“Blast you, Kialan!” said Brid. Kialan looked at her in surprise. “Oh, it doesn’t matter,” said Brid. “Just if this show goes wrong, I’ll blame you. Dagner, I think we’d better put on our glad rags now.”
“No,” said Dagner.
“What do you mean?” said Brid.
“Just no,” said Dagner. “We’ll give the show as we are. We’re quite respectable.”
“Yes, but we always change,” Brid protested. “It gives you a feel.”
“That was Father’s idea,” said Dagner. “And he was right in a way. It went with his style to come rolling in, singing and glittering. He could live up to it. But if I go in dressed in tinsel and singing my head off, people are just going to laugh.”
“You think that because you’re nervous,” Brid said persuasively. “You’ll feel better once you’re changed.”
“No, I won’t,” said Dagner. “I’ll feel ten times worse. Brid, I just haven’t got Father’s personality, and I can’t do the same things. I’ll have to do them my way, or not at all. See?”
Brid, by this time, was near tears. “Do you mean you’re not going to give a show at all then?”
“Not Father’s kind,” said Dagner, “because I can’t. We’ll give a show all right, because we’ll starve if we don’t, and you can introduce us and explain what’s happened, and maybe it’ll be all right. But if I find you boasting and ranting about us—that goes for you, too, Moril—I’ll stop. We’ll just have to be plain, because we’re not Father.”
Brid sighed heavily. “All right. But I’m going to put my boots on, anyway. I need a feel.” She brightened a little. “I’ve always hated the color of your suit, Moril. You look nicer like that.”
“Thank you,” Moril said politely. Dagner had suddenly brought it home to him that, for the first time in their lives, they were about to give a show entirely on their own. He had never, as far as he knew, been nervous before. Now he was.
As Brid drove downhill toward Neathdale, Moril sat clutching the big cwidder with hands that were icy cold and sweating at once, and it would have been hard to say whether he or Dagner was the more nervous. The houses came nearer. Quite desperate, Moril laid his cheek against the smooth wood of the cwidder. “Oh, please help me!” he whispered to it. “I’ll never manage. I can’t!”
“Can you stop a moment?” said Kialan.
Brid drew up. Kialan immediately swung down from the cart to the road. Brid looked at him somberly. “Now you’re going to give us that about not being interested in our shows, aren’t you? Well don’t. I won’t believe you. I’ve seen you listening to every show we’ve given.”
Kialan looked up at Brid’s stormy face and seemed nonplussed. Then he laughed. “All right. I won’t give you that. But I’m going to meet you on the other side of Neathdale all the same. See you.” He set off at a good swinging pace toward the town, with his hands in his pockets, whistling “Jolly Holanders.”
“I give up!” said Brid. But both her brothers were too nervous to reply.
7
The main square at Neathdale was always busy. It was not very large, but it had a handsome fountain in the middle and four inns on three of its sides. There was also a corn exchange and two guildhalls, which added to the coming and going. The fourth side was occupied by the gray frowning block of the jail. When Brid drove the cart into the square, it seemed busier even than they had remembered. It was packed with people. The reason, they saw, as Olob patiently shouldered his way toward the fountain, was that there had been a public hanging that morning. The gallows was still there, outside the jail, and so was the hanged man. A number of people outside the inns were raising tankards jeeringly in his direction.
The dangling figure made them all feel sick, although it meant a good crowd. Dagner turned green. Moril clutched his cwidder hard and swallowed. Brid could not resist leaning down and asking the nearest person who it was who had been hanged.
“Friend of the Porter’s,” was the cheerful reply. It was a cheerful whiskery man Brid had chosen to ask, and he looked as if he had enjoyed every second of the hanging. “Some say he was the Porter,” he added, “but you can’t tell. He wouldn’t admit to anything. Taken up last week, he was, on the new Earl’s orders.”
“Oh, is there a new Earl?” Brid said blankly, trying to keep her eyes from the swinging criminal.
“Sure,” said the man. “Old Tholian died more than a month back. The new Earl’s the grandson. Got a real nose for the Porter and his like, he has. Good luck to him, too!”
“Oh yes. Very good luck,” Brid said hurriedly, terrified of being arrested for disloyalty to the new Earl.
“Leave off, Brid, and let’s get started,” Dagner said irritably.
Brid smiled rather falsely at the whiskery man and hitched up the reins so that Olob knew to stand still. Then she blew a blast on the panhorn for attention. When sufficient people had turned their way, she stood up and spoke. Moril marveled at how cool she was. But Brid was like Clennen that way. An audience was meat and drink to her.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” she called, “please come and listen. You see the cart I’m standing in? Many of you will know it quite well. If you do, you’ll know it belongs to Clennen the Singer. You’ll have seen it coming through Neathdale, year after year, on its way North. Most of you will know Clennen the Singer—”
She had aroused people’s interest by then. Moril heard someone say, “It’s Clennen the Singer.”
“No, it isn’t,” said someone else. “Who’s the pretty little lass?”
“Where’s Clennen, then? It isn’t Clennen,” said other people. Finally, someone was puzzled enough to call out, “Where is Clennen, lass? Isn’t he with you?”