Elda had been towering behind her father, delighted to see him getting on so well with her friends. Now she flung both feathered forelegs around his shoulders, causing him to sag a bit. “You really don’t mind me being here? You’re going to let me stay?”
“Well.” Derk disengaged himself and sat on the plinth beside Filbert’s interested nose. “Well, I can’t deny that Mara and I had a bit of a set-to over it, Elda. It went on some days, in fact. Your mother pointed out that you had the talent and were at an age when everyone needs a life of her own. She also said you were big enough to toss me over a barn if you wanted.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t do that!” Elda cried out. She thought about it. “Or not if you let me stay here. You will, won’t you?”
“That’s mostly why I’m here,” said Derk. “If you’re happy and if you’re sure you’re learning something of value, then of course you have to stay. But I want to talk to you seriously about what you’ll be learning. You should all listen to this, too,” he said to the other five. “It’s important.” They nodded and watched Derk attentively as he went on. “For many, many years,” he said, “forty years, in fact, this University was run almost entirely to turn out Wizard Guides for Mr. Chesney’s tour parties. The men among the teachers were very pressed for time, too, because they had to go and be Guides themselves every autumn when the tours began. So they pared down what they taught. After a few years they were teaching almost nothing but what was needed to get a party of nonmagic users around dangerous bits of country, and these were all the fast, simple things that worked. They left out half the theory and some of the laws, and they left out all the slower, more thorough, more permanent, or more artistic ways of doing things. Above all, they discouraged students from having new ideas. You can see their point in that. It doesn’t do for a Wizard Guide with twenty people to keep safe in the Waste when a monster’s charging at them to stand rooted to the spot because he’s thought of a new way to make diamonds. They’d all be dead quite quickly. Mr. Chesney didn’t allow that kind of thing. You can see the old wizards’ point. But the fact remains that for forty years they were not teaching properly.”
“I believe those old wizards have retired now, sir,” Felim said.
“Oh, they have.” Derk agreed. “They were worn out. But you haven’t grasped my point. Six smart students like you ought to see it at once.”
“I have,” Filbert said, chomping his bit in a pleased way. “The ones teaching now were taught by the old ones.”
“Exactly,” said Derk, while the others cried out, “Oh, I see!” and “That’s it!” and Olga said, “Then that’s what’s wrong with Wermacht.”
“All that about ‘your next big heading.’ So schooly,” said Claudia. “Because that’s all he knows. Like I said, pitiful.”
“Running in blinkers,” Filbert suggested brightly.
“Then it’s all no use!” Elda said tragically. “I might just as well come home.”
From the look of them, the others were thinking the same. “Here now. There’s no need to be so extreme,” Derk said. “Who’s your tutor?”
“Corkoran,” said Elda. The others noticed, with considerable interest, that she did not go on and tell Derk that Corkoran reminded her of a teddy bear.
“He’s the fellow who’s trying to get to the moon, isn’t he?” Derk asked. “That could well force him to widen his ideas a little, though he may not tell them to you, of course. You should all remember that for every one way of doing things that he tells you, there are usually ten more that he doesn’t, because half of them are ways he’s never heard of. The same goes for laws and theory. Remember there are more kinds of magic than there are birds in the air, and that each branch of it leads off in a hundred directions. Examine everything you’re taught. Turn it upside down and sideways; then try to follow up new ways of doing it. The really old books in the library should help you, if you can find them—Policant’s Philosophy of Magic is a good start—and then ask ques
tions. Make your teachers think, too. It’ll do them good.”
“Wow!” murmured Olga.
Elda said, “I wish you’d come and said this before I’d given in my essay. I’d have done it quite differently.”
“I also,” said Felim.
Lukin and Ruskin were writing down “Policant, Phil. of Mag.” in their notebooks. Ruskin looked up under his tufty red brows. “What other old books?”
Derk told them a few. All the others fetched out paper and scribbled, looking up expectantly after each title for more. Derk concealed a smile as he met Ruskin’s fierce blue glare and then Felim’s glowing black one and then found Claudia’s green eyes raised to his, like deep, living lamps. You could see she was half Marshfolk, he thought, looking on into Olga’s long, keen gray eyes, and then Lukin’s, rather similar, and both pairs gleaming with excitement. He seemed, he thought quite unrepentantly, to have started something. Then he looked upward at Elda, feeling slightly ashamed that she trusted him so devotedly.
But he met one of those grown-up orange twinkles that Elda had been surprising him with lately. “Aren’t you being rather naughty?” Elda asked.
“Subversive is the word, Elda,” Derk said. “Oh, yes. Your mother reminded me how beastly the food used to be here. We didn’t think it could have changed. Filbert!”
Filbert obediently moved his hind legs around in a half circle until he was facing the statue and sideways on to Derk. There was a large hamper standing on his saddle. Derk heaved it down and opened it in a gush of piercing, fruity scent.
“Oranges!” squawked Elda as the lid came creaking back. “My favorite fruit!”
Everyone else but Claudia was asking, “What are they?”
“Offworld fruit,” Derk said, heaving down a second hamper. “Don’t give them away too freely, Elda. I’ve only got one grove so far. This one’s lunch. Mara seems to have put in everything Lydda cooked and left in stasis for this last year. She reckoned the food might even be worse now the University’s so short of money. Help yourselves.”
The smells from the second hamper were so delicious that five hands and a taloned paw plunged in immediately. Murmurs of joy arose. Filbert fidgeted and made plaintive noises until Derk thoughtfully turned over buns, pies, pasties, flans and found Filbert some carrot cake, then a pork pie for himself. For a while everyone ate peacefully.
“Is the University short of money?” Olga asked as they munched.
“Badly so, to judge by the plaintive but stately begging letter they’ve just sent me,” Derk said. “They tell me they’re forced to ask for donations from the parents of all students.”
He was a little perplexed at the consternation this produced. Claudia choked on an éclair. Lukin went deep red, Olga white. Ruskin glared around the courtyard as if he expected to be attacked, while Felim, looking ready to faint, asked, “All students?”