The Secret Country (34 page)

“That’s what I mean,” said Patrick. “I think she wants the story to come out right, and since we’re different from the characters in the story and it might not, she has to do things differently to balance that.”

“You think she kept the crystal from working, then?”

“Well . . .”

“I don’t see how she could have,” said Ted.

“With Shan’s Ring holding her, you mean. Well, maybe she’s working for somebody else. Say for the cardinals. We never had any cardinal interrupt our practice before.”

“And they also had her bewitch Randolph?”

“So he wouldn’t be reasonable about killing the King. That’s what I think.”

“But look,” said Ted, grappling rebelliously with this theory, which seemed even mistier than Patrick’s other theories, “in the first place, I don’t think she did bewitch Randolph.”

“He said she did.”

“That was just a figure of speech,” said Ted.

Patrick looked scornful.

“Why should she have to, anyway?” said Ted.

He was beginning to get a headache, and his cheek hurt suddenly. He put a hand up to it and came away with a smear of blood.

“I mean,” he said, “Randolph was going to be unreasonable, in the original story, so she shouldn’t have had to mess with him.” He thought some more. “I mean,” he said, “
if
she did it, she bewitched him before we got here, right? Now if she’d bewitched him after we’d done something to make him change his mind, that would make sense.”

Patrick screwed up his forehead. “Wait a minute,” he said. “Let me think. This just came to me, you know. Okay. What if she knew we were coming and so she got him ready just in case.”

“How could she know?”

“Maybe she brought us.”

Ted felt a cold creep up his backbone. “Patrick,” he said. “We got so mad at each other, when we were all talking yesterday, I forgot to mention something. It hit me—if we’re not the right kids for this story, then where are they?”

“I think they ought to be back home,” said Patrick. “That would at least be tidy.”

“But then we wouldn’t have been missed all those times we were gone.”

Patrick shrugged.

“So what else did Claudia do?”

“Tried to kill Fence, and got the King mad at Fence, and got that council moved.”

Ted frowned. “That doesn’t make sense. If she
had
killed Fence, that wouldn’t have helped the story. I can see getting him in trouble by telling the King he was here before he was ready to see him. And maybe ruining his performance at the council by calling it before he was ready.”

Patrick sat down on the table. “Well,” he said, “if you’re right about Shan’s Ring being dangerous, maybe she never really meant to kill Fence; she knew he could beat her in a fight and then he’d call Ruth and Ruth’d use Shan’s Ring.”

“How would she know it’s dangerous?”

Patrick shrugged again. “If she could bring us here, she probably knows a lot.” He shook his head violently. “Why am I arguing with you? Who cares what the mechanism is if it isn’t real?”

Ted said sourly, “You want it to be tidy, whether it’s real or not.”

Patrick got up on his knees on the table and tried to pull the sword out of it. “I wonder how I got it in so deep?” he said.

“You were pretty worked up.”

“Well, how are we going to get out of here?”

“When the time comes, we’ll steal the swords.”

“Easy, huh?” Patrick, having begun scornfully, looked suddenly thoughtful and then secretive.

Ted tried to disregard this. “Well, we’ve got lots of time to find out where they keep them. And we don’t have to be sneaky about it. I figure that when we get desperate enough to steal the swords, we won’t want to come back.”

It probably wouldn’t really be that easy, but Ted felt even tireder by now, and another discussion with Patrick would be too much.

“And just when will that be?”

Ted shrugged. “Well, either before the battle if we don’t want to have anything to do with that, or before I’m supposed to kill Lord Randolph, because I certainly don’t want to have anything to do with
that.
”

“Last time we mentioned it you didn’t want to have anything to do with the battle.”

“I guess I still don’t,” said Ted, slowly. “But if you’re right about something working to make the story come out, then there’s really nothing to be afraid of, is there?” Even as he asked the question, he remembered Laura’s ideas about waiting for the worms to come. He put the thought away.

“Only killing Lord Randolph,” said Patrick, with a nasty grin. “In for a penny, in for a pound.”

“Stop sounding like Agatha.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Well,” said Ted, “why shouldn’t we be able to fight this thing, whatever it is? Especially now that its—its secret agent—is out of the way.”

“If you fight it,” said Patrick, “what’s to keep it from getting fed up and letting us all get killed after all?”

“I still think you’re crazy,” said Ted, whose patience was wearing thin. He did what was almost always a mistake, and told Patrick what he really thought. “This is real, and I think we can do things to make it different.”

“Explain how it fits in with the game, then.”

“Well,” said Ted, “we’ve all been acting as if we put this here, out of our heads. What if it put itself into our heads somehow?”

Feet pounded up the stairs.

“Here it comes,” said Patrick, and sprang off the table.

Ted was expecting guards. But it was Ruth, Ellen, and Laura who burst into the room. They all looked absolutely wild; windblown somehow, Ted thought, and furious.

Ruth opened her mouth, and Patrick spoke first. “How’d you find us?” he said mildly.

Ruth clamped her mouth shut; she was clearly fighting to keep from either shrieking at him or slugging him.

“The noise came from here,” said Ellen, “and it just pulled us along.”

“Did you think you were home?” asked Ted.

“Maybe for a minute,” said Laura. “Ellen thought so, but I don’t see how anybody could tell anything with all that noise.”

“I thought so too,” said Ruth, very quietly.

She had been looking around the room while the others talked, and now she stooped under the table and picked up a shard of colored glass. She held it up to the light, and behind her on the bare wall sprang the figures of an old man in wizard’s garb with a young man at his feet. They were wavery, as if they were under water, but the colors were brilliant and the scene easy to recognize. It was one of the earlier scenes from the tapestry in the West Tower.

“Again!”
said Ellen, almost in a wail. “I’m not even sure I blame you for smashing it. Did it have the hole or the sun, Patrick?”

“What did you smash?” demanded Ruth.

Patrick looked straight at her, and Ted, who had been trying to think of a plausible lie to save them much anger and more argument, saw that Patrick wanted to tell her the truth, and was relishing the moment.

“The Crystal of Earth,” said Patrick.

Ruth flew at him and shook him. “You idiot! You are so stupid! You are so stupid I could kill you!”

She smacked him across the face. Laura burst into tears. Ellen, crying, “Cut it out, Ruthie!” flung herself at them, fell over a chair, and knocked them both over.

Ruth stood up. “You are so stupid I don’t have to kill you, you’ll do it yourself,” she said, calmly.

“I’ll tell you who’s stupid,” said Patrick from the floor. “You didn’t even bother to find out why I did it.”

There was a bright red mark on his cheek, and he was considerably ruffled, but he managed to exude great dignity. Ted was not sure whether to cheer for him or kick him. Probably it would make no difference to Patrick.

Ruth tossed her head. Ted had never seen her do anything like that, even when she was Lady Ruth.

“Well, why did you?” Ellen asked Patrick. She was still on the floor herself.

“Because Fence and Randolph have the swords,” said Patrick. He looked so pleased that Ted would not have minded smacking him too.

Ruth looked up from patting Laura. “And how did they get them?”

Patrick told the story with aplomb, but it did not help his case with Ruth.

“I said you were stupid,” she remarked. She looked at Ted. “And so are you. Don’t you have any better sense than to play with magic swords?”

“Don’t you have any better sense than to play with magic rings?” Ted said bitterly.

“That’s different. It was necessary. You just got those swords out of laziness because you didn’t want to learn fencing.”

“You just used the ring out of laziness because you didn’t want to learn sorcery,” said Patrick.

“That’s not true!” cried Ellen. “She had an emergency. You were just practicing.”

Patrick shrugged and stood up. “What’s the matter with Laura?”

“I want to go home,” said Laura.

“Don’t we all,” said Patrick.

“No,” said Ruth.

“It occurs to me,” said Patrick, “that we ought to get out of here. Why didn’t the guards come running when I broke that thing?”

“You made me forget, screaming and fighting,” said Ellen, “but everybody was frozen, like somebody stopped the movie. We couldn’t stop to look at them because the noise was bringing us here, but they were just stopped in the middle of what they were doing.”

“Lucky for us,” said Patrick. He looked at Ted. “Add another one to your list.”

“What list?” said Ruth irritably.

“Not now,” said Ted. “It’s another one of his theories. If he tells you now you’ll probably kill him.”

“All right, later,” said Ruth. “But look, Patrick. You’ve got to stop doing things like this on your own. You could’ve killed us all. And it’s not fair.”

“I don’t care about fair,” said Patrick. “I just want us to stay in one piece.”

“We won’t if you run around doing things without thinking.”

“It wasn’t without thinking. I thought about it for days. I just didn’t expect to need it.”

“You’re missing the point.”

“Not
now,
” said Ted.

“All right,” said Patrick. “Let’s discuss something easier, like how to keep Laura from breaking her neck on the Unicorn Hunt.”

“I’m not going,” said Laura.

“It’s not just Laura,” said Ruth. “Ellie and I can’t—what?”

“Not going.”

“It’ll be fun,” said Ellen, sounding outraged.

“Banquet of Midsummer Eve was supposed to be fun.”

“Didn’t you like it?” said Ellen, surprised.

Laura was silent.

“Anyway,” said Ruth, “Ellie and I can’t ride that well, either, Pat. Rocks and hills and trees, and galloping.”

“I think,” said Ellen, frowning, “that Agatha and servants and old people walk on behind with picnic baskets or something. Maybe we could go with them?”

“I don’t think any of us should ride,” said Patrick.

“Well, maybe we could all go with the walkers, then,” said Ruth.

“I can ask Agatha,” said Ellen.

“And now can we get out of here?” said Patrick. “I suppose the guards will have to unfreeze sometime, and they might remember that something odd happened.”

“Well, don’t leave the evidence lying around like that,” said Ruth.

She supervised Ted’s sweeping the shards of the Crystal of Earth into one pile. They all stood around looking at it. Ted felt the sadness of having broken something beautiful, and wondered whether Laura felt like that all the time.

“They’re bound to find out about this sooner or later,” he said. “I wonder why it wasn’t guarded.”

“I wonder why it didn’t work,” said Patrick.

After some halfhearted argument, Ruth was allowed to bundle up the pieces of the Crystal of Earth in Ellen’s pinafore and bear them away to her room. Patrick wanted to bury or hide them somewhere, but Ruth said shortly that she would feel better being able to keep an eye on them.

Ted and Patrick went back to the practice swords, and had little to say to one another.

CHAPTER 19

ON the day of the Unicorn Hunt Laura woke up at dawn with her ivory unicorn clutched in one hand. Ellen had objected to Laura’s sleeping with it, maintaining that she, Laura, would certainly let go of it in her sleep and she, Ellen, roll over on it and be gouged. But Laura had been stubborn. Now, wriggling her hand to get rid of the lines and creases left by the statue, she decided that Fence really had put a spell of finding and returning on it.

She climbed out of bed and went over to the window. She tried to be quiet. If she couldn’t sneak out and hide herself before Ellen woke up, Ellen would make her go to the Unicorn Hunt. The floor was chilly, but no more than you would expect of a stone floor in the early morning. She put her head out into the pale air.

The sky was faint and pure. The long thin sunlight of early morning spread like a blanket over the treetops, but the roots of the Enchanted Forest were blue with shadow, and High Castle reared its massive height over the lake so that the lake too was dark. Or was it? Laura almost fell out of the window. There were hundreds of them, a sea of cloudy manes and spiral horns, and they shed about them a substantial light. The trees in the sunshine were more ephemeral than they. Laura jumped down from the window seat and made for the door.

“Ellen!” she yelled. “Wake up!” She jerked open the door and ran in her nightgown down the passage, down the back stairs, and out into the light.

“Good morrow, Child of Man,” said the unicorn.

“Good morning,” said Laura, staring.

“What do you wish?”

“I only wanted to watch,” said Laura, and bit her tongue, wondering if this was an admission that she had never seen a unicorn. “And to greet you,” she said.

“That was gracious,” said the unicorn.

Laura was embarrassed, and said nothing.

The unicorn too was silent. The others had drifted away, elusive as the things that crowd the edges of your vision. This last one slid farther into the lake, and Laura grabbed handfuls of her nightgown and waded into the water. It was shockingly cold.