Wend walked through the orchard with long strides and knocked at the house door. It was opened almost at once by an old woman leaning on a stick.
“His sister?” Navis said, watching the two talking eagerly together.
“More like his granny,” said Mitt. “Still, we might get a bed for the night out of it.” And a bedroom had a door you could bar, in case Kankredin persuaded Noreth to do her killing now.
Oh yes! Maewen thought. And a bath!
Navis looked nervously back down the path. “They won’t find us here,” Moril said to him. “Promise.” Navis looked at Moril’s cwidder, but not as if he was convinced.
Wend came striding back. He seemed almost as carefree as when he had taken charge of the cwidder. “She says you’re welcome to camp in this field here,” he said cheerfully. “And if the young ones like to go to the door when the horses are seen to, she’ll have milk and eggs and cheese ready for you.” Whistling a little tune, he untethered the goats and led them away round the side of the house.
Bother! Mitt and Maewen thought, though both for different reasons.
“The old lady likes her privacy, I see,” Hestefan said glumly. Evidently he had been hoping for a bed, too.
“It’s not a very big house,” Moril said as he unhitched the mule. Apart from Wend, he was the only one who was happy with the arrangement. Navis continued to watch the path, and he insisted on setting up the camp where it could not be seen by anyone coming up from the lake. This m
eant a long trudge across the grass to the trough, which Mitt felt was unnecessary. He was the one who fetched the water. The trough fascinated him. Clear water bubbled up in it the whole time, but it never, for some reason, overflowed.
When the horses were rubbed down and feeding, Moril jerked his head toward the house. Mitt winked and left Navis to see about the rest. They were both a little put out to find Maewen coming with them through the orchard trees. They did not consider Noreth as one of the young ones. Maewen saw it. But she had come along almost without thinking, and it seemed a little late to go back now. Besides, she was curious about this sister of Wend’s.
Wend opened the door to them. “Come you in,” he said. “This way.”
He led them quickly through a kitchen-room and opened a door to the back of the house. Maewen looked around curiously, but all she had time to see was a scrubbed wooden table and a banked-up fire of smoky peat, with a copper kettle singing on it. The room at the back of the house was even harder to see at first. It had only one window, which was half blocked by a big loom with woolen cloth being woven on it. It smelled of warm wood and, even more, of slightly oily wool. The ceiling was low and beamed. The walls were dark from being paneled in old wood—very beautifully carved, in a mass of half-seen designs—and the rest of the dim space was nearly full of stack upon stack of tall, chubby wooden things. These things were where the wool smell was coming from. Large bobbins, they seemed to be, wound with woolen yarn of every conceivable color.
Wend’s sister got up from her seat at the loom and edged through the bobbins toward them. She was tall, and she moved very spryly. When she was near enough to be seen clearly, all of them had a moment when they thought the old woman who answered the door must have been Wend’s old mother. Then they realized she was the same lady. But she looked much younger, though older than Wend. Her face was thin and only a little lined, and her hair was white, mass upon mass of it, wriggly and curly and pinned back with combs that glittered black among the white. Mitt thought there was just a look of the Countess about her, but a kinder look than the Countess’s. Maewen, too, found this lady reminded her of someone, but she could not place it. She thought she must have been stunning when she was younger, when all that hair was surely flaxen fair. The lady’s eyes were still stunning, huge and blue-green.
“I’m pleased to meet all of you,” she said. Her voice was much more educated than Wend’s, and that reminded Mitt of the Countess, too. “I hear you’re looking for the Adon’s sword.”
“Oh, did Wend tell you?” said Maewen. “Yes. We’ve got his cup and”—she held up her hand with the ring on its thumb—“this.”
“Then one of you is truly riding the royal road,” the lady said, looking from Maewen, to Moril, to Mitt, with very strong interest. “At last! I thought no one would ever get round to it again! Very well. The sword is here. You’d better see if you can get it down.”
“The sword is here!” Moril was so astonished that his voice went up into a squeak.
The lady swung round on him. “What makes you so surprised?”
“Well,” Moril said awkwardly, “I heard … the Singers say … that the Adon’s wife—Manaliabrid—hid his sword when she went back to the Undy—er, her own people.”
“And so she did,” said Wend’s sister. “My poor daughter. She’d thought her Adon was of the Undying, too—and as I told her, so he might have been for all we knew, but when a man sets himself up as King, he puts himself in the way of assassins, and sooner or later one of them will strike lucky. There are many ways to kill the Undying, though we don’t die easily.”
“Manaliabrid,” said Moril, “is your daughter?”
“That’s right,” said the lady. She folded her arms and looked amused at the awe in Moril’s face. “And the name you’ll have heard for me is Cennoreth. Am I right?”
“Then you’re a witch,” said Mitt.
“You’re the Weaver,” said Moril.
Both of them turned to look at Wend. “My sister is both,” he said.
“So I should hope!” Cennoreth snapped.
“But you—” Moril said to Wend.
“Tanamoril,” said Cennoreth, energetically making her way between the piles of bobbins, “Osfameron, Oril, Wend, Mage Mallard—when a person lives a long time, names tend to pile up. Now, do you want this sword or not? Here it is.”
There was a fireplace at the end of the room opposite the window, made of stone as beautifully carved as the wooden walls. Hung on the wooden panels above the stone was a long dark thing. Maewen and Mitt both took it at first for a stuffed fish. But when they had edged over there along the narrow path between the bobbins, they saw it was actually a sword, probably quite a plain one, in a blackish leather sheath. The reason it was so hard to see in that dim room was that it was tied to the wall by innumerable long strips of leather. The leather thongs had been knotted to about a hundred rusty nails hammered into the paneling above and below the sword, and then knotted and overlapped and knotted again, until the sword was in a kind of basket of leather strips.