“Fence,” said Celia, in a wrung-out voice, “we should be gone from this place.”

Laura had been listening to this suggestion all evening. But as Fence stood up without word and held the door open for the rest of them, she realized what it meant. No food; no rest; an uneasy seat on the jouncing horse, riding through the dark and cold—with, quite possibly, a host of practical, humorous, inhuman enemies at their backs. This time Ellen didn’t smile.

They went without speaking back to Prospero’s room. The door stood open. Patrick was asleep on Prospero’s bed, with the cat on his stomach. All their luggage was piled in a corner, a blot on the room’s tidiness. Prospero sat at the desk with three leather-bound volumes the size of pattern catalogues at a fabric store laid out before him. He glanced up as they came in, took one look at Fence, and sat back in the chair, his austere, bearded face very grave.

“No profit,” said Fence.

“Fence, it’s not thy fault,” said Matthew.

Fence walked over to the desk, and recited to Prospero the course of the bargaining for the lives of the royal children.

“Indeed, Fence, I see no fault therein,” said Prospero. “Their offers were impossible to be taken up, but those are the most liberal terms I’ve heard from these lords in a century.”

“Oh, aye, but look you,” said Fence, calmly. “An I angered them not, either they had been more liberal yet, did that liberality spring from a lessening of their habit and not from malice; or else they had been so ungenerous, did that liberality spring indeed from malice, that we were teased with no possibilities. Those terms they gave us will prick our dreams in years to come, so near were they to be accepted.”

Laura’s burden of guilt, having this speech laden on top of it, gave way suddenly to an exasperation so pure there was no space for caution in it. “Oh, for heaven’s sake!” she burst out. “You’re as bad as Randolph! You think everything has to be your fault.”

“That were a pity,” Fence said. “One snick-snatching conscience is aplenty for Ted’s court, thinkst thou not so?”

“Fence, leave it be for an hour!” said Celia. “Sort out the blame at leisure, do you have any again; but now let us be gone.”

“No, peace a moment,” said Fence. He laid one hand on Prospero’s open book. “What work have you done here?”

Prospero sat forward. “I have been nibbling at the shell of that hard nut, Apsinthion,” he said. “Look you on this page.”

Fence sat down in the other chair and began to read. Laura tried to read the page upside down, but it looked as if even right way up it would be very difficult. It resembled the homework she dreamed of not doing, a handwritten list of words and definitions. Ellen walked around behind Fence, peered over his shoulder, said, “What hideous spelling,” and wandered away.

After a moment Fence said, “There’s one new to me.”

“Aye,” said Prospero. “Wormwood: the abode of a dragon.”

“Well!” said Ellen.

“But are dragons shape-shifters?” said Laura.

“No; there’s the rub,” said Fence.

“Well,” said Laura, “Apsinthion could have been the name of the house. But we didn’t see a dragon.”

“The answer to the third riddle I have also,” said Prospero. “The Outside Powers.”

“Well,” said Ellen, “it’d take an Outside Power to keep a dragon.”

“What about the first question?” said Laura.

Prospero shook his splendid wizard’s head. “Even the riddle is new to me,” he said. “If you will but sleep here for the waning of the night, I’ll search this matter for you.”

“Matthew?” said Fence.

Matthew, who had been moving restlessly in and out of the doorway, slowly shook his head. “Better we were gone,” he said. “If they reach an accord, they will be after us straight.”

“They cannot be after you herein,” said Prospero.

“We cannot linger herein; we have an errand in the north,” said Matthew.

Prospero sighed. “Do you return this way, then,” he said, “and I shall have news for you. Eat something before you go.”

After a brief discussion Matthew agreed that they could eat something. Prospero went off to arrange for it. Matthew took his place and he and Fence read in the large books. Patrick woke up and demanded an account of the bargaining. All he said to Ellen’s recitation was, “They sound crazy to me. You can’t bargain with crazy people.”

“They aren’t people,” said Ellen, “so maybe they aren’t crazy.”

“They might as well be,” said Patrick.

The three of them sat on Prospero’s bed in a gloomy silence. Laura looked from the gems on the white cat’s collar to the golden globes of the lamps to the glowing caves of the coals in the fireplace. These last melted and brightened instantly. She saw a vast formal garden under a hot, bright sky. Around it reared high white walls, not the grayish white of High Castle, but brilliant, smooth, and blinding as snow in the sunshine. Two figures in the garden’s center crossed swords. One of them was tall and angular, with a wild mop of black hair, and moved with a reckless abandon all too familiar. Laura clenched her hands together. The other was tow-headed, yes, and moved more cautiously. But he was almost as tall as Randolph, and he had a moustache.

Randolph and Andrew, fighting in a rose garden; but not the one at High Castle. This was not what she had hoped to see; she was looking for the young man in the bare room who quoted “James James Morrison Morrison.” This one she might have to do something about.

“Fence?” she said. “Would they know some way here to counteract the pestilent spell-song?”

“Oh, I know the way,” said Matthew. “One must but catch it in a fistful of fire. What we know not is the tune that maketh the fire-letters.”

Laura sat very still. She remembered the tree in her dream, burning at the tune she played; and the young man, writing on a large sheet of waxy paper, quoting the same song. “I bet I know,” she said.

Matthew came and sat on the bed. “Tell me,” he said.

He looked extremely thoughtful when Laura had explained her reasoning. Patrick, however, just rolled his eyes.

“What’s the matter with you?” said Ellen. “Do you have a better idea?”

“No,” said Patrick, “I haven’t. She’s probably right. But God damn it, she shouldn’t be. It’s shoddy reasoning. It’s all intuitive. It’s not logical. It’s like poetry,” said Patrick, as if that were the worst thing he could think of.

“It transcends logic, nitwit,” said Ellen.

“It may,” said Patrick, “but you two sure don’t. You haven’t even gotten that far.”

“Let’s try it,” said Laura to Matthew.

They went over and rummaged in the pile of luggage. Laura’s pack was almost too cold to touch. She wrapped an extra shirt around her hand and cautiously lifted out the flute. Matthew said, “Prospero, may we have the use of paper?”

Prospero gave him one huge waxy sheet of it, and pen and ink. Celia had built the fire into a towering forest of flames. Matthew moved to sit on the hearth, and dipped the pen into the ink bottle. Laura trailed after him and sat on the floor. She couldn’t play the flute through a shirt. She unwound the cloth and picked up the flute. It felt very heavy, but was no colder than the pack. Perhaps it would give her chilblains. She had always wondered what they were.

Fence and Prospero had abandoned their books to watch; but when Laura looked inquiringly at Fence, he only smiled.

“Now, Laura. If the whole of the song burned a tree,” said Matthew, picking up the pen, “one line thereof shall serve us well. Play the tune of the line the young man did speak, until I cease to write.”

Laura did. Matthew wrote, covering both sides of the large sheet densely in minute characters. Finally he lifted the pen and nodded; he, or something, had timed his last line to end with hers. Laura laid the flute across her knees and caught her breath.

Matthew flattened the paper and dropped it into the fire. It did not curl or discolor, but the lines of ink ran together, into the center, swirled like dirty water going down a drain, and then ran up, not down, and spun up the chimney. The fire sank back to a bed of orange. All the wood Celia had fed it was consumed already. Matthew fished out the paper and returned it to Prospero.

If they were lucky, they had caught “Good King Wenceslas” in a fistful of fire. “Should I play ‘What if a Day’?” said Laura.

Celia and Matthew looked inquiringly at each other. “Something stronger,” said Celia. “‘And From the Sword.’ ”

“Laura?” said Matthew.

“Say the words,” said Laura, “and I’ll see.”

Matthew said precisely, “ ‘And from the sword, Lord, save thy heart by my might and power, and keep thy heart, my darling dear, from dogs that would devour. And from the Dragon’s mouth that would thee all in sunder shiver, and from the horns of Unicorns, Lord, safely you deliver.’ ”

“Whose might and power?” said Celia. “If Laura playeth those words, Matthew, to whose might and power dost thou commend Randolph?”

“It needs must be someone’s,” said Fence.

“This is a message, of my wife,” said Matthew; “not a prophecy nor an abjuration.”

“I’ve got it,” said Laura, listening to the back of her mind. She was both pleased and terrified that Randolph should be commended to her might and power; she knew, perhaps more clearly than anybody, what might happen to him. She would think very hard about the danger of Andrew and the warning of the unicorn, and perhaps these things would come to Randolph when he heard the message.

“Play, then,” said Matthew.

Laura played it through, holding up carefully her thoughts of Andrew and the unicorn. She liked the tune. She wondered if she would remember it, or any of them, if she ever got an ordinary flute into her hands. This one grew colder and colder as she played, as it had not when she played the phrase from “James James Morrison Morrison” for Matthew. She could hardly hold it for the last few notes; and dropped it gratefully.

Prospero came back with their food, which was mugs of soup and an assortment of dumplings stuffed with everything from broccoli to raisins. They ate it; and thanked him; and packed up; and left Heathwill Library. At Prospero’s suggestion, they left without their horses, through a tunnel intended to supply the library in case of siege. Patrick, who was offensively cheerful and observant after his nap, was delighted with this means of egress; but the adults were too tired or preoccupied to answer his questions, and Ellen and Laura were too tired to be interested.

Just before midday, when Laura had determined that she was going to die, and it was only a matter of whether she announced this fact first or simply fell in a piteous heap, they came to a long, low stone building with a brick chimney and one window. Nobody asked what it was doing there; they simply went inside. Laura only realized that she had gone to sleep by waking up again. It was sunset. They went on their way again.

They walked all night, under a blazing of stars like sugar thickly sprinkled on a cake, and in the spaces between their sticky clusters a sky so black it looked to Laura like a pit she could fall into. The land they traveled over seemed to her a tiny, made thing, a clutter of gravel held together with ice and the little feathery sticks of the evergreens. She kept drowsing off and then jerking awake, because it was not sleep she would fall into, but the endless empty sky. After the third time this happened, she was seriously considering tickling Patrick as a diversion, when Ellen said from beside them, “Can’t we sing?”

Celia laughed. “How please both a dragon and a unicorn?”

“I was thinking of pleasing myself,” said Ellen. “Something long and rousing.”

“Kipling,” said Patrick.

“Oh, well thought!” said Ellen, and promptly began to sing.

Those last few words, spoken honestly with flesh and breath, falling naturally on the real air that Laura moved in, left behind them a frozen silence. The wind had died; the party from the Hidden Land stood in a perfect stillness, their soundless breath congealing in the dark air, and looked at the speaker.

Laura recognized the unicorn, by its gold eyes and by something in the timbre of its voice. It was Chryse. She seemed much larger; and, as with the other unicorn they had spoken to, although she did not shine herself, there was light around her. But her breath, too, made clouds in the frosty air, and from the wicked horn with its spiral of violet there hung a dingy tendril of dead vine.

“That,” said Chryse in her ringing voice, “is the oddest music that ever I was summoned—” She broke off. Laura had never heard a unicorn do such a thing. “Fence,” said Chryse. “What dost thou here among the barren rocks?”

“Seeking your gracious presence, lady,” said Fence. Laura, accustomed to the way in which he had spoken to the other unicorns and to the Lords of the Dead, with that threadbare courtesy just covering his wariness, his disdain, his distrust, actually looked away from the unicorn to stare at Fence. He meant it. This one he respected.

“My brothers sent me word thou wast at Heathwill Library,” said Chryse.

“Heathwill Library,” said Fence, “is an abode of monsters. The Lords of the Dead do take their ease behind its walls.”

Chryse made an abrupt and discontinuous sound, like a cat walking on a keyboard. There was an uneasy silence. “The strangest summons,” said Chryse at last, “and the strangest news. What are these others with thee? Will you come and take what ease I can afford you?”

“Lady,” said Fence, “for this relief much thanks.”

They followed Chryse on a winding path through ice and rocks, and down into a valley that held a little wood of pine trees. It was much warmer here. They trudged up to a thick hedge of some evergreen, and shrugged off their packs. Matthew stacked them under the hedge, and Laura said to Ellen, “What kind of hedge is that?”

“Yew,” said Ellen.

Fence joined them and said quietly, “Be somewhat scanter of thy knowledge in converse with Chryse. Do not lie, but do not speak more than you must.”

“I’m sure Chryse knows what kind of a hedge it is,” said Ellen, rather testily.

“It will like her an thou answerest thus pertly,” said Fence, unruffled, “but beware. She’ll lead thee on to those delights, and thou wilt speak more than thou shouldst. Thou mayst strew dangerous conjectures in ill-breeding minds.”

“I thank you for your good counsel,” said Ellen, and did him a courtesy.

“Oh, go your ways,” said Fence.

Matthew and Celia joined them. Fence said, tilting his head and looking from her to Matthew and back again, “Look the two of you to my weaknesses.”

He walked away, and they all followed him, to a wide clearing where a pale light as of the moon behind clouds told them Chryse was waiting. She invited them to sit down, and Laura at least was very glad to do so. The pine needles were thick on the ground and very soft. Laura thought belatedly that it was perhaps impolite to sit while Chryse stood, and also that they would all have stiff necks from looking up at her. But once they were all seated in a half-circle—Matthew, Celia, Fence, Laura, Ellen, and Patrick—Chryse lay down neatly, as the unicorn they had hunted last summer had done, her forelegs stretched out before her like a cat’s and her plumy tail spread fanlike on the scattered needles. She did not look smug; she looked expectant.

“You are welcome,” she said. “Make me known, Fence, to your companions.”

“Lord Matthew,” said Fence, “King’s Counselor of the Hidden Land.”

Chryse looked down her long white horse’s nose at Matthew, and said, “They speak well of thee in Heathwill Library.”

“Celia,” said Fence, while Matthew seemed to be struggling with a reply, “Onetime Queen’s Counselor, and the King’s Counselor and musician.”

“And Belaparthalion speaks well of thy music,” said Chryse.

Celia smiled; Fence said, “Laura.”

“Well met,” said Chryse. If she noticed the sudden absence of title or designation, she didn’t mention it. Laura was not sure she was relieved. Chryse said, “Thou hast played the flute of Cedric and found the unicorn in winter, bereft of the cardinal.”

“But, lady,” said Laura, startled into speech, “it’s October.”

“Is it?” said Chryse.

“Ellen,” said Fence.

Chryse said, “Thy spirit liketh my sister.”

“Hers liked me too,” said Ellen.

“And Patrick,” said Fence.

Chryse said, “Think on’t.”

Laura, bewildered, looked at Patrick, who was scowling, but not in the manner of somebody who has been presented with a senseless remark.

“Well met,” said Chryse again. “Now. What meaneth this embassy?”

Fence cleared his throat, pushed his hood back from his face, and spoke of the action of the Dragon King that had led to the war in August. He told of the doubts Andrew had sown among the King’s Council; he told of the death of the King, which he termed “doubtful” and managed to imply it might have been in some way engineered by the Dragon King. He described the battle. He told of the death of Conrad, the only experienced general the Hidden Land had. He told of the death of the new King, and the bargain made with the Judge of the Dead for his release. Chryse, who after all had been there, interrupted him at this point.

“That was ill done,” she said. “For we did not receive Edward.”

Fence looked as if he wondered how she knew. He said, “I myself, lady, am loath to lose Randolph. But that is by the way, save as an instance of the farflung trouble the meddlings of the Dragon King have caused us, who have troubled him nothing. There is no honor in him; no statecraft will bind him to be quiet. Wherefore we come to give you a gift, and to ask in return the gift of your intervention. Celia?”

Celia reached under her cloak and drew out a wrapped bundle. She spun the long windings of cloth from it as if she were unrolling a carpet, and the swords of Shan and Melanie tumbled to the ground and lay there shining in pale blue and ghostly green. The stones on their hilts winked like stars between clouds. They sparkled in green and blue; but it was gold and red that Laura saw in them, a huge glow of gold light and a red, sinuous form coiled in the middle of it like a worm in an apple. She blinked, and the sparkles steadied, and the glimpse was gone.

Chryse stood up. “Glory and trumpets,” she said. “I will have these swords. For my part, an you give them up, I’ll read the Dragon King a prohibition shall stay him to the shape of a polecat until all these deeds are but a song the minstrels cannot trace to’s makers. But my part is not all. We’ll find Belaparthalion by and by. Now, look you; I will have also more knowledge than thou, Fence, didst tell my sister, touching these swords and their history. Is there aught thou wouldst have of me in return for that tale?”

“Fence!” said Ellen. “The three riddles.”

“What!” said Chryse, in alert and joyful tones. “Riddles all Heathwill cannot read?”

“Dangerous conjectures,” said Patrick, leaning across Laura and addressing Ellen in a disgusted voice, “in ill-breeding minds.”

“Thy tongue breeds iller,” said Fence.

“Fence,” said Chryse, in a voice that for the first time held no shadow of laughter. “Thy dealings with us were ever circumspect.”

“How, lady,” said Fence, in a pleading tone laced lightly with irritation, “should they be otherwise?”

“Dost thou know,” said Chryse, still soberly, “what time’s gone by since any trusted us?”

“That same that’s passed,” said Fence, as if he were painstakingly explaining long division to a slow pupil, “since you did warrant it.”

“An you try us not,” said Chryse, with the humor back in her tuneful voice, “how may you know do we warrant it or do we not?”

“Is this not wonderful?” said Fence. He sounded rather desperate; but there was a touch of irony in his voice also. “You have pleased it so, to punish me with this, and this with me, that I must be your scourge and minister.”

“Thou art a wizard,” said Chryse.

Nobody moved or spoke; Laura’s nose itched, and she would not have scratched it for anything. The two swords on the ground, like stained glass through which the sun is shining, cast little motes of blue and green in all directions, blemishing Chryse’s white coat and making the clearing look like a scene under water. Laura squeezed her eyes shut briefly, and in the dazzle of red and yellow afterimages she saw again the golden glow and the red snaky thing within it. These things were in a tower room, but not any in High Castle. The golden glow was a great globe; the red snaky thing in it was a dragon, all whiskered and tendriled and shot with streaks of black. It was looking at her out of one black eye with a pupil as red as a garnet.

Nothing in any of her visions had looked at her before. To lie in cold obstruction and to rot, said a crackling voice, like no voice she had ever heard in the back of her head. The sight snapped out suddenly, as if the dragon and not she had ended it. Laura opened her mouth, remembered Fence’s abjurations to Ellen, and shut it again.

The silence stretched on a little longer. Then Fence said, “Ellen. Ask thy riddles.”

“What beast is it,” said Ellen, “the unicorns pursue each summer?”

Well, thought Laura, Chryse should certainly know the answer to that one.

“The dragon,” said Chryse.

“And before what beast doth winter flee?”

“The dragon,” said Chryse.

“And what beast maketh that which putteth the words to the flute’s song?”

There was another silence. “The dragon,” said Chryse, and chuckled richly, like three low notes of a pipe organ.

“The dragon?” said Ellen. “Not—ow!”

Patrick had leaned over and hit her in the arm; but it was Fence who said, “Hold your tongue.”

“Heathwill thinketh otherwise?” said Chryse.

“Send to them, lady, and ask,” said Fence.

“Well,” said Chryse. “Tell your tale.”

Fence told it, appealing occasionally to Matthew or Celia or Laura, and once to Patrick, but never to Ellen, for details. The sun came up before he had finished. Chryse twitched her tail from time to time, somewhat as a cat might do and somewhat as a horse might. She made no comment when he had finished.

“That,” said Patrick, with relish, “is a packet of news and no mistake.”

Chryse made an obscure hooting sound. Laura wasn’t sure what it meant. Chryse said, “Fear not this bargain, Fence. I’ll call Belaparthalion.” She stood up, with considerably more grace than any of the rest of them, scrambling hastily to their feet at Fence’s urgent gesture, could manage. Then she put her long white head back, like a donkey about to bray, and made sounds far more melodious.

In Laura’s mind the words marched along with the music. “Wake: the silver dusk returning / Up the beach of darkness brims, / And the ship of sunrise burning / Strands upon the eastern rims. / Wake: the vaulted shadow shatters, / Trampled to the floor it spanned, / And the tent of night in tatters / Straws the sky-pavilioned land.”

Which was very impressive, but Belaparthalion did not come. Laura was afraid that she knew why. “When you know these things,” the man in red had said, “then what manner of thing I am you will know also.” He had not said, I am the thing that is the answer. If he was indeed a dragon-keeper, she had just seen the dragon he kept. That tower room had not looked as if it were in the bare, blocky, modern house she and Ted had visited; but it might be. She might have seen Belaparthalion; but she might have seen some other dragon, in the present or the future or the past.

The others were milling around, shaking the blood back into their feet, yawning, and scanning the sky. Laura looked up too, but there were only two crows. Chryse stood still, her head cocked as if she were listening for the beat of scaly wings.

Fence was watching Chryse. The irrational dread of Laura’s dream clutched at her stomach. There was something that Fence must not find out; that was what that dream had told her. Fence had intimated to them all there were things Chryse ought not to find out, that they should say as little on any subject as they could get away with. Both these circumstances and all the natural inclinations of her character told Laura to keep her mouth shut. But she thought also of her talk with the unicorns, long ago it seemed now, when they had hinted to her in their cheerful way what might be the consequences of a failure to shout abroad every vision she had.

“Chryse,” said Laura, not caring if it was rude. “What color is Belaparthalion?”

“Red, curdled with black,” said Chryse, readily.

“Somebody’s got him,” said Laura. “I saw him. He’s in a big, glowing golden globe.” She paused to disentangle her tongue, thinking, with a saving lightness, say that five times fast. “In a high room somewhere; a house, I think, not a castle. At least, the walls aren’t stone. And he says, ‘To lie in cold obstruction and to rot.’”

“Does he so?” said Chryse, slowly, and with a very unpleasant intonation. “Melanie’s elder brother said so also.”

“Chryse,” said Fence, very gently, “have a care.”

He and Chryse looked at each other, and Celia and Matthew looked at the two of them.

“I know where to seek him,” said Chryse, suddenly. She took four strides for the edge of the clearing, and paused. “I can carry one,” she said.

“Laura?” said Fence. “ ’Twas thy vision.”

It seemed impossible to refuse. Well, Laura thought, it hadn’t killed her last time. She took a step toward Chryse, and considered again. The worst thing about being a coward was the risk that you would choose the wrong moment to stop being one.

“I’ll go if you think I should,” she said to Fence. “But Ellen would like to go; and you, or Matthew, or Celia, might be a lot more use.”

“But not Patrick,” said Patrick; his voice was unperturbed, but he had chosen to say something.

“Send Patrick!” said Ellen. “He’s the one who needs it.”

“Patrick is incorrigible,” said Matthew. “I’ll go, Fence.”

“Lady?” said Fence.

And Chryse, the omnipresent glint of humor magnified and shining like the sun in every syllable, said, “Patrick likes me well. Let him come and be witness.”