“Is it indeed?” said Maewen. “Welcome back. Where were you when I needed you to warn me about the other man with a knife?”
At the stream Mitt discovered that it was possible to be colder. The water was icy. It must have been snowmelt from some high mountain out of sight from here. The bits of him he could bear to dip in turned blue. He washed in a hurry, with great splashings and snortings, and put his clothes back on quickly. The sun was up by then. It was no wonder he was cold, Mitt saw. The stream was in deep blue shadow. But there was misty yellow sunlight on the boulders. Shivering all over, Mitt went over there to get warm.
He could hear Noreth talking on the other side of the rocks, and a deep voice answering her. So Hestefan or Wend was up. Mitt went cheerfully round the boulders.
“You were in no danger. Help was at hand whether I warned you or not,” the deep voice said.
Mitt stood, confounded. Noreth was brushing Navis’s mare and entirely on her own. He could see Wend, still asleep by the dead fire in the distance. Navis was the other hump. And Hestefan was just crawling out of the cart.
She said the One spoke to her, Mitt thought. But I never really believed it till now. He backed quietly away behind the boulders so that Noreth would not think he was prying and stood in the sun there. But he could still hear both voices.
Maewen said, “I’m not going down into the dales anymore. I’m staying up on the green roads. Wend says I’m safe here.”
“You are not safe here,” said the deep voice.
There was a pause. “Why not?” came Noreth’s voice. She sounded quite calm. Mitt was not to know Maewen was shaking all over. He was thinking he had better back away some more, out of hearing, when the deep voice answered.
“The Southern youth you call Mitt,” it said, “is the worst danger you have encountered yet. You must kill him before he destroys you.”
After this Mitt could no more have moved than he could have flown.
“But Mitt rescued me from the second murderer,” Maewen protested.
“For his own ends,” said the voice. “And this Mitt will not be easy to kill while the man Navis is alive. Navis will defend Mitt for his own ends. For this reason I advise you to kill them both at the same time.”
“You can’t mean this!” Maewen said.
“After you have found the Adon’s sword, both of them are expendable,” said the voice. “Stab them as they sleep, the night before you reach Kernsburgh.”
“Really?” said Maewen. “And what about Wend and Moril and Hestefan? Are they expendable, too?”
“I told you,” the voice replied imperturbably, “you will need the Singer-boy to find you the crown. After that, he will be as much of a liability as the Southerners, and you may stab him as soon as you have an opportunity.”
“You’re asking me”—said Maewen; she was trying not to giggle, even though it was not funny at all—“you’re asking me to arrive at Kernsburgh with nothing but a pile of corpses.”
“You will be joined there by a sizable army. Display the bodies as the bodies of traitors and explain that all traitors to the crown must suffer the same fate.”
“Thanks a bunch!” said Maewen. “That’s quite a program!”
“Do as I say,” said the voice, and the deep notes of it made both Mitt and Maewen shudder, “or fail, and die yourself.”
There was silence then. Mitt stood where he was until he heard vigorous horse-grooming noises from the other side of the boulders. Then he did his best to walk casually over to the camp. Nobody there seemed to notice that he was shaking all over. But they were all cold and all shivering.
Breakfast was nasty. There was no decent bread. The outsides of all the cheeses had gone moldy. Almost the only thing eatable was the pickled cherries, and Mitt discovered that he hated them by now.
They moved on up the stretched and windy valley, and neither Mitt nor Maewen spoke to anyone much that morning.
Maewen’s thoughts were chaos. Was it the One who spoke to her? Or was it just a time-confused part of her own mind, reacting with violence to the violence she had met in Gardale? There was no doubt she had been in danger from someone. Or if it was the One, he was angry. Those he had singled out—Mitt and Moril had tried to steal the cup, and Navis had taken it. She had known during the song that Navis had done something awful. It might be because of the cup. But it did not really matter what spoke or why. It hurt. Maewen’s head was now full of nasty sus
picions of Navis, Mitt, and Moril. Right back at the beginning of this ride, she had seen that each of them had come to follow her for their own secret reasons, and Mitt and Navis had shown her some of those reasons in Gardale. It was Hildy who was important to them. That hurt.
Oh, I want to go home! Maewen thought this so strongly that she almost said it aloud. In fact, she did utter a sort of noise, which caused Hestefan and his mule, who happened to be alongside her just then, both to turn and look at her. But no sooner had she almost said it than she saw she did not quite mean it. She wanted to find out what had happened to Noreth and to try to change history, even though she knew now that one of those three was going to do her some terrible harm. Correction. Mitt was going to do her some terrible harm. Navis was a cool customer, Moril was a deep one, and he had that cwidder, but Mitt was the one who did things. The knowledge made her throat ache, as if Mitt had tried to strangle her—and maybe he had, at the inn in Gardale.
Mitt kept thinking, This is a laugh! The One was playing games with him. Or he had it in for Mitt, which was much more likely. Mitt wanted to ride away from the whole mess. It would be lovely to settle down on a farm, somewhere near enough the South to be like what he was used to, and leave the One to stew. But he needed his half of the golden statue for that, and Noreth was not likely to part with it now. Not now she knew Mitt had been told to kill her. Anyway, he had to stay with her until Kernsburgh. If Hildy was safe, Ynen was not, and Kialan might not manage to bring Ynen there after all. He would have laughed at the mess if he’d felt like laughing. Meanwhile, he had to warn Navis and Moril somehow. And talking of warnings, that dream had been a warning, hadn’t it just!
Mitt came out of his thoughts to find he was warm—more than warm, almost too hot, for a wonder. He undid his jacket. There was light, white rain steaming over them, but he was too warm to care. This makes a change! he thought. It must be almost record heat for the North.
They had come out of the stretched valley and were now following the green path across a high gorse-grown heath. The mountains had melted to white-purple distance, and the one behind, Mitt saw, peering through the misty bands of rain, did indeed have snow on the top of it.