The Bitterbynde Trilogy

by Cecilia Dart-Thornton

  ‘What wouldst thou do with my fair and forgetful captive, Brown?’ idly inquired the Prince.

  The wight outlined his proposition, sparing no detail.

  ‘Inventive,’ commented the Prince when the wight had finished. ‘Invention deserves a reward. Gull, shoot down yonder pigeon, and Yallery Brown’s it shall be.’

  Scowling gleefully, the squint-eyed Spriggan Chieftain raised his longbow, notched an arrow and loosed it. The dart hit the bird, which dropped, still fluttering, into a bank of flowering brambles.

  ‘Go and fetch it,’ said Morragan to Yallery Brown. The wight stepped into the brambles and picked up the dead bird.

  ‘Play for me a merry jig, Ergaiorn,’ Morragan said to his bard. ‘I would fain see some dancing.’

  The Faêran musician put the pipes of Cierndanel to his lips and began to blow.

  Long ago, the music issuing from those pipes had spoken irresistibly. To the rats of Hythe Mellyn, it had described enticing scenes of gluttony. Then, to the citizens the pipes had tendered a different air, promising ponies, swings and sandcastles, hoops and whistles. No man or woman had hearkened to it but they had wept, for they were swept back to the lost days of childhood. However, their feet were glued to the ground. No child heard it but they must cease their games and follow in quest of enchantment and delight. A generation ago these same instruments had forced the citizens of Gilvaris Tary to leap about until they begged for mercy.

  Now in the halls of Annath Gothallamor the pipes of Cierndanel played a fast and mirthful tune which set to dancing every wight who heard it. Only the Faêran and Ashalind seemed immune to this enchantment, although Ashalind’s leg ached where it had been broken when she was thrown from her pony as a child. Involuntarily, Caitri jumped up. She began to skip and hop with the rest, a look of astonishment stamped upon her face. Amongst the brambles, Yallery Brown let the pigeon fall, and began to jig and caper. The louder the pipes played, the higher he leaped, and the more the thorns tore his garments and pierced his flesh, ripping to shreds his jacket and breeches. Black blood gushed from his legs and arms. Ergaiorn played all the faster, and seeing the distress of Brown, the spriggans shouted with laughter as they pranced.

  ‘Gentle Highness,’ gasped the unfortunate wight, ‘prithee, bid Lord Ergaiorn cease ere your servant perishes! Let me go and I swear I shall never again offend you.’

  ‘How have you offended me?’ casually asked Morragan.

  ‘I perceive now that Your Highness would not have me torment the captive.’ The wight ended his frantic statement on a scream of agony.

  ‘Jump out on the other side,’ said Morragan with a silencing gesture to his bard, ‘and get thee gone.’ Yallery Brown made all haste, fleeing into the wood, pursued by the jeering of the spriggans, for the thorns had stripped him almost naked and he was covered in his own blood.

  As soon as the music ceased, the spell shattered.

  While the wightish dancers fanned themselves with pigeons’ wings after their exertions, a diminutive figure offered Ashalind a cup of midnight wine.

  ‘Tak’ a wee drap, lass. ’Twill gie ye courage.’

  ‘Oh, Tully!’ Caitri exclaimed breathlessly, in joy and surprise. Without a word Ashalind accepted the cup, drank, and passed it to her young friend. Witnessing the wight’s torture had sickened her—still her stomach churned.

  ‘I’m free tae come and go,’ explained the urisk, ‘at His Royal Highness’s pleasure. He bears me no ill will, if he notes me at all.’

  ‘What news of Viviana?’ asked Ashalind, quickly.

  ‘The young lass at this moment bides safely among the tents of the King-Emperor’s Legions.’

  ‘Good tidings indeed!’

  ‘I wish we might join her. Can you help us escape?’ asked Caitri.

  ‘Nay, lass,’ the urisk said with compassion. ‘There’s naught a little fellow like me can do. ’Tis laid on me that I may not e’en bear a message for ye. I can do naught aboot it.’

  The Raven Prince set his boot against the marquetry dressing-table and overturned it with a crash. The high-backed mirror, instead of shattering, liquefied. Pots of jewelled hairpins spilled to become a confetti of flowers growing around a pool of water, lustrous as burnished platinum. Taking Ashalind by the elbow, Morragan drew her to the pool’s edge, the pressure of his fingers sending arrhythmic shocks of delight through her heart’s chambers.

  ‘Kneel,’ he said, and she must obey. She looked down through the gleaming meniscus.

  Caught through the network of internal forces and currents and intersliding surfaces of the water were shifting impressions of the mighty, ponderous cycle in which each droplet churned forever—the great levees of blowing clouds like stately galleons, the slant of rain falling through a thousand feet of charged air, the dazzle of raindrops splitting asunder as they struck the world’s upturned face, the effervescent tumble down stony gullies, the slow surge and pull of tides, the mist rising like ghostly herons from the sea. The water held its memories in the same way human histories were preserved by the shang.

  Morragan spoke to the water.

  ‘Reveal.’

  Reflections of leaves and stars drifted. Their images warped, blurring as the surface shivered. When it cleared, the pool displayed an entirely different landscape.

  Arcdur.

  Before Ashalind’s eyes unfolded the land of stone and pine, of water and cloud, of jumbled stones and scree slopes, where constant rain and wind swept the rocks clean. Only in the deepest cracks the mosses grew, and the tenacious roots of the blue-green arkenfir. The dove-grey stacks and chimneys rising hundreds of feet high were blemished only by patches of aquamarine lichen and interrupted only by the dark green of fir trees. Wind through the chinks in the formations chanted a threnody in counterpoint to the song of the chuckling, chiming rivulets.

  The scene moved and changed, as if the mirror-pool were a roving eye seeking this way and that through the monoliths and piles. Impelled, Ashalind could not look away. It seemed the pool widened like the eye’s pupil, engulfing the edges of vision until Ashalind thought herself propelled, a disembodied watcher, through the fissures and gorges of Arcdur, by the high ways and the profound.

  ‘Seek,’ said a voice like flawless steel, inside her head. ‘Seek the Gate!’

  There seemed to be a barrier to her searching. Time and again, there would come an impulse, a surge, almost, of recognition of a certain pebble or the set of a rocky outcrop. It would seem as though she glided with confidence towards this, only to be met with a wall of glass, slowly clouding from transparency to opacity, and the familiarity of the location would alter to confusion.

  After a long time, dizziness overcame Ashalind. She tried to close her eyes, with no success. She tried to disengage herself from these rocky sites but was unable to do so.

  ‘Let me go,’ she said. ‘I cannot find it.’

  A scudding wind blew thistledown across her face. Like a receding tunnel, the frame of her vision shrank. Pink stone, pine trees and blue-green lichen faded. Against a sable sky, canopied oak leaves and distant stars shimmered in the mirror-pool. Puffs of thistledown hovered and a black feather boated on its own reflection.

  Released from the spell, Ashalind shook back her hair.

  A little way off, the Crown Prince leaned upon a gnarled oak bole, surrounded by the Faêran, his handsome face as grim and brooding as a wintry mountain. For a while he stood in thought, silent in the moonlight, while those around him waited. And then with a sudden impulsive burst of violence he smote the tree with a mighty blow that broke it in twain, sending the trunk and boughs crashing to the ground. Yet already, touched by a Faêran hand, the embedded roots were sending up new green shoots.

  ‘Anon,’ said the Prince, ‘thou shalt seek again, Elindor.’

  Ashalind remained kneeling among the pin-flowers at the poolside.

  ‘He has set his seal on thee,’ the Prince continued, ‘and thus I am unable to bring thee by my power to full recollec
tion. Only thou, or he, can do that. Approach me.’

  She walked to where he leaned. He bent his handsome head to her, and his long hair fell forward, sliding softly against her face with a caress as light as a moth’s wing, as exhilarating as passion.

  ‘Finding the Gate shall be to thy benefit, Elindor, and mine. ’Tis my desire to take thee with me into the Realm.’

  ‘And should I find the Gate and open it,’ boldly said she, ‘who else shall pass through it, and who shall remain in Erith?’

  Caitri caught her breath nervously. Fear rippled amongst the courtiers, causing some to shudder, but Morragan replied, with a hint of derision, ‘What dost thou augur?’

  Like the others, Ashalind was afraid of him, but recklessness born of futile anger at her enforced subjugation made her speak out.

  ‘I presume ’twill be those of your company who find favour with you. I’ll warrant you shall have no qualms at leaving your brother to languish in exile.’

  ‘As he endeavoured to exile me, and, so doing, ironically received the same punishment?’ He smiled wonderfully. ‘My brother has chosen to lord it among mortalkind. Let him persevere.’

  ‘No …’

  ‘Dost hope for his exile, Elindor, that I may leave him here in Erith for thee? It appears thou didst delude thyself into some attachment, believing him mortal, but how does so-called love permit such secrecy? Why should he not undeceive thee, if he truly loved thee? Make no mistake, he who masquerades as mortal, calling himself Thorn, is indeed my brother. Angavar, High King is he, my twin, the elder by a heartbeat or two. Heir to the Realm by virtue of an accident of time—the Fortunate Son.’

  He gave her a long, slow look as if awaiting some response.

  ‘Yes. This must be so,’ she said. ‘I know it to be no falsehood. And yet I am at a loss as to how such a strange thing might have come to pass.’

  A flock of huge ravens swept low through the glade. One, cawing, alighted on a bough near the Prince. Morragan observed it for a moment. Something seemed to pass between the Faêran and the bird. Then the Prince nodded.

  ‘Thine orders are clear,’ he said. ‘Prepare for battle.’ The raven spread out its glossy wings and departed like hope. Morragan returned his attention to Ashalind.

  ‘The mirror now displays time past. Gaze upon it.’ He made as if to throw something into the water, but if anything left his hand, it was not to be seen.

  A second time the pool’s surface trembled, its frame expanded. For the space of a wingbeat, it seemed that a solemn face looked up out of the depths—the green-haired loveliness of an asrai water-witch. Then a fog blew away like torn cobwebs, or curtains parting on a theatre stage. The scene: a forest of elm, yew and birch. Dew upon the leaves. The primrose light of early morning dappling the grass like fallen petals of the sun. A sea-sound of rustling leaves, the pipes and bells of bird-song. Then, lashing across this tranquillity like the edge of a crimson whip, the stridor of a hunting-horn …

  In the year 45 William, King-Emperor of Erith, went hunting one morning from his lodge in Glincuith Forest. The young King, though inclined to brashness and somewhat foolhardy, was brave and strong and he rode the best hunter in Erith. By midday he, following his dogs, had—unintentionally or otherwise—outdistanced his lords and huntsmen. Reining in his steed he found himself alone in a forest glade which gave onto a spacious clearing.

  Without warning a magnificent stag flashed across the glade. Close behind it ran a pack of hounds so bizarre they were like no beasts that William had ever seen. Their coats glistened with a silver-whiteness purer than winter frost, and when the sunlight flickered on them through the elms their ears glowed as crimson as forge coals.

  In an instant William and his own pack had reached the clearing. The outlandish hounds had already brought down the stag but William drove them off and set his own dogs onto the wounded beast. He ought to have known these were no lorraly creatures and that it would have been prudent not to meddle with them, but in his haste he was careless.

  He jumped down, pulled back the head of the dying stag and slit its throat. At the same time there came riding into the glade a tall stranger clothed in dark green, mounted on a splendid grey stallion. The stranger reined in his steed.

  ‘William D’Armancourt of Erith,’ he said, ‘I know you well enough, but I give you no greeting. Never before have I beheld a man of Royalty and good renown stoop to a deed so unworthy, so discourteous it can scarce be credited. Be assured—although I will not condescend to avenge this wrong by harming your person, yet I intend, nonetheless, to bring disgrace upon you.’

  William looked up at the speaker. In his life, he had never known fear, yet meeting that wrathful gaze he was severely shaken. His discomfiture was compounded by humiliation and embarrassment.

  ‘Lord,’ said he, uneasily, ‘I am most eager to make reparation for my churlishness, and would fain win your goodwill.’

  ‘By what means?’ asked the stranger.

  ‘If you will give me your name, I will try to find an appropriate method,’ William replied.

  The tall rider answered, ‘Angavar, High King of the Fair Realm, am I called.’

  Then William was in no doubt about the peril he faced.

  ‘Greatest of sovereigns, I wish you well,’ he said. ‘I understand now that I have offended no mortal huntsman, but the most powerful of all Lords of Gramarye. I beg you to bid me do anything within my power and I shall do it, in order to regain your high regard and be of accord with you.’

  ‘In that case, hearken,’ said the Faêran King. ‘In the Realm of Faêrie I am plagued by the Waelghast, who is Lord of the Unseelie Host. My power is greater than his, for as you know well, I am mightier than any wight, man or Faêran in Aia. Despite this he is forever trying to contend against me, and his followers challenge my knights without cease. In his folly he boasts to his entourage that I shall never overthrow him.

  ‘It has been decided that once in every Erithan year he and I shall encounter one another in a duel, and the winner shall be proclaimed the stronger. Already we have met once. We are to clash again, twelve of your months from this very morn. I commission you to do duty for me in that contest. If you will do this, I shall put upon you the semblance of myself, and send you forthwith to the Fair Realm, in my place. There, neither Faêran nor wight nor mortal visitor will guess it is not myself who comes home from the hunt. The glamour I will put on you cannot be penetrated by their arts.’

  ‘Yet, if you have not prevailed in this duel,’ said William, ‘how shall I?’

  ‘There is one way only. With your first blow you will sorely wound the Waelghast. He will fall to his knees and cry mercy, begging you to deal him a second stroke to release him from the torment of his agony. He will be in the form of a fair and chivalrous knight, and by his words he will try to elicit your compassion. Once I submitted to his appeal, and there is a good chance I will do the same next time. Under no circumstances must you be persuaded, however. Smite him a second time and he will arise whole once more. Deliver a single stroke only, and peace shall reign again.’

  ‘Must Erith be ungoverned while I reside in Faêrie?’

  ‘As I will give you my aspect, so I will take yours. In your stead I will go this day to Caermelor, and none will suspect I am not William D’Armancourt.’

  William looked down at the noble stag whose throat he had cut. No longer did it sprawl on the greensward with the blood pumping from its neck like a welter of rubies. Its hide was whole once more, white as innocence. Clambering upright, it walked to Angavar and nuzzled his hand.

  ‘A stag of Faêrie,’ said Angavar. ‘They are bred to the chase. Countless times have I hunted this beast and much sport has he given me.’ To the beast he said, ‘Go thou, Royal Cervidus. The Gate is open.’ Then to William he said, ‘Make haste—we ride this hour. We must reach the outskirts of the Fair Realm before sunfall.’

  Together they cantered across the countryside. William was not aware of passing through an
y Gate, but as the sun slid near the horizon, he perceived that the landscape had altered, and he knew he rode within the Fair Realm.

  As soon as they approached within view of a mighty, ancient forest they drew rein. William looked across at the Faêran King and saw himself, astride his own horse. He glanced down, and saw the form of Angavar mounted on the grey stallion. In his amazement, his breath caught in his chest for an instant, and his heart jumped.

  ‘Your new abode lies before you,’ said Angavar. ‘Return to the Forest of Glincuith in a year and a day. There I will meet you, and we shall revert to our true shapes.’

  ‘Tarry a moment!’ said William suddenly. ‘One troublous matter has occurred to me. When I fight, my left hand is the dominant. You people will note this …’

  ‘Fear not,’ said Angavar, ‘your handedness could not be more appropriate. I, too, am sinistral. Now, ride forth.’

  They took their leave of one another and Angavar seemed somehow to melt into the woodlands. William, however, with the white hounds following in his wake, rode into the ancient forest.

  Here was the abode of Angavar. It was a palace, but not after the fashion of the palaces of mortal Kings. Aisles of growing trees formed the corridors and halls. The chambers were greenwood bowers, hung with leaves and flowering vines instead of tapestries; floored with living mosses instead of carpets, and in places, with smooth, natural slate. This royal dwelling place was open to the sky, yet it was apparent that rain never spoiled the interior. It was lit by stars of extraordinary brilliance and by lamps hung in the trees, and by luminous flying insects. No form of comfort was lacking.

  The Faêran lords and ladies welcomed him as the High King. They themselves waited on him, fetching rose-scented water for bathing, and wine for his refreshment. The dusty hunting garments they removed from him, replacing them with raiment of green and gold. Then he sat down to feast in a magnificent hall, wherein was provided every luxury a man’s dreams could invent.