The Crown of Dalemark (13 page)

Holding that first conversation with Mitt was one of the hardest things Maewen had ever done. Long before they stopped for what Navis called “a nuncheon,” she could feel sweat starting in beads on her face. The air grew milder anyway, warm enough for Maewen to remember that this was, after all, Midsummer Day, but it was not that. It was the sheer difficulty of keeping her end up. She kept looking at Wend, hoping he would give her a hint or so, but Wend simply strode along, easily keeping up with Navis's mare, and said nothing to anyone. Maewen took this to mean that Wend was only going to come to her rescue if she made a really bad mistake.

In a way this was comforting because it meant she had not done anything really wrong yet, but it was frightening, too. She knew her face was a mass of dots, dots of freckle and dots of sweat. She hated herself like that. She kept sneaking looks at Mitt's long, bony profile, hoping he was not too disgusted.

Mitt usually turned and grinned at her. After a while Maewen realized that he was as flustered as she was. At first she thought it was because she was supposed to be Queen. Then Mitt said, “I'll tell you straight, Noreth. It came as a shock last night, finding out you were so old.”

Old! Maewen thought. Oh,
bother
these freckles! He must be at least fifteen! How old does he think I am? Eighteen, said her memory. Noreth went on her ride the Midsummer after she was eighteen. That would seem old to Mitt. “Don't hold it against me,” she said. “Please!”

Mitt laughed. “I'll try not to.”

This did not make the conversation any easier. Maewen was trying to find out who Mitt was—he had a dreadful Southern accent for someone so far north—and how he knew Noreth, and how he was connected with Navis, and why Moril disliked him so, and why Mitt talked as if he lived in Aberath, not Adenmouth, and what had made him come on this expedition, and Mitt would keep talking about that golden statue. His beastly horse did not help. It kept trying to bite her leg.

Each time Mitt hauled its head round and cursed it. “Stop that! I told you, you Countess, you!”

After about the sixth time, Maewen had to laugh. “It's a gelding. Why do you call it Countess?”

“I told you yesterday,” Mitt said, obviously surprised.

Help! “Oh, so you did,” Maewen said hurriedly.

It was like that all the time. But Maewen kept on, because she did need to know, feeling ridiculously flustered for someone riding in the clear open air with mountains slowly wheeling around them on all sides. And at last she seemed to have the story of the statue sorted out. Mitt and Noreth had found it together in the river Aden. Maewen frowned a little at this. There was that odd dream she had had in the train….

“And I need my share of the money,” Mitt told her. “I need it bad. It's to help Navis out, too, or I wouldn't keep nagging about it.”

Mitt believed in plain speaking, Maewen could see. She liked that, but it made her feel dishonest. “The statue is quite safe … honestly,” she repeated. She began to hope devoutly that the horse she was riding might have belonged to Noreth. It had been wandering by the way-stone. Noreth had meant to meet everyone there, and then she had been kidnapped, so it could have been her horse, if you supposed the kidnappers had hauled her into a carriage and turned the horse loose. If that was so, then the golden statue just
could
be in the roll of baggage behind the saddle.

They stopped to eat in a grassy bay surrounded by high rocks. Maewen made haste to lead her horse to one side across the moist green tender grass, where she hunted through that baggage roll, pretending to look for food. Food she found—bread, cheese, apples, and a fine small pie—though not very much of it, not nearly enough to last all the way to Kernsburgh. She found a clean undershirt and drawers and some socks. They were all her size, so it did begin to look as if this was indeed Noreth's horse, but there was no statue. What about this roll of blanket, then? It felt unpromisingly soft and light, but Maewen unrolled it all the same. As she did so, someone spoke, close beside her.

“You won't find the statue there. It has been stolen.”

It was a man's voice, deep and rather echoing. “What do you mean, stolen?” Maewen said, wondering how whoever it was knew. She looked round, expecting to find herself talking to Navis or Hestefan. She was confounded to see Hestefan many yards away, still dreamily sitting on the driver's seat of the cart, and Navis unsaddling his mare right on the other side of the green bay. It had not sounded like Wend. Wend was anyway sitting against the wheel of the cart, fetching a loaf out of his knapsack. Mitt was over beside Navis. Moril came crawling out of the cart beside Hestefan as she looked. Everyone was too far away to have spoken—unless of course one of them was a ventriloquist. Maewen looked up at the rocks, and all round, and then bent to look under the horse's belly. There was no one else. But the blanket came unrolled as she stooped, showing that it was nothing but blanket. There was no golden statue anywhere in this baggage.

“Who are you?” she said, keeping her eyes warily on all of the other five people. “Where are you? How do you know?”

She had spoken too softly for anyone to have heard her, and none of the others moved. But the voice answered her, seemingly out of the air beside her. “I am the one who has always advised you. And I can feel the statue near. One of those five has it.”

“Thanks very much!” Maewen rolled the blanket up. “I can't tell you how that sets my mind at rest!” She thought she was in a state of shock again. Her mind was whirring with it. Whoever had taken the statue could only have taken it from Noreth. Therefore, one of her companions must have helped kidnap Noreth, and that person knew Maewen was a fraud. Why had that person not said? Or was this voice lying?

“I am glad to find you so calm,” the voice said. “You speak like the Queen you will be.”

Calm! thought Maewen. She rammed the blanket and clothes back in the container and turned back across the grass, juggling pie and cheese and apple with hands that seemed too shaky to hold them.

Moril met her as she came. He was eating a large hunk of bread—one-handed, because his other hand was supporting that cwidder of his. Maewen had yet to see Moril put it down. It was as if it were part of him. She noticed now, without any surprise, that it was the same cwidder that had been in that portrait of Moril, the one that was in the glass case beside it. She was noticing everything just then. She felt like a hunted hare, wild big eyes staring. She noticed that Moril did have a scatter of freckles on his pale skin, rather like hers, only not so many. She noticed he was looking at her wonderingly.

“What's the matter?” he said with his mouth full. “Have you seen a ghost?”

“Yes—or I heard one at least,” Maewen said. “Out of the air. A man spoke.”

“I thought something happened,” Moril said. “I think I need to break my rule again. Just a second.” He bit off another mouthful of bread, tossed the rest down on the grass, and put both hands to the cwidder. For a moment he chewed and thought, and then he played a short run of mellow rippling chords.

Peace swept through Maewen, running like strength up her back and down her arms, and relaxing muscles in her face that she had not known were there. She found herself smiling dreamily, thinking that, whatever that voice had been, it had no way to harm her. “Thanks,” she said.

Moril left the cwidder humming and looked at her critically. “It was easy,” he said. “You're really quite a relaxed person.” And he added, very seriously, “Things do happen on the green roads. There are lots of stories.”

He bent to pick up his bread. Mitt and Navis sauntered over. Moril must have seen them out of the corner of his eye, because his face went blank and unfriendly, and he went away at once, back to Hestefan.

Maewen sat against the cartwheel to eat, looking out across broken rocks to blue-black mountains, in front of dun-colored mountains, with more jagged mountains beyond that, all under a heavy gray sky. She must get to know Moril, she thought. He had seemed to be one of those dreamy types, entirely wrapped up in himself, but he noticed things, dreamy or not, and that—whatever—he had played on his cwidder had been … Well, go on. Say it, Maewen. Magic. That boy is some kind of magician, and I want to know how he does it.

Far off among the mountains an indigo peak caught the sun and was for a moment yellow and green and purple.

Wend pointed a fist holding a piece of cheese. “City of gold!” He and Moril and Hestefan spoke almost in chorus. “Hern's golden city.”

“Go on,” said Maewen. “It
can't
be! Kernsburgh's miles south of here.”

“It's what we say, lady,” Wend explained, “when a peak catches the sun—to show we remember the city even though it's long ruined and gone.”

“Ruined and
gone
!” Maewen said. “But—”

“It is, though,” Hestefan said reprovingly from the cart above her. “Did you not know?”

“I—” Maewen craned round at what she could see of the gray beard. What did Hestefan remind her of? She should have known about Kernsburgh. All the guides in the palace had never seemed tired of pointing out that Amil the Great had rebuilt the city. But none of them had thought to say that he had rebuilt it from nothing. “Ruins and rubble?” she asked.

“More like grass and humps in the ground by what I heard,” Mitt told her.

“Oh—
bother
!” Maewen said. “How am I supposed to find a crown in a place like that?”

“How indeed?” Navis murmured.

“A way will be found, lady,” Wend said.

Maewen supposed Wend knew. But as they mounted again and moved off, she could not help thinking that this mission was becoming more impossible with every mile they went. She wondered if Noreth had realized and simply run away. Maewen would not have blamed her. Six people set out wandering the old roads—one of those six accused of theft by a voice in the air, too!—in search of a crown buried in a city that did not exist anymore, with no provisions and almost no baggage, and this was supposed to prove that the wrong girl was Queen. As if the earls in their earldoms would let even Noreth get away with it! Maewen uneasily remembered that earls were like little kings in those days, bad kings in the South and better ones in the North, but all of them kings. And kings always made a point of keeping their thrones.

But Amil the Great did it somehow, she told herself. Don't be too long turning up, Amil. I'll hand over to you with the greatest pleasure.

The green road all this while was taking them through another gorge, overhung by more rowan trees. Maewen found she was nervously looking at the skyline, high above, in case an earl had sent a party of hearthmen to make sure they got no farther. It must be an earl who had kidnapped Noreth. One of her five companions was in the pay of an earl.

She felt a great deal better when the road took them out onto a green plain, high, high up. Chilly reviving wind swept over her. Far below, and yet seeming to stand up into the sky, was the gray sea, chopped by white galloping waves.

“This is better,” Mitt said, coming up beside her. “Maybe it's being brought up a fisherman; I always like seeing the sea. Or maybe it comes of being a Holander. Eh, Navis?”

Navis had come up on the other side. He was looking out at the sea just as Mitt was—as if it was home, really. He said, “I miss the blue of the sea farther south, but I wasn't displeased the Countess sent me to Adenmouth. Plenty of sea there. And I've never for one moment regretted leaving Holand.”

It was odd to hear Navis talk without sarcasm at all. Maewen wondered how to find out what they were both doing so far from Holand, but before she could think how, Navis said to her, “You, of course, will have a special interest in this stretch of sea.”

“Why? Do you know something I don't know?” Maewen shot back. A silly thing to say, but Navis had that effect on her.

“I was meaning that we must be quite near Kredindale,” Navis said, “where I gather you were born, Noreth. Isn't it your cousin Kintor who's lord here?”

Maewen said quickly, “Yes, but we don't get on.” That, she hoped, would stop Navis expecting her to go and visit her cousin. But he can't be right! she thought. It was miles round the coast from Adenmouth to Kredindale. It took ages, even by car. But as they moved on, she saw the long spit of green, scribbled with the ditches of a sea marsh, stretching out into the sea below, where, in her day, the big refinery stood. She had seen it from the train only days ago. It seemed that the old road had cut straight through the mountains.