Rhymer, p.1
Rhymer, page 1
Table of Contents
DEDICATION
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
PART ONE: TRUE THOMAS I. On Huntley Bank
II. The Teind
III. Waldroup
IV. Cleaving Stone
V. Iachan’s Departure
VI. Learning the Bow
VII. Ercildoun
VIII. Innes
IX. Corpse Road
X. Among the Ruins
PART TWO: TÀM LYNN XI. The Knight
XII. Waldroup’s Madness
XIII. Þagalwood
XIV. Talking Stones
XV. The New Teind
XVI. Janet
XVII. The Christes Maesse
XVIII. Morven & the Riddles
XIX. Calligraphy
XX. The Visitors
PART THREE: TYWYLLWCH LLWYR XXI. A Road to Hel
XXII. Queen’s Pawn
XXIII. “Again”
XXIV. The Royal Hunt
XXV. Taliesin
XXVI. Beeswax
XXVII. Thomas Underground
XXVIII. Thomas Underwater
XXIX. Escape
PART FOUR: RECKONINGS XXX. Filib & Janet
XXXI. Glamouring
XXXII. Preparations
XXXIII. Forbes
XXXIV. Fortnight
XXXV. Return to St. Mary’s
XXXVI. Oakmill
XXXVII. Castle MacGillean
XXXVIII. Ađalbrandr
XXXIX. Alwich
Table of Contents
DEDICATION
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
PART ONE: TRUE THOMAS I. On Huntley Bank
II. The Teind
III. Waldroup
IV. Cleaving Stone
V. Iachan’s Departure
VI. Learning the Bow
VII. Ercildoun
VIII. Innes
IX. Corpse Road
X. Among the Ruins
PART TWO: TÀM LYNN XI. The Knight
XII. Waldroup’s Madness
XIII. Þagalwood
XIV. Talking Stones
XV. The New Teind
XVI. Janet
XVII. The Christes Maesse
XVIII. Morven & the Riddles
XIX. Calligraphy
XX. The Visitors
PART THREE: TYWYLLWCH LLWYR XXI. A Road to Hel
XXII. Queen’s Pawn
XXIII. “Again”
XXIV. The Royal Hunt
XXV. Taliesin
XXVI. Beeswax
XXVII. Thomas Underground
XXVIII. Thomas Underwater
XXIX. Escape
PART FOUR: RECKONINGS XXX. Filib & Janet
XXXI. Glamouring
XXXII. Preparations
XXXIII. Forbes
XXXIV. Fortnight
XXXV. Return to St. Mary’s
XXXVI. Oakmill
XXXVII. Castle MacGillean
XXXVIII. Ađalbrandr
XXXIX. Alwich
RHYMER
GREGORY FROST
Rhymer
Gregory Frost
Thomas the Rhymer, legendary twelfth-century figure of traditional Scottish balladry, as you've never seen him before.
Rhymer brings to life Thomas the Rhymer, legendary twelfth-century figure of traditional Scottish balladry, as a champion who must battle the diabolical Yvag—an alien race thought to be elves and faeries—hell-bent on conquering our world. This saga pits Thomas against the near-immortal elves, first with only his wits, then with powers of his own that enable him to take on these evil creatures throughout the centuries. He’s known by many names over time—Tam Lin, Robin Hood, and numerous other incarnations reaching into the present—but at his heart he is still True Thomas, one man doing all he can to save us all from a powerful foe.
When his brother is snatched right before his eyes, Thomas hunts for justice and discovers that not only do these “elves” steal people, but they also are skinwalkers who occupy humans in positions of power. Their goal: to obliterate humanity and take over our world. When Thomas is dragged into their alien realm, he’s imprisoned and barely escapes alive, but in the process he gains near-immortality and the ability to transform himself. Will it be enough to protect his loved ones and defeat the enemies of humankind?
BAEN BOOKS by GREGORY FROST
Rhymer
Rhymer
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2023 by Gregory Frost
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book
or portions thereof in any form.
A Baen Books Original
Baen Publishing Enterprises
P.O. Box 1403
Riverdale, NY 10471
www.baen.com
ISBN: 978-1-9821-9266-2
eISBN: 978-1-62579-917-3
Cover art by Eric Williams
First printing, June 2023
Distributed by Simon & Schuster
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Frost, Gregory, author.
Title: Rhymer / Gregory Frost.
Description: Riverdale, NY : Baen Publishing Enterprises, [2023] | Series: Rhymer trilogy ; 1
Identifiers: LCCN 2023002616 (print) | LCCN 2023002617 (ebook) | ISBN 9781982192662 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781625799173 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Thomas, the Rhymer, 1220?-1297?--Fiction. | LCGFT: Fantasy fiction. | Novels.
Classification: LCC PS3556.R59815 R59 2023 (print) | LCC PS3556.R59815 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54--dc23/eng/20230202
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023002616
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023002617002645
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Electronic version by Baen Books
www.baen.com
DEDICATION
To Terri Windling and Ellen Datlow,
partners in folklore, fairy tales, and balladry.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As with most novels, various people played a part at various stages in the development of Rhymer. The author would like to thank a few who played significant roles in its gestation. First, Jonathan Maberry, with whom the original “T. Rhymer” tale was concocted. Although this version has journeyed a long way from there, none of it would exist at all had it not been for an initial idea discussed over beers, lo, many years ago. Second, my thanks to author/translator Craig Williamson for all the Anglo-Saxon riddles in his A Feast of Creatures. Neither Thomas nor Taliesin would exist as they do without you. A special thank-you to Oz Whiston, proof- and beta-reader nonpareil. I cannot imagine getting feedback from anyone else as reliable and helpful as yours. You are the “True Thomas” of this text. Finally, to my agent, Marie Lamba, for doggedly representing the project through its various permutations.
PART ONE:
TRUE THOMAS
I. On Huntley Bank
“Ya understand?” Onchu asked, and Thomas realized suddenly that his brother had been speaking to him. He looked up, mouth agape, lips slack as a drunkard’s. He squinted. He pushed dirty fingers through his unkempt hair. Shook his shaggy head. They weren’t at home, their mother and father weren’t here, their sister, neither. What was Onchu saying?
“God, he’s gormless.” Baldie laughed. He stood behind Onchu, halfway to the river. The river . . .
Onchu shushed Baldie and tried again. “You stay here now, Tommy. It’s dry an’ ye ken sleep in the grass while we fish upriver, right, little brother?” He tenderly brushed back Thomas’s hair.
Thomas took in the tall, reedy grass around him, the glimmering of the river ahead; then he twisted around to see the trees behind him. Black alders. He knew where he was, remembered they had come here from home, the route Onchu, Baldie, and he always took, though the specifics of the journey itself eluded him. So many things eluded him. They’d been walking, but anyway he wasn’t allowed on a horse. He closed his eyes, saw his feet, plodding, plodding, plodding along a path, following it from their big wooden wall with the keep upon its scarp, past sties and the well, across countryside past Oakmill on the Tweed to the Yarrow where it met the Ettrick Water—Onchu’s fishing path.
The weight of his brother’s hand slid down and pressed upon his shoulder. “Sit,” Onchu gently ordered, and he opened his eyes again. Memory slipped away like a school of minnows.
Thomas Lindsay Rimor de Ercildoun, half-witted fourteen-year-old son of a locally powerful family, did as he was bade and squatted down in the grass. He was lean and black-haired, and his fierce blue eyes could pin you sharp as blades if you could get him to focus on you for longer than an instant. Had it not been for the fits that plagued him and the simpleness of his mind, he might have been a fine catch for most any girl in the town. The trouble was, everyone there and for miles around knew of his peculiarities. Some thought him possessed. Others were certain he was touched, perhaps even divine. Weren’t the sibyls of ancient days similarly cursed? And the poet Taliesin as well? Opinions varied widely.
Those closest to him—his father, even his mother (privately), and definitely his brother—believed him to be a harmless idiot. His sister, Innes, alone thought him blessed by God in a way no one yet understood. Which wasn’t to say that Onchu didn’t love him, h
Pushed down, he sat cross-legged among the reeds. He smiled to Onchu.
“Hey-o,” Baldie said, “there’s a relief.” His thick mouth smirked beneath a nose bent crooked ever since the first time they had brought the idiot with them.
That morning, Thomas had been seized by a fit, fallen face-first into the Ettrick Water, and would have drowned if Baldie hadn’t waded in quick and grabbed hold of him. But Thomas, unaware of everything including his savior, had flapped and windmilled and swung his head wildly back, cracking the bridge of Baldie’s nose, getting himself dumped facedown in the water again, until Onchu hauled him out. Baldie, cursing and spitting, refused thereafter to touch him for all the treasures of the fay.
When Onchu had flung him safely onto dry land, he’d rolled about and babbled, “The teeth of the sheep will lay the plough to rest!” and then fallen quiet and still. As his “predictions” went, it made about as much sense as any.
There were no fish caught that morning. Spluttering Thomas had scared them off.
Since then, Baldie continued to give him a wide berth. If he’d set himself on fire now, Baldie would only have nodded in appreciation of the blaze from a respectful distance.
“Ye don’t follow us now,” Onchu told Thomas. He knelt close, rubbed Thomas’s back. “Ye stay here and sleep till the sun’s down. Or, I don’t know, count the leaves on that black alder.”
Thomas tilted back his head and looked at the nearest tree upside down. “Two thousand nine hundred sixty-eight,” he said.
“Leave him already!” Baldie called. Boots off, he was wading into the water, hissing at every plashing step from one big and precarious stone to another.
“Christ yer,” Onchu cursed. “Then count the damned bulrushes.”
“Eighty-seven. I could see more were I standing.” He started to get up.
“Well, you’re not standing, Tom. Lie back now, count birds flying over, count clouds, count catkins till we come get ye and then tell me all of what you’ve seen, hey, sweet boy?”
He did as he was told, and stared into the sky, all but forgetting that Onchu was there.
“Come on,” insisted Baldie. “It’s feckin’ cold and I’m not gaunny stand here till meh balls crawl up inside me!”
Thomas heard Onchu, laughing, tug off his boots, and wade out after his friend. Plump Baldie was generous (though he would never admit it), but Thomas saw him as true as the tenderness in Onchu’s heart for himself. Heard them on the far bank then, Baldie chattering about the harvest.
Their voices faded into the world where birds sang songs—no two alike, a conversation he could very nearly understand as he tracked it back and forth—and the reeds sizzled now, waving accompanied by breezes, and thoughts jittered and split and swarmed.
Every moment took him off somewhere. He hardly noticed when the sounds and sensations of the whole world absorbed his brother and Baldie like soil soaking up rain. Time isolated him from before and after, cause and effect, sealed him off from human communication, from meaning. It could be sunrise one moment and night the next; such discontinuity was just how the world was to Thomas. He was quite used to losing most of it. What was lost wasn’t important, wasn’t noticed.
After awhile, he tilted his head back again. “Two hundred seven catkins,” he said of a goat willow, “larger than my fingers.” He held up his hand to study those fingers. Dirt encrusted the broken nails. The sun was hanging to the west now. Afternoon had arrived—new shadows, different lines, angles, and slices out of the light.
He placed his hand over the sun. The edges of his fingers glowed red-orange and he smiled.
A breeze blew and the reeds hissed all around him. An alien scent rode on the breeze. It drew his attention away from admiring his glowing fingers. He recalled every smell ever, though many had no name and simply came with images, moments cut out of a dark dough and scattered. This one was new, strangely sweet, like wildflower honey.
At that moment the sun went into eclipse, or had it begun to set? His hand was just his hand again, held up against darkness. He lowered it.
A strange shape sat upon a beast right beside him, silhouetted black against the sun. The shape seemed to have two heads. He squinted, but that didn’t help. Odd spikes festooned the figure and the horse it rode; but he saw immediately that it wasn’t a horse. It had a snout too long and too sharp, though it pawed the ground as impatiently as a horse. It carried its rider out of the sun’s way, and brightness flared into his eyes again, making them tear up. The air tinkled musically. The sweetness enveloped him and the bees making it buzzed within his brain, realigning his thoughts. Two tiny things like bats dove and flitted about the silhouette.
Thomas sat up, wiped at his eyes, streaking dirt across his cheek like some warrior Pict preparing for battle. He was no longer staring into the sun.
Peering down upon him was the most extraordinary woman he had ever seen. She wore a green cape, the hood fallen back to reveal her resplendent red hair beneath a pointed cap. The beast was revealed now to be a stallion of pure white bedecked in a fine blue-and-gold caparison. How had he seen it differently? It also observed him coolly, but he hardly noticed that. The second head belonged to Onchu, who was seated behind the woman on the stallion. Onchu’s expression was as dull as if he was asleep with his eyes open.
“Onchu changed his mind about fishing with Baldie,” Thomas said aloud without noticing. “Why?”
Something like invisible fingers seemed to prod and push at his head, creating a pressure not unlike what he felt just before a fit struck. But no storm raged through him. Instead the bees buzzed about his thoughts again.
“Majesty,” said a deep voice. Thomas followed it to a retinue of two men on their own horses behind her. Knights in black armor. They had plainly crossed the river together. “Shall we—?”
“No, Ađalbrandr,” she answered. “Look at him. Poor broken toy, and such a pretty one, too. What a waste. I wonder, should we swap him for this other?” Odd that her cherry lips didn’t move as she spoke, though the words rang in his head, clear as New Year’s bells.
The Queen of Heaven, he thought, but could not remember where he had heard the title. Was it a song? Wasn’t someone playing a hurdy-gurdy?
She smiled then with the magnanimous pity of a monarch, and in that smile lay her decision that would change her world and his in ways unimaginable. She would not take him in place of the other boy, but instead leaned down and brushed her long, slender hand across his face. Her blood-dark nails traced his forehead. His whirling, buzzing thoughts slowed, stilled. Desire plucked at him.
For the first time in his life, Thomas experienced a silence inside himself.
One thing was clear. “Onchu changed his mind about—”
“Shhh.” The lady shushed him with the sound of the reeds. Urged him to lie back in the grass again and sleep. To her retinue she said, “We will leave this one. Let him forget we passed. I’ve snatched his puzzle-thoughts from him.”
He did lie back as commanded, but neither slept nor forgot. He could see in his mind the fifty-nine silver bells woven into the stallion’s mane, and the twelve stars along the reins, the way the shining barding across its forelock poked up as if the horse had horns, just as he could see the odd gold shape of the lady’s eyes, which made him think of both buttons and spiders—the way her six pupils seemed like a circle of pinpricks within her bright irises. She pulsated with desire. He wanted to go with Onchu. They went everywhere together.
The bells tinkled as she rode off.
The other two passed beside him, and like her they each crossed the ball of the sun; and as they did, they changed. Spines as sharp and polished as thorns projected from their silhouettes. Their mouths became fanged, and the beasts upon which they were seated turned into things carved from dark skeletons but not of horses. He had never seen anything like them, and was too awed to be terrified. Close by came the gray riders’ thoughts, matching the cold regard in their eyes—they wanted to kill him, nor cared that he saw their true nature. But their queen had been clear in command, and they passed him by, becoming men and horses again.
