The Bitterbynde Trilogy (21 page)

“Culicida,” he breathed. “They travel the path of living breath and target the warmth and sweat of flesh. Burrow into the leaves.”

Cold leaves abounded, shredded drifts of stained and twisted parchment in the deserted nest. In their depths, infinitesimal spores bedded, each mycelium a gangling hair, a frail, inexorable agent of decomposition. Into this mold the cuckoo's nestlings dug themselves, until they were completely covered, not daring to breathe the fungous atmosphere. The monotonous song of the hunting Culicida came and hung right over them, piercing their ears, drilling into the marrow of their bones. A long time the creature hung there, sensing, while those she sought, with burning lungs, endured the scarlet flashes of oxygen depletion vivid against their eyelids.

The predator moved away, droning off into the night. Her would-be prey exploded from the heap of leaves and melancholy yeasts like corks from ale-jars, gulping fresh air. Panting like a hunted fox, the Ertishman scanned their surroundings.

“I'll warrant she's foretasted something she liked better. Ha! Here are dry leaves of pennyfoil and elder, which the tyrax used to line its bower, praise be! Those herbs and some others may drive away her kind. For the moment, we are out of peril. I never thought to see Culicidae here—their clans dwell mainly in Mirrinor, where they lay their egg-rafts among the bulrushes in the long lakes and the swamps. They can only fly short distances and that only in still airs. But winds can blow them hundreds of miles. You do not know of them … Imrhien? Mosquito-folk, they be, cousins to the insect swarms. Their prettiness belies their strength. They be not eldritch wights, aye, but they be deadly evil. Vectors, like the one we saw, be the worst among them. Their pricking tongues bring diseases and plagues the like of which have wiped out countless numbers of mortalkind, and they know that. Yet they have no conscience, none at all.” He fell silent for a time, craning his neck up at the nets of white stars framed by the trees.

“There, ye see? That is the Swan—the constellation of the Swan. Nine stars. Ye can see them at this time of year, here and at home in Finvarna.” He traced out the bird's shape with a stubby finger, then began to pick leaves and a small caterpillar out of his mustache.

“Sleep now. I will watch.”

Shaking her head, his companion jabbed a thumb at her own chest. Sianadh shrugged.

“As ye wish, then,
chehrna
, if you be so set on it. But first let me teach ye to say that in handspeak.”

He pointed to himself, then held out his left hand, curled in a fist.

“This be the
slegorn
rune, the dragon, that hisses like a snake. With the right hand ye make the
vahle
rune, that is the valley, with the index and middle fingers extended. These fingers be the two eyes watching. Rest the heel of the right hand on the back of the downturned left hand. This be the sign for watching with the eyes, the dragon watching under the valley. Now ye have had your first lesson in the handspeak.”

He yawned and then fell asleep almost immediately.

She could not sleep. She walked on the edge of oblivion but could not have let herself drop into it, even had she tried. For danger she watched, all the while the salt of self-doubt rubbing on the raw graze of confusion. All the hidden embers of defiance had been doused now. How had she prevented herself from knowing that Truth? When Grethet had pulled tight the straps confining her chest and hissed warnings in her ear, how had she snapped spontaneously into apathetic acceptance?

Because
, she told herself,
Grethet was all and only. And you were new, bruised, needing guidance. The crone had seen too many wenches suffer. It may be supposed she herself had been violated. Ill-tempered and selfish, she was, but she saved you. She gulled the rest, too. Do not condemn her for gulling you
.

But she condemned herself. To be gullible was to be adrift on the world's sea at the mercy of tide and current.

Search your heart, fool. You knew in there, all along. Plunder your heart for the Truths therein and cleave to what you find
.

An owl “boo-booked” across the scufflings of Summer night, and the quenched firedrake's eyes kept watch under the valley.

The quicksilver notes of a magpie struck the bleaching air like a bell-hammer. Dawn's alchemy transmuted the canopy's edges from blue gray to green gold. Sianadh snorted awake.

“Time to go,
chehrna
. 'Tis not wise to stay in one place for too long.”

They climbed down the whispering weather beech. Not far away, a freshet sprang from sphagnum mosses. There they drank and bathed discreetly, tending their various hurts. The Ertishman rummaged in his pack and produced food.

“Pah! This mutton's rotten. The heat has sent it off. I took it but yesterday morning from the ship's galley, even before Poison had tampered with it—this other provender, the dry stuff, I have had stowed in readiness since before I boarded the
Witch
. No matter, there be plenty.”

After eating, Sianadh brought out a battered compass.

“Needle's swinging all over the place. These things be never reliable when eldritch creatures be close by. Never mind, I can find the way. We continue to follow the line of this ridge. Wights and wild beasts may be about, but we both wear tilhals, and what's better, I have the skian. I never miss when I throw a knife. Still, 'twere prudent to go quietlike.”

He bounded ahead like a firecracker, twigs snapping and bending before his broad shoulders and flailing back in the face of his follower. After they had walked for a time, a white hare started up and ran beside them. When it loped ahead they saw a woman in white moving before them among the trees, but when they came up to her she was gone, having been no true woman.

“
Doch
shape-shifters,” grumbled Sianadh. “Not a mortal man or woman for miles about, yet with these shifters I feel crowded!”

Here, the forest canopy was thinner and the travelers could look out through the parallel stripes of tree-boles, through a tapestry of nodding foliage and long cascades of leaves, a green-gold cochineal flickering embroidery; across steep-walled valleys to where layer upon layer of ridges marched into the distance in ever-deepening shades of blue. The long folds of the mountains' mantles rolled against a sky scratched by the wind's fingernails—a blue sky paling to silver at the horizon.

It was hard going, but in the middle of the morning they came upon a faint trail of sorts, leading in the right direction. Now that they could proceed more easily, Sianadh began to talk.

“And now ye most likely want to ask me some questions. Why did I jump overboard with ye, and where are we going? Truth be known, I b'ain't no pirate. I be a trader, see, a traveler and a trader. I have turned my hand to many things—crewed on merchant ships, sold wares in city stalls, labored in the fields and byres—but I be my own man. There's some as envied me my successes, some with power who brought it against me. I have been hounded and harried across most countries for one thing or another, never my fault. I've had a wife. Two children I have in Finvarna, but I cannot go back there now. They be grown and flown anyhow, older than I reckon ye to be.

“I never lifted steel against your shipmates, believe me or not, as ye will. I b'ain't never been a pirate, never killed a man, though I could do it easy, and I have fought enough fights and beat them all within an inch of their lives. See,
chehrna …
Imrhien, there was this guardhouse, and I was inside it. Locked me up they did, the black-hearted
skeerdas
, and I was in there with a man who was dying. I did what I could to ease him. I be not a heartless man. Gave him part of my water ration and covered him with my jacket … he gave me this here map before he faded.”

From an inner pocket he drew out the crumpled parchment he had been looking at on the mess deck of the
Windwitch
.

“Do not laugh.” He smoothed it out. “In tales, pirates always have these. 'Tis a map to find buried treasure. He said it was the location of a sildron mine.” He looked sideways at her, and she merely nodded.

“Funny thing about ye, Imrhien. Ye do not seem surprised by that. Most folks would have stopped in their tracks and swooned. A sildron mine! Do ye ken what untold wealth would be buried there? A man could be a King. A man could be many Kings.”

She repeated the nod. He refolded the parchment and replaced it meticulously.

“A long-abandoned, sealed, and forgotten mine, he said, still loaded with ore. Loded! Ha ha! Anyhow, I suppose the stuff must be layered with andalum or else stashed high in a mountainside. Else it would not be a mine at all but a
doch
great chunk of ore blundering about the sky. I wanted to search for it alone—there are few who can be trusted these days, and those who can are too precious to be risked on a venture that might prove worthless. So I paid the last of me savings to a wizard to put extra wards of protection on my tilhal so that I could go alone. How to reach it was a riddle, for it was stuck in the wildness of these inaccessible Lofties.

“There be a river running out of these parts to Gilvaris Tarv, but I could not get aboard a boat, could not afford passage, and besides, there be not one river-boat captain trapping in and out of Tarv I would trust as far as he could toss me, which be not an inch. Even if I got a boat, the map was not clear on which tributary to follow—there be many unnamed and unmapped streams in those parts.

“So I found out through means too twisted and tangled to describe that the outlaw Winch planned for to sail these remote areas in the Summer, and by further devious means I got aboard as crew. I sailed with 'em and put up with 'em and their foul methods, all the while waiting until the ship should come over the right spot. A few words in the captain's shell-like ear about the best course to take did not go astray, I might add. We were almost there, lass, almost there, when ye were discovered. I had some king's-biscuit, that is, sildron—the stuff has many names—which I had managed to get hold of. A small piece. I had planned to go overboard in the night, quietlike, but when I saw ye trapped by the rail I just upped on the mainsheet and swung over like a capuchin on a vine. Chariots o' fire! Ye clawed me like a gray malkin as we fell! So here we be, a day or two's journey from the mine. I can see ye be brimming with asks. Let me teach ye the hand-signs what, why, how, who, when, and where. Also yes and no for good measure.”

He taught her. She had to be shown only once. She signed, <>

“Why do I bring ye? Ye can help me carry the treasure, of course, strawgirl!” He chuckled.

A bolt of excitement went through her—not because of this supposed wealth waiting around the corner, but because she had spoken with her hands and made herself understood! The greater treasure apparently lay already in her hands, waiting to be brought to light.

<> she signed urgently, flapping hands.

“How what? How shall we find it, carry it?… No? Peace,
chehrna
, I cannot read your thoughts. How to handspeak? Aye. I will show ye more as we go along. Ye learn quick. Wait—where has our talk taken us?”

He halted. The trail had led them under ancient trees clasping oddly dark places between them, shuffling with their ropy roots in the mosses. Beneath, silent rainpools lay in the wide angles of their toes. Their boughs spread wide, rich with scalloped leaves. Young saplings had sprung from the trunks of felled trees, and the coppice floor was misted with hooded flowers, blue as sapphires.

“A bluebell wood! Imrhien, we must away from here at once!”

Leaving the path, he plunged down the slope to the left, the trees hemming them in. Seeing the Ertishman begin to run, the girl did likewise, seized by unreasoning panic. Roots tripped them up; branches billowed around their ears.

Suddenly Sianadh's boots left the ground. His eyes bulged. An intermittent snorting left his mouth, followed by no sound at all. His tongue lolled out, purple, like the protruding head of some internal worm.

A branch of holly had whipped around his neck, and he was being hanged. As he dangled, strangling, hacking at the branch with his skian, another prickly bough swung lazily out at the girl's neck; she ducked under it and danced away. Sianadh's blade sliced through. He fell heavily to the ground. The girl seized the skian from his limp hand and slashed at the wicked branches. Thorny leaves sewed her skin with fine red embroideries. With a shuddering gasp, the Ertishman heaved himself up and rolled out of reach of the holly-tree.

Laughter rose on one side, then another. Queer voices called out mockingly in words that could not be understood. Unseen things came on behind the travelers on silent feet, only their squalling and guffaws indicating their proximity. Sianadh staggered to his feet and stumbled on, clearing a path for his companion, but as fast as they sped, they could not shake off these pursuers. At last the Ertishman balked before a thicket of interlocking thorns. He flung the knapsack into the girl's arms and snatched the skian out of her hand.

“Imrhien, delve out the salt—'tis in a wooden box. And the bells, Imrhien—rattle them!”

She obeyed. The brace of bells jingled, a jarring sound here. Other sounds ceased.

“Ahoy!” Sianadh bellowed hoarsely, his flaming auburn mane plastered to his sweating brow. “We have cold iron. And salt! Hypericum, salt, and bread, iron cold and berries red, by the power of rowan-wood—harm us, and we'll burn ye good! A plague on ye
skeerdas
. If ye come near us, we will make ye suffer!”

With a jerk of his head he indicated that his companion should follow him. Warily they walked along the edge of the thorn thicket, she ringing the festive-sounding bells, he with a clump of salt in one hand, the dagger in the other. He was whistling. Something small and gnarled hooted, grabbing for his boot—he dashed salt on it, and it fled, shrieking. Sudden spears of hoots and howls stabbed out from every direction. Once, she thought she glimpsed a grinning face, a grotesque caricature of humanity.