The Crown of Dalemark (11 page)

“Oh.” Maewen looked down at her two somewhat scruffy sandals planted on the glossy floor. Then I must have been—I will be—as mad as he is! Though of course, if he really
was
there, he is over two hundred years old, and that means he can't be mad. It all hung together. And she knew mad people's fantasies did often hang together. That was why they found it so difficult to get out of them. Perhaps the best way to deal with Wend was to show him it was nonsense by daring him to send her into the past. No. He could turn violent then. Best just to go. She slid carefully away along the glass cupboard and braced her sandals to run.

Wend smiled his polite smile. “Thanks. I was needing to get at this showcase. Your father wants some of the things moved.”

He fetched up his bunch of keys and advanced on the lock of the sliding door. He was far too near. Maewen could feel her stomach squirming and those queer pins and needles in her back that she always got when she was about to do something wrong. Strange the way Wend always made her feel like this. She slid farther away, warily watching him as he undid the electronic lock and then the ordinary one. Any second now she would be far enough away to risk running for help.

Wend reached inside the glass cupboard and gently, almost reverently, picked up a small gold statue that was standing there among vases, salt cellars, rings and other golden objects. While Wend turned to her holding the statue in both hands—she could see it was heavy—Maewen craned to see the label it had been standing on.

F
IGURE OF KING OR NOBLE
(
GOLD
).

P
REHISTORIC
. O
RIGIN UNKNOWN
.

“This is the image of the One that my family once guarded,” Wend said. The radio on his belt beeped as he spoke. He frowned. “Would you take this to your father for me? Someone wants me.”

He held the small golden image out. It was the ideal excuse for going away. Maewen reached out gladly and took hold of the image in both hands. The thing was so worn and old that all you could say of it was that it had once had a face and wore a long sort of poncho robe, but the instant she touched it she had the queer doing-wrong feeling worse than before. Her teeth ached with it, and her hair tried to lift. She snatched her hands away. But by then the pins and needles were worse down her hands and legs and through her face. It seemed to affect her eyes, so that the long empty room grew foggy, and her ears, so that she could only dimly hear Wend's beeping radio.

6

The fogginess was cold as well as thick. Maewen lost all sense of direction. She staggered and found her sandals were getting wet in short grass beaded with fog drops. It felt icy. “Oh—ouch!” she cried out.

Her voice had the unechoing clarity of somewhere outside—and high up, too, she thought, having been brought up among mountains. Anyway it was nothing like the woody, stony echoes inside the museum gallery. She looked up and around in a panic. Everything was mist, thick white mist, except for—thank goodness!—one pink streak of dawn over to the right. And there was something dark ahead through the mist. Maewen took a couple of excruciating cold, wet strides toward the dark thing, enough to numb her feet, and found the thing was a round stone a little higher than her waist with a hole in the middle. A waystone? It was only about a tenth the size of the one outside the station in Kernsburgh, but she supposed that was what it might be.

She stood shivering in her scanty summer shorts and shirt, staring at the stone resentfully. It's real! she thought. Wend tricked me! I'm in shock! I'm going to die of exposure, and I haven't the
faintest
idea where I am! Or
when
!

Here she noticed that the pins and needles feeling was no longer with her. It had been replaced—some seconds ago, now she thought about it—by a much better feeling, a feeling that everything was going to be all right. Well, I hope so! she thought. I
could
scream, only there doesn't seem to be anyone around to hear.

She began to feel definitely warmer.

She looked down in time to see her sandals closing over and growing up her legs into stout-looking boots. Her shorts were growing downward into felty, rather baggy trousers that tucked into the boots. A faint jingling alerted her to the fact that her shirt was also growing, and multiplying, into linked mail with one thinnish shirt under it and another, thicker one on top. A heaviness on her head caused her hand to leap up there. She touched metal. She now had a light domed helmet on.

She felt a mad, hilarious pleasure. I'm a warrior maid! I'm changing into a fighting girl under my own eyes—what I can see of myself! Her feet were still frozen inside the boots, and her hands were no warmer, but she nevertheless had a warm, cared-for feeling. Something—the golden statue?—was looking after her.

There was another jingling over to the right. Maewen whirled like a wild animal. The jingling mixed with a
pruff
of breath, a sound that she knew very well. She moved warily over that way, jingling herself. Sure enough, looming out of the mist, dark against the pink stripe of dawn, was a horse, standing patiently waiting for someone. Not a bad horse, though rather shaggy, as far as she could see, and it was saddled and bridled, with a roll of baggage behind the saddle. It turned and blew steamy breath at Maewen as if it knew her.

Maewen had not realized how much she had been missing horses. Almost by reflex, she gathered in the reins, put her foot in the stirrup, and swung up into the saddle. Ouch! Effort! The mail and the boots were
heavy
. It was only when she was up that it occurred to her that the horse almost certainly belonged to someone else. What did they do to you for horse stealing? Oh well. Say I'm awfully sorry, there was this thick fog and I thought it was mine. Would that work? It felt so much better to be mounted that she hardly cared. Deal with the owner when we meet her. She reined around toward the little waystone and tried to make out where she was.

The mist was clearing gradually, downward, dropping into a valley below the stone, but that was still all she could see. “Hello?” she said uncertainly.

“Oh—your pardon, lady. I never heard you come.”

Maewen bunched herself, again with wild-animal wariness, as a tall man unfolded himself from where he had been sitting against the other side of the waystone and bowed to her, hastily and politely. When he straightened up, she saw he was Wend. She went warier than ever. His hair was a good deal longer, grown into wavy whitish ringlets that were not very well combed, which altered the shape of his face somewhat, and instead of the neat uniform she had seen him in a few minutes ago, he was wearing patched and baggy woolens with an old sheepskin jacket on top. The sort of clothes, Maewen thought, that a poor shepherd might have worn two hundred years ago. She stared at Wend, wondering if she really was in the past. And does he know me? Does he think I'm Whatshername?

Wend stared back with the usual grave politeness. “I am Wend, lady,” he said. “If you remember, we met before.” So he
does
know me, Maewen thought. “And I am here to follow you from waystone to waystone along the royal road, until you come to Hern's city of gold and claim your rightful crown.”

He's briefing me, Maewen thought, and so he should—tricking me into pretending to be this Northeen, or whatever she's called! The trouble was Wend still made her fizz with embarrassment. He spoke in a very strong Northern accent, of the kind that Mum and Aunt Liss always objected to when Maewen spoke that way. It seemed quite natural to Wend, but she had heard him speak quite normally only a minute ago, and she could not get over the feeling he was putting on an act. It irritated her. “I think I need to know a bit more than that,” she said angrily.

Wend bowed humbly, which irritated Maewen even more. “True, lady. Then I will tell you what no one else knows. I am the one they call the Wanderer, and I keep the green roads—”

He stopped talking and looked over his shoulder. There was a brisk jingling of tack below and nearby. Maewen once more bunched up like a wary wild animal and watched two more riders scramble uphill out of the fog. They seemed to bring the fog with them, fog of their own breath, fog of their horses' breath, and fill the air with their presence.

“Good morning, Noreth,” said the smaller of the two. “You got ahead of us very quickly. We were hoping to ride up with you.” He was riding a truly magnificent mare. His clothes were like the ones Maewen had so recently acquired, mail coat and cap and all, except that on this man they had a neater, wealthier look. Maewen was shocked to find that she knew his face. She had last seen those clear-cut ruthless features staring over a painted shoulder out of the portrait of the Duke of Kernsburgh.

It gave her a vivid, physical shock, like touching a live wire. Up to then Maewen had not really believed she had been sent two hundred years into the past. But here was a live man, breathing out warm, live, foggy breath, whom she
knew
to have been dead for well over a century. It made it real. It made it much more frightening. She looked rather frantically across at the taller rider, wondering if she would know him, too. He was young and gawky and obviously in the middle of growing even taller. His clothes, which were quite neat, too, sat on him as if they were his best clothes and he was used to wearing something much scruffier. And his horse looked villainous.

He was a total stranger, but Maewen's feelings about that changed from relief to dismay when this young one smiled at her. He smiled in a cheerful, friendly way, with just a touch of shyness, as if he knew her quite well. And she had simply no idea who he was. O great
One
! she thought. Why hasn't Wend
warned
me about these people?

She looked at Wend, waiting humbly by the way-stone, but had to look back when the man with clear-cut features spoke again. “As you see,” he said, “Mitt and I have come to be your followers on the royal road.”

Maewen was thrown into confusion again. He sounded so sarcastic. It was just the way a man like this one
would
speak—and it made her feel about five years old. But it was a double confusion. She suddenly found she had no idea
when
this was. She had been assuming, in a muddled and buried way, that she had been bounced into this Noreth woman's place somewhere halfway to Kernsburgh. But from what this man said, she could be right at the start of Noreth's journey from the North. It gave her a low, grinding sort of worry to add to all the other things. Among the other things was the thought, If Kankredin got to Noreth
that
early, how soon will he get to
me
? And a slightly more trivial thought, but just as worrying, was that this man on the fine mare was not going to be made Duke of Kernsburgh until some years on in Amil the Great's reign. If she was Noreth and at the start of Noreth's journey, then Amil the Great was somewhere else in Dalemark and nowhere near being King yet. So this man was not Duke of Kernsburgh yet. And she had no idea what to call him. At least she now knew the younger one was called Mitt.