“Enormous ones,” Ruskin boomed airily, and then dropped his voice to the jarring whisper he had perfected for the library. “Majesty, when I was bringing the tribute from our fastness during the last tour, I met a dwarf at Derkholm called Dworkin, who was from that fastness just on the border of Luteria. Your Majesty may know him.” King Luther shook his head, resisting the need to block his ears as well. “Well, they aren’t truly Your Majesty’s subjects,” Ruskin conceded, still in the dreadful whisper. “Anyway, this Dworkin, who was a subchief and knew what he was talking about, said that Luteria was sitting on some of the biggest gold deposits in the world. It quite broke Dworkin’s heart,” he added, seeing King Luther’s six soldiers looking at him avidly, “because these deposits run very deep and very thick, and he couldn’t get in to mine them without Your Majesty’s getting to know—and he knew, of course, that these deposits really belong to the crown—and he couldn’t see himself keeping it secret, not in the hundred years of mining it’d take to get all the gold out. But if Your Majesty gives me, as one of your loyal subjects, permission, I can find that gold. As a dwarf and a wizard I’d have no problem. And Lukin—when’s he’s a wizard, too—can make the mine shafts.”
Lukin pinched his mouth together in order not to laugh.
“He’s certainly good at making holes in things,” King Luther agreed dourly.
“Ah, but they’ve cured him of that here already, Your Majesty,” Ruskin said, in what passed for his normal voice now, much to the King’s relief. “Next he has to learn to sink pits to order. That’ll take him the next three years, but after that he and I are both at your service, Your Majesty.”
“On condition that I marry Olga first,” Lukin put in.
King Luther looked up at Lukin and down at Ruskin, grimly. “What if I refuse?”
“Then I inherit a needlessly poor kingdom, obviously,” Lukin said. “I’d hate that. But I’d hate even more not being friends with you.”
There was a pause while King Luther looked from his son to his soldiers, who were all staring before them so correctly that they looked like fish, and realized that Luteria was going to be riddled with amateur mine shafts unless he took some action. The only person who seemed genuinely uninterested was Isodel. She seemed to be in some kind of dream, with a strange, happy smile on her face.
It was during this pause that Kit put his head up to take in more air. He still felt as if he could never get enough of it. And his beak tasted singed. “Funny,” he croaked to Elda. “There’s a row of men in spiked helmets up on that roof.”
Everyone within hearing whirled to look up at the Spellman Building. Sure enough, the parapet there bristled with helmets and the ends of weapons. Querida felt depressed. Kit was obviously too tired to be much help, and she was not sure she could manage an army on her own. Blade seemed to have slithered out of sight, the way he often did.
Felim sprang up from beside Elda and spun around to look at the other roofs. They also bristled with spiked helmets and weapons. Felim dodged around the statue of Wizard Policant, so that he could see the main gates. They were just being thrown wide, and the Emir was storming through them, walking with that forward lunging stride that always means trouble, with more soldiers at his back.
“This is idiocy!” Felim exclaimed. He set off for the gates at a sprint.
“Oh, dear!” Elda groaned. She dragged herself up and crawled off to help.
Blade, meanwhile, was edging over to the Emperor and his sister. Titus and Claudia still had their arms clasped around one another, but more loosely now. Claudia’s laugh was ringing out delightedly. “Honestly, Titus? The lot of them?” she was saying. “It’ll do them such good to sit in prison. They sent so many people there themselves. But I still don’t know how you dared!”
As Blade edged up closer, Titus answered, a trifle guiltily, “Because I’d never been so angry in my life, I suppose.”
This is going to be impossible, Blade thought. He felt very tired, wholly apprehensive, and thoroughly determined. He remembered once, eight years ago, thinking that something must happen to soften people’s brains between the ages of fourteen and twenty, but he had never once, even when he met Isodel, discovered exactly what that something was. Now he had, eight years later, and it was awful.
Here Elda dragged herself past, with Felim sprinting ahead of her, and things became slightly less awful. Claudia said, “Stay here, Titus. I must go and look after Elda for a minute. I don’t think spaceflight agrees with griffins.” And she hurried after Elda.
Blade walked sideways up to the Emperor. He had always liked Titus, and he knew him quite well these days. But it was still hard to know what to say. Blade settled for the most official way he could manage, because Titus was, after all, an emperor, and blurted it out. “Er, Titus, er, Imperial Majesty, would you give me leave to pay my addresses to your sister, Claudia. Er, court her, you know?”
“Eh?” said Titus.
Gods! thought Blade. He’s gone all haughty, and who’s to blame him! This is hopeless! But when he looked at the Emperor, he saw that Titus had probably not been listening. The Emperor was staring across the courtyard. Blade looked where Titus was looking and saw Isodel. Evidently whatever Isodel did to men had infected Titus, too, except that for some extraordinary reason Isodel was staring back at Titus. The yearning, painful, happy unhappiness on both their faces made Blade’s chest twist. It was so exactly what he was feeling himself. “Did you hear what I said?” he asked Titus.
Titus jumped a little. “Perfectly,” he lied. Then, because he had been trained all his life to listen even when his attention was somewhere else, he somehow recalled exactly what Blade had said. He frowned. Blade watched the Emperor’s straight eyebrows meeting over his Imperial nose and felt his own heart sink. “Claudia? Really? My sister?” Titus said. This sounded very forbidding. But Titus went on, talking in jerks. Blade saw that the Emperor was thinking very slowly, with his mind almost entirely on Isodel and the fact that he and Isodel’s father had been at war for eight years, and waited, hardly dari
ng to breathe. “She’s far above you in birth, Blade,” Titus began. Then he added, “But you were appointed by the gods, weren’t you? And you’re a wizard. You could keep Claudia safe. I have to let some of the senators out of prison sometime. But Claudia’s her own person. I don’t even know if she likes you.”
“Neither do I,” Blade said sadly.
“You’re a wizard,” Titus repeated. He grabbed Blade’s arm crushingly. “She’s his daughter, isn’t she? King Luther. Get him to agree that I can marry her, and I’ll back you with Claudia in every way I can.”
“Done,” Blade said promptly. Now I’m going to have to perform a miracle! he thought as Titus started to drag him across the courtyard.
“I don’t even know her name!” Titus said, faltering a little.
“Isodel,” said Blade.
“How lovely!” Titus dragged Blade onward. “What a perfect name!”
As Blade and Titus went toward King Luther, Flury was scudding after Elda and Claudia. He arrived beside Felim and the Emir almost as they did, but no one but Elda noticed him. Elda spared him a glance while she and Claudia waited anxiously for Felim to become encased in the beehive of books again. Both were extremely dismayed when nothing of the kind occurred. Felim dashed up to the Emir and stopped. The Emir halted his troops with a gesture and stopped, too. And the two of them stood face to face yelling at one another.
“Perhaps the spell’s worn off,” Claudia suggested.