The Spellcoats (The Dalemark Quartet 3)

“If your mother knew what I was asking,” Tanamil said quickly, “she would tell you to do as I say.” That struck me as unfair. Tanamil did not know what my mother would say. But Robin is always saying and thinking that our mother would want this and not like that, and I am sure Tanamil knew it. Robin began to cry. “All I’m asking is that you stay here with me,” he said.

All he was asking! I did not care to have Robin bullied like this. I meant to sit up and tell Tanamil a thing or two, but I went to sleep instead.

I woke up to hear Robin shouting, “I tell you no!”

And Tanamil shouted back, “Why? Why, why, why?”

“Because of what you are,” Robin said. She was crying again—or still. “It wouldn’t be right.” I could have shaken her. She had as good as told him we were not Heathens.

“How do you mean, not right?” Tanamil demanded. “Where’s the difference between us?”

“Age, for a start,” said Robin.

“What a feeble thing to say!” said Tanamil. He sounded as disgusted as Hern would have been. But I was glad because I could see Robin was trying to cover up her mistake. “Have you any other silly excuses?” he said.

“They’re not excuses; they’re reasons,” Robin said coldly.

“That was unfair. I apologize,” said Tanamil.

I thought that in spite of her mistakes, Robin was dealing with him better than I could have done. I must have gone to sleep thinking it. When I woke up next, Robin was getting the worst of it.

“I can’t see how you can know that!” she was bleating, in her feeblest way.

“I do,” said Tanamil. “Next to Gull, you’re the one most at risk. I’m not just saying it to persuade you—”

“Then why are you saying it?” said Robin.

“A hit,” Tanamil said. “Robin, I can’t see much of the future, but I don’t like what I see. Stay here and let the others go. They’ve inherited his toughness. You haven’t.”

This gave Robin the moral advantage. She is good at taking that. “And what would you think of me if I drew back just because I was born feeble?” she asked.

That must have been the winning answer. When I woke up again, Tanamil was not in the room and Robin was asleep just beside me. This time it was Duck who had woken me. He was crouched beside me, half rosy in the fire, and the other half of him caught in whorls and ripples of moonlight from the River beyond the door.

“Tanaqui,” he whispered, “I’ve just remembered something. You know that boatload of people Tanamil said were Heathens?”

“Yes,” I said. I was suddenly full of distrust for Tanamil. He had taken Gull, and now he was trying to take Robin. I wondered how we had been mad enough to stay with him. I knew he must have cast a spell to make us, and I was scared silly. “What about them?” I said. “They weren’t Heathens, they were our people, weren’t they?”

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“No,” whispered Duck. “That was the funny thing. They were real Heathens. They had hair a bit like ours and brown faces—like his—and peculiar clothes with iron hats. Why did he call them Heathens?”

Hern was sitting up on the other side of the fire. “Are you sure?” he whispered.

“Positive. I saw them,” said Duck.

We all looked at the small pale figure of Gull sitting on the hearth. I felt sick. Hern said, “Then he knew who we were from the start. We—”

There was a rilling, splashing noise outside. The rushes at the entrance bobbed, and the moonlight was drowned in the shadow of Tanamil, wading in the water. We dived into our rugs and lay there, so that he would not know we were awake. And we all went to sleep. Duck and Hern remember nothing beyond diving into the blankets either.

Next morning Tanamil was gone. The shelter was as I remembered it when I first started to think about it, built of old wood and red earth, leaning against the cliff. The one door was open to the sun on the grassy shoulder between the two rivers. It was cold. The fire was out, and I think there were no longer any blankets. There were certainly none when I looked back into the shelter before we left. We got up and hurried into the sun, shivering.

Robin was there first, holding the little figure of Gull. “I take it he means us to go,” she said dourly. “I think he might have said good-bye.”

“He might have given us breakfast,” said Duck.

“We’ve got food in the boat,” said Hern. “Come on.”

The boat was there, bobbing in a green cave among the reeds, with our food and the Undying still in her.