“Now don’t you think there’s some use to freedom fighting?” Mitt asked him.
“It only makes things worse,” said Hobin.
“No, see,” Mitt said persuasively, “you could set all the earls fighting one another, then have an uprising, and the North would come and help us. They’d have to!”
“If the North did any such thing,” said Hobin, “you’d find the earls would stop fighting one another and start on the North. And you’d find yourself on their side, Mitt. You couldn’t help yourself. You’re born a Southerner. The North knows that better than you do. It’s history. It’ll take more than an uprising to make things better in Holand.”
“The trouble with you is you’re so patient!” Mitt said.
In spite of his patience, Hobin began to look a little worn by springtime. There were the babies and Mitt to feed. And Milda was still rushing out and “just happening to see” expensive things, though these days it was mostly furniture. Hobin began to talk seriously of moving back to Waywold.
“We can’t do that!” Mitt told Milda in a panic.
“I know. Not after I’ve trained you all these years,” said Milda. “But he’d stay if only Hadd was gone. Run and catch Siriol.” And she broke a whole bowl of eggs to give Mitt an excuse to go out.
Mitt was lucky enough to catch Siriol just as he was boarding Flower of Holand. Siriol stood on the quayside and thought so long that Mitt wondered whether to suggest he would miss the tide. “Ah,” said Siriol. “Well. You better do it this autumn then.”
“This autumn it is!” Mitt agreed, and the muscles at the back of his legs jumped with excitement. “And thank goodness! After three flaming years, I can’t wait much longer!”
PART TWO
THE SEA FESTIVAL
6
There were great gales that spring. The sea broke the dikes in two places, and even in the harbor, boats blew this way and that and masts snapped. Siriol could not put to sea for a fortnight, and few people in Holand went out much because the wind in the street filled your face with sand and salt until you could barely see. Mitt was kept very busy. The old Earl of the South Dales died, and all the earls of the South began to gather in Holand to invest the new Earl, as the custom was. People asked one another whether Hadd would manage to quarrel with them all or only half of them. Mitt thought Hadd must be determined to. Hobin was busy making and mending guns day and night. The Palace must have bristled with them. Mitt got little chance to look at any earls. He saw one windswept fine person, who looked as if he would very much rather have been indoors, but no one could tell Mitt if he was an earl or not.
“Down with him, anyway!” Mitt muttered, and hurried back indoors.
Then a strange boat was sighted, beyond the shoals, beating her way to the harbor. There was intense excitement. The boat was said to be a Northerner. Mitt could think of nothing else.
“We’d best settle this for you before you ruin any more bullets,” Hobin said. He and Mitt put on pea jackets against the gale and went out to look, along with most of the rest of Holand.
The ship was wallowing in the great waves outside the harbor wall, black in the yellow stormy light. Though all her canvas was in and she was riding only on the rags of a storm sail, Mitt saw at once that she was indeed a Northerner. She had the square rigging which few ships in the South used these days. People round Mitt shook their heads and said it was daft to go out in this gale with a little square-rigger like that, but then Northmen were all daft. And it was clear the ship was in bad trouble. For some minutes Mitt doubted that she would make the harbor at all. Then she rounded the wall, and it was clear she would be safe.
The harbor was lined with soldiers to meet her. Behind them, a lot of ordinary people had come out with knives and stones. And Mitt watched with the most extraordinary mixed feelings. He was glad the ship was safe. But how dared they! How dared they put into Holand harbor like this! The ship wallowed her waterlogged way to the quayside. When some of the sailors on board saw the soldiers waiting, they dived into the harbor rather than be caught.
“What cowards!” he said to Hobin.
“They haven’t a chance, anyway,” said Hobin. “Poor devils.”
The Northmen who stayed on board were taken prisoner as soon as soldiers could jump onto the ship. The crowd hid most of it from Mitt. But he had a glimpse of them being taken uphill to the Palace, a bunch of soaking, draggled fellows with fair hair and brown faces, who all had a thicker, healthier look than anyone in Holand, even though they were plainly almost too exhausted to realize what had happened to them. Mitt’s shaken thought was that they looked like people. He had expected them to look mysteriously free. But they held their heads low and shuffled along, just like anyone else taken by Harchad’s men.
Their arrival caused quite as much excitement up at the Palace. Everyone had been in a ferment there, anyway, because of the investment of the new Earl. Feasts and fuss and arrangements had gone on for a week now. All the children were bundled out of the way and ordered to be seen and not heard—and not seen unless asked for. There was much excited peeping and giggling. To Hildy’s scorn, all the girl cousins decided that the new Earl of the South Dales was terribly handsome and spied on him whenever they could. They all wished they had been betrothed to him and not to whomever they were betrothed to. Hildy herself thought Tholian looked rather unkind. She made the mistake of telling Harilla so.
“All right, Lady Be Different!” said Harilla. “I’m not telling you my spyhole for that. Go and find your own.”
Hildy did not mind. Ynen and she were better than any of them at finding places where they could see what was going on. They watched a great deal of the feasting and music, until it was obvious that the Lord of the Holy Islands was not going to arrive.
“Why not?” Hildy wondered.
“I don’t think he’s anyone’s hearthman,” said Ynen. “His job is to keep the North’s fleet out.”
Then it was learned that one Northern ship at least had slipped through. Half the earls were convinced that it was the first of an invasion. The messages, the orders, and the bustling about made Hildy think of an ants’ nest stirred with a stick, and there were more still when the soaking prisoners were marched in. The prisoners were questioned. It came out that two of them were nobly born—and not only that, they were the sons
of the Earl of Hannart himself. The excitement was feverish. The Earl of Hannart was a wanted man in the South. Ynen reported to Hildy that when he was a young man, the Earl of Hannart had come South and taken part in the great rebellion, just as if he were a common revolutionary.
The fate of the Northmen was no longer in doubt. They were all put on trial for their lives.