Year of the Griffin (18 page)

“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.”

“You told me that,” said Lukin, “when you lent me the money for these clothes. Remember? It must have taken real nerve. And it must have taken even more nerve to hang on to the treasure and only sell a little bit in each town you went through. Me, I'd have got rid of it all at once, even if it would have made it easier for him to trace me.”

“But now
everyone
knows I'm a thief!” Olga said.

“No one I've spoken to blames you,” Ruskin said. “They all say they wouldn't have dared. And it was all stolen goods, anyway, wasn't it?”

“Besides,” added Claudia, “everyone knows you only took what you thought you were due.”

“We-ell,” said Olga, “I took a bit extra for being beaten.” A tear trickled down one of her angular cheeks. She went on in a slow, faraway voice, “He didn't treat me too badly when I was his cabin boy. He only hit me then when he was drunk. He thought of me as a boy, I think. He'd always wanted a son. But it got much worse when he discovered I could raise winds. You know how when you're new to a thing, you don't always get it right, or sometimes it doesn't work at all? When that happened, he was always furious and gave me a beating. And then one day he found me playing about on land, talking to air elementals and making a lot of small whirlwinds. I told him I was practicing, but I wasn't really. Air people are—were—such fun to talk to, and I was really enjoying myself for once. And he was furious. He said it wasn't
useful
, and girls shouldn't do things that weren't any use to their menfolk. And he called me a witch and beat me half to death. It made me so ill he had to leave me behind on the next voyage, and when I got better at last, I found the air elementals couldn't hear me when I talked to them. I could only raise monsters after that. And he beat me again for not raising winds.”

Out of the long silence that followed this, Elda said, “You should have taken
all
his treasure.”

Olga made a gulping sound. Two more tears chased down her cheeks. “I wish,” she said, “I
wish
I didn't look like him.”

There was no doubt that Olga inherited her hawk looks from Olaf. Her friends exchanged glances, which somehow ended with all of them looking at Claudia. She said slowly, thinking about it, “You know, Olga, where I come from, in the Empire, all the people who do the governing and have the most money come from a very few families. This means you get a lot of people who look very much alike. My brother, Titus, has a second cousin, son of a senator, who could almost be his twin, except that no one could ever mix them up, because Porphyrio looks like the evil little twit he is, and Titus looks plain nice. And there's a dreadful tarty woman who's always causing scandals, who looks very like
me
. And I often look at these people and feel really astonished that the same features can look so different on different people. Do you see what I mean?”

Olga almost smiled. “Yes, I do. Thank you, Claudia.”

Lukin was so grateful to Claudia that he wanted to reward her in some way. All he could think of was to say, “That cloakrack, it's down inside the pit. I think it's gone for good.”

“I hope so,” said Claudia. “I just hope my magic's not down there with it.”

T
HE RAIN CLEARED
up in the night. In the morning, and for the next few mornings, since the weather turned mild and sweet and stayed that way, Elda kept her promise to herself and went out flying before breakfast.

She was surprised at how much she enjoyed it. All alone with the whistling of her own wings, she swept out across the countryside, enjoying the sight of plowed fields, green meadows, and graying tracts of stubble wheeling below. The sun caught sideways upon woodlands that were tinting after the frost, bronze and red and almost purple. Scents came up to her from farms, and trickles of smoke itched her nostrils. When she wheeled to fly back, there was the city and its towers, golden pink in the morning sun, with the mountains beyond flushed misty yellow with deep blue creases in them.

The second morning her wings felt stronger, and she went further, right over to the moorlands beyond the civilized country. She was winging back from there, watching cows being driven out to pasture far below in the first farms she came to, when something glinted in the sky, over to her left, in the north. She turned her head and saw it was a dragon. It was a young one, with a lot of gold and white in it, the way the young ones had, and it seemed to be coming on a slanting course toward the University.

Elda was surprised because dragons were rare this far south. She increased her speed, hoping to be near it when it reached the city, and flew on, admiring the sight of it against the clear blue sky. So graceful, she thought. Dragons had no need to flap wings all the time the way griffins did. This one balanced its great webby wings this way and that and sailed forward on the air currents. Or did it actually
talk
to the air as Olga said she could once? Poor Olga. She was still white and quiet, and her face was all haughty with misery.

Elda's course and the young dragon's brought them closer together every minute. Elda was confident that they would meet somewhere over the University, which was in full sight now, ahead and below. Then, to her disappointment, the dragon tilted a wing, swept down and around in a half circle, and planed elegantly to earth beside a bronzed woodland some miles away. Elda watched a crowd of panic-stricken rooks and pigeons rise out of the trees as the dragon crawled into the wood and out of sight.

For a moment Elda wondered whether to fly over there and ask what it was doing. But you did not mess with dragons, particularly not the hot-tempered young ones. This one had definitely gone into hiding. So Elda flew on, rejoicing at having seen such a beautiful, unexpected thing. She came in low across the city, across the twiddly turrets and elaborate arches of Bardic College on its outskirts, and around in a great sweep over the lake. There, as she had hoped, were several long, thin boats crawling across the surface of the water like water beetles, and Wizard Finn running along the bank bellowing at them through a loud-hailer. Elda spotted the boat with Olga in it and dived down to skim just above the heads of the laboring oarswomen.

“I saw a dragon!” she shrieked.

Olga, rowing stroke, looked up and actually laughed, while behind her oars pointed every which way, crossed, clashed, and missed the water.

“Get out of it, Elda!”
Wizard Finn roared from the bank.

Elda swooped up and away, chuckling, to glide in over the roofs of the city and land in the courtyard beside Wizard Policant's statue.

Olga was still laughing when she came in to breakfast, and the wild-rose pink color was back in her cheeks, as if Elda's exploit had restored her to herself. “Don't
ever
do that again!” she said to Elda. “Two of them fell in. Finn was furious. What dragon?”

Elda was about to describe it when she noticed that Claudia was simply sitting, staring, in much the same way that Olga had been doing up to now. “What's the matter, Claudia?”

Claudia just pointed at the cloakrack standing in the corner of the refectory.

“You sure it's the same one?” Ruskin asked, swiveling his stumpy body to look.

“Yes,” said Claudia. “It was waiting for me at the bottom of my staircase.”

“Let us experiment,” said Felim.

After breakfast, which was no worse and no better for the absence of the cook, they led Claudia this way and that through the buildings, upstairs and downstairs, and found that the cloakrack faithfully followed wherever it could. In the courtyard and the corridors it trundled easily along on its three legs, always about ten feet behind Claudia. Going upstairs to the library, it fell sideways with a clatter and bumped slowly upward so long as Claudia kept moving. When she stopped, it stopped. When they shut a door on it, it waited patiently outside until somebody happened to open the door. Then it resumed its patient pursuit.

“Hmm,” said Ruskin. “Why are doors an obstacle when it was able to get out of the pit?”

“That took it two days,” Olga pointed out.

“But surely fairly strong magic,” said Felim. “Let us test it for magic.”

It was a fairly easy matter to coax the cloakrack into Elda's concert hall. There they tried all the divination spells for magic on it that they knew. Every single one was negative. Ruskin said that he was quite good at sensing magic, anyway, and put his great dwarf hands on it. After a moment he shook his head. “Not a thing,” he said. Elda, after her experience in the refectory the other night, was fairly sure that she would be able to sense if there was any magic in the cloakrack, too, but she, like Ruskin, could feel nothing. It seemed simply to be neutral wood.

“At least Wermacht didn't put any of your magic in it,” Olga said as they went over to the tutorial room with the cloakrack bumping along behind. “You can be thankful for that, anyway.”

“Look at it this way,” Lukin said when they reached the tall stone room. He slammed the door to keep the cloakrack out. “It's not doing you any harm. It's not magic itself. It's just following you around because stupid Wermacht linked it to you rather powerfully somehow.”

“Or my jinx did,” Claudia said with rueful creases in her cheeks. “I'm not scared of it exactly. It's—it's just embarrassing. I won't dare go to choir practice.”

“We must get Wermacht to undo what he did,” said Felim.

Inevitably, when Corkoran opened the door of the tutorial room and hurried inside, the cloakrack sidled in after him. Corkoran frowned at it absently. But he was late anyhow, because so many people had stopped him on his way here to complain of mice. It seemed as if the former pirates had tunneled their way out of the pit. Corkoran wondered what everyone thought he could do about it. He was far too busy, anyway, trying to construct his moonsuit, and he did not want any more calls on his time. So he ignored the cloakrack and got straight down to handing back essays and explaining to his students that what they had been saying in them had nothing to do with the real world.

His pupils stared sadly at the marks he had given them and then equally sadly at his tie, which today had a pattern of stars and comets on it. Corkoran thought they seemed unwarrantably depressed. “What I'm trying to tell you,” he said encouragingly, “is that everything has to have limitations. It's no good expecting magic to perform wonders if those wonders are against the laws of nature.”

“But a lot of magic
is
against the laws of nature,” Elda protested. “I couldn't fly without magic. Neither could dragons.”

Lukin, the dedicated chess player, said, “You mean you have to have rules or the game won't work? But magic isn't a game. And anyway, rules can be changed.”

“You're not seeing my point,” Corkoran told him. “You have to use magic like a tool, for a certain set of things, and you have to operate within certain safe limits, even then, or you're in trouble. Take magic to do with time, which you'll be doing in your second year. It is known that if you speed time up or slow it down too often in the same place, you weaken the walls between universes and let all sorts of undesirable things through. It's thought that this is how Mr. Chesney got here.”

They looked glum. They were too young, Corkoran thought, to understand the troubles Mr. Chesney had caused. “Or take my own work,” he said. “I'm up against a law of nature at the moment, which magic has no power to change. There is no air to breathe on the moon. If I got in my moonship and went there as I am, I would suffocate, or worse, because where there is no air, my experiments have proved that the human body implodes, collapses in upon itself. I am having to design a special suit to keep myself in one piece.”