They had put up at an inn used by previous embassies, and after supper he went to the stables to see if the horses’ legs had been washed and if they were properly rugged. All was well. He said good night to the grooms, who were sleeping with the horses, and was turning back to the inn when he heard a voice in the fog say, ‘To Blokula!’ and a second voice repeat, ‘To Blokula!’ Fog distorts sound, and it seemed to him the speakers were standing on a roof. They were loud mortal voices—such speakers could not be going to an elfin court. When another voice went past him saying more urgently, ‘To Blokula!’ he remembered the word’s chawbacon associations, determined to witness a Blokula, and set out to follow the voices. The fog swirled round him, he was splashing through cat-iced puddles, he had lost sense of direction, knew he was being a fool and should give up the chase; but for the sake of foolery he shouted out, ‘To Blokula!’ A halloo of voices answered him. He went on and was in a changed world.

There were nine plaids, one for each Dissident, and one over. They were accepted, like the hot meals, as a matter of course—though with complaints about the smell. Beline said romantically that it was a step toward self-knowledge to learn what you could put up with. Beline was visionary and rather smug. Of all the party she was the most bent on self-approval. Her career as Court Harpist had given her exacting ideals of putting herself in tune, here tightening, here loosening, till all her strings were in accord with her intentions. Considered as strings, the rest of the party were apt to slip. Sir Maugre’s erudition was so wide that whatever anyone said reminded him of something that had no bearing on it—as when a reference to the music of the spheres set him off on the conjectural compass of the Roman trumpet. The Roman trumpet reminded Sir Hune of an ancestral anecdote about Queen Boudicca, Sir Moray trumped Queen Boudicca with a family ghost. This outraged a Dissident called Titmuss—a flaxen-haired fairy with a mild manner, and the most embattled Dissident of them all. There could be no such thing as an Elfin ghost. Ghosts were a mortal appurtenance. If Moray’s pedigree embraced a family ghost, it was a blot on the scutcheon, and nothing to boast about. Beline seized her harp to restore harmony. Moray protested it was the ghost of a hare. The sun went down on their wrath.