WHEN THEY CAMPED that night, Wend said that Gardale was only a mile or so away, below in a valley they could not see.

It was odd, Maewen thought, that it had taken all this time to get that near, even coming straight through the centre of the mountains. When she had driven here with Aunt Liss, it had only taken four hours, and that was with a detour on the way to look at Hannart. Her sense of distance was all confused.

Her sense of everything was all confused. She was dreading Gardale. Mitt was still being so distant and gruff that she knew she was not going to ask him to steal the Adon’s cup for her. And Moril was younger than she was, and she was not going to ask him either. She would have to do it herself. But she still felt hurt at the way Mitt was behaving. She wanted to apologise, although she had no idea what she had done to annoy him. Perhaps they should all just go away and not bother about the cup.

No. Out of this muddle of thoughts came one thing that was clear – probably. Maewen and Aunt Liss had done the usual tourist thing and seen round the college at Gardale, where the old Lawschool was. Part of the Lawschool was the Chapel of the One. There had been – would be – a cup on the altar there, with a notice saying that this was only a replica of the cup that had been stolen two hundred years before. So it looked as if she had stolen – would be going to have stolen – the darned thing. In a mad, circular way, that meant she had to go down into Gardale and steal it because she already had.

It came on to rain. Oh, I give up! she thought.

Moril and Hestefan had the best of it. They vanished into the cart. The others draped the oilskin covers off their baggage over three large rocks and crawled underneath, where they spent a hot and sticky night, steamily full of the plopping and thrumming of rain. It was so uncomfortable that everyone woke and crawled out again at dawn. The rain stopped and became thinning mist, almost mockingly.

Maewen was clammy all over, and itchy, and – well – plain dirty. She could smell herself. She wanted to clean her teeth. But nobody seemed to bother about tooth cleaning any more than they appeared to worry about baths. At that moment Maewen felt she would have given her left ear and probably several toes as well for a nice hot bath full of rose-scented bath oil. And there was not even a hairbrush in her baggage roll! While Navis was shaving and Hestefan was clawing the kinks out of his beard, Maewen did what she could by taking her hair down from the little helmet, shaking it out and scratching hard at her scalp. Her hair smelt awful, of horse mostly, but dirty human hair was part of the smell too.

“What wouldn’t I give for a bath!” she said as she crammed the helmet back on her head.

“Me too,” Mitt said, surprisingly, looking up from tightening the buckles on the Countess-horse. This was always a wary business, of circling and darting, in order not to get kicked or bitten, and he was glad to be distracted. “I never thought I’d live to hear myself say that,” he said. “But I got spoilt this last year in Aberath. Alk’s got the whole place mined through with lead pipes and a furnace down in the dungeons. Water comes out boiling.”

A chuckle rose up in Maewen’s throat. Things were all right again. Mitt was back in form. Now she could almost look forwards to Gardale.

Mitt kept talking about Alk as they wound their slow way down into the valley. It matched a tender place in his mind where that promise to Alk was. So he was not sure why he was suddenly so cheerful. Maybe it was that the fog had gone. You could see mountains navy blue against pink dawn, peak after peak, right away to far-off Mount Tanil, which had a quiet feather of smoke coming out of its pointed head. Near to, there was still no sign of a valley – only a chasm of dark blue emptiness with mist boiling up out of it as if there were a giant version of one of Alk’s Irons down there.

“I hear there’s this great huge steam organ they have in Hannart,” he remarked, as the roiling, rising mist put him in mind of it.

Maewen nodded. She had seen the carefully preserved remains of that organ on that trip with Aunt Liss.

Maybe, Mitt considered, it was the sight just now of Noreth with her hair down from her helmet in long, frizzy clouds. Like that, she was the young lady he had felt so respectful to in her aunt’s hall, so different and so far away from Mitt that it was silly to be awkward with her. Or maybe he was simply looking forward to seeing Hildy again.

The track that led down from the waystone was nothing like as grassy and well made as the green roads. Mostly it was rubble and raw earth and quite dangerously frayed at the edge of the great drop-off, where the mist heaved and rose. It led down in zigzags beside a furious stream of white water splayed over wet rocks, and at every hairpin bend, the cart threatened to come off and pitch into the depths. Hestefan led the mule. Everyone else took turns leaning on the outer side of the cart, boots braced in sliding gravel, either above white water or horrifying mist-filled steepness, helping to ease the cart round. When Maewen took her first turn, a nattering and honking above made her look up. There were white triangular splotches some bends overhead. The goosewoman seemed to have caught up.

The splotches and the noise came nearer every bend. “The geese get down here more easily,” Navis remarked to Mitt as they leant side by side against the gold letters. Mitt laughed, and hoped they would not have to meet the goose-lady again.

As they slowly descended the track, the white stream enlarged into a mountain river roaring on a bed of green rocks, under a cliff hung with holly trees and small perilous rowans. The mist continued boiling its way upwards as they went down. Somehow it had miraculously changed from mist to a proper cloud hovering against the upper crags. The sun caught it there and turned it to a cloud of gold film, with the green-black bones of the rock showing through. Everyone began to feel dry again at last.

About then Maewen caught sight of a woman standing on the other side of the loud green river. At least she thought she saw someone, between two of the rowan trees. But when she turned her head, there were only the two trees. She saw Mitt’s head jerk, as if he had seen someone there too. Then, as if he was struck by a sudden thought, Mitt turned his head back and up to look at the zigzags of the track above. Maewen looked too. There was nothing up there. No gaggle of geese, no woman driving them. She could not even hear the geese chatting any more.

They’re out of sight on a bend, she thought.

Mitt thought, Libby Beer! Now what’s she playing at?

Wend came hurrying down to the cart in a slide of small stones, unslinging the cwidder from his neck as he came. “Is it all right to give this back now?” he called to Maewen. “I’ll have to leave you for a while. I’ll wait for you by the waystone south of Gardale Valley.”

“Yes, I suppose so,” Maewen said, rather taken aback. “What if we take all day, though?”

“I’ll wait,” Wend promised, handing the cwidder to Moril. Moril settled it on his knees, and quite a weight of responsibility with it, from the look of him. They went on down. The last Maewen saw of Wend, before a shoulder of the hill hid him, he was leaping in great, splashing strides across the river.

Going to see that lady, Maewen thought. She was there, then.

At the next bend of the path Wend vanished from her mind. The path came out above the great green wedge shape of the Gardale Valley, with Gardale Town nestled into the pointed end just below them, seemingly at their toes, a mass of smoking chimney stacks. Maewen was astonished. She had known the place was bound to be smaller, but not this small! It was more like a large village than a town.

Two more turns of the road brought them into green meadows outside the town, and Maewen still marvelled. She knew it was absurd, but she had been expecting the high blocks of buildings and the tall shops she had seen on her visit with Aunt Liss. This Gardale was all low. The houses were all built of greenish stone, and none was more than three storeys high. The amount of smoke from all those chimneys astonished her. The track suddenly turned into a proper road paved with the same greenish stone and took them across a bridge over the same river, now flowing quietly and more brown than green, between stone walls where small boys sat fishing.

After that they were in the main street, and Maewen could hardly breathe. It’s like a foreign country! she thought. There were crowds of people. She had thought she had become used to being in the past. Now she knew she had only become used to the people travelling with her and the way those five people dressed and talked. Everyone who crowded the street here seemed to have more lines on their faces – or fewer – as if they all worried about different things from those that concerned people in Maewen’s own time. This set their faces into quite another shape, like people who spoke a foreign language. As to their clothes, the hearthman’s livery she had grown used to was the rarest kind here. The men wore bright wools and sober velvets in any number of styles, from tight-fitting suits with a coloured blanket thing folded over one shoulder, through the looser sort of clothes that Moril or Hestefan wore, to the elderly fellow pushing past in a long dark blue velvet robe with a jewelled chain round his neck. The women were in so many styles and colours – nipped waists, loose pleats, long flounces, calf-length gathers – that even when Maewen saw the outfit was home-made and probably redyed from another colour, they still made her feel dowdy and wrongly dressed. The place smelt of people and, almost chokingly, of smoke with, underneath that, most definitely cesspits.

“It seems very busy,” Navis remarked. “Market day?”

“That and more, I rather think,” Hestefan said. People had seen his cart by then and were pressing up to it all round, wanting to know when the Singer would perform. Hestefan enlarged his voice, in the Singer’s way, so that though he seemed to be speaking normally, his voice rang round the street. “In the market square in an hour’s time.”

“Oh, but—” Moril started to say. Then he saw faces turning and nodding eagerly. He gave up.

“What are our plans?” Navis asked Maewen. They were down to a slow walk, boot to boot, as they pressed through the crowd.

“Go to the college – Lawschool,” Maewen said.

“That suits me,” Navis said, and he bent to the nearest person to ask the way.

It was out on the other side of the town. They had to go through the market square, where there was a frenzy of buying and selling going on, and such shouting mixed with smells of new bread, fruit, leather and cattle dung to add to the cesspit smell that Maewen’s stomach began to feel unhappy. Hestefan cast a professional eye over the chaos and agreed with Moril that they would have time to visit the Lawschool before people were ready to listen. So the whole party continued, out through the further end of the market square and down another street, to where the crowds and then the houses quite abruptly stopped and the street became a white dirt road leading across more green fields. There were animals – cows, goats and a donkey or so – tethered out in the fields, but the only other people in sight were a small party of horsemen some distance ahead on the road.

“Hannart livery,” Navis said. He and Mitt exchanged a significant, worried look. “I think we’ll let them get well ahead.”

That suited Maewen. In these times Hannart was a name to conjure with. As everyone reined in and hung back at the mule’s slowest pace, she looked anxiously at the horsemen until they vanished behind a clump of trees. “Do you think someone told the Earl of Hannart that the Adon’s ring was stolen?” she asked Mitt.

“I don’t reckon so,” Mitt said, almost equally worried.

“I’ll give a false name,” Maewen said, “if anyone asks.”

“A wise precaution,” Navis agreed. “At times like this I could wish Mitt and I were not so obviously Southerners.”

The Hannart horsemen had vanished by the time they came round the clump of trees and saw the Lawschool. Maewen had another moment of sheer surprise. She had known the School would have to be the oldest part of the College she and Aunt Liss had visited, but she had expected that this would be the part with all the towers and tall, pointed windows. She had not expected it would be these low, graceful greenish buildings topped with clusters of long, stylish chimneys. The windows were wide, one and all, and they had diamond panes. In the middle, an elegant archway filled by a wrought-iron gate joined two blocks of the buildings together. The rest were joined by a high stone wall.

“Looks a good place for studying,” Mitt said. He tried to smile, but he knew his face had gone pinched and worried. Those Hannart riders were inside. He could glimpse horses between the bars of the gate.

By the time they reached the gate, there was nothing to be seen through it but a garden and a cobbled path leading away between lavender bushes. An official walked to the middle of the gate. Maewen bit the inside of her mouth, or she would have laughed. He was wearing exactly the same uniform that the porters at the College wore in her day: baggy knee-length breeches and tunic in dark blue, with a wide white collar. It was obviously old-fashioned even two hundred years before that. He had bad teeth. She saw them as he spoke.

“Visitors for Sending Day? Which of the scholars are you for?”

Navis hesitated a fraction because of those riders from Hannart. “Hildrida Navissdaughter,” he said, with a shrug you could only have seen if you knew him.

“And I’m for Brid Clennensdaughter,” Moril called from the cart.

The porter smiled at them. Maewen had to look away from his teeth. “I’m sorry for it, but you’re all too early. Sending Day doesn’t start till midday. Come back then, and I’ll let you in with pleasure. You’re not the only ones I’ve had to turn away. You’ll find the town’s full of you. But,” he said to Hestefan, “you can come half an hour ahead if you want to set up to sing. The other Singer will be coming back then.”

Hestefan frowned to hear of another Singer to compete with and began to turn the cart round. “Thank you. I shall only perform in the town then. But my apprentice will be back to see his sister.”

Nobody pointed out that the riders from Hannart had been let in at once. Nobody even remarked that since they had been let in, this meant they were not just a chance band of hearthmen but members of the Earl’s household on important business. Yet they all knew it, even Maewen. They rode back the way they had come very soberly.

The other Singer was now camped just outside the town. They saw him as soon as they came round the trees, a neat black, white and gold cart at the edge of the wide green, surrounded by sacks and bundles of provisions. Someone – presumably the Singer – was sorting through the bundles in a rather hopeless way.

Moril, at the sight, tugged excitedly at Hestefan’s arm. Hestefan whipped up the mule. The green cart, in a most uncharacteristic way, went rollicking and bumping across the turf towards the black and white one. Moril stood up on the seat, waving and shrieking, “Dagner! Dagner!”

The Singer, a slightly built young man with reddish hair, who looked very little older than Mitt, had just picked up one of the sacks. He turned round at the noise and let out a bellow of his own. “Hestefan! MORIL!” He dropped the sack and came racing over to hang on to the step of the green cart, laughing as if this was the most wonderful meeting in the world. The three of them fell into instant eager talk.

As Maewen came up with Navis and Mitt, she thought she had never seen Hestefan look so animated. They hung about a short distance away, none of them sure how private the Singers wanted to be, and admired the new Singer’s turnout. The horse, which was enjoying a nosebag, was as black and glossy as the black paint on the cart, and its harness was white. The austere colours served to show up the fact that instead of a name painted on the cart, there was a large and complicated coat of arms.

Moril turned and shouted to them, “It’s my brother! Isn’t it wonderful! Dastgandlen Handagner!”

“Oh, I’ve heard of him,” Mitt said, decidedly impressed. “Aberath folk said he was the best.”

“Let us be introduced,” Navis said.

But before they had come within talking distance, Moril had said something to Dagner which seemed to alarm him acutely. Dagner backed away from the green cart, asking anxious questions. Next moment he was running for his cart and hurling the sacks and bundles in anyhow, latching the tailgate, and running again to take the nosebag off the horse. The horse’s head came up. It looked as surprised as everyone else. “Sorry, Stiles,” Dagner called out. “Later.” With that he was in the driving seat and untying the reins, and the cart was in motion. All in seconds.

“But what about Brid?” Moril yelled.

“You’re here now. You can give her my love!” Dagner shouted back. “Get up, Stiles. I want your best pace.” The horse broke into a trot. The black and white cart went in a swift near-circle past Navis, Mitt and Maewen. Dagner leant out to call as he passed, “I’d have followed you too, lady, if this hadn’t happened!”

Maewen realised he was talking to her and managed to shoot a smile in reply. Then the horse was going faster still. The black and white cart went careering away into the distance, raising a cloud of moisture and grass seeds behind its flying wheels.

“What got into him?” Mitt asked.

“I told him Fenna was hurt,” Moril said. “He’s in love with her. He’s going straight to Adenmouth by the green road above Hannart.” It was clear Moril was very pleased by his brother’s devotion.

“And why does he carry a coat of arms?” asked Navis. “It looked like the arms of the South Dales to me.”

Moril grimaced. This was something which did not seem to please him so much. “It is,” he said. “Dagner’s Earl of the South Dales. Since last year, when our cousin got killed. He told me Earl Keril made him put the arms on his cart, but I know Dagner only agreed because it takes up less space than his names do.” He looked fondly after the galloping cart. “Dagner’s only proud of being a Singer,” he said.

Navis had one eyebrow right, right up. “Is Tholian dead then?”

“Yes,” said Moril.

“Well, well,” said Navis. “One hesitates to say good riddance, since he was obviously a near relation of yours, but—”

“We have to sing in the market square,” Hestefan interrupted. He was back to his schoolmaster manner.

“Well, well,” Navis said again as they followed the green cart back into the town. “Tholian dead! If I had to choose between Tholian and Keril, I might, even at this moment, choose Tholian.”

“Never met him,” said Mitt.

“You have no idea how lucky you are,” said Navis. He did not say anything else until they were in the confusion of the market again. Then he said, “Mitt, how about a decent breakfast at the inn?”

“That,” said Mitt, “is the best thing I heard today.”

The two of them threaded their horses between the stalls towards the large inn at one side of the square. Maewen had no money. She was watching them rather wistfully when Navis turned round and called, “You too, lady. This is my treat.”

Maewen followed gratefully. They clopped under a huge archway into a stable yard, where a boy with a raw face and yellow hair spat out the straw he was chewing and came to listen to Navis’s instructions. He wanted the horses to have a good breakfast too. Maewen patted her horse and let the boy take it away with the other two. A nice horse, she thought, as she followed Navis into the inn, but one without any character at all. If it was Noreth’s horse, the girl must have used it like a bicycle. What had become of her?

The front rooms of the inn were wide open to the square, where tables were set out under a sort of covered way supported by old gnarled pillars with creepers trained up them. A nice arrangement in summer, Maewen thought. It reminded her of the pillared balconies at the front of the Tannoreth Palace. But what did they do in winter? Kernsburgh was many degrees warmer than Gardale even now. People in these times seemed to be so hardy. They lived out of doors much more than Maewen was used to.

The only free table they could find was a long way from the end of the square where Hestefan had stopped his cart. Maewen could hear his voice faintly, behind all the rest of the din, calling to people to come and listen, but any view was blocked off by a gnarled pillar and a big stall selling iron pans. It was a slight disappointment. Maewen had never yet heard the Singers perform. Still, as she agreed with Mitt, it was good to be sitting in a proper chair listening to Navis ordering food from a cheerful, hurried man in a dirty apron.

“And beer for three,” Navis finished.

Help! thought Maewen. Coffee came from abroad, of course, and it was not much drunk until a hundred years later than this. She would have preferred water – except from the way this town smelt she was sure the water was not fit to drink. Oh well. Beer couldn’t be that bad, or people wouldn’t drink it. Hestefan and Moril were singing now. Maewen leant back, trying to pick out the sound from behind the shouts, the talk, the yelling of animals and the bonging of the pans in the ironware stall. It was not a tune she knew.

The food came promptly on enormous wooden platters, sizzling hot: bacon, kidneys, eggs, mushrooms, and hot bread to go with it, with butter and honey for the bread. With this arrived three pewter tankards of sour-smelling yellow stuff. Maewen tried it. Yuk. But she was very hungry, and all that food needed something to wash it down. She kept drinking, in valiant sips.

Mitt could no longer contain his anxiety. “They let Hannart in early,” he said to Navis. “I don’t like that. What do we do?”

“Play it as we see it,” Navis answered. “At least we’re here.”

“And what’s this Sending Day?” Mitt asked, wolfing down food he hardly noticed.

“As I gather, it’s the day most pupils go home for the summer,” Navis said. “Not that anyone thought to inform me. I asked Noreth’s aunt.”

“Then you can take her away,” Mitt said.

“So can Hannart,” Navis pointed out. He was, as usual, trying not to show his feelings, but Mitt could tell Navis was as strained and gloomy as he was himself.

There was applause from the distance. Hestefan began a new song. Maewen thought it was perfectly lovely, but it was low and sweet, and she kept losing it in the noise.

“Suppose,” said Mitt, “that Hannart has been and gone by the time they let us in?”

“There’s a closing ceremony,” Navis replied. “Surely even Hannart can’t remove a pupil before that. And of course neither can we.”

“First moment we can then,” Mitt said urgently.

“Whatever’s possible,” Navis agreed.

They ate in worried silence after that. Hestefan seemed to be telling a story. There were bursts of laughter and clapping, but Hestefan’s voice was almost inaudible. Maewen was straining to hear when Navis pulled himself together and turned to her politely.

“I fear we have been leaving you out of our private concerns, lady,” he said. “As you may have gathered, we became your followers not entirely out of personal conviction.”

“Speak for yourself,” said Mitt. “I’m convinced.” He turned to Maewen, waving a hunk of bread and honey in one bony hand. Here was something to take his mind off Hildy. “Tell us your beliefs, Noreth. Convince him.”

Help! thought Maewen. She stared at the pots and pans swinging on the stall, hoping for inspiration. Mitt was leaning towards her eagerly as if he thought she really did have beliefs. Probably Noreth did have beliefs, but Maewen had no way of knowing what those were. She had simply been getting by on a messy muddle of beliefs from her own day, mixed up with what she knew had happened in the last two hundred years. Dalemark had changed, almost out of recognition, in that time, and not wholly for the better at that.

“It is possible she just follows the will of the One,” Navis remarked in his usual sarcastic way.

This bounced Maewen into speaking. She did not want to let Mitt down. “I believe there has to be change,” she said. A disgustingly safe thing to say. Something seemed to be wrong with her, adding to her difficulty. Her face buzzed, and the sounds from the market had gone quiet and distant. Moril was singing. She could just pick out his voice among the deep belling chords of his cwidder. She would have liked to think it was the cwidder doing this to her, but she was fairly sure it was the beer. And the way Gardale smelt like a filthy farmyard. Maewen swallowed. “There’s a lot in Dalemark that hasn’t come out yet,” she said. “Wonderful people, and talents and richness. Some of the reason it hasn’t come out is that all the ordinary people are too poor for different reasons –” Am I going to be sick? – “but the main reason is that everybody is too busy thinking of themselves as North and South. They need to be one country and – and be proud of it before – before they can show what’s … really in them.” There. I believe that. Maewen pushed back her chair. She knew what was wrong with her now. A truly vicious stomach ache. Nerves? Those mushrooms? She could not help it that Mitt’s eager face was going puzzled and disappointed. “I’m sorry … I have to— Do you know where is the—”

Navis understood instantly. “It’ll be round in the stable yard. First door. Women to the right.”

Maewen bolted that way. She raced under the arch. And – bless Navis! – there was the door. It was dark inside, with a sticky mud floor, but she was led to the right door by the smell. Yuk! She nearly was sick. Inside, it was clean enough in its primitive way, with whitewashed walls and a bundle of rags instead of paper, but the smell! Why hadn’t things smelt anything like this bad up on the green roads? Did Wend really look after that kind of thing as well as the roads?

It was not a place to stay long in. Maewen finished as quickly as she could and unlatched the door to the dark muddy passage with relief. That’s better. Now I can go back and talk sense to Mitt.

A hard arm grabbed her round the throat. A hand, with the faint glint of a knife accompanying it, rose and came down, stabbing.

“Help!” Maewen screamed. The hard arm cut her scream off to a squawk. She struggled furiously. What an awful place to be killed in! I will not die here! She twisted sideways against the grip on her throat and kicked where she could feel legs behind her. The rest of her twisted and bucked mindlessly. It was horrible the way she could feel the man. Intimate. Beastly. It never occurred to her to use the knife and short sword she had just hitched aside to fasten her breeches. She kicked madly, trying to fall out of the man’s grip into a sort of squat. That unbalanced him. The hand with the knife swept away sideways and banged on a wooden wall as he tried to stay upright. His arm loosed her throat enough for her to give a high, whistling scream.

“With you!” someone said. Doors banged. Wood resounded. The knife gleamed in half-daylight. It had grown. No, it was a sword, being held by someone else. Maewen only glimpsed it before her attacker dropped her as if she was on fire and fled, kicking her as he barged across her, shoving the swordsman aside, and banging out through the door. Maewen could feel the pounding of his running feet as she lay on the sticky mud floor.

“Are you all right? Noreth! Where are you hurt?”

It was Navis. His hand was pulling at her arm. Maewen tried to sit up and found she had suddenly no strength at all. Navis hauled her upright and dragged her out into the comparatively pure-smelling yard.

“Where are you hurt?”

“I – I’m not … I … How did you— Who was he?”

“I wish I knew,” said Navis. “It was far too dark. As I didn’t see him when I came along behind you, I conclude he was hiding in there.”

“What a horrible place to hide!” Maewen managed to say. “Why did you—”

“I told you,” said Navis. “Your aunt told me to look after you. Let’s get the horses and go out on the common. You should be safe out of the crowds. We should have stayed there as soon as we saw Hannart was in town.”