“Mate,” replied Elda, moving her queen back to where it had been. While Lukin was cursing at having missed what she was doing, she wondered if Flury had intended to put this idea into their heads and just what Flury was up to.

She kept encountering Flury all over the University after that. He was in the library when she went to take back most of Ruskin’s food-spell books in order to fetch Felim a stack of volumes on astronomy. When she backed out of the astronomy section, she saw Flury, looking very small and drab, humbly approaching the librarian’s desk. He was asking anxiously for a copy of Wermacht’s teaching timetable then, but when she came up to the desk herself with Felim’s books, he was saying, “Then I’ll ask in the office. Thank you. Can you give me any books on the founding of the University, or a biography of Wizard Policant at all?” The librarian seemed to accept that Flury was another griffin student and gave him two books without question. Elda had no idea what Flury wanted them for.

The next time she met him, Flury seemed to be searching along the edges of the courtyard, as if he had lost something. “What are you looking for?” Elda asked him.

“I thought I might catch some mice,” he told her.

Elda was not sure by now that anything Flury said about himself was true, but she said, “They won’t go near you. Griffins have too much cat in them.”

“I daresay you’re right,” Flury said dejectedly.

Elda hated people to agree with her in this dismal way. She explained rather tartly, “The mice get in all the students’ rooms, but they never get into mine. I smell of danger to them.”

This was true. Claudia vouched for it to Ruskin, and the next day Ruskin implored Elda to sleep in his room. His food-spells had all been eaten. Felim looked up from his calculations and said, “It would be much more use if Elda were to sleep in the kitchens.” Wizard Dench, horrified at the waste of food, had been and put guard-spells on all the cupboards and the cold store, but the mice still got in.

“Don’t be silly,” said Elda. “You know I can’t get up Ruskin’s stairs or squeeze through the kitchen door.”

Felim once again looked up from his scribbling. Elda assumed he was doing his usual equations, full of x =yz or things that looked like big tick marks, until he said, “Does daffodil rhyme with Isodel, do you think?”

“No!” said everyone, and Olga added to Lukin, “If ever I saw a heart-whole woman, it’s your sister, Lukin.”

“Yes, Felim, honestly,” Lukin said. “Everyone who sees Isodel falls madly in love with her, but she hardly even notices.”

“That is beside the point,” Felim answered loftily. “To write poems to a cruel love is the height of artistry.” Then, while Lukin was muttering that this was what they all said, Felim added, “About the mice. The assassins are certainly in partnership with the mice and assassins are usually magic users, if only in a small way. So they can certainly circumvent the Bursar’s spells.”

“Then I’ll go and cast some spells on the kitchen!” Ruskin said, exasperated.

“You couldn’t do worse than Wizard Dench,” Claudia agreed in her driest way. “Come on, everyone. We’ve got a class. I’m interested to see if it’s Flury or a bar stool taking it.”

It was Flury. Flury seemed to be taking all Wermacht’s classes, always with the same apologetic air, which seemed to suggest he was only humbly filling in until someone turned Wermacht back again, but always teaching things that Wermacht had never even mentioned. He was taking the second- and third-year classes, too. Elda discovered he was when second- and third-year students began to turn up among the first-year classes, saying Flury had told them to come and catch up on the basics.

“Has Corkoran asked you to take Wermacht’s place then?” Elda asked Flury.

“I did speak to Corkoran, yes,” Flury said. “This University is not in a very thriving way, you know. Are your brothers likely to visit again soon?”

“Blade and Kit?’ said Elda, instantly distracted from Flury’s activities. “They said so. I don’t know what’s keeping them.”

It had taken Kit, Blade, and Callette, too, more time and effort than they believed possible to get their parents, and Florence and Angelo, and all the horses, and the winged runt piglet that Derk was rearing by hand, plus all the luggage Mara thought necessary, safely to the coast and then onto a ship. It was some days after Elda spoke to Flury before they were through and could return to Derkholm at last. There Callette said she was exhausted. “It’s keeping my temper for a whole week,” she said, and she went away to sleep in the spiky gothic den she had built for herself beside the Derkholm stables.

Kit and Blade, who did not find their parents quite as annoying as Callette did, looked at one another. Kit said, “We said we’d see Elda.”

“And I promised to do something about that girl with the cloakrack,” Blade said. “That’s been worrying me.”

“Let’s go now then,” said Kit, and took off for the University in a thunder of wings. Blade waited on the terrace, with his feet up on a chair, drinking a quiet mug of tea, until experience told him that Kit would have the University in sight. Then he sighed, stood up and stretched, and translocated there, too.

That day Flury had given Wermacht’s class on Basic Ritual and was now moseying around the backyards of the University in his usual way. One way or another he had explored nearly all of them. This particular yard backed onto the empty stables Flury had found to sleep in, but to get there, Flury had had to fly in over the stable roof. There seemed to be no door or gate to the yard at all. But once he was there, he discovered that it also backed onto the kitchens. “Ah,” Flury said.

Lion-size and sleepy-looking, Flury wandered about the weedy flagstones, scratching idly at little piles of rubbish, turning over old horseshoes and pieces of crockery, always getting closer to the larger pile of rubbish in one corner. When he was close enough to it, he pounced. Mice ran out of it in all directions, squealing. Flury took no notice of them and dug with both sets of talons. There followed a few seconds of violent activity, and then Flury stood back on his haunches, becoming the larger size that was probably natural to him, holding a bundle of small, black-clad human figures. Ignoring the way they shouted shrilly and writhed and struggled, he calmly sorted through them.

“Six,” he said. “Assassins always go in sevens, I heard. Where’s the other one?”

Six small black arms pointed. Flury turned his head down to look at the tiny black cockerel almost between his hind legs. “I see,” he said. “That doesn’t seem quite fair.” Spreading his wings for balance, he picked the cockerel up with his left back talons. He brought that leg up to his front ones and transferred the chicken to the bundle of assassins he already held. As soon as it reached its companions, it became a small man dressed in black, too, who seemed to be struggling not to cry. “That’s better,” Flury said as he uncurled himself. “And I suppose you’ll all be wanting to be your proper size now.”

The small men became very eloquent about this. Their arms waved, and their voices shrilled.

“Yes, all right,” Flury said. “But I’m afraid there’s a catch. You’ll be the right size ten miles from here. If you come any closer, you’ll be small again.”

The small men, at this, became even more eloquent.

Tags: Diana Wynne Jones Derkholm Fantasy
Source: readsnovelonline.net