Her two uncles looked at one another. “She’s quite determined, and we can’t make her,” said Harl. “This one had to be different. Her father’s Navis.”
“I’m afraid you’ll find you’re mistaken, Hildrida,” said Harchad. “We can make you. And we will.”
“I shall refuse,” said Hildy. “Utterly. There’s nothing you can do.”
“She’ll refuse utterly,” said Harl.
“She will not,” said Harchad.
“She can if she wants,” said Harl. “She’ll be married by proxy, anyway. Can’t expect Lithar to come all this way. You refuse, my dear girl,” he said to Hildy. “Refuse all you want if it makes you happy. It won’t bother us.” He wriggled his toes at Hildy again, and once more they cracked. Harl was impressed. “Hear that, Harchad? That noise was my toes. Wonder why they do that.”
Hildy clenched her teeth in order not to scream at him. “Lithar might bother if I refuse.”
Harl bawled with laughter. A small smile flitted on Harchad’s face. “Well, it’ll be you he takes it out on, won’t it?” said Harl. “That doesn’t worry me!” He lay back in his chair and grinned at the idea.
“All right,” said Hildy. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.” She swung round and swept out, with her back very straight and her chin up, willing herself not to let the tears in h
er eyes fall until she was past the attendants, and then the soldiers. Then she ran. She ran to find Ynen. He was the only person in the Palace who was kind.
She could not find him. She dried her tears on her sleeve and searched grimly, high and low, right down to the kitchens. The cooks there were cursing. Hildy discovered that Navis had bestirred himself sufficiently to cancel the feast. She was angrier than ever. To think that out of what she had said to him, this was the one thing he had attended to! She wanted to bite something and tear things up. She stormed to her own room, wondering if a sheet or a curtain would be best to tear.
Ynen was there, still curled up on her window seat. By this time he was feeling very doleful. Hildy was a little ashamed to think she had clean forgotten telling him to wait.
“Hildy,” he said plaintively before he noticed her state of mind. “Why is it all so miserable?”
“Can’t you think why?” Hildy snapped. She seized the coverlet on her bed, a good handful in each hand, and wrenched. It gave way with the most satisfactory ripping noise.
Ynen’s eyes widened. He wished he had not spoken. Now he knew he would have to say something else, or Hildy would turn on him for sitting there like a dumb idiot. “Yes,” he said. “It’s because nobody’s even pretending to be sorry Grandfather’s dead.”
“How right you are!” Hildy snarled. Carefully, almost with enjoyment, she tore a long strip off the coverlet.
Ynen watched her anxiously and kept talking. “People are more sorry about the Festival being messed up. They go on about bad luck. And the awful thing,” he said hurriedly as Hildy began on another strip, “is that I don’t care about Grandfather either. I just feel sort of shocked. It makes me think I’m wicked.”
Hildy finished the second strip. Then, fists up and elbows out, she began on a third. “Wicked! What a stupid way to talk! Grandfather was a horrible old man, and you know he was! If people didn’t do exactly what he wanted, he had them killed, or tried them for treason if they were lords.” She dragged the third strip down to the selvage and wrenched to tear that. She began on a fourth. “The only people who dared argue with him were other earls, and he quarreled with them all the time. Why should you be sorry? Even so,” she said, rending the fourth strip loose, “I felt sick when I heard Uncle Harl calling him old Haddock.”
Ynen judged that Hildy’s temper was cooling. He risked laughing. “Everyone called him that!”
“I wish I’d known,” said Hildy. “I’d have said it, too.”
This encouraged Ynen to believe she was almost calm again. “Hildy,” he said, “that was rather a good coverlet.”
It had been a good one. It was blue and gold, and worked in a pattern of roses. The sewing women down in Holand had taken a good month to embroider it. Hildy’s four furious strips had left it a square of ragged, puckered cloth about four feet long. “I don’t care,” said Hildy. Her rage flared up again. She seized the puckered square and tore it and tore it. “I hate good things!” she raged. “They give us good coverlets, and golden clocks, and beautiful boats, and they don’t do it because they like us or care about us. All they think of is whether we’ll come in useful for their plans!”
“Nobody thinks I’m useful at all,” Ynen said. That was the reason for his misery, but he had been ashamed to say it before.
Hildy glared round at him, and he shrank. “I could murder them for thinking that!” she raved. “Why do you have to be useful? You’re nice. You’re the only nice person in this whole horrible Palace!” Ynen went pink. He was very flattered, but he would like to have been told he was useful, too. And he wished Hildy would realize that she was quite as alarming raging for him as she was raging at him. “I intend to teach them a lesson,” Hildy proclaimed.
“They probably won’t notice,” Ynen said. “I wish we could go and live somewhere else. Somebody told me Father preferred living in the country. Do you think if I asked him—?”
Hildy interrupted him with a squawk of angry laughter. “Go and ask one of the statues in the throne room! They’ll pay more attention.”
Ynen knew she was right. But now he had talked about going away from the Palace, he knew it was the one thing he really wanted to do. “Hildy, couldn’t we go out for the rest of the day? I hate the Palace like this. Couldn’t we go sailing—oh, I forgot. You’re not allowed to anymore, are you?”
“Don’t be a fool! The place is full of revolutionaries. They won’t let us go out,” said Hildy. But she could see from the window behind Ynen that it was perfect weather for sailing. “Won’t all the sailors have a holiday today?”
Ynen sighed. “Yes. I wouldn’t have a crew.” Still, it had been a good idea. “Suppose we rode out to High Mill then?”
But Hildy stood looking from the window to the ruins of her coverlet. There was going to be trouble about that. It was a silly thing to get into trouble about on its own. She ought to do something worse. She was aching to do something really terrible and show everybody. She remembered Navis had asked them to stay where he could find them. That decided her. “Let’s go sailing, Ynen,” she said. “And let’s give them a fright. Let’s knot the coverlet and hang it out of the window, and make them think we’ve run away.” Ynen looked at her dubiously. “I can crew,” said Hildy. “You can be captain because it’s your boat.”