Year of the Griffin (32 page)

A
T THE
U
NIVERSITY
Corkoran sat in his ruined lab, wondering whether to end it all. Sometimes he held his throbbing head in both hands—this was on the occasions it seemed about to fall apart in segments, like one of Derk's oranges—and sometimes he simply stared miserably at the remains of his sabotaged moonship. A lot of the time he just stared at the wall. It seemed a yellow sort of color that he did not remember its usually being. He was thinking that when he had the energy, he would climb to the top of the Observatory tower and throw himself off, when someone opened the lab door.

“I told you I didn't need you,” he said, assuming it was his assistant.

“You haven't told me anything yet,” the intruder replied.

It was a much larger voice than Corkoran's assistant's, with windy undertones and shrill overtones that made Corkoran shudder. He turned around—too quickly; it made him yelp—and saw the front parts of a strange griffin sticking through the doorway. He remembered uneasily then that Finn had said something about a plague of griffins. But at least the creature was a soothing shade of brown. Even its unusual heavy-lidded eyes were a restful mud color, and its feathers, though crisply glossy, were no harder to look at than the crust of a loaf. “What do you want?” Corkoran said. “Who are you?”

The griffin ducked its great head apologetically. “I'm Flury. I want to join up as a student here.”

“You can't,” Corkoran told him. Or was it her? It was hard to tell from just the front view. “You're too late. Term has already started. You'll have to wait until next autumn now.”

“But I didn't know. I'm from the other continent,” Flury protested. “Can't you make an allowance for that?”

The voice grated on Corkoran. It was too big. “No,” he said. “Apply next spring with proof of magical attainments, and we'll see what we can do. I suppose you do have some magical abilities?”

Flury looked shy. “Some,” he admitted.

“And you'll find the fees are quite high,” said Corkoran. “Have you money?”

“Quite a lot,” Flury admitted bashfully.

“Good. Then come back next spring,” said Corkoran. “Now go away.”

There was a fraught pause. The door frame creaked. “I can't,” Flury said. “I'm stuck.”

“Oh, ye gods!” said Corkoran. They really shouldn't trouble him with griffins when he felt like death and had just remembered he had a lecture to give. He needed help. And consideration. At this it occurred to him that Healers Hall had headache remedies. They had soft hands and soothing voices, too. That was what he needed. Hoping that if he took no notice and went away, Flury would prove to be a monstrous hallucination, Corkoran stood up and translocated to find a healer.

Seeing the room suddenly empty, Flury shrugged, causing the door frame to jiggle. “Oh, well,” he said. “I tried.” He put his head sideways, listening in case Corkoran was on his way back with levers or spells to get him out of the doorway. When it was apparent that Corkoran had simply forgotten him, Flury shook himself loose from the door frame and advanced into the lab. He was now about the size of a small lion. This put his beak at an entirely convenient height for sniffing along benches at the ruins of the moonsuit experiments. These puzzled him extremely. So did the torn-up calculations on the floor. He picked quite a few up, held them together where they seemed to fit, and examined them. He shook his head, baffled. Then he found the rat cage, with the Inescapable Net still hanging off it and its bars bent. He put his beak right inside it and closed his eyes to analyze the smells he found there.

“Ah,” he said. “That's what I've been smelling. They were here for some time before they got out and started lurking. Can't say that I blame them really.”

He then padded across to the remains of the moonship and spent some time carefully inspecting what was left of it. He nodded sadly. “Waste of effort,” he said. “It would never have flown anywhere, anyway.”

Then he padded away and carefully shut the door behind him.

Elda was surprised to see Flury at Corkoran's lecture, bulking huge and beach-leaf brown near the back. It was surprising also that no one else seemed to notice him and even more surprising that he fitted in. The lecture hall was crammed. By breakfast time every student in the University knew that Corkoran's moonship was in ruins and Corkoran himself devastated.

Breakfast had been a disaster because the mice had got into the kitchens. Aided by vigorous miniature assassins, they had got into all the cupboards and even into the cold store, where they sucked eggs, chewed bacon, squeezed fruit, poured out milk, and split open bags of cereal. Almost the only thing left to eat was bread—which had luckily been set to rise in a heavy iron oven—and there was only black coffee to drink.

“Thank goodness for coffee!” said Olga. “My father never did like it.”

Felim and Ruskin at once set about designing a foolproof mousetrap—nor were they the only ones; even Melissa was inventing one—and the rest were rather inclined to blame Elda for making the mice in the first place, which made Elda very uncomfortable and guilty. “Mice were just what came into my head!” she explained. “Someone had to do
something
!”

“Leave her alone,” said Claudia, who had spent the night on the floor of Elda's concert hall and felt she owed Elda protection in return. “Nobody else did anything.”

“Lukin did,” said Olga.

“But he makes deep holes all the time, anyway, so that hardly counts,” said Claudia.

The news about the moonship was almost a welcome distraction. It caused a wave of sympathy for Corkoran. Even those who felt, like Lukin, that Corkoran was poor stuff (with an unfortunate taste in ties) were determined to show that they were sorry about the sabotage. Every student who could get there, and a few novice healers, crowded into the main lecture hall to show Corkoran moral support.

Corkoran felt quite touched. He was usually lucky to get an audience of five, all female and all gazing adoringly. To find everyone cared this much cheered him considerably. Nevertheless, as he set about delivering the lecture he always delivered at this stage in the term, he knew he was doing it with much less than his usual verve.

He
does
look devastated, Elda thought. Corkoran's face was yellow-pale, and she could see his hands shaking. Even his tie was pallid, full of washed-out–looking white and yellow daisies. In a guilty, illogical way, Elda felt that this might be her fault for not finding Corkoran charming anymore. And though she knew this was probably nonsense, she found herself thinking urgently of some way to make it up to him. She heard very little of the lecture because as soon as she began thinking, she had her inspiration.

It took her until after lunch (another disaster) to find courage to mention her idea to her friends. But as they were gathered around Wizard Policant, waiting to go into Wermacht's class, she blurted it out. “Couldn't we get him to the moon somehow?”

They looked at her understandingly. They had all known that Elda would be more upset about Corkoran than anyone else. They had been worrying about her.

“I don't like to see him looking so miserable,” Elda explained.

“I know what you mean,” Felim said kindly. “I wonder.” He fell into deep thought.

Olga, for her part, tried to put the realities of life before Elda. “I know what you mean, too,” she said, “but I've seen my father with enough hangovers to know why he looked so bad.”

“We can't let him take to drink!” Elda pleaded.

Lukin laughed. “You must be the most softhearted griffin in the world! Teddy bears and moons! Come on, Elda. Everyone else is going into the North Lab.” He politely helped Claudia reel in her cloakrack. Claudia had discovered that it was easier if she kept the cloakrack close to her. Since it was going to follow her, anyway, she reasoned that keeping one hand on it as she walked was pleasanter than getting jolted every time the cloakrack stuck on a doorstep.

She parked it beside her desk in the North Lab. Elda sat protectively beside Claudia. Then she turned her head and saw Flury again. He was sitting behind a desk without a chair, just as Elda was herself, with his feathery forearms on the desktop and his talons clasped, staring around with keen interest. He looked very bright and keen and glossy and nothing like as big as he had looked in Corkoran's lecture. Elda began to wonder why he was different every time she saw him. Then she wondered why it was that no one seemed to see him but herself. She was in such a guilty, perturbed mood that it began to seem to her that Flury might be some kind of hallucination that followed her around like Claudia's cloakrack to punish her for not loving Corkoran anymore, or perhaps for turning the pirates into mice, or perhaps for both.

Here Wermacht strode in and put a stop to thinking. “Write down your next big heading,” he commanded. “Moving Magefire About.” Elda saw Flury looking around anxiously at everyone else's busy notebook. “Now,” said Wermacht. “All of you stand up and call up magefire as you learned to do last week.”

Elda had been looking forward to holding her lovely teardrop of light again. She jumped up eagerly and cannoned into Claudia in her hurry. Claudia, who was not looking forward to this at all, was getting up rather slowly. She was off-balance when Elda bumped her and staggered sideways into the cloakrack, which fell with a clatter into the aisle beside the desks.

Wermacht exclaimed with annoyance. He came striding up the aisle and picked the cloakrack up before Claudia could reach it. He banged it upright. “Are you
still
going around with this thing, you with a jinx?”

“Yes, of course I am,” Claudia retorted. “You connected me to it. You should know.”

“Nonsense,” said Wermacht. “It's entirely your own doing. You attempted a spell beyond your powers, and you bungled it.” He leaned in a lordly attitude with one hand on the cloakrack and the other stroking his beard, smiling contemptuously down on Claudia. While Claudia was gasping at the injustice, he said, “It's all in your mind, you know. Really deep down you
want
to be tied to this cloakrack.”

“I do
not
!” Claudia asserted.

“Oh, but you do.” Wermacht was smiling pityingly now. “Make an effort, girl. Free yourself from the shackles of your own timidity. You only want this object around for a sense of security.”

Claudia gaped at him. “I—I—I—”

Flury came quietly up behind Wermacht and tapped him on one shoulder. No one had seen Flury move. No one, not even Elda, knew how he got where he was, but there he was, towering over Wermacht and wearing his usual apologetic look. There was quite a gasp from everyone, because this was the first time anyone but Elda had seen Flury at all. Wermacht whirled around, found himself staring into Flury's chest feathers, and seemed wholly irate that he had to stare upward to see Flury's face, somewhere near the ceiling. “Excuse me,” Flury said, “but what you just said can't be right. As soon as you touched that hatrack, I could tell that it was your spell that did it.”

“
My
spell!” Wermacht exclaimed.

Flury nodded. “I'm afraid so. I'm sorry. Nobody likes to be caught out in a mistake, do they?”

Wermacht drew himself up, looking surprisingly small under Flury's beak. “I have made no mistake. I'll show you. I'll attempt to take this silly girl's spell off and
show
you it's not mine!”

“Yes,” Flury said mildly. “Do that.”

Wermacht glared at him and turned to put both hands on two of the cloakrack's battered wooden hooks. He grasped them firmly, closed his eyes, and concentrated. The next instant, both Wermacht and the cloakrack were surrounded in a bluish lightning flash. There was a strong smell of ozone. The instant after that, Wermacht and the cloakrack appeared to melt into one another, folding downward as they melted. By the time everyone had blinked and exclaimed, the only thing left of Wermacht or the cloakrack was a large, leather-topped bar stool standing in the aisle on four chunky wooden legs.

“Oh, dear,” Flury said, blinking with the rest of them. “I'd no idea that was going to happen.” Elda, all the same, had the feeling that he was not nearly as surprised as he claimed to be.

Claudia's immediate action was to retreat experimentally to the other side of the lab. To her enormous relief, the bar stool made no move to follow her. It just stood there, looking woebegone. The reaction of everyone else was almost as swift and entirely practical. Everyone except Elda put notebooks back into bags and pens into pockets, and while Elda was staring at Flury and realizing that he was no sort of hallucination at all, everyone else was cheerfully making for the door. They were almost there when Flury said, “Why are you all going? Don't you
want
to learn magic?”

“Yes, of course we do,” someone told him joyfully, “but no one can learn magic from a bar stool.”

“
I
can teach you, though,” Flury said, looking hurt and injured.

The students looked at one another. Somehow they all found that they did not like to hurt Flury's feelings. They shrugged, turned around, and sat at the desks again, where they resignedly got out notebooks. Flury prowled to the front and sat on his haunches by the lectern, still big, but not quite as big as he had been when he towered over Wermacht. He looked at the students. They stared dubiously back.