Year of the Griffin

by Diana Wynne Jones

  “You told me that,” said Lukin, “when you lent me the money for these clothes. Remember? It must have taken real nerve. And it must have taken even more nerve to hang on to the treasure and only sell a little bit in each town you went through. Me, I’d have got rid of it all at once, even if it would have made it easier for him to trace me.”

  “But now everyone knows I’m a thief!” Olga said.

  “No one I’ve spoken to blames you,” Ruskin said. “They all say they wouldn’t have dared. And it was all stolen goods, anyway, wasn’t it?”

  “Besides,” added Claudia, “everyone knows you only took what you thought you were due.”

  “We-ell,” said Olga, “I took a bit extra for being beaten.” A tear trickled down one of her angular cheeks. She went on in a slow, faraway voice, “He didn’t treat me too badly when I was his cabin boy. He only hit me then when he was drunk. He thought of me as a boy, I think. He’d always wanted a son. But it got much worse when he discovered I could raise winds. You know how when you’re new to a thing, you don’t always get it right, or sometimes it doesn’t work at all? When that happened, he was always furious and gave me a beating. And then one day he found me playing about on land, talking to air elementals and making a lot of small whirlwinds. I told him I was practicing, but I wasn’t really. Air people are—were—such fun to talk to, and I was really enjoying myself for once. And he was furious. He said it wasn’t useful, and girls shouldn’t do things that weren’t any use to their menfolk. And he called me a witch and beat me half to death. It made me so ill he had to leave me behind on the next voyage, and when I got better at last, I found the air elementals couldn’t hear me when I talked to them. I could only raise monsters after that. And he beat me again for not raising winds.”

  Out of the long silence that followed this, Elda said, “You should have taken all his treasure.”

  Olga made a gulping sound. Two more tears chased down her cheeks. “I wish,” she said, “I wish I didn’t look like him.”

  There was no doubt that Olga inherited her hawk looks from Olaf. Her friends exchanged glances, which somehow ended with all of them looking at Claudia. She said slowly, thinking about it, “You know, Olga, where I come from, in the Empire, all the people who do the governing and have the most money come from a very few families. This means you get a lot of people who look very much alike. My brother, Titus, has a second cousin, son of a senator, who could almost be his twin, except that no one could ever mix them up, because Porphyrio looks like the evil little twit he is, and Titus looks plain nice. And there’s a dreadful tarty woman who’s always causing scandals, who looks very like me. And I often look at these people and feel really astonished that the same features can look so different on different people. Do you see what I mean?”

  Olga almost smiled. “Yes, I do. Thank you, Claudia.”

  Lukin was so grateful to Claudia that he wanted to reward her in some way. All he could think of was to say, “That cloakrack, it’s down inside the pit. I think it’s gone for good.”

  “I hope so,” said Claudia. “I just hope my magic’s not down there with it.”

  NINE

  THE RAIN CLEARED up in the night. In the morning, and for the next few mornings, since the weather turned mild and sweet and stayed that way, Elda kept her promise to herself and went out flying before breakfast.

  She was surprised at how much she enjoyed it. All alone with the whistling of her own wings, she swept out across the countryside, enjoying the sight of plowed fields, green meadows, and graying tracts of stubble wheeling below. The sun caught sideways upon woodlands that were tinting after the frost, bronze and red and almost purple. Scents came up to her from farms, and trickles of smoke itched her nostrils. When she wheeled to fly back, there was the city and its towers, golden pink in the morning sun, with the mountains beyond flushed misty yellow with deep blue creases in them.

  The second morning her wings felt stronger, and she went further, right over to the moorlands beyond the civilized country. She was winging back from there, watching cows being driven out to pasture far below in the first farms she came to, when something glinted in the sky, over to her left, in the north. She turned her head and saw it was a dragon. It was a young one, with a lot of gold and white in it, the way the young ones had, and it seemed to be coming on a slanting course toward the University.

  Elda was surprised because dragons were rare this far south. She increased her speed, hoping to be near it when it reached the city, and flew on, admiring the sight of it against the clear blue sky. So graceful, she thought. Dragons had no need to flap wings all the time the way griffins did. This one balanced its great webby wings this way and that and sailed forward on the air currents. Or did it actually talk to the air as Olga said she could once? Poor Olga. She was still white and quiet, and her face was all haughty with misery.

  Elda’s course and the young dragon’s brought them closer together every minute. Elda was confident that they would meet somewhere over the University, which was in full sight now, ahead and below. Then, to her disappointment, the dragon tilted a wing, swept down and around in a half circle, and planed elegantly to earth beside a bronzed woodland some miles away. Elda watched a crowd of panic-stricken rooks and pigeons rise out of the trees as the dragon crawled into the wood and out of sight.

  For a moment Elda wondered whether to fly over there and ask what it was doing. But you did not mess with dragons, particularly not the hot-tempered young ones. This one had definitely gone into hiding. So Elda flew on, rejoicing at having seen such a beautiful, unexpected thing. She came in low across the city, across the twiddly turrets and elaborate arches of Bardic College on its outskirts, and around in a great sweep over the lake. There, as she had hoped, were several long, thin boats crawling across the surface of the water like water beetles, and Wizard Finn running along the bank bellowing at them through a loud-hailer. Elda spotted the boat with Olga in it and dived down to skim just above the heads of the laboring oarswomen.

  “I saw a dragon!” she shrieked.

  Olga, rowing stroke, looked up and actually laughed, while behind her oars pointed every which way, crossed, clashed, and missed the water.

  “Get out of it, Elda!” Wizard Finn roared from the bank.

  Elda swooped up and away, chuckling, to glide in over the roofs of the city and land in the courtyard beside Wizard Policant’s statue.

  Olga was still laughing when she came in to breakfast, and the wild-rose pink color was back in her cheeks, as if Elda’s exploit had restored her to herself. “Don’t ever do that again!” she said to Elda. “Two of them fell in. Finn was furious. What dragon?”

  Elda was about to describe it when she noticed that Claudia was simply sitting, staring, in much the same way that Olga had been doing up to now. “What’s the matter, Claudia?”

  Claudia just pointed at the cloakrack standing in the corner of the refectory.

  “You sure it’s the same one?” Ruskin asked, swiveling his stumpy body to look.

  “Yes,” said Claudia. “It was waiting for me at the bottom of my staircase.”

  “Let us experiment,” said Felim.

  After breakfast, which was no worse and no better for the absence of the cook, they led Claudia this way and that through the buildings, upstairs and downstairs, and found that the cloakrack faithfully followed wherever it could. In the courtyard and the corridors it trundled easily along on its three legs, always about ten feet behind Claudia. Going upstairs to the library, it fell sideways with a clatter and bumped slowly upward so long as Claudia kept moving. When she stopped, it stopped. When they shut a door on it, it waited patiently outside until somebody happened to open the door. Then it resumed its patient pursuit.

  “Hmm,” said Ruskin. “Why are doors an obstacle when it was able to get out of the pit?”

  “That took it two days,” Olga pointed out.

  “But surely fairly strong magic,” said Felim. “Let us test it for magic.”
>
  It was a fairly easy matter to coax the cloakrack into Elda’s concert hall. There they tried all the divination spells for magic on it that they knew. Every single one was negative. Ruskin said that he was quite good at sensing magic, anyway, and put his great dwarf hands on it. After a moment he shook his head. “Not a thing,” he said. Elda, after her experience in the refectory the other night, was fairly sure that she would be able to sense if there was any magic in the cloakrack, too, but she, like Ruskin, could feel nothing. It seemed simply to be neutral wood.

  “At least Wermacht didn’t put any of your magic in it,” Olga said as they went over to the tutorial room with the cloakrack bumping along behind. “You can be thankful for that, anyway.”

  “Look at it this way,” Lukin said when they reached the tall stone room. He slammed the door to keep the cloakrack out. “It’s not doing you any harm. It’s not magic itself. It’s just following you around because stupid Wermacht linked it to you rather powerfully somehow.”

  “Or my jinx did,” Claudia said with rueful creases in her cheeks. “I’m not scared of it exactly. It’s—it’s just embarrassing. I won’t dare go to choir practice.”

  “We must get Wermacht to undo what he did,” said Felim.

  Inevitably, when Corkoran opened the door of the tutorial room and hurried inside, the cloakrack sidled in after him. Corkoran frowned at it absently. But he was late anyhow, because so many people had stopped him on his way here to complain of mice. It seemed as if the former pirates had tunneled their way out of the pit. Corkoran wondered what everyone thought he could do about it. He was far too busy, anyway, trying to construct his moonsuit, and he did not want any more calls on his time. So he ignored the cloakrack and got straight down to handing back essays and explaining to his students that what they had been saying in them had nothing to do with the real world.

  His pupils stared sadly at the marks he had given them and then equally sadly at his tie, which today had a pattern of stars and comets on it. Corkoran thought they seemed unwarrantably depressed. “What I’m trying to tell you,” he said encouragingly, “is that everything has to have limitations. It’s no good expecting magic to perform wonders if those wonders are against the laws of nature.”

  “But a lot of magic is against the laws of nature,” Elda protested. “I couldn’t fly without magic. Neither could dragons.”

  Lukin, the dedicated chess player, said, “You mean you have to have rules or the game won’t work? But magic isn’t a game. And anyway, rules can be changed.”

  “You’re not seeing my point,” Corkoran told him. “You have to use magic like a tool, for a certain set of things, and you have to operate within certain safe limits, even then, or you’re in trouble. Take magic to do with time, which you’ll be doing in your second year. It is known that if you speed time up or slow it down too often in the same place, you weaken the walls between universes and let all sorts of undesirable things through. It’s thought that this is how Mr. Chesney got here.”

  They looked glum. They were too young, Corkoran thought, to understand the troubles Mr. Chesney had caused. “Or take my own work,” he said. “I’m up against a law of nature at the moment, which magic has no power to change. There is no air to breathe on the moon. If I got in my moonship and went there as I am, I would suffocate, or worse, because where there is no air, my experiments have proved that the human body implodes, collapses in upon itself. I am having to design a special suit to keep myself in one piece.”

  “What kind of suit?” Ruskin asked.

  And suddenly, to Corkoran’s slight bewilderment, everyone was agog with interest. Questions were fired at him, and suggestions after those. Ruskin and Lukin discussed articulated joints for the moonsuit, which Corkoran had not realized he would need, while Olga recommended several air-spells Corkoran did not know, saying she had always kept several kinds ready in case her father’s ship sank. Claudia, after some scribbling and calculating, came up with a formula for exactly how thick the metal of a moonsuit would have to be, and while Ruskin snatched her paper, checked it, and pronounced it could be thinner than that, Felim produced a scheme for surrounding the whole moon in an envelope of air. “Using your Impenetrable Net to hold it there,” he explained.

  “But,” said Elda, “why not make the moonsuit out of Impenetrable Net, anyway? With one of Olga’s air-spells on each shoulder. That’s what I’d do.”

  While Corkoran was staring at her, wondering why this had never occurred to him, Felim observed, “You might have to stiffen the net to prevent implosion.” And Claudia began calculating again just how stiff it should be.

  After this Ruskin asked about the construction of the moonship in such detail and so knowledgeably that the idea began to grow in Corkoran that he might get Ruskin to finish the moonship for him. Dwarf craftsmanship was just what was needed, delicate and strong. Perhaps offer Ruskin a scholarship … Offer Claudia another, so that she could do his calculations … But before these ideas had quite ripened to a decision, Corkoran found Ruskin’s eye on him, round and blue and innocent. “Pity dwarf work costs such a lot,” Ruskin mused. “Such a very great deal that even the Emperor can’t afford it most of the time.”

  Ah, well, Corkoran thought. He had enough new ideas to go on, anyway. He rushed away back to his lab, half an hour early, almost dizzy with all the possibilities his students had suggested.

  There was a small square of paper lying in the middle of his lab floor. Corkoran picked it up, idly reading it as he threw it away and turned to his workbench. “MAKE US THE RIGHT SIZE,” it said, in rather small letters, “AND WE GO. DO NOT, THEN BEWARE.” Corkoran let it fall into his wastebin without bothering to think about it. He did not even glance toward the rat cage, where the Impenetrable Net hung off the front and the bars were forced outward. He had forgotten the assassins days ago. He got down to puzzling out articulated joints for his moonsuit.

  Meanwhile a young woman was walking through the city. Every so often she stopped someone and politely inquired the way to the University. Each person she asked directed her with willing eagerness and smiled as she walked on the way he or she had pointed. She was that kind of young lady. She walked very upright in a plain cloak that swirled sedately aside to show a worn blue woolen dress, and her hair, which was on the dark side of brown, curled a little around a face that was longish and not quite pretty, but it was so full of humor and confidence and kindness that most people reacted to her as if she were a raving beauty. The porter at the University gates was no exception. He bowed to her.

  “That way, my lady. Taking coffee by the statue in the main courtyard at this hour usually.” And after the young lady had given him a smile that half stunned him, he said to the janitor, “Quite the most lovely lady I ever set eyes on, and I seen a few. Puts Wizard Myrna and that Melissa quite in the shade, I say.”

  The young lady walked on into the courtyard, where Elda and her friends were gathered around Wizard Policant and Olga had just fetched coffee.

  “Forget Corkoran. He can’t see beyond his tie,” Lukin said to Ruskin. “How are the food-spells coming on?”

  Ruskin grumped. His room was now a mess of little bowls and dishes, and tiny cooking fires in clay pots, where the smells of bread or fried fish regularly woke him during the night. “I can’t seem to balance the smell with the taste yet,” he confessed. “If I do get a good steak pie, it smells of lavender, or I got a lovely chowder, but it—”

  Lukin gave a great shout and raced away across the courtyard. “Isodel!” he yelled, and flung both arms around the young lady. She hugged him back heartily.

  Olga had gone white again. Elda cocked an eye at her. “His sister,” she said. “My brother Blade thinks she’s wonderful.”

  “Oh,” Olga said rather faintly, and her face flooded red.

  “Here,” Isodel said to Lukin, handing him a worn old wallet that chinked a little. “It’s not as much as we’d hoped, I’m afraid. Father suddenly decided to check up on everyone
’s allowance—Mother’s particularly—and tell us we all spent too much. We had to account for every copper. Mother invented a charity, and I pretended there was a dress bill I’d forgotten. But we think he’s getting suspicious, Lukin. He keeps asking about you. Mother and I keep saying we’ve seen you just this minute, and the younger ones are being magnificent, inventing things you said to them that morning, but there are so many courtiers not in the secret—like Lord Crevet, going around saying he’s not seen you for weeks now—that it’s getting very difficult.”

  Lukin experienced a deep sinking feeling somewhere just under his stomach. “The University sent out a request for donations. Did he—”

  “No, that was all right,” said Isodel, “though it was a narrow squeak. I’d told the loftkeeper that any pigeons that arrived from the University were to be brought to me, but Father was actually in the loft, inspecting it, when it came. Luckily Lyrian was with Father, and he realized and managed to whisper to the pigeon to fly off and look for me, so Father never saw it after all. But, Lukin, it would make things a lot easier if you could manage to nip home on a spell for a day or so and show Father you’re there.”

  “Oh, gods!” said Lukin. “They keep us so busy here. And we haven’t done translocation yet. The way I am now, I’m quite likely to arrive in the palace at the bottom of a deep pit. Or,” he said, thinking about it, “at the end of a line of deep pits, between here and Luteria.”

  “You could borrow Endymion,” Isodel suggested. “If I asked him very nicely—”

  “Endymion regards himself as your own personal dragon,” Lukin said. “If he wouldn’t bring me here, why should he take me back? Where is he, by the way?”

  “Hiding in a wood. He got shy,” Isodel explained. “He hates being gawked at.”

  “Then you must have walked miles!” Lukin exclaimed. “Come over to the statue and sit down and meet my friends.” He put an arm around her shoulders and led her to the statue, where his friends were all rather feverishly pretending not to be interested. “You’ve met Elda, of course. This is Ruskin, Claudia, Felim, and”—he took a deep breath—“this is Olga.”