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  The Ill-Made Mute

  “Cecilia Dart-Thornton exhibits strong and authentic evidence of having visited some of the more exotic corners of Faerie.… The opener of Dart-Thornton’s series proves a sweet surprise.” —The Washington Post

  “Not since Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring fell into my hands have I been so impressed by a beautifully spun fantasy. [The Ill-Made Mute] is indeed a find!” —Andre Norton

  “With deep roots in folklore and myth, tirelessly inventive, fascinating, affecting and profoundly satisfying, [The Ill-Made Mute] is a stunning, dazzling debut.” —Kirkus Reviews

  “[The Ill-Made Mute] is a generously conceived, gorgeously written novel, recalling to mind the wonder we encountered upon reading such books as Tolkien’s or Mervyn Peake’s.… It well might go on to become—the potential is manifest—one of the great fantasies.” —The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction

  “An elegantly written saga that invites comparison with the best fantasy novels of the 20th century, [The Ill-Made Mute] may well prove to be one of the classics of the 21st.” —Elizabeth Hand

  The Battle of Evernight

  “Dart-Thornton beguiles with poetic, songlike prose.… Those who esteem the Irish and Scottish myths of faerie folk will be delighted by the magic folklore and tales within tales that fill [The Battle of Evernight].” —Publishers Weekly

  “This complex conclusion to a trilogy inspired by British folklore … makes for action, suspense, and powerful, vivid conflicts.… Dart-Thornton courteously provides … a short glossary and references reflecting her folkloric expertise, which is of a high order and may win the trilogy additional readers among folklore enthusiasts.” —Booklist

  The Bitterbynde Trilogy

  The Ill-Made Mute, The Lady of the Sorrows, and The Battle of Evernight

  Cecilia Dart-Thornton

  The Ill-Made Mute

  Book One of the Bitterbynde Trilogy

  Cecilia Dart-Thornton

  INTRODUCTION

  Becoming a Writer

  Recently I saw an interview with Michael Morpurgo, an author I admire greatly. A child asked him what she must do to become an author. His reply was, in a nutshell, ‘Read, Write, Live’.

  I couldn’t agree more.

  Read.

  Looking back, it seems as if Circumstance was moulding me into a writer from the very beginning. My parents played the chief role. My mother loved to read and in her efforts to be a good mother, she surrounded her children with books. Literally. The walls of my childhood home were lined with bookshelves, which in turn were packed from end to end with books: paperbacks, hardcovers, illustrated editions large and small, non-illustrated titles, classics, modern works, dog-eared volumes read over and over.

  My father, for whom his children were the centre of the world, took the time at the end of each day—whether or not he was exhausted—to read aloud to us, when we ourselves were too young to be able to decipher the written code.

  Our parents instilled in us a love of books, a thirst for books; a certainty that books were not merely bound pages between covers, but portals into other worlds. They also passed on to their offspring some innate, genetic ability to read easily, with profound comprehension and at very high speed. For this, neither they nor I can claim applause. It just happened. Reading came as easily to me as breathing, and often seemed as essential to life.

  I learned to read at the age of five, and thrived on it as a plant thrives in a well-composted garden, reading anything and everything I could get my hands on—perusing the cereal packets on the table at breakfast time, labels, signs, advertisements splashed across hoardings, the multiplication tables on the back covers of school exercise books. Anything. We didn’t own a TV, so reading and playing games were our entertainment.

  During our childhood, Mum walked to the library and back every week (our family couldn’t afford a car), for the purpose of refreshing the exciting selection of books on our shelves. Every birthday and at Christmas, Mum and Dad gave us each a carefully chosen book, lovingly wrapped in gift paper, with a handwritten inscription and the date on the flyleaf. Oh yes, my siblings and I knew full well that books were treasures.

  When, in our early teenage years, life became more difficult, books were—for me at least—saviours. They were refuges, escapes and fortifiers. Friends and supporters. Stories would take you by the hand and, flashing you a conspiratorial smile, run away with you on winged feet to wonderful places where hardship could not touch you—at least for a while.

  Most of the stories available to me and my siblings were fiction, and most of that fiction was written by British authors. Two reasons lay behind this—the majority of children’s books stocked by the local library in those days had been shipped over from the UK, and my mother was an Anglophile.

  Mum also loved fantasy and science fiction. Her taste in books helped form my taste, and thank goodness, for all our lives together, she and I shared that bond. Never have I known anyone’s taste to so closely reflect my own literary preferences. I was shocked, once, to discover that Mum and I differed on the matter of Hilaire Belloc’s ‘Cautionary Tales for Children’, which Mum considered hilarious, but which Child Me disliked heartily. Mum was also greatly fond of Tove Jansson’s Moomin series which, though I liked it, scared me slightly, it being a little too weird and eerie for the emotionally vulnerable child I was.

  Notwithstanding, Mum opened the doors of my young mind to the thrilling prose and poetry of E. Nesbit, Nicholas Stuart Gray, Alan Garner, Eleanor Farjeon, Andre Norton, George MacDonald, Walter de la Mare, C.S. Lewis, Rosemary Sutcliff, Andrew Lang, Madeline L’Engle and Hilda Lewis. Later, when Mum joined the mail order Science Fiction Book Club, my mind was enriched by the genius of Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury and the like. In my teens Mum introduced me to Douglas Adams, Ursula LeGuin, Vonda N. McIntyre, the folklore collections of Katharine Briggs and, of course, the incomparable Tanith Lee, whose brilliant use of language captivated and inspired me. Mum also brought us myths and legends from Japan, India, Russia, Finland, Denmark, New Zealand … from all over the world. My mother may have been an Anglophile, but she was utterly catholic in her love of the fabulous.

  It was not all speculative fiction—we also delved with relish into the works of classic writers such as Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, the Brontë sisters, Jane Austen and George Eliot. Classic fantasy was, nonetheless, my favourite and I devoured books by the likes of Charles Kingsley, William Morris, Lord Dunsany and William Allingham. I discovered the Romantic poets—Keats and Wordworth, Shelley, Coleridge and Byron and lost myself in the beauty of their dreams.

  The books in our house were an eclectic collection. Many of them were far beyond the comprehension of children, so that when I poked inquisitively amongst them, turning the pages and trying to understand the unfamiliar words, learning from context and by asking my parents, I was always stretching, reaching out for knowledge and skill. Only the library books and the gift books and some beautiful volumes My mother herself owned as a child (I still have one of them) were written for our age group. This combination of being fiercely driven to comprehend the more sophisticated works, and having access to children’s literature to reassure us that yes, we were capable of understanding a story from beginning to end, was a mightily powerful stimulant to our reading abilities.

  The culmination of all this reading, however; the star atop the Christmas Tree of my literary influences was The Lord of the Rings, which I first encountered at t
he age of nine. From the moment I entered its pages, J.R.R. Tolkien became my favorite writer. I wanted to visit Middle-earth, and that reinforced my desire to create my own “alternative world”.

  Read. I echo Michael Morpurgo’s advice. Read, but read the best authors, the ones whose works enchant you, the ones you love.

  Yet it was not only words, but art and music (their sister muses) that formed me; in particular the art of the Pre-Raphaelite painters (especially John Waterhouse and Edward Burne-Jones), the masters of Art Nouveau such as Beardsley and Mucha, and unparalleled artists like Cicely Mary Barker, Arthur Rackham, Maxfield Parrish, Brian Froud, Alan Lee, Kinuko Y. Craft, Julek Heller and Michael Whelan. The love of art made me pick up a brush and execute several oil paintings of my own.

  During my teenage years I was inspired by rock ’n roll and heavy metal music, and by the melodies and lyrics of the English and Celtic folk-rock revival, including such bands as Fairport Convention, Steeleye Span, The Chieftains and Clannad. Again, I was so thrilled by this art form that I felt compelled to participate. I began playing and singing in amateur folk-rock bands, having learned piano as a child and having taught myself to play guitar.

  Music, poetry, prose, art, sculpture—they are all faces of the same muse—my muse. For me, visual images, sounds and literature are so closely related they can at times be almost indistinguishable.

  Write.

  Since stories are so enthralling and delightful, what could be better than to create one’s own? I cannot remember when this notion first occurred to me; I can only assume that I was born with it. Very early I began, as soon as my small fingers could hold a pencil, to record the tales that were already chasing each other around in my head. My mother preserved a story I wrote when I was about six years old, in painstakingly formed, rounded letters. Approximately six pages long, with one very short sentence per page, it is illustrated with pictures of a prince, a princess, a horse and a willow tree. I still have this story filed somewhere, and it reminds me of how desperately I wanted to create something that did not exist in the real world but that had sprung from the fount of my imagination.

  Write. In my room at night, after school, hour after hour into the darkness, that’s what I did. Poetry (plenty of that, all rhyming, all metrical). Ideas. Diaries. Stories—never short, always epic. Pictures to illustrate the stories. Notes. Lists of fantastic character names and place names. Maps. Descriptions. Outlines of plots. Fragments. Most were more ‘outpourings of spirit’ than anything that could claim to belong in the literary domain. All the tales I wrote before I reached my teens were tales of fantasy. After Mum joined the Science Fiction Book Club (which is still running), I incorporated sci-fi into them as well.

  Writing was a form of recreation. ‘Come out and be with the rest of the family!’ Mum sometimes irritably called to me from the other side of my bedroom door. But they were all watching TV. I wanted to be somewhere better.

  Not that I never watched TV. When at last we owned one, I made full use of it. According to my teen diaries, I adored old movies—movies made before 1950, preferably starring Jeanette McDonald and Nelson Eddy, Deanna Durbin or Shirley Temple. These films helped shape my literary wellspring, with their elaborate costumes and hair styles, their romantic themes and their sheer innocence.

  Write I did, and my purpose was to construct a world that blended all the best parts of the Real World, with none of the bits I despised, and some extra ingredients concocted by myself. For Teenage Me it was nature, seasons, landscape, music and weather that I loved best in the real world. (That, and boys.) If ever I awoke to a clear autumn day with the sun shining and a breeze blowing through the fiery panes of a liquidambar tree, or looked out across the horizon to see the piled-up purple cloud-bank of an approaching storm front, or found myself in the hills in winter, with snow encrusting the needles of fir trees, or noticed the first daffodil of spring pushing up from the earth, my heart leapt with such wonder that I longed to preserve the whole experience, to somehow place it in a jewel-box so that I could take it out in later days and look at it, and feel that thrill all over again—perhaps at some dark time when it was desperately needed. The only way I knew how to preserve impressions and feelings and scenes and events was to describe them in words. I tried to preserve them by drawing or filming (for a while I joined a film school), and I wanted to use a combination of drawing and filming to create fantasy animations, but all that was beyond me, then. These days, CGI and 3D animation are within our grasp. They are fields I would have greedily seized upon, had they been available when I was growing up. Their possibilities fascinate me. How I wish I could make my inner worlds real with the use of computers! No doubt future generations will be able to do this easily and cheaply.

  I wrote and wrote. I filled drawers and boxes with my longhand scribblings, my ‘Juvenilia’. Images of some of this work are reproduced in this very volume. At the back of a wardrobe, recently, I came across not Narnia but an old story of mine called ‘Tales of Frostfire’. I wrote it when I was still learning, still finding my voice still experimenting. I had illustrated it in black and white, in a style reminiscent of art nouveau, of which I am a huge fan. Fortunately I never showed this work to anyone. It was never published and never should be, for it is a preliminary, not the finished product. The creating of it was a lesson—a lesson I was teaching myself.

  For I did teach myself. I learned by writing and by reading. All the passion was innately in me, the stories were swirling in my head from the beginning—but I needed to learn the art of putting them on paper, not merely word after plodding word, but in a form that made the words sing. The more I wrote, the more they sang. In hindsight I am glad I never studied creative writing. In my case, learning the ‘rules’ would have stifled me.

  Live.

  Michael Morpurgo’s advice was to immerse yourself in real life—to watch it, and learn from it, and record it. As mentioned earlier, during my formative years Fantasy land was my favourite place; however good stories need good characters, and the best characters—there is no doubt of it—are drawn from real life. In ‘The Bitterbynde’, Sianadh’s personality, for example, is based on a friend by the name of George, a funny, loveable, irresponsible, reprehensible adventurer who looms larger than life.

  Live.

  Live life to the fullest. And while living, observe. Collect. Record. The person sitting next to you on the train, the teacher of your class, your friends and family—more often than not they will do or say something amazing or funny or profound or whimsical that you must capture before it wings away into the mists of forgetfulness. Carry a notebook. Keep your eyes and ears open.

  Read, Write and Live. This is what Michael Morpurgo advised the little girl who wanted to write books.

  Without my knowing it, from the moment I was born Fate was teaching me to be an author.

  Cecilia Dart-Thornton

  Juvenilia: Youthful scribblings and fragments of poetry and prose

  Juvenilia: Illustrations for an early fantasy story

  1

  FOUNDING

  Speechless, castaway, and wry, a spellbound oddity am I.

  My feet are planted in the clay, my gaze is locked upon the sky.

  FROM THE TALITH SONG “YEARNING FOR FLIGHT”

  The rain was without beginning and without end. It pattered on incessantly, a drumming of impatient fingers.

  The creature knew only the sound of the rain and the rasp of its own breathing. It had no concept of its own identity, no memory of how it had come to this place. Inchoate purpose drove it upward, in darkness. Over levels of harsh stone it crawled, and through dripping claws of vegetation. Sometimes it slept momentarily or perhaps lost consciousness.

  The rain lapsed.

  Time wore away.

  With stiffening limbs the nameless creature moved on. Reaching level ground, it now rose onto trembling legs and walked. Thought-fragments whirled like dead leaves inside its skull.

  The ground emptied from bene
ath its feet. It hurtled downward, to be brought up on a spear-point of agony. A band around its arm had snagged on a projection. The scrawny thing dangled against the cliff face, slowly swinging like bait on a hook.

  Then slowly, with great effort, it lifted its other arm. Bird-boned fingers found the catch and released it. The band sprang open and the creature fell.

  Had it landed on the rocks, it would have been killed—a kinder fate—but it finished, instead, facedown in a green thicket of Hedera paradoxis. Stealthily the juices of the poisonous leaves ate into its face while it lay there for hours, insensate. When it awoke it was too weak to scream. It used its last energies to crawl from the toxic bushes and lie frozen in the morning sunlight, its now ghastly face turned up to the sky.

  A benison of warmth began to creep into the chilled flesh, seeping into the very marrow of the bones. Detached, as though it viewed itself from afar, the creature felt its jaws being forced open, inhaled the steamy aroma of warm broth, and sipped instinctively. The sweet, rich liquid coursed inward, spreading waves of flowing warmth. The creature sipped again, then fell back, exhausted.

  As its body attempted to normalize, its thoughts briefly coalesced. It held tightly to the one idea that did not spin away: the awareness that for as long as it could remember, its eyelids had been shut. It tried to open them but could not. It tried again 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.