Year of the Griffin Read online

  The next time she met him, Flury seemed to be searching along the edges of the courtyard, as if he had lost something. “What are you looking for?” Elda asked him.

  “I thought I might catch some mice,” he told her.

  Elda was not sure by now that anything Flury said about himself was true, but she said, “They won’t go near you. Griffins have too much cat in them.”

  “I daresay you’re right,” Flury said dejectedly.

  Elda hated people to agree with her in this dismal way. She explained rather tartly, “The mice get in all the students’ rooms, but they never get into mine. I smell of danger to them.”

  This was true. Claudia vouched for it to Ruskin, and the next day Ruskin implored Elda to sleep in his room. His food-spells had all been eaten. Felim looked up from his calculations and said, “It would be much more use if Elda were to sleep in the kitchens.” Wizard Dench, horrified at the waste of food, had been and put guard-spells on all the cupboards and the cold store, but the mice still got in.

  “Don’t be silly,” said Elda. “You know I can’t get up Ruskin’s stairs or squeeze through the kitchen door.”

  Felim once again looked up from his scribbling. Elda assumed he was doing his usual equations, full of x =yz or things that looked like big tick marks, until he said, “Does daffodil rhyme with Isodel, do you think?”

  “No!” said everyone, and Olga added to Lukin, “If ever I saw a heart-whole woman, it’s your sister, Lukin.”

  “Yes, Felim, honestly,” Lukin said. “Everyone who sees Isodel falls madly in love with her, but she hardly even notices.”

  “That is beside the point,” Felim answered loftily. “To write poems to a cruel love is the height of artistry.” Then, while Lukin was muttering that this was what they all said, Felim added, “About the mice. The assassins are certainly in partnership with the mice and assassins are usually magic users, if only in a small way. So they can certainly circumvent the Bursar’s spells.”

  “Then I’ll go and cast some spells on the kitchen!” Ruskin said, exasperated.

  “You couldn’t do worse than Wizard Dench,” Claudia agreed in her driest way. “Come on, everyone. We’ve got a class. I’m interested to see if it’s Flury or a bar stool taking it.”

  It was Flury. Flury seemed to be taking all Wermacht’s classes, always with the same apologetic air, which seemed to suggest he was only humbly filling in until someone turned Wermacht back again, but always teaching things that Wermacht had never even mentioned. He was taking the second- and third-year classes, too. Elda discovered he was when second- and third-year students began to turn up among the first-year classes, saying Flury had told them to come and catch up on the basics.

  “Has Corkoran asked you to take Wermacht’s place then?” Elda asked Flury.

  “I did speak to Corkoran, yes,” Flury said. “This University is not in a very thriving way, you know. Are your brothers likely to visit again soon?”

  “Blade and Kit?’ said Elda, instantly distracted from Flury’s activities. “They said so. I don’t know what’s keeping them.”

  It had taken Kit, Blade, and Callette, too, more time and effort than they believed possible to get their parents, and Florence and Angelo, and all the horses, and the winged runt piglet that Derk was rearing by hand, plus all the luggage Mara thought necessary, safely to the coast and then onto a ship. It was some days after Elda spoke to Flury before they were through and could return to Derkholm at last. There Callette said she was exhausted. “It’s keeping my temper for a whole week,” she said, and she went away to sleep in the spiky gothic den she had built for herself beside the Derkholm stables.

  Kit and Blade, who did not find their parents quite as annoying as Callette did, looked at one another. Kit said, “We said we’d see Elda.”

  “And I promised to do something about that girl with the cloakrack,” Blade said. “That’s been worrying me.”

  “Let’s go now then,” said Kit, and took off for the University in a thunder of wings. Blade waited on the terrace, with his feet up on a chair, drinking a quiet mug of tea, until experience told him that Kit would have the University in sight. Then he sighed, stood up and stretched, and translocated there, too.

  That day Flury had given Wermacht’s class on Basic Ritual and was now moseying around the backyards of the University in his usual way. One way or another he had explored nearly all of them. This particular yard backed onto the empty stables Flury had found to sleep in, but to get there, Flury had had to fly in over the stable roof. There seemed to be no door or gate to the yard at all. But once he was there, he discovered that it also backed onto the kitchens. “Ah,” Flury said.

  Lion-size and sleepy-looking, Flury wandered about the weedy flagstones, scratching idly at little piles of rubbish, turning over old horseshoes and pieces of crockery, always getting closer to the larger pile of rubbish in one corner. When he was close enough to it, he pounced. Mice ran out of it in all directions, squealing. Flury took no notice of them and dug with both sets of talons. There followed a few seconds of violent activity, and then Flury stood back on his haunches, becoming the larger size that was probably natural to him, holding a bundle of small, black-clad human figures. Ignoring the way they shouted shrilly and writhed and struggled, he calmly sorted through them.

  “Six,” he said. “Assassins always go in sevens, I heard. Where’s the other one?”

  Six small black arms pointed. Flury turned his head down to look at the tiny black cockerel almost between his hind legs. “I see,” he said. “That doesn’t seem quite fair.” Spreading his wings for balance, he picked the cockerel up with his left back talons. He brought that leg up to his front ones and transferred the chicken to the bundle of assassins he already held. As soon as it reached its companions, it became a small man dressed in black, too, who seemed to be struggling not to cry. “That’s better,” Flury said as he uncurled himself. “And I suppose you’ll all be wanting to be your proper size now.”

  The small men became very eloquent about this. Their arms waved, and their voices shrilled.

  “Yes, all right,” Flury said. “But I’m afraid there’s a catch. You’ll be the right size ten miles from here. If you come any closer, you’ll be small again.”

  The small men, at this, became even more eloquent.

  Flury shook his head. The tiny voices were making his ears buzz. “I don’t care if you haven’t fulfilled your mission. You seem to me to have done enough. The wretched fellow is wandering about looking as if a house has fallen on him.” Ignoring the assassins’ further attempts to scream that Corkoran was not the target!, he spread his wings and flew out into the countryside with them. There were several farms about ten miles off where Flury had been cadging food, and he wanted his lunch.

  He had described Corkoran exactly. Around the time Flury was finishing an excellent lunch, Corkoran was shambling around the edge of the main courtyard on his way to the White Lion, oblivious of students streaming out of Myrna’s lecture. Corkoran had forgotten all about teaching this last week. Most of his students had realized and considerately not turned up. Corkoran was not interested in that or in anything much any longer. He barely looked up when a great black griffin coasted down to land beside Wizard Policant. Nor did he look around when Kit’s arrival was followed by the whipcrack of Blade appearing. Elda’s happy shrieks of greeting only made him wince.

  “Oh. You’ve got rid of the cloakrack,” Blade said to Claudia. He felt rather cheated.

  Claudia saw how he felt. “It was another accident,” she said. “The wizard who did it is now a bar stool.” She chuckled about it. Her eyes glowed, and a delighted greenish dimple appeared in one cheek.

  Blade gazed at her laughing face and discovered that he did not mind too much about the cloakrack. He said, “Oh, no! Really?” and laughed, too.

  But here Felim and Ruskin advanced on Blade and Kit with sheets of paper. “We think it may be possible to translocate a man to the moon,” Fe
lim said, “by a combined boost of shared power. Would either of you agree?”

  “In a bubble of air,” Ruskin said, holding up a page of drawings. “Like so.”

  As Blade took the papers with considerable interest and Kit leaned over his shoulder to look at them, too, Olga explained, “Elda was terribly upset when Corkoran’s moonship was destroyed. She got us thinking of other ways to get him there.”

  Griffins do not blush. Elda wriggled and felt ashamed. “He looked so devastated,” she said, wishing she had never, ever told anyone that Corkoran reminded her of a teddy bear. “But you don’t have to bother,” she added earnestly.

  “Well, I can’t see why anyone would want to go to the moon myself,” Blade said, “But this looks as if it could work. Kit’s got the strongest boost of anyone I know. What do you think, Kit?”

  “Let’s take another look at that air bubble,” Kit said. “We wouldn’t want to kill him.” He skewered Ruskin’s page of drawings on a talon and studied it closely. “I’d double this,” he said at length. “You always need a safety margin, and it would make the outside harder if you packed more compressed air in. What say, Blade? No time like the present. Isn’t that Corkoran over by the main gate? Shall I fetch him here?”

  Claudia said swiftly, “He might find that a bit overwhelming.”

  “We’ll go,” said Olga.

  Corkoran was on his way through the gate when running feet approached him. He looked around with slow surprise at Olga on one side of him and Lukin, very breathless, on the other.

  “You do still want to go to the moon, don’t you?” Lukin panted.

  Now they were having a joke with him, Corkoran thought.

  “If you do,” Olga said, tossing a sheet of her hair off her face, “Kit and Blade can send you there now.”

  Kit and Blade, Corkoran thought. Two of the most powerful wizards there were. He looked back over his shoulder, and there indeed was Kit, with Blade looking child-size against him, conferring with Ruskin, who looked child-size against Blade, all of them passing pieces of paper about. Felim stood beside Elda, evidently explaining, with strong, spell-like gestures of his brown hands, and Claudia was beside Felim, nodding. Perhaps Olga meant what she said. Perhaps this thing was possible after all.

  Corkoran straightened his plain white tie. “Let’s give it a try, anyway,” he said.

  They led him back to the statue, where Kit explained quite briefly what they meant to do and then braced himself low on the ground with his legs spread for balance. Blade swiftly organized the rest of them into a ring around Corkoran, so that Elda was clasping Kit’s right foreleg and Ruskin his left one, and Blade himself took the final place facing Kit, between Claudia and Felim, while Lukin and Olga stretched their arms wide on the sides to make the ring as even as possible. “Go,” Blade said.

  The air bubble began to form around Corkoran. He looked at it, marveling. It was expanding and hardening to a beautiful misty blueness when Flury came flying gently back across the Spellman Building. As soon as he saw what was going on by the statue, he gave a shriek of horror and went into a dive.

  “No!” he screamed. “Not with whatshername in there!” He hit the courtyard in what was probably the worst landing a grown griffin had ever made and, stumbling, legs sliding in four directions, wings beating for balance, tried to hurry toward the statue. “Stop!” he shrieked.

  As he shrieked, the misty blue bubble expanded to enclose everyone around Corkoran. Flury could see all their heads turn to look at it and the mystified expressions on their faces for an instant. Then the bubble vanished, blasting Flury backward with the force of its going.

  He picked himself up miserably and hobbled toward the statue. “That’ll teach me to teach people things, won’t it?” he said, and looked uselessly up into the cloudy sky. “I suppose they’ve all gone to the moon now.”

  “No,” said the statue of Wizard Policant. “They missed the moon.”

  Flury limped another step and stared into the statue’s stone face. “Er, did you speak?”

  “Yes. I said that they missed the moon,” the statue replied. “Two of them had jinxes. It’s been irritating me profoundly that no one’s done anything about them.”

  “Did they take enough air?” Flury demanded.

  “Enough air for what?” asked the statue. “I’ve no idea where they’ve gone.”

  SIXTEEN

  QUERIDA ARRIVED AT lunchtime. As the house she owned in the city was let out to a friend, she went straight to Healers Hall, where she arranged stabling for Hobnob and lodging for herself, and then made sure that she was invited to lunch there. She entered the University an hour later at the head of a procession of three young healers, each of whom carefully carried a cat basket.

  Flury peered down at her from the roof of the Spellman Building. He could see at once who and what she was. But Querida’s expression was that of a snake looking for something to sink its fangs into. He decided to give her a while to get settled.

  Querida made straight for the Council Chamber. When Flury crawled in there, at his very smallest and meekest and least noticeable, there were already three dead mice laid in a row under the table by Querida’s tiny feet. Querida had piles of paper and ledgers in front of her on the table, together with a saucer of milk—Sabrina having refused utterly to eat on the floor after the trials of the journey—and she had Wizard Dench and Wizard Finn standing on either side of her. Both wizards looked thoroughly miserable.

  “I can just about forgive the upper floor of this building being turned into luxury flats for wizards,” Querida was saying, “but the two other things I will never forgive. Dench, be kind enough to explain how you came to let Corkoran squander all this money.”

  Wizard Dench squirmed. “The moonshot, you know. It’s a very prestigious project.”

  “Prestigious!” hissed Querida. “Prestigious! Corkoran is no more able to get to the moon than you are. And you know it!”

  Flury went smaller yet and tiptoed away to a corner. He could tell he had not given Querida nearly enough time to get settled.

  “As for you, Finn,” Querida continued, “had you no idea that the wards here—Who are you?” she snapped at Flury. “You there! Stop crawling about like that!”

  Flury stopped and turned to her respectfully. This was a wizard to be reckoned with. Very few people could see him unless he wanted them to. “I’m Flury, ma’am.”

  Querida frowned. “Flury?”

  “Flurian Atreck,” Flury admitted. “And I’m afraid I’ve got some more upsetting news—”

  Querida’s brows went up. “The wizard? I’ve heard of you, though I had no idea you were a griffin. And I’m sorry. If you were hoping for some kind of high-powered conference with wizards of this continent, you’ll have to wait. We have a crisis here. The University wards are all but down.”

  “I know, ma’am,” said Flury. “That’s why I stayed here. I was in charge of four exiled griffins, you see, with a contract from my government to get them painlessly neutralized—”

  Sharp as a striking snake, Querida demanded, “Was one of them called Jessak?” Flury nodded. “Then I do not love you, Flurian,” she said. “You sent them to me, didn’t you?”

  “Not exactly,” Flury protested. “I laid it on them to go where they would be neutralized. It was a tricky matter, ma’am, because they were largely immune to magic, and I couldn’t neutralize them myself because they were distant cousins. I brought them here first, thinking the University would be full of people who could do it, and I had rather a shock when I found that the place was pretty nearly powerless. I had to call for help, or young Elda would have been hurt. Then when they’d gone, I stayed to see if I could restore the power here. But I can’t. I think it’s because Corkoran refused to enroll me as a member.”

  Querida looked at the ribbed stone ceiling. “Typical. I get angrier with Corkoran with every minute that passes. Finn, you were about to say where you think Corkoran is, I think.”

&n
bsp; “No, I wasn’t,” Finn said. “He’s, er, he’s unavailable.”

  “Nonsense!” hissed Querida. “Unless he’s really gone to the moon, that is.”

  “That’s just the trouble,” Flury said unhappily. “He has. Only I think they missed.”

  They knew they had missed when they saw the moon whip past in the distance. Corkoran moaned at the sight. His teeth chattered in his gray face, and he clutched his arms around himself, trying not to look at the deep stars in the black sky outside the bubble or at the tiny, shrinking blue ball of the earth. “I was always afraid of heights!” he said, not for the first time.

  “Do shut up!” Elda snapped at him. She was slightly ashamed of snapping, but she was having a harder time than Corkoran, being so much bigger. She had never expected not to be able to stand with her feet or push with her wings. Kit was trying to wedge her in, but he had nothing to brace on either. They were slowly wheeling over and over inside the sphere, along with everyone else wheeling in different ways, and it was making Elda feel sick. She had not expected the extreme cold either. It was eating through fur and feathers, into her wings particularly, until she felt she was turning into a block of ice. Ruskin was resourcefully muttering heat spells, and Blade was backing him up, but the sphere seemed to shed the heat as fast as they made it. And there was no way to thicken the outside because, as they quickly discovered, there was nothing out here to thicken it with.