The Crown of Dalemark

Alk frowned. “You scrub even brisker than Gregin, if that’s what we’re talking about.” He said nothing else for a while, until Mitt had scrubbed him to clean pink blotches and was starting to help him into good clothes. As his head came out through the neck of the white silk shirt, he said, “See here. I was only a poor farmer’s boy before I came to be a lawman. Keril’s Countess Halida was nobody much either, and she was from the South like you.” Mitt had not the heart to answer this. It was kindly meant, but so wrong. “Hmm,” said Alk. “Wrong track there.” As Mitt helped him force his arms down the sleeves, he added, “And it’s maybe the wrong track too, if I was to mention that you’re much better placed than you were when you came? You can read and write and use weapons now. They tell me you learn good and quick, and you’ve brains to use what you learn – well, I know you’ve got brains. My Countess has not treated you so badly—”

“And that’s a lie!” Mitt burst out. “She did it all for a reason!”

“As to that,” Alk said as Mitt threaded golden studs into his cuffs, “you’ve not gone out of your way to make her love you, Mitt. And everyone always has a reason for what they do. It’s only natural.”

“Then what’s your reason for trying to cheer me up like this?” Mitt retorted.

“Easy,” said Alk. “I can’t abide misery, and I hate mysteries. Anyone taking half a glance at your face could see something was wrong. And cheering up often brings things to light. I found that out when I was a lawman, the first time we had a man accused of murder.” Mitt winced at that and nearly dropped a stud. He knew Alk noticed, but Alk only said, “Want me to talk to my Countess about this?”

“No point. Wouldn’t do any good,” Mitt said. Everyone knew that Alk never went against the Countess. He turned away and got Alk’s vast brocade trousers. “Look, I don’t want to talk about this no more,” he said, helping Alk step into them.

“I see that. And I think you ought to,” Alk said.

Mitt obstinately said nothing while he buttoned the trousers round Alk’s bulging waist and then fetched the huge embroidered jacket. Alk backed into it with his arms out, like a bear. “Nothing you want to say, then?” he asked.

“Nothing, only a question,” Mitt said, meaning to change the subject. “Is the One real?” Alk turned round with the jacket half on and stared at him. “I mean,” said Mitt, “I never heard of the One, nor half the other Undying either, until I came here. We don’t take much note of Undying in the South. Do you believe in any of them?” He went round Alk and heaved the jacket on to him. Then he bent down to help Alk with his boots.

“Believe in the One!” Alk said, and trod into the right boot. “It would be hard not to, here in Aberath, at this time of year, but—” He trod into the left boot and stamped down in it, thinking. “Put it like this. I believed in my machines when they were just a notion in my head and nothing I could touch or see. Who’s to say that the One isn’t as real as they were in my head – or as real as they are now?” He flipped the fastening at the neck of his shirt to see if Mitt had tied it securely and tramped to the door. “Coming?”

Supper would be ready in the great hall. It came to Mitt that it would be his job to wait on Kialan at table. He could not face it. “I got to polish my gear and pack now,” he said. “I’m off to Adenmouth tomorrow.”

“Are you now?” Alk turned round in the doorway and looked hard at Mitt again. “Then I’ll make sure someone remembers to feed you,” he said. “I think I’m on the right track now. And I don’t like it, Mitt. I don’t like it any more than you do. Don’t do anything stupid until I talk to you again.”

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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.

Hildrida

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.

“Going my way, hearthman?” somebody called after him.

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.”

“Mitt,” said Mitt. “Out of Aberath.”

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?”

“Ten months,” said Mitt.

“Then you’ve had one of our winters. I bet you froze!”

“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.”

“Don’t they have coal in the South?” Rith asked wonderingly.

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

Rith whistled. “You did come a long way, didn’t you?”

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.”

“Not when it matters, though,” said Rith. “And?”

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!”

“The Southern roads are, of course, all perfect,” Rith said.

“I never said—” said Mitt.

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.”