THE BITTERBYNDE TRILOGY

Book One: The Ill-Made Mute

(c) Cecilia Dart-Thornton.

About the creature's neck, beneath the gorget, she strung a leather thong tied to a rowan-wood charm crudely carved in the shape of a rooster. The bathed one sat, obediently, cross-legged while gnarled hands combed the short hair dry.

Bewildered, feeble, it lifted its scrawny hand to its head and felt the short stubble there. Its arachnoid fingers wandered to its face, where there was no sensation other than slight irritation. They found there grotesque lumps and swellings; a knobbed, jutting forehead, thick lips, an asymmetrical cauliflower of a nose, cheeks like bags of acorns. Tears filled its eyes but its benefactress, chattering gummily to herself, seemed oblivious to its agony of humiliation. Time organised itself into days and nights.

The days organised themselves around eating, dozing and the exhausting minutiae of existence.

The spider-haired woman jabbed a stubby thumb at herself. "Grethet," she repeated. Apparently she had discovered he was not deaf. Her charge, instantly grateful for this first attempt at communication, opened its mouth to utter its mentor's name.

No sound came forth.

Its jaw hung slack, a crater of hollow disbelief - it had simply forgotten, or had never known, how to make speech. Frantically it searched its memories. It was then that the fist of despair slammed into the foundling, tossing it high against the scaffold of defeat, where it hung lankly, crumbling again into wretchedness. There were no memories.

None at all.

The thing, pale and debilitated, stared into hot iron darkness for half the night. To its dismay, it now recognised it could dredge up no recollection of a past and was unable to evoke its own name, if name it had ever possessed.

As days passed in bewilderment, meaningless sounds began to metamorphose into half-comprehended words - communications between other people. Although still confused, the newcomer compared their raiment to that which Grethet had put on him, and concluded that its

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