The Hidden Land

  “Who made the claim?” cried the musician.

  “Laura,” called Fence, gently.

  “I know the song,” said Laura. She felt as if she had spoken out of turn in a word game.

  The musician looked across the fire at her. There was a light in his eyes, but it was not firelight. “Who art thou?” he said.

  “Laura,” said Laura, choked in time over her last name, and added, “Princess of the Secret Country.”

  “Who taught thee this music?”

  Laura, panicked, fell back on the truth. Princess Laura was supposed to have a music master, but Laura had never seen him. “I can’t tell you.”

  “Dimwit!” whispered Ellen. “His name was Nathan.”

  “Well said,” the musician told Laura, “for I cannot tell thee whence came the flute.”

  He moved across the grass toward her, stepping right over or through the fire. She could not see it through him; it did not cast light upon him; and when it was behind him he cast no shadow forward. He brought a breath of cold air with him.

  Laura, pretending valiantly that he was Randolph, stood her ground. He knelt before her on the grass, which meant she could look him in the face, and held out to her across his two palms the shining flute. He had a ring on his finger. The red stone in it was all the color he had.

  Laura took the flute. It was cold. “Well,” she said; she resented him enormously for so embarrassing her. Then she looked at his long hands and kindly face, and was ashamed of herself. “My lord,” she said, “I humbly thank you.” And she did him, as well as she could in the short boy’s tunic, a courtesy.

  The musician stood up and walked away into the forest. He faded through, and not between, the trees.

  “Who was that?” said Laura, wishing they would not all stare at her.

  “Cedric,” said Randolph. “He was a wizard and his skill was with sounds. He was the only one of all the wizards in history to master music. He was my six-times great-grandfather.” He had started on a pleased note, but he sounded a little shaken by the time he had finished.

  Laura remembered the unicorns. They had said that she would play Cedric’s flute. Well, here it was. Maybe Ruth could show her how.

  “Fence,” said Ted, “what does this mean?”

  “Rather ask a musician,” said Matthew. “The prophecies touching Cedric have come down not from wizards but from bards.”

  “Well, then?”

  “It is said he will save us at the end.”

  “Is this the end?”

  “No doubt,” said Fence, dryly; “if it is, seemingly we shall be saved.”

  Randolph looked at the circle of faces. “Back to your posts and your beds,” he said, cheerfully. They went as he bid them. Laura noticed how quiet they all were. They were not discussing what had happened. She wondered why.

  Ruth and Ellen came over to her and looked at the flute.

  “Can you show me how to play it, Ruth?” said Laura in an urgent whisper. Princess Laura probably knew how already.

  “Well, I could try,” said Ruth. “Isn’t it beautiful?”

  Randolph and Fence came over, trailing Ted and Patrick. Most of the others had dispersed; Agatha still lurked, waiting for Ellen and Laura, and Matthew stood beside her.

  “May I see it?” said Fence to Laura. She held it out to him. He took it from her, and she felt him jerk and stiffen as he touched it.

  “Well,” he said, and his voice caught. “If sorcery can save us at the end, then of a certainty there is enough here to do’t.” He handed the flute back to Laura. She wondered what he meant. It was very cold to the touch, but it did not prickle as the enchanted swords did. “Guard it well,” said Fence.

  Laura, accompanied by Agatha and Ellen, took it and put it in her pack. Then she took it out again and got into her bedroll with it.

  Fence and Randolph stared at one another in the moon- and firelight, and Ted and Patrick fidgeted. Ruth stood still.

  “Fence,” said Ted, suddenly, “what about the fire-letters?”

  “Well?”

  “I mean—if this is a famous flute, and the song means something, if we used it on the fire-letters it might turn out to be right.”

  “If it were not,” said Fence, as he had said to Randolph several times already, “it would be the end of the manuscript, which would burn like any common parchment.”

  “Couldn’t you copy it?” said Ted.

  “It would then not be sorcerous. Half its virtue lieth in the substance whereon ’tis inscribed.”

  “Fence,” said Matthew. “It may be—”

  “Speak to me in the morning, then,” said Fence.

  Ruth said in Ted’s ear, “For pity’s sake, don’t get them to ask that child to play the flute! She hasn’t any idea how.”

  “Good grief, I forgot,” whispered Ted. “Sorry.”

  “I should hope so.”

  Ted turned to find Randolph’s eye on them. He did not look angry. Ted was not sure how he looked, but he did not want to see it again. “Randolph,” he said. “Could I talk to you for a minute?”

  “Of course, my lord,” said Randolph.

  Ted took him a little way off into the dripping trees. “I just wanted to tell you,” he said, “that I don’t want to marry Ruth, and Ruth doesn’t want to marry me. And,” he added, feeling this too brusque, “you’re welcome to be happy with her.”

  It was too dark to see Randolph’s face, but he made a startled movement. “This is most convenient, my lord, seeing that I am betrothed to her.”

  “You don’t act like it,” said Ted, without thinking. Then he remembered Claudia.

  Randolph was quite still. “Well,” he said at last, “I am amazed. What is the Lady Ruth’s desire?”

  “That,” said Ted, “you will have to take up with Ruth.” He turned to go before he got himself—or Ruth—into any more trouble, and Randolph caught his wrist.

  “My lord,” he said, “why tell me now?”

  “Because,” said Ted, his fear coming unbidden to his tongue, “I might not be here to tell you tomorrow.”

  Randolph’s grip on his wrist bit like a manacle. “Not while I have breath—in which case it would not matter.”

  “I know,” said Ted, suddenly close to tears, “but still.”

  “Edward,” said Randolph, “who art thou?”

  Ted was too startled even to jump, but he was sure Randolph could feel the shocked blood pounding in the wrist he held.

  “You know as well as I do.”

  “Maybe,” said Randolph.

  “If that’s too little,” said Ted, truthfully, “you can’t be sorrier than I am.”

  “No?”

  “What do you want?” cried Ted.

  “That thou shouldst tell me who thou art.”

  “I’m the King,” said Ted, desperately.

  “And what am I?”

  Ted’s throat hurt as if he had been running.

  “Thou knowest quite well. Now, is it meet that a king should give his cousin to a—”

  “Be quiet!” shouted Ted. “I will not hear this!” So he had said, playing; so Edward would say when Randolph was finally accused of having poisoned the King. “I am the King and I give what I like.”

  Randolph let go of him. “And see naught but what liketh thee?”

  Ted felt all the shame that ought to be felt by a king who was willing to marry his cousin to a murderer. In the damp dark of the woods his face burned. He still found it very hard to think of Randolph as a murderer, or of his treachery as wrong; but Randolph did think of these things thus. There was, of course, no question of Ruth’s marrying anybody here; and Ted did not want to marry Ruth: so telling the truth had seemed a harmless way of making things easier. But he certainly could not say that to Randolph.

  Randolph seemed to mistake his silence. He said, “Consider this. Fence squeezed from the napkins that wine you spilled from my hand.” He looked at Ted’s face, and his mouth twisted. “And he gave it to Mat
thew, who is something of an alchemist. And he did find therein, not a poison, but an antidote therefor.”

  “Andrew was mad because I spilled his antidote?”

  “So ’twould seem.”

  “But how’d he know there’d be anything for it to be an antidote for? I mean, it makes sense he didn’t want the King killed, because the King agreed with him, but—”

  “I know not,” said Randolph.

  Ted barely heard this. Coldness had washed through him. “Oh, God,” he said. “Shan’s mercy, my lord. If I hadn’t spilled the antidote the King would’ve drunk that with the poison.”

  Randolph nodded. His face was impassive. He watched Ted as if Ted were a pan of fudge about to lose its shine.

  “This is awful,” said Ted. He had killed the King. The one part of the game they had tried most earnestly to change, he himself had accomplished. He began to laugh, painfully and found that tears were running down his face.

  “So close were we come to immediate salvation and final doom,” said Randolph. “But see you that Andrew, on whom Fence would most quickly put the blame, is now safe from it?”

  Ted wiped his eyes.

  “So have a care,” said Randolph, “that you use me not in your deeper-laid plans. I will not be here.”

  They turned and went in silence back to the camp.

  CHAPTER 13

  THE army of the Dragon King was two days late. This seemed to afford great satisfaction to Fence and Randolph, and to unsettle Andrew considerably.

  “Maybe he is a spy of the Dragon King,” said Ted to Patrick, in the middle of the second day. It was too hot to do anything in particular, even if their nervousness would have allowed them to be interested.

  “I think so,” said Patrick. “I’ve been talking to the Peonies—that’s his company—and they’re mad at him because he told them the army was leaving two days later than it did, and Conrad yelled at them, not Andrew, for not being ready.”

  They had learned a little about the organization of the army. Its smallest unit seemed to be called a company, to consist of twenty-four men, and to be named after a flower. The companies were collected into fellowships, which were named after jewels, and the fellowships into orders, which were named after trees. This was the mundane army; how the sorcerers were organized, how the two were to be combined, and who exactly was running things, they did not know. Most of the King’s counselors commanded mere companies, Conrad being the notable exception.

  “And who told Andrew?” asked Ted.

  “I don’t know, but I’ll bet it was Fence.”

  “He did take Laura seriously when she said Andrew was a spy.”

  “Not seriously enough, or he wouldn’t let Andrew keep that company.”

  “Couldn’t he put it where it can’t do any harm?”

  “If he can afford to waste twenty-four men, sure.”

  “How big is the Dragon King’s army?”

  Patrick looked at him, and looked away.

  “How’d you get the Peonies to talk to you?” said Ted hastily.

  “Childish blandishments,” said Patrick, grinning, and showed Ted a blue-eyed stare that made him look closer to ten than to thirteen.

  “What?”

  “Never mind,” said Patrick, looking secretive.

  There seemed no conversation possible that did not suddenly develop pitfalls.

  “Let’s go practice fencing,” said Ted.

  On the third day, the day they expected the Dragon King, Fence got them all up before dawn. Ted sat hunched over a fire, eating lumpy oatmeal brought to him by Agatha, and watched the clear red light chase the stars down behind the mountains. It was chilly. The mountains looked forbidding, and the bare land before them parched and miserable in the growing light. Ted had a cold knot in the center of his stomach, which the oatmeal did nothing to alleviate. He wondered how soon he would be killed.

  There was a great deal of purposeful bustle going on, which no one had bothered to explain to him. Ted became irritated. Even if your minions had it all their own way, they might do you the courtesy of telling you what they were up to. Thinking of minions reminded Ted of Ellen, and he thought of going and telling her once more that she was not to fight in the battle. But if he insulted her by the reminder, she might go just to spite him.

  In the end he found Agatha. She was wearing a sword, which suited her very well, and building up fires, which suited her equally well. I bet she was a good Queen’s Counselor, thought Ted. I wonder why the King didn’t want her.

  “The Lady Ellen,” he said to her, “has thoughts of fighting in the battle.”

  The moment he had said it he was sorry. This was the ultimate betrayal: going to a grown-up to solve a problem. Especially in the Secret, even if it was not the Secret they knew, it seemed reprehensible. But surely letting Ellen get herself killed would be worse. Agatha looked at him with resignation, and assured him that Ellen would be far too busy with carrying water and rolling bandages to sneak off to the battle. Ted thanked her and crept off to be collared by Fence and Randolph.

  Both of them seemed perfectly calm, though Ted did notice, again, that Randolph was thinner than he had been and looked as if his head hurt. If it did, this did not stop him from giving Ted and Patrick a brisk and compressed lecture on how they were to conduct themselves during the battle. Ted was to fight with Matthew’s company, whose badge was a bloom of lilac. He was to stay with the company. People wearing a yellow feather were messengers: if one told him to do something, he was to do it; and if he saw anything amiss, he was to find a messenger and so inform him. Patrick was to do likewise, except that he would be with Benjamin’s company, whose badge was a daisy.

  Ted, receiving these instructions silently, thought of his mother, when he was much younger, delivering him to a birthday party with mild reminder not to throw the present at Adam Simmons no matter what Adam said to him; to say “please” when he wanted something and “thank you” when he was given something, whether he wanted it or not; and to inform his hostess he had had a nice time even if he had hated every child there and his dumb sister Laura could have made a better cake.

  These reflections made him feel worse rather than better.

  They left a body of soldiers with the camp and moved the main army out a mile or so into the desert, since the surveyors they had brought were not as sure as they ought to have been about where the borders of the Secret Country were. Randolph, most uncharacteristically, snapped at them, and was rewarded with a lecture from Fence concerning the possible actions of sorcery upon geography. Patrick, whom Ted and Fence and Randolph had collected on their way, shut his mouth on the suggestion that this was because none of the five children who had made up this story knew the first thing about surveying, doing so in such a way that Ted knew exactly what he was not saying. This did not improve Ted’s temper.

  When the army was safely into the desert it sat down and waited. Ted saw people playing cards and dice and chess, and other things he did not recognize.

  “They must be crazy,” said Patrick.

  He sounded so resentful that Ted stared at him. Patrick was scared, too. This was alarming. Ruth was the only one of his three cousins who had ever seemed to be afraid of anything. It was probably good for Patrick to be frightened, but Ted wished he had not noticed it.

  “Cheer up,” he said stiffly. “It isn’t real, after all.”

  “There’s nothing either good nor bad,” said Patrick, venomously, “but thinking makes it so.”

  “Start thinking, then,” said Ted, and walked away before he could say something nastier, or be sorry he had said anything.

  He almost fell over Randolph and Fence, who sat a little apart, drawing lines in the sand and putting pebbles on them and murmuring to each other.

  “Those don’t look like any battle plans I ever saw,” said Ted over Fence’s shoulder.

  “This is wizardry,” said Fence tranquilly. “I have neglected my apprentice of late.”

  Ted
looked at the ring on Randolph’s finger.

  “What ails thee?” Fence asked him, without even looking around.

  “I’m nervous,” said Ted truthfully, and sat down in the sand.

  “This will occupy your mind,” said Fence, and shifted so Ted could see. “These are spells of opening and closing. When thou comest to cast them,” he said to Randolph, “’twere best thou hold the patterns in thy mind. To draw the runes is to do much damage. The Dragon King draweth runes for them, and he shattereth mountains.”

  “Oh, wonderful!” said Ted. “Could he shatter us, too, if he liked?”

  “No,” said Fence crisply, “he could not—not in this manner. Where is thy scholar’s abstraction? That is not the point.”

  “Fence, have some heart,” said Randolph.

  “That is neither for scholars nor for wizards,” said Fence, with an austerity that seemed to chill the growing heat of the desert.

  “And for friends?” said Randolph. Ted looked away from his searching and ironic eyes.

  Fence flung his hands up. “You are both a trial,” he said.

  “No doubt,” said Randolph.

  Ted, seeing far away something even worse than the look in Randolph’s eyes, sprang to his feet, scattering sand. “Look!”

  They looked to the east, squinting at the early sun. Crawling across the desert were a line of black specks and a cloud of dust. Crawling across the sky was another line of specks. Fence and Randolph snatched up helmet and sword and were gone in opposite directions, shouting. Ted looked down at the pattern they had left in the sand, and shivered.

  The Lilacs, when they came to fetch him, seemed rather preoccupied and subdued. Ted had somehow expected them to be pleased that theirs was the company chosen to fight with the King. A very little reflection, as they trudged to their appointed place in the desert between the Daisies and the Mallows, showed him that this expectation had been foolish. They might be blamed if anything happened to him. Even if his protection was delegated solely to Matthew, that would keep Matthew from doing whatever else he was supposed to do as captain of a company. Ted was a charge and a nuisance, that was all. Well, Edward wouldn’t have been any better; he was much shyer than Ted and hated fighting.