“She seems to be all right,” said Blade. “Come on. Let’s get her visible.” Everyone at once backed away considerately. “Oh, no,” Blade told them. “Whoever made her this way has to help, or it’ll take us all night. Who did do it?”
Everyone there exchanged looks and realized that they had all done it. They all stepped forward again. Claudia hauled herself up the cloakrack and tried to stop laughing.
“Look,” Blade said to her kindly, “do you really need that thing? Can I put it over by the wall for you?”
“I, er, I’m not sure it’ll stretch that far,” Claudia confessed.
Lukin hastened over. “It won’t go more than ten yards away from her,” he explained. “She’s tied to it magically somehow.”
Blade reached up and felt the wooden hooks around the top of the cloakrack. “So she is! Kit, come and have a look at this! I’ve never met anything like it.”
Kit, who was attempting to arrange the students in a circle around Callette’s multiple shadow, left off for the moment and came over to plant a massive taloned, handlike forefoot on the top of the cloakrack. “What is this? This is the most cockeyed spell I ever met! It’s all back to front and sideways. Who did it?”
“Wermacht,” said Lukin.
“Who?” said Blade.
“Whoever he is, he’s a fool,” said Kit. “This is going to take some unraveling.” He and Blade began prowling around Claudia and the cloakrack, muttering technicalities, while Claudia stood there like someone holding the pole in a maypole dance, looking self-conscious.
Elda saw that they were going to be some time. She left her place in the circle and began tiptoeing away toward the dark corner by the refectory steps. “We’ll need your name,” she heard Kit saying behind her, and Claudia replying that she was Claudia Antonina. At which Blade exclaimed, “Then you must be Emperor Titus’s sister! I thought I’d seen you before!”
“Only once.” Claudia’s voice came distantly to Elda. “When I was fourteen.”
The dull brown griffin had not moved. He was sitting the way cats do, with his forelegs tucked under him and his back hunched, and his wings in a brown glittery swath above that. He seemed much smaller in this position. His face was level with Elda’s, very dull and meek. His heavy-lidded eyes were half shut. Elda would have thought he was asleep, except that she could see his eyes shine as they turned to look at her. She was surprised to find that his smell was quite clean, or only as sweaty as you might expect from a griffin who had just flown here from the coast.
“Who are you?” she demanded. “Why are you still here?”
“Me?” he said, sounding rather surprised. “I’m Flury. I’m very inoffensive really. You mustn’t be alarmed. I stayed because I thought it was interesting here.”
“Why hasn’t anyone else noticed you?” Elda said.
“I hoped nobody would,” Flury answered modestly. “I’m good at lying low.”
He was certainly quite a contrast with Jessak, but he was so dull and meek that Elda found him rather exasperating. “You mean you’re lying low because you’re an outlaw?” she asked with a bit of a snap.
“No,” Flury said. “At least nobody told me I was an outlaw.”
“Then why were you with Jessak?” Elda asked suspiciously.
“He’s a sort of distant relative,” Flury explained. “The family wanted me to look after him.”
“Look after him!” Elda could think of nothing more unlikely.
Flury hunched himself a little tighter, apologetically. “It does seem senseless, doesn’t it? What could I do to stop him getting into trouble? But they’re a very influential family, you know. Jessak should have been executed, really, for war crimes, but they got him exiled instead and then employed me to go with him.”
“Are you a fighting griffin then?” Elda asked.
“Not really,?
?? said Flury.
“A lawyer then?” said Elda.
“Not particularly,” said Flury.
“But,” said Elda, exasperated by now, “if you’re being paid to be with them, why have you let them fly off without you?”
“I couldn’t stop them, could I?” Flury pointed out meekly. “They seemed rather set on leaving in a hurry. Do you think the people in charge here would let me be a student if I asked?”