“The sun is up.”
The cwidder produced a shrill and defiant sound. Moril, cross with himself for being scared, tried to recapture the first melting tone and only succeeded in making a scratchy, bad-tempered tinkle. Dagner would have hated it. Moril thought of Dagner and put in the first four lines again at the end, as Dagner had suggested he might. But he was not thinking very clearly of Dagner himself—more of Dagner as part of that happy family on a green road in the North that he had pictured the night before. And just as he had last night, he heard the cwidder making that odd, muzzy noise.
Moril sprang up and sprang back. He could not help it. The cwidder fell on the turf with a melodious thump.
“Moril!” said Brid. “You’ll break it!”
“It was splendid!” said Kialan. “Don’t stop.”
“I don’t care!” Moril said hysterically. “I’ve a good mind to jump on it! The blessed thing was playing my thoughts! It played the way I was thinking!”
Brid and Kialan looked at one another, then at Moril. “Don’t you think,” Kialan said, “that that’s the way it works? It’s your thoughts that bring out the power.”
“But it never did that for Father!” said Moril. “He told me! He said it only did it once.”
“Well,” Kialan said, rather awkwardly, “he couldn’t really use it, could he? It wasn’t his kind of thing.”
“Except just that one time,” said Brid. “Which proves it, Moril. Because it must have been when Father saw Mother in Ganner’s hall. And he wanted her to love him instead of Ganner so much that he managed to make the cwidder work, and she did love him enough to come away with him.”
After that Moril went and put the cwidder away. Brid got it out again and polished it for him, but he pretended not to notice. When Olob, the cart, and all the instruments were gleaming with care, they set off again through the first Upland, toward the steep hill to the second. Brid drove. Moril sat beside her, trying out another of Dagner’s songs on his small treble cwidder. But it was no good. The treble cwidder just felt foolish and flimsy and shrill, and it sounded terribly ordinary. As Olob settled into a slow, heaving walk up the steep hill into the next Upland, Moril was forced to turn and ask Kialan to put the little cwidder away and pass him the big one.
The matter-of-fact way Kialan handed it to him made Moril feel much better about it. Moril took the cwidder thankfully. It felt right. He was not sure now whether it was a comfort or a burden, but if Kialan could accept so easily that it was a powerful and mysterious thing, so could he. But he knew he was going to have to learn to control the thing. You could not earn your living with a cwidder that whined if you were miserable and croaked if you were cross. “How should I start?” he asked Kialan over his shoulder.
Kialan hesitated, not because he did not understand Moril, but because he was not sure how Moril should start. “Understanding yourself, perhaps?” he asked. “I mean, I’ve no idea either, but try that. Er—why didn’t you stay in Markind, for instance? Was it just seeing Tholian there?”
Moril, by this time, was sure that it was not. “Why didn’t you want to stay?” he asked Brid, as a start. “Duty to Father?”
“Like Mother, you mean?” said Brid. “N-no. A bit of that. I do prefer Father’s outlook to Mother’s, but it was really almost more like the way Mother went back to Ganner. It’s what I’m used to—this—and nothing else felt right.”
Moril felt that went for him, too. But there was more to it than that. He could have persuaded Brid to go back to Markind after Dagner was arrested, but he had not thought of it, even. He had not wanted to go back when he had found out how dangerous their journey North really was. And he was still going North, as if it was a matter of course. Why?
“Why, Moril?” asked Brid.
“I was born in the North,” Moril answered, rather slowly. “When I—er—dream of things, it’s always the North. And the North is right and the South is wrong.”
“Bravo!” said Kialan.
Moril turned to smile at him. He found himself turning from the towering unseeable hills of the North to a low, blue vision of the South, beyond Kialan’s head. “But I still don’t understand,” he said.
At the top of the hill there was a village, a very small place, simply ten houses and an alehouse, clinging to the steep brow of the hill.
“Don’t let’s perform here,” said Brid. “There’s a bigger place farther on, I know.”
They went past the village into a wider Upland, full of grazing sheep. By the middle of the morning Moril’s cwidder was sounding melancholy. “I can’t see us getting much,” he said. “Not just the two of us.”
“Would it help at all,” said Kialan, “if I were to pretend to be Dagner?”
Both their heads whipped round his way. It was almost a marvelous idea.
“Would they remember Dagner from last year?” said Kialan.
“We didn’t perform in the Uplands at all last year,” said Brid. “But—”
“I’ve been thinking,” said Kialan. “No one but the earls knows I’m in the South. And it’s so out of the way here that no one’s going to know Dagner was arrested unless we tell them. I think it would be safe enough—and a bit in your father’s style, too.”
Moril made the obvious objection. “You can’t sing.” They looked at one another for a moment. Moril remembered Kialan listening in to his lessons with Clennen, appearing in the crowd whenever they gave a show, and seeming so knowledgeable the time the big cwidder went out of tune. “Or can you?” said Moril.
“Not as well as you,” said Kialan, “but—may I borrow one of these cwidders for a moment?”