“Are you going to see Derk again soon?” Querida asked.
“Yes,” Callette said. “He wants me in the base camp.”
So she was making it clear that Derk would miss her as well as Mara, Querida thought. The only thing, then, was to try to make this lovely griffin stay here voluntarily. This could be managed. “Then tell him,” she said, as if she were quite resigned to Callette’s leaving, “to look out for any other odd thing that Mr. Chesney might have arranged and let me know at once if he finds anything. Tell him it’s most important.”
“All right,” said Callette. She rose to her four feet, carefully unwrapped the pouch from her talons, and placed it on the furthest end of the table. “Here’s the universe. I must go now.”
Querida’s eyes flicked to it, gratified. It was most unlikely the spell to dissolve it would work once Callette had let go of the pouch. “You know, my dear,” she said, “this has made my day. Tell Mara and Derk that I’m most grateful. It’s gone a long way to console me for having to let such a beautiful creature as you go.”
Callette stopped on her way to the door and looked at Querida across one glossy, barred wing. “Beautiful?” she said. “I’m not beautiful.”
Ah! thought Querida. The bait is taken. “I assure you that you are,” she said fervently. “You are one of the loveliest and most splendid creatures I ever set eyes on.”
“But I’m brown,” Callette objected. “Elda and Don and Lydda are golden.”
“Yellow gives me a headache,” said Querida. “Your coloring is infinitely more subtle.”
The feathers above Callette’s beak jutted in a frown. “I think I’ll ask Shona,” she said after a thoughtful pause. “Except she may be too used to me to tell.” She considered further. “But I thought you were like Mr. Chesney and never made jokes?”
“And here was I priding myself on my dry sense of humor!” Querida said.
Callette continued to frown at her over one wing for a moment. Then the frown melted back into the rest of her feathers. “You’re cheating,” she said. “You’re enticing me the way Mum entices tourists and trying to keep me here that way.”
“Only a little,” Querida protested—rather desperately, with a feeling she was fighting in the last ditch of her defenses. “For the most part I was telling you my honest opinion. You are my idea of the perfect griffin.”
“Then I will speak to Shona. Thank you,” Callette said. She bent her head and squeezed her way out of the conference hall.
Querida sighed out a hiss of breath and stared at the table. Fancy being bested by a griffin! She felt ill and old and full of losses. She hadn’t felt as bad as this since the day Mara’s father left her for Mara’s mother. Long, long ago, that had been. Still, she had coped with her feelings then, and she could cope with them now. She squared her shoulders and reached for the blank pigeon slips. Now that she knew what to tell the women wizards to look for, she had better tell them at once.
FIFTEEN
SCALES CAME BACK the following morning, dangling two protesting hampers of geese and accompanied by a snowy, gliding echelon of daylight owls. Perched between the saw edges on his shoulders, and looking rather the worse for it, was Derk. Shona screamed with delight and ran out from among the trees. As soon as Scales had tossed the hampers down—honk, yatter, SCOLD!—and made a rather heavier landing than he nowadays did, Shona hurried to help Derk tenderly down.
“Oh, Dad! You’ve lost weight! And you look chilled to the bone!”
“Only more or less cut in half. I don’t recommend dragon riding,” Derk said. “Thanks, Scales. Can I offer you a Friendly Cow?”
“No, thank you,” Scales rumbled. “I told you. I hunted on the way, for the first time for three hundred years. I had forgotten both the pleasure of it and what skill it took.”
Derk turned as Kit and Don came bounding up, with Blade hurrying in the rear. They had all three hung back a little because they were fairly sure they were in for a scolding. But Derk beamed at them all. “You seem to have been coping rather well. Great doings. And whichever of you asked those dwarfs what they were doing did a really smart thing.”
“That was me,” said Don. “But Blade asked, too. Anyone would. It was pretty queer.”
“You’re right,” said Derk. “It was pretty queer. Scales came and told me about it, and then we flew out to ask them some questions. Then we had to go back and send Elda and Callette to Mara. It’s been a busy night. Why isn’t Barnabas here? I thought he was supposed to be helping you.”
“We didn’t really tell him you were ill,” Shona confessed.
Blade simply stood there, grinning increasingly widely as he realized that Scales could not have eaten those dwarfs after all, not with Dad there. Derk looked at him, wondering why he was so quiet. “What happened to the dwarfs in the end?” Blade asked, to make absolutely sure.
Derk laughed. “We gave them a change of destination—Scales’s idea—and sent them to Derkholm. We told them, quite truthfully, that it’s the Dark Lord’s Citadel. They were quite pleased because it wasn’t nearly so far to go.” This more or less set Blade’s mind at rest, although he felt slightly dubious when Derk turned to Scales and said, “I suppose you’ll want to be off looking for the rest of the dwarfs with tribute now?”
“I shall help you get these murderers into their barracks first,” Scales replied. “I can’t see how you would get them there without a dragon to drive them.”
“I expect I’d have thought of something,” Derk said comfortably. “But I would be very grateful for your help.”
They got ready to march, accompanied now by the whole flock of geese and with the owls riding on the bundles piled on the spare horses. Shona willingly gave up riding Beauty. Beauty and Pretty were so pleased to see Derk again that they nuzzled around Derk and became quite a hindrance to him. “You wouldn’t be half so pleased if you knew my plans for you,” Derk told Pretty, rubbing Pretty’s forelock. “Your wings have grown, haven’t they?”
The trouble was that the new arrivals had left them one horse short and with three empty hampers to carry. Derk thought briefly and then told Blade to pack all the leftover bundles into the hampers and translocate to the next camp with them. It was one of those neat solutions Dad was so good at, Blade thought, ramming things into creaking wickerwork. And he was going to have a very boring day because of it, waiting about in the next camp for the rest of them to arrive.