The Bitterbynde Trilogy

by Cecilia Dart-Thornton

‘But chiel, the gean-cannah cannae harm a down-feather o’ her,’ remonstrated the urisk, pulling her back again, ‘nor could she cowe him, nae mair than twa trees in a forest wad blatter each other. Dinnae fash yoursel’.’

  ‘What is she doing?’

  From somewhere, or everywhere, a slow skirl of bagpipes moaned into being, dimly, as if muffled. The ganconer and the swanmaiden gazed at one another. Mist unfurled in fans around them. Two long, white diamonds of vapour soared to pointed tips at the swanmaiden’s back, like vast moth’s wings hovering at her shoulder blades. The moon-pale chain mail of the ganconer remained undimmed, softly glimmering. Liquid star-shine ran up and down its sheen like quicksilver.

  With her swathes of dark hair streaming through the translucent wings, and his shadowy locks cascading over the polished lames of his gorget and pauldrons, they made a breathtakingly striking couple. The eldritch loveliness of them was as poignant as a half-forgotten dream or a long-cherished vision never realised. Caitri knew then that she was witnessing something of eldritch such as mortals were rarely privileged to behold.

  The plaint of bagpipes grew louder. It came from under the ground, from some subterranean road where, presumably, an eldritch piper or a long-enchanted mortal slave marched eternally in the darkness. The lonely piper halted directly beneath the spot where Caitri and Viviana sat. The ground stirred. The music’s time signature changed, becoming three quarter notes to the bar and it was ‘Sheemor’ the piper was playing—‘The High Sithean’. Caitri had heard Thomas Rhymer play the lilting melody once at Court, and it was said to have been taught to a Royal Harper of yore by the Faêran themselves. To its rhythm, the immortal couple now moved into a dance of exquisite grace.

  ‘I trow she is trying tae draw him awa’,’ hoarsely whispered the urisk, but all the time the eldritch mist was pouring upwards, from eddies on the ground, filtering from the trees, rising ever higher between the branches, blotting out the stars.

  Dancing, the swan and the seducer seemed to meet but not to touch. Their feet appeared to float just above the ground. Through the fingertips crammed into her ears, Caitri heard and felt the music, which itself played the strings of her nerves, jarred her bones with a kind of ecstasy, thrilling her in ways she had never thrilled before.

  Then, through the plugs of flesh and bone, over the music, over the throbbing of her own tides, another sound entered; long, low, bleak, ominous, dreadful. Somehow Caitri knew it was coloured black, the instrument which disgorged that clangour—a hunting horn created from a void.

  And a cacophony of hounds.

  Caitri was up and dragging Viviana to her feet. The little girl was screeching against the lubricous cadences of the pipes and the tumult of whips and hooves, of savage baying and shrill war cries and deep voices shouting.

  ‘Get up, get up!’ she screamed, and Viviana slumped like a doll in her arms, a doll made of uncooked dough. The little urisk was trying to prop up the courtier on the other side and failing, and shouting something Caitri could not make out. Branches were cracking, breaking. The mist was shredding, blown by the back-draughts of a swan’s frantically beating wings, or by the massive displacement of air caused by huge horses dropping out of the sky bearing terrible riders on their backs.

  Viviana was snatched from Caitri’s arms. Her yellow hair went flying as she was thrown across a saddlebow. Caitri stood, dazed. A grinning horse loomed over her, disclosing pointed teeth. Boring into its muzzle were the most appalling gutters of nostrils she had ever seen, until she beheld the noxious cavities in the head of the apparition straddling its back.

  That apparition leaned down. The last thing Caitri saw, looking back at the orchards dropping away as the Wild Hunt rose higher, was a tiny horse and rider wheeling to a halt between the trees on the ground below.

  That rider was Tahquil.

  Black against the night the trees reared their arms. Ragged ends of unnatural fog slipped between the leaves and dissipated among the stars. The hue and cry died away to the southeast. An owl flew by, hooting like a hollow pipe. A girl sat astride a horse, in Cinnarine. Zephyrs roused her tattered garments and draggled hair, but otherwise a vice of great stillness clamped around her.

  She stared towards sunrise, where no sun was yet rising.

  The horse beneath her shied. A horned and curly head peered around a cracked bole that oozed rows of resin like amber beads.

  ‘Be still, Tighnacomaire. ’Tis only I!’ reproached the urisk.

  The cord suspending Tahquil’s concentration snapped. She made as if to dismount, but was brought up short.

  ‘Let me down, Tighnacomaire,’ she lashed out, quick to learn a useful name at need. ‘Have you forgotten who I am to you?’

  Released from supernatural stickiness, her hands slipped down the glossy hide. She leaned forward, withdrew her leg over his croup and slid off.

  ‘How dare you adhere me to your back!’

  The waterhorse hung his head humbly.

  ‘Yarr nat the best av riders. I had tae stick ye an.’

  ‘The Hunt has ta’en the twa lassies,’ said Tully heavily. ‘The ganconer betrayed us. There was naething we could do—’

  ‘I know,’ Tahquil acknowledged grimly, ‘you have not the power to match them. Where is he now, the ganconer?’

  ‘He has gane. The swan draws him awa’ frae here.’

  ‘It is as I feared—they have mistaken Via for me.’

  She sat down on the grass, bowed her head in her hands, and remained silent for a long while. Eventually, looking up, she said, ‘Under my auspices my companions have suffered, despite that they accompanied me by choice. Out of friendship to me they have been brought to this pass. No mortal comrades have I now, and no ring of gramarye, no red vial of strength, no provisions, no means of making fire, no weapons or shields—but I have you, Tully, and you, Tighnacomaire, and I believe the swan remains my ally. In this terrible hour, I must abandon my journey to Arcdur and turn to the southeast, following the Hunt. If my friends live, I will rescue them. If not, I must know their fate, or else be unworthy of honour and deserve no fellowship.’

  ‘A mad quest, Mistress Mellyn!’ rejoined the urisk.

  ‘Do ye not ken what lies east and south of this place? The orchards of Cinnarine give way to miles, nay, leagues of country untrod by the races of Men. Beyond that, the mazes of Firzenholt, or Haythorn—call it what you will—and beyond that, barren Wastelands stretch to the Nenian Landbridge. Few mortals be such mollymawks as tae try and cross that sea-causeway—it was ever a kittle road. And the Landbridge leads into Namarre.’

  ‘If they have been taken to Namarre, Namarre is where I must go.’

  ‘We dinnae ken for sure—’

  The swan fluttered in over the treetops, fell awkwardly through them and emerged as a pristine damsel, demurely smoothing her feather cloak.

  ‘What news of the Hunt?’ Tahquil rasped peremptorily.

  ‘Horse and hounds have hastened far with fair friends. Swan saw Huon fly where hedges wander. Swallows say he flies further to fallow, furrowed fields of war and salt-wind seashores.’

  ‘To Namarre?’ Tahquil demanded.

  ‘With certainty.’

  It was a turning point. Once again, her path had changed direction.

  She must abandon the search for the Gateway to Faêrie.

  Four hundred and forty miles lay, in a straight line, between Tahquil’s turning point and the outskirts of the hedge-mazes of Firzenholt.

  Eastwards and southwards galloped the waterhorse by night, tireless, jumping barriers of wood and stone, evading barriers of moving water, swimming across pools so still and clear they might have been forgotten shards of the sky. Swift and strong he was, beyond the powers of mortal horses. His rider must have fallen from his back many times, were she not fastened there by his sly magicks. Swift and unwearying also was the nimble-footed, leaping wight that ran like a goat at his side every time night’s doors swung around, while away up in the airy heights a long-neck
ed bird kept pace using slow, sure sweeps of her wings. It was a pace no lorraly beast could match.

  Strange hawk and hound and horse.

  Strange huntress, who is the quarry.

  5

  FIRZENHOLT and BEYOND

  The Laurel Labyrinth

  With skilful elegance she skims the sky

  And rides the wind like foam upon the sea,

  Yet mortal men for love of her would try,

  To steal her, in their bold effrontery.

  Their fleeting hands of clay should not endeavour

  To smirch the likes of she who treads the ground

  In eldritch loveliness, unchanged forever,

  While flowers spring like fallen stars around,

  Or glides, spearheading chevrons on the lake,

  Reflected there in lucid symmetry.

  No lover nor true artist could mistake

  This paragon of femininity—

  Where else is such ethereal beauty twined

  Than avian and damsel-shape combined?

  SONNET FOR A SWANMAIDEN

  Riding upon the back of a waterhorse—what mortal had ever stayed in such a seat for so long? On a horse made of cold currents and liquid convergences, jests and trickery, pressed against a hide like the burnished seas of midnight, things looked different to the rider. It seemed to Tahquil-Ashalind that they ran through a different world, a world of shadow and incendiary lambency blown always by the forge bellows of shang winds.

  If she was capable of musing at all, if the concepts and passions surging through her head were able to string themselves together in any rational sequence, she wondered if it were possible that Thorn, despite all the terrible risks he faced, still lived. If he did, Namarre would surely be the place to find him. As this fatuous hope took flame, it drew her with redoubled urgency to pursue this mad, new quest.

  They went by secret ways, for the Wild Hunt was active every night, screaming around every horizon. Five hundred miles long was their winding course over the wild, wide land. Five times the rising sun had opened its eye to behold that they had covered another one hundred miles or more, despite the brevity of the Summer nights. On the twelfth day of Grianmis they reached Firzenholt. But there on the edge of that place, among the outlying topiaries, they were forced to stop.

  Before them lay miles of interlocking evergreen hedges, dense and high, formed of box, privet, juniper, cypress, fragrant laurel. Odd as it appeared to the newcomer, these bushy palisades were trimmed into formal shapes not usually associated with nature. The creatures that predominated in Firzenholt-Haythorn were peripatetic hedge-eaters. These small beasts with their scissor-like mandibles preferred the new shoots, and because it was their habit to travel on straight paths, ingenious cambers and geometric curves, eating as they went, they unwittingly molded the hedges into smooth, rounded forms: wedges, overhangs, blocks, cubes, stairs, archways, cones, ramparts, pyramids and spirals, yet mostly into long, unbroken walls of pruned greenery.

  Peculiar to this northeastern region of Eldaraigne, the hedge species of Firzenholt propagated themselves largely by suckers arising from their rootstock below ground level. These shoots always arose in straight lines, only turning corners when meeting an adamant embedded obstacle such as a knotted brain of granite globules or a smooth plane of shale. This gave Firzenholt’s layout the appearance of having been planted in regimental rows by an overzealous and eccentric gardener. Long avenues and short walks forked or turned corners to become cul-de-sacs, concentric paths or a sudden series of elbows and doglegs.

  Directly beneath these verdant walls a system of narrow channels and dry dirt paths ran between the thin trunks, with scarcely enough headroom for a fox to creep along without brushing its ears against the lower boughs. Entities were wont to travel along these hidden canals and pathways, and other things lived above: small birds, squirrels and creatures that pranced upon the hedge tops.

  Thus was Firzenholt.

  At dusk, Tahquil lingered beside a glossy pool bordered with trees. Her long, slim fingers encompassed an orb of Fairbread that glowed softly like a pink pastel smudge beneath the long leaf-curtains of a willow.

  It was dusk. Soon the melting sun found the brink of the world and sank beneath it. As this occurred, the willow withies that trailed like slender rain into the waters of the pool suddenly trembled. It was the agitation of the water that had made them do so. Equally suddenly, the cause of that agitation came up, breaking the water’s surface: a horse’s head, its eyes rolling like white marbles in their sockets, ears laid back flat against its skull, water-weed like verdigris interwoven in its streaming mane, its dark lips drawn back in a rictus of tombstone teeth.

  Tahquil jumped backwards and fell over.

  ‘Fancy a ride?’ queried the nygel innocently, heaving himself horsily out of the pool. He nichered in a self-satisfied manner and frisked about, shaking droplets from his hide.

  ‘I would,’ said Tahquil, picking herself up, ‘but ’tis impossible.’

  The nygel looked up at the high ramparts of Firzenholt, now ebony against the last magnolia smokes of sunset.

  ‘Ah yes, I forgetted.’

  He flicked his jaunty tail at an imaginary fly. Tahquil waited for helpful suggestions as to how they should proceed, but none were forthcoming.

  ‘Can we go around?’ she asked.

  ‘Wild farrests creep tae the southern marches. Stony peaks cluster at the narrth. Baith are barriers equal tae this.’

  ‘Och,’ said the urisk, a wild thing crouched among willow roots.

  ‘Och what?’ said Tahquil.

  ‘Merely “och”.’

  ‘I gather that you have no advice as to how we should cross this … this formal garden that wanders in its dotage?’

  ‘I can gae its paths, for I am small enough that when I reach a dead end I can crawl underneath the bushes and out t’ither side. Nygel can swim the channels. Swan can fly over. But ye?’ The urisk shook his crimp-haired head.

  The swanmaiden reported, from green-shadowed torrents of withies, that according to her aerial inspection no route existed along the grassy walks between the hedges—all were blind alleys, at least in the western half of the maze. Beyond the midpoint, a route did exist, albeit a most circuitous course.

  Tahquil pondered.

  ‘I require,’ she said at length, ‘merely the materials at hand.’

  With that she took the small knife that remained at her rope-belt and began slicing withies from the willow, stripping the leaves from the flexible stems. By the time the moon had risen, Tahquil, by dint of weaving and tying, had fashioned a pair of items which resembled the racquets with which the courtiers of Caermelor had been wont to play at shuttlecock—but without the handles.

  ‘Hedge-shoes,’ explained their maker. ‘I intend to walk across Firzenholt. Without such apparati, the hedge-roofs will not support me if I should stand on them—my feet and legs would sink straight in amongst their twigs. Yet those twigs are strong and dense enough to hold up my weight when it is spread over a greater area. In any event, this is my hope.’

  She tied the hedge-shoes to her own worn boots and practised walking, to the amusement of the nygel and the disdain of the swanmaiden.

  ‘Ye’ve the gait of an egg-bound duck, dearie,’ opined the urisk.

  ‘Aptly described,’ mused Tahquil. ‘And oh, to be able to fly like one, but where might I obtain such flight-feathers?’ And she envied the freedom of the swan-maiden, not for the first time.

  Tying the woven platters to her belt she tried to climb the nearest portion of the hedge. At the surface of the green wall, no shoot or sprout was stout enough—they all broke off in her hands. Plunging her arms deep inside the yielding plush nap, she found twigs and sprigs. Further in, her fingertips met small branches. To these she endeavoured to beat her way, but the springy shoots pushed out at her face and body, and would not let her near their supports. Her struggles were in vain.

  Inevitably, frustrated, she flun
g herself aside.

  ‘At Caermelor, the palace gardeners used to trim the tops of the hedges but they would use ladders to get up,’ she said, panting with exertion. ‘I have no ladder and my knife will not cut through any saplings thick enough to construct one. Is there truly no way around this maze?’

  ‘It straggles far to the north and south,’ said the urisk, ‘until it meets forests and bleak hills. Beyond lies the coast. The swan says all the coastline is weel guarded at this time.’

  ‘Ye need nae ladder,’ said the nygel, just as Tahquil had lost all hope. ‘There be a batter way. Jump an me back.’

  ‘Oh no,’ said Tahquil, as his proposed method dawned on her. ‘That hedge is higher than a cottage roof-gable. If you overshoot, every bone in my frame shall be broken. If you undershoot, every morsel of flesh shall be stripped from me as I fall through the hedges.’

  The waterhorse neighed and capered.

  ‘D’ye think I am a larraly horse with nae marr sense than a fly? My aim never errs. It has never erred sae far,’ he added lamely.

  Knowing that this was of course the truth, since wights were unable to lie, Tahquil mounted the horse. Nevertheless, as he walked away from the hedge to allow himself space for a run-up, feelings of trepidation strangled her with blue and skinny hands.

  The night drew in, caliginous, gelatinous.

  Tahquil could only assume that the nygel was able to see the hedge better than she through the gloom. He began to trot, then to canter and finally to gallop. Sitting back on his rump she was glued to the wightish hide so closely that she felt she was fused to the powerful frame. The outer hedge of Firzenholt loomed, solid sable. With an abrupt lurch her body separated from the horse’s as his hindquarters violently heaved up, and she was flung through the air. For a timeless moment she hung suspended in the night, between firmament and ground—next she was sprawled face-deep in a resinous, scratchy cushion high on the hedge top.

  Shouts spurled from below. Crawling to the edge she peered over, waving to nygel and urisk. A winged thing dived at her head, hissing as it passed her ear—Whithiue. The swan veered away in a steep turn and faded to a glimmer on the darkness. Tahquil tied on her hedge-shoes, stood hesitantly, and looked around.