Drowned Ammet by Diana Wynne Jones Page B

had a brother who fell to pieces in his nightmares. When he did, he found he quite liked Hobin. Meanwhile, Hobin was firmly but kindly resisting all Milda’s persuasions to become a freedom fighter. He agreed that the earls made life needlessly hard. He agreed that things were bad in Holand. He grumbled at taxes like everyone else. But he did not hold with freedom fighting, he said. He called Canden—sadly and a little severely—a boy who played with fire, and when Milda talked eagerly of injustices, he smiled and said it depended on her circumstances. After a while he took to scolding her kindly for buying him wine she could not afford.
    Ham grew increasingly gloomy over that winter. Mitt could not understand why, until the spring, when Flower of Holand was gliding out on the tide one morning.
    Siriol said, “Your ma going to marry that Hobin?”
    â€œNo!” Mitt said indignantly.
    â€œGood for the cause when she does,” Siriol said.
    Ham sighed. “Good for her, too,” he said nobly. “Hobin’s a good man.”
    Mitt was furious. And when Siriol and Ham proved right, it made another grudge he bore them. Milda did marry Hobin. And all through the wedding Mitt was muttering to himself that he would get Siriol and Ham for this if it was the last thing he did. Probably will be, too, he thought. Since last Festival, he had been living as if there was nothing to look forward to, beyond the moment he somehow planted a bomb under Earl Hadd. The only good thing he could see in this wedding was that he would be living in reach of a store of gunpowder.
    Milda and Mitt moved into the upper part of the house in Flate Street, some way west of the waterfront. It was a good house, though small and peeling. It even had a yard with a mangle in it, and a target on its dingy brick wall where, to Mitt’s interest, Hobin tested the guns he made. Mitt had his own room for the first time for years, and though he was far too proud to admit it, very lonely he was in it, too. Milda gave up her sewing and bustled round their four upstairs rooms, singing and laughing, and the crease of worry seemed to have left her face for good. It saddened Mitt. He had only been able to send that crease away from time to time, yet Hobin had banished it forever. Hobin offered to send Mitt to school, but Mitt preferred to go on working. The Free Holanders would not find much use for a boy who was tied up at lessons all day. And besides, Mitt felt that freedom fighting was almost the only tie left between himself and Milda.
    It was then that Hobin showed a surprising strictness. “You’re a fool, Mitt,” he said. “You’ve got a brain and you ought to learn to use it, not waste your time talking freedom with a bunch of boatmen who don’t know what the word means. You’ll wish you’d done otherwise when you grow to be a man.”
    This kind of argument is always irritating. Mitt twisted about and did not answer. He wanted to say he was not going to grow up—he was going to kill Hadd instead—but with Hobin’s sober blue eyes fixed on him, he did not like to.
    â€œWell, if you must work,” said Hobin, “you can do one job and one only. You can learn my trade from me, or Siriol’s from him, or you can sell fish if you want. But you do no more than one.”
    Mitt passionately wanted to go on selling fish. He enjoyed shouting out rude things about Hadd even more than he loved fooling Harchad’s soldiers. Fishing—well, he was glad of any excuse to stop doing that. On the other hand, he knew that he would have far more chance of getting his hands on some gunpowder if he was Hobin’s apprentice. He shifted about, kept his eyes on the floor, and finally swallowed his annoyance enough to say grudgingly, “I’ll learn your trade, then.”
    â€œYou did quite right, Mitt,” Milda said, and hugged him delightedly. That consoled Mitt