Lukin was perplexed. Olga looked so angry. He could not understand why her eyes were brimming with tears when everything had gone so well. “You know I had to say something like that to give the book a proper provenance. They wouldn’t have accepted that it was mine to sell if I hadn’t. You know I didn’t mean a word of it.”
“All right, don’t rub it in!” Olga screamed at him.
“I’m not,” Lukin said, trying to be reasonable. “I thought we were friends enough and understood one another enough that you could accept what I had to say and back me up. I’m sorry if it annoyed you, but we had to rescue Ruskin.”
“I’m not talking about Ruskin!” Olga yelled. “You might at least have warned me!”
“Then I’m sure I don’t know what you are talking about!” Lukin snapped. “You’re being as bat-headed as Melissa. You must have realized, when I asked you to come with me, that I was going to have to spin a yarn of some kind.”
“Oh!” Olga gasped. “That does it! I never want to speak to you again, ever in my life! Never!” She burst into tears. Crying so hard that she could barely see what she was doing, she fumbled the door open, flung it wide, and ran away. She was crying such volumes of tears that Lukin could see drops whirling out on either side of her flying hair, shining like rainbows for an instant, before the door swung back and slammed in his face.
“What’s got into her?” he asked his friends slightly irritably.
They stared solemnly back. Claudia, realizing this was a time to forget her own troubles, climbed off the stage and went to join Elda. The cloakrack jiggled across the carpet after her. Everyone ignored it. “Don?
?t you really know?” Claudia asked Lukin.
“No,” said Lukin, and it seemed to him he was being entirely honest. “I haven’t a clue.”
“Then we can’t tell you. Think about it,” Claudia said.
Everyone waited while Lukin thought. His first thought was that his friends were being as unreasonable as Olga had been. Here he was, having behaved like a prince for once and rescued Ruskin, and instead of telling him how clever he had been, they were asking him to think. It made no sense. But while he thought that, his immense satisfaction at rescuing Ruskin began to melt and crack a little. Uncomfortable feelings began to wriggle out from under it. Perhaps he had ridden roughshod over Olga a little. But behaving like a prince made you do that. He found he needed to move about, so he went and handed Ruskin the signed and sealed parchment. “There,” he said, and then, before he could stop himself, “Did she really mean that, about never speaking to me again?”
Everyone knew Olga, her pride and her straightforwardness, and they answered, “Yes!” in chorus, and continued to watch him.
“Don’t all stare at me like that!” Lukin said irritably. He wondered whether to go away like Olga and be alone for a while. But as soon as he thought of being alone, by himself entirely, he began to see that there was a great yawning pit inside him, of hurt that Olga did not want him anymore. Olga had become the person he relied on. She understood him. She knew when he was making a joke and when he was being serious; that was why it was so astounding that she had not seemed to know he was lying to the dwarfs when she had been his staunch ally in all the other troubles. She had lent—no, given—him money for clothes. She had handed him a priceless notebook without hesitation in Wermacht’s first class, and she had conjured up a smelly monkey to help him, though—as she had confessed to him later—she truly hated calling up monsters; it made her feel unclean. So why, why had she run off now? He had not known she could be so feckless. “Do you think perhaps I should go after her and talk to her?” he asked.
“That depends on what you want to say to her,” Claudia answered.
Then I won’t bother, Lukin thought. She’d just shout at me again. And for himself, he suspected that he would whine and complain to Olga that he needed her, which would annoy Olga and make Lukin ashamed of himself. But then, when he started to think of needing Olga, he discovered that the need was really there, much deeper and much stronger and likely to go on for much longer than he had ever believed such a need could. And he began, dimly, to see why Olga had been so upset. She had after all been born to a very different family from Lukin’s. But I don’t care two hoots about her beastly father! he told himself angrily. In fact, I’d quite happily set an enormous infallible mousetrap for him personally. But he knew this was not really what this was all about. He sighed. “But I’ve no idea where she’s gone,” he said.
“Aren’t you training to be a wizard then?” Ruskin asked him.
Lukin frowned at him.
“Ruskin means,” said Elda, “that if you’re linked to Olga in any way, then you can know where she’s gone.”
Lukin thought about this, too, while everyone again watched him expectantly. At length the heavy look cleared off Lukin’s face, and he smiled. “On the roof of the Spellman Building,” he said. “More or less where Elda was.”
Olga was indeed on the roof. Climbing up the narrow wooden staircase to the trapdoor beside the chimney, tears whisking off her chin and soaking her hair as she went, felt just like the many, many times she had climbed to the masthead after Olaf had beaten her. Just the same, she thought. I’m alone again. As usual. She coiled up by the chimney, which gave her some small shelter from the cold breeze up there, and she cried. She cried for herself, for her father, and for Lukin—Lukin, who she had thought had such great kindness and depths and affection under that rather sulky face of his and who obviously had not. Or not for Olga. She had seen that, fully and truly, while Lukin was putting on his crown prince face for the dwarfs. Aristocratic, haughty, and so polite. Considerate to people lower than he was—and most people were lower, of course. Olga was lower than most. Waterfront riffraff she would have been, had Olaf not stolen that ship after Olga’s mother died.
And she cried. Oblivious of the cold breeze, which kept wrapping itself around her in strands and plastering her hair into her mouth, she cried and cried.
Oh, what is the matter? the breeze cried back. Speak to us! Please speak to us again!
Olga opened her wet and swollen eyes and stared at the air elementals wrapping themselves around her. They were long, silky, scarflike beings, and quite transparent, with anxious birdlike eyes. Elda’s eyes remind me of theirs, Olga thought. That must be why I like her so much. “What’s happened? I can see you!” she said. Her voice sounded thick and awful. “I can hear you again! Why haven’t you talked to me all this time?”
But we did! they cried back. Their voices were like the delicate moan of wind in wires. We talked, but you never seemed to hear us. You never cried.
Nor had she, Olga realized. That first time when Olaf had beaten her half to death, she had refused to make a noise or shed a tear. Somehow it had been important not to. And after that it was as if the tears had gone underground in her and got lost in a place she could never find. “I think I got too proud to cry,” she told the elementals. “I wasn’t going to let him know he hurt me.”
But what has hurt you now? they asked.
“Lukin,” Olga gulped.
We’ll go and blow him away for you, they offered.
“Oh, no,” she said quickly. “I don’t want him hurt. It looks as if I’ll just have to leave the University.”