The Dubious Hills

by PAMELA DEAN

  “Do you know what you’re about?”

  “Learning about pain,” said Arry.

  “Let me tell you a spell,” said Niss, still holding the coat. “Don’t say it unless you mean it. I can say them with or without intent, but I can’t teach you that in five minutes.”

  “I understand you,” said Arry.

  “Listen well, then. Here it is. Mastiff, greyhound, mongrel grim, hound or spaniel, brach or lym, or bob- tail tyke or trundle-tail, Tom will make him weep and wail; for with throwing this my head, dogs leaped the hatch, and all are fled.”

  She repeated this several times, until Arry assured her that she would remember it. Arry said, “Must I throw my head?”

  “No,” said Niss, laughing.

  “There’s no wolf in the rhyme, Niss.”

  “I well know,” said Niss, not laughing at all. “But I think the mongrel grim will serve.”

  She piled the wolfskin coat into Arry’s arms. Arry thanked her, and went out. Halfway across the water meadow she finally put the thing on; it was much lighter to wear than to carry. The cats were milling about the front door when she got home, though this was usually their hunting time. They bounded into the house, complaining loudly, as soon as she had opened the door. The house smelled stale and stuffy. Arry opened windows, and gave the cats some milk, and heated some for herself, with peppermint in it for her stomach’s sake. Three times, she thought, not three nights. And a good thing, too, now that Halver’s found ways to make people want to be wolves without being a wolf himself. He must be in a hurry.

  She sat down in the largest chair, with extra cushions, and laid the coat across her lap. She was afraid of it, though she did not really know why. At the worst, after all, she could let Halver turn her into a wolf, and then she could see her parents again. He was the only way she could think of to get to them, whether he turned her into a wolf or not. He also really could not be let to slink and plot all over the hills, tempting half the children and biting the rest, which was the way he seemed to want to go on. Or if Mally were right after all and this was just a lesson on a strange and grand scale, then she must do what she could. Halver always told them to attack a problem, not to stare at it and wait for it to resolve itself.

  She stroked her hand down the sleeve of the coat, and Sheepnose leapt into her lap and settled down, kneading the fur and purring hugely.

  “Well,” said Arry. “Once can do no harm, in any case.” She blew out her candle, wriggled further under the coat, rubbed the affronted Sheepnose behind the ears, and shut her eyes.

  She fell asleep almost at once. She woke at dawn, when the birds were shouting their loudest. Sheepnose had retreated to sleep on a fold of the coat that had fallen to the floor, and Woollycat was stretched out on Arry’s thigh, head laid flat along the coat like a sleeping dragon.

  Arry moved her arm, which had gone numb, from under her head, shoved a cushion there instead, and tried to remember what she had dreamed. Nothing. “Oh, doubt!” she said suddenly, sitting up with a jerk and dislodging the indignant Woollycat. “Keep the wolf far hence.”

  That meant she would have to sleep under the coat outside. She got out of the chair and moved blearily to the window. The sun was lining everything with gold; the birds were as loud as a waterfall. Not now, she thought; she must have some real sleep before walking anywhere else with the heavy coat. She stumbled through the washing room to her own bed and went back to sleep on top of the quilt, with all her clothes on.

  She dreamed she was Sir Patrick Spens, set upon a golden bough to sing to lords and ladies of Byzantium of what was past, or passing, or to come; except that she could not really sing at all and was concerned only with the fact that there was going to be a dreadful storm, whereupon the three sons of the Wife of Ussher’s Well would come back with bark in their caps and find Melusina splashing the bath water about with her fishy tail. This would make the lords and ladies unhappy. She used her golden beak to pluck the bark from the cap of the youngest. “Look!” said everyone. “From the far side of the tree that grows in Paradise!” “Nonsense,” said Frances. “Paradise is a Unicornish word for an orchard or park.” Arry dropped the bark onto Frances’s head. Frances smiled and thanked her. The lords and ladies began to harangue her for not singing. They sounded remarkably like Con and Beldi. After a while Arry realized that they were Con and Beldi. She opened her eyes.

  Woollycat stared back at her from the pillow. Con and Beldi were not in the room, they weren’t trying to wake her up at all. They were in the kitchen.

  “You can’t make pancakes out of the blushful Hippocrene,” said Beldi; he sounded a little desperate. “You use buttermilk.” There was a pause, punctuated with clattering and splashing noises. “Everybody says so.”

  “I don’t,” said Con. “I hate buttermilk.”

  Arry rubbed Woollycat’s nose. “You probably could make pancakes out of the blushful Hippocrene,” she told the cat. “It’s acidic, I think. But I can’t imagine what they would taste like. Con really oughtn’t to waste all that flour and milk.” Woollycat jumped off the bed at the last word and sat on the floor making impatient noises. Arry got up. She was still dressed, however dusty and sweaty the garments might be, so she stopped only briefly in the washing room and then went into the kitchen.

  They had not made much more mess than she might have, if she had been in a hurry. They had built a small fire of pinecones on the hearth, to boil the kettle, and were heating the griddle on its remains. The main fire was burning much too briskly to cook pancakes, but Con could presumably deal with that. The only alarming thing was the batter itself, which was a faint pink and suffered from an uprush of huge bubbles, as if it were being boiled itself.

  “We were going to surprise you,” said Con.

  “You have,” said Arry, peering into the bowl. It looked worse close up, though it smelled pleasant. She retreated to the table and poured herself a mug of tea.

  “I told Woollycat not to wake you up.”

  “She didn’t.”

  “I told you you were talking too loudly,” said Beldi.

  Con gave this remark no attention whatsoever. She said to the fire, “In thee I see the twilight of such day, as after sunset fadeth in the west.” It shrunk itself into a bed of coals, and Con moved the griddle onto that. Arry bit her lip on a number of remonstrations. Con had protected her hand with a towel; and she was at this moment remembering to try the griddle with a drop of water. She dropped rounds of batter on it. They were of wildly differing sizes, but it didn’t really matter. It was the pinkness that most required comment, but it was too late for that. As the pancakes cooked, they got pinker, as pink as Con’s cheeks. The little bubbles that broke their surfaces were as red as raspberries.

  Arry could not bear to look at them. She went down into the cold cellar and got a crock of apple butter and the honey Derry had given her. That had not been long ago at all; most of the honey was still there; but it seemed as if it happened in some other spring.

  When she came back up Con had put a whole plate of pancakes on the table. Beldi was serving himself, looking glum. Arry got plates for herself and Con and served pancakes onto both. Con, she was astonished to see, was cleaning the griddle while it was still hot, a proceeding earnestly recommended to her by everybody in her family but never once followed before. Arry looked long and hard at her, but she had no fever, nor any other complaint of flesh. Of spirit it was harder to tell, but the kinds of pain Arry had found before did not seem to be present.

  Beldi had taken a spoonful of pancake and was looking at it as one might regard a piece of good rotten bark, to see what might crawl out. Arry felt much the same.

  They both watched Con. She hung the griddle back on the wall, which she had certainly never done before, and sat down in her chair. She grinned amiably at her siblings. “You forgot to put any honey on,” she said. She spread honey liberally over her own pancakes, cut off a spoonful, and crammed it into her mouth. She chewed and swallowed it,
and cut off another. Arry followed the progress of the first mouthful as if she were studying the action of poison on her dearest enemy. It went down like pancakes.

  She knew what Con was going to say, but felt compelled to wait and hear her say it. Con finished her plateful and took three more pancakes. Arry was relieved to see her use her fingers instead of the fork. Con put apple butter on the pancakes this time. She looked at Arry, at Beldi, and back at Arry. “Why aren’t you eating?”

  As if he too had been waiting for this, Beldi put his spoonful into his mouth. His went down like pancake too. He said, “Too dry.”

  “Put some honey on it,” said Con.

  Arry put her spoonful into her mouth. It tasted like summer, late, full, old summer with harvest almost upon it. It had, under its complex flowery grainy sunny flavor, almost no actual substance; she could not imagine what Beldi had meant by calling it too dry. She swallowed it. “It’s lovely, Con,” she said, “but mightn’t it be a little too rarefied for breakfast?”

  “It’s a special breakfast,” said Con.

  “Yes, extremely,” said Arry, and ate the rest of her plateful.

  “Because of Zia’s plan,” said Con.

  Arry looked at Beldi. He said, “I made her tell you at least.”

  “You did not,” Con said, without heat. “You can’t make me do anything. You persuaded me that I ought, and Zia helped you.”

  “Zia wanted you to tell me?” said Arry. “Why?”

  “Because you’ve got Tiln’s coat,” said Con.

  Angels and ministers of grace defend us, thought Arry. “What does she want with Tiln’s coat?”

  “You older ones always forget,” said Con, leaning her elbows on the table and fixing her round dark gaze on Arry. In her clear high voice Arry could hear traces of Zia’s deeper drawl. “But Halver teaches by games. If we lose the game, then he makes us learn the hard way. So Zia wants to win the game.”

  “And what’s the game?”

  “Being better wolves than Halver.”

  “Who told Zia,” said Arry, with extreme care, “that Halver was any sort of wolf at all?”

  Con looked at her pityingly. “Zia always finds things out,” she said.

  “Did Halver tell her?”

  “Halver doesn’t tell you when he’s playing a game,” said Con, still pitying.

  Arry put the entire tangle aside for later consideration and said, “So why are you making us a special breakfast, again?”

  “Because wolves can’t cook,” said Con.

  “Halver isn’t a wolf all the time.”

  “No,” said Con, with enormous patience. “But to be better wolves than Halver, we have to be wolves all the time.”

  “Con, for mercy’s sake. Do you want to be a wolf?”

  “No,” said Con, with her mouth full. “I didn’t want to learn to read, either, but I liked it after.”

  “But if you become a wolf you’ll lose your knowledge.”

  “Haven’t got any,” said Con, indistinctly.

  “But Mally thinks you’re going to be a wizard.”

  “I’ll be a wolf wizard, then.”

  Arry ground her hands into her forehead. She reminded herself that she did not have to have this argument, that force would probably suffice, that she had the one coat and Niss the other, and what Niss would do for the Physici of the whole community she would not do for Con. On the other hand, to underestimate Con or Zia, or most especially Con and Zia, might be fatal, not in the rhetorical but in the true sense. And why in the world, thought Arry, can Zia persuade Con to anything while I can persuade her to nothing?

  “There’s no such thing as a wolf wizard,” said Beldi.

  “Sune says there is.”

  Oh, merciful heaven. “Con,” said Arry. “You can’t perform this plan at once. I need to study this coat, and Niss needs to study Beldi’s. She must discover how they work, and I must discover if they can do hurt.”

  “Zia already asked Niss,” said Con. “She said no, no child might have one.” Con scowled. “And she hid it with the strongest spell she has. So we have to have this one.”

  “Not while I’m studying it.”

  “Well, when?”

  “I don’t know, Con.”

  “Well,” said Con, scrambling down from her chair. “Zia said she’d think of a way to get the coat away from Niss. So we’ll think about that, and if we can’t you can give us Beldi’s.”

  “Con, you are not to meddle with Niss.”

  “No, I won’t,” said Con cheerfully. “I’ll just help Zia think.”

  “Whatever she thinks, I want you to tell me. I need to see if it will do hurt. These coats are very powerful, Con.”

  For once, the combined ring of authority and truth seemed to catch Con’s ear. “All right,” said Con. “But we can’t wait very long, Arry, or Halver will win.”

  “Halver can’t be a wolf at all until the next full moon,” Arry told her. “I’ll be done by then. Go take a bath, Con, it’s been days since you did.”

  Con went off without demur, probably in the hope of finding towel-sprites. Arry looked at Beldi. “Will Zia let you in her plan?”

  “She’ll let anybody in who does what she says.” “Does Mally know about this plan?”

  Beldi shrugged.

  “Can you be my spy? Can you stick with Con and Zia and tell me what they’re doing, what state they’ve got to?”

  “She usually makes us promise not to tell,” said Beldi.

  “Well, promise me first; promise me you will.”

  Beldi looked at her.

  “No,” said Arry swiftly, “it isn’t right. But it’s as right as we can manage at the moment.”

  “Frances used to say that,” said Beldi.

  “She did, didn’t she?”

  “This isn’t just a plot to make me watch Con, is it?”

  “No,” said Arry. “It is not. This is extremely important.” She hesitated. Beldi could certainly keep quiet; but he was not very old. I’m not so very old myself, she thought. “Halver is trying to change us all,” she said. “And while that’s part of his province, I think there’s something wrong. So do Frances and Bec. It looks as if they’re trying to stop him, but I think they need help. And I certainly need help—not just to keep Con out of the way. She and Zia could wreck anything, you have seen them do it before. This mustn’t be wrecked.”

  “Maybe you should ask them to help you,” said Beldi.

  “I don’t want them. I want you.”

  She had thought this would please him, but in fact his face went very blank. “All right,” he said after a moment. “I promise to tell you all about their plan, and not to tell them about yours.”

  “Thank you,” said Arry.

  Beldi nodded, and helped himself to the last of the pancakes. Arry drank her tea and thought. It would really be better to go talk to Mally again. But she did not think she could bear it; she was not sure that anything Mally could tell her would be of use; and she felt in a serious and terrible hurry. She took the last of the oatcake, the three remaining cold potatoes, and another large lump of cheese, shoved them into a pouch that had been her father’s, and went into the front room to collect the wolfskin coat.

  Both cats were sleeping on it. Arry wondered if sleeping on it three times would also cause some profound transformation; if it worked on cats; if it would work through Niss’s warding. She shook the coat, and the cats sprang away, glaring. Arry rubbed each affronted head briefly and went out the front door.

  It was warm again, and today the sky was perfectly clear and no breeze blew, which meant it would soon be more than warm. Arry stood under the pine tree, looking at the crocuses, which were a little wilted now, and would soon lose their blooms altogether and resemble striped grasses until they turned brown and disappeared. Where shall I go to nap, she thought. Lying down right amongst the crocuses would be pleasant, but not these crocuses, of course, so close to the house: She wouldn’t be undisturbed for long en
ough to shut her eyes.

  She walked away towards Halver’s house, skirted the foot of its hill, and came to Sune’s house. Sune was sitting outside in the sun, still spinning. She had quite a large mass of yarn by now, but she would have to knit fast if she wanted a blanket for Knot by the time Knot presented herself. Sune felt better today, though she did not feel very well. She waved, so Arry climbed the hill and greeted her.

  “Have you been sleeping out?” said Sune, looking rather pointedly at the coat.

  Arry realized that she had not bathed since she went on that long futile walk with Oonan; that she was still wearing her crumpled shirt and grass- and mud-stained leggings; that she had not even combed her hair, which was coming out of its braids and probably full of twigs. “I thought I’d see what it was like,” she said. “Can I do anything for you?”

  “You can, in fact,” said Sune. “I haven’t seen Halver today, or yesterday, either.”

  “I think he’s devising some particularly strong lesson for us to make up for the holiday,” said Arry, putting the coat and pouch down.

  “I never found planting oats much of a holiday,” said Sune. “Though there must be better ways of avoiding it than being pregnant.”

  Arry fetched her a great deal of water; brought her last sack of potatoes out of the cellar; moved the rocking chair nearer the fire, since Sune said Grel had been by to say it would grow cooler this evening and probably rain; spread an extra blanket on the bed; and made a pot of tea. Sune thanked her profusely. Arry professed herself delighted, and in fact she was: she needed to be tired if she were to sleep well outside.

  She went on down to the stream and into the little wood on its far side. No crocuses here, but drifts of scilla in the clearings, and eyebright, and more may blooming. Arry finally tucked herself under a huge twisted hawthorn, put her head on her pouch of food, spread the coat over herself, and shut her eyes.

  Her mind woke up at once. Is this once or twice under this coat, she thought, exactly as she would when measuring cinnamon for solstice buns. Extra cinnamon never marred the buns, though Frances used to talk about how much it cost. If something didn’t happen soon after her third nap under this garment, she would just have to have a fourth. She hoped it wouldn’t be like kneading the cinnamon into the dough after it had already risen once. That was never entirely satisfactory.