The Crown of Dalemark (The Dalemark Quartet 4)

Maewen kept looking at Mitt, wondering if he was still feeling bad about Hildy. She simply could not tell. The fact was, Mitt had no idea himself. At times, while Navis was giving Wend and Hestefan the story of all they had missed in Gardale, he thought that if only someone would give him definite proof that Hildy and Biffa were safely on the way to Ansdale, he could forget Hildy entirely—almost with relief. Trouble with me, he thought, watching Wend’s straight, fair face turning to Noreth in alarm, I’m like a stupid dog that asks to be kicked.

“Twice?” said Wend. “Lady, I must ask you not to go down from the green roads again. The paths can keep you safe.”

“But did you get the cup?” Hestefan asked.

“Navis did,” Moril said. He was still sore about it.

“Please show us,” Hestefan said politely to Navis.

Maewen forgot Mitt. This was going to be alarming. Nervously she watched Navis feel in his pocket and pull out the bundle of silk handkerchief. It was twilight by then and greenish. As the handkerchief fell aside, the firelight made mild dancing gleams on the silver of the cup. Navis bowed to Maewen from his seat on a boulder. “Your cup, Noreth,” he said, handing it to Mitt to pass over to her.

Mitt was not expecting Navis to hand him the cup. He came out of his thoughts with a jump and fumbled. The handkerchief unrolled. For an instant the green light and the flicker of the fire just vanished, overwhelmed in blue fizzling light. “Ouch!” said Mitt. While everyone blinked and saw yellow dazzle, he hastily rewrapped the cup and passed it to Maewen. “Careful. There’s a strong hex on it.”

Maewen took the bundle. This was worse than the ring. They were all expecting her to unwrap it and take hold of it and she was probably going to be electrocuted. But, she told herself, swallowing hard, if I had been electrocuted, Wend would have mentioned it in the palace. Here goes. Pulling away the handkerchief, she said, “Look, everyone. This is the Adon’s cup.” She took firm hold of the lopsided silver bowl of it and held it out.

To her huge relief, nothing fizzed. Everyone’s dim faces were turned to the cup. After a moment or so Maewen realized they were looking at the way her hands looked dark against it, darker than natural. The cup seemed to have grown brighter. Yes. It had. It was filling with a spreading gentle blue glow, shining like a blue lamp in the near dark, making her hands look bloodred against it. It was so beautiful, and so welcome, that her eyes filled with tears.

Several people let breath out noisily. “It is the cup,” Wend said. “It knows you as it knew the Adon.”

Well, thank the One! Maewen thought as she wrapped the thing up again.

Under the friendly rustling of the rowans and birches, they all slept well. But toward dawn, around the time when the pouring of the stream began to sound less soothing and more like a noise, and people began to turn and shift because the grass was flat and the bones of the earth came through, Mitt had a strange dream. There was danger in it, and wonder, and the two were mixed up confusingly.

It began with him looking down on the camp from above. He saw the silver cup glowing and another, yellower glow nearby. After a while he knew the yellow glow was from the golden statue. It was very important. Mitt looked at it and thought, Noreth won’t need it so much

now. I can have my share. But that was not why it was important. Mitt puzzled over this, until his attention was distracted by finding he could see the green roads winding away from the camp. While he was looking at them, he dreamed he was back in the camp, lying under his blanket, dreaming he was looking at the green roads.

He dreamed and looked at the roads with interest. They went in all directions, snaking among the mountains, linking place to place. He could see them all, right down past Dropwater to Kernsburgh and beyond that, into the North Dales and on into the South. Yes, there had been green roads that led through the South, but they were not kept up any longer. Things moved over them, keeping them hidden, dangerous things. But they had been meant to cover all Dalemark.

Mitt dreamed that he would have been happier about seeing it all if the roads had not kept coming back to him, lying under the rowan trees and in danger. Since the idea of danger made him impatient, he turned his attention out again, to the roads, gray under late yellow moonlight, and took a look at the people traveling on them. Quite a few people were up early or traveling through the night. Hildy was one. She and Biffa were riding, a long way over toward that smoking mountain, nearly into Ansdale already. Kialan was riding, too, well on the way to Hannart. This meant danger. That troubled Mitt, so he looked North, where the young Singer who was Moril’s brother was up early and hastening toward Adenmouth. Beyond, and coming toward Dagner, there were more riders. These meant danger, too.

There was a black patch of danger centered on the camp under the rowan trees.

Mitt ignored it obstinately and kept watching the roads. He saw the Undying moving on them, too, unnoticed by ordinary people. They looked so much like ordinary people that Mitt wondered how he knew they were Undying. But he knew King Hern, coming down the King’s Way to build Kernsburgh, though King Hern looked like a gawky boy only about Mitt’s age, and he knew Manaliabrid, hurrying into exile with the Adon and a small boy who was the Adon’s son. The Adon turned out to be a short man, much more like Navis than Mitt expected, and Manaliabrid had a strong look of Noreth about her. Wend was with them, to Mitt’s surprise, looking much the same.

Now he knew he was dreaming. So it did not surprise him that the green roads were winding away into the past. He lay and marveled at the way they turned back and forth through history, up to the present, into the place where he lay in such danger, and then went winding and snaking on into the far future. The Undying went walking on, taking the roads through time, and history went with them, ignoring them, forgetting the Undying were making history. He watched the roads snake out again into the South, and battles, and other strange things. He would have enjoyed watching more, if the roads had not kept on winding back into the rowan trees and showing him Noreth was a danger.

“No,” Mitt said to his dream. “She may be in danger, but she’s not a danger.”

And the dream kept telling him, “Not Noreth. You.”

“Ah, come on! She’s all right,” Mitt told the dream. “If there’s any danger, it’s those earls.”

Then he woke into white mist with gray trees like shadows in it, feeling very irritable and rather frightened.

Everyone else seemed annoyingly refreshed. When Wend asked Maewen, “Where to next, lady?” she answered cheerfully, “To get the Adon’s sword.”

“Then we go toward Dropwater,” Wend said.

When the road branched at the next waystone, they took the right-hand branch and found themselves almost at once in the stony bottom of a vast valley. It dwarfed everyone. Sweeps of hill rose on either side, barren, and curved tight as a wind-filled sail. Mitt supposed he was put in mind of sails because the wind streamed in this valley, with a sour sort of whistling, as hard as he had ever known it at sea. Like wind at sea, it kept sweeping bands of misty rain across them, which made the barren hills look even more harsh and empty. They look stretched, Mitt thought, staring up at the bare yellowness, through little itching raindrops. A vision came to him of the One, immeasurably huge, taking the hard rocky edge of this land and pulling until it was so tight it would stretch no more. Rivers, rocks, and creatures went tumbling and rolling as the One pulled—

Mitt shivered and hunched into his jacket. He had a dim memory that he might have seen something like this in his dream. He put it, and the idea of danger, resolutely out of his mind. It did no good to get nervous fancies.

It was a drear day’s ride and a cheerless camp that night, which could not have been more of a contrast to the camp under the rowan trees. The wind came from all directions. The flames of the fire blew out raggedly, making more smoke than warmth, and the smoke seemed to follow you about wherever you sat. Everyone, even Moril and Hestefan in the cart, rolled themselves in all the coats, cloaks, and blankets they could muster, but nobody slept very well. The wind seemed to get in everywhere. Mitt was so cold that he got up almost before it was light. It had rained again, and everything he had was damp. Since it did not seem to matter how much colder or wetter he got, he went off to wash in the stream beyond the pile of boulders where the horses were. It was a cheerless little stream, clattering down through gray stones with a sound like teeth chattering.

The sound of his going woke Maewen. She rolled up into the gray day, moaning. She had never been so cold or so damp in her life. The one good thing was that her stomach had stopped aching. As if the green roads cured you, she thought as she stumbled off to the latrine beyond the horses. She came back to find everyone else huddled in dead heaps. This was depressing. She went back to the boulders and started to attend to the horses.

She was alone. The deep voice spoke to her at once. “I have considered,” it said. “Your way is now clear before you.”