Year of the Griffin (38 page)

Lukin pinched his mouth together in order not to laugh.

“He's certainly good at making holes in things,” King Luther agreed dourly.

“Ah, but they've cured him of that here already, Your Majesty,” Ruskin said, in what passed for his normal voice now, much to the King's relief. “Next he has to learn to sink pits to
order
. That'll take him the next three years, but after that he and I are both at your service, Your Majesty.”

“On condition that I marry Olga first,” Lukin put in.

King Luther looked up at Lukin and down at Ruskin, grimly. “What if I refuse?”

“Then I inherit a needlessly poor kingdom, obviously,” Lukin said. “I'd hate that. But I'd hate even more not being friends with you.”

There was a pause while King Luther looked from his son to his soldiers, who were all staring before them so correctly that they looked like fish, and realized that Luteria was going to be riddled with amateur mine shafts unless he took some action. The only person who seemed genuinely uninterested was Isodel. She seemed to be in some kind of dream, with a strange, happy smile on her face.

It was during this pause that Kit put his head up to take in more air. He still felt as if he could never get enough of it. And his beak tasted singed. “Funny,” he croaked to Elda. “There's a row of men in spiked helmets up on that roof.”

Everyone within hearing whirled to look up at the Spellman Building. Sure enough, the parapet there bristled with helmets and the ends of weapons. Querida felt depressed. Kit was obviously too tired to be much help, and she was not sure she could manage an army on her own. Blade seemed to have slithered out of sight, the way he often did.

Felim sprang up from beside Elda and spun around to look at the other roofs. They also bristled with spiked helmets and weapons. Felim dodged around the statue of Wizard Policant, so that he could see the main gates. They were just being thrown wide, and the Emir was storming through them, walking with that forward lunging stride that always means trouble, with more soldiers at his back.

“This is idiocy!” Felim exclaimed. He set off for the gates at a sprint.

“Oh, dear!” Elda groaned. She dragged herself up and crawled off to help.

Blade, meanwhile, was edging over to the Emperor and his sister. Titus and Claudia still had their arms clasped around one another, but more loosely now. Claudia's laugh was ringing out delightedly. “Honestly, Titus? The
lot
of them?” she was saying. “It'll do them such good to sit in prison. They sent so many people there themselves. But I still don't know how you
dared
!”

As Blade edged up closer, Titus answered, a trifle guiltily, “Because I'd never been so angry in my life, I suppose.”

This is going to be impossible, Blade thought. He felt very tired, wholly apprehensive, and thoroughly determined. He remembered once, eight years ago, thinking that something must happen to soften people's brains between the ages of fourteen and twenty, but he had never once, even when he met Isodel, discovered exactly what that something was. Now he had, eight years later, and it was awful.

Here Elda dragged herself past, with Felim sprinting ahead of her, and things became slightly less awful. Claudia said, “Stay here, Titus. I must go and look after Elda for a minute. I don't think spaceflight agrees with griffins.” And she hurried after Elda.

Blade walked sideways up to the Emperor. He had always liked Titus, and he knew him quite well these days. But it was still hard to know what to say. Blade settled for the most official way he could manage, because Titus was, after all, an emperor, and blurted it out. “Er, Titus, er, Imperial Majesty, would you give me leave to pay my addresses to your sister, Claudia. Er, court her, you know?”

“Eh?” said Titus.

Gods! thought Blade. He's gone all haughty, and who's to blame him! This is hopeless! But when he looked at the Emperor, he saw that Titus had probably not been listening. The Emperor was staring across the courtyard. Blade looked where Titus was looking and saw Isodel. Evidently whatever Isodel did to men had infected Titus, too, except that for some extraordinary reason Isodel was staring back at Titus. The yearning, painful, happy unhappiness on both their faces made Blade's chest twist. It was so exactly what he was feeling himself. “Did you hear what I said?” he asked Titus.

Titus jumped a little. “Perfectly,” he lied. Then, because he had been trained all his life to listen even when his attention was somewhere else, he somehow recalled exactly what Blade had said. He frowned. Blade watched the Emperor's straight eyebrows meeting over his Imperial nose and felt his own heart sink. “Claudia? Really? My sister?” Titus said. This sounded very forbidding. But Titus went on, talking in jerks. Blade saw that the Emperor was thinking very slowly, with his mind almost entirely on Isodel and the fact that he and Isodel's father had been at war for eight years, and waited, hardly daring to breathe. “She's far above you in birth, Blade,” Titus began. Then he added, “But you were appointed by the gods, weren't you? And you're a wizard. You could keep Claudia safe. I have to let some of the senators out of prison sometime. But Claudia's her own person. I don't even know if she likes you.”

“Neither do I,” Blade said sadly.

“You're a wizard,” Titus repeated. He grabbed Blade's arm crushingly. “She's his daughter, isn't she? King Luther. Get him to agree that I can marry her, and I'll back you with Claudia in every way I can.”

“Done,” Blade said promptly. Now I'm going to have to perform a miracle! he thought as Titus started to drag him across the courtyard.

“I don't even know her name!” Titus said, faltering a little.

“Isodel,” said Blade.

“How lovely!” Titus dragged Blade onward. “What a perfect name!”

As Blade and Titus went toward King Luther, Flury was scudding after Elda and Claudia. He arrived beside Felim and the Emir almost as they did, but no one but Elda noticed him. Elda spared him a glance while she and Claudia waited anxiously for Felim to become encased in the beehive of books again. Both were extremely dismayed when nothing of the kind occurred. Felim dashed up to the Emir and stopped. The Emir halted his troops with a gesture and stopped, too. And the two of them stood face to face yelling at one another.

“Perhaps the spell's worn off,” Claudia suggested.

“And
you
had the nerve to send assassins!” Felim was screaming.

“Do you think we should try to put it on again?” Elda asked as the Emir screamed back.

“What do you
take
me for?” the Emir howled. “If I make a threat, my honor demands I
keep
it!
You
had the nerve to disobey me! I
told
you I had no objection to your sitting in your study all day. I told you you could learn to be a hundred wizards! But I told you to stay at
home
!”

“And I told you never to try to bully me!” Felim yelled. “Son of a she-camel!”

“I told you I wish you to be Emir after me!” bawled the Emir. “Son of a mangy nanny goat!”

“This shall never be!” Felim screamed. “The she-camel had mange, too!”

The two of them then embarked on a shouted description of the nature of one another's grandmothers, all of whom seemed to have been several different animals, each with a number of startling diseases. Claudia and Elda stared. They had not realized that the polite and clever Felim could be like this. Claudia watched the two dark-browed faces, roaring insults at one another, and realized that they were surprisingly alike. The noses were the same, as well as the brows, although Felim's nose was smooth and young.

“Is he perhaps the Emir's son?” she said to Elda. The Emir, red-blotched and haggard, certainly looked old enough to be Felim's father.

A slight, tired smile came to the ends of Elda's beak. She knew this kind of scene rather well. Scenes like it happened at Derkholm whenever Kit and Shona happened to be at home together. “No,” she said. “Brothers.”

Here Felim returned to the thread of the discourse, just as Shona always did, and yelled, rather hoarsely, “Besides, you have twenty-two sons to become Emir after you! Choose among
them
!”

“Not I!” bawled the Emir. “I dislike every one of them! I have told you this a hundred times!”

At this Felim calmed down suddenly and stated, “It is not a question of
liking
but of suitability. I have told you this many hundred times.”

This seemed to end the argument. The Emir, equally suddenly, became calm, too. He reached out and gripped Felim by his upper arms. “Oh, my brother, I have missed you so badly,” he said. “No one shouts at me as you do. No one dares. Will you not come home?”

“No,” said Felim with utter finality.

The Emir accepted this. He nodded, and sighed, just as Kit always did when Shona had the last word. “In that case,” he said, “please step into the shelter of this gateway while my army slaughters everyone here. I do not wish you to be hurt.”

Flury leaned down and tapped the Emir on his shoulder. “Excuse me,” he said. “I can't let you do that.”

Everyone except Elda jumped violently. Flury, at that moment, towered twelve feet above the Emir, who was a tall man, and no one but Elda had seen him before this. The Emir started backward, and his face became a strange leaden gray color. Felim said quickly, “Please abate your height and step back, Flury. My brother's heart has been giving us concern for three years now.”

“But I can't let him
kill
everyone!” Flury protested.

Simultaneously the Emir protested, “There is nothing
wrong
with my heart!”

“Nevertheless”—Felim smiled lovingly and took the Emir by one arm—“you will not give the signal to attack, my brother, until you have been with me to Healers Hall. It is only a step away. Come with me.”

“Why should I?” demanded the Emir.

“Because,” said Felim, beginning to lead him gently away, “I need you to live for another three years, until I am a qualified wizard. I do not wish to be snatched home because you have named me your heir. At the end of those three years I promise I will come to you with a spell of potent divination and choose which of my nephews is most suitable to be emir. Meanwhile there are here the best healers in the world. Come.”

Flury dropped to all fours and stared.

“Of twenty-two sons,” the Emir said sadly as he walked, “none is satisfactory.”

“Hassan,” Felim replied, “has qualities, and it is a pity that Assif and Abdul are twins, for one cannot choose between them. Sayeed is firm.”

“But cruel,” said the Emir. “And Imram is indolent.”

“Not where his racing camels are concerned,” said Felim. “And Hamid or Noureddin would proceed with justice. All my nephews have something to recommend them.”

This had the air of an absorbing discussion that the brothers had often had—so much so, that when cracking and creaking, followed by crashing and loud cries, proclaimed that the roof had given way under the Emir's soldiery, just above Felim's room, neither brother even glanced that way. The Emir said, “True, but they are always balanced by an undesirable trait.” And they walked on, discussing other names.

“Well, I'll be …!” said Flury. He looked suspiciously at Elda and Claudia, who were leaning together, both in fits of laughter.

Claudia took her head out of Elda's wing and looked around for Titus, to tell him about all this, and found him, much to her surprise, on the other side of the courtyard beside King Luther. Hoping that this did not mean more trouble, she hurried over to him.

As Claudia arrived, Lukin was saying, “I am
not
trying to make conditions, Father. I just want to learn enough wizardry to help—”

He broke off, and Claudia shut her mouth on what she had been going to say to Titus. Both of them felt the pressure of some kind of magic as Blade slid himself into the group beside Lukin. Blade spared a glance toward the Emir's soldiers, floundering among the broken rafters of the roof opposite, and decided that what he had to say to King Luther was more important. Nobody up there seemed to be hurt. “Your Majesty,” he said, “do forgive the interruption. The emperor Titus begs to wonder if the princess Isodel would consent to be introduced to him.”

Before King Luther could speak, Isodel said, “Oh,
yes
!” and went toward Titus with both hands out. Then, realizing that she did not really know him, she took her hands down and said wonderingly, “Are you the Emperor of the South then?”

Titus seized her hands, anyway. “Yes,” he said. They stood face to face, staring at one another and marveling. “I hope you're good at governing,” Titus said then. “I've just imprisoned most of the people who usually do it.”

“Quite good,” Isodel said, “and very economical. You sound as if you have an emergency. Do you want us to set out now or wait till tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow will do,” Titus said. “We'd have time to get married before we leave then.”