The Secret Country

by PAMELA DEAN

  People were still feasting when they returned to the clearing, but there were fewer of them. The five children accordingly went back to High Castle as fast as they could go, nodding at guards and muttering to one another.

  Ruth, by refusing to listen to anyone, got them all to her room first, and pulled from a chest the linen towel in which she had wrapped what Patrick had left of the Crystal of Earth. It did not clink or rattle. Ruth laid it on her bed and unfolded it with considerably more care than any of the rest of them thought necessary.

  There was nothing inside the towel. Ruth shook it in the air a few times, looking pensive, and consented to go to the North Tower. Patrick, who had disappeared without anyone’s noticing, met them at the foot of its stairs with the announcement that his sword, at least, had not returned to the place he used to keep it.

  “Maybe we can only change things we did,” suggested Ted. “So we should have said, ‘Let’s say Patrick and I didn’t practice with the magic swords.’ ”

  “Well, at least you did say that you wouldn’t kill Lord Randolph,” said Ruth, and they started up the stairs.

  The North Tower was already dim at this time of day. It was perhaps for this reason that the light spilling out of its first-floor room seemed so vivid. Laura, trudging in the rear as usual, thought that the door must be open. But when she peered under Ted’s elbow, she saw that the door was firmly shut, the light welling all around and through it and showing up a myriad of tiny cracks and holes. It was like sunlight, but a deeper gold. It was much less discouraging than the purple light Laura had seen at other times, but it still made her uneasy.

  Ruth and Ted looked at one another, and simultaneously put a hand to the door. The door opened quietly.

  “Good Lord!” said Ruth, walking in nonetheless.

  Nobody else found anything to say. Laura followed them into the room and understood why. Poised in the middle of the air was a globe the diameter of a wading pool. It painted the bare stone room with gold light, but inside itself it had shifting and sparkling points of all colors.

  “Good Lord, Patrick!” said Ruth. “How did you bring yourself to break that?”

  “I didn’t,” said Patrick. Even with the gold light on his face, Laura thought, he looked pale.

  Laura moved closer to the globe, and cracked her chest against something hard. The globe was sitting on a table.

  “Be careful, Laurie,” said Ted, grabbing her. “That’s not what he broke, Ruthie. What we saw was much smaller, and it didn’t glow.”

  “You know what, though,” said Patrick. “This is the one I dreamed about. It’s not where it was in the dream, but this is what it looked like.”

  “You mean somebody knew you were going to try to break it and put a false one here for you to find?”

  “Claudia, I bet,” said Patrick.

  “Well, maybe she put the false one here, but who put this one back?”

  “The unicorns,” said Laura. “They’d think it was funny.”

  “I suppose that’s your fault,” said Patrick to Ellen.

  “They’d be boring without a sense of humor.”

  “Some sense of humor,” said Ted.

  “Well,” said Patrick. “I bet if we broke this one, it would be all over for the Secret Country, and we wouldn’t have to put up with their sense of humor.”

  “Don’t you dare,” said Ruth.

  “I’ll save it for more desperate times,” said Patrick, only a little reluctantly.

  “Maybe we won’t have more desperate times,” said Ted.

  “I guess this means we aren’t going home?” said Laura, half wishing that she had never made her first wish about the Crystal of Earth.

  “Do you still want to?”

  “Well—all the things that were supposed to be nice are over, that you didn’t want to miss. All that’s left are the awful ones.”

  “Well, we think we’ve prevented the awful ones.”

  “So all that’s left are boring ones, then. Councils and battles.”

  “Now look,” said Ted, cajolingly. “You have an important mission. You have to change time of your own power, and play the flute of Cedric, and find the unicorn in winter, so the unicorns will answer your riddles and we can find out just what the hell is going on around here.”

  “Don’t swear,” said Ellen.

  “You shut up. Okay, Laurie?”

  Laura wished very much that it were Ted, or Ellen, who must do all these things. Either of them would delight in it. She herself hated the very thought of being important. But she would have to be important later; if she declined her mission, they would laugh at her and scorn her courage now.

  “Okay,” she said.

  They looked at the Crystal of Earth for a long time, but its colors made no shapes or pictures, and no answers.