Mitt eyed the heaving horizon. He supposed he might as well tell them, if they could tell him about their silly escape with their pies. There was something odd about Hildy’s story, though—something not quite right. Mitt felt that as strongly as Ynen evidently felt it about his. “They made plans—the Free Holanders,” he explained, “but it wasn’t in me to listen, because I was planning to get myself taken. I was aiming to kill Hadd, and when they caught me, I was going to tell them the Free Holanders set me on, to pay them out for informing on my father. It was them that informed on him. I’ve been planning that half my life. You might say my mother brought me up to do it. And your pa goes and spoils it in half a second. That’s what had me standing there—the waste!”
There was silence from Ynen and Hildy. Mitt did not wonder he had shocked them. He took his eyes off the horizon and caught them exchanging a look that was not shocked but deeply puzzled.
“And so it was a waste!” he told them aggressively. “Three years I saved gunpowder. Five years me and my mother planned it. And your pa kicks the bomb instead of grabbing me. Then I run straight at those fool soldiers, and they lose me. What was I supposed to do after that? Walk in the Palace gates and say, ‘Here I am’?”
“It’s not that,” said Ynen. “You keep saying everyone informs because they’re frightened—and I believe you—but why do you blame the Free Holanders for informing and not the woman who gave you Libby Beer?”
“She wasn’t a friend of mine, was she?” Mitt said gruffly.
There was a further silence, puzzled and uncomfortable, filled only with the sound of Wind’s Road’s ropes pulling in a wind that seemed to be slackening. Hildy and Ynen looked at one another. They were both thinking of the Earl of Hannart’s son and wondering how to say what they thought.
“I don’t understand about mothers,” Hildy said cautiously. “Not having one myself. But—” She stopped and looked helplessly at Ynen.
“You do know,” Ynen blurted out, “your mother does know, does she, the kind of things that happen when people get arrested for your kind of thing? Do you know about my uncle Harchad?”
Harchad’s face, and the terrible fear that had gripped Mitt when he saw it, seemed to have mixed in Mitt’s mind now with his nightmare of Canden shuffling to the door. Under his thick jacket, his skin rose in gooseflesh. But he was not going to let Hildy and Ynen know how he felt. “I’ve heard things about Harchad,” he conceded.
Hildy shivered openly. “I saw. One thing.”
“That’s why we said we’d take you North,” said Ynen.
“Thanks,” said Mitt, and he stared woodenly at the horizon. He was not sure quite what was the matter with him. He felt sick and cold. He shook Canden and Harchad out of his mind, but he still felt as if a load of worry had fallen on him, making his head ache and drawing his face into a strange shape. Ynen and Hildy stared, because Mitt’s face seemed all old, with scarcely any young left in it. “See here,” Mitt said, after a minute, “I feel wore out again. Mind if I go for a lie-down??
?
Hildy took the tiller without a word. Mitt plunged into the cabin, onto his favorite port bunk, and fell heavily asleep.
“Ynen, what did you have to go and say all that for?” Hildy whispered, wholly unfairly.
“Because I didn’t understand,” said Ynen. “I still don’t. Why has he gone to sleep like that?”
“I think it’s because you—we—upset him more than he wanted to think about,” Hildy answered. “He’s in an awful muddle. It must be lack of education.”
“He’s muddled me, too,” Ynen said crossly. “I don’t know whether to be sorry for him or not.”
The slackening wind brought a drizzle of rain. Ynen and Hildy found a tarpaulin and wrapped it round their heads and shoulders. The rain increased, and the wind strengthened slowly, until the sea was so choppy that Hildy found it hard to steer and hold the sail rope, too. The sail was yellow-gray and heavy with rain.
“Miserable!” she said. Water dripped off the end of her nose and chin.
“I wonder if we ought to take in a reef,” Ynen said.
Just before midday, the choppiness woke Mitt. Wind’s changed, he thought. Coming more off the land.
He stumbled muzzily out into the well to find a real downpour. Rain was battering down into the well and swirling along the planking, going putter, putter on the tarpaulin over Hildy and Ynen’s heads, and making myriad pockmarks in the yellow-gray waves alongside. Mitt was not sure he liked the angry tooth shape of all those pockmarked waves.
“I’ve been wondering if I ought to reef—just in case,” Ynen said to him.
Mitt looked at him, frowning sleepily against the cold water in his face. Beyond Ynen, the little figure of Libby Beer was shiny as new with rainwater. Beyond her, dim behind veil upon veil of silver rain, was what looked like a mountain walking up the sky from the land, monstrous, black and impending.
“What do you think about reefing?” Ynen asked.
Mitt stared at that mountain of black weather, aghast. Last time he had seen anything like it, Siriol had made for Little Flate as fast as Flower of Holand could move, and they had hardly got there in time. This was twice as near. There was no chance of making land. Those two had been sitting with their backs to it, but all the same! “Flaming Ammet!” said Mitt.
“Well, I thought I’d reef,” Ynen said uncertainly.
“What am I doing standing here letting you ask?” Mitt said frantically. “You should have woke me an hour ago. Three reefs we’ll need, and let’s be quick, for Old Ammet’s sake! I bet this boat handles real rough.”
Ynen was astounded. “Three?” Hildy was so surprised that she lost her hold on the wet tiller. Wind’s Road tipped about, and the boom swung over their heads. Mitt caught it, braced himself against the weight of wind and sopping sail, and tied it down with such haste that Ynen began to see he was in earnest. He slipped out from under the tarpaulin and scrambled onto the cabin roof in the hammering rain, to the ropes that lowered the mainsail. When he saw the weather the tarpaulin had been hiding from him, he did not feel quite so surprised at Mitt’s command. Ynen had never been out in any weather so black himself, but he knew when the sky looked like that, you saw all the shipping making for Holand as fast as it could sail. He let the huge triangle of the sail down a foot or so. Mitt began tying the resulting fold down against the boom by the little strings that dangled from the canvas, and tying as if for dear life. “We have got a storm sail,” Ynen called.