“Down to the stream,” said Oonan, glumly, “and perhaps through it, or along it; but a healer and a soul-knower with a single lantern could see no more.”
“Were the tracks fresh?”
“Yes,” said Oonan, positively.
“How do you know?”
Oonan opened his mouth, and closed it again. He looked at Mally. “Were they fresh?”
“How should I know?”
“But how should I?” said Oonan. “For I did.”
“It’s been happening to me, too,” said Arry. “I think it’s the wolf-spell.”
“But why?”
“That’s what Halver meant,” said Arry. “About the breaking of history.” She was pleased with herself for a moment, but then she remembered. “But he didn’t have his own knowledge,” she said.
“If the wolf-spell is a spell of ignorance,” said Oonan, “then maybe this is our own hill-spell fighting back. We’d have to ask Niss.”
“What are we going to do?” said Arry.
“Whose province is it, that’s the question,” said Mally. She frowned, and ran both hands through her hair. “It may well be Niss’s, now that I think of it. Halver is very likely under a spell, after all.” She yawned. “I wish I’d thought of that an hour ago,” she said.
“I could bring her up to the hut tomorrow night,” said Oonan, wearily, “and see which of them pokes its whiskers in.”
“I want to come too,” said Arry. Or do I? she thought. What if they came here, tonight, and found I was gone? What if they come back here? What if they come back here tonight?
“Bring some beer and a fiddle,” said Oonan, standing up. “We’ll have a celebration.” He put his mug down on the table and walked out. Arry heard the door open, and close again.
She looked at Mally, who was draining her own mug and fastening up the jacket she wore over her nightdress. “Is that all?” said Arry. “Let Niss look them over, and ask her?”
“It may be her province,” said Mally, standing. She considered Arry’s face for a moment, and added, “I’ll think whose else it might be, if it isn’t hers; we could talk to them tomorrow and see what they think.” She put her hand lightly on Arry’s head. “Go to sleep,” she said. “Before Con wakes up.”
And she left, too.
Arry did not go to bed. She almost fell asleep where she sat; then she went into the front room and opened the door wide, and sat in the largest chair, listening.
15
When she woke up it was full bright sunny day, and the black cat was standing on her chest and yowling. Arry sat up in the chair, rubbing her eyes. The cat jumped down, still yowling, and began pacing around the chair. Arry had been sitting on her right foot, and it was asleep. She untucked it laboriously and leaned forward, rubbing it. Sheepnose came around the side of the chair and stood in front of her, still yowling. She was standing by a pile of dead mice, quite a large pile, thirty or forty of them.
Sheepnose yowled again, and then hissed. Arry recognized that this was not the mighty-hunter cry, but a serious protest. She supposed the white cat might have brought the mice in, but it seemed unlikely. Woollycat was lazy. Besides, while both cats might have caught all those mice in a night’s work, it looked more like the product of dozens. It could take Sheepnose a week to clean out a moles’ nest, after all.
Arry climbed slowly out of the chair, wondering if this was how Sune felt every time she had to stand up. She gathered her breath and bellowed, “Con!”
Con came in the front door immediately. “I thought you’d never wake up,” she said. “Look at all those mice.”
“Did you see Sheepnose bring them in?”
“No.”
“Or Woollycat?”
“No.”
“Somebody else’s cats?”
“I just woke up and came out and they were there,” said Con. “When’s breakfast?”
“Let me take a bath first,” said Arry. “Where’s Beldi?”
“Doing his lessons,” said Con, scornfully. “He says we have to go back to school tomorrow. How would he know?”
“Asked Wim, I expect,” said Arry, heading for the washing room. “Con, could you take those mice outside? They already smell.”
“Sheepnose,” said Con sternly. “Take those mice outside again right now.”
When Arry came out drying her hair, Sheepnose had done nothing of the sort; neither had Con, who was nowhere in sight. Arry went out the front door and almost tripped over the white cat, who was sniffing deeply and repetitiously all around the path. And no wonder, thought Arry, kneeling for a better look. The soft dirt was pocked with very large tracks, a great many of them, heading for the door and going away again. Arry stood up and followed them. These did not go around the back of the house and down to the stream, as Mally and Oonan had said the ones they had followed did. Arry could see the single line Oonan and Mally must have seen. But the overlaid and multiplied tracks went the other way, past the pine tree and down the hill and up and down again, into one of the water meadows where there were, indeed, a great many mice.
“Not any more,” said Arry, giggling; and then shivered in the warm sun and bright open spaces of the water meadow. She had not heard them, not one of them, as they came in the door and laid those mice at her feet.
She went home in a hurry and made oatmeal pancakes and cheese scones and tea. Beldi emerged as she was taking the scones off the griddle, and poured out the tea for her.
“Where’s Con?” he said, sitting down.
“Oh, heavens,” said Arry. “I don’t know. Not in the water meadow.”
She made a swift search of the house; Con was not, of course, in it. She put her head in the kitchen door and said to Beldi, “Come help me find her.”
Beldi put a scone whole into his mouth and got up willingly enough. He choked, however, when he saw the pile of mice. Arry hurried him outside and then stood in the sun, at a loss. Con had said nothing that might give a clue to where she was going. Arry had asked her to remove the mice. She might have gone to get somebody to help her, or to do it for her.
“Run on over to Mally’s,” she said to Beldi, “and see if she’s there. And bring her home if she is.”
Beldi gave her a reproachful look, swallowed the rest of his scone, and went off over the hill. Arry started to go the other way, to Halver’s house, and then realized that if Con came home and nobody was there, she might wander off again. Arry called her a few times. Then she bethought herself of the other line of wolf-tracks, and followed it down to the stream. The path was scuffed here and there and some of the tracks half gone, but small children did not weigh as heavily on the ground as grown wolves, and Con usually walked in the grass or climbed on the rocks anyway. Arry called her again.
Nobody answered. But when Arry came down to the bank of the stream, she found Con sitting in the sunniest, shallowest part of the water, trying to catch minnows in her fingers. The sunlight glittered on the water, and on the silver specks in the gray and pink rock, and on the smooth gray pebbles in the streambed, and even in Con’s tangled black hair. The hazel bushes on the far side of the stream were coming into leaf. All the ground under them was covered in daffodils. No wolf had gone that way, or the flowers would be crushed.
“Con!” yelled Arry.
“Well, now you’ve ruined it,” remarked Con, standing up in her dripping smock. “You scared all the fish.”
“Don’t wander off without telling me!”
“I come down here all the time,” said Con.
She did, too. Arry swallowed. What was in my head, she thought. “There are wolves about,” she said.
“Not in the daytime,” said Con, in the same tone she had used about Beldi’s doing his lessons.
“Who says?”
“Zia.”
“What does she know about it?”
Con pondered. “Well. She might have asked Derry.”
“Well, next time you ask Derry, or at least find out if Zia did. Zia’s got
a brain like the Autumn Dance, Mally says so. You mustn’t just believe her.”
“I don’t believe anybody really,” said Con, climbing out of the stream and joining Arry on the grassy bank. “Mally says so.”
Arry bit back her laugh just in time. “Let’s go eat breakfast,” she said. “And then we’ll take those mice outside.”
“Maybe we should eat them,” said Con, accompanying her by jumping from rock to rock.
“I can’t make mouse stew,” said Arry, a little absently.
“Mother could,” said Con. “She said they eat it in Fence’s Country; but only in the winter.”
“I thought I remembered that,” said Arry. She added carefully, “Have you been thinking about her lately?”
“I think about her all the time,” said Con. “I just don’t talk about her.”
“Why?”
“Mally says I don’t like people to see what I’m thinking.”
“Who does?” said Arry.
“Beldi wishes you would,” said Con.
Arry stopped and stared at her sister, who was sliding down the last rock before the path went up the hill their house stood on. “Did Mally say that?”
“Mmmmm,” said Con.
They started up the hill. “Con,” said Arry.
“I don’t remember,” said Con.
When Beldi came home from Mally’s, he brought Tiln with him. Arry had made more pancakes, as a consolation for having sent Beldi all the way to Mally’s when Con was just down by the stream. He and Tiln sat down and ate all of them. Tiln looked peculiar, both exhausted and exalted somehow.
“Mally and Wim ask you to my celebration tonight,” he said when he had finished eating. “Halver says we won’t begin school until the day after tomorrow, so we can celebrate unimpeded.” That sounded exactly like Halver, thought Arry. Although the thought of another day chasing Con alarmed her, and the notion that Halver might have something else he would prefer to do in that extra day frightened her, she smiled at Tiln and said they would all be happy to come. And how do I know that, she thought. Well, she didn’t, of course. It was just a manner of speaking.
“What do you know?” asked Con, who had been staring at Tiln ever since he came in.
Tiln smiled. “What’s ugly and what’s beautiful,” he said.
“Con,” said Arry. “Don’t go asking him. He’s had enough of that.”
“Only if it really matters to you,” said Tiln to Con.
“Everything matters to me,” said Con.
“That’s not what Mally says,” said Tiln; and as Con continued to stare at him and did not even open her mouth, he made a little bow to Arry, as Halver had taught them all but none of them ever bothered actually to do. “We’ll see you with pleasure at sunset,” he said, and left the kitchen.
Arry said, “Let’s get those mice out of our house.”
“Tiln must have walked right over them,” said Beldi.
“We should have asked him if they were beautiful or ugly,” said Con, scrambling out of her chair and making for the front room.
The pile of mice was still there. Arry wondered a little that the cats had not dragged them off somewhere, or eaten them on the spot. Maybe it was the smell of wolf.
“We must put them somewhere the crows can get them,” she said.
“We need a box or a bag,” said Beldi.
“Let’s use the milk pans,” said Con.
“No,” said Arry.
“You could even stew them in the milk pans,” said Con.
Arry went off into the kitchen and found, among the piles of discarded objects still to be dealt with, a wooden milk bucket acquired when they had kept a goat. She brought the bucket and the fire tongs back to the front room and began lifting mice out of the pile and dropping them into the bucket. Con demanded to try, and after dropping a mouse onto Beldi’s feet and one onto Arry’s, got quite fast and accurate at it. Arry sat back down in the chair she had slept in and tried not to watch. The mice were certainly in no pain now, but they made her flinch just the same.
When Con was finished, she sent Con and Beldi to carry the bucket up to the top of Windy Hill and spread the mice around for the crows. She herself got water and soap and the brush and knelt to scrub the stain off the floor. At least wolves were tidier than cats. Cats would have left all those mice on the rug, at the very least. She held the brush dripping over the floor, and paused.
Where the drops of water had fallen, lines of bright, beautiful, and unnatural green showed on the smooth gray floor. Arry dripped more water, and more, and finally scraped very lightly with the brush over the mess the mice had left. The brush did not take off the green, so she applied it a little harder. When she had cleared all the soapy mousy mass of water off that patch of floor, the green lines revealed themselves as blocky letters, which said uncompromisingly, “Keep the wolf far hence, that’s foe to men.”
It was part of a burial spell Oonan had taught her. She had not even been born, he and Wim and Mally all said, the last time anybody here had had to use it, but tears came up in her eyes and ran down her cheeks. When one of them dripped down onto the floor, all the green letters winked out like the stars at dawn.
Arry wiped her nose fiercely on her hand and scrubbed the entire floor, much to the annoyance of Sheepnose, who came in halfway through, and Woollycat, who came in just as she had finished cleaning up Sheepnose’s dirty pawprints. She wiped up the new prints, and emptied her bucket, and washed and dried the bucket and the brush and hung them in their places.
Then she sat in the front door, staring at the crocuses under the pine tree, waiting for Con and Beldi to come back so she could disobey the message left her. Her brain must be slow, but it had finally occurred to her that, while wolves might sleep in the woods or out on the mountain, her parents were, presumably, wolves only when the full moon was up. Where would they take shelter, then, during all the days? She meant to go around to all the possible places, and find them.
She spent some time wondering what to do with Con and Beldi, and finally decided that she would just take them along. They had a right to see their parents too, after all, surely they must.
When they got back, Con looked flushed and triumphant and Beldi distinctly frazzled. Arry told them she needed to go visit Sune and that she meant to go all around the hills picking flowers. Beldi said he would rather do his lessons, and looked pleadingly at Arry, so she set off with just Con. It was almost hot, and after the night’s rain rather sticky. All the early leaves had doubled their size since yesterday, and the late ones had come out vigorously. Larks and robins and sparrows and wheatears sang madly in all directions; the mockingbird made cat noises, as if the concert of its fellows had disconcerted it.
When they got to Halver’s house, Arry suffered a pang of cowardice, and said to Con, “I want to speak to Halver for a moment. Will you run down the hill and tell Sune I’m coming?”
“What about?” said Con.
“The baby,” said Arry, patiently.
“Halver doesn’t know anything about babies.”
So much for misdirection. “I want to talk to him about Beldi.” Which was true as far as it went.
“Oh,” said Con, and ran full tilt down the rocky hill. Arry winced, and turned her back, and knocked hard on Halver’s door.
It was strange to be knocking to be admitted to school. Nobody admitted her, either. She knocked again. Then she went around the house knocking on all the windows she could reach. The ones in the back, where you would expect people to be sleeping, were all shuttered—in this weather. She would have shouted, but she was afraid Con and Sune would hear her; the wind was blowing down the hill from Halver’s house to Sune’s. There was no sound from the house, but Arry thought she felt somebody listening. She went back to the door and tried it. It was bolted. She tried the low schoolroom window, and it swung open easily. Arry looked over her shoulder at Sune’s house, saw nobody, and climbed in.
The schoolroom was dim and cool and ti
dy, and smelled of oil paint and sawdust. Arry marched across the red rug before she could think about it, and almost failed to stop in time when she saw that the door between schoolroom and Halver’s part of the house was shut. She pushed at it. It was bolted from the other side. Arry thought, and shook her head. No. She could remember no bolt on that door. But he is the wolf, she thought, why should he bolt his door? She heard herself laughing, and stopped. But something had moved on the door’s other side.
Arry retreated to the window, picking up the largest of the wooden geometry blocks on her way. They can’t be wolves in the daytime, she thought; but her heart was beating as fast as it ever had and she could hardly breathe. She wasn’t hurt; this was fear.
There was the creak of a wooden bolt withdrawing, and the door opened. Arry opened her eyes as wide as she could.
It was only Halver. He was blinking and tousled and wearing his nightshirt. He had no fever, no headache, no sore joints or muscles. His hand still itched.
“It’s me,” said Arry.
“I thought it might be,” said Halver, mildly. “What do you want?”
“I want to see my parents.”
“They aren’t here,” said Halver.
“Where are they?”
“Choose,” said Halver, in a gentle and reasonable tone that made Arry shiver, “and I’ll take you to them when next the full moon rises.”
“Very well,” said Arry, “I choose not to be a wolf.”
Halver smiled. “You wot well what I did mean,” he said, in the accents of Arry’s mother.
Arry put down the block, lest she throw it at him. “I’ll find them myself,” she said, and with no regard to dignity at all she climbed back out the window and ran down the hill to Sune’s house.
16
Con was in fact at Sune’s house. Sune was sitting in her rocking chair and spinning; Con was sprawled on the floor with Sune’s button box. She must have been importunate, or Sune must be very tired. Sune was certainly tired. Con had probably been importunate as well.