Year of the Griffin Read online

  Here he met his wife’s alarmed eyes and realized that they were, all of them, extremely nervous at this sudden family dinner. “It’s all right,” he said. “I’m not going to eat you.” He murmured the customary thanks to the gods and sat down. Everyone else but Lukin pulled out chairs and sat down, too. Lukin was unaccountably still standing beside his mother. “Sit down, Lukin,” his father said.

  As the servers came forward with oatmeal soup—oatmeal figured a lot in the palace diet, partly from poverty, partly from tradition—Lukin sidled around the corner of the table in a rather curious way to the empty chair nearest the queen. The yellowish tablecloth billowed. Beside the empty chair Princess Erola made a sort of snatching movement and Lukin appeared to sit down. But King Luther could have sworn that just for an eyeblink, Lukin had vanished completely. A server leaning to place a bowl of soup got in the way at a crucial moment, however, and King Luther could not be sure.

  That wretched boy has been doing magic again! he thought. And in spite of all I said to him! But as this was supposed to be a friendly family supper, King Luther ate his soup and asked Isodel pleasantly how she had spent her day.

  Isodel looked as if she wished he had asked her anything else. “Oh, I, er, took a nice long flight on Endymion. Right over the mountains, you know.”

  “And this made you late for lunch?” asked her father.

  Isodel colored heavily. “Yes,” she admitted. “Endymion misjudged the time.”

  Since Isodel was obviously so uncomfortable, King Luther considerately turned to his two younger sons and asked them the same question. Lyrian replied that they had had lessons in the morning.

  “But the afternoon was much more interes—” Logan said, and stopped with a yelp. It looked to King Luther as if Princess Emana had most uncharacteristically jabbed him with a fork. “I was only going to say,” Prince Logan said, glowering at his sister, “that we had a good game of hide-and-seek.”

  “Big mouth,” muttered Emana.

  “I conclude you were playing somewhere you shouldn’t have been,” King Luther said tolerantly, and he turned to Erola. Beyond Erola, Lukin was just sitting there in front of his untouched soup. “What’s the matter, Lukin? Aren’t you hungry?” King Luther asked.

  The glances his children exchanged with one another and with their mother seemed almost panic-stricken, until Emana said, “He just doesn’t like oatmeal soup.”

  “He told me that, too,” Lyrian said, with such a strong air of relief that King Luther was puzzled. “This morning,” Lyrian added earnestly.

  “While you were in your lessons?” asked the king.

  Lyrian went white. “No. At breakfast. Yes. Breakfast, it must have been breakfast.”

  “Can’t you speak for yourself, Lukin?” King Luther asked.

  Again there was the barely hidden panic. Queen Irida said, “I think Lukin has overtaxed his throat somehow, my love. I’m worried about him.”

  “Do you mean he’s made a magical hole in his throat now?” the king demanded.

  “Oh, no, no, no, nothing like that!” Irida said faintly.

  A look of cleverness came over Prince Logan’s face. “He did do some magic, though. That may be it.” The cleverness died away, and panic replaced it as his father looked at him. “You know how you can drink magical potions,” he said wildly. “Accidentally. It was brown, and Lukin probably thought it was coffee.” As the king continued to stare at him, he added desperately, “Or gravy. Maybe it was only gravy. Strong gravy, of course.”

  “What on earth are you talking about?” said King Luther.

  “He’s just inventing things again,” said Emana, glaring warningly at Logan.

  “I am not!” Logan retorted, near to tears. “I always tell the exact truth. Lukin made me promise to last year!”

  This caused his father to look at the motionless, silent Lukin again.

  “You know, Mother,” Erola said abruptly, “I think it would be best if I took Lukin to his room. And helped him lie down, you know. He doesn’t seem well.”

  “Excellent idea!” Queen Irida said, with extraordinary heartiness.

  “Just a moment,” King Luther said as Erola was pushing back her chair. He would have been a fool indeed not to have realized by now that his family was trying to keep something from him, and he was not a fool. “Lukin, come over here and let me have a look at you before you go.”

  Looks of desperation were exchanged on the other side of the table. On Lukin’s side the tablecloth billowed again. Erola and Lyrian both acquired distant, concentrating looks, and Lukin first jumped from his chair and then came sideways in jerks behind Erola. When he reached Lyrian’s chair, he did another of those momentary blinks out of existence but swiftly reappeared and came on strongly sideways again, accompanied by more billowing from the tablecloth, to stand at last obediently beside the king’s chair.

  “Hmm,” said King Luther, and put out his large blue-knuckled forefinger. Not wholly to his surprise, this finger went right through Lukin. “This is a simulacrum, isn’t it?” he said. “What’s going on? Where is Lukin?”

  Nobody answered. Lyrian sighed slightly, and the false Lukin disappeared.

  “Answer me!” barked King Luther. “I have a right to be told where Lukin is. I’m not an ogre, you know.”

  “Or not more than half the time,” Lyrian murmured.

  King Luther pretended not to hear Lyrian, but this did not improve his temper. He raised his hurt, gloomy face to look at his wife. She was staring at him from her end of the table as if he had an arrow trained on her heart. “Irida, you seem to be leading this conspiracy. Be so good as to tell me where Lukin really is.”

  Irida licked her dry lips and pushed away her soup. “I—I’m sorry, my dear. He’s at the University. He—he had my mother’s money, you know.”

  “Is he?” King Luther said with the sarcastic calm of extreme fury. “Is he now? Against my express orders and with the connivance of the rest of you. And I suppose you were late for lunch, Isodel, because you’d sneaked off to see him.” Isodel simply nodded. “No wonder”—King Luther continued—“that I haven’t set eyes on the boy for the best part of a month! Well, well. I shall just have to set out myself tomorrow and fetch him back. In chains if necessary.”

  “Oh, no!” gasped Irida.

  “Oh, yes, madam,” said King Luther. “You may handle the kingdom while I’m away. Though it may be that I’m a fool to trust you even with that.”

  “Luther!” Irida exclaimed.

  The king ignored her and rang for the servers. When they hastened in, he gave orders for a squad of guards to be ready to ride with him at dawn. “And I want a watch kept on the pigeon loft,” he said. “No one—no one—except myself is to be allowed into it.” At this the glances Isodel and Lyrian had been exchanging fell glumly to the tablecloth. King Luther saw this. “And I shall need to speak to the Chancellor,” he added. “None of my sons or my daughters is to receive any money while I’m away, and my queen only precisely what is needed for running the country. Now please bring on the second course.”

  He then savagely ate the rest of his supper, while his family picked at theirs. All of them had the sense not to pretend to be ill in order to dash to the pigeon loft, he was glad to see. He smiled grimly into his oatmeal dessert. Perhaps he did know his family after all. He knew exactly what was going to happen next. He ate cheese and then some fruit, vengefully, in order to spin out their suffering. Finally, he pushed back his chair and strode from the Dining Chamber without another word. Sure enough, behind him Isodel and Irida broke into frantic whispering.

  “But, Mother, it’s worse than that! Olga—” he heard as the door was swinging shut.

  King Luther hastened then, with long strides, but not quite running, through stone corridors and down the dank spiral stairs that led to the garden court where Endymion had chosen to take up residence. The young dragon was there as he expected, coiled up by the stone seat, finishing the sheep he had had fo
r supper. The last of the daylight shot gold and copper gleams from Endymion’s baby scales as he moved aside politely so that the king could sit on the seat and get his breath back.

  A mere half second later, so that King Luther barely had time to lounge back in the seat breathing normally as if he had been there for quite a while, Isodel pelted into the garden with her skirts hauled up around her knees and her shabby shawl flying. The light was so bright on the dragon that she did not notice her father at all.

  “Oh, Endymion, finish your sheep quickly!” she panted. “We have to go to the University again at once!”

  “Do you indeed?” asked King Luther, and Isodel jumped nearly a yard sideways. “You can come with me, on horseback, tomorrow morning, if you really want to go.”

  Isodel glared at him. She opened her mouth angrily, then shut it again and arranged her shawl. “No, thank you. I’d prefer to stay here and support Mother.”

  “Then you must certainly come with me,” said her father, “or the gods know what fresh plots you’ll be hatching.”

  “You intend,” asked Isodel, “for everyone to be as miserable as you can possibly make them?”

  “How well you understand me,” said King Luther. “You accompany me; the rest stay here without money for exactly that reason. Isodel, you know I’m not normally a tyrant, but you’ve all forfeited my trust this evening, you and Lukin most of all.”

  Isodel stood very straight. Her hands, arranging her shawl, pulled it downward so fiercely that it jolted her head forward. “Not a tyrant!” she said. “What trust?”

  Her father stared at her gloomily, wondering what had gone wrong. It was as if he and the rest of his family had somehow missed one another in the dark. Nevertheless, he did not intend to let them get away with this evening’s capers. He turned to the dragon. “You’ll have to leave Luteria, Endymion,” he said. “Now.”

  Endymion, who had been studiously bolting his sheep and keeping out of this trouble, turned a large green eye toward him in surprise. “Why is that?”

  “Because I, the King, command it,” said King Luther. “Because I know you’ll help Isodel on the sly if you’re here.”

  “But,” Endymion said smugly, “I am sworn to Isodel, not to you, sire.”

  “You’re not old enough, as dragons go, to swear to anyone,” King Luther told him. “I know dragonlore, and I know you count as a hatchling still—and a runaway hatchling at that. I’m quite well acquainted with your king, as it happens, and I’m about to send off a pigeon to him, telling him where you are.”

  A roll of immature smoky flame came from Endymion’s mouth, causing the sheep’s wool to sizzle and stink. “You wouldn’t!”

  “I would and I will,” said King Luther. “The next place I go is the pigeon loft. If you go now, you can arrive ahead of the pigeon and pretend you came back voluntarily.”

  “This is not nice of you,” Endymion said. “Very well.” He rose limberly to his feet and settled his wings with a rattle. Very gently he nosed at Isodel’s stiff face. “I shall come back later, my princess,” he said. Then he raised his wings, which, like sails, caught the wind off the mountains and lifted him at once. With a mere tilting of them, he was up and circling and ghosting away as a darkness against the darkening sky.

  Tears were pouring down Isodel’s face. “I shall do my best to make the journey as miserable for you as it will be for me!” she promised.

  King Luther nodded, seeing that she meant it. He supposed he would survive it. He was used to being rather unhappy.

  The pigeon flying east reached its destination around then. Since Ampersand was a long way south of Luteria, night had already fallen over the many painted spires, domes, and spiked cupolas of the Emir’s palace. The Emir himself had wandered into one of his gardens after dinner to gaze up at the waxing moon and enjoy the slight, sad fragrance of autumn. The pigeon was brought to him there, nestled bright-eyed in the hands of a servitor. Other servitors followed with lights, so that the Emir could see to read the message it carried, and his vizier personally accompanied them, to extract the tiny slip of paper from the tube on the bird’s leg and hand it, bowing, to the Emir.

  The Emir accepted the message, unfolded it, and peered. Lights were instantly and anxiously brought closer. “This writing is quite unacceptably small,” the Emir complained.

  The vizier snapped his fingers. A servitor handed the Emir a pair of spectacles. The Emir put them on and once more raised the slip of paper. This time he seemed able to read it. Everyone relaxed.

  Prematurely. The Emir’s face became suffused so darkly with blood as he read that the vizier secretly signed to a servitor to run for a healer. This was regardless of the fact that the Emir always categorically refused to see a healer. For the last couple of months the Emir’s heart had been giving cause for concern, and the vizier had taken the precaution of having a healer always within call, just in case. As the servitor streaked off, the Emir uttered such a shriek of rage that the man stopped as if he had been shot.

  “Villainous swine!” howled the Emir. “Order me my guard, my camels, and my weapons! I must go at once to raze that infamous University to the ground!”

  “In person, gracious lord?” the vizier ventured to inquire.

  “In person, of course!” snarled the Emir. “Those wizards have stained my honor twice now. This time those sons of dubious ancestry have also dishonored seven of my best assassins. I shall not let this pass!”

  “But would it not be better, gracious lord,” pleaded the vizier, thinking of heart attacks, chaos, and crisis and, most of all, of twenty-two sons of the Emir, none of whom had yet been designated as heir to Ampersand and who were all increasingly annoyed about it, “would it not be more convenient to set off at dawn tomorrow? Your guard would be better prepared and your gracious self much fresher.” You might even have thought better of it, he thought, but did not of course dare say.

  The Emir pulled his lower lip, scowling, and considered. The vizier made sense. In a hasty departure, someone always forgot something, and he was determined that his vengeance on the University should be meticulously complete. He intended to take the University apart, stone by stone, and its wizards limb from limb. “You are right,” he conceded. “We will start an hour before dawn tomorrow.” But he wanted to take something apart now. He looked around and saw valued servitors staring at him earnestly under lights that trembled slightly. Taking them apart would be a waste. New ones would have to be trained. Then his eye fell on the pigeon. “Take that bird out of my sight and wring its neck!” he commanded before he turned on his heel and strode back indoors. The peace of the garden was ruined now.

  The servitor obediently carried the pigeon away through the garden. One did not wring the necks of birds in the Emir’s private quarters. The pigeon had the sense not to show that it had understood everything that had been said. It was, after all, one of Derk’s clever pigeons, and most of its round body was brain. It continued to nestle trustingly in the man’s hands, until they reached the stable yard, where the servitor shifted his grip, preparing to take hold of the pigeon’s neck and twist it. As soon as it felt the man’s hands move, the pigeon clapped its wings mightily, struggled, pecked, clawed with its feet, and finally burst upward from between the servitor’s palms, to swoop—in the greatest relief—to the very top of the stable minaret. The man watched it go philosophically. Perhaps he had in mind the fact that the pigeon was the hired-out property of a very famous wizard. Perhaps he felt that the Emir had been unjust. At any rate he made no attempt to recapture the bird. It was able to roost undisturbed on the minaret all night, and when dawn was only a suggestion at the bottom of the sky and the stable yard began to bustle with men running and shouting orders, clashing weapons, protesting camels, and bundles of supplies, the pigeon took to its wings and flapped briskly westward toward Derkholm.

  FOURTEEN

  HIGH CHANCELLOR QUERIDA, who was very small, very wrinkled, and so old that she looked greenish, had been e
njoying herself hugely until the moment she looked up and saw Derk approaching on Filbert. She had found a cottage on the edge of the Waste, all by itself among swelling hills, which was the cottage of her dreams. Alone there, except for her three large tabby cats, she spent most of her days working to reduce the Waste to proper farming country again. It was utterly satisfying. She caused pools of unspeakable slime to dry up, she anchored the roving carnivorous trees into clumps of woodland and made them change their diet, and she turned the savagely mutated beasts back to what they should have been. It amused her extremely when creatures with crocodile teeth and wings suddenly found they were really rabbits. The looks on their faces were quite comical.

  These activities of course released quantities of unpleasant magic. Querida spent pleasurable weeks setting up spells in her cottage attics that caught this magic, converted it to neutrality, and sent it out into the world again. Some part of the magic she made proactively good, and each time this was sent out it changed the world, just a little, into what it might have been had not Mr. Chesney come along with his tours. It was the kind of learned but practical magic that Querida most enjoyed. And it confirmed her in her opinion that she was still the strongest wizard in the world. Kit and Blade, though probably as strong, were too young, in Querida’s opinion, to influence the very earth that they lived on.

  By now almost a third of the Waste had been returned to woods, meadows, and unpolluted streams. Querida was looking forward to tackling the mountains in the middle, where there were some very knotty and interesting nasty things. Some of these had been disturbed by Elda. Querida had not been pleased about that. She had taken swift steps to get Elda packed off somewhere where she could do no harm. In the meantime, before she took on the mountains, Querida allowed herself the leisure to spend her evenings gardening. She was at work planning and planting a flower bed for spring in front of her cottage, with her cats rather crossly curled up in the grass nearby, when she looked up to see Derk descending toward her in the sunset.