Beyond the dangling feet, Brid was sitting in the cart looking haughty and impatient. The cart was still in a clear space, and the sack of oats had been joined by a number of other sacks and bundles, all of them too heavy for Brid to lift by herself.
“Where have you been?” she demanded, as soon as Moril was near enough. “I thought you were never coming back! What’s the matter? You look like a jug of spilled milk.”
Moril was feeling so lost and peculiar that all he could do was to go to Olob. He put his arms round Olob’s neck and rubbed his forehead on Olob’s nose.
“Well, tell me!” said Brid. “Have you seen Dagner?”
“Yes,” said Moril.
“Did you tell him to say what I told you?”
“No,” said Moril.
“Why not? Moril, I shall hit you in a moment if you don’t tell me sensibly what happened!”
“I can’t,” said Moril. “Not here.”
“Why not?” Brid almost shouted.
Moril realized that he must stop her attracting attention to them. “Please, Brid. Shut up,” he said, looking at her as meaningly as he could from beside Olob’s nose. “Let’s get these sacks loaded and get on.”
Brid began to see that something terrible might have happened. “Without Dagner?” she said, in a more subdued voice. Moril nodded, tore himself away from warm, soft, friendly Olob, and began to heave at the nearest sack. Brid came down and joined him. “Moril, for goodness’ sake!” she whispered angrily. “It can’t be that bad! You’re behaving as if they’re going to hang Dagner.”
“They are,” said Moril.
Brid went white, but she did not really believe him. “Oh no!” she said. “Not on top of everything! Why?”
“Get these things in, and I’ll tell you when we’re moving,” Moril said.
They loaded the cart, and Brid drove out of the square. When they came into the cobbled streets, where the cart made sufficient clatter to cover up whispers, Moril told Brid what had happened. It turned Brid so sick and weak that had Olob been that kind of horse, he could easily have got out of control.
“I can’t believe it!” she kept saying.
She was still saying it when half a mile out of Neathdale, Kialan pushed his way out of a hedge and came to join them. When he first looked at them, he was smiling, as if he were relieved. Then he saw there were only two of them, and his smile vanished. H
e looked along the cart to make sure Dagner was not there, and then at their faces. When he climbed up to join them, his brown face was tired and yellowish. “What happened?” he said. “Better drive on.”
“Moril says they’re going to hang Dagner for passing information,” said Brid. “He says Father told Dagner to do it. And I can’t believe it! I just can’t believe it!”
“Oh,” said Kialan. “They got him for that, did they? I thought that was too much of a risk on top of everything else.”
“You’re mighty cool, aren’t you?” said Brid. “But I suppose Dagner’s not your brother!”
There was a pause, in which Kialan tried to control his feelings. But his natural outspokenness won. “All right,” he said. “So he’s not my brother. So you think I don’t know how you feel. You just thank your stars, my girl, that you don’t have to stand there and watch them hang Dagner, like I had to with my brother!” Brid and Moril turned round in the driving seat to stare at Kialan. But they turned back, because there were large, angry tears running past Kialan’s high-bridged nose, and more tears filling and reddening his light blue eyes. “I always thought the world of Dagner, anyway,” he said. “I remember him quite well from when we were small.”
There was silence, except for horse and cart noises. Brid encouraged Olob to make the best speed he could up the first steep hill to the Uplands. It was horrible to be urging Olob away from Dagner. There were tears in Brid’s eyes, too.
“Why did they hang your brother?” Moril asked at length.
“No reason,” Kialan said angrily. “It was Tholian’s idea—that pale-eyed murdering swine who killed your father—but I didn’t hear Hadd or Henda or any of the others making much objection. They just had us put on trial first, to make it seem respectable. And then it came out that I was only fourteen—”
“Oh! I thought you were older!” said Brid.
“People do,” said Kialan. “But I was fourteen in March. Tholian was furious, because the rest of the earls said it was against the law to hang me for another year. But they hanged poor Konian, and the ship’s captain, and all the crew they could catch, and they made me watch. It was just like our luck to land when all the earls had got together to invest that brute Tholian! His grandfather died the week before.”
They were now high enough above Neathdale to have, at that moment, an excellent view of the same Tholian’s mansion. Moril looked down at its long white front, peaceful and pompous and bowered among trees, and felt like a mouse running over the paws of a cat. He wished the cart was not so very pink and noticeable.
“I’m beginning to think,” Kialan said miserably, “that I bring bad luck on people. First Konian, then your father, now Dagner—and goodness knows what happened to the people who helped me escape from Hadd!”