Year of the Griffin Page 12

  Corkoran’s stomach did strange things. He looked from the steady pistols by the door to the dozen or so crossbows and pistols around the walls and felt betrayed. “I thought,” he murmured to Wermacht, “you were supposed to have put protections on the kitchens at least.”

  “Nobody move, nobody try to cast a spell,” the handsome man said loudly, “and nobody need get hurt.” Wermacht, at this, made faces at Corkoran, expressing complete bewilderment that his protections had not seemed to work. Unfortunately his grimaces caught the clear blue eyes of the handsome man. “Cover those two,” he said. “Those are real wizards.”

  Several pistols and two crossbows swung toward the table where Corkoran and Wermacht sat. Corkoran swallowed. Wermacht was in robes, of course, so it was obvious he was a wizard. Corkoran would have liked to think that it was his air of magical authority that caused the handsome man to know him for a wizard as well, but he feared that it was more likely that the man had recognized him from somewhere. Damn it, he knew he had seen the fellow before, if only he could place him! “Who are you?” he said. “What do you want?” His voice came out a little high, but he was relieved to hear that it was almost steady.

  “Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten me!” the handsome man said, with what Corkoran found to be a rather hideous mock sympathy. “The years must be getting to you, Corkoran. I’ve not forgotten you. Surely you remember. You and I had a little set-to over money during Chesney’s last tour. You tossed me in the sea. Olaf Gunnarsson. Remember?”

  Olaf Gunnarsson. Of course! That evening on the docks nearly nine years ago that Corkoran had done his best to forget ever since, came back to him now like yesterday: the fishy smell of the Inland Sea, the screams of the circling gulls, the salt staining the wharf, everything. Everything, including the beat-up wooden ship towering against the sunset and Olaf towering in front of the ship on the wharf, aiming that very gold-inlaid pistol at the anxious tourists clustered behind Corkoran on the dock. Olaf had not been nearly so well groomed in those days. In fact, he had looked almost as beat up and ragged as that ship of his. He had terrified Corkoran. It was not his fault that someone had egged Olaf on to demand twice as much money for pretending to kidnap the tourists. But Olaf had assumed Corkoran was party to the deal. He had insisted that Corkoran was trying to pocket the extra money. Corkoran could even remember the exact insults Olaf had shouted at him and the way that Olaf’s crew, from the one-legged mate to the small cabin boy, stood in a row above them on the ship and shouted insults, too. Then Olaf had said he would shoot the tourists one by one until Corkoran paid up. Corkoran had been so terrified of what Mr. Chesney might do about that that he had hurled Olaf away with the very strongest spell he could muster and gasped at the tourists to run for their lives. It was not exactly Corkoran’s fault that the strength of his terror had caused him to overcook the spell. Olaf had gone whirling up over his ship, to land with a mighty splash in the water beyond, followed by all his crew. Corkoran could still hear the shouts and the splashes, like yesterday. And now the man seemed to have tracked him down.

  “So you’re still a pirate,” he said shakily.

  Olaf shook his handsome head. “Not any longer. When Chesney went, there was no profit in piracy. I’m respectable now. These days I run merchants’ protection around the Inland Sea.”

  “You mean you’re a gangster now?” Corkoran said.

  Wermacht stirred beside him, genuinely horrified. “Corkoran, don’t speak to him like that! Everyone knows Gunnarsson’s a very rich man.”

  “Shut up,” said Olaf. “Both of you shut up. I’m not here to speak to either of you. I’m here to collect my two-timing witch of a daughter. Come on, Olga. Out of there.”

  Corkoran slumped with relief. If that was all! Everyone else’s eyes turned to Olga, half hidden behind Elda’s right wing. Olga’s face had gone so white that, what with the fairness of her hair, she looked as if there were a spotlight shining on her. Corkoran remembered that cabin boy. So he had thrown Olga into the water, too, along with her father.

  Olga moved her chair until she was no longer hidden by Elda. She leaned back in it and stared across at Olaf. “How did you know I was here?”

  Olaf grinned, baring very white teeth. “Your precious University was kind enough to send me a request for money. Still after the money, are you, eh, Corkoran? So I brought the boys along and came to fetch you. We’ve been here two days now, staking the place out, so don’t feel you can get away. Come quietly and no one will get hurt.”

  “No,” said Olga. She looked and sounded quite calm, but Elda could feel her shaking. “I’m a student now. I’m studying here.”

  There was a simultaneous threatening move forward by all the men standing around the walls. Olaf held up a hand, glinting with rings and a gold bracelet, to stop them. “Now, now. This is an ancient and august institution, boys. Pretend to be civilized here at least. Olga, I came prepared to be reasonable, but if you push me, I’ll tell them all what you did. Then they’ll kick you out.”

  “I didn’t do anything except what I told you I’d do,” Olga retorted. “You wouldn’t let me train as a wizard, so I arranged it for myself. As I told you I would.”

  Olaf shook his golden head in mock sorrow. “Ah, Olga. Sparing with the truth. As always.” His manner changed. Suddenly and frighteningly his face flushed, particularly over his hawklike nose, and he bared his big white teeth like a skeleton’s. “You howling little witchy cow of a liar! I forbade you to leave! You disobeyed me! Me—Olaf! And on top of that, you go and raid my secret island and carry off my treasure! Don’t deny it! You did it!”

  “I don’t deny it,” Olga said calmly. Lukin, who had been staring at Olaf in fascinated hatred, turned and looked at her with respect. “I did tell you I would,” Olga said. “I told you quite plainly that because you’d never given me one copper of my own all my life, I’d take what I was due. I’ve worked for you for ten years now, Dad, raising winds and raising monsters for you when you went into the protection game, for nothing, not even what you pay your crew!”

  “And so a dutiful daughter should do!” Olaf yelled. “You robbed me—me, your own father!”

  “I only took enough to pay my fees and to live on for three years,” Olga said. “There’s still a lot left. Haven’t you been and counted it? That’s not like you, Dad.”

  “You robbed me!” Olaf howled. “That money was for my old age! The treasure was your dowry, girl!”

  “Then it was mine,” Olga said.

  “No, it was not!” screamed her father. “A daughter is her father’s property until he buys a husband for her. With her dowry! And you know very well, you thieving witch, that I had a husband all lined up for you until you robbed me and ran away!”

  “My timing did have something to do with that, yes,” Olga agreed.

  “Hark at her!” Olaf looked around the staring students as if he knew they were bound to agree with him. “Have you ever heard such ungrateful disobedience? Daughters have to do what their fathers tell them.”

  “Only if the other side of the bargain is kept,” Lukin remarked.

  Olaf’s glaring blue eyes, and the muzzle of his pistol, turned Lukin’s way. “What was that? Speak up, whoever you are.”

  “I said”—Lukin began. He was shaking as badly as Olga—“obedience depends on—”

  “He’s the Crown Prince of Luteria, Dad,” Olga cut in quickly.

  “Oh. Then I shan’t shoot him through the head,” Olaf said. “Through the knee, probably, when we leave. But before that I want my money.” He pointed at Corkoran. “You. Disgorge. Give me what this ungrateful hag paid you for teaching her.”

  Humor him, Corkoran thought. Get him to leave. “Yes, of course,” he said readily. “We’ll have to ask the Bursar to bring the money here, though.” He had already sent several warn-spells to Wizard Dench, and to Finn, to Myrna, to Umberto, to anyone else who might be in the University. Why doesn’t one of them do something? he thought.


  To Elda, Corkoran’s ready agreement was the final item to her disillusionment with him. She could see he was soggy with fear. So was everyone there. She felt the same herself, hating Olaf, hating the men standing there, calmly aiming weapons. Elda could feel, almost as if it had already happened to her, what it was like to have a crossbow bolt in the chest. A blunt whump. A sharp pain. Astonishment at the thought one was going to be dead in a second. The mere idea was enough to keep Elda, and everyone else there, as still as if they were all under a stasis spell. And she could see that Olaf was what Derk would call a psychopath, who enjoyed shooting people. But this did not quite excuse Corkoran, who was after all a fully qualified wizard and might have tried to do something.

  “Goo-od!” said Olaf. A long, satisfied smile made creases in his hollow cheeks. “Sensible Corkoran. Get your Bursar here then. Stand up, Olga, there’s a good girl. Your husband’s here, waiting for you.” He put his left arm around the bulky man next to him and pulled him forward. A look of despair crossed Olga’s face at the sight of him. He had a round face, missing several teeth, and a scraggy beard fringing it. His head was shaved bald, possibly to display the fact that he had earrings entirely around each ear, in golden ranks. The way he looked at Olga, the wide-legged way he walked, and the way his hands hung told everyone in the refectory that this was a man who liked beating people up and that Olga was not going to get away from him again. “Torkel,” said Olaf. “My chief enforcer. You’ve hurt his feelings, Olga.”

  “I meant to,” Olga said, and did not move.

  At this Olaf breathed in, terribly, ready to yell again, but before he could, Melissa sprang to her feet at the table next to Olga’s. “Stop it!” she cried out. “It’s quite wrong! People seem to think that just because a person’s female and pretty, they’re not supposed to do magic and they’re supposed to stay at home and have babies and be obedient and be married to a—that man! Why is that? Why? How would you like it, Mr. Olaf, if I shut you up in a house for the rest of your life and made you marry an ogress?”

  Everyone so hated Olaf by this time that Melissa would have received a rousing cheer had anyone dared to move. Everyone’s eyes shot to her, as she stood with her hands clasped to her chest and her eyes wide with feeling, looking more beautiful even than usual. Everyone thought, Well, fancy Melissa having the nerve! And everyone smiled at her, including Olaf, but Olaf’s smile was the smile of a hungry cat with a mouse under its paw.

  “A brave little beauty!” he said. “I think I’ll take you with us when we leave.”

  “You dare!” Melissa cried out. Her face flushed, and she looked lovelier than ever. “I can put terrible spells on you. I know quite a few!”

  Olaf smiled at her admiringly. “I’ll risk that,” he said, and turned to Torkel. “Where’s that blessed priest? What are you waiting for? Do you want this wedding now, or don’t you?”

  Torkel nodded vigorously and beckoned someone behind them. There was a short scuffling. The current high priest of Anscher was dragged up beside Olaf with somebody’s pistol held to his head.

  “Stand up, Olga,” Olaf said. “Come on over here this instant and be married.”

  Olga’s face drained of color entirely as she realized just how far her father was prepared to go. She stood up, quite slowly, and looked around at all the silent, staring faces. “I thought he’d give in when he found out I meant it,” she explained. “Sorry about this.”

  Somebody do something! Elda thought. She swiveled an eye at Claudia, who usually had ideas, but Claudia was still green-white and staring at that cloakrack standing on the other side of Olaf. Claudia was actually willing the cloakrack to fall sideways and knock Olaf out, but nothing happened, and Elda thought Claudia was simply paralyzed with fear. She wanted to scream.

  She toyed with the idea of giving a really piercing griffin screech. But that would cause guns to go off and crossbows to twang. It was truly awful being this helpless when everyone sitting so still in the refectory was full of magic, full of skills to use that magic, full of anger, full of hatred for Olaf. As Olga walked slowly toward her father, Elda could feel the anger like an electric charge on her skin. It made her fur bristle and her feathers stand up. She could even feel the helpless anger from the people dithering outside the door on the steps. Wizards Umberto and Dench were out there, by the feel of them. They had fetched the porter and the janitor, too, but none of them had the least idea what to do.

  Hey! Elda thought, when Olga was within three steps of the hulking Torkel and the piteous, gasping high priest of Anscher. Hey, I could use all this anger! She began gathering it in, and the magic of all the people it belonged to, pulling it in, gusts of it, blasts of it, blazing clouds of it, the indignation of Melissa, the cold fury of Felim, Ruskin’s rage, the sense of outrage from the girls around Felim, Corkoran’s fear and hatred, Wermacht’s disgust that this could happen to him, the people in the Rowing Club’s desire to batter Olaf’s head with an oar each, and Lukin’s truly formidable deep anger. It all filled Elda in instants, so that she felt like a taut, feathery balloon with it. And when she had as much of it as she could hold, she let it out at Olaf and his followers.

  She could not avoid making a small pouncing movement as she sent the anger forth. Crossbows and guns snapped toward her. She made a big target after all. But the anger got there first, and it was too late. As their fingers tried to pull triggers, every pirate there was already dwindling, rushing down the walls and changing as they shrank, to become little grayish mice running away along the wainscot. The same thing happened to Olaf and his friends by the door. They did not realize they were mice straightaway. They stood in a little gray group around the skirts of the high priest’s robe, staring this way and that in proud astonishment at the way the room had suddenly gone huge.

  Lukin made his move only an instant after Elda’s. There was one thing he could always rely on being able to do, and he did it. He opened a truly deep pit just inside the door. The cluster of men there had barely become mice, barely stared haughtily around, when they vanished away downward—along with the high priest, unfortunately. Olga braced both feet, leaned backward, and managed to step away from the lip of the chasm just as the cloakrack toppled into it, too.

  “Hurray!” screamed Elda. “Chase the rest of them down the pit! Come on, everyone!” She went bounding after the mice running and squeaking along the walls, jumping over chairs and hurdling tables, pouncing, hunting and uttering great griffin shrieks of joy. Melissa predictably began screaming, too, and climbed on a chair with her skirt wrapped around her knees. But everyone was sympathetic after the way she had stood up to Olaf. A dozen hands reached out to steady the chair with Melissa balanced on it as Elda crashed past it both ways, chivying mice to the edge of the pit and then sending them flying over into it with swats of her great golden forefoot.

  “I love mice,” she said happily to Lukin, who was standing by the pit with his arms around Olga. “I used to chase them a lot when I was little.”

  Ruskin helped Elda chase mice. A lot of them, even so, escaped into handy crannies in the wall, but when all the visible ones had been rousted out and tumbled into the pit, Ruskin bellowed, “Somebody close this hole! I don’t know how to! Can’t somebody here close this hole and get that poor priest out of it?”

  Several students came forward, but they all gave way respectfully when Corkoran pulled himself together and levitated the unfortunate priest out. Then he took pleasure in closing the pit with a vengeful smack. There. Let that be the last of Olaf.

  The priest had hurt his leg. A party of students got in one another’s way to carry him off to Healers Hall, while as soon as they opened the refectory door, Dench, Umberto, and Finn rushed inside in a gaggle, demanding to know what was going on. They joined the other party of students who went to investigate the kitchens. They found most of the kitchen staff there on the floor, tied up and gagged with dishcloths, except for the cook, who had taken a bribe from Olaf and run, it seemed. Nearly all the rest
were shaken and bruised. They were led off to the healers, too.

  Through all this activity Olga stood like a statue in the curve of Lukin’s arms. Wizards ran to and fro, belatedly putting strong wards around the rooms, and students hurried and exclaimed, but Olga did not seem to see or hear them. She did not move until Felim came up with the very largest mug of coffee he could find and wrapped her fingers around it. Olga put the mug to her mouth and sipped. Encouraged by this sign of life, Lukin and Felim led her over to sit with Claudia. Claudia put both arms around Olga, while Elda pressed up close on her other side and Ruskin squatted in front of her. Olga came to life enough to drink most of the coffee. Then she said, “I am so sorry. I’ve caused everyone to have such a terrifying experience.”

  “But so did I,” Felim pointed out. “It’s not your fault, or mine.”

  “I don’t know what you must think of me,” Olga said. It was as if she had not heard Felim.

  “The same as usual,” said Elda.

  “Except we now know why you joined the Rowing Club,” Claudia said with a slight chuckle. “You spent most of your life at sea, didn’t you?”

  Olga slowly nodded. They watched her anxiously. This was the first time she had moved like a human being and not a zombie. “But I don’t know what everyone must think of me,” she repeated.

  “One can’t choose one’s parents,” Ruskin growled, and Claudia, Lukin, and Felim added, almost together, “Unfortunately.”

  “But I did steal his treasure,” Olga insisted. “I was the only one who knew where it was. I rowed out there at night and dug it up.”