The Secret Country

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  GAME—OR REALITY?

  “Well, look,” said Ted. “Lord Randolph is going to poison the King, right?”

  “I suppose. If this is our game, yes, he is.”

  “And then I have to kill Randolph, right? Because the King was my father? And I’m the new King?”

  “Yes, what about it?”

  “Ruth, I don’t want Randolph to poison the King.”

  “Of course you don’t,” said Laura, relieved to hear someone say something she could understand. “The King is a good, kind man, but he’s been corrupted, and he’s old, and—”

  “You don’t know that,” said Ted. “I met him, and he is a good, kind man. And I met Randolph, and I don’t want to kill him, either.”

  “Well, of course not, that’s the point,” said Ellen, “he’s your best friend, but you kill him for his honor and yours because—”

  “Ellen!” Ted shrieked, and startled them all. He stood up and threw his stick into the fire. “You don’t know anything, none of you do.”

  “I made up as much as you did!” said Ellen.

  “That’s not what he means,” said Ruth. “Sit down, Ted.”

  “I have a good mind to quit right now,” said Ted, not moving. “What do I mean, if you’re so smart?”

  “It’s real, that’s what you mean.”

  “But I tell you, it isn’t,” broke in Patrick. “It can’t be. There’s no such thing as magic.”

  FIREBIRD WHERE FANTASY TAKES FLIGHT™

  FIREBIRD

  Published by Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England

  Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road,

  Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

  Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue,

  Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

  Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand

  First published in the United States of America by Ace Fantasy Books,

  The Berkley Publishing Group, 1985

  Published by Firebird, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2003

  Copyright © Pamela Dyer-Bennet, 1985

  All rights reserved

  eISBN : 978-1-440-68444-9

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  For my mother,

  Mary Ann Dean,

  who let me read

  when I should have been

  outside playing softball

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book took a long time to write. I am grateful to the following people, without whose aid it would not be written yet:

  Brian Davies, Kathy Etter, Betsy Mitchell, Ellen Trumbull, and David Weiner, who gave me my earliest encouragement;

  Nick O’Donohoe, who gave me notebooks that the story might not languish in my head;

  Gerri Balter, Judy Cilcain, Joyce Odum, Laramie Sasseville, Joyce Scrivner, and Mike Smith, who prevented its languishing in the notebooks;

  Nate Bucklin, Steven Brust, Emma Bull, Kara Dalkey, Will Shetterly, and Pat Wrede, whose stern advice and kindly nagging transformed what had come out of the notebooks;

  David Dyer-Bennet and Scott Robinson, who rescued the transformed book from the wrong computers;

  and David Dyer-Bennet, who cheerfully married the book along with its author.

  PROLOGUE

  EDWARD Fairchild, Prince of the Enchanted Forest, Lord of the Desert’s Edge, Friend to the Unicorns, and King of the Secret Country, wished he were somewhere else. Pretending his foot was asleep, he slid closer to the door.

  “My lord,” said Randolph, his chief counselor, “I beg you—”

  “I do more than beg!” said Fence the Wizard. “Edward, keep thy place.”

  Edward looked at him. “I will not hear these things,” he said.

  “Thou wilt if I say thou wilt.”

  “I am king here.”

  “And I am above kings. I am not thy servant.”

  “Hey!” said a page.

  “Be still!” said Fence. The page scowled.

  “Very well, then,” said Randolph, “as I was saying. Could vintners or merchants distill this poison? Could butlers, cooks, pages”—the page looked up, pleased—“know its secret? Thou,” he said to Fence, “taught me the use of my wits. Now where are thine?”

  Fence stood up, and as the folds of his robe fell into place he seemed suddenly to dwarf the room. “If mine are addled,” he said, “I must needs make do with thine. Make thine work for me.” He fixed Randolph with piercing blue eyes, and the counselor looked suddenly blank.

  “I know the truth,” whispered the page.

  “Silence, varlet!” said Edward, and was pleased to see the page’s eyes widen.

  “I know the truth,” said Randolph. “I do not need my wits to discover it. And knowing it already, how can I tell thee in what way thou shouldst work thy wits to discover it thyself?”

  “Tell me this truth, then,” said Fence.

  The page tugged at the King’s sleeve and whispered, “Your crown’s slipping.” Edward pushed the crown farther back on his sweaty head. Was it so hot in the room?

  “No, indeed I shall not,” said Randolph. “I would not betray thy teaching thus. How many times, knowing the truth thyself, hast thou made me dig it out for myself? Can I do less for thee?”

  “Do you know,” said Fence to Randolph, “why I did thus?”

  “I do,” said Randolph. “It was that I might believe the truth when I saw it. For truth hath shapes strange and terrible.”

  “And this truth,” said Fence, “a most terrible one.”

  “Say it,” said Randolph.

  “Randolph,” said Fence, “you have betrayed all I ever taught you; you have betrayed your liege lord and your solemn word; you have done this besides with the lowest and cruelest of all weapons, a weapon of cowards. You poisoned King William.”

  “I have said I will not listen to this!” shouted Edward.

  “Well done,” said Randolph to Fence.

  “What?” said Edward.

  “Will you set a trial, my lord,” said Randolph, “or—”

  “A trial is a coward’s weapon also,” said Edward, loosening his sword in its sheath.

  “My lord, have a mind for your cloak,” said the page. Edward unfastened it, and the page took it from his shoulders and folded it.

  Randolph took off his own and dropped it onto the floor. He and Fence looked at each other. “You can do no good here,” said Randolph.

  The wizard nodded and turned to go.

  “What about his ring?” demanded the page.

  “Be quiet!” said Edward.

  “But he forgot—”

  In the distance a bell rang.

  “Hell!” said Randolph. “That’s lunch.”

  “You forgot to take his ring of sorcery and kick him out of the guild of wizards!” said the page fiercely.

  “Ellen,” said Randolph, “
no matter what anybody forgets, you shut up. You’re only a page and we can hang you for mouthing off, okay?”

  “You try it!” said Ellen. She pulled off her velvet cap and shook out her cloud of black hair. In the hat she had looked very like a page. Without it, thought Edward, she looked like someone who would grow up to be a witch.

  “I’d love to,” said Fence, struggling out of his robe. “But we’d be late for lunch.”

  “This is it, then, isn’t it?” said Edward. “The plane leaves at two-thirty.” He pulled at his crown, which came damply apart in his hands.

  “And you still didn’t get it right,” said Ellen. “You ought to let Ted do Fence, Patrick, and you be Prince Edward.”

  “I am Prince Edward, and I want to be him in this part,” said Ted. “Especially in this part.”

  “Oh, all right.”

  “So this is it,” said Patrick, cramming Fence’s robe under his arm.

  “And you still didn’t get it right,” said Ellen. “And neither did Ruth. Randolph is supposed to be resigned, Ruthie, and you just sounded bored. And Ted, Edward is much more shocked than that; you just sounded like somebody’s put a frog in your bed, not like—”

  “Ellie, stop that, please,” said Ruth, picking up Randolph’s cloak again. Being fifteen to Ellen’s twelve, and having the same wild hair and green eyes, she looked like a witch already, no matter how inspired a Randolph she could do. “When you’re grown up and directing plays,” she told Ellen, like a sorcerer lecturing her apprentice, “you can fuss at people like that. Until then, cut it out.”

  The bell rang again.

  “Next summer,” said Patrick, “we should—”

  Laura stuck her head into the doorway of the barn. Ted looked at his sister in despair. Her braids were coming undone. She would never look like a witch.

  “Will you guys come on?” she said. She looked at what Patrick had under his arm and added, “Your mother just started wondering what happened to that sheet.”

  “Took her long enough,” said Ellen.

  “Next summer,” said Patrick to Laura, “you can be a page. She talks too much.”

  “Hey!” said Ellen.

  “Well,” said Laura, “it might be better than being a dead king. Lying there waiting for the worms to come.”

  “Laurie, for goodness’ sake, you don’t have to wait for the worms to come,” said Ruth. “Dead people don’t, you know.”

  “How do you know?” demanded Ellen. “You ever been dead?”

  “We could embalm you,” said Patrick to Laura. “They’d leave you alone then.”

  “Embalming’s barbaric,” said Ruth. “The Secret Country is more civilized than that.”

  “Civilized!” said Patrick. “They don’t even have machines!”

  “I don’t want to be embalmed,” said Laura hastily. “I’d rather wait for the worms.”

  “I don’t think you’d make a good page,” said Ellen. “I like to be impudent, so I make a good page, but you only like to be a mouse, which is better for a dead king, really.”

  “On the other hand,” said Patrick, “it’d be good for her to be impudent once in a while. Next summer—”

  Laura seemed to feel that she was on Ellen’s side and that she did not want to hear any more about this. She asked Ellen, “How’d it go?”

  “They messed it up,” said Ellen. “They forgot that we decided that Fence is Edward’s servant, and they forgot to take Randolph’s ring away, and—”

  “Next summer,” said Ruth.

  “Let’s eat,” said Laura.

  “Shut up, brat,” said Ted, throwing the remains of Edward’s crown at her.

  “I’m hungry!”

  “Me too,” said Ellen.

  “Next summer,” said Ruth, giving in and turning for the door, “we’ll do it right.”

  CHAPTER 1

  WHO’S done what now?” “Laura. In the two weeks that that child has been here—”

  “Eight days.”

  “In the eight days that seem like two weeks that that child has been here, she has broken four cereal bowls, two mugs, three plates, a mirror, a Waterford bowl, two pots with plants, three pots without plants—”

  Their voices came clearly through the closed door of the study. Laura crouched further behind the Japanese screen they kept in the hall. Three cereal bowls, she thought.

  “—and, just now, the stained-glass window in the bathroom.”

  “Where is she?” asked her uncle.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did she run? Poor kid.”

  “Poor kid?” Her aunt’s voice rose to a squeak in the way her mother’s would when you said something silly. But her mother would not think that her uncle was being silly.

  “She’s also cut herself picking up all the pieces,” said her uncle. “And fallen down the front stairs twice. Not to mention cracking her head on—”

  “And she won’t let me cut her hair.”

  Maddeningly, at this most important point, her uncle lowered his voice to answer. Laura, wondering if she dared to stand right at the door and listen, put her head around the edge of the screen and saw her older brother standing in the middle of the hall. He looked disgusted.

  “Ted!” she hissed. To her great satisfaction, he jumped and looked around in the wrong direction before he spotted her on the floor. He came and leaned against the wall next to her.

  “Jen’s up crying in the bathroom,” he said, just above a whisper. “She liked that window.”

  “It was an ugly window,” whispered Laura, who had liked it too.

  “How did you break it when it’s up so high?”

  “There was a wasp.”

  “I told you, you want something killed, come and get me.”

  “I can kill my own wasps!”

  “They’ll kill you,” said Ted, pointing at the door of the study, “if you break anything else. They’ll put you in an orphanage for the summer.”

  “I’m not an orphan.”

  “You are for the summer.”

  “So are you! If I go you’re coming with me!”

  “You don’t have to go if you’d just—”

  “They’ll hear you,” said Laura.

  “They’re talking too loud themselves,” said Ted. They listened again.

  “I know her parents are in Australia, I know she misses them, I know she’s shy, I know she doesn’t get along with our kids. Does that mean she can turn the whole house into a wreck and kill herself—and probably us—in the process?”

  “All I’m trying to say—”

  “She wants to cut my hair,” said Laura, watching Ted try to catch what her uncle was saying. Her uncle had lowered his voice again.

  “What good would that do?” said Ted absently, his eyes on the study door.

  “She says it makes me look like a waif.”

  “Be quiet a minute,” said Ted.

  “It’s her own fault. She can’t braid hair,” said Laura. Ted squinted at the door. “What’s a waif?” she asked him.

  “A beggar child. You’ve been one in the Secret, don’t you remember?” said Ted, still looking at the door.

  “I don’t look like a waif.”

  Ted finally looked at her. “It wouldn’t hurt you to cut it,” he said. “Jen says it takes you forever to wash it.”

  Laura was stung. “Whose side are you on anyway?”

  “I’m not on anybody’s side, I just talked to Jen. We have to live here, you know. Jen’s all right; she asks us to play tag.”

  So what, thought Laura. “I hate tag.”

  “So do I, dimwit. That’s not the point.”

  “Yes it is. It’s a stupid game. All their games are stupid.”

  “Why don’t you let them cut your hair?” said Ted. “It’ll grow again.”

  “I’m a princess,” said Laura, who had never had her hair cut and was not about to entrust the process to people who talked about her the way her aunt and uncle did.

 
“Not this summer you’re not a princess. Come on, Laurie.”

  “No.” Laura forgot to whisper.

  “Shut up,” said Ted.

  They both shut up, but the voices in the study went on. Ted sat down on the floor and scowled at Laura, who scowled back.

  “You’ve got to do something. They’re really mad.”

  “I can’t help it if I break things.”

  “But you can cut your hair. Then they’ll see you want to be nice.”

  “I don’t want to be nice. I don’t like them and I want to go home.”

  “Well, so do I. You’ll just make it worse if you don’t like them. Come on. Let’s go in the study and tell them you’ll cut your hair. Then they won’t be so mad about the window.” He studied her with a look she had not seen since last summer, and his voice became formal. “You could do it for a penance.”

  That was too much. You did penance for things like murder not for breaking a window when you hadn’t meant to. Laura jumped to her feet, crying “Leave me alone!” and bumped her elbow on the screen, which tilted dangerously. She put her hands out to catch it. Ted, who was quicker, had already caught the screen, but he pushed it right into them. The taut paper gave suddenly with a horrible popping tear; the screen, trailing shreds, crashed past a shocked Ted to the floor of the hall, and their aunt flung the study door open and caught them in the wreckage.

  The problem was that they were staying with the wrong cousins. Ted and Laura had been spending summers with the Carroll cousins for as long as they could remember, and probably, said Laura, longer. They had never stayed with the Barretts before and they didn’t want to.

  The worst of it was that there was really nothing wrong with the Barretts. Tommy was too little to bother anybody. Jennifer was almost Laura’s age and delighted in letting guests have their way. David wouldn’t talk to them, but he wouldn’t talk to anybody else either, and he let Ted read his books. Katie was seventeen and presumably too old to bother with cousins of fourteen and eleven, but she had some of the best books they had ever read, and she didn’t care who read them as long as they were given back in one piece. Aunt Kathy and Uncle Jim, as other people’s parents went, were bearable.