THE BITTERBYNDE TRILOGY

Book One: The Ill-Made Mute

(c) Cecilia Dart-Thornton.

instinctively. The sweet, rich liquid coursed inward, spreading waves of flowing warmth. Presently the creature drank again, then fell back, exhausted.

As its body attempted to normalise, its thoughts briefly coalesced. It held tightly to the one idea which did not spin away - the awareness that for as long as it could remember, its eye-lids had been shut. It tried to open them, but could not. It tried again, and before being sucked back into lethargy, stared briefly into the face of an old woman whose wisps of white hair stuck out like spiders' legs from beneath a stained wimple.

There followed millennia or days or minutes of warm, foggy half-sleep interspersed with waking to drink, to stare again at that face bound in its net of wrinkles and to feel the first very faint glimmerings of strength returning to its wasted body. Recognition evolved, too, of walls, of rough blankets and a straw pallet on the stone-flagged floor beside the heat-source - the mighty, iron-mouthed furnace which combusted night and day. The creature's face felt numb and itchy. And as senses returned, it must endure the sour stench of the blankets.

Stokers entered the room, fed the hungering furnace with sweetmeats of wood, clanged the iron door shut, raised their voices accusingly at one another, then went away. Children with malt-brown hair came and stared, keeping their distance. The white-haired crone fed some broth to her charge and spoke to it in incomprehensible syllables. It stared back at her, wincing as she lifted it, blankets and all, and carried it into a small room. Beneath the peelings of bedding the creature was clad in filthy rags. The old woman stripped it naked before lowering it into a bath of tepid water. Wonderingly, it looked down at its own skeletal frame floating like some pale, elongated fish, and perceived a person, with arms and legs like the crone, but much younger. The crone was doing something to its hair, which it couldn't see- washing it in a separate container behind the bath, lathering the hair thoroughly with scented soaps, rinsing again and again.

The woman dressed the rescuee in garments of a nondescript sepia hue - thick breeches, long-sleeved gipon and thigh-length doublet corded at the waist. There was a heavy, pointed hood with a wide gorget which was allowed to hang down behind the shoulders, leaving the head bare.