tell him, but Mitt found he could not bear to, any more than he could bear to go near Kialan. He finished scrubbing Alk’s left arm and began on the right, even blacker and larger than the left.
“Something’s up,” Alk said at length, “that I don’t know about, I think. And it can’t be quite legal, or she would have told me. Did they tell you not to tell me?”
Mitt looked up to find Alk staring shrewdly at him across his lathery arm. “No,” he said. “But I’m not saying. They knew I wouldn’t too, for fear you’d be disgusted and kick me out. How do you like being washed by the scum of the earth?”
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.”
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
