The Bitterbynde Trilogy

Author:Cecilia Dart-Thornton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media

7

THE CAULDRON

Thyme and Tide

Fires in the core of cores lie quiescent;

Once they jetted from its maws, incandescent.

Lava from the magma bath, effervescent,

Nullified all in its path, heat rubescent.

Once upon a cinder cone light flew sparkling—

Now a crater-lake unknown, deep and darkling.

‘DORMANCY’, A SONG FROM TAPTHARTHARATH

All the time—through the drag and suck, the lift and toss, through the seethe and sudden swell battering ears to deafness, eyes to blindness, skin to numbness, through the forced drafts of brine gulping and gurning in her stomach, the salt stinging her mouth, the dread inbreathing of water provoking a panic of suffocation, her heart racing for air, splashes of red agony on a black ground like an eruption of the lungs; through it all, the object remained beneath Rohain’s hand and bore her up: the Hope, the wooden Hope that floated on the top of the ocean.

Another surge, and the buoyant piece of timber scraped on something. Rohain found solidity beneath her feet. She tiptoed on it and it was snatched away, relinquished, abducted, returned. She walked, emerging from the flood. The wood weighed her hand down now—why so faithful? Why could it not leave her? Wiping blur from her eyes with her free hand she looked down. The leaf-ring on her finger was caught in a bent copper nail, partly dislodged and jutting from the fishing boat’s figurehead. Thorn’s gift had saved her.

Now she leaned over, unhooked the bright metal band, waded to land, and lay down on a muddy knoll above the tide. Her body spasmed as she gave back to the sea the water that had invaded her lungs. Clad only in a pale shift, she sprawled there like a hank of pallid seaweed, long and lank. Somewhere on the sea or under it, her discarded gown floated; a headless, handless specter among specters more truly terrible.

Drying in the mild night within a thin casing of salt and ash, the girl lifted her aching head. She was conscious now of the careless clatter and tinkle of water chuckling down a stony sluice. A brackish freshet bounced down a rock wall, like a handful of silk ribbons. Rohain drank a long and delicious draft. As she leaned, two articles fell forward and swung in front of her face: her jade-leaved tilhal and the vial of nathrach deirge, both strung on strong, short chains about her neck. At her waist the tapestry aulmoniere remained firmly attached, though bedraggled. For the retaining of these precious accessories she was grateful.

She sat by the laughing trickle and looked about in wonderment. This was no rocky shore or strand. Farther uphill, trees were growing, with green turf mantling their feet. Perhaps, after all, the ocean had carried her inland. Under the starless sky, its vestigial moon a haloed sliver of bluish green, the savage waters that had spat her out were now receding, as though the tide were ebbing. They seemed to clutch at the land as they dragged backward, scoring the turf with their talons. Through the ash haze Rohain saw the mermaid figurehead, wedged between two tree boles.

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