The Secret Country

by PAMELA DEAN

  “At least nobody’s missed them,” said Patrick.

  They had fed the swans perhaps a quarter of the loaf of bread, and begun an argument about what Matthew had meant when he had said, “Sits the wind in that quarter?” when they saw the distant figures of horses plodding over the plain. They scrambled from the wall and ran through the front gate to greet them.

  Ruth would not say a word until they had turned the horses over to a groom, and then she would say only that she wanted some breakfast. She and Ellen seated themselves in the rose garden, and Ted and Patrick and Laura all went back to the breakfast hall once again. It did not need three of them to bring Ruth and Ellen breakfast, but none of them felt able to stay in the garden with Ruth and Ellen while Ruth and Ellen were not talking.

  A flurry of cats leaped from the table when they came in, and some of the dishes had already been cleared away. So they bundled bread and drumsticks and a lump of butter and a honey pot into a tablecloth, and hurried back to the garden. It was starting to get hot.

  “Did it work?” asked Ted.

  “We had the most awful time,” said Ellen. Her hair was full of leaves and her face scratched, but she sounded complacent.

  “Did it work?”

  “Our sword does so work on your hedge,” said Ellen to Laura.

  Patrick yelped. “It can’t!”

  “It was probably Shan’s Ring that let it,” said Ted. “Did it work, Ruth?”

  “Why should Shan’s Ring let it?” bristled Patrick.

  “Shut up and let her talk. Ruth, did Shan’s Ring work? Did you change the time?”

  “Yes,” said Ruth.

  Ted and Patrick immediately looked happier. Laura’s stomach contracted. She had hoped that, if it did not work, they would have to go home. Now they were stuck. And what did Ted look so pleased about, anyway? He was the one who’d been so upset, and hollering that nobody understood. Laura felt deserted.

  “So how?” said Patrick.

  “Not the way we thought,” said Ruth. She was cleaner than Ellen, but she still looked draggled. She picked a yellow rose and sniffed it thoughtfully. “We tried the Ring at the bottle trees and not a darn thing happened. So we finally thought we might as well at least look at the hedge. It was on the way home anyway, and we thought the horses could drink at the stream.”

  “They wouldn’t, though,” said Ellen.

  “So we tried to get through the hedge into the yard, and it worked,” said Ruth. “There were streetlights on the other side of the hedge, instead of the stream, and cars parked. So then I tried all the things I’d tried by the bottle trees.”

  “Did you throw the ring in the air and say the verse?” asked Patrick. “I thought of that when it was too late.”

  “Didn’t work,” said Ellen.

  “I tried everything,” said Ruth. “So finally I thought I should throw it over the hedge. So I tried standing in the stream and doing that, and Ellie stood in the yard to catch it.”

  “You could’ve lost it!” said Patrick, furiously.

  “Well, we didn’t,” said Ruth, with the kind of patience usually reserved for very small children. “So then I stood in the street and Ellie stood in the yard.”

  “I didn’t like that,” said Ellen. “There was a light in the attic window, a purple one.”

  “And I threw the ring over the hedge and said the verse.” Ruth paused.

  Laura could see that Ted would not give her the satisfaction of being prompted, but Patrick was too wild to care about that. “Well?” he said.

  “There was a very bright flash of purple light,” said Ruth, “and a big space opened in the hedge, and I could see the Secret Country in it. Ellen had the sword, so I thought I should go on through. I did, and I was back here, but Ellie wasn’t. I’d just been looking around for a moment, when I heard a splash in the stream.”

  The three members of the audience looked at Ellen.

  “I saw the purple light too,” she said. “It hurt my eyes, and I couldn’t see where the ring fell. And while I was waiting for the spots to go away, I looked at the house, because the whole hedge was lit up. All the lights in the house went on, and the front door burst open and there was a lady with a broom just screaming her head off.”

  Ted and Laura looked at each other.

  “What’d she say?” asked Ted.

  “ ‘Aroint thee,’ ” said Ellen. “And she called us something like ‘onions,’ but it can’t have been. I wish all these people didn’t talk so weird.” She pushed her hair away from her eyes. “So I wanted to get out of there, and I ran for the hedge and the hedge went out—I mean it wasn’t glowing anymore—and the sword pulled me and I fell down.”

  “How pulled?” said Patrick.

  “It pulled,” said Ellen. “It made me lose my balance. So I fell down and right in front of my nose was the ring, shining.”

  “Shining how?”

  “Shining,” said Ellen. “Anybody’d think you don’t speak English. The gold was all yellow—”

  “It’s brass,” said Patrick.

  “—yellow, like sunshine, okay? So I grabbed it, and the sword let me up.”

  “What do you mean, let you up?”

  “It stopped pulling,” said Ellen, dangerously, and waited for her brother to say more, but he was silent. Laura thought he looked like somebody doing mental arithmetic in front of a crowd of parents.

  “So,” said Ellen, “I got up and got through the hedge and fell in the water.”

  “Now I thought,” said Ruth, “that what Ellie said happened with the lady took more time than the time between when I got back here and when I heard Ellie fall in the water. But I wanted to make sure.”

  “And I wasn’t going back in there,” said Ellen.

  “So I did,” said Ruth. She paused again, twirling the yellow rose.

  “Come on,” said Patrick. He snatched the rose from her.

  “I took the ring,” said Ruth, “but not the sword. Just to see what happened.”

  “Well?” said Ted.

  “I wasn’t back in your town, because the streetlights and cars weren’t there.”

  “Well?”

  “But I wasn’t just in the Secret Country, either. Ellie wasn’t on the other side of the hedge. It was daytime, and there was an army all over the plain.”

  “Camped?” said Ted.

  “Moving.”

  “What’d it look like?”

  “Well, it looked like the Secret Country, more or less. I mean, the Well of the White Witch was there, and there was a cardinal singing like mad in the yard. I got out of there fast.”

  “Why?” said Patrick.

  “It felt wrong.”

  “Wrong how?”

  “The air was like a sheet of glass,” said Ruth, helplessly. “And I felt too small and the sky was the wrong color. I don’t know, Patrick. It just was.”

  “I’m going to have to check this out,” said Patrick. “Go on.”

  “I came back and got the sword from Ellie,” said Ruth, “and ended up in the right place when I used the ring and the sword to get through. The lady had gone in, there was just the light in the attic again. So I just sat and waited for a few minutes. I got chomped by mosquitoes, and there was a cat in the yard that hissed at me.”

  “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.