The Crown of Dalemark (29 page)

To her huge relief, nothing fizzed. Everyone's dim faces were turned to the cup. After a moment or so Maewen realized they were looking at the way her hands looked dark against it, darker than natural. The cup seemed to have grown brighter. Yes. It had. It was filling with a spreading gentle blue glow, shining like a blue lamp in the near dark, making her hands look bloodred against it. It was so beautiful, and so welcome, that her eyes filled with tears.

Several people let breath out noisily. “It is the cup,” Wend said. “It knows you as it knew the Adon.”

Well, thank the One! Maewen thought as she wrapped the thing up again.

Under the friendly rustling of the rowans and birches, they all slept well. But toward dawn, around the time when the pouring of the stream began to sound less soothing and more like a noise, and people began to turn and shift because the grass was flat and the bones of the earth came through, Mitt had a strange dream. There was danger in it, and wonder, and the two were mixed up confusingly.

It began with him looking down on the camp from above. He saw the silver cup glowing and another, yellower glow nearby. After a while he knew the yellow glow was from the golden statue. It was very important. Mitt looked at it and thought, Noreth won't need it so much now. I can have my share. But that was not why it was important. Mitt puzzled over this, until his attention was distracted by finding he could see the green roads winding away from the camp. While he was looking at them, he dreamed he was back in the camp, lying under his blanket, dreaming he was looking at the green roads.

He dreamed and looked at the roads with interest. They went in all directions, snaking among the mountains, linking place to place. He could see them all, right down past Dropwater to Kernsburgh and beyond that, into the North Dales and on into the South. Yes, there had been green roads that led through the South, but they were not kept up any longer. Things moved over them, keeping them hidden, dangerous things. But they had been meant to cover all Dalemark.

Mitt dreamed that he would have been happier about seeing it all if the roads had not kept coming back to him, lying under the rowan trees and in danger. Since the idea of danger made him impatient, he turned his attention out again, to the roads, gray under late yellow moonlight, and took a look at the people traveling on them. Quite a few people were up early or traveling through the night. Hildy was one. She and Biffa were riding, a long way over toward that smoking mountain, nearly into Ansdale already. Kialan was riding, too, well on the way to Hannart. This meant danger. That troubled Mitt, so he looked North, where the young Singer who was Moril's brother was up early and hastening toward Adenmouth. Beyond, and coming toward Dagner, there were more riders. These meant danger, too.

There was a black patch of danger centered on the camp under the rowan trees.

Mitt ignored it obstinately and kept watching the roads. He saw the Undying moving on them, too, unnoticed by ordinary people. They looked so much like ordinary people that Mitt wondered how he knew they were Undying. But he knew King Hern, coming down the King's Way to build Kernsburgh, though King Hern looked like a gawky boy only about Mitt's age, and he knew Manaliabrid, hurrying into exile with the Adon and a small boy who was the Adon's son. The Adon turned out to be a short man, much more like Navis than Mitt expected, and Manaliabrid had a strong look of Noreth about her. Wend was with them, to Mitt's surprise, looking much the same.

Now he knew he was dreaming. So it did not surprise him that the green roads were winding away into the past. He lay and marveled at the way they turned back and forth through history, up to the present, into the place where he lay in such danger, and then went winding and snaking on into the far future. The Undying went walking on, taking the roads through time, and history went with them, ignoring them, forgetting the Undying were making history. He watched the roads snake out again into the South, and battles, and other strange things. He would have enjoyed watching more, if the roads had not kept on winding back into the rowan trees and showing him Noreth was a danger.

“No,” Mitt said to his dream. “She may be
in
danger, but she's not
a
danger.”

And the dream kept telling him, “Not Noreth. You.”

“Ah, come on!
She's
all right,” Mitt told the dream. “If there's any danger, it's those earls.”

Then he woke into white mist with gray trees like shadows in it, feeling very irritable and rather frightened.

Everyone else seemed annoyingly refreshed. When Wend asked Maewen, “Where to next, lady?” she answered cheerfully, “To get the Adon's sword.”

“Then we go toward Dropwater,” Wend said.

When the road branched at the next waystone, they took the right-hand branch and found themselves almost at once in the stony bottom of a vast valley. It dwarfed everyone. Sweeps of hill rose on either side, barren, and curved tight as a wind-filled sail. Mitt supposed he was put in mind of sails because the wind streamed in this valley, with a sour sort of whistling, as hard as he had ever known it at sea. Like wind at sea, it kept sweeping bands of misty rain across them, which made the barren hills look even more harsh and empty. They look stretched, Mitt thought, staring up at the bare yellowness, through little itching raindrops. A vision came to him of the One, immeasurably huge, taking the hard rocky edge of this land and pulling until it was so tight it would stretch no more. Rivers, rocks, and creatures went tumbling and rolling as the One pulled—

Mitt shivered and hunched into his jacket. He had a dim memory that he might have seen something like this in his dream. He put it, and the idea of danger, resolutely out of his mind. It did no good to get nervous fancies.

It was a drear day's ride and a cheerless camp that night, which could not have been more of a contrast to the camp under the rowan trees. The wind came from all directions. The flames of the fire blew out raggedly, making more smoke than warmth, and the smoke seemed to follow you about wherever you sat. Everyone, even Moril and Hestefan in the cart, rolled themselves in all the coats, cloaks, and blankets they could muster, but nobody slept very well. The wind seemed to get in everywhere. Mitt was so cold that he got up almost before it was light. It had rained again, and everything he had was damp. Since it did not seem to matter how much colder or wetter he got, he went off to wash in the stream beyond the pile of boulders where the horses were. It was a cheerless little stream, clattering down through gray stones with a sound like teeth chattering.

The sound of his going woke Maewen. She rolled up into the gray day, moaning. She had never been so cold or so damp in her life. The one good thing was that her stomach had stopped aching. As if the green roads cured you, she thought as she stumbled off to the latrine beyond the horses. She came back to find everyone else huddled in dead heaps. This was depressing. She went back to the boulders and started to attend to the horses.

She was alone. The deep voice spoke to her at once. “I have considered,” it said. “Your way is now clear before you.”

“Is it indeed?” said Maewen. “Welcome back. Where were you when I needed you to warn me about the
other
man with a knife?”

At the stream Mitt discovered that it
was
possible to be colder. The water was icy. It must have been snowmelt from some high mountain out of sight from here. The bits of him he could bear to dip in turned blue. He washed in a hurry, with great splashings and snortings, and put his clothes back on quickly. The sun was up by then. It was no wonder he was cold, Mitt saw. The stream was in deep blue shadow. But there was misty yellow sunlight on the boulders. Shivering all over, Mitt went over there to get warm.

He could hear Noreth talking on the other side of the rocks, and a deep voice answering her. So Hestefan or Wend was up. Mitt went cheerfully round the boulders.

“You were in no danger. Help was at hand whether I warned you or not,” the deep voice said.

Mitt stood, confounded. Noreth was brushing Navis's mare and entirely on her own. He could see Wend, still asleep by the dead fire in the distance. Navis was the other hump. And Hestefan was just crawling out of the cart.

She said the One spoke to her, Mitt thought. But I never really believed it till now. He backed quietly away behind the boulders so that Noreth would not think he was prying and stood in the sun there. But he could still hear both voices.

Maewen said, “I'm not going down into the dales anymore. I'm staying up on the green roads. Wend says I'm safe here.”

“You are not safe here,” said the deep voice.

There was a pause. “Why not?” came Noreth's voice. She sounded quite calm. Mitt was not to know Maewen was shaking all over. He was thinking he had better back away some more, out of hearing, when the deep voice answered.

“The Southern youth you call Mitt,” it said, “is the worst danger you have encountered yet. You must kill him before he destroys you.”

After this Mitt could no more have moved than he could have flown.

“But Mitt
rescued
me from the second murderer,” Maewen protested.

“For his own ends,” said the voice. “And this Mitt will not be easy to kill while the man Navis is alive. Navis will defend Mitt for
his
own ends. For this reason I advise you to kill them both at the same time.”

“You can't mean this!” Maewen said.

“After you have found the Adon's sword, both of them are expendable,” said the voice. “Stab them as they sleep, the night before you reach Kernsburgh.”

“Really?” said Maewen. “And what about Wend and Moril and Hestefan? Are they expendable, too?”

“I told you,” the voice replied imperturbably, “you will need the Singer-boy to find you the crown. After that, he will be as much of a liability as the Southerners, and you may stab him as soon as you have an opportunity.”

“You're asking me”—said Maewen; she was trying not to giggle, even though it was not funny at all—“you're asking me to arrive at Kernsburgh with nothing but a pile of corpses.”

“You will be joined there by a sizable army. Display the bodies as the bodies of traitors and explain that all traitors to the crown must suffer the same fate.”

“Thanks a bunch!” said Maewen. “That's quite a program!”

“Do as I say,” said the voice, and the deep notes of it made both Mitt and Maewen shudder, “or fail, and die yourself.”

There was silence then. Mitt stood where he was until he heard vigorous horse-grooming noises from the other side of the boulders. Then he did his best to walk casually over to the camp. Nobody there seemed to notice that he was shaking all over. But they were all cold and all shivering.

Breakfast was nasty. There was no decent bread. The outsides of all the cheeses had gone moldy. Almost the only thing eatable was the pickled cherries, and Mitt discovered that he hated them by now.

They moved on up the stretched and windy valley, and neither Mitt nor Maewen spoke to anyone much that morning.

Maewen's thoughts were chaos.
Was
it the One who spoke to her? Or was it just a time-confused part of her own mind, reacting with violence to the violence she had met in Gardale? There was no doubt she had been in danger from
someone
. Or if it was the One, he was angry. Those he had singled out—Mitt and Moril had tried to steal the cup, and Navis had taken it. She had known during the song that Navis had done something awful. It might be because of the cup. But it did not really matter
what
spoke or why. It hurt. Maewen's head was now full of nasty suspicions of Navis, Mitt, and Moril. Right back at the beginning of this ride, she had seen that each of them had come to follow her for their own secret reasons, and Mitt and Navis had shown her some of those reasons in Gardale. It was Hildy who was important to them. That hurt.

Oh, I want to go
home
! Maewen thought this so strongly that she almost said it aloud. In fact, she did utter a sort of noise, which caused Hestefan and his mule, who happened to be alongside her just then, both to turn and look at her. But no sooner had she almost said it than she saw she did not quite mean it. She wanted to find out what had happened to Noreth and to try to change history, even though she knew now that one of those three was going to do her some terrible harm. Correction.
Mitt
was going to do her some terrible harm. Navis was a cool customer, Moril was a deep one, and he had that cwidder, but Mitt was the one who did things. The knowledge made her throat ache, as if Mitt had tried to strangle her—and maybe he
had,
at the inn in Gardale.

Mitt kept thinking, This is a
laugh
! The One was playing games with him. Or he had it in for Mitt, which was much more likely. Mitt wanted to ride away from the whole mess. It would be lovely to settle down on a farm, somewhere near enough the South to be like what he was used to, and leave the One to stew. But he needed his half of the golden statue for that, and Noreth was not likely to part with it now. Not now she knew Mitt had been told to kill her. Anyway, he had to stay with her until Kernsburgh. If Hildy was safe, Ynen was not, and Kialan might not manage to bring Ynen there after all. He would have laughed at the mess if he'd felt like laughing. Meanwhile, he had to warn Navis and Moril somehow. And talking of warnings, that dream had been a warning, hadn't it just!