Copyright

First published in Great Britain by Macmillan London Ltd in 1977

This edition published by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2016

HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd,

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Copyright © Diana Wynne Jones 1977

Map illustration © Sally Taylor 2016

Cover artwork © Manuel Šumberac

Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2016

Diana Wynne Jones asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008170653

Ebook Edition © 2016 ISBN: 9780008170660

Version: 2016-10-21

Map of North and South Dalemark

For my mother

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Map of North and South Dalemark

Dedication

PART ONE: Free Holanders

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

PART TWO: The Sea Festival

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

PART THREE: Wind’s Road

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

PART FOUR: The Holy Islands

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Keep Reading …

About the Author

Books by Diana Wynne Jones

About the Publisher

PEOPLE MAY WONDER how Mitt came to join in the Holand Sea Festival, carrying a bomb, and what he thought he was doing. Mitt wondered himself by the end.

Mitt was born the day of the Holand Sea Festival, and he was called Alhammitt after his father. Perhaps the first sound Mitt heard as he burst bawling into the world was his parents laughing about both these things.

“Well, he took his time,” said Mitt’s father, “and chose his day all right. What does this make him? A man of straw, born to be drowned?”

Milda, Mitt’s mother, laughed heartily at this, because the Sea Festival was something of a joke. On that day, every autumn, Hadd, the Earl of Holand, was required by tradition to dress up in outlandish clothes and walk in a procession down to the harbour carrying a life-size dummy made of plaited wheat. The dummy was known as Poor Old Ammet. One of Hadd’s sons walked after him carrying Poor Old Ammet’s wife, who was made entirely of fruit, and her name was Libby Beer. The procession that went with them was both noisy and peculiar. When they reached the harbour, they said traditional words and then threw both dummies into the sea. Nobody knew why this was done. To most people in Holand the ceremony was just an excuse to have a holiday, eat sweets and get drunk. On the other hand, everyone would have thought it horribly unlucky not to have held the Sea Festival.

So Milda, even though she was laughing until her dimple was creased out of existence, bent over the new baby and said, “Well, I think it’s a lucky birthday to have had. He’ll grow up a real free soul, just like you – you wait! That’s why I’m calling him after you.”

“Then he’ll be common as dirt,” said Mitt’s father. “Just like me. You go into town and shout ‘Alhammitt’ in the street, and half Holand will come to you.” And they both laughed at the thought of the common name they were giving their baby.

Mitt’s early memories were full of his parents’ laughter. They were very happy. They had the good luck to rent a smallholding on the Earl’s land in what was known as the New Flate, only ten miles from the port of Holand. It had been reclaimed from sea marsh by Earl Hadd’s grandfather and grew lush emerald grass, big vegetables and corn in narrow yellow stripes between the dykes. Dyke End holding was so fertile and the market of Holand so near that Mitt’s parents had plenty to live on. Though Earl Hadd was said to be the hardest man in Dalemark, and other farmers in the Flate were always being turned out of doors for not paying their rent, Mitt’s parents always had just enough money to go round. They laughed. Mitt grew up running carelessly along the paths between the crops and the dykes. It never occurred to anyone that he could drown. When he was two, he taught himself to swim by falling into a dyke when his parents were busy. Since no one was there to help him, he had to help himself. He struggled to the bank and got out, and his clothes dried in the stiff breeze as he ran on.

The sound of that breeze was as much part of his early memories as his parents’ laughter. Apart from the hill where Holand stood, the Flate was flat as a floor. The wind blew straight across from the sea. Sometimes it came storming in, laying the grass over, chopping the sky reflected in the dykes into grey Vs, and hurling the trees sideways so that their leaves showed white. But most days it simply blew, steadily and constantly, so that the dykes never stopped rippling and the leaves of the poplars and alders went rattle-rattle up and down the banks. If the wheat was ripe, it rustled in the wind, stiffly, like straw in a mattress. The constant wind sighed in the grass and hummed in the chimney, and kept the sails of the big windmills always turning, creak-thump, creak-thump, to pump the water to the dykes or grind the flour. Mitt used to laugh at those windmills. It was the way their arms pawed the air.

Then one day, shortly after Mitt had taught himself how to swim, the wind suddenly dropped. It did that sometimes in early summer, but it was the first time in Mitt’s life that he had known the Flate without wind. The sails of the windmills creaked and stood. The trees stopped moving. There was blue sky in the dykes, and trees upside down. Everything went quiet and unexpectedly warm. Above all, there was suddenly an extraordinary smell. Mitt could not think what was happening. He stood on the bank of the dyke nearest the house with his ears tipped to the silence and his nose lifted to the smell. The smell was cow dung and peat and trampled grass, mixed with smoke from the chimney. But that was only in the foreground. Beyond that was the smell of fresh things growing – cow parsley, buttercups, a hint of may, and strongest of all, the heaven-like scent of willows budding. While, at the back of it, there and not there, so that Mitt almost missed it, was the faint boisterous bite of the distant sea.

Mitt was too young to think of it as smells, or to realise that the wind had simply stopped. He thought it was a place. It seemed to him that he had got an inkling of somewhere unspeakably beautiful, warm and peaceful, and he wanted to go there. Yes, it was a land. It was not far off, just beyond somewhere, and it was Mitt’s very own. He set off at once to find it while he still remembered the way.

He trotted to the end of the dyke, crossed the footbridge, and continued trotting, northwards and inland. He passed all the places he knew, impatiently – they were obviously not his land – and trotted on until his legs ached. Even then he was still in the New Flate, lush and green, with its dykes, poplars and windmills. Mitt knew his land was different from the Flate, so he was forced to toil on. And after a mile or so, he came out into the Old Flate. Here it was different, all right. The ground was wide and treeless and covered with pinkish marsh plants. In some places, long lines of rushes and green scum showed where there had once been dykes and farms, but now it was all flat and blank. Nothing seemed to be alive there but mosquitoes and plaintive marsh birds. In the wide distance, it was true, there were one or two islands of higher ground with trees and houses on them. The roads to them crossed the pink waste on causeways, raised up like the veins on an old man’s hand. Otherwise there was nothing until, away on the edge of the distance, there was what Mitt took for a line of clouds but was in fact the beginning of the land above sea level, where Holand joined Waywold.

Mitt was a trifle daunted. This was not the kind of land he had in mind. His vision of his perfect place faded a little, and he was no longer sure this was quite the way to it. Nevertheless, he set forwards bravely into the dismal landscape. He felt he had come too far to turn back now. After a while he thought he saw something moving, out in the marsh. He set his eyes on the movement and waded towards it. It was extremely dangerous. There were snakes in the Old Flate. And if Mitt had walked into one of the scummy pools, he could have been sucked down into it and drowned. Fortunately he had no idea. And even more fortunately the moving things he could see were a troop of the Earl’s soldiers combing the Flate for a runaway revolutionary.

Mitt could see they were soldiers before long. He stood on a clump of rubbery plants, with the marsh sucking and gobbling around him, and wondered whether he ought to go near them. When people in the New Flate talked about soldiers, they talked as if soldiers were something to be afraid of. There was a causeway quite near Mitt. He wondered if he ought to climb up on it, out of the soldiers’ way. While he was wondering, a muddy horse heaved itself on to the causeway from the marsh behind it. The young officer on its back reined in and stared at the sight of such a very small boy standing all alone in the middle of the Flate.

“What on earth do you think you’re doing?” he called to Mitt.

Mitt was rather pleased to have company. “I’m looking for my home,” he told the officer chattily. “I come a long way too.”

“I can see you have,” said the officer. “Where is your home?”

“There.” Mitt pointed vaguely northwards. He was busy examining his new acquaintance. The gold on the officer’s coat took his fancy. So did the officer’s face, which was very smooth and pale and narrow, with a nose that went out much more sharply than any noses Mitt had known before and a mouth which Mitt somehow thought of as clean. Altogether Mitt felt he was a person worthy of knowing about the perfect place. “It’s all quiet, with water,” he explained, “and it’s my place where I’m going to, but I can’t find it yet.”

The officer frowned. His own small daughter had been found marching out into the Flate only yesterday, saying she had a house on a hill that was hers and she had to find it. He thought he knew the signs. “Yes, but where do you live?” he said.

“Dyke End,” Mitt said impatiently. It was unworthy of the officer to ask such things. “Of course. That’s where I come from, and I’m going to my home.”

“I see,” said the officer. He waved at the distant soldiers. “Come here, one of you!”

The several troopers who came running at his shout were somewhat astonished to find not a full-grown revolutionary but an extremely small boy. “He shrank with the wet,” one suggested.

“He says he lives in Dyke End,” said the officer. “One of you take him home and tell his parents to take more care of him in future.”

“Dyke End’s not my home. It’s where I live!” Mitt protested.

Nevertheless, he was taken back to the New Flate almost dangling from the hand of a huge trooper in the Earl’s green uniform. Mitt was sullen at first, disappointed and vaguely humiliated. And he was deeply disillusioned about the officer. Mitt had told him a valuable secret, and the officer had barely even listened. But the trooper was a cheerful man. He had children of his own, and it had been hot, wet work, hunting the revolutionary in the windless Flate. The trooper was pleased to have a rest. He was very jolly to Mitt, and before long Mitt cheered up and chatted happily about how far he had walked and how he thought he would like to be a soldier too, when he grew up, and a sea captain as well and sail the Earl’s ships for him.

When they came to the New Flate, people came to doors and gates to stare at Mitt trotting along with his hand stretched above his head in order to reach the great warm hand of the trooper. The stares were unloving. Earl Hadd was a hard man and a vindictive one. The soldiers were the ones who carried out the Earl’s harsh orders. And lately the Earl’s second son, Harchad, had taken command of the soldiers, and he was even harder than his father, and a good deal more cruel. But since, all over Dalemark, an earl in his earldom had more power than a king, in the times when there were kings, Harchad and his soldiers did exactly as they pleased. Therefore, soldiers were hated heartily.

Mitt understood none of this, but he saw the looks. “Don’t you look like that!” he kept crying out. “This is my friend, this is!”

The trooper became steadily more uncomfortable. “Take it easy, sonny,” he said every time Mitt cried out. And after a while he seemed to feel the need to justify himself. “A man’s got to live,” he told Mitt. “It’s not work I enjoy, but what can a poor boy off the harbour edge do? When I get my bounty, I aim to take up farming, like your dad does.”

“Did you fall in the harbour?” Mitt asked, fixing on the only part of this he understood.

They came to Dyke End. Mitt’s parents had missed Mitt about half an hour before, and they were by then in a panic. Mitt’s father received him with a great thump, and his mother hugged him frantically. Mitt did not understand the reason for either. The vision of his perfect land had faded by then. He was not sure what he had gone away to do.

The trooper stood by, very stiff and correct. “Boy was found out in the Old Flate,” he said. “Said he was looking for his home, or some such story.”

“Oh, Mitt!” Milda cried joyously. “What a free soul you are!” And she hugged him again.

“And,” said the trooper, “Navis Haddsson’s compliments and would you keep more of an eye on him in future.”

“Navis Haddsson!” exclaimed both Mitt’s parents, Milda in considerable awe, and Mitt’s father with surprise and resentment. Navis was Earl Hadd’s third and youngest son.

“Big of Navis Haddsson,” Mitt’s father said sarcastically. “Knows all about bringing up boys, I suppose?”

“Can’t say, I’m sure,” said the trooper, and he made off, having no wish to get into an argument with such a thickset and aggressive person as the elder Alhammitt.

“Well, I think it was very kind of Navis to send us our Mitt back like that!” Milda said when he had gone.

Mitt’s father spat in the dyke.

All the same, Milda remained extremely impressed by the kindness of Navis. She told people about it whenever her husband was not by to resent it, and most people she told were impressed too. Earl Hadd and his family were not, as a rule, kind to anyone. After that Milda took a great interest in Navis for a while and found out everything about him that she could. There was not very much known. The Earl’s eldest son, Harl, and his second son, Harchad, were the Earl’s favourites and the ones people heard most about. But about the time Navis sent Mitt home, Navis was enjoying a little more of the Earl’s favour. The reason was that three years or so before, the Earl had chosen Navis a wife, as he had chosen wives for his other two sons. Milda heard that Navis and his wife adored each other and went everywhere together. Then Navis’s wife gave birth to a daughter. That was the reason the Earl was pleased with Navis.

The Earl valued granddaughters. He did not like girls in the least, but he needed granddaughters because he was an extremely quarrelsome man. Granddaughters could be married off to other earls and lords, who would then become Hadd’s allies in his quarrels. But so far only Harl’s wife had had a daughter. So when Navis’s wife, too, had a daughter, Hadd was delighted with them. Milda learnt that Navis’s wife was expecting a second child shortly, and Hadd was gleefully expecting another marriageable granddaughter.

The baby was born the following month. He was a boy, and Navis’s wife died having him. It was said that Navis was so stricken with grief that he could not be bothered to find a name for his son. The nurses were forced to ask Earl Hadd to think of a name, and Hadd was so annoyed at not having a granddaughter that he called the boy Ynen, which was the name of a lord he particularly disliked. Hadd was consoled later on that year when Harl’s wife and Harchad’s both had girl babies. As for Navis, he gave up his commission in the Earl’s army and fell into total obscurity. It was soon quite impossible to learn anything about him or about his children, Hildrida and Ynen.

Mitt did not quite forget his perfect land. He remembered it, though a little fuzzily, next time the wind dropped, but he did not set off to look for it again. It was plain to him that soldiers only brought you back again if you went. It made him sad. When an inkling of it came to him in silence, or in scents, or, later, if the wind hummed a certain note, or a storm came shouting in from the sea and he caught the same note in the midst of its noise, he thought of his lost perfect place and felt for a moment as if his heart would break. But then he would shake off the feeling and laugh with his parents.

It seemed to Mitt that the three of them could laugh at anything. He remembered laughing with Milda one evening during a rainstorm. Mitt was trying to learn his letters. He found them so difficult that he had to laugh. Then the door came clapping open in a gust of rain, blowing everything in the house to the end of the room, and there stood Mitt’s father, soaking wet and laughing, shouting above the gale that the cow had calved. At that the door came off its hinges and fell on Mitt’s father. And they all laughed till they ached.

The very funniest thing happened when the calf had grown into a young and gamesome bull. Mitt and his parents were all in the pasture, trying to mend a place where the dyke bank was giving. The bull stood watching them, rather interested. Life was a little dull in the pasture. Then Hadd’s rent collector climbed over the fence and stalked irritably over to the dyke.

“I’ve been all the way to the house,” he said. “Why couldn’t you—?”

The bull, with a look of pure mischief in his merry red eye, lowered his horns and charged. He would not have dreamt of harming any of the family, but the rent collector was another matter. And in a misty, bullish way, he may have noticed that the family was not altogether pleased to see the rent collector. Anyway, up went the rent collector in a graceful arc, moneybag and all, and down he went again, moneybag and all, into the dyke, where he gave out a truly tremendous splash. He came up. He swore horribly. He floundered to the bank and tried to get out. The bull was there to meet him and simply prodded him back in again. It was the funniest thing Mitt had ever seen. It never occurred to the rent collector to cross the dyke and get out on the opposite bank where the bull could not reach him. He kept floundering up, clutching his moneybag. And prod, prod went the bull, and the rent collector was sitting in the dyke again. Over and over again, with the rent collector, floundering, reeling, sitting down splash, and squawking “Can’t one of you control this beast!” and Mitt’s parents leaning head to head, too helpless with laughter to do a thing about it. It was Mitt, laughing as hard as anyone, who at last hooked his finger in the ring on the bull’s nose and let the raging rent collector scramble out. And the rent collector was not pleased.

“I’ll teach you to laugh, boy!” he snarled.

He did. Next time he came for the rent, he asked double. When Mitt’s father protested, he said, “Nothing to do with me. Earl Hadd needs the money.”

Probably Hadd was short of money. The rents were put up all over the Flate. Rumour said that there were riots in the town of Holand, and the Earl needed to pay more soldiers to deal with the rioting. But only at Dyke End was the rent doubled. That was the rent collector’s private revenge. And there was nothing Mitt’s parents could do about it. Theoretically they could have gone to law and accused the rent collector of extortion. But the rent collector was the Earl’s official, and judges always upheld the Earl’s employees against ordinary people – unless, of course, you gave the judge a big enough bribe. Mitt’s parents had no money for bribes. They needed more than they had to pay the rent collector. They had to sell the bull.

Next quarter they sold the mule. Then some furniture. And by that time they were in a vicious circle: the more things they sold from the farm to pay the rent, the less they had to make money with to pay the next quarter’s rent, and the more things they had to sell. Mitt’s parents stopped laughing. That winter Mitt’s father took to spending most of the week away in the port of Holand, earning what money he could there, while Milda tried to run the farm with what help Mitt could give. It was desperately hard work. Milda’s pretty face acquired a seam of worry down one side – a sort of pucker where her dimple had been. Mitt hated that pucker. He did not remember how his father looked at that time. He remembered a curt, bitter voice and his father’s square back plodding away from them down the causeway to Holand to find work.

He could not have found much work. He spent longer and longer away in Holand, and brought very little money back, but what he did bring enabled them to drag on at Dyke End for the following summer. But Milda on her own was a poor, forgetful manager. Mitt did all he could to help, but they lost money steadily. There were still a few times when Mitt was able to lie on his back by the dyke, looking up at the rattling leaves, and think yearningly about his perfect land. As times grew harder, he seemed to want it more and more. He longed to set off again to find it, but of course he was older now and he knew he had to stay and help his mother.

Then quarter day came round again, and there was no money at all. It did no good for Milda to beg the rent collector to wait a day or so. He came back the next day with the bailiff and three of the Earl’s soldiers, and Mitt and Milda were turned out of Dyke End. A short while before Mitt’s sixth birthday, he helped his mother pack their few belongings into a handcart and push it into Holand to join his father.

MITT ALWAYS HATED to remember that first winter in Holand. His father was living in one room in a big tenement block down by the harbour. Mitt and Milda joined him there. The tenement had perhaps once been the house of a wealthy man. Outside, on its greenish, peeling walls, there were the remains of pictures – once fine paintings of garlands of flowers and people out of stories, sheaves of wheat and bunches of fruit. But they were so old that Mitt could not quite tell what they were, and anyway, the inside of the building was what he saw most. The large rooms had been chopped into as many small ones as possible, so the house was crowded as full as it would hold of people. It was filthy. The buckets on the dark stairs stank. Bedbugs lived in all the walls. They came out at night and bit, viciously. What with that, and the strangeness, and the noise of all the people, Mitt could not sleep very well. He lay awake and listened to his parents quarrelling as they had never quarrelled before.

Mitt could not understand what the quarrels were about. It seemed as if his father was not pleased to have them with him in Holand. “Hanging round my neck!” he put it. He wanted them to go back to Dyke End. When Milda shrieked at him that there was no rent, he cursed her for laziness.

“Why should I work my fingers to the bone to keep you in idleness?” Milda screamed at him. But after a week of quarrelling, she found a job in a workroom which made fine embroidered hangings, and she was there, sewing, from early morning until light failed in the evening.

After this the quarrels Mitt’s parents had became even harder for Mitt to understand. His mother kept saying to his father, “You and your Free Holanders! Free Holanders! There’s no such thing as freedom in this place!” Mitt had no idea what that meant.

Mitt was shocked and shattered by the town of Holand itself. He hated the dirt and the noise and all the people. His job for the day was to carry their bucket to the waterfront and tip it in the harbour. As Milda said, the one advantage of living in that tenement was that you did not have to go far to get rid of your rubbish. Mitt hated the smell on the greasy waterfront, where fish scales glimmered on the flagstones like sequins on a dirty dress. The crowded harbour appalled him. There were tall ships with many masts and pennants flying, merchant ships, ships of the Earl’s fleet, loading and unloading going on most of the time. In between were small boats, packed and bustling, rowing boats, cutters, jollyboats and a good hundred fishing boats. Mitt was always glad when the fishing fleet sailed out, because the crowded water seemed a little emptier then.

After Mitt had brought the bucket back to the door of their room, he was all on his own once Milda had found work. He had nothing to do but keep out of the way of the other children. He hated them most of all. They were town children, shrewd, nimble and knowing. They made rings round Mitt. They jeered at him for not understanding town ways. They made him look a fool, then ran away laughing.

Mitt hid from them, usually, in the dark holes and corners of the house or the waterfront. But one day he felt he had had enough of that and ran away instead, up the hill from the harbour, into the better part of the town. Here, to his surprise, the streets were cleaner, and became wider and cleaner still as he went upwards. The air smelt almost fresh. There was a tang in it of the sea, and an autumn smell from the Flate. Better still, most of the houses were painted, and unlike the tenement, the paint was fresh and bright, and Mitt could see what the pictures were about. He walked slowly, looking at trees and fruit, red swirls and blue flowers, until he came to a particularly fine tall house, where the painting was in gold as well as other colours. On one gable, a stiff sort of lady in a green dress held out a very purple bunch of grapes to a stiff man on the other gable, whose hair seemed to be solid gold. Mitt much admired them. They reminded him a little of the figureheads on the fronts of the big ships. And perhaps because of the fresh air smell, they made him think of his perfect land.

He was standing lost in admiration and daydream when a servant of the merchant who owned the house came out with a stick and told him to be off. He called Mitt a guttersnipe and said he had no business to be there. Mitt ran away, terrified. As he went, he looked back and upwards. And there, on the very top of the hill, was the Earl’s palace, larger, whiter, brighter, and with more gold paint than any other house in Holand. Mitt felt it was squashing him. He felt like a pip in a cider press.

That was the last time for many years that Mitt remembered his perfect land. Holand quashed it out of his mind entirely and left him simply bewildered.

When Mitt’s birthday came, a few days later, and with it the Sea Festival, that was bewildering too. Everyone had a holiday, so there were more people about than ever. Mitt watched the Festival procession, hoisted on to the shoulders of a kindly man called Canden, who seemed to be a friend of his father’s. Down the street came a boiling and a bubbling of brightly clothed people. There was terrific shouting and yelling, and ribbons, fruit and flowers on everyone. Some had silly hats. Images went by on sticks – heads of cows and horses, with hats and ribbons on too. Big boys went tearing in and out of the procession, shouting and swirling wooden rattles. It was noise, noise, noise. Every so often came a group of people playing the traditional tune on traditional instruments. There were pipes called scarnels, which sounded just like their name, and triangular stringed things you played with a horsehair bow. They were cruddles, and they sounded just like their name too. And the groups of musicians were so far apart from one another that it was only by accident that they played the same part of the tune as the rest. Then, drub, drub, drub, came people banging at horsehair drums and drowning out even the scarnels. In the midst of it, Mitt glimpsed a straw dummy, fantastically looped with cherry-coloured ribbons, riding along in somebody’s arms.

“Look,” said the kindly Canden. “There’s Poor Old Ammet. That’s Earl Hadd carrying him.”

“What’s he going to do with him?” Mitt asked anxiously. He had never heard of Earl Hadd doing anything good with anything.

“Throw him in the harbour, of course. For luck,” explained Canden.

Mitt was horrified. Earl Hadd must be quite heartless. He thought of Poor Old Ammet being tipped into the harbour just like the bucket of muck Mitt tipped in daily, and Poor Old Ammet sinking, soaking, drowning, his ribbons getting spoilt. “Doesn’t he float?” he asked tensely.

“Not too often,” Canden said, quite unaware of Mitt’s state of mind. “Mostly he falls to pieces and sinks in the harbour or just outside it.”

“He doesn’t!” Mitt said frantically.

There was another friend of Mitt’s father’s standing beside Canden. He was called Dideo, and his face was a mass of tiny lines. Mitt thought Dideo’s eyes looked like two shiny fish caught in the net of his skin. Dideo said, “He doesn’t always fall to bits – Old Ammet. If the tide’s right, he goes out on the tide in one piece. Or they say he does. Floats for miles. And those in a boat that can find him and pick him out have a lucky boat ever after, they say.”

If anything, Mitt found it even more distressing to think of Poor Old Ammet floating, floating, all on his own out to sea. He tried to change the subject. “Who are those boys with rattles?”

Canden glanced at the procession, where boys in red and yellow trousers were having great fun whirling their rattles under the noses of cruddle players. “Boys from the Palace. All them in the procession come from the Palace,” he told Mitt, and turned to Dideo again. “I’ve never seen Old Ammet float. He goes down almost as quick as Libby Beer.”

“Would they let me run about with a rattle?” Mitt interrupted desperately.

“No. You’re born a nobody,” said Dideo. “He does float,” he said to Canden. “You’ve not been in Holand long enough to know, but he was picked up once, a good ten miles out, by the old Sevenfold, and I heard every man on that ship made a fortune afterwards. That was the only time I ever knew it happen, though,” he added regretfully. “I was about Mitt’s age at the time.” Here he looked up at Mitt and, finding him inexplicably white and tearful, nudged Canden.

Canden took Mitt down and peered at his face. “What’s the matter? Would you like an Ammet of your own?”

“No!” said Mitt.

Nevertheless, he arrived in front of a stall where dozens of tiny straw Ammets were for sale. With them came another friend of Mitt’s father’s, a man with a dour, blank face, called Siriol, who stood by without saying anything while Canden and Dideo bent over Mitt, doing their best to please him. Would Mitt have this Ammet here? Or how about this one with blue ribbons? And when Mitt firmly refused to have anything to do with Poor Old Ammet in any colour ribbons, Canden and Dideo tried to buy him a wax model of Libby Beer instead. But real and enticing though the wax fruit looked, Mitt did not want Libby either. She was thrown into the sea just like Poor Old Ammet. He burst into tears and pushed her away.

“But they’re lucky!” Canden said, quite mystified.

Dour-faced Siriol picked up one of the toffee apples from the other end of the stall and stuffed it into Mitt’s damp fist. “There,” he said. “That’ll please you best, you see.” He was quite right. Mitt forgot his distress, somewhat, in the difficulty of getting his teeth through the toffee into the apple underneath.

There was some mystery about these friends of Mitt’s father’s. Mitt knew his mother did not care for them. He heard her objecting to them every night when his parents quarrelled. Her objections seemed to mount steadily through that winter, until around the new year, when Mitt heard her say, “Oh, I give in! Only don’t blame me when the soldiers come for you!”

It must have been about a week after Milda said this, in the very heart of winter, when Mitt woke up suddenly in the middle of the night. A red light was flickering on the ceiling. He could hear crackling and distant shouting, and smell smoke. One of the big warehouses on the waterfront was clearly on fire. Mitt could see it, when he raised himself on one elbow, blazing into the sky and down into the dark water of the harbour. But what had woken Mitt was not that. It was the slow shuffling outside the door of the room. The sound made Mitt’s back prickle. He could hear Milda trying to light the lamp, whimpering with haste and annoyance because she could not get the wick to burn. Then the light came at last, and Mitt saw his father was not in the room. Milda ran through the room with the lamp, making lurching shadows as she ran, and tore open the door.

Canden was on the other side of it. He was clinging to the doorframe to hold himself up. Mitt could not see him well because Milda was holding the lamp all wrong, but he knew that Canden was either hurt or very ill, or both. He could see it in Canden’s face. He had a feeling that the part of Canden which was behind Milda and the doorpost was the wrong shape. It did not surprise him that Milda gave a dreadful strangled scream.

“Eeech! What—? I knew it would go wrong!”

“Harchad’s men,” said Canden. He sounded disgusted. “They were there waiting for us. Informers – that’s what they were. Dideo, Siriol and Ham. They informed on us.”

After that Canden gave a quiver of indignation and slid down the doorpost to the floor. Milda knelt down to him, hugging the lamp and whimpering. “O ye gods! What do I do? What can I do? Why doesn’t somebody help?”

After that doors began cautiously opening and shutting up and down the stairway. Ladies came in nightgowns and old coats, with more lamps or candles. There were troubled whispers and soothing words, while Milda rocked about on her knees, moaning. Mitt was too appalled to move. He did not want to look at Canden or his mother, so he lay and looked at the ceiling instead. The bustling ladies thought he was asleep, and after a while he must really have gone to sleep. Canden was not there in the morning. But he had been there. He had left a stain on the floor. And Mitt’s father was still not there either.

Mitt knew both of them were dead. Nobody told him, but he knew. What he did not know and wanted to be told was what had happened. He wanted to know why ladies in the tenement came and told Milda, “I should lie low, if I was you. You don’t want to get yourself arrested too.” Milda stayed away from work for a while, sitting very still by the window. Her face was so drawn in by worry that the seam where her dimple used to be looked more like a puckered scar than a line. Mitt hated her face like that. He crouched beside her feet and asked to be told what had caused it.

“You’re too young to understand,” said Milda.

“But I want to know,” said Mitt. “What’s happened to Dad?” He asked at least forty times before he got an answer.

“Dead,” said Milda. “At least, I hope that’s what he is, because they all say it’s better to be dead than have Harchad after you. And I shall never forgive them that did it to him – never, never, never!”

“What did Siriol and Dideo and Ham do?” Mitt prompted her.

“Leave me be, if you know so much!” Milda said irritably. But Mitt went on asking, and in the end Milda told him as much as she knew.

It seemed that when Mitt’s father had found it so hard to get work in Holand, he had felt so bitter against the Earl that he had joined a secret revolutionary society. There were a lot of them in Holand. The Earl’s son Harchad had spies and soldiers hunting out these societies night and day, at all times. But when he found one and marched the members off to be hanged, there was always another to take its place.

The one Mitt’s father joined was called the Free Holanders. It was composed mostly of fishermen who felt there should be more justice and better living for the ordinary people of Holand. Their ambition was to have the whole city rise against the Earl, and, as far as Milda knew, they had never done much except talk about it. But when Milda and Mitt had been turned out of Dyke End, Mitt’s father was so angry that he had tried to stir the Free Holanders to action of some kind. Why not set fire to one of the Earl’s warehouses, he said, to show the Earl they meant business?

Canden and the other younger Free Holanders were delighted by the idea. It would hit Hadd where it hurt, they said – right in the moneybags. But the older members, particularly Siriol, Dideo and Ham, were clean against it. If they fired a warehouse, they said, the Free Holanders would be hunted down by Harchad’s men, and how would that help the city to rise and overthrow the Earl? The society split in half over it. The younger members went with Mitt’s father to fire the warehouse. The older members stayed at home. And when the younger ones reached the warehouse, Harchad’s men were waiting for them. All that Milda knew beyond that was that someone had managed to start a fire even so and that no one had come back from it except Canden to say that Siriol, Dideo and Ham had informed on them. And Canden was dead too.

Mitt considered all this. “Why did Siriol and them inform, though?”

The crease of worry down Milda’s face drew into a tighter seam. “Because they were frightened, Mitt, like I am now.”

“Frightened what of?” Mitt asked.

“Harchad’s soldiers,” Milda said, shivering. “They might come banging at this door any moment now.”

Mitt considered what he knew of soldiers. They were not so frightening. They brought you home when you were found wandering in the Flate. “How many soldiers are there? More than everyone else in Holand?”

In spite of her misery, Milda smiled. To Mitt’s relief, the crease on her face turned into a dimple again for a moment. “Oh no. The Earl couldn’t afford that number. And I don’t suppose he’d bother to send more than six or so to come and take us away.”

“Then,” said Mitt, “if all the people in this house, or all the people in Holand, all got together, they ought to be able to stop the soldiers, oughtn’t they?”

Milda was forced to laugh. It was quite beyond her to explain why everyone in Holand lived in dread of soldiers, and even greater dread of Harchad’s spies, so she said, “Oh, Mitt, you’re a real free soul, you are! You don’t know what fear means. It seems such a waste when Hadd and the Free Holanders have done for us between them, it does really!”

Mitt realised that by talking in this sturdy way, he had managed to comfort his mother. He had sent the hateful crease of worry out of her face twice. Better still, he had made Milda comfort him by calling him a free soul. Mitt was not sure he knew what a free soul was – it never occurred to him that his mother had no idea either – but he thought it was a splendid thing to be. By way of earning it, he said stoutly, “Well, you’re not to worry any more. I’ll make it all right for you.”

Milda laughed and hugged him. “There’s my Mitt!”

MIRACULOUSLY, NO SOLDIERS came for Milda and Mitt. It seemed as if Dideo, Siriol and Ham had contented themselves with getting rid of the younger half of the Free Holanders and had not bothered to include wives and families. All the same, Milda and Mitt had a hard time of it for a while. When, after a week or so, Milda dared to go back to work, she found her place had been taken. Mitt was furious.

“It’s the way things are in this town,” Milda explained. “There’s hundreds of poor women willing to work their fingers into blisters. And the rich people have to have their curtains ready on time.”

“Why?” said Mitt. “Can’t the poor people get together and tell the rich ones where they get off?”

That was the kind of question which made Milda call him a free soul. Mitt knew it was, so he made a point of asking such things. It was a great comfort to know he was a free soul who did not know what fear was, while Milda was out trudging from workshop to workshop. Mitt himself, hungry and miserable, spent the days hanging round the back doors of counting houses, or on the edges of boatbuilders’ yards, hoping to be sent on an errand. Few errands came Mitt’s way. He was too small, and there was always the crowd of bigger, quick-spoken city boys to jostle Mitt aside and run the errand instead. And of course they jeered at Mitt too. But Mitt would tell himself that he was a free soul, he was, and wait patiently on. It helped him greatly.

At night Mitt had horrible dreams. He dreamt repeatedly that Canden was coming shuffling to the door again. Then the door would open, and there would be Canden, hanging on to the doorpost and slowly falling to pieces like Poor Old Ammet in the harbour. “All dead,” Canden would say, as pieces dropped off him, and Mitt would wake up trying to scream. Then Mitt would lie and tell himself sternly that he did not know what fear was. In the middle of the night that was not always so easy to believe. But sometimes Milda woke up when Mitt yelled. She would tell Mitt stories she had learnt as a girl until he went back to sleep again.

Milda’s stories made good listening. There was magic and adventure and fighting in them, and they all seemed to happen in North Dalemark in the time when there were kings – though there were earls in the stories too, and ordinary people. Mitt puzzled about the stories. He knew Holand was in South Dalemark, but this North Milda talked about seemed so different that he wondered for a while if it was real.

“Do they have kings still in the North?” he asked, to see what Milda would say.

But Milda knew disappointingly little about the North. “No, there’s no kings any more,” she said. “I’ve heard they have earls in the North just like we do, only the earls there are all freedom fighters like your dad was.”

Mitt could not understand how an earl could be anything of the sort. Nor could Milda explain.

“All I can say is I wish there were kings again,” she told Mitt. “Earls are no good. Look at Hadd – us poor people are just rent on two legs to him, and if we do anything he doesn’t care for, he claps us in prison, or worse.”

“But he can’t put everyone in prison,” Mitt objected. “There wouldn’t be anyone to catch his fish for him or sew his clothes.”

“Oh, you are a free soul, Mitt!” Milda exclaimed.

Mitt was not sure when or how it happened, but in the course of these talks he had with Milda in the night, it began to be understood between them that Mitt was one day going to avenge his father and put right all the wrongs in Holand. It was an accepted thing, even before Milda found work. She found work fairly soon, in another sewing house, because the one thing she could really do well was fine embroidery. They managed to pay the rent on their room in time to prevent the landlord turning them out. But they were still short of food. Milda spent the rest of her week’s earnings on a new pair of shoes.

“To celebrate,” she said. “I just happened to see them. Aren’t they pretty?”

Mitt would have been very hungry indeed had not Siriol, the dour-faced informer, sent round his daughter, Lydda, with a basket of sea fry. Lydda was a fat, meek girl of twelve. She showed Milda how to cook the fry, and she much admired Milda’s pretty new shoes. Perhaps she described them to her father. At any rate, Mitt and Milda had a square meal, and there were still enough fish for breakfast. Milda put them out on the windowsill of their room to keep fresh. The ants came out of the wall in the night and ate them up. When Mitt opened the window to fetch in breakfast, all he found was some tiny scraps of bone. He was looking miserably at them when Siriol came clumping up the dark stairs in his clogs and came into the room without being invited.

“Lost your breakfast, I see,” he said. “You’d better come round to mine and have some. And best thing I can see, Milda, is for him to sail with me in future. I was thinking of taking an apprentice.”

“Well—” said Milda.

“Free Holanders look after their own,” said Siriol.

Knowing what he knew about Siriol, Mitt was speechless. He had to stand there and let Milda do the refusing for him. But to his astonishment, Milda smiled gratefully at Siriol, thanked him over and over again, and agreed that Mitt should sail with Siriol.

“I don’t need breakfast,” was all Mitt could think of saying.

“Be round at my place in half an hour,” Siriol said, and clumped away again.

Mitt rounded on Milda. “But he informed!” he said passionately. “What did you want to go and agree for?”

Milda shrugged, with the crease in her face very deep and bitter. “I know. But we have to live. And maybe you’ll see your way to getting even with him if you keep close to him.”

Mitt was mollified by that. And it made a great deal of difference that he had a job too. Siriol was very scrupulous. Mitt had an apprentice’s share of the takings, so that when the catch was good, he earned nearly as much as Milda. That almost made up to him for the kind of job it was. He did not like fishing. He did not like Siriol. He hardly knew which he disliked most.

Fishing was a mixture of boredom, hardship and frantic bursts of work. Siriol was sour and surly and insisted that everything should be done exactly right. Mitt very soon learnt that he was not allowed to make a mistake. The first day he forgot to coil a rope as Ham had shown him. Siriol picked up the end of the offending rope – which had a knot in it – and hit Mitt across the back with it. Mitt glared at him.

“Do it,” said Siriol. “Do it right. Or else. You’ll be glad to know how one of these days.”

Small as Mitt was, he shared watches with big, slow Ham, who was Siriol’s partner. He learnt to patch the much-patched sail, to mend nets and to gut fish. Siriol and Ham taught him to steer, at first by day, which was simple, then to find his way by night, by the stars, or in pitch dark, by the feel of the wind and the water, and the pull of the sails. They taught him to smell bad weather before it was near enough to hurt. Mitt also learnt what chilblains were and how it felt to be too wet and too cold for too long. And he learnt all these things, loathing them, until they were second nature, and learnt them so young that they were with him all his life.

One thing that surprised Mitt was that he was never in the least afraid at sea. He expected to be. When he first climbed gingerly down into the Flower of Holand, and she rocked, and he knew there were only salt-swollen old boards between him and sinking into the sea like Old Ammet, he had to tell himself very hard that he was a free soul who did not know what fear was. Then Flower of Holand went dipping out to sea with all the rest of the fishing fleet, and he forgot all about it. Sailing was just a job, like Milda’s sewing. And it was good to have a job and earn money when the host of bigger boys hanging round the waterfront had no such thing.

Sometimes, on a fine day, when Siriol’s boat went bluntly out of the harbour on the tide, rich people’s pleasure boats would be putting out, too, from the West Pool. The West Pool was a shallower mooring just beyond Holand, where the dues were so high that only wealthy people could keep boats there. Mitt enjoyed watching them. But Siriol and Ham had nothing but contempt for them. They spat in the water when they saw them.

“Rich men’s toys,” said Siriol. “Half out of the water in this little breeze! Put one of those in a gale, and she’s under in five minutes.” Siriol’s respect was reserved for the stately merchant ships. Let the Proud Ammet or the graceful Lovely Libby come nodding out of Holand, crowding up sail as she came, then Siriol’s face would light up, and Ham’s also. “Ah!” Siriol would say. “That’s a ship for you!” And he would look round his thick and fishy Flower of Holand as if she disappointed him.

After a year of fishing, Mitt felt himself the equal of any boy in Holand. He did not grow much – probably because he had to work so hard – but he was as tough and quick-witted as any lad on the waterfront, and much quicker-tongued. He knew every bad word there was. He had a retort for everyone. Boys and girls alike treated him with respect now. Indeed, many of them would have liked to make friends with Mitt. But Mitt kept himself to himself. These children, or children like them, had made his life a misery when he first came to Holand, and he found he could not forget it. He preferred grown-ups. He cracked jokes on shore and on board that made big slow Ham guffaw and even Siriol smile. That pleased Mitt. It made him feel grown-up and independent – a proper free soul.

It was just as well Mitt was independent. Milda had simply no sense of economy. It became a habit with her to “just happen to see” something whenever she came home with her wages. One week it would be a huge iced cake, the next, a pair of pretty earrings.

“You have to keep up your self-respect,” she told Mitt when he protested. “I’m being ground underfoot, I am, and if I don’t keep my spirits up somehow, I shall just go under, I know I will!”

This was all very well, but if Mitt was out and the thing Milda “just happened to see” cost more money than Milda had, she did not scruple to take Mitt’s hard-earned money too. Mitt had to hide his money, or they would have starved. He felt terribly put-upon and responsible. One evening, when he crawled home, tired out, to find Milda had bought a whole tub of oysters, it seemed like the last straw. She had opened the tub too, and left it in the sun under the window. It was already smelling rather queer, and the ants were swarming up the sides of the tub to investigate.

“What did you want to buy that for!” Mitt yelled.

Milda was injured. “Oh, Mitt! I thought they’d be such a treat for you.”

“But there’s thousands of them!” Mitt bawled. “How are we going to eat all that lot? If you wanted oysters, I could have got you oysters – for nothing, from Dideo. Honest, you need more looking after than a kid! How am I going to pay Siriol out for informing, or do anything else, if you’re going to carry on like this?”

“You sound just like your dad,” Milda said coldly. “Let me tell you, those oysters were a bargain at two silver, and you ought to be grateful.”

“Two silver!” Mitt raised both his chilblained hands to the blotchy ceiling. “That’s no bargain. That’s daylight robbery, that is!”

Mitt and Milda – and the ants – had oysters for supper and for breakfast, and after that they both felt unwell, although the ants seemed as lively as ever. Ham kindly helped Mitt throw the rest of the tub into the harbour.

“And she went and paid two silver for them!” Mitt groaned.

“Don’t be too hard on her. She’s used to better things,” Ham said. “She’s a lovely good woman, she is.”

Mitt stared at him. “If I didn’t feel sick as a dog already,” he said, “I would after I heard you say that!” And he went back upstairs, muttering, “Lovely good woman!” to himself in the greatest disgust. Of course he knew his mother was still young and pretty, in spite of that hateful crease on her face where her dimple should have been, and he knew she was not like those other ladies in the tenement who were always down on the waterfront, making up to the sailors whenever a ship came in, but for Ham to say that! Mitt had never noticed that Ham deeply admired Milda. Ham was too slow and shy to let Milda know it. And Mitt’s feeling was that all women were born stupid and grew worse.

Alda, Siriol’s wife, was the worst of the lot. Mitt supposed he should be thankful that his mother did not spend all her money on arris, the way Alda did. Alda was usually too drunk to sell the fish Siriol, Ham and Mitt had caught. She sat on a barrel at the corner of the stall, while Lydda stood dumbly behind the heaps of fish, letting people have them too cheap. It pained Mitt to his soul. After all their trouble, out half the night pulling in fish in the drizzling rain, a rich merchant’s housekeeper or a mincing man from the Palace had only to appear and point to a pile of sweet whitebait, and Lydda would humbly halve the price. It was not fair. The ones who could afford to pay the full price always got it cheap. But that was Holand all over.

At length, Lydda’s spineless meekness was more than Mitt could bear. If the fish was to go cheap, he felt it should go cheap to the right people. He elbowed Lydda aside and tried selling the fish himself.

“Hadd, Hadd, haddock!” he shouted. “Fit for an earl, and dirt cheap too!” When people stopped and stared, Mitt took up a haddock and waved it about. “Hadd,” he said, “ock. Come on. He won’t eat you. You eat him.” He picked up an eel in the other hand. “And here’s an earl – I mean a Harl – I mean an eel – for sale. Who wants a nice fresh Harl for supper?” It was great fun, and it sold a lot of fish.

After that Mitt always sold the fish. Lydda weighed and wrapped it, while her mother sat on her tub chuckling at Mitt and breathing arris fumes over the customers. Mitt was often very tired. His hands were chapped and covered with little cuts from the fish scales, winter and summer, but it was worth it, just to be able to shout rude things about Hadd.

“You want to watch it, Mitt,” Siriol said whenever he heard Mitt’s sales talk. But he let Mitt go on. After all, there was always a laughing crowd round the stall, buying fish. Even the Palace lackeys sniggered as they bought.

Then one day, as soon as Flower of Holand was out of the harbour and no one could overhear, Siriol amazed Mitt by asking him if he wanted to join the Free Holanders.

“I’ll have to think,” Mitt said. And he missed selling the fish that next morning, in order to hurry home and ask Milda what he ought to do, before she went to work. “I can’t join, can I?” he said. “Not after what they did to Dad?”

But Milda went dancing round the room, her skirts held out and her earrings swinging, and her dimple deep and clear. “This is your chance!” she said. “Don’t you see, Mitt? This is your chance to get back at them at last!”

“Oh yes,” said Mitt. “I suppose it is and all.”

So Mitt became a Free Holander, and great fun it was too. At first it was simply the great fun of being in the secret, with, behind that, the further secret that he was only in it to get revenge for his father. Mitt grinned to himself at both secrets all through long, boring watches when he was alone at Flower of Holand’s tiller, and the stars wheeling overhead seemed to glimmer with sheer glee.

“Ah, shut up, he’s useful!” Siriol said to Ham when Ham protested. “Who’s going to bother with a lad who looks just like all the other kids? People think boys don’t count. Look at the way he gets away with selling fish. He’s safer than what we are.”

Taking messages for the Free Holanders was pure bliss to Mitt. He revelled in going unnoticed through the crowded streets. It was good to be small and ordinary-looking, so that he could get the better of Harchad’s soldiers and spies. He would memorise the message carefully and slip off after selling the fish, mingle with the crowd in this street, watch a fight in that alley, loiter round the barracks, joking with the soldiers, and still go unsuspected. He was Mitt of the free soul, who did not know the meaning of fear. And the greatest fun of all was when he chanced to be in a street while soldiers stopped off both ends of it and questioned everyone in it about their business.

Harchad ordered this done quite often, as much to keep people properly subdued as to catch revolutionaries. In a tense silence, broken only by the clopping of soldiers’ boots, his men would go from person to person, searching bags and pockets and asking each one what he was doing in this street. Mitt delighted in inventing business. He loved giving his name. It was marvellous to have the commonest name in Holand. Mitt, with perfect truth, could call himself Alham Alhamsson, Ham Hamsson, Hammitt Hammittsson, and Mitt Mittsson, or any combination of those that he fancied. He enlivened boring hours of fishing by thinking up new ways to fool Harchad’s men.

The only trouble about being a Free Holander was that Mitt did not understand what the meetings were about. Once the novelty wore off, they bored him to tears. They would sit in someone’s shed or attic, often without a candle even, and Siriol would start by talking of tyranny and oppression. Then Dideo would say that the leaders of the future were coming from below. Below what? Mitt wondered. Someone would tell a long tale of Hadd’s injustice, and someone else would whisper things about Harchad. And sooner or later Ham would be thumping the table and saying, “We look to the North, we do. Let the North show its hand!”

The first time Ham said this, Mitt felt a shiver of excitement. He knew Ham could be arrested for saying it. But Ham said it so often that Mitt lost interest. He found he was using the meetings to make up sleep in. He never got enough sleep in those days.

Mitt felt this would not do. If he was to get his revenge on the Free Holanders, he needed to know what they were up to. “What do they think they’re doing?” he asked Milda. “It’s all looking to the North, or whisper, whisper, about Harchad, or tyranny and that. What’s it about?”

Milda looked nervously round the room. “Hush. They’re getting at rebellion and uprising – I hope.”

“They don’t get at it very fast,” Mitt said discontentedly. “There’s no plans at all. I wish you could come to meetings and see if you could make some sense of them.”

Milda laughed. “I might – I bet they wouldn’t have me, though.”

When Milda laughed, the crease on her face gave way to a dimple again. It was a thing Mitt always tried to encourage if he could. So he said, “I bet they would have you. You could stir them up a bit and get them to come out with something. I’m sick of old tyranny and the rest!” And since this made Milda smile broadly, Mitt did his best to keep her smiling. “Tell you what,” he said. “While I’m getting back at them for informing, I’d like to get back at old Hadd too. I’d like to give him what for, because of him trampling you underfoot all these years.”

“What a boy you are!” said Milda. “You don’t know what fear is, do you?”

After that, it was understood between Mitt and Milda that the mission of Mitt’s life was a double one. He was to break the Free Holanders and rid the world of Earl Hadd. Mitt was sure he could do it. So was Milda.

Milda joined the Free Holanders too. Mitt was delighted. He had high hopes of it. Milda came to meetings, and she talked as eloquently as anyone there. She loved to talk. She loved leaning forwards over the secretive night-light and seeing everyone’s listening faces shadowy and attentive. But the sole result was that Milda became as ardent a freedom fighter as anyone there. She talked revolution to Mitt whenever he was at home.

“Flaming Ammet!” Mitt said disgustedly. “It’s like being at a meeting all the time now!”

All the same, Milda’s talk did make things clearer to Mitt. He was soon able to talk of oppression and uprising, tyranny and leadership from below, and feel he knew what it meant. And when he had leisure to think – which he sometimes did while Flower of Holand ploshed her sturdy way to the fishing grounds – he decided that what it amounted to was that there were two parts to Dalemark: the North, where people were mysteriously free and happy, and the South, where the earls and the rich people were free and happy enough, but where they made darned sure that ordinary people like Mitt and Milda were as unhappy as possible.

Right, Mitt said to himself. I reckon that sums it up. Now let’s get busy and do something about it.

But the Free Holanders seemed simply content to talk, and Mitt became increasingly annoyed by them. He was very pleased when another secret society actually killed four of Harchad’s spies. Siriol was not. He told Mitt, with a glum sort of gladness, that things would be very much worse now. And they were.

Harchad imposed a curfew. Anyone found in the streets after dark was marched away and never seen again. Siriol forbade Mitt to carry messages during that time. Mitt did not quite understand why he should not.

Then a thief on the waterfront tried to rob a man. He knocked the man down and was taking his money when he found a gold button with the wheatsheaf crest of Holand on it, hidden in the man’s coat. The thief knew it was the badge Harchad gave all his spies, and he was so frightened that he jumped into the harbour and was drowned. Mitt did not understand this story at all.

“Well, if you don’t, I’m not telling you,” was all Siriol would say.

Then Earl Hadd quarrelled with four other earls at once. Everyone in Holand groaned. Much as they detested Hadd, they almost admired him for being so very quarrelsome. “Fallen out with Earl Henda again, has he?” the women in Milda’s sewing shop would say. “Honestly, I never knew anyone like him!” This time, however, Hadd fell out not only with Henda, but with the Earls of Canderack, Waywold and Dermath too. And so powerful were these Earls, and owned so much of South Dalemark between them, that there was some doubt in Holand whether Hadd could hold his own against them all.

“Bitten off more than he can chew this time for sure, the old sinner,” Dideo said to Mitt. “Maybe this is where the Free Holanders get their chance.”

Mitt hoped so. But Harl, Hadd’s eldest son, managed to put himself into Hadd’s good books by suggesting a way to deal with the four Earls. Harl, fat and indolent though he was, could sometimes be seen with his brother Navis and a crowd of beaters, servants and dogs, walking over the Flate and shooting birds with a long silver-inlaid fowling piece. Harl was allowed to use a gun, being an earl’s son. No one else was, apart from lords and hearthmen, because there had been so many uprisings in the South. Big ships carried cannon, as a protection against the ships of the North, but guns were other wise banned. But, said Harl, why not give all the soldiers guns as well? That would make the four Earls think twice before attacking Holand.

Hadd agreed that it would. And that put paid to the hopes of Mitt and the Free Holanders. Up went rents and taxes and harbour dues. The people of Holand admitted grudgingly that Hadd was up to everything, even while they groaned.

“It’s not right,” said Ham. “Give Harchad’s men guns and they’ll be ten times worse than they are now. But you have to admire Hadd. Fair play.”

But Hadd took other precautions too. The Earl of Canderack, since most of the coast north of Holand was his, owned a fair-size fleet he could send against Holand if necessary. Holand also had its fleet. But to be on the safe side, Hadd betrothed his granddaughter Hildrida to the Lord of the Holy Islands, north of Canderack. The ships of the Holy Islands were famous. As Siriol remarked to Ham, the Holy Islands fleet was probably the main reason why the North had not long since conquered the South and brought freedom to everyone. Milda, as she sewed with three other women at a great bedspread to be covered with blue and gold roses, thought of it from another point of view. One of the women said that Lithar, Lord of the Holy Islands, was twenty years old. And, another added, Hildrida Navisdaughter could only be about nine.

Milda remembered she had once been interested in Navis and his family. “Then in that case I don’t think it’s fair at all!” she said warmly.

IT DID NOT seem fair to Hildrida Navisdaughter either. She thought at first she was in trouble. She and her brother, Ynen, had gone sailing. They had been tired of being told they were too young to go out in a boat alone and of being taken tamely up and down the coast by the sailors the Earl employed to sail his family. Ynen had wanted to sail a boat himself. So they slipped away and borrowed their cousins’ yacht. It had been splendid fun, and very frightening too. Ynen had nearly laid the boat on her side, just outside the West Pool, before he got used to the wind. And they had twice found themselves nearly aground in the shoals beyond. But they had managed. They had brought the yacht back and not even bumped the jetty.

Then, as soon as she reached the Palace, Hildy was told her father wanted to see her. Naturally she thought he had found out about the sailing.

Too bad for him! Hildrida thought, while she was having a good dress put on and her windblown black hair brushed. I shall be very angry. I shall say we’re never allowed to do anything. I shall say it’s my fault, and I shan’t let him send for Ynen. And I’ll tell him that it doesn’t matter whether we drown or not. It’s not as if we were important.

The lady-in-waiting who led Hildrida by her hand through the lofty corridors to Navis’s rooms rather thought Hildrida must have found out what was in store for her. She had never seen her so white and stormy. The lady-in-waiting was glad she was not in Navis’s shoes.

Navis was well aware that his daughter had an awkward personality. He had taken refuge in a book. When Hildy was shown in, she found him sitting on the window seat, with his calm profile outlined against the Flate beyond the window, and his eyes on a song by the Adon. She was exasperated. The ladies-in-waiting told her that Navis was still grieving for her dead mother, but Hildy found that hard to believe. To her mind, Navis was the coldest and laziest person she knew.

“I’m here,” she said piercingly, to stir him up a bit. “And I’m not sorry.”

Navis winced a little and kept his eyes studiously on his book. But like the lady-in-waiting, he assumed that Hildrida had already heard about her betrothal, and he was heartily relieved. “Then, if you’re not sorry, I suppose you’re glad,” he said. “Whoever told you has saved me a great deal of trouble. You may run away and boast now if you wish.”

Hildy was taken aback at not being scolded. But it seemed to her that her father was washing his hands of her, just as he always did, and she wanted to do battle with him instead. “I never boast,” she said. “But I could. We didn’t sink her.”

Navis was puzzled enough to take his eyes off his book and look at Hildy. “What are you talking about?”

“What did you send for me for?” Hildrida countered.

“Why, to tell you that you’ve just been betrothed to the Lord of the Holy Islands,” said her father. “What did you think it was for?”

“Betrothed?” said Hildy. “Without asking me!” It was such a bombshell that, for the moment, she clean forgot she had been sailing. “Why wasn’t I told?”

Navis found himself facing a blazing white daughter, out in the open, as it were, without a book to hide behind. “I am telling you,” he said, and hastily picked up his book again.

“When it’s too late!” Hildrida said, before he could find his place again. “When it’s done. You might have asked me if I minded, even if I’m not important. I’m a person too.”

“Most people are,” Navis said, rather desperately scanning his page. He wished he had not chosen to read the Adon. The Adon said things like “Truth is the fire that fetches thunder,” which sounded unpleasantly like a description of Hildrida. “And you are very important now,” he added. “You’re forming an alliance with Lithar for us.”

“What’s Lithar like? How old is he?” Hildrida demanded.

Navis found his place and put his finger on it. “I’ve only met him once.” It was hard to know what else to say. “He’s only a young man – twenty or so.”

“Only—!” Words nearly failed Hildy. “I’m not going to be betrothed to an old man like that! I’m too young. And I’ve never met him!”

Navis hastily got his book in front of his face again. “Time will cure both those objections.”

“No, it won’t!” stormed Hildrida. “And if you go on reading, I’ll – I’ll hit you and then tear that book up!”

Realising that strong measures were necessary, Navis laid his book down. “Now listen, Hildy. This is something that happens to all our family. Your cousin Harilla is being betrothed to the Lord of Mark, and what’s her name – Harchad’s daughter – to one of the—”

Hildy interrupted with a screech. Her father could call her Hildy all he liked – usually only Ynen did – but the thought of being lumped in with the dreadful girl cousins was too much for her. “Just you un-betroth me!” she said. “And do it at once, or you’ll be sorry!”

“You know I can’t,” said her father. “It’s your grandfather’s doing, not mine.”

“Then he’ll be sorry too!” Hildy proclaimed, and swept to the door.

Navis called after her. It was easier talking to her back. “Hildrida! Don’t make an undignified scene, there’s a good girl. It won’t do any good. I advise you to go to the library instead and read about the Holy Islands. You’ll find they’re rather interesting.”

Hildy paused, with her hand on the doorknob. Islands were places surrounded by water, weren’t they? Perhaps she could turn this bombshell to some advantage at least. “I ought to learn to sail, oughtn’t I, if I’m going to the Holy Islands?” she said.

“Yes, I suppose so,” Navis said. Rather relieved to find her no longer raging, he added consolingly, “But you won’t be going for some years yet.”

“Then I’ve got time to learn,” said Hildy. “If I promise not to make a fuss, will you get me a boat of my own?”

“Er – if you like,” said Navis.

“I do like. But you must give the boat to Ynen too, because he never gets anything,” said Hildy. “Or I shall make a fuss to Grandfather and all over the Palace.”

By this time Navis’s one desire was to be left in peace with his book again. “Yes, yes,” he said. “If you run away like a good girl and don’t make a scene, you and Ynen shall have the best boat money can buy. Will that do for you?”

“Yes, thank you, Father,” Hildy said, primly and bitterly, and swept out.

The Palace people kept out of her way. Even her cousins, when they saw Hildrida marching, white, upright and staring like a mask out of the Sea Festival, knew better than to cross her path. They all knew Hildrida had inherited her temper from Grandfather Hadd himself. Only Ynen dared go near her, and he dared not say a word. Hildy swept to her own room. There she collected all the ornaments, from the gilded clock to the gold-painted chamber pot, put them in a heap on the floor, and broke them with the poker. Ynen crouched on the window seat, wincing at the carnage. He still dared not say a word when Hildy flung aside the poker, somewhat bent, and went to sit by her dressing table, where she stared long and earnestly at the thin white face in the mirror. She had left the mirror unsmashed on purpose.

“I am a person,” she said at last. “Aren’t I?”

“Yes,” said Ynen. “What happened, Hildy?”

“And not a Thing,” said Hildy. “What’s happened is I’m betrothed. And nobody told me, just like a Thing. Do you think I should sit quiet and not mind and be a Thing? The girl cousins are betrothed too.”

“They’ll make a fuss,” Ynen predicted. “Have you been forbidden to go sailing?”

“No,” said Hildy. “We’re getting a boat out of it. You have to get between the Islands somehow. I think I shall go to the library now.” And she got up and went. Ynen went with her. He was still mystified, but he was used to that. He knew he would have to be very patient and tactful if he was to hear more about this promised boat.

The library was very tall and built of speckled marble, with a domed window in its high ceiling. Hildrida, looking very small, followed by the even smaller Ynen, marched across to the librarian. “Give me all the books you have on the Holy Islands,” she said.

Rather astonished, the librarian went away obediently. He returned shortly with one big old volume and one small newish one. “Here we are. Not too much, I’m afraid. I advise you to take the little book. It’s easy, and it has pictures.”

Hildrida gave him a scathing look and took the big book. She marched to the nearest table and opened it. Rather helplessly, the librarian gave Ynen the small book and left them to it.

“This book is all pictures,” Ynen said dolefully. “Read me yours.”

“Quiet,” Hildy said severely. “I’m concentrating.” But she did not like to think of Ynen sitting humbly there with nothing to do, and, besides, the book was the difficult, old kind that is easier to read aloud. So she read, “Indeed men say that the Holy Isles been of all places in the South marks the sole place where enchantment abides.”

“I like that,” said Ynen. “What are marks?”

“The old name for earldoms. Quiet. ‘Of legends that do there pertain, there is said by some to be a certain enchanted Bull which appears, no man can say how, now on one Isle, now upon another. By some it is said that this Beast may grant wishes, and certainly to see it is deemed by all a great good fortune. Further, there may be heard in clear weather a strange piping among the Islands, most piercing and pleasant to hear, though no piper can be seen, and which goeth like the Bull from Island to Island. This has been heard by many, and many good ships been foundered following the sound. Withal come the horses of the sea, and, it is said, at times the Sea himself in the likeness of an old fellow of the Islands, who will oft speak fair with those that meet him, but oftentimes be rough and violent. For this reason, the men of the Islands count themselves holy and favoured above others. And certainly the Holy Islands are a fair place, mild, fruitful and full of fair havens.”’

“They sound wonderful,” said Ynen. “I’d like to go there.”

Hildy shut the book. “You shall,” she said. “You can come with me when I go. I think I shan’t make an undignified scene after all. I’m important. There’s no magic Bulls in Mark, are there?”

“I didn’t know there were any anywhere,” said Ynen. “When are we getting our boat?”

“I don’t know. But Father promised,” said Hildy.

Later that day their cousin Harilla learnt that she was betrothed to the Lord of Mark and lay on the stairs, drumming her heels and screaming, while everyone near ran for smelling salts and made a great to-do. Hildy managed to smile a little. It was a dry, stretched smile, but very dignified. And as, one by one, her four other girl cousins learnt of their betrothals and promptly followed Harilla’s example, Hildy’s smile grew more and more dignified. She was still not exactly glad to be betrothed, but she did almost feel it was worth it when the yacht Wind’s Road was towed into the West Pool.

Navis kept his promise lavishly. He had heard of the smashed ornaments, of course, but knowing Hildrida’s temper, he felt she had shown great self-control. Wind’s Road was twice the size of the cousins’ boat – Navis did not think his children were old enough to sail alone, so he provided space for a crew, as befitted the grandchildren of an earl – and she was sheer beauty, from the golden ears of wheat carved on her prow to the rosy apples decorating her stern. Her hull was blue, her cabin white and gold, and her canvas snowy. She carried two foresails too, to Ynen’s joy. In fact, Hildy felt that the look of pure bliss on Ynen’s face almost made up for any number of betrothals.

THAT AUTUMN, WHEN the Festival procession poured, scraping and banging and colourful, down to the harbour to drown Poor Old Ammet, it was guarded by soldiers with the new guns. Mitt did not like watching it. Each Festival brought back his nightmares about Canden falling to pieces in the doorway. But the tenement was so near the harbour that it was hard to avoid watching. This year Dideo came to lean out of the window between Mitt and Milda, with his netted eyes wistfully on those new guns.

“The stuff they use in those,” he explained, “can blow a man up, used right. Years back I used to sail with a man who could get the stuff, and we went after fish with it. You might call it unfair to the fish, but I know to this day how to make a bomb. And I was thinking that a bomb in the midst of Old Ammet could rid the world of Hadd and give us uprising all over Holand in one moment.”

Mitt and his mother exchanged a long, startled look over Dideo’s gnarled hat. That was it! What an idea! They discussed it excitedly as soon as the procession was over and Dideo gone.

“If you were to get a bomb and throw it at old Haddock – you do throw bombs, do you?” said Milda. “You could shout out that Dideo and Siriol set you on.”

“But I might not be heard,” said Mitt. “No – I’d have to get myself taken. Then when Harchad comes to ask questions, I tell him the Free Holanders set me on to do it. But how can we get hold of some of that gun stuff?”

“We’ll get some,” said Milda. “We’ll think of a way. But you’ll have to do it before you’re old enough to hang. I couldn’t bear to think of you taken and hanged!” She was so excited that she went out and spent the rest of her wages on fruit and sweets to celebrate.

Mitt looked at the bundles of toffee apples as dourly as Siriol. He sighed. He saw he would have to put off throwing any kind of bomb until he had earned enough money to rent another farm for Milda. She would certainly starve if he was arrested and she left to manage all by herself. He thought he might have to wait until he was at least as old as Dideo.

It did not happen that way. A week later Mitt came home from selling fish, smelly, slimy and pinched with cold. He wanted only to go to bed. But to his annoyance, his mother was entertaining a visitor. The visitor was a square, sober-looking man, with an air that reminded Mitt vaguely of something – or someone – else. He was wearing much more respectable clothes than most people wore on the waterfront, and to Mitt’s further annoyance, Milda had squandered her money this week on a bottle of Canderack wine for this visitor. Mitt stood in the doorway glowering at him.

“Oh, Mitt!” Milda said happily. She was looking very pretty, and the dimple was back in her face. “You remember Canden?” Mitt did remember Canden – too well. He was still having nightmares about him after the Festival. He had to hold hard to the doorpost when he heard the name. Milda, quite unaware how Mitt was feeling, said, “Well, this is Canden’s brother, Hobin, all the way from Waywold. My son, Mitt, Hobin.”

The visitor smiled and came forwards, holding out a square, useful-looking hand. Mitt shuddered, clenched his teeth, and put out his own fishy hand. “I’m all covered with fish,” he said, hoping the visitor would not like to touch him.

But the warm, square hand seized his and shook it. “Oh, I know what it’s like to come in dirty from work,” Hobin said. “I’m a gunsmith myself, and sometimes I think I’ll never get the black off. You go and wash and don’t mind me.”

Mitt smiled shakenly. He realised Canden’s brother was a very nice man. But that did not alter the fact that he had a nightmare for a brother. Mitt went over to the bucket in the corner to wash, hoping that Hobin would go back to Waywold at once and never be seen in Holand again.

That hope went almost immediately. “Yes, I’ve got a tidy little house, up in Flate Street,” he heard Hobin telling Milda. “Workshop below, plenty of room to live upstairs. Earl Hadd’s done me proud.”

Mitt realised that Hobin had come to live in Holand. He was so dismayed that he called out, “And who did Earl Hadd turn out of there, in order to do you proud?”

“Oh, Mitt!” said Milda. “You mustn’t mind him,” she told Hobin. “He’s a real free soul, Mitt is.”

Mitt was furious. She had no right to tell a stranger private things like that. “Yes,” he said. “Bit poor and common for you here, aren’t we?” And, to make sure that Hobin would not want to visit them again, he wandered round the room swearing as hard as he could. He could tell that worried Hobin. He kept giving Mitt sober, concerned looks. It worried Milda too. She apologised for Mitt repeatedly, which made Mitt angrier than ever. When Hobin at last put out his hand to say goodbye, Mitt turned his back and pretended not to see it.

“You didn’t have to be like that, Mitt!” Milda said reproachfully when Hobin had gone. “Didn’t you understand? He’s a gunsmith! And you can see he was fond of Canden. If I can only get him to join the Free Holanders, then we can have that bomb – or a gun would be better. You could shoot Hadd from this very window, then!”

Mitt only grunted. He knew he would rather take a gun off a soldier in the open street than get one from Canden’s brother.

To Mitt’s acute misery, Hobin called again, repeatedly. It took months of visits before Mitt could forget Hobin had a brother who fell to pieces in his nightmares. When he did, he found he quite liked Hobin. Meanwhile, Hobin was firmly but kindly resisting all Milda’s persuasions to become a freedom fighter. He agreed that the Earls made life needlessly hard. He agreed that things were bad in Holand. He grumbled at taxes like everyone else. But he did not hold with freedom fighting, he said. He called Canden – sadly and a little severely – a boy who played with fire, and when Milda talked eagerly of injustices, he smiled and said it depended on her circumstances. After a while he took to scolding her kindly for buying him wine she could not afford.

Ham grew increasingly gloomy over that winter. Mitt could not understand why, until the spring, when Flower of Holand was gliding out on the tide one morning.

Siriol said, “Your ma going to marry that Hobin?”

“No!” Mitt said indignantly.

“Good for the cause when she does,” Siriol said.

Ham sighed. “Good for her too,” he said nobly. “Hobin’s a good man.”

Mitt was furious. And when Siriol and Ham proved right, it made another grudge he bore them. Milda did marry Hobin. And all through the wedding Mitt was muttering to himself that he would get Siriol and Ham for this if it was the last thing he did. Probably will be too, he thought. Since last Festival, he had been living as if there was nothing to look forward to, beyond the moment he somehow planted a bomb under Earl Hadd. The only good thing he could see in this wedding was that he would be living in reach of a store of gunpowder.

Milda and Mitt moved into the upper part of the house in Flate Street, some way west of the waterfront. It was a good house, though small and peeling. It even had a yard with a mangle in it, and a target on its dingy brick wall where, to Mitt’s interest, Hobin tested the guns he made. Mitt had his own room for the first time for years, and though he was far too proud to admit it, very lonely he was in it too. Milda gave up her sewing and bustled round their four upstairs rooms, singing and laughing, and the crease of worry seemed to have left her face for good. It saddened Mitt. He had only been able to send that crease away from time to time, yet Hobin had banished it for ever. Hobin offered to send Mitt to school, but Mitt preferred to go on working. The Free Holanders would not find much use for a boy who was tied up at lessons all day. And besides, Mitt felt that freedom fighting was almost the only tie left between himself and Milda.

It was then that Hobin showed a surprising strictness. “You’re a fool, Mitt,” he said. “You’ve got a brain and you ought to learn to use it, not waste your time talking freedom with a bunch of boatmen who don’t know what the word means. You’ll wish you’d done otherwise when you grow to be a man.”

This kind of argument is always irritating. Mitt twisted about and did not answer. He wanted to say he was not going to grow up – he was going to kill Hadd instead – but with Hobin’s sober blue eyes fixed on him, he did not like to.

“Well, if you must work,” said Hobin, “you can do one job and one only. You can learn my trade from me, or Siriol’s from him, or you can sell fish if you want. But you do no more than one.”

Mitt passionately wanted to go on selling fish. He enjoyed shouting out rude things about Hadd even more than he loved fooling Harchad’s soldiers. Fishing – well, he was glad of any excuse to stop doing that. On the other hand, he knew that he would have far more chance of getting his hands on some gunpowder if he was Hobin’s apprentice. He shifted about, kept his eyes on the floor, and finally swallowed his annoyance enough to say grudgingly, “I’ll learn your trade, then.”

“You did quite right, Mitt,” Milda said, and hugged him delightedly. That consoled Mitt somewhat.

But it was unexpectedly awkward when Hobin went with Mitt to Siriol’s house to explain to Siriol and buy out the remainder of Mitt’s apprenticeship. Alda threw both arms round Mitt and gave him an arris-scented kiss on both cheeks. Slow tears trickled down Lydda’s face. “I shall miss you on the stall, Mitt,” she said. Mitt was prepared for this. But what he had not been prepared for was the look of disappointment and resignation on Siriol’s face.

“I should have thought of this,” Siriol said, and he got out the arris bottle and poured everyone a glass, by which Mitt knew that this was a special occasion. “Yes, I should have thought,” Siriol said when they were all sitting stiffly round the table. “You got right on your side, Hobin, and Mitt’s worth a better trade than fishing. But it’s not easy for me – having no son of my own.”

Hobin looked uncomfortable. Lydda and Alda cried. Mitt sat squirming on his stool. “It made me feel all slimy, sort of,” he told Milda afterwards. “As if I was covered in fish juice. And I can’t abide the taste of arris.”

Siriol fetched the crumpled paper that Milda had signed on Mitt’s behalf nearly two years back. At first he refused to take any money for it. Hobin insisted. Everything got more and more awkward, until Ham was called in to witness the bargain. Ham clapped Hobin on the shoulder, and wrung Mitt’s hand until Mitt wondered if he would have the use of it again, and was generally so cheerful and so pleased for Mitt that all the awkwardness vanished. Everyone had another glass of arris – Mitt poured his secretly into Alda’s glass – and then he and Hobin came away.

“But I feel bad, I do, really,” Mitt told Milda. “As if I owe it them to tell them we need the gunpowder.”

“Well, why don’t you tell them?” Milda said. “Dideo knows how to make a bomb. It wouldn’t do any harm to get them to help.”

“You mean, bring the Free Holanders into it, really?” Mitt said. It seemed a very good idea.

Unfortunately Hobin came in at that moment and caught the words Free Holanders. Again he showed surprising strictness. “I’m not having freedom-fighting talk in this house,” he said. “Silly cloak-and-dagger stuff! And don’t get the idea I’m scared of Harchad either. He knows I can go back to Waywold if I want. What gets me is the way those boatmen don’t grow up. It’s like a game to them, just like it was to Canden. Nobody’s playing that silly game in my house!”

Mitt and Milda could only continue their talk in utmost secrecy, either in snatched moments or when Hobin was out at the Gunsmiths’ Guild. The upshot of their planning was that Mitt lied himself blue in the face to Hobin and managed to attend the next meeting of the Free Holanders. There he laid before them his suggestion: that he steal enough gunpowder for a bomb and plant it under Hadd when he next carried Old Ammet down to the harbour to drown.

The suggestion made a startled hush. Ham broke it by saying reproachfully, “It wasn’t because of the gunpowder I was glad for you, Mitt. I hope you don’t think that.”

“Funny. I made sure you was expecting it,” said Mitt, who could seldom resist teasing Ham.

“Now, Mitt—” Ham began.

“Hush,” said Siriol. “Learn to take a joke, Ham. Mitt, that’s a risk. Horrible risk. You’d get taken.”

This was fighting talk from Siriol. He was really considering the idea. Highly delighted, Mitt made haste to assure Siriol that he had no intention of being taken. “Suppose I was dressed up in red and yellow, like the Palace boys. They’d not know who I was until it was too late. I can run.”

“I know you can run,” said Siriol. “Your ma never agrees, does she?”

“Ask her,” said Mitt. “Only not when Hobin’s there. She can sew the clothes if we can get her the stuff.”

Siriol pondered, long and deep.

“Mitt looks just like any other lad I ever saw,” Dideo said persuasively. “Half the time I don’t recognise him myself. And I would love to get making a bomb.” Indeed, all the other Free Holanders were loving the thought too. They leant forwards, murmuring eagerly across the night-light.

“Boom!” said someone. “Up goes Hadd. Lovely!”

“And all Holand rises to us!” said someone else. “He can do it, Siriol.”

“Quiet!” said Siriol. “I know he can do it. But he has to get away after. This is going to take careful planning.”

Mitt scampered home to Flate Street, wholly delighted. “We did it!” he whispered to Milda when she met him anxiously on the stairs. “We’re on!”

“And you’re not afraid at all?” Milda whispered, wonderingly.

“Not a bit,” said Mitt. And it was true. He was looking forward to it. He felt dedicated.

The Free Holanders began to lay their plans, carefully and thoroughly as Siriol did everything. Mitt and Milda laid theirs. And all of them very soon realised that it would not be next Festival that Mitt planted his bomb. As Siriol said, they would need to study the road the procession took, and the way the soldiers were placed, to find out where and when would be the safest time for Mitt. And he had to look into escape routes and possible hiding places for Mitt afterwards.

As Mitt had no intention of escaping, he never attended when Siriol talked of things like this. But after the first week he spent as Hobin’s apprentice, he knew that it would take him years, literally, to steal enough gunpowder to make Dideo a bomb. Hobin was only allowed enough gunpowder to test the guns he made. Harchad’s arms inspectors called once a week to make sure there was no more. Sometimes they made surprise visits, to make doubly sure. They would weigh the powders and count the guns, and, unless their seal was on everything, Hobin was not allowed to work. They were a great annoyance to Mitt, though Hobin did not seem bothered by them. He would joke with them, almost as if they were friends.

Gunpowder, Mitt discovered, was made of three things, which Hobin mixed, very carefully, himself. One was charcoal, which Mitt never bothered with. Dideo could get that easily. But the sulphur and the saltpetre were, as far as Mitt knew, impossible to get any other way than by stealing them. Mitt supposed they must be made somehow, but he never found out how. They were delivered in sealed bags by the inspectors and locked away by Hobin. It was months before Mitt was allowed even to touch any. He had to spend his time instead melting lead and casting boring little bullets in a string of small sausage-shaped moulds. And watching, watching.

Hobin himself was the other great drawback to Mitt’s plans. He was such a careful man, and so patient. Mitt suspected that even without inspectors, Hobin would have kept all his things under lock and key anyway. And he was much in demand. There was scarcely an hour when there was not someone else in the workshop besides Mitt and Hobin. Troopers and captains came, bringing guns which had problems. Other gunsmiths came, to consult Hobin on difficult technical matters. Mitt discovered that Hobin had invented a way of making a gun shoot true, by putting a spiral groove up the inside of the barrel. That was why the bullets Mitt so boringly cast were pointed, and not round like the shot Harl used when he shot birds on the Flate. Twice Hobin was actually summoned to Harchad to be consulted. By the time Mitt had graduated to carving butts and even weighing a little powder, he had grasped that Hobin was the best gunsmith in South Dalemark. Mitt was quite proud, and glad on his mother’s behalf. But it did mean he had chosen the very worst man to filch from. Hobin had a name for honesty. He was respected in the Guild. And for a long time Mitt dared not do anything but pretend he was honest too.

Hobin was truly anxious for Mitt to learn, and to become what he called “a decent citizen”. Mitt had to wear better clothes – which were certainly warmer in winter, but which he despised on principle. He had to wash when they came up from work. Once a week he was forced to wash all over in front of the fire, in spite of his conviction that washing took the strength out of you. And every evening Hobin produced a book. It was called A Reader for the Poor, and it bored Mitt to tears. “If you won’t go to school, you must learn at home,” Hobin said, and he made Mitt read a page aloud every night after supper.

Mitt’s only wonder was that he did not die of boredom in the first year. It seemed to him that he only came alive when he began to be able, at last, to take Dideo tiny packets of sulphur and saltpetre. Then it was even better than running errands for the Free Holanders. Mitt would lie to Hobin, as he told Milda, like a fishmonger’s scales, and slip off into the streets with his packet, knowing that if he was caught with it on him, there would be trouble indeed. It was a marvellous feeling of danger, and marvellous to know he was getting somewhere at last.

He did not get on very fast, either as a gunsmith or a thief. Hobin was a patient man, but he sometimes grew irritated with Mitt. Mitt’s mind was wholly on filching powders. He did not intend to be a gunsmith, so he attended to Hobin as little as he attended to the plans Siriol insisted on making about a hiding place for him after his bomb was thrown. Meanwhile, Milda had a baby, and another the year after. Mitt was rather astonished to find himself with two sisters long before he had a bomb. They were rather a nuisance. They would cry, and they would cut teeth, and they would take up Milda’s time when Mitt needed her. But they would not believe they were nuisances. Whenever Milda dumped a sister in Mitt’s arms, the baby would start to laugh and gurgle, as if Mitt liked her.

Mitt started to grow then. That astonished him too. He was used to being the smallest boy in the street. Now he was one of the bigger ones, with long, long, thin legs. The woman who had stolen the red and yellow cloth to make Mitt’s bomb-throwing clothes from had to steal more, and Milda put off making them until she was sure Mitt would not grow out of them.

“All to the good,” Siriol remarked. “If you keep on this way, you’ll have changed so after a year’s hiding that even Harchad’s spies won’t know you.”

The trouble was that Mitt needed a lot to eat, and Hobin became increasingly hard up. Hadd put the rents up again all over Holand. His guns had done very little good. Every other earl in South Dalemark had hastened to get guns too. Hadd was forced to bargain for peace, and bargains cost money. Hobin, Mitt was glad to see, grumbled just like everyone else. He led a petition from the Guild of Gunsmiths, asking to be allowed to raise the price of guns. Hadd refused.

“Now don’t you think there’s some use to freedom fighting?” Mitt asked him.

“It only makes things worse,” said Hobin.

“No, see,” Mitt said persuasively, “you could set all the earls fighting one another, then have an uprising, and the North would come and help us. They’d have to!”

“If the North did any such thing,” said Hobin, “you’d find the earls would stop fighting one another and start on the North. And you’d find yourself on their side, Mitt. You couldn’t help yourself. You’re born a Southerner. The North knows that better than you do. It’s history. It’ll take more than an uprising to make things better in Holand.”

“The trouble with you is you’re so patient!” Mitt said.

In spite of his patience, Hobin began to look a little worn by springtime. There were the babies and Mitt to feed. And Milda was still rushing out and “just happening to see” expensive things, though these days it was mostly furniture. Hobin began to talk seriously of moving back to Waywold.

“We can’t do that!” Mitt told Milda in a panic.

“I know. Not after I’ve trained you all these years,” said Milda. “But he’d stay if only Hadd was gone. Run and catch Siriol.” And she broke a whole bowl of eggs to give Mitt an excuse to go out.

Mitt was lucky enough to catch Siriol just as he was boarding Flower of Holand. Siriol stood on the quayside and thought so long that Mitt wondered whether to suggest he would miss the tide. “Ah,” said Siriol. “Well. You better do it this autumn then.”

“This autumn it is!” Mitt agreed, and the muscles at the back of his legs jumped with excitement. “And thank goodness! After three flaming years, I can’t wait much longer!”

THERE WERE GREAT gales that spring. The sea broke the dykes in two places, and even in the harbour, boats blew this way and that and masts snapped. Siriol could not put to sea for a fortnight, and few people in Holand went out much because the wind in the street filled your face with sand and salt until you could barely see. Mitt was kept very busy. The old Earl of the South Dales died, and all the Earls of the South began to gather in Holand to invest the new Earl, as the custom was. People asked one another whether Hadd would manage to quarrel with them all or only half of them. Mitt thought Hadd must be determined to. Hobin was busy making and mending guns day and night. The Palace must have bristled with them. Mitt got little chance to look at any earls. He saw one windswept fine person, who looked as if he would very much rather have been indoors, but no one could tell Mitt if he was an earl or not.

“Down with him, anyway!” Mitt muttered, and hurried back indoors.

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