The Dubious Hills (35 page)

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.