The Crown of Dalemark (The Dalemark Quartet 4)

“Where is this? Why is it so hot?” he said. It was the first thing he had said since breakfast.

Moril grinned at him. “Welcome back. It’s the Shield of Oreth.”

“It is a large upland that opens toward the South,” Hestefan explained from beside Moril on the driving seat. Schoolmaster again, Maewen thought. The warmth was making her feel better. “We’ll be having the warm air from now until Kernsburgh. This used to be fine land. Even in the Adon’s day it was full of people.”

Hang on! Maewen thought, coming properly out of her misery. If this was the Shield, she had looked out the train at it. There had been farmlands and factories, trees and towns. But Hestefan could be right. Up among the gorse and heather on either side there were piles of stone in faint, broken squares, which could have been ruined houses.

“Where did all the people go?” she asked.

“Fled in the wars after the Adon died,” said Moril.

“Who owns it now?” Navis asked, looking out over bracken and heather beyond the gorse bushes as if he would not mind owning some of it himself.

As Hestefan went into a complicated account that suggested that Hannart or Dropwater might have a claim, but nobody wanted this land, anyway, Maewen frowned. She rather thought Navis would be owning some of it before long. The Duke of Kernsburgh owned the big brewery here in her day. Would she dare change history to the extent of cutting Navis out of it? Could she? No, of course not. That was a relief. But that did not apply to Mitt or Moril, who were not really in history at all.

She looked sideways at Mitt. He was turning his head to watch a slightly bigger pile of stones with an old apple tree drooped over them. I could farm here, he thought. It would take a deal of hard work, but I reckon it would be peaceful.

The rain blew away into the mountains, leaving a tearful sort of blue sky overhead. Everyone steamed in the heat. And the cart went along in its own cloud made of wreathing spirals of steam. Flies came out of the heather and circled the horses. They made the Countess-horse restive, but Mitt rode along with his chin down, hardly noticing. That dream was nagging at him. Farming had not been in it anywhere. Something was wrong.

By this time they were seeing occasional small farms built of gray stone, with square fields around them scratched out of the heather. The Shield was not quite as derelict as Maewen had thought. The farms grew bigger and more frequent as they went on. By midday, when they stopped to eat, there was farmland all round, and walled lanes leading to distant farmhouses on both sides of the green road. There were even a few trees. They stopped to eat under a mighty old ash on a corner by a lane.

Navis reveled in the heat. While the horses crowded into the shade with Maewen and Hestefan, Navis sat against the drystone wall in the sun and stretched both arms out. “This is more like it!” he said to Mitt.

“It is and all,” Mitt agreed. “First time I’ve been warm since I came North. I’ll be back in a moment.” He picked up a couple of pickled onions—better than those cherries—and a handful of the manky cheese and set off up the lane. That dream was now mixing in his mind with what he had heard this morning, and he wanted to be alone to think. Something was badly wrong.

He almost wondered whether he might not simply walk away. He came to another lane and turned into it because it was narrow and had no walls and he felt freer there. He climbed higher with it, until he was walking in the warm wind between low hedges with a field of grain on either side. Gray-green both fields were, like the sea over sand in dangerous shallows. The barley on the right surged in the wind, in green waves over silky white, as if it were the sea indeed. The wheat on the other side stood stiffer, and the wind rasped in it like sea over shingle. But the land smell was wrong for the sea, dusty and juicy.

Great homesickness overtook Mitt. “Flaming Ammet!” he said. “Why did I ever leave the coast?”

“You know you had no choice,” someone told him.

16

Mitt’s head snapped up. A tall golden man came walking along the lane toward him and bent his head in a solemn nod of greeting as Mitt looked. At this season Old Ammet had a face that was neither young nor old. He could have been the same age as Navis, except that the long golden hair blowing about his head and shoulders made him seem young.

“Now it’s you,” Mitt said. “Why do you Undying keep pushing me about?”

“It’s not our fault, Alhammitt,” Old Ammet answered. “The times are pushing us. And I should remind you that when you chose the wind’s road, you chose the green road, too.”

“I know, I know,” Mitt said. “Once I got on, there’s never been a moment I could have got off. But I keep having to choose all the same! And every time I choose and try to get right, things turn round on me and try to make me go the other way. The One told Noreth to kill me this morning—and Navis and Moril. You tell me what I’m supposed to do about that!”

Old Ammet looked at him gravely, in a way that reminded Mitt of Wend all of a sudden, except that Old Ammet was blowing and rustling in the wind. “I am not here to tell you what to do.”

“No,” Mitt said bitterly. “You Undying never do give a straight answer. You just push.”

“It is not my place,” said Ammet, “to question our Grand Father, whom they call the One. His law is that we do not tell his mortal family what to do. That is to make people into puppets.”

“Then the One just broke his own law,” Mitt said.

“I am here to tell you to think about that,” said Ammet.

There was a silence full of the warm wind and the rustling and streaming of Ammet’s white-blond hair, while Mitt digested this. “I don’t get it,” he said at last. He found Old Ammet looking so kind that it made him feel terrible.

“I should remind you that we gave you our names to say at need,” Old Ammet

said.

Mitt nodded. He felt his face screw up. There were indeed four names, the greater and lesser names of Old Ammet and Libby Beer, tucked away in the corner of Mitt’s mind. That part of his head always felt like a sore tooth, where you kept putting your tongue even though you knew it would hurt. “You mean, I could say your biggest name at her?”