Year of the Griffin

by Diana Wynne Jones

  “Where’s Callette?” the strutting griffin demanded. “I know she came this way. She doesn’t escape Jessak Atreck just by crossing the ocean.”

  “You can see she’s not here,” said Elda.

  The griffin’s yellow eyes flicked around the courtyard. “She’s hiding. There are at least four doors here big enough for her to get through.”

  “Want me to search the place, Jessak?” the off-white griffin asked.

  Jessak looked at Elda with his scruffy head on one side and pretended to consider. “No. This little yellow cat can tell me. Can’t you, runtlet?”

  “No,” said Elda. “Even if I could, I wouldn’t.”

  Jessak’s answer to this was to extend his neck, so that it became improbably long and scrawny, with chestnut feathers sticking out all around it, until his beak was pointing into the middle of Elda’s forehead and his yellow eyes were glaring into hers. He raised a forefoot and pretended to scratch his beak, showing talons at least twice the size of Elda’s and wickedly sharp. “Yes, you will, runtlet.”

  Claudia tried to distract Jessak by calling out, rather shrilly, “What do you want with Callette, anyway?”

  Jessak did not bother to move or answer, but the brown-and-white griffin said, “Jessak’s sworn to marry Callette and teach her manners. She scratched his—”

  “Shut up!” said Jessak, still glaring at Elda.

  “It’s a funny kind of human, anyway,” grumbled the brown-and-white griffin. “Greenish. Shall I tear it up?”

  “When I’ve got Callette,” said Jessak. “You want to keep your eyes, yellow cat, you tell me where she is.”

  Elda simply remained as still as a statue, as still as a cat at a mousehole, and did not answer. Her scalp and the line of her backbone ached, her hackles were up so high. She understood exactly why Callette had said this griffin made her feel soft and squeamish inside. The smell of him, the way he glared, and the great eagle-lion shape of him were making strong primitive demands that Elda had never met before. He made her, like a cat or a bird, or even like a lioness, want to lie down and give in. Her insides crawled with what seemed to be lust. But griffins were a higher order of being than cats or eagles, as Elda remembered Mum’s firmly telling her once when she caught Elda chasing mice, and the way Jessak was deliberately making her feel was beginning to enrage her.

  Behind the brown-and-white griffin, in the doorway of the concert hall, Felim, Olga, and Lukin rather frantically tried a third spell. They had tried to open one of Lukin’s pits under each griffin, and then to turn the invaders into mice, and now they tried a simple banishment spell. This one had no effect on the invaders either. “I do not understand this,” Felim whispered. “They seem to have some kind of magical immunity.”

  Ruskin, standing beside Elda, had discovered the same thing and then remembered that dwarflore stated that griffins in the old days could not be touched by magic. “These griffins are throwbacks,” he rumbled disgustedly. “Cave griffins! Why don’t they just go away?”

  Jessak’s beak stabbed around at Ruskin with incredible speed. Ruskin sprang backward. Elda, beginning to be really angry, clapped her right wing over the dwarf and hauled him against her flank, glaring at Jessak while she did so. The other griffins snapped their beaks, clapped their wings, and screamed with amusement.

  “Ho, ho, ho!” howled the pigeon-colored one. “She’s ready to be a mother, isn’t she? Can I have her, Jessak?”

  That did it. Elda’s building rage erupted and exploded at the full pitch of her lungs. She had a very powerful voice. As Derk had often ruefully pointed out, the youngest in a family of vociferous griffins had to be the loudest in order to get heard at all. “You disgusting crew of horrible little birds! You barge in here, you strut about, you do your best to bully and frighten everyone, and you haven’t even the decency to wash! Or even preen. You stink! And then you have the cheek to think that my sister would have anything to do with you! You, when you’re so filthy and so rude and haven’t three brain cells among the lot of you, you think you can come in here and lord it over decent people....”

  There was a lot more than this. Once Elda got going, she got going with a vengeance. Jessak, still with his neck stretched out, put his head on one side and pretended to admire her, which made Elda angrier than ever.

  “Even your ancestral pigeon would be ashamed of you!” she screamed. “The half-breed vulture you have for a grandmother must be writhing in her muck heap. And your mother, who was obviously a street-walking baboon or an unusually stupid civet cat, probably died of humiliation long ago!”

  There was a sound like a whip crack beside her. Air blasted Elda’s wing feathers sideways. And, to Elda’s enormous relief, her human brother Blade appeared beside her. “Carry on, Elda,” he said. “Keep their attention. You’re doing wonderfully. We got your message. Kit’ll be here in a moment.”

  TWELVE

  ELDA FILLED HER lungs joyfully and screamed again. “Your grandfathers were all rats, and they were educated by jackals!”

  But Jessak and his friends were no longer listening. They were looking at Blade and drawing together into a huddle in what looked very like dismay. “You again!” said Jessak.

  Blade folded his arms and tapped with one booted foot. “Yes. Me again. I warned you when they exiled you that if you came over here, I’d make you sorry. And I will. I give you a count of ten to get out of this place. One. Two.”

  Elda looked fondly down at Blade as he stood and counted. Blade these days was tall and rather thin, with straight, fairish hair and a straight, fairish face that usually held the same mild, friendly look that his father, Derk’s, did. You would not think to look at him that he was one of the four most powerful wizards in the world. Elda just wished she could learn to be anything like so good.

  “Five. Six,” said Blade. “Seven.”

  Elda noticed that Blade was keeping half an eye on the evening sky above the Spellman Building as he counted. She kept half an eye there, too. Blade and Kit usually worked as a pair. Sure enough, there was a dark bird-shaped speck against the sunset there, and it grew very rapidly larger and darker. Kit was flying flat out.

  “Eight,” said Blade. “Nine.”

  “You can’t frighten us. We’re immune to magic,” the off-white griffin said unconvincingly.

  Blade raised his eyebrows. “Ten,” he said.

  And Kit came hurtling down past the Observatory tower and over the parapet like a diving black demon, shouting thunderously. “GET AWAY FROM MY SISTER, YOU GODFORSAKEN REJECTS!” Fire blasted up from the courtyard where the invading griffins stood. Blade grinned and added his magic to Kit’s. The result was that all four griffins were shot into the air as if a bomb were under them. Kit flung a further sheet of fire beneath them as they rose, causing them to scream as one griffin and flap their singeing wings desperately. Blade sped them on their way with another blast of magic. They clapped their tails between their legs and flew madly to get away.

  “BLASTED RIFFRAFF!” Kit thundered over his shoulder at them as he landed.

  That was neat, Elda thought. You don’t magic them, because it doesn’t take, so you magic the air underneath them. Then she had a moment when she thought, Only four griffins? And what message? But she forgot those questions in her total delight at seeing her brothers again. She raised both wings, letting a rather overheated-looking Ruskin tumble out, and wrapped Blade in her pinions. “Love you, Blade!”

  “Me, too,” Blade said, butting her with his head, griffin fashion. He slapped her flank. “You had a good shout, didn’t you? Those gangsters were looking almost respectful when I got here.”

  Elda chuckled as she galloped over to Kit. Kit was so glad to see her that he actually twined his neck with Elda’s, which was a thing he very rarely did. Elda rejoiced in the well-known clean smell of his feathers and the sleek shine of his pantherlike sides. The only pale part of Kit was his great buff-colored beak. And his yellow eyes, of course, which were just now returning from
angry black to ordinary gold. But she had forgotten how huge he was, bigger than Callette, bigger than Jessak by some way. He made her feel as small as Ruskin.

  “Are all the griffins on the other continent as nasty as those ones?” she asked Kit, with a worried thought about Lydda.

  “Lords, no!” Kit paced toward Blade, looking rather satisfied, and Elda trotted beside him, wondering why Kit did not seem to notice that there was still one foreign griffin left, the plain brown one, crouched in the opposite corner of the courtyard in the shadow of the refectory steps. “Most of the griffins there are nice people,” Kit said. “Those lot were the dregs. Outlaws. But don’t worry. I don’t think they’ll come back in a hurry.”

  “What did they get outlawed for?” Elda asked, flicking an anxious glance at the motionless brown griffin in the corner.

  “Not just for stalking Callette, I can tell you!” Kit said as they reached Blade. “They enjoy tearing humans and griffins apart. They had themselves real fun during the war.”

  “And everyone over there is far too civilized to get rid of them properly,” Blade told Elda. She could see he was disgusted about it. “Jessak’s family got lawyers, and the lawyers argued that they were throwbacks to primitive griffins and couldn’t help themselves. So they exiled them instead. We ran into them just before that, when Jessak got a thing about Callette.”

  “Lawyers!” snorted Kit. “Where is Callette, anyway? She said she—”

  Kit said this at the precise moment that he walked into the invisible Callette. Callette surged and squawked. Kit reared up and back, hugely astonished.

  “What the—”

  “You trod on me!” Callette said out of nowhere. “Clumsy oaf!”

  Elda and Ruskin became helpless with laughter. So did Claudia. She had been getting up, clutching the cloakrack for support for her very shaky legs. Now she clung to it and giggled.

  “Where are you?” Kit demanded of the air.

  “How do I know? I can’t see myself to tell you!” Callette retorted.

  “She asked us to make her invisible because she didn’t want Jessak to see her,” Claudia explained, as well as she could for laughing.

  “Fair enough,” said Blade. He was grinning, too.

  Kit was not amused. “Trust you to do something really stupid, Callette! Where are you, for goodness’ sake?” He scythed at the air with both front sets of talons, walking cautiously forward on two legs like somebody playing blindman’s buff. “How can I turn you back if I don’t know where you are?”

  “But I don’t know—Now you trod on my tail!” Callette howled. There was an invisible turmoil. Kit canted sideways, carried by an unseen body almost as big as he was, and tried to save himself falling by wrapping his talons around the statue of Wizard Policant. There was a sharp crack. Wizard Policant swayed, broke off at the ankles, and fell, first with a padded whump—“OUCH!” cried Callette. “Now look what you’ve done, you fool!”—and then with a stony crash, when he rolled on the ground by Kit’s feet. Kit, like a giant-size startled cat, skittered away sideways and stood in an affronted arch.

  Claudia whooped and pointed.

  “What’s the matter?” Blade asked her anxiously.

  “His.” Claudia swallowed. “His.” She managed to get the rest out between laughs in a hurried, chesty drone. “His feet. In pointy shoes. Oh!” She gave a whine of laughter and slid down the cloakrack, shaking.

  Blade looked at Wizard Policant’s feet standing all by themselves on the plinth and collapsed, too. The lights around the courtyard came on just then, showing the wide space full of people again. Everyone who had run away from Jessak and his friends was now outside once more, very curious to see two of the world’s strongest wizards, and most of them were laughing at Wizard Policant’s feet, too. After a moment even Kit saw the funny side of it.

  “Hey, look!” someone called out. “You can see Callette’s shadow!”

  This was true. The shadow was large and ruffled and spread in several directions. Its heads swung about as Callette realized she could see it as well and then raised blurred multiple wings and waved a forefoot or so.

  “She seems to be all right,” said Blade. “Come on. Let’s get her visible.” Everyone at once backed away considerately. “Oh, no,” Blade told them. “Whoever made her this way has to help, or it’ll take us all night. Who did do it?”

  Everyone there exchanged looks and realized that they had all done it. They all stepped forward again. Claudia hauled herself up the cloakrack and tried to stop laughing.

  “Look,” Blade said to her kindly, “do you really need that thing? Can I put it over by the wall for you?”

  “I, er, I’m not sure it’ll stretch that far,” Claudia confessed.

  Lukin hastened over. “It won’t go more than ten yards away from her,” he explained. “She’s tied to it magically somehow.”

  Blade reached up and felt the wooden hooks around the top of the cloakrack. “So she is! Kit, come and have a look at this! I’ve never met anything like it.”

  Kit, who was attempting to arrange the students in a circle around Callette’s multiple shadow, left off for the moment and came over to plant a massive taloned, handlike forefoot on the top of the cloakrack. “What is this? This is the most cockeyed spell I ever met! It’s all back to front and sideways. Who did it?”

  “Wermacht,” said Lukin.

  “Who?” said Blade.

  “Whoever he is, he’s a fool,” said Kit. “This is going to take some unraveling.” He and Blade began prowling around Claudia and the cloakrack, muttering technicalities, while Claudia stood there like someone holding the pole in a maypole dance, looking self-conscious.

  Elda saw that they were going to be some time. She left her place in the circle and began tiptoeing away toward the dark corner by the refectory steps. “We’ll need your name,” she heard Kit saying behind her, and Claudia replying that she was Claudia Antonina. At which Blade exclaimed, “Then you must be Emperor Titus’s sister! I thought I’d seen you before!”

  “Only once.” Claudia’s voice came distantly to Elda. “When I was fourteen.”

  The dull brown griffin had not moved. He was sitting the way cats do, with his forelegs tucked under him and his back hunched, and his wings in a brown glittery swath above that. He seemed much smaller in this position. His face was level with Elda’s, very dull and meek. His heavy-lidded eyes were half shut. Elda would have thought he was asleep, except that she could see his eyes shine as they turned to look at her. She was surprised to find that his smell was quite clean, or only as sweaty as you might expect from a griffin who had just flown here from the coast.

  “Who are you?” she demanded. “Why are you still here?”

  “Me?” he said, sounding rather surprised. “I’m Flury. I’m very inoffensive really. You mustn’t be alarmed. I stayed because I thought it was interesting here.”

  “Why hasn’t anyone else noticed you?” Elda said.

  “I hoped nobody would,” Flury answered modestly. “I’m good at lying low.”

  He was certainly quite a contrast with Jessak, but he was so dull and meek that Elda found him rather exasperating. “You mean you’re lying low because you’re an outlaw?” she asked with a bit of a snap.

  “No,” Flury said. “At least nobody told me I was an outlaw.”

  “Then why were you with Jessak?” Elda asked suspiciously.

  “He’s a sort of distant relative,” Flury explained. “The family wanted me to look after him.”

  “Look after him!” Elda could think of nothing more unlikely.

  Flury hunched himself a little tighter, apologetically. “It does seem senseless, doesn’t it? What could I do to stop him getting into trouble? But they’re a very influential family, you know. Jessak should have been executed, really, for war crimes, but they got him exiled instead and then employed me to go with him.”

  “Are you a fighting griffin then?” Elda asked.

  “Not really,�
�� said Flury.

  “A lawyer then?” said Elda.

  “Not particularly,” said Flury.

  “But,” said Elda, exasperated by now, “if you’re being paid to be with them, why have you let them fly off without you?”

  “I couldn’t stop them, could I?” Flury pointed out meekly. “They seemed rather set on leaving in a hurry. Do you think the people in charge here would let me be a student if I asked?”

  “Probably not,” said Elda. “You have to train to be a wizard in order to study here. Do you want to do that?”

  “Not enormously,” Flury said. “No.”

  “Well then,” said Elda, more exasperated than ever, “you’d better fly after Jessak and his friends. They’re bound to be causing trouble by now.”

  “Not at night,” said Flury. “Besides, my contract ended when I brought them here. You’d better go back to your friends. They’ll be needing you any moment.”

  This appeared to be true. Kit and Blade were now asking everyone where Wermacht was. They seemed to have decided they could only raise the spell on the cloakrack with Wermacht there to help. “He’s not here,” various people said. “He’ll have gone home by now. He lives in town.”

  “Where does he live? I can fly there and fetch him—by the scruff of his neck if necessary,” Kit said.

  But nobody knew. As several students pointed out, apologetically. Wermacht was not one of those tutors you wanted much to do with outside classes. If it had been Finn, now, or Myrna.

  “Bother this!” said Kit. “Blade, we really do have to get home.”