heard all about you!” shouted Doreth, the copper-haired daughter.
“Can’t stop! Message! Sorry!” Mitt shouted back. He did not want to meet the daughters either. Alla had jeered at him for being so miserable when Hildy was sent away, until Mitt got mad and pulled her bronze hair. Then Doreth had told the Countess on him. Mitt had been quite surprised not to be sent away then too. But that must have given them proof that Mitt did care what became of Hildy. Flaming Ammet! The Countess and Keril must have had this planned for months!
Kialan was now shouting himself. “See you later, then!” Mitt had a glimpse of him waving, tawny and thickset and quite unlike his father – but quite certainly not really unlike, not deep down where it counted. Mitt put his head down and sped along by the wall, wondering if Kialan saw him as a dirty Southern guttersnipe too. Kialan would certainly see a lot of lank hair and two spindly legs and shoulders that were too wide for the rest. Mitt kept his face turned to the wall because that was the real giveaway, a guttersnipe face that still looked starved even after ten months of good food in Aberath. He told himself Kialan wasn’t missing much.
He plunged through the nearest door and kept running, through rooms and along corridors, and out again on the other side of the mansion, to the long shed on the cliffs above the harbour. That was the best place to be alone. The people who were usually there would all be rushing about after Keril’s followers or getting the Midsummer feast ready. And he was having to miss that feast. Hildy had once said that misery was like this: silly little things always got mixed up with the important ones. How right she was.
Mitt rolled the shed door open a crack and slipped inside. Sure enough, the place was empty. Mitt breathed deep of the fishy smell of coal and of fish oil and wet metal. It was not unlike the smell on the waterfront of Holand, where he had been brought up. And I might just as well have stayed there for all the good it did me! he thought, staring along a vista of iron rails in the floor, where tarry puddles reflected red sun or rainbows of oil. He felt caught and trapped and surrounded in a plot he had not even noticed till they thrust it at him this afternoon. Everyone had told him that the Countess was treating him almost like a son. Mitt had been pretty sarcastic about that, but all the same he had thought this was the way people in the North did treat refugees from the South.
“Fool I was!” he muttered.
He walked along the rails to the huge machines that stood at quiet intervals along them. Alk’s Irons, everyone called them. To Mitt, and to most people in town, they were the most fascinating things in Aberath. Mitt trailed his fingers across the cargo hoist and then across the steam plough and the thing that Alk hoped might one day drive a ship. None of them worked very well, but Alk kept trying. Alk was married to the Countess. It was the only other thing Mitt liked about the Countess: that instead of marrying the son of a lord or another earl who might add to her importance, she had chosen to marry her lawman, Alk. Alk had given up law years ago in order to invent machines. Mitt dragged his fingertips across the wet and greasy bolts of the newest machine and shuddered as he imagined himself pushing a knife into a young woman. Even if she laughed at him or looked like Doreth or Alla, even if her eyes showed she was mad – no! But what about Ynen if he didn’t? The worst of this trap was that it pushed him back into a part of himself he thought he had got out of. He could have screamed.
He went round the machine and found himself face to face with Alk. Both of them jumped. Alk recovered first. He sighed, put his oilcan down on a ledge in the machine, and asked rather guiltily, “Message for me?”
“I – No. I thought nobody was here,” Mitt said.
Alk relaxed. To look at him, you would have thought he was a big blacksmith run to fat, with his mind in the clouds. “Thought you were calling me to come and run about after Keril,” he said. “Now you’re here, have a think about this thing. It’s supposed to be an iron horse, but I think it needs changing somewhere.”
“It’s the biggest horse I ever saw,” Mitt said frankly. “What good is it if it has to run on rails? Why do your things always run on rails?”
“To move,” said Alk. “Too heavy otherwise. You have to work the way things will let you.”
“Then how are you going to get it to go uphill?” said Mitt.
Alk rubbed an oily hand through the remains of copper hair like Doreth’s and looked sideways at Mitt. “Boy’s disillusionment with the North now complete,” he said. “Taken against my machines now. Anything wrong, Mitt?”
In spite of his trouble, Mitt grinned. Alk and he had this joke. Alk himself came from the North Dales, which Alk claimed were almost in the South. Alk said he saw three things wrong with the North for every one that Mitt saw. “No, I’m fine,” Mitt said, because the Countess had probably told Alk all about her plans anyway. He was trying to think of something polite to say about the iron horse when the door at the end of the shed rolled right open. Kialan’s strong voice came echoing through.
“This is the most marvellous place in all Aberath!”
“Excuse me,” Mitt muttered, and dived for the small side door behind Alk.
Alk grabbed his elbow as he went. He was as strong as the blacksmith he looked like. “Wait for me!” he said. They went out of the side door together, into the heap of coal and cinders beyond. “Taken against the Adon of Hannart too, have you?” Alk asked. Mitt did not know how to answer. “Come up to my rooms,” Alk said, still holding Mitt’s elbow. “I have to dress grandly for supper, I suppose. You can help. Or is that beneath you?”
Mitt gasped rather and shook his head. It was supposed to be an honour to help the lord dress. He wondered if Alk knew.
“Come on, then,” said Alk. He let go of Mitt and lumbered ahead of him through the archway that led to his apartments. Alk’s valet was waiting there, with candles lit and water steaming and good clothes hung carefully over chairs. “You can have a rest tonight, Gregin,” Alk said cheerfully. “Mitt’s going to clean me up today. Part of his education.”
Even if Alk did not know he was doing Mitt an honour, the valet certainly did. His face was a mixture of jealousy, respect and anxiety. “Sir,” he said. “The coal. The oil.” He started to back out of the room as Alk waved him away, and then came back to whisper fiercely to Mitt. “Mind you don’t let him stop you scrubbing him when he’s still grey. He’ll try. He always does.”
“Go away, Gregin,” said Alk. “My word by the Undying that we won’t let you down.” Gregin sighed and went away. Mitt got down to the hard work of scrubbing Alk clean. “Do I take it you’ve had another of your disagreements with my Countess?” Alk asked while Mitt laboured.
“Not … the way you mean this time,” Mitt said, rubbing away at one huge hairy arm.
“Her bark is worse than her bite,” Alk observed.
Alk had to think that, Mitt supposed. He must have had a lot of illusions about the Countess to have married her at all. “Keril’s worse,” he said. “He’s all bite and no bark, as far as I can see.”
“So Keril’s in it too?” Alk said musingly. He took his arm away from Mitt, looked at it, and gave it back, sighing. It was still grey. “Now I see you’re in no mood to agree with me, but Earl Keril’s a good man, shrewd as he can hold together. Knows all about steam power too. They have a steam organ at Hannart, did you know? Huge thing. But he’s not the man to get on the wrong side of if you can help it.”
“Well, I have,” Mitt said bitterly. “I was on his
