The Crown of Dalemark (The Dalemark Quartet 4)

Wend unclipped the radio and flipped the switch. “Orilson here. Over.”

Major Alksen’s voice blasted from it like someone talking into a tin. “About bloody time! Wend, get down into the front court soonest. There seems to be something going on in Amil’s tomb—animal or something shut inside. Over.”

“Coming, sir,” said Wend. “Over and out.” He clipped back the radio, forced a smile at Maewen, and said, “Tell me about it later.”

Maewen watched him hurry away down the gallery. Tanamoril, Osfameron, Mage Mallard—he was all those heroes of all those stories, and he could be one of her own ancestors, too—and he had come down to this, a museum attendant in league with Kankredin. She knew how Moril had felt about Hestefan. It made a bad taste in your very bones. Playing the good guy on the train so that she would trust him. Yuk.

It was like knowing the answer to a crossword clue by instinct and then working out the clue after that. That photograph. Aunt Liss had sent it to Dad. Wend had seen it and known she was like Noreth. It had to be Wend. How would Kankredin know to look?

Maewen looked at the golden statue, a buttery shine from behind the glass. She was fairly sure that if she hunted along the cases, somewhere she would find a lopsided silver cup and a ring with a big red stone that had the Adon’s profile on it—maybe two rings—but she had not the energy to look. Her boots had dissolved into sandals again, showing her toes outlined in brown dirt. She needed a bath. She had to wash her hair. She looked at her thumb. There was a clean white band round it where the false ring had been. Yes, there would be two rings. The One had turned everyone’s cunning schemes round—Wend’s, Kankredin’s, Earl Keril’s, that Earl of Andmark’s, Maewen’s own ideas—and used them against themselves. Maewen herself had not been able to change history; she had just helped it happen as it should.

She really had to have a bath.

Instead she set off round the gallery, very slowly, toward the line of huge windows that looked over the front court. She did not mean to look in the cases as she went, but she could not help seeing the sword. It seemed to throw itself at her eyes, in spite of its dark color, in its dingy, somber sheath. Maewen took a step back, having almost walked past it, and read the label:

ONE OF SEVERAL SWORDS REPUTED TO BE THE

ADON’S. LEGENDS CLAIM THAT ONLY THE RIGHTFUL

MONARCH CAN UNSHEATH THE ADON’S SWORD.

That’s true, she thought. I couldn’t draw it. Mitt had to do it both times. She dawdled toward the windows, with heaviness on her heart. Ordinary life was so very ordinary. Everything was over.

When she came to the first window, she looked cautiously out from one corner of it. There was the wide cobbled yard, with its paved patterns and the absurd onion-domed stone tomb in the middle. A very fine example of Amilian stonework. There was Major Alksen, too, and all his people, Wend included, in a cautious circle all the way round the tomb, slowly moving inward. What did they think was in there?

Whatever was in there squealed, a long, descending hee-hee-hee. Maewen could hear it quite clearly even through the glass. Horse. Something began banging in her throat, and she felt her face go pale as she realized which horse. It had not whinnied much, but Maewen knew horses, and she knew this one only too well. She wanted to lean out of the window and scream to Major Alksen, Don’t go near it! That’s Kankredin in there! Wend must know. He was letting them all move in on it, not knowing what they were up against. Major Alksen was right beside the tomb now. He was putting his hand on the grille over its door.

There was a disturbance in the air over the little domes of the tomb’s roof. Major Alksen did not see it. It was very faint, like the ghost of the trumpet-shaped whirlwind Mitt had summoned, but the new wariness in Maewen had prepared her to expect it. She was looking right at it as it went spiraling up to hover level with the roof of the palace. She saw Wend’s head tilt slightly as he saw it, too, but his face was expressionless and he did not say anything to anyone. Meanwhile, Major Alksen threw open the grille and then the door, and his lady helper threw open the ones at the other end at the same moment. They went in. They came out. They walked with blank, puzzled, irritated movements. Nothing there. All the other people in the circle moved uncertainly, let down, but ready for some kind of trick.

Maewen discovered she was watching this in glimpses, mostly with her back to the wall so that the hovering cloud of Kankredin would not see her. Her throat pounded harder and her legs felt weak as she caught up with the way her new wariness was making her behave. He’s come for me! she thought. He’s not going to forgive me in a hurry! Had Wend summoned him? Or perhaps by the action of coming and going back over two hundred years Maewen herself had opened the way for Kankredin. Or again, with One-like cunning, maybe Kankredin had used the force Mitt had thrown at him to help him take that open way through time. It could not be coincidence that Kankredin had arrived just as she had taken hold of the golden statue. It just could not be.

She was very frightened indeed.

This was worse than any time on the green road. It was more horrifying than being attacked twice in Gardale. Why? At first Maewen thought it was because that had only been Hestefan, and this was Kankredin. But she had not known her attacker was only an elderly Singer in Gardale. No—it was because this was her own time. This was modern life, when things like this were not supposed to happen. And worse still, she was alone. All the friends who might have helped her had been dead for two hundred years.

That was when it hit her. Dead. Two hundred years. It was Mitt’s tomb she had been looking at, down there in the court.

Grief thundered down on her, hard and continuous as the waterfall at Dropwater. Maewen fled under it, round the gallery, and up the stairs, and upstairs again to her father’s apartment. There she ran a bath. Even with both taps full on, the water did not pour as fiercely as grief poured on Maewen. She sat in the bath and she washed herself and she washed her hair without, for a single instant, thinking what she was doing. Instead her mind was going through, going through that entire journey from Adenmouth to Kernsburgh. She found she remembered things about Mitt she had not even known she had seen until now.

When the water was cold, she noticed it was with a dull sort of jump, and got out and dried, and dried her hair. By that time she had been through everything twice and was starting round again. She even laughed in several places—that time when the ring stuck, for instance. By then the grief had stopped pouring and set into a full ache, so that her throat hurt, and her chest, as if she was full, full of sorrow as a person could get. Her hair dried wild and floating and fluffy, as it always did. It was a good inch longer. Aunt Liss would have noticed, but she was fairly sure that Dad never would. There was more than a touch of Cennoreth’s wriggliness to it—or Kialan’s, or Kankredin’s. She put on her nicest dress. That was not to let Mitt down when she had to face Kankredin alone. She looked quite good in the mirror.

I might have been the Queen, she thought, in an experimental way, watching herself. And watched herself shake her head. Somehow that was never a possibility. So I might have been feeling like this, anyway, even if I never touched the statue and Alk passed it to someone else, she told herself. She did not believe that either. Whatever she believed, there was no point to might-have-beens. Now was enough—and bad enough.

Mitt had left her a legacy, although he did not know it (at the word legacy Maewen had a moment when she thought she was going to cry, but she did not seem to be able to cry; she was hard and dry inside). She had heard the word Mitt shouted to bring that whirlwind, and she had no doubt it would work for her, too. She could use it on Kankredin—and Wend—if need arose.

Out on the leads the pigeons we

re landing, taking off, circling uneasily. They knew. Kankredin was hovering as a nearly invisible cloud somewhere near. But before she went into battle, there were things she wanted to do.

Maewen let herself out of the apartment again and raced downstairs, down, and on down, until she came to the old part of the palace where the pictures were. She had spent too long in the bath. The art students were all there, and she had to edge round their easels and step over them as they lay on the ballroom floor, in order to look at the paintings on the walls and the ceiling.

She shook her head at the fair-haired Amil in his purple trousers. Whoever painted that had not had a clue what Mitt looked like. Or had he? she wondered, remembering King Hern. Was it deliberate? she thought, looking up at the battles in the ceiling. Navis was up there, and a huge man who was supposed to be Alk, and a fierce-looking woman. Was she the Countess? She did look a bit like a horse. And now Maewen knew whom to look for, she could spot Kialan and Ynen, neither of them much like themselves—and the young man with red hair, carrying a cwidder and half hidden behind a troop of horses, was surely intended to be Moril, and that was nothing like him. She still had no idea who the savage type in fur was, down in the South.

There was no real portrait of Mitt, she knew that now. All the same, she went on into the polished room where the pictures hung. It was full of people, large men from Haligland, who all looked a bit like Kialan, talking foreign talk and wearing silly national-dress kilts and badges—a convention of some kind. Maewen pushed among them with urgent curiosity. Here were the two old, old portraits of the Adon—quite right: One said it was from Holand, the other from Aberath—and both were startlingly like Mitt, or rather, like Mitt painted by someone who had not got it quite right. She could see why Mitt might not want his portrait painted. That bony, ill look. Or was that the reason?

But here was Navis as Duke of Kernsburgh, staring keen and haughty over his shoulder. The artist had got Navis to the life. And round here was Moril. Moril looked more than betrayed. He looked heartbroken. Maewen wondered whether he ever got over what Hestefan had done. She rather thought not. It was funny, though, because it was not that Moril had been so enormously fond of Hestefan. No, she thought, as her eye fell on the cwidder in the picture; it was because they were both Singers. If you were a Singer, there were things you just did not do.

Maewen pushed between two broad backs from Haligland to look at the real cwidder in its glass case. Yes. It really was Moril’s. And it had looked so much newer and more used when she last saw it. Shame that a thing of such power should lie crumbling in a glass case. But though her name was Singer, Maewen knew she had not the least chance of using it as it could be used. Shame. Waste.