Read Online The Hidden Land by PAMELA DEAN - Free Book Online

council table was littered with books and maps and scribbled bits of parchment. The candles were pools in the bottoms of their holders. Ted felt like a pool in his chair. If he had not been exhausted he would have been terrified. He did not understand a third of what he had been told. He had never been fond of military history; what he liked were the tactics of single fights, like the one Prince Edward was supposed to have with Lord Randolph in the rose garden. Even if he had known about battles he would have been bewildered by the peculiar blend of normal and magical fighting that Fence and Randolph seemed to think the best way to manage things.
    He had gathered something of the magnitude of their problem. Fence and Randolph, for all their youth, seemed to know a great deal about the art of war. Precepts, examples from history, episodes from their own experience, came easily to their tongues. But half their well-taught and successfully exercised theories foundered on the rock of sorcery. Neither of them had ever fought a sorcerous battle. Fence was a sorcerer, but not in the school of the Dragon King. He did not know, and apparently neither did anybody else, by what principles the Dragon King ordered his powers. He did not know his enemy; and that, said Randolph, somewhere in the cold dregs of the night, was the first rule of war.
    “What about all those spies?” Ted asked.
    “King John says,” said Fence, “that of the information your spies gather about a sorcerous opponent, it is necessary to discount half.”
    “Which half, he saith not,” said Randolph. He was still pale, and there were two lines of pain or weariness between his eyebrows; but he smiled at Fence with all his old charm, and Ted saw that this was an old argument between them.
    “Indeed he does,” said Fence.
    “Ah,” said Randolph, “but which half one cannot tell until one hath the whole; and we have not the whole.”
    “We were not permitted it,” said Fence, not smiling at all; and Ted knew he spoke of the King.
    As they talked on, and the west wind drove the clouds over the plain and the huge stars of the Secret Country bloomed from the clearing sky, Ted found that those precepts rescued from the rock of sorcery would drown in the whirlpool of what ought to have been the Secret Country’s greatest strength: the Border Magic. To meet your enemy before he was ready, on ground of your choosing; to attack him in his weak places, so that he must abandon his strong ones to defend them; to feint back and forth over large stretches of ground until you had exhausted him—all these things would give you the victory. But because of the Border Magic, the armies of the Secret Country could do none of them.
    If an army of enemies set foot in the Secret Country, the Secret Country would become a wasteland. Wherefore those wishing to defend it must fight its enemies where its enemies chose to gather. It was true that the Border Magic defeated from the start all those whose intent was to own the Secret Country, to live in it, to usefully occupy it in any way. But the Border Magic opened up vast new opportunities for the vengeful, the mischievous, the malicious. The Dragon King, by all accounts, was all three. And King John had nothing to say about the Border Magic, because the Border Magic had been contrived after his time.
    “Who by? ” asked Ted, with considerable resentment. This was not so much for the contriver as for the ruthless manner in which his own invention, of which he and Patrick had been so proud, had been logically dismantled and shown to be like a badly thrown boomerang, that not only recoils upon its wielder, but smacks him in the forehead and leaves him helpless in the hands of his enemies.
    Fence shut King John’s Book and pushed his damp, flattened hair out of his eyes. His round face was a little sunken; Ted could see the line of his cheekbone, and realized with a lurch of the heart that in some curious and sidelong way, Fence