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piped in the grasses. The huge plain still gave off its scents of baked grass and dust. Laura felt very odd. Not four hours ago she and her brother and their cousins had ridden this way, resolved to give up the Secret Country. It seemed beyond the bounds of reason that now she and Ted were going to Australia with Fence. For the first time since she came to this country, the power and presence of magic, the difference it made in plans and actions, became clear to her.
    When they came to the Well of the White Witch, the western sky was still spilling color, but it was dark enough for them to see the Well’s glow. Like those unexpected and disconcerting walls of High Castle, it was a vivid pink granite. It lit the tall grass around it as if it were a bonfire.
    “Fence!” called Ted. “We usually leave the horses here.” He persuaded their own horse to stop. Laura wondered if the horses they escaped on had managed to get home yet.
    Fence had turned his horse back to them and dismounted. He came over and held up his hands for Laura, who slid down and managed to land on her feet. Ted dismounted. “Oh, hell,” he said. “Ruth always whispered sorcerous words at the horses.”
    “Well, my powers are other,” said Fence, “but I have speech enow for that.” He laid his hand on the neck of Ted’s horse and said, “Thou, my steed, may graze thy fill, for I must dismount and walk.” He went over to his own horse and repeated it.
    Ted and Laura stared at each other in the glow of the well. Their mother had sung that song to them.
    “What spell is that, Fence?” said Ted.
    “One of Shan’s,” said Fence. He pulled the three cloaks out of the saddlebags and handed them around. He put his own on, so Ted and Laura followed suit. Fence said, “Now lead on.”
    They climbed the bank above the Well, and went lightly along the wooden bridge over the little stream, and slid and scrabbled along the stream’s edge until the bottle tree bulged out of the darkness at them.
    Fence put both hands on its smooth bark and whistled under his breath. “I can well believe,” he said, “that where this tree is native, all the seasons are upsodown.”
    Ted rummaged cautiously in the hollow made by the bottle tree’s many trunks, and drew up Melanie’s sword by its jeweled hilt. It was not glowing.
    “I am tame,” said Fence, as Ted hesitated. “Pronounce.”
    “We all need to hold onto the sword,” said Ted, “and then somehow duck under this mess and come out the other side.”
    “We’re none of us so large as we might be,” said Fence, cheerfully. “Do you lead the way, and we’ll set the Lady Laura between us.” His voice faltered a little on Laura’s title, and Laura thought that Fence had almost forgotten that they were not his own royal children.
    They arranged themselves as he had said, wound their hands around the hilt of the sword, and ducked awkwardly under the bowed branches of the bottle tree. Then they were squelching over short grass that soaked Laura’s tennis shoes, and blinking in a gray light, and shivering in a straight, hard wind that whipped her hair back so fast it hurt as if Ted had pulled it.
    Compared to winter in Pennsylvania this was paltry. The grass was still bright green, almost the color of Melanie’s sword when that weapon chose to display its light; and in this colorless world, the grass seemed to glow itself. The squelchy land rolled away before them, up and down and up again in a towering slope touched here and there with shapely pale trees. Their bark was peeling off in long strips, as though the wind were tearing them to pieces. A fence, also shaking in the wind, and rattling a little, ran down the middle of the slope and then bent sharply away from them.
    “It isn’t just winter,” said Ted, tipping his head up at the gray sky and shaking the hair off his face. “It’s morning .”
    “That’s tidy,” said Fence, a little absently. “How late do your cousins arise?”
    “I