The Secret Country

by PAMELA DEAN

“Fence,” said the King.

  “Andrew,” said Fence, “do you surmise, then, that these weak and mortal enemies to the south have plotted four hundred years that they might cozen us with this at last?”

  “I do not.”

  “How, then, is it that their illusory spells match so precisely both King John’s Book and other writings of sorcery which have never been out of wizards’ hands?”

  “One who knew such things,” said Andrew, “had only to tell them.”

  Fence did not even blink. Randolph was looking at him as if awaiting a signal, but Fence still looked at Andrew. “Where is your proof?” he said at last.

  “Of what?”

  “I see,” said Fence. He looked at the King.

  “Andrew,” said the King. “Will you not repeat that accusation you made a sennight ago?”

  “I was o’er hasty,” said Andrew. “Many could have given lore to the southerners.”

  “Many could not,” said Fence, without permission. The King let him go on, as he had let Andrew earlier. “Many could have brought them the book of King John. But most few could have told these other things. I, and Belaparthalion, and Chryse. Hath Belaparthalion visited High Castle, Andrew? Hath Chryse lightened your doors?”

  Ted had never heard either name, but the rest of the council seemed to find this funny. Only Randolph and Benjamin still looked grim. Andrew looked as if something were dawning on him and he was not sure he liked it.

  “So,” said Fence. “They have not come hither for King John’s Book, and none other knoweth the other writings. Stands now your accusation in better state?”

  “There is yet no proof save reason.”

  “Reason may prove aught,” said Fence.

  Andrew shrugged. “My opinion, my lord,” he said, looking straight at Fence, “is that you are a fraud and a traitor. I have no proof thereof.”

  Ted found himself standing up.

  “Edward,” said the King. This could have been either a recognition or a warning. Ted chose to take it as the former.

  “Isn’t it written,” he said, “that he who makes an accusation without proof makes himself what he accused his enemy of? Is it not treacherous of Andrew to tie us so in doubt that we can neither prove nor disprove him and thus neither take nor spurn his advice?”

  There was a profound silence. Benjamin had his hands over his eyes again. Fence was shaking his head slowly, but did not seem displeased. Randolph was astonished. Ted wondered if he had stolen Randolph’s speech, and whether Randolph would have delivered it better. Matthew tugged gently on Ted’s sleeve and made him sit down. The King was furious; he looked as if he were counting to ten and finding it insufficient. Andrew looked blank. Ted thought that the King should have been blank and Andrew furious. He still felt a tiny prick of outrage at this, as if his cousins had played their parts wrong.

  The King opened his mouth, and Fence stood up again. The King said, “Fence,” as if he were not sure how to pronounce it.

  Fence looked from Ted to Andrew, and grinned. His grin was not infectious like Randolph’s, but it was reassuring. “My lord,” he said to the King, “will you have both of us, or neither?”

  The King cocked his head. “Send you to join Claudia, or have you wrangling at my every council and have no peace withal?”

  “Nor no wisdom neither?” said Fence.

  “I protest!” said Randolph, slapping the table; he was laughing.

  So were others. Ted turned and stared at Matthew, who was chuckling as he wrote. The entire council had turned benign, as if it were a snarling cat upon which Fence and Randolph had dumped catnip. Ted wondered how they had done it. He looked at the King, who was smiling faintly, and gave up.

  “We will hear no more accusations,” said the King. “But we will hear all your philosophy now, our Lord Andrew, for Fence is here to answer you.”

  Matthew eased the drawer open and got himself a new pen, and Ted tried to settle comfortably into his chair. A cold wind sifted through the chamber, and the argument began.

  CHAPTER 15

  IN Fence’s living room the fire had burned low, and none of them could find the wood to build it up. It was past midnight, and growing cold again. Laura and Ellen and Patrick sat at the far end of the table, keeping a wary eye on the door, and rehearsed their parts.

  “Why,” demanded Laura, “should Fence care that Prudence has been hiding bread in the West Tower? And who’s Prudence?”

  “Oh, he doesn’t,” said Ellen, poking her finger into a dish of jam and then licking the finger. “But it’s not our job to decide what’s important. We just tell him things.” She reached for the jam again.

  “Don’t put your finger in there after you’ve licked it,” Patrick told her.

  Ellen stuck her thumb in and licked that.

  “You’ll get fatter than me,” said Laura.

  “You’re not fat.”

  “Claudia makes me feel fat.”

  “Claudia’s a weasel.”

  “Ellie,” said Patrick, “did you really not make her up?”

  “Nobody could,” said Ellen. “She changes the story too much.”

  Patrick got up to poke at the fire, which glowed sullenly for a moment and then collapsed into gray lumps.

  “Now look what you’ve done,” said Ellen.

  One of the lamps flickered red and went out. The shadows in the corners shifted and gnarled, and a cold air came from the dead fireplace.

  “I wish Fence would get back,” said Laura.

  “It’s after midnight now,” said Ellen. “We could go find Ruth.”

  “But how do we leave word of where we may be found?”

  “You go get Ruth,” said Patrick, “and I’ll stay here. It shouldn’t take long. If she has any sense she’s gone to bed.”

  “What if they have a cast party after the ceremony?” said Ellen.

  “What’ll she do with Claudia when she gets here, is what I want to know,” said Laura.

  “The sooner you get her here the longer she’ll have to think about it,” said Patrick. He herded them along to the door and bolted it loudly behind them.

  It was freezing in the stairwell; Laura expected to see frost and icicles on all the stones. They went down cautiously, steeling themselves for the sight of Claudia as they came around the third turn.

  The steps were empty.

  “Where is she?” said Ellen.

  “Maybe we didn’t count right,” said Laura.

  They went down a few more steps, and a glint on the step caught Laura’s eye. For the barest fraction of an instant she saw Ted’s face, with blood on it, and then there was only the twisted silver knife, its jewels burning hurtfully. Laura would not have touched it for the world.

  “This is the right place,” said Ellen. They looked at each other in the shivery light.

  “We should tell Fence,” said Laura.

  “We should find Ruth.”

  They ran down the echoing stairs.

  The guard at the door to the Council Chamber was not inclined either to speak to them or to let them in.

  “It’s very important,” Ellen told him. “If we can’t go in, can’t you get Randolph or Fence to come out?”

  The guard looked skeptical.

  “Can you give one of them a message?” persisted Ellen.

  The guard, a solid young man with big eyes, shook his head.

  “If we write them a message,” said Laura, “could you give it to them?”

  The guard nodded with no more hesitation than he had shown in shaking his head before. He did not look likely to have paper or pen, so they trudged back to their room. Laura felt that she had never properly appreciated elevators.

  Ellen wrote the message, telling Fence that Claudia was gone, but had left her knife, and that Ellen and Laura were looking for Ruth and would try to bring her to Fence’s tower. She signed it “the Princesses Ellen and Laura,” and they grinned at each other.

  Ellen insisted on sealing the note
with sealing wax. There was a heavy ring in the drawer with the wax. The signet of the royal family appeared to be a fox. Laura was not sure she approved of this.

  “Well, it’s not my fault,” said Ellen, shaking the folded letter in the air to dry the wax. “I wanted our sign to be a unicorn.”

  “I don’t know if the unicorns would like that.”

  They bounced out of their door and clattered along the corridor, making echoes.

  “Let’s get Ruth now, as long as we’re here,” said Ellen.

  They went along the passageway to its end, turned right, went up some steps and around another corner, and pounded on Ruth’s door. Laura took great comfort in the plain yellow torches, but she wished it were warmer.

  Ruth did not answer, so they tried the door. It swung silently open into darkness. They padded in, and Laura tripped on a rug and fell down with a thump.

  “Who goes there?” said a voice so imperious that Laura did not recognize it at once. She rubbed her elbow.

  “It’s us,” said Ellen crossly, “and we don’t know how to unfold ourselves, so there.”

  “You just did,” said Ruth, sounding more like herself. Laura heard the bed creak, and Ruth make an exasperated noise. “I wish this place had electricity.”

  “You can’t have proper adventures with electricity,” said Ellen.

  Ruth snorted, and got out of bed, a dim white shape. She came around the bed’s end and tripped on Laura, who said “Hey!”

  Ruth picked her up with one swift motion, made sure she would stay up, and went on out. When she came back in she had the candle lighted. She put it on a table, and they all crowded around it. The shadows in Ruth’s room were less crawly than the ones in Fence’s.

  “Fence wants you,” said Laura.

  “Why weren’t you at the banquet?” said Ellen.

  Ruth made them shut up. Then she made Ellen tell the story, with the provision that Laura could interrupt if Ellen made a terrible mistake. Ellen did not, although Laura thought that she made too much fuss about their being Fence’s spies.

  “So,” finished Ellen, “you’d better come back up with us and wait for Fence.”

  “That is not a good idea,” said Ruth. “I got through this ceremony tonight, which nobody told me about because I was supposed to know, by the skin of my teeth, because I’m only a student and I could copy the other students. I couldn’t go talk with a real magician like Fence without giving us away.”

  “Won’t you give us away if you won’t talk to him?” said Laura.

  “I don’t think he knows anything about what you’re supposed to know,” said Ellen. “It’s two different kinds of magic.”

  “So why does he want me then?”

  “Well, he doesn’t know about Claudia’s magic, but you might.”

  “Well, I don’t. I never even heard of Claudia.”

  “Well, it can’t hurt to say so.”

  “But what if Claudia’s magic is Green Caves magic?” said Laura uneasily. If they were Fence’s spies, as Ellen had made up, it was probably all right to tell Fence what she had made up to tell him. But knowing nothing about Claudia, how could they tell what they were supposed to know?

  “You better get dressed,” said Ellen to Ruth.

  When they got to the door of Fence’s tower, there was a beast on the steps. Laura liked the beasts less each time she saw them, even if Fence did think they were funny. This one was sloshing steadily, like the shore of a lake. It lapped a few inches up the wall, and a few inches back from the wall, over and over.

  “We need to get by, please,” Ellen told it.

  The beast sucked itself into a tighter pool and made a number of rapid splats.

  “Great,” said Ruth.

  “Let’s wait for Fence here,” said Laura. “He can talk to them.”

  “Patrick’ll get worried,” said Ellen. “Go away, beast.” The beast bubbled. Laura wished she had not eaten so much dinner.

  There was a clatter of boots and voices in the passageway. Laura grabbed at Ruth. The beast snorted. Ted, Fence, and Randolph came down the darkness in sober discussion.

  “Did you get our note?” cried Ellen.

  Fence gave her an absent pat on the shoulder, nodding, and looked at Ruth. In the purple dimness of the stair torch, the stars on his robe seemed to grow and swarm.

  “My lady, I thank you most heartily for your trouble,” he said. “Will it please you to examine the knife?”

  Ruth looked as if it would have pleased her to go away quickly, but she nodded. “If your beast will let us by,” she said.

  “It is not mine,” said Fence, and addressed it in burbles.

  It shifted and seemed to swell, and from it came a hissing like water droplets on a hot griddle. It was not a loud or particularly menacing sound, but Laura’s hair prickled and Fence looked astonished. He hissed back. The beast slurped and squelched, and overflowed onto a lower step.

  “You had better remind it of its place,” said Randolph, at Fence’s shoulder.

  Fence gave him much the same kind of pat he had given Ellen, and shook his head. Then he looked at Ruth, who was standing at his other side with Laura hanging on to her hand. She was gripping Laura’s hand with more force than that necessary to be comforting. Ellen was cramped between Laura and the wall, looking as if she wanted to pet the beast. Laura, who did not even want to see it, looked over her shoulder and saw that Ted stood behind them all, seeming bored.

  “Can you do aught with it?” Fence asked Ruth.

  Laura felt her tense, but she sounded quite composed. “I can call on water,” she said.

  “You and Randolph are both too precipitate,” said Fence.

  Laura glanced up in time to see Randolph look at Ruth over Fence’s head. He rolled his eyes at the ceiling and grinned. Ruth smiled back.

  “Well,” she said to him, “we could call on the mountains, then.”

  “Nonsense,” said Fence, “this is rival waters.”

  “And that rivals all nonsense,” said Randolph.

  Laura looked to see if Ruth was as bewildered as she was. Ruth looked outraged, but she said nothing.

  “What are you talking about?” demanded Ellen.

  Ruth looked at Fence, took a deep breath, and answered her sister. “When the power of the Green Caves, which is over earth and water, meddles with matters of the Blue Sorcery, which is of fire and air, then these beasts are made, which are air and water.” She sounded as if she were quoting.

  “Who’s been meddling?” asked Ellen.

  “Claudia, no doubt,” said Fence.

  The beast sucked and bubbled like someone trying to pull the last drops of a milkshake through a straw—a loud and unmistakably rude noise. Fence laughed at it. “Thou art a guardian, not a warrior,” he said. “Begone.”

  The beast rose up like a geyser, swirled, and vanished. Fence and Randolph stared at each other. Then Randolph shrugged and Fence started up the steps. The others followed, one by one.

  Laura hung back to walk with Ted, who still looked bored. “What did you do at the banquet?” she asked.

  “Ate.”

  “No, what did you do wrong?”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “Well, Matthew told Fence you did.”

  “Great,” said Ted, climbing faster.

  “Well, what?”

  She expected him to shut her up, but he told her. Laura was awed. “Prince Edward would never do that!”

  “Well, I’m not Prince Edward.”

  “Shhh!”

  “Sorry.”

  “Why can’t you play Edward the way we’re all playing?” Laura was breathless just from asking questions, and it was hard to climb stairs and pay proper attention to Ted’s answers. But who knew when she might find him in this mood again?

  “Because it’s not a game. It’s important. Maybe if Edward wasn’t such a milksop Randolph wouldn’t have to kill the King. Maybe if the King respected Edward he’d listen to him about sorcery.”<
br />
  “He doesn’t respect you for hitting Andrew, does he? Didn’t you say he was mad?”

  “Sure he was, but he might respect me for it anyway.”

  Laura gave up and climbed in silence. The closer they got to the top, the colder it became. As she came around the last corner before Claudia’s knife and bumped into Ted, she realized that she could see her breath in the purple air.

  “You see,” said Fence to Ruth.

  “Uh,” said Ruth.

  She knelt on the step and looked at the knife. Laura, regarding the cold gleam of the jewels, felt a picture begin to form in them and looked away quickly, right at Fence’s robe. The stars exploded at her so that she blinked, and the flat red and green afterimages wavered into a vast field where the tiny figures of men and beasts strove together. Laura finally blinked again, and screwed both eyes tight shut, breaking the picture into meaningless dots. When she opened her eyes again, Ruth was talking.

  “It’s like she took one of yours and one of ours and put them together,” she said.

  Fence looked horrified. “And where is the desert she made in the combining?”

  Ruth looked taken aback, but Fence did not seem to expect an answer.

  “ ’Twas not made for you,” he said to her. “Can you hold it harmless?”

  “Well,” said Ruth. She looked at the knife, and back up at Fence. “Why don’t you get Meredith?”

  Randolph made an incredulous noise and looked at Ruth as if she were crazy.

  Fence shook his head. “Think, child,” he said. “I did not say ‘unmake,’ but ‘hold harmless.’ ”

  “Oh,” said Ruth. She looked at the knife again.

  “Ruth,” said Ellen, “you want to slow it down, right?”

  Laura looked at her with admiration. She had forgotten all about Shan’s Ring, but it was certainly the only thing they had that might keep Claudia out of the way.

  “Oh,” said Ruth.

  “Hey,” said Ted, sounding alarmed. Laura wondered what was the matter with him.

  Ruth put her hand in the pocket of her skirt and furrowed her brow.

  “I am a trinket,” said Ellen.

  “Hush,” said Ruth.

  “Ruth,” said Ted.

  “Shut up,” said Ruth, fiercely. She shut her eyes and put out her other hand for the knife.