Copyright

First published in Great Britain by Mandarin in 1993

This edition published by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2017

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

HarperCollinsPublishers

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Copyright © Diana Wynne Jones 1993

Map illustration © Sally Taylor 2017

Cover artwork © Manuel Šumberac

Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2017

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.

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Source ISBN: 9780008170714

Ebook Edition © 2016 ISBN: 9780008170721

Version: 2016-11-25

For Rachel

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Map of North and South Dalemark

PART ONE: Mitt

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

PART TWO: Maewen

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

PART THREE: Ring and Cup

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

PART FOUR: Sword and Crown

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

PART FIVE: Kankredin

Chapter Twenty-Two

Keep Reading …

About the Author

Books by Diana Wynne Jones

About the Publisher

Map of North and South Dalemark

PART ONE

THE EARL OF HANNART arrived in Aberath two days before Midsummer. He was bringing the Countess of Aberath a portrait of the Adon to put in her collection. As this was a state visit, he brought his son as well and a string of his hearthmen, and his arrival caused a rare bustle.

A tall man dressed like a shepherd watched it all from high in the hills where the green roads ran. He had an excellent view from there, not only into the seething courts of the mansion but of the whole town, the cliffs, the bay and the boatsheds. The Earl was easy to pick out among the hurrying figures, because he was with a servant carrying the picture. The man watched them go straight to the library, where he knew the Countess was waiting to receive the Earl. Almost immediately the servant was sent away to fetch someone else. The watcher could see him pushing his way, first to the stables, then to the dining hall, and finally to the hearthmen’s quarters, where he fetched out a large gangly person and pointed to the library. The gangly one set off there at a run, on long, gawky legs.

The watcher turned away. “So they did send for this Mitt,” he said as if this had confirmed his worst suspicions. Then he looked up and round and over his shoulder, clearly thinking that someone else was standing nearby, watching too. But the green road was empty. The man shrugged and set off walking swiftly inland.

About the same time as this man left, Mitt arrived at the top of the library steps, trying not to pant, and pushed open the creaky door.

“Oh, there you are,” said the Countess. “We want you to kill someone.”

She was never one to beat about the bush. It was almost the only thing Mitt liked about her. All the same, he wondered if he had heard her right. He stared at her long, bony face, which was set slightly crooked on her high shoulders, and then looked at Earl Keril of Hannart to make sure. Mitt had been ten months now in Aberath, but the North Dalemark accent there still sometimes made him hear things wrong. Earl Keril was dark, with a long nose. Everyone said what a likeable man he was, but he was looking at Mitt as grimly as the Countess.

“Didn’t you hear?” Earl Keril asked. “We want someone dead.”

“Yes. Is this a joke of some kind?” Mitt said. But he could tell from their faces that it was not. He felt cold and disgusted, and his knees shook. “I gave up killing – I told you!” he said to the Countess.

“Nonsense,” she said. “Why else do you think I had you trained as my hearthman?”

“You would have it that way, not me!” Mitt said. “And I never kidded myself you made me learn all that out of love for me!”

Earl Keril looked questioningly at the Countess.

“I warned you he was rude,” she said. She leant towards him, and they murmured together.

Mitt was too disgusted to try to overhear. He looked beyond their two implacable faces at the painting of the Adon propped on an easel behind them. The light was across the canvas from where Mitt stood, in a bluish haze, but the painted eyes caught his, like dark holes in the haze. They looked ill and haunted. The famous Adon had been far from handsome, sickly-looking, with lank hair and crooked shoulders. Near on a cripple, like the Countess, Mitt thought. She and Earl Keril both descended from the Adon. She had the shoulders; Keril had the Adon’s long nose. Earlier that day Mitt would have been thoroughly disappointed to find that the Adon looked like this. Since he came to Aberath, he had heard story after story of the Adon, the great hero who had talked with the Undying and lived as an outlaw before he became the last King of Dalemark several hundred years ago. Now he looked from the painting to the two living faces leaning together in the twilight of the library, and he thought, Fairy stories! Bet he was just as bad as they are! Well, I ran off from Holand, so I reckon I can run off from Aberath too.

Just then he caught a murmur from Keril. “Oh, yes, I’m sure that he is!” Sure I am what? Mitt wondered as they both looked at him again. “We’ve gone into your history,” Keril said to him. “Attempted murder in Holand. Successful murder in the Holy Islands—”

“That’s a lie!” Mitt said angrily. “Whatever you think, I never murdered a single soul! And I gave up trying long before I came here.”

“Then you’ll have to force yourself to try again,” said the Countess. “Won’t you?”

“And you came on here by boat,” Keril went on, before Mitt could speak, “with Navis Haddsson and his children Hildrida and Ynen. In Aberath the Countess took you in and had you educated—”

“For my sins,” the Countess said unlovingly.

“So you see the North has treated you well,” Earl Keril said. “Better than most refugees from the South, in fact, both you and your friends. We found Navis a post as hearthman to Stair of Adenmouth, and we sent Hildrida to study at the Lawschool in Gardale. Have you ever wondered why this was?” As Mitt wondered about it, Keril added pleasantly, “Why the four of you were separated in this way, I mean.”

It was a pleasantness that made Mitt feel like a sack with a hole in it. Everything trickled away through the hole, and his knees almost let him down. “Where’s Ynen then?” he said. “Isn’t he with Navis?”

“No,” said the Countess. “And we are not telling you where he is.”

Mitt watched her long jaw shut like a trap. “I used to think,” he said, “that the earls in the North were good. But you’re as bad as the ones in the South. Go to any lengths, all of you! You’re telling me to kill someone for you or my friends suffer. Right?”

“Let’s just say – if you want to see your friends again,” Keril suggested.

“Well, you’re wrong,” Mitt said. “You can’t make me do anything. I don’t care two hoots for any of them.”

The two implacable faces just looked at him.

Mitt managed a careless shrug. “We happened to ride on the same boat, that’s all,” he said. “I swear it.”

“You swear it? By which of the Undying?” Keril asked. “By the One? The Piper? The Wanderer? She Who Raised the Islands? The Weaver? The Earth Shaker? Come on. Choose which and swear.”

“We don’t swear like that in the South,” said Mitt.

“I know,” said Keril. “So it won’t hurt you to swear to me by the Earth Shaker that Navis and his children mean nothing to you. Just swear, and we’ll forget the whole matter.”

Their faces tilted towards Mitt. Mitt looked away, at the dark painted eyes of the Adon, and tried to make himself swear. If Keril had chosen any other of the Undying, he thought he could have done it easily. But not the Earth Shaker. And that showed how frighteningly much Keril knew. Even so, perhaps he could swear about Navis and Hildy and let on he meant Ynen too? Navis, cold fish on a slab that the man was, still didn’t seem to like Mitt particularly; and as for Hildy, after her last letter, Mitt could almost swear he hated her. But he had shown he was worried about Ynen, like a fool, and there was no way he could even pretend to dislike Ynen or let these two earls hurt him.

“Is Ynen all right?” he said.

“Perfectly, at the moment,” said the Countess. She never told lies. Mitt was relieved, until he realised that she and Keril both had the same look, satisfied and unsurprised. They knew he had given in. They had expected it.

“I warn you,” Mitt said, “if there’s murdering needing doing, I can see two ripe cases for it here in this room. So who do you want killed? What’s so special that you need to go to all this trouble with me to have it done?” Keril’s eyebrows went up. The Countess seemed surprised. Good, Mitt thought. Find out how important it is from how rude they let me be. “Do you take me for a fool?” he said. “If it was lawful, you both have lawyers to burn, and if it was ordinary, you’ve hearthmen to do it by hundreds. And I’d lay good money you have spies and murderers better than me any day. So it stands to reason it must be politics – you wanting to lay this on Southern scum like me.”

“You said it, not me,” Keril replied. “Politics, it is. We want a young lady out of the way. She’s very charming and much too popular. The whole of the west coast, including Dropwater, will follow her as soon as she gives the word.”

“Flaming Ammet!” protested Mitt.

“Be quiet!” said the Countess. “Listen!” She said it like the snap of a steel trap. End of rudeness, thought Mitt, and swallowed what he had been going to say. It hurt, as if he had swallowed an apple whole.

“Noreth of Kredindale, known as Onesdaughter,” Keril said. “I expect you’ve heard of her.” Mitt shook his head, but it was from amazement, because he had indeed heard of Noreth Onesdaughter. The story of the One’s only human child was one of the many, many stories he had heard round the small coal fires in Aberath this last winter. He had thought that like other stories, it was from times long ago. But Keril, in the most matter-of-fact way, went on to speak of Noreth as alive here and now. “Unfortunately,” he said, “she’s extremely well connected. The Kredindale family go back to the Adon’s daughter Tanabrid, whose mother was of the Undying. Noreth is cousin to Gardale and Dropwater – though Stair’s wife at Adenmouth is the aunt who brought her up – and she’s a distant cousin of mine too—”

“And mine,” said the Countess. “Pity the girl’s mad.”

“Mad or not,” said Keril, “Noreth claims that her father is the One himself. As her mother died when Noreth was born, there’s no one to contradict her, and this claim gives her a huge following among the ordinary people. She makes no secret that she thinks she’s born to become Queen of all Dalemark – North and South.”

“And that fool in Dropwater backs her,” said the Countess.

So that’s it! Mitt thought. They’re scared for their earldoms. So they get me to stop her and then blame it on the poor South! “Just a minute,” he said. “If she’s who she says she is, no one can do a thing about it. And someone who’s from the Undying on both sides isn’t going to be easy to kill either.”

“Quite possibly,” Keril said. “That’s why we were so interested in what we heard about you from the Holy Islands. Reports from there suggested that you could well ask the Undying to help you.” Mitt stared at him, shocked at how much Keril knew and how coldly he was prepared to use that knowledge. Keril leant forwards. “We don’t want yet another false king and yet another ruinous uprising,” he said. Mitt saw he really meant it. “We don’t want another war with the South. We want Noreth quietly stopped before she can lay her hands on the crown.”

“The crown?” said Mitt. “But nobody knows where that is. They tell stories here about how Manaliabrid hid it.”

“She did,” said Keril.

“Noreth,” said the Countess, “says that the One will show her where it is.” Mitt looked from one face to the other and suspected both of them had a fair idea where the crown was hidden. “The girl claims the One talks to her,” the Countess added disgustedly. “I told you she was mad. She says the One has promised her a sign to prove her claim and that this year at Midsummer she will become Queen. Silly nonsense.”

“She’s in Dropwater at the moment,” Keril said, “acting as law-woman for her cousin, but our information is that she’ll be going to her aunt in Adenmouth for Midsummer to drum up support there. We’re sending you to Adenmouth too.”

“And,” said the Countess, “you’re to go there and stop her. But don’t do it there. We want this quiet.”

“We advise you to join her as a follower – you shouldn’t be noticed among all the others – and then look for a suitable opportunity,” Keril said. As Mitt opened his mouth, he added, “If you want to see Hildrida and Ynen again, you will.”

“But Midsummer’s the day after tomorrow!” Mitt protested. A stupid thing to say, but he had been looking forward to the feasting in Aberath.

“It’s an easy day’s ride,” said the Countess, who rarely went anywhere except by carriage. “I shall give out that you have my leave to go and visit Navis Haddsson in Adenmouth. You will go first thing tomorrow. You may go away and pack now.”

Mitt had been taught that you bowed on leaving the presence of an earl, but he was too disgusted to remember. He turned and blundered his way across the dimness of the library, past the books and the glass cases that held the Countess’s collection: the necklace that was supposed to have been worn by Enblith the Fair, the ring that once belonged to the Adon, a flute of Osfameron’s, and the withered piece of parchment that went back to the days of King Hern. Behind him he sensed the two earls drawing themselves up in indignation.

“Mitt Alhamittsson,” said Keril. Mitt stopped and turned round. “I remind you,” Keril said, “that a man can be hanged when he is fifteen. They tell me your birthday is the Autumn Festival. Noreth had better be dead before then, hadn’t she?”

“Or we may not be able to avert the course of justice,” added the Countess. “You have nearly three months, but don’t cut it too fine.”

So there was no possibility of putting things off. “Yes,” said Mitt. “I get you.” He looked past them to the harrowed, ill-looking face of the Adon. He could see the portrait better from here. He pointed his thumb to it. “Miserable-looking blighter, isn’t he?” he said. “It must be giving him a right bellyache having you two as descendants!” Then he turned round and walked to the door, rather hoping he had been rude enough to be thrown into prison on the spot. But there was no sound behind him while he opened the door, and no sound but the groan of the hinges as the door shut on his heels. The man on guard outside straightened up guiltily and then relaxed when he saw it was only Mitt. Mitt marched away down the steps without speaking to him. They really meant him to kill this girl. Even the Countess had not told him off for his rudeness.

His knees were trembling as he came out into the courtyard. He almost wanted to cry with shame. It was the way Keril had muttered “Oh, yes, I’m sure he is!” that seemed to have got to him most – sure Mitt was a guttersnipe, a Southerner with no feelings, the first person earls turned to when they wanted dirty work done. Mitt had known such a person and vowed never to be like that, but a fat lot those two cared!

Someone shouted to him across the courtyard.

A knot of people stood there, all about his own age. Earl Keril’s son, Kialan, was one of them, and the others were waving to Mitt to come over. Mitt had been rather anxious to meet Kialan. Now he found he could not bear to. He ducked sideways and turned along the wall.

“Mitt!” shouted Alla, the Countess’s bronze-haired daughter. “Kialan wants to meet you!”

“He’s heard all about you!” shouted Doreth, the copper-haired daughter.

“Can’t stop! Message! Sorry!” Mitt shouted back. He did not want to meet the daughters either. Alla had jeered at him for being so miserable when Hildy was sent away, until Mitt got mad and pulled her bronze hair. Then Doreth had told the Countess on him. Mitt had been quite surprised not to be sent away then too. But that must have given them proof that Mitt did care what became of Hildy. Flaming Ammet! The Countess and Keril must have had this planned for months!

Kialan was now shouting himself. “See you later, then!” Mitt had a glimpse of him waving, tawny and thickset and quite unlike his father – but quite certainly not really unlike, not deep down where it counted. Mitt put his head down and sped along by the wall, wondering if Kialan saw him as a dirty Southern guttersnipe too. Kialan would certainly see a lot of lank hair and two spindly legs and shoulders that were too wide for the rest. Mitt kept his face turned to the wall because that was the real giveaway, a guttersnipe face that still looked starved even after ten months of good food in Aberath. He told himself Kialan wasn’t missing much.

He plunged through the nearest door and kept running, through rooms and along corridors, and out again on the other side of the mansion, to the long shed on the cliffs above the harbour. That was the best place to be alone. The people who were usually there would all be rushing about after Keril’s followers or getting the Midsummer feast ready. And he was having to miss that feast. Hildy had once said that misery was like this: silly little things always got mixed up with the important ones. How right she was.

Mitt rolled the shed door open a crack and slipped inside. Sure enough, the place was empty. Mitt breathed deep of the fishy smell of coal and of fish oil and wet metal. It was not unlike the smell on the waterfront of Holand, where he had been brought up. And I might just as well have stayed there for all the good it did me! he thought, staring along a vista of iron rails in the floor, where tarry puddles reflected red sun or rainbows of oil. He felt caught and trapped and surrounded in a plot he had not even noticed till they thrust it at him this afternoon. Everyone had told him that the Countess was treating him almost like a son. Mitt had been pretty sarcastic about that, but all the same he had thought this was the way people in the North did treat refugees from the South.

“Fool I was!” he muttered.

He walked along the rails to the huge machines that stood at quiet intervals along them. Alk’s Irons, everyone called them. To Mitt, and to most people in town, they were the most fascinating things in Aberath. Mitt trailed his fingers across the cargo hoist and then across the steam plough and the thing that Alk hoped might one day drive a ship. None of them worked very well, but Alk kept trying. Alk was married to the Countess. It was the only other thing Mitt liked about the Countess: that instead of marrying the son of a lord or another earl who might add to her importance, she had chosen to marry her lawman, Alk. Alk had given up law years ago in order to invent machines. Mitt dragged his fingertips across the wet and greasy bolts of the newest machine and shuddered as he imagined himself pushing a knife into a young woman. Even if she laughed at him or looked like Doreth or Alla, even if her eyes showed she was mad – no! But what about Ynen if he didn’t? The worst of this trap was that it pushed him back into a part of himself he thought he had got out of. He could have screamed.

He went round the machine and found himself face to face with Alk. Both of them jumped. Alk recovered first. He sighed, put his oilcan down on a ledge in the machine, and asked rather guiltily, “Message for me?”

“I – No. I thought nobody was here,” Mitt said.

Alk relaxed. To look at him, you would have thought he was a big blacksmith run to fat, with his mind in the clouds. “Thought you were calling me to come and run about after Keril,” he said. “Now you’re here, have a think about this thing. It’s supposed to be an iron horse, but I think it needs changing somewhere.”

“It’s the biggest horse I ever saw,” Mitt said frankly. “What good is it if it has to run on rails? Why do your things always run on rails?”

“To move,” said Alk. “Too heavy otherwise. You have to work the way things will let you.”

“Then how are you going to get it to go uphill?” said Mitt.

Alk rubbed an oily hand through the remains of copper hair like Doreth’s and looked sideways at Mitt. “Boy’s disillusionment with the North now complete,” he said. “Taken against my machines now. Anything wrong, Mitt?”

In spite of his trouble, Mitt grinned. Alk and he had this joke. Alk himself came from the North Dales, which Alk claimed were almost in the South. Alk said he saw three things wrong with the North for every one that Mitt saw. “No, I’m fine,” Mitt said, because the Countess had probably told Alk all about her plans anyway. He was trying to think of something polite to say about the iron horse when the door at the end of the shed rolled right open. Kialan’s strong voice came echoing through.

“This is the most marvellous place in all Aberath!”

“Excuse me,” Mitt muttered, and dived for the small side door behind Alk.

Alk grabbed his elbow as he went. He was as strong as the blacksmith he looked like. “Wait for me!” he said. They went out of the side door together, into the heap of coal and cinders beyond. “Taken against the Adon of Hannart too, have you?” Alk asked. Mitt did not know how to answer. “Come up to my rooms,” Alk said, still holding Mitt’s elbow. “I have to dress grandly for supper, I suppose. You can help. Or is that beneath you?”

Mitt gasped rather and shook his head. It was supposed to be an honour to help the lord dress. He wondered if Alk knew.

“Come on, then,” said Alk. He let go of Mitt and lumbered ahead of him through the archway that led to his apartments. Alk’s valet was waiting there, with candles lit and water steaming and good clothes hung carefully over chairs. “You can have a rest tonight, Gregin,” Alk said cheerfully. “Mitt’s going to clean me up today. Part of his education.”

Even if Alk did not know he was doing Mitt an honour, the valet certainly did. His face was a mixture of jealousy, respect and anxiety. “Sir,” he said. “The coal. The oil.” He started to back out of the room as Alk waved him away, and then came back to whisper fiercely to Mitt. “Mind you don’t let him stop you scrubbing him when he’s still grey. He’ll try. He always does.”

“Go away, Gregin,” said Alk. “My word by the Undying that we won’t let you down.” Gregin sighed and went away. Mitt got down to the hard work of scrubbing Alk clean. “Do I take it you’ve had another of your disagreements with my Countess?” Alk asked while Mitt laboured.

“Not … the way you mean this time,” Mitt said, rubbing away at one huge hairy arm.

“Her bark is worse than her bite,” Alk observed.

Alk had to think that, Mitt supposed. He must have had a lot of illusions about the Countess to have married her at all. “Keril’s worse,” he said. “He’s all bite and no bark, as far as I can see.”

“So Keril’s in it too?” Alk said musingly. He took his arm away from Mitt, looked at it, and gave it back, sighing. It was still grey. “Now I see you’re in no mood to agree with me, but Earl Keril’s a good man, shrewd as he can hold together. Knows all about steam power too. They have a steam organ at Hannart, did you know? Huge thing. But he’s not the man to get on the wrong side of if you can help it.”

“Well, I have,” Mitt said bitterly. “I was on his wrong side before he even set eyes on me.”

“Now why was that?” wondered Alk.

He was obviously waiting for Mitt to tell him, but Mitt found he could not bear to, any more than he could bear to go near Kialan. He finished scrubbing Alk’s left arm and began on the right, even blacker and larger than the left.

“Something’s up,” Alk said at length, “that I don’t know about, I think. And it can’t be quite legal, or she would have told me. Did they tell you not to tell me?”

Mitt looked up to find Alk staring shrewdly at him across his lathery arm. “No,” he said. “But I’m not saying. They knew I wouldn’t too, for fear you’d be disgusted and kick me out. How do you like being washed by the scum of the earth?”

Alk frowned. “You scrub even brisker than Gregin, if that’s what we’re talking about.” He said nothing else for a while, until Mitt had scrubbed him to clean pink blotches and was starting to help him into good clothes. As his head came out through the neck of the white silk shirt, he said, “See here. I was only a poor farmer’s boy before I came to be a lawman. Keril’s Countess Halida was nobody much either, and she was from the South like you.” Mitt had not the heart to answer this. It was kindly meant, but so wrong. “Hmm,” said Alk. “Wrong track there.” As Mitt helped him force his arms down the sleeves, he added, “And it’s maybe the wrong track too, if I was to mention that you’re much better placed than you were when you came? You can read and write and use weapons now. They tell me you learn good and quick, and you’ve brains to use what you learn – well, I know you’ve got brains. My Countess has not treated you so badly—”

“And that’s a lie!” Mitt burst out. “She did it all for a reason!”

“As to that,” Alk said as Mitt threaded golden studs into his cuffs, “you’ve not gone out of your way to make her love you, Mitt. And everyone always has a reason for what they do. It’s only natural.”

“Then what’s your reason for trying to cheer me up like this?” Mitt retorted.

“Easy,” said Alk. “I can’t abide misery, and I hate mysteries. Anyone taking half a glance at your face could see something was wrong. And cheering up often brings things to light. I found that out when I was a lawman, the first time we had a man accused of murder.” Mitt winced at that and nearly dropped a stud. He knew Alk noticed, but Alk only said, “Want me to talk to my Countess about this?”

“No point. Wouldn’t do any good,” Mitt said. Everyone knew that Alk never went against the Countess. He turned away and got Alk’s vast brocade trousers. “Look, I don’t want to talk about this no more,” he said, helping Alk step into them.

“I see that. And I think you ought to,” Alk said.

Mitt obstinately said nothing while he buttoned the trousers round Alk’s bulging waist and then fetched the huge embroidered jacket. Alk backed into it with his arms out, like a bear. “Nothing you want to say, then?” he asked.

“Nothing, only a question,” Mitt said, meaning to change the subject. “Is the One real?” Alk turned round with the jacket half on and stared at him. “I mean,” said Mitt, “I never heard of the One, nor half the other Undying either, until I came here. We don’t take much note of Undying in the South. Do you believe in any of them?” He went round Alk and heaved the jacket on to him. Then he bent down to help Alk with his boots.

“Believe in the One!” Alk said, and trod into the right boot. “It would be hard not to, here in Aberath, at this time of year, but—” He trod into the left boot and stamped down in it, thinking. “Put it like this. I believed in my machines when they were just a notion in my head and nothing I could touch or see. Who’s to say that the One isn’t as real as they were in my head – or as real as they are now?” He flipped the fastening at the neck of his shirt to see if Mitt had tied it securely and tramped to the door. “Coming?”

Supper would be ready in the great hall. It came to Mitt that it would be his job to wait on Kialan at table. He could not face it. “I got to polish my gear and pack now,” he said. “I’m off to Adenmouth tomorrow.”

“Are you now?” Alk turned round in the doorway and looked hard at Mitt again. “Then I’ll make sure someone remembers to feed you,” he said. “I think I’m on the right track now. And I don’t like it, Mitt. I don’t like it any more than you do. Don’t do anything stupid until I talk to you again.”

MITT HAD TO SET out for Adenmouth without seeing Alk again. The Countess had obviously given strict orders. He was roused before dawn, and fed, and pushed to the stables as the sun rose, where he found the Armsmaster waiting for him in a very bad temper. Mitt sighed and watched every buckle, pouch and button being checked, and then every scrap of tack on the horse. He had had some idea of hanging his belt, with the sword on one side and the dagger on the other, up on a nail and then forgetting it accidentally on purpose. But there was no question of that with an angry Armsmaster standing over him.

“I’m not going to have you let me down in front of potty little Adenmouth,” the Armsmaster said as Mitt mounted.

Mitt rather hoped the horse would try to take a bite out of the Armsmaster, the way it always did with anyone else, but of course, it did not dare, any more than Mitt did. “I wish you’d let me take a gun,” Mitt said. “I can use a gun. I’d let you down with a sword for sure.”

His idea was that it would be much easier to shoot this Noreth from a distance than to get close up the way you had to with a sword. But that idea died at the look on the Armsmaster’s face. “Nonsense, boy! Guns here have to be smuggled in from the South. Think I’d trust you with something that expensive? And sit up straight! You look like a sack of flour!”

Mitt straightened his back and clopped angrily through the gate. He could use a gun, and care for it too. Mitt’s stepfather, Hobin, made the best guns in Dalemark. But nothing ever seemed to convince the Armsmaster of this. “Yes, sir, goodbye, sir. Good riddance, sir,” he said, raising one smartly gloved hand when he was too far away to be caught.

He clopped through the streets of the town, all hung with decorations for the feast he was having to miss, and up along the top of the cliffs, where the sun was a gold eye opening between heavy grey eyelids of sea and sky, and looked down on the boatsheds at the cliff foot as he went. One of those sheds hid the battered blue pleasure boat they had arrived in: Mitt, Hildy, Ynen and Navis. Ynen’s boat. And the Countess had started plotting from that moment on. Today Mitt found he was angry about it, very angry. And the odd thing about being angry was that it seemed to break through the walls that had seemed to hem him in yesterday and give him space to hope. He was going to see Navis. Navis was Ynen’s father and a cool customer, and he would think of something. Navis was used to dealing with earls’ plots, being the son of an earl himself.

Thinking of Navis, then of Ynen, Mitt rode between the sea and the steep fields on the hills above, where people were scrambling to scrape in a crop of hay despite its being a feast day. Ynen was younger than Mitt, but Mitt had nevertheless come to admire him more than he admired anyone else. Ynen was – steadfast – that was the word. His sister, Hildy, on the other hand …

After first Navis, then Ynen had left Aberath, Hildy and Mitt had been together there another short month, while Hildy was coached by the Countess’s law-woman in law, geometry, history, and the Old Writing, so that she could pass into the great Lawschool in Gardale. That way, as she told Mitt, she could always earn her living. Nobody was more respected than a lawyer. Hildy was inclined to patronise Mitt, just a little, as Mitt struggled simply to read and write along with all the other duties of a hearthman-in-training. “I’ll send you letters,” Hildy had promised, when she went away, “to help with your reading.” The trouble was, she kept her promise.

Her first letters were carefully printed and quite full of news. The next few were dashed off, with an air of duty about them. Around then Mitt had learnt enough to be able to write back. Hildy had answered several of his letters with one of her own, carefully, point by point, but she had been quite unable to resist correcting his spelling. Mitt had kept writing – there had been a lot to tell – but Hildy’s letters had become ever briefer and further apart, and each one was harder to understand than the last. Mitt had waited well over a month for Hildy’s latest letter. And what came was:

Dear Mitt,

This grittling the boys on fayside were at trase with peelers, would you believe! They had sein right too, so it was all kappin and no barlay. We only had mucks. But Biffa was our surnam and you should have seen the hurrel. Now highside is doggers and we have herison from scap to lengday, and everyone looks up to us although we are to be stapled for it. In haste to trethers.

Hildrida

It was like a message from the moon. It hurt Mitt badly. Hildy and he had had little enough in common anyway, and now Hildy was making it clear that this little was gone. After that letter Mitt had told himself he did not care what became of Hildy, and then Earl Keril came along and forced him to behave as if he did care. As he rode on, he tried to tell himself that he was being noble about Hildy. This was not true. He did not want Hildy hurt, not when she was evidently having fun for the first time in her life.

The sun came up higher. People began passing Mitt on their way to the feasting at Aberath, calling out in the free way of the North that Mitt was going the wrong way, wasn’t he? Mitt called jokes in reply and urged his horse on. The horse, as usual, had other ideas. It kept trying to go back to Aberath. Mitt cursed it. He had a very bad relationship with this horse. His private name for it was The Countess. It held its head sideways like she did, and walked in the same jerky way, and it seemed to dislike Mitt as much as the real Countess did. They came to the place where the road forked, a rutty track going along the coast to Adenmouth and a wider and even ruttier one winding back right into the mountains at the heart of the earldom. People were streaming down this wider road and turning along the way Mitt had come, and the horse tried to turn back with them. Mitt wrestled its head round on to the Adenmouth road and kicked its sides to make it go.

“Going my way, hearthman?” somebody called after him.

Hot and annoyed, Mitt looked round to find a boy on an unkempt horse turning out of the main road after him. Another hearthman, by the look of the faded livery. Mitt did not feel like company, but people in the North never seemed to feel you might want to be alone, and it was a fact that the Countess-horse went better for a lead. So, as the two horses slid and stamped in the ruts, Mitt said a little grudgingly, “Going to Adenmouth, hearthman.”

“Good! Me too,” said the lad. He had a long, freckled face with a sort of eager look to it. “Rith,” he introduced himself. “Out of Dropwater.”

“Mitt,” said Mitt. “Out of Aberath.”

Rith laughed as they set off side by side up the narrower road. “Great One! You’ve come even further than I have!” he said. “What’s a Southerner doing this far North?”

“Came by boat – we went where the wind took us,” Mitt explained. “I think we missed Kinghaven in the night somehow. How come you knew I was a Southerner? My accent that bad still?”

Rith laughed again and pushed at the fair, frizzy hair that stuck out all round his steel cap. “That and your looks. The straight hair. But it’s the name that’s the clincher. Dropwater’s full of Southern fugitives, and they all answer to Mitt, or Al, or Hammitt. I’m surprised the South’s not empty by now, the way you all come to the North. Been here long?”

“Ten months,” said Mitt.

“Then you’ve had one of our winters. I bet you froze!”

“Froze! I nearly died!” said Mitt. “I never saw icicles before, let alone snow. And when they first brought the coal in to make a fire, I thought they were going to build something. I didn’t know stones could burn.”

“Don’t they have coal in the South?” Rith asked wonderingly.

“Charcoal – for those that could afford it,” Mitt said. “At least that’s what they used in Holand, where I come from.”

Rith whistled. “You did come a long way, didn’t you?”

By this time Mitt had forgotten he had wanted to be alone. They rode with the sea sparkling on one side and the hills climbing on the other, under the douce Northern sun, talking and laughing, while the Countess-horse followed Rith’s travel-stained little mount as smoothly as its jerky gait would allow. Rith was good company. He seemed genuinely interested to know what Mitt thought of the North now he was here. Mitt was a bit wary at first. He had found that most Northerners did not like criticism. “It’s this porridge they all eat I can’t stand,” he said jokingly. “And the superstition.”

“What superstition?” Rith said innocently. “You mean, like the Holanders throw their Undying in the sea every year?”

“And you lot put bowls of milk out for yours,” said Mitt. “Believe anything, these Northerners! Think the One’s a pussycat!”

Rith bowed on to his horse’s neck with laughter. “What else do we do wrong?” he said when he could speak. “I bet you think we’re inefficient, don’t you?”

“Well, you are,” said Mitt. “All runabout and talk and do nothing when a crisis happens.”

“Not when it matters, though,” said Rith. “And?”

And he went on coaxing Mitt until Mitt at last came out with the real cause of his disappointment with the North. “They told me it was free here,” he said. “They told me it was good. I was badly enough off in the South, but beside some here I was rich – and idle. People are no more free here than – than—” He was trying to find a proper description when they came round a bend to find the road blocked house-high with earth and boulders. A stream sprayed from the top in a raw new waterfall and ran round their horses’ hooves. “This just about sums it up!” Mitt said disgustedly. “And your roads are all terrible!”

“The Southern roads are, of course, all perfect,” Rith said.

“I never said—” said Mitt.

Rith laughed and dismounted. “Come on. This is hopeless. We’ll have to lead the horses uphill and come back to the road where it’s clear.”

Mitt slid down from the Countess-horse and discovered he was more than a little saddle-sore. Ow! he thought. I wonder my pants aren’t smoking! But he did not like to confess this to Rith, who had ridden all the way from Dropwater and was obviously a seasoned hearthman. A small, tough boy, Rith. When they were both on their feet, Rith only came up to Mitt’s shoulders. Makes me look a big booby if I moan, Mitt thought, and he set off dragging the Countess-horse up the hill after Rith. Both horses were huge, heavy and reluctant. Their hooves slid in the slippery grass. Mitt’s horse put its ears back and tried to bite him.

“Stop that!” Mitt slapped its nose aside. “You Countess, you!”

Rith broke into a panting laugh. “What a name! It’s a gelding. O-oh! Piper’s pants!”

Mitt dragged his horse up beside Rith’s. The hill, in the mysterious manner of hills, was twice as high as he had thought. Beyond and above them, it was a huge triangle of earthy boulders and trickling water, which had slid down across the road, blocking it for as far as they could see. At the lower edge of it, the sea twinkled, flat and impassable.

“We’d better go up over the hill,” Rith said. “I know the way. It’ll mean fording the Aden after we cross the green road, but it won’t be deep this high.”

So they struggled on upwards, about twice as high as they had already come, until they left the landslip behind and reached a squishy yellow-green shoulder, where Rith said they could ride again. Mitt nearly yelled as he kicked his way into the saddle. He was raw. But he did not like to mention it. He simply bore it, all the way through a long, marshy valley and then up an endless firm green slope, where they came to one of the things the Northerners called waystones. It was round, like a roughly shaped millstone set up on one edge, with a hole in the middle. Rith leant over and slapped the thing.

“For luck,” he said, grinning. “I’m a superstitious Northerner. I may ask the Wanderer’s blessing too, just to annoy you. There’s the Aden down there. What do you say we stop for some lunch?”

Mitt was only too glad to get down. He helped himself off by hanging on to the waystone, which was a way of touching it without seeming to. He knew he could do with some luck. And once he was down, he was so sore that he had to concentrate on small things, like stripping off his gloves and tucking them into the proper place on his belt, and hitching his horse to the waystone, where someone had tied a piece of red twine through the middle for the purpose. Then, moving in a careful, stiff-legged way, he unbuckled his baggage roll and got out the food they had given him. By then the agony had gone off enough for him to sit down beside Rith, bat the Countess-horse’s nose aside as it tried to eat his bread, and look at the view.

There were hills all around, yellow and green, with sunlight scudding over them in patches. The green way stretched from the waystone, very level and firm and dry, leading south into the mountainous heart of Dalemark, and the Aden rolled parallel with it about a hundred yards downhill from where they sat. It was a fine big river, wider than any Mitt had seen, and the way it rolled quietly along among all those reeds and willow trees suggested that it might be pretty deep. Mitt hoped Rith knew what he was talking about when he said they could ford it. He leant back and sniffed the smell of the river and willows mingling with the damp wild smell of heather and rock, the smell of the North, which Mitt still thought of as the smell of freedom in spite of his disillusionment with the North. Perhaps, he thought, not very hopefully, he would be stuck this side of the river and never get to Adenmouth at all. But that would be the worse for Hildy and Ynen.

“You look pretty gloomy!” Rith said, laughing.

“Just thinking,” Mitt said hurriedly. “What are these green roads? Who made them – really?”

“Kern Adon,” said Rith. “King Hern. They’re the roads of his old kingdom. That’s why they don’t go to places where people live any more. They say that Kern Adon set up the waystones and told the Wanderer to guard the roads, and if you follow them right, they say you arrive at King Hern’s city of gold.”

“I heard them called the paths of the Undying,” said Mitt.

“Oh yes. They’re called that too,” said Rith. “My old nurse used to tell me that the Undying sit in the hole in the waystones. What do you think of that?”

“They couldn’t!” Mitt said unguardedly. “Not unless they shrank.”

Rith got very interested in this idea. “Then how big do you think the Undying are?” he kept saying, in the same coaxing way he had tried to get at Mitt’s opinion of the North. “I’ve never been able to decide. Do you think they’re made of something that isn’t as solid as we are, so that they can be of any size? Or what?”

These Northerners! Mitt thought. Rith was laughing, but he was serious too. They finished eating, and Mitt got up, rather reluctantly, to untie the Countess-horse.

“What size do you think?” Rith said, leading his horse downhill to the river.

“If you must know,” Mitt called over his shoulder, “they’re people-sized. It stands to reason.” He dragged the Countess-horse round to follow Rith. “How could—” He stopped and blinked.

There was no wide rolling river any more. Rith was on his way down to a sunken crease in the hillside that was choked with small oak trees. Mitt could hear water rushing among the trees.

“You’re probably right,” Rith called back, “though some of the things they do make them seem smaller. Come on. It really is quite shallow here.”

Mitt slowly followed him down among the oaks, wondering just what river it was that he had seen. There was no question in his mind that the real Aden was the yelling, stony stream in front of him now, glinting bright coins of sunlight under the trees. Rivers in the North always seemed to crouch like this one along dips in the hills. And he had not seen a single willow tree since he left the South. Shivers ran down his back, and he approached the brawling little Aden very cautiously indeed.

So did the Countess-horse. At the edge of the water it put its ears back, braced its hooves, and refused to move. Mitt called it names.

“I’ll give you a lead,” said Rith. He stepped into the shrilling water, which proved to be only a few inches deep, and waded carefully, watching the stones in the bottom, until he and his horse had become dark shadows, patterned with sun between the oak leaves.

At this point the Countess-horse found it preferred not to be left behind and took off suddenly after Rith, dragging Mitt in sheets of bright water. Mitt kept hold of the reins and managed to stay on his feet until he was halfway across, where his foot turned heavily on something that flashed in the sun.

Rith called out, “Look there!” in a surprisingly deep, strong voice, and dived towards Mitt.

It was all sun-patterned wet confusion. Both horses got away, and Mitt sat down with a splash. Rith plunged his hands down where Mitt’s feet had been and stood up triumphantly holding something that shone. Water poured off his elbows as he held it out for Mitt to see.

“Look at this!”

Mitt floundered to his knees. The thing had evidently once been a little statue – a figurine, Mitt thought the word was. As Rith turned it round, Mitt could see traces of a face and the folds of a robe on the side that was green with river slime. The other side was grated and scratched all over, and that side shone a pure buttery yellow. Mitt in his time had worked enough inlay into gun handles to know what that meant. “It’s solid gold!” he said.

“I think it is,” Rith said. He sounded awestruck. “Who found it? You or me?”

“You picked it up,” Mitt said. “I only stepped on it.”

Rith turned the dripping statuette round again. “I wish I could be sure— Look, may I keep it for now and give you your share when I’ve got it?”

If Mitt had not been so saddle-sore, he might have argued. But the cold water was smarting him like acid, and he could think of almost nothing else. “Fine,” he gasped, and splashed his way across to the far bank, where the horses were standing head to tail, looking pleased with themselves. Rith followed, stowing the wet figurine in the front of his jacket.

“You’re being very generous,” he said several times, as they mounted and rode on. “You really mean I can keep it for now?” He was evidently feeling a strange mixture of doubt and elation, but then anyone would, Mitt thought, who had just picked up a pound of solid gold. He thought Rith was nice to be so bothered about it. All through the next hour or so Rith was either exclaiming at the amazing chance that had led them to that spot or asking Mitt if he really minded waiting for his share. “If it hadn’t been for that landslide,” he said, “we’d never have come this way. Look, are you really sure?”

Mitt got increasingly gruff with him. Mitt’s leathers were wet through and rubbing his soreness until he was convinced he was being flayed. Besides, he thought angrily, the way he was caught in the earls’ plotting, he couldn’t see himself having much use for gold or anything else shortly. He wished Rith would shut up. By the late afternoon, when the sea came into view again blue and crisp to northwards, Mitt was wanting to scream at Rith – and he might have done had they not come out on a headland overlooking Adenmouth to find themselves looking down on an accident.

A Singer’s cart had overturned on the bridge below. The bridge had no sides, and the horse that had pulled the cart was dangling struggling in the Aden. Mitt saw someone pulling uselessly at the horse. A girl lay on the bank as if she might be dead.

“Come on!” shouted Rith, and his shaggy horse was off down the hill as if it was aiming to end in the river too.

Mitt followed as fast as the Countess-horse would let him, which was not very fast. The hill was extremely steep. Even Rith slowed down halfway, but this was probably because he could see that help was on its way. They could see into a long green valley to one side, where a party of people were running from one of the farms. More people were running across a second bridge, from Adenmouth itself, and a horseman was galloping ahead of them.

Everyone converged on the bridge, but the horseman got there first. He was a hearthman in Adenmouth livery. As the Countess-horse slithered cautiously down the last slope, Mitt saw the horseman leap to the ground, thrust his reins into the hands of the red-headed Singer’s boy, and run towards the struggling horse. There he took one look, cocked his pistol, and shot the horse through the head.

Mitt and Rith came down to the bridge while the horse was still jerking. The bang rang in Mitt’s ears like the memory of his worst dreams. The white staring face of the Singer-boy looked just like he felt.

“Anything we can do?” called Rith.

The hearthman turned from slashing at the traces that held the dead horse. Mitt almost laughed. It was Navis. It would be. “Hello,” he said.

Navis nodded at him in his cool way. “You see to that girl,” he said to Rith. “I think she’s alive. Mitt, you help me cut this horse loose.”

As the two of them dismounted, Mitt noticed the Singer himself wandering about on the bank, carefully laying out musical instruments from the overturned cart. A dreamy-looking fellow with a grey beard. Mitt ignored the Singer as useless and hobbled over to Navis, while Rith sprinted to where the Singer-girl was sitting up, holding her head.

“Get your knife out and cut here, then here,” Navis said. He did not seem in the least surprised at seeing Mitt there. His attention was mostly on the accusing yellow-white face of the Singer-boy. “Your horse had broken two legs – look,” he said to the boy. “There was nothing else to be done.”

“He was blind in one eye,” the boy said. “He walked off the bridge.”

“I just wish mine would do that too!” Mitt said, to make him feel better. “Mine’s a right brute.”

The boy simply stared at him. “Southerner,” he said. “You both are.” He turned his back and led Navis’s mare to the other side of the road.

Navis glanced at Mitt. “There’s a lot of prejudice,” he said. “Now cut here.” Mitt slashed away angrily. Cool, cool Navis. He had forgotten just how cool.

By the time they had cut the horse loose, the people from the farm and the town had arrived. There was a lot of typically Northern milling about and talking. The chief talker was a lad from the farm, who wanted everyone to know how quickly he had gone for help to the mansion and what the lady Eltruda had said to him. But amid all this there was unnoticed efficiency. In less than a minute many hands had heaved the neat green cart upright and Mitt was able to read the gold lettering on its side.

“Hestefan the Singer.”

“You want me?” Hestefan asked.

He was standing beside Mitt with a cwidder in one hand and a fife in the other. Mitt was embarrassed. He had only said it aloud because he still found it easier to read that way. Now he felt he had to say something. “How did you get past the landslip on the road?” he asked.

“Landslip?” said Hestefan. “What landslip?”

Mitt gave him up again and turned to Rith, who said in a worried whisper, “I think that girl, Fenna, has really hurt her head. Can you help me get her on a horse?”

The Countess-horse was at that moment demonstrating that it was not carriage-trained. They had tried to back it into the shafts of the cart, where it divided its attention between trying to take bites out of anyone near and attempts to kick the splashboard in. Mitt ran and hauled it clear. “You good-for-nothing Countess, you!” He dragged it over to the injured girl, where the Singer-boy held it while Mitt and Rith heaved Fenna into its saddle. The chattering crowd seized Rith’s horse and backed that into the cart instead. Nobody thought of using the beautiful mare that belonged to Navis. Typical of Navis, that, Mitt thought, taking the reins from the boy. The lad looked as ill as Fenna. “Want me to boost you up behind her, Moril?” Mitt asked. He had gathered the boy’s name was Moril.

Moril simply turned away and walked to the cart.

“All right. Be like that then!” Mitt said to his back. All this running about made his backside feel as if it was on fire. It got worse when he set off leading the horse into Adenmouth. Fenna had to nudge him with her foot before Mitt noticed she was trying to speak to him.

“Er – young hearthman. Sir.”

Mitt looked up. She was pale, but she was dark and pretty, and she spoke with just a trace of a Southern accent, which made him try to smile at her. “Sorry. What?”

“Don’t think too hard of Moril, sir,” Fenna said. “He loved our old horse. And I heard tell he had another horse killed by Southerners last year.”

Well, he’s no call to take it out on me! Mitt thought. But he said politely, “Heard tell? I thought he was your brother.”

“Oh no, sir,” Fenna said. “Moril is Clennen the Singer’s son. He’ll be a great Singer himself before long.”

Rith grinned at Mitt round the nose of the Countess-horse. “These artists! You can tell what they’re like from the red hair. Sit straight, Fenna, or you’ll fall off.”

It was not far to Adenmouth, just across another bend in the Aden, which then poured noisily past low grey houses crowded at the edge of a cove. Mitt was glad. By the time they had gone up the main street to the mansion, he was not sure he could have walked another step. Their arrival caused much confusion, for a good hundred more people came out of the houses to see what was wrong and then followed them into the courtyard of the mansion, where rows of trestle tables that had been set up for the Midsummer Feast all had to be moved to make way for the cart.

Lady Eltruda was out on the hall steps, bellowing instructions in a voice like the Armsmaster’s. “Navis!” she yelled. “Get that thing through to the stables! Spannet, fetch the lawman! You!” she screamed at Mitt. “You in the Aberath livery! Bring that poor girl to me!”

Before Mitt could move, Rith was dragging Fenna and the Countess-horse towards the steps, zigzagging between tables and shouting back. “Aunt! Aunt! I’m here! I got here, and I got my sign!”

At this Lady Eltruda dashed down the steps, yelling, “Noreth, my dove! Noreth!” and flung her arms round Rith.

Mitt stared. He felt terrible.

THE CONFUSION CLEARED up surprisingly quickly. Mitt was almost alone in the yard, wondering what on earth to do now, when Navis put a hand on his shoulder.

“Come to my room,” he said. “Tell me your news there.”

Funny, Mitt thought, staring slightly downwards into Navis’s cool, clear-cut face. I don’t remember him being that small. Maybe I grew. “I would if I could walk,” he said.

Navis smiled a little. “It’s not far. But I can’t carry you.”

He turned and led the way. Mitt hobbled after him, protesting, “I do know how to ride! It’s just that I never did it for a whole day before!” They went through the hall, big enough, but a dark little place compared with the one at Aberath, and up a shallow flight of steps. Navis had a comfortable panelled room beyond, as good as one of Alk’s. Typical, Mitt thought, looking round. He must be well in with Lord Stair. “How did you know I got news?”

“Hush a moment,” Navis said. Two serving-men came into the room. They were grinning rather and carrying a large bowl of something sour and strong. They dumped it where Navis pointed and then hung about, lingeringly, as if there was some joke. “Thank you,” Navis said, “but we’d like to be private now.”

“What is this?” Mitt said suspiciously as the men left, still grinning.

“Vinegar,” said Navis. “Take your leathers off and sit in it. Go on. It works.”

Slowly, with misgivings, Mitt did as Navis said. He sat. Yelled. Tried to get out again and found himself held down by Navis’s unexpectedly strong hand. Vinegar spilt on the rugs, and Mitt went on yelling, even though he was sure the two men were standing outside the door loving every shriek. “Flaming Ammet!” he roared. “Are you trying to kill me?”

“No,” said Navis, and he went on holding Mitt down until Mitt’s yells had given way to gasps and then to miserable panting. Then he let go and went to the half-open door. “That will be all,” he said, and closed the door.

Mitt heard footsteps retreating. “Can I get out now?”

“The longer you stay in, the sooner you’ll be able to ride again,” Navis said. “Tell me your news to take your mind off it.” It was on the tip of Mitt’s tongue to tell Navis he was as bad as Earl Keril, but he did not say it because he suddenly realised it was true. Navis, in his way, could be quite as ruthless as Keril. Earls’ blood will out! Mitt thought. He was wondering if he was going to be able to tell Navis anything after all when Navis added, “They wouldn’t have let you leave Aberath without very good reason, I’m sure.” Very strong bitterness came through his coolness.

He feels just as caught as I do! Mitt thought. “Well, before I start, do you know where Hildy is?”

“In Gardale,” said Navis. “Though, from the one letter she deigned to send, I wondered if she wasn’t in the moon.”

“I got one of those,” Mitt said. “Total gibberish. And Ynen? You have any idea where Ynen is?”

“No,” said Navis. There was a cold little silence before Navis said, “No. No one has bothered to tell me that. Is that why they let you see me? To bring me a threat?”

“That may be part of it,” Mitt said. “They must have reckoned I’d tell you. Navis, they want me to kill that girl Noreth. And I tell you I rode most of the way here with her and she’s no madder than what I am!”

“Sit still,” said Navis. “You’ll get vinegar everywhere.” He drew up a chair and sat facing Mitt in his bowl. “Tell me this carefully. Who wants you to?”

“The Countess and Earl Keril,” said Mitt. “Talk about your past catching up with you! They found out all about me.”

“Keril,” said Navis. “Keril. Then, Mitt, you are not the only one whose past has caught up with him. I once risked a good deal to send a message to Keril to warn him that his sons were prisoners in Holand. He must have taken it as a threat. What did he say?”

Mitt sat in his bowl and told Navis everything, including his ride with Noreth. The only thing he left out was the way he had thought the Aden was a mighty river. He was not sure he believed that himself now. He found he felt a little tearful as he talked, not for obvious reasons but because Navis was listening and not treating him as the scum of the earth.

“That statue,” Navis said. “You were a little overgenerous there. Can you persuade her to give you your half?”

“Chop it in two? Why?” said Mitt.

“Because if it is solid gold,” said Navis, “neither of us need depend on the charity of earls. We could leave tonight. Mitt, I don’t like this at all. You hear a great deal about Noreth here in Adenmouth. She is much loved. If anything happened to her, there would be an outcry all down the coast dales as far as Kinghaven. You are an obvious Southerner. Yet they send you after her in full Aberath livery. What are they playing at? Everyone will know Aberath had a hand in it, however villainous they say you are.”

“I’m not doing it,” said Mitt. “I can’t. That’s final. But what do we do?”

“We leave,” said Navis, “as soon as I think of an excuse, with your share of the gold if possible. We look for Ynen and we cut short Hildrida’s education and we hope we can get to them before Keril finds out.” He sighed. “Then we all go into hiding again. Meanwhile, keep sitting. You have to be able to ride.”

Mitt sat for another hour. During that time the big panelled room darkened, and drops of rain patterned on the tall window. Lady Eltruda’s voice was heard bawling for Navis to see about awnings over the yard. Navis hurried away. He came back only to be called away to see about candles. By the time he was back from that, the clouds had passed and red-gold sunlight was slanting into the room. Lady Eltruda bawled that it was going to be fine after all, and Navis hurried off to have the awnings rolled away. Mitt saw why Navis seemed so well in with Lord Stair. People welcomed a little Southern efficiency round here. He grinned as he watched Navis come back and dress for the feast, with the same efficiency, in a ruffled shirt and blue-green Adenmouth livery. You wouldn’t think, to look at him, that Navis must have been dressed by a valet all his life until these last months.

“You can get out now and wash,” Navis said.

Mitt did so. He was not sore any more, not even tender. In fact, he was as smooth and leathery as his own buff and gold Aberath livery. “You pickled me!” he said.

“That was the idea,” said Navis.

They went out into the hall, which was full of cooking scents and people standing about waiting for Lord Stair to arrive and start the feast. The big doors were open, blowing in a chilly wind. A lot of noise came from the yard, where everyone else in Adenmouth was gathered at the tables drinking beer until the food arrived. Mitt stood, a little lost among all these strangers.

“Oh, there you are, Mitt!” said Rith’s voice.

Mitt turned and found himself facing an elegant lady. He was utterly dismayed. The only thing that was the same about her was the longish, freckled face with its eager, cheerful look. But that was surrounded by clouds of fair, frizzy hair, done in a most fashionable style, and she had on a slender dress of grey-blue that hung in sheeny folds round a thoroughly female figure. Mitt could see now she was a lot older than he was – eighteen or twenty at least – and that was enough to make him feel a fool. But the thing that dismayed him most was the fact that Noreth was alive, utterly alive, and warm, and a person.

“Come on!” said Noreth. “Where’s your tongue?”

“Er,” said Mitt. “Your ladyship—”

“I told you,” she said, “to call me Rith.”

“Yes,” said Mitt, “but … what were you doing, letting on you were a boy?”

“I always travel like that,” Noreth said. “It’s far quicker and safer than a carriage, and I don’t need to bother to take a guard. My cousin lends me the livery. And I can use the weapons too. You learn to, during grittling. But listen—” To Mitt’s consternation, Noreth reached out and took hold of both his hands. Her hands were strong and warm, but so small they made Mitt’s feel like great cold paws. “I’m very nervous,” she said. She was. Mitt could feel her hands trembling. “There’s something I have to do. Do you know how it feels to do something that means your life will never be the same again?”

“Don’t I just!” Mitt said. He sensed that Navis had come up behind him and was watching Noreth coolly. That reminded him that he had to ask for his share in the statue, but he was too confused to know how to put it.

“I had a feeling you did,” said Noreth. “Listen, could you—” There was a bustle up on the dais. Someone was calling for lamps to be lighted. Noreth looked round. “Oh, here comes my uncle,” she said. “Drunk as usual. I must go. If you could just bear witness about that statue when the time comes?”

“Sure,” said Mitt, “but—”

Noreth let go of him and hurried away. Everyone was surging towards the long tables to sit down. Navis beckoned Mitt to a place beside him, just below the important table on the dais. Mitt found there were advantages to being sent to Adenmouth after all. At Aberath he would have been waiting at the tables with the other boys. Here he was a guest, and he could sit and let boys wait on him. He settled down to enjoy himself. The food was good, though Mitt found he did not much care for the traditional Midsummer sausage. Like so much of the food in the North, it seemed to be mostly oatmeal. But there was venison and pork and chicken and beef as well, oyster patties and plum-and-mutton pies, strawberries, raspberries with syllabub, and sweet soda bread. Ale and spirits were passed round the whole time. The sound of voices became a cheerful roar that almost drowned the even greater din from the yard outside. Mitt ate hugely and became very friendly with the hearthmen at his table. There were a great many jokes about vinegar.

Lord Stair was indeed drunk. It was impossible not to notice. He was a large, sallow man, and he sat sprawling in his chair, eating very little and shouting for more drink. Every so often he complained loudly about the food. Nobody took much notice. If people needed to have orders about anything, they asked Lady Eltruda. It looked as if Lady Eltruda, short and fat and loud as she was, had the same power here that the Countess had in Aberath.

“Indeed she does,” Navis told Mitt. “I owe my position here to Eltruda. I imagine Noreth does too.”

Lady Eltruda was obviously very fond of Noreth. She kept smiling at her proudly.

The feast drew to a close in sweet cream cheeses and sugared fruit, which Mitt was too full to touch. Lord Stair began to get impatient. His voice roared something about “those idle flaming Singers!” and there were terrific clatterings and scrapings from the yard, where the tables were being moved aside. Hestefan got up from a table near the end of the hall and went to stand in the great doorway. With him, to Mitt’s surprise, came Fenna and Moril.

Navis frowned. “I don’t think that girl should be here. Nor the boy. They both look ill to me. But I suppose they have to earn their keep.”

His voice was nearly drowned in cheering and clapping. Nobody else cared two hoots how the Singers felt, for there was going to be dancing. Tables were pushed aside in the hall too. Hestefan slung a narrow drum round his neck, looked to see if Fenna was ready on the portable organ and that Moril had tuned his cwidder, and struck up a strenuous jig. Outside and inside, everyone grabbed a partner and danced.

The dancing went on and on. Mitt at first leant against a table, feeling a little out of things and watching Navis being whirled about by Lady Eltruda. But at the next tune he was grabbed by a young lady in scarlet ribbons, and from then on he danced with the rest. The hall whirled around him, hot and riotous. He kept catching glimpses of Navis dancing with Lady Eltruda, which bothered him slightly, since Lord Stair simply sprawled in a chair and went on drinking. But once or twice he saw Navis dancing with Noreth, in a very courtly way. Mitt would not have dared to dance with Noreth himself. He knew absolutely none of the dances. The young ladies squealed with laughter and pushed him into the right places, and he kept going wrong. Every time his desperate, ignorant caperings got him into a real mess, he seemed to catch the eye of Moril, tirelessly playing his cwidder in the doorway, and there was malicious amusement in Moril’s look. It began to annoy Mitt.

It took Mitt unawares when the Singers suddenly changed to a slow, haunting tune and everyone stopped dancing. For a moment Mitt was the only one capering. Moril grinned. “What’s this tune, then?” Mitt gasped.

“Undying at Midsummer, of course,” said the girl in scarlet ribbons. “It’s nearly midnight.”

Around him dancing partners were breaking apart and the servers were going round with bottles of rare white wine, Southern wine, to welcome midnight with. Someone put three mugs of it down on the steps for the Singers.

Navis bent over his mug, sniffing deeply. “Now this I have missed,” he said to Mitt. “Grapes don’t ripen this far North.”

They exchanged a little smile of pride in the South, even though it had turned them both out. Mitt said wonderingly, “That can’t be the only thing you miss!”

“I think it is,” said Navis. “Life’s never dull up here.” Saying this, he thrust his mug into Mitt’s free hand and dived towards the doorway. He was just in time to catch Fenna as she dropped the heavy organ and passed out. Everybody stared in shock as Navis turned to Hestefan with Fenna draped over his arms. “What were you thinking of, letting this girl play tonight? Couldn’t you see she was ill?”

Hestefan gave him a slow, worried look. “She swore she was well, sir, and we needed her part on the organ. I thank you for catching her so quickly.”

Navis looked at Moril. “And you? Are you quite well?”

Moril’s face did not have much expression, but Mitt could tell that he would not have admitted it to Navis even if he had been playing with all ten fingers broken. “Perfectly, thank you,” Moril said.

Here Lady Eltruda raised her voice. Two women came and took Fenna quickly away. Someone shoved the heavy little organ to the side of the doorway. It was almost midnight. A running crowd of men and women were carrying every lamp and candle in the place and putting them down on the ground in two long lines leading from the gates of the yard, through the yard, up the steps and into a circle in the middle of the hall. It was good luck to place a candle, so everyone fought for the honour except for Lord Stair – and Mitt and Navis, who did not know the custom.

“Let in the Undying!” everyone shouted as the last candle was put in place.

Silence fell, expectantly. From the yard came a strong grating sound as the two big gates were pushed open. At Hestefan’s nod, Moril again played the slow, haunting chords of Undying at Midsummer. To Mitt’s ears he seemed to be playing now in an odd, different way. At any rate, there was a queer humming building under the notes. A damp breeze blew in from the yard, where it was probably raining again, bending all the candle flames. A great wavering shadow advanced across the floor and grew up the wall beyond.

Flaming Ammet! Mitt thought, with shivers spreading up his back. I think something really is coming in!

But the shadow shortened and fell, and Mitt saw it had been caused by Hestefan advancing up the lane of lights, carrying a small treble cwidder. When Hestefan reached the circle of lights, he turned round and called out, “Welcome the Undying to this house, for this night and the coming year!” Then he played the same slow tune on his cwidder. Mitt wondered why it sounded so much more ordinary now.

A growl of voices welcomed the Undying too. The custom seemed to be to tip your mug and let a few drops of wine splash on the floor. Navis looked at Mitt. Mitt shrugged. And they both spilt some wine as well, with a private murmur to Libby Beer. After that the feast broke up into groups loudly wishing one another luck for the year. It looked for a minute or so as if things were nearly over.

But suddenly everyone was shouting, “Noreth! Noreth! Noreth, has your sign come?” as Noreth came to stand in the circle of candles beside Hestefan. She was carrying the golden statue, and she held it up for everyone to see.

“Here is my sign,” she called out.

Navis murmured to Mitt, “You can say goodbye to your half of it, I think.” A number of people were cheering, although Lord Stair was saying loudly in the distance, “Is that girl up to her nonsense again?”

“Hush!” someone said.

Noreth called out again. “Will my uncle’s lawman please come and stand by me? I wish to make a statement in the proper form of law.”

There was a lot of grumbling from the back. One of the men who had been at the high table, rather unsteady on his feet and very embarrassed, came and joined Noreth. She left the circle of light and walked down the lane of candles with him to the door. “I want everyone to hear,” she explained to the lawman as they came past Mitt. “Tell me if I say anything wrong.” Mitt could feel her shaking with the importance of what she was going to do. It made his stomach give a cold jerk.

“You know ash mush law ash me,” the lawman complained, but he went and stood by Noreth as she took up a position in the doorway where she could speak to the people outside as well as those in the hall. The two of them pushed Moril right back to the side of the door. Mitt could see him there, looking awed.

Noreth said, loudly and slowly, “I, Noreth of Kredindale, do this night state and affirm that I am the rightful Queen and heir to the crown of Dalemark, over both North and South and the peoples of both.”

It really is true, Mitt thought sadly. The lawman leant across and murmured to Noreth.

“Oh yes. Thanks,” said Noreth. “And over all earldoms and marks therein, not excluding the earls of those marks and the lords under them. This claim I make through my mother, Eleth of Kredindale, descendant in direct line from Manaliabrid of the Undying, and also by right of my father, the One, whose true names are not to be spoken, and from whom all Kings descend. In proof of this my right, my father promised me a token at Midsummer this year, and this promise he kept. This is the token.” She held the golden statue up over the nearest lamps so that it could be seen. “Who witnesses,” she called out, “that the River Aden today gave me this golden image of my father, the One?”

Mitt jumped and looked round for somewhere to hide. But Noreth turned and looked at him as she spoke. He sighed and pushed his way to the doorway. “If I’d known what you meant when you asked,” he said, “I’d have gone straight back to Aberath.”

The lawman said, “Do you witnesh thish?” and swayed a little.

“Sure,” Mitt said bitterly. If Keril and the Countess had arranged personally for the landslip, they could hardly have pushed him into this any deeper. “I trod on the statue halfway across the brook. She picked it up. That do?”

Noreth replied with an eager, flustered smile. Her hands were still shaking as she held up the statue. She was truly nervous. She was not doing this because she was mad but because she saw it as her duty, as perhaps it was. Mitt felt himself bound to give her a smile in return before he edged away. Beyond Noreth he could see the Singer-lad staring at him resentfully. Now what does he think I’ve done? Mitt thought irritably.

“I call on you all,” Noreth said, “to support me in my right. Today at dawn, it being Midsummer Day, I go to ride the green roads until I come to where the crown is hidden, and there I shall be crowned Queen. Let whoever wishes to ride with me and support my claim meet me at the waystone above the quarry at sunrise today.”

There was another silence, which was followed by a surge of murmurs, half doubtful, half enthusiastic. Navis whispered to Mitt, “Well, there seems only one thing we can do now.” Mitt nodded, but his attention was on Moril in the doorway. He could almost feel the boy making some kind of decision. Sure enough, Moril put his hands to his cwidder and struck up the tune called The King’s Way. Hestefan looked surprised but took the tune up on his cwidder too, and walked between the two lines of guttering candles to join Moril. Moril, leaning over, plucked once again in the odd and different way. The humming gathered and gathered behind the tune, until it had become more than simply a rousing song. Mitt could quite clearly feel a serious purpose booming behind the notes. Everyone sang:

“Who will ride the King’s Way,

the King’s Way?

Who will ride the royal road

and follow with the King?”

There was a certain amount of muddle as about half the people tried to sing “Queen” instead of “King”, but the singing was truly lusty. It seemed to affect Mitt’s head, either the singing or the queer boom of Moril’s cwidder, and his memory went a bit faulty after that. He remembered Noreth, glowing in the doorway, holding the glinting statue for everyone to see as they sang. He remembered glancing uneasily at Navis because this song was banned in the South, and finding, to his confusion, that Navis was singing with the rest. Mitt knew the song because he had been a freedom fighter, but Navis was an earl’s son, for Ammet’s sake!

Next thing he knew, he was back in Navis’s room, where Navis seemed to be persuading him to get into bed. Mitt interrupted what he was saying – he seemed to be repeating with great earnestness, “This is serious, Navis, she was serious!” – in order to protest that he didn’t need to sleep.

“Please yourself,” Navis said. “It’s only a few hours to sunrise anyway.” Mitt had a confused notion that Navis went away then, saying he had a lot of things to do, and he knew Navis did not come back until the next thing he knew, which was Navis shaking him awake in grey dawn.

“What is it now?” Mitt said.

“Time to get up,” Navis said. “You and I are going to ride the green roads with Noreth.”

“Whatever for?” protested Mitt. “I told you I—”

“Can you think of a better way to keep Hildy and Ynen safe until we get to them?” Navis asked. “You were told to join Noreth. Keril will assume you are doing what you are told. Now get up.”

Mitt got up – luckily he still seemed to be dressed – and shortly stumbled out into old food and beer smells in the hall. His bedroll was on the nearest table alongside one for Navis. Navis was just beyond, with his arms round someone, evidently kissing that person goodbye. For a moment Mitt thought it was Noreth and was outraged. Then the girl – no, woman, no, lady – stood back with her hands on Navis’s shoulders, and Mitt saw it was Lady Eltruda. He stood there in even greater outrage. How could Navis! An elderly woman. A married woman. Taking advantage of Lord Stair being a drunk!

“Take care of my girl for me, love,” Lady Eltruda said to Navis. “I trust her to you. She’s the only child I ever had.”

“I’ll look after her, I promise,” Navis said, and smiled in what Mitt thought was altogether too loving a way.

At that moment Noreth herself rushed into the hall, once more dressed as a hearthman. “Aunt, where’s my bedroll? Aunt! Oh!” she said as she saw how her aunt was occupied. She made a face at Mitt that showed that she felt much the same as he did about it. “I’d better go and look in the stable,” she said. “I don’t think I ever unpacked. Are you riding with me?”

Mitt nodded.

“Oh good!” Noreth said, and raced away outside.

PART TWO

MAEWEN CAME BACK to the present with a jump. For a moment there it had seemed as if the noise of the train was not the beat of wheels on tracks, but the sound of water rilling over stones. She had almost seemed to see young leaves rustling overhead, casting a mix of sunspots and shadow on the racing water. In the confusion of glints she could have sworn there was a brighter glint, hands diving for the brightness, voices, and then the brightness taking the form of a dripping golden statuette.

Nonsense, of course. She must have dropped off to sleep while the train was rushing into this deep green cutting – such a deep one that there was no sign of the mountains beyond – and the glint had to be the gold buttons of the guard, just passing on his regular walk down the corridors. The guard smiled gravely at Maewen with his head cocked to one side. Was she all right?

Maewen managed a sort of smile, and the guard passed on. She prickled all over with embarrassment again. It was too bad of Aunt Liss. Mum would just have given Maewen a vague kiss and waved goodbye, but Aunt Liss, being the practical sister, had had to collar the guard and explain loudly and at length. “This is my niece’s first-ever train journey. She’s going all the way to Kernsburgh to visit her father and I don’t like to think of her going all that way without someone to keep an eye on her. Could you make sure she’s all right? Can I leave her in your tender care?”

And so on for five minutes, while Maewen wished she were anywhere else and hoped the other four passengers in the carriage were all deaf. As if she were ten years old instead of nearly fourteen! The worst of it was that the guard was quite young and rather good-looking. He probably did think Maewen was only ten. She was unfortunately small for her age. He listened seriously to Aunt Liss and eventually took his cap off, baring his beautiful white-fair curls, and bowed slightly.

“Thank you, madam. You can safely leave your niece to me.”

Looking back on it, Maewen wondered if the guard hadn’t been making fun of Aunt Liss, but it hadn’t seemed like that at the time, and Maewen had spent the entire space between Adenmouth and Kredindale trying to hide her hot face and squirming all over.

The silly part was that Maewen usually got on with Aunt Liss, better than with Mum. Aunt Liss was the one who cared. While Mum wandered in her studio covering her strange gawky statues with metal rags and splashes of bright colour, deaf and blind to the world, Aunt Liss made sure Maewen had meals and clothes and – most important of all to Maewen – a horse to ride. Aunt Liss earned day-to-day money by running a livery stable. When Mum sold a statue, she earned big money, but that only happened—

“Are you travelling far, young lady?” asked the passenger opposite, making her jump again. He must have got on the train at Orilsway or somewhere. She looked at him, trying to remember, and decided she must have been asleep when he got on because she had certainly not noticed him before. He was one of those wide kind of old men who are almost bell-shaped sitting down. He had a sheet of wriggly grey hair on either side of his wide, plump face. Maewen was not sure she liked the way his eyes were half hooded in fat eyelids – it made him look cunning and rather cruel – but his question had been perfectly polite, and she supposed she had better answer.

“Just to Kernsburgh.”

“Indeed?” he said. “And where did you get on?”

“Adenmouth,” said Maewen.

“From the furthest north,” said the old man, “halfway down the country to King Hern’s city of gold. That is a momentous journey, child. At one time it was the royal road to the crown of Dalemark.” He chuckled in a windy, breathy way. “And what brings you on the paths of the Undying?”

What a silly way to talk! Maewen thought. There are people who travel between Adenmouth and Kernsburgh every day of the week. “I’m going to visit my father,” she said. Up to this moment she had secretly thought this was the greatest adventure of her life, but thanks to this old man, it was suddenly ordinary and boring. “For the holidays,” she added drearily.

“Your father,” said the old man, in a breathy sort of pounce, “works away from home? In Kernsburgh? Eh?”

“Yes,” said Maewen.

“You travel to see him often?”

“No,” she said. “This is the first time I’ve been.” And she wished she could end this conversation. She did not like the old man’s voice. There was something odd about it.

“Ah, I see. He’s only just gone to work in Kernsburgh, is that it? Eh?”

“No. He’s worked there for the last seven years.” What was so odd about his voice? It almost seemed as if the sound was not coming from the old man at all but from somewhere else quite a long way away. Perhaps he was one of those people who had had surgery on his larynx and had to use a false voice box, in which case he was unfortunate and she ought to be polite to him. Maewen tried to explain without giving away her entire family history. “I haven’t seen him since I was – was a lot younger.” She really did not want to tell him her age, which he would know if she told him her parents had been divorced when she was seven.

“Now why is that?” the old man asked. “Do your parents perhaps not get on? They seem to have lived a long way apart for most of your life.”

Cheek! Maewen thought. It’s none of his business. “My mother,” she explained haughtily, “is a sculptor who prefers to work near the stone she uses. And my father is a very busy man. He’s Head Curator of the Tannoreth Palace.”

“Ah,” said the old man. She really did not like his half-hooded eyes. She looked away. “So you are truly on your way to the royal palace?” he said. He seemed very pleased. “And travelling all on your own until we met, eh? Now you can travel with me.” He leant forwards. The carriage seemed full of his wheezing breath, as if it were coming from outside into him, instead of the right way.

For one horrid moment Maewen thought he was going to pat her knee. She surged herself right to the back of her seat, but that did not seem nearly far enough away.

“I will be with you from now on,” he said, leaning at her. “Think of me as a friend.”

No! Help! Maewen thought. She looked at the other passengers. Three were asleep, and the other was deep in a book. She thought of putting her feet up and kneeling sideways out of reach of the old man’s fat hand hovering to pat her. And the guard only just went past, she thought, so it’ll be hours before he comes back again.

“Look me in the eyes,” said the old man, “and tell me you think of me as a friend.”

His face seemed to be right in front of hers, filling all she could see. Maewen shut her eyes. Let the guard come! she prayed. Let somebody help!

And here, like a miracle, the carriage door was sliding back and the guard’s solemn good-looking face was leaning round it. “Are you all right in here?”

“I … oh … yes … no … he—” Stop stammering and say he tried to pat your knee, you fool! “He—” Maewen turned to point at the seat opposite and found herself stammering again, this time with astonished embarrassment. The seat was empty. A quick look round the carriage showed her that there were only four passengers, three asleep, one reading. “But he … there was … I thought an old man … I mean—”

The guard shifted his head to look gravely at the empty seat. “I don’t think he’ll bother you again,” he said, perfectly straight-faced and polite, and he shut the door and went away.

Maewen sat back hot and squirming, worse than before. If one more thing happens with that guard, I think I shall die! She must have fallen asleep and dreamt the old man. What had possessed her to have a sinister little dream like that? Probably, deep down, she was terrified of seeing Dad again. Determined to stay awake from now on, she sat looking out at the mountains, dun-coloured shoulders, green steeps, black crags and blue jagged distances spinning past as the train thundered through the centre of North Dalemark. She thought firmly of Dad, to conquer her nerves. He had written over and over again to ask Maewen to visit him. He must really want to see her. But Mum just said irritably that she was not letting Maewen go until she was old enough to take care of herself. “Because he’s quite likely to forget you exist after half a day,” she said. “You’d starve or worse.” She went on to a tirade about how wrapped up Dad was in his work.

Maewen grinned. That, coming from Mum, was rich. But it seemed to have been the main reason for the divorce. Dad just kept forgetting he had a wife and daughter. She felt that if Dad turned out to be a male version of Mum, she could cope. She was used to it. It was worth it for the chance of living in the royal palace of Amil the Great in the middle of the capital city. But what if Dad turned out unpleasant? Maewen had always found it hard to believe that you could divorce someone just for being vague. After all, she had never felt the slightest desire herself to divorce Mum. That made her grin again.

By the time the train slowed and rolled creaking into Kernsburgh Central Station, Maewen was feeling quite cheerful and poised. But that was in her mind. Her body persisted in thinking it was very nervous, and her arms felt like string as she tried to heave her suitcase off the train. It was blocking the door, and she could sense the crowd of passengers behind getting more and more irritated. But just as she was getting truly flustered, here was the polite, attentive guard again, giving her a serious smile and picking up her case for her.

“Let me carry that.”

He set off into the station, and she pattered after him, grateful even though he was looking after her like a baby. The station was much larger than she had expected, high and ringing with announcements and people’s voices and feet, and full of big red pillars that made all the parts of it look the same.

“My father is meeting me,” she began defensively.

She saw Dad as she said it, coming through hordes of people going the other way. He was reading from a bundle of notes in his hand, and it was clear that the other people pushing past just did not exist for him. The sight took Maewen instantly back seven years. It was a pure delight the way Dad stood out from everyone else by being so trim and clear-cut – but not for being tall, she realised as Dad came close. He only came up to the guard’s shoulder. So that’s where I get my smallness from! she thought, and for one mad moment she wondered if Mum had divorced Dad because Mum herself was so tall and willowy.

Dad looked up from his notes and recognised her as if he had only seen her yesterday. “Oh, hello,” he said. “You don’t look a bit like this photo.” He turned the bundle of notes round to show her the snapshot clipped to the front. It was one Maewen had never liked, herself all long-faced and freckled with her arm over a horse, not unlike the horse, and the horse the better-looking of the two. “I suppose that’s how your aunt Liss likes to see you,” Dad remarked. “She sent the photo, of course.”

There was a slight awkwardness then as Dad bent a bit and kissed her cheek and did not quite give Maewen time to kiss him back. He smelt just the same as she remembered, with pipe smoke somewhere. He wheeled away almost at once to stare at the guard. “You needn’t have bothered, Wend,” he said. “I can be trusted to remember to meet my own daughter, I hope.” He had put back his head and gone all haughty. Maewen remembered that haughtiness well. Was it the haughtiness that had caused the divorce really?

“I was supposed to take care of her, sir,” said the guard. “Or so I thought.”

Maewen turned to stare at him. She had thought the uniform he was wearing was a railway one, but now she saw it was a paler blue and that the cap was wrong. How puzzling.

“I take it you two have met,” Dad said. He was still haughty. He went on with the utmost sarcasm, “Maewen, my chief assistant, Wend Orilson. Wend, my daughter, Mayelbridwen Singer.” Then he swung round and strode rapidly towards the way out, leaving Maewen to dither, not knowing whether to run after him or stay with the puzzling Wend and her suitcase.

She arrived at the exit doing neither, partly chasing Dad and then stopping and turning to look at Wend, wondering if she had the nerve to ask him if Dad had really sent him all the way to Adenmouth to collect her, and then forgotten – and then not daring and running after Dad again. They arrived outside in single file, into a roar of traffic and much hotter sun than Maewen was used to. There was a vast stone, round, with a hole in the middle, upended in the traffic island in front of the station. Its huge shadow fell across the front half of the queue for taxis.

“We won’t need a taxi; it’s no distance,” Dad said. He pointed to the huge stone. “The old waystone,” he said, and set off striding into the town, “marking the start of the ancient road system of North Dalemark. King Hern, or most probably his descendants, made the roads, but simple people often thought the gods made them and tended to call them the paths of the Undying.”

Maewen pattered after him up a broad thoroughfare, listening to as much as she could hear of a series of little lectures. After the waystone, it was the traffic, then the circular road system invented by Amil the Great, then the goods sold in the expensive shops she could see on either side. Somewhere along the street, Wend caught up, carrying her suitcase, and she thought he said, “I’ll explain later,” but she was too confused to be sure.

She forgot everything, anyway, when they came between giant gilded gates in a high wall and she had her first sight of the palace. It was across a cobbled court, and it was majestic. Like a very graceful cliff, she thought, almost too big to take in, and all upright lines that made it look taller still. In front of it, right in the middle of the court, there was a very much smaller building. It caught Maewen’s attention for being so different from the palace that it looked quite out of place. It was like a house-sized model of a fairytale palace, with three small onion domes and such numbers of spiral towers that it looked almost absurd.

“Whatever is that?” she said.

“That? Oh, that’s the tomb of Amil the Great,” her father told her, and followed this up with one of the little lectures Maewen was coming to expect. “He completed the old part of the palace two hundred years ago, quite early in his reign. That’s Amil’s old facade we’re looking at now; those recessed arcades along the lower storeys were one of his own ideas. He was always full of ideas, but towards the end of his reign the ideas got rather out of hand, I’m afraid. Amil seemed to become obsessed with death and evil. He divided his time between having this tomb built and journeying all over the kingdom to eradicate what he called ‘pockets of Kankredin’. He simply meant places where there was injustice or lawlessness, but he had become very eccentric by then, and he preferred to call them that.”

“He was very old when he died, wasn’t he?” Maewen asked.

“Nearly ninety,” said Dad. “Come on inside. Give me that case, Wend. We’ll go up in the lift for once.” He set off across the big space, over a pattern of cobbles and flagstones, still lecturing. “Amil had seen this country through from two primitive groups of earldoms to a fully industrial society, so I think he earned the right to be a little eccentric. That tomb is by way of being his folly.”

DAD HAD AN enormous, spacious apartment right at the top of the Old Palace, filled with books and old furniture. The main room looked over the leads of the roof, where pigeons waddled to the windows, expecting crusts of bread for breakfast. Maewen’s bedroom looked out over the forecourt and the top of Amil’s mad little tomb to what seemed miles below, with a huge view of Kernsburgh beyond that, all dark trees and towers and square office blocks. The room was enormous, with almost nothing in it but a bed, a cupboard and a great threadbare carpet that had been old when Amil’s son imported it. Next door was a large clanking bathroom with plumbing so elderly that Maewen was more awed by it than anything else in the palace.

“I’m afraid I can only spare time to be with you in the evenings and early mornings,” Dad said over supper. Supper was supplied by one of a bewildering set of young ladies, who all seemed to wait on Dad hand and foot and then turn into secretaries in between. Seeing them, Maewen instantly knew that Dad regretted the divorce no more than Mum did. He was entirely comfortable. After supper he lit a pipe and explained, “We’re just moving into the height of the tourist season now. As soon as the palace opens to the public, I have to be everywhere at once. But I’ve told everyone that you can explore anywhere you want. Tomorrow I’ll make sure they all know you, so there won’t be any trouble.”

That evening they just talked, with Dad puffing clouds of pipe smoke through sunset light slanting in across the leading. Maewen found they got on. Dad seemed to think the same kind of thoughts that she did. Next morning he woke her quite surprisingly early and they had breakfast – supplied by another young lady – with rosy light slanting the other way across crusty rolls and rich black coffee. Just as Maewen was thinking how grown-up and leisurely this was, Dad sprang up and took her on a tour of the palace.

The Tannoreth Palace was vast. Buildings of various ages rayed out round courtyards with fountains, or gardens with statues and summer houses in them, and hedges and roses, and a small menagerie. At every huge room they came to – and on some of the stairways – at every picture or work of art or curious object, Dad gave her another of his little lectures. In between he was introducing her to bewildering numbers of people who worked in the palace: ladies in overalls polishing the long museum galleries or dusting gilded tables, security men, guides, secretaries, and Major Alksen, who was head of security. Maewen’s mind began to seize up. When Dad took her outside to be introduced to the gardeners, she was thinking, I shall never remember all this! Our minds are not the same after all. It was too early. Even though she was used to being up with the lark in the holidays to help Aunt Liss in the stables, she could see to a horse on autopilot, half asleep. This was different. No one introduced you to horses or expected you to know the history of the barn.

Afterwards she found the only thing she could remember from the entire tour was Major Alksen because he was so much her idea of a retired soldier. And Wend, of course. She was glad Dad had not reintroduced her to Wend. Maewen felt too much pure embarrassment to go near him.

But she felt she was letting Dad down, or wasting opportunities, or something. So when Dad had given her another of his swift, awkward kisses and rushed off, Maewen felt herself bound to go all over the palace again.

It took days. Some of the time she joined in the guided tours, having made sure first that the guide was not Wend, and the guides would give her a special smile among all the crowds of foreign schoolchildren, and ordinary families, and silk-suited men and women from Nepstan, and then go on with their spiel. She visited Amil’s tomb with one such crowd, but it was a cold, boring arched room inside, with a lot of gold lettering on the tombstone, and she only went there that once. She preferred indoors.

Here she usually started her sightseeing in the Old Palace, where most of the pictures were. That was easy to find because of the art students. They lay on the floor in what had been the great hall but was now a ballroom, copying the perspective in the ceiling picture. On the walls of this room Amil the Great, with his mane of fair hair and a roll of plans trailing from one hand, supervised the building of the palace. Amil was wearing purple breeches, which Maewen thought were decidedly unfortunate. They looked worse in the copies the students made of them. On the ceiling there was the whole of Dalemark spread out, from the plains and slow rivers of the South to the mountains of the North, and full of battling figures, as Amil (in the same purple breeches) led his armies against the rebellious earls at the start of his reign.

Next door to the ballroom was a smaller room where oil paintings hung in frames. This was where Maewen’s favourite pictures were. She got into the habit of stepping over the students lying on the floor and then pushing between the easels and the busy students in the smaller room in order to look at the portraits they were copying. The biggest was of the Duke of Kernsburgh, posed haughtily looking over the shoulder of a trailing crimson cape, in front of a new castle on a hill.

“Amil the Great’s chief minister,” Dad told her when she asked that first evening, “and one of the most ruthless men in history.”

Maewen could see the Duke was ruthless – it was in every fierce, clear line of him – but there was something familiar and almost friendly about him too. She almost felt as if she knew him. She kept trying to decide why. He looks as if he was very nice to his friends, she decided. But if you weren’t one of his friends, you had to watch it. He’d put you to death without turning a hair.

The Duke was flanked by two dismal portraits of the Adon, both much, much older, and beyond that was an even older portrait of Enblith the Fair, who was supposed to have been the most beautiful woman ever, daughter of the Undying and a famous queen. The portrait was cracked, but even so Maewen could only suppose that ideas of beauty had changed. Enblith reminded her very strongly of Aunt Liss – and no one had ever called Aunt Liss a beauty, even when she was young. I bet she managed people into thinking she was lovely, Maewen thought. That was all women were supposed to be in those days. And she pushed between easels to the portrait that truly fascinated her.

It was called Unknown Minstrel Boy, and she kept wishing she knew more about him. He was probably about her own age, and he had red hair – which Maewen had always secretly wished for herself – with the paleness that always goes with such hair. He was rather richly dressed in dark maroon satin, so either he was a very good minstrel or a young aristocrat posing as one. Good minstrel, Maewen decided. It was in the way his pained eyes met yours and yet looked way, way beyond, full of thoughts and knowledge and strong sadness. Someone’s let him down badly, Maewen thought when she first met those eyes. She wished she knew who had and why. And kept going back to look.

She wanted so badly to know about that boy that in the end she joined the afternoon guided tour that went round the pictures. The advantage was that the students had gone home by then. The disadvantage was that this tour was always taken by Wend. It took Maewen several days to muster courage to go with it. When she did, the mere sight of Wend started her fizzing with embarrassment again. Wend saw her and gave her a polite little bow and a restrained smile. Maewen felt her face flooding with red. It was the awful way Wend never seemed to show any emotion but politeness. But she clenched her teeth and followed the other tourists.

The picture of the minstrel boy was famous for several reasons, she discovered. Nobody had ever been able to find out who the boy was, although he was important enough to have been painted by the best artist of the time. And he must have been important to Amil the Great too, because Amil made a special bequest of the picture to his grandson, Amil II. Books had been written about the picture. Some theorists suspected the boy was Amil himself, before he won the throne. Amil the Great had also carefully preserved the cwidder that had been painted with the boy. It was obviously old, even then. The minstrel boy had his hand dreamily wrapped across the cwidder, half hiding the strange old lettering inlaid on the front. And the actual selfsame cwidder was in a glass case just beside the portrait, very fragile and cracked-looking, despite careful restoration.

“Well, fancy that!” said everyone, raising cameras and jostling for the best shot of it.

After that Wend took the party into the ballroom, where he told them that the paintings on the wall and the ceiling had been done in the time of Amil II. Nobody knew what Amil the Great really looked like, and the purple trousers were a pure invention. This so amused Maewen that she left Wend’s embarrassing presence in order to go down to the hallway and buy a postcard of Amil in his breeches and write a “Wish you were here” message on it to Mum and Aunt Liss. Then she made a foray into Kernsburgh itself to post it.

The city was even more crowded than the palace, and the traffic was terrible. A very few glances into the shops as she passed showed Maewen that she had barely enough money even for ordinary presents for Mum and Aunt Liss. Kernsburgh sold things from all over the world, and it was expensive. But the distressing thing to someone who had been brought up in the country like Maewen was that the place seemed to have almost no trees once you were down on street level.

“Where do all the trees go?” she asked Dad that evening.

It was a perfect example of the way she and Dad got on. Dad knew just what she was talking about although he was busy laying out sheets of stiff paper and notebooks on the other end of the table. “In people’s gardens, I think,” he said. “I believe Amil the Great planned it that way, because there were no trees on the site when he started to rebuild Kernsburgh.”

“Then he made a mistake,” Maewen said. “It’s all buildings and cars, and it makes me cough.”

“You’d have coughed worse when the place was new,” Dad said. “Two hundred years ago it would have been smog from coal fires. Though I’m never sure it was such a good thing when they discovered oil under the Marshes. It makes the Queen a rich woman, I suppose, but it has its drawbacks.”

“Where is the Queen?” Maewen asked. “I’ve been almost all over the palace now, and—”

“Oh, she very rarely comes here these days,” Dad said. “She’s pretty old, you know, and she prefers the warmth in the South. She almost only ever comes to the Tannoreth for state occasions.”

“And the Crown Prince?” Maewen asked, feeling rather let down.

“He lives in Hannart,” Dad answered absently, busy with a notebook. “Doesn’t get on with his mother or with public events.”

“What are you doing?” Maewen asked him.

“Trying to establish our family tree,” said her father. “It’s a hobby of mine – and damned exasperating too. You can come and look if you like.”

Maewen came and leant on his square, warm shoulder, and he spread scrawled books and careful diagrams out for her to see. “Here,” he said. “My family. As far as I can tell we go back to one of the travelling Singers. I think his name may have been Clennen, but Singers wandered about so and were so little documented that it’s a fiendish job to find out for sure. Compared with that period, the last hundred years were a doddle, and I thought those were bad enough. And when we get to your mother’s family, things get even worse. Here.” Dad pushed sheets of paper in front of Maewen, hectically scrawled all over in pale pencil. “See? There’s some connection with Amil II’s brother Edril, but that’s as far as—”

“You mean Mum descends from Amil the Great!” Maewen exclaimed.

“So do a lot of people. If you mean that accounts for your mother’s standoffish vagueness,” Dad said drily, “I hardly think so. If you remember that everyone has four grandparents and eight great-grandparents, you can see that almost everyone has to be related if you go back far enough. We’re talking here about doubling the number of ancestors each person has every generation, and halving – or even quartering – the number of people those ancestors could have come from. The population of Dalemark was quite small until a hundred years ago.”

He was lecturing again. Maewen tried to listen. She was quite interested in the difficulties Dad had had sorting out the two generations around the time of Amil the Great. School history didn’t tell you half the confusions and revolutions there had been then. But there was so much of it. It had been dark for hours and she was yawning before Dad said, “Well, that will have to do for now. I’ve another long day tomorrow.”

Once she was in bed, Maewen tried to sort out how she felt about Dad and the divorce. She was very fond of Dad – achingly, fiercely fond – but not so much when he lectured. And try as she might, she could not be upset that he was quite happy to be divorced from Mum. She had expected to feel sad – she felt she ought to feel sad – but whenever she passed the big busy office on the floor below and saw Dad conferring with secretaries, snapping instructions at Wend, or consulting with Major Alksen – and sometimes all three at once – she was glad she did not have to live with him and Mum at once. These were two strong-minded people who were both utterly buried in their work. And one of those, Maewen felt, was enough at one time.

Next morning, as she chucked pieces of bread on to the leads for the fat waddling pigeons, Maewen discovered that sorting that out about Dad had somehow let her off having to remember everything about the palace. As it was another baking hot day, Maewen decided to go for a swim. Major Alksen had said she could use the staff bathing pool. But he had not said where it was. She set out to find him and ask him.

Downstairs she went to the office. It was so busy that though she could hear Dad’s voice, she could not see him among all the other hurrying people. And the secretary nearest the door said that Major Alksen had already gone down to his security post. Maewen went down again to the great upper galleries of the palace, which were cool and quiet and empty yet, until the palace opened to the public. These long rooms were a sort of museum, where curios and clothes belonging to past kings and queens sat in cases among statues and pieces of carving that had once been on the outside of the palace. As a lot of the things were very valuable, Major Alksen was often there, patrolling with a radio phone, checking security. As she came into the first room, Maewen could hear his footsteps ringing in the distance somewhere and his voice talking into his radio. “Coming through Gallery Two now. All secure. Over.” She made towards the sound.

The person she saw when she went round the corner was Wend. Maewen stopped. How had he sounded so exactly like Major Alksen? Luckily Wend’s handsome face was set intently on distance as he listened to the voice on his radio. He had not seen her. Full of embarrassment again, Maewen started to tiptoe softly round the corner.

“Don’t go, Maewen,” said Wend. “I’ll be with you in a moment. Right. Everything in place here. Over and out.”

What excuse could she possibly give for rushing away? Maewen wondered. So sorry, I need to swim this second. Forgive me, but I have to go and depress myself at once by seeing Amil’s tomb. Excuse me, I must go and look at the Duke of Kernsburgh – urgently. Or she could just run away. But Wend was already turning towards her, and the only thing she could think of was to let him explain why he had been sent to meet her as if she were ten years old and get it over with.

“You must have wondered,” Wend said to her.

“No, no!” Maewen said. It seemed as if she did not want to get it over after all. “No, no, I never wonder—”

“Who that old man on the train was,” said Wend. “The one I sent away.”

This was so entirely unexpected that Maewen said, “Oh!” Then because she could feel her face was as red as it could be, she said, “He wasn’t there. I dreamt him.”

“No,” said Wend. “He was – well – there, even if he wasn’t what you’d call quite real. I’m afraid he’s about to become a very big threat to you unless you let me help you. Will you let me help – or at least let me explain?”

“I – er—” Maewen was even more flustered. She was suddenly sure that Wend was mad. This was the only explanation for his grave, polite, sane look and the way it made her squirm every time she was near him. “Who was the old man?”

“A piece of Kankredin,” said Wend. “A pocket of evil. And –” he smiled – “I promise you I am not mad.”

This was worse than ever. “Yes, you are! You must be!” Maewen cried out, and she knew she would squirm even harder about this when she had time to think about it. “Kankredin’s just a legend from the days of King Hern – and Hern killed him, anyway, when he conquered the Heathens.”

Wend looked his most serious, and there was a sympathy about him as if he understood precisely how she was feeling – which, if possible, made Maewen feel worse. “Yes, I know how the story goes,” he said. “People tell it like that because it’s more comforting, but it wasn’t the way of it, I assure you. Hern helped defeat Kankredin, that is true, but Kankredin couldn’t die because he was dead already. The only way he could be conquered was for someone to unbind the One himself. You’ve heard of the witch Cennoreth. She unbound the One, and Kankredin was broken and scattered into a million pieces. But he wasn’t dead. He came together over the centuries – concentrated, if you like, into larger and larger pockets – and eventually he was strong enough to take over the South and divide it from the North. Amil the Great found a way to destroy quite a bit of Kankredin, but even that didn’t really defeat him. He was just scattered, and some parts of him came forwards in time to these days. Other parts simply stayed around and arrived here and now by keeping secret and outlasting anyone who believed he was there. I’m not sure which kind of pocket you met, but I think from the way it behaved, it was one of the parts sent forwards in time.”

“I don’t believe you,” Maewen said. “How do you know?”

Wend shrugged. “I was there for nearly all of it. Hern was my brother.”

Maewen stared at him. “But that’s –” She was going to say “nonsense!” but she stopped herself, because you had to be careful with mad people – “not possible, Mr Orilson. You see, that would make you so old you’d almost be one of the Undying.” And no one believes in the Undying any more, anyway, she thought, but I’d better not tell him that.

Wend nodded. There was a sad, priggish sort of sanity to him that Maewen found deeply suspect. “I found it hard to believe too, when two of my brothers died and I didn’t even age. It is hard to admit that you are anything but mortal. But the Undying exist whether people believe in them or not. I am one. You have probably heard of me. I was known as Tanamoril for a while. Then I was called Osfameron.”

Osfameron! The Adon’s friend who raised the Adon from the dead! He’s further round the twist than I thought a person could be! Maewen stared at Wend, all alone in the long empty museum room. Do all lunatics look this sane? I wish I knew. He’d look quite normal if he wasn’t so good-looking. Keep humouring him until he gets called away to his duties. “What do you think this piece of Kankredin wanted with me?” Maewen asked gently.

“I think,” said Wend, “that he was trying to get control of you.”

Maewen’s spine felt as if cold fingers were being trailed down it. She backed into the nearest glass case in order to feel safer. “Why – why would he want to do that?”

“Because you are the image of a young woman who lived just over two hundred years ago,” Wend told her.

“That makes no sense!” said Maewen.

But Wend continued talking as if he had not heard her. “A very important young lady,” he said. Looking at his constrained and serious face, Maewen thought that this was the heart of his mental disorder, whatever it was. She leant on the glass cupboard and let him go on talking. “Noreth,” Wend said. “Born to rule all Dalemark. My grandfather the One was her father, and she knew from her childhood up that she was to take the crown and rule both North and South. When she had it, people would have risen to her all over the country, whatever the earls had to say.”

“What happened? Wouldn’t she do it?” Maewen asked.

“I don’t know what happened. She was willing enough.” Just for an instant Wend seemed to feel wretched about this. Then his face smoothed over. “I was guarding Noreth on the royal road,” he said. “The Midsummer after her eighteenth birthday, as was right, she set off from Adenmouth to ride to Kernsburgh for the crown. Nothing should have gone wrong. I was as watchful as I could be. But somewhere along the way Kankredin got to her as he was trying to get to you, and she … simply disappeared.” Wend swallowed a little. Then, with his face all cold and smooth, he said, “That was how Amil, so-called the Great, was able to claim the crown.”

Maewen stayed pressed against the glass. “And,” she said, gently and humouringly, “you’re telling me this because I look like this lady.”

“No,” said Wend. “I’m telling you because I’m fated to send you back in time to take Noreth’s place.”

“Fated?” said Maewen. “That’s a strong word. You need me to agree first, and I haven’t.”

Wend came nearer to laughing than she had ever seen him. “You forget,” he said. “I was there. So were you. So I know I did send you.” He had a funny light-hearted air to him, now that he had arrived at this point. “As I see it now,” he said, “I must have asked the One to send you to the moment on the royal road when Noreth disappeared, so that you could find out what happened and tell me when you came back here.”

“Oh.” Maewen looked down at her two somewhat scruffy sandals planted on the glossy floor. Then I must have been – I will be – as mad as he is! Though of course, if he really was there, he is over two hundred years old, and that means he can’t be mad. It all hung together. And she knew mad people’s fantasies did often hang together. That was why they found it so difficult to get out of them. Perhaps the best way to deal with Wend was to show him it was nonsense by daring him to send her into the past. No. He could turn violent then. Best just to go. She slid carefully away along the glass cupboard and braced her sandals to run.

Wend smiled his polite smile. “Thanks. I was needing to get at this showcase. Your father wants some of the things moved.”

He fetched up his bunch of keys and advanced on the lock of the sliding door. He was far too near. Maewen could feel her stomach squirming and those queer pins and needles in her back that she always got when she was about to do something wrong. Strange the way Wend always made her feel like this. She slid further away, warily watching him as he undid the electronic lock and then the ordinary one. Any second now she would be far enough away to risk running for help.

Wend reached inside the glass cupboard and gently, almost reverently, picked up a small gold statue that was standing there among vases, salt cellars, rings and other golden objects. While Wend turned to her holding the statue in both hands – she could see it was heavy – Maewen craned to see the label it had been standing on.

FIGURE OF KING OR NOBLE (GOLD).

PREHISTORIC. ORIGIN UNKNOWN.

“This is the image of the One that my family once guarded,” Wend said. The radio on his belt beeped as he spoke. He frowned. “Would you take this to your father for me? Someone wants me.”

He held the small golden image out. It was the ideal excuse for going away. Maewen reached out gladly and took hold of the image in both hands. The thing was so worn and old that all you could say of it was that it had once had a face and wore a long sort of poncho robe, but the instant she touched it she had the queer doing-wrong feeling worse than before. Her teeth ached with it, and her hair tried to lift. She snatched her hands away. But by then the pins and needles were worse down her hands and legs and through her face. It seemed to affect her eyes, so that the long empty room grew foggy, and her ears, so that she could only dimly hear Wend’s beeping radio.

THE FOGGINESS WAS cold as well as thick. Maewen lost all sense of direction. She staggered and found her sandals were getting wet in short grass beaded with fog drops. It felt icy. “Oh – ouch!” she cried out.

Her voice had the unechoing clarity of somewhere outside – and high up too, she thought, having been brought up among mountains. Anyway it was nothing like the woody, stony echoes inside the museum gallery. She looked up and around in a panic. Everything was mist, thick white mist, except for – thank goodness! – one pink streak of dawn over to the right. And there was something dark ahead through the mist. Maewen took a couple of excruciating cold, wet strides towards the dark thing, enough to numb her feet, and found the thing was a round stone a little higher than her waist with a hole in the middle. A waystone? It was only about a tenth the size of the one outside the station in Kernsburgh, but she supposed that was what it might be.

She stood shivering in her scanty summer shorts and shirt, staring at the stone resentfully. It’s real! she thought. Wend tricked me! I’m in shock! I’m going to die of exposure, and I haven’t the faintest idea where I am! Or when!

Here she noticed that the pins and needles feeling was no longer with her. It had been replaced – some seconds ago, now she thought about it – by a much better feeling, a feeling that everything was going to be all right. Well, I hope so! she thought. I could scream, only there doesn’t seem to be anyone around to hear.

She began to feel definitely warmer.

She looked down in time to see her sandals closing over and growing up her legs into stout-looking boots. Her shorts were growing downwards into felty, rather baggy trousers that tucked into the boots. A faint jingling alerted her to the fact that her shirt was also growing, and multiplying, into linked mail with one thinnish shirt under it and another, thicker one on top. A heaviness on her head caused her hand to leap up there. She touched metal. She now had a light domed helmet on.

She felt a mad, hilarious pleasure. I’m a warrior maid! I’m changing into a fighting girl under my own eyes – what I can see of myself! Her feet were still frozen inside the boots, and her hands were no warmer, but she nevertheless had a warm, cared-for feeling. Something – the golden statue? – was looking after her.

There was another jingling over to the right. Maewen whirled like a wild animal. The jingling mixed with a pruff of breath, a sound that she knew very well. She moved warily over that way, jingling herself. Sure enough, looming out of the mist, dark against the pink stripe of dawn, was a horse, standing patiently waiting for someone. Not a bad horse, though rather shaggy, as far as she could see, and it was saddled and bridled, with a roll of baggage behind the saddle. It turned and blew steamy breath at Maewen as if it knew her.

Maewen had not realised how much she had been missing horses. Almost by reflex, she gathered in the reins, put her foot in the stirrup, and swung up into the saddle. Ouch! Effort! The mail and the boots were heavy. It was only when she was up that it occurred to her that the horse almost certainly belonged to someone else. What did they do to you for horse stealing? Oh well. Say I’m awfully sorry, there was this thick fog and I thought it was mine. Would that work? It felt so much better to be mounted that she hardly cared. Deal with the owner when we meet her. She reined around towards the little waystone and tried to make out where she was.

The mist was clearing gradually, downwards, dropping into a valley below the stone, but that was still all she could see. “Hello?” she said uncertainly.

“Oh – your pardon, lady. I never heard you come.”

Maewen bunched herself, again with wild-animal wariness, as a tall man unfolded himself from where he had been sitting against the other side of the waystone and bowed to her, hastily and politely. When he straightened up, she saw he was Wend. She went warier than ever. His hair was a good deal longer, grown into wavy whitish ringlets that were not very well combed, which altered the shape of his face somewhat, and instead of the neat uniform she had seen him in a few minutes ago, he was wearing patched and baggy woollens with an old sheepskin jacket on top. The sort of clothes, Maewen thought, that a poor shepherd might have worn two hundred years ago. She stared at Wend, wondering if she really was in the past. And does he know me? Does he think I’m Whatshername?

Wend stared back with the usual grave politeness. “I am Wend, lady,” he said. “If you remember, we met before.” So he does know me, Maewen thought. “And I am here to follow you from waystone to waystone along the royal road, until you come to Hern’s city of gold and claim your rightful crown.”

He’s briefing me, Maewen thought, and so he should – tricking me into pretending to be this Northeen, or whatever she’s called! The trouble was Wend still made her fizz with embarrassment. He spoke in a very strong Northern accent, of the kind that Mum and Aunt Liss always objected to when Maewen spoke that way. It seemed quite natural to Wend, but she had heard him speak quite normally only a minute ago, and she could not get over the feeling he was putting on an act. It irritated her. “I think I need to know a bit more than that,” she said angrily.

Wend bowed humbly, which irritated Maewen even more. “True, lady. Then I will tell you what no one else knows. I am the one they call the Wanderer, and I keep the green roads—”

He stopped talking and looked over his shoulder. There was a brisk jingling of tack below and nearby. Maewen once more bunched up like a wary wild animal and watched two more riders scramble uphill out of the fog. They seemed to bring the fog with them, fog of their own breath, fog of their horses’ breath, and fill the air with their presence.

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