Enchanted Glass by Diana Wynne Jones

up into flat-and-dangerous, where there was a sandbank that Andrew thought might help them cross the water. While Aidan cheerfully munched his way through more than half the sandwiches, Andrew got out the map and marked in the boundary as they had found it so far. It was surprisingly regular, a steady curve that seemed to be the beginning of a large oval emanating from Melstone House near its centre. He was tempted to mark in the rest of the oval by guess and go home. But that felt likecheating. He was, now he was doing it, quite convinced that his responsibility to the field-of-care meant that he had, personally, to walk every step of its boundary. All the same, he pencilled in where he
thought
it went on the map. It would be interesting to see if it did as he predicted.
    They crossed the river by jumping from the sandbank and got rather wet doing it. Then they walked downriver to the broken bridge and went on from there.
    On this stretch, the path must once have run between two hedges and then been forgotten. They now had to struggle through the middle of a hedge, where brambles tore at their clothes, branches whipped their faces, crab apples clouted their heads and nettles tried to sting through to their legs. The pair of them forced their way on for miles, hot and out of breath, while their hair filled with seeds, until Aidan’s new fleece no longer looked new and their boots were heavy with mud.
    Then it was suddenly different. They staggered out into a proper lane with a fence on the other side of it. A notice fixed to the fence said:
    PRIVATE GALLOPS
KEEP OUT
    “What does that mean?” Aidan gasped. He took his fleece off and shook seeds out of it.
    “It’s where they exercise the racehorses,” Andrew said. He leaned on the fence and looked at the long stripes of green turf running from right to left across their way. “You know,” he said, “this boundary must be very old. I can see I’m supposed to look after half these gallops, but not the other half. They must run right across our boundary. That wouldn’t make sense unless the gallops are much newer.” He climbed the fence and swung over on to thick, thick cushiony grass. “Come on, Aidan. We’ll have to do a bit of trespassing.”
    Aidan quailed. Suppose someone called the police…
    “I’m sure it’s all right,” Andrew told him. “They only ride the horses out in the early morning, I know that. I’ll be surprised if we see anyone at all.”
    He strode off, dropping divots of seed-filled mud from his boots as he went. Aidan followed him, cringingly. The green spaces were only divided from one another by lines of longer grass full of wild flowers. They spread out over the hillside roughly in the shape of a bunch of bananas, so open and exposed that Aidan expected the two of them to be seen and shouted at any second. And, in a way, he was right.
    The boundary curved more abruptly here towards theend of the village, making the narrow end of the oval Andrew had predicted. They traced it up a steep hill and slantwise down again, to where they could see red brick buildings that were obviously the Stables and the big house that went with those, down among trees in the distance. Here someone on a horse came thundering up the turf towards them. Aidan turned round and looked desperately about the empty grass for somewhere to hide. He wondered whether to throw himself flat.
    But Andrew was waving cheerfully at the rider. The rider waved back and thudded happily up to them. The horse gave a protesting sort of snort as it was pulled up. Stashe, on its back, looking surprisingly glamorous in a hard hat, smiled down at them.
    “Hello, you two,” she said. “Lost? Or just doing a bit of trespassing?”
    “The latter,” Andrew said in his most professor-like way. “We’re tracing the boundary of my field-of-care.” He was terribly pleased to see Stashe so unexpectedly, but not quite sure how to show it.
    “Oh!” said Stashe. “Is
that
what it is? It