The Hidden Land

Fence closed his eyes and let his breath out. “One must tell him,” he said.

  Randolph was beginning to look sick again. Serve you right, thought Ted. Maybe nobody else cared about the King: Matthew and Conrad had seemed more worried about Randolph, but Benjamin did care. And Randolph did, of course, crazy as that seemed. That was why he was so upset. Ted wished his mind would start working normally again.

  “I’ll do’t,” said Randolph: he sounded exactly as Ted’s father had when it had been necessary to put one of their dogs to sleep.

  “Meanwhile,” said Matthew, a little shakily, “the council lords fume and fret.”

  “Let Agatha examine them,” said Fence. This startled Ted considerably, but nobody remarked on it. Fence regarded Matthew for a moment longer, and added, “And do you take it down, an it please you.”

  “It will be long ere aught pleaseth me,” said Matthew, as if he were quoting something, and he went out.

  “’Tis Benjamin should attend the King,” said Fence to Randolph. “We will stay ’til you find him.”

  Randolph looked down at the King. “A will stay ’til we come,” he said, and went away.

  Ted and Fence stood in the darkening room. Its candles were all out. Fence was wearing his wizard’s robe, and its curious twinings glowed and pulsed. Ted looked away from them to the King, and went to the window. He could not seem to stop shaking, and the air coming through the window, though damp, was warmer than the room.

  “Well,” said Fence. “Confusion now hath made his masterpiece. Say you still that Randolph’s hand is in this?”

  “I don’t see how he could have done it, Fence,” said Ted, truthfully enough. “I was watching him every minute.”

  “My mind tends to Andrew,” said Fence, “but that is for a mere dislike; and he was in favor; why would a cut’s own throat?”

  “Could it have been a mistake?” asked Ted.

  “I would I had been here,” said Fence. There was a silence. “And I am remiss,” he added. Ted turned around. Fence had stooped over the King and raised the blue cloth. Ted was just as pleased to be unable to see what he was doing.

  “Dear heaven,” said Fence.

  “What?” said Ted.

  “This is the very smell of sorcery.”

  Oh, of course. But Edward would be surprised. “What?” said Ted.

  “This is not a natural poison. It cannot be got save by sorcery.” Fence let the cloth fall from his hand and stood up. “Conrad, Matthew, Andrew, Randolph,” he said. “All had a chance at cup or bottle; and all have dabbled save Andrew.”

  “His sister could have made it for him,” said Ted, viciously.

  “So she could,” said Fence. He joined Ted at the window. “Or, think you, to Randolph?”

  “No,” said Ted. “When he spilled the wine, I gave him a different cup, and I was right next to him the whole time. Besides,” added Ted, thinking that a little truth could do no harm, “he was very cheerful while we were setting the table.” He had become cheerful after seeing the spiderweb in the cupboard, whatever that meant.

  “And Andrew was marvelous distempered at the spilling of the wine?”

  “Yes, marvelous.”

  “Now thou hast seen the deed, thou hast less stomach for the thought that Randolph did do’t?” said Fence, belaboring the point as was his occasional regrettable habit. Ted remembered the scolding Laura, Patrick, and Ellen had gotten for disobeying Fence’s orders, the night Claudia came up the stairs to Fence’s tower with a sorcerous knife in her hand. Arguing had done them no good; Randolph had shut Fence up eventually. Ted was silent. Fence put an arm around his shoulders, and a little of his stillness had seeped into Ted when Randolph came back with Benjamin. They had brought two torches.

  Randolph still looked sick. He stayed by the door, leaning on the wall next to the bracket he had slid the torch into. Benjamin’s face, as he stared at the disordered room and the body of the King, was stunned and furious. Fence came away from the window, almost dragging Ted with him. Benjamin stooped over the King as Fence had done, and grief began to overtake the fury on his face. Then he started, and sniffed the air, and looked up at Fence.

  “Aye,” said Fence.

  “So Melanie haunts us still,” said Benjamin. He kissed the King’s forehead, and looked at Fence again. Ted braced himself for the alas-speech; he had a horrible feeling that he might laugh.

  “The bright day is done,” said Benjamin, as if Fence were personally responsible, “and we are for the dark.”

  “See to thy torches, then,” said Fence.

  Benjamin seemed a little taken aback; then, shocking Ted, he laughed. “Aye,” he said. “Fire is the test of gold.” He stood up and looked at Ted. “A was better pleased wi’ thee these last weeks,” he said. He put his head out the door. “Bear him away,” he said.

  Four women Ted had never seen before came in and did so.

  Benjamin looked at Ted again. “Leave all the rest to me,” he said, and went after them.

  “Well, my lord,” said Fence to Ted. “you cannot have a council whilst your lords are penned with an inquisitor, but by your gracious will Lord Randolph and I might impart to you what we these six months have done.”

  “Only if you promise not to go on talking like that,” said Ted.

  “While we are private I will not,” said Fence. He sat down in Andrew’s chair and fished a map from the folds of his robe. “Randolph,” he said, without looking up, “where is the Book of King John?”

  “In Matthew’s chamber,” said Randolph. “Fence. What of the children?”

  The other four children had gathered in Ellen and Laura’s room. They sat, fidgeting and squabbling, on the bed with its green quilt. Around them the white horses raced unregarded across the green tapestries; the black cat slept on Ellen’s discarded yellow dress. Outside above the shadowy mountains the western sky grew prickled over with stars as some wind from lands they had never seen pushed the clouds over High Castle, south and west to the domains of the Dragon King. This same wind faltered in through the unglazed window, whose shutters no one had thought to close, and tipped the flames of the lamps a little sideways. Only Laura, carefully staying out of the argument, noticed any of these things.

  Ellen wanted to go listen at the door of the Council Room, but had been prevented by Ruth. Laura was not sure what she thought of Ruth these days. She had taken to wearing long white dresses, staring abstractedly into space when you were talking to her, and using her sorcerous voice for trivial things like telling Ellen that her hair ribbon did not match her dress. She was taller than ever, and wore her hair tightly braided and wound around her head, which made her look much less like Ellen and entirely too grown-up.

  “I guess we’ll know if anything went wrong,” said Ellen, resigning herself. “They’ll all shout ‘Treason!’ ”

  “Even if they did we wouldn’t be able to hear it over here,” said Patrick. “It’s probably half a mile to the Council Room.”

  “Matthew has to come right by here to get Agatha,” said Ellen. “So she can lay the King out.”

  “Why should she hit him when he’s dead?” said Laura, despite her resolutions. It did not matter in the slightest, of course, because nobody paid any attention.

  “Fence has to come tell us if the King’s dead,” said Ruth to Ellen, patiently. “He’s Patrick’s father and our uncle.”

  “He is not,” said Ellen.

  “The King is,” said Ruth, less patiently.

  “Let’s do something,” said Ellen.

  “Like what?” said Patrick. “Play hopscotch?”

  “I could read aloud,” said Ruth.

  “Can you read that stuff?” asked Laura.

  “Sure,” said Ruth. She picked up the book she had brought with her, a shabby affair with a much-scored leather binding, and opened it. “But King John,” she read, “had been raised by an old country woman, and he knew the ways of monsters. So when the—”

  “Oh, don’t!” said
Ellen. “I can’t stand hearing any more about King John. I wish we’d never invented him. And that’s dumb. Why should a king be raised by an old country woman?”

  Ruth was exasperated, but she was interrupted before she could express herself. Fence came into the room without knocking. They all gaped at him. He was very still and remote; only the curling starry lines on his robe moved a little as the lamplight caught them.

  Fence looked at them for a moment as they sat and sprawled on the bed. Then he came across the room in a flurry of stars and put his hand on Patrick’s head. Patrick looked at him as if he were the worst part of a horror movie; except that horror movies never bothered Patrick.

  “Thy royal father’s dead,” said Fence.

  He appeared braced for hysteria; they simply stared at him. Laura was supposed to throw herself into his arms and howl, but she could not do it.

  “I knew it,” muttered Patrick.

  Fence took his hand from Patrick’s head and examined him much as he had examined Claudia’s knife. “Did you so?” he said.

  Patrick stood up and looked him straight in the face. “Ted told me what he thought.”

  “He does not think it now,” said Fence.

  Ruth was the first to recollect her part. Glaring at Patrick, she said, in strained tones. “What happened? I didn’t know his Majesty was unwell.”

  “He was not,” said Fence. He looked around at them again, and seemed to abandon whatever gentle measures he had settled on, in the face of their abnormal calm.

  “The King was poisoned,” he said, “with a sorcerous brew.”

  He went on looking at them, and they stared back. Laura thought again about howling, but she was shocked, not grieved. She wondered if Ted was killing Randolph yet. He had not wanted to; but he had not wanted Randolph to poison the King, either. So much for wishing on the Enchanted Forest, she thought. We unbroke the Crystal of Earth, but everything else is going to happen.

  “Well,” said Patrick, “who did it, then?”

  Fence buried both hands in his robes, and his face, which had become more normal when their response perplexed him, turned remote again. “We know not,” he said.

  “Heh,” said Patrick.

  “What we may discover, you and your brother the King shall know,” said Fence. Patrick’s mouth fell open, which seemed to afford Fence a very dim and distant amusement, the way Laura’s father would sometimes smile when you told him a joke while he was reading. Fence addressed Ellen and Laura. “Agatha hath other business than you.”

  “We can put ourselves to bed,” said Ellen.

  Fence regarded her with curiosity. “How commendable in you,” he said.

  Ellen, unaccustomed to sarcasm from this quarter, said, “No, not at all,” like a society lady, thought Laura. Then she looked appalled.

  Patrick snickered, and Ruth pulled his hair. He pushed her hand away.

  “Cut it out!” he said.

  “Children,” said Fence.

  “I’m sorry we’re so unbecoming,” said Patrick, sourly.

  “So am I,” said Fence.

  They squirmed under his gaze, even Ruth, and looked at the floor.

  “Whatever wildness possesseth you,” said Fence at last, “tame it by tomorrow.”

  “You began it,” said Patrick, “making Ellie look silly.”

  “And you shall end it,” said Fence. He turned and went from the room, closing the door behind him with a thud that missed being a slam but was not a neutral noise.

  “Patrick,” said Ruth.

  “What’s the use of playing any more?” demanded Patrick. “It didn’t work; the King’s dead!”

  “You don’t have to make Fence any more unhappy than he already is.”

  “He’s not even real!”

  Ruth picked up the skirts of her white dress and advanced on him. “Do you mean to tell me,” she said, “that after all the things that have gone different and all the things that have gone wrong and even after this you can sit there and say this is all out of our own heads?”

  “Yes!” shouted Patrick, standing his piece of the floor defiantly. Ruth stopped coming toward him. “And the reason it’s going wrong and different is that some of us are sick in the head!”

  Laura would not have spoken for anything. There was a brief but profound silence. Ellen broke it by twisting around on the bed and regarding her brother as if he were a spider that she would have liked to step on had she not been afraid it would run up her leg.

  “Who,” she said ominously, sounding very like Ruth, “is sick?”

  “Ted and Ruth,” said Patrick. “And they’re the oldest, so you and Laura think whatever they say, and I can’t do anything by myself to keep things straight.”

  “Why,” said Ruth, in a flat tone, “are we sick.”

  “You’re important here and you want to stay that way. So you want it to be real.”

  “Why,” said Ruth, more angrily, “even if that’s true, is it sick?”

  “Megalomania,” said Patrick, scaring Laura; it sounded like some kind of cancer.

  “You’re sick!” said Ellen. “You think you’re the only one who can be right, and we’re all against you.”

  “Paranoia,” said Ruth, with a sort of melancholy pleasure in knowing the word.

  Laura knew that word herself, but she wasn’t pleased. It was unwise to enter a family fight, but she was finding this one too much for her.

  “I think you’re all horrible,” she said. “How can you stand there and call names when—”

  “I didn’t mean to call names,” said Patrick. “I was trying to bring you to your senses so we can do something. You’re no use if you go on thinking this stuff is real.”

  “What do you want to do?” asked Ruth.

  “Get out of here!”

  “But I need to see what happens!” said Ellen.

  “For God’s sake!” said Patrick. “This isn’t a book.”

  “Oh, no?” said Ruth. “I thought you said it wasn’t real?”

  It still surprised Laura to see Patrick nonplussed. Ellen and Ruth looked at him with a tentative sort of triumph, as if they were quite sure they were right but expected him to come up with a slippery answer.

  He had an answer, but it did not seem slippery to Laura.

  “It’s happening to us,” he said. “It isn’t good for us. It’s going to hurt us, and we’re real.”

  “Why isn’t it good for us?” demanded Ruth. “Why shouldn’t it teach us things and make us better people?”

  “I guess there’s no reason it shouldn’t,” said Patrick, “but it isn’t. It’s making all of you—all of us—unreasonable. And emotional and grumpy. And name-calling. And callous,” he added. “The King’s dead and Ellie thinks he’s real and she’s not even sorry, she just wants to hang around and see what else happens.”

  “Now look,” said Ellen.

  “Be quiet,” said Ruth. She addressed Patrick. “Lots of things that are good for the soul make people unreasonable.”

  Patrick sat down on the bed in a despairing movement. “It’s not good for the soul,” he said, “to think you’re important when you’re not.”

  “Seems to me you think you’re pretty important,” said Ellen. “You think you could make all this happen.”

  “I think we could. And that’s not important, it’s just normal imagination gone bad. Because it isn’t happening, we just—”

  “Who made up Lady Claudia, then?” asked Ruth.

  “How should I know? What with everybody running around making up just anything and not even telling anybody, somebody could have made her up and forgotten all about her. Or just decided she wasn’t a good idea.”

  “Why didn’t that decision stick, then?” asked Ruth. “Some of them did. Laura isn’t a prince.”

  “Just as well,” said Laura, briefly entertained. Real as everything here had always looked to her, right now she would be just as pleased if everything—even the unicorns—were imaginary. “Hey,
” she said, recalled, as always, to her primary problem in this country, “if it’s all in our heads, why can’t I ride a horse like we said I could?”

  “Because you think it’s real.”

  “So what? If the King’s real, why can’t me riding horses be real, too?”

  “Because you know you can’t!”

  “I knew the King wasn’t real, too, before we got here,” said Laura.

  Patrick seemed to be struggling with another way to make his point, and there was a pause during which Ellen fell asleep on Ruth’s knee.

  “I don’t really care,” Ruth said suddenly to Patrick, “what you think, but I would appreciate it if you would act as though this were real. It seems to me, since you’re in no danger of thinking you’re important, that you have less to lose by acting as if this were real, even if it isn’t, than you would have by acting as if it weren’t real, when it was.”

  Laura and Patrick looked at her in astonishment. This was a far better Lady Ruth than she had ever achieved, even at the height of her acting.

  “Since you won’t pay any attention to my arguments anyway,” said Patrick.

  “That’s right.”

  “I guess so,” said Patrick.

  “Thank you.”

  “What do we do now?” asked Laura.

  “Go to bed, I think,” said Ruth, looking at Ellen.

  “Shouldn’t we wait for Ted?”

  “I don’t think,” said Ruth, “that Ted is going to feel like talking to anybody.”

  In the clear gray morning, Fence, Ted, and Randolph straightened their backs and rubbed their eyes. The whole long council table was littered with books and maps and scribbled bits of parchment. The candles were pools in the bottoms of their holders. Ted felt like a pool in his chair. If he had not been exhausted he would have been terrified. He did not understand a third of what he had been told. He had never been fond of military history; what he liked were the tactics of single fights, like the one Prince Edward was supposed to have with Lord Randolph in the rose garden. Even if he had known about battles he would have been bewildered by the peculiar blend of normal and magical fighting that Fence and Randolph seemed to think the best way to manage things.