The Bitterbynde Trilogy (115 page)

It occurred to Rohain that she might easily abandon them and slip away on her own, drawing off the Hunt. She did not entertain the thought for long. Two untutored maidens, roaming out here without even the benefit of her limited knowledge of survival in the wilderness, must surely perish. Either way, there seemed scant hope of saving the lives of these faithful companions. There was no choice—she must accede at last to their wishes.

‘Well,' she said briskly, ‘if you are prepared to meet your dooms at such an early age, who am I to stop you? Be it on your own heads. But move discreetly. We are looked for.'

‘We spied the Stormriders,' said Viviana. ‘Here is your elixir, m'lady.'

‘Worse things than Stormriders are abroad,' replied her mistress, accepting the vial and rehanging it around her neck. ‘Come. The wind is in the west. We only have to keep our backs to it.'

Chains pulled down Rohain's heart. She foresaw the spilling of the blood of her loyal friends, and guilt flooded her conscience. When she faced the direction of Huntingtowers, an undefined fear also began to take root.

As they hastened along the way, to thrust aside dread she pointed out useful wildflowers, and in a low voice imparted knowledge gleaned from Thorn in the wilderness.

‘In tales, adventurers merely stroll along through wood and weald, pulling wild berries and nuts off the hedges,' said Caitri.

‘Yes, I have noticed that,' said Rohain. ‘Obviously, they only go adventuring in Autumn, the season of ripe fruits.'

‘And they do not die of cold,' added Viviana. ‘In tales they merely lie down to sleep wrapped in their cloaks, even on bitter nights, with no fire or Dragon's Blood to warm them.'

‘Sheer fiction,' said Rohain firmly.

White umbels of wild carrot nodded in the breeze, alongside the pinkish-green bells of bilberry. The travellers passed banks of pimpinella, sporting its flat-topped flower heads like lacy plates.

‘Common centaury,' instructed Rohain, indicating a herb. ‘A bitter tonic can be made from an infusion of the dried plants. Dock leaves for nettle stings. Loosestrife for henna dyes, pretty hemlock, all lace and poison. Poppies for torpid illusions.' She astonished herself with her own erudition. ‘Here's chicory. The leaves can be eaten, the roots roasted.'

‘'Tis a veritable pantry out here,' marvelled Viviana. ‘A pharmacopeia.'

‘In sooth,' affirmed Rohain, ‘but most of it does not taste very nice.'

Everywhere in this pathless land, Spring wildflowers nodded, but there was no time to stop and examine them closely. Instead, Rohain was compelled to rush across the face of the land under unfriendly skies, toward the very bastion of all things unseelie.

‘I feel a certain nostalgia for life on the road,' she said, brushing with her fingertips the leaves of an overhanging elder-bough.

‘You are bold and brave, my lady,' said Caitri.

‘Mayhap. I am bold but I can be craven, I'm free but I'm caged, I'm joyful but I grieve, Caitri, like everyone else. But do not call me by my title now, or even by my name—we might be overheard.'

‘What name will you be called instead, my la—my friend?' stuttered Viviana.

‘I wish to be called Tahquil. 'Tis a name I heard once, at Court, and did not mislike. It will suffice.'

‘A strange-sounding, foreign name. It has the ring of Luindorn.'

‘Indeed, I believe it originates from that country. I heard tell it means “Warrior”, in feminine form. And warrior I must become. I intend to fight on, despite that fate throws turmoil at me again and again. Whether I will be defeated, I cannot guess.'

After a brief halt for an unappealing meal of cold porridge and samphire leaves, the three companions followed a flowery ridge up wooded slopes and over a shoulder of the hills into rank meadows that once had been well-tended farmlands. Abandonment had made wild the overgrown hedges, the deep brakes of flowering briars. Choked drainage-dikes provided a haven for marsh pennywort, bog asphodel, sedges, and rushes. Under the hedges grew foxgloves and tall spikes of wound-wort—‘A styptic, used to staunch the bleeding of injuries,' observed Rohain—and white deadnettles, whose dry hollow stems she collected in a bunch.

‘Used in concoctions?' inquired Viviana.

‘Used to make whistles.'

As she scanned the landscape for provender, words of Thorn's came back to Rohain-Tahquil. He had said,
there is no need to hunger or thirst in the lands of Erith … When all else fails, there is always Fairbread
.

The thought brought reassurance.

Later in the afternoon, tattered clouds began to move across the sun's face. A wind gusted, blowing up leaves and dust in sudden spurts. A few spots of dirty rain spattered down. Worse than bad weather, uneasiness crept over the travellers—a cooling of the blood. Rohain-Tahquil shivered, the nape of her neck prickled. Time and time again she would whirl rapidly, knife in hand, only to face emptiness. Yet she could swear she had sensed something following behind. She kept the knife ready in her hand.

By unspoken agreement, the companions kept under shelter as much as possible, creeping cautiously from tree to tree or scuttling quickly across open glades. Always their heads turned this way and that as if they expected to see dark shapes of an antlered horseman and other fell manifestations watching them from the shadows or from the skies, ready to spur forward and ride them down.

Ever ahead loomed the low, flat-topped trapezium of the cauldron-mountain, dark through the haze. The closer they approached it, the heavier was the hush that fell on the landscape. Back along the coast, magpies and larks had warbled their pure bell-tones. From every bush and tree had issued shrill twitterings and pipings. As they pushed farther inland, the birdsong had diminished without the travellers noticing. Now they became aware of a quietude eased only by the murmur of the wind in the leaves.

Acid rain came sluicing down in drowning sheets, hissing in the dust until it made mud of it, before settling down to a steady patter and trickle. Made corrosive by the oxidation of atmospheric nitrogen and brimstone gases from the eruption, water dripped down the collars of the walkers' oilskins, off the edges of their fishermen's taltries, and into their eyes.

‘I'd rather an unstorm than this,' grumbled Viviana, shouting to be heard above the downpour. ‘This rain bites. It stings.'

‘Hush,' warned Rohain-Tahquil. ‘Something might hear us.'

As the sun dipped behind their backs, the shower eased. The land had begun to rise steeply. Emerging from a belt of oaks they saw the great sheared-off cone rising ahead of them; the caldera of Huntingtowers, its lower versants leprous with stunted vegetation, pimpled with the low mounds of old, forsaken diggings.

It seemed desolate. Nothing stirred. The ancient caldera lay silent and still. In its mouth where once deadly fires had raged, the waters of the lake stood deep, dark and cold.

Now that they stood on its slopes, breathless apprehension laid hold of the damsels. The feeling was so strong it was almost intolerable.

The light was fading. In the east, long clouds ripped themselves to black ribbons. No moon came up behind the summit of the blunted cone.

‘I shouldn't like to be any closer to that place at night,' said Rohain-Tahquil.

They found shelter in a mossy stone ruin that had once, in ages long past, conceivably been a byre. Honeysuckle and traveller's joy formed a roof over the few remaining, slug-haunted walls. Against these they piled dry bracken to serve as a bed. Not daring to light a fire, they unwrapped the last slabs of cold porridge from their dock leaves and dined in silence. Rohain-Tahquil offered a sip of
nathrach deirge
all around. Warmed, but wet and cheerless, they huddled together.

‘I did not know it would be like this,' complained Viviana. ‘I hate slugs.'

‘They like you,' said Caitri, subtracting one from Viviana's sleeve. ‘Anyway, you said you wanted to come,' she added primly.

‘I said I wanted to come, but I never said I would not grumble.'

The malachite oval of the sun strayed into a magnificent post-eruption sunset, a drifting flowerscape in a profusion of marigold, carnation, primrose, gentian, and lilac—colours that would bleed softly into the air and hang there in frayed, cymophanous striations like shang-reflections for hours after the sun had wasted away.

‘We have been fortunate to discover this niche,' said Rohain-Tahquil with a new sense of authority born of her limited knowledge of survival. ‘Sometimes farmers inscribed runes into the walls of these animal pens—charms to ward off unseelie wights. See here—' With a loose rock she scraped away a thick nap of moss. ‘Some symbols are cut into the stones. They are worn shallow now and hard to see. Still, they may yet hold some efficacy.'

‘Of course, all the lesser wights have spied us already,' said Caitri fatalistically. ‘It is to be hoped that they will be deterred by our iron blades and tilhals and salt, and by these great bunches of hypericum.'

‘And it is to be hoped they will not go telling their greaters,' said Viviana, using a silver needle from her chatelaine to punch holes in a stalk of deadnettle.

‘I have been told that eldritch beings do not cooperate like that, not in the way of our kind,' said Rohain-Tahquil, who was crushing yet more thyme leaves to release their penetrating aroma. Not unless they're forced, by threat or bribe.'

‘Some have their own leaders,' said Caitri. ‘The siofra bow to their Queen Mab, for example; their little queen no bigger than a man's thumb.'

‘Even so,' replied Rohain-Tahquil, ‘but fortunately the siofra are given more to glamourish trickery than to war. Their tiny spears would prick mortal flesh no more than a thistle would. Once I travelled with a road-caravan which was dispersed and ravaged by unseelie wights, but I surmise it was not the result of a planned and concerted effort on their part. Many of them happened to be crossing the Road at that time and by ill chance we moved in their way.'

It came to her again that perhaps Huon had planned the devastation of the caravan. But no—hindsight and reason told her there were significant differences in the method of attack. The Wild Hunt had mounted a full-scale, coordinated assault directly on the Tower, while the wights of the Road had appeared at random, following their own hostile instincts rather than obeying a leader.

‘Long before that time,' she went on, ‘I learned something of the ways of wights from a fellow traveller. Like all creatures of eldritch, the fell things of unseelie are amoral. Left to their own devices they are arbitrary in their choice of victims, neither punishing the bad nor letting alone the good. Spriggans are trooping wights, to be sure, and they have a chieftain—nominally, at any rate—but most unseelie wights are solitary by nature. They do not hold meetings or discussions, they simply act in accordance with the antipathy that drives them. As such, they are the more terrible, being an ungoverned—I will not say lawless, for they are subject to the rigorous laws of their kind—an ungoverned battalion of man-slayers, a division without a major-general, a corps without a head. Yes, a headless horseman would be an apt symbol. But I have said enough, enough to give you nightmares. Sleep now. I shall take the first watch. Caitri, did you want to tell me something?'

Caitri drew breath and looked at her mistress. Then she shook her head and turned away with a sigh.

There being no moon, and the stars being hidden by the last aerial memories of Tamhania, the night waxed as thick as pitch. The wind had dropped. Strangely hushed was the landscape, and devoid of movement. Time dragged on, with no way to mark the hours. A dark melancholia seeped up from the ground.

The thoughts of Rohain-Tahquil strayed to Thorn, encamped in the north with his men. This night he would speak and laugh, but not with her.

Not with her.

Tears welled at the inner corners of her eyes. They were tears for Thorn, and for the young Prince and the others who had been subjected to the wrath of Tamhania because of her inexcusable stubbornness. Could her culpability ever be absolved? She thought not.

Slugs meandered across her skin. She flicked at them. Toward what she guessed to be midnight, a sound came through the gloom. Something was coming,
brush, brush, brush
.

It stopped.

She ceased to breathe.

It came again,
brush, brush, brush
, and this time she thought it was accompanied by a dull clanking as of several links of a heavy chain striking together. She strained into the darkness until she fancied her eyes must be bulging from their sockets. Nothing was visible. Groping for the sharp knives she had brought from the cottage, she held them ready in both hands.
Brush, brush, brush
, something approached, until it stopped right at the doorstep of the ruined shelter.

A sudden wind blasted Rohain's face. In the sky, clouds of vapor and ash parted momentarily. Dimly the stars shone out. Standing silently in front of the hideaway of crumbling stone was a black dog, huge and shaggy, the size of a calf. It stared with great saucer-eyes as bright as coals of fire.

Tahquil-Rohain's hand groped for the tilhal of jade-carved hypericum leaves that hung beside the vial at her neck. She gripped it tightly. Her thoughts flew to Viviana and Caitri, asleep and innocent at her back.

Let them not wake now, or they will cry out
.

There must be no sound, nor sign of fear. This Black Dog might be benign or malign. With luck, it might be a Guardian Black Dog, one of those that had been known to protect travellers. Yet again, it might be one of the unseelie morthadu. In that case, one must not speak or try to strike it, for the morthadu had the power to blast mortals.

She stared at the apparition and it stared back at her. Her body ached with the tension of keeping perfectly still.

It was said that to see one of the morthadu was a presage of death. Whether the thing now before Tahquil-Rohain represented succor or calamity, there was no way of finding out. She sat, rigid as steel, avoiding the burning scarlet gaze, using every ounce of her strength to prevent herself from betraying her fear by the slightest twitch and thus yielding power to the creature.