The Crown of Dalemark (34 page)

“By what it tells you—mostly,” Mitt said.

“But I'm the only one who can hear it!” Maewen protested.

“We've both heard it,” Moril told her. “And we know it's Kankredin.”

He and Mitt looked at one another again. “If he's got rid of Noreth,” Mitt said, working it out, “he got you instead because he thinks you'll do what he wants.
Do
you want to?”

“No!” Maewen said fervently. “If you heard—No!”

“Then don't let's talk about it outside this house,” Moril said.

Maewen looked up from the bowl of eggs, big pale blue duck eggs and brown hen eggs mixed, which she had mostly been staring at, and gazed round the kitchen. Low beams with strings of onions hanging from them, copper pans, chairs with knitted cushions and a wall of shelves with glass jars on them, holding colored mixtures that may have been dyes—it all belonged to Cennoreth. It made sense that Kankredin could not hear them here, even if he seemed to be everywhere else. She shuddered. That voice. She knew it was Kankredin now. It was the same voice that had so frightened her from the old man in the train—the way it had not seemed to come from a person—but she had not realized, because there had not been a face to connect it to.

“No,” she said. “I won't say a word. You know I—Secretly, I was afraid I might be going mad!”

“Not you!” said Mitt. “So we'll keep him thinking we don't know it's him. Right?”

“Right,” said Maewen.

They were all suddenly jolly with relief. Maewen felt like a person who has long had a splinter festering under a fingernail, after someone has come along and pulled the splinter out. Mitt laughed as he picked up the bowl of eggs and the cheese. “One thing,” he said. “I bet you got that idea about the miners from history books, didn't you? Telling them to go on smash.”

“Strike,” said Moril, and he laughed as he picked up the crock of milk.

This left Maewen free to snatch up the loaf and rush out of the door, crying out, “Wallop! Smash! Strike!” She raced through the trees, waving the sword in one hand and the loaf in the other. “We got the sword!” she shouted.

Mitt and Moril were forced to follow more slowly for fear of spilling milk and breaking eggs. Moril had gone sober again. “Penny for them,” said Mitt.

“She never heard of Noreth,” Moril said. “So what happens to
her
? She can't be in history either.”

18

Navis had evidently decided that the meadow was safe. Maewen caught him in the act of dressing after a bath in the stone trough. As she dashed across the field, Navis was scrambling into clothes, in time to behave as if nothing at all unusual had happened when she reached him. Hestefan left off polishing a row of cwidders and ambled across to look. By the time Mitt and Moril reached them, Navis was saying, “Antique, certainly, and worth devoting half the evening to, no doubt. We had more notable blades in the armory in Holand, but if we are to have an uprising, I suppose every weapon counts. And is Wend staying the night with his sister?”

“Didn't he come out here awhile back?” Mitt asked.

“We haven't seen him since he went away with the goats,” Hestefan said. “Should we have done?”

“I'm not sure,” said Moril. “He may have left.”

There was no sign of Wend that night. When he had not appeared by nightfall, Mitt and Moril shared the buttered eggs they had set aside for him. Maewen was chiefly relieved that Wend had not rushed out and denounced her to Navis and Hestefan. She thought Navis might not have taken it too badly, but Hestefan would have been outraged. Navis, however, took Wend's absence as a sign that they were not safe and rigged up a trip wire across the rushes some way down the path.

There was no alarm in the night. They woke to a gray morning to find that the meadow cupped in the crags was smaller and more ragged. There was no garden and no fruit trees. Maewen discovered this first, when she went to have a bath in the stone trough before the rest were awake. The trough had gone. Where it had been, there was a muddy hole in the ground. She looked for the house. Where it had been, there was a thicket of crab apples and wild cherries against the rocks, overgrown with brambles and dog roses. Inside the thicket she could just see the broken walls of a small stone house.

“No hens either,” Navis said, coming up beside her. “It was improvident of us to eat all the eggs.” By this time the others were coming across the field in a dismayed straggle. Navis slid an eyebrow up at Mitt. “Would you say the Undying have deserted us?”

Mitt shrugged unhappily. “No idea.”

Hestefan stood by the muddy hole and looked slowly round, stroking his beard. “I know this place now,” he said. “This
is
Dropthwaite, and this”—pointing to the mudhole—“is the source of the river Dropwater. I have camped here before. It is said that the Adon once lived in hiding in those ruins over there.”

“Then that serves to authenticate the sword,” Navis said, and went briskly off to inspect his trip wire. It took him a long time to find it. The rushes had been replaced by thistles and brambles. When they did find the wire, it was lying loosely a long way up the hill. From there they could all see that the lake of yesterday was now only a large green pond.

Hestefan stared at it gloomily. “This change is the worst of all possible omens.”

“Oh come on,” Maewen said, forgetting how Hestefan seemed to dislike her. “We got the sword.”

Hestefan turned his gloomy look on her. “The City of Gold is always on the most distant hillside,” he said. Before Maewen or Mitt could ask him what that was supposed to mean, he said, “I believe we should all now disperse on our separate ways.”

Moril gave a short protesting “Oh!” and Mitt said, “Well, Navis and I can't, and that's final.”

“But you may disperse by yourself, by all means, Singer,” Navis added.

Breakfast made no one feel much better. Hestefan was, if possible, even gloomier, when they set off, to find that the path was mud and marsh, with hardly room to get the cart past the pond. As they came slowly down the bank of the river, Navis murmured, “The Undying make quite a difference.”

Everyone was glad when they came to the place where the green road crossed the river and found it just the same. They could even see the place where the pursuing horsemen had trampled through the spongy turf, in and out of the water.

“Go cautiously,” Navis said, “since the pursuit is now ahea—” He turned round in surprise as the cart came splashing through the river, too, with water whirling from its wheels. “I thought you were leaving us, Singer.”

“There are only two ways to go,” Hestefan pointed out. “I chose not to turn back.”

This seemed to be Hestefan's way of saying he was not going to leave them after all. They went on together, the same party, apart from Wend striding alongside, and the river Dropwater went with them, too, sometimes winding in the distance, sometimes skirling along beside them, and growing steadily larger. A long way farther on, they came to the place where the band of hearthmen had camped for the night. There was not much to see, merely hoofprints and the cold ashes of their fire, but it sent Navis very cautious again. From then on he was either watching for prints in the green road or scanning the distance on either side.

It was empty distance, all green sheep runs and faraway dark peaks, but there were sheep and, once or twice, a shepherd a long way off. Maewen found herself staring every time they saw a shepherd, expecting him to come striding toward them and turn out to be Wend. But no shepherd did more than turn and look at them. She was quite surprised to be missing Wend so much.

When they camped that night by the river, Navis insisted that they find a place a long way back and hidden from the road. Hestefan drove the cart after him along the riverbank just as if he had never threatened to leave, remarking cheerfully, “We've made good time without a walker to slow us down. We'll be at Dropwater tomorrow.”

As they dismounted, Moril hopped off the back of the cart and came over to Mitt. “That's a relief,” he said. “I wouldn't have known what to do if he'd decided to leave. I'm sure he's not well.”

Maewen led her horse into the river, still thinking about Wend. She had been sure he would get over his anger and come back, but now she began to see that he was not going to. It was Noreth he followed, not her. So what was she going to do? She had, she saw, been relying on Wend to get her back to her own time. Perhaps she never would get back. She thought of Mum and Aunt Liss and Dad and felt a touch of fear—but only a touch. She was surprised not to be much more frightened.

“The Wanderer is no loss,” said the deep voice. “You never needed him.”

Maewen jumped and shuddered, wondering if it—he—could read her mind. “Didn't I?” she said. “That's a weight off my mind!”

Sarcasm always seemed to pass Kankredin by—if it was Kankredin. The voice went on imperturbably, “From now on, look for an opportunity to stab the Southerners. The danger from them is growing.”

“Anything you say!” Maewen told it bitterly.

It was a great relief to her over supper to hear Navis arranging with Mitt for the two of them to keep watch that night in turns. Those pursuing hearthmen had been a blessing in disguise. Kankredin could not expect her to try to kill them tonight. But she was terrified of what might happen when he found she had no intention of trying.

They went on again next day through the same rolling green country, with Mitt yawning and Navis red-eyed. Maewen was inclined to be sorry for them until Mitt said, “I'm used to it, and Navis is one of those who just get sharper for it. Mind you, I've only seen him lose four nights of sleep, but he never turned a hair then.”

She realized Mitt was right when Navis spotted the faint marks where the party of hearthmen had turned off the green road to the left, to follow a disused-looking path that led toward the mountains. Navis pounced on it like a cat. “Where does that lead?” he asked Hestefan and Moril.

“You can cut through to the North Dales that way,” Moril said.

Navis narrowed his eyes at the path and then raised them to the mountains. They were nearer here. Ahead they curved inward and seemed to stand right over the green road. “And can horses work their way round through the tops to come back to the road?” he asked.

“Possibly,” said Hestefan. “But the river goes down to Dropwater there.” He pointed to the craggy eminences ahead. “We only have to go down into the valley to be safe.”