The Grey King by Susan Cooper Page A

teaches me. He taught your auntie too, this is hers I’m at.” He ran one finger across the lilting strings. “Freezing in the winter in this room, always, but it keeps better in tune than in the warm. . . . Ah, Will Stanton, you don’t know what a distinguished place you are in. This is the only farm in Wales where there are two harps. Mr. Rowlands has one in his house too, you see.” He nodded through the window, at the trio of farm cottages across the yard. “I practise there mostly. But Mrs. Rowlands is busy cleaning today.”
    â€œWhere is David Evans?” said John Rowlands.
    â€œIn the yard with Rhys. Cowshed, I think.”
    â€œDiolch.” He went out, preoccupied.
    â€œI thought you’d be at school,” Will said.
    â€œHalf-holiday. I forget why.” Bran wore the protective smoky glasses even indoors; they made him look eccentric and unreal, the inscrutable dark circles taking all expression out of his pale face. He was wearing dark trousers too, and a dark sweater, making his white hair still more striking and unnatural. Will thought suddenly: He must do it on purpose; he likes being different.
    â€œAn awful thing happened,” he said, and told Bran about the sheep. But again he left out the quick glimpse of the attacker that had made him think it was a white dog.
    â€œAre you sure the sheep was alive when John left it?” Bran said.
    â€œOh, yes, I think so. There’s always the chance someone just stopped and took it away. I expect John’s checking.”
    â€œWhat a weird business,” Bran said. He stood up, stretching. “I’ve had enough practising. Want to come out?”
    â€œI’ll go and tell Aunt Jen.”
    On the way out, Bran picked up his flat leather schoolbag from a chair beside the door. “I must drop this off at home. And put the kettle on for Da. He comes in for a cuppa, round about now, if he’s working nearby.”
    Will said curiously, “Does your mother work too?”
    â€œOh, she’s dead. Died when I was a baby, I don’t remember her at all.” Bran gave him a strange sideways look. “Nobody told you about me, then? My dad and I, we’re a bachelor household. Mrs. Evans is very nice, always. We eat supper at the farm, weekends. Of course, you haven’t been here at a weekend yet.”
    â€œI feel as if I’d been here for weeks,” Will said, putting his face up to the sun. Something in the way Bran spoke was making him oddly uneasy, and he did not want to think about it too closely. He pushed it to the back of his mind, to join that image of the flicker of a white muzzle through the bracken.
    â€œWhere’s Cafall?” he said.
    â€œOh, he will be out with Da. Thinking I am still at school.” Bran laughed. “The time we had when Cafall was young, trying to persuade him that school is for boys, not puppies. When I went to primary school in the village, he used to sit at the gate all day, just waiting.”
    â€œWhere do you go now?”
    â€œTywyn Grammar. In a bus.”
    They scuffed their feet through the dust of the path down to the cottages, a path made by wheels, two ruts with hummocky grass growing between. There were three cottages, but only two were occupied; now that he was closer, Will could see that the third had been converted into a garage. He looked beyond, up the valley, where the mountains rose blue-hazed and beautiful into the clear sky, and he shivered. Though the mystery of the wounded sheep had taken up the front of his mind for a while, the deeper uneasiness was swelling back again now. All around, throughout the countryside, he could feel the malevolence of the Dark growing, pushing at him. It could not focus upon him, follow him like the gaze of a great fierce eye; an OldOne had the power to conceal himself so that his presence could not at once be sensed so precisely. But clearly the Grey King knew that he