11

Moril picked up his cwidder, carefully so as not to wet it on his clothes. “Can you read what it says on the front of it?”

There were swirls and dots there, made of mother-of-pearl, inlaid on either side of the strings. Mitt recognized it as the Old Writing, but that was all. “Not me,” he said. “It takes me all my time to read the usual stuff.”

“I can’t read it either,” Moril confessed. “But I was told that one bit says, ‘I sing for Osfameron’—and that’s my name, along with Tanamoril—and this other bit says, ‘I move in more than one world.’”

“What’s this?” said Mitt. “You mean we’re in another world!”

“I … don’t know,” Moril admitted. “You always have to tell the truth with the cwidder. It works on how you think when you play it.”

“Then let’s get at what we were both thinking,” Mitt suggested. He looked at the water boiling round the front of the boulder. “You were thinking I want this Southerner drowned deep. That right?”

Moril ducked his wet head uncomfortably. “Not quite. At least, I was probably meaning the sea. I was thinking, Let this Southerner go back where he came from, and I knew you came by sea—”

“How?” Mitt demanded.

“I heard about you in Lavreth last spring,” said Moril. “It’s all round the North that a Southerner came north by the wind’s road with the Undying before and behind to guard him. Singers call the sea the wind’s road in a lot of the old songs.”

“I never knew that!” Mitt said. “And it’s true, too, in a way!”

“They told me in Adenmouth that you were the one,” Moril told him, “and I didn’t like you because I could see you had something bad on your mind.”

Mitt shivered. He was beginning to feel awed by Moril’s perceptiveness, not to speak of that cwidder of his. A dangerous enemy, Moril, if they hadn’t both chanced to get themselves into this mess together. “Stuck out like a sore thumb, did it?” he said ruefully. “You’d think I’d do better than that after a lifetime of guilty secrets. All right. So you wanted me back at sea.”

“And you hit the strings, too, and we were both in this river. What were you thinking?” Moril asked.

Mitt stood up and scowled at ribbons of foam tearing backward from the nearest jagged rock. He was fairly sure that he would not have been so blindly furious with Moril if he had not been feeling so trapped himself. Then Moril had brought it all to a head by asking, “Didn’t someone order you to suck up to her?” That had brought two pictures into Mitt’s mind. One was of the Countess, sitting upright in her chair, making it clear that Mitt had to do what Keril wanted. The other was of Alk, bulging out of that selfsame chair, turning the whole thing round with that promise, making Mitt feel just as trapped, because the One was supposed to have an interest.

“In a funny way,” he said, “I may have been thinking about the One. That’s where I was at when my hand hit, anyway.”

Moril tipped his face up. His eyes were squinted with dismay. “You were? Then we’ve gone back into the One’s river, before he destroyed Kankredin. I hope he’s not too angry.”

“You mean we’re back in history?” Mitt demanded. “Or dead, really?”

“More like … the place in the stories where the One really is, I think,” Moril said doubtfully. “It’s hard to explain, but the other world the cwidder moves in is the place where the stories are.”

Mitt looked again at the torrent tearing past their boulder and thought that he had seldom seen anything more real. Equally real were his steaming, clammy clothes. He had a notion that the One was taking the opportunity to point out that he was real, too. No wonder Alk had been so cautious. “Then we get back by apologizing and asking the One to let us go?” he said.

Moril nodded, looking as sober as Mitt felt. “I’ll ask, if you like, because I know the way. You get ready to hit the strings in the same place as you did when I nod.”

“I don’t know where I did hit!” said Mitt. “And it won’t do to get it wrong, will it?”

“You hit the lowest string,” said Moril. “This one—it’s always the dangerous one—and I wasn’t touching it, because I didn’t want to kill you or anything, but I heard it sound. Just pluck it, with one finger when I say.”

Mitt put forth one doubtful finger and knelt ready. Moril seemed to settle himself—no, it was not simply that. Mitt could feel the power building in the cwidder. It hummed along his shaking finger. He felt even more awed by the thing.

Moril drew a big breath and spoke in the strange formal way that Hestefan had used to invoke the Undying at Midsummer. “Great Grand Father of the golden bonds, Unbound and Undying, understand my asking. Hear and help. History’s flood took us and tore us from our traveling. Restore us to our own realm out of the river you made. Mitt and Moril ask this by Manaliabrid most humbly, and by Cennoreth, Clennen’s son begs you cast aside your anger.” He nodded at Mitt: now.

Mitt’s finger twanged the thickest string heartily. He thought he saw the way of this speech, and he could not resist doing it, too. “By the Adon and Alhammitt and his all-fruitful lady,” he said as he twanged.

Moril’s fingers made the rest of the sound. It was a many-toned roaring.

It seemed as if the sound of the river had increased, almost unbearably, to a sound that fogged their eyes as well as their ears. They felt the river was now thundering over a cliff in a waterfall, whose thunder gradually faded to a long, deep chord, and then a growling vibration. As the sound faded, it seemed to carry the river away with it. The water became foggy and quiet. The golden whiteness of the fog spread to the very riverbed, and for a second or so it was the great transparent ghost of a river, silently rushing over green ground. At the instant that Mitt realized that the green was really grass, the river was gone, except for the faintest vestige of that chord, still sounding and dragging on him like a current. During the next instant it took him to realize that the dragging was taking all the river with it, including the water that filled his boots and soaked his clothing. He was dry. So was Moril. Moril’s hair went from draggled brown to true red again. And though they were dry, though there was a little feeble sunlight on them, the air was so much colder that they were both still shivering.

From Maewen’s point of view, the river vanished as suddenly as it had come, leaving Mitt and Moril crouched on an outcrop of rock just across the green road. She was not sure whether to cheer or to run and shake them. It had been maddening watching them. All they seemed to do was sit on that rock in the river and talk for an hour. Maewen kept shouting to them. Navis had shouted, too, after he had rounded up Mitt’s horse, but the boys had taken no notice. Hestefan and Wend maddened her almost as much. Both shook their heads and said, “They’ll not hear from where they are.”

Moril and Mitt climbed off the rock and crossed the road, both looking self-conscious.

“So soon?” said Navis. “We were expecting to wait all night.”

Mitt tried to give him an explanation. It sounded lame and stupid to him, and he was glad when everyone was distracted from it by Hestefan. Hestefan seized Moril by one shoulder and ranted at him. He began in a low, penetrating voice. “This is neither the time nor the place for such tricks. We have a journey to go on, fellow travelers to consider, and a performance to give in Gardale.” His voice gradually increased as he went on to, “You could have spoiled your cwidder, or—worse!—lost it. You nearly stampeded the horses. You could have drowned us all!”

Everyone listened uncomfortably. Moril was staring at Hestefan as if he had never heard anything like this in his life, and that made it clear that this was not just a master giving his apprentice a dressing-down, but something more. Maewen could see that Hestefan had been terrified by the sudden river, and she supposed he was working it off on Moril. Then Hestefan’s voice increased again.

“Now give me your cwidder at once, and I shall lock it in the chest until you are old enough to be trusted with it.”

Moril clutched the cwidder and stepped backward. “No. You’ve no right—”

“I have every right!” Hestefan enlarged his voice as only a Singer could. It rang in the rocks. “My apprentice has been fooling with something too powerful for his years. You have no notion what that cwidder is!”

“Yes, I have,” Moril said, dogged and white. “And it belonged to my father, not to you. You’ve no right to take it away.”

Mitt felt he had better intervene. “Now look. He didn’t do any harm with it.”

Hestefan ignored Mitt. “Give me the cwidder here,” he said, and held his hand out sternly for it.

“There’s no need—” Mitt tried to say.

But at this point Navis intervened, too. He came up beside Moril and said, in his most sarcastic way, “Is it possible the master envies his apprentice? Surely not?”

Hestefan turned and glared at Navis.

Wend looked urgently at Maewen. “Lady!”

Maewen had been feeling like she did in school, watching one of the teachers tell off someone else in her class. Hestefan was so very much like Dr. Loviath that she could not help it. And of course, if a teacher decides to tell someone off, no one else in the class dreams of interfering. Wend’s look made her realize that it was not like this at all. She tried to gather her wits.

“Stop it,” she said to Navis. “Er—Hestefan, I’m not sure this is right. Moril told me this morning that it was your daughter, Fenna, who was indentured to you, not him. He said he came with you from his own choice. Doesn’t that make him your—er—colleague instead of your apprentice?”

“Well yes,” Hestefan said, very displeased. “But considering his years and his actions, common law would hardly make that distinction.”

That displeased look made him so like Dr. Loviath that Maewen had to fight herself not to agree humbly. As so often happens, she found herself going too far the other way. “But I’m the leader,” she said, “and I say he isn’t really your apprentice. So I say you can’t take his cwidder away even if he did something—er—rather mad with it.”

“That was my fault, too,” Mitt put in, but in a very gruff and unfriendly way. He was having trouble even looking at Noreth after what Moril had said.

Hestefan lifted his chin and jutted his beard at Maewen.

A black mark and detention! Maewen thought. And Mitt glowering, too. If you’re a leader, everyone hates you. So will Moril after this. “And, Moril, you were trying to hurt Mitt with that cwidder, weren’t you?”

Any other boy would have protested that Mitt was bigger than he was. Moril impressed Maewen by just saying, “Yes.”

She felt like a beast, but she was launched on her way now and found she had to go on. “Then, until we get to Gardale, someone else is going to take charge of it. Moril, will you give your cwidder to Wend, please?”

It was hard to tell if Moril, Wend, or Hestefan was more surprised. Hestefan turned away and climbed into the cart, still jutting his beard. Moril at first clutched the cwidder closer. Then, with a glance at Mitt that certainly meant something, he passed the beautiful gleaming instrument over to Wend. Wend took it so reverently that it seemed to slide into his hands. He hung the worn leather strap across his shoulder and looked down at the cwidder as if it was a lamb he had just rescued from the snow. His left hand formed a chord on the strings as if it could not help itself. “May I?” he asked Moril.

“If you can,” Moril said. “I’ll fetch you the case.”

Wend’s right hand played on the strings as if it were stroking the lamb’s head. He only played a sequence of chords and arpeggios, but he became a new person doing it. His face came alive, into a slight, rapt smile, full of thoughts and energies that had not been there before. The way he stood altered, to accommodate the cwidder, into the stance of someone much stronger. For the first time since Maewen had met him, he looked happy. Oddly enough, that made him look ten times more dangerous, too.

Why couldn’t he be like that all the time? Maewen wondered as she turned away to mount her horse again at last. Instead of trying to pretend he was not an Undying among all us dying-people? She tried to catch Mitt’s eye to see what he thought, but Mitt was raw with shame about that word jealous, and he turned away quickly. Hestefan gave her an unloving look from the seat of the cart.

Two black marks and a whole week in detention! Maewen thought. She thought Navis was right. Hestefan had wanted Moril’s cwidder. As they rode on, she found herself wondering why Hestefan had chosen to follow Noreth if he disliked her so much.

The handing over of the cwidder had a surprising effect on Moril. While Wend strode along, looking strong and different, Moril behaved like a boy let out of school. He went scampering along beside Mitt’s horse, shouting cheeky remarks up at Mitt. Mitt answered the same way, and both of them laughed themselves silly. After a while they began taking turns to ride, with a lot more silly laughter when the Countess-horse tried to throw Moril off.

Maewen rode out ahead, feeling lonely and unloved, listening to the pair of them laughing in the foggy distance behind. I suppose owning a thing like that cwidder is a big responsibility, she thought, but she had a stupid, hypersensitive feeling that Moril and Mitt were fooling about because of her. I was told to come here and be the leader, she thought. No need to be paranoid.

As if that word had triggered it off, the deep voice spoke to her, at her ear in the gathering fog. “You did well not to let the Singer get his hands on the cwidder,” it said.

Maewen’s hands shook on the reins. She had known that the voice would catch her alone sooner or later. Was it the One? Somehow, because it was telling her what she wanted to hear, she doubted it. After seeing that sudden mighty river, she had a feeling that the One was more likely to tell her something unexpected that she did not want to know about at all. No. It was some kind of ghostly effect of her own mind on the green road.

“You will need that cwidder, and the Singer-boy to play it,” the voice continued, “when you come to find the crown.”

Maewen had not meant to answer, but she found herself saying, “And what about the cup and the sword?”

“The Southerner can steal both of those for you,” said the voice.

“Oh? Can he? Just like that?” Maewen said.

“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.