“Oh, really!” Shona was leaning off one side, hanging on to the twenty feet of thread and scrabbling for her iron. “It’s lucky I’m a good rider, Beauty, or you’d have lost me by now. Do go down.”
But Beauty tried to go up again, neighing for Pretty, rearing in midair in her anxiety. Shona looked so likely to come off that Don took to the air with a clap in order to catch her, and the noise he made—maybe—disguised the approach of the people who had found Pretty. At any rate, Pretty suddenly reappeared only a few feet from Kit and Blade and the dogs, mincing joyously among the long legs of six tall fair-haired men in green.
There was a long rumble of awe from the watching soldiers.
The reason for this was that all six men, and Pretty, were surrounded in a green-blue haze of magic. The tallest man had a golden circlet on his white-fair hair. This one bowed gravely to Blade and Kit. “I come to return this small wonder horse to the Dark Lord, our master,” he said. “Can you lead me to him, if you please?”
“Er—” Blade began, but was interrupted by Beauty descending as suddenly as she had gone up. Pretty dashed to her side, at a prudent distance from the sheep, and feverishly represented himself as a poor, lost, lonely, bewildered, stolen little colt.
“No, you aren’t,” said Shona. “You’re just a nuisance.” Then she looked up and saw the tall man with the circlet. Her eyes went wide and black, and she stared. Don landed beside her, staring, too.
“I’m afraid Derk’s not here at the moment,” Kit said with great politeness, bending down toward the magic haze. “But we all thank you for returning Pretty. Can we assist you by taking a message to Derk?”
“I thank you,” replied the man with the golden circlet. “Inform him that I must in courtesy speak with him myself. I am Talithan, eldest son of Talian Elfking.”
Even Kit’s confidence was shaken. This man was a very important elf indeed. Kit’s throat bobbed, and he answered even more politely, “My father, Derk—ah—found himself a little unwell and was forced to stay at home today.” The elf prince’s smooth forehead gathered into a frown at this. Kit added hurriedly, “But of course I can fly home with all speed—”
“No need,” said the elf prince, to Blade’s acute relief. He wanted to kick Kit. How on earth could anyone tell Derk anything when he was in a healing coma? Blade glanced up at Shona, hoping she would interrupt to stop Kit making complete fools of them all, and was exasperated to see her sitting on Beauty like a statue, staring at Talithan. Oh, no! he thought. He was going to have to point out to Shona that if Talithan was who he said he was (and he must be, because elves never lied), then he was at least five hundred years old and married already.
“I will wait upon the Dark Lord myself,” Talithan was saying. “Know that I am, only this very day, appointed to fight on his side, and these my friends with me, as captains of his Dark Elves. This suddenness, as we must hasten to assure him, was not intended as discou
rtesy. Another high elf had been chosen, but is now removed, by reason of my own rash fault.”
“Indeed?” Kit said, rather helplessly.
“I had the misfortune to offend my honored father by uttering a scoffing prophecy,” Talithan explained, “and for this I must regard the Dark Lord as my master for a year and a day. For this reason must I hasten to Derkholm.”
“Perhaps you’d better wait for a week, Your Highness,” Blade blurted out. Kit’s head swiveled angrily at him.
“Your Highness,” Don put in, “Dad’s got no end of urgent business—” Don’s beak snapped shut as Kit’s head swiveled at him, and Kit’s tail slashed. Don knew Kit had a point here. You did not suggest to the heir of the Elfking that anything could be more important than he was. Except—“With Mr. Chesney,” Don added, out of pure inspiration. Kit’s tail hit the ground like a whip.
“Then I will wait on his pleasure for a week,” Talithan said graciously. “I do not,” he said, and his chin went up disdainfully, “associate with the man Chesney, who holds my brother hostage and forces my race to do his will. But see the Dark Lord I must, if only to ask a favor of him.” He half turned. It looked as if he was going, but he turned back and looked up at Kit. “Forgive me if I ask impertinently, but how do two members of your race call the Dark Lord Father?”
“Because he is,” Kit said, rather astonished. “He bred us from eggs.”
Talithan smiled. “That explains my puzzle. I had not thought there were any griffins this side of the ocean, but if you were fetched over in the egg, the reason is clear.” He bowed to the astonished Kit, to Don, to Blade and the still-staring Shona. “Farewell. I must no longer interrupt your herding of this unpleasant soldiery.” That left Blade almost as surprised as Kit. None of the elves had so much as glanced at the goggling crowd of soldiers.
All six elves turned as if they were about to walk away. The magic haze turned with them, like an open door shutting, and the grassy place where they had been standing was empty. Every one of the horses, including Pretty and Beauty, surged forward after them and stopped, seeing the elves were gone. Elves often had that effect on horses. Beauty’s sudden stop jerked Shona out of her saddle, to land with a rush, a stagger, and a snatch at the reins around the sheep. It seemed to jerk Shona out of her daze, too.
“Gods!” she said. “I had a dream about him!”
“Oh, don’t go and be soppy!” Kit snapped.
“I wasn’t,” Shona said. “It wasn’t a nice dream. There were dwarfs in it, too, and you’d been drowned and there was something wrong with Dad. I just couldn’t believe it when he turned out to be real.”
“We thought you were smitten,” Blade explained.
“Of course not. He’s five hundred years old and married to Malithene,” Shona retorted. “I do know my elflore, but I didn’t know it was him in my dream, and it was a scary dream.”
Kit prowled swiftly back to the soldiers and commenced shaking the magic reins to get the procession moving again, obviously in a very bad temper indeed. Blade thought he knew how Kit felt. Elves, when they went away, had the effect of leaving you feeling flat and ordinary and ugly. Everything seemed unpleasant. Blade found himself really noticing the way they were leaving a broad trampled trail across perfectly good farmland, littered with things dropped by the soldiers. They had no idea where the soldiers found all the rubbish they dropped, but drop it they did, all the time—papers, packets, pieces of cloth, fragments of black armor, keys, bad fruit, crusts—and after them the Friendly Cows dropped cowpats on top of that. Blade found it disgusting suddenly.
But there was more to Kit’s bad temper than this. Later, when they had made it to the next camp and shut the soldiers inside, Kit said to Blade, “I never knew there were griffins on the other continent.”
“Dad must have got the idea from somewhere,” Blade said glumly. He felt desolated. He knew Kit was going to go away across the ocean to look for wild griffins the first opportunity he got. “It’s too far to fly there,” he said despairingly. “You’d drown.”
“What are boats invented for?” Kit demanded.
There was a sharp frost that night. The soldiers, warm inside their camp, jeered and shouted and sang half the night, while their four supervisors shivered. At dawn the frost melted and the rain began. The soldiers sat down inside the transparent walls of the camp, snug and dry, and refused to come out. This was when Blade began truly wishing the dragon had died before it got to Derkholm.