The Bitterbynde Trilogy

by Cecilia Dart-Thornton

  She drank again, from a rocky cascade, wishing that she had a flask in which to carry water. She was alone in an uncertain place, probably far from human habitation, and she knew nothing of wilderness survival, but good sense told her that thirst and exposure were her two most immediate enemies, and against them she must be prepared. First—survive. Next—fulfil her quest. She decided not to proceed until she had memorized the surroundings in the vicinity of the Geata Poeg na Déanainn, to ensure future recognition.

  The furor of the Closing had distorted and dislodged the entire Gate, including both of its Doors. The portal had been blasted out of alignment. Fallen rocks partially covered the Erith Door.

  I think the Faêran would no longer know this Gate. Only I am here, to record it in memory.

  She began to take careful note of her surroundings, preparing to imprint every detail of the Gate’s identity and location on her consciousness. Something nagged, diverting her attention, like a fly buzzing about her ears. She lost concentration …

  ‘—hain?’

  Crackling voices, someone calling out a name.

  She took no notice. It was not her name. Or was it?

  What was her name?

  The interruption faded. A fancy.

  She shook her head to rid her ears of the buzzing. The voices faded, giving way to memories.

  The Faêran cloak now appeared to be mottled gray in colour, exactly like granite. Its fabric, soft and strong, was unidentifiable and had remained dry, although rain and wind had bedraggled her riding-gown and other garments. Leodogran’s dagger and pouch of gold swung from her belt. Ashalind emptied the water out of her riding-boots, braided her long hair, and bound it around her head for convenience, then took a deep breath of the pure, silver-tinged air. It set her blood ringing. The soft luminescence that indicated the sun’s position was still low in the sky, behind dully gleaming crags that stood up like pointed teeth.

  Northeast of Arcdur, she knew, lay the strait that separated Eldaraigne from Avlantia. Besides having no means of crossing it she was reluctant to return to her homeland lest devastating changes had been wrought on it by the winds of Closing, or by Time. Never had she travelled out of Avlantia, but her thorough education had included studying the maps of the Known Lands of Erith. These she now recalled.

  South, a long way south, lay the Royal City, Caermelor, and the Court of the King-Emperor of Erith. It might be the best place to glean news of the whereabouts of Faêran royalty. Besides, the Geata Poeg na Déanainn had spilled her out toward the south, so it seemed somehow meet to continue in the same direction.

  Now that excitement, fatigue, and thirst were behind her, Ashalind was aware that hunger, like a rat, gnawed her belly. Worse than that, the Langothe, which had coiled up like a snake temporarily dormant, now hit her with full force, redoubled now that she had not only breathed the air of the Fair Realm but also left her loved ones there. Retching, she staggered and clutched at an outcrop, half turning toward the Gate.

  Now was the time to leave, and leave quickly, before the Langothe’s cruel pull drew her back to the Fair Realm at the very outset of her quest. With an effort, as though walking through water rather than air, she forced herself to set out, step by step, aching to turn back, at least to take one extra glance over her shoulder at the Geata Poeg na Déanainn. Instead, as she rounded a granite shoulder she quickened her pace. To deflect her thoughts from hunger and longing she determined to focus her mind on her final glimpse of the Gate, to recall every detail so as to engrave its image deeply into memory. She must never forget.

  The Door she left behind, seemingly just another rocky crevice among many, stood still and unnoticeable in the deep shadows of morning, as it had stood for many years. Yet not quite as it had previously stood—a crack was penciled down one side, where it remained slightly ajar. Only a thin crack; a hairline, one might say, as wide as the thickness of three strands of gold; three thin braids of hairs torn out, one by one, from the roots and weighed down at one end by a rock and at the other by a broken knife. A girl’s fingernail might have slid into that gap, as it had indeed slid not long before, to test it.

  A girl’s fingernail could open that Door, as long as the girl was the owner of the hair.

  ‘—hain! Rohain!’

  The girl on the mullock heap opened her eyes to darkness. Spicy, intoxicating night enclosed her in its embrace. Someone was calling. Fear drilled her brain, lacerating it with cold skewers.

  ‘Rohain …’

  How can one move, with wooden limbs?

  Closer now: ‘Where are you?’

  Where indeed? On the slopes of Huntingtowers.

  She stood up too late—they were upon her, two white masks of terror in the gloom.

  ‘She’s here!’

  ‘My lady, hasten!’

  The young woman stared at the masks, unseeing.

  ‘’Tis us, Viviana and Caitri—we have been searching for you all day! Quickly—night is come and danger is upon us! Wights are everywhere and not a seelie one among them!’

  The urgent tones shattered meditation. An insubstantiality floated away from the dreamer’s grasp. Her reverie had been interrupted just as she was about to recreate a visualization of the portal to Faêrie.

  Now I shall never recall it.

  As her lady’s maids grabbed her by the elbows, the damsel had enough presence of mind left to ensure that the bracelet securely encircled her wrist. Then they were off, stumbling through the mountainside’s witchy darkness.

  Wicked and eldritch indeed was the night. The three mortals were tripped and tricked at every turn, taunted and haunted, jeered at, leered at by the hideous, the horrible, the hateful. Unseelie energies hummed electric in the air like charged wires, for the wind or eldritch fingers to pluck or to slide down with fiendish screams; like cords to snake across their path, to catch in webs at their ankles, transmitting the throbbing menace of the darkness in thin metal slices of pain. On ran the three mortal maidens, expecting at any time to be cut down from behind, or beside, or in front, but a globe of soft luminosity illuminated their path.

  This light travelled with them. It radiated from the ring worn on the finger of one of them. Things that lunged at the escapers were brushed by the edge of this orb. They yelped and ricocheted away. The boots of the three damsels hammered on the surface of a road as they crossed. On the other side a bank ascended steeply into a wood. Panting, they climbed up into the tangle of undergrowth, pushing in under muffling trees until one of them, the smallest, fell.

  ‘Caitri!’

  ‘I can run no further. Go on without me.’

  Green eyes, long and narrow, popped up like sudden lamps. A skinny, pale hand reached for Caitri. Her mistress slashed at it with a knife. Black blood spurted. The screech was like a white-hot arrow through the eardrums. Encouraged, she slashed right and left, back and forth. On her hand, Thorn’s leaf-ring flared. Shadows leaped up and away from it, and so did the mad things of the night. Some of the screaming was pouring from the knife-wielder’s own mouth, a wordless battle cry of which she had not known she was capable, a song of frenzy. Her knife was everywhere, flashing in a kind of whirling cocoon, of steel within which her two charges huddled.

  When she stopped, arms hanging by her sides, the blade no longer gleamed. Inky blood covered it, splashed her arms and dripped from her clothing. Silence on silver chains hung suspended from somewhere far above. The damsel wiped the knife, ineffectually, on her sleeve.

  ‘Trouble us no more!’ she shouted into the quiescent shadows—or tried to shout. The words emerged in a strangled whisper. She sank to her knees on a whispering carpet of leaves.

  ‘You saved us,’ said Viviana, awed. ‘Are you hurt?’

  ‘Is there any water?’

  In the woods, the night was long. She whose memories had been reborn did not sleep. She sat with her back to her dozing friends, holding a knife in each hand. The ring shone. Strangely, wights’ blood had never smeared it.


  I must recall the image of the Gate.

  Somehow, as she sat through the night, she happened to glance again at the golden bracelet that symbolised her kenning-name. Her eyes began to cloud over. More memories returned …

  Arcdur. She had travelled through it.

  Avlantian riding-habits had not been designed for hard walking. The skirts of blond and turquoise saye tangled about Ashalind’s legs and caused her to stumble. On her feet, the soft leather boots yielded to sharp angles of adamant. Only the amazing Faêran cloak flowed with her movements, never snagging on projections, conforming to her body with a gentle caress.

  Jumbled stones and scree slopes made progress even slower and more difficult. Constant water and wind kept the rocks swept clean of silt in this region—only in the deepest cracks it found refuge, and there the mosses grew, or the tenacious roots of the blue-green arkenfir.

  The cadence of the wind amplified as Ashalind approached the summit of a hill, and it was as if she walked at the edge of the world, for there was only the deep sky beyond. In a few steps, a majestic vista of far-flung hills and stacks stalking into the distance unfolded unexpectedly at her feet, and the wind swept up over the rise to meet her, soughing in her ears. She paused, looking out over lonely Arcdur, devoid of human habitation. Overhead, choughs on the wing caught updrafts. A dark patch of conifers clothed the opposite ridge. To her right, a glint on the horizon suggested the sea.

  She picked her way down the hill and lay flat to drink at a clear beck, then went on, hoping to reach the shelter of the trees before nightfall. The Faêran cloak provided extraordinary warmth and protection, and without it she must surely have perished by now, but fallen pine-needles would be a softer cushion than rock.

  From stone to stone she stepped, conscious always of keeping her footing, aware that her next enemy in this remote region was injury. She kept going on a course due south, memorizing landmarks along the way; a stack of flat rocks like giant pancakes, another like loaves of bread … most of the constructions reminded her of food, and she wondered how long it was since she had eaten. Searching her memory, she recalled honeyed pears poached in a cardamom and anise sauce, followed by buttered griddle-cakes, eaten for breakfast on the morning of the Leaving. The memory tied knots in her belly, and she directed her musing elsewhere.

  She pondered all the strange events that had brought her here, and the foolishness of Men and Faêran that had caused them. Images of her loved ones in the Fair Realm made her choke with longing and she suddenly stopped and hurled herself down among the boulders, digging her fingers into gravel.

  ‘I cannot go on. I must go back.’

  There she lay, rigid, while the sun moved a little farther across the pearly sky and the choughs wheeled, inquisitive, above. Eventually, out of her confusion arose a conclusion: she had decided to attempt this venture in order to be rid of the Langothe and to bring the High King back to his Realm. Yet even as she reached this disposition she knew the answer was not really that simple; there was more, if only she had the courage to admit it. For now, however, the important point was that she had freely chosen her own path. No one had coerced her. She had elected to pursue this quest, and all pain, all longing, must be contained and controlled if it were to be achieved.

  Hence, with a new strength born of despair, she climbed to her feet again and resumed her journey.

  There was no food.

  It was very beautiful, this land of stone and pine so close to the sky; clear and clean, embroidered with joyous, glimmering waters. But day followed day and Ashalind could find nothing to eat, not even mushrooms down among the gnarled roots of the arkenfirs. Chitinous beetles sometimes crawled in crevices, but she had no mind to consume them. When they opened their wingcases and became airborne, the choughs swooped to snatch them instead.

  The light-headedness and aching she had experienced in the first two days vanished, leaving her with a sense of remarkable calm and vigor. She held her course, but on the sixth day of her journey the land to the east started to climb in ragged notches, more precipitous and sheer, while to the west it gentled, and groves of pine and fir marched over undulating hills.

  Using a castle-shaped crag as a landmark for her turning-point, she was now forced to veer westward. Somewhere ahead, she knew, lay the northwest coast of Eldaraigne that looked out over a vast sea whose end was in the storm-ring that encircled the rim of the world. A deep ocean current, the Calder Flow, journeyed from the icy southern latitudes past the island country of Finvarna to touch that coast with its chill fingers and keep Arcdur cooler, year-round, than the rest of the country.

  On the seventh day she gathered a few handfuls of watercress and wild sage, the first edible plants she had seen. But she noticed that her hands and feet were always cold, and her limbs quaked. Her strength was failing. At night, proper sleep would not come, only a trancelike state, similar to floating on water, buoyed up and unable to sink. She wondered how long anyone could continue to travel without proper sustenance. Perhaps if she could reach the seashore she would find food. If she did not, then she must lie down there and die, within sight of elindors flying over the waves.

  Would elindors still navigate the airs of Erith? How many years had passed? Would Men still walk the world, or would their cities lie in ruin? She stumbled, then shook her head to clear it, but could not focus, and recalled vaguely that she had fallen many times that day and her hands were bleeding.

  The sky turned from pearl to grape. Another storm blew out of the west that night, bringing strong winds and lashing rain. It lasted all night and through the next day. The Faêran clothes were waterproof, but moisture insinuated itself past the edges to dampen her neck and wrists.

  By nightfall on the ninth day the rain had dissipated to the southeast. The falling sun had at last broken through the clouds, and as the traveller plodded up the side of a grassy dune she saw it, low on the horizon, scattering a fish-scale path across the sea. Lulled by the susurration of the waves, she sat among saltbushes and watched the evening’s glory fade. Stars appeared. A gibbous moon looked down at the long pale beach, but Ashalind, wrapped in her cloak, her head pillowed on her arms, was already dozing.

  It was a fitful sleep, disturbed by dreams of Faêran feasts. The first gleam of dawn wakened her suddenly, and, raising her head, she looked out to sea. A stifled cry escaped her lips, and in the next instant she had sprung to her feet, and, drawing on her last reserves, was running down to the water’s edge, waving and calling.

  Triangular sails floated, saffron, in the dawnlight. A boat, not far from shore, was silently heading south toward a headland. Onward it tacked without deviation, seeming unaffected by her cries, and she thought it would pass from sight forever and leave her stranded to become, washed by time and tide, sunbleached bones in the sand. But the angle of the hull changed. It had turned, and now cut through water toward her; she could see the curl of white foam beneath the prow. When the vessel was within earshot, she hove to. Her keel prevented her from venturing into the shallows. A man on board dropped anchor and shouted, honouring the time-worn cliché of mariners:

  ‘Ahoy there!’

  ‘Help me,’ Ashalind answered. ‘I have no food. I am alone.’

  The man hesitated.

  ‘Please help me.’ The damsel’s voice cracked and she sank to the sand, heedless of the lace-edged waves swirling around her knees. Perhaps he did not believe her, or thought she was a decoy for some brigand’s ambush, which indicated that whenever she was, danger lurked still.

  There was a splash. He had stripped to his breeches and was swimming to the beach, towing something buoyant on a rope. A strong swimmer, he soon rose out of the water, dripping, and waded out. He was thickset and bearded, with hair as brown as his body. Bright eyes peered from a weathered face.

  ‘Gramercie. I am grateful,’ was all she could think of to say. She tried to stand but collapsed again. He gave her a measuring stare, then asked, in unfamiliar but clear accents,

 
‘Can you swim?’

  She nodded, unclasping the cloak and throwing off the ragged gown and jacket.

  ‘Come on now,’ the man said to the gaunt, hollow-eyed damsel shivering in hose and gipon. Securing her to the cluster of inflated bladders, he towed her out to the boat and dragged her aboard, then tossed a dry blanket over her while he returned to retrieve her riding-habit and mantle.

  There was a small cabin on board, and wicker baskets filled with luminous shells like pale rainbows. An older, grizzle-bearded sailor in the boat handed her a bottle of water and some food: stale bread, cheese, and pickles in a stoneware jar.

  ‘Eat slowly,’ he advised.

  On his return the younger man dressed himself. Then without another word he dragged in the anchor. The old man hauled on the jibsheet and took the tiller. The favourable breeze bellied out the lateens against an azure sky. Ashalind lay back on a pile of stinking nets and watched the horizon rise and fall.

  ‘Where are you from? Where are you going?’

  ‘My name is Ashalind na Pendran. I am a traveller, seeking the High King of the Fair Folk. I lost my way.’

  This was the truth, as far as it went. She trusted them, these brown sailors—their faces were open and honest. Nonetheless, the secret of the Gate was too precious to be revealed to any save the High King of the Faêran.

  ‘My name is William Javert,’ said the younger man, ‘and this is my father, Tom. Never have I known a young lass like you to travel alone, but such practices may be common in outlandish regions, I suppose. I doubt not that you seek whom you say you seek, but we have never seen any such people as those you call the Fair Folk. It is not our habit to pay heed to tales and legends of the Strangers. If such folk do exist, maybe ’tis better they remain hidden. To my mind, the less trouble that is stirred up, the better. Some old tales what folks make up when they got nothin’ useful to do, tell of a King of the Strangers—the Gentry, as some calls ’em—who sleeps with his warriors under a hill, but I don’t put much faith in that. I believe in what I see. In wights I believe, for mickle trouble they do give us. Thought you was one, at first.’