The Bitterbynde Trilogy Read Free

and, before being sucked back into unconsciousness, 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 heatsource—the mighty, iron-mouthed furnace that 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 that was allowed to hang down behind the shoulders, leaving the head bare. 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 cropped hair dry.
    Bewildered, feeble, it lifted its scrawny hand to its head and felt the short stubble there. Its spindly 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 of its agony of humiliation.
    Time organized itself into days and nights.
    The days organized themselves around eating, dozing, and the exhausting minutiae of existence.
    The spider-haired woman jabbed a stubby thumb at herself.
    â€œGrethet,” she repeated. Apparently she had discovered her charge was not deaf.
    Instantly grateful for this first attempt at communication, it opened its mouth to respond.
    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.
    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 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 among other people. Although still confused, the newcomer compared their raiment with that which Grethet had put on him and concluded that its own sex was male. This was an identity, no matter how generalized, to be grasped and held secure, a solid fact in a morass of uncertainty.
    He