The Crown of Dalemark (38 page)

“This won't do,” Mitt said at last.

“No,” Kialan agreed. He nudged Moril with his boot. “Moril, do the Singers have any sayings that might help us find the crown?”

Moril looked up. His face was full of a kind of nervous awe. “You want to go and get it now?”

Everyone stared at him.

“I've been walking around,” he said, “trying to work it out. I
think
the cwidder will do it. We have to go to the waystone.”

Everyone sprang up. “Why didn't you
say
?” Ynen cried out.

“I second that,” said Navis.

“Leave him be,” Kialan said, as they all raced down the hummock. “He's like that. One of us should have asked him before.”

They raced past the hobbled horses, where the hearthwomen were fixing bayonets to long guns. Mitt knew how they felt. Every one of the women was trying to pretend this was just a training exercise, and very much hoping that was all it would turn out to be. As they ran on, more hearthmen sprang up alertly from among the green humps and then subsided, seeing they were not being attacked. Further heads reared up from across the green road and disappeared, as the eight of them gathered round the waystone.

“What do we do?” said Kialan.

“Go through,” said Moril. “I think.” He knelt down and carefully put his face to the impossibly small hole in the middle of the waystone.

“Look any different through there, does it?” Mitt asked hopefully.

“No,” Moril said, crawling away backward. He slung the cwidder round to the front of him and stripped off its cover, thinking hard.

“I don't wish to cast a blight, lad,” said Alk, “but not even young Ynen is going to get through there.”

Moril frowned. “I know. I wish I could think how—”

“Wait a minute,” Maewen interrupted.

As she spoke, there was a yell and a splatter of gunfire from the mounds over to the right. Here comes the frantic bit, Mitt thought.

“Uh-oh,” said Alk.

Luthan's curvaceous face went a little less pink. “My sector,” he said and went dashing away.

“Good,” said Maewen. “Moril, in the time I come from, this waystone is as tall as a house—and I think the hole is lower down. Does that help?”

Moril's white face lifted to her. “Yes. That's a truth.” He put his fingers to the strings of the cwidder and bent his head. Mitt, now he knew a little about the working of the cwidder, could feel Moril concentrate and the power begin to build. He knelt beside him, as if that could help.

There was another shot and a great deal of yelling, fierce and strident, from over to the left. Alk flinched in that direction and turned back. “I'd better go,” he said. “That's my part. Here, Mitt. Here's a keepsake for you. Catch.” He tossed Mitt something small and round and heavy.

Mitt was just in time to catch it. “What's this, then?”

“Told you I made a copy of the Adon's ring,” Alk called over his shoulder. “Put it on. I may have a hole in me like that waystone when you see me next.”

Mitt gave the ring a distracted look and shoved it on his nearest finger. Moril had begun to play, rippling music like waves from a stone dropped in water, expanding and expanding, and rippling again. The waystone looked no different, but Mitt could feel the solid booming beneath the ripples, and strange, shrill stretching sounds buried in it, that told him that something was happening. Counterpoint against the music came more shots and clamor, this time from behind.

Navis looked over his shoulder. “Now I must go. You young ones find that crown, and we'll cover your backs.”

“But you'll need me,” Mitt said, half getting up.

Navis put a hand on his shoulder and held him down. “Not yet. You go. Luck ship and shore.”

A strange thing to say, Maewen thought. She looked back at the waystone and saw the impossible sight of Moril stepping through the hole in the center, carefully holding his cwidder. The waystone looked no larger. Moril looked no smaller. Yet he stepped through, and there was no sign of him on the other side. Ynen hopped eagerly through after him, and he disappeared, too. Then Kialan stooped to follow. He was so much bigger that Maewen held her breath. But Kialan stepped through as calmly and easily as if he did this impossible thing every day. Mitt went next, in a gawky scramble of elbows and long legs. By this time the yelling and the gunshots were coming from all round. As Maewen bent down to follow Mitt, there were white puffs of smoke coming from every mound she could see. She saw the hearthwomen in the center grimly getting on their horses.

A strange voice behind her yelled,
“Charge! Come on, charge them!”

Maewen had no time to think that the hole was too small. She simply scrambled through it, and was barely surprised to find that it was easy.

20

Maewen had a glimpse of Kialan and Ynen following Moril down a silent golden street, casting blue-black shadows as they went. There was a warm sun and a feeling of humming peace in this place. But Maewen could clearly hear screams and shots and crashing in the distance all round. The battle was only a hair-breadth away. She knew it could come bursting through Moril's paper-thin enchantment any second. When someone came at her sideways in another long indigo shadow, it was just like Gardale again. She put her hands to her face and screamed.

“Hush!” Mitt said, giving her a shake.

It was only Mitt, who had waited for her. Maewen knew this, but still she whimpered and sobbed.

Mitt shook her harder. “Will you hush! Moril made this out of
sounds
, don't you understand! You're going to break it if you carry on. What are you, a baby?”

Maewen pulled herself together. “Of course I'm not a baby. I'm thirteen. It was just the battle out there.”

“Thirteen? Really?” Mitt found this wonderful and remarkable. He had been thinking of Maewen as the same age as Noreth, and here she was younger than he was! It seemed to turn everything round. As they set off to follow the others, Mitt slid his hand carefully down Maewen's arm and took hold of her hand. It was the most momentous and the most exciting thing he had ever done in his life.

Click!

“Snap!” said Maewen, as Mitt swung their joined hands up to see what the noise was. They both laughed. On Maewen's thumb and Mitt's forefinger were two identical gold bands and two identical gloomy profiles carved out of what seemed exactly the same kind of red stone. “Alk's copy?” Maewen asked.

“Yes. He made it to fit himself by the size of it,” Mitt said.

After that it became a more normal thing to hold hands. They walked on, following the square gold-yellow stones of what seemed to be a street. Everywhere was misty, white mist with the sun in it, and the other three were out of sight ahead by then. But there seemed nowhere else for them to have gone except along the street.

At first there appeared to be houses on either side, though these were fuzzed out above the first story by the mist. But after a while they seemed to have come into a garden or a parkland. There was a feeling of openness. Delicate trees spread green-gold branches in the mist, and others were spires and blocks of gold-dark. It seemed moist underfoot. Maewen thought she could hear birds, but when she listened, they were somehow out of hearing. Seabirds? Mitt thought. Land birds? There were smells, too, delicately scrawled on the air. Mitt's head came up at the smell: the peat smell of the North, of a distant farm, the hot tang of the South, water lazily running, and even, amazingly, the far-off salt of the sea. This was a smell he had once thought of as home. Nearby, willows were budding.

It can't be this wet here! Mitt thought. But it was, secretly. The scent was conveying him the secret that under Kernsburgh the rock was porous and riddled with channels of water flowing down to the sea. Then they can sink wells, he thought with some relief. It had worried him slightly that Kernsburgh did not seem to have a water supply. He found himself saying to Maewen, “There's going to be war and fighting for the next two years.”

“They can't do much rebuilding till that's over,” she agreed.

“They can make a start. That's not what I meant,” Mitt said. “I meant it was all building to war when I left the South, and I get the feeling I'm going to have to be part of it, but I don't like to think of you getting hurt in it.”

“I don't want to be left out,” Maewen said.

“But you don't like war,” Mitt pointed out. “What I mean is, you might stay here and start the building.”

“Only if you promise to come back and see me after the war,” Maewen said. “I'll come after you if you don't.”

“All right,” said Mitt. “I promise. In two years.” In the strange scented gold mist it did not seem ridiculous to talk of these things.

“I'll hold you to that,” Maewen said, laughing.

They wandered on. Shortly they came out into a wide golden courtyard where they found the other three, none of whom seemed to notice that Mitt and Maewen must have come by a side way. Ynen was pointing to a statue on a pedestal.

“Ours are the only shadows, here,” he said. “Look.”

He was right. All their shadows were long and blue-black. The statue ought to have laid a zigzag shadow up a flight of stairs, but it did not. Moril stumbled on the stairs because they were so hard to see. Kialan caught his elbow to stop him falling, all in a crisscross of inky shadows, and accidentally jarred the cwidder. It sang out melodiously. The sound seemed to shake the entire place. Everything blurred. For a moment, even the inky shadows were faint. Nobody dared breathe. They all stood still until the sound died and the faint golden buildings came back.

The tall building at the head of the steps, though it was lost upward into mist, was remarkably like the Tannoreth Palace. Like, but quite unlike, too, Maewen realized, staring up at it while the others tiptoed gently up the steps. It had almost no windows, and its roof was supported on mighty pillars shaped like buds—long whorled buds, like the ones on magnolias—and yet it had the same shape and gave her the same feel as the palace she knew. She climbed the difficult steps on cautious, whispering feet and joined the others in the long gold-stone tunnel.

They trod forward as gently as they could, all horribly aware that this palace of gold was only the most fragile illusion. The stony air from the tunnel made both Ynen and Mitt want to cough. Neither of them dared make that much noise, and they had to keep clearing their throats as gently as they could. Then the tunnel branched.