“Why?” Hildy said haughtily.
“I may need you in a hurry.”
This was such an unlikely thing that Hildy simply made a scornful noise and crashed out of her father’s rooms, slamming each door behind her as hard as she could. She was so angry, and so determined to make Navis sorry, that she reached the gallery outside her uncle Harl’s rooms on a surge of blind fury and had almost no idea how she got there. She was fetched back to her senses by running into her cousins Harilla and Irana. They were hurrying the other way. Harilla’s face was still streaked with red from her recent hysterics. Irana’s was red all over.
“It’s no good,” Irana said. “If you’re going where I think you’re going. They’re both pigs.”
Harilla gasped, “I wish I was dead!” and burst into tears. Irana led her away.
Hildy wondered what was the matter with them this time. When she saw that there were guards outside her uncle’s rooms, she supposed that meant Harl had refused to see them. She marched up to the guards, prepared for battle. But they stood aside, most respectfully, and one opened the door for her. Hildy marched on into the antechamber, rather puzzled. The servants there bowed. She heard her uncle Harl’s voice from the room beyond.
“I tell you I owe the fellow a favor! He killed old Haddock, didn’t he? Let him get away.”
“Don’t be an ass, Harl!” snapped Uncle Harchad’s voice.
“With my blessing,” added Harl.
“Look, Harl, if we don’t catch him—” Harchad broke off irritably as Hildy came in.
Harl looked at her and let out a great guffaw. He was sitting in great comfort, with his shoes off and his feet on a chair. A table under his beefy elbow was crowded with wine bottles. He seemed very happy. He was grinning and sweating with happiness all over his big, bluff face. Harchad, on the other hand, was sitting tensely on the edge of his chair, nervily twiddling a full glass of wine. His face was paler than usual.
“Ha! Ha!” bellowed Harl. “Now it’s Hildrida. That makes the full set of them. We haven’t any more, have we, Harchad? Daughters and nieces and things?”
“No,” said Harchad. He did not seem to find it funny. “If you please, Hildrida. We are trying to talk business. Say what you have to say quickly, and then go.”
Hildy stared at them. She had never paid much attention to her uncle Harl before. He had always been a lazy, sober, silent man—and so ordinary. Nothing he said or did was ever remarkable. But now Uncle Harl was drunk, drunker even than the soldiers got on their nights off. And he was not drowning his sorrow either. He was celebrating. And Uncle Harchad was no more sorry about Grandfather than Harl was. But he was frightened: scared stiff in case he got shot next.
Harl pointed a drunken finger at Hildy. “Don’t say it. We know. All the rest said it.” He put on a high, squeaky voice. “ ‘Please, Uncle, will you break off my betrothal, please?’ Who’s she betrothed to?” he asked Harchad.
“Lithar,” said Harchad. “Holy Islands. And the answer’s no, Hildrida. We need all the allies we can get.”
“So it’s no good asking,” said Harl. He wriggled his stockinged toes at Hildy and produced strange cracking sounds.
At this Hildy’s anger blazed up again. “You’re quite wrong,” she said haughtily. “I wasn’t going to ask. I was going to tell you. I am not marrying Lithar or anyone else you try to choose for me. I’m quite determined about it, and you can’t make me.”
Her two uncles looked at one another. “She’s quite determined, and we can’t make her,” said Harl. “This one had to be different. Her father’s Navis.”
“I’m afraid you’ll find you’re mistaken, Hildrida,” said Harchad. “We can make you. And we will.”
“I shall refuse,” said Hildy. “Utterly. There’s nothing you can do.”
“She’ll refuse utterly,” said Harl.
“She will not,” said Harchad.
“She can if she wants,” said Harl. “She’ll be married by proxy, anyway. Can’t expect Lithar to come all this way. You refuse, my dear girl,” he said to Hildy. “Refuse all you want if it makes you happy. It won’t bother us.” He wriggled his toes at Hildy again, and once more they cracked. Harl was impressed. “Hear that, Harchad? That noise was my toes. Wonder why they do that.”
Hildy clenched her teeth in order not to scream at him. “Lithar might bother if I refuse.”
Harl bawled with laughter. A small smile flitted on Harchad’s face. “Well, it’ll be you he takes it out on, won’t it?” said Harl. “That doesn’t worry me!” He lay back in his chair and grinned at the idea.
“All right,” said Hildy. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.” She swung round and swept out, with her back very straight and her chin up, willing herself not to let the tears in her eyes fall until she was past the attendants, and then the soldiers. Then she ran. She ran to find Ynen. He was the only person in the Palace who was kind.
She could not find him. She dried her tears on her sleeve and searched grimly, high and low, right down to the kitchens. The cooks there were cursing. Hildy discovered that Navis had bestirred himself sufficiently to cancel the feast. She was angrier than ever. To think that out of what she had said to him, this was the one thing he had attended to! She wanted to bite something and tear things up. She stormed to her own room, wondering if a sheet or a curtain would be best to tear.
Ynen was there, still curled up on her window seat. By this time he was feeling very doleful. Hildy was a little ashamed to think she had clean forgotten telling him to wait.
“Hildy,” he said plaintively before he noticed her state of mind. “Why is it all so miserable?”
“Can’t you think why?” Hildy snapped. She seized the coverlet on her bed, a good handful in each hand, and wrenched. It gave way with the most satisfactory ripping noise.
Ynen’s eyes widened. He wished he had not spoken. Now he knew he would have to say something else, or Hildy would turn on him for sitting there like a dumb idiot. “Yes,” he said. “It’s because nobody’s even pretending to be sorry Grandfather’s dead.”
“How right you are!” Hildy snarled. Carefully, almost with enjoyment, she tore a long strip off the coverlet.
Ynen watched her anxiously and kept talking. “People are more sorry about the Festival being messed up. They go on about bad luck. And the awful thing,” he said hurriedly as Hildy began on another strip, “is that I don’t care about Grandfather either. I just feel sort of shocked. It makes me think I’m wicked.”
Hildy finished the second strip. Then, fists up and elbows out, she began on a third. “Wicked! What a stupid way to talk! Grandfather was a horrible old man, and you know he was! If people didn’t do exactly what he wanted, he had them killed, or tried them for treason if they were lords.” She dragged the third strip down to the selvage and wrenched to tear that. She began on a fourth. “The only people who dared argue with him were other earls, and he quarreled with them all the time. Why should you be sorry? Even so,” she said, rending the fourth strip loose, “I felt sick when I heard Uncle Harl calling him old Haddock.”
Ynen judged that Hildy’s temper was cooling. He risked laughing. “Everyone called him that!”
“I wish I’d known,” said Hildy. “I’d have said it, too.”
This encouraged Ynen to believe she was almost calm again. “Hildy,” he said, “that was rather a good coverlet.”
It had been a good one. It was blue and gold, and worked in a pattern of roses. The sewing women down in Holand had taken a good month to embroider it. Hildy’s four furious strips had left it a square of ragged, puckered cloth about four feet long. “I don’t care,” said Hildy. Her rage flared up again. She seized the puckered square and tore it and tore it. “I hate good things!” she raged. “They give us good coverlets, and golden clocks, and beautiful boats, and they don’t do it because they like us or care about us. All they think of is whether we’ll come in useful for their plans!”