The Secret Country (15 page)

“Could they do it?” asked Patrick.

“They can do anything, can’t they?”

“If you can convince them,” said Ruth. “They don’t care why you want a thing done, but you have to show them how it will profit them.”

“And they’re sly,” said Patrick. “It would be dangerous.”

“Yeah,” said Ted, “remember what happened to Shan. He asked for a magic ring, but he couldn’t tell them what good it would do them if they gave him one.”

“So,” said Laura, “being a young wizard still, and hasty—”

“—and too proud,” said Ruth.

“—he told them,” said Ted, “what harm it would do them if they didn’t give him a ring—he said he’d curse them.”

“So,” said Laura, “they gave him a ring—”

“—and wouldn’t tell him what it did, so what?” said Patrick. “This isn’t helping.”

“That’s it!” cried Ruth. “That’s it. The Riddle of Shan’s Ring. How’s it go—where’s Ellen when we need her? ‘I am a trinket in the world—sullen stone and—’ No, that’s not right. Bother!”

“ ‘Unvalued gold and sullen stone,’ ” said Ted.

“I’ve got it!” said Ruth.

 

 

“The Ring of Shan,” said Patrick, “and what good is that? The problem is what Shan’s ring
does.
”

“It’s pretty bad poetry,” said Ted. “It could mean anything.”

“Oh, who cares!” said Ruth. “Can’t you see? Shan’s Ring will change the time for us if we take it outside the Secret Country, outside the Power, outside the magical place. There’s certainly no Power in Australia or Illinois. If we take it outside the Power, then outside power—whatever that means—is unfurled, and time awry is blown, you see? I bet that’s it.”

“Do you have to hurl it?” said Laura dubiously.

“That was just for the rhyme,” said Ted.

“Well, it still says you have to hurl it.”

“I’ll throw it up in the air and catch it again,” said Ruth. “I bet that’s it, though.”

“It is if you think so,” said Patrick.

“What can it hurt to try?” said Ruth.

“Where,” said Patrick, “is Shan’s Ring?”

CHAPTER 7

INTO the dumbfounded silence Laura said proudly, “In the West Tower, of course.”

“How do you know?” said Patrick.

“I remember, that’s how. First floor is old weapons, second floor is old books, third floor is old clothes, fourth floor is old jewelry.” It was with some difficulty that she refrained from giggling. Patrick was so obviously irked that someone did in fact know.

“How do you remember all that?” he said crossly.

“I made it up just last summer,” retorted Laura, and stopped.

“Even if the fourth floor is old jewelry,” said Patrick, after a moment, “would it be there and not in some safe place with the royal treasures?”

“It’s not a royal treasure,” said Laura, exasperated.

“It’s a royal embarrassment,” added Ruth.

“Don’t you remember anything?” asked Laura, grinning because she was fairly sure he would not be able to see her in the firelight. “Every year, just to remind us who’s boss, the unicorns make us bring that Ring and ask that riddle—”

“Just so they can answer, ‘I am the Ring of Shan,’ ” said Ruth, “—which is perfectly true and means nothing—and laugh.”

“And Princess Laura gets to go and fetch it,” said Laura.

“All right,” said Patrick, “it’s on the fourth floor of the West Tower. How do we get it out?”

“Let’s not get caught again until after we’ve changed the time, if we can help it,” said Ted. “Let’s sneak up on High Castle, if we can, and—”

“You can’t sneak up on High Castle,” said Lady Ruth.

“Why, because of the guards?” said Ted. “I didn’t think much of them, myself.”

“No, fool, because of the grass!”

“Listen,” said Ted, “you don’t have to call names.”

“What was that grass?” asked Laura, feeling the cold again.

“If you had learned your history properly,” said Lady Ruth, to Laura’s delight, “you would remember.”

“History!” said Princess Laura. “History’s nothing. It heals no wounds and gladdens no hearts. Now, music—”

“It would have kept you from yowling like a stepped-on cat and rousing the castle,” said Lady Ruth.

“Listen,” said Laura, “everybody else yelled too.”

“As the Border Magic protects the Secret Country against invasion from without,” said Ruth, “so the Nightmare Grass protects High Castle from treachery within the Secret Country. It’s planted in all the possible sneaking-up places—”

“Why wasn’t there any outside the postern, then?” said Ted.

“There probably was,” said Patrick. “You could hardly expect it to work on horses.”

“—and it makes you see whatever you’re most afraid of.”

“I wasn’t afraid of it until I did see it,” said Laura; “what I’m most afraid of is telephones.” Perhaps she had seen what Princess Laura was most afraid of. Laura had been afraid of it herself, but she preferred that sort of fear, marrow-chilling though it had been, to the stomach-sinking dread of picking up the telephone and calling to find out when the library closed, or whether Roxanne thought it was her mother’s turn to take everybody to the Girl Scout meeting.

“They don’t have telephones here,” said Ruth thoughtfully, and Patrick laughed.

“I wonder what would’ve happened,” he said, “if nobody had remembered what the grass was?”

“We’d all still be running in circles and screaming,” said Laura.

“Or maybe,” said Patrick, “it never would have happened at all.”

“Nonsense,” said Ruth, “I remembered what it was after it started doing things to me.”

“But your subconscious knew.”

“So did your subconscious know,” said Ruth, smugly. “You remembered as soon as I reminded you.”

“Ruth,” said Ted, “why didn’t the guards know?” Laura saw the firelight gleam in Ruth’s eyes as she turned and stared at Ted.

“They couldn’t have known,” said Ted, “or they wouldn’t have walked into the grass. If it’s really a part of the defenses, why didn’t the guards know about it?”

“Oh, my God,” said Ruth.

“Don’t swear,” said Laura.

“The grass is a device of the Green Caves,” said Ruth. “Remember all the feuds between the different kinds of magicians? Probably the ones of the Green Caves thought it would be funny not to tell the other kinds about the grass. It would do its job whether anybody knew about it or not, because people trying to sneak up would make a racket.”

“I don’t see why you should swear about that,” said Ellen.

“I’m a sorcerer of the Green Caves. They’ll think I lured the guards into it as some kind of joke.”

“Don’t knock it,” said Ted. “That’s better than their thinking you sneaked off with me.”

“Well,” said Patrick, “how do we get Shan’s Ring?”

“We get caught again,” said Ted, throwing a stick clear across the remains of the fire and narrowly missing Patrick, “and wait until the punishment is over, and then we get the ring and take it home, get caught again and punished again because we won’t have changed the time yet. Then we change the time. That takes care of home; they won’t notice we’re gone. But then we come back here and we have to account for the time we spent at home, because they
will
notice here, if it works the way we think it does, because this will be our normal time. So we get clobbered again. And then we can settle down and enjoy treason, and murder, and not knowing what we’re doing.”

“Can’t we get the magic to take care of all that too?” said Laura.

“Don’t make things too complicated,” said Ruth. “We don’t have much to go on as it is.”

“Let’s get it over with, then,” said Patrick, and stood up. “Let’s start walking.”

“In the dark?” said Laura.

“It’s too far for Laurie,” said Ted.

“It is not,” said Laura automatically, “but we have to wait for Ellen.”

“Benjamin found us here last time,” said Ted. “Maybe he’ll come back.”

“He probably already did,” said Patrick, “when we weren’t here.”

“Could he have found out anything from the horses?” asked Ted.

Patrick snorted.

“He can talk to them,” said Ruth, “because he’s from Fence’s Country. But only to the ones that can talk. I mean, there’s a special kind of horses with their own language—”

“Which the Unicorns gave Benjamin,” said Laura.

“—and he can speak to them. But I don’t think the ones we rode were that kind.”

“So let’s start walking,” said Patrick.

“Listen,” said Ted, “Laurie and I haven’t had any supper or any sleep. And we have to be back by seven at the latest because they start getting up around then. And—”

“We ought to be back by six,” said Patrick, “to eat dinner. But what I meant by getting it over was, let’s go and do it, now, no matter how long it takes. The longer we’re gone from High Castle, the worse we’ll catch it, so let’s show up as soon as we can.”

“But the longer we’re gone from home,” said Ted, “the worse we’ll catch it there.”

“Have some sense,” said Patrick, beginning to walk back and forth in his agitation. “Nothing they can do to us at home can possibly match what they’ll do to us here. At home we’re just irresponsible kids. Here we’re somebody. They’ll try you for treason and kick milady here out of her magic school if they think you two have sneaked off again. They’ll probably get the rest of us for conspiracy.”

“Are you sure you don’t think this is real?” said Ruth.

“What’s real?” said Patrick. “You all think it’s real. You can certainly think yourselves to death, and maybe me too.”

“Oh, you’re hopeless,” said Ruth.

“Anyway,” said Patrick, “you do think it’s real, so you ought to listen. Let’s stay here for as long as it takes to get the Ring. Then let’s go home, change the time, face the music, and come back—”

“And face the music,” said Ruth, dolefully.

“I know what would be better,” said Patrick, stopping in midpace. “Get the Ring, go home, change the time, come back here and face the music, but leave facing the music at home until we’re done here.”

“I don’t like that at all,” said Ruth, “leaving them all stuck like that at home the whole summer while we’re here. I’d rather get it over with.”

“Me too,” said Laura.

“What’s wrong with you?” said Patrick passionately. “I don’t even believe this and I make more sense than you. They won’t be stuck there from
their
viewpoint, and we can’t afford to get in trouble with Benjamin again.”

“Your marvelous plan
has
us getting in trouble with Benjamin again,” said Ruth, in a tone Laura had never heard either from her cousin or from the sorcerer. “Because we can’t get the Ring without running into Benjamin.”

“So we should split you and Ted up,” said Patrick, “so at least he won’t think it’s as bad as he thinks it was last time.”

“Pat,” said Ted, “if you and I went together we could say we’d dared each other into the Nightmare Grass—say I’d been irritating you with my learning and you told me you didn’t believe in the stuff.”

“Edward’s learning wouldn’t include the Nightmare Grass,” said Ruth. “But you could say that I told Ellen about it and she told you, maybe.”

“Huh,” said Patrick, “and the grass so unsettled our wits that we fled off into the night.”

“Having enough wit left to take five horses?” said Ruth.

“No,” Patrick told her, “you must have done that.”

“I know!” said Ruth. “I was planning to gather herbs by moonlight—and Laurie and Ellen had been pestering me to let them go too—you know, anything to postpone bedtime. And we saddled two more horses for my attendants. I’m sure they wouldn’t want three young girls riding around alone in the dark. But the noise you two made in that grass made the horses bolt with us, before the attendants got there. And the two extra horses just came along too.”

“And we were carried far over the plain and lost!” exulted Laura.

“Why didn’t you keep the horses?” asked Patrick. “Princess Laura wouldn’t let a horse get out from under her, even if you and Ellie can’t ride. And I think you both can. I mean, I think Princess Ellen and Lady Ruth can.”

“We sent them for help,” said Ruth.

“Well—”

“I’ll polish it up before they find us. I’ll say they didn’t enchant right because they’re not the talking horses.”

“Last time you tried that Benjamin caught you.”

“That was bad luck,” said Ruth. “I think he just happens to keep track of when the ceremonies of the Green Caves are, so he knew there wasn’t one. Benjamin can’t know everything about what Lady Ruth can do.”

“Well,” said Patrick, “as long as you’re not with Ted, I suppose it doesn’t matter. So we should split up now.”

“What about Ellen?” said Laura.

“I’ll get her,” said Ruth. “She must be sick of that broccoli by now. Please give me the sword.” He did, and she tramped off into the darkness.

“There’s one thing I don’t like about this plan,” said Ted. “Talk about three young girls riding around in the dark—”

“You can give me our sword,” said Laura. “I found it anyway.”

“None of you know how to use it.”

“Neither do you!”

“She’s right,” said Patrick. “And Ruthie’s bigger than me or you.”

Laura grinned to herself. Ted’s height was becoming a sore point with him as all his friends grew taller and he stayed stubbornly short. She hoped to be taller than he was someday, although her mother said it was unlikely.

“Well,” said Ted, “there’s probably nothing out there to hurt them anyway.”

“Aren’t there wolves?” asked Laura, who was determined to have the sword.