The Secret Country (16 page)

“Not this near to the well,” said Ted. “It’s a protection against normal dangers. It’d rather zap you itself.”

“Who thought that up?” asked Patrick.

“Ellen, probably,” said Ted. “All the really weird ideas about things that don’t matter are hers.”

“Some of them seem to matter now,” said Patrick.

“I wish we hadn’t been so thorough,” lamented Ted.

“Mom says it’s a virtue to be thorough,” observed Laura.

“That’s just to get you to clean your closet.”

“Oh.”

“It is a virtue when you’re finding out about things,” said Patrick. “But not when you’re making them up.”

“Sure it is,” said Laura. “It makes it more fun.”

“But it’s not fun now.”

They heard the ominous tramping again, and a cacophony of cracking twigs.

“Is that really only Ruth and Ellen?” said Patrick.

Ted pulled the sword out, and it blazed like the sun on a mirror, bright gold and hurtful. Laura’s eyes squeezed themselves shut and overflowed.

“What are you doing now?” said Ruth’s voice. Laura swiped at her eyes and made them open. The glow of the sword had steadied down to its kinder blue. Not even the runes she had seen before danced on the blade. Ruth and Ellen and Ted and Patrick were all standing up, and looking a little ghostly in the sword light. The fire had gone out.

“I’d swear there was something besides you two coming through those woods,” said Patrick. “Unless there’s some echo effect, and I don’t see why there should be.”

“I’m sure there’s a lot you don’t see,” said Ellen. “Ted, why did your sword do that?”

“How should I know?” said Ted. “Laurie found it.”

“And you can give it to me now,” said Laura, “so the wolves don’t get us.”

Ellen snorted. “There aren’t any wolves around here.”

“Why should they get both the swords? And I found it.”

“Why don’t you give it to her, so we can get going?” said Patrick.

“You just don’t want to give them yours,” said Ted. “All right, but I want Ruth to carry it.”

“I don’t want it,” said Ruth. “I don’t like sharp pointed things.”

“Some hero you are.”

“I’m not a hero, I’m a sorcerer.”

“Will you go on and give Laura the sword?” said Patrick.

“I get it next time,” said Ted.

“Oh, all right,” said Laura.

Ted unbuckled the belt and handed it to her with the sword and sheath. Laura stood up to put the belt around her waist and promptly dropped it into the ashes of the fire.

“You see?” said Ted.

“Shut up,” said Laura.

Ruth had to help her put the belt on.

“You’d better practice walking with it or you’ll kill yourself,” said Patrick, kindly enough.

“You shut up too,” said Laura, who was mortified to a degree she had never experienced before. It was all right to be clumsy back home, but here, and especially with the sword, it suddenly felt like a crime. She pondered this for a moment while Ruth tried to adjust the belt so it would stay on. Falling off the pony had not felt like a crime, even though Benjamin had certainly acted as if he thought it were one. But standing under the strange stars of the Secret Country with the belt too tight around her middle, and the sword’s weight making her want to lean sideways, and the smoky dust she had disturbed making her want to sneeze, she felt like her usual grubby self for the first time since she and Ted had sneaked out of the house.

And that was it. She had been Princess Laura all evening, until Laura the mouse dropped the sword in the ashes.

“This is hard!” she said.

“Standing up with the sword on?” said Ted. “You’d better give it back.”

“No!” said Laura. She backed away from him, and fell down.

Patrick laughed, Ted groaned, Ellen told them to shut up, and Ruth came and picked Laura up.

“You’d better let me have that sword,” said Ted, holding his hand out for it.

“I meant,” said Laura, “it’s hard being Princess Laura.”

Ted’s hand dropped. “You see?” he said. “See?”

“See what?”

“Why I might want to quit?”

“Oh,” said Laura.

“Patrick,” said Ted, turning away from her, “let’s go if we’re going.”

“We’d better agree on a time and place to meet,” said Patrick. “We could lose each other for days in High Castle. I don’t think our lives overlap that much.”

“What fun is that?” demanded Ellen.

“Tomorrow,” said Ted. “Let’s get it over with.”

“Should we sneak out after bedtime,” said Ruth, “or is there anything wrong with just going sometime during the day?”

“We don’t know when we’ll all be free,” said Patrick, “so we’d better sneak. Besides, that will make it easier to get out of here right after we get the ring.”

“Midnight, then,” said Ted.

“The witching hour,” said Ellen.

“Let’s meet at the foot of the West Tower, then, if that’s where the Ring is,” said Ruth.

“I think,” said Patrick, when everyone had agreed to this, “that Ted and I should go south and you guys go east.”

They took their separate ways in the darkness, and Laura fell down the hill.

CHAPTER 8

LAURA and Ellen were late for the rendezvous at the West Tower. Ellen was comfortably sure which way was west, but it turned out not to be. They found themselves treading a long stretch of very dusty and cobwebby corridor lit by two torches that burned an unlikely and disconcerting purple. What should have been the door to the West Tower, flung hospitably open so that people could go up and rummage, was shut and bolted, and guarded by a grumpy beast the exact nature of which they did not stay to ascertain. It looked like the pool of light made by an imaginary sun shining through a round purple stained-glass window, and gurgled at them like a suddenly unclogged drain. They ran.

They were still running when they reached the rendezvous. If Laura had not tripped on the skirt of the dress Agatha had made her wear that day, they would probably have run right past their relations and ended up in Conrad’s Close, which would have pleased neither of them. It was said (by Agatha, in the course of a long and impassioned lecture) to be haunted by the ghost of Conrad’s bitterest enemy, who had actually died in the Nightmare Grass, and whose ghost therefore appeared to everybody it saw as what Conrad’s enemy had feared most when alive.

As it was, Laura tripped, Ellen stopped and went back for her, and they both blinked in a sudden blaze of green from Patrick’s sword.

“You don’t have to run yourselves to death even if you are late,” said Ruth from behind her brother.

Laura, sitting on the cold stone floor and panting for breath, looked at her green-tinged face and would have run again if she had been standing.

“There was something,” said Ellen, “some beast.” She stopped to breathe.

“Where?” demanded Patrick. “Is it following you?”

“I didn’t hear it,” said Laura doubtfully.

Ellen pointed in the direction they had come. “We thought it was at the bottom of the West Tower, but—”

“South,” said Patrick, disgustedly. “That’s Fence’s tower, you ninnies, and whatever he left to guard it wouldn’t hurt you.”

“It’s probably just a handful of moonlight and six rhymes,” said Ruth.

“Where’s Ted?” asked Laura.

“He’s guarding the way we came,” said Patrick. “Some of the catlike guards might walk this way sometimes. I hope nobody heard you guys charging along.”

“I don’t think anybody except Fence uses that part of the castle,” said Ruth.

“It didn’t look like it,” said Ellen. “All dusty.”

“I’ll get Ted,” said Ruth. “Give me the sword, Patrick, please.”

“Why didn’t you bring a torch or a lantern?” asked Ellen. “We tried to get one but they wouldn’t let us, and the candles just blew out. It’s awfully windy in this place.”

“Ted’s got the lantern,” said Ruth. “He didn’t want to stand where the guards might come, holding this weird sword.”

Patrick handed her the weird sword, and she went off down the hall in a halo of green. Laura leaned against the hospitably open door to the West Tower’s stairs and tried to peer up them. There was a faint glow on the wall of the first turn.

“How was your first day at High Castle?” Patrick asked them.

“Benjamin said we couldn’t have anything but bread and water,” said Ellen, “but Agatha brought us pasties.”

“They were awful,” said Laura.

“They were not.”

“Do you have any left?” asked Patrick. “Because Ted and I don’t have any Agatha, and—”

“Ellen ate them all,” said Laura.

“What happened to Ruthie?” asked Ellen.

“They turned her over to Meredith, who’s the head sorcerer of the Green Caves at High Castle. They scolded her and turned her from a journeyman back into an apprentice. Don’t ask her about it. She’s furious.”

Laura could well imagine. Ellen seemed unimpressed.

“
We
were actually lucky to be punished,” said Ellen. “It meant no lessons. Whoever decided we should have lessons in the summer?”

“You think you’re unhappy,” said Patrick. “Ted and I have a fencing lesson with Randolph first thing tomorrow, and he thinks he’s been teaching Ted for three years and me for one, and we don’t know anything about it at all.”

“Well,” said Ellen, “we don’t know anything about the history of the Outer Isles, either.”

“The what?”

“The Outer Isles. I made them up one day when it rained and you guys were all playing cards.”

“How many more things like that are we going to run into?” demanded Patrick. “If I’d had any idea you were all going around making things up on your own—”

“Weren’t you?” asked Ellen.

“No!”

“You’re weird.”

Patrick’s reply to this was forestalled by the return of Ted and Ruth, who came clattering down the corridor in a muddle of green light from Patrick’s sword and yellow from Ted’s lantern.

“Why are you so loud?” said Ellen.

“It’s these boots,” said Ted. “They’re heavy. Don’t you have any?”

Ellen stuck her foot into the circle of lantern light and showed him her soft leather shoe.

“That’s much better for sneaking around in,” said Ted.

“Lady Ruth has some of those,” said Ruth, “but they’re not warm enough for this place. They might fit you.”

“What’s Patrick got?” said Ellen.

“Boots,” said Patrick. “But I know how to walk.” He took his sword back from Ruth and sheathed it, and a new set of darker shadows sprang up around them.

“Where’s my sword, Laurie?” said Ted.

“It’s not yours,” said Laura. Ellen’s reminder that they were likely to get in trouble over their lessons, and the fact that Ted was no longer guarding against discovery by the guards, were making her feel frightened again. As a result, she felt uncompromising. “It’s under the bed. I had to tell Benjamin it was a toy.”

“Did he believe you?”

“No,” said Ellen.

“Well, he let me keep it.”

“He kept looking at those stones on the handle,” said Ellen.

“Hilt,” said Patrick. “Take care of that sword, you guys. We can’t get you back if you lose it.”

“Let’s go,” said Ted, holding the lantern up. They started up the narrow stairway, first Ted, then Ruth, then Patrick, then Ellen, and then Laura.

There was indeed a torch burning just beyond the first turn of the stairway, high up on the wall. There was also another beast. Laura could not see it, but she could hear it gurgle.

“Back up!” said Ted’s voice, echoing a little in the stairwell. “Patrick, the sword—”

The sword rang as Patrick drew it, and the beast made a noise like a bucketful of water thrown into a patch of mud. All of this sounded hollow and horrible.

“What’s it doing!” cried Laura, retreating back around the corner so that Ellen would not knock her over.

“I can’t see, they’re all in the way,” said Ellen. She sounded like someone who has discovered that he has chosen a bad seat at the movies, and Laura, who wanted to take off down the stairs and find a bed to hide under, marveled at her.

“Give me the sword,” said Ted’s voice.

“You get out of the way,” said Patrick’ s. “You believe in this stuff. It’ll probably drown you.”

The beast produced a remarkable imitation of a water balloon hitting a hot sidewalk from a long way up.

“Will you give it here!”

“Will you move!”

“Will you wait!” said Ruth’s voice. Laura, two steps farther down than she had been when the water balloon hit, froze, looking up at their shadows on the wall.

“Does anybody remember anything like this?” said Ruth.

“No,” said Ted. “Give me the sword.”

“It sounds,” said Ellen, “like the one we met at Fence’s tower.”

“Does it look like it?”

“You’re in the way.”

“Well, come on up.”

Ellen disappeared around the corner and her shadow joined the tangle on the wall. The beast bubbled like a coffee percolator for a moment, slurped once, and stopped.

“Hey, Laurie!” called Ellen, reappearing around the bend. “Come and look at this.”

Laura shook her head. “One’s enough.”

“I want you to see if you think it looks like the other one. It’s not doing anything.”

“It’s gurgling!”

“Well, maybe we sound like that to it too. Come on.”

Laura, feeling as if someone else had broken the bathroom window and she were going to get the blame, came slowly up the stairs she had sneaked down, and stood next to Ellen.

The beast, taking up three or four steps, sat in the torchlight, looking like a pool of water with a scum of purple fur. It had no eyes, no legs, no up or down, and no edges. There were spots that were clearly step, and spots that were clearly beast, and an odd zone between that was not clearly anything. It bubbled gently at Laura from somewhere inside itself.