The Bitterbynde Trilogy

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PRAISE FOR THE BITTERBYNDE TRILOGY

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 the 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”.