“Yes, you are!” Hildy cried out. “If what you told me goes wrong, then we’d be on the run and I’d never get back here. I’d have to sacrifice what I want to politics, just like I have done all my life! I’m not going to. I refuse to come with you. I’m staying here!” She spun round and marched away down the steps, angrily swinging her blue hood.
Navis watched until she was lost in the surging, mingling crowd. His eyes were narrowed. He looked vicious and wretched.
“Excuse me, sir,” Biffa said, looming shyly over him.
Navis jumped and looked up at her. “Didn’t anything I said get through to her?” he asked Biffa.
“Not really,” Biffa admitted. “But it got through to me. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. I know she ought to be away from here, somewhere where no earls will think to look, and I thought—Anyway, if I asked her to come home to our mill with me for the summer, I know she’d come, and no one would expect that, because we’re poor. But—but the trouble is I only have the hire for one horse.”
Navis’s face relaxed. “May the One bless you, my child!” he said. “That would solve the summer. But I was talking about an autumn campaign, if you remember. Can you think of a way to stop her coming back here?”
Biffa shyly twisted her hood. “That’s the other thing I wanted to tell you, sir. We get the autumn storms real terribly in from the Marshes, over in Ansdale. Sometimes you can’t get down to the valleys until weeks after Harvest. I was over a month late getting here last autumn. That’s how I came to know Hildy. We were both latecomers, as well as on scholarships. But Hildy came a month after me, and she won’t know.”
“Aha!” said Navis. “This is deep cunning, my dear!” Biffa went very pink and shot a flustered smile at Mitt, then at Maewen and Moril. “Well, if you think you can keep my thankless daughter safe,” Navis went on, briskly undoing his money belt, “here is the hire of a horse for her and money for her keep. Is this enough?”
Biffa looked at the pile of gold coins he pushed into her hand, and her eyes went large. “It would do me a year, sir—or two, if I went steady. I’ll give it Hildy now, not to be tempted. That’s the third thing I wanted to tell you: We ought to go now, in among everyone else, so that when those Hannart people look round for Hildy, she’s gone. Wouldn’t you say so, sir?”
“Absolutely right,” said Navis. “Biffa, you are an extremely intelligent young woman.”
Biffa went an even brighter pink. “Yes, I know,” she said. “But me being so big, people never think of me as clever. I trade on it quite a lot.” Everyone laughed. It was too much for Biffa. She turned and ran.
“Quite a character,” Navis said.
“Do you trust her?” Mitt said.
“I think it’s all right,” Moril said. “She sort of worships Hildy—you know the way girls do.”
“But all that money!” Mitt muttered as they joined the shuffling mass of people trying to get through the garden and out of the school gate. “I wouldn’t trust myself with that lot. And she said she traded on her size.”
It was a nerve-racking time. They shuffled and stopped and shuffled again, and the garden lawn got trampled under many feet. They were too far from the gate to tell if the cup had been missed, or if the many holdups were because Hannart hearthmen were waiting at the gate for Hildy or Maewen. And that gate was the only way out.
“I think it’s merely the confusion of so many departures,” Navis said. He was completely cool. He seemed to be one of those people who just got cooler the more danger there was.
As they shuffled nearer the gate, it began to look as if Navis was right. The opening was crammed with parents and pupils and younger brothers and sisters, all with luggage and lunch baskets. Pupils kept forgetting things and shoving back into the school to find them. Many families had hired porters to carry the pupils’ trunks, so the way was constantly being blocked by men with handcarts, shouting, “Porter for Serieth Gunsson!” as they came in and, “Por-ter! Mind your backs!” as they shoved their way out again.
After a while Moril said quietly, “Biffa and Hildy are in the crowd behind us.”
Maewen wished she was taller. It took her five minutes of twisting and standing on tiptoe to see the two girls. Both carried bulging bags. Very sensibly they had mixed themselves up with a family of tall men who were fetching home a boy pupil even taller than Biffa and were talking busily with them as if they belonged.
“A relief,” Navis said, after he had turned casually and seen them, too. “So young Biffa is honest then.”
They reached the gate at long last. People were just shoving their way through without being stopped but without any order either. The man with bad teeth was standing to one side. He stopped Navis.
“Excuse me, sir.” Everyone waited for the worst. “Excuse me, one of your party left a cwidder with me.”
Moril shoved his way through, while the rest of them tried hard not to look as relieved as they felt. The man turned and fetched the cwidder out of his cubbyhole beside the gate.
“Here you are. One cwidder, safe and sound. Is it you the Adon’s waiting for?” He pointed sideways through the opening.
There, beyond a confusion of carriages and carts, the Hannart horsemen stood in a huddle. Kialan was in the midst of them, looking bored and impatient.
Moril took it in without a blink. “No. It’s my sister. She’s always late.”
“No, lad, she’s out there,” the man said.
They could all see Brid as he spoke, on a horse beside Kialan.
“Well, it’s not me. I don’t live in Hannart,” Moril said. “I expect they’re waiting for Hildrida Navissdaughter. Isn’t that so?” he asked Navis.