That was all they had time for before Navis trod briskly out of the chapel again, carrying something bundled in a large handkerchief. “Quite simple, you see,” he said.
Mitt stood back a bit, with a damp spreading patch on his jacket where Maewen’s face had been. “Simple?” he said. “It’s got a hex on it sizzles off like a thunderbolt when you touch it!”
“This being the North, I considered that,” said Navis, “and I didn’t touch it. Look.” He opened the silk handkerchief a fraction to show the cup nestled in it. Then he calmly stowed the bundle in one of his wide pockets. “We’d best take ourselves off to the great court,” he said as he made sure this pocket was arranged not to bulge more than the one on the other side of his coat. “We must attend a closing ceremony, it seems.”
They went there slowly. Maewen was still shaking, and her legs were not steady. Navis courteously put his hand under her elbow to help her along. Mitt avoided touching her. Maewen kept seeing him rubbing at the wet patch her face had made on his chest. She could hardly look at him for embarrassment.
“You persuaded Hildy to come along?” Mitt asked, rather too casually, giving his chest a further rub.
“Not yet,” said Navis.
Mitt’s face went tight and bony, like a skull. “She’s got to.”
“I know,” said Navis. “I’m hoping that extremely large friend of hers can make her see reason. In that hope I explained the whole situation to both of them.”
“Biffa?” said Mitt. “Is that safe?”
“I trusted her,” said Navis. “And this you won’t believe! The girl’s real name is Enblith!”
“After Enblith the Fair!” In spite of his skull face of worry, Mitt began to giggle.
“Unkind, isn’t it?” Navis said. “Her parents made a serious miscalculation there. Not that she’s unbeautiful, poor girl. Just too big for one to see it.”
Maewen wondered how anyone could be so cool with the stolen cup in his pocket. Mitt tried to match Navis in coolness. He said, “I found out where Ynen is. It seems like bad news, but it could just be good—very good.”
“Later. Hush,” said Navis.
They came round a corner in a covered walk and found themselves at the top of wide steps overlooking the biggest courtyard. People were crowded on the steps below them, serious, parently people, all looking across to the main school building, where a line of gray-coated teachers stood. One stood out in front in a blue and gray gown. In front of them the courtyard was filled with rows and rows of uniformed pupils in bright white collars.
They had missed quite a bit of the ceremony. The gowned teacher was saying, in a voice that carried almost as well as Hestefan’s, “For those who now go out into the world, this is a solemn leave-taking. For those who will return here next Harvest, it is a temporary parting, accompanied, I hope, by new resolves and higher endeavors. I would like you all seriously to consider…”
Maewen let the strong voice fade to a drone in her ears. I don’t believe it! she thought. Headmasters must have made this speech ever since schools were invented!
Something scuffled behind. She and Mitt both jumped round. But it was only Moril, tiptoeing toward them. He looked white and worried. Mitt, at the sight of him, self-consciously rubbed at his chest again. “What’s up?”
“The cup!” Moril whispered back. “I went to get it and it wasn’t there!”
“Never fear,” Navis murmured. “The sacrilege has been committed already.”
“Is that why you all look so worried? Why don’t we just go, then?” Moril said.
People on the steps turned round and said, “Hush!” Navis put a finger to his lips. Maewen pulled herself together enough to take hold of Moril’s arm and tow him back round the corner.
“We have to leave with everyone else or they’ll know exactly who’s got it,” she whispered.
Moril was no fool. She saw him realize this as she was telling him. “Sorry,” he said. “But I told Mitt I’d get it. He—”
“It wasn’t Mitt. It was Navis.”
This obviously astonished Moril. Well, it astonished Maewen, too, now she came to think of it. Navis was an adult and a sensible person. If he thought it was necessary to take the cup, this somehow made the whole matter more serious.
When they came back round the corner, the headmaster was saying, “We will now sing our customary prayer to the One, who is the special guardian of our school. What comes after that is something my staff and I know nothing about.”
For some reason almost everyone laughed. Then the gray rows of pupils broke into song. It was a solemn and simple invocation to the One and like nothing Maewen had heard before. Mitt was as startled as she was. The song was beautiful. The strange old tune swelled and mounted, warm and chilling at the same time, and full of reverence. While it lasted, something seemed to fill the vast courtyard that was not of this world. Maewen’s back prickled. Navis has done an awful thing! she thought. But Navis never turned a hair.
Moril listened critically. “I never care for those old tunes,” he said. “What’s going—Oh, I remember.”
The headmaster and the other teachers had vanished from the front of the building as if the ground had swallowed them up, and the ranks of gray-uniformed pupils were suddenly seething. Nearly every one of them was pulling over his or her head a colored hood of some kind, and most were putting on clumsy gloves, too. Quite a number of the hoods were gray, or gray with a blue or orange tuft on top. As soon as Maewen saw them, she understood how her attacker had managed to be so thoroughly disguised. He must have raided a cloakroom. The hoods covered faces except for the eyes. Sober pupils had now become blob-faced monsters, with formless gray, green, or red heads. The sight upset her.