Read Online The Dubious Hills by Pamela Dean - Free Book Online

What’s the matter?”
    “ Nothing,” said Arry. “I mean—I
thought something was the matter with you.”
    “ Are you sleeping?” said
Oonan.
    “ Are you?”
    Oonan drew his knees up and wrapped his arms around
them. “Sit down,” he said, very patiently, “and tell me why you
came to see me.”
    “ I wanted to know if you’d had any
more wolves.”
    “ You may well ask,” said Oonan.
“We brought the sheep down in the afternoon, and Wim stayed with
them, and I went back up to the meadow.”
    “ And?” said Arry, though she
thought she knew.
    “ I had wolves, yes,” said Oonan.
“Two of them. Not the sheep. They came to see me.”
    “ What did they do?”
    “ You tell me,” said
Oonan.
    Arry sat down on a stool. “They looked at you,” she
said. “As if they were thinking what was wrong with you. And they
went away.”
    “ Is that all?”
    “ First they showed you their
teeth.”
    “ How many visited you?”
    “ Just one. The big
one.”
    “ The same?”
    “ I think.”
    “ Well, did it limp?”
    “ Oh. I don’t—I think I would have
seen, but maybe not.”
    “ Mine didn’t. They weren’t very
large, as wolves are said to go.” He rubbed his eyes. “There was
something wrong with them. Was yours in pain?”
    “ No.”
    “ I didn’t think mine were either.
Something other was wrong.”
    “ That’s what I think about Con,”
said Arry.
    “ It’s not what I know about
her.”
    They looked at each other for a long time. The wind
blew the smell of muddy sheep in through the open door, and the
cold green smell of spring, and a thread of woodsmoke from some
more responsible person’s fire.
    “ Who should we ask?” said
Arry.
    “ We’d have to ask Mally. This is
outside the bounds of anything she’s said to me.” Oonan rolled back
and stared into his fireplace.
    “ I was just to see Mally
yesterday. She gave me some stories.”
    Oonan looked at her again, but said nothing.
    “ I couldn’t tell if they were
knowledge or history.”
    “ Ask Sune.”
    “ I didn’t think,” said
Arry.
    “ I’ll come with you. I want to ask
her what the books say about wolves.”
    7
    Sune lived in a small house halfway down the hill
from Halver’s. Usually she was up at the school most of the day;
but this morning they found her at home, spinning. Her back hurt,
her feet hurt, and her stomach was uneasy. As they put their heads
around the door, the baby gave an enormous kick. The spindle sprang
out of Sune’s hand and wrapped its yarn around the rocker of her
chair.
    “ I’m going to call this one Knot,”
said Sune, a little grimly. She ran the offending yarn through her
hands, shrugged, and let it fall. “What is it? Is the baby
coming?”
    Arry began to laugh. What else should Sune think,
with both the Physici and the Akoumi come to see her
unexpectedly?
    “ No,” she said, after looking at
Oonan in case he knew something she didn’t. “Mally gave me some
stories, and I don’t know what they are.”
    She handed the cedar box to Sune, who said, “There’s
tea in the kitchen,” opened the box, and began to read.
    Oonan went into the house’s other room and came back
with three mugs on a tray. Sune had the only chair, and all the
cushions, so Arry sat on the hearth rug. Sune moved her lips when
she read, and frowned heavily— not from the baby, who had quieted
down again. She took the mug Oonan handed her and held it without
drinking. Arry drank hers. Peppermint. Good for the uneasy stomach.
She wished Sune would drink some.
    Outside a robin sang in the willows down by Sune’s
stream, and occasional bursts of laughter came out of the school.
Finally Sune looked up. “Why did Mally give you these?” she said.
She rolled them neatly as she spoke, and put them back into their
box.
    “ I was asking her about Con,” said
Arry. “And if having one’s parents leave could be
hurtful.”
    “ Ah,” said Sune. She had no lap to
lay the box in, and dropped it on top of her