“Herds of them!” Damorin said raptly.
Talithan glanced across at him, rather coldly. “But none to match Pretty,” he said. “Well, my lord?”
There was always the other winged foal Pretty’s grandmother would give birth to, Derk thought. “Look,” he said, “you may regret this. Pretty can be a dreadful handful.”
“He is a colt of infinite spirit,” Talithan said.
Besotted, Derk thought. But this was one way of ensuring that Querida could not get her hands on Pretty. Pretty would be far happier being doted on by an elf prince than shut in a pen at the University. “You could put it that way,” he told Talithan. “Oh, all right. After a year and a day then, Your Highness.”
“Witnessed!” chorused the five captains.
Talithan flung himself down on both knees and kissed Derk’s hand. “My liege! Command me as you will!”
“Command him to leave so that you can go back to bed,” Lydda murmured, not quite quietly.
Derk glowered at her. “Then please go and take up your tour position,” he said to the elves. “Tour number two has an expendable whom one of you has to kill in a surprise attack tomorrow, and after that you had better look at the ten cities you’ll be besieging.”
“This shall be done!” Prince Talithan said, joyously leaping up. “Let us go, my captains.”
They bowed deeply and filed out of the house. Old George began shooing the pigs out after them. Derk sat watching, feeling gray, the way elves made you feel when they left.
“Upstairs, Dad. Bed,” said Lydda.
Derk was just getting up to obey Lydda when Callette stuck her large brown head in through the open window. “Why did we have six soppy men in a green haze out here just now?”
Lydda spread her wings and bounded straight up from the floor, tail lashing. “Damn you, Callette! Why do you have to turn up and stick your beak in now? We’d almost got him to go back to bed!”
“I need several hundred more clues,” said Callette. “Five hundred and seventy-three, in fact. And I’m exhausted. I’m mean. I’m horrible. Don’t argue with me.”
Derk shunted his chair across the floor so that he could lean against the wall by the window. “Just a short word,” he said soothingly to Lydda. “Elda, you’ll find the right number of clues in a package in the top right-hand drawer of my desk. Yellow envelope.”
“Thank goodness!” said Callette as Elda scooted off. “I didn’t think I could fly all the way out to ask Shona for any! I went and asked Mum, and she tried, but she was too busy to think straight. And I don’t know what to do. I’m not as good at flying distances as I thought. I do twenty miles, and then I have to come down.”
“You’re a high-energy flier, that’s why,” Derk explained. Callette’s eyes were dull, and her feathers scrawny. He could see she had lost weight. “Twenty miles is pushing it for you. You should be coming down for a rest every fifteen miles, at least until you’re older.”
“But I’ll never get all the clues done if I have to come down every fifteen miles!” Callette wailed. Lydda sighed and sat down very upright against the far wall. Her tail, folded across her front legs, tapped the floor. Beside her Fran stood in the kitchen doorway with her sticklike arms folded, tapping one foot in a rather similar way. “Some of the places are in the desert,” Callette protested, “or right over by the far ocean! Half the tours are going to be past the places before I get there!”
“It’s all right,” said Derk. “I never intended you to do the clues, Callette. I was going to get Blade to take me to do them in my spare moments.” Callette’s beak opened to point out that Blade was not available now. Derk said quickly, “And by the way, however tired and cross you are, you should never call a dragon names.”
“This one deserved it,” said Callette. “He thought of eating me. I hoped he would. I was upset.” She lifted her beak and gave a great trumpeting howl. “I was so slow fetching a healer to you!”
“You were not so!” Lydda called out. “Don couldn’t keep up with you.”
“I flew and I flew and I hardly seemed to be moving!” Callette wailed.
Elda came scampering back with a large yellow envelope skewered to one talon. “What do you mean?” she said. “I saw you. I never saw even Kit go that fast.”
“It seemed that way to Callette,” Derk explained. “Callette, I think you were in a state of shock. Things happening very fast always seem to go very slowly then. I expect you saw every blade of grass you flew over.”
“I did, you know!” Callette said wonderingly. “Pebbles, too. I counted them. Was that shock?”
“Yes, and the need to go unusually fast,” Derk said. “I’m very grateful, Callette.”
“In that case,” Callette said, looking a little brighter, “I’ll get on with the clues. Give them here, Elda.” She put her large feathery forearm in through the window.
Derk curled the talons inward for her and pushed her arm back outside. “Not now. You need a rest. Let Lydda do it.”
“Me?” Lydda sprang angrily across the room.