SIXTEEN

QUERIDA ARRIVED AT lunchtime. As the house she owned in the city was let out to a friend, she went straight to Healers Hall, where she arranged stabling for Hobnob and lodging for herself, and then made sure that she was invited to lunch there. She entered the University an hour later at the head of a procession of three young healers, each of whom carefully carried a cat basket.

Flury peered down at her from the roof of the Spellman Building. He could see at once who and what she was. But Querida’s expression was that of a snake looking for something to sink its fangs into. He decided to give her a while to get settled.

Querida made straight for the Council Chamber. When Flury crawled in there, at his very smallest and meekest and least noticeable, there were already three dead mice laid in a row under the table by Querida’s tiny feet. Querida had piles of paper and ledgers in front of her on the table, together with a saucer of milk—Sabrina having refused utterly to eat on the floor after the trials of the journey—and she had Wizard Dench and Wizard Finn standing on either side of her. Both wizards looked thoroughly miserable.

“I can just about forgive the upper floor of this building being turned into luxury flats for wizards,” Querida was saying, “but the two other things I will never forgive. Dench, be kind enough to explain how you came to let Corkoran squander all this money.”

Wizard Dench squirmed. “The moonshot, you know. It’s a very prestigious project.”

“Prestigious!” hissed Querida. “Prestigious! Corkoran is no more able to get to the moon than you are. And you know it!”

Flury went smaller yet and tiptoed away to a corner. He could tell he had not given Querida nearly enough time to get settled.

“As for you, Finn,” Querida continued, “had you no idea that the wards here—Who are you?” she snapped at Flury. “You there! Stop crawling about like that!”

Flury stopped and turned to her respectfully. This was a wizard to be reckoned with. Very few people could see him unless he wanted them to. “I’m Flury, ma’am.”

Querida frowned. “Flury?”

“Flurian Atreck,” Flury admitted. “And I’m afraid I’ve got some more upsetting news—”

Querida’s brows went up. “The wizard? I’ve heard of you, though I had no idea you were a griffin. And I’m sorry. If you were hoping for some kind of high-powered conference with wizards of this continent, you’ll have to wait. We have a crisis here. The University wards are all but down.”

“I know, ma’am,” said Flury. “That’s why I stayed here. I was in charge of four exiled griffins, you see, with a contract from my government to get them painlessly neutralized—”

Sharp as a striking snake, Querida demanded, “Was one of them called Jessak?” Flury nodded. “Then I do not love you, Flurian,” she said. “You sent them to me, didn’t you?”

“Not exactly,” Flury protested. “I laid it on them to go where they would be neutralized. It was a tricky matter, ma’am, because they were largely immune to magic, and I couldn’t neutralize them myself because they were distant cousins. I brought them here first, thinking the University would be full of people who could do it, and I had rather a shock when I found that the place was pretty nearly powerless. I had to call for help, or young Elda would have been hurt. Then when they’d gone, I stayed to see if I could restore the power here. But I can’t. I think it’s because Corkoran refused to enroll me as a member.”

Querida looked at the ribbed stone ceiling. “Typical. I get angrier with Corkoran with every minute that passes. Finn, you were about to say where you think Corkoran is, I think.”

“No, I wasn’t,” Finn said. “He’s, er, he’s unavailable.”

“Nonsense!” hissed Querida. “Unless he’s really gone to the moon, that is.”

“That’s just the trouble,” Flury said unhappily. “He has. Only I think they missed.”

They knew they had missed when they saw the moon whip past in the distance. Corkoran moaned at the sight. His teeth chattered in his gray face, and he clutched his arms around himself, trying not to look at the deep stars in the black sky outside the bubble or at the tiny, shrinking blue ball of the earth. “I was always afraid of heights!” he said, not for the first time.

“Do shut up!” Elda snapped at him. She was slightly ashamed of snapping, but she was having a harder time than Corkoran, being so much bigger. She had never expected not to be able to stand with her feet or push with her wings. Kit was trying to wedge her in, but he had nothing to brace on either. They were slowly wheeling over and over inside the sphere, along with everyone else wheeling in different ways, and it was making Elda feel sick. She had not expected the extreme cold either. It was eating through fur and feathers, into her wings particularly, until she felt she was turning into a block of ice. Ruskin was resourcefully muttering heat spells, and Blade was backing him up, but the sphere seemed to shed the heat as fast as they made it. And there was no way to thicken the outside because, as they quickly discovered, there was nothing out here to thicken it with.

“We forgot heat and neglected to provide gravity,” Felim said, shivering ruefully. “Is there perhaps some means of reversing ourselves?”

“I’d need something to kick off from before I could turn us,” Kit said.

Corkoran moaned again. “We won’t find anything now before the air runs out.”

They all looked anxiously at what they could see of the compressed air at the rim of the sphere. It was almost impossible to tell how thick it was. The blue haze looked different from every angle. Elda supposed it was a comfort to know there was still some there. “Do, please, try not to be so depressing,” Olga said to Corkoran. “Think how lucky it is that we all came, too. You’d hate to be all alone.”

“But you’re using the air up!” said Corkoran. “All of you. The griffins most of all. You’re killing me!”

Nobody tried to point out to Corkoran that he had been wanting to travel like this for years, or that they had been trying to please him—or, anyway, show him it could be done. They were all too anxious. Ruskin did mutter, from the midst of his heat spells, something about ungrateful bunny rabbits, and Blade, still sending Ruskin power, said, “You know, I just don’t understand. This is really only a simple translocation. Normally when you translocate, you get there almost at once.”

“We must be going rather a long way then,” Lukin said.

He had hardly spoken when they were there, wherever it was. With merest soft grinding, the sphere stopped. It was up to its middle into red stony earth, and the sun was blinding across them from a sky that was a curious color, between pink and blue. Despite the sunlight, it was still severely cold. They all scrambled to their feet and stared anxiously over bare desert into a distance that struck them as being rather too near. Their long, peculiar shadows stretched halfway to the horizon. As they stared, the sunlight grew stronger and the sky pinker, and they all somehow began to grasp that it was dawn here. Just as the sun grew strong enough to hide the veiled stars behind the pinkness, two rather small moons hurtled across the sky.

This seemed to be the last straw for Corkoran. He put his hands to his face and screamed.

“A screaming wizard is all we need!” Kit said, and he slapped a stasis spell on Corkoran. Corkoran’s eyes bulged with horror, but at least his screaming stopped.

“Ah, that’s not kind,” said Claudia.

“You’re right,” Kit admitted. “It’s not his fault he’s useless.” He took the stasis off and made Corkoran unconscious instead. Nobody protested.

“Apologies,” Blade said as Corkoran flopped to the rounded floor. He did not fall nearly as heavily as they might have expected. Blade frowned about this as he said to Claudia, “Kit and I have just come from a war, and I’m afraid we both got used to being ruthless. Why were you the only person who wasn’t scared stiff on the way here?”

Claudia flushed a dark olive and looked down so that her hair coiled in and hid her face. “It’s my jinx,” she said. “It’s mostly a travel jinx. I always have trouble traveling, but I always get where I was going in the end. So I knew we’d arrive somewhere, you see.”

“You might,” said Kit, “have warned us you had a jinx. Was that what made that spell on the cloakrack so tangled?”

“I think so,” Claudia admitted, with her head still down.

“And collected us all together and dumped us in this hole?” Kit persisted.

“Er,” said Lukin, “some of that was probably mine. I always make a pit of some kind when I do any magic.”

“Don’t criticize this hole,” Ruskin said, huskily even for him. “I reckon we freeze or burn here without it. Wherever here is,” he added. “We ought all to keep well down inside it.”

As everyone hurriedly sat or crouched down, Felim said, “This is a lesson to me not to rely on my honor to rule my actions. I am well served. I thought I was right and Corkoran was wrong, and look where we are now!”

Kit, who knew how it felt to have your pride crushed, said, “You were right. We got here. It just needed a bit more thinking through. Nobody reckoned on two jinxes either. If we had, we’d be on the moon at this moment. Where do you think we are?”

Felim seemed slightly comforted. “All the same,” he said, “I shall be more cautious in the future if we ever get away. As to where this is, I have a feeling that Corkoran was screaming because he knew. Should we rouse him and ask him?”

Blade looked at Corkoran curled up among their legs. “We may have to,” he said, “if we can’t work it out for ourselves. The problem is that I have to know where I am in order to go somewhere else. Kit can push me, but I take us. Kit, when we do go, reckon for everything being lighter here, won’t you?”

Ruskin slapped his knee so hard that his hand bounced. “Now that is the attitude I like! Not if, but when we go. That’s positive wizarding, that is!”

“We were taught that way,” said Blade. “But I don’t want to sit and watch the world go past the way the moon did. Before we do anything else, we’re going to unravel these jinxes.”

“Air?” asked Kit. “Doesn’t that come first? Is there any air here at all?”

Olga edged forward. “Maybe I can ask,” she said. When everyone turned to her in confusion, she pushed her hair back and said, “Well, you see, there are some very queer sorts of elementals looking in at us from the sides of this pit. They’re awfully interested, and they might help.”

Naturally everyone craned to look at the sides of the pit. Not all of them could see the beings Olga meant. Of those who could see them, Ruskin and Lukin had the least trouble. Kit and Elda kept turning their heads this way and that because, from the very tails of their eyes, they thought they could see faces there, like clods of earth with round pebblelike eyes, but when either of them turned to look full on, there was just reddish earth. Claudia thought she glimpsed one face, but that was all. Blade and Felim saw nothing but dry, stony earth, anyway.

Olga shut her eyes and tried to listen to the dry, stony voices. It was like hearing a foreign language that was mostly clicks and faint pattering, a language Olga felt she had once learned and then forgotten. As she listened, the words seemed to come back to her slowly. “They want to know,” she said after a while, “if we really are from the blue world. The air elementals in the bubble with us say we are, and they can’t believe it. I’ve told them we are. And they say this is the red world.”

Everyone started speaking at once. “Ye gods! We’re on the Red Planet!” Blade exclaimed. “The dragons call it Mars,” said Kit. “Oh, damn my jinx!” wailed Claudia. “We came a long way out of our way then!” Felim remarked. “How do we get back?” demanded Elda. “How much air do our air elementals say we’ve got?” Ruskin asked urgently, and Lukin said, “Can’t you use our elementals to translate for you?”

“I don’t want to hurt their feelings,” Olga answered Lukin. “I’m getting what they say more clearly now. Now they’re saying that we seem awfully big and soft. They’re wondering about the way the light from the sun is going right through us.”

They all noticed at once that it was getting very hot in the bubble now that the sun was climbing. Kit said, “Oh, lawks!” and a thing like a huge umbrella shot out of the bubble top and hovered over it. Unfortunately it took some of their precious air with it as it opened. They all heard the whoosh and exchanged anxious looks in the sudden shadow. The pit now felt icy. Warm drops of water formed under the umbrella and went running down the bubble inside and out. This made the rim of compressed air much easier to see. It was much less than half as thick as it had been.

“All huddle together,” said Blade. “I daren’t do another warmth-working. I think magic may use more air than anything else does.”

They all moved closer together, except Olga, who remained leaning against the wet side of the bubble. She said dreamily, “Now they’re saying they haven’t seen melted water for thousands of years. They’re fascinated. I asked about air here. They say the air elementals are all frozen, too.”

It was getting fairly stuffy in the damp shade. “Ask them to send us some air,” Ruskin said, “before we smother. I’ve been in mines with more air than this!”

Olga listened again. “There’s an argument about that,” she said, to everyone’s dismay. “The air ones want to come. They want to see our world. But the earth ones say it’s not fair. They want to see the blue world, too.”

“Tell one of them to get in here with us,” Blade suggested tensely. “I can make a link between it and the rest of them, so that they see what it sees.”

There was a long, long pause. Then Olga pushed her hair back and held out both hands. What looked like a simple clod of the reddish earth detached itself from the surface of the pit and hopped like a toad, straight through the surface of the bubble and into Olga’s hands. She held it up to her face, smiling, as if she were holding a kitten. “I can make the link,” she told Blade. “No need to worry. The air ones are coming now.”

There was a pattering and a pinging from all over the outside of the bubble and a frothy rushing-feeling from underneath where they all sat. Little bright bits like snowflakes came swirling in under the umbrella, and from the sides and bottom of the pit, and attached themselves to the outer surface of the sphere like iron filings clinging to a magnet. In seconds there was a thick layer of them all around, whitish and shining. They all felt they were inside a snowdrift. The light was dim and pinkish blue. But it was noticeably easier to breathe.

“Thank you,” Ruskin said devoutly. “Tell them thank you, Olga.” His face suddenly streamed with sweat, and sweat dripped in the plaits of his beard. They all looked at him and looked away quickly, realizing that being without air was a dwarf’s most hideous nightmare. Ruskin had been living in that nightmare until this moment.

As frozen air elementals continued to patter onto the outside of the sphere, and the earth clod sat between Olga’s hands exuding smug excitement, Blade turned to Claudia. “What exactly does your jinx do?”

Claudia spread her thin olive palms out expressively. “This! It messes everything up. Twists it. Everything, particularly magic. It’s at its very worst when I travel, but it’s terribly ingenious, too, so that I can’t guard against it. Something different happens every time. I’ve had snowstorms in summer and landslides and flash floods and things struck by lightning. People go to the wrong place to meet me, or we miss the supply cart, or the road subsides and we have to go around it. Or the horses go lame or trees fall across the track or, or … I’ll tell you, coming to the University, I lost our map—I think ants ate it!—and we went miles out of our way to the east, until the road just ended in a cliff. So we turned back. The legionaries said they’d try to get me back to Condita—they’d gone all grim and sarcastic, the way people do after a taste of my jinx—but instead we blundered into a wet forest full of alligators and went north avoiding that. And then it rained and rained, and when the rain stopped, we saw the University city on the horizon. So we went there. Luckily Titus had made us set off in plenty of time. He always does these days. And I did get there in the end, because that’s the way it works.”

“Let’s get this straight,” said Blade. “You weren’t using magic to travel with, were you?”

“Of course not,” said Claudia. “The legionaries would have hated it.”

“Perhaps she should have been,” Kit suggested. “It sounds like a powerful translocation talent that’s got bent out of shape somehow.”

“It does,” Blade agreed thoughtfully. “And when she does put magic consciously with traveling, it brings us to another planet. It’s strong all right.”

“But other magic things go wrong, too,” Claudia pointed out.

“Well, they would,” Blade explained. “Everyone has one or maybe two major abilities. Olga’s is talking to things I can’t even see, for instance. And if the major talent gets deformed somehow, all the rest goes wrong, too.”

Olga, with her face pink in the strange shadowy light, looked at Lukin and murmured, “That explains my monsters.”

Blade sat with his knees up, chin in hands, elbows on bony knees, staring thoughtfully at Claudia. She looked miserably away from him. “Sorry,” Blade said. “You’ve realized, have you? It’s your feelings that are deforming your magic.”

“I refuse,” Claudia said, with her head bent. “I refuse utterly to believe that Wermacht was right!”

“I don’t know what Wermacht said,” said Blade. “But it’s an awful pity. You feel to me as if you ought to be as strong as Querida really. Let me think—I’ve been to Condita lots of times, but I only ever met you there once. You must have been away a lot.”

Claudia nodded. “I expect I was away in the Marshes with my mother. She insisted I spent half my time with her.”

“And which did you like best, the Empire or the Marshes?” Blade asked her.

Claudia began to speak. “I—” she said, and then put both hands to her face and stopped. “I always tried to kid myself,” she began again, “that I liked both of them equally. But now that it seems important to admit it, I know I hated both of them equally. I mean, I’m fond of Mother, or I would be if she ever stopped grumbling, and I adore Titus, but when I’m in the Marshes, everyone and everything make it plain to me that I’m Empire born and don’t fit, and when I’m in the Empire, it’s worse, because they think of me as dirty Marshwoman—scum, marsh slime, all that. Are you trying to make me admit that my jinx is because I’m a half-breed?’ There were tears in her eyes, big and shiny and greenish in the peculiar snowdrift light.

Blade shook his head emphatically. “No, no, no. Mixes usually make stronger magic. Look at Kit and Elda: They’re lion, eagle, human, and cat. No, what I’m getting at is that you’ve spent most of your life shuttling between two places you hated, and you probably have a fiercely strong translocation talent, anyway, so of course it went wrong. It was your way of kicking and screaming as they dragged you back and forth.”

The tears in Claudia’s eyes spilled out and rolled down her narrow cheeks. “Of course that’s what it is! I should have seen. But—what do I do about it?”

“Forget your childhood. It’s over,” said Blade. “You can be a wizard now and go anywhere and do anything you want.”

Claudia stared at him, still with her hands to her tear-marked cheeks. A slow smile of relief began to spread on what could be seen of her face. “Oh!” she said, and took a deep breath of the chilly, heady new air. As she did so, Blade gave Kit a slight nod. Kit’s mighty talons reached out and tweaked.

“Got it,” he said, whisking something invisible away through the snowy side of the sphere. “One jinx gone. One to go.”

“I know all about mine,” Lukin said defensively. “Mine happens because I don’t want to be a king. When I think about ruling, I just want to dig myself a deep pit and stay in it. So it’s quite obvious and natural that whenever I do magic, I make a hole in something. There’s nothing anyone can do about that.”

Felim had listened appreciatively as Blade coaxed Claudia’s jinx out of her. Now he leaned forward and joined in. “Why do you not want to be a king?” he asked. “This continues to puzzle me, for I know that in my case I would far rather be a wizard, but I know that you have another kind of mind that spreads wider than a wish to sit and study spells.”

Lukin blinked a bit. He thought. “You have to be so strict if you’re a king,” he said at last, rather fretfully. “Everything has to be just so, because you have to set an example, and there’s no money—and by the time I’d get to be king, there’ll be even less money—and we can’t ever seem to heat the castle, and nothing ever really goes right because the tours laid the kingdom to waste, and—”

“Hang on,” said Blade. “You’re talking about the way things are, in Luteria, and the way your father behaves, not about being a king. Just because your father’s the gloomiest man I know, it doesn’t follow that you have to be.”

“Or mismanage money the way he does,” added Kit.

Ruskin who, as a dwarf and a future citizen of Luteria, had been attending to this keenly, looked deeply shocked. “Mismanages money?”

Lukin said angrily, “He doesn’t mismanage money! There just isn’t any!”

“Our dad’s always saying he does,” Elda chipped in. “Derk says King Luther seems to think it’s beneath him even to think about making money.”

Lukin became angrier still. “My father can’t breed winged horses or make a mint of money out of clever pigeons, the way yours can!”

“Yes,” said Kit. “But you could.”

Lukin glared at him. His teeth were so tightly clenched that the muscles bulging in his cheeks, in the strange light, made his face look like a wide, sinister skull. Kit glared calmly back. “I wish you weren’t bigger than me!” Lukin said without taking his teeth apart.

“Hold your hammer,” said Ruskin. “I’m with Felim here. I don’t understand. You met the forgemasters. They love their power. They’d kill to keep it. Why don’t you?”

Lukin shrugged and unclenched his teeth a little. “It doesn’t bother me. I don’t have any power.”

“So you went to train as a wizard in order to get some,” Blade said. “Fair enough. Then what don’t you like? The responsibility? I’d have thought you’d quite like being the one in charge.”

“I would,” Lukin admitted. “Only I’m not, am I? To listen to my father, you’d think I was still ten years old. It’s not his fault. He missed a whole hunk of our lives when Mother took us away into the country because of the tours, and he still hasn’t caught up. There’s a gap—” He stopped suddenly.

Olga looked up from the happy clod cradled in her fingers and surveyed Lukin through the hanging sheet of her hair. “I knew you’d see it in the end,” she said. “Remember magic doesn’t think in a reasonable way, the way people do. Yours just peppers everything you do with that gap your father doesn’t notice, trying to show him you’re grown-up now. Doesn’t it? Didn’t you tell me you first started making pits when the tours stopped and you came home?”

Something seemed to drain out of Lukin. He slumped. “When I was ten,” he said. “I’d been looking after everyone before that: Mother, the younger ones, even Isodel a lot of the time. Isodel and I did the cooking and cleaned the cottage because Mother didn’t know how to. Then we went home, and I got treated as if I were five years old!”

Blade caught the whatever it was that drained out of Lukin and posted it quickly through the ice-covered wall, in among the peering pebble-eyed faces. “There,” he said. “Thanks. Don’t get too upset, Lukin. I don’t know why it always has to hurt to get things straight, but it always does.” He gave a look of apology to Claudia, who sat with her head pensively hanging, on the other side of Lukin.

She saw the look through her coiling hair. She giggled. “You sound just like Flury!”

“I always want to wring Flury’s neck when he looks like that,” Elda agreed. “It really irritates me!”

“Especially when you know that not one cringe of it is real,” Claudia said. “You did what you had to do, Blade. Don’t crawl to us about it.”

“How come you know Flury?” Kit asked in considerable astonishment.

“Later,” said Blade. “I want to try and get us back now. All of you concentrate hard on home, please. If we miss again, we’ll probably be dead.”

The ringing of the bell on the pigeon loft made Callette growl sleepily and crawl out of her majestic shed. She had promised Derk that she would see to any messages that came while he was away, even though she had known they would come the moment she fell asleep. She prowled around the stable buildings to the loft ladder, muttering grumpily. She was far too big to get up the ladder, had been for years. She solved this the way she always did, by standing on her hind legs with her front talons clutching the top rung of the ladder, while she pushed her head inside the loft.

“Which of you just came in?” she said to the dimness in there.

Two pigeons promptly presented themselves. Both looked exceedingly cheerful at being home. Both had beakfuls of grain. They swallowed hastily as Callette glowered at them.

“The Emperor of the South has arrested his Senate and gone to the University with his horse soldiers,” crooned the pigeon on the left.

“The Emir of Ampersand has gone to the University with his army,” croodled the pigeon to Callette’s right. “He says he will take it all apart.”

“Hmm,” said Callette. “Thanks. I suppose I’d better fly over there and warn them. You two go back to your lunch.” She got herself down to the ground by climbing her front talons down the ladder, puzzling about this news. She found it hard to believe. There was no reason that she knew for anyone to make war on the University. Even during the tours no one had attacked the place. But the pigeons always told the truth, though they did sometimes get hold of the wrong end of the stick. “Fly over there and check,” she told herself as she reached the ground. “Bother!”

“Oh, there you are!” Don’s voice rang out behind her. “Where’s everybody else?”

Callette whirled around. The stable yard was packed with griffins, with Don in front of them, huge and glad and golden. Callette gaped. Derk always said that Callette’s mind worked like nobody else’s. She supposed that was true, for she discovered that her way of being quite intensely delighted to see her brother again was to decide to make a big golden model of him. Now. At once. A model of the perfect griffin, enormous and shapely and bright, like a huge male version of Elda, except that Don was so—so uncomplicated somehow. Callette’s talons twitched to get modeling. Don completely outshone the gaggle of smaller griffins behind him. Most of those were girls, anyway.

“Huh!” said Callette. “Did you bring your whole fan club with you? Or are some of them Kit’s?”

Don laughed. “They all wanted to see what it’s like over here.”

Callette slowly took in the sheer number of griffins packed in behind Don. Or wanted to found a colony, she thought. “How did you get on the boat?”

“Took turns flying and resting on the deck, of course,” Don told her happily. “One of the fan club’s yours.”

“What!” Callette watched a griffin who was only three-quarters of Don’s size come sliding out from behind Don. He was gray and white and brown, with barred wings like her own, and a very sleek, self-possessed person whose large black eyes seemed brighter and more perceptive than those of the other griffins. “Oh, no,” said Callette. “Not Cazak again. Don, that’s not fair!” And like an offended cat, she turned her back on the whole crowd and sat staring at the ladder with her tail angrily beating.

Cazak was perhaps not quite as confident as he looked. He hesitated. “Go on,” Don said to him. “I know she’s just being stupid about you. She’d fly away if she really meant it.”

Cazak advanced. Callette heard his talons clicking on the ground and said, “Go away. You’re too small.”

Cazak, with some caution, poked his head over Callette’s winged shoulder so that he could look her in one eye. She turned her head away. “Come on, Callette,” Cazak said. “You know most males are my size. We never let that bother us. Why should you?”

“Because!” snapped Callette.

The griffins crowded behind Don exchanged looks, knowing perfectly well that Callette could have put out one of Cazak’s eyes if she had wanted to, but none of them dared speak. Griffins were used to being far more public about these things than humans were.

“Promise at least to let me paint that picture of you,” Cazak said.

Callette bent and nibbled absently at one of the rungs of the ladder. She had, she knew, felt acutely out of sorts ever since she came home, downright crotchety, in fact. Now she suddenly felt fine—peaceful inside, happy really. Cazak must be why. How stupid! The wooden rung snapped. “Bother!” she said. “Now you made me break the ladder. All right, paint your picture. Then we’ll see. I may hate you.”

Cazak laughed. “No, you won’t. Callette, I love you even more when you’re being grumpy!”

“You can’t start painting yet,” said Callette. “I really and truly have to go to the University and warn them. There may be an emergency there. That’s where Blade and Kit are,” she told Don over her shoulder, “visiting Elda.”

“Then we’ll go with you,” Don said. “There are enough of us here to deal with most emergencies.”