The Secret Country (36 page)

“Not so close to battle as we are,” said Randolph.

“Indeed not,” said Fence. “The answer would raise more dispute than it could answer; each man would bend it to his own need. The unicorns speak not straightly. We would be more muddled than we are, and what little strategy we have would be undone. Besides, some things it is better not to know.”

“Isn’t that pretty cautious and prudent too?” said Patrick.

“Very well,” said Matthew, patiently. “Then let us ask the unicorns what is the nature of Claudia?”

Everyone turned toward him with exclamations of surprise and pleasure. He looked smug.

“Excellent,” said Fence.

“Oh, good,” said Laura. “We can find out who she is and what she’s up to and—”

Ellen bumped her.

“Why do you ask who she is?” said Randolph. “She has lived here longer than you have. She and I were from our childhood days brought up here.”

“She was a goodly child,” said Fence, thoughtfully. “When, I wonder, did—”

“
I
keep wondering,” said Laura, who had just thought of it, “if she could have put a spell on us to make us think she’d been here and was Andrew’s sister and was nice, but—”

“That would be a considerable spell,” said Fence.

Laura began to feel irritated with him. Obviously he did not like to admit that someone he had not taught could do anything right.

“In the same league,” said Randolph, suddenly, “as covering the Southlands with monsters that seem as trees?”

Fence stared at him. “I had thought she furthered her own ends. A spy of the Dragon King?”

“No,
no!
” cried Laura, unbearably exasperated. “Lord Andrew is the spy of the Dragon King!”

“
Laurie!
” said Ted.

“Laura!”
said Randolph a bare second behind him, and much more severely.

But Fence brought his hand down on the table with a crash that rattled the bones on the plates and spilled what remained of Laura’s mead. “Why not?” said he.

“Why?” said Randolph.

“Consider his beliefs touching magic,” said Matthew.

“All the better,” said Fence. “The deluded mind is the easier to deceive.”

“Fie on this,” said Randolph, “where is the evidence?”

“Laura?” said Fence, and looked at her much too intently for comfort.

Laura was unbearably frustrated and extremely frightened. None of the others seemed inclined to help her. Or perhaps they could not; they looked frightened too. She swallowed.

“I just thought so,” she said. “Because he hangs around the King all the time and you can
tell
he doesn’t like him.” This was a restatement of something Ted had said when he was reporting the second council to them.

Randolph shrugged. “Andrew likes no one, save perhaps himself.”

“Well, he doesn’t hang around anybody else,” said Laura, gaining a little confidence from the mere fact that someone had bothered to answer her.

“Maybe he wants to be King,” said Ellen, a little shakily. Laura looked at her with gratitude.

Fence had an expression on his face that Laura was not sure she liked; he looked as if he were about to pounce.

“How could he become King?” said Ruth to Ellen, a little irritably.

“He’s related,” said Ellen, bristling.

Randolph, looking at Fence, said, “It is but distantly.”

“So,” said Fence, “who stands in his way? Ted, Patrick. Who next?”

“Siblings,” said Randolph, with a sort of glee that Laura did not understand at all. “Patrick the Elder. Anna. Children of siblings. Justin the Younger. Angus. Laura, Ellen. Children of the grandsires’ siblings.”

Ellen began to giggle.

“William’s father, John V, had one brother, Edward,” said Fence, frowning as if he were doing mental arithmetic. “His children were James and Elaine.”

“Elaine,” said Matthew, with the air of one entering a game, “is High Sorceress, and has forfeited her claim.”

“James,” said Fence, “is a hermit in the Dubious Hills.”

“John also,” said Fence, “had one sister, Celia, who had five sons and two daughters. None is dead and all have children.”

Laura had not the remotest idea what they were all doing, but they were so obviously having a joke that she, too, began to giggle.

“We may see by this,” said Fence, raising his voice over their chortles, “that the other heirs to the throne are far too numerous to be disposed of by assassination or by any other means that Andrew might effect on his own. His alliance with the Dragon King lies therefore within the borders of the probable. Granting the premise,” he added, nodding in Ellen’s direction. She snorted, and began to laugh again.

“There is a much simpler premise,” said Randolph. “Andrew wants, not the throne, but rather that considerable degree of power that comes from being in the King’s favor and in his confidence, both of which he hopes to gain by speaking what he views as hard sense, when every other counselor who is his own man is babbling children’s stories.”

“In which case,” said Matthew, “Andrew must himself believe what he says touching magic?”

Randolph shrugged. “It’s like him,” he said, scornfully. “He can see inward to the minds of men, but never outward to anything that is not Man.”

“ ‘The proper study of Mankind is Man,’ ” mumbled Ruth.

“And a more foolish teaching I’ve seldom heard,” exclaimed Randolph. “Had King John studied Man we would all be slaves in the mines of the Dragon King and all our gardens would be a wilderness of snakes.”

“Laura,” said Fence, “why did you say that Andrew was a spy?”

Ruth said to Randolph, “If the Dragon King had studied man, he’d only be a man now, and we wouldn’t have to worry about Andrew’s loyalties.”

“If pigs had wings,” said Fence, laughing, “they would be pigeons.”

“No matter the circumstances, we needs must concern ourselves with Andrew’s loyalties,” said Randolph, “for that they lie always with himself whether that be right or wrong.”

“Randolph,” said Fence.

“Have a care for thine own tongue,” said Randolph, smiling; there was an edge to his words.

Fence looked thoughtfully at him, and nodded. “A very palpable hit,” he said. “This is a day neither for politics nor for philosophy, save what twisted and uncertain bits of’t come our way in the Riddle Game. But once more, before we turn our tongues to merrier things. Laura?”

“I already told you,” said Laura, a little sullenly; she had thought the danger was over.

Fence dropped his hand to the table. “You may be a child,” he said, “which I can see you hope will excuse you, but you are not stupid, nor malicious, nor fanciful. I will have this out of you ere the next council. Let it be for now.”

With one accord they stood and made for the door.

 

I knew I shouldn’t have come, thought Laura, but she could not dread Fence’s questions when the Unicorn Hunt lay before her. She felt that seeing a unicorn again was all that anyone could ask for.

“Not malicious or fanciful, maybe,” said Ted in Laura’s ear, “but you’re certainly stupid. What made you do that?”

“They need to know!”

“Not unless you can back it up.”

“Well, you told Fence about Randolph!” said Laura, and then stared at him. Had he told Fence as she had, without thinking, because he was exasperated? She tripped on the doorsill, and Ted picked her up. Laura was relieved that Fence had not seen.

“Keep an eye out for Agatha,” said Patrick, on the other side of Laura. “We don’t want you breaking your neck.”

“Agatha’s right there,” said Laura, waving as they came out into the courtyard. “Where are the horses for Ted and everybody?”

“There’s Benjamin,” said Ellen, behind her.

All four of them stopped and stared. Benjamin was on foot, and he was not dressed for riding. He led one white horse, without a saddle. With him came the King and the other counselors. They were all on foot, and they were not dressed for riding either.

“What now!” said Ted. “Claudia again?”

“Where?” said Ellen.

“No, I mean she did this.”

“How could she?” said Laura. “She’s locked up.”

“Be quiet a minute,” said Ted, watching the rest of their breakfast party merge with the King’s. Randolph kissed the King’s hand and spoke to him earnestly. Several counselors made for Fence. Matthew stood looking amused, and Ruth hovered nervously near him. A cardinal whistled out of the fir trees.

“I know perfectly well,” said Ted, “that this hunt goes on horseback. Now what’s she done?”

“Well, it saves a lot of trouble,” said Ellen.

“That’s unusual for Claudia,” said Ted. He caught Patrick by the sleeve. “Name me those random factors again,” he said.

Patrick blinked at him. “Solving Shan’s Ring. And it looks like you were wrong about that too; it’s not dangerous. Let’s see. Getting Fence in trouble a couple of different ways. Claudia definitely did that. And the Crystal of Earth not working.”

“And no horses on the hunt?”

Patrick strode across the courtyard, followed by Ted, and tapped Matthew’s elbow. “Sir.”

“My lord?”

“Were we not to ride upon this hunt?”

“The Unicorn Hunt?” said Matthew, astonished. “It was never so. You know that.”

“He’s just being troublesome,” said Ted, dragging at Patrick, who had acquired his stubborn look.

“Don’t be an idiot,” Ted said to him. “If she can make them believe she’s been at court all her life, if she did, or get out of Fence’s spell, which he says she did anyway, she can make them think they’ve never used horses for the hunt, can’t she?”

“I want to know what’s going on.”

“Still at Claudia?” said Matthew.

Patrick looked up at him. “I remember as well as I remember anything that we ride to this hunt.”

“And I,” said Matthew, “remember better than anything that we do not.”

“You’re bewitched!”

“Or you are,” said Matthew, sounding mildly interested.

“Me!”
said Patrick, outraged.

Ted felt cold all over. “Why not?” he said. “How could you tell? Maybe that’s how they put all this into our heads.”

Behind them there came a tumult of horns, a blare and blast of enormous melody that shook the bones in them and seemed likely to accomplish what Patrick had wanted when he broke the Crystal of Earth. Their ears rang, the ground trembled, a cloud of pigeons shot away from the towers of High Castle, and Ted saw the cardinal go like a red arrow out of the fir trees.

CHAPTER 20

THE hunters came in a crowd of hounds. They were tall men, with intent faces and large eyes. They were dressed in red and green, and they had caps with feathers. Some of them carried horns, but most of them had long spears. Their eyes stared over or around or through the assembled lords and ladies and servants and children. They seemed to contemplate, with infinite patience, something enormously remote, farther than the mountains, past the shores of evening, west of the west.

The King stepped from among his counselors to greet these men, and he bowed to them.

“You are welcome, my lords,” he said. His voice carried as well in the courtyard as it had in the Council Chamber. “You do us great honor, to come so far for so brief a time that we who cannot even track the hart may be overbold and merry with the unicorn. Is all well with you?”

“My lord,” said one of the hunters, “one who was ever of our company goes missing.”

Ted was quite sure who this was, and he looked at Patrick. Patrick seemed poised between fury and fascination.

“My lord, it grieves me to hear it,” said the King. “Who?”

“The Lady Claudia does not ride with us.”

“How did he know that so fast?” Ted whispered to Patrick.

Matthew glared at them, and Patrick did not reply; he did manage to look eloquently disgusted.

“My lord,” said the King, “I deeply regret that you were not informed, and that we sought not to replace her. We are hedged about with troubles, and our minds set on things other than festival. I crave your indulgence; this shall be remedied.”

He looked away from the hunter, and his eye fell on Ruth, who stood between Matthew and Patrick, looking at the ground.

“Milady Ruth,” said the King.

Ruth looked at him warily. “Sire.”

“I prithee take Claudia’s place in this game, that all be not cheated of their celebration. Thy hand dispatched her to the dungeon; come then and fill the gap thou’st made.”

“Sir,” said Ruth, in a voice so low that Ted, just the other side of Patrick, could barely hear her. He saw Laura and Ellen, across the courtyard with Agatha, staring in bewilderment. “I did not dispatch Claudia to the dungeon on a whim,” Ruth went on, looking straight at the King and growing red, “but because it was needful. And I will never, in jest or in earnest, ask me who will, my lord, play such a part as she played yearly here. Do not ask me to.”

The King seemed to have had no trouble hearing her; he turned red, too, and began to speak.

“Ruth!”
said Patrick, overriding the King.
“It’s only a game!”

Ruth stepped clear of Matthew, who had tried to take her arm. She glared at her brother; this time her voice carried to everyone.

“It is a base treachery,” she said, not with the shrillness of Ruth when she was excited, but with the impressive deepness of Lady Ruth in a temper, “and I would not act such a part in the meanest theater in Telma!”

Patrick closed his mouth, despair in his face. Ted, crazily, wondered what Telma was.

Into the awful silence came Ellen’s voice.

“I’ll do it,” she said.

Ted jumped and looked at her. Laura was gaping at her; Agatha was regarding her with the kind of proprietary pleasure Ted had seen exhibited by mothers at school concerts. She had startled other people too.