The Crown of Dalemark by Diana Wynne Jones Page B

important journey!
    Angrily she turned her horse sideways to the rest of them. “What’s the matter with you all?”
    They stared at her out of a confusion of horses and mule half pulled up. Mitt’s horse refused to stop and went bucking backward into the stones of the verge. He hit it. “Behave, you Countess, you!”
    â€œMatter?” Navis said with his head haughtily up.
    He reminded Maewen of someone like that, but she had not the patience to think who just then. “Yes,” she said. “There are only five of you, and every one of you is deliberately annoying all the others. You’re to stop it, do you hear! Why can’t you all be cheerful?”
    Mitt, who had on the whole been trying, Maewen had to admit, gave his horse another bang and said resentfully, “That’s great, coming from you! Who’s been off ahead the whole time, looking like a wet week?”
    Moril grinned at this, as if he could not help it.
    Maewen glared from one to the other. Boys! “All right. I’ll try as well. But I order the rest of you to be cheerful, too!”
    Navis asked smoothly, “And how do you suggest we fulfill your orders?”
    â€œ You can do it by stopping being so damn sarcastic!” Maewen shot back. “And you”—she pointed to Hestefan—“can come out of your dream.”
    This seemed to alarm Hestefan. He stared at her in a stunned, terrified way which seemed entirely wrong for the kind of person he was. Maewen did not understand, and it cooled her down rather suddenly. She had been about to go on to Mitt and suggest he made peace with Navis and then to Moril and tell him to stop the dumb insolence, but Hestefan’s stare made her see that she really knew nothing about what had happened among these people before she met them. Maybe they were right and she was wrong. So she swung round on Wend, as the only one she knew. “And you’re to stop being so polite all the time!”
    Wend snatched off his cap and seemed about to give one of his humble bows.
    â€œNo,” said Maewen. “Don’t even think of it!”
    Navis threw back his head and bellowed with laughter. Mitt snorted. Moril actually giggled. Even Hestefan gave a shaky smile. Maewen thought there might even have been a bit of a grin on Wend’s face, too. Thank the One! Maewen heaved a deep startled breath and rode on again, staring at a large bird—eagle?—circling among the nearest mountains, to help herself cool down. How had she dared snap at Navis? No matter. It had worked. She could hear people talking behind her in an ordinary, cheerful way now. But she thought she had better go round each of the party and talk privately to them if she could. That way she might piece together what had made them so gloomy.
    Mitt came up to ride beside her as she was thinking this. “You’ve got that golden statue safe, have you?” he said. “Don’t forget that it’s half mine.”
    Maewen went hunched and wary again. She had no doubt which statue he meant. The trouble was, it was two centuries away, locked in a glass case in a palace which was not built yet. “Oh yes. Safer than houses,” she said, which, she thought, was certainly true.

7

    Holding that first conversation with Mitt was one of the hardest things Maewen had ever done. Long before they stopped for what Navis called “a nuncheon,” she could feel sweat starting in beads on her face. The air grew milder anyway, warm enough for Maewen to remember that this was, after all, Midsummer Day, but it was not that. It was the sheer difficulty of keeping her end up. She kept looking at Wend, hoping he would give her a hint or so, but Wend simply strode along, easily keeping up with Navis’s mare, and said nothing to anyone. Maewen took this to mean that Wend was only going to come to her rescue if she made a really bad mistake.
    In a way this was comforting because