Year of the Griffin (33 page)

“What have you done so far?” Flury asked them. “Setting wards? Pattern magic? Power sharing? Conjuring? Numerology? Theurgy? Scrying? Raising lone power?” Heads were shaken at each question. “Conjuring fire then?” Flury asked as if this were a last resort. “Levitation then? Translocation? Crystallography? Bespelling objects?” Heads were shaken again. No one knew what half these things were. “May I look at one of your notebooks to see what you
have
done then?” Flury asked rather hopelessly.

Melissa, who was as obliging as she was beautiful, handed him hers. Flury flicked over pages covered with Melissa's round writing with little hearts for dots over the
i
s and frowned. A frown on even a mild-faced griffin like Flury was a menacing thing. Everyone sat very still, except for Elda, who was used to Kit. Mara often said that when Kit frowned, the universe cracked. Elda simply twiddled her talons and wondered how, and why, Flury was never the same size for more than five minutes. He was about her own size, or a little larger, as he flicked pages and frowned. “Wermacht seems to take a lot of classes,” he murmured. “You should have got through more than this.” Eventually he handed the notebook back. “Well,” he said, “I'd better invent some way of making up for lost time. If you don't mind pushing these desks back and standing in a ring holding hands, we'll set wards by sharing power and kill two humans with one stone.”

Notebooks were put away again, and everyone rather cautiously did as Flury suggested. The caution was reasonable, Elda thought. Flury was obviously a wizard as well as a griffin. But after that she and everyone else were so absorbed and busy that no one had time to feel nervous, and the rest of the hour passed before they were aware. They used their joined power to raise wards around the North Lab in six ways that Flury said were elementary and they should have known already. Then they used their joined power to scry. All of them saw, clear as clear, as if they were inside the various rooms, Corkoran sitting in his lab, the librarian resetting Inventory-spells, and the buttery bar with a few idle students in there drinking beer. Flury said the results would be better when they learned to use crystals. Then he had them conjure into the North Lab all the bar stools that no one was actually sitting on. After that the hour was suddenly over. The top of Wermacht's hourglass was empty of every grain and the bottom full of sand.

“Do you know, I actually
learned
something!” Melissa was heard proclaiming in surprised tones while everyone was leaving.

Someone returned all the stools to the buttery bar, including Wermacht, although nobody liked to sit on Wermacht until the bar became crowded later that evening. He was easily distinguishable by being taller and gloomier than any of the other stools. Elda, who was couched comfortably against the wall with a straw in her beak and Claudia leaning on her beaming because she was free of that cloakrack at last, looked at that stool and wondered if Flury had intended this to happen to Wermacht. Flury was a total mystery, she thought. Around her everyone else talked of mousetraps or the moon. Ruskin had designed what he felt was the perfect mousetrap, until Olga pointed out, with what seemed to be family feeling, that these mice had human brains.

“Hmm,” Ruskin grunted. “You have a point there. I'll think again.” And he joined Felim in considering how to send Corkoran to the moon.

Felim seemed to be becoming obsessed with the moonshot. Elda was embarrassed. “You don't need to worry about it,” she protested.

“But it is a superb intellectual problem,” Felim said. “The things we learned this afternoon, particularly the notion of several people combining powers, is, I think, the key to the problem.”

“You mean, several people combining to do something like translocation?” Lukin asked.

“It beats me why Corkoran didn't plan to translocate there, anyway,” Ruskin growled. “It's the obvious way.”

“Do you think that maybe he can't?” Claudia suggested. “Oh, no, we saw him translocate, didn't we, Olga, the day Felim was inside the books?”

“Yes, but he probably can't go very far,” Elda said. “My dad can't. He can only go five miles at his best. The moon's further than that, isn't it?”

Felim laughed. “Many thousands of miles further. This is why a boost from several people is certainly necessary.”

“But remember there's no air there,” Olga put in. “You'd need to translocate him in an enclosed bubble of air and you'd have to be sure there was
enough
air for him. How would you do that?”

“By compressing it?” Lukin suggested. “If you had the outside of your bubble made of squashed-up air that could be gradually released, that would hold the bubble firm, too, wouldn't it?”

“Darned good idea!' Ruskin said. He and Claudia began calculations to find out how much air Corkoran would need, while Lukin worked out spells that might compress it, and Felim tried to calculate how many people it would take combining their powers to send the lot as far as the moon.

They're
all
doing it! Elda thought. And they're only doing it because they think I'm still in love with Corkoran. She would have squirmed if Claudia had not been leaning on her. It seemed too late to explain that she was simply
sorry
for Corkoran. She spent the whole of the next day in a state of mingled guilt and embarrassment, while calculations and discussions went on obsessively around her, until she simply had to explain to someone.

“You don't need to send Corkoran to the moon just because I said so,” she said to Lukin as they sat facing one another across a chessboard at Chess Club that evening.

Lukin moved a knight and took it back again quickly as he saw Elda would have his queen if he moved it. “It's not on your
orders
, if that's what you think. You just produced the right idea. It's to
show
Corkoran that our adaptation of spells really does work. Felim simply couldn't believe it when Corkoran gave him such a low mark for his essay, he said he filled it with the best stuff he knew and Corkoran simply spat in his face. He says it's his honor at stake. And Ruskin was stunned. Did you see his face when he looked at his mark? Or Claudia's? Claudia went grass green, and her eyes seemed to swallow up the rest of her face.”

“What about you and Olga, though?” Elda slyly moved her queen one square.

“Seen that!” said Lukin, moving up a high priest. “Olga was furious. Corkoran had the cheek to say there probably wasn't such a thing as air elementals. It really upset her. And I've always thought Corkoran needs
showing
that he's running in blinkers.”

“Filbert hates blinkers,” Elda agreed. “I was a bit sad about my essay, too, but that wasn't why I thought of sending Corkoran to the moon.”

“I know,” Lukin said kindly. “You're far too nice, Elda. And then Flury comes along and shows us how to combine power and that was that. Check.”

“Mate,” replied Elda, moving her queen back to where it had been. While Lukin was cursing at having missed what she was doing, she wondered if Flury had intended to put this idea into their heads and just what Flury was up to.

She kept encountering Flury all over the University after that. He was in the library when she went to take back most of Ruskin's food-spell books in order to fetch Felim a stack of volumes on astronomy. When she backed out of the astronomy section, she saw Flury, looking very small and drab, humbly approaching the librarian's desk. He was asking anxiously for a copy of Wermacht's teaching timetable then, but when she came up to the desk herself with Felim's books, he was saying, “Then I'll ask in the office. Thank you. Can you give me any books on the founding of the University, or a biography of Wizard Policant at all?” The librarian seemed to accept that Flury was another griffin student and gave him two books without question. Elda had no idea what Flury wanted them for.

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.