“Nobody thinks I’m useful at all,” Ynen said. That was the reason for his misery, but he had been ashamed to say it before.
Hildy glared round at him, and he shrank. “I could murder them for thinking that!” she raved. “Why do you have to be useful? You’re nice. You’re the only nice person in this whole horrible Palace!” Ynen went pink. He was very flattered, but he would like to have been told he was useful, too. And he wished Hildy would realize that she was quite as alarming raging for him as she was raging at him. “I intend to teach them a lesson,” Hildy proclaimed.
“They probably won’t notice,” Ynen said. “I wish we could go and live somewhere else. Somebody told me Father preferred living in the country. Do you think if I asked him—?”
Hildy interrupted him with a squawk of angry laughter. “Go and ask one of the statues in the throne room! They’ll pay more attention.”
Ynen knew she was right. But now he had talked about going away from the Palace, he knew it was the one thing he really wanted to do. “Hildy, couldn’t we go out for the rest of the day? I hate the Palace like this. Couldn’t we go sailing—oh, I forgot. You’re not allowed to anymore, are you?”
“Don’t be a fool! The place is full of revolutionaries. They won’t let us go out,” said Hildy. But she could see from the window behind Ynen that it was perfect weather for sailing. “Won’t all the sailors have a holiday today?”
Ynen sighed. “Yes. I wouldn’t have a crew.” Still, it had been a good idea. “Suppose we rode out to High Mill then?”
But Hildy stood looking from the window to the ruins of her coverlet. There was going to be trouble about that. It was a silly thing to get into trouble about on its own. She ought to do something worse. She was aching to do something really terrible and show everybody. She remembered Navis had asked them to stay where he could find them. That decided her. “Let’s go sailing, Ynen,” she said. “And let’s give them a fright. Let’s knot the coverlet and hang it out of the window, and make them think we’ve run away.” Ynen looked at her dubiously. “I can crew,” said Hildy. “You can be captain because it’s your boat.”
“You don’t mind getting into awful trouble?” said Ynen.
“I do not,” said Hildy.
Ynen jumped up, so full of pleasure and mischief that he looked like a different boy. “Come on then! We’ll need warm clothes, and we’d better pinch some food, too. We’ll have to sneak out past the kitchens, anyway.”
Hildy laughed at the change in him as she snatched up two strips of coverlet and knotted them together. She pulled the knot tight. There was an ominous ripping noise. “It wouldn’t bear a sparrow, this stuff,” she said.
“It’s only got to look used,” Ynen pointed out. “Pull it as tight as you can without tearing it.” He helped her make the knots and then to tie the fraying strip to the window frame and let it down outside. It did not reach very far. “It’ll do,” Ynen said hopefully. “We could have jumped down onto the library roof.”
Hildy leaned out beside him. Their rope dangled a pitiful sixteen feet. The library dome was twenty feet or more below that. “They’ll wonder how we didn’t break our necks,” she said. “Go and get warm clothes. I’ll come to your room when I’ve changed.”
Ynen raced off, hardly the same boy who had sat miserably on Hildy’s window seat half the afternoon. Hildy, as she changed into a short woolen dress, sea boots, socks, and a pea jacket, told herself she was doing right. Ynen was so happy. She still felt wonderfully rebellious, but she was also just a little scared. There were people in Holand with bombs and guns. She had seen them.
“They won’t know who we are,” she told her reflection in the mirror. “And I’m sick of being important.” She took her hair down and did it in pigtails, to look as ordinary as possible, and collected dust from all the corners where she could find it and rubbed it on her face. Then she threw her good clothes to the back of a closet and set off for Ynen’s room.
Her cousins Harilla and Irana were coming along the passage. Hildy dodged behind a grand china vase. She heard them go into her room. Harilla was saying: “Well, Hildy, did they let you break off your betrothal? You needn’t think—Oh!”
Hildy dodged out from the vase and ran, as quietly as she could in sea boots. “Quick!” she told Ynen. “Harilla found the coverlet.”
“It would be her, wouldn’t it?” said Ynen.
They could tell the alarm was up as they crept down toward the kitchens. There was a great deal of noise and running about. But everyone seemed to believe that Hildy and Ynen would be found in the direction of the library. It was easy to avoid the people running there from the kitchens, and once they reached the kitchens, there were very few people left there. They heard someone whistling and dishes clattering, but the sounds echoed with emptiness. Ynen risked opening the door of a pantry.
“Look at that!” he said. The pantry was full, from floor to ceiling, with pies—glazed pies, golden pies, puffy pies, tarts, flans, pasties, and pies with flowers and birds on them. “Pass us a couple of those sacks,” said Ynen. “Let’s make it look as if we took enough for a week.”
They pulled the pantry door to behind them and, in the half-dark, seized what pies came first to hand and stuffed the sacks with them. While they were doing it, footsteps hurried outside, backward and forward. They waited for whoever it was to go away, and took the opportunity to eat a pasty each.
“Seems quiet now,” Hildy whispered.
They wiped gravy and crumbs off their mouths and tiptoed out. The kitchen gate was just beyond. The footsteps had been Uncle Harchad’s. He had done them a favor. The soldiers who should have been on guard at the gate were standing stiffly just inside the kitchen door up the passage, listening to Harchad, along with the scullions left in the kitchen.
“And you’re absolutely sure neither of them has gone past?” they heard Harchad saying.
“Quite sure, sir.”
“If you see them, I want them brought to me, understand? Not to Earl Harl,” said Uncle Harchad.
Nobody saw or heard Ynen and Hildy tiptoe to the gate, open the small postern carved in the big door, and slip out of it with their sacks.
10
Mitt took a last deep breath, hurled himself across the alley, and ran up the wall. If you are light and strong and determined, you can get a long way up a wall like this. Mitt’s feet scrambled, his breath sawed, and his fingers caught and slipped in the greasy bricks overhead. His right hand managed to clench in a crumbly crack. He threw the other arm over the top of the wall. Then, with a rasping slide and a slither, he was over and down, in his own backyard, terrified at the noise he had made.
It was queer. It looked like a strange backyard already. Mitt had not remembered it so small and grimy, or the target on the wall so pitted, or the mangle so rusty. As he stole over the slippery earth, he could hardly believe that just as usual, he would be able to slide up the workshop window and unlatch the back door. Yet just as usual, he put his arm in and the cold latch clicked upward under his fingers. He pulled open the door, creeeak, and slipped round it into the grimy, gloomy workshop. Remember to break that window, Mitt thought.
Noisy. Pity. Do it last. He crept across the room and picked up a crowbar. He looked at the rack of finished guns—locked, with the seal of Holand dangling from the lock—and the chests of powder—each kind separate, and locked, with the seal of Holand dangling there, too. He wished Hobin was not so careful. He was going to have to break everything, mix his own powder, make his own cartridges.