely beating wings began to lose altitude on its long, low final descent. The eotaurs came in over the palace walls, their feathered fetlocks barely clearing the crenellations. They hovered like giant dragonflies over the baileys, churning the air with a backwash as thunderous as a hurricane. From the courtyards below, hats and straw and dust swirled in a chaotic porridge. The cavalcade landed with flawless precision.

  Equerries ran to slip off the sildron hoof-crescents and lead away the Skyhorses, to unsaddle them and scrape the sweat from their gleaming flanks, to preen and water and treat the steeds like pampered lords and ladies. Servants hurried to meet the riders, to bear away the jewel-backed riding-gloves they stripped from their hands, to offer fluted cups of wines and cordials. The splendid foot-guards of the Household Division formed two ceremonial columns, creating a human arcade leading to the palace doors. Flowers had been strewn along the cobblestones. Along this arcade walked their sovereign and the dark-haired lady.

  As the couple entered the doors of the palace, a slender young man stood upon the flagstones, barring their way. He seemed, in fact, no more than a youth—not much older than Caitri; fourteen or fifteen Summers, a sprout-chinned adolescent. His black hair was impeccably bound into a long horsetail, framing a face that was pale, serious, comely. He bowed briefly to Thorn—a look of understanding flashed between them—and regarded Rohain quizzically from behind soot-coloured eyelashes.

  There was no need for introductions.

  Rohain performed a deep, gracious curtsey. The youth pronounced her current name in the crack-pitched tones of his years and she replied with his royal title. Then they regarded one another. Rohain glimpsed a flicker of what lay behind the starched facade and smiled.

  ‘I am joyed to greet you.’

  ‘And I you,’ he said guardedly, but he smiled too and added, ‘well come.’

  The Heir Apparent stood aside, that the King-Emperor and Rohain might enter first.

  The rooms of Rohain’s suite burned with frost and flame. Snowy plaster moldings of milky grapes and vine-leaves twined across the ceilings. Brilliant garlands of flowers had been woven into pure white carpets, upon which stood carmine couches and ottomans. A pale marble chimneypiece was drizzled with sparkling ornaments of ruby red glass. Between the casement windows stretched tall mirrors, polished to perfection.

  In one of the three bedchambers—vermilion-carpeted—there stood a bed whose canopy was supported on massive pillars of mahogany. It was hung with curtains of crimson damask embroidered with an interlocking pattern of clover, over and over. The table at the foot of the bed was muffled in a blood-red cloth. The walls had been painted a soft cream colour with a blush of rose in it, and around them were arranged several clothes-chests, lace-draped tables upholding jewel-caskets and chairs of dark, polished mahogany. A tall cushioned chair had been placed near the head of the bed, with a footstool before it.

  The main dressing-room was sumptuously over-furnished with looking-glasses. Boxes on the dressing-table contained numbers of miniature compartments and drawers to hold trinkets and jewellery, with further mirrors fitted to the undersides of the lids, which could be propped open, in case one didn’t see enough of oneself elsewhere. In the writing-room, an impressive ink-stand with a double lid and a central handle dominated the polished jarrah escritoire.

  Long fingers of windows, half-disguised by festoons and falls of wine-coloured velvet, looked out upon the Winter Garden where crystal wind-chimes had been tied to the boughs, ringing soft and pure, in random melody. Between the green cones of the cypress pines, cornelian fires sprang from high stone dishes, admiring their own fervent lucidity in tarnished ponds.

  This, Viviana informed Rohain, was the Luindorn Suite—a vast and exquisitely furnished apartment usually reserved for state visitors.

  After breakfast, two height-matched footmen skilled in the art of unobtrusiveness wheeled out the dining trolley and melted quietly away. Caitri, who had rung for them, leaned wide-eyed from a sitting-room window as though she might presently shift to a linnet’s shape and fly out into the sky. She appeared oblivious of Rohain and Viviana, who sat head to head, deep in conversation.

  ‘My lady,’ said Viviana, ‘that you have found favour in the King-Emperor’s eyes is advantageous for us both. As long as his favour lasts, we can never be Cut. As for your secret history of service in Isse Tower, why, you can depend on me never to divulge it to anyone. See, you have become a lady after all! I have but one concern—this dresser who has been assigned to you, and this footman also. What next? There is talk that you are to have a noblewoman as your own bodyservant! Are my services to be dispensed with?’

  ‘Of course not. You are to remain as my maid, if you wish it, as I do. And there are to be no ladies-in-waiting—not yet.’

  ‘Ladies-in-waiting?’

  As the implications of the term sank in, Viviana’s eyes widened. Only a queen would have ladies-in-waiting.

  ‘Six there shall eventually be, chiefed by the Duchess of Roxburgh whenever she is at Court,’ whispered Rohain.

  Simultaneously, maid and mistress burst out laughing. Seizing each other by the hands, they danced the circumference of the floor like children around a beribboned pole on Whiteflower’s Day, finally falling breathlessly on two couches of plum-red velvet.

  ‘So ’tis true!’ panted Viviana. ‘His Majesty has asked—’

  ‘Yes! We are troth-plighted, he and I. But it is not generally known—the announcement has yet to be officially made.’

  ‘In sooth, rumour has been rampant! I did not like to pry, but everyone guesses it. I cannot believe this! My mistress to be Queen-Empress!’

  Caitri turned her head, emerging from the haze of her musing. She had been scandalizing at the amount of world that had heretofore been denied her, imprisoned as she had been in Isse Tower.

  ‘Is my lady to be Queen?’ She was clearly thunderstruck.

  Viviana pranced to the window, grasped the little girl, and
whirled her in another polka.

  ‘Yes! Love is the season of the year! What is more, Caitri, when Dain Pennyrigg lifted me from his eotaur just now, he called me his little canary and kissed me. Kiel varletto! And he only a stablehand! Oh, but it was taraiz delicious. His kiss thrilled me like lightning!’

  Rohain nodded. ‘Passion’s current. In both senses of the phrase.’

  ‘Skyhorse travel is eminently more pleasurable than Windship travel,’ pronounced Viviana. ‘Oh, and Master Pennyrigg found this in his saddlebags.’ Rummaging in her pocket, she produced the crimson vial of Dragon’s Blood.

  Rohain clapped her hands. ‘Happy day! It is returned to me! Was it companioned by anything else? An aulmoniere perhaps?’

  ‘Why yes, m’lady. Here it is, but it is now putrid with a stink of goats, and I thought to cast it away. I shall have it cleansed for you.’

  Her mistress took the dirty purse and felt around inside it. ‘Curses! ’Tis empty! Was there naught else?’

  ‘No, m’lady, there was nothing else which Master Pennyrigg himself did not pack. Only an ensofell of smelly hair, tied with string—it comes from a dog or a goat methinks—and the bedraggled feather of some fowl. Shall I throw them away?’

  ‘No, give the feather to me. It is a powerful talisman.’

  Rohain tucked the feather inside a tapestry aulmoniere, fastened with buttons of jet. It seemed that Pod was at least capable of thanks for his rescue from Thorn’s wrath. However, his return of the vial did not hint at a reversal of his dismal prediction. After all, he was supposed to be a prophet, not a maker of curses.

  ‘Come now, my two birds,’ said Rohain, absently retying a seditious lace on Caitri’s gown of forget-me-not blue. ‘I have been from his side for too long. It is fully an hour since we arrived from the Stormrider Tower. That is more than enough time to wash away the stains of travel and recostume ourselves.’

  ‘Look at us!’ prattled Viviana, ever conscious of appearances. ‘My lady dark-haired in crimson, I fair in daffodil, and cinnamon Caitri in a sky-coloured gown. What a motley bouquet!’

  ‘Yet some among us do not smell as a bouquet should,’ said her mistress, holding a perfumed pomander to her nose to block out the last odorous traces of siedo-pod oil wafting from Viviana’s hair. ‘Hasten!’

  A rapping at the door announced the Master of the King’s Household, a gray-haired gentleman of middle age. ‘His Majesty sends greetings, my lady,’ he said, bending forward from the waist, ‘and regrets to inform you that he has been called away on a matter of uncommon import.’

  ‘So soon?’ murmured Rohain. ‘We have only just arrived!’

  ‘These are fickle times,’ said the gentleman. ‘Even the best-laid plans may go astray.’

  ‘I thank you, sir, for your advice.’

  The palace seemed suddenly devoid of substance and character during Thorn’s unexpected absence. Rohain grasped the opportunity to visit Sianadh in the dungeons.

  ‘You are to be set free,’ she told him.

  He would not believe her. ‘’Tis kind of you to try to cheer me,’ he said in a morose mood, ‘but these hard-hearted skeerdas would not free their own grandmother if she was in leg-irons.’

  ‘I tell you, I have heard the King-Emperor say so!’

  ‘Ye must have been dreaming,’ he said mournfully. ‘Ach! I’d give me right arm for a drop o’ the pure stuff.’

  Thorn returned two days later. He sent a message to Rohain asking her to join him in the Throne Room. Swiftly she made her way through the long galleries and passageways, eager for the reunion.

  The columns of the Throne Room aspired to a forty-foot ceiling. This huge space was lit by metallic lusters pendant on thirty-foot chains, and flambeaux on brass pedestals. Twin thrones beneath their dagged and gilded canopy stood atop the grand dais. They were reached by twelve broad stairs.

  Around the walls, the history of the world reenacted itself perpetually on adjoining tapestries that reached to a height of twenty feet and represented years of painstaking stitchery. Above them, every inch of the plasterwork crawled with painted murals—not scenes, but geometric designs, stylized flowers, vegetables, flora and fauna, and fantastic gold-leaf scrollwork that did not stop at the ceiling merely because that was too high to be easily viewed, but surged across it in a prolific efflorescence with the vigor of weeds.

  By comparison to this busy overabundance the polished floor seemed austere, parquetried as it was with wood every shade of brown between palest blond and burnt umber. These coloured woods formed the heraldic device of the House of D’Armancourt in repeated tiles six feet square. The hall was so vast that to enter the doors was to dwindle immediately to the proportions of a mouse among cornstalks.

  Rohain entered, accompanied by her small entourage and a froth of footmen and alert courtiers who had entangled themselves in her wake as she sailed through the corridors. Like every chamber in the palace, currently the Throne Room was arrayed with a flotsam of courtiers and servants. One of the former—a familiar, foppish figure—bowed low before her.

  ‘My Lady Rohain, His Majesty yet walks in the gardens with the Attriod but will shortly join us here in the Throne Room.’

  ‘Please show me the way to the gardens, Lord Jasper.’

  The courtier bowed again, but before he could fulfil her request a footman, whose wig resembled a white rabbit, dropped to his knee. He elevated a silver salver from which Lord Jasper plucked a parchment. The nobleman’s brow furrowed as he squinted at the writing of some palace scribe.

  ‘Er—a gentleman begs audience with Your Ladyship. It appears His Majesty sent for him. An Ertishman with an unpronounceable name.’

  ‘Send him in,’ said Rohain.

  Uproar and a torrent of Ertish curses emanated from outside the Throne Room, reaffirming Sianadh’s contempt for formalities. The doors crashed apart and he burst through like a boulder from a mangonel. Catching sight of Rohain, he stood blinking as though dazed. Two footmen who had been shed from his brawny arms stood helplessly by.

  ‘There ye are, chehrna,’ said the Ertishman meekly, the bear now a lamb. ‘The skeerdas would not let me through.’

  ‘Mo gaidair,’ said Rohain warmly. She proffered a hand. He clasped it with the utmost delicacy and a bewildered look. Nothing else being offered in the way of courtesy, she drew it back with an appreciative sigh. ‘Mo gaidair, your lack of etiquette is a refreshing draught.’

  ‘Chehrna, in one breath I am thinking it might be me last, the next they’re turning the key in me cell-door and I am a free man. How is this? What have ye done?’

  ‘Lord Jasper, is there some minor chamber where I can converse in private with my friend? Somewhere less cavernous and popular?’

  Lord Jasper’s eyebrows shot up to meet his hairline. ‘But of course, m’lady,’ he said, trying to conceal his disapproval by dabbing his brow with a kerchief of embroidered lawn. ‘Methinks the Hall of Audience is unoccupied for the nonce. Allow me to conduct you there.’ Calling for footmen to bring lighted tapers, he indicated the Hall’s direction with a courtly flourish and a neatly pointed toe.

  In a corner of the Hall of Audience, Viviana and Caitri played Cloth-Scissors-Rock. Despite the fact that the chamber was virtually deserted, one hundred and sixty candles blazed in gold candlesticks, like banks of radiant flowers. Rohain and Sianadh conversed in another corner, she imparting an outline of all that had occurred at Isse Tower. As she spoke, he grew progressively more restive, jubilant at what he was hearing.

  ‘So you see, I did not find what I sought,’ she concluded, ‘but I found instead something far dearer to my heart.’

  ‘Dear to anyone’s heart, the riches of royalty!’ he crowed.

  ‘You mistake my meaning. I have no ambition, mo gaidair. I did not seek this. I have never desired anything that is theirs—wealth or pomp. Perhaps I have desired respect and ease, who has not? Yet I had hope for an ease that does not live by battening on the toil of others, and a respect that grows
from genuine friendship, not social status. I do not need so many jewels, so many costly possessions. All this obsequiousness and etiquette is foreign to me. I suppose I shall get used to it for his sake and I doubt not that in time I shall have forgotten that it could be otherwise, and it shall all be enjoyable—for, mistake me not, I am not ungrateful. I entered the world beyond the Tower looking for three things: a face, a voice, a past. In the searching I found the first two, discovered a fourth desire, and lost the third. Now my past matters no longer. The present is all I could desire.’

  She fell silent. It occurred to her that now, at last, she was at rest, if not at peace—not seeking anymore. Yet even as she surveyed the luxury surrounding her in the Hall of Audience with its one hundred and sixty lighted candles and three times as many waiting to be lit, a musty wind came funneling out of a past she had forgotten that she had forgotten. Troubled by Pod’s words, by a couple of abandoned loam-worms, the lingering breath of forest mold, and withered foliage sprinkled like scraps of torn manuscript in the ruined bedchamber, she shuddered and shrank from remembering. History was too dark; far too dark.

  ‘As my first edict,’ she said briskly, ‘I shall outlaw the beating of servants throughout Erith.’

  ‘Very right-minded of ye, chehrna,’ replied Sianadh, ‘but ye shall start a rebellion with that kind of thinking.’

  ‘My strength shall be used to shield the vulnerable. All I need,’ she concluded, ‘all I need is air to sustain me, and the one I love.’

  ‘And drink,’ rejoined Sianadh prosaically, jumping up, ‘and vittles. And him to be good enough for ye.’

  Unable to restrain his glee, he jumped in the air and danced, as energetically as Rohain had danced with Viviana not long before. To the disgust of the stone-faced footmen and the door-sentries who for years had practiced outfreezing statues, the wild red-haired man performed an Ertish jig.

  ‘Free!’ he trumpeted. ‘Free, and pardoned, and in favour with the Queen Apparent! I could kiss ye, chehrna, I could kiss ye!’