Weatherwitch: Book Three of The Crowthistle Chronicles

by Cecilia Dart-Thornton

  “We can only wait and see,” her grandfather said with his usual serenity.

  When the dark hours came stealing over the Mountain Ring, nocturnal creatures of many species commenced their habitual activities under wood and water, upon hill and stone. On Rowan Green the windows of the House of Maelstronnar glowed softly with the dim radiance of part-shielded dark-lanterns and solitary candles. Asrthiel did not sleep. She stayed for a while in the library, but inasmuch as no goat-legged visitors appeared, she transferred her vigil to the courtyard, and thence to the scullery. Just before midnight, she wandered outdoors again, drifting to the garden bed that ran along the house’s exterior wall. In this very plot grew the roots of the briar roses that climbed to the cupola, where her mother lay in a trance.

  At midnight it appeared; the urisk.

  The air was quite still—only a light breeze played amongst the briar stems, flicking at the leaves and flowers. The rose-petals gleamed argentine in the starlight.

  “So, you have escaped the walls,” remarked the wight, with no preamble, as if nothing untoward had happened and he had not discommoded the en-tire household.

  “The walls contain my home, and you have caused mischief therein!” Asrthiel said indignantly.

  “Why not? It is a loathsome place.”

  “What?” The damsel could not be sure she had heard aright.

  “Utterly nauseating. The kitchen and the library in particular.”

  Boiling anger arose in Asrthiel. “I will not ask you to explain to me why you insult my home. I no longer wish to have parlance with you,” she said between gritted teeth. “Except to make one final request. Send the brownie back; we’d rather have it than you. It helps, while you only hinder.”

  The wight scowled. “If you do not like my methods I shall take my leave.”

  “That is the best news I have heard in ages!” flared the damsel. “Begone, then! Begone and never return here! You cause only discord.”

  Next moment, Asrthiel threw up her arm and ducked, screwing shut her eyes. The urisk had tossed a handful of leaves into her face. When she looked again, he had, naturally, vanished. “And tell the brownie to come back!” the damsel shouted into the night.

  No reply came from the darkness, but then, she had expected none. The argentine rose-petals shivered as a breeze shirred through.

  In the morning, the brownie was found whimpering, curled up in an empty barrel in the cellar. When freed, it declared that it had been told to stay in the House of Maelstronnar and perform its duties as before.

  But of the troublesome urisk there was no further evidence. Clearly, it had departed for good.

  Asrthiel surprised herself by feeling disappointed at the lack of the wight.

  Notwithstanding, there were myriad events to fill up Asrthiel’s days and push thoughts of the departed visitor from her mind. It was the middle of the month of Jule, and the hour of her birthday celebrations was approaching apace. Furthermore, tidings had recently come to High Darioneth out of Orielthir in Slievmordhu, where several enthusiastic prentices and journey-men had been fossicking for hidden wonders amongst the decaying remnants of the Dome of Strang. Three of them, armed against highwaymen, had ridden back to the Mountain Ring, bearing with them a small but well-wrapped bundle.

  “Lady Asrthiel, I come to you at Lord Dristan’s behest,” said the senior journeyman. “It seems that your ruins have yielded a prize after all!” Handing her the package he explained. “Lord Dristan was weatherworking in Orielthir, accompanied by his children. After the task was finished he landed his sky-balloon at the Dome site, and let the children wander at will. While exploring, your young cousin Corisande spied something lying on the ground, amongst the rubble, half covered by broken pieces of mortar. It looked like an item of no value—a thing so blackened with grime and encrusted with growths that it barely resembled its original form. Yet the bri is strong in Lord Dristan’s daughter, and she recognised it as a thing of gramarye. She picked it up and took it to show her father, and when ‘twas cleaned we perceived ‘twas a comb of outlandish workmanship, fashioned in dark silver. Lo!”

  He ceased speaking, for Asrthiel had opened the parcel. The article lay gleaming on the creamy linen wrappings.

  Tall it was, with long, slender daggerlike tines, nineteen in number. The design—filigreed, engraved, knurled and embossed—was incredibly intricate and opulent. A narrow frieze depicting ugly, glaring creatures squatting in a row topped the tines. These grotesqueries bore on their shoulders a slim band of patterned silver, and out of this band sprouted an asymmetrical woodland scene of trees with intertwining leaves and boughs, in exquisite detail, about half the height of the prongs. It might have been beautiful, were it not insidiously disturbing.

  “This is a potent thing,” said Asrthiel, turning the comb over in her hands. It was not hollow but solid, and as intriguingly wrought on one side as the other. The somber metal prickled her fingers where they touched it.

  “Aye,” said the senior journeyman, “but we have no idea what powers it might possess.”

  “I, for one, am not about to secure my hair with such a comb,” said Asrthiel. “It looks like something that might send down its metal roots to infiltrate one’s brain and suck out one’s wits. On the matter of what it is capable of, I shall consult the Storm Lord.”

  Avalloc, however, could not explain the comb’s arcane purpose, and neither could Lidoine Galenrithar, the carlin of High Darioneth, or any of the Councilors of Ellenhall.

  “There is only one man I know who might be able to crack the riddle of this thing,” said Avalloc, “and that is my old friend Almus Agnellus.”

  “Fortunately he will be amongst us any day now,” said Asrthiel, “for he is one guest expected to arrive early.”

  The wandering scholar-philosopher appeared at the Seat of the Weather-masters several days before the party was to begin. At sixty-nine years of age, Agnellus was still a sprightly man. Although totally devoid of hair on his head, of recent times he made up for the lack by sporting copious quantities on his chin. His beard reached to his waist. Clad in simple, rustic garb of brown homespun he arrived on the back of a mule, accompanied by two loyal aides; a scribe and an apprentice scribe. Like his disgraced mentor, the missing ex-druid secundus Adiuvo Clementer, Agnellus had once been a member of the druidic brotherhood but, disillusioned, had resigned in order to pursue his interests independently. Few people who had known him during his tenure at the Sanctorum would have recognized him now in his disguise. As an added precaution, he went by the vague pseudonym “Declan of the Wildwoods.”

  The history of both men was well known in the House of Maelstronnar. By Ninember of the year 3471, Clementer had become so zealous about his new philosophical insights that he took the daring step of publicly rejecting his faith in the actuality of the Four Fates. Jeopardizing his personal safety, he openly disseminated his opinions. This behavior by anyone, let alone an ex-druid, was intolerable to the Sanctorum. The Druid Imperius took immediate reprisals, sending a band of ruffians in the night, to apprehend Clementer as he lay sleeping. They captured him, confiscated his possessions, and hauled him away.

  Naturally the Sanctorum denied all knowledge of the abduction.

  Nobody could find out for certain what had happened to Clementer. His assistant Agnellus, who had escaped the same fate only by chance—he had been lodging elsewhere that night—sought information in vain. It was later rumored that the venerable gentleman had been thrown into a dungeon, there to languish for the remainder of his life, or that his throat had been cut.

  Outraged and terrified, Agnellus fled into hiding at a remote hermitage in dangerous territory near the borders of the Wight Hills. The brutality and unfair circumstances of his mentor’s downfall fixed his purpose; partly in retaliation against those wrongs, and partly because he believed in Clementer’s cause, he determined to actively promote the ideas of the vanished scholar. These days, he and his own squire passed their days immersed in study i
n the seclusion of his secret abode, or traveling the Four Kingdoms discreetly promulgating Clementer’s insights, gathering lore, and sometimes inveigling consultations with eldritch wights of the seelie kind. Always they journeyed in disguise, to avoid being recognized and betrayed to the Sanctorum; the punishment for defection was life-imprisonment or death.

  “What prompted Clementer to forswear the Fates?” Asrthiel had once asked her grandfather as they engaged in one of their discussions in the library. “When he left the Sanctorum and first took to his wandering life he still believed in them, did he not?”

  “He did. It happened this way: After he parted from the druids he spent much time pondering the nature of morality. At first he postulated that, in essence, ‘good is the sustenance of life, while evil is its destruction.’ Later he felt obliged to admit that for living creatures in general, both sustenance and destruction are essential. Death nourishes Life.”

  Asrthiel nodded, not without a twinge of unease that she herself was exempt from this natural law. “Go on,” she said.

  “Clementer began to travel further abroad,” said the Storm Lord, “learning as much as possible about living organisms. He began to perceive the greatest Good as being the safekeeping of Life itself, rather than the preservation of individual living creatures. After investigating Extinction, he concluded that that must be the greatest evil.”

  “His further research,” Avalloc continued, “led him to augur that millions of years in the future, the world would slow in its orbit and fall into the sun. Then he suffered much, picturing all life on Tir having been snuffed out by the raging inferno.” Both Avalloc and his granddaughter grew pensive. “He arrived,” the Storm Lord said eventually, “at the belief that it would not matter so much if the human race became extinct after all, as long as some form of life remained in the world.”

  “That would certainly be an unpopular tenet amongst most people!” Asrthiel commented with a wry smile. “Clementer seems destined to choose friendless doctrines. Where did his cogitations take him from there?”

  “Do not be misled into thinking he was comforted by his conclusions! The world and all life seemed doomed. Convinced of the inevitability of apocalypse and the annihilation of our species, he toppled to the nadir of despondency. For many months he remained at a point of despair. He retired to a simple cottage near Tealgchearta, abandoning his scholarly investigations and spending most of his days in bed. Ultimately our good friend Agnellus persuaded him to climb from his pit of languor, and in a final desperate search for hope, Clementer began again to sally forth, time after time, employing every means possible to gather more information from eldritch wights. He questioned them closely, knowing that their answers were all true—or at least, the truth as the wights believed it.”

  Asrthiel pictured the two weather-beaten sages in their travel-stained robes, trudging through the night along some woodland track; perhaps entering a moonlit glade wherein a haunted pool glimmered, and seating themselves at the brink; perhaps setting out some gifts of food or silver trinkets, and waiting patiently in the hope of glimpsing and hailing some eldritch personification—a trow, maybe, or a spriggan, or one of the elusive woodland guardians. The scholars were venturesome gentlemen, and over a long period their enterprise had been rewarded.

  “They told Clementer,” said Avalloc, “of life existing in secret places; the deepest and the highest, the hottest, and the ends of the world where ice never melts. My learned friend began to understand how tenacious life is; how it can and will survive in almost any environment, no matter how extreme. It needs only one element—water.”

  Asrthiel, who had been intent on her grandfather’s monologue, broke in. Clapping her hands impetuously, she exclaimed, “As ever when we speak of Clementer’s discoveries, I am delighted! It is always splendid to be assured that Life is not a fragile thing. I myself ponder much over this same matter, amongst others, as I sit at the bedside of my mother.”

  Her grandfather had nodded. “I am aware that such thoughts have often occupied you, my dear child.” She had smiled lovingly at him, comforted by his sympathy.

  Their discussion had ended here. As the first day of Asrthiel’s party approached, Clementer’s protege Agnellus came, in person, to High Darioneth, and when he first set eyes on the comb he recoiled as if bitten by a snake. On recovering his composure the sage spread his fingers and tapped the fingertips of his right hand against those of his left—a habit of his—saying in wonder, “Well, well. I never thought to see such a thing in all the days of my life.”

  “I gather it is something noteworthy,” commented the Maelstronnar.

  “My dear Avalloc,” the scholar replied, “I cannot say for certain, but this might well be an artifact written of in one of my old master Clementer’s rarest and most ancient tomes of lore. I believe it might possibly be the Sylvan Comb, a long-lost thing of goblin make.”

  “What are its properties?” asked Asrthiel.

  “It is impossible to be sure, my lady, until I try it out.”

  Dristan, who had lately returned from the Dome site, interposed, “Would that not be a perilous undertaking, Agnellus? One supposes that goblins would be hardly likely to fashion items that did not pose some sort of danger to humankind.”

  “Certainly. Be assured, sir, I will perform the trial with utmost care. But first, I must send my apprentice back to my lodgings to fetch that ancient tome of which I spoke. For on its pages is written a Word of Mastery, and I shall need that Word if I am to test this thing.”

  The apprentice was duly dispatched. Meanwhile, Rowan Green buzzed with activity as the day of the party drew nearer.

  A lavish junket was to be held at High Darioneth, to celebrate Asrthiel’s birthday. Guests arrived in a timely fashion; the houses of the weathermasters were filled with royalty, aristocrats and commoners scattered their pavilions across Rowan Green, and before long the Seat of the Weathermasters resembled a fairground. Even sturdy octogenarian Earnán Kingfisher Mosswell made the long journey from the Great Marsh of Slievmordhu to attend, accompanied by Cuiva Featherfern Stillwater, the carlin of the Marsh. Although he was no true blood relative of hers, Asrthiel accorded Earnán the status of great-grandfather. He had been the second husband of her great-grandmother, Liadan, the grandmother of Asrthiel’s mother, Jewel. For the sake of her mother, Asrthiel had paid a few visits to the Marsh over the years. She had grown fond of the ancient eel-fisher, and also of Cuiva, a wise woman who had been her grandmother’s friend. As for Avalloc, he esteemed the marsh-man and the carlin highly, and the three spent many hours in conversation.

  On the twenty-eighth of Aoust in that year, Asrthiel Heronswood Maelstronnar turned nineteen, and the final secrets of weather working were conferred on her with all due ceremony.

  First, she had to fast and meditate overnight, alone, and custom dictated that this be done in Lord Alfardene’s Reflectory. Behind the houses on Rowan Green, a twisting path climbed steeply through the dim light beneath overhanging pines and across bridges spanning deeply cloven gorges, until it arrived at the tranquil dell, high on Wychwood Storth, that cupped the cemetery of the weathermasters. Central to the elegant tombs and mausoleums stood a building of vaulted stone. Here was the reflectory; a haven of serenity and seclusion; a sanctuary in which to reflect and ponder. The shining water-pools encircling the exterior held perfect images of the sur-rounding snow-capped peaks, wreathed in cloud. Before sunrise a group of women came to terminate Asrthiel’s lonely vigil—weathermages all—but not a word was spoken by anyone, for this part of the ritual was performed in silence.

  At the heart of the building stood a great silver-lined bowl, kept clean and filled with pure water, and it was here that Asrthiel’s handmaidens bathed her. They arrayed her in ceremonial robes and dressed her hair, after which they gave her the traditional spiced bread and seasonal fruits with which to break her fast.

  As the sun peeped over the horizon, Asrthiel’s attendants left the reflec-tory. Her tutor,
Avalloc, took their place, speaking words of formal greeting. The Storm Lord taught his pupil the final secrets of weatherworking—long, intricate phrases and gestures that affected such powerful and potentially catastrophic phenomena as the world’s magnetic fields, the major ocean currents, and the large-scale wind systems.

  By evening the arduous lesson was over. Then Asrthiel was conveyed down the mountain path on a litter, beneath a trellised double arch decked with the flowers and leaves of late Summer, carried high on the shoulders of eight stalwarts.

  The magehood ceremony took place in Ellenhall, the belfried meetinghouse at the seat of the weathermasters. In attendance were the councillors of Ellenhall and a vast audience comprising all the denizens of Rowan Green and their guests. There was not room enough to hold everyone who wanted to view the proceedings. People from the plateau, who had journeyed up the cliff road for the occasion, crowded around the doors and the open windows, craning their necks and straining their ears.

  Words were uttered and further rituals were performed, witnessed by all. At the end, Avalloc, in his role as Storm Lord, officially awarded Asrthiel the title of weathermage, and the spectators gave a loud shout of delight, accompanied by the waving of scarves and general acclamations.

  The festivities continued for four days. It was a blithe period for Asrthiel—one of the happiest times in her life—however she was unable to prevent some slight impatience for the conclusion, so that she would be free to claim her adult independence. The party did eventually come to an end, and most of the guests duly departed. Asrthiel then began to make her preparations for taking up her new post as representative of High Darioneth and resident mage at King’s Winterbourne.

  Nine days after the party, Agnellus’s apprentice returned from the scholar’s lodgings, bearing the tome of lore his master had requested. Agnellus rifled through the pages, found the Word he was seeking and returned the book carefully to its velvet-lined box.