“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.”
“I know.” Blade turned to Claudia. “Look, I’m awfully sorry about this. Do you mind waiting a day or so until we’ve got my parents safely on their way? We’ll come back then, during teaching hours, so that this Wermacht’s bound to be here, and make sure he untangles you properly, I promise. Will you be all right until then?”
“Perfectly,” Claudia said bravely. The cloakrack after all was the least of her worries. If the Senate wanted her dead before she became enough of a wizard to protect herself, then what was a cloakrack here or there? When Blade came back, she thought she might summon courage to ask him to protect her, but privately, not out in the courtyard in front of everyone like this. Meanwhile she intended to stick to Elda like a burr.
“Right.” Blade smiled at her, and as Elda slid back to her place between Olga and Felim, he turned to the matter of making Callette visible again.
“And about time, too!” Callette said from somewhere near the fallen statue.
“It won’t take a moment,” Kit said, huge and glistening like tar beyond the ring of students. “This is simple—just strong because so many people did it. All join hands. That’s right. Now concentrate on Callette as you last saw her.”
Everyone did so, while Kit and Blade raced in a clockwise circle outside the ring of concentrating students. And it was almost as if they turned Callette on like a light. She reappeared, large and ruffled and cross, in a momentary blaze of evening sunlight, as everyone had last seen her, her barred wings rosily gleaming and her big brown eyes catching nonexistent orange sunset. By the time she had lifted each foot and turned her head to inspect both wings, the glow had faded to the normal dimness from the courtyard lights.
“Thanks,” she said gruffly. Her tail lashed. “Blaze of glory.”
“And now we really must go,” Blade said. “See you soon, Elda, Claudia.” He translocated away, vanishing with a whistle of inrushing air.
Kit and Callette had to travel in a less wizardly way. Both spread their great wings, braced their legs, and leaped upward in a windy tolling of wing feathers and a downdraft that tossed everyone’s hair. “Bye!” Callette called downward. Everyone clustered around the ruined statue to wave good-bye. Ruskin jumped onto the empty plinth to get a last sight of the huge dark bodies wheeling around to gain height against the blue-black sky. Olga and Lukin stood on the fallen statue. Elda gazed upward and sighed. She had not realized how much she had been missing her family until they were gone again.
“You know,” Ruskin boomed thoughtfully, “it must be possible to make a wing-spell.”
Lukin laughed. “Get your food-spells right first.”
A strong, sour voice spoke from under his feet. “Would you be so good as to lift me back to my pedestal now? It feels most uncomfortable lying here without my feet.”
Olga and Lukin hastily jumped off the statue. Ruskin knelt on the plinth and stared down at it. Everyone else backed away. “That was Wizard Policant speaking, was it?” someone asked, Melissa probably.
“Of course it was, you silly minx,” said the statue.
There was no question of it this time. Everyone near saw the stone lips move. “Then we had better put him back,” said Felim.
This was not easy. As Felim said later in the buttery bar, Wizard Policant probably weighed nearly a ton, and without Elda’s strength and Ruskin’s knowledge of how to move stone, they might never have done it. It took ten people using the cloakrack as a lever to raise Wizard Policant enough for Elda and Ruskin to grasp him near his stony middle and haul him up—while everyone else dropped the cloakrack and pushed—until he was lying across his plinth. At this stage several people tried casting weight-reducing spells, but Wizard Policant seemed as immune to magic as Jessak had been. They had to use brute strength to get him upright. Then as many of the strongest people who could crowd onto the plinth had the difficult task of guiding Wizard Policant’s broken legs into the shattered ends of his ankles, while Elda hovered strenuously above, with Wizard Policant’s pointed hat grasped in all four feet.
Stone rasped. People panted, Elda loudest of all. Everyone’s sweat plopped down onto the plinth like rain. And Wizard Policant himself intoned, “To your right … A fraction backward … Now half an inch left … Forward, and right an eighth of an inch … Rotate me a very small amount clockwise … No, too far … The other way … Hold it there … Now down.”
They dumped him with a crash. Elda shot upward, wondering if she would ever be able to walk again. Everyone on the plinth balanced upright, trembling. “Is that it?” Claudia asked from the ground.
“Yes,” said Wizard Policant. “Thank you.” Upon that he became completely a statue again. Though a number of people asked him anxiously if he was all right now, he did not reply.
As Elda sank shakily to the ground, Ruskin crouched and ran his big hands around the statue’s legs where the break had been. “Seamless,” he said. “Not a sign of any join.”
“He must have been a very powerful wizard,” Felim said soberly. “I cannot, frankly, see any of our present teachers being able to do this.”
Everyone murmured agreement as they climbed off the plinth. Lukin wiped his sweating forehead with the back of his hand. “Phew!” he said. “Quite a day! I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’ve just remembered I’ve got some money now, and I’m going to the buttery for a drink.”