The Dubious Hills (23 page)

They kept stopping to speak to people, so Arry made
a quick foray through the house and found Oonan in the kitchen,
cutting up a wheel of red cheese.

“
Halver’s taking Sune home,” she
said. “I’m going to follow him until moonrise.”

“
And what are you going to do
then?” said Oonan. “Can you run as fast as a wolf? You can’t follow
him, Arry, unless he wants you to.”

“
Could Derry?”

“
Ask her,” said Oonan.

“
I can’t, Oonan, without telling
her why.”

“
Then why bring it up?”

“
I have to find my parents,” said
Arry through her teeth.

“
I think,” said Oonan, putting
down his knife and regarding her gravely, “that they have to find
you.”

“
They’re telling me to keep
away,”
said Arry; it was almost a wail, and she stopped
talking and looked at the door.

“
When; how?” said Oonan, coming
around the table.

Arry told him about the green letters.

“
Then do as they tell you,” said
Oonan. “They’re your parents.”

“
They’re not
themselves.”

“
Who says so?”

“
Oh, you’re
hopeless
!”
cried Arry, and bolted back through the front room and
outside.

Sune and Halver were gone, but there was really only
one path home, especially for someone so heavily pregnant, and she
caught up to them without difficulty in the water meadow. They were
about halfway across it when she came down the hill; she could see
Sune’s hair glinting faintly and hear the murmur of their
voices.

Arry considered going to Sune’s along the stream,
which would be shorter, and then following Halver from there. She
could think of no particular reason he should not wish to take Sune
home and get out of sight before turning into a wolf.

Unless, of course, he wanted for some reason for
Sune to see him do it. This was Mally’s province; Arry had no idea
why or whether he would do such a thing. The mere fact that she had
thought of it at all made her uneasy. She stepped out softly into
the water meadow after the two of them. If they looked back they
might see her, since she was wearing a white shirt; but she walked
on anyway.

They did not look back. They went on steadily on
their way home, passing Oonan’s house and Arry’s and Halver’s and
moving slowly down the hill to Sune’s small house. Arry came around
the corner of Halver’s house just in time to hear Halver say, “What
in all doubt is that?”

Sune’s house, like Niss’s, showed green light
through its windows and around its door.

“
Niss said she might be by, with
some kindly spells for young Knot,” said Sune, placidly.

“
Green’s for warding,” said
Halver, not placidly at all.They walked forward to the house; Arry
came halfway along the downhill path and then sat down next to a
rock and watched. Sune opened her door and the green light poured
out like some strange form of melted butter and colored all the
rocks and grass and flowers with itself.

Sune said something, and then laughed.

“
What does it say?” said
Halver.

He was keeping well back, Arry saw, and as much out
of the light as he could manage.

Sune said, “And from the wolf I save thy soul, by my
might and power, and keep thy soul, my darling dear, from dogs that
would devour; and from the lion’s mouth that would thee all in
sunder shiver, and from the horns of unicorns I safely thee
deliver.

“
Mally says Niss is over-careful,”
said Sune, laughter still in her voice. “Unicorns indeed. Will you
come in, Gnosi, and take some tea?”

“
Thank you, no,” said Halver. “If
I hurry, I’ll be back in time to hear Wim play the pipes.” And he
backed out of the green light and came quickly up the hill. Arry
sat where she was. He plunged past her, almost running. Sune had
gone into her house and shut the door. The green faded and went
out, and plain yellow light lit up the windows. Arry got up and
went after Halver.

His hand was itching furiously, and he was having
more trouble with his breathing than she would have expected from
somebody who had walked and run in these hills all his life. Arry
ran lightly behind him, trying to be quiet but not worrying
overmuch about it. Her feet seemed to know the path and to avoid
rocks and roots of themselves. The air was growing lighter. Arry
looked up and saw the moon shouldering its way over the hills. She
was immediately shaken by a violent dislocation of everything, and
just as it subsided she tripped on nothing and fell on her
face.

So much for my feet knowing anything, she thought,
sitting up and brushing gravel out of her leggings. She had torn
her skirt, too, but was not herself hurt. She got up quickly and
looked around for Halver. He had been at the bottom of the hill she
was just rounding the top of, but he was nowhere to be seen. She
ran down and up again and turned in a circle at the top of the next
hill, looking for any movement, at man- or wolf-height. Nothing.
She pushed her hands into the pockets of her shirt, thinking. He
could not go to the sheep hut; possibly the whole meadow was
barred to him: she didn’t know the extent of Niss’s spells.

“
I wonder,” said Arry to the
rising mist, and she turned and trudged all the way back to
Halver’s house and up to his shut door. No green light. She knew he
had eaten quite a lot at Tiln’s party, but she did not know if his
wolf-stomach needed feeding separately. What did he do when he
wasn’t killing sheep and dragging people about to witness his
transformation so he could try to talk them into sharing
it?

“
Bother,” said Arry, and went back
to Tiln’s party.

She stopped at her own house first. It did not glow
hugely as Sune’s had, but there was a faint wavery almost-light
about it, like the reflection of sunlight off water on the shady
underside of a bridge. Arry supposed the warding was still working.
There had been nothing like that around Halver’s house.

The party, when she got back to it, had shrunk but
grown denser, like paper crushed tightly. A number of parents had
taken their children home. Most of the remaining party was playing
charades in the front room; Beldi was with them. Arry slipped
behind Tiln, who appeared to be enacting a drunken cow with a
broom, and went into the kitchen. To her great relief, Con was
there, rolling out little balls of dough into circles so Zia could
put spoonsful of honey and nuts on them and Tany could fold them
into crescents and give them to Mally, who was frying them in fat.
If everything were only the way this kitchen smells, thought Arry
vaguely. She sat down on a stool out of the way.

“
Why do they puff up when you fry
them, Ma?” said Zia.“Dough-sprites,” said Con.

“
I say so,” said Tany.

Mally said, “The heat of the boiling fat expands the
liquid in the dough. Grel says so.”

“
Can’t we have dough-sprites?”
said Zia.

“
We can if we want to,” said
Tany.

“
Maybe in yeast,” said Mally,
lifting a strainer full of little brown crescents out of her kettle
and emptying it onto a towel.

“
Let’s make something with yeast
in, then,” said Zia.“I don’t think this is going to be that long a
party,” said Mally. “People won’t stay for breakfast.”

Arry took this to mean that Mally hoped they
wouldn’t. She was tired, and her arms were speckled with little
burns from the spitting fat. Arry was tired, too. Con and the other
children were emphatically not tired in the least. I should send
all of them after Halver, thought Arry, except that he could eat
them in one bite if he fancied eating a child. I wish I could tell
if he did fancy it, if he could. But no, he wouldn’t want to talk
them into becoming wolves if he wanted to eat them. Unless it’s to
prevent himself eating them.

“
Do wolves eat children?” she said
aloud.

“
Not if they can help it,” said
Mally, very quickly; Arry suspected that reassurance was more on
her mind than the truth. But she added, “I asked Derry earlier
tonight. She said, not if they can find anything else, even mice or
frogs.”

Oh, fine, thought Arry, I’ll come home tonight and
find a pile of frogs on my doorstep.

“
They can eat me if they like,”
said Tany, licking his fingers. “When I’m inside I’ll make them run
around.”

“
Does it hurt if a wolf eats you?”
said Con.

“
Extremely,” said Arry.

Tany looked at her. He was very dark, but he had
light blue eyes, which made him always seem to be thinking of
strange things. On the other hand, thought Arry, given what he said
sometimes, perhaps he really was always thinking of strange things.
He said now, “Not if they eat me.”

Arry looked at him. What a mercy he was not her
child. “Just you wait,” which was what she usually said to similar
pronouncements by Con, did not seem precisely appropriate here. She
was still thinking what to say when a jolt of pain as if Mally had
emptied the hot fat over her went down her arm. She sprang off the
stool. “Somebody
is
hurt,” she said, and ran out of the
kitchen, through the startled players of charades and into the
windy moonlit darkness.

“
Oonan!” she yelled belatedly,
peering around in the dark. She ran up the next hill, and collided
hard with somebody coming down. It was Jony, and her arm was torn
open from the round outside bone of the wrist right up to the
elbow.

“
What happened?” said Arry,
ripping at her skirt since it was torn already. Oonan must sew this
up, she thought, it will make a terrible scar even with a great
deal of marigold, but I don’t think the muscle is hurt; that would
feel different.
“Oonan!”

“
It was a wolf,” said Jony. She
sounded annoyed, but she was also quite shaky. It was hard to tell,
but there seemed to be a lot of blood. Arry was not equipped to
tell where it was coming from or how much of it there was
really.

“
It asked me if I’d like to be a
wolf too,” said Jony, “and I said I would; but then it started to
change me, and I was looking at, right exactly at, a clump of
thyme, and I didn’t know what it was, or where it grew, or when, or
what its uses were. So I said I’d changed my mind.”

“
And it did this?”

“
And ran off.”

“
The
wolf
spoke to
you?”

“
I thought it did,” said Jony,
hesitantly. “Wolves don’t talk, do they? Where’s Derry?”

Where’s Oonan, thought Arry. He had shown her some
of the places to press to stop bleeding, and what he had shown her
seemed to be working. But she wanted him to look at this before she
did anything else. He would know how best to avoid the scarring,
not to mention inflammation and what, if anything, you could catch
from a wolf bite.

“
Can you walk?” she said. “I want
to let Oonan look at this.”

“
Of course I can, it didn’t bite
me in the leg,” said Jony. She consented to lean on Arry, and they
started down the hill. “Does it hurt a great deal?”

“
It certainly did at first,” said
Arry. “Now it’s more throbbing.”

People were finally coming out of the house,
demanding to know what had happened.

“
Where’s Oonan?” said
Arry.

“
He went home,” said Wim. “Lina’s
fetching him, she’s the fastest.”

“
She’d better be,” said Arry
furiously, “there’s a wolf out there that just got
Jony.”

Wim and Niss and Grel went running down the path.
Arry took Jony into the house, pressing the torn skirt against
Jony’s arm as hard as she could. She could feel the blood trying to
get out, which seemed foolish of it. The arm was beginning to hurt
quite a lot. She sat Jony down. Where was Oonan? She asked Mally
for some willow-bark tea and gave it to Jony, suppressing a mad
urge to drink it herself. She had tried this once, of course;
drinking it herself did nothing whatsoever to dim the knowledge of
somebody else’s pain.

All the children crowded around and gaped at Jony
and looked hopeful. Arry was sure they wanted her to take off the
bandage so they could get a good look at the wound. She snapped at
them, calling them vultures. Some of them laughed; the rest looked
hurt or taken aback. Where was Oonan? Where were any of them? Eaten
by wolves, probably. Arry got Elec, who was reasonably reliable,
to go on holding the cloth to Jony’s arm, and ran outside and up
the path. She collided solidly with Oonan.

“
That bad, is it?” he said, taking
her by the arm and rushing her back inside.

Arry sat down hard on the floor. Her job was done.
Oonan sent Mora for a bowl of water, which she spilled half of.
With the other half he soaked the cloth off Jony’s arm. He sent
Elec for goldenrod cream and marigold essence; he washed the wound
and prodded at it, making Arry flinch. He took thread and needle
and Jony’s own potato water out of his pouch and sewed the long
wound up. The children crowded around. Oonan told them crossly not
to breathe on the wound or he would sew their mouths shut too. They
giggled and backed off.

Arry went outside and sat down on a rock.

“
It’s safe now,” said Oonan at her
elbow. Arry jumped.

“
You should go home and go to
bed,” he said.