Read Online The Bitterbynde Trilogy by Cecilia Dart-Thornton - Free Book Online Page B

turns. Thanking them with gifts or compliments is taken by them as an insult!”
    â€œNot so,” another disagreed. “I’ll warrant they vanished because they thought they were too fine, in their new clothes, to do lowly work anymore.”
    â€œNow there,” said Brinkworth, stroking his beard, “is a matter about which many folk disagree. A bone, one might say, of contention. To thank or not to thank. My own opinion is that by the thanking-gifts, the bruneys knew they had been spied upon. They detest spying as much as any eldritch wight, seelie or otherwise, and that is why they went away.”
    â€œBody o’ me! If any of them helping-wights ever come here to the Tower, I’ll thrash anyone what spies on them or thanks them,” declared Rennet Thighbone. “I never get no thanks, and I don’t see why tricksy wights should. Anyway, I never seen one in me life, and I reckon it’s all just cock-and-bull.”
    â€œSo ringed is the Tower with rowan, iron, and wizardry,” commented Brand Brinkworth, “there’s never a minor wight of seelie or unseelie could invade us. That is why you have never seen one, Rennet.”
    â€œWhat I say be no cock-and-bull,” said Teron Hoad the ostler, licking his lips. “This be truth.”
    The kitchen’s occupants nervously gathered closer together. Hoad’s accounts were famed for their gruesomeness, and they did not want to miss a word. It seemed he felt it his duty to darken the mood if it chanced to become too cheery; for this he had unwittingly acquired the name “Hoad the Toad.” Two of his fingers were, inexplicably, missing. He kept them pickled, in a jar—a foible that added to his sinister reputation.
    â€œI speak of the Beulach Beast what used to haunt the Ailagh Pass in Finvarna,” the aforesaid ostler began with relish.
    â€œUsed to haunt it?”
    â€œAye. It went away after its blood-search was successful. Only during the night hours it used to be heard, uttering shrieks and howls that chilled the blood of those who heard and made them flee in horror and set them to locking their doors and shutters.”
    â€œHow was it formed?”
    â€œSometimes like a man with one leg, sometimes like an ordinary man, sometimes like a greyhound or a fell beast of foul description. Folk dared not venture out after dark in those parts, for the Beast would be always on the prowl. Finally it got what it was after.”
    He paused for dramatic effect.
    â€œWhat, Hoad? What?” bleated the listeners. Hoad deliberately looked over his shoulder and lowered his tone confidentially.
    â€œOne morning,” he said, “a traveler was found dead by the side of the road—pierced by two deep wounds, one in his side and one in his leg. He had a hand pressed to each hurt. It was said that these injuries were too frightful and strange to have been made by a man, and indeed the Beulach Beast must have done it, for it was not seen or heard again at the Ailagh Pass.”
    â€œThey might have got rid of it, but it will just go somewhere else,” commented Thighbone, scraping his callused fingers with a paring-knife. “They’ll never get rid of the Buggane what haunts that Great Waterfall near Glyn Rushen.”
    â€œThat is a water-bull, is it not?” the stoker interjected dubiously.
    â€œAye. Not a seelie one, my friend, not at all, but a water-bull just the same. It is particularly dangerous and vicious. It lives in the pool right under where the Waterfall drops. Sometimes it is a man, but usually it takes the form of a big black calf what crosses the road and jumps down into the pool with a sound like the rattling of chains.”
    A lackey shook the chains of the cast-iron stew-pot, and everyone jumped.
    â€œI’ll box yer ears for yer, ribald clown!” Thighbone yelled indignantly.
    The servants soothed the cook, and eventually he went on with his