FIFTEEN

AT THE UNIVERSITY Corkoran sat in his ruined lab, wondering whether to end it all. Sometimes he held his throbbing head in both hands—this was on the occasions it seemed about to fall apart in segments, like one of Derk’s oranges—and sometimes he simply stared miserably at the remains of his sabotaged moonship. A lot of the time he just stared at the wall. It seemed a yellow sort of color that he did not remember its usually being. He was thinking that when he had the energy, he would climb to the top of the Observatory tower and throw himself off, when someone opened the lab door.

“I told you I didn’t need you,” he said, assuming it was his assistant.

“You haven’t told me anything yet,” the intruder replied.

It was a much larger voice than Corkoran’s assistant’s, with windy undertones and shrill overtones that made Corkoran shudder. He turned around—too quickly; it made him yelp—and saw the front parts of a strange griffin sticking through the doorway. He remembered uneasily then that Finn had said something about a plague of griffins. But at least the creature was a soothing shade of brown. Even its unusual heavy-lidded eyes were a restful mud color, and its feathers, though crisply glossy, were no harder to look at than the crust of a loaf. “What do you want?” Corkoran said. “Who are you?”

The griffin ducked its great head apologetically. “I’m Flury. I want to join up as a student here.”

“You can’t,” Corkoran told him. Or was it her? It was hard to tell from just the front view. “You’re too late. Term has already started. You’ll have to wait until next autumn now.”

“But I didn’t know. I’m from the other continent,” Flury protested. “Can’t you make an allowance for that?”

The voice grated on Corkoran. It was too big. “No,” he said. “Apply next spring with proof of magical attainments, and we’ll see what we can do. I suppose you do have some magical abilities?”

Flury looked shy. “Some,” he admitted.

“And you’ll find the fees are quite high,” said Corkoran. “Have you money?”

“Quite a lot,” Flury admitted bashfully.

“Good. Then come back next spring,” said Corkoran. “Now go away.”

There was a fraught pause. The door frame creaked. “I can’t,” Flury said. “I’m stuck.”

“Oh, ye gods!” said Corkoran. They really shouldn’t trouble him with griffins when he felt like death and had just remembered he had a lecture to give. He needed help. And consideration. At this it occurred to him that Healers Hall had headache remedies. They had soft hands and soothing voices, too. That was what he needed. Hoping that if he took no notice and went away, Flury would prove to be a monstrous hallucination, Corkoran stood up and translocated to find a healer.

Seeing the room suddenly empty, Flury shrugged, causing the door frame to jiggle. “Oh, well,” he said. “I tried.” He put his head sideways, listening in case Corkoran was on his way back with levers or spells to get him out of the doorway. When it was apparent that Corkoran had simply forgotten him, Flury shook himself loose from the door frame and advanced into the lab. He was now about the size of a small lion. This put his beak at an entirely convenient height for sniffing along benches at the ruins of the moonsuit experiments. These puzzled him extremely. So did the torn-up calculations on the floor. He picked quite a few up, held them together where they seemed to fit, and examined them. He shook his head, baffled. Then he found the rat cage, with the Inescapable Net still hanging off it and its bars bent. He put his beak right inside it and closed his eyes to analyze the smells he found there.

“Ah,” he said. “That’s what I’ve been smelling. They were here for some time before they got out and started lurking. Can’t say that I blame them really.”

He then padded across to the remains of the moonship and spent some time carefully inspecting what was left of it. He nodded sadly. “Waste of effort,” he said. “It would never have flown anywhere, anyway.”

Then he padded away and carefully shut the door behind him.

Elda was surprised to see Flury at Corkoran’s lecture, bulking huge and beach-leaf brown near the back. It was surprising also that no one else seemed to notice him and even more surprising that he fitted in. The lecture hall was crammed. By breakfast time every student in the University knew that Corkoran’s moonship was in ruins and Corkoran himself devastated.

Breakfast had been a disaster because the mice had got into the kitchens. Aided by vigorous miniature assassins, they had got into all the cupboards and even into the cold store, where they sucked eggs, chewed bacon, squeezed fruit, poured out milk, and split open bags of cereal. Almost the only thing left to eat was bread—which had luckily been set to rise in a heavy iron oven—and there was only black coffee to drink.

“Thank goodness for coffee!” said Olga. “My father never did like it.”

Felim and Ruskin at once set about designing a foolproof mousetrap—nor were they the only ones; even Melissa was inventing one—and the rest were rather inclined to blame Elda for making the mice in the first place, which made Elda very uncomfortable and guilty. “Mice were just what came into my head!” she explained. “Someone had to do something!”

“Leave her alone,” said Claudia, who had spent the night on the floor of Elda’s concert hall and felt she owed Elda protection in return. “Nobody else did anything.”

“Lukin did,” said Olga.

“But he makes deep holes all the time, anyway, so that hardly counts,” said Claudia.

The news about the moonship was almost a welcome distraction. It caused a wave of sympathy for Corkoran. Even those who felt, like Lukin, that Corkoran was poor stuff (with an unfortunate taste in ties) were determined to show that they were sorry about the sabotage. Every student who could get there, and a few novice healers, crowded into the main lecture hall to show Corkoran moral support.

Corkoran felt quite touched. He was usually lucky to get an audience of five, all female and all gazing adoringly. To find everyone cared this much cheered him considerably. Nevertheless, as he set about delivering the lecture he always delivered at this stage in the term, he knew he was doing it with much less than his usual verve.

He does look devastated, Elda thought. Corkoran’s face was yellow-pale, and she could see his hands shaking. Even his tie was pallid, full of washed-out–looking white and yellow daisies. In a guilty, illogical way, Elda felt that this might be her fault for not finding Corkoran charming anymore. And though she knew this was probably nonsense, she found herself thinking urgently of some way to make it up to him. She heard very little of the lecture because as soon as she began thinking, she had her inspiration.

It took her until after lunch (another disaster) to find courage to mention her idea to her friends. But as they were gathered around Wizard Policant, waiting to go into Wermacht’s class, she blurted it out. “Couldn’t we get him to the moon somehow?”

They looked at her understandingly. They had all known that Elda would be more upset about Corkoran than anyone else. They had been worrying about her.

“I don’t like to see him looking so miserable,” Elda explained.

“I know what you mean,” Felim said kindly. “I wonder.” He fell into deep thought.

Olga, for her part, tried to put the realities of life before Elda. “I know what you mean, too,” she said, “but I’ve seen my father with enough hangovers to know why he looked so bad.”

“We can’t let him take to drink!” Elda pleaded.

Lukin laughed. “You must be the most softhearted griffin in the world! Teddy bears and moons! Come on, Elda. Everyone else is going into the North Lab.” He politely helped Claudia reel in her cloakrack. Claudia had discovered that it was easier if she kept the cloakrack close to her. Since it was going to follow her, anyway, she reasoned that keeping one hand on it as she walked was pleasanter than getting jolted every time the cloakrack stuck on a doorstep.

She parked it beside her desk in the North Lab. Elda sat protectively beside Claudia. Then she turned her head and saw Flury again. He was sitting behind a desk without a chair, just as Elda was herself, with his feathery forearms on the desktop and his talons clasped, staring around with keen interest. He looked very bright and keen and glossy and nothing like as big as he had looked in Corkoran’s lecture. Elda began to wonder why he was different every time she saw him. Then she wondered why it was that no one seemed to see him but herself. She was in such a guilty, perturbed mood that it began to seem to her that Flury might be some kind of hallucination that followed her around like Claudia’s cloakrack to punish her for not loving Corkoran anymore, or perhaps for turning the pirates into mice, or perhaps for both.

Here Wermacht strode in and put a stop to thinking. “Write down your next big heading,” he commanded. “Moving Magefire About.” Elda saw Flury looking around anxiously at everyone else’s busy notebook. “Now,” said Wermacht. “All of you stand up and call up magefire as you learned to do last week.”

Elda had been looking forward to holding her lovely teardrop of light again. She jumped up eagerly and cannoned into Claudia in her hurry. Claudia, who was not looking forward to this at all, was getting up rather slowly. She was off-balance when Elda bumped her and staggered sideways into the cloakrack, which fell with a clatter into the aisle beside the desks.

Wermacht exclaimed with annoyance. He came striding up the aisle and picked the cloakrack up before Claudia could reach it. He banged it upright. “Are you still going around with this thing, you with a jinx?”

“Yes, of course I am,” Claudia retorted. “You connected me to it. You should know.”

“Nonsense,” said Wermacht. “It’s entirely your own doing. You attempted a spell beyond your powers, and you bungled it.” He leaned in a lordly attitude with one hand on the cloakrack and the other stroking his beard, smiling contemptuously down on Claudia. While Claudia was gasping at the injustice, he said, “It’s all in your mind, you know. Really deep down you want to be tied to this cloakrack.”

“I do not!” Claudia asserted.

“Oh, but you do.” Wermacht was smiling pityingly now. “Make an effort, girl. Free yourself from the shackles of your own timidity. You only want this object around for a sense of security.”

Claudia gaped at him. “I—I—I—”

Flury came quietly up behind Wermacht and tapped him on one shoulder. No one had seen Flury move. No one, not even Elda, knew how he got where he was, but there he was, towering over Wermacht and wearing his usual apologetic look. There was quite a gasp from everyone, because this was the first time anyone but Elda had seen Flury at all. Wermacht whirled around, found himself staring into Flury’s chest feathers, and seemed wholly irate that he had to stare upward to see Flury’s face, somewhere near the ceiling. “Excuse me,” Flury said, “but what you just said can’t be right. As soon as you touched that hatrack, I could tell that it was your spell that did it.”

“My spell!” Wermacht exclaimed.

Flury nodded. “I’m afraid so. I’m sorry. Nobody likes to be caught out in a mistake, do they?”

Wermacht drew himself up, looking surprisingly small under Flury’s beak. “I have made no mistake. I’ll show you. I’ll attempt to take this silly girl’s spell off and show you it’s not mine!”

“Yes,” Flury said mildly. “Do that.”

Wermacht glared at him and turned to put both hands on two of the cloakrack’s battered wooden hooks. He grasped them firmly, closed his eyes, and concentrated. The next instant, both Wermacht and the cloakrack were surrounded in a bluish lightning flash. There was a strong smell of ozone. The instant after that, Wermacht and the cloakrack appeared to melt into one another, folding downward as they melted. By the time everyone had blinked and exclaimed, the only thing left of Wermacht or the cloakrack was a large, leather-topped bar stool standing in the aisle on four chunky wooden legs.

“Oh, dear,” Flury said, blinking with the rest of them. “I’d no idea that was going to happen.” Elda, all the same, had the feeling that he was not nearly as surprised as he claimed to be.

Claudia’s immediate action was to retreat experimentally to the other side of the lab. To her enormous relief, the bar stool made no move to follow her. It just stood there, looking woebegone. The reaction of everyone else was almost as swift and entirely practical. Everyone except Elda put notebooks back into bags and pens into pockets, and while Elda was staring at Flury and realizing that he was no sort of hallucination at all, everyone else was cheerfully making for the door. They were almost there when Flury said, “Why are you all going? Don’t you want to learn magic?”

“Yes, of course we do,” someone told him joyfully, “but no one can learn magic from a bar stool.”

“I can teach you, though,” Flury said, looking hurt and injured.

The students looked at one another. Somehow they all found that they did not like to hurt Flury’s feelings. They shrugged, turned around, and sat at the desks again, where they resignedly got out notebooks. Flury prowled to the front and sat on his haunches by the lectern, still big, but not quite as big as he had been when he towered over Wermacht. He looked at the students. They stared dubiously back.

“What have you done so far?” Flury asked them. “Setting wards? Pattern magic? Power sharing? Conjuring? Numerology? Theurgy? Scrying? Raising lone power?” Heads were shaken at each question. “Conjuring fire then?” Flury asked as if this were a last resort. “Levitation then? Translocation? Crystallography? Bespelling objects?” Heads were shaken again. No one knew what half these things were. “May I look at one of your notebooks to see what you have done then?” Flury asked rather hopelessly.

Melissa, who was as obliging as she was beautiful, handed him hers. Flury flicked over pages covered with Melissa’s round writing with little hearts for dots over the is and frowned. A frown on even a mild-faced griffin like Flury was a menacing thing. Everyone sat very still, except for Elda, who was used to Kit. Mara often said that when Kit frowned, the universe cracked. Elda simply twiddled her talons and wondered how, and why, Flury was never the same size for more than five minutes. He was about her own size, or a little larger, as he flicked pages and frowned. “Wermacht seems to take a lot of classes,” he murmured. “You should have got through more than this.” Eventually he handed the notebook back. “Well,” he said, “I’d better invent some way of making up for lost time. If you don’t mind pushing these desks back and standing in a ring holding hands, we’ll set wards by sharing power and kill two humans with one stone.”

Notebooks were put away again, and everyone rather cautiously did as Flury suggested. The caution was reasonable, Elda thought. Flury was obviously a wizard as well as a griffin. But after that she and everyone else were so absorbed and busy that no one had time to feel nervous, and the rest of the hour passed before they were aware. They used their joined power to raise wards around the North Lab in six ways that Flury said were elementary and they should have known already. Then they used their joined power to scry. All of them saw, clear as clear, as if they were inside the various rooms, Corkoran sitting in his lab, the librarian resetting Inventory-spells, and the buttery bar with a few idle students in there drinking beer. Flury said the results would be better when they learned to use crystals. Then he had them conjure into the North Lab all the bar stools that no one was actually sitting on. After that the hour was suddenly over. The top of Wermacht’s hourglass was empty of every grain and the bottom full of sand.

“Do you know, I actually learned something!” Melissa was heard proclaiming in surprised tones while everyone was leaving.

Someone returned all the stools to the buttery bar, including Wermacht, although nobody liked to sit on Wermacht until the bar became crowded later that evening. He was easily distinguishable by being taller and gloomier than any of the other stools. Elda, who was couched comfortably against the wall with a straw in her beak and Claudia leaning on her beaming because she was free of that cloakrack at last, looked at that stool and wondered if Flury had intended this to happen to Wermacht. Flury was a total mystery, she thought. Around her everyone else talked of mousetraps or the moon. Ruskin had designed what he felt was the perfect mousetrap, until Olga pointed out, with what seemed to be family feeling, that these mice had human brains.

“Hmm,” Ruskin grunted. “You have a point there. I’ll think again.” And he joined Felim in considering how to send Corkoran to the moon.

Felim seemed to be becoming obsessed with the moonshot. Elda was embarrassed. “You don’t need to worry about it,” she protested.

“But it is a superb intellectual problem,” Felim said. “The things we learned this afternoon, particularly the notion of several people combining powers, is, I think, the key to the problem.”

“You mean, several people combining to do something like translocation?” Lukin asked.

“It beats me why Corkoran didn’t plan to translocate there, anyway,” Ruskin growled. “It’s the obvious way.”

“Do you think that maybe he can’t?” Claudia suggested. “Oh, no, we saw him translocate, didn’t we, Olga, the day Felim was inside the books?”

“Yes, but he probably can’t go very far,” Elda said. “My dad can’t. He can only go five miles at his best. The moon’s further than that, isn’t it?”

Felim laughed. “Many thousands of miles further. This is why a boost from several people is certainly necessary.”

“But remember there’s no air there,” Olga put in. “You’d need to translocate him in an enclosed bubble of air and you’d have to be sure there was enough air for him. How would you do that?”

“By compressing it?” Lukin suggested. “If you had the outside of your bubble made of squashed-up air that could be gradually released, that would hold the bubble firm, too, wouldn’t it?”

“Darned good idea!’ Ruskin said. He and Claudia began calculations to find out how much air Corkoran would need, while Lukin worked out spells that might compress it, and Felim tried to calculate how many people it would take combining their powers to send the lot as far as the moon.

They’re all doing it! Elda thought. And they’re only doing it because they think I’m still in love with Corkoran. She would have squirmed if Claudia had not been leaning on her. It seemed too late to explain that she was simply sorry for Corkoran. She spent the whole of the next day in a state of mingled guilt and embarrassment, while calculations and discussions went on obsessively around her, until she simply had to explain to someone.

“You don’t need to send Corkoran to the moon just because I said so,” she said to Lukin as they sat facing one another across a chessboard at Chess Club that evening.

Lukin moved a knight and took it back again quickly as he saw Elda would have his queen if he moved it. “It’s not on your orders, if that’s what you think. You just produced the right idea. It’s to show Corkoran that our adaptation of spells really does work. Felim simply couldn’t believe it when Corkoran gave him such a low mark for his essay, he said he filled it with the best stuff he knew and Corkoran simply spat in his face. He says it’s his honor at stake. And Ruskin was stunned. Did you see his face when he looked at his mark? Or Claudia’s? Claudia went grass green, and her eyes seemed to swallow up the rest of her face.”

“What about you and Olga, though?” Elda slyly moved her queen one square.

“Seen that!” said Lukin, moving up a high priest. “Olga was furious. Corkoran had the cheek to say there probably wasn’t such a thing as air elementals. It really upset her. And I’ve always thought Corkoran needs showing that he’s running in blinkers.”

“Filbert hates blinkers,” Elda agreed. “I was a bit sad about my essay, too, but that wasn’t why I thought of sending Corkoran to the moon.”

“I know,” Lukin said kindly. “You’re far too nice, Elda. And then Flury comes along and shows us how to combine power and that was that. Check.”

“Mate,” replied Elda, moving her queen back to where it had been. While Lukin was cursing at having missed what she was doing, she wondered if Flury had intended to put this idea into their heads and just what Flury was up to.

She kept encountering Flury all over the University after that. He was in the library when she went to take back most of Ruskin’s food-spell books in order to fetch Felim a stack of volumes on astronomy. When she backed out of the astronomy section, she saw Flury, looking very small and drab, humbly approaching the librarian’s desk. He was asking anxiously for a copy of Wermacht’s teaching timetable then, but when she came up to the desk herself with Felim’s books, he was saying, “Then I’ll ask in the office. Thank you. Can you give me any books on the founding of the University, or a biography of Wizard Policant at all?” The librarian seemed to accept that Flury was another griffin student and gave him two books without question. Elda had no idea what Flury wanted them for.

The next time she met him, Flury seemed to be searching along the edges of the courtyard, as if he had lost something. “What are you looking for?” Elda asked him.

“I thought I might catch some mice,” he told her.

Elda was not sure by now that anything Flury said about himself was true, but she said, “They won’t go near you. Griffins have too much cat in them.”

“I daresay you’re right,” Flury said dejectedly.

Elda hated people to agree with her in this dismal way. She explained rather tartly, “The mice get in all the students’ rooms, but they never get into mine. I smell of danger to them.”

This was true. Claudia vouched for it to Ruskin, and the next day Ruskin implored Elda to sleep in his room. His food-spells had all been eaten. Felim looked up from his calculations and said, “It would be much more use if Elda were to sleep in the kitchens.” Wizard Dench, horrified at the waste of food, had been and put guard-spells on all the cupboards and the cold store, but the mice still got in.

“Don’t be silly,” said Elda. “You know I can’t get up Ruskin’s stairs or squeeze through the kitchen door.”

Felim once again looked up from his scribbling. Elda assumed he was doing his usual equations, full of x =yz or things that looked like big tick marks, until he said, “Does daffodil rhyme with Isodel, do you think?”

“No!” said everyone, and Olga added to Lukin, “If ever I saw a heart-whole woman, it’s your sister, Lukin.”

“Yes, Felim, honestly,” Lukin said. “Everyone who sees Isodel falls madly in love with her, but she hardly even notices.”

“That is beside the point,” Felim answered loftily. “To write poems to a cruel love is the height of artistry.” Then, while Lukin was muttering that this was what they all said, Felim added, “About the mice. The assassins are certainly in partnership with the mice and assassins are usually magic users, if only in a small way. So they can certainly circumvent the Bursar’s spells.”

“Then I’ll go and cast some spells on the kitchen!” Ruskin said, exasperated.

“You couldn’t do worse than Wizard Dench,” Claudia agreed in her driest way. “Come on, everyone. We’ve got a class. I’m interested to see if it’s Flury or a bar stool taking it.”

It was Flury. Flury seemed to be taking all Wermacht’s classes, always with the same apologetic air, which seemed to suggest he was only humbly filling in until someone turned Wermacht back again, but always teaching things that Wermacht had never even mentioned. He was taking the second- and third-year classes, too. Elda discovered he was when second- and third-year students began to turn up among the first-year classes, saying Flury had told them to come and catch up on the basics.

“Has Corkoran asked you to take Wermacht’s place then?” Elda asked Flury.

“I did speak to Corkoran, yes,” Flury said. “This University is not in a very thriving way, you know. Are your brothers likely to visit again soon?”

“Blade and Kit?’ said Elda, instantly distracted from Flury’s activities. “They said so. I don’t know what’s keeping them.”

It had taken Kit, Blade, and Callette, too, more time and effort than they believed possible to get their parents, and Florence and Angelo, and all the horses, and the winged runt piglet that Derk was rearing by hand, plus all the luggage Mara thought necessary, safely to the coast and then onto a ship. It was some days after Elda spoke to Flury before they were through and could return to Derkholm at last. There Callette said she was exhausted. “It’s keeping my temper for a whole week,” she said, and she went away to sleep in the spiky gothic den she had built for herself beside the Derkholm stables.

Kit and Blade, who did not find their parents quite as annoying as Callette did, looked at one another. Kit said, “We said we’d see Elda.”

“And I promised to do something about that girl with the cloakrack,” Blade said. “That’s been worrying me.”

“Let’s go now then,” said Kit, and took off for the University in a thunder of wings. Blade waited on the terrace, with his feet up on a chair, drinking a quiet mug of tea, until experience told him that Kit would have the University in sight. Then he sighed, stood up and stretched, and translocated there, too.

That day Flury had given Wermacht’s class on Basic Ritual and was now moseying around the backyards of the University in his usual way. One way or another he had explored nearly all of them. This particular yard backed onto the empty stables Flury had found to sleep in, but to get there, Flury had had to fly in over the stable roof. There seemed to be no door or gate to the yard at all. But once he was there, he discovered that it also backed onto the kitchens. “Ah,” Flury said.

Lion-size and sleepy-looking, Flury wandered about the weedy flagstones, scratching idly at little piles of rubbish, turning over old horseshoes and pieces of crockery, always getting closer to the larger pile of rubbish in one corner. When he was close enough to it, he pounced. Mice ran out of it in all directions, squealing. Flury took no notice of them and dug with both sets of talons. There followed a few seconds of violent activity, and then Flury stood back on his haunches, becoming the larger size that was probably natural to him, holding a bundle of small, black-clad human figures. Ignoring the way they shouted shrilly and writhed and struggled, he calmly sorted through them.

“Six,” he said. “Assassins always go in sevens, I heard. Where’s the other one?”

Six small black arms pointed. Flury turned his head down to look at the tiny black cockerel almost between his hind legs. “I see,” he said. “That doesn’t seem quite fair.” Spreading his wings for balance, he picked the cockerel up with his left back talons. He brought that leg up to his front ones and transferred the chicken to the bundle of assassins he already held. As soon as it reached its companions, it became a small man dressed in black, too, who seemed to be struggling not to cry. “That’s better,” Flury said as he uncurled himself. “And I suppose you’ll all be wanting to be your proper size now.”

The small men became very eloquent about this. Their arms waved, and their voices shrilled.

“Yes, all right,” Flury said. “But I’m afraid there’s a catch. You’ll be the right size ten miles from here. If you come any closer, you’ll be small again.”

The small men, at this, became even more eloquent.

Flury shook his head. The tiny voices were making his ears buzz. “I don’t care if you haven’t fulfilled your mission. You seem to me to have done enough. The wretched fellow is wandering about looking as if a house has fallen on him.” Ignoring the assassins’ further attempts to scream that Corkoran was not the target!, he spread his wings and flew out into the countryside with them. There were several farms about ten miles off where Flury had been cadging food, and he wanted his lunch.

He had described Corkoran exactly. Around the time Flury was finishing an excellent lunch, Corkoran was shambling around the edge of the main courtyard on his way to the White Lion, oblivious of students streaming out of Myrna’s lecture. Corkoran had forgotten all about teaching this last week. Most of his students had realized and considerately not turned up. Corkoran was not interested in that or in anything much any longer. He barely looked up when a great black griffin coasted down to land beside Wizard Policant. Nor did he look around when Kit’s arrival was followed by the whipcrack of Blade appearing. Elda’s happy shrieks of greeting only made him wince.

“Oh. You’ve got rid of the cloakrack,” Blade said to Claudia. He felt rather cheated.

Claudia saw how he felt. “It was another accident,” she said. “The wizard who did it is now a bar stool.” She chuckled about it. Her eyes glowed, and a delighted greenish dimple appeared in one cheek.

Blade gazed at her laughing face and discovered that he did not mind too much about the cloakrack. He said, “Oh, no! Really?” and laughed, too.

But here Felim and Ruskin advanced on Blade and Kit with sheets of paper. “We think it may be possible to translocate a man to the moon,” Felim said, “by a combined boost of shared power. Would either of you agree?”

“In a bubble of air,” Ruskin said, holding up a page of drawings. “Like so.”

As Blade took the papers with considerable interest and Kit leaned over his shoulder to look at them, too, Olga explained, “Elda was terribly upset when Corkoran’s moonship was destroyed. She got us thinking of other ways to get him there.”

Griffins do not blush. Elda wriggled and felt ashamed. “He looked so devastated,” she said, wishing she had never, ever told anyone that Corkoran reminded her of a teddy bear. “But you don’t have to bother,” she added earnestly.

“Well, I can’t see why anyone would want to go to the moon myself,” Blade said, “But this looks as if it could work. Kit’s got the strongest boost of anyone I know. What do you think, Kit?”

“Let’s take another look at that air bubble,” Kit said. “We wouldn’t want to kill him.” He skewered Ruskin’s page of drawings on a talon and studied it closely. “I’d double this,” he said at length. “You always need a safety margin, and it would make the outside harder if you packed more compressed air in. What say, Blade? No time like the present. Isn’t that Corkoran over by the main gate? Shall I fetch him here?”

Claudia said swiftly, “He might find that a bit overwhelming.”

“We’ll go,” said Olga.

Corkoran was on his way through the gate when running feet approached him. He looked around with slow surprise at Olga on one side of him and Lukin, very breathless, on the other.

“You do still want to go to the moon, don’t you?” Lukin panted.

Now they were having a joke with him, Corkoran thought.

“If you do,” Olga said, tossing a sheet of her hair off her face, “Kit and Blade can send you there now.”

Kit and Blade, Corkoran thought. Two of the most powerful wizards there were. He looked back over his shoulder, and there indeed was Kit, with Blade looking child-size against him, conferring with Ruskin, who looked child-size against Blade, all of them passing pieces of paper about. Felim stood beside Elda, evidently explaining, with strong, spell-like gestures of his brown hands, and Claudia was beside Felim, nodding. Perhaps Olga meant what she said. Perhaps this thing was possible after all.

Corkoran straightened his plain white tie. “Let’s give it a try, anyway,” he said.

They led him back to the statue, where Kit explained quite briefly what they meant to do and then braced himself low on the ground with his legs spread for balance. Blade swiftly organized the rest of them into a ring around Corkoran, so that Elda was clasping Kit’s right foreleg and Ruskin his left one, and Blade himself took the final place facing Kit, between Claudia and Felim, while Lukin and Olga stretched their arms wide on the sides to make the ring as even as possible. “Go,” Blade said.

The air bubble began to form around Corkoran. He looked at it, marveling. It was expanding and hardening to a beautiful misty blueness when Flury came flying gently back across the Spellman Building. As soon as he saw what was going on by the statue, he gave a shriek of horror and went into a dive.

“No!” he screamed. “Not with whatshername in there!” He hit the courtyard in what was probably the worst landing a grown griffin had ever made and, stumbling, legs sliding in four directions, wings beating for balance, tried to hurry toward the statue. “Stop!” he shrieked.

As he shrieked, the misty blue bubble expanded to enclose everyone around Corkoran. Flury could see all their heads turn to look at it and the mystified expressions on their faces for an instant. Then the bubble vanished, blasting Flury backward with the force of its going.

He picked himself up miserably and hobbled toward the statue. “That’ll teach me to teach people things, won’t it?” he said, and looked uselessly up into the cloudy sky. “I suppose they’ve all gone to the moon now.”

“No,” said the statue of Wizard Policant. “They missed the moon.”

Flury limped another step and stared into the statue’s stone face. “Er, did you speak?”

“Yes. I said that they missed the moon,” the statue replied. “Two of them had jinxes. It’s been irritating me profoundly that no one’s done anything about them.”

“Did they take enough air?” Flury demanded.

“Enough air for what?” asked the statue. “I’ve no idea where they’ve gone.”