The Crown of Dalemark Read Online Free PDF Page A

from Dropwater and was obviously a seasoned hearthman. A small, tough boy, Rith. When they were both on their feet, Rith only came up to Mitt’s shoulders. Makes me look a big booby if I moan, Mitt thought, and he set off dragging the Countess-horse up the hill after Rith. Both horses were huge, heavy, and reluctant. Their hooves slid in the slippery grass. Mitt’s horse put its ears back and tried to bite him.
    â€œStop that!” Mitt slapped its nose aside. “You Countess, you!”
    Rith broke into a panting laugh. “What a name! It’s a gelding. O-oh! Piper’s pants !”
    Mitt dragged his horse up beside Rith’s. The hill, in the mysterious manner of hills, was twice as high as he had thought. Beyond and above them, it was a huge triangle of earthy boulders and trickling water, which had slid down across the road, blocking it for as far as they could see. At the lower edge of it, the sea twinkled, flat and impassable.
    â€œWe’d better go up over the hill,” Rith said. “I know the way. It’ll mean fording the Aden after we cross the green road, but it won’t be deep this high.”
    So they struggled on upward, about twice as high as they had already come, until they left the landslip behind and reached a squishy yellow-green shoulder, where Rith said they could ride again. Mitt nearly yelled as he kicked his way into the saddle. He was raw. But he did not like to mention it. He simply bore it, all the way through a long, marshy valley and then up an endless firm green slope, where they came to one of the things the Northerners called waystones. It was round, like a roughly shaped millstone set up on one edge, with a hole in the middle. Rith leaned over and slapped the thing.
    â€œFor luck,” he said, grinning. “I’m a superstitious Northerner. I may ask the Wanderer’s blessing, too, just to annoy you. There’s the Aden down there. What do you say we stop for some lunch?”
    Mitt was only too glad to get down. He helped himself off by hanging on to the waystone, which was a way of touching it without seeming to. He knew he could do with some luck. And once he was down, he was so sore that he had to concentrate on small things, like stripping off his gloves and tucking them into the proper place on his belt, and hitching his horse to the waystone, where someone had tied a piece of red twine through the middle for the purpose. Then, moving in a careful, stiff-legged way, he unbuckled his baggage roll and got out the food they had given him. By then the agony had gone off enough for him to sit down beside Rith, bat the Countess-horse’s nose aside as it tried to eat his bread, and look at the view.
    There were hills all round, yellow and green, with sunlight scudding over them in patches. The green way stretched from the waystone, very level and firm and dry, leading south into the mountainous heart of Dalemark, and the Aden rolled parallel with it about a hundred yards downhill from where they sat. It was a fine big river, wider than any Mitt had seen, and the way it rolled quietly along among all those reeds and willow trees suggested that it might be pretty deep. Mitt hoped Rith knew what he was talking about when he said they could ford it. He leaned back and sniffed the smell of the river and willows mingling with the damp wild smell of heather and rock, the smell of the North, which Mitt still thought of as the smell of freedom in spite of his disillusionment with the North. Perhaps, he thought, not very hopefully, he would be stuck this side of the river and never get to Adenmouth at all. But that would be the worse for Hildy and Ynen.
    â€œYou look pretty gloomy!” Rith said, laughing.
    â€œJust thinking,” Mitt said hurriedly. “What are these green roads? Who made them—really?”
    â€œKern Adon,” said Rith. “King Hern. They’re the roads of his old kingdom. That’s why they