‘Ghost?’ I said hopefully. I felt a touch of something warm against my leg, and looked down to find pup (thankfully hound-shaped) nosing at my shin.
‘Like I said,’ Wyr answered. ‘Insane.’
‘Fine, forget the ghost.’ My pup had something in her mouth. I bent down to wrestle it off her. It was a stick… probably.
‘What’s known about him?’ said Jay.
‘Not much.’ Wyr shrugged. ‘Claimed to be some kind of a king, went off to found a new kingdom with a bunch of cronies… the details escape me. Why are we caring about him when we’ve a unicorn to dispose of?’ He looked around. ‘Or we… did.’
I’d been obliged to let go of Addie some minutes earlier, when she’d developed something spiky which stung my hands. Where (and what) she was right now was beyond my knowledge, but I was not unduly worried. With Wyr on the lookout, she was probably safer as a mayfly or a waterlily than a standard-issue-sized unicorn. And I could always fall back on the pipes.
‘She’ll turn up,’ I said, and smiled. ‘Listen, what if we had something of Furgidan’s? Do you think we could find out what became of him?’
‘What, his handkerchief or his chamber pot?’ Wyr smirked. ‘Don’t be absurd.’
I was beginning to get tired of the thief.
‘That’s a lie,’ said Emellana calmly. ‘Isn’t it?’
Wyr gave her a bland stare. ‘I guarantee, Furgidan the Dispossessed’s chamber pot will get you nowhere.’
‘But something more personal might,’ said Em. ‘Mightn’t it?’
‘Like a scroll-case,’ I said. ‘With a map on it, drawn by his own hand.’
‘The unicorn trader’s this way.’ Wyr jerked his thumb in the direction of a narrow, crooked street that meandered away to my left.
‘Ves,’ said Miranda suddenly. Her tone held a note of some urgency, and I looked sharply at her. She hadn’t spoken for some minutes.
‘Yes?’
‘Those griffins.’ She pointed in the direction of the tall hill we had glimpsed an hour or two before, on Addie’s back. I followed her gaze, shading my eyes against the strong sun. ‘They’re behaving oddly.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘They’re… their flight’s too regular. It’s as though they are following some kind of circuit.’
‘That isn’t normal?’
She hesitated. ‘I haven’t had much chance to study live griffins, understand. But it doesn’t look right.’
Vague, but I’d take it. Milady was right about Miranda: few people were more to be relied upon when it came to magickal beasts. If she had a hunch… ‘What might be causing that?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know, but I want to find out.’
13
‘How about unicorn trader, then griffins?’ growled Wyr.
‘Sorry,’ I said briefly. ‘No unicorn, no unicorn trader.’ Not that I wouldn’t have been happy to get rid of Wyr and his attitude, but he was useful. Sometimes.
And I wasn’t yet sure how to dispense with him without compromising Addie.
Wyr grumbled something incoherent, and jammed his hat further down on his head. ‘You’ve some nerve,’ he informed me.
‘What are you going to do, steal my shoes?’
‘How about that scroll-case you mentioned?’
‘Oh?’ I considered his carefully bland face. ‘Valuable, is it?’ I hadn’t mentioned the jewels. Only the fact that it was defaced by a map — drawn by Furgidan.
Wyr opened his mouth, and shut it again with a snap. ‘You I dislike,’ he said.
I ignored him. Jay had found his feet, and his regular height to boot. To my relief, he was looking somewhat recovered from his Wayfinding marathon, and less grey about the face. Hopefully he could tank five or six sandwiches without throwing up, but I kept a little distance between us just in case. ‘The, uh, object in Emellana’s possession might be of use,’ he said obliquely. ‘With the scroll.’
I nodded. I’d drawn the same conclusion from Emellana’s words. Could she find traces of Torvaston, with the use of a magick-drenched lyre, her talent for tracking old magick, and the scroll-case to help her? I hoped so.
But first, the griffins.
Finding Griffin Heights proved to be a lot easier than it had in Old Farringale, to my relief. This particular hill had no interest in playing coy, or concealing itself, at least not from a near distance; it loomed over Vale, suitably solid and stationary, and we slogged through the crooked streets of the town in pursuit. There really weren’t many people living there, I judged; Wyr was right. Few of the properties we passed had a residential air about them. Many were clearly commercial properties, with at least a minimal shopfront opening onto the street, and workshops or warehouses behind.
The streets had a way of moving about. They were not doing so either for our benefit or for our inconvenience, I thought, but rather according to some purpose of their own. Roads bulged under our feet, forming slopes and little hillocks, only to dip again farther along, dropping us down and down into impromptu valleys. Sometimes they writhed like snakes before us and reconfigured themselves, curving to this side or the other of a house, and racing around corners.
One imaginative street rerouted itself right through the middle of a tall, green-painted house — with the house’s assistance, I might add, for an arched walkway blossomed around us, complete with stocky pillars.
‘How does anybody find anything around here,’ I said after a while, when the street we were following took a sudden, gleeful curve and apparently doubled back on itself.
Wyr gave a low, rather smug chuckle. ‘You’ll see,’ he said, in a tone I did not at all like.
Emellana drew nearer to me. ‘I believe there’s mischief afoot,’ she said softly.
‘Undoubtedly, with that one,’ I sighed, regretting my decision of half an hour before. Was Wyr useful, or a liability? ‘That hill really isn’t getting any closer, is it?’
‘No.’
‘It’s not getting farther away, maybe?’ I said, thinking again of Farringale.
‘No.’
Miranda was so busy studying the distant griffins’ flight patterns, I doubted whether she had noticed our navigational difficulties. Jay, though, had developed that dark frown of his, the one that means someone’s in trouble.
After a couple more minutes, he stopped in the middle of a prettily dappled cobblestone street and said: ‘Wyr.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Where are we going?’
Wyr thought about that. ‘Wherever Vale wants to take you,’ he answered, which sounded to have more truth in it than I’d expected.
‘And is that more or less where we want to go?’ asked Jay.
‘You find that out when you get there.’
Jay looked around. To our left rose a leggy cottage with a towering brown roof and great windows like eyes in its front. To our right stood a more compact building made from blue bricks, with a sign up front reading “R. B. Wimberley, Charmwright.”
‘This isn’t it,’ said Jay.
‘Then I’d suggest you keep walking,’ said Wyr.
What could we do but comply? Though it did not inconvenience us for very much longer, for after another three minutes of discontented trudging, the town melted away around us, leaving open meadow in its wake. Neatly fenced meadow, to be specific, and each enclosure was crowded with unicorns.
‘Oh, look,’ said Wyr, with a smile of pure malice. ‘The unicorn traders.’
‘And how did you achieve that?’ said Emellana, stone-faced.
‘Didn’t you hear me?’ he said, beaming. ‘This town has a mind of its own.’
‘But it can be influenced, no? Or is that not what you were doing?’
Wyr’s smile faded. ‘How is it that you—’
‘Newcomers we may be, but we are not wholly without arts. I am sometimes aware of the traces magick leaves behind, and yours has been leaving a fresh trail for the past half-hour.’
‘Well then, you
figure it out,’ said Wyr. ‘In the meantime, I’ll thank you to produce that unicorn, please.’
‘There is no knowing where she’s got to,’ I said blandly.
‘Find her, then.’ He pulled something long and twinkling from a pocket and began to juggle with it.
I recognised the jewel-encrusted shapes of Torvaston’s scroll-case.
‘I knew you were a thief!’ I said.
Wyr added a second object into his juggling, which to my horror proved to be my Sunstone Wand. ‘Didn’t do much about it, did you? That’s the problem with you soft-hearted types. Too trusting by half.’ To top it all off, Orlando’s prized new invention went into rotation above his infuriating head. Jay made a grab for the nearest object — pretty nimble, I thought — but Wyr danced backwards several steps, somehow pulling his ill-gotten hoard with him.
I found myself almost as intrigued as I was furious. ‘But you—’ I said. ‘You were nowhere near me!’ How had he taken anything from my bag, not only without my noticing but without being within ten feet of me?
‘Tell you what,’ he said. ‘Give me the unicorn. I’ll not only let you have all these back, I’ll show you how I purloined them in the first place. You could use a few survival skills.’
‘I can’t give you the unicorn,’ I grated. ‘She isn’t for sale.’
‘You mean… you lied?’ Wyr turned a shocked countenance upon me. ‘But at least you aren’t a thief or something. That would be really bad.’
I groped in my shoulder-bag. To my relief, Mauf was still in there; too big and heavy to steal, perhaps. But the sleep-spheres I’d cadged from Orlando were not.
Hm.
Lucky that Jay and Emellana had kept the lyre out of Wyr’s sight.
And I still had my pipes. Next time Jay was inclined to mock me for my choice of storage space, I’d thank him to remember this day. I had them out in a trice, but before I could play more than three notes, Emellana charged in, her mouth set in a thin, furious line, and levelled a crashing punch at Wyr’s face.
It bounced off… something. Jay’s attempt to grab the little creep fared much the same.
‘Nice try,’ Wyr grinned. ‘But when you’re this short, you learn a trick or two.’
I had to admit to a grudging respect for his shielding abilities. I wasn’t bad at wards, but I couldn’t have stopped that punch.
‘Nice pipes,’ said Wyr — and then, in the blink of an eye, they too were circling over Wyr’s head in sequence with the scroll-case, the Wand, and Orlando’s unnameable thing.
‘Wha—’ I spluttered. ‘Give. Those. Back.’
My advance upon Wyr, violence filling my heart, was as ill-fated as Emellana’s. But it was satisfying to try.
‘Listen,’ Wyr said. ‘It’s been blindingly obvious from the moment I met you that you lot are… something else. I don’t know where you’re from, but you’re far out of your depth in Vale. I could run rings around you all day long. Not only that, but so could every single person here, so if you’d kindly get me that unicorn, you can have your stuff back, and I’ll be on my way.’
I didn’t love the feeling of helplessness those words created. He was right, and we knew it. I had only to think back to our utter incapacity to cope with the magickal surges of Old Farringale; if it weren’t for the potions Emellana had procured, we’d be in a similar state now.
That said, perhaps we weren’t far off it. Our wits must have been asleep ever since we’d set foot in the so-called Vales of Wonder, or we’d have got rid of Wyr already.
Even now, I couldn’t seem to think how to proceed. My brain whirled in fuzzy circles and nothing came up.
‘If you want the unicorn,’ said Jay, ‘she’ll need those pipes back.’
Wyr’s head tilted, and one brow went up. ‘Oh?’
‘Wait,’ I said. ‘Why do you want that particular unicorn anyway? I mean, look.’ I made a sweeping gesture, which took in all the paddocks before us. ‘You want a unicorn, take your pick.’ We stood not six feet away from a long, silvery fence which shimmered with magick, and behind it there must have been fifty unicorns at least. What a glorious sight they made, too, for they came in every imaginable colour. So much ancient magick was compressed into that small space, the air itself pulsed and glimmered with it.
And that was just one of the many paddocks. The horizon was a mass of colour and magick.
I spotted Miranda, hanging half over the fence, her fingers entangled in the mane of a lavender-and-white unicorn, and sighed. Thanks for the help.
That look of utter disbelief was back on Wyr’s face. ‘Do you not even know that much?’ he said incredulously. ‘Honestly, where did you dig yourselves up from?’
‘Far, far away,’ I said impatiently. ‘Someone said something about royal lines—’
‘Yes,’ Wyr all but shouted. ‘Unicorns there are aplenty, but this lot’s common as muck. Great for horns, teeth, bones, and so on, but I can’t remember the last time anybody saw a pure-bred Majestic!’ He was yelling now, but even at top volume, the word “Majestic” emerged with particular emphasis. ‘And you were just wandering around with it. I’m amazed you kept it for as long as you did.’
His words ignited a miniature panic somewhere in my belly, for he was speaking past tense, and considering how long it was since any of us had caught a glimpse of Addie, perhaps he had a point. I’d assumed she was safer out of sight, and that I could call her back with a blast of my pretty pipes. But what if I couldn’t?
What if someone had made off with her?
14
‘I’m really going to need those pipes,’ I said in a smouldering voice. I’m surprised I didn’t set fire to Wyr’s stupid hat.
‘Like I said,’ he answered. ‘I’ll trade you.’
‘You don’t understand. I can’t get her back without those pipes.’
Wyr, at last, stopped juggling. ‘You mean to say,’ he said slowly, ‘that these pipes can summon Majestics?’
‘No. Just one particular one, and only if I do it.’
‘How convenient.’ He patently did not believe me.
A flicker of colour caught my eye. Some small, darting thing dived down upon Wyr, and flashed away again.
And the Wand was gone from his grasp.
‘What?’ His head came up, the pipes momentarily forgotten. Eyes narrowed, he looked hard at me. ‘How did you do that?’
‘You figure it out,’ I said, with a smile. Let him chew on that.
Meanwhile, Miranda — for it had been she — whispered something to the bright blue bird in her grasp, and let it fly again.
This time, it returned with Orlando’s glassy-looking toy.
Wyr’s quick gaze caught some part of its return flight, for he whirled in Miranda’s direction. ‘You’ve got to be kidding me,’ he spluttered. ‘A Majestic and a gods-blessed lirrabird?’
I turned a questioning gaze upon Miranda, for I’d heard that name before. Lirrabirds were listed in Dramary’s Bestiary. They were as fast as hummingbirds and not much larger, but remarkably strong for their diminutive size, and they responded well to training. They were sometimes referred to as the little winged wizards, because — as this one had just demonstrated — they were highly magickal, and difficult to deter by wizardly means. They’d made quite the pests of themselves among magickal communities, some few hundred years ago.
They were also extinct, at least on our Britain.
And now Miranda had a pet one.
‘Ancestria Magicka pays well, hm?’ I said.
‘You’re one to talk,’ said Miranda. ‘Do you know what I would have given for a tame unicorn?’
Ack. Had my friendship with Addie somehow fuelled Miranda’s dissatisfaction? Was I part of the reason why she’d jumped ship?
I shook off the thought. Now wasn’t the time to try to explain how Adeline and I had come about. ‘Handy,’ I offered instead, for to be fair, that lirrabird had just saved our hides.
Miranda gave a crooked smile, and tossed
my pipes to me. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘you could ask Addie what she’d like done about Wyr.’
‘I reckon she wouldn’t like him much,’ I said, tightly clutching my pipes.
Miranda’s smile widened. ‘I reckon the same.’
So I lifted my precious pipes to my lips and I played Addie’s song.
And I waited.
She didn’t come.
‘So much for the pipes,’ muttered Wyr. He looked about at all of us with an expression much aggrieved, and added, ‘And so much for the easy mark.’ With which words, he stalked off, back towards the town.
‘Good riddance,’ I said, emulating Emellana’s inhuman calm, though my insides were tying themselves in knots. What had become of Addie? ‘Question,’ I said, as Miranda handed my Wand back to me. ‘What did he mean about horns, teeth and bones?’
‘Wondering the same thing,’ said Miranda laconically, and turned a worried gaze upon the herd of unicorns behind us. ‘You know, these… they’re odd, too. See how still they are?’
She was right; they were as placid as cows, if not more so. They had a listless look about them. ‘Wingless, all of them,’ I observed.
‘Makes sense if you want to hang onto them,’ said Miranda, her frown deepening.
‘Though we saw some winged ones, near the hill,’ I said. ‘Right?’ We hadn’t seen any since.
‘It looks like a farm,’ said Jay. ‘Unicorn… milk?’
‘Milk, and hairs from the manes and tails,’ I said, remembering snippets of lore from the days of yore, back when unicorns had been more common in our Britain, too. Though there’d never been enough of them for entire farming operations, nor had they ever been… tamed, enough.
This was something else.
‘Milk, hair,’ said Miranda darkly. ‘Horns, bones and teeth. Every part of a unicorn is magick-drenched, isn’t it?’
‘That’s why they’re so rare at home,’ Jay said. ‘Griffins, too — all the ancient mythicals, the deeply magickal creatures. Kings building thrones out of unicorn horns, people paying small fortunes for strands of unicorn hair or griffin claws or dragon’s teeth, blood, scales… a damned rotten trade.’
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