The Secret Country

  “How did you come by these?” Randolph asked them.

  I found mine under a hedge,” said Ted, and saw Patrick close his mouth and look annoyed. “Patrick found his under a clump of trees.”

  Randolph’s gaze sharpened and pinned him. “Where?”

  “Near the Well of the White Witch,” said Ted.

  “Do you know their nature?”

  “They make it easier to practice,” said Ted. Wishing to tell the whole truth and afraid of the consequences, he told as much of it as he could, which for some reason made him feel better. “They seem to make it easier to learn things.”

  “They give a headache to every sorcerer, every wizard, and every apprentice for leagues around,” said Randolph. “And what price the two of you have paid for their use I do not like to think.”

  “We’re all right,” said Patrick, edgily.

  “I think they were meant for us,” said Ted.

  “If they are what I think they are, woe to anyone for whom they were meant,” said Randolph. He frowned, and gave the swords back to them. “I think we must see Fence,” he said.

  He herded them along the paths to the castle.

  Fence’s room was flooded with sunlight. Fence was on his knees before one of the carved chests, rummaging briskly and whistling a tune that Ted almost recognized. He looked up as they came in, and the cheer and energy of his aspect were almost shocking. Ted thought that he must have needed a few nights’ sleep very badly indeed to look so much better than he had. He still was not impressive.

  Fence’s mouth quirked when he saw Ted and Patrick. “These?” he said.

  “Show him,” said Randolph.

  Ted pulled his sword from the sheath and held it out.

  “Shan’s blade,” said Fence. Ted thought he was merely being emphatic, but when Randolph nodded slowly, Ted realized that Fence had meant it.

  “Show him, Patrick,” said Randolph.

  “This is mine,” said Patrick, but he drew it out.

  “That is Melanie’s,” said Fence. He was very still for a moment. “How came they to your hands?”

  “Found where you might expect,” said Randolph, when neither Ted nor Patrick answered.

  “How long ago?”

  Randolph looked at Ted in such a way that Ted thought it better to answer. “A few weeks.”

  “And,” said Fence to Randolph, “is’t so long he hath not been himself?”

  “It is.”

  “I think,” said Fence, “that we had better have them.”

  Ted handed his over promptly, although doing so gave him a sinking sensation in the stomach. The less fuss he and Patrick made about losing the swords, the easier it would be to get them back again.

  Patrick must have had other ideas. He put his sword back into its sheath, and his expression was not pleasant.

  “Patrick?” said Fence.

  “This is mine,” said Patrick. “You can’t know it’s Melanie’s without testing it.”

  “You have tested it for us,” said Fence, dryly.

  “Pat!” said Ted.

  “Thy training is not in this,” said Randolph. “It will serve thee ill.”

  He took a step toward Patrick and held out his hand, as if he were trying to make friends with a dog of uncertain temper.

  Patrick leaped back against the wall and whipped out the sword. Ted’s had done nothing when he took it out to give to Fence, but Patrick’s blazed green.

  “Patrick!” said Ted, and moved toward him. Randolph caught his shoulder and held him still.

  “My lord,” said Randolph to Patrick, with the sudden assumption of icy formality that the Secret Country people did so well. “Will you be pleased to hand over the sword, or must I take it?”

  “You must take it,” said Patrick.

  The sword Patrick had held the night before when they all came back upstairs after the council was leaning against the mantel. Randolph took it, jerked it from its sheath, tossed the sheath behind him, and went at Patrick so fast that even if Ted had known what to do he would not have had time to do it. There was a clash of metal and a flare of green, and Patrick’s sword thumped to the rug. Patrick stood backed against the wall, furious, Randolph’s sword at his throat.

  “Fence,” said Randolph, but Fence had already stooped for the blazing sword. It dimmed as he touched it.

  Randolph drew back and put his sword into its sheath again, and leaned it against the mantel. Patrick stayed where he was, his eyes steady on Randolph. Ted was glad that Patrick was not in the habit of carrying a dagger.

  “Thank you, Edward,” said Randolph.

  This was a dismissal. Ted moved for the door, trying to signal Patrick to come along quietly.

  Patrick would not look at him. He pushed himself away from the wall as if he wanted to knock it over, and addressed himself to Fence.

  “You’ll be sorry,” he said. He was still wrathful, but there was a tinge of satisfaction in his tone that made Ted anxious.

  Fence nodded. “The more you say,” he said, “the less sorry I shall be. It is high time these were taken from you both. They work great ill. Edward, I think thou seest now the force behind that which we spoke of last night.”

  Ted was too eager to get out to argue. He nodded and pulled at Patrick’s arm as he went by. Patrick yanked away from him, but came along.

  “What the hell got into you?” Ted demanded, when they were several turns down.

  “Me?” said Patrick, in such a low tone that Ted could hardly hear him over the stony echo of their feet, but with considerable force. “Me? I’m not the one who turned traitor and gave up our only way out of here!”

  “What’d you expect me to do, kill them both?”

  Patrick went faster, passing Ted and disappearing around the next curve. Ted’s legs still hurt from the climb up, but he tried to hurry too.

  “Where are you going?”

  No answer.

  He trailed Patrick back to their own room, where his cousin flung open a wooden chest, banging its lid on the wall behind it. He pulled out a sword, thumping the hilt on the side of the trunk, and whipped past the astonished Ted, the sword held in front of him like a hockey stick.

  Ted, panting and incredulous, caught up with him in the stairwell and grabbed the collar of his tunic. Patrick just stood there, waiting for Ted to go away.

  “What’s that sword?”

  “It’s nothing special,” said Patrick, “but it’ll do what I want.”

  “I suppose it’ll kill Fence and Randolph for you?” said Ted, trying for sarcasm and achieving what sounded to him like fright.

  “Yes and no.”

  “You can’t beat Randolph fencing. You’ll just get yourself in trouble and feel stupid.”

  “Come on and see,” said Patrick, twitching out of Ted’s grip. He rounded a corner in the wrong direction for Fence’s tower. Ted, hoping that he had gotten confused, said nothing. It soon became obvious that they were headed for the North Tower. Ted tried to remember what was there, and could not.

  The corridor to the North Tower was dim at this time of day, and the dust raised by their hurried passage made it worse. Ted began to wonder how much of High Castle was unused.

  The door to the stairs was carved very oddly, and Patrick did not give Ted time to figure it out. He banged through it as if it were any door in a supermarket, and bounded up the stairs.

  The door to the first tower room was plain wood. Patrick pushed it open and waited for Ted. Ted, panting, looked into a round bare room. In the middle of the room was a round wooden table. In the middle of the table was a dazzling globe. It might have been full of bits of colored glass, or the color might all have been the rainbows made by the sunlight shining through the crystal. It was bigger than Ted’s head. It made the tears come to his eyes, and when he had blinked them away, Patrick was standing over the globe with the sword raised.

  “This is another way out,” he said to Ted.

  “What the hell are you doi
ng?”

  “This is the Crystal of Earth. And when I break it, all this will vanish and we’ll all be back home.”

  He gripped the sword with both hands.

  “Patrick,” said Ted, in an agonized squeak; then, when Patrick ignored him, he shouted. “Don’t!”

  Patrick raised the sword above his head and brought it down.

  There was a tremendous flash, as the crystal of the Secret Country exploded into a billion colored shards, and a ringing, terrible, sustained crash as the land, from end to end, from the Mountains of the North to the Dubious Hills, from the Wide West Waste to the Sunrise Sea, cities of men and manners, climates, councils, governments, the boast of heraldry and pomp of power, all that heart heard of or mind expressed, trees, flowers, cottages, and wells, the unicorn, the cardinal, the dragon, and the owl, sun, moon, stars, clouds, the loving detail of High Castle, the barely imagined cities of the Dwarves, the fabulous mines whence came Lord Randolph’s ring, the Green Caves and the Magic Wood, King John’s solemn tomb, Laura and Ellen downstairs, the stones beneath them and their very bones, shook, rang, shattered, and seemed to collapse in dust.

  CHAPTER 18

  TED breathed for one moment a dustier and thicker air, and saw in a flash the drooping leaves of the hedge and the bulk of the secret house, looking shabbier than he remembered it. A car horn honked behind him, he jumped, and the scene was gone.

  Ted and Patrick stood still. Sunlight streamed through the flawless windows. Out of the windows, far away across the green plain, they saw sheep grazing the slopes. Above the sheep the clouds sailed, high and white. A bird went in a red streak by the window. Patrick’s sword was stuck six inches into the solid oak of the table, and on the table was a scattering of broken glass and bits of color, brighter than the bands of sunlight on wall and floor.

  “Criminy,” said Ted, whispering. “What will they do to us?”

  “What will we do?” said Patrick.

  “Get a broom,” said Ted. He thought he should be angry, but he was much too tired.

  “How are we going to get out of this?”

  Ted looked at him. Patrick went out, and came back with a broom. He tried to sweep up the glass, but he knocked the wooden handle of the broom, which was taller than he was, into all the chairs until Ted, who felt he could not stand any noise that he was not making himself, took the broom away from him and began sweeping.

  Patrick put both hands over his face as if he were going to cry—which Ted had never seen him do—and said, matter-of-factly, “When does this stop?”

  “When it’s over,” said Ted, wishing he had the strength to say, “I told you so.”

  “Are you going to kill Lord Randolph?”

  “No,” said Ted.

  “What makes you think you have a choice?”

  Ted unbent himself from under the table, where he was pursuing elusive splashes of glass, and said, “Why shouldn’t I?”

  “Everything else we’ve tried to stop it hasn’t worked.”

  “We haven’t really tried much,” said Ted. “And anyway, this is me. I have a sword, and I can use it, or not, and I won’t.”

  “That’s what I thought,” said Patrick, looking at the scarred table.

  “But you were trying to do something, and it didn’t happen to work. I choose not to do something. How can that not work?”

  Patrick shrugged. “Maybe you’ll stab him through the arras because you think he’s Andrew.”

  Ted shivered. Then he thought about it. “Well,” he said, “even that would be better than killing him in the rose garden.”

  “Why?” demanded Patrick. “As long as we’re stuck in this story we might as well . . . stick to it. Deviating only causes trouble, as far as I can see. I bet if you hadn’t been acting so weird, Randolph wouldn’t have taken the swords away.”

  “Me?” said Ted, stung. “Me? If you’d been satisfied with normal practice swords and not wanted to play with the magic ones—”

  “Okay, okay,” said Patrick.

  “And did you hear what Fence said to me? He thinks my suspicions of Randolph were caused by the sword, and now he’ll never believe them.”

  “Yes, all right. But see? Deviating causes trouble, that’s all. I wish I’d thought of this sooner.”

  Ted sat down, feeling resigned. “Thought of what?”

  Patrick said patiently, “I think a random element enters the plot whenever it’s necessary to keep us from changing the final outcome.”

  “What random elements?”

  “Shan’s Ring,” said Patrick. “That Lady Claudia. And now this.”

  “But how—”

  “We never found out the riddle of Shan’s Ring before, but we had to do it this time or we couldn’t have stayed at all. And this crystal didn’t work the way it should have, so we’d have to stay.”

  “How did you expect it to work?”

  “Well,” said Patrick, “I thought that just this once, my mind might be able to overpower all the rest of your minds, because the other three don’t believe anything about the Crystal of Earth because we didn’t make it up and they haven’t seen it. And you weren’t sure what you thought about it, and you hadn’t seen it either. I figured that, whatever is really going on, if I destroyed this place or seemed to, by its own rules, you know, we’d have to end up back where we came from.”

  Ted, about to yell at him for being stupid and risking all their lives on his pet theory, remembered the brief glimpse of their own world he had had, and bit his lip. “You know,” he said, “it almost seemed to work. Did you notice—”

  “Yes,” said Patrick, a little smugly. “For just a minute I saw the bottle trees and the dog. But something kept it from working. So now I’m not sure what’s going on, but I think something’s trying to keep the story going.”

  “And what about that Claudia?”

  “Now there’s a really random element,” said Patrick. “Telling the King about Fence too soon, getting that council called too early, trying to ambush Fence on the stairs—and bewitching Randolph.”

  “But she hasn’t really managed to do anything,” said Ted. “Well, unless you count making such a fuss that Ruthie used Shan’s Ring on her, which I think could have had a nasty effect.”

  “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.”