“But you must have some teaching,” Derk pointed out, “in case you do something wrong by accident. Mara and I should have been teaching you at the same time as Blade. You ought to have told us, Kit. Let me tell you the same as I told Blade. I will find you a proper tutor, both of you, but you have to be patient, because it takes time to find the right magic user, and you’ll have to be patient for the next year at least, now that I have to be Dark Lord. Can you bear to wait? You can learn quite a bit helping me with that if you want.”
“I wasn’t going to tell you at all,” Kit said.
“So you bit everyone’s head off instead,” Derk said.
Kit’s beak was still stuck among his cushions, but a big griffin grin was spreading around the ends of it. “At least I haven’t been screaming you’re a jealous tyrant,” he said. “Like Blade.”
Well, I am, a little, Derk thought. Jealous, anyway. You’ve both got your magical careers before you, and you, Kit, have all the brains I could cram into one large griffin head. “True,” he said, sighing. “Now lie down and rest. I’ll give you something for the bruises if they’re still bad this evening.”
He shut the door quietly and went back to the house. Shona met him at the edge of the terrace, indignant and not posing at all. “The younger ones are all safe,” she said. “They were in the dining room. They didn’t even notice the roof coming down!”
“What?” said Derk. “How?”
Shona pointed along the terrace with her thumb. “Look at them!”
Blade sat at the long, littered table. So did Mara, Finn, and Barnabas. Lydda and Don were stretched on the flagstones among the empty chairs. Callette was couchant along the steps to the garden, with her tail occasionally whipping the cowering orchids. Elda was crouching along the table itself. Each of them was bent over one of the little flat machines with buttons, pushing those buttons with finger or talon as if nothing else in the world mattered.
“Callette found out how to do this,” Don said.
“She’s a genius,” Barnabas remarked. “I never realized they did anything but add numbers. I made her a hundred of them in case the power packs run out.”
Elda looked up briefly when Derk went to peer across her feathered shoulder. “You kill little men coming down from the sky and they kill you,” she explained. “And we did so notice the roof fall in! The viewscreens got all dusty. Damn. You distracted me, and I’m dead.”
“Is Kit all right?” Blade asked. “Hey! I’m on level four now. Beat that!”
“Level six,” Callette said smugly from the steps.
“You would be!” said Blade.
“Level seven,” Finn said mildly. “It seems to stop when you’ve won there. Will the house do like this, Derk?”
The middle section of the house was there again, in a billowy, transparent way. Derk could see the stairs through the wall, also back in place. The piece of roof that had fallen in was there, too, hovering slightly like a balloon anchored at four corners. At least it would keep the rain out until it all had to be transformed into ruined towers, Derk supposed.
“It’s fine,” he said. “Thanks.” He put a hand on Barnabas’s arm. “I hate to interrupt, but Querida had an accident awhile ago, around by the paddock. I think she broke a couple of bones. She wouldn’t let me see to them. She’s gone home.”
“Oh, dear!” said Barnabas. He and Mara came out of their button-pushing trances, looking truly concerned.
“You should have brought her up to the house at once!” Mara said.
“She wouldn’t let me do anything,” Derk explained. “She translocated.”
“She’s done this before,” Barnabas said. “Five years ago some fool Pilgrim broke her wrist, and Querida got us all fined by translocating straight home and refusing to come back. We had to do without an Enchantress for the rest of the tours. I think shock takes her that way.”
Finn stood up anxiously. “We’d better go to the University and check.”
Barnabas sighed and got up, too. “Yes, I suppose so.”
He and Finn stood there looking at Derk expectantly.
“Oh. Sorry,” Derk said. “What do we owe you for restoring the house?”
The two wizards exchanged looks. “Thought you’d never ask,” said Barnabas. “We’ll accept a bag of coffee each, please.”
“Phew!” said Shona when the two wizards had finally gone. “I think this was the most upsetting day I’ve ever known. And the tours haven’t even started yet!”
“I should hope not,” said Mara. “There are several thousand things to do before that.”
FIVE