“Come with me, come with me.
The blackbird asks you, ‘Follow me.’
No one will know, no one will know,
Wherever you go, I shall go.
Come with me. Morning spreads,
Clouds are high in milky threads,
The moon looks like a white thumbnail,
Larks are singing up the dale.
The sun is up, so follow me.
I’d like us to go secretly
Along the road, across the hill
Where water runs and woods are still.”
“And then I think the first four lines again,” Dagner said, looking up at Clennen.
“No,” said Clennen. “Won’t do.”
“Well, I needn’t have them again,” Dagner said humbly.
“I mean the whole thing won’t do,” said Clennen.
Dagner looked very dashed. Kialan seemed unable to stop himself saying indignantly: “Why? I thought it was going to be a jolly good song.”
“The tune’s all right, as far as it’s gone,” said Clennen. “But why spoil a tune like that with those words?”
“They’re jolly good words,” Kialan insisted. “I liked them.”
“It’s the words I seem to want,” Dagner said diffidently.
“I see,” said Clennen. “Then in that case don’t utter them again until we’re in the North—unless you want us taken up for rebels.”
Dagner tried to explain. “But I—it wasn’t. I was just trying to say how much I liked traveling in the cart and—and so on.”
“Were you?” said Clennen. “And haven’t you heard the songs the freedom fighters used to sing here the year of the rebellion—oh, it’ll be sixteen years ago now, the year you were born? They never dared say a thing straight out, so it was all put sideways—‘Follow the lark’ was one, ‘Free as air and secret’ another went, and the best known was ‘Come up the dale with me.’ The lords here still hang a man on the spot for singing words like that.”
“And I do think that’s ridiculous!” Kialan burst out. “Why can’t people sing what they want here? What’s the matter with everyone?”
Brid and Moril looked at his firelit face with interest. It began to seem as if Kialan might be a freedom fighter. They felt they could forgive him much if he was. Clennen, however, simply seemed amused.
“I hope there’s not someone behind the gorse listening to you,” he said. Kialan’s head jerked round toward the nearest looming bush. “See?” said Clennen. “That’s why, in one easy lesson, lad. No one can trust anyone anymore. It comes of uneasy rulers paying uneasy men to make the rest uneasy, too. It’s not always been like that, you know. Dagner, what did I say outside Derent?”
Dagner’s mind was woefully on his unsuitable song. “Oh—er—something about life being only a performance, I think.”
“I knew I could trust you to get the wrong saying—and the wrong saying wrong,” Clennen said tolerantly. “Anyone?”
“You said the South was once as free as the North,” said Brid. “You said it to me, really.”
“Then remember it,” said Clennen.