The Crown of Dalemark (The Dalemark Quartet 4)

Moril ducked his wet head uncomfortably. “Not quite. At least, I was probably meaning the sea. I was thinking, Let this Southerner go back where he came from, and I knew you came by sea—”

“How?” Mitt demanded.

“I heard about you in Lavreth last spring,” said Moril. “It’s all round the North that a Southerner came north by the wind’s road with the Undying before and behind to guard him. Singers call the sea the wind’s road in a lot of the old songs.”

“I never knew that!” Mitt said. “And it’s true, too, in a way!”

“They told me in Adenmouth that you were the one,” Moril told him, “and I didn’t like you because I could see you had something bad on your mind.”

Mitt shivered. He was beginning to feel awed by Moril’s perceptiveness, not to speak of that cwidder of his. A dangerous enemy, Moril, if they hadn’t both chanced to get themselves into this mess together. “Stuck out like a sore thumb, did it?” he said ruefully. “You’d think I’d do better than that after a lifetime of guilty secrets. All right. So you wanted me back at sea.”

“And you hit the strings, too, and we were both in this river. What were you thinking?” Moril asked.

Mitt stood up and scowled at ribbons of foam tearing backward from the nearest jagged rock. He was fairly sure that he would not have been so blindly furious with Moril if he had not been feeling so trapped himself. Then Moril had brought it all to a head by asking, “Didn’t someone order you to suck up to her?” That had brought two pictures into Mitt’s mind. One was of the Countess, sitting upright in her chair, making it clear that Mitt had to do what Keril wanted. The other was of Alk, bulging out of that selfsame chair, turning the whole thing round with that promise, making Mitt feel just as trapped, because the One was supposed to have an interest.

“In a funny way,” he said, “I may have been thinking about the One. That’s where I was at when my hand hit, anyway.”

Moril tipped his face up. His eyes were squinted with dismay. “You were? Then we’ve gone back into the One’s river, before he destroyed Kankredin. I hope he’s not too angry.”

“You mean we’re back in history?” Mitt demanded. “Or dead, really?”

“More like … the place in the stories where the One really is, I think,” Moril said doubtfully. “It’s hard to explain, but the other world the cwidder moves in is the place where the stories are.”

Mitt looked again at the torrent tearing past their boulder and thought that he had seldom seen anything more real. Equally real were his steaming, clammy clothes. He had a notion that the One was taking the opportunity to point out that he was real, too. No wonder Alk had been so cautious. “Then we get back by apologizing and asking the One to let us go?” he said.

Moril nodded, looking as sober as Mitt felt. “I’ll ask, if you like, because I know the way. You get ready to hit the strings in the same place as you did when I nod.”

“I don’t know where I did hit!” said Mitt. “And it won’t do to get it wrong, will it?”

“You hit the lowest string,” said Moril. “This one—it’s always the dangerous one—and I wasn’t touching it, because I didn’t want to kill you or anything, but I heard it sound. Just pluck it, with one finger when I say.”

Mitt put forth one doubtful finger and knelt ready. Moril seemed to settle himself—no, it was not simply that. Mitt could feel the power building in the cwidder. It hummed along his shaking finger. He felt even more awed by the thing.

Moril drew a big breath and spoke in the strange formal way that Hestefan had used to invoke the Undying at Midsummer. “Great Grand Father of the golden bonds, Unbound and Undying, understand my asking. Hear and help. History’s flood took us and tore us from our traveling. Restore us to our own realm out of the river you made. Mitt and Moril ask this by Manaliabrid most humbly, and by Cennoreth, Clennen’s son begs you cast aside your anger.” He nodded at Mitt: now.

Mitt’s finger twanged the thickest string heartily. He thought he saw the way of this speech, and he could not resist doing it, too. “By the Adon and Alhammitt and his all-fruitful lady,” he said as he twanged.

Moril’s fingers made the rest of the sound. It was a many-toned roaring.

It seemed as if the sound of the river had increased, almost unbearably, to a sound that fogged their eyes as well as their ears. They felt the river was now thundering over a cliff in a waterfall, whose thunder gradually faded to a long, deep chord, and then a growling vibration. As the sound faded, it seemed to carry the river away with it. The water became foggy and quiet.

The golden whiteness of the fog spread to the very riverbed, and for a second or so it was the great transparent ghost of a river, silently rushing over green ground. At the instant that Mitt realized that the green was really grass, the river was gone, except for the faintest vestige of that chord, still sounding and dragging on him like a current. During the next instant it took him to realize that the dragging was taking all the river with it, including the water that filled his boots and soaked his clothing. He was dry. So was Moril. Moril’s hair went from draggled brown to true red again. And though they were dry, though there was a little feeble sunlight on them, the air was so much colder that they were both still shivering.

From Maewen’s point of view, the river vanished as suddenly as it had come, leaving Mitt and Moril crouched on an outcrop of rock just across the green road. She was not sure whether to cheer or to run and shake them. It had been maddening watching them. All they seemed to do was sit on that rock in the river and talk for an hour. Maewen kept shouting to them. Navis had shouted, too, after he had rounded up Mitt’s horse, but the boys had taken no notice. Hestefan and Wend maddened her almost as much. Both shook their heads and said, “They’ll not hear from where they are.”

Moril and Mitt climbed off the rock and crossed the road, both looking self-conscious.

“So soon?” said Navis. “We were expecting to wait all night.”

Mitt tried to give him an explanation. It sounded lame and stupid to him, and he was glad when everyone was distracted from it by Hestefan. Hestefan seized Moril by one shoulder and ranted at him. He began in a low, penetrating voice. “This is neither the time nor the place for such tricks. We have a journey to go on, fellow travelers to consider, and a performance to give in Gardale.” His voice gradually increased as he went on to, “You could have spoiled your cwidder, or—worse!—lost it. You nearly stampeded the horses. You could have drowned us all!”

Everyone listened uncomfortably. Moril was staring at Hestefan as if he had never heard anything like this in his life, and that made it clear that this was not just a master giving his apprentice a dressing-down, but something more. Maewen could see that Hestefan had been terrified by the sudden river, and she supposed he was working it off on Moril. Then Hestefan’s voice increased again.

“Now give me your cwidder at once, and I shall lock it in the chest until you are old enough to be trusted with it.”

Moril clutched the cwidder and stepped backward. “No. You’ve no right—”

“I have every right!” Hestefan enlarged his voice as only a Singer could. It rang in the rocks. “My apprentice has been fooling with something too powerful for his years. You have no notion what that cwidder is!”