“We have to sing in the market square,” Hestefan interrupted. He was back to his schoolmaster manner.
“Well, well,” Navis said again as they followed the green cart back into the town. “Tholian dead! If I had to choose between Tholian and Keril, I might, even at this moment, choose Tholian.”
“Never met him,” said Mitt.
“You have no idea how lucky you are,” said Navis. He did not say anything else until they were in the confusion of the market again. Then he said, “Mitt, how about a decent breakfast at the inn?”
“That,” said Mitt, “is the best thing I heard today.”
The two of them threaded their horses between the stalls toward the large inn at one side of the square. Maewen had no money. She was watching them rather wistfully when Navis turned round and called, “You, too, lady. This is my treat.”
Maewen followed gratefully. They clopped under a huge archway into a stable yard, where a boy with a raw face and yellow hair spit out the straw he was chewing and came to listen to Navis’s instructions. He wanted the horses to have a good breakfast, too. Maewen patted her horse and let the boy take it away with the other two. A nice horse, she thought, as she followed Navis into the inn, but one without any character at all. If it was Noreth’s horse, the girl must have used it like a bicycle. What had become of her?
The front rooms of the inn were wide open to the square, where tables were set out under a sort of covered way supported by old gnarled pillars with creepers trained up them. A nice arrangement in summer, Maewen thought. It reminded her of the pillared balconies at the front of the Tannoreth Palace. But what did they do in winter? Kernsburgh was many degrees warmer than Gardale even now. People in these times seemed to be so hardy. They lived out of doors much more than Maewen was used to.
The only free table they could find was a long way from the end of the square where Hestefan had stopped his cart. Maewen could hear his voice faintly, behind all the rest of the din, calling to people to come and listen, but any view was blocked off by a gnarled pillar and a big stall selling iron pans. It was a slight disappointment. Maewen had never yet heard the Singers perform. Still, as she agreed with Mitt, it was good to be sitting in a proper chair listening to Navis ordering food from a cheerful, hurried man in a dirty apron.
“And beer for three,” Navis finished.
Help! thought Maewen. Coffee came from abroad, of course, and it was not much drunk until a hundred years later than this. She would have preferred water—except from the way this town smelled she was sure the water was not fit to drink. Oh well. Beer couldn’t be that bad, or people wouldn’t drink it. Hestefan and Moril were singing now. Maewen leaned back, trying to pick out the sound from behind the shouts, the talk, the yelling of animals, and the bonging of the pans in the ironware stall. It was not a tune she knew.
The food came promptly on enormous wooden platters, sizzling hot: bacon, kidneys, eggs, mushrooms, and ho
t bread to go with it, with butter and honey for the bread. With this arrived three pewter tankards of sour-smelling yellow stuff. Maewen tried it. Yuk. But she was very hungry, and all that food needed something to wash it down. She kept drinking, in valiant sips.
Mitt could no longer contain his anxiety. “They let Hannart in early,” he said to Navis. “I don’t like that. What do we do?”
“Play it as we see it,” Navis answered. “At least we’re here.”
“And what’s this Sending Day?” Mitt asked, wolfing down food he hardly noticed.
“As I gather, it’s the day most pupils go home for the summer,” Navis said. “Not that anyone thought to inform me. I asked Noreth’s aunt.”
“Then you can take her away,” Mitt said.
“So can Hannart,” Navis pointed out. He was, as usual, trying not to show his feelings, but Mitt could tell Navis was as strained and gloomy as he was himself.
There was applause from the distance. Hestefan began a new song. Maewen thought it was perfectly lovely, but it was low and sweet, and she kept losing it in the noise.
“Suppose,” said Mitt, “that Hannart has been and gone by the time they let us in?”
“There’s a closing ceremony,” Navis replied. “Surely even Hannart can’t remove a pupil before that. And of course neither can we.”
“First moment we can then,” Mitt said urgently.
“Whatever’s possible,” Navis agreed.
They ate in worried silence after that. Hestefan seemed to be telling a story. There were bursts of laughter and clapping, but Hestefan’s voice was almost inaudible. Maewen was straining to hear when Navis pulled himself together and turned to her politely.
“I fear we have been leaving you out of our private concerns, lady,” he said. “As you may have gathered, we became your followers not entirely out of personal conviction.”
“Speak for yourself,” said Mitt. “I’m convinced.” He turned to Maewen, waving a hunk of bread and honey in one bony hand. Here was something to take his mind off Hildy. “Tell us your beliefs, Noreth. Convince him.”
Help! thought Maewen. She stared at the pots and pans swinging on the stall, hoping for inspiration. Mitt was leaning toward her eagerly as if he thought she really did have beliefs. Probably Noreth did have beliefs, but Maewen had no way of knowing what those were. She had simply been getting by on a messy muddle of beliefs from her own day, mixed up with what she knew had happened in the last two hundred years. Dalemark had changed, almost out of recognition, in that time, and not wholly for the better at that.
“It is possible she just follows the will of the One,” Navis remarked in his usual sarcastic way.
This bounced Maewen into speaking. She did not want to let Mitt down. “I believe there has to be change,” she said. A disgustingly safe thing to say. Something seemed to be wrong with her, adding to her difficulty. Her face buzzed, and the sounds from the market had gone quiet and distant. Moril was singing. She could just pick out his voice among the deep belling chords of his cwidder. She would have liked to think it was the cwidder doing this to her, but she was fairly sure it was the beer. And the way Gardale smelled like a filthy farmyard. Maewen swallowed. “There’s a lot in Dalemark that hasn’t come out yet,” she said. “Wonderful people, and talents and richness. Some of the reason it hasn’t come out is that all the ordinary people are too poor for different reasons”—am I going to be sick?—“but the main reason is that everybody is too busy thinking of themselves as North and South. They need to be one country and—and be proud of it before—before they can show what’s … really in them.” There. I believe that. Maewen pushed back her chair. She knew what was wrong with her now. A truly vicious stomachache. Nerves? Those mushrooms? She could not help it that Mitt’s eager face was going puzzled and disappointed. “I’m sorry… I have to—Do you know where is the—”