The Whim of the Dragon (12 page)

Ruth told her story for the fourth time. Randolph frowned all through it. “You have been with the cavernous magicians these three months, and knew not sooner?”

“How was I supposed to know sooner?” said Ruth, so sharply that Ted blinked. Randolph seemed unaffected; and also unconvinced. Ruth said, “I spent those months as a disgraced apprentice; because of the Nightmare Grass.”

“Oho!” said Randolph, as if something had suddenly become clear to him.

“Yes,” said Ruth. “So I didn’t know. But your Lady Ruth knew right where those books were.”

“The next question,” said Randolph, slowly, “is, knew Meredith that she knew?”

“You think she might have been as sneaky as I am?”

“Sneakier by far,” said Randolph, looking her in the eye until she turned red.

“Shouldn’t we all do some sneaking?” said Ted, impatiently. “You don’t know what may be happening to Fence.”

“But look you,” said Randolph. “Ruth must not seem to have betrayed her to Fence.”

“Well, you won’t find out by speculating,” said Patrick. “Let Ruth stay here.”

“Come on, then,” said Ellen, jumping up.

Randolph stood up from the bench and surveyed them. “All of you?” he said.

“Say Fence asked you to come for him if he was late, and we were all with you and would not be gainsaid,” said Ellen.

“And that’s no more than truth,” said Randolph. He stopped in the act of turning away, and looked at Ruth again. “Will you guide us so far as the door?” he said.

“Good heavens, don’t you know where Meredith’s study is?”

“How should I?” said Randolph.

Ruth stood up and shook crumbs from the white folds of her skirt. “It’s in the old wine cellars.” As Randolph simply went on standing there, she added, “
Fence
knew where those are.”

“Shut Fence in a wardrobe,” said Randolph, precisely, “and he’ll find the loose plank i’the back before thou’st turned the key i’the lock.”

“I’d think,” said Ruth, exasperated, “that rival schools of magic would spy on one another.”

“So they have,” said Randolph, in extremely grim tones. “But one of ’em hath been o’er-trusting. Come your ways.”

They followed him out of the noisy hall. Ruth then led them to the back of High Castle, out of the regions Ted was familiar with. Nobody said anything until she marched down the last narrow stairway and flung open the door into a dazzle of gold light. It smelled of flowers and greenness and grass baking; it smelled like the soul of summer; it smelled as the whole outdoors had smelled on the day of the Unicorn Hunt. Something stirred and stretched in the back of Ted’s mind, and, incomprehensibly but with a pleasing rhyme and rhythm, Edward said, “The fieldis ouerflouis / With gowans that grouis, / Quhair lilies lyk lou is, / Als rid as the rone.”

“I never knew this was here!” said Ellen, indignant.

And Patrick said, “They
can
grow trees underground. One point for us.”

“What’re you doing,” said Ted, irritated, “keeping a list of everything we got right in the game?”

“Shut up,” said Ruth, from the far door.

Randolph had already joined her there; the rest of them hurried up. “Now, then,” said Ruth to Randolph. “Meredith’s study is the second door on the right.” She took him by the elbows and shook him slightly, as if he were Patrick. “Now
watch out
,” she said. “Meredith is a
demon.
She’ll say awful things that go around in your head for weeks afterward.”

Randolph said, “We’ll heed your warnings,” and Ruth let go of him. He opened the door softly, and they followed him through it.

R
UTH stood in the green smell and waited. She leaned her back against an oak and thought very pleasantly about almost nothing. In the far spaces of her mind somebody said,
The fieldis ouerflouis / With gowans that grouis, / Quhair lilies lyk lou is, / Als rid as the rone.
She looked thoughtfully at the lilies at her feet, which were certainly the color of rowan berries, although she would not have called that red. She blinked; the tangled, half-familiar language drifted away.

The far door burst open and the rest of them tumbled back in. Ellen and Patrick bolted up to her and began talking about broken glass and people in white.

“Not here,” said Fence. “Come to my chamber.”

“Oh, Fence, for the love of mercy,” said Ruth. “Not all those stairs. Come to my room. I think Lady Ruth might even have kept there somewhat for our refreshment.”

They came with her docilely enough.

It seemed to Ruth, ushering her six guests into her room, that she had done nothing since returning to the Hidden Land except gather in odd places for uncomfortable conferences. Her three younger relations piled into the room and took over the bed. Ted lay on the rug. Fence, refusing her offer of the one chair, sat on the table. Randolph came past her last of all, and Ruth felt suddenly peculiar. He was much taller than the rest of them, and his constraint and the signs of stress on his face made him seem by far the most adult. Fence was as grown-up as they came, but Fence seldom looked it. How old were they, anyway? Younger than her parents? Ruth consulted the back of her mind, which was silent; and then blurred her thoughts, whereupon she knew that Randolph was twenty-six and Fence three years older.

Ruth shut the door. Randolph sat down on one of her chests, beneath the tapestry depicting the double white violet that blooms twice a year. Ruth felt it necessary to take the situation in hand. She took from the little wall cupboard a tray containing eight rather dusty goblets in red glass and a large red glass decanter. She put the tray down beside Fence, twisted the stopper out of the decanter, and poured into one of the goblets a thick, dark fluid. It clung to the sides of the glass and gave off a potent smell of blackberries. Ruth handed the glass to Fence, who was looking bemused.

“There,” she said. “Is that fit to drink?”

“It’s one of Agatha’s cordials,” said Fence. “Sweet but wholesome.”

Ruth accordingly distributed glasses to everybody, and sat down in Lady Ruth’s chair. “Now will somebody tell me coherently and in a decent order,” she said, “what happened in there?”

“Fence first,” said Randolph, in a stifled tone as if he wanted to laugh, “for great events transpired e’er we arrived.”

Fence snorted, and ran both hands through his hair, flattening it again. “Oh, great,” he said. “Two sorcerers with more wit than to use their powers; the one barred from any effect of violence by the lack of his weapon and a disinclination to do harm, t’other by her sworn oath. A tussle of children.”

“What made you so mad?” said Ellen.

“Me, thou knowest,” said Fence. “What did so enrage Meredith was, first, that any dare meddle in her affairs; second, that I should presume to remove the Lady Ruth; third, that I demanded to read o’er the indices of her libraries. She soon minded her that should she ope her indices to me, my presumption would then be revealed to me regarding the Lady Ruth.”

“I don’t like the sound of that,” said Ruth.

“You shouldn’t,” said Ted.

Fence looked at him, and then at Ruth. “Indeed, she said she’d speak to you herself, and I could not gainsay her.”

Ruth experienced the swooping dread of a person who wakes up on a lovely summer morning and remembers that she has to go to the dentist. “Shan’s
mercy
, Fence! You told me not to trouble myself! Now she’s thrice as stirred up as she’d have been had I braved her, and you’ve left her to me?”

“What am I to the Lady Ruth,” said Fence, rather sharply for him, “that I might meddle so in her affairs?”

“How should I know? You
said
you could meddle!”

“Forgive me,” said Fence, more quietly. “I did in some wise mistake the Lady Ruth’s commerce with Meredith.”

“She hasn’t—-I haven’t
had
any commerce with Meredith all summer, not to speak of.”

“That, I think, is for your punishment. She hath withdrawn her custom of friendly confidence, thinking to wound you.”

Ruth found this reasonable, but could not refrain from saying, “Oh, that’s wonderful. Now I get to go be wounded, I suppose, and hope that’s excuse enough for leaving her tutoring?”

“Wait,” said Randolph. “Fence, thou hast no power o’er the Lady Ruth, but I have. I’ll remove her, as my betrothed, from a malign influence. Meredith will be choleric, but she’ll have little recourse.”

Ruth struggled with contradictory impulses. Having scolded Fence for saying he would help her and failing, it was foolish, not to mention ungrateful, to refuse the selfsame help when Randolph offered it. And yet she was indignant that he should choose this way out, as if he were certain she would never manage the matter on her own.

“Ruth doesn’t like it,” said Ellen, who was acute, if not discreet.

“Nor I,” said Randolph, promptly. “Yet meseemeth the handiest way from out our difficulties. My lady?”

“I’m not anybody’s lady,” said Ruth. She had figured out what bothered her. She disliked Randolph’s calling attention to the betrothal just when breaking it off would save them both embarrassment. But Randolph was right. She said, more calmly, “Yes, it is the handiest way out. It’s just not very savory.”

Randolph stood up. “No,” he said. “It is of a piece with all our business this summer. By your gracious leave, I’ll go rant at Meredith.”

“Shouldn’t you wait until she’s calmed down?” said Ted.

“No, I think not,” said Randolph. “In the wake of calm cometh thought; the less she thinks while yet she hath Ruth in her grasp, the better.” He paused on his way out and said to Fence, “I’ll make report to you.”

“Make it here, to all of us,” said Fence.

Randolph said, “As you will,” and left, closing the door with a certain force.

“What else happened?” said Ruth.

“ ’Twas Claudia,” said Fence. “Like me, Meredith taught her, and did presently refuse to teach her; yet she learned more than Meredith knew, and did, it now appeareth, some little mischief. She did strew about the open library library works not rightly the Green Caves’, or rightly theirs but secret. We know not whence she had Shan’s journal. The book concerning animals they had most properly from the Red Sorcerers, before the war; and they do use it to subdue the cardinal to their will, and for naught else. The third book, the history, they had from the Dwarves, though it differeth from our own accounts.”

Ted listened earnestly to all this, as if he were trying to commit it all to memory. The three younger ones, having heard it twice already, bounced gently, trying out the bed.

“All right,” said Ruth. “Now, almost nobody at High Castle wears red, except Claudia, who wears it all the time, and Benjamin, who has a red cape. How does this fit in?”

“We shy from red, for the reasons you saw in the book,” said Fence. “This is no law, nor hath it truly the force of custom. Claudia, methought, did wear red to be rebellious at little cost. Benjamin wears it because he is of Fence’s Country, where all the wars were fought. It is their reminder of what transpireth when sorcerers strive one with another.”

“Fence,” said Ted. “The man who sent us here wore red.”

“Good grief,” said Ruth, jarred. “I’d forgotten. So is
he
a Red Sorcerer? Is this all some complicated trap?”

“I know not,” said Fence, fixing her with a very sober expression. “But this matter, as it so far unfolds itself, hath not quite the smell of those Sorcerers. What smell it hath is strange to me.”

“Could
Claudia
be a Red Sorcerer?” said Laura.

“No doubt,” said Fence. “Insofar as she is a Blue Sorcerer, and an initiate of the Green Caves. She might have traveled, and cozened one of them also.”

“I couldn’t help wondering,” said Ruth, “why the mixture of Blue and Green sorcery should produce purple beasts. What if it’s a mixture of Blue and Red?”

“She had one blue and one red stone on her dagger,” said Ellen.

“Are the Red Sorcerers plotting a comeback?” suggested Patrick.

Ruth looked at Fence, who was leaning back, supported by his hands, and looking half-thoughtful and half-amused. There was a pause, as that line of discussion died for lack of knowledge. Ruth wondered if Fence could have supplied it.

“Benjamin,” said Laura, after a moment, “said red was the color of the Outside Powers.”

“That is so,” said Fence. “From them the Red Sorcerers did draw their power; they trifle not with the elements, as we other schools all do, but reach beyond them to their origins.”

“Sounds dangerous,” said Patrick, in a tone relatively free of sarcasm.

“It is so,” said Fence, looking him straight in the eye.

Patrick didn’t look away, but he did shrug in the way he would when he thought you were taking something too seriously. Fence smiled at him, started to speak, and stopped.

“What’s the matter?” said Ruth.

“You’re very like,” said Fence to Patrick. “Very like Prince Patrick.”

“That’s a pity,” said Ruth, tartly, over the ache in her throat.

“Fence?” said Ted. “What about the rest of us?”

Ruth turned and glared at him; he was only making things worse. Ted lifted his chin and gave her a level, slightly arrogant stare from under his thick brown bangs. It was a very Edward-like look.

“Well,” said Fence. “Ellen is like the Princess Laura, and Laura like the Princess Ellen. Thou, my prince, art very like Edward overall, but hast some relish of contention in thee, that I do welcome, and did wish to find in Edward. Thou hast also less of maturity.”

“I’m only fourteen,” said Ted.

“Well for you,” said Fence, his mouth quirking, “that Edward is—that Edward was someways behind his age.”

Ruth, fuming, saw that Ted had indeed made things worse, making Fence think about Edward, whom Fence had been particularly fond of. “What about me?” she said.