The Hidden Land

by PAMELA DEAN

  The King had not seen Ted; he had seen only the jerk of Randolph’s arm. As the cup thumped over, he laughed. Now he said, “Hast been coddled too long, Randolph? Shouldst be a page more often, to keep thy nimbleness?”

  “No doubt,” said Randolph, smiling. “Your pardon, my lord.”

  He turned and looked down at Ted, who was wedged between him and Matthew. The smile left his face, but Ted was astonished to see congratulation in his eyes.

  “Edward, a cloth, if you would be so good,” said Randolph.

  Ted moved back from the table and found himself six inches from the furious and panic-stricken face of Andrew, who had been perfectly placed to see Ted jog Randolph’s elbow. Ted backed away from him, pushed his way to the cupboard, and brought Randolph a pile of napkins the long way around rather than pass by Andrew again. What was wrong with him? Had he poisoned the wine, too? He had been sitting right there with the open bottle before him.

  “Oh, God,” said Ted involuntarily.

  He looked at Matthew and Conrad, who stood dripping wine onto the stone floor. Matthew was laughing; Conrad just looked rueful. Ted handed them some of the napkins, wondering how to keep them from putting their hands in their mouths.

  He looked at Andrew. That young man had not returned to his seat; he was leaning against the edge of the table, fists clenched: he looked thwarted and desperate, exactly as Randolph ought, but he was not concerned with Matthew and Conrad. He was watching Randolph as if Randolph were an escaped tiger. Did he simply not care how many other people he poisoned, or was something else the matter with him? There was no reason for him to poison the King. Ted shook his head. His job was with Randolph, who was now holding up the King’s glass and examining it for cracks.

  Ted slithered forward and took it out of his hand. If there had been poison in that glass he shouldn’t let the King near it. “I’ll get you another, my lord,” he said.

  Randolph grinned at him in the manner of one conspirator to another, and Ted went back to the cupboard feeling almost dizzy. He had never known anyone who could so wholeheartedly approve of his enemy. As a weird person, Lady Ruth of the Green Caves had nothing on Randolph.

  Ted brought him another cup, and Matthew handed him another bottle. Randolph poured the King’s wine: his hand on the bottle jerked once and then steadied. Andrew, who had still not sat down again, was glaring at the tabletop; the tabletop was dry; Matthew and Conrad were merely damp, not dripping. They seemed perfectly healthy. How did the lines go, from which the game’s version of this event had derived its inspiration? So mortal, that but dip a knife in it, where it draws blood, no cataplasm so rare can save the thing from death that is but scratched withal. Well, all right; they were fine if they had no scratches or cuts. Like first-aid class, thought Ted wildly, do not suck the venom from the snakebite if you have a cut or sore in your mouth.

  Shut up, he told himself, it’s all right now. You stopped Randolph. Enjoy your wonderful feast. And Ted became aware that he was in the wrong place for this feast. So was everyone else, but his chair was actually empty. He edged and groped his way to the far end of the table, going sideways so as to keep an eye on Randolph, and prickling with the expectation that the King would see, and embarrass him and everyone else by chiding his unreadiness, his dullness, and his lack of manners. Not to mention that someone might take it upon himself to excuse Ted by explaining that the King had the feast wrong; and if they went ahead and had the other feast, and Randolph had not actually been so foolish as to poison the cup Ted had upset, then Randolph could do his murder after all.

  But nothing happened. Matthew was asking the King if he knew of any learned and accomplished musicians in the Castle, and explaining about the fire-letters in Shan’s journal. Apparently Shan’s journal was not a touchy subject, and the King knew something about fire-letters. This conversation occupied the King nicely while a few other lords also found their proper seats, and Randolph poured everyone’s wine.

  Randolph was beginning to look a little strained, which alarmed Ted until he realized an innocent reason for it. All of the preparations for this feast were wrong now. The feast the King thought it to be was much more elaborate. It was pure luck that both feasts began with wine. Most of the feasts did not: Ted and his sister and cousins, having more taste for sweets than for wine, had created most of the feasts with three desserts, one at the beginning, one at the middle, and one at the end.

  Randolph came around behind Ted and poured his wine. Ted looked at him, involuntarily. Randolph looked back with so fierce a gaze that Ted was impelled to say something.

  “Are you going to be able to manage?” he asked, and did not know if he had intended the double meaning he saw as he said it.

  Randolph’s smile was not so radiant this time. “The preparations will serve the need,” he said.

  He took his place behind the King’s chair. The King had already proposed one toast, which Ted had missed. He drank some wine anyway, and grimaced. It made his tongue fur up. Well, they had decided that it must be strong enough to disguise the taste of the poison.

  People were beginning to relax a little. Matthew stood up and flourished his goblet at them. The red wine and the blue glass caught the candlelight and sent it reeling around the room in sparks of purple.

  “My lords,” said Matthew, “to the King. Both glory and length of days.”

  Everybody echoed him, and drank. Ted looked over the smiling King’s shoulder at Randolph, and froze. Randolph looked as if he were going to throw up.

  King William shook his head and put down his goblet with a thud.

  “My lord?” said Matthew into the hush.

  Ted got up, words from the warning labels on all the bottles of poisonous things he had ever seen going around in his head.

  King William put both hands to his throat, and in the hideous light of the candles his staring and contorted face looked like a gargoyle’s. Matthew knocked his chair over backward and took hold of the King.

  “Fetch Fence!” he shouted.

  Several people stood up, getting in Ted’s way.

  “Randolph,” said Matthew. “Where’s Fence?”

  “Atop that tower of his, I’ll warrant,” said Conrad. “Give him wine, Matthew. My prince, fetch Fence.”

  “No; the wine’s at fault,” said Andrew. “Randolph, where is Fence?”

  Andrew drew his dagger; Conrad took hold of Andrew’s wrist. Randolph shook his head.

  Ted knew where Fence ought to be.

  “I’ll go,” he said, but no one heard him; they were all clustering about the King, doing this and that, and talking until he wanted to hit them. The room swam and shuddered before him. He put his hand to the heavy door, and was caught from behind by someone who closed both arms around his shoulders and held on. Ted kicked backward, and was dodged. He bit at one of the imprisoning arms and got a double mouthful of gray velvet. He shook it out and opened his mouth to yell, when there was a thud behind him.

  The arms let go of him. He turned and bumped into Lord Randolph, who looked at the King, and neither moved nor blinked.

  “Randolph,” said Matthew, leaning on the table with the King in a heap at his feet. Well, they had said it would be a quick poison.

  “So swift,” said Randolph. He looked calm and a little abstracted, but he was whiter than Ted had ever seen anyone. He shivered, turned for the door, and fell over. His head would have cracked against the stone floor, but it hit King William’s knee.

  “Two!” said Conrad. He and Matthew both knelt over Randolph, and nearly bumped heads. Conrad looked over his shoulder at Ted. “Thy father’s dead,” he said. “This one lives.”

  “I’ll get Fence,” said Ted, and went running.

  “None must leave!” Andrew called after him, but he ran on. He could not stay in that room.

  He was supposed to run all up and down Fence’s steps before he found him in the rose garden, but it no longer mattered what anybody was supposed to do. He went straight down pa
st the startled guard and out into the damp gray evening. He blundered past the rain-heavy roses, scattering petals on the wind as his robe slapped them, and came, in the center of the garden where the fountain was, upon Fence and Claudia.

  They looked at him, Fence with sharp concern and Claudia with irritation. She was out: out of the spell of Shan’s Ring, and thence easily out of the tower where Jerome had imprisoned her. Ted had no time for her. He stood catching his breath and looking at Fence.

  “Edward?”

  “The King,” said Ted, lurched to his knees, and threw up.

  Fence held his head, with cold but extremely steady hands.

  “Thou cream-faced loon!” exclaimed Claudia. “Where gotst thou that goose-look?”

  “Hold your tongue,” said Fence, absently.

  Ted’s stomach finished with him. Maybe they had all been poisoned by Andrew, and that was why Randolph fell over.

  Fence picked him up off his knees and steered him to the fountain. “Wash thy face,” he said.

  Ted put his head into the water obediently. It was cold, and when he had stood up and blinked the drops from his eyes, he could see clearly for the first time since they had lit the candles in the Council Chamber.

  He shook back his wet hair and turned to Fence. Claudia stood just beyond the short figure of the wizard. Her dress was brighter than all the roses, and the pallid sky behind her dark head made it regal. She looked like a queen contemplating the fate of nations.

  “You did it,” Ted said to her.

  “What’s the matter?” said Fence.

  “King William is dead,” said Ted.

  Fence, not a fidgeter at the worst of times, became absolutely still. “How?” he said.

  “Poison in the wine,” said Ted. “At least, Andrew said—” he stopped.

  “Who hath done this?”

  “Randolph, by her will.” Ted pointed at Claudia.

  “In that chaos, how might you know?”

  “It wasn’t chaos, Fence. The King mistook the feast.”

  Fence remained still. “For which other?”

  “Randolph’s serving-feast.”

  “So there is no doubt?”

  Ted was silent. He had remembered that it was not in his own interest to accuse Randolph now.

  “Did others drink?”

  “Everyone.”

  “Were others stricken?”

  “I don’t think so. Randolph fainted, or something; and I’m sick, but nobody else just—just died like that.”

  “In the cup, then, not in the bottle.”

  “I guess,” said Ted, miserably.

  “Who had a chance at the cup?”

  “Search close for one that strikes,” said Claudia, in her deep voice with its insinuating touch of huskiness. She sounded amused. “All may yet be very well.”

  “Keep the words of Shan from thy mouth,” said Fence, with astonishing severity, and he put his arm through Ted’s. “Go we to Randolph, then,” he said.

  CHAPTER 4

  THEY went back to the Council Chamber in silence. Ted stole an occasional glance at Fence. For all that he was walking briskly, that same stillness hung about him, as if he had suspended all his mental processes and half his bodily ones. Ted kept wanting to make sure he was breathing. But it was comforting to have something so steady so close. Ted felt as if he had just stepped off one of the nastier carnival rides, the kind you could never let Laurie go on because she threw up.

  They came up the last flight of stairs. It was colder than ever. The man-at-arms had his sword out and held it to block the stairway. He, too, looked sick. Seeing Fence seemed to make him feel sicker; he did not move the sword, nor did he speak when they came up to him.

  “I have an errand to the King,” said Fence, formally.

  “You are too late,” said the guard.

  “That,” said Fence, “is for the King to say.”

  The guard opened his mouth, looked at Ted, shut it, and moved out of their way.

  “You must learn to speak for yourself,” said Fence, as they went down the hall. “You are no sorcerer’s puppet; give none cause to say you are.”

  Ted could not answer him. He had forgotten that by failing to stop Randolph he had made himself King.

  Both doors of the Council Chamber stood open, but two people with swords barred their way. One of them was the yellow-haired woman with the scarred forehead who had sat next to Matthew at the Banquet of Midsummer’s Eve. She looked peculiar with a mail-shirt dragged on a little askew over her red dress, but the sword suited her well enough. Her companion’s mail half-covered what looked remarkably like a nightgown, insofar, among the odd fashions of High Castle, as you could tell a fancy nightgown from a plain dress; her red hair was mussed and her sharp face a little bleary. But she, too, looked quite at home with her sword. Ted wondered what in the world was going on.

  “What hath been accomplished?” Fence asked the yellow-haired woman.

  “All save Randolph and Matthew have been taken under guard, ’til they give account of what hath occurred. Jerome awaits you, at your leisure.”

  “The King?”

  She looked at Ted for a moment, and then back at Fence. “Within,” she said.

  “Thanks,” said Fence, imbuing the single word with more formality than Ted would have believed possible.

  The guards lowered their swords and Fence went between them into the Council Chamber. Ted had no desire to go back into that room. He looked at the yellow-haired woman, who had been kind at the banquet. She saluted him with her sword and stood a little more aside. Ted sighed and went in.

  Someone had straightened out the King’s body and spread a dark-blue cloth over it. Randolph sat on the floor with his head on his knees. Matthew leaned on the table between him and the body of the King. He looked exasperated and helpless, and his whole face lit up when he saw Fence.

  Fence got to his knees beside Randolph with a swiftness most people achieve only in jumping up, and put his arms around him.

  “He, too?” he asked Matthew.

  “He says not,” said Matthew; “he says ’tis but some gaingiving as might perhaps trouble a woman.”

  Ted thought that the women at the door had no gaingivings troubling them. Then he thought that Randolph must know that, too. Some such gaingiving, he thought, as might perhaps trouble a woman who has poisoned the King. Or anybody with any sense.

  “A looketh ill to me,” said Matthew.

  “So do you,” said Ted. “So do I, I bet.”

  “Matthew,” said Fence, still holding Randolph, “what happened?”

  Matthew said slowly, “Many came early, thinking this the feast where all must serve. We set bottles and napkins and cups in place; Andrew had the opening of the bottles; ’tis some joke a hath with Conrad.”

  He looked at the top of Randolph’s head. “As befitted the feast, we were all helter-skelter when the King arrived. Each of us, Fence, hath polished a glass, set a napkin or a plate. The King spoke to us and we saw he had mistook the feast.” He cleared his throat. “Randolph was on the King’s right; Edward to his; I to his; Conrad to his; Andrew to his. Now, when we saw the King was wrong, I put a napkin along Randolph’s arm; the King could not see for that Randolph was between us. Andrew had all the bottles before him, and he did push one past Conrad, and me, and Edward, to Randolph, who began to pour, the King’s cup having been set already.”

  Matthew looked at Ted, who, not understanding the look, just shrugged at him. “Randolph was o’erhasty in his pouring,” said Matthew, still looking at Ted, “and striking the cup wi’ the bottle, he o’erturned it; then, striving to right the cup, he dropped the bottle. He did require Edward to bring him a cloth, and Edward did do’t.” He turned back to Fence. “Now the cup had been marred by the striking of the bottle, so that Edward brought him another; and, Andrew being sulky, I did take a new bottle and give it to Randolph, who poured for the King and for all.”

  Matthew stood away from the table
and crossed his arms. “All drank the wine, and took no harm therefrom; also, in the spilling of the first bottle, Lord Conrad and I were wet, but took no harm.”

  “My best thanks to you,” said Fence. “Edward?”

  “What he said,” said Ted, a little wildly. Either Matthew had not seen him bump Randolph, or he thought it best not to say so. From Matthew’s looks, it was probably the latter. In any case, he would prefer not to have to explain his actions.

  Randolph brought his head up and looked over Fence’s arm at Ted; once again there was congratulation in his eyes. Ted stared at him, confounded; and then he knew. Now he and Randolph were in truth conspirators. It was Randolph who could save the Secret Country. If they thought Randolph was guilty they would not let him be Regent.

  “Randolph?” said Fence, less sharply than he had spoken to Ted.

  “ ’Tis a true account,” said Randolph; his eyes on Matthew were speculative. He seemed to be recovering.

  “One thing other,” said Matthew, still looking at Fence. “When Randolph did spill the wine, it put Andrew into a most fierce choler.”

  “What said he?” demanded Fence.

  Matthew shrugged. “Naught,” he said. “He turned color and clenched his hands.”

  “Yes, he did,” said Ted.

  “Randolph?” said Fence.

  “I saw not,” said Randolph.

  Fence and Matthew looked at one another, but no one said anything. Randolph put a hand on Fence’s arm, and Fence and he helped each other up.

  “Didst thou drink?” Fence asked him.

  “The servant drinks not,” said Randolph.

  “Shan’s mercy,” said Fence suddenly, “where is Benjamin?”

  “He came not,” said Randolph, sounding surprised.

  So that’s why my chair was empty, thought Ted, we were missing one. I never even noticed. Benjamin was supposed to be here, too. He makes a speech and says “Alas” a lot.