Laura was astonished. She had never in all the Secret Country seen a town. This one had a grim-looking wall around it on three sides; on the fourth was the river. The hills above the wall were striped with stubble fields and tidy rows of grotesque apple trees. The wall had a gatehouse with a tower. The town was three streets wide and four long, with two wooden piers and small boats moored to them. Its houses were of stone, some with thatched roofs, some with slate. Laura could see a man working in a bed of dark red flowers; and two children throwing a stick for a dog; and a cat sitting atop one of the crenellations of the gatehouse, washing its foot.

“What’s that?” said Ellen.

“Feren,” said Fence.

They rode up the road toward the gate. Fence stopped them about ten feet away from it, rummaging in his belt-pouch. While they waited, the heavy door of the gatehouse creaked its way up, and a man ran out. He wore a brown tunic and breeches and a red cape. He had brown hair, and a brown beard, and very large blue eyes. To Laura’s relief, he did not remind her of anyone.

“Milord Fence!” he called. “What’s amiss? Hath—” He stopped, staring not at any of the party, but at their horses. “Who are you?”

“Your lord Fence,” said Fence, and held out the ring he had taken from his pouch. It was of twisted silver, with a blue stone that, just at the moment, glowed faintly. The sun had disappeared behind the trees, and the ring in Fence’s grimy hand looked like the first star of evening wandered from its appointed rounds.

The man in the road must have thought it looked like something else. His face was sick. “We have your horses within,” he said. “You took the boats and rowed upriver two hours since.”

“And had I this ring then?” said Fence.

“Milord, you did not. Your—their answers came so pat; they knew my name, they knew of your letters.”

“And,” said Celia, “there was a kind of glamour on them that so pleased you, you considered not, but obeyed them.”

The man’s face relaxed, as if he recognized in Celia somebody who could put matters right. “You know our weakness,” he said.

Celia smiled. “Everyone born in this country were well advised to spend a century outside it. Exile sharpeneth the eyes.”

“And the wits,” said the man in the road, as if he were capping a quotation. He looked back at Fence. “Milord, I am sorry for our carelessness. I think your foes are very great. Will you take their horses?”

“I’ll take my boats,” said Fence.

“You’ll take your money, an it please you,” said the man; “but the boats are taken already.”

Fence pressed one palm to his forehead and let his breath out. “Matthew?” he said. “Celia?”

“I think we must ride,” said Matthew.

“The road’s good,” said the man. “’Twill take you halfway to the house of Belaparthalion.”

“Have you lodging for the night,” said Fence, “or is that taken also?”

“That we have,” said the man.

“Deliver it, then,” said Fence.

“Is there time for this?” said Matthew.

“The horses need rest, if we do not,” said Fence.

Matthew smiled. “Take the horses of those that removed our boats.”

“Take them by all means,” said the man in the road. “We have little enough fodder for our own beasts; and though we’re well paid to house these, neither we nor they can eat silver.”

“Celia?” said Fence.

“I don’t advise it,” said Celia. “They’re too like to turn to sticks and land us in the river; or worse, drown all our victuals there.”

“We could send our message, if we’re somewhere Laura’s fingers can thaw out,” said Ellen.

Laura’s fingers were not so much cold as sore and swollen, but she supposed they would perform better in a heated room.

Matthew looked at his wife; she raised her eyebrows; Matthew sighed heavily and turned to Fence. “Know you this man?” he said, gesturing at the man in the road, who stood comfortably with the air of somebody watching a medium-good magic show.

“As well as he knoweth me.”

“Which is to say, not well enough?”

If anybody had spoken about Laura in that tone of voice, she would have been indignant, whether she understood what was being said or not. The man in the road looked resigned. Fence said to him, “Will you, of your courtesy, bring the horses to us here?”

“An you take them away, aye.”

“Until I see them, I know not or I shall or I shall not take them.”

“Why are you so eager to get rid of them?” said Patrick to the man in the road.

Laura thought this was a shrewd question. The man in the road said, “As I did say, we have not their maintenance.”

“Why’d you take them, then?” said Patrick.

“For that they did, we thought, belong to your party, toward whom we have some obligation.”

Fence said, “An we take them not, I’ll leave you a letter wherewith you may have from High Castle the fodder to maintain those beasts the winter.”

The man moved his thoughtful blue gaze from Matthew’s irate countenance to Celia’s judicious face, past Patrick’s considering expression and Ellen’s delighted grin. He glanced briefly at Laura, who tried to look alert but feared it had come out startled. Finally, last of all, he looked at Fence. Fence quirked the corner of his mouth.

“I’ll bring them,” said the man, turned smartly, and went back through the gate.

“All right, quickly,” said Patrick. “What is going on here?”

“I sent letters,” said Fence, “asking for the hire of three boats. A party in our likeness hath come before us and taken the boats, leaving behind their horses, which belike are no horses at all.”

“And do you think you know who this party was?”

“I know what they were,” said Fence.

“Shape-changers,” said Ellen. “Since they came in our likeness, you know,” she added to Laura.

“Does that mean the Dragon King sent them?” said Patrick.

Laura didn’t want to think about it. Apparently Fence didn’t either; he got down off his horse and handed his reins to Celia. Matthew did the same. Laura wondered what Celia could be expected to do if one of the four horses she was suddenly in charge of took fright or felt perverse. But the horses just nosed about the road and bit off the grass in its cracks, seeming far more disposed to go to sleep than to cause trouble. Perhaps Celia had been taking lessons from Benjamin.

The man in brown and two children in yellow came back out of the gate, leading three nondescript brown horses. One had a white blotch on its nose and another had three white stockings. They looked as bored as the Secret Country horses. But the Secret Country horses suddenly flared their nostrils and put their ears back and showed the whites of their eyes. Laura felt the one she and Patrick were sitting on jump and tremble. Celia said something in some language Laura didn’t recognize, and the horses stood still; but they kept their ears back and looked distinctly uneasy.

“No closer,” said Fence.

The three leading the strange horses stopped where they were. Fence and Matthew came forward, cautiously. Fence said, in an extremely prosaic voice, “They’ll shape me in your arms, Janet, / A dove, and but a swan: / And last they’ll shape me in your arms / A mother-naked man. Cast your green mantle over me, / I’ll be mysel’ again. Wherefore,” said Fence, much more vigorously, “thy mantle, Ellen.”

Ellen stood up in her stirrups, pulled off her green woolen cloak, and flung it at Fence, who caught it neatly and in his turn hurled it at the three horses. It billowed hugely, like a queen-sized bedsheet being snapped open, and settled over all three horses and one of the little girls. There was a tremendous commotion from under the green folds, and a certain amount of heaving and stamping. The man in brown backed hastily off the road, climbed the slope until he came to an evergreen with branches like the rungs of a ladder, climbed that too, and appeared to settle in to watch the fun. Laura wanted to emulate him, but Patrick was holding the miserable horse firmly where it was, and she would attract attention if she got off.

The heaving mantle slumped suddenly to the road, to the accompaniment of a huge blast of hot air and a pelting of dust. Laura and Patrick both sneezed; Ellen coughed; the grown-ups just put their hands over their eyes.

When the dust had settled, Ellen’s half-sized green cloak lay meekly in the middle of the road. The man in brown sat in the tree and laughed. One child crouched in the ditch, gaping.

“Wow,” said Patrick. Laura couldn’t remember ever having heard him say that. Patrick did not like to appear impressed.

“Wherefore laugh you?” shouted Matthew to the man in the tree.

“I feared they were monsters,” gasped the man; Laura realized that he was not so much amused as hysterical. “I thought them poisonous, direful, dangerous; and what were they but a puff of air and a screeching as of cats?”

“What were they but concerned elsewhere?” said Fence, grimly. He walked forward, picked up Ellen’s cloak, and shook it briefly. The child in the ditch sneezed. “So, thou’rt real enough,” said Fence. Laura deduced from this that shape-shifters didn’t sneeze, and that Ellen’s mantle had known which creatures were shape-shifters.

Fence helped her back onto the road. She backed away from him and ran, which Laura thought ungrateful.

“What about the other kid?” said Ellen.

“An she’s gone, she’s one of them,” said Fence. He surveyed his party. “Celia,” he said, “I do commend thy stubbornness. I think we must stay the night.”

In the little town, they were given a square room, about ten feet by ten, with a stone floor and a fireplace, and tapestries on the walls. The tapestries had largely to do with quarrying rock and building castles. Nobody seeming inclined to trust the food offered by the denizens of the town, they ate their usual rations, except that Celia crumbled up the oatcake in boiling water and made porridge. It was hot, and as far as Laura was concerned, that was all you could say for it.

After this vexing meal, Laura and Ellen sat on a pile of all their bedclothes, looking dismally through one of Patrick’s physics books and trying to find something to laugh at. Ellen rather liked “mean acceleration,” but Laura was not finding anything very funny. Mean acceleration just sounded like what a horse did when it wanted you to fall off. They had a branch of candles to read by; its light was bright but rather wavery. Patrick had the fire, and was, infuriatingly, reading the only piece of fiction he had brought along.

Matthew and Celia were sitting on two more wooden stools, holding hands, their heads leaning against one of the quarry tapestries and their eyes shut. Fence had spread a battered map the size of a game of Twister out on the floor, and was kneeling in the middle of it, scowling.

“Fence,” said Matthew, “Heathwill will furnish us a newer map.”

“The man of Feren,” said Fence, “did say the road ran halfway to the House of Belaparthalion.”

Laura looked up from an uninspiring picture of two wooden carts with roller-skate wheels being smashed together to demonstrate the conservation of momentum, straight into the firelit swirls of Fence’s robe. She saw Claudia and three black cats standing in tree-dappled sunshine on the bank of a stream. The cats were fishing; Claudia appeared to be making sarcastic remarks, which they ignored. She was still wearing the red checked dress in which she had greeted Ted and Laura on their return to Illinois. It was limp. Claudia looked different. She was still elegant, as she leaned against a rowan tree and laughed at her cats. She was one of those people of whom Laura’s mother said that they had elegant bones. But the conscious grace she had displayed even walking in the damp woods gathering herbs was missing. She was somehow more likeable and less alarming than Laura had seen her. She cocked an eye at the wet-footed cats, shook her head, sat down on a convenient rock, and picked a white crocus the size of a tulip.

Laura leaned forward to see better, and found herself staring at a mud-smeared nebula on Fence’s gown. She rubbed her eyes. Claudia was where they had been the night before. Why should she be following them on foot, with three cats?

“Laura Kimberly Carroll,” said Ellen, glancing up from the physics book and fixing her with a look as stern as any of Agatha’s, “what is the matter with you?”

Laura shrugged.

“Fence,” said Ellen. “She’s seen something.”

“Seen what?” said Fence, to Laura.

It was no trouble to tell her visions once she was cornered. She obliged. This one was not very dramatic, except for Claudia’s location. Her attempt to describe in what way Claudia seemed likeable was not a success. Ellen and Patrick stared at her, and Celia made a very sharp remark, for Celia, about people who killed children but cherished cats.

“You never should have called that cardinal, Ellie,” said Patrick, laying his pen down. “I bet that’s how she found out where we were.”

“But how could she get there so fast?” said Ellen. “I think she was following us all along.”

“With three cats?” said Laura. “Cats that fish?”

“Well,” said Matthew, who still had not opened his eyes, “if travel one must with cats in the wilderness, let them by all means be cats that fish.”

“I wish we knew more about her powers,” said Patrick.

“Her greatest deeds meseemeth are performed with the aid of the windows in her house,” said Fence. “She hath none now.”

“She can escape the spell of Shan’s Ring,” said Ellen.

“Or,” said Patrick, rather smugly, “the spell of Shan’s Ring has a limit to it.”

“She knows what I taught her, and what Meredith taught her,” said Fence. “That sufficeth to follow us, but not to catch us.”

“Let’s go in the morning early, all the same,” said Matthew.

“Wherefore,” said Celia, “let us to bed now.”

“Celia,” said Laura, with a silent apology to her sore hands, “shouldn’t we try to send the message about Belaparthalion?”

Celia got up, came across the room less briskly than usual, and examined Laura’s hands. “Well,” she said, “an it be short, and we have the horse-salve for it after.”

“That stuff smells awful,” said Ellen. “I have to sleep with her.”

“Canst thou play the flute?”

“You know I can’t.”

“Well, then,” said Celia.

Laura dug the flute’s case out of her bedding and took out the mouthpiece. It hurt her hands with a cold throb, not so much on the surface as in the bones. She dropped it onto the physics book. Celia touched it with the tip of her finger, let her breath out softly, and, picking up the mouthpiece in one hand and the next piece in the other, began fitting the flute together.

“No use, I’ll warrant, in warming this?” she said.

“No,” said Laura.

“Well,” said Celia, “may there be much music, excellent voice, in this little organ.”

She handed it back to Laura. Laura put it to her lips hurriedly. It played “Good King Wenceslas.” Always before, she had played the flute. She had not always known how she played it, or what, before she started, she would be playing; but it was she who had played. This was the flute. Ellen stared at her, and then at Patrick, who had closed his book and was looking exasperated. But Matthew leapt from his resting place with a face full of consternation, and Fence stood up in the middle of his map, both exclaiming disjointedly.

Laura stopped after one round of the tune, laid the flute down on the physics book again, and shook her hand hard.

“May heaven confound them!” said Celia.

“What’s the matter?” said Patrick.

“That’s a pestilent song,” said Matthew; “it’s a spell that turneth messages from their ways, delivering them amiss.”

“Who hath set it?” said Fence.

“Worse, who in th’ other party shall know of’t?” said Celia. “Will Lady Ruth warn her other, or be silent?”

“I wouldn’t count on anything,” said Patrick. “The help we get from our others is erratic.”

“Can Andrew play the flute?” said Celia.

“Not to my knowledge,” said Fence, with an astonishing bitterness; “but then, what is that?”

He flung this last remark at Matthew, but Matthew only pressed his hand over his high forehead and back into his flaming hair, and shook his head, and walking across the room, stooped for the flute and picked it up.

“I’ll tell you this,” he said, hefting the flute with one hand and patting Celia’s arm with the other. “This showeth either an unpracticed hand, or a confident. There are spells little harder that do merely twist a message into some plausible semblance, whereby those receiving it may keep unsuspecting. This spell saith most loud that one desireth our silence.”

“Claudia’s confident, I imagine,” said Patrick.

“And in some matters, it may be, unpracticed also,” said Fence, more calmly.

Ellen said, “Does this mean Randolph got the earlier message telling him to watch out?”

“It should,” said Fence, frowning. “Celia?”

“It should,” said Celia, not very confidently.

“You people are so vague,” said Patrick. “Why is that?”

“Because magic is an art, not a science, smart-ass,” said Ellen.

“And none of us is master of this art in special,” said Celia. “Matthew is a scholar, who knoweth but may not perform; I but dabble; in his own field Fence knoweth much but in this he must be cautious. Content you until we are come to Heathwill Library. Its council may be more sharp than thou desirest.”

Laura rubbed her stinging hands together. It was infuriating not to be able to send a message. It was enough to make you wish for a telephone.

“Frown not so earnest,” said Celia; Laura jumped. “Come to bed; we must be up betimes.”

Laura dreamed about home again. She had lost her third bus ticket in two months, and was afraid to tell her parents. She had been using her allowance as bus money, but Ted caught her at it. She was having a furious argument with him, in which he promised to help her talk their parents out of cutting her hair if she would confess to the loss of the bus ticket. When she wouldn’t agree to this, Ted threatened to tell Fence. Even in the dream this seemed odd to Laura. She had a powerful feeling, though, that telling Fence would be disastrous. She was trying to explain this to Ted when Celia shook her awake. She got up extremely indignant, with no one to vent her outrage on.

They left when the sun had barely cleared the eastward hills and the mist from the river hung blurrily in all the valleys. Laura went on feeling cross. She also felt shy of Fence, as if she were in fact keeping some secret from him because it would hurt her to have him know of it.

“If this is a good road,” she said to Patrick, “I’d hate to see a bad one.”

“It’s a road,” said Patrick. “The point is not that it is done well, but that it is done at all.”

Ted had once said something similar about a batch of cookies from which Laura had omitted the salt and baking soda. She bared her teeth at Patrick’s sleek head, so like her brother’s; and leaned her forehead into the slick nylon of his purple pack, trying to think of something soothing. Somewhere very far away, a voice remarked, Can honor’s voice provoke the silent dust, / Or flattery soothe the dull cold ear of death?

Laura jerked her head up and looked wildly around. The countryside revealed itself in layer after layer of tree-furred hills, all red and yellow and orange, as the mist dwindled. The sky was a murky blue that set off the brilliant trees better than a cleaner color would. Three crows swooped by on the left, lower than the road but high above the bottom of the valley whose upper rim they rode along. Another voice, closer, said, Where shall we gang and dine the day-O?

“Fence!” said Laura, and the caution of her dream caught her by the throat. She heard herself say, “When’s lunch?”

“When we arrive at Heathwill Library,” said Fence. He was riding next to them, and he frowned a little, as if he knew that was not really the question she wanted to ask.

“Are we that close?” said Patrick.

“We’ll be there by sunset.”

Not marble, said the distant voice, in a tone that clutched Laura’s heart and made her tighten her grip on Patrick, nor the gilded monuments / Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme; / But you shall shine more bright in these contents / Than unswept stone besmeared with sluttish time.

“Hey!” said Patrick. “Laura, you’re breaking my ribs. What’s the problem?”

“It seems a long way down,” said Laura.

Fence was silent, but Laura could feel his troubled look. She shut her eyes and tried to think of nothing. Give to airy nothing a local habitation and a name, said somebody. Laura held very still, and the voice said nothing more.

It was a long way down to the valley; they descended the slope very slowly in a series of switchbacks. The road got better; Laura wondered if, among their other crimes, the people of Feren had neglected the roads around their town. Then she wondered where this thought had come from. Princess Laura, perhaps. They descended into the valley and rode between the rows of towering hills. The day grew warm, and cool again. There was a great noise of birds, and the sun disappeared behind the hills on their left.

“Are we there yet?” said Ellen, in a pseudo-whine.

“Just fifteen minutes,” called Patrick; and they both laughed.

Then Ellen said in a heartfelt tone, “I’m starving.”

“Good grief, if you’re starving, Laura must have died of hunger an hour ago,” said Patrick.

Laura felt that this remark did not deserve the dignity of an answer. She was surprised not to be hungry. Maybe Princess Laura was above such things as food. Dost thou think, said the distant voice, that because thou art virtuous there shall be no more cakes and ale?

“They’ll feed us well in Heathwill Castle,” said Fence.

“Oh, yeah?” said Patrick. “What’s to keep the shape-changers from taking our dinner the way they took our horses?”

“Shape-changers,” said Matthew, from behind them, “eat the air, promise-cramm’d.”

The distant voice said, You cannot feed capons so.

“They knew me not at Feren,” said Fence, “but at the Library they will; their arts are very great.”

“Heh,” said Patrick.

They rode on up the valley. Eventually it broadened out before them, and in the blue twilight they saw a tower on a hill. It looked grim, with its thick walls and dry moat, its stingy arrow-slits and toothy crenellations. But there was something wrong with the crenellations. Laura saw as they drew nearer that each one was topped with a large earthenware pot full of flowers. She supposed one could tip them off onto the heads of enemies.

“What!” said Ellen. “Somebody’s yelling poetry.”

“Saying what?” said Matthew.

“ ‘When wasteful war shall statues overturn,’ ” said Ellen, rather wildly, “‘and broils root out the work of masonry, nor Mars his sword nor war’s quick fire shall burn the living record of your memory.’ ”

“That’s a building spell,” said Fence. “It is no matter—but I knew not thou hadst the ear for sorcery.”

He broke off abruptly; remembering, Laura supposed, that Princess Ellen might not have had such an ear but there was no telling what Ellen Carroll had. Lord, said her own private voice, we know what we are, but know not what we may be.

Nobody challenged them from the tower. The road bent eastward; a stream crossed its path, and they clattered over a wide stone bridge. Laura heard water running, louder than the stream, and saw a river on their right. Soon there loomed ahead of them in the growing dusk the glimmer of a very high circular wall. As they rode closer Laura saw that within that wall, on its riverward side, was another higher one, and within that, in the middle of the river itself, a higher still; and within that, one last wall, highest of all. Laura thought that the question “Are we there yet?” might have a variety of answers.

“Which gate?” said Fence.

“The market, since we come so late,” said Celia.

They rode up to the first wall, and were admitted by a couple of guards who merely looked them over without comment and then stood aside. They rode into the second town Laura had seen here. Everything seemed to be made of stone: little stone huts with thatched roofs, high stone houses with roofs of slate and red tile, stone walls enclosing gardens and fountains, stone benches, stone statues, stone pillars standing about with no visible purpose, stone pillars with stone lanterns on them. People were coming with torches and lighting these as they passed. They rode slowly past one cross-street and five or six houses, and into a wide square. Suddenly the air smelled of overripe fruit, and spoiled vegetables, and frying, and spices. Laura had a vague impression of striped awnings rolled up, and shuttered windows.

They rode on through the empty square, past more houses, and took the first right turn that offered itself. And there was the second wall. It belonged to what looked like a miniature castle, with a gatehouse and corner towers. Light shone through all the arrow-slits, and there were no flowers on the crenellations. A woman in shirt of mail came out to them, holding a torch. She looked surprisedly at Celia.

“My lady, I thought I saw you yesternight,” she said.

“You were the more deceived,” said Celia.

“Saw you me also?” said Fence.

“Oh, aye, and all thy crew,” the guard said, gesturing at the rest of the party.

“Did they swear aright?” said Fence.

“Oh, aye.”

“They might mean harm to us, Fence, and none to Heathwill Library,” said Celia.

“Well,” said the woman, “can you swear aright?”

“I do swear by the mercy granted to Shan and the three precepts of Belaparthalion,” said Fence, “that neither I nor any of my train come with the will or the power to do harm to Heathwill Library, its members, or those whom it doth protect.”

“That’s more than they could do,” she said; “I had to speak it to ’em.” She looked again at Celia. “You did say that you’d forgot all civil discourse, being so long in a barbarous land.”

“An you stop now, I can forgive,” said Fence, rather sharply. “May we go our ways?”

“Heartily,” she said.

They were challenged, as they came out the other side of the gatehouse, by two more guards, who accepted their account of themselves amiably enough, but took issue with Fence’s desire to ride the horses further. There was plenty of room, they said, here in the Refuge Close; and Heathwill Castle’s stables were crowded.

“Who’s here?” said Fence.

“I couldn’t say,” said one guard, in a sour tone that Laura thought was directed not at Fence, but at those about whom he couldn’t say.

Fence seemed disposed to argue, but Matthew touched his arm and he was silent. They dismounted, and handed over the horses to the guards, and were given a handcart for their luggage. Somebody came out of the darkness to pull it for them. Laura was too stiff and sleepy to pay much heed. They had to wait while a great deal of grinding and clattering went on: the drawbridge being let down. They walked across it, over the dark-sliding, fresh-smelling river, and came to the next wall. This one was so high it disappeared into the darkness. Another gate, four guards, their voices cautious and Fence’s patient.

“I thought as much!” exclaimed one of the guards.

“But they did take the oath,” said Fence.

“Well, in that case the quarrel’s yours,” said the guard, “but I take it ill that we should be so trifled with you. Do you send for us an they confound you.”

They were allowed into a torchlit, oddly shaped courtyard inside which loomed the highest wall of all, a great blocky building just like an apartment complex, dotted with squares of yellow light. They went along its length to a far door, and up a narrow stair, and into a large, square room, blessedly warm, with a table, and chairs, and a bewildering clutter of objects on every available flat surface. A fair-haired man in yellow sat writing at the far side of the table. His moving elbow was going to knock a stack of books into his inkwell any moment, thought Laura, and she woke up a little.

The man who had pulled their handcart and guided them up the stairs tapped on the frame of the door, and cleared his throat, and finally shouted, “My lord!”

The man at the desk looked up, and smiled, and stopped smiling to lay down his pen. “Fence?” he said.

“This time for sure,” said Patrick.

“So I believe,” said Fence.

The fair man stood up. “Well, we must sift these matters. But for the moment, welcome,” he said, “to Heathwill Library.”

As they filed into the room, Ellen caught Laura by the sleeve. “That’s him!” she said. “That’s Michaelmas!”

The voice, very close now, so close that for a moment Laura thought it belonged to the fair man, spoke pleasantly. It said, Up, lass: when the journey’s over / There’ll be time enough to sleep. And then it said, Welcome indeed, to Heathwill Library.