The Crown of Dalemark (19 page)

Maewen said, “Now you're being ridiculous, Moril. I shan't listen to you if you're going to talk like that.”

Mitt thought it was nice of her, but he was not in the least mollified. As the mist began to thin to a moist yellow, and Navis shouted back that there was a good place to stop for a nuncheon, Mitt thought, If that little sneak says
one more thing
! He towed the Countess-horse out of the mist to find everyone else sitting on wet rocks unpacking bread, cheese, and pickled cherries. Here, the ravine with the lakes had opened into what was almost a meadow. The horses moved about in it, trying to crop the grass, half hidden in golden shifting mist that might have been the top of a cloud.

The bread was stale. Everyone ate quickly and packed up again. “We're at the highest point the green roads go, lady,” Wend told Maewen. “From now on it is down toward Gardale.”

“Oh good,” she said. “Real food. If I eat one more pickled cherry, I might scream. Or does anyone know a way to cook them to make a change?”

“I might have a notion,” Mitt said. “On a skewer, like, with cheese and a bit of that bacon.”

They were all moving about, getting ready to go on. Moril gave Maewen a meaning look as he went toward the cart. “See what I mean? Sucking up to you.”

Mitt went after Moril with giant strides, roaring, “You take that back, you little slime-bag!”

Moril turned round against the tail of the cart. He was prepared. He was holding his cwidder in front of him like a shield. “What should I take back?” he said coolly. “
Didn't
someone order you to suck up to her?”

There was enough shrewd truth in this to make Mitt even angrier. The cwidder made a poor, fragile shield, but a year in Aberath had taught Mitt the value of a beautiful old instrument like that. He knew it was less of a sin to break Moril instead. “You little coward!” he said, grabbing for Moril's arm.

Moril swung aside and tried to pluck a chord on the cwidder. Mitt's hand, lashing out in what was now the wrong direction, hit the strings as Moril's fingers plucked them. The cwidder boomed. It was a mighty chord, and it seemed to boom on and on. Mitt felt the hairs on his outstretched arm stand upright. What Moril felt he had no idea, but he felt something strongly. There was shock all over his white face. To Mitt it was as if he had just punched a cwidder made of solid granite.

Then they were both in rushing cold water up to the shoulders.

The other four travelers scrambled for the panicking animals. Wend seized the mule's bridle on the other side from Hestefan, and together they hauled mule and cart through the rushing shallows and out onto the strip of turf beside the rocks. The three horses were all farther in. Maewen was soaked all over as Mitt's horse floundered past her and galloped away down the bank, but she managed to catch her own before it followed Mitt's. Navis was just beyond her, soothing his mare while he dragged her through rolling stones and racing current. Maewen and he made it to the cliffside almost together, where they turned, both dripping, and stared at a sudden mighty river where there had only been grass before.

The river was a good half mile wide and one of those tricky, spiteful stretches of water, full of upreared rocks and vicious back eddies, flowing with a force that made it hard to stand up in. Mitt and Moril were a long way out in it, much farther away than Maewen had expected, staggering this way and that and, as far as she could see, still screaming insults at one another in spite of it. At the moment when she looked, they were submerged to Moril's shoulders and Mitt's chest. Moril had his cwidder held high in both hands. He was raising a bubbling wave of water under his chin as he pushed and surged, and almost fell sideways into a hidden pothole, trying to make his way to the nearest big rock. She could hear Mitt's voice faintly through the incredible noise of the water, roaring at Moril.

“Stop them, somebody!” she said.

Mitt surged after Moril, grabbing angrily. The result was that Mitt went sideways into the same hidden pothole and vanished underwater. He emerged almost at once, flailing sheets of spray and yelling with rage.

“A bit hard to do anything from here,” Navis observed.

Moril made it to the rock. He put the cwidder carefully down on a dry space and, scrabbling and hauling, managed to drag himself onto the rock, too, brown and skinny with wet as a drowned weasel. Mitt was still in the water with a white wave frilling round his neck. Moril knelt on the rock and called down at him derisively.

“If you want to stop this,” Hestefan said, coming up beside Navis, “someone must go and take that cwidder away. It's a thing of great power. Moril ought not to be trusted with the thing.”

Navis shrugged. “Really? I should never have guessed. And how do you suggest we remove the cwidder? But while you consider that problem, please do not underestimate Mitt. I have reason to believe he can call on power of his own.”

Maewen thought both of them were being utterly unfeeling. She looked at Wend for help. Wend was pale, subdued, and awe-stricken. “It's not for any of us to interfere, lady,” he said. “They have put themselves in the hands of the One himself.”

“O-oh!” Maewen said.
“Fiddlestick!”

She looked helplessly out at that distant rock.

Out there, up to the neck in racing river, Mitt said, “What do you mean, look what I made you do? Of all the feeble, wingeing things to say! It's
your
flaming cwidder that did this!”

To his surprise Moril seemed quite ashamed. But his white face remained mulishly set. “I meant the rest of it,” he said. “You try to get on this rock, and I'll kick you off!”

“And a fat lot of good it's going to do us, each squatting on a different rock!” Mitt bawled up at him. “We got into this river together. It stands to reason it's going to take both of us to get out.”

Moril looked from bank to bank of the improbable river. Mitt had already looked. He knew water. He had been brought up with it, both fresh and salt, and it was kind of instinctive with him. He hoped what Moril saw would bring him to his senses. Wisps of fog hung over the shrilling water, making it hard to see far, but it was possible to pick out a sheer, dark cliff on either side. Trees clung to niches in the cliffs here and there, so high that at first glance they looked like bushes. And those were the only other living things in sight. There was no sign of Navis, Hestefan, and Wend, or of the horses and the mule. As he discovered this, Moril's face unbunched into wide-eyed alarm.

Good, Mitt thought. His teeth were beginning to chatter, and this river scared him badly. He knew it. He had seen it before while he sat with Noreth by the way-stone above Adenmouth. This one had the same smell, the same feel to it, and the thing which scared him most was that it did not seem to exist. “Listen,” Mitt called up to Moril, “I'll give you my life history if it makes you feel better. I know you hate us Southerners—I heard what you said to Noreth—but I swear to Ammet you got no reason to hate me!”

Moril went on hands and knees and leaned down to look at him. Mitt actually had hopes that Moril was going to help him scramble up, until Moril said, “Yes, I knew you'd listen in. I was trying to annoy you.”

Mitt roared with frustration. “Flaming Ammet! What's wrong with you? I think your
mind's
mixed up! You behave like the whole world's out to get you!”

That got home to Moril. He was pinched and staring and hurt for the time it took to draw breath, but then he went calm again. “And you're jealous,” he said. “I meant you to be.”

Jealous? The word seemed to take all the heat out of Mitt's body. He felt as cold as the water rushing round him. An instant later the heat came back, tenfold. He could feel his face burning above the frill of water round his chin. He was surprised the frill didn't start to steam. He tried to tell himself that he hadn't a clue why one word should affect him like this, but if one of his own words could affect Moril as badly, why not? Moril's mind
was
mixed up. And Mitt had a thousand clues about his own condition: Rith's cheerful freckly face and man-to-man way of talking and then Noreth, the young lady in the fashionable dress who was so nervous about what she had to do, and then the girl trying to hold them all together on the road. As soon as he picked up these clues, Mitt could look up into Moril's pinched and greenish face and see that some part of the mix-up in Moril's mind was the same thing. The same clues were there. They had both been unhappy. They had both fallen at the same young lady's feet. Both of us! Mitt thought bitterly. How flaming
stupid
!

“All right!” he shouted up at Moril. “So I am jealous! So are you! Calf love, they call it. And it's not going to get either of us
anywhere
!”

A surge of pink swept across Moril's face. He blinked. “I … wasn't only angry about that,” he said.

“Neither was I!” Mitt shouted back. “Let me come up, and let's have it out, shall we?”

To Mitt's extreme relief, Moril at last held out a thin wet hand to help him up. Gripping it, Mitt hauled himself upward, skidding and slipping and clawing at the rock with his other hand. His boots weighed like lead, and the sodden leather of his clothes seemed to have the whole river in them. As Mitt floundered onto the top of the boulder, dripping and panting, Moril hurriedly crouched in front of his cwidder.

“Don't get it wet!”

That made sense. If the cwidder was spoiled, they would be in this for good. Mitt stood at the edge of the rock and let the water course and sluice and trickle off him where it did no harm. He was freezing, but to his surprise the air was warm. He could see himself beginning to steam as he said, “Well then. What's biting you?”

Moril bent his head and fiddled with some pebbles lodged in a crack of the boulder. “I—It's not that I
think
the whole world's out to get me. I
know
the whole South is. I … killed an awful lot of them last year.”

“What? With that cwidder?” said Mitt.

Moril nodded. “When they tried to invade the North. It can move mountains. I closed Flennpass.”

“You did Noreth a favor then,” Mitt said. “In advance like. They can't get at her till she's ready, and from what I heard she can come down at them on the sheep tracks whenever she wants.”

He looked down at Moril's head, wet and brown, feeling almost sympathetic until Moril said, “You don't understand. I don't dare go near Dropwater—it's so full of Southerners—and I've no proof that you and Navis haven't been sent to kill me. Almost the only person I can
trust
is Hestefan.”

“Get away!” said Mitt. “I heard you tell Noreth what friends you are with Earl Keril. That's what got me mad.”

“Yes, but he treats me like—like a child,” Moril said. “And I'd done something so … awful I needed to go away and work it out for myself.”

“Just as long as you don't have your workout on me,” Mitt said. “You don't look much of a child to me if that's any comfort to you. How old
are
you?”

“I shan't be thirteen for another month,” Moril said regretfully. “How old are you?”

“Fifteen come Harvest,” said Mitt.

“I thought you were more than that,” Moril said, marveling. “You come from a slum somewhere, don't you? You've got that old-and-young look they all have in Holand and places. But I thought you were at least as old as my brother.”

“Comes of earning a living as soon as you can walk,” Mitt answered. “But then I reckon that applies to both of us.”

From there it was the most natural step for Mitt to sit down on the edge of the boulder and swing his soggy boots above the streaming water while he told Moril about his life in Holand and his journey North and then about the Countess and Keril. Moril frowned at this. “I like Keril,” he said, dubious and thoughtful. “Could he be up to something deep?”

“No,” said Mitt. “No deeper than he wants Noreth out of the way before she can get to be Queen.”

Moril's face came alight, the way it had when he talked to Noreth in the fog. “She
must
be Queen! It's like the old stories, like Enblith and Tanamoril. I want to help her. I know the old things are still true.”

“Well, well,” said Mitt. “You make me feel old. Here was I going to say that the country needs bringing together because the North is poor as an empty barrel full of mice—let's face it—and the South is rich—or it would be if those earls didn't take it all. Noreth wants to do that, so I'm for her. Very dull and political.”

Moril laughed. “So you ride off in the night, like an old story, to steal her the Adon's ring.”

“As to that,” Mitt said, knowing his face had gone hot, “it proved I wasn't going to stick a knife in her, didn't it?”

“That made me jealous,” Moril said frankly. “You must let me steal her the cup. Anyway, I'm dull and political, too. She said she thought the Singers ought to be paid by the Queen to stay in one place and make better music than they can going round in a cart. A royal academy, she said. I like that idea.”

“She's got good ideas,” Mitt agreed. “I really loved the way she settled those miners. All right. So we're both on the same side. Are you feeling happy enough about it to think how we get out of this river?”