The Hidden Land

by PAMELA DEAN

  Ted leaped after him. “Wait! Please.”

  Randolph, almost around the first curve below the room, looked over his shoulder. “What’s the matter?”

  “Can you spare me just a couple more minutes?”

  “I can spare thee all the time thou’lt take,” said Randolph, and came back up the stairs. “It hath seemed to me these two months that thou wouldst take as little as thou couldst.”

  “You were the one who left just now,” said Ted.

  “Well,” said Randolph, still gently, “I have not said I will sit meek under all manner of insult.”

  Ted stood aside to let him back through the door. Randolph dropped the mass of green to the floor and sat upon it. Ted hunched down beside him. “Is the truth an insult?”

  Randolph turned red again, and in his voice the gentleness was replaced by nothing in particular. “On occasion,” he said. “It is also, perhaps, ill-mannered to speak of things that speaking can but worsen.”

  “How if I think it can better them?”

  Randolph made a wry face. “Speak, then. I am bound to hear.”

  Ted, wondering uneasily what ritual he had invoked, said, “What is the King’s mind now, regarding the Dragon King?”

  “He says he yet considereth the matter,” said Randolph, “but all orders he giveth are for the mundane, not the arcane army.”

  “Why,” said Ted, suddenly, “should I have to rely on chance encounters with you to find out these things?”

  “That,” said Randolph, “is between you and the King.”

  “Randolph,” said Ted, one of his lines from the game rising unbidden to his lips, “if ever I have sons, let me not treat them thus.”

  Randolph winced.

  “You will counsel me still when I have sons?” said Ted, still saying his lines, although they could not belong in this conversation, because in the game Edward had never dreamed of suspecting Randolph until it was too late.

  “Am I thy mouse, that thou shouldst toy thus with me?” said Randolph, matter-of-factly; and he stood up.

  “Stop leaving!” said Ted. “How can we get anything done if you keep leaving?”

  “For what,” said Randolph, “do I stay, my lord?”

  “For your lord, maybe,” said Ted, viciously. He was getting almost too good at this peculiar game of wringing too many meanings from a carelessly used word.

  “Speak to the purpose, then.”

  “The King is set in his error?”

  “He is.”

  “And there’s no hope in his strategies?”

  “None.”

  “And you’re set in your plan?”

  “Edward, Edward,” said Randolph. “Thou mayst call a guard; thou mayst draw a sword; thou mayst do more than hint to Fence. But this matter is far past words. I beg thy leave to go.”

  “We could think of something else! Some—some—half-measure. We could say the King’s sick; Fence could, and keep him out of the way. We could do something, Randolph, besides—”

  “There is no ‘we’ in this,” said Randolph, grimly. “I will have no conspiracies. I will not stain thee, I will not sully Fence, with these half-measures. That were more dishonorable yet. And I say to thee,” he added, taking Ted by the shoulders in a light but merciless grip, “that I wish no harm to King William, and am sworn to defend him. Dost thou hear?”

  Ted could not say a word. He stared at Randolph’s face, with its ghostly kinship to his cousins’: eyes greener than Ruth’s, hair blacker and wilder than Ellen’s; a scar on the cheek neither of them was likely to acquire; lines around the mouth and eyes neither of them, he hoped, would suffer to earn.

  This was not the gay lord, the brilliant magician, the convenient hand with poison they had invented lest their plot be too easy to guess. Their Randolph would have been pleased with any way out of what had seemed to him an insoluble dilemma: the King or the Country, one must go. Their Randolph would never have said, I will have no conspiracies. Ted felt as if he had opened a door to a familiar room and found vast dark caverns. He feared Randolph as he had never feared him before: for now he was afraid, not of what he knew about Randolph, but of what he did not know.

  “The gray robe, you think?” said Randolph.

  Shan’s robe of state, he had said. The robe of another renegade apprentice, another traitor with the highest of principles.

  “As a jest, perhaps,” said Ted, but his voice shook.

  “Fence would take it amiss,” said Randolph, “not for the gray, but for the brooch. To wear the brooch is presumption; not to wear it is denial.”

  “Maybe there’s something else,” said Ted, and began rummaging, almost frantically.

  “Here,” said Randolph after a few minutes. Ted turned to him. He held up a heavy and voluminous velvet robe, like those worn by the King’s Counselors, but pale gray, not blue.

  “I had forgot,” said Randolph. “Before Shan and Melanie, the counselors wore gray; Shan and Melanie were held to have disgraced the color and the office, and so the color was changed. This will do, Edward, it will do very well.”

  “Think on it more,” said Ted.

  “This matter, as I have told you, is past words,” said Randolph, “and it is far past thinking.”

  He put a hand on Ted’s head as if Ted were Laura or Ellen, bundled up the mass of gray, and left. This time Ted let him go. He sat on in the stuffy room, staring at the vivid green of the robe Randolph had been sitting on, until the bell rang for the midday meal.

  CHAPTER 2

  ALL five children had exercised their imaginations on High Castle’s Banquet Hall, but none of them had considered where the inhabitants of the castle would eat the humbler meals of everyday. The room in which this happened was therefore often a great comfort to visit, because it thwarted nobody’s expectations. It was called the Dragon Hall, perhaps for the color of its walls and floor. It occupied the southeastern corner of the second pink section of High Castle, High Castle being constructed, most unfortunately, like a marred specimen of one of those round peppermints sometimes given away by restaurants.

  The Dragon Hall was two stories high, the details of its ceiling and upper walls generally lost in smoke and shadows. A number of corridors dead-ended suddenly in balconies overlooking it, but most people coming along them did so under the impression that they were going elsewhere, and were therefore impatient of them. Only the five children and an occasional young servant seemed to have discovered the delights of unseen observation from these spots. Ted used one of them to ascertain that his sister and cousins were already eating their lunch below, and went resignedly down to join them.

  The room was lit by two fires, by a few smoky torches probably left over from the night before, and by six wide bands of noon sunshine from the rose garden. In this predominantly pink light, Laura, who was normally pale, looked healthy; Ruth and Ellen, normally robust, looked a little feverish; and Patrick, normally feverish, looked bedeviled. Ted hoped it was only the light. The last thing he cared to struggle with now was Patrick in one of his moods.

  All four of them greeted him with their mouths full; remarked on his lateness without giving him space to explain it, supposing he had wanted to; and returned to their discussion of whether Agatha was more than she seemed, or just extraordinarily impudent. When the woman in question sat her plump, black-haired, elegant self down at the far end of their table, there was an abrupt silence around Ted. Agatha had sharp ears and a sharper tongue.

  “Why aren’t you eating?” Ellen asked him quickly.

  “Because I’m not hungry.”

  Laura and Ruth looked up.

  “Why not?” said Patrick.

  Ted looked around. Randolph was not there, but Fence, High Castle’s resident wizard, and Matthew, the Scribe of the King’s Council, were in earshot, the brown head and the red one jostled together over a piece of parchment. Ted doubted they would notice anything less than a scream, but it was just as well not to take chances.

  “Com
e outside and I’ll tell you.”

  “Some of us are hungry,” remarked Ellen, cramming a meat pie into her mouth and stuffing two more into the pocket of her dress.

  “Agatha’ll kill you,” said Laura, under her breath.

  “I keep forgetting we can’t just throw these things in the washer,” said Ellen, with mild regret. “Come on, Ruthie.”

  “I don’t want to hear any more arguments,” said Ruth.

  “I’m not going to argue,” said Ted. “I’m just going to tell you what happened.”

  “Patrick’ll argue,” said Ruth.

  “No, I won’t.”

  “You will so, you can’t help it.”

  “You can come back in when he starts,” said Ted.

  “He’s doing it now,” remarked Ruth, but she stood up.

  Ted put his hand under her elbow as he had several times seen Randolph put his under Claudia’s during the Banquet of Midsummer’s Eve. “I want to ask you some things, too,” he added, thinking of Claudia staring in her tower, stopped cold by Ruth’s sorcery in the midst of her plots, whatever they were.

  “I can’t tell much to outsiders,” said Ruth, standing up nonetheless.

  “Well, I like that!” said Ellen.

  “Good,” said Ruth.

  They all moved for the door.

  “My lord Edward!” called Fence.

  Ted started and almost tripped Ruth, who snorted and pulled her arm out of his grip.

  “Sir?” said Ted.

  “I would have your advice on a matter.”

  “Could I attend you later?” asked Ted.

  “Come to my chamber,” said Matthew, “and spare us all the steps.”

  Fence nodded, and Ted nodded, and the five children went on out.

  “I’m getting tired of this,” said Ellen with her mouth full, as they made for their favorite spot on the pink wall above the moat. If you sat on a pink wall, at least you got to look at a white one.

  “Ruthie,” continued Ellen, walking backward along the curving marble path so she could address all four of them, “has her sorcery. Ted gets to go give advice to Fence. Patrick doesn’t care. But Laurie and me, we can’t do anything. We can’t even go to our own feast.”

  “Laurie and I,” said Ruth.

  “You want to watch the King get poisoned?” said Laura to Ellen.

  Ellen wedged herself between two stones of the wall and hurled a fragment of pastry amongst the waiting ducks. The day was clear, hot, and damp, and the moat shimmered and broke and came together again in great swatches of blue and green.

  “I want to go to the feast,” she said, “and watch Ted save him.”

  “Fat chance,” said Ted, bitterly. “I talked to Randolph while I was finding my costume.”

  “Did you find a good one?” asked Ellen.

  “That’s irrelevant,” said Ted, sharply.

  “It is not!”

  “Let him finish, Ellie,” said Ruth.

  “He told me quite plainly,” said Ted, “that the King is still going to try to fight the war without magic, and that he—Randolph, I mean—is going to kill the King.”

  “He said, ‘I am going to kill the King’?” demanded Patrick, coming awake suddenly. He had been lying on a stone bench with his eyes closed, as though falling asleep were the only way he could prevent himself from arguing.

  “No,” said Ted. “But he told me I couldn’t stop him by talking.”

  “That’s hardly the same thing,” said Patrick, closing his eyes again.

  “He didn’t have to spell it out,” said Ted, exasperated. “We both knew what he was talking about.”

  “Well, that’s not the point,” said Patrick. “If he’d said something you could tell Fence—”

  “Oh, he did,” said Ted, realization smiting him. “He said he bore no ill will to the King and he was sworn to defend him. Isn’t that just great?”

  “Nobody ever said Randolph was stupid,” said Patrick.

  “I never did think you could make Randolph change his mind,” said Ruth. “We should just stop him.”

  “Well, we tried to when we made Laurie wish on the magic ground in the Enchanted Forest,” said Ellen. “That could still work.”

  “Wouldn’t hurt to have a backup plan, though,” said Patrick, opening his eyes again.

  “Randolph told me three backup plans,” said Ted, wishing he could think that was funny. “He said I could use a sword, or tell Fence, or tell the Castle guard to arrest him.”

  “And of course,” said Patrick, “he can beat you in a sword fight, and you’ve already talked to Fence. And we couldn’t make any sense at a trial without giving ourselves away, even if the King thought there was time to have a trial before the battle.”

  “Randolph wouldn’t want to kill you, though, would he, Ted?” said Laura.

  “That’s not the point,” said Patrick, overriding Ellen’s customary protest that Randolph was a murderer who would probably just as soon kill Ted as anybody else. Ellen had never liked the character Randolph, and the apparent charm and goodness of the actual person had not changed her opinion in the slightest. “What Randolph meant, Laurie, was that Ted could challenge him to a duel; and if he beat Ted, that would mean he was innocent.”

  “Pretty sneaky,” said Ellen.

  “Even sneakier than we thought,” said Ted, gloomily. “Patrick, I asked him to try some sort of plan with Fence and me—lock the King up and say he’s sick, or something—”

  Patrick sat up. “Huh,” he said.

  “He said he would have no conspiracies,” said Ted.

  “He did?”

  “I think he’s crazy or something.”

  “Randolph?” said Laura.

  “So how are you going to stop him?” said Ruth.

  “I don’t suppose you know any sorcery for it,” said Ted, bitterly.

  “Green Caves sorcery isn’t people sorcery,” said Ruth. “That’s Fence’s kind. We do things with earth and water and plants.”

  “If it doesn’t affect people,” said Ted, “how did it work on Claudia?”

  “That wasn’t anything to do with the Green Caves,” said Ruth, sharply. “That was Shan’s Ring. I just altered a spell I’d learned from the Green Caves, to—to focus the power of the ring. But I don’t know any more about Shan’s Ring than you do.”

  Ted gave up on this line of inquiry, and picked a yellow rose from a bush that wound its way over the wall. “Well,” he said, “which feast does Randolph kill the King at?”

  “You mean, which feast is it supposed to be?” said Patrick, under his breath. Ellen kicked his foot, which he had propped up on the wall, but no one else took any notice of him.

  “Every Man a Servant and a Master,” said Ellen.

  “Oh, of course,” said Ruth. “Because it provides the most confusion.”

  “How can you do anything with everybody running around?” asked Ellen.

  “If everybody’s running around,” said Ted, “I can run around after Randolph.”

  “How come Edward didn’t, then?”

  “Edward didn’t suspect anything,” said Patrick.

  “But isn’t Andrew supposed to be running around after Ted?” said Ellen.

  “In the game, Randolph did the poisoning by baiting Andrew until everybody was arguing and yelling,” said Ted. “And Andrew said something nasty about Edward’s mother. That’s why Edward didn’t notice what Randolph was doing. It’s essential to Randolph’s whole plan that Edward not know what he’s done, because Randolph has to guide him through the war or the murder’s been for nothing, and the moment Edward finds out Randolph has killed the King, Edward has to kill Randolph. But I don’t care about Edward’s mother, so I can ignore Andrew and watch Randolph. He knows I suspect him, too, so I don’t think he can do it if I’m watching. Or I’ll take the cup and pour it out the window, if I have to.”

  “What about Edward’s mother, I wonder?” said Ruth.

  “I used to make up something
different every year,” said Ellen, with unusual diffidence.

  “No,” said Ruth, “I mean really. Where is she?”

  Ted shrugged.

  “There is a definite dearth of parents around here, when you come to think of it,” said Ruth.

  “Royal children are always raised by servants,” explained Patrick.

  “So,” said Ellen to Ted, “what’s your costume like?”

  “Green,” said Ted.

  “What else?”

  “Ellie, I haven’t really looked at it.”

  “You’re supposed to choose it with great care,” said Ellen, darkly.

  Ted, an all-too-familiar impatience overtaking him, threw the rose into the moat. “I have to go talk to Matthew and Fence,” he said, and went.

  Matthew had a cluttered room on the ground floor of High Castle’s second white circle, overlooking the rose garden. He and Fence were sitting on the elaborate carpet when Ted came in, probably because every chair and every table was piled with documents and scrolls and books. They both looked young, bookish, and confused.

  “Be welcome,” said Matthew, without looking up, “and do me the honor of reading over these lines.”

  Ted came around behind them and peered over their bowed heads. They were looking at a very grimy, tattered, creased piece of paper, or parchment, or who knew what. Ted squinted at the swift lines of black that filled the piece, not from top to bottom, but from corner to corner, and felt a vast dismay. He did not even recognize them as an alphabet of the Secret Country that he had invented and then forgotten.

  “What thinkest thou?” Fence asked.

  “Not much,” said Ted, still shocked.

  “I thought it akin to the scribbling of the Dwarves,” said Matthew, “but Fence, who saith those are not scribblings, makes it to be a riddle of Shan’s. Hast seen aught of it in thy reading?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Ted, so dizzy with relief that he had to lean on Fence’s shoulder.

  “Consider a little longer,” said Fence, seeming not to take it amiss.

  Ted took a breath to steady himself, smelled the aura of burning leaves that surrounded Fence, and sat down backward from his kneeling position. The day four years ago when he and Patrick had built the bonfire, and Ellen had found them and been furious at being left out: what ritual had they invented to placate her?