Year of the Griffin (36 page)

Blade shook his head emphatically. “No, no, no. Mixes usually make stronger magic. Look at Kit and Elda: They're lion, eagle, human, and cat. No, what I'm getting at is that you've spent most of your life shuttling between two places you hated, and you probably have a fiercely strong translocation talent, anyway, so of
course
it went wrong. It was your way of kicking and screaming as they dragged you back and forth.”

The tears in Claudia's eyes spilled out and rolled down her narrow cheeks. “Of
course
that's what it is! I should have seen. But—what do I do about it?”

“Forget your childhood. It's over,” said Blade. “You can be a wizard now and go anywhere and do anything you want.”

Claudia stared at him, still with her hands to her tear-marked cheeks. A slow smile of relief began to spread on what could be seen of her face. “Oh!” she said, and took a deep breath of the chilly, heady new air. As she did so, Blade gave Kit a slight nod. Kit's mighty talons reached out and tweaked.

“Got it,” he said, whisking something invisible away through the snowy side of the sphere. “One jinx gone. One to go.”

“I know all about mine,” Lukin said defensively. “Mine happens because I don't want to be a king. When I think about ruling, I just want to dig myself a deep pit and stay in it. So it's quite obvious and natural that whenever I do magic, I make a hole in something. There's nothing anyone can do about that.”

Felim had listened appreciatively as Blade coaxed Claudia's jinx out of her. Now he leaned forward and joined in. “Why do you not want to be a king?” he asked. “This continues to puzzle me, for I know that in my case I would far rather be a wizard, but I know that
you
have another kind of mind that spreads wider than a wish to sit and study spells.”

Lukin blinked a bit. He thought. “You have to be so strict if you're a king,” he said at last, rather fretfully. “Everything has to be just so, because you have to set an example, and there's no money—and by the time I'd get to be king, there'll be even
less
money—and we can't ever seem to heat the castle, and nothing ever really goes
right
because the tours laid the kingdom to waste, and—”

“Hang on,” said Blade. “You're talking about the way things
are
, in Luteria, and the way your father behaves, not about being a king. Just because your father's the gloomiest man I know, it doesn't follow that
you
have to be.”

“Or mismanage money the way he does,” added Kit.

Ruskin who, as a dwarf and a future citizen of Luteria, had been attending to this keenly, looked deeply shocked. “Mismanages money?”

Lukin said angrily, “He
doesn't
mismanage money! There just isn't any!”

“Our dad's always saying he does,” Elda chipped in. “Derk says King Luther seems to think it's beneath him even to
think
about making money.”

Lukin became angrier still. “My father can't breed winged horses or make a mint of money out of clever pigeons, the way yours can!”

“Yes,” said Kit. “But
you
could.”

Lukin glared at him. His teeth were so tightly clenched that the muscles bulging in his cheeks, in the strange light, made his face look like a wide, sinister skull. Kit glared calmly back. “I wish you weren't bigger than me!” Lukin said without taking his teeth apart.

“Hold your hammer,” said Ruskin. “I'm with Felim here. I don't understand. You met the forgemasters. They love their power. They'd kill to keep it. Why don't you?”

Lukin shrugged and unclenched his teeth a little. “It doesn't bother me. I don't have any power.”

“So you went to train as a wizard in order to get some,” Blade said. “Fair enough. Then what
don't
you like? The responsibility? I'd have thought you'd quite like being the one in charge.”

“I would,” Lukin admitted. “Only I'm not, am I? To listen to my father, you'd think I was still ten years old. It's not his fault. He missed a whole hunk of our lives when Mother took us away into the country because of the tours, and he still hasn't caught up. There's a gap—” He stopped suddenly.

Olga looked up from the happy clod cradled in her fingers and surveyed Lukin through the hanging sheet of her hair. “I
knew
you'd see it in the end,” she said. “Remember magic doesn't
think
in a reasonable way, the way people do. Yours just peppers everything you do with that gap your father doesn't notice, trying to
show
him you're grown-up now. Doesn't it? Didn't you tell me you first started making pits when the tours stopped and you came home?”

Something seemed to drain out of Lukin. He slumped. “When I was ten,” he said. “I'd been looking after everyone before that: Mother, the younger ones, even Isodel a lot of the time. Isodel and I did the cooking and cleaned the cottage because Mother didn't know how to. Then we went home, and I got treated as if I were five years old!”

Blade caught the whatever it was that drained out of Lukin and posted it quickly through the ice-covered wall, in among the peering pebble-eyed faces. “There,” he said. “Thanks. Don't get too upset, Lukin. I don't know why it always has to
hurt
to get things straight, but it always does.” He gave a look of apology to Claudia, who sat with her head pensively hanging, on the other side of Lukin.

She saw the look through her coiling hair. She giggled. “You sound just like Flury!”

“I always want to wring Flury's neck when he looks like that,” Elda agreed. “It really irritates me!”

“Especially when you know that not one cringe of it is real,” Claudia said. “You did what you had to do, Blade. Don't crawl to us about it.”

“How come you know Flury?” Kit asked in considerable astonishment.

“Later,” said Blade. “I want to try and get us back now. All of you concentrate hard on home, please. If we miss again, we'll probably be dead.”

The ringing of the bell on the pigeon loft made Callette growl sleepily and crawl out of her majestic shed. She had promised Derk that she would see to any messages that came while he was away, even though she had
known
they would come the moment she fell asleep. She prowled around the stable buildings to the loft ladder, muttering grumpily. She was far too big to get up the ladder, had been for years. She solved this the way she always did, by standing on her hind legs with her front talons clutching the top rung of the ladder, while she pushed her head inside the loft.

“Which of you just came in?” she said to the dimness in there.

Two pigeons promptly presented themselves. Both looked exceedingly cheerful at being home. Both had beakfuls of grain. They swallowed hastily as Callette glowered at them.

“The Emperor of the South has arrested his Senate and gone to the University with his horse soldiers,” crooned the pigeon on the left.

“The Emir of Ampersand has gone to the University with his army,” croodled the pigeon to Callette's right. “He says he will take it all apart.”

“Hmm,” said Callette. “Thanks. I suppose I'd better fly over there and warn them. You two go back to your lunch.” She got herself down to the ground by climbing her front talons down the ladder, puzzling about this news. She found it hard to believe. There was no reason that she knew for anyone to make war on the University. Even during the tours no one had attacked the place. But the pigeons always told the truth, though they did sometimes get hold of the wrong end of the stick. “Fly over there and check,” she told herself as she reached the ground. “Bother!”

“Oh,
there
you are!” Don's voice rang out behind her. “Where's everybody else?”

Callette whirled around. The stable yard was packed with griffins, with Don in front of them, huge and glad and golden. Callette gaped. Derk always said that Callette's mind worked like nobody else's. She supposed that was true, for she discovered that her way of being quite intensely delighted to see her brother again was to decide to make a big golden model of him. Now. At once. A model of the perfect griffin, enormous and shapely and bright, like a huge male version of Elda, except that Don was so—so
uncomplicated
somehow. Callette's talons twitched to get modeling. Don completely outshone the gaggle of smaller griffins behind him. Most of those were girls, anyway.

“Huh!” said Callette. “Did you bring your whole fan club with you? Or are some of them Kit's?”

Don laughed. “They all wanted to see what it's like over here.”

Callette slowly took in the sheer number of griffins packed in behind Don. Or wanted to found a colony, she thought. “How did you get on the boat?”

“Took turns flying and resting on the deck, of course,” Don told her happily. “One of the fan club's yours.”

“What!
” Callette watched a griffin who was only three-quarters of Don's size come sliding out from behind Don. He was gray and white and brown, with barred wings like her own, and a very sleek, self-possessed person whose large black eyes seemed brighter and more perceptive than those of the other griffins. “Oh, no,” said Callette. “Not Cazak again. Don, that's not fair!” And like an offended cat, she turned her back on the whole crowd and sat staring at the ladder with her tail angrily beating.

Cazak was perhaps not quite as confident as he looked. He hesitated. “Go on,” Don said to him. “I
know
she's just being stupid about you. She'd fly away if she really meant it.”

Cazak advanced. Callette heard his talons clicking on the ground and said, “Go away. You're too
small
.”

Cazak, with some caution, poked his head over Callette's winged shoulder so that he could look her in one eye. She turned her head away. “Come on, Callette,” Cazak said. “You know most males are my size.
We
never let that bother us. Why should
you
?”

“Because!” snapped Callette.

The griffins crowded behind Don exchanged looks, knowing perfectly well that Callette could have put out one of Cazak's eyes if she had wanted to, but none of them dared speak. Griffins were used to being far more public about these things than humans were.

“Promise at least to let me paint that picture of you,” Cazak said.

Callette bent and nibbled absently at one of the rungs of the ladder. She had, she knew, felt acutely out of sorts ever since she came home, downright crotchety, in fact. Now she suddenly felt fine—peaceful inside, happy really. Cazak must be why. How
stupid
! The wooden rung snapped. “Bother!” she said. “Now you made me break the ladder. All right,
paint
your picture. Then we'll see. I may hate you.”

Cazak laughed. “No, you won't. Callette, I love you even more when you're being grumpy!”

“You can't start painting yet,” said Callette. “I really and truly have to go to the University and warn them. There may be an emergency there. That's where Blade and Kit are,” she told Don over her shoulder, “visiting Elda.”

“Then we'll go with you,” Don said. “There are enough of us here to deal with most emergencies.”

A
T THE
U
NIVERSITY
there were now fourteen dead mice laid out under the council table and most of the teaching staff were gathered around Querida. There was as yet no sign of any new emergency. Querida, taking the very reasonable line that no one could do anything about the missed moonshot, was dealing with other matters instead. The wards were proving very hard to restore. They seemed to resist anything that Querida did. Consequently, she was in a very sharp temper as she leafed through piles of essays and exam papers.

“Why is it that nobody ever gives any mark higher than a B?” she demanded. “Why are they nearly
all
given a B, for that matter? Half of these deserve to fail, to my mind. Finn?”

Finn, who was having a miserable afternoon, replied as he had replied many times before, “Corkoran had this policy, you see, that we should turn out as many working wizards as—”

He broke off in some relief as Sabrina came trotting in with the fifteenth mouse. “Good cat!” said Querida. “By ‘working wizards,' Corkoran meant half-trained magic users, I gather. He means to clutter the world with incompetent warlocks who can't tell a spell from a shopping list, does he? I think it's getting a little stuffy and mouseish in here. All of you come outside for a breath of fresh air.”