She looked at Halver’s helpless body. Nobody had been much concerned with how long their concoctions would make him sleep.
He slept for a long time. The sun went down. Con came back with Beldi and a basket of food, for which Arry was very grateful. The blushful Hippocrene had made her hungry. Con and Beldi sat down and stared at Halver while she ate everything they had brought.
“Is he ever going to wake up?” said Con.
“He’s going to wake up a wolf if he sleeps very much longer,” said Beldi, practically.
“Isn’t a man easier to kill than a wolf?” said Con.
“Much,” said Arry. She sat up straight. “Unless—”
“What?”
“Never you mind. You and Beldi had better go home, I think.”
“You said you wouldn’t leave us,” said Beldi.
“Halver isn’t going to eat me.”
“How do you know?”
“Because Niss gave me a spell.”
“To kill wolves?”
“To keep them off, at least.” But that, of course, was not enough.
“So we’ll be safe with you,” said Beldi, and sat down with great firmness.
“Con,” said Arry.
“Oh, no,” said Con, sitting next to Beldi. “If Beldi stays I get to stay too.”
“Well,” said Arry grimly, “I hope the spell’s a good one.”
Con and Beldi had both fallen asleep by the time the moon rose. Arry got up and stood between them and Halver. This put her closer to Halver than she might have liked, but there was nothing to be done about it. The sky over the far hills grew silver, and pale yellow, lighter and lighter. Arry stared steadfastly at Halver, who had turned on his side and was snoring lightly. The ground moved sideways, also lightly, but Arry blinked, and when she looked again the wolf was lifting its head from its paws and looking at her with eyes as yellow as the moon. The loose gray robe lay puddled around it.
Silently, and with her own voice, it said, “Did you misjudge your dosage?”
“No,” said Arry, softly, so as not to awaken her brother and sister. She held Niss’s spell in her head like a page not yet turned to in a book.
“What do you want, then?” he said to her, as if she were talking to herself.
“I want you to go and never come back,” said Arry fiercely, which was entirely true, if useless.
“No,” said Halver. “I have a job to do also; this is my province.”
“You’re hurting us!” she said, in her levelest and most knowledgeable voice.
“For your good,” he replied, with a terrifying sincerity.
“All right, then,” said Arry; her voice came out loud but wavery. She steadied it and took a good breath.
“Mastiff, greyhound, mongrel grim, hound or spaniel, brach or lym, or bobtail tyke or trundle-tail, I will make you weep and wail, for, with throwing this my head, dogs leaped the hatch, and all are fled.”
Halver jumped up. Tail between his legs, he went cringing to the very edge of the bank where they had meant to roll him into the water. Then he turned and faced her, ears down, the picture of canine abjection.
“She’s mad,” he said to Arry in her own voice, “that trusts the tameness of a wolf. You have frightened all the dogs about this night into the darkest corners they may find. You have kept me off you, too. But from those you would protect, you have not kept me.”
Arry picked up one of the rocks the children had put in a circle to hedge the fire with. As she lifted it, her mind presented her with a precise picture of what Halver would look and feel like if she hit him in the head with it.
“You know you can’t,” her voice told her.
She flung the rock. It bruised Halver’s shoulder and fell splashing into the water. Arry moved forward, holding her own shoulder. One of them was not leaving here; probably, she thought, herself.
“Fear no more the heat o’ the sun,” said somebody behind her.
“Beldi, go home,” she said.
“Nor the furious winter’s rages,” said Beldi. “Thou thy worldly task hath done, home art gone, and ta’en thy wages.”
“I am not gone,” said Halver, or Arry.
“Fear no more the frown o’ the great,” said Con. She did not sound as if anybody had just awakened her. “Thou art past the tyrant’s stroke. Care no more to clothe and eat; to thee the reed is as the oak.”
Beldi said, “Fear no more the lightning-flash, nor the all-dreaded thunder-stone, fear not slander, censure rash; thou hast finished joy and moan.”
“No,” said Arry, or Halver.
“No exorciser harm thee!” said Con and Beldi together, as precisely as if they were singing. “Nor no witchcraft charm thee! Ghost unlaid forbear thee! Nothing ill come near thee! Quiet consummation have, and renowned be thy grave.”
There was a moment of piercing silence.
Arry felt as if her bones were falling to powder, her blood evaporating, all of her raining down into the earth. The wolf that was Halver slipped backwards off the bank of the stream, and fell with a shockingly loud splash into the water where they had meant to put him.
“Killed with kindness,” Arry said softly, and she sat down hard. Con ran over and hugged her around the neck, which was not at all like Con. Beldi walked, not very steadily or eagerly, to the bank of the stream, and knelt, and looked down.
“It’s Halver down there,” he said. “Not the wolf.”
“Is he dead?” called Con.
“He’s gone,” said Arry, aloud, in a shaking and sandy voice that was nonetheless hers and only hers. “He’s altogether away. I’m surprised there’s a body in the water.”
“But it didn’t hurt you, did it?” said Con.
“Or him either?” said Beldi.
“No,” said Arry. “No.” Her eyes stung and filled and ran over. “I wouldn’t say it hurt him. Or me. Only you.”
“But we don’t know,” said Beldi.
Arry looked at the slight tousled outline of him against the moonlit sky; she started to say, “But I do,” and stopped.
Nothing was there. She knew nothing. What Halver had wished to do to all of them, he had done to her. Or had she done it? She had meant to kill him; that Niss’s spell was not strong enough did not, perhaps, change that. She had thrown her head at him, whatever had been in it. He had left his robe on the bank, after all his care with clothing what the wolf left naked. He would never see the summer night they had talked in, up in the high meadow.
Arry swallowed hard. He would never bring the cruel mothers, she thought, the cruel sisters, the brothers whose swords dripped with blood, the drowned maiden from whose breastbone the minstrels must make a harp.
Beldi walked back to where she sat with Con, and knelt down in front of them. “We thought,” he said, in a voice almost as shaky as hers had been, “that if you could have plans, and Zia could have plans, and you and I could have plans, that Con and I could have a plan too.”
His voice pleaded with her. “It was well done,” said Arry. “It was very well done.” Her voice cracked. “But we can’t stay here. Do you feel differently, either of you?”
“I used up all my magic,” said Con. “I thought I might.”
“Beldi?”
“No,” said Beldi, a little wistfully.
“We’re outside now, I think.”
“I think I always was,” said Beldi.
“We have to go tonight.”
“What about the cats?” said Con.
“Oonan will take them. We’ll have to tell Oonan, I think; he’ll need to know, whatever we did it’s his to mend.”
“Where are we going?” said Con.
“Home,” said Arry. “Home to the Hidden Land.”
They went back to their house first, and packed what they could carry. Neither Con nor Beldi gave her any trouble about anything she refused to let them take, which was alarming. And she kept looking around wildly, as if they had disappeared. They were always in the house, sometimes in
the room, sometimes just beside her, but she did not know, if you could even then call it knowing, until she had them under her eye. They seemed like pictures of themselves, moving dolls made to look like her brother and sister.
While the two of them were down cellar making sure that nothing vital to their future lives had somehow lodged there, Arry found baskets for the cats and put the cats into them, which was easy with Woollycat, who promptly went to sleep, and almost impossible with Sheepnose. At least the cats were the same.
She tidied the house: somebody else would come to live here, maybe Jony, who probably felt crowded with her own family and was old enough to be by herself. The house, like the cats, seemed the same as ever, except that it felt empty even with Con and Beldi making strange hollow thumpings underneath it.
They had piled everything in the front room and were beginning to think who could carry how much when Arry realized that Oonan’s house was not in the direction they were going. It would be easier to take him the cats, come back for their baggage, and then set off for the ford at Waterpale.
She explained this to Con and Beldi, who only looked at her blankly. She picked up the baskets of cats and herded the children out the front door. They went as they always had, down the hill their house sat on, and along the dry rocky path between their hill and Niss’s; and then around the side of Niss’s hill and up and down and up and down again and up once more to Oonan’s door.
It was open. His cats were sitting on the wall. Sheepnose made a brief welcoming noise and popped her head over the edge of the basket. Arry put a hand on her neck, hustled everybody into Oonan’s front room without knocking, and shut the door. Sheepnose climbed out of the basket and began to prowl the room, grumbling under her breath. Con and Beldi stood in the middle of the floor.
Arry drew in her breath to call Oonan, and he walked in from the kitchen, wiping his hands on one of the yellow towels Bec had brought back the year Con was born. He smiled around at them, and said, “Who’s been hitting whom now?” He was looking at Arry, and although she had said nothing, he dropped the towel and his face flattened out like that of a shaped cookie after you bake it.
“What happened?” he said. He shut his eyes. “You’ve chosen.”
Arry had been thinking of how to tell him carefully, but this was too much. “We killed Halver,” she said.
“But you’re just like him,” said Oonan; he had not opened his eyes. He closed his hand over them until his finger and thumb met at the bridge of his nose. Arry thought he must have a headache, but she did not know it.
For a moment, when he first came in, he had looked like himself, but now he too seemed flat as a figure in a tapestry, moving only because air had rippled the cloth. He opened his eyes suddenly. “You killed him?”
“We all did,” said Con.
Oonan sat down in one of the red chairs. He looked at Con. He looked at Beldi. He looked at Arry, and she could hardly keep from flinching: she felt like a window the sun was shining through, showing up every finger- and nose-print, every mote of dust and every spatter left behind by the rain.
“Not just like Halver,” said Oonan; he himself sounded very like Halver correcting somebody’s arithmetic.
“Thank you a thousand times,” said Arry, in a tone she recognized as one her mother had used.
“Tell me what happened,” said Oonan. “And sit down, do.” He got up himself, looking jittery. “Do you want some tea?”
“I do,” said Con, sitting down on the floor.
Oonan picked up his towel and went back into the kitchen.
Arry sat in the other red chair; she felt curiously comforted. She supposed it was the tea. Oonan wouldn’t give them tea if he had already judged them broken. Then she thought of the party she had just been at with Halver, and was uncomforted again at once. She looked at her brother and sister. Con was yawning and rubbing her eyes, which was hardly surprising. Beldi had a very somber face.
“Beldi,” said Arry, “have you got a headache?”
He stared at her. “Don’t you—” he said, and shut his mouth.
“Have you?”
“A bit of one.”
“I thought so.”
“But you didn’t know?”
“Not since Halver.” She thought about it. “Is that when you started knowing?”
“I think so,” said Beldi, dubiously.
“Will I know when I hurt now, too?” said Con.
“Probably,” said Arry.
“Can I try it?”
“No,”said Arry. Con scowled at her, and Arry added, “It’ll happen soon enough, Con, and you won’t like it a bit.”
Oonan came back in with a whole willow tray, with a blue cloth on it, and the big black teapot, and four black mugs, and his blue honey pot and a little green milk jug that Sune had made when she was ten, and a plate of cold griddle cakes. He put the tray down on the footstool. He looked more somber than Con. He sat on the edge of the other red chair, rubbing his forehead, and said nothing while they waited for the tea to steep. Arry kept an eye on Con, who was looking at the hot pot as if she might try burning her fingers on it.
When Oonan poured the tea, it was not the pale green or yellow of herbal tea, but the rich red-brown of black tea from the Outer Isles. Sune and Jony said the leaves came from bushes that grew high in the mountains. Wim said it cost a great deal. Oonan was very stingy with his, as a rule, Mally said.
Oonan handed the cups around, having put milk and honey into Con’s and Arry’s first. Then he said, “Tell me what happened.”
“Well,” said Arry, “Zia had a plan.”
Oonan rolled his eyes and made a small groan. She told him the story, with frequent additions from Con and a little actual help from Beldi. Oonan looked at her with great intentness the whole time, even when Con was speaking. When they finished, he went on looking.
“I couldn’t let them do it,” said Arry. “But it had to be done.”
“Bec and Frances didn’t come to help you?”
“No.”
“Frances always liked you to do things for yourself,” said Oonan. “Even when you could hardly walk without staggering, she would say, ‘Don’t help her, let her find out how to do it. ’”
“What did I find out how to do, Oonan?”
“You saved us,” said Con, in astonished tones. She added, “We helped a lot, though.”
“Did I save us, Oonan, or did I break us?”
“Sometimes,” said Oonan, “one can’t know the difference.”
“Oonan.”
“I’m still finding out. All things are deeply altered.”
“Did we keep out the cruel mothers?”
Oonan looked puzzled and irritated; then his brow cleared. “Ah. The ones with poisoned apples; the ones who drive their sons to kill their other sons; all the cruel ones. I think so. I told you, I am still finding out what has happened. I think knowledge is altered.”
“So now you can throw a child away like a batch of bad yoghurt?”
“No, not so much as that. It’s not the certain knowledge, the right knowledge, that did us harm, if harm was being done to us. It was refusing to step outside it.” “We should leave soon.”
“Yes, long before dawn. And I should go take Halver from the stream; it would frighten Sune to find him there. Where are you going, Arry?”
“To the Hidden Land.”
Oonan frowned. “That will do you harm,” he said. “Go to Heathwill Library, where they understand breaking the bounds of knowledge.”
“We have to go through the Hidden Land to get there. Can we look at it a bit?”
“Travel along the borders,” said Oonan. “I think you may meet someone there, or some two.”
“The cruel mother I kept out?” said Arry bitterly.
“If you are looking for a cruel mother,” said Oonan, “look in the stream there below Sune’s house. Don’t look at Frances. I think she may well have done what Halver said he always did.”
Arry w
as too tired to think. “Will you take the cats?” she said.
“No,” said Oonan. “They need to go with you.”
“Oonan, who will teach the children?”
“I will, no doubt,” said Oonan. “Mally thinks Elec may be a teacher. In two years, or three, she’ll know. I can’t do much harm in that time.”
“You’ll have to be Physici, too.”
“As best I may.”
“Will you miss Halver?”
“Don’t pick at the scab,” said Oonan.
They crossed the river at the Waterpale ferry just at dawn. The ferrywoman was sleepy but amiable. Arry gave her one of Frances’s coins, which she took as if there were nothing unusual about it.
“You’ll want to be careful,” she said as they got out of her boat, hoisting the sacks and pouches and the basket with the sleeping Woollycat in it; Sheepnose jumped out by herself. “You’ll want to have an eye of those cats. There are wolves about.”
“Yes, we know,” said Arry.
PAMELA DEAN, The Dubious Hills
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