by PAMELA DEAN
“You’re offering it to everyone?” said Arry. She felt cold and full of dread, but for a moment she almost laughed. What would all of them say?
“How else?” said Halver. He sounded, and suddenly felt, extremely tired. “I’d hoped to have Frances and Bec to help me, but they don’t understand.”
“They’re free of the spell, they’ve been free longer than you, and yet they don’t agree with you?” said Arry. “Is there no conclusion to be drawn from that?”
“That the world is wider than you can think,” said Halver.
He stood over her, looking down; he reminded her of an owl on a fencepost. Arry got up. He was going to say something final. She said, “Why is it summer here?”
“I don’t know,” said Halver. “I assumed Niss was meddling with the coats. It doesn’t signify. Go to sleep, and you’ll be home again.”
“And what then?” said Arry.
“We’ll have school tomorrow,” said Halver, “and I will tell everyone what’s to be done.”
“You can’t,” said Arry. “You can’t possibly kill any of us.”
“That’s Mally’s province, I would have thought,” said Halver. “But she might well say the same, and if she did she would be right. It makes no matter. The wolf can.” He turned and walked away across the meadow.
Sleep, thought Arry, oh, indeed. On a bed of planks and dust, with a head full of terrors. Well, it must be done. It could, at least, be done on a bed of thyme instead. She curled herself into the sweet sharp smell of the bruised leaves and shut her eyes. Blackie had vanished when she sat down to talk with Halver, and she had not heard him come in, but he was licking her face, with a very rough dry tongue for a dog. Arry put her hand out to push him away, and encountered Sheepnose’s sleek short fur. She opened her eyes.
Inside the house the fire, obedient to Con’s commands though now somewhat short of actual fuel, burned on. Beldi was asleep on the threshold. Arry pushed the wolfskin coat to the floor and got up. Beldi had probably seen nothing but his older sister snoring under a coat. Or no, he would have seen a wolf sleeping in the hollyhocks. The way for him to come with her was, of course, for him to sleep under the coat as well. It was probably better that neither of them had thought of that—but she would have been very glad of a witness.
Then again, tomorrow after school she would have all the witnesses she could ask for. She thought it over. Halver had said he could not kill the recalcitrant, but the wolf could; which presumably meant that he must wait until the moon was full again. Even the new strange Halver would be fair enough, in any case, to give people time to consider the choice he was offering them.
How do I know that? thought Arry. I don’t, of course. And Mally may not know either. Nobody knows at all. It’s possible even Halver doesn’t. I’m going to ask Mally just the same. It can’t hurt. And I want to talk to Niss, and to Oonan.
She went inside and sat down limply on top of Sheepnose, who had crawled into the warmth of her chair and gone to sleep again. Sheepnose made an irate noise and squirmed. Arry got up again and sat on the wolfskin coat. I don’t want to ask anybody anything, she thought, ever again. I want to do something, just to do it quickly. Not, I daresay, a very good reason for wishing to do anything.
She put some wood on the fire; the fire consumed it instantly and then died down properly to a bed of coals. Arry woke Beldi up just enough to walk him into his bedroom. He would be indignant with her in the morning. Then she took off the clothes she had been wearing, had a bath, put on fresh clothes in case the very act of sleeping had become irretrievably enchanted, and went to bed in her own bed with harmless linen and wool as her covering.
She dreamed of nothing at all. What woke her was, once again, Con and Beldi quarreling in the kitchen. Arry put her shoes on and dipped her head in cold water before she went to face them. It was a cool gray dripping sort of morning, and Con was not, for a mercy, making pancakes, though somebody had made a pot of tea. Both of them whipped around when they heard her footstep, and Beldi, for a wonder, got his word in first.
“Tell her I didn’t!” he said.
“Didn’t what?”
“Ruin my fire,” said Con.
“I put wood on it so it would proceed naturally,” said Arry. “Beldi was asleep. What do you want for breakfast?”
“Relish sweet,” said Con. “Manna wild and honeydew.” She marched out of the kitchen.
Arry looked at Beldi. “Did anything extraordinary happen while I was gone?” she said.
“I didn’t even know you were gone,” said Beldi. “You turned into a wolf while I was looking at the stars, and then you went to sleep. You snored a little. After a while I went to sleep too. What happened?”
“Are you awake? Can you remember what I tell you? Halver’s going to tell everybody about it at school today, he says, but I want you to hear and remember what he told me.”
“Let’s make some more tea first,” said Beldi.
“I’ll tell you while the water’s boiling; Con’ll be back soon enough.” She told him everything that had happened. He frowned several times during her recitation of the argument. Arry was not sure if this came from not understanding, or from understanding all too well. The water boiled; she made tea; she made oatmeal pancakes and fried potatoes; she and Beldi ate them. Arry got up tiredly at last and went to pry Con far enough out of her sulks to enable her to eat her breakfast before school. School was a wearing business at the best of times, and today would not be the best of times.
Con was not in the house. Arry was hardly surprised.
Beldi did not seem so either. “It’s probably Zia’s plan,” he said.
“Well,” said Arry, “you go along to school; we need one representative of the family there, at any rate, and I already understand what Halver will say. I’ll go to Mally’s and see if I can find them. Where were they going to burn their herbs?”
“In the pine woods,” said Beldi.
“Of course, where else? In the place with the most flammable floor of all. Go on to school; we’ll come when we can.”
Beldi went slowly off towards Halver’s house, and Arry pelted in the other direction as fast as she could go. She did not know why she was anxious, but it was better to run for nothing than to be too late for something. She went on past Mally’s house and up into the pine woods, where she stopped to breathe and also to listen. Children’s voices drifted with the wind and the smell of burning, over the crest of the hill. Arry crashed through the woods, climbing as fast as she could, gained the top of the hill, put her foot into a spring there, and slid down the other side next to the stream it became. In the first clearing she came to she found Zia and Con and Tany and Lina.
Lina had at least seen to it that they cleared all the dry needles away and surrounded their fire with rocks. She was sitting with her back to the fire, and to Arry, rather hunched up. Arry thought she understood how Lina felt. It was odd that the field of one’s knowledge so often made one feel so, when you thought of it.
“Con!” she yelled.
Con straightened from helping Zia make little piles of dried leaves and flowers, and regarded her with no expression at all.
“What are you doing?” said Arry, arriving breathlessly at the edge of their circle of rocks.
“Playing,” said Zia.
“No, you’re not. You’re conjuring.”
They all stood and looked at her. Even Lina stood up and came to stand behind Con, though she eyed the fire unhappily. They did not plead, or make excuses, or try any more lies or explanations. They just looked.
Arry looked back at them. Lina had scratched her hands moving the rocks; Zia had a bruise on her shin and another on her elbow; Tany had a burned finger, though there was no fire lit here as yet; Con was hungry. She looked harder. This is my province, she thought; this is my field of power; I know what I see. I know what hurts. I know what is hurting each of them, now and always. She looked harder still. We flinch from pain, she thought, whether we kn
ow it’s there or not. I know why Con is doing this: she thinks it will get her Bec and Frances back; and why else did I sleep under the wolfskin coat in the hope of finding Halver?
She looked at Lina, who was older than Con, Zia, and Tany but smaller than any of them, who wished her short sleek brown hair, like an otter’s, would curl and spring all over her head like Con’s or Arry’s. She was afraid of the lightning and the lightning bug alike; she would eat all her food cold and raw if she could; Halver said her knowledge would not grow properly if she hedged it in so, but would warp and twist on itself like an oak high up in the cold wind. Such oaks were struck by lightning, in summer storms. He said Grel said so.
She looked at Tany. He was the only one there was. The rest of them lived in his liver, that was why it was called that. He let them out when he was bored or lonely, though they never did much for the being lonely. He believed there were others somewhere, but whenever he thought he had found one it merely melted into himself at the moment he had the highest hopes. Halver said he could learn if he would think about it, but all the things Halver wanted him to think about were curled up already, tight as new ferns, in the parts of him named for them. He had asked Oonan, when he thought Oonan was another person, for the names of all the parts. But Oonan had the names wrong, which showed he was just Tany too. Halver said Oonan was right, which showed exactly the same thing.
Arry shivered and looked at Zia. At first she thought that everything that existed hurt Zia. But that wasn’t it. Everything was hugely and fiercely important to Zia. When Con told Tiln, “Everything matters to me,” she had been imitating Zia again. And who wouldn’t, who wouldn’t warm her hands at that fire? Even Lina followed her, if at a distance. Halver said she had no sense of proportion, and that nobody without one had ever become a wizard in the entire history of the world.
Arry sat down on one of their rocks. “You’d better tell me,” she said.
“Why?” said Zia.
“Because I think I can help you.” Halver is hurting them, she thought. Mally says he does that to teach them. But he’s hurting them just the same.
“You want to beat Halver at his own game,” she said.
Zia nodded.
“You think his game is being a wolf.”
Zia nodded again.
“But it isn’t.”
They all looked at her.
“He’s telling them all about it right now, in school,” said Arry. “He wants to make us all either be wolves, or die.”
“Why do you think so?” said Zia.
“I slept under Tiln’s coat and found Halver, and he told me.”
“If we sleep under the coats, then he’ll tell us, and we’ll think so too,” said Zia. “So you have to help us get the coats.”
“That will take too long,” said Arry. “He said he couldn’t kill us, but the wolf could; and he’ll be a wolf again when the moon is full. You don’t think you can all sleep under the coats by then, do you?”
Zia looked at the other children, her thought plain on her face. But she did not voice it. “How can you help us, then?” she said.
“We could kill him first,” said Tany. “If he wants to kill us, that’s what we should do.”
Arry’s stomach contracted. Nobody else seemed alarmed at all. They looked calmly at Tany, and considered it. Lina said, “Niss said we mustn’t.”
“She said we mustn’t do it with our own magic,” said Zia.
“That’s because we’re too small to do it any other way,” said Lina.
“It’s what she said just the same,” said Zia.
“Jony knows about poison,” said Con.
“That’ll hurt him,” said Arry, before she could stop herself.
They all looked at her again.
“Put him to sleep first then,” said Lina. “Jony knows about that too.”
“Will she tell us?” said Con.
“I’ll tell you,” said Tany.
They all looked at him. “Catnip and valerian and hops,” he said. “Hops are best. Nightshade if you’re careful. It’s poison, too, but it’ll hurt him. Lavender works a little. Lemon balm does, too, but it makes you cheerful first. Passionflower. Sweet woodruff. Wormwood. Yarrow.”
“You can learn if you think about it,” exclaimed Arry. “Why did you think about all this, Tany?”
“I asked Jony a long time ago,” said Tany. “In case things got too noisy inside.”
Arry stared at him.
“What do we do after we put him to sleep?” said Con.
“Hit him in the head,” said Zia.
“Put him in the stream,” said Lina.
“Chop off his head,” said Tany. “Or cut his throat the way Rista does with the old sheep.”
Arry folded her cold hands firmly over her quivering stomach. “Chopping off his head would hurt even if he were asleep already,” she said. “So would cutting his throat.”
“Hitting him might too, then,” said Zia. “So we must put him in the stream.”
“Can we carry him?” said Con. “Even if Arry helps?”
“Give him tea by the stream,” said Lina. “Then just tip him in.”
Arry swallowed hard. She found herself remembering going up to the high meadow with Oonan, the night after Halver first killed those sheep. Oonan had used a spell Niss gave him. It had gone like this: “Hence loathed Melancholy of Cerberus and blackest midnight born, In Stygian cave forlorn ’Mongst horrid shapes, and shrieks, and sights unholy, Find out some uncouth cell, Where brooding Darkness spreads his jealous wings, And the night-raven sings; There under ebon shades, and low-browed rocks, As ragged as thy locks, In dark Cimmerian desert ever dwell.”
That was a curse, and it seemed it had stuck on Halver. She had not expected to be bringing it about herself, and she had most certainly not expected to be letting the little children plan its execution. She looked at them in awe and fascination. They don’t know, she thought. They haven’t the remotest notion. When do we begin to have one? I can’t remember.
“Would that hurt him, Arry?” said Con. “If we made him sleep and then put him in the water?”
“He would have to be very thoroughly asleep,” said Arry. “I should ask Oonan, I suppose, to be certain.” She stopped speaking abruptly. Old habits indeed, she thought. Oonan would be horrified.
“Arry?” said Con. “Who’ll teach us, after we do this?”
“I don’t know,” said Arry. “Maybe we could go to school in Waterpale.”
This met with rather mixed enthusiasm. Then Tany said, “After we do this we won’t need teaching any more.”
Nobody asked him how he knew.
“When shall we do it?” said Con.
Arry drew a very deep breath and steadied her voice. “This is very serious,” she said. “Breaking Halver so Oonan can’t fix him, that’s what it amounts to. So it mustn’t be done if there’s any other way. We should go to school now and see if he’s threatened everybody yet. And we must give everybody time to talk to him and persuade him not to kill any of us, even if we refuse to be wolves. But if he holds to his purpose, then we must do it before the moon is full again. Tany, if you could ask Jony which of those herbs work best together, and taste best, and which she has supplies of, already dried, that would be useful. Zia and Lina, if you could take a good look at the stream and find a deep pool with a good tea- taking spot above it. Con, I think when the time comes it’s you that must invite him. You’re fondest of him.”
She held her breath; but Con must be given the reminder. Con merely looked thoughtful.
Tany said, “And then we can get the coats and be wolves.”
He wanted to be a wolf, and she was taking his choice away. Arry clenched her jaw. It was not a true choice, it was a contrivance of Halver’s. If Tany became a wolf he would never come into his knowledge.
Arry supervised the dousing of the fire. Zia packed up her piles of herbs again. All five of them walked up and down and up and down the hills until they came to
Halver’s house. The door was open, and they could hear excited voices from the bottom of the hill. The four little ones broke into a run and disappeared into the house. Arry sat down on the ground quite suddenly.
The voices went on. Halver must have issued a general summons: she heard Mally’s voice, and Niss’s, and Oonan’s, and Sune’s, as well as those of the children. Grel's deep booming tones and Rista’s melodious ones drifted down to her as well. Everybody was out.
It had begun to drizzle again. Arry sat in the grass and let the rain gather on her hair and run down her neck. She was so cold already that it made no difference. This is a broken thing, she thought; maybe Oonan can fix it. This is not like Halver; maybe Mally can tell him. This is sorcery; maybe Niss can deal with it all. Once he has told them all, in plain terms, what he wants to do, they’ll have to stop him.
This is hurtful, she thought. I have to stop him.
23
Arry did not go back to school. Nobody remarked on this. She did visit Mally, who steadfastly insisted that Halver, either as man or as wolf, would not kill anybody. Arry was strongly tempted to ask her if Con and Tany and Zia and Lina would kill anybody, but if Mally realized the answer was Yes she might very well begin to think things Arry did not wish her to think. The four children were, after all, still solidly in Mally’s province. Mally was harried and overworked: everybody came to ask her if becoming a wolf were a part of his or her character, a happy or convenient thing to be doing. None of them, she said irritably on the second day, asked similar things about dying.
Arry visited Niss, who said she would ward everybody’s houses against wolves, but could not possibly ward everything if anybody expected to have a clean harvest and healthy sheep. She visited Oonan, who frowned worriedly at her every time he set eyes on her, and fed her a variety of herb teas that did more harm than good, because they recalled to her the conversation with her young conspirators. Oonan shared her opinion of what was likely to happen when next Halver became a wolf: what he did not share was her conviction that something definite must be done. Keeping Halver at bay until the moon waned was the only action he seemed to contemplate. “There’s only one of him,” he said reasonably.