“How long into the future?” Moril said.
“Oh. Er – two hundred years, I think.”
Mitt and Moril looked to one another. “That long!” said Mitt. “Then you’ll know what’s going to happen here – right?”
“Not really,” Maewen confessed. She was rather dashed to find that what they were really interested in was their own future. She had wanted to amaze them about planes and computers and television. “History doesn’t tell you about the Undying or the green roads or anything,” she explained. “It’s mostly kings and politics. Noreth didn’t come into any of the history I learnt, but I’ll tell you who does: Amil the Great. I’m almost sure he’s almost now.”
“Who?” said Mitt.
“Amil,” Moril said, rather accusingly. “That’s not a king’s name. It’s one of the names of the One.”
“What about him? Tell,” said Mitt.
Maewen racked her brains. “Well, there was a big uprising, and Amil the Great took the crown and united all Dalemark. He reigned for ages and rebuilt Kernsburgh and changed the whole country.”
“Ah,” said Mitt. This sounded good. Let him and Navis only get in on that, and Earl Keril and the Countess could go whistle. “When is this uprising going to start?”
“I can’t remember the date,” Maewen confessed – which was stupid, considering how often she had heard it in the palace – “but it can’t be more than a year away now. I’ve been thinking all along that I’ve only got to keep going until Amil comes.”
“Then where does he start?” said Mitt. He needed to know where to make for.
Maewen flogged her brain again, feeling quite resentful at being released from her imposture only to stand up to a history test. She would have told him so too, if she hadn’t thought she owed it to them. The trouble was, what she remembered was a muddle. “I think it began in the South, down on the coast— No, because I seem to remember that the North Dales and Dropwater came into it too. And Kernsburgh, I think. Yes, I’m pretty sure that some of it began near Kernsburgh.”
“Kernsburgh.” Mitt and Moril looked at one another again. She could see that both their minds were hard at work. “Kialan’s bringing Ynen to meet us at Kernsburgh,” Mitt told Moril. “If he can.”
“Kialan,” said Moril, “would make a good king.”
“My money’s on Ynen,” said Mitt. “I grant you that Kialan’s kingly, but Ynen’s got the character.” Both boys looked at Maewen. “I reckon,” Mitt said, “that our job is to go along there and hand over that sword and that ring and the cup, to one of them.”
“Yes,” Moril agreed. “I don’t think we can stop. The One’s got an interest in it. You can tell from this king’s name.” He frowned down at the little white goat cheese in front of him on the table. “But I don’t understand. What’s happened to Noreth?”
This was the part Maewen had been dreading. Both of them were eyeing her, picking out the features that did not match their memory of Noreth – or, maybe, wondering if she was a murderess. “I don’t know,” she said. “Honestly. She was gone when I got here. I found her horse – at least I suppose it’s her horse – wandering about by the waystone. I thought maybe one of the earls might have kidnapped her.”
Again Mitt and Moril exchanged looks. “It could be,” Moril said. “About the only earl in the North who won’t want to stop her is Earl Luthan.”
Mitt said, “Then we’ll look for her … after.”
There was a silence, filled with the soft singing of the kettle on the banked peat and clacking from the loom next door. A memory teased at Maewen, now she had space to think. “I remember! Wend told me, back in the palace when he was tricking me into coming here, that Kankredin had got to Noreth somehow.”
Both of them pounced on this. “The voice,” said Moril.
“Now we’ll tell you something,” said Mitt. “That voice that talks to you. You think it’s the One, don’t you?”
“But it’s not,” said Moril. “It’s Kankredin.”
“How do you know?” Maewen said guiltily.
“By what it tells you – mostly,” Mitt said.
“But I’m the only one who can hear it!” Maewen protested.
“We’ve both heard it,” Moril told her. “And we know it’s Kankredin.”
He and Mitt looked at one another again. “If he’s got rid of Noreth,” Mitt said, working it out, “he got you instead because he thinks you’ll do what he wants. Do you want to?”
“No!” Maewen said fervently. “If you heard— No!”
“Then don’t let’s talk about it outside this house,” Moril said.
Maewen looked up from the bowl of eggs, big pale blue duck eggs and brown hen eggs mixed, which she had mostly been staring at, and gazed round the kitchen. Low beams with strings of onions hanging from them, copper pans, chairs with knitted cushions and a wall of shelves with glass jars on them, holding coloured mixtures that may have been dyes – it all belonged to Cennoreth. It made sense that Kankredin could not hear them here, even if he seemed to be everywhere else. She shuddered. That voice. She knew it was Kankredin now. It was the same voice that had so frightened her from the old man in the train – the way it had not seemed to come from a person – but she had not realised, because there had not been a face to connect it to.
“No,” she said. “I won’t say a word. You know I— Secretly, I was afraid I might be going mad!”
“Not you!” said Mitt. “So we’ll keep him thinking we don’t know it’s him. Right?”
“Right,” said Maewen.
They were all suddenly jolly with relief. Maewen felt like a person who has long had a splinter festering under a fingernail, after someone has come along and pulled the splinter out. Mitt laughed as he picked up the bowl of eggs and the cheese. “One thing,” he said. “I bet you got that idea about the miners from history books, didn’t you? Telling them to go on smash.”
“Strike,” said Moril, and he laughed as he picked up the crock of milk.
This left Maewen free to snatch up the loaf and rush out of the door, crying out, “Wallop! Smash! Strike!” She raced through the trees, waving the sword in one hand and the loaf in the other. “We got the sword!” she shouted.
Mitt and Moril were forced to follow more slowly for fear of spilling milk and breaking eggs. Moril had gone sober again. “Penny for them,” said Mitt.
“She never heard of Noreth,” Moril said. “So what happens to her? She can’t be in history either.”
NAVIS HAD EVIDENTLY decided that the meadow was safe. Maewen caught him in the act of dressing after a bath in the stone trough. As she dashed across the field, Navis was scrambling into clothes, in time to behave as if nothing at all unusual had happened when she reached him. Hestefan left off polishing a row of cwidders and ambled across to look. By the time Mitt and Moril reached them, Navis was saying, “Antique, certainly, and worth devoting half the evening to, no doubt. We had more notable blades in the armoury in Holand, but if we are to have an uprising, I suppose every weapon counts. And is Wend staying the night with his sister?”
“Didn’t he come out here a while back?” Mitt asked.
“We haven’t seen him since he went away with the goats,” Hestefan said. “Should we have done?”
“I’m not sure,” said Moril. “He may have left.”
There was no sign of Wend that night. When he had not appeared by nightfall, Mitt and Moril shared the buttered eggs they had set aside for him. Maewen was chiefly relieved that Wend had not rushed out and denounced her to Navis and Hestefan. She thought Navis might not have taken it too badly, but Hestefan would have been outraged. Navis, however, took Wend’s absence as a sign that they were not safe and rigged up a tripwire across the rushes some way down the path.
There was no alarm in the night. They woke to a grey morning to find that the meadow cupped in the crags was smaller and more ragged. There was no garden and no fruit trees. Maewen discovered this first, when she went to have a bath i
n the stone trough before the rest were awake. The trough had gone. Where it had been, there was a muddy hole in the ground. She looked for the house. Where it had been, there was a thicket of crab apples and wild cherries against the rocks, overgrown with brambles and dog roses. Inside the thicket she could just see the broken walls of a small stone house.
“No hens either,” Navis said, coming up beside her. “It was improvident of us to eat all the eggs.” By this time the others were coming across the field in a dismayed straggle. Navis slid an eyebrow up at Mitt. “Would you say the Undying have deserted us?”
Mitt shrugged unhappily. “No idea.”
Hestefan stood by the muddy hole and looked slowly round, stroking his beard. “I know this place now,” he said. “This is Dropthwaite, and this –” pointing to the mudhole – “is the source of the River Dropwater. I have camped here before. It is said that the Adon once lived in hiding in those ruins over there.”
“Then that serves to authenticate the sword,” Navis said, and went briskly off to inspect his tripwire. It took him a long time to find it. The rushes had been replaced by thistles and brambles. When they did find the wire, it was lying loosely a long way up the hill. From there they could all see that the lake of yesterday was now only a large green pond.
Hestefan stared at it gloomily. “This change is the worst of all possible omens.”
“Oh, come on,” Maewen said, forgetting how Hestefan seemed to dislike her. “We got the sword.”
Hestefan turned his gloomy look on her. “The City of Gold is always on the most distant hillside,” he said. Before Maewen or Mitt could ask him what that was supposed to mean, he said, “I believe we should all now disperse on our separate ways.”
Moril gave a short protesting “Oh!” and Mitt said, “Well, Navis and I can’t, and that’s final.”
“But you may disperse by yourself, by all means, Singer,” Navis added.
Breakfast made no one feel much better. Hestefan was, if possible, even gloomier, when they set off, to find that the path was mud and marsh, with hardly room to get the cart past the pond. As they came slowly down the bank of the river, Navis murmured, “The Undying make quite a difference.”
Everyone was glad when they came to the place where the green road crossed the river and found it just the same. They could even see the place where the pursuing horsemen had trampled through the spongy turf, in and out of the water.
“Go cautiously,” Navis said, “since the pursuit is now ahea—” He turned round in surprise as the cart came splashing through the river too, with water whirling from its wheels. “I thought you were leaving us, Singer.”
“There are only two ways to go,” Hestefan pointed out. “I chose not to turn back.”
This seemed to be Hestefan’s way of saying he was not going to leave them after all. They went on together, the same party, apart from Wend striding alongside, and the River Dropwater went with them too, sometimes winding in the distance, sometimes skirling along beside them, and growing steadily larger. A long way further on, they came to the place where the band of hearthmen had camped for the night. There was not much to see, merely hoofprints and the cold ashes of their fire, but it sent Navis very cautious again. From then on he was either watching for prints in the green road or scanning the distance on either side.
It was empty distance, all green sheep runs and faraway dark peaks, but there were sheep and, once or twice, a shepherd a long way off. Maewen found herself staring every time they saw a shepherd, expecting him to come striding towards them and turn out to be Wend. But no shepherd did more than turn and look at them. She was quite surprised to be missing Wend so much.
When they camped that night by the river, Navis insisted that they find a place a long way back and hidden from the road. Hestefan drove the cart after him along the riverbank just as if he had never threatened to leave, remarking cheerfully, “We’ve made good time without a walker to slow us down. We’ll be at Dropwater tomorrow.”
As they dismounted, Moril hopped off the back of the cart and came over to Mitt. “That’s a relief,” he said. “I wouldn’t have known what to do if he’d decided to leave. I’m sure he’s not well.”
Maewen led her horse into the river, still thinking about Wend. She had been sure he would get over his anger and come back, but now she began to see that he was not going to. It was Noreth he followed, not her. So what was she going to do? She had, she saw, been relying on Wend to get her back to her own time. Perhaps she never would get back. She thought of Mum and Aunt Liss and Dad and felt a touch of fear – but only a touch. She was surprised not to be much more frightened.
“The Wanderer is no loss,” said the deep voice. “You never needed him.”
Maewen jumped and shuddered, wondering if it – he – could read her mind. “Didn’t I?” she said. “That’s a weight off my mind!”
Sarcasm always seemed to pass Kankredin by – if it was Kankredin. The voice went on imperturbably, “From now on, look for an opportunity to stab the Southerners. The danger from them is growing.”
“Anything you say!” Maewen told it bitterly.
It was a great relief to her over supper to hear Navis arranging with Mitt for the two of them to keep watch that night in turns. Those pursuing hearthmen had been a blessing in disguise. Kankredin could not expect her to try to kill them tonight. But she was terrified of what might happen when he found she had no intention of trying.
They went on again next day through the same rolling green country, with Mitt yawning and Navis red-eyed. Maewen was inclined to be sorry for them until Mitt said, “I’m used to it, and Navis is one of those who just gets sharper for it. Mind you, I’ve only seen him lose four nights of sleep, but he never turned a hair then.”
She realised Mitt was right when Navis spotted the faint marks where the party of hearthmen had turned off the green road to the left, to follow a disused-looking path that led towards the mountains. Navis pounced on it like a cat. “Where does that lead?” he asked Hestefan and Moril.
“You can cut through to the North Dales that way,” Moril said.
Navis narrowed his eyes at the path and then raised them to the mountains. They were nearer here. Ahead they curved inwards and seemed to stand right over the green road. “And can horses work their way round through the tops to come back to the road?” he asked.
“Possibly,” said Hestefan. “But the river goes down to Dropwater there.” He pointed to the craggy eminences ahead. “We only have to go down into the valley to be safe.”
“If they don’t reach us first,” Navis said.
From there on he rode with his pistol ready in his hand. When, around midday, they reached the crags, and the road wound in among them, Navis’s eyes were continually flicking to the skyline above, watching for an ambush. Mostly he watched to the left. But if there was a heathery dip in the crags above the Dropwater, which now roared beside the road as a wide wild torrent, Navis was sure to check that too.
Half a mile further on, the Dropwater suddenly spread wider still, into an immense flat sheet of racing water, and seemed to plunge off the edge of the world into vague blue distance. The road curved so that they could see where it fell and fell and fell, nearly a mile of falling white water, in smoky rainbows and wet thunder. The noise was enormous.
“Quite something, isn’t it?” Moril yelled.
Maewen turned to shout back and saw a squad of armed men running towards them from further up the road. Her hands leapt to the Adon’s sword, lying crosswise in front of her saddle, and then fell away. Navis swung round with his pistol ready. She saw him lower it. There were so many armed men. They were all wearing dark red and blue livery, except for the man in front who seemed to be waving at them, and she was sure she had seen those colours before— Oh. Maewen looked down at herself. She had grown so used to her clothes that she had thought of them as just clothes. But she was wearing the same dark red and blue. The man in front was in expensive scarlet silk and red le
ather, and he was definitely waving to her.
Maewen slid down from her horse. This was like Kredindale, only possibly worse, she thought, as she went hesitatingly to meet him. To her gratitude, Moril realised she would need help and hopped off the cart to come with her.
“Who is he?” she half shouted, under the roar of the falls.
“Luthan!” Moril yelled in her ear. “Earl of Dropwater. Noreth’s cousin. He’s been her hearthlord these last two years. Don’t nod at me! Smile at him!”
Maewen stretched her mouth into a grin. At least, she thought, this saved them from any ambush.
The Earl of Dropwater pelted up and stood in front of her panting and smiling. “Cousin!” he bawled.
“Hearthlord!” Maewen shrieked back. He was awfully young. She took him for her own age at first sight. But as he laughed and seized hold of both her hands, she saw he was older than that, maybe at least eighteen. He was one of those people who have a pretty pink and white face, all curves. As he laughed, he tossed back glossy black hair.
“At last!” he shouted, fluttering long dark eyelashes Maewen truly envied him for. “Where have you been? We expected you yesterday at the latest.”
He clearly had no idea she was not Noreth. Well, you see what you expect to see, Maewen thought. “How did you know when to expect me?” she bawled back.
Luthan put an arm round her shoulders and led her up the road, past the people who had been running with him, and among masses more. There was what looked like a small army strung out along the way, and horses for them standing in patient rows under the crags. “There’s less noise along here. We can hear ourselves speak,” Luthan said.
Mitt looked at Moril, who nodded and scampered off beside Maewen. Mitt slid to the ground and hurriedly led Maewen’s horse and the Countess-horse along behind them. Navis looked at him questioningly and then rode up behind Luthan.
The Crown of Dalemark (UK) Page 22
