The Dalemark Quartet: The Crown of Dalemark

MITT HAD TO SET out for Adenmouth without seeing Alk again. The Countess had obviously given strict orders. He was roused before dawn, and fed, and pushed to the stables as the sun rose, where he found the Armsmaster waiting for him in a very bad temper. Mitt sighed and watched every buckle, pouch and button being checked, and then every scrap of tack on the horse. He had had some idea of hanging his belt, with the sword on one side and the dagger on the other, up on a nail and then forgetting it accidentally on purpose. But there was no question of that with an angry Armsmaster standing over him.

“I’m not going to have you let me down in front of potty little Adenmouth,” the Armsmaster said as Mitt mounted.

Mitt rather hoped the horse would try to take a bite out of the Armsmaster, the way it always did with anyone else, but of course, it did not dare, any more than Mitt did. “I wish you’d let me take a gun,” Mitt said. “I can use a gun. I’d let you down with a sword for sure.”

His idea was that it would be much easier to shoot this Noreth from a distance than to get close up the way you had to with a sword. But that idea died at the look on the Armsmaster’s face. “Nonsense, boy! Guns here have to be smuggled in from the South. Think I’d trust you with something that expensive? And sit up straight! You look like a sack of flour!”

Mitt straightened his back and clopped angrily through the gate. He could use a gun, and care for it too. Mitt’s stepfather, Hobin, made the best guns in Dalemark. But nothing ever seemed to convince the Armsmaster of this. “Yes, sir, goodbye, sir. Good riddance, sir,” he said, raising one smartly gloved hand when he was too far away to be caught.

He clopped through the streets of the town, all hung with decorations for the feast he was having to miss, and up along the top of the cliffs, where the sun was a gold eye opening between heavy grey eyelids of sea and sky, and looked down on the boatsheds at the cliff foot as he went. One of those sheds hid the battered blue pleasure boat they had arrived in: Mitt, Hildy, Ynen and Navis. Ynen’s boat. And the Countess had started plotting from that moment on. Today Mitt found he was angry about it, very angry. And the odd thing about being angry was that it seemed to break through the walls that had seemed to hem him in yesterday and give him space to hope. He was going to see Navis. Navis was Ynen’s father and a cool customer, and he would think of something. Navis was used to dealing with earls’ plots, being the son of an earl himself.

Thinking of Navis, then of Ynen, Mitt rode between the sea and the steep fields on the hills above, where people were scrambling to scrape in a crop of hay despite its being a feast day. Ynen was younger than Mitt, but Mitt had nevertheless come to admire him more than he admired anyone else. Ynen was – steadfast – that was the word. His sister, Hildy, on the other hand …

After first Navis, then Ynen had left Aberath, Hildy and Mitt had been together there another short month, while Hildy was coached by the Countess’s law-woman in law, geometry, history, and the Old Writing, so that she could pass into the great Lawschool in Gardale. That way, as she told Mitt, she could always earn her living. Nobody was more respected than a lawyer. Hildy was inclined to patronise Mitt, just a little, as Mitt struggled simply to read and write along with all the other duties of a hearthman-in-training. “I’ll send you letters,” Hildy had promised, when she went away, “to help with your reading.” The trouble was, she kept her promise.

Her first letters were carefully printed and quite full of news. The next few were dashed off, with an air of duty about them. Around then Mitt had learnt enough to be able to write back. Hildy had answered several of his letters with one of her own, carefully, point by point, but she had been quite unable to resist correcting his spelling. Mitt had kept writing – there had been a lot to tell – but Hildy’s letters had become ever briefer and further apart, and each one was harder to understand than the last. Mitt had waited well over a month for Hildy’s latest letter. And what came was:

Dear Mitt,

This grittling the boys on fayside were at trase with peelers, would you believe! They had sein right too, so it was all kappin and no barlay. We only had mucks. But Biffa was our surnam and you should have seen the hurrel. Now highside is doggers and we have herison from scap to lengday, and everyone looks up to us although we are to be stapled for it. In haste to trethers.

It was like a message from the moon. It hurt Mitt badly. Hildy and he had had little enough in common anyway, and now Hildy was making it clear that this little was gone. After that letter Mitt had told himself he did not care what became of Hildy, and then Earl Keril came along and forced him to behave as if he did care. As he rode on, he tried to tell himself that he was being noble about Hildy. This was not true. He did not want Hildy hurt, not when she was evidently having fun for the first time in her life.

The sun came up higher. People began passing Mitt on their way to the feasting at Aberath, calling out in the free way of the North that Mitt was going the wrong way, wasn’t he? Mitt called jokes in reply and urged his horse on. The horse, as usual, had other ideas. It kept trying to go back to Aberath. Mitt cursed it. He had a very bad relationship with this horse. His private name for it was The Countess. It held its head sideways like she did, and walked in the same jerky way, and it seemed to dislike Mitt as much as the real Countess did. They came to the place where the road forked, a rutty track going along the coast to Adenmouth and a wider and even ruttier one winding back right into the mountains at the heart of the earldom. People were streaming down this wider road and turning along the way Mitt had come, and the horse tried to turn back with them. Mitt wrestled its head round on to the Adenmouth road and kicked its sides to make it go.

Hot and annoyed, Mitt looked round to find a boy on an unkempt horse turning out of the main road after him. Another hearthman, by the look of the faded livery. Mitt did not feel like company, but people in the North never seemed to feel you might want to be alone, and it was a fact that the Countess-horse went better for a lead. So, as the two horses slid and stamped in the ruts, Mitt said a little grudgingly, “Going to Adenmouth, hearthman.”

“Good! Me too,” said the lad. He had a long, freckled face with a sort of eager look to it. “Rith,” he introduced himself. “Out of Dropwater.”

Rith laughed as they set off side by side up the narrower road. “Great One! You’ve come even further than I have!” he said. “What’s a Southerner doing this far North?”

“Came by boat – we went where the wind took us,” Mitt explained. “I think we missed Kinghaven in the night somehow. How come you knew I was a Southerner? My accent that bad still?”

Rith laughed again and pushed at the fair, frizzy hair that stuck out all round his steel cap. “That and your looks. The straight hair. But it’s the name that’s the clincher. Dropwater’s full of Southern fugitives, and they all answer to Mitt, or Al, or Hammitt. I’m surprised the South’s not empty by now, the way you all come to the North. Been here long?”

“Froze! I nearly died!” said Mitt. “I never saw icicles before, let alone snow. And when they first brought the coal in to make a fire, I thought they were going to build something. I didn’t know stones could burn.”

“Charcoal – for those that could afford it,” Mitt said. “At least that’s what they used in Holand, where I come from.”

By this time Mitt had forgotten he had wanted to be alone. They rode with the sea sparkling on one side and the hills climbing on the other, under the douce Northern sun, talking and laughing, while the Countess-horse followed Rith’s travel-stained little mount as smoothly as its jerky gait would allow. Rith was good company. He seemed genuinely interested to know what Mitt thought of the North now he was here. Mitt was a bit wary at first. He had found that most Northerners did not like criticism. “It’s this porridge they all eat I can’t stand,” he said jokingly. “And the superstition.”

“What superstition?” Rith said innocently. “You mean, like the Holanders throw their Undying in the sea every year?”

“And you lot put bowls of milk out for yours,” said Mitt. “Believe anything, these Northerners! Think the One’s a pussycat!”

Rith bowed on to his horse’s neck with laughter. “What else do we do wrong?” he said when he could speak. “I bet you think we’re inefficient, don’t you?”

“Well, you are,” said Mitt. “All runabout and talk and do nothing when a crisis happens.”

And he went on coaxing Mitt until Mitt at last came out with the real cause of his disappointment with the North. “They told me it was free here,” he said. “They told me it was good. I was badly enough off in the South, but beside some here I was rich – and idle. People are no more free here than – than—” He was trying to find a proper description when they came round a bend to find the road blocked house-high with earth and boulders. A stream sprayed from the top in a raw new waterfall and ran round their horses’ hooves. “This just about sums it up!” Mitt said disgustedly. “And your roads are all terrible!”

Rith laughed and dismounted. “Come on. This is hopeless. We’ll have to lead the horses uphill and come back to the road where it’s clear.”

Mitt slid down from the Countess-horse and discovered he was more than a little saddle-sore. Ow! he thought. I wonder my pants aren’t smoking! But he did not like to confess this to Rith, who had ridden all the way from Dropwater and was obviously a seasoned hearthman. A small, tough boy, Rith. When they were both on their feet, Rith only came up to Mitt’s shoulders. Makes me look a big booby if I moan, Mitt thought, and he set off dragging the Countess-horse up the hill after Rith. Both horses were huge, heavy and reluctant. Their hooves slid in the slippery grass. Mitt’s horse put its ears back and tried to bite him.

Rith broke into a panting laugh. “What a name! It’s a gelding. O-oh! Piper’s pants!”

Mitt dragged his horse up beside Rith’s. The hill, in the mysterious manner of hills, was twice as high as he had thought. Beyond and above them, it was a huge triangle of earthy boulders and trickling water, which had slid down across the road, blocking it for as far as they could see. At the lower edge of it, the sea twinkled, flat and impassable.

“We’d better go up over the hill,” Rith said. “I know the way. It’ll mean fording the Aden after we cross the green road, but it won’t be deep this high.”

So they struggled on upwards, about twice as high as they had already come, until they left the landslip behind and reached a squishy yellow-green shoulder, where Rith said they could ride again. Mitt nearly yelled as he kicked his way into the saddle. He was raw. But he did not like to mention it. He simply bore it, all the way through a long, marshy valley and then up an endless firm green slope, where they came to one of the things the Northerners called waystones. It was round, like a roughly shaped millstone set up on one edge, with a hole in the middle. Rith leant over and slapped the thing.

“For luck,” he said, grinning. “I’m a superstitious Northerner. I may ask the Wanderer’s blessing too, just to annoy you. There’s the Aden down there. What do you say we stop for some lunch?”

Mitt was only too glad to get down. He helped himself off by hanging on to the waystone, which was a way of touching it without seeming to. He knew he could do with some luck. And once he was down, he was so sore that he had to concentrate on small things, like stripping off his gloves and tucking them into the proper place on his belt, and hitching his horse to the waystone, where someone had tied a piece of red twine through the middle for the purpose. Then, moving in a careful, stiff-legged way, he unbuckled his baggage roll and got out the food they had given him. By then the agony had gone off enough for him to sit down beside Rith, bat the Countess-horse’s nose aside as it tried to eat his bread, and look at the view.

There were hills all around, yellow and green, with sunlight scudding over them in patches. The green way stretched from the waystone, very level and firm and dry, leading south into the mountainous heart of Dalemark, and the Aden rolled parallel with it about a hundred yards downhill from where they sat. It was a fine big river, wider than any Mitt had seen, and the way it rolled quietly along among all those reeds and willow trees suggested that it might be pretty deep. Mitt hoped Rith knew what he was talking about when he said they could ford it. He leant back and sniffed the smell of the river and willows mingling with the damp wild smell of heather and rock, the smell of the North, which Mitt still thought of as the smell of freedom in spite of his disillusionment with the North. Perhaps, he thought, not very hopefully, he would be stuck this side of the river and never get to Adenmouth at all. But that would be the worse for Hildy and Ynen.

“Just thinking,” Mitt said hurriedly. “What are these green roads? Who made them – really?”

“Kern Adon,” said Rith. “King Hern. They’re the roads of his old kingdom. That’s why they don’t go to places where people live any more. They say that Kern Adon set up the waystones and told the Wanderer to guard the roads, and if you follow them right, they say you arrive at King Hern’s city of gold.”

“Oh yes. They’re called that too,” said Rith. “My old nurse used to tell me that the Undying sit in the hole in the waystones. What do you think of that?”

Rith got very interested in this idea. “Then how big do you think the Undying are?” he kept saying, in the same coaxing way he had tried to get at Mitt’s opinion of the North. “I’ve never been able to decide. Do you think they’re made of something that isn’t as solid as we are, so that they can be of any size? Or what?”

These Northerners! Mitt thought. Rith was laughing, but he was serious too. They finished eating, and Mitt got up, rather reluctantly, to untie the Countess-horse.

“What size do you think?” Rith said, leading his horse downhill to the river.

“If you must know,” Mitt called over his shoulder, “they’re people-sized. It stands to reason.” He dragged the Countess-horse round to follow Rith. “How could—” He stopped and blinked.

There was no wide rolling river any more. Rith was on his way down to a sunken crease in the hillside that was choked with small oak trees. Mitt could hear water rushing among the trees.

“You’re probably right,” Rith called back, “though some of the things they do make them seem smaller. Come on. It really is quite shallow here.”

Mitt slowly followed him down among the oaks, wondering just what river it was that he had seen. There was no question in his mind that the real Aden was the yelling, stony stream in front of him now, glinting bright coins of sunlight under the trees. Rivers in the North always seemed to crouch like this one along dips in the hills. And he had not seen a single willow tree since he left the South. Shivers ran down his back, and he approached the brawling little Aden very cautiously indeed.

So did the Countess-horse. At the edge of the water it put its ears back, braced its hooves, and refused to move. Mitt called it names.

“I’ll give you a lead,” said Rith. He stepped into the shrilling water, which proved to be only a few inches deep, and waded carefully, watching the stones in the bottom, until he and his horse had become dark shadows, patterned with sun between the oak leaves.

At this point the Countess-horse found it preferred not to be left behind and took off suddenly after Rith, dragging Mitt in sheets of bright water. Mitt kept hold of the reins and managed to stay on his feet until he was halfway across, where his foot turned heavily on something that flashed in the sun.

Rith called out, “Look there!” in a surprisingly deep, strong voice, and dived towards Mitt.

It was all sun-patterned wet confusion. Both horses got away, and Mitt sat down with a splash. Rith plunged his hands down where Mitt’s feet had been and stood up triumphantly holding something that shone. Water poured off his elbows as he held it out for Mitt to see.

Mitt floundered to his knees. The thing had evidently once been a little statue – a figurine, Mitt thought the word was. As Rith turned it round, Mitt could see traces of a face and the folds of a robe on the side that was green with river slime. The other side was grated and scratched all over, and that side shone a pure buttery yellow. Mitt in his time had worked enough inlay into gun handles to know what that meant. “It’s solid gold!” he said.

“I think it is,” Rith said. He sounded awestruck. “Who found it? You or me?”

Rith turned the dripping statuette round again. “I wish I could be sure— Look, may I keep it for now and give you your share when I’ve got it?”

If Mitt had not been so saddle-sore, he might have argued. But the cold water was smarting him like acid, and he could think of almost nothing else. “Fine,” he gasped, and splashed his way across to the far bank, where the horses were standing head to tail, looking pleased with themselves. Rith followed, stowing the wet figurine in the front of his jacket.

“You’re being very generous,” he said several times, as they mounted and rode on. “You really mean I can keep it for now?” He was evidently feeling a strange mixture of doubt and elation, but then anyone would, Mitt thought, who had just picked up a pound of solid gold. He thought Rith was nice to be so bothered about it. All through the next hour or so Rith was either exclaiming at the amazing chance that had led them to that spot or asking Mitt if he really minded waiting for his share. “If it hadn’t been for that landslide,” he said, “we’d never have come this way. Look, are you really sure?”

Mitt got increasingly gruff with him. Mitt’s leathers were wet through and rubbing his soreness until he was convinced he was being flayed. Besides, he thought angrily, the way he was caught in the earls’ plotting, he couldn’t see himself having much use for gold or anything else shortly. He wished Rith would shut up. By the late afternoon, when the sea came into view again blue and crisp to northwards, Mitt was wanting to scream at Rith – and he might have done had they not come out on a headland overlooking Adenmouth to find themselves looking down on an accident.

A Singer’s cart had overturned on the bridge below. The bridge had no sides, and the horse that had pulled the cart was dangling struggling in the Aden. Mitt saw someone pulling uselessly at the horse. A girl lay on the bank as if she might be dead.

“Come on!” shouted Rith, and his shaggy horse was off down the hill as if it was aiming to end in the river too.

Mitt followed as fast as the Countess-horse would let him, which was not very fast. The hill was extremely steep. Even Rith slowed down halfway, but this was probably because he could see that help was on its way. They could see into a long green valley to one side, where a party of people were running from one of the farms. More people were running across a second bridge, from Adenmouth itself, and a horseman was galloping ahead of them.

Everyone converged on the bridge, but the horseman got there first. He was a hearthman in Adenmouth livery. As the Countess-horse slithered cautiously down the last slope, Mitt saw the horseman leap to the ground, thrust his reins into the hands of the red-headed Singer’s boy, and run towards the struggling horse. There he took one look, cocked his pistol, and shot the horse through the head.

Mitt and Rith came down to the bridge while the horse was still jerking. The bang rang in Mitt’s ears like the memory of his worst dreams. The white staring face of the Singer-boy looked just like he felt.

The hearthman turned from slashing at the traces that held the dead horse. Mitt almost laughed. It was Navis. It would be. “Hello,” he said.

Navis nodded at him in his cool way. “You see to that girl,” he said to Rith. “I think she’s alive. Mitt, you help me cut this horse loose.”

As the two of them dismounted, Mitt noticed the Singer himself wandering about on the bank, carefully laying out musical instruments from the overturned cart. A dreamy-looking fellow with a grey beard. Mitt ignored the Singer as useless and hobbled over to Navis, while Rith sprinted to where the Singer-girl was sitting up, holding her head.

“Get your knife out and cut here, then here,” Navis said. He did not seem in the least surprised at seeing Mitt there. His attention was mostly on the accusing yellow-white face of the Singer-boy. “Your horse had broken two legs – look,” he said to the boy. “There was nothing else to be done.”

“I just wish mine would do that too!” Mitt said, to make him feel better. “Mine’s a right brute.”

The boy simply stared at him. “Southerner,” he said. “You both are.” He turned his back and led Navis’s mare to the other side of the road.

Navis glanced at Mitt. “There’s a lot of prejudice,” he said. “Now cut here.” Mitt slashed away angrily. Cool, cool Navis. He had forgotten just how cool.

By the time they had cut the horse loose, the people from the farm and the town had arrived. There was a lot of typically Northern milling about and talking. The chief talker was a lad from the farm, who wanted everyone to know how quickly he had gone for help to the mansion and what the lady Eltruda had said to him. But amid all this there was unnoticed efficiency. In less than a minute many hands had heaved the neat green cart upright and Mitt was able to read the gold lettering on its side.

He was standing beside Mitt with a cwidder in one hand and a fife in the other. Mitt was embarrassed. He had only said it aloud because he still found it easier to read that way. Now he felt he had to say something. “How did you get past the landslip on the road?” he asked.

Mitt gave him up again and turned to Rith, who said in a worried whisper, “I think that girl, Fenna, has really hurt her head. Can you help me get her on a horse?”

The Countess-horse was at that moment demonstrating that it was not carriage-trained. They had tried to back it into the shafts of the cart, where it divided its attention between trying to take bites out of anyone near and attempts to kick the splashboard in. Mitt ran and hauled it clear. “You good-for-nothing Countess, you!” He dragged it over to the injured girl, where the Singer-boy held it while Mitt and Rith heaved Fenna into its saddle. The chattering crowd seized Rith’s horse and backed that into the cart instead. Nobody thought of using the beautiful mare that belonged to Navis. Typical of Navis, that, Mitt thought, taking the reins from the boy. The lad looked as ill as Fenna. “Want me to boost you up behind her, Moril?” Mitt asked. He had gathered the boy’s name was Moril.

“All right. Be like that then!” Mitt said to his back. All this running about made his backside feel as if it was on fire. It got worse when he set off leading the horse into Adenmouth. Fenna had to nudge him with her foot before Mitt noticed she was trying to speak to him.

Mitt looked up. She was pale, but she was dark and pretty, and she spoke with just a trace of a Southern accent, which made him try to smile at her. “Sorry. What?”

“Don’t think too hard of Moril, sir,” Fenna said. “He loved our old horse. And I heard tell he had another horse killed by Southerners last year.”

Well, he’s no call to take it out on me! Mitt thought. But he said politely, “Heard tell? I thought he was your brother.”

“Oh no, sir,” Fenna said. “Moril is Clennen the Singer’s son. He’ll be a great Singer himself before long.”

Rith grinned at Mitt round the nose of the Countess-horse. “These artists! You can tell what they’re like from the red hair. Sit straight, Fenna, or you’ll fall off.”

It was not far to Adenmouth, just across another bend in the Aden, which then poured noisily past low grey houses crowded at the edge of a cove. Mitt was glad. By the time they had gone up the main street to the mansion, he was not sure he could have walked another step. Their arrival caused much confusion, for a good hundred more people came out of the houses to see what was wrong and then followed them into the courtyard of the mansion, where rows of trestle tables that had been set up for the Midsummer Feast all had to be moved to make way for the cart.

Lady Eltruda was out on the hall steps, bellowing instructions in a voice like the Armsmaster’s. “Navis!” she yelled. “Get that thing through to the stables! Spannet, fetch the lawman! You!” she screamed at Mitt. “You in the Aberath livery! Bring that poor girl to me!”

Before Mitt could move, Rith was dragging Fenna and the Countess-horse towards the steps, zigzagging between tables and shouting back. “Aunt! Aunt! I’m here! I got here, and I got my sign!”

At this Lady Eltruda dashed down the steps, yelling, “Noreth, my dove! Noreth!” and flung her arms round Rith.