The Secret Country (22 page)

“She must be a witch,” said Laura to Ellen. “She’s got a broom and a mean cat.”

“Too young,” said Ellen.

“What then, Ruthie?” said Patrick.

“So when I got tired of the mosquitoes, maybe in five minutes, I came back here,” said Ruth, “and Ellen fell all over me.”

“She’d been gone, for hours,” said Ellen a little reproachfully.

“So we figure we changed the time,” said Ruth.

“Did you go back to the bottle trees and check out Australia?” asked Patrick.

“We certainly did not,” said Ruth. “We were late.”

“Ellie, didn’t you have a watch?” said Patrick.

“You know I lost it.”

“But we don’t know the conversion factor, if you don’t know how long you waited for Ruth!”

Ellen shrugged. “It was dark when I started waiting, and the sun came up and had
been
up for
ages
when she got back.”

“Do you remember anything about that army?” Ted asked Ruth. “How big was it? Infantry or cavalry?”

“It covered the whole plain,” said Ruth, submitting to this interrogation with more of her usual meekness than she had shown for some time. “There were men and horses and other things. Maybe a dragon, probably ogres. I didn’t look long.”

“Which way was it going?”

“Toward High Castle,” said Ruth. “What’s wrong? It wasn’t our Secret Country.”

“Sounds like the Dragon King’s army,” said Ted. “So that’s why everything looked wrong. The Border Magic.”

“It didn’t look that wrong,” said Ruth. “The grass wasn’t burned, it wasn’t turned into a desert. The birds weren’t gone; I heard the cardinal.”

“Well, who’s to say the Border Magic works the way we thought it would?” said Ted. Laura looked at him in surprise. He sounded pleased.

“Who’s to say the Border Magic works?” murmured Patrick.

“Cut it out,” said Ruth. She stretched luxuriously, and almost fell off the wall. “Everything’s going to be all right now, so stop making trouble.”

“How do you figure that?” demanded Patrick. He had finished with the leaves of Ruth’s rose and began methodically pulling the petals off and holding them up to the light.

“How do you figure anything else?” said Ruth smugly. Lady Ruth had spoken so when the emissary of the dwarves had asked her to tell them how to grow trees underground. It was the demand of tribute they had the right to make every ten years, and it had been a plot on their part to ask for something she could not do. Then she would have had to reveal the magic of the Green Caves to them. But she had said, “How not?” to them, in just that tone, and taught them to make trees grow underground. Laura began to feel a little better.

Patrick clearly felt worse. “You talk to her,” he said to Ted. “You believe this stuff.”

“I think she might be right,” said Ted; he did not sound as smug as Ruth had, but he sounded hopeful.

Patrick flung his hands up in the air, scattering rose petals and bread crumbs in all directions. Three pigeons came out of nowhere and began squabbling over the crumbs.

“I think we can change things if we work at it,” said Ted. “If we changed the time, why not other things? We just have to do it by the rules inside the Secret Country.”

“What makes you so optimistic all of a sudden?”

“Changing the time,” said Ted. “I never thought it’d work.”

“You went to an awful lot of trouble for something that wouldn’t work.”

“Well, but if it didn’t work, then we could go home. But it seems like if that worked, anything will. I think we’ll be all right.”

“You do still think this is real?”

“Really real,” said Ted. “We can do things with it.”

“Well, what did you think it was before, then?”

“Well, real, but magically real. I thought we might be stuck with the story, and it wasn’t even quite the story we knew, so we couldn’t play it right, even if we’d wanted to. But this is just wide open, so it’s all right.”

“So what do we do?” asked Patrick. He was not giving in; he was waiting for Ted to say something stupid so he could argue some more.

“Keep Randolph from poisoning the King,” said Ted, promptly.

“How?”

“Convince the King that he’s fighting dragons and monsters,” said Ted, “or convince Randolph that no matter what happens it won’t do any good to kill the King, or just keep him from doing it by letting him know we know, or watching him all the time, or something.”

“If Randolph can’t convince the King,” said Patrick, “what makes you think we can?”

“And it
will
do good to kill him, so how do we convince Randolph not to?” said Ruth.

“I’ll tell him I believe the King, that there’s no magic.”

“Great,” said Ruth. “Then he’ll kill you.”

“He will not!”

“Why shouldn’t he?” cried Ruth.

“He . . .” said Ted, and the word stuck in his throat. He looked sick.

“But . . .” said Laura.

“He’s going to kill King William,” Ruth said to both of them. “And as far as I know, he’s known the King a lot longer and likes him a lot better than Ted.”

“He might think he can control Ted,” said Patrick, thoughtfully.

“He does think so,” said Ruth. “That’s why he kills the King; he figures he can push Edward around, because he’s weak. But if Ted doesn’t act weak, which it looks like he already isn’t, and tells Randolph that he doesn’t believe in magic, then I think Ted’s had it.”

“What should Randolph do?” demanded Ted.

There was silence.

“Fence says,” said Ellen, slowly, “I mean, in the game, doesn’t he, that Randolph should obey the King and go to war, and if he dies, and if the Secret Country gets burned up, then so what.”

“But what do we think?” said Ted, with an intensity that made Laura glad that he was not addressing her.

“Hey,” said Patrick, absently, shaking what was left of his rose. “There are insects here after all. Here’s an ant on this rose.”

“Patrick,” said Ted.

“Look,” said Patrick, suddenly furious, “I didn’t write this story. I didn’t make things so that all the choices are stupid.”

“I think we’d better think about what we think,” said Ted, and no one laughed at the way he put it.

CHAPTER 11

THEY had little time to think, and none to resolve anything so complicated. Preparations for the Banquet of Midsummer Eve began days before the event, and no one was exempt from work. No matter where Laura went, to the rose garden, to the moat, to the clove-scented fastness of the West Tower, some harried grown-up would hail her with glad cries and send her on some incomprehensible errand. Burrowing in the cellar among piles of sheepskins, she wondered why any banquet should need thirteen black ones; picking all the white roses in the garden, and sucking her pricked fingers, she racked her memory for what was wrong with the red and yellow.

She met Ellen carrying an armful of indignant kittens. She found Ruth scattering sand in the halls. She watched Ted grimly sort through colored ribbons; she giggled to see Patrick make ferns and wildflowers into garlands, scowling as fiercely as if he were reading poetry.

This flurry was not without its benefits. Ted and Patrick had no more fencing lessons. Randolph told them to practice and left them alone. Laura learned her way around the innermost part of High Castle; Ellen was spared the ordeal of geography lessons. Ruth, rummaging in the library for a recipe which one of the undercooks had disgraced himself by forgetting, discovered a collection of damp and unpleasantly stained volumes about the sorcery of the Green Caves. She sat up late reading them every night and was grumpy every day from then on.

They had little time to argue and barely time to eat. “If it’s this bad before this banquet,” said Patrick, one evening when they sat in the dining hall painfully picking the seeds out of millions of raisins, “what will it be like before the Unicorn Hunt?”

“That’s outside,” said Ellen, crunching an unseeded raisin.

“So what?” said Patrick. “We’ll probably have to weed the whole forest.” He flung a handful of seeded raisins into a wooden bowl and looked balefully at Ted. “Quit using your right hand,” he said.

“You’ll make him stutter,” said Ruth.

 

Ted was awakened on the morning of the banquet by the faint but persistent sound of bells. He sat up, and saw Patrick leaning out the window. He was wearing one of the nightshirts they both hated. It was too cold in High Castle at night not to wear them.

“What’s that racket?” demanded Ted.

“Dunno,” said Patrick, absently, to the outside.

“How’s the weather?”

Patrick shrugged. Ted got reluctantly out of bed and joined him at the window. Like most early mornings in the Secret Country, this one was damp and blurry, like a botched and abandoned watercolor. The bells pealed on. Ted thought the sound might be coming from the North Tower.

He looked at his cousin. Patrick was preoccupied, which was not unusual, but he was also unsettled.

“I didn’t dream anything last night,” said Ted. “It was a nice change.”

Patrick, uncharacteristically, did not look at him as he spoke. “Maybe I got your dream too.”

Ted waited.

“I dreamed about the Crystal of Earth again.”

Ted was exasperated. “We forgot to ask Ruth about that!”

“Yeah.”

“So what’d you dream?”

“Nothing clear, really,” said Patrick, still not looking at him. “Somebody was trying to smash it, to prove there wasn’t any magic, and everybody thought that that would destroy the Secret Country. Things got pretty nasty, people killing each other all over.”

“Is the Crystal of Earth like the Border Magic, then?” said Ted, who preferred not to be reminded of killing people.

“Worse,” said Patrick, leaning further out and appearing to address the paving stones of the inner courtyard. One of the more feathery of the hunting dogs trotted across it, barking desultorily.

“It doesn’t just get the Secret Country,” said Patrick. “It gets this whole place, whatever it’s called: Fence’s Country and the Dubious Hills and those Outer Isles of Ellie’s—everything.”

“I sure don’t remember anything like that.”

“No,” said Patrick.

“What’s it look like?”

“Oh, one of those tacky paperweights with the snow-storms in it, only bigger.”

There was nothing specific to object to in this answer, but Ted found it objectionable just the same. “We’ll ask Ruth,” he said. “But what’d you dream that I should have dreamed?”

Patrick straightened up and looked at him. He looked as if someone were taking a splinter out of his finger. “You dream it,” he said, and went into their bathing room.

Ted began to get dressed, absently. It seemed to him high time to do something about his left hand. He could not use it at a formal banquet without receiving severe comments on his sloppiness. A week’s practice at eating left-handed had provided great amusement to his companions, but little improvement in his skill. He would be chided for disobedience as well if the seating arrangements put him and Randolph at the same table. And after the Banquet, he and Randolph would resume their fencing practice.

He had already decided that he could not pretend to have hurt his hand; Benjamin or Agatha would be sure to insist on looking at it. Besides, he had an obscure feeling that this would be cheating. He looked after Patrick. Patrick was in a foul mood. He might enjoy disabling Ted’s hand. Ted crouched down beside the bed, reached under it with both hands for the sheathed sword, and was rewarded with a stinging pain in the left one. He jerked back and watched the blood drip onto the stone floor.

“Pat!”

Patrick came out, trailing his towel. “Good God,” he said. “Here, take this.” He crumpled the towel against the cut and jabbed his thumb onto the pressure point.

“Ease up; I haven’t severed an artery,” said Ted.

“I thought you’d settled for spraining your wrist.”

“Reach under there carefully,” said Ted, jerking his head at the bed.

Patrick looked first, and pulled the sword out by the hilt.

“Where’s the sheath?” asked Ted.

Patrick looked again. “Other side,” he said. “Didn’t you take the sword out of it?”

“No.”

“Neither did I.” Patrick paused. “Unless I did it in my sleep,” he said. “I dreamed I was using a sword to—” He looked secretive.

“Well,” said Ted, knowing better than to prompt him, “it certainly solves the handedness problem.” He stood up. “I’d better take this to Agatha.”

“You can’t. She’ll put cobwebs or dung or something on it, and it’ll get infected. Besides, I bet it needs stitches.”

“I just grazed the blade. And how can it get infected if it’s not a real—”

“You think it’s real.”

“So I also think it won’t get infected.”

Agatha, when applied to, provided a lecture, a handful of goldenrod, an odd-smelling salve, a clean rag, and great expertise in bestowing the first on Ted and Patrick and the rest on Ted’s hand.

“Feel better?” said Ted to Patrick as they left.

“No,” said Patrick. “I’m wondering if somebody else was messing with that sword.”

 

Laura thought she was looking for something. She trudged through the crackling leaves, throwing up the scents of cinnamon and dust and dampness. The trees were huge and the woods dim, and the air had the sharpness of frost. It smelled like Halloween.

Noticing all this had made her forget what she was looking for. She blinked and pushed the hair out of her eyes. She must have been doing this for some time: The hair was very tangled, and full of twigs and leaves. Her hands were filthy.

“Now what,” said Laura aloud, “would I be looking for in the middle of the woods?”

The sound of her own voice made her remember that she was not looking, but listening. It also woke her up.