The Crown of Dalemark (31 page)

“But,” said Moril, “this morning she was sounding sarcastic, rather the way your Navis does.”

“Maybe, but she'll do it in the end,” Mitt said. “Don't you see? He works her along, like you said. He tells her she's got to be Queen and she's the One's daughter, and she sets out to ride for the crown. For all we know, she's got no claim at all. Alk thought not. It means this whole ride is a load of old crab apples.”

“So what should we do?” Moril asked.

Mitt smiled his most unfunny smile. “It looks as if I better do what the Countess and your Keril wanted in the first place. Kill her somehow. It's a laugh!”

It was a horrible thing to say. Mitt almost choked on it, thinking of Noreth's nervous, freckly look—which seemed to get to him more now he knew her so much better—and how plain frightened she had been when that man attacked her in the Lawschool. He was still surprised at how
very
frightened she had been. She would be the same, or worse, when she found Mitt after her.

He was fervently relieved when Moril said, firmly and quietly, “No.”

“But she's got to be stopped,” Mitt protested hopefully.

“Yes, but if she's dead,” Moril said, “won't Kankredin just move on to somebody else? Somebody who's more—you know—ruthless?”

Like Navis, Mitt thought. That would be worse. The idea snapped his brain clean out of the bind Keril and the Countess seemed to have put on it. “Then it's Kankredin we ought to go after.” This was the way Old Ammet had been trying to make him think, he realized. “Can this cwidder of yours do anything there?”

Moril put his chin on his knees and twiddled the last crust of his bread while he thought. “It's got to be truth,” he said. “I think, if we could catch him talking to her again, I could make him appear in his true shape. Would that be enough?”

“Could be just right!” Mitt said. “I've a name or two up my sleeve I could use as long as I know where he is.”

Moril put the crust of bread in his mouth. “I hoped you might have,” he said, munching it. “There are stories about you.”

They got up and dusted off crumbs. “Don't give Kankredin any kind of hint,” Mitt said.

“What do you take me for?” said Moril. They smiled at one another, conspirators, but not at all happy about it.

Mitt thought, as they walked back between the rustling corn, The worst of it is, if it goes wrong. I might have to kill her, anyway. The hot sun seemed to weigh on him. He felt as if he was in mourning already.

The others were waiting impatiently under the ash tree. They said, almost in chorus, “Where
were
you?” The rest of the bad gray bread had been tipped into the ditch. Mitt and Moril looked at it guiltily.

“We got lost,” Moril said. “I think we ought to stop at a farm for more bread.”

“Teach your grandmother,” said Maewen. Mitt could see her, as they mounted and rode on, looking from him to Moril and wondering what they had been plotting. She had her nervous, freckly look. He knew he ought to do something about it, but the Countess-horse was balky in the heat and kept Mitt busy wrestling with it all through the long, blazing afternoon. Despite his warning to Moril, Mitt kept wanting to tell the horse, Cheer up! Come Kernsburgh, you could be carrying my dead body! He could see himself, too, dead hands trailing on one side, limp boots swinging on the other, and the whole thing starting to smell in the heat. He had to keep biting his tongue not to say it.

Maewen and he did not say one word to each other until they were camped that night—in a proper field with cowpats in it, near a farm. While Wend and Navis were away at the farm, buying bread, and Mitt and Maewen were doing the horses, Mitt took a deep breath and said, “Are we not on speaking terms or something?”

She jumped and turned to him gratefully. “Yes. Probably. You didn't have to wait under that tree and listen to Navis and Hestefan being sarky to one another.”

Though Mitt knew there was much more to it than that, he said, “If you shoot someone's horse, he's not likely to love you. Mind you,” he added, watching Hestefan fussily washing down the wheels of the cart, “if that Hestefan wasn't a Singer, he'd be teaching school and living alone in a house with the door barred.”

“Yes! Wouldn't he!” Maewen said, quite delighted.

They chatted lightheartedly after that, until they saw Wend and Navis returning with cans of milk and armfuls of cheese and bread. Maewen said guiltily, “Oh dear. I bet Navis paid for it all. I hate the way we seem to be living off him.”

Mitt's attitude to money was much more carefree. “Well, we can't hardly wave a golden statue at them,” he said.

It was the wrong thing to say. She gave him a nervous, freckly look and went off to meet Navis. Mitt sighed. All the same, he and Moril took good care never to be far away from Maewen in case the voice spoke to her again. But nothing happened that night.

When they went on next morning, they found the farms thinning out again, giving way to more and more bracken and tumbled rocks. The Shield here descended slightly in a series of waves, downward toward Dropwater and the coast, and the green road went with it, up and over and down, up and over and down. The warm, itchy rain came over in waves, too. You could look back and see each white shower traveling back along the way you had come, up and up and up, like a ghost going upstairs, until it was lost in the high green distance.

In the middle of the afternoon Mitt was looking back after the latest shower, having watched it as it came climbing up and swept over them, when he thought he could see a darkish blot, right up at the top, where the road and the rain went out of sight. Next time he looked, the blot was more definite, wavering forward in the high distance.

“Ay-ay,” he said. “Looks like there might be a troop of horses coming down behind.”

Heads snapped round. Hestefan and Moril leaned out on either side of the cart. It was what everyone had been dreading.

“Looks to be at least twenty,” Wend said.

“In good order,” said Navis. “Quite a body of hearthmen, I would say. Can anyone see what livery?”

“Too far off,” said Hestefan.

“But coming quite fast,” said Moril.

“And they must have seen us,” said Navis, “if we can see them.” He turned to Wend. “Is there anywhere we can get off this road while we're in a dip and they can't see us?”

Wend's solemn face twisted anxiously. “Not for some miles.”

“Then get in the cart,” said Navis. “Let's get there as fast as we can.”

Wend took three running strides and heaved himself over the tailgate of the cart. Hestefan whipped up the mule. The cart set off rattling up the next rise, and the rest of them kept pace. It was maddeningly slow to Maewen. The mule was trying, but the cart was heavy, and it slowed down over every long, undulating rise. She grew a crick in her neck from looking back. The horse-men were gaining steadily. Every time she looked, there were fewer hills between them. Before long, they could tell that there were, in fact, only about fifteen of them. But as Mitt said, that was quite enough against six.

“Perhaps they aren't after us at all,” Maewen said hopefully.

“Would you bet on that?” Navis asked. “Between us we have stolen a cup and a ring and attempted to start an uprising. I
wish
I could see the livery. That would give us a clue.”

And
stolen a horse, Maewen thought guiltily, looking at the patient ears of the horse she had hoped was Noreth's. Would someone ride all the way from Adenmouth after a stolen horse in these days? She wished she knew.

“And someone may think we sneaked Hildy along,” Mitt said, with his head turned back over his shoulder.

“Are they Hannart?”

The rain was blinding over in white clouds. It was never possible to see the horsemen except as a wavering dark blur, but they saw them most of the time. When the cart was down in a dip, the blur was cresting a rise, and as the cart labored uphill, the pursuers had already been down in the next dip and were wavering into sight again. They came closer and closer.

Navis was looking off into what could be seen of the countryside. It rose steeper and steeper to the left and not so steep to the right. Most of it was covered in head-high bracken. If they did go off the road, the cart would make tracks in that bracken that a blind man could follow. “How much farther?” Navis snapped at Wend.

“Just down to the river,” Wend said anxiously. “Not far.”

By the time they came down the last slope to see a small river cutting across the green road, the horsemen were only three hills behind. They were almost invisible in what seemed to be a final cloud of rain. As the cart splashed into the moist edge of the river, weak sunlight traveled after the rain and made everything golden white.

“Stop a moment,” Wend called. He leaned out of the back of the cart. “Will you play your cwidder now?” he asked Moril.

Moril leaned out to look at him. “Does it matter what?”

“Yes.” Wend jumped down into squashy turf. “Play anything you can think of about the witch Cennoreth,” he said, going to the mule's head.

Moril wrenched the cover away from the cwidder and hurriedly plucked out the chorus to “The Weaver's Song”:

Thread the shuttle, throw the shuttle,

Weave the close-bound yarn.

As he moved on to the tune of the verses, Wend led mule and cart in a half circle, with much splashing and swaying, until it was facing up to the left, along the riverbank.

“Follow me upriver,” he said to the others, under the music.

They rode after him along the wet grassy verge, none of them very hopeful. The light was brighter and more golden than before. Mitt looked at the tracks of the cart and the prints the horses were leaving and thought that even in another shower of rain the riders behind could hardly miss them. Maewen wondered if Moril had got the music wrong in his hurry. She knew “The Weaver's Song,” and she had never known it had anything to do with the witch Cennoreth. Navis rode trying to look back up the green road, but the rise of the land cut off the view almost at once.

“This is going to take a miracle,” he murmured.

The lawnlike riverbank turned into a proper track, leading easily upward among bracken and rocks. As the cart clattered onto the higher, rockier part, they all distinctly heard the drumming of several dozen hooves, mixed with the rattle of tack and mail, and a few voices. Navis stopped his mare and, in a resigned way, fetched out his pistol and cocked it. Above, the cart went on, and Moril continued to play.

To everyone's amazement, the drumming of hooves barely paused. It slowed and broke into separate noises, but that was mixed with the splashing of water and the
clack
of rolled stones as the party crossed the river. Then the regular drumming took up again and faded off into the distance.

“Missed us!” Mitt said. He could hardly believe it.

“Let's hope they don't come back before we're out of sight,” Navis said, turning his mare back to the path.

Above the rocky section, the river was a mere stream, flowing out of a fair-sized lake, cupped inside steep black crags. The banks were squashy with marsh, but the path avoided it by mounting higher, among clumps of tall rushes. Maewen could not resist leaning sideways to trail her hand in the feathery heads. They were the scented kind of rushes. Clouds of strong pollen filled the air with a lovely smell, like nothing else she knew. Mitt sneezed. Navis pushed through the rushes in clouds of more pollen and caught up with the cart. Moril had stopped playing by then.

“Are you sure this is safe?” Navis asked Wend.

“Of course, sir,” Wend said. “This is Dropthwaite where my sister's croft is. No one can find us here.” He smiled in his pent-up way and pointed out into the lake where a number of fat white ducks were swimming beside a patch of white-flowering weed. “Those are my sister's ducks.” The way he smiled, Maewen thought he and his sister must have some private joke about them.

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