by Tim Susman
Alice shook her head. “We shouldn’t lie to her. That’ll just make things worse. She needs to know she can trust us.”
Kip exhaled. “She’ll never trust me.”
“You’ve got to start somewhere.” Malcolm drew his hand back. “You’ve the advantage of being of her race, where I’m at even more of a disadvantage because I’ve not got any fur to speak of. Alice here is our best chance to win the wolf’s good graces.”
“All right. But I won’t hide from her,” Kip said.
They crept back into the house, which belonged to Ella Lutris, Coppy’s sister whom Kip had saved at the Battle of the Road. Kip lay down next to Alice but took a long time to find sleep, his head full of burning houses and snarling wolves and three young students helpless in the depths of the cold stone of King’s College.
In the morning, Ella Lutris was positively overcome to find Kip in her house. She told him she had insisted that Malcolm and Alice stay with her so she would know they were safe, and she was delighted that he was safe too. Kip hugged her and told her he was glad she too was doing well, but privately he wondered at the conditions on the Isle of Dogs if Ella Lutris worried for Malcolm and Alice’s safety outside of her own home. They hadn’t mentioned soldiers or ruffians coming onto the Isle, just the disappearance of Calatians. But he didn’t want to upset Ella by asking; the otter was so happy and so pleased to be able to offer them bread for their breakfast.
Soon enough, though, the pleasant morning had to give way to the meeting. Alice led Malcolm and Kip to Grinda, with Sleek taking Alice’s shoulder and chattering back to Ash and Corvi on Kip’s and Malcolm’s, respectively. At a street corner, Alice stopped and pointed to the roof of the house. “We’ve been leaving the ravens there,” she said.
Malcolm rested a hand on Alice’s arm as Corvi and Ash flew up to the roof. “Aye, so as not to flaunt the whole ‘us being sorcerers,’ you know. Seems more politic.”
“Of course.” Kip sent his mind to Ash for a moment as Sleek joined the other two, looking down on the two foxes and the human in their black robes in the street. How could they be mistaken for anything but sorcerers?
Still, Alice and Malcolm had been navigating Grinda’s graces for the last day, so he didn’t argue, just followed to a house at the next corner, a little larger than the others. Murmurs of conversation came from inside, but as Alice drew the curtain aside, they stopped cold.
Kip followed the others in and let the curtain fall behind him. “Ah,” Alice said as she guided Malcolm to a seat, “My husband’s here. Kip. I didn’t know he’d be coming. There was some trouble in Paris.”
A few of the muzzles in the house nodded in greeting to him; he recognized Pierce the otter as well as a few others among the twenty or so packed into the room. The large shape at the center he recognized too, and he knew her growl as soon as she spoke. “The great sorcerer descends from on high to grace us with his presence,” Grinda said. “Shall we all kneel?”
“Of course not,” Kip snapped. “I’m here to help.”
“Here to help.” The wolf’s ears stayed flat down. “Calyxes have been going missing for two months now, but when your students are kidnapped, then you want to come help.”
“Nobody told us about the disappearances,” Kip shot back.
Alice tugged at his sleeve. “I told her that,” she whispered.
“Ah, Grinda.” This was Pierce. “Leave the boy alone. He’s here now, isn’t he? Let’s look forward rather than back. Another sorcerer on our side has to be a good thing, doesn’t it?”
“It very much does not,” she said.
A beaver sitting next to the wolf rested a paw on her arm. “Let him hear our plans and tell us how he can help.”
“Yes, very well.” Grinda straightened and addressed the assembled Calatians, ignoring Kip. “We are still waiting for the sorcerers to come for either Naveen or Colin, and Alice will take their place then.”
“I think I should take their place instead,” Kip put in.
“Lovely.” Grinda cut him off before he could go any farther. “You’re told to listen to our plans and we don’t even get one sentence in before you jump in to tell us how to do it better.”
“Naveen and Colin are male, like me,” Kip said. “And they’re not pregnant. You’d risk a cub for your plan?”
This stirred some murmurs and got Kip a smack on the arm from Alice. “I volunteered to do it,” she said, “and whether I’m pregnant or not makes no difference. How is it better to put our cub’s father in danger? No matter which of us goes, we’re protecting his future.”
“It does make a difference, though,” a polecat Kip didn’t know said. “Penfold’s right; it ought to be him.”
“Kip’s known in the College,” Alice objected. “What if he’s recognized?”
“Only a few people know me,” Kip said. “And without my robes, I doubt anyone will know the difference.”
“Are you pregnant?” Grinda asked Alice directly.
The room fell quiet until Alice nodded her head, and then murmurs started up again, louder than before. “I can’t believe you did this,” Alice said in a low voice as Grinda, ears now up, called for quiet. “Well, actually, I can. It’s typical.”
“What?” Kip asked into a quieting room. “That I want to protect the people I love?”
“No calyxes have disappeared,” Alice hissed. “And you knew how they,” she nodded out at the others, “would react when a cub was involved.”
“Because cubs are so few and so precious to us.”
“Quiet,” the wolf said pointedly at him. “You make a good point, but that doesn’t give you license to keep talking.”
Kip clamped his muzzle shut. Grinda surveyed the others. “We’ll send Penfold then. Be ready this afternoon; that’s usually when they come, if they come at all. It might be days.”
He stopped himself from asking what they were doing in the meantime and kept his ears up to listen. “Anytime a calyx is called, come report it to me,” Grinda went on. “If any are not returned, we need to know as soon as possible.”
The meeting adjourned soon after that without anything else of substance discussed, and most of the members dispersed to go to their jobs. But Pierce came to talk to Kip, to shake his paw and welcome him and tell him not to mind old Grinda, she was just frustrated.
He appreciated the otter’s reassurances and friendship, but he knew that Grinda’s dislike of him ran deeper than that, to a level he couldn’t fix just by being friendly with her. She saw the world not only divided into Calatian and human, but also sorcerer and non-sorcerer, and in her world, sorcerers used others. It would do no good for him to explain to her that he didn’t want to summon demons anymore, for example, because she would believe that his station as sorcerer would tempt him eventually to summon one again.
And she might not be wrong, at that. His frustration here had led him almost to that point already. Nikolon had said that Kip could summon her if there were truly need, and if he did not make his way into the College in the next day, he had very few other alternatives. Malcolm would happily call a demon for him, but Kip had let him do that enough. It didn’t change the fundamental wrongness of the sorcerer-demon relationship that someone else was summoning. If Kip needed a demon, he should be the one to summon it.
He would make that decision when the time came. Until then, he would search for any alternative. He could use magic; there had to be more than one answer to a problem.
When Pierce left, Alice led Kip and Malcolm back to Ella Lutris’s house, where they sat around on the floor and Kip told them more about Paris and then asked what else they had been doing over the last two days. Ella worked repairing baskets but listened to their talk.
“Malcolm had Corvi fly around the College to see if he could spot Victor or anything like that,” Alice said. “But he also agreed we would need someone inside the College.”
“I didn’t think of scanning for wards.” Malcolm diplomatically did not addr
ess Kip’s action during the meeting, even though Kip was sure that’s what Alice had been leading up to. “It’s a good idea.”
“The problem is we have to get in there somehow. You can’t do it through Corvi. Can you?”
For a moment Kip hoped that Malcolm might have discovered some new sorcery, but his friend shook his head. “No, alas. He’s a lovely companion but all I can do is translocate to him.”
Kip sent Ash to fly around the College anyway, in case there was something he could spot that Malcolm had missed or hadn’t realized the significance of. He instructed her to be careful lest someone see her and trap her with a spell, and even so he kept his mind with her as she circled windows and tried to peer inside, soared above the college to watch the comings and goings on the roof, perched with the other ravens outside the courtyard where students bustled about, and saw a great deal of very ordinary activity. If she spotted Victor, Kip thought he might be able to carry out their planned kidnapping, but Victor, if he was back, stayed well out of sight.
Ella interrupted him for lunch, and so he had Ash fly back to eat as well. They reported back to Emily, who had not yet readjusted to the time in East Georgia and was working on the school’s accounts at seven in the morning. She told them, in turn, that the refugees had settled down and were all still sleeping as far as she knew. Two had asked her to take them back to Paris and she had convinced them to wait a day; she planned to go back today and see whether the “uprising” was still going on.
She approved of their plan and had no other ideas, but promised to think about it. “Oh, and Kip, Master Chakrabarti wants to stay here, so I’ve put him in the empty room next to Master Argent. When they’re all awake, I’ll introduce them.”
“That’s good.” Kip’s ears perked, surprised. “Does he know we might not be able to pay him?”
“He knows. He says he believes his school will provide at least money for his food if we can promise to help them with flooding. Every rainy season—I’m not sure when that is—some of their villages have problems with water and mud and they think that having a few extra sorcerers could save many lives. I said yes, because we really do need a healer, and Alice is good with mud and water.”
“Of course,” Alice said immediately, and Malcolm and Kip echoed her.
After that, it was back to watching the windows of the College through Ash and waiting for the call for a calyx. An hour passed, then another, and finally Kip said, “If we don’t hear something today, I’m going to go to the College tonight and look around myself.”
“Kip, no,” Alice said.
“I’d go right now if the College weren’t so crowded during the day. We can’t wait any longer. Every day gives Victor more chances to do something to the students. He’s been occupied in Paris, and today is his first day back. I don’t want him to have time to—”
Alice put a paw on his. “I know,” she said. “But you can’t just go snooping around the College. You’ll get caught.”
“What if Malcolm goes along to keep me warded?”
She folded her arms. “Then I’m going too. If he’s focusing on the wards, and you’re doing magical snooping, someone has to keep an eye out in the physical world for you.”
“Ash and Corvi can do that.”
Alice glared at him. “I’m not sitting here alone while you two go off into danger. All right, I shouldn’t go by myself, but neither should you, and neither should any of us. We should all work together whenever we can.”
Kip gave Corvi a beseeching look, and Malcolm shook his head. “Nah, mate. I’d make the same argument to Emily and I’d get overruled just the same. It’s dangerous, aye, but she’s more than earned her place with us. An’ I venture to say that if she were the sort to meekly sit home while you went out into danger, your marriage would be a sight less successful.”
Alice looked very pleased at this, and Kip had to smile as well. “All right,” he said. “Yes. It’ll be the three of us.”
“Good.” Alice’s ears went up. “Now if you’re done having Ash look around, why don’t you come see this wall that Malcolm and I have been helping with? We started doing it because we didn’t want to just sit around doing nothing.”
She led them through narrow streets and past mice, hedgehogs, foxes, and other Calatians to the western shore of the Isle, and then about fifty feet along it to a place where the old stones that marked the edge of the Isle fell away. “Here,” Alice said, sitting on the edge of the breach. “The wall here fell down last year, Varwen told me.”
“Varwen?”
An old otter in a long threadbare tunic walked toward them from one of the riverside houses. “Him,” Alice pointed. “Hello, Varwen.”
“Hallo, young miss.” The otter smiled. “And Master sorcerer, and this’ll be your husband the other Master sorcerer, I suppose, Master Penfold.”
“That I am.” Kip smiled. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
“Many on our Isle adore you, and a few despise you.” The otter drew closer, so that Kip could make out the grey on his muzzle and the cloudiness in his eyes. “And me, I’ve not met you yet, so I’m reserving my judgment.”
“I’ll be on my best behavior,” Kip promised.
Alice pointed to the breach. “So the wall fell down and many of the stones are in the river now. I’ve been trying to feel around down there and find rocks…” Lined up neatly in front of the breach rested a pile of stones. “But I only found a couple that I could put in place and I’m not sure how to secure them. I figure just getting the stones up is helpful, and if we can put them in place that’ll be even better.”
“It’s a good idea. Did you go underwater to look?”
“No; I tried to call a water elemental but I couldn’t make it work.” She splayed her ears. “Still. But I found out I could ‘feel around’ under the water, and I can tell when something is about the right weight to be a stone from the wall, and then most of the time it is. Once it was a rusted metal thing and once it was a dead dog.” She shuddered. “But I found a lot of the stones, and if we find more we could maybe repair the wall, or at least help them to do it.”
“The river don’t come up t’here,” Varwen said, looking down over the breach, “but without t’wall, it eats away at the Isle on this side.” His paw swept out. “Current come down from London proper.”
“We can help get it fixed,” Kip said. “Can you get mortar?”
“Aye. Least, I know someone who can.” The otter sat down on the wall beside Alice. “Will it be a bother if I watch?”
“Not at all.” Alice gestured to Kip. “Want to try?”
He took a seat on the other side of her from the otter. At least from here he could see the College and keep Ash occupied flying around it looking for Victor. “I’ll be happy to.”
For a short time they explored the river bottom looking for stones to lift up. Kip hadn’t found any to Alice’s two when Sleek croaked loudly and then said in Emily’s voice, “Malcolm! Kip! Alice!”
Kip let go of his spell and stood. Malcolm, closer, also stood and said, “We’re here,” his face creased with worry.
“Charity came back.”
Alice jumped to her feet. “What?”
“She came back.” The raven clacked its beak. “She’s here.”
Malcolm held out his arm for Corvi, and Kip took Alice’s paw as Ash came to his shoulder. “We’ll be there in a moment.”
“Where?” Kip asked.
“I’m taking her to her room,” Sleek said, flying up to Alice’s shoulder.
A moment later the three of them stood in the Welcome Hall of the Lutris School, a warm, cheery space with windows that opened onto the flower gardens and a large fireplace that held only a lone phosphorus elemental. The lizard perked up when they arrived and chirped a greeting to Kip, which he returned, apologizing for the hurry as he followed Malcolm and Alice to the student quarters.
They met Emily at the door of Charity’s room, and floating next to her in the air
was indeed Charity herself. She looked almost as she had when they’d last seen her at the Exposition, her tunic a little less white, her face streaked with dirt, and under her arm she carried a small wicker box that she kept her eyes downcast to. But when she heard them approach, she looked up and held her arms out to Alice.
Alice ran over to her, and Charity threw her other arm around the fox and hugged her, keeping the wicker box clutched tightly to her.
“Shh, shh,” Alice said. “I’ve got you. You’re safe now.”
Charity burst into tears. “We’re not safe,” she sobbed. “We’re none of us safe.”
Kip reached out to take the wicker box from her. “I can get this,” he said.
She clutched it tighter, then registered that it was Kip reaching for it and let it go, but stared after it. “Don’t let him out of your sight,” she whispered.
The box felt warm and had some weight to it. Kip hefted it, and in that moment whatever was in it moved around, shifting the weight of the box and making Kip put both paws on it. The lid pressed up against his grip, and a high-pitched chattering sounded from inside it.
“What is it?” Emily asked, beckoning them all into the room.
Charity gulped and pressed her face into Alice’s shoulder as Alice carried her forward. Her words came so muffled that Kip’s ears didn’t pick them up, but Alice’s did, and lay flat against her head.
“What?” Kip asked. “I didn’t hear.”
Alice set Charity on her bed and Emily released the spell so that the girl could sit properly. They waited for her to repeat what she’d said, but she shook her head and looked at Alice.
The vixen turned to the others, her eyes on the wicker box. “She says that’s Jorey in there.”
14
Less Than Human
Malcolm and Emily stared at the box as well. Kip cracked the lid and peered inside. Certainly the animal that was in there was a red squirrel, but there was nothing to identify it specifically as Jorey. What had he been looking for? A tiny sorcerer’s robe?
