She was not exactly asleep, or exactly awake. A blue wash of moonlight swept in the unglazed window, struck the silver pitcher that sat on their dressing table, and fell muted into her face. She wished Ellen snored. She wished for a thunderstorm. She was afraid of what she would see if she dozed, and terrified of what she would dream if she slept. She was not the Princess Laura and she had never even laid eyes on the Princess Laura’s mother; but Fence had told her that the visions she saw and the oddities she dreamed of were a legacy of that mother’s family. She did not mind playing Princess Laura, but she minded this.

Ellen did not snore, and the night was clear. The moonlight fixed her with its glittering eye, and she saw what she was meant to. The evergreen trees of the forest were enormous; their branches began yards above her head. Between their widely separated trunks were only piles and heaps of discarded brown needles, and fallen branches, and an occasional seedling, growing hopefully upward. The air was very cold and smelled damply of pine and cedar. There was also a fainter smell that Laura associated with Christmas. Blue spruce. Laura was confused by this sudden collision of her memories and Princess Laura’s. It was she who remembered Christmas, but Princess Laura who knew that that smell meant blue spruce.

“Deck the halls with boughs of holly!” shouted Laura, afraid that Princess Laura would move her to say something peculiar.

Her voice was frail and faint in this vastness of air and branch. Very high up, a sharp wind drove long clouds across a thin blue sky. She could hear crows quarreling.

Laura was cold and puzzled, and beginning to be bored. She listened to the inside of her mind, but nothing unusual was there. Princess Laura wasn’t going to be any help. Laura hunched her shoulders against an eddy of wind, and realized she was wearing a pack. She shrugged it off and knelt gingerly in the needles to open it. It was made of green nylon, and the tag said “Caribou.” Inside it were a squashed apple, a little ivory unicorn with green eyes, a pocket-sized copy of Peter Rabbit, with the original illustrations, and a silver flute that made her tentative hand shiver as if it were falling asleep. She had felt it before. This was the flute of Cedric.

Laura stared at this collection for some time. The unicorn was hers, a present from Fence. The food might have been anybody’s. She opened the little book, and encountered Ellen’s determined black script on the flyleaf. “EX LIBRIS ELLEN JENNIFER CARROLL. THIS MEANS YOU.”

The flute was Laura’s too. Somebody who had seemed to know what he was doing had given it to her, when Princess Laura was already dead. Fence said there was a saying that Cedric’s flute would save them at the end. Ruth, who had had flute lessons for eight years, couldn’t get a single decent note out of this flute. Laura, who couldn’t even play the piano, let alone coordinate her breath and her fingers at the same time, could play this flute to perfection.

She supposed she might as well play it now. It was very cold to the touch. She put it to her lips and blew a few experimental breaths. She played “The Minstrel Boy,” which had once summoned her a unicorn. This time it summoned nothing. She played “Sir Patrick Spens,” which had pricked Randolph’s conscience. Only her cold fingers tingled where she held the flute. She played “Matty Groves,” which she did not like. Whatever she hoped to wake up did not care for it either.

“You could at least let all the wild animals come and listen and be tamed,” said Laura, removing the flute from her mouth and addressing it severely. She gave up on Secret Country songs and, defiantly, played “James James Morrison Morrison.”

She was playing the last line when the tree nearest her burst violently into flame. A rush of hot air drove her backward. Laura considered running, but saw that neither nearby trees nor the needles at the foot of the burning one had caught. The flame was very clear and yellow. Laura looked at it hopefully; but the tears ran down her face from the heat and the brightness. She blinked them away, and when she opened her eyes again she was staring into a shaft of moonlight, and the cat had jumped down from the bed.

His sentences were more brisk and businesslike, and required Ted and Patrick to meet him after breakfast in the Council Room. This gave Ted an uncomfortable sensation in the stomach; but Fence had added a line at the bottom of the page to say that he would already have apprised Benjamin, Matthew, and Celia of Ted and Patrick’s true nature. Ted felt better, until Patrick said, “What do you suppose he thinks our true nature is?”

“Thanks a lot,” said Ted. Patrick just stood there on the stone floor in his white nightshirt, with his pale brown hair sticking up, and grinned at him.

“What are you so pleased about?” said Ted.

“I’m just looking forward,” said Patrick, serenely, “to being myself once in a while.”

“We agreed that we need to keep up the masquerade.”

“But not with anybody who knows.”

“Pat, come on, we’re only here on sufferance.”

“That’s right,” said Patrick. “Mine.”

Ted said, in as close an imitation as he could come to Benjamin’s abrupt tones, “Pride goeth before a fall.”

Patrick regarded him with the intent, blue, merciless stare he had used when he played Fence. Ted had never thought to ask him what he thought of the harmless-looking, untidy, abstracted reality that was High Castle’s resident wizard. He did not ask him now. “Let’s get dressed.”

“I hoped,” said Patrick, crossing the huge room to the six oak chests lined up against the wall, “that I’d never have to wear those damn stockings again.”

“Don’t we have any robes, like Fence and Benjamin wear?”

“I don’t want one like Fence’s,” said Patrick, rummaging. “I don’t want one at all. They’re probably as hot as the hose.”

“Well, it’s fall now. The hose won’t be so hot.”

Patrick looked over his shoulder, his hands full of embroidered silk, his face holding its most distant calculating expression. “It’s fall,” he said, “and it’s a hell of a lot warmer in here in the morning than it was all summer.”

“Maybe we burned Claudia up with her house,” said Ted, savagely.

“I hope not,” said Patrick. “What if the only way to find out what’s going on is to ask her?”

“No problem,” said Ted, still savagely. “You just go to the land of the dead.”

Patrick hauled the nightshirt over his head, flung it into the middle of their bearskin rug, and disappeared into the violet folds of the silk shirt, still with the calculating expression. He had lost track of what he was holding; he would never have put that shirt on if he had looked at it first. Ted put on one of the linen shirts Patrick had strewn on the floor.

“And ask her?” said Patrick.

“The ghosts don’t remember, unless you nudge them.”

“The sight of you ought to nudge her all right,” said Patrick, crossing the room and picking his jeans up out of the rocking chair. There was something strange in his tone. After a moment Ted recognized it as admiration. Admiration from Patrick was rare, and, just now, unnerving.

“When’s the council?” said Patrick.

“Eleven. We should go now.”

“Oh, Lord,” said Patrick, standing up abruptly. “I have to go check my watch.”

Well, thought Ted, Patrick would have to get the sword from Fence, who would say something to keep him in line. Ted waved him cheerily on his way and ran down to the Council Room. Randolph was there already, with the three girls. Ruth was wearing the sort of white flowing dress she had always worn in this country. Ellen and Laura had apparently, like Patrick, suffered a rebellion against the garments of the Hidden Land; they had put on their boys’ clothes from the battle.

Randolph was wearing blue as usual, although he was no longer of the school of Blue Sorcery. In the late morning light he looked, if not all right, at least better than he had. The table in front of him was piled with books and scrolls and maps. Most of them were dusty. Ted was nerving himself to ask what they were for when Celia and Matthew came in, also piled with books and scrolls. Matthew, a long, thin young man with red hair and a sardonic eye, looked at the children with an expression of uneasy reproach and said nothing. Celia moved briskly past him, dumped her burden on the table, and smiled. She was taller than Matthew; she had sleek yellow hair braided down her back, and pale eyes that might have been blue or green or gray, and a long, puckered scar on her forehead.

“Give you good morrow,” she said. “I am Celia, called Lady for my service to the last Queen; but in this company we dispense with sugary courtesy. Matthew is my husband, and the three yellow bees you’ve marked buzzing hither and yon making an upset are my children.”

There was a muddled silence. Ted collected himself and said, “Thank you. You know our names and we don’t have any sugary titles. Laura is my sister. Ruth and Ellen are my cousins. The Patrick with the superior smirk who isn’t here is their brother.”

Celia said, “You are welcome to High Castle.”

“I doubt it,” said Ruth. “But it’s kind of you to say so.”

Matthew grinned; Randolph actually looked at Ruth as if he were seeing her; Celia made a disapproving frown and then smiled too. “So,” she said. “Let plain speaking be the order of the day.”

There was another silence, less uncomfortable, broken by the arrival of Fence, who sat down in the chair to the left of the one that had been King William’s. Celia and Matthew sat down too, and Ted gathered his courage and sat in the King’s chair.

“Where’s Benjamin?” said Ellen. Ted knew that she was, as always, enjoying herself. He and Ruth and Laura, because they were not, would never have asked Fence that question.

“Recovering himself,” said Fence, sitting down and exchanging some look with Matthew.

“Is he terribly grieved?” said Ellen. She didn’t sound eager, but like somebody dispassionately in search of information.

“He is so,” said Fence. “More to thy purpose, he is wroth. A saith, if a should lay eyes on one of you before the day is out, a will break that one between his two hands.”

Ellen sat back abruptly. “We didn’t do anything.”

“You cozened and deceived him, and all of us; if there was a necessity in’t, yet thou shouldst give Benjamin some little time to see it clearly.”

“Can we have a council without Benjamin?” said Ted.

“Well enough,” said Fence. “He hath told me his desires; and given leave for all of you to accompany what embassies we have chosen for you.”

“Well, good.” Ted decided that this time he would out-wait Fence. Fence had called this council.

Fence said, “I have spoken also to Andrew. I’d thought to have some small difficulty in the persuasion, but he seemed well pleased to have thee, my prince, and Randolph also, in his train. So have a care.”

He looked at Ted until Ted nodded, and then looked at Randolph until Randolph put his head back and said to the ceiling, “Fear me not.”

Ted remembered, suddenly and unpleasantly, that there was another secret here they had not spoken of. Only the five children, Randolph, and Fence knew that Randolph had killed the King. Andrew suspected it, but had seemed unwilling to enter any accusation because of some plot of his, or of his sister Claudia, that he did not want to call attention to. Matthew and the other members of the King’s Council had all the information they needed to discover Randolph’s crime, but they had not discovered it yet.

“How,” said Ruth, rather diffidently, “did Andrew like the notion of having me along?”

“That pleased him also,” said Fence, “that thou, and Randolph and Ted, that he thinks are both besotted on thee, should be made to travel all together and endure one another’s company.”

“Do we have to keep up that masquerade?” demanded Ruth.

“In small things only,” said Fence. “A hasty withdrawing on thy part, or a gaingiving in thy look, those will serve.”

“I can hardly wait,” said Ruth, gloomily.

Ted could not look at Randolph, who had been betrothed to a girl he now knew was dead; and who had, when the present Ruth appeared, been treating Lady Ruth with distant courtesy and dancing every dance at the Banquet of Midsummer Eve with Claudia. Then Claudia tried to kill Fence, and Randolph avoided both her and Ruth. On the journey back from the battle, Randolph began, cautiously, treating Ruth as an affianced bride who had reason to be angry with him. Ted thought that Randolph hoped that Lady Ruth, who unlike their own Ruth had great pride and a hasty temper, would refuse to take him back after his dallying with Claudia. Randolph had told Ted that he did not, as a regicide shortly to be so proclaimed before the court, wish to encourage anybody to marry him. Ruth had been driven almost to distraction by this state of affairs. At least now both of them would be playing a part.

“Andrew,” said Fence, having considered Ruth and apparently decided not to comment on her remark, “doth require that those accompanying him be prepared to depart four days hence.”

“Oh, good,” said Ruth. “There’s an enormous Green Caves ceremony six days hence.”

Fence frowned. “’Twere better not delay our speech to Meredith,” he said. “She’ll need one can take thy place.”

“Give me today to poke around,” said Ruth, “and then you can tell her I’m resigning. I’m still in disgrace, you know, so the place she’ll have to fill won’t be very exalted.”

Fence nodded. “Well,” he said. “Matthew and I will also make ready to depart four days hence. We must devise some means of exchanging news.” His glance brushed Randolph and moved to Ruth. “What training hast thou?” he said to her. “Canst read a message in the grasses, or the stones along thy way?”

“Of a certainty I cannot,” said Ruth; she did not sound sorry.

“No matter,” said Fence. “We will send by music. Laura, wilt thou bring thy flute?”

“Yes,” said Laura, staring a little but seeming more pleased than otherwise.

“Dost thou play also?” said Fence to Ruth.

“Pretty well,” said Ruth. “On an ordinary flute.”

“Excellent,” said Fence. “Celia, who goes north with us, will aid Laura, and before we depart also will instruct thee.”

“On the subject of instruction,” said Celia, “we have brought somewhat. Edward, hand thy lady cousin the undermost book. ’Twere best she read it before the Green Caves are barred to her. Thou and Patrick will profit most from the scrolls and the blue books.”

Ted slid the dusty volume from his stack and handed it down the table to Ruth. Its dark green cover was stamped in silver: The Book of the Seven Wizards. It sounded like something they would all have enjoyed reading, before they got into this mess.

“Now,” said Fence. “If aught’s unclear to our visitors, let them ask us not to unmuddy them. And if aught’s unclear to you, Randolph, Celia, Matthew, ask now.”

All of Ted’s relatives looked alarmed. He could at least postpone the inevitable. “Can you tell us,” he said, “the story of Shan?”

“’Tis in the thicker blue book,” said Celia.

So much for that.

“Can you tell us,” said Celia, “of Andrew? This report of his spying mislikes me. What, as such, did he accomplish?”

“Nothing,” said Ellen. “He was always thwarted.”

“Was he so foolish, then?”

“No,” said Ellen, “but he was wrong. He didn’t believe in magic.”

“Which was a considerable handicap,” said Ruth dryly.

“Fence,” said Matthew. “The antidote is hereby explained.”

Celia said, “But how knew he one would kill the King?”

“And who did so?” said Matthew, gloomily.

Celia turned back to Ellen. “What hath Andrew yet to do?”

“Nothing, I think,” said Ellen.

“He betrayeth not this embassy?”

“We don’t know,” said Ellen. “The embassy wasn’t in the game.”

“How not?”

Ted said quickly, “We ran out of time. It was September by then, and we had to go back to school.” It seemed to be the outsiders’ turn again, so he said, “What about Laura’s visions? They can’t really be a talent of her mother’s house.”

“Did Princess Laura have visions?” said Laura.

“She had dreams that would have grown so,” said Celia, “but was too young for visions.” She looked intently at Laura. “What age hast thou?”

“Eleven,” said Laura.

“The Lady Laura was but nine,” said Celia.

Celia and Matthew looked at one another. Nobody said anything. Ted thought what a strain this must be for all of them, confronted with the lying doubles of children they knew in their minds, but surely not yet in their hearts, to be dead, and to have been dead for three months. Ted remembered Laura’s vision, that Claudia had buried the bodies in the cellar of the Secret House. But keep the wolf far thence, that’s foe to men, he thought, for with his nails he’ll dig them up again.

Ted made a sharp movement, as if he had found a spider walking up his arm, and both Fence and Celia turned inquiring faces his way. “Fence,” he said, “Edward says to keep the wolf far thence, that’s foe to men, for with his nails he’ll dig them up again.”

“That’s another spell of Shan’s,” said Fence.

“But why’s it in the back of my head? Are Laura’s visions another manifestation of it?”

“Have all of you this affliction? Hath Patrick?”

“Oh, yes,” said Ted. “But it’s not words, with him. It’s muscle memory. All the prestidigitation.”

“But not the bladework?” said Fence.

“No. And Laura has the visions, but she can’t ride a horse.”

“I don’t have much,” said Ellen. “The name of a flower, or knowing that the pies have bones in them.”

“The devising of Melanie,” said Fence, “was that some dear to her, whom Shan had killed, should speak to his lightest thought, as do the unicorns in the places of their abiding.”

“What’s Melanie got against us?” said Ellen.

“Could Claudia have learned it from her?” said Ted.

“Or from another,” said Fence. “Or it may be that, being so like your others, wearing their clothes, sleeping in their beds, answering to their names and observing all their ways with the very comment of your souls, that you be not found out, you are like enough to them that you hear them speaking. For sorcery makes nothing happen that may not happen left alone. It can turn a trickle to a sea; but there must first be a trickle.”

“Your turn,” said Ellen.

“In your game,” said Celia, “who did murder King William?”

Ted’s whole interior recoiled like a snapped rubber band. Fence was actually managing to give Celia an admiring glance, as if to say he should have thought of that question himself. Randolph was extremely pale, but that wasn’t much of a change. Ellen looked thoroughly shocked, which would be good for her. Laura appeared to be going to say something, and Laura was not good at improvising.

“It depended,” said Ted. This was just short of a lie; in the early days of the game, it had depended. “Sometimes,” said Ted, “it was Andrew; sometimes it was an evil castle magician that we got rid of later; and sometimes, when we got tired of the obvious, it was Randolph; and once it was Agatha, and—”

“No profit there,” said Celia.

“Well thought,” said Randolph, to the tabletop.

“Our turn,” said Ellen, quickly. “Why didn’t breaking the Crystal of—”

“What do you know about Claudia’s sorcery with the windows?” Ted overrode her loudly. It was, of course, too late. When people in the Hidden Land heard “breaking the Crystal,” there was only one interpretation they would give it.

“Edward,” said Fence, in a less terrible voice than Ted had expected. “Tell the tale.”

Ted felt put upon; why should he have to guess Patrick’s motives or, where he knew them, decide whether to betray them? But he told the story. The Crystal of Earth was no part of their original game, but Patrick had dreamed about it: a globe like a gigantic snowflake paperweight, which had a magic in it that, let loose, would destroy the Secret Country. Fence had confirmed this, more or less, by listing for them the three things that were dangerous to the Hidden Land: the Border Magic, the Crystal of Earth, the Whim of the Dragon. So on Midsummer’s Day, Patrick, infuriated by Fence’s taking from them the swords of Shan and Melanie, their only way home from this country, had decided that he would break the Crystal and set them all free. Ted had followed him to the North Tower, protesting. Patrick had broken the Crystal. And for the barest moment, they had seen home. Then they were back in a Secret Country none the worse for this wavering. They gathered all the colored fragments up and hid them in Ruth’s room.

Ted looked over at Fence’s intent face, and said, “There’s an awful lot Ruth didn’t think to tell you in that letter!”

“Well, she was hard-pressed,” said Matthew.

Fence said nothing, but only waited. Ted would have felt better if he had been angry. None of them looked angry. He supposed they were waiting for Patrick.

“All right,” said Ted. “I noticed, during the Unicorn Hunt, that the ground in the Enchanted Forest sometimes feels like the magic swords—there’s that tingling. So I thought we should try standing there and changing things around, the way we used to do in the game. So I tried it, saying that Patrick and I had never practiced with the magical swords, and therefore you and Randolph took them not. And that didn’t work. But Laura said, ‘Let’s say Prince Patrick broke not the Crystal of Earth.’ And she felt the ground tingle. So we went back to Ruth’s room and looked in the towel; and all the fragments were gone. We went to the North Tower, and there was a floating globe, much larger than the one Patrick broke, and having inside it sparkles of all colors, but giving off a deep gold light like nothing I have seen. And that,” said Ted on the last of his breath, “is the tale of the Crystal of Earth.”

“What appearance had the Forest, when this was done?” said Fence.

“Very different from during the Hunt,” said Ted. “The hedge of roses had grown wild, and the stream was much deeper.”

“But there were roses?” said Celia. “That was the true power of the unicorns, then, and not some meddling of Claudia’s.”

“Okay, but why was what Patrick broke not the Crystal of Earth?” Even as he said the last few words, Ted realized what the answer was. “Because we were going to stand in the Enchanted Forest and say, ‘Let’s say Patrick broke not the Crystal of Earth,’ the Crystal of Earth wasn’t there for Patrick to break?”

“What did he break?” said Laura. “Something happened when he did it.”

“Now that may be some meddling of Claudia’s,” said Celia.

Somebody rattled the door. Matthew got up and let Patrick in. Patrick was flushed, and his eyes gleamed. Ted realized that he was excited, not tired. The things that got Patrick excited were always either incomprehensible or troublesome.

“Did it work?” said Ellen. “Where’s your watch?”

“It worked,” said Patrick. “When I got back there, the watch said it was eight forty-five on June seventeenth. That’s when we left. But that’s not the half of it.” Patrick shouldered himself out of his knapsack, opened it, and began piling books on top of those already on the table.

“Now,” he said. “These books are about a lot of things that must be just as impossible here as digital watches. This used to be my digital watch.” He pushed back the violet silk sleeve of his shirt, thick with embroidery in black and white, and showed them the watch he wore. It had a plain leather strap, a round crystal, and the usual twelve numbers picked out in gold. The hour and minute hands were gold too.

Laura remembered the serviceable black plastic watch with all its baffling buttons and its red characters in twenty-four-hour time that would show you the date and the day of the week if you knew how to ask it, and was safe underwater to two hundred meters.

“That’s your watch?” she said.

“You bet it is. This happened once before, remember? And I think you must have been right, Laurie. Your flashlight did turn into a lantern. Now, just what happened when it did?”

Laura looked at Fence, who nodded at her. Ted decided that they were letting Patrick dig his own grave, and then they would push him into it.

“It stayed a flashlight,” Laura said, “until Ted tried to turn it on. Then there was a flash of blue light. Ted dropped it in the stream. There were a lot of sparks, and then the blue light went out. And all we found in the stream was a lantern.”

“I got a green flash from the watch. Now.” Patrick lined the books up on the table. The Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, Elements of Programming Style, The Communist Manifesto, An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish, and a science fiction novel called Inherit the Stars. “I went through these and marked passages contrary to the way reality works in the Secret Country,” said Patrick. “And they are all still here. Nothing whatever has happened to these books. Whatever makes these things happen alters artifacts, but it leaves books alone.”

“Touching the alteration of artifacts,” said Celia. “What is this tale we hear of the Crystal of Earth?”

“Who told you?” said Patrick, in a dangerous tone. His face had not changed.

“Never mind,” said Fence, to Laura’s profound relief. Ellen would feel bad enough without Patrick’s hollering at her.

Matthew said, “Why broke you that Crystal, knowing what fate you doomed us to?”

“I wanted to go home,” said Patrick, pale but still calm.

“Patrick,” said Fence, “there must be no more of these trials and testings, neither out of temper nor out of thy cooler speculations. Thou knowest nothing; thy proddings are perilous. Have I thy word?”

Patrick’s calm face moved swiftly into stubbornness. He said, “I prefer example to authority.”

Randolph stood up, his face furious.

“No, wait,” said Ted. He looked at Patrick. “You swore me an oath,” he said.

“Oh, no, you don’t,” said Patrick. “You may be my King, but you’re not my superior officer.”

“He is more,” said Randolph. “He hath the power of life and death o’er thee, without counsel or appeal. Thy officer is answerable to his, and to his King; the King is answerable to himself, and to powers so fickle ’twere better none awakened them. And thou didst swear.”

“I said faith and truth,” said Patrick, “and you’ll get more of both of them if you let me go my gait.”

“Patrick,” said Ted, “remember where you are. The oath means what it means. Words have power here.”

“Say some, then,” said Patrick, his face flushed again but otherwise unreadable.

“Don’t go performing private experiments like breaking the Crystal of Earth. Don’t do anything without consulting us.”

Patrick looked from Celia and Matthew, who were a little tense but clearly amused, to Randolph, who was still angry, to Fence, whose face was as uninformative as Patrick’s own. Then he looked at Ted. “It’s as bad as having a government grant,” he said. “All right. No unauthorized research. I hope you won’t be sorry.”

“Thy hopes commend thee,” said Fence, dryly.

Patrick sat down in the chair to the left of the King’s, looking as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. If those four people had ganged up on Laura, she would have been in tears.

“Whose turn is it now?” said Ellen, without much vigor.

“Yours, yours,” said Fence, “for we have just put Patrick to the question.”

“Pat?” said Ellen. “Ask them something you want to know.” And that, thought Laura, was Ellen’s apology for what Patrick didn’t know she had done.

“Tell us,” said Patrick, “about Shan’s Ring.”

“Nay, do you tell us,” said Fence. “Shan says in his journals that he had it from the unicorns, and that it did greatly magnify the power of his mirrors.”

“What was the power of his mirrors?” said Ted.

“To see matters far off, as ours show us still today,” said Fence. “Mayhap also to see things that shall be an certain conditions be met; we are not agreed.”

“Because that’s what Apsinthion could do with his mirrors,” said Ted, “and I don’t think he had a ring.”

“Well, does Shan’s Ring magnify the power of your mirrors?” demanded Patrick.

“Not ours,” said Fence. “Shan’s were, it may be, made differently.”

Patrick scowled. “What about the riddle?” he said.

“We solved that,” said Ruth.

“I don’t think so,” said Patrick. “I think that was fortuitous. I think blowing time awry is a side effect, and every time we use Shan’s Ring we do we don’t know what.”

“The red man,” said Laura, “said it worked too well and woke up powers that were better off sleeping.”

“What powers?” said Fence. “Only the Outside Powers do sleep.”

“But Benjamin said they were rising,” said Ellen, “before we ever found Shan’s Ring.” She seemed to give up. “Your turn,” she said to Fence.

“This matter’s too long for talk,” said Fence, “but I would you’d write me the story of your game as you did most commonly play’t out. In its departures from our history we may find answers.”

Laura thought this would be tedious; but it was clever of Fence to avoid asking them to talk about the game, in front of people who didn’t know what Randolph had done. “You should get another question, then,” she said.

“In this game,” said Fence, “how were events ordered?”

They all looked helplessly at one another. Fence said, “Tell me of a small thing only.”

“Fire-letters,” said Matthew. “Had you those?”

Ellen laughed. “Oh, yes,” she said. “That was my fault. Ted and Patrick sneaked off and built a bonfire without me, and I got so mad they had to make up the fire-letters on the spot.”

Matthew looked as if he wanted to withdraw the question. Randolph said, “This is how our very lives are ordered?”

“Or the other way?” said Laura, quickly.

“Yes,” said Patrick, with an approving glance. “Because in the Hidden Land there are fire-letters, when Ted and I needed to calm Ellen down with some intriguing thought, fire-letters came into our minds.”

Ellen started to say something; Laura shook her head, hard; and Ellen closed her mouth. Laura was relieved. This was no time for the old argument about who had put what into whose head. However distasteful it might be to the five of them to think that their wonderful game had been slipped into their heads by Claudia, it was far worse for the characters of the game to think that all their actions and all their history had been dictated by a bunch of children in unwitting collaboration with a renegade sorcerer. Until they knew which way—if either—it had gone, it would be better for the people who had to live in the Hidden Land to think that power flowed from them to Laura’s world, and not the other way around.

“I think we should take a break,” said Ted.

“Well, we must all to our studies,” said Fence, pushing his chair back. “Bear yourselves meekly, I beg of you; and should you see Benjamin, stand aside from his path.”