The Hidden Land Read online

  “Aren’t those fire-letters?” he asked.

  Matthew yelped, and Fence looked blankly over his shoulder at Ted.

  “Oh, my lord, thou’rt worth a hundred of scholars and wizards such as we!” said Matthew. “Canst read ’em, then?”

  “No,” said Ted.

  “What are fire-letters?” said Fence, mildly.

  Matthew paused, as if to give Ted a chance to air his knowledge; but he was too excited to wait for long. “A device of the wandering minstrels,” he said. “I know not what sorcery ’tis akin to; but they do somehow place a sheet of this,” and he shook the sheet, “in the fire, and play certain notes, and speak what they would capture; and play certain notes at the ending. To make it speak, one but puts it into the fire again.”

  “And plays certain notes, no doubt,” said Fence, dryly.

  Matthew looked less exuberant. “Alas, that’s true.”

  “So it’s not much good, knowing what they are?” said Ted.

  “It is great good,” said Matthew, firmly. “Yet it may not come in time.”

  “Do you think the King’s changed his mind, then, if you’re still doing sorcerous research?” said Ted, hopefully.

  Fence fixed him with a most unpleasant look. “It is our place to be ready an he change his mind, not to pry and speculate hath he done so.”

  “Have we any skilled scholars of music in the castle?” mused Matthew.

  “Where did you get that, anyway?” asked Ted.

  “Parts of Shan’s journal are written thus,” Fence answered him.

  “I didn’t know Shan was a musician.”

  “Nor did we,” said Matthew. He stood up, a little stiffly. “Fence, by your leave, I will go to Celia; a most accomplished musician, she knows something of these matters and may direct us to one who knows more.”

  “As you will,” said Fence. “I’ll go on with the parts more straightly written.”

  Matthew bounded through the door and could be heard running down the hollow corridor.

  “He’s having fun,” said Ted, wistfully.

  “That is a scholar,” said Fence, not looking up from his manuscript. “He’d welcome death itself if he learned from it what Melanie did in the Gray Lake or why the Dwarves dwindle.”

  “Would you?” said Ted.

  “For other knowledge, perhaps,” said Fence. “Not for the riddles of wizards and history.”

  “I guess I’d better leave you to work,” said Ted.

  Fence looked at him thoughtfully, with green eyes unusually sharp in his innocent round face. “Polish thy blade,” he said, “with use, not with sand. I would not lose thee easily.”

  “If the King doesn’t change his mind, you’ll lose everything easily,” said Ted.

  “Indeed I will not,” said Fence. “The Dragon King’s victory will come as hard as I can make it—and that is hard, in truth.” He bent his disheveled head to the scroll again. “Get thee to arms,” he said.

  CHAPTER 3

  TED walked slowly along the dim halls. He could not walk quickly because he would trip over the green robe, and he was grateful for this. He found himself counting off the familiar landmarks of door, stair, and turn. He thought, I don’t have to worry until I’m past the kitchen; I have a long way to go still; I’m safe for a few minutes.

  It had been a cold and foggy day, like all the mornings before Ruth used Shan’s Ring on Claudia. Outside, trees dripped, grasses drooped, the roses hung heavily, and the moat was a sheet of lead; inside, every wall and floor was cold and every torch dim. The gray garment of Shan would have suited the weather; Ted’s vivid green seemed brash and useless, like flinging yourself across a banquet table at an insult.

  He climbed a last stair, nodded to the man-at-arms, and turned down the corridor for the Council Chamber. It seemed to him not at all appropriate to hold the feast in the Council Chamber, but everyone except his sister and cousins appeared to think this normal.

  The carved double doors were shut. He was very early, in case Randolph had planned to set something up before anyone else was around. Ted pushed, but the doors were locked.

  “Open, an it please thee,” he said, but the doors did not.

  Ted leaned against the wall. Cold shot up his spine, but he stayed where he was. He wondered if Claudia had gotten out of Ruth’s spell. He and Patrick had asked Fence, sometime in the burning middle of July, when fog would have been welcome, if Claudia could have made all those mornings in June cold and foggy. Fence’s mouth quirked, and he said that he had done just that thing in his youth, so that he would not have to go hunting. “So you see, ’tis a skill mastered early,” he said. “But why, think you, would Claudia work it upon us?”

  Ted and Patrick had had no answer at the time, but now Ted wondered if it might not have suited Claudia’s purposes very well to make waking gloomy, and getting up a trial, and being out early a misery, and seeing the sun rise almost impossible. Maybe the way cold and shadows and fog of a summer’s morning made people feel was just the way she wanted them to feel. She probably liked nasty weather herself, the weasel. It would be hard to slink well without fog.

  Ted jerked away from the wall. He was spooking himself. In the dim corridor shadows were beginning to crawl. He slid his hands inside the wide sleeves of his robe, rubbing his arms. There was a man with a sword not ten yards away, and there wasn’t anything in the hall anyway.

  Someone let a whole basinful of water down a drain all at once, just behind him. He flung himself around, tripped on the robe, and sat down next to the purple beast. It gurgled. It looked neither more appealing nor more dangerous than it had seemed on the steps of the West Tower, the night he and the others had found Shan’s Ring. It had no eyes, no legs, no up or down, and no edges. It looked like spilled ink, like light blurrily reflected through a dirty window a long way off, like the water after a long afternoon of painting exclusively with red and purple. Fence and Randolph had said, more or less, that these purple beasts were the byproducts of Claudia’s forbidden mingling of the methods of the sorcery of the Green Caves with those of the school of Blue Sorcery.

  The beast gurgled again, and sloshed itself a little, back and forth on the worn gray stones of the floor.

  “Very funny,” said Ted. Nobody seemed to think the things were dangerous, but they were disquieting. “Just your kind of weather, isn’t it?” he said companionably. The beast was silent.

  The man-at-arms poked his head around the corner at the top of the stairs. “My lord?”

  “Can you come here and—” No, of course not, he couldn’t leave his post. “Look at this thing on the floor; have you ever seen one of these?”

  The man squinted. “ ’Tis too small for my eyes, seemingly, my lord.”

  It was the size of a beanbag chair. Ted turned to look at it again, and it was gone.

  “Never mind,” he said, trying not to sound as furious as he felt.

  The guard grinned at him and went back around the corner.

  “Give you good day,” his voice said then, echoing a little in the hollow stairs.

  “I would that you could,” said Randolph’s voice, wryly rather than gloomily.

  “Hath been a bad year for fogs,” said the guard.

  “Well,” said Randolph, “they say ’tis wondrous good for sorcery.”

  “No doubt,” said the guard, sounding like Fence; and Randolph laughed.

  When he came down the corridor and saw Ted, he stopped smiling.

  “Give you good day,” said Ted, and was astonished at the insolence in his voice. He wondered if he would be able to summon up the same tone for the school principal the next time the principal deserved it. He wondered if Randolph deserved it.

  Randolph’s eyebrows went up, but all he said was, “And you.”

  He did not look at Ted as Ted moved to let him by. He stopped before the carved doors, stepped back, tilted his head as if he were reading, and said, “Master and servant bid thee open.”

  Ted looked
at the door, but if its wooden twinings were letters, they were none he had ever seen. The doors swung inward, silently, and Randolph went in.

  “Will it ruin the ritual if I come in and sit down?” called Ted.

  “This is not sorcery,” said Randolph, rather shortly.

  Ted’s impulse was to ask him if he minded, but he thought in time that it was probably not wise to be too courteous to a murderer. Even on the brink of the deed it was hard to think of Randolph as a murderer. Ted went to his chair and sat down. A trickle of water had come in one corner of the easternmost window and collected on the floor in a dull pool. Ted thought for a moment that it was the beast again. The room was even darker than the hall. But Randolph, who could speak to the beasts and be obeyed, only muttered under his breath and went out, leaving Ted to feel like someone in the waiting room of an unknown dentist of dubious reputation.

  Before Randolph returned, Andrew and Conrad came in. They did not look as if they had walked to the Council Room together; they had the wary and disgruntled air of people who have been startled by someone they do not like.

  They made an odd pair even in appearance: Conrad large and placid, with his bald head and vast black beard; Andrew thin and wary, with his sleek hair and yellow moustache and his level eye. Conrad wore a huge and shapeless robe of some shiny purple stuff. Andrew had stayed with what Ted realized must be the newer fashion, shirt and doublet and hose. His were gold and white. Faith and health, thought Ted. There’s arrogance for you.

  He and Andrew had not spoken to one another since the nasty scene at the Banquet of Midsummer’s Eve. There had been no need; except on just such formal occasions, they did not move in the same circles. Now Andrew took one look at Ted and frowned even harder. Conrad only grinned at him.

  “Give you good day,” said Ted, to the space between them.

  “Well, lad, where’s the wine?” said Conrad.

  “I expect Randolph’s gone for it,” said Ted, wondering if he should have gone, too. But it was in sealed bottles, wasn’t it?

  Conrad sat down in his accustomed chair. Ted looked at him, remembering Ruth’s remark about the dearth of parents. Conrad was supposedly Ellen and Laura’s parent, but Ted did not think he had ever seen Conrad address a word to either of them. And who was their mother?

  Randolph came back into the room with a wad of cloths in one hand and a collection of bottles in the other arm. He did not look pleased to see Andrew and Conrad.

  “You are early, cousins,” he said. He put the wine bottles untidily at one end of the table and attacked the pool of water with his cloth.

  “Not so early as thou,” said Conrad.

  “I must depart early,” said Randolph. This was news to Ted, who looked warily at him. “I thought therefore to do my serving while I might.”

  “Why, no man leaves this feast before its end,” said Andrew.

  Randolph shrugged. Ted had never seen him approach rudeness. Perhaps when you were about to murder somebody it was harder to be polite.

  Randolph opened a cupboard against the wall and took out a pile of napkins, yellow and faded. Ted knew by now that the old ones were the good ones, but he wished for fresh white napkins to brighten the room. Randolph turned back to the cupboard and took out wine-glasses; they were a cloudy blue, and much finer work than Ted had seen on any table in High Castle heretofore, even at the Banquet of Midsummer’s Eve.

  “These are something dusty,” observed Conrad, picking one up.

  “Do you polish them, then,” said Randolph, shortly, and handed him a cloth.

  Conrad cocked an eyebrow at him, and began to polish glasses. Ted looked at Randolph, who was staring into the empty cupboard. Ted followed his gaze, and saw only a cobweb in the corner of the bottom shelf.

  “That’s something dusty, too,” he offered.

  Randolph turned on him, and suddenly laughed. “In such a castle, why should it not be?” he said, gaily. Ted blinked at him.

  Randolph pulled open a drawer and began taking out candles and candlesticks. Conrad was still polishing glasses and Andrew had begun to fold the napkins into intricate shapes—a talent Ted would never have dreamed of assigning him—so Ted was left to put the candles into the sticks and light them from the torch in the hall.

  They were not, in the absence of the usual augmenting torchlight, as cheering as they ought to have been. They cast great leaping shadows into the high corners of the ceiling, put an eerie halo around every head, and distorted every visage into unfamiliarity by smoothing out some features and deepening others. Ted began to wonder how, in this bewilderment, he was to keep an eye on Randolph. Follow him like a pet dog, he supposed.

  Of course, it might already be too late. Had Randolph poisoned the cloth with which Conrad was polishing glasses? No, that was silly, that would get everyone. How in the world did it go in the story: how did Randolph administer the poison? In the wine, yes. But in what form was it: a liquid, a pill? Had they followed Hamlet and made the poison a pearl?

  Ted cursed himself for not having asked the others when he had the chance. Then he calmed down a little. He would probably have gotten four different answers, Randolph’s exact method having been one of the less stable items of their repertoire. And you could not trust the Secret Country not to come up with a fifth answer, anyway.

  Matthew and Julian came in, Matthew in a red robe that quarreled with his hair, and Julian in a black one that made him look like a bad watercolor of his usual vivid self. They were given spoons and knives and plates to polish, and fell cheerfully to these duties. If he had been feeling better, Ted would have laughed to see lords and counselors, in their best clothes, doing kitchen work. As it was, he stayed within a foot of Randolph and was stepped on several times. Randolph was so good-natured about this that Ted began to despair: he must have arranged his poison already. That meant that he could not be allowed to give anything to the King. Ted wished for the others: five of them might have been enough to achieve this.

  While Randolph was talking to Matthew in a far corner that contained no glasses or napkins, Ted stole a moment to look around the room. It had filled up while he dogged Randolph. As he looked at the door, the King came in. He wore red, and a crown with rubies. The light of the candles falling back from his robe and his jewels wiped the lines from his face and dyed it a healthy color. He looked terrifyingly capable.

  Andrew, with a swift movement that reminded Ted of Claudia, got to the King’s chair first and held it for him. Ted, seeing Randolph taking his usual seat, slid into the chair next to him, hoping that he had gotten this detail right, that people sat where they pleased at this feast.

  The King raised his hand and spoke.

  “My lords, my counselors, and my friends.” His voice, as always, carried well, without any suggestion of effort. Ted saw that his hands lay still upon the dully gleaming table. He might be old, but he was not weak. No wonder Randolph had felt driven to poison. Ted felt a momentary panic. They had not settled on a plan for what to do when the King did not die and still wanted to fight the battle wrong.

  “It is the way of things,” said the King, “that ye serve me. That we should not forget that this service is of utmost value, nor that a master would be less than he is without the least of his servants, there is a feast wherein I serve ye. But tonight is the feast wherein one of ye serves us all, that he may taste the joys of that least servant, and ye may taste the joys of the King, and the King may relish his jest. And this year is the year wherein Lord Randolph Martin’s son is the least servant.

  “Let the feast begin.”

  He looked, smiling, to Randolph on his right, and nodded.

  Ted sat petrified. This was the wrong speech, the wrong feast, the wrong arrangement. This should be the feast wherein all lords served one another and the King served them, that they might not forget that in the end master and servant were equal. In the joviality and confusion of that feast any lord would have half a dozen chances to poison half a dozen of his fellows, h
is king, and the kitchen cat, with no one the wiser until the victims began to writhe. In that feast, Randolph could poison the King with Ted at his elbow, unless Ted were eternally alert.

  But if the King died at this feast, only one lord would be pointed at: the one who had served.

  Randolph could not possibly poison the King tonight. If he did they would catch him, and if someone did not stab him on the spot, they would hang him almost as speedily. He would not be able to guide Ted through the war with the Dragon King and thus save the Secret Country. And since to save the Secret Country was the only reason Randolph would kill the King, and to kill the King this way would not save the Secret Country, Randolph would not kill the King this way.

  Ted almost laughed aloud, but he became aware in time of the silence he would have laughed into. Randolph looked as if he had seen the sun rise in the west. Everyone else looked acutely embarrassed. This was not just the Secret Country playing tricks, then. Everyone here had expected the Every Man a Servant and a Master Feast. Did that mean the King’s mind really was weakening? Was Randolph more in the right than they had thought?

  Ted stopped watching Randolph’s hands and stole a look at his face. He looked neither reprieved nor thwarted; he seemed, rather, amused and somehow satisfied.

  “My lords,” said Randolph, gathering their gazes to him.

  Matthew, screened from the King’s notice by Randolph’s body, slipped his napkin over Randolph’s arm. A bottle of wine stood at Andrew’s elbow. He slid it past Conrad and Matthew and Ted to within Randolph’s reach, and Randolph took it up and began to pour the King’s cup full.

  Ted moved like an eel and bumped Randolph’s elbow solidly. The bottle knocked into the cup, tipping it over, and a pool of vigorous red spread over the tabletop in the candlelight. As Randolph reached hastily for the toppling cup, Ted bumped him again, and he dropped the bottle, which poured impartially over the table, the floor, and Conrad’s and Matthew’s laps. Ted’s thought caught up with his hand: nobody who looked that pleased with himself when his plans appeared to have been thwarted should be allowed to do what he liked.