“I believe so,” Derk said. But before he could ask what was worrying them all so, the courtyard echoed to heavy, striding feet. A peremptory voice called out, “You there! You with the horse!”
“Wermacht,” said Olga. “This was all we needed!”
They turned around from the hamper. The refectory steps were now empty since it was lunchtime. Wermacht was standing alone, with all the folds of his robe ruler straight, halfway between the steps and the statue, outrage all over him. “It is illegal to bring a horse inside this University courtyard,” he said. “Take it to the stables at once!”
Derk stood up. “If you insist.”
“I do insist!” Wermacht said. “As a member of the Governing Body of this University, I demand you get that filthy brute out of here!”
“I am not a filthy brute!” Filbert wheeled around and trotted toward Wermacht, quite as outraged as the wizard was. “I’m not even exactly a horse. Look.” He spread his great auburn wings with a clap.
To everyone’s surprise, Wermacht cringed away backward with one arm over his head. “Get it out of here!”
“Oh, gods! He’s scared of horses!” Elda said, jigging about. “He’s probably scared of me, too. Somebody else do something before he puts a spell on Filbert!”
Lukin had his legs braced ready to charge over there. Ruskin was already down from the plinth and running. Derk forestalled both of them by swiftly translocating himself to Filbert’s flank and taking hold of the bridle. “I’m extremely sorry,” he said to Wermacht. “I wasn’t aware that horses were illegal here. It wasn’t a rule in my day.”
“Ignorance is no excuse!” Wermacht raged. He was mauve with fear and anger. “You should have thought of the disruption it would cause, bringing a monster like this into a place of study!”
“He’s still calling me names!” Filbert objected.
Derk pulled downward hard on Filbert’s bit. “Shut up. I can only repeat that I’m sorry, wizard. And I don’t think there’s been any disruption—”
“What do you know about it?” Wermacht interrupted. “I don’t know who you are, but I can see from the look of you that you haven’t a clue about the dignity of education. Just go. Take your monster and go, before I start using magic.” He shot an unloving look at Elda. “We’ve one monster too many here already!”
At this Derk’s shoulders humped and his head bowed in a way Elda knew meant trouble.
But here Corkoran came flying across the courtyard from the Spellman Building with his palm tree tie streaming over his left shoulder. One of his senior students had seen trouble brewing from the refectory windows and sent him a warn-spell. “Oh, Wizard Derk,” Corkoran panted cordially. “I am so very pleased to meet you again. You may not remember me. Corkoran. We met during the last tour.” He held out a hand that quivered with his hurry.
Wermacht’s reaction would have been comic if, as Olga said, it had not been so disgusting. He bowed and more or less wrung his hands with servile welcome. “Wizard Derk!” he said. “The famous Wizard Derk, doing us the honor to come here! Corkoran, we were just discussing, Wizard Derk and I—”
Derk shook hands with Corkoran. “Thank you for intervening,” he said. “I remember you had the tour after Finn’s. I was just leaving, I’m afraid. I had been thinking of discussing a donation with you—though my funds are always rather tied up in pigs and oranges and things—but as things turn out, I don’t feel like it today. Perhaps later. Unless, of course,” he added, putting his foot into Filbert’s stirrup, ready to mount, “my daughter has any further reason to complain of being treated as a monster. In that case I shall remove her at once.”
He swung himself into the saddle. Filbert’s great wings spread and clapped. Wermacht ducked as horse and rider plunged up into the air, leaving Corkoran staring upward in consternation.
“Wermacht,” Corkoran said with his teeth clenched, and too quietly, he hoped, for the students around the statue to hear. “Wermacht, you have just lost us at least a thousand gold pieces. I don’t know how you did it, but if you do anything like that again, you lose your job. Is that clear?”
THREE
GRIFFINS’ EARS ARE exceptionally keen. Elda’s had picked up what Corkoran said to Wermacht. Ruskin had heard, too. His large, hair-filled ears had evolved to guide dwarfs underground in pitch dark by picking up the movement of air in differently shaped spaces, and they were as keen as Elda’s. He and Elda told the others.
“How marvelous!” Olga stretched like a great blond cat. “Then we can get Wermacht sacked anytime we need to.”
“But is that marvelous?” Elda asked, worried. “I think I ought to stand on my own four feet—I think we all ought to—and deal with Wermacht ourselves.”
This struck the others as being far too scrupulous. They attempted to talk Elda out of it. But by the time they had carried the hamper of oranges and the half-empty hamper of lunch to Elda’s concert hall, their attention was on Felim instead. Something was wrong with him. He quivered all over. His face was gray, with a shine of sweat on it, and he had stopped speaking to anyone.
Elda picked him up a
nd dumped him on the concert platform, which now served as her bed. “What’s the matter? Are you ill?”
“Something in the hamper disagreed with him,” Ruskin suggested. “Those prawn slices. They’re still making me burp.”
Felim shook his wan face. “No. Nothing like that.” His teeth started to chatter, and he bit them closed again.
“Then tell us,” coaxed Claudia. “Maybe we can help.”
“It does quite often help to tell someone,” Lukin said. “When I’ve had a really bad row with my father, I nearly always tell my sister Isodel, and you can’t believe how much better that makes me feel.”