“I tell you so,” said the voice. “You must accept my advice or you will never find the crown. And I tell you not to alienate the Singer-boy.”
“All right.” Maewen was working on her horse, slowing down so that Navis and Wend could catch up with her. “All right. Just go away now, will you?”
She could hear Navis behind now, asking Wend how much farther it was to Gardale, and Wend answering that it would take another day. Maewen fell in on the other side of Navis, and as she had hoped, the voice did not speak to her again.
The fog thickened. By nightfall, when it was blue-dim, they stopped in another of those lumpy places that might once have been a town. There was a well-made fire pit where Moril built a cheerful coal fire. Maewen reminded Mitt of his idea for cooking pickled cherries. Mitt could not bring himself to be natural. Gruffly he borrowed skewers from the cart and kept his back turned while he stuck them with cherries, cheese, and dried meat to roast. It was terrible. Mitt tried to be polite and found himself agreeing fawningly with Noreth that a lentil stew would help. He tried to correct that and went gruff again. He could not seem to get it right. Plainly by the firelight, he could see the hurt, puzzled look among Noreth’s freckles. He could feel her wondering what she had done to offend him, and of course there was no way he could tell her.
Never mind. I’ll be seeing Hildy again in Gardale, he thought. For some reason he knew that would make things better.
While the lentils plopped and bubbled and turned too thick, Maewen tried to put Mitt out of her mind by thinking what she should do in Gardale. Should she make a speech? She had told Navis that her army would arrive by itself, but that was over on the coast. They were now a long way inland, where people would not know about Noreth. The trouble was that she had no idea what to expect. She had been to Gardale in her own time. She and Aunt Liss had driven there on a sight-seeing trip. But she had a feeling that this was only going to confuse her.
Around then Wend politely asked Moril’s permission and played the cwidder again. Lilting tunes from the old days rang in the crags. Everyone seemed to feel better. They ate caked lentils and Mitt’s sooty skewered things quite cheerfully, and when they had finished, Hestefan surprised them all by telling tales. Most of them were stories that were around in Maewen’s day, too, but she had only read them in books. It was another thing again to hear Hestefan tell them, gravely and plainly, as if every strange occurrence were the exact truth. The stories were suddenly unknown and new. Maewen had known what was going to happen nearly every time, but it still surprised her.
This is what it means to be a good Singer, she thought, and he really is good!
“I thank you,” Navis said when Hestefan finished. “I have never heard those tales better told.”
Hestefan bowed as he sat. “And I thank you. Never have I told them so well for so little in return.”
Navis laughed and tossed Hestefan a silver piece. Hestefan took it with a bit of a twinkle. It looked as if they were actually beginning to like one another. Maewen caught a little smile on Wend’s face as he carefully put the waterproof case round the cwidder, and she wondered.
The fog was worse in the morning. Probably they were down into the clouds again. Certainly the green road sloped gently downhill as if it were leading them back to the valleys. Before long it was branching past waystone after waystone, and Maewen was glad to have Wend striding out in front to show the right way. And this day, for the first time, there were other people using the road. It made sense, as Navis remarked. Up to now they had been ahead of or behind all the folk who had gone somewhere else to celebrate Midsummer. Now they came up with all those people returning home and also the usual traffic of people going into Gardale.
They passed riders, groups of walkers, and families with carts all coming toward them. Hestefan called out cheerfully to each. But when they passed the first person going the other way, who was someone driving a flock of geese, he said ringingly, “Hestefan the Singer here! Watch for me in Gardale.”
Maewen tensed. Hestefan had to advertise, of course, but so did she. She wondered whether to call out in the same way, Noreth Onesdaughter here! and ask the gooseman—no, it was a woman all bundled up against the fog—ask the goosewoman, then, to join her at Kernsburgh. She dithered. She hated the idea, and besides, the woman might tell the Earl of Gardale. On the other hand, perhaps she ought. For once she would have welcomed that deep voice speaking to her out of the air to tell her what to do. But of course, there were too many people near.
Meanwhile, more and more white triangular geese kept appearing out of the fog. As Maewen, still dithering, opened her mouth to imitate Hestefan, Mitt’s horse demonstrated that it considered geese a lower life-form. It began moving at them in pounces, with Mitt hauling on the reins and cursing it. After ten feet of rocking-horse-like progress, the Countess-horse won and plunged in among the geese. Mitt fell off into an outrage of honking, flapping, and running. Geese ran in all directions, except for two, which ran for Mitt with spread wings and outstretched necks. The lady driving them shouted mightily—most of it very rude things about Mitt and the horse.
Navis was into the fray almost instantly, using his riding crop on everything. The lady shouted at Navis, too. But the two geese fled, Moril caught the Countess-horse, and Navis hauled Mitt up. Everyone else chased geese for a while. By the time the flock was assembled again, Maewen’s nerve was gone. Even if the goose-lady had not been so very angry, she thought, watching Navis and Hestefan being wonderfully polite to the woman, the proper time to declare Noreth as Queen was when she had reached Kernsburgh with the Adon’s gifts and had something to show those earls. The decision made her feel utterly relieved and completely feeble in about the same proportions.
“I think this is yours, madam,” Navis said, bowing and handing the goose-lady the stick she had dropped.
“Just keep that big looby off his back and out of my geese,” she answered.
“Certainly,” Navis agreed. “But I’m afraid that would mean buying him a real horse, and we neither of us have the funds just now.”
At this the woman hooted with laughter. Mitt struggled back into his saddle again feeling like an utter idiot.
After that he kept tight hold of the beast whenever another traveler loomed through the fog.
12
When they camped that night, Wend said that Gardale was only a mile or so away, below in a valley they could not see.
It was odd, Maewen thought, that it had taken all this time to get that near, even coming straight through the center of the mountains. When she had driven here with Aunt Liss, it had only taken four hours, and that was with a detour on the way to look at Hannart. Her sense of distance was all confused.
Her sense of everything was all confused. She was dreading Gardale. Mitt was still being so distant and gruff that she knew she was not going to ask him to steal the Adon’s cup for her. And Moril was younger than she was, and she was not going to ask him either. She would have to do it herself. But she still felt hurt at the way Mitt was behaving. She wanted to apologize, although she had no idea what she had done to annoy him. Perhaps they should all just go away and not bother about the cup.
No. Out of this muddle of thoughts came one thing that was clear—probably. Maewen and Aunt Liss had done the usual tourist thing and seen round the college at Gardale, where the old Lawschool was. Part of the Lawschool was the Chapel of the One. There had been—would be—a cup on the altar there, with a notice saying that this was only a replica of the cup that had been stolen two hundred years before. So it looked as if she had stolen—would be going to have stolen—the darned thing. In a mad, circular way, that meant she had to go down into Gardale and steal it because she already had.
It came on to rain. Oh, I give up! she thought.
Moril and Hestefan had the best of it. They vanished into the cart. The others draped the oilskin covers off their baggage over three large rocks and crawled underneath, where they spent a hot and sticky night, steamily full of the plopping and thrumming of rain. It was so uncomfortable that everyone woke and crawled out again at dawn. The rain stopped and became thinning mist, almost mockingly.
Maewen was clammy all over, and itchy, and—well—plain dirty. She could smell herself. She wanted to clean her teeth. But nobody seemed to bother about tooth cleaning any more than they appeared to worry about baths. At that moment Maewen felt she would have given her left ear and probably several toes as well for a nice hot bath full of rose-scented bath oil. And there was not even a hairbrush in her baggage roll! While Navis was shaving and Hestefan was clawing the kinks out of his beard, Maewen did what she could by taking her hair down from the little helmet, shaking it out and scratching hard at her scalp. Her hair smelled awful, of horse mostly, but dirty human hair was part of the smell, too.
“What wouldn’t I give for a bath!” she said as she crammed the helmet back on her head.