“Thank goodness for coffee!” said Olga. “My father never did like it.”
Felim and Ruskin at once set about designing a foolproof mousetrap—nor were they the only ones; even Melissa was inventing one—and the rest were rather inclined to blame Elda for making the mice in the first place, which made Elda very uncomfortable and guilty. “Mice were just what came into my head!” she explained. “Someone had to do something!”
“Leave her alone,” said Claudia, who had spent the night on the floor of Elda’s concert hall and felt she owed Elda protection in return. “Nobody else did anything.”
“Lukin did,” said Olga.
“But he makes deep holes all the time, anyway, so that hardly counts,” said Claudia.
The news about the moonship was almost a welcome distraction. It caused a wave of sympathy for Corkoran. Even those who felt, like Lukin, that Corkoran was poor stuff (with an unfortunate taste in ties) were determined to show that they were sorry about the sabotage. Every student who could get there, and a few novice healers, crowded into the main lecture hall to show Corkoran moral support.
Corkoran felt quite touched. He was usually lucky to get an audience of five, all female and all gazing adoringly. To find everyone cared this much cheered him considerably. Nevertheless, as he set about delivering the lecture he always delivered at this stage in the term, he knew he was doing it with much less than his usual verve.
He does look devastated, Elda thought. Corkoran’s face was yellow-pale, and she could see his hands shaking. Even his tie was pallid, full of washed-out–looking white and yellow daisies. In a guilty, illogical way, Elda felt that this might be her fault for not finding Corkoran charming anymore. And though she knew this was probably nonsense, she found herself thinking urgently of some way to make it up to him. She heard very little of the lecture because as soon as she began thinking, she had her inspiration.
It took her until after lunch (another disaster) to find courage to mention her idea to her friends. But as they were gathered around Wizard Policant, waiting to go into Wermacht’s class, she blurted it out. “Couldn’t we get him to the moon somehow?”
They looked at her understandingly. They had all known that Elda would be more upset about Corkoran than anyone else. They had been worrying about her.
“I don’t like to see him looking so miserable,” Elda explained.
“I know what you mean,” Felim said kindly. “I wonder.” He fell into deep thought.
Olga, for her part, tried to put the realities of life before Elda. “I know what you mean, too,” she said, “but I’ve seen my father with enough hangovers to know why he looked so bad.”
“We can’t let him take to drink!” Elda pleaded.
Lukin laughed. “You must be the most softhearted griffin in the world! Teddy bears and moons! Come on, Elda. Everyone else is going into the North Lab.” He politely helped Claudia reel in her cloakrack. Claudia had discovered that it was easier if she kept the cloakrack close to her. Since it was going to follow her, anyway, she reasoned that keeping one hand on it as she walked was pleasanter than getting jolted every time the cloakrack stuck on a doorstep.
She parked it beside her desk in the North Lab. Elda sat protectively beside Claudia. Then she turned her head and saw Flury again. He was sitting behind a desk without a chair, just as Elda was herself, with his feathery forearms on the desktop and his talons clasped, staring around with keen interest. He looked very bright and keen and glossy and nothing like as big as he had looked in Corkoran’s lecture. Elda began to wonder why he was different every time she saw him. Then she wondered why it was that no one seemed to see him but herself. She was in such a guilty, perturbed mood that it began to seem to her that Flury might be some kind of hallucination that followed her around like Claudia’s cloakrack to punish her for not loving Corkoran anymore, or perhaps for turning the pirates into mice, or perhaps for both.
Here Wermacht strode in and put a stop to thinking. “Write down your next big heading,” he commanded. “Moving Magefire About.” Elda saw Flury looking around anxiously at everyone else’s busy notebook. “Now,” said Wermacht. “All of you stand up and call up magefire as you learned to do last week.”
Elda had been looking forward to holding her lovely teardrop of light again. She jumped up eagerly and cannoned into Claudia in her hurry. Claudia, who was not looking forward to this at all, was getting up rather slowly. She was off-balance when Elda bumped her and staggered sideways into the cloakrack, which fell with a clatter into the aisle beside the desks.
Wermacht exclaimed with annoyance. He came striding up the aisle and picked the cloakrack up before Claudia could reach it. He banged it upright. “Are you still going around with this thing, you with a jinx?”
“Yes, of course I am,” Claudia retorted. “You connected me to it. You should know.”
“Nonsense,” said Wermacht. “It’s entirely your own doing. You attempted a spell beyond your powers, and you bungled it.” He leaned in a lordly attitude with one hand on the cloakrack and the other stroking his beard, smiling contemptuously down on Claudia. While Claudia was gasping at the injustice, he said, “It’s all in your mind, you know. Really deep down you want to be tied to this cloakrack.”
“I do not!” Claudia asserted.
“Oh, but you do.” Wermacht was smiling pityingly now. “Make an effort, girl. Free yourself from the shackles of your ow
n timidity. You only want this object around for a sense of security.”
Claudia gaped at him. “I—I—I—”
Flury came quietly up behind Wermacht and tapped him on one shoulder. No one had seen Flury move. No one, not even Elda, knew how he got where he was, but there he was, towering over Wermacht and wearing his usual apologetic look. There was quite a gasp from everyone, because this was the first time anyone but Elda had seen Flury at all. Wermacht whirled around, found himself staring into Flury’s chest feathers, and seemed wholly irate that he had to stare upward to see Flury’s face, somewhere near the ceiling. “Excuse me,” Flury said, “but what you just said can’t be right. As soon as you touched that hatrack, I could tell that it was your spell that did it.”
“My spell!” Wermacht exclaimed.
Flury nodded. “I’m afraid so. I’m sorry. Nobody likes to be caught out in a mistake, do they?”
Wermacht drew himself up, looking surprisingly small under Flury’s beak. “I have made no mistake. I’ll show you. I’ll attempt to take this silly girl’s spell off and show you it’s not mine!”
“Yes,” Flury said mildly. “Do that.”