Lukin said angrily, “He doesn’t mismanage money! There just isn’t any!”
“Our dad’s always saying he does,” Elda chipped in. “Derk says King Luther seems to think it’s beneath him even to think about making money.”
Lukin became angrier still. “My father can’t breed winged horses or make a mint of money out of clever pigeons, the way yours can!”
“Yes,” said Kit. “But you could.”
Lukin glared at him. His teeth were so tightly clenched that the muscles bulging in his cheeks, in the strange light, made his face look like a wide, sinister skull. Kit glared calmly back. “I wish you weren’t bigger than me!” Lukin said without taking his teeth apart.
“Hold your hammer,” said Ruskin. “I’m with Felim here. I don’t understand. You met the forgemasters. They love their power. They’d kill to keep it. Why don’t you?”
Lukin shrugged and unclenched his teeth a little. “It doesn’t bother me. I don’t have any power.”
“So you went to train as a wizard in order to get some,” Blade said. “Fair enough. Then what don’t you like? The responsibility? I’d have thought you’d quite like being the one in charge.”
“I would,” Lukin admitted. “Only I’m not, am I? To listen to my father, you’d think I was still ten years old. It’s not his fault. He missed a whole hunk of our lives when Mother took us away into the country because of the tours, and he still hasn’t caught up. There’s a gap—” He stopped suddenly.
Olga looked up from the happy clod cradled in her fingers and surveyed Lukin through the hanging sheet of her hair. “I knew you’d see it in the end,” she said. “Remember magic doesn’t think in a reasonable way, the way people do. Yours just peppers everything you do with that gap your father doesn’t notice, trying to show him you’re grown-up now. Doesn’t it? Didn’t you tell me you first started making pits when the tours stopped and you came home?”
Something seemed to drain out of Lukin. He slumped. “When I was ten,” he said. “I’d been looking after everyone before that: Mother, the younger ones, even Isodel a lot of the time. Isodel and I did the cooking and cleaned the cottage because Mother didn’t know how to. Then we went home, and I got treated as if I were five years old!”
Blade caught the whatever it was that drained out of Lukin and posted it quickly through the ice-covered wall, in among the peering pebble-eyed faces. “There,” he said. “Thanks. Don’t get too upset, Lukin. I don’t know why it always has to hurt to get things straight, but it always does.” He gave a look of apology to Claudia, who sat with her head pensively hanging, on the other side of Lukin.
She saw the look through her coiling hair. She giggled. “You sound just like Flury!”
“I always want to wring Flury’s neck when he looks like that,” Elda agreed. “It really irritates me!”
“Especially when you know that not one cringe of it is real,” Claudia said. “You did what you had to do, Blade. Don’t crawl to us about it.”
“How come you know Flury?” Kit asked in considerable astonishment.
“Later,” said Blade. “I want to try and get us back now. All of you concentrate hard on home, please. If we miss again, we’ll probably be dead.”
The ringing of the bell on the pigeon loft made Callette growl sleepily and crawl out of her majestic shed. She had promised Derk that she would see to any messages that came while he was away, even though she had known they would come the moment she fell asleep. She prowled around the stable buildings to the loft ladder, muttering grumpily. She was far too big to get up the ladder, had been for years. She solved this the way she always did, by standing on her hind legs with her front talons clutching the top rung of the ladder, while she pushed her head inside the loft.
“Which of you just came in?” she said to the dimness in there.
Two pigeons promptly presented themselves. Both looked exceedingly cheerful at being home. Both had beakfuls of grain. They swallowed hastily as Callette glowered at them.
“The Emperor of the South has arrested his Senate and gone to the University with his horse soldiers,” crooned the pigeon on the left.
“The Emir of Ampersand has gone to the University with his army,” croodled the pigeon to Callette’s right. “He says he will take it all apart.”
“Hmm,” said Callette. “Thanks. I suppose I’d better fly over there and warn them. You two go back to your lunch.” She got herself down to the ground by climbing her front talons down the ladder, puzzling about this news. She found it hard to believe. There was no reason that she knew for anyone to make war on the University. Even during the tours no one had attacked the place. But the pigeons always told the truth, though they did sometimes get hold of the wrong end of the stick. “Fly over there and check,” she told herself as she reached the ground. “Bother!”
“Oh, there you are!” Don’s voice rang out behind her. “Where’s everybody else?”
Callette whirled around. The stable yard was packed with griffins, with Don in front of them, huge and glad and golden. Callette gaped. Derk always said that Callette’s mind worked like nobody else’s. She supposed that was true, for she discovered that her way of being quite intensely delighted to see her brother again was to decide to make a big golden model of him. Now. At once. A model of the perfect griffin, enormous and shapely and bright, like a huge male version of Elda, except that Don was so—so uncomplicated somehow. Callette’s talons twitched to get modeling. Don completely outshone the gaggle of smaller griffins behind him. Most of those were girls, anyway.
“Huh!” said Callette. “Did you bring your whole fan club with you? Or are some of them Kit’s?”
Don laughed. “They all wanted to see what it’s like over here.”
Callette slowly took in the sheer number of griffins packed in behind Don. Or wanted to found a colony, she thought. “How did you get on the boat?”
“Took turns flying and resting on the deck, of course,” Don told her happily. “One of the fan club’s yours.”
“What!” Callette watched a griffin who was only three-quarters of Don’s size come sliding out from behind Don. He was gray and white and brown, with barred wings like her own, and a very sleek, self-possessed person whose large black eyes seemed brighter and more perceptive than those of the other griffins. “Oh, no,” said Callette. “Not Cazak again. Don, that’s not fair!” And like an offended cat, she turned her back on the whole crowd and sat staring at the ladder with her tail angrily beating.