The Crown of Dalemark (32 page)

They came through the rushes to find a small ragged field with a stone trough in the middle. Hens wandered there. Two goats were tethered farther off, and there was a vegetable garden beyond that. The croft was a low stone house built against the crags, among fruit trees and lilacs. Everything was warm and fragrant because the rocks went round the holding in a high horseshoe and cut off all but the west wind.

Wend walked through the orchard with long strides and knocked at the house door. It was opened almost at once by an old woman leaning on a stick.

“His sister?” Navis said, watching the two talking eagerly together.

“More like his granny,” said Mitt. “Still, we might get a bed for the night out of it.” And a bedroom had a door you could bar, in case Kankredin persuaded Noreth to do her killing now.

Oh yes! Maewen thought. And a
bath
!

Navis looked nervously back down the path. “They won't find us here,” Moril said to him. “Promise.” Navis looked at Moril's cwidder, but not as if he was convinced.

Wend came striding back. He seemed almost as carefree as when he had taken charge of the cwidder. “She says you're welcome to camp in this field here,” he said cheerfully. “And if the young ones like to go to the door when the horses are seen to, she'll have milk and eggs and cheese ready for you.” Whistling a little tune, he untethered the goats and led them away round the side of the house.

Bother! Mitt and Maewen thought, though both for different reasons.

“The old lady likes her privacy, I see,” Hestefan said glumly. Evidently he had been hoping for a bed, too.

“It's not a very big house,” Moril said as he unhitched the mule. Apart from Wend, he was the only one who was happy with the arrangement. Navis continued to watch the path, and he insisted on setting up the camp where it could not be seen by anyone coming up from the lake. This meant a long trudge across the grass to the trough, which Mitt felt was unnecessary. He was the one who fetched the water. The trough fascinated him. Clear water bubbled up in it the whole time, but it never, for some reason, overflowed.

When the horses were rubbed down and feeding, Moril jerked his head toward the house. Mitt winked and left Navis to see about the rest. They were both a little put out to find Maewen coming with them through the orchard trees. They did not consider Noreth as one of the young ones. Maewen saw it. But she had come along almost without thinking, and it seemed a little late to go back now. Besides, she was curious about this sister of Wend's.

Wend opened the door to them. “Come you in,” he said. “This way.”

He led them quickly through a kitchen-room and opened a door to the back of the house. Maewen looked around curiously, but all she had time to see was a scrubbed wooden table and a banked-up fire of smoky peat, with a copper kettle singing on it. The room at the back of the house was even harder to see at first. It had only one window, which was half blocked by a big loom with woolen cloth being woven on it. It smelled of warm wood and, even more, of slightly oily wool. The ceiling was low and beamed. The walls were dark from being paneled in old wood—very beautifully carved, in a mass of half-seen designs—and the rest of the dim space was nearly full of stack upon stack of tall, chubby wooden things. These things were where the wool smell was coming from. Large bobbins, they seemed to be, wound with woolen yarn of every conceivable color.

Wend's sister got up from her seat at the loom and edged through the bobbins toward them. She was tall, and she moved very spryly. When she was near enough to be seen clearly, all of them had a moment when they thought the old woman who answered the door must have been Wend's old mother. Then they realized she was the same lady. But she looked much younger, though older than Wend. Her face was thin and only a little lined, and her hair was white, mass upon mass of it, wriggly and curly and pinned back with combs that glittered black among the white. Mitt thought there was just a look of the Countess about her, but a kinder look than the Countess's. Maewen, too, found this lady reminded her of someone, but she could not place it. She thought she must have been stunning when she was younger, when all that hair was surely flaxen fair. The lady's eyes were still stunning, huge and blue-green.

“I'm pleased to meet all of you,” she said. Her voice was much more educated than Wend's, and that reminded Mitt of the Countess, too. “I hear you're looking for the Adon's sword.”

“Oh, did Wend tell you?” said Maewen. “Yes. We've got his cup and”—she held up her hand with the ring on its thumb—“this.”

“Then one of you is truly riding the royal road,” the lady said, looking from Maewen, to Moril, to Mitt, with very strong interest. “At last! I thought no one would ever get round to it again! Very well. The sword is here. You'd better see if you can get it down.”

“The sword is
here
!” Moril was so astonished that his voice went up into a squeak.

The lady swung round on him. “What makes you so surprised?”

“Well,” Moril said awkwardly, “I heard … the Singers say … that the Adon's wife—Manaliabrid—hid his sword when she went back to the Undy—er, her own people.”

“And so she did,” said Wend's sister. “My poor daughter. She'd thought her Adon was of the Undying, too—and as I told her, so he might have been for all we knew, but when a man sets himself up as King, he puts himself in the way of assassins, and sooner or later one of them will strike lucky. There are many ways to kill the Undying, though we don't die easily.”

“Manaliabrid,” said Moril, “is your daughter?”

“That's right,” said the lady. She folded her arms and looked amused at the awe in Moril's face. “And the name you'll have heard for me is Cennoreth. Am I right?”

“Then you're a witch,” said Mitt.

“You're the Weaver,” said Moril.

Both of them turned to look at Wend. “My sister is both,” he said.

“So I should hope!” Cennoreth snapped.

“But you—” Moril said to Wend.

“Tanamoril,” said Cennoreth, energetically making her way between the piles of bobbins, “Osfameron, Oril, Wend, Mage Mallard—when a person lives a long time, names tend to pile up. Now, do you want this sword or not? Here it is.”

There was a fireplace at the end of the room opposite the window, made of stone as beautifully carved as the wooden walls. Hung on the wooden panels above the stone was a long dark thing. Maewen and Mitt both took it at first for a stuffed fish. But when they had edged over there along the narrow path between the bobbins, they saw it was actually a sword, probably quite a plain one, in a blackish leather sheath. The reason it was so hard to see in that dim room was that it was tied to the wall by innumerable long strips of leather. The leather thongs had been knotted to about a hundred rusty nails hammered into the paneling above and below the sword, and then knotted and overlapped and knotted again, until the sword was in a kind of basket of leather strips.

“Hey, Moril!” said Mitt.

Moril was still over by the door, looking across his shoulder at Wend, full of awe and amazement. Mitt could hardly blame him. This was the man Moril had been named after, twice over, the hero of half the stories the Singers learned to tell, and Moril's own ancestor into the bargain. Wend was shifting about self-consciously, as if—just like a normal person—he had no idea what to say. He was obviously relieved when Moril switched his attention to Mitt.

While Moril was making his way through the bobbins, grinning and going like a sleepwalker, Wend said awkwardly, “These things happen—if you live long enough. You should think nothing of it—or not too much.”

“Think nothing of it!” Moril said, looking up at the sword and its thongs. “That's asking a bit much! Those pieces of leather are knots and crosses. There has to be a catch.”

“Quite right.” Cennoreth stood by the hearth with her arms folded. “You're an observant boy. You must understand that none of it is my doing. My daughter nailed it up there. Remember she was mad with grief—though I suppose you're all too young to know how that feels—and try to forgive her. She was disappointed in her children, too. She expected too much of them, but there you go, I'm only her mother, and it didn't matter what I said. So she set this sword up, knots and crosses, like redhead said, for the children of her blood and the Adon's. That's rather a lot of people these days, but that's another thing she wouldn't listen to, when I told her how it would be if enough time passed.”

“So what's the catch?” Mitt asked.

Cennoreth shrugged. “The knots must be undone without touching sword or scabbard, and the sword must be drawn before it touches wood, stone, or earth. My daughter,” she said, “expected too much of her children's children, too, if you ask me, but I wasn't consulted.”

They all stared up at the sword in its cat's cradle of leather. The thongs were black with age, and there was dust all over them. Maewen could see that each knot, beside being pulled fiercely tight to start with, had shrunk and hardened over the years—how many? two hundred?—and must by now be nearly impossible to undo. Just to think of the lasting fierceness of the misery that did this was appalling. Could one wet the leather and loosen the knots that way? “What happens if you break the rules?” she asked.

“She didn't say,” said Cennoreth.

“Though you may take it that you won't get the sword, lady,” Wend added from the other side of the room.

They stared up at the sword again. It was high above Maewen's reach. I suppose if I knelt on the mantelpiece—the leather could just be old enough to crumble away when I touch it. Anyway, I don't really
need
this sword—though it seems a shame, when I've got the ring and the cup.

Moril thought awhile. Then he sat down on the nearest pile of bobbins and started taking the case off his cwidder.

“What are you doing?” Mitt asked him.

“The leather was straight to start with,” Moril said. “The cwidder could tell the truth and make it straight again.”

It could, too! Mitt realized. Things unfolded with a crisp
snap
inside his head, and he saw that he and Moril had been so taken by surprise that they had not thought this through. Why don't I
think
? he asked himself angrily. If Kankredin was talking to Noreth, and Noreth had listened to him all her life, then even if he and Moril could do for Kankredin—which was a stupid thing to plan when even the One could not do it—then the last thing either of them should do was to help Noreth become Queen. That meant the whole country under Kankredin. So—break the rules, quick.

Mitt was the only one tall enough to reach the sword. “No. That's going at it the slow way,” he told Moril.

Moril's fingers went slow and fumbling on the cwidder. As Mitt turned away and pulled out his knife, he knew Moril had seen the danger, too. Mitt pushed between Maewen and Cennoreth, reached up, and, quick as he could, slashed along the length of the sword, between the multitude of knots.

“Get ready to catch it!” he cried out merrily.

He had meant to call out too late. But to his annoyance, not all the age-hard thongs parted. He was forced to slash again, and again after that. Even then only the pointed end of the scabbard came loose. Mitt watched it with satisfaction, descending slowly to the mantel-shelf, tearing the other thongs as it came.

Maewen yelled out, “Careful!” and flung herself forward with both arms up at full stretch. She was just in time to catch the tip of it. The cwidder resounded as Moril set it hastily down and jumped forward to pretend to help her. He grabbed hold of the scabbard above Maewen's hands and blundered artfully around her. But Maewen hung on grimly. All Moril managed to do was dislodge a long iron-handled hearth brush from beside the grate. It fell among their legs with a clatter.

Bother! Mitt thought. Hadd's
pants
! He took hold of the sword's hilt, thongs and all, and pulled. That ought to bring it down
and
make sure it touched the wall or the fireplace on the way.

The hearth brush seemed to set off an avalanche. Fire irons went on falling, with mighty clangs: ladles, toasting forks, a slotted spoon, shovels, two pokers, a mighty black roasting spit, a set of hooks for cauldrons. Cennoreth seemed to have a whole blacksmith's worth of implements in her hearth. Maewen and Moril stumbled on a firedog. Mitt found long tongs between his legs and reeled aside. This burst the last of the thongs. Maewen and Moril crashed backward onto Cennoreth's feet, both trying to save themselves by hanging on to the scabbard. Mitt was left holding aloft a naked sword.