by ‘Hippogriff, I think,’ said Luan calmly, and pointed to Jay’s feet.
Hooves. Dead giveaway.
Jay said something beaky.
‘Oh, dear,’ I sighed.
‘Your associate?’ said Luan.
‘Yes. And I would love to know where he’s been this past hour or so, but I think I’ll have to get him out of here to find out. He was okay outside.’
‘Magickal dissonance,’ said Luan, nodding. ‘It has been harder to maintain a balance since the Heart was lost.’ His eyes narrowed, fixed upon me. ‘How is it that your companion is so much affected, while you are not?’
I had not yet got around to telling him that part of my increasingly complicated story. ‘It all started in Vale,’ I said, trying unsuccessfully to soothe a visibly alarmed Jay.
‘Vale?’ echoed Luan sharply. ‘What were you doing up there?’
‘Looking for this place. Torvaston’s map depicted both the valley of the Vales of Wonder, and the Hyndorin Mountains, and we went to the other one first. It’s… interesting up there.’
Luan gave a faint snort, but did not offer any further comment.
‘Well, and we were all losing our collective… er, marbles in Vale. It’s way too intensely magickal for a feeble crowd from a magickal backwater. We were given these disgusting unicorn potions to drink, and that helped. For a while.’
‘And then what?’ said Luan, when I fell silent.
How to explain the rest?
All in a giant rush, and hope for unusual mental acuity in my auditor. Go.
‘We went to the top of Mount Vale and there’s major griffin and unicorn activity up there by the way, not without a certain amount of forced labour, and we were kind of in trouble and we wanted to release all the shiny beasts. So I took out my mother’s magickal lyre of fabulousness and it sort of adopted me and I came out of that experience soaked in magick up to my eyeballs.’
Luan looked at me in silence.
‘That part has yet to go away,’ I finished. ‘Hence, I am okay in here but Jay is not. Which is rather the reverse of the way things were back in Scarborough, when everyone else was okay and I existed on the point of imminent explosion.’
Luan nodded slowly. ‘It is many years since any of us were in Vale,’ he mused. ‘You have guessed, I suppose, the connection?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t—’ I paused, and thought. Jay had taken a seat beside me, and I realised I was absently stroking his arm. He had soft feathers. I have no idea if it was more soothing to him or to me.
Connections between the enclaves of Hyndorin and Vale. Torvaston had clearly had an interest in the latter, even if he had not chosen it for his headquarters. His scroll-case told us that much. But if he hadn’t settled there, and his successors at Hyndorin never went there anymore, what possible link could there be?
Jay said something, his beak clattering, and gesticulated.
‘How long has there been a settlement in Vale?’ I said. ‘In Torvaston’s day, it appears to have been known as the Vales of Wonder, which is suggestive of an area of natural magickal intensity. We were surprised to find a town, when we went there.’
Jay said something else, and I even caught a word or two. ‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘Some parts of the town did appear to be very old.’
Luan smiled faintly. ‘Very good. Yes, the settlement there is not so old as this one, but nearly so. It dates from the mid eighteenth century.’
Or, around the same time that the Heart of Hyndorin was destroyed. ‘That is where Torvaston’s disgraced courtiers went,’ I guessed. ‘The ones who opposed him, and were kicked out.’
Luan inclined his head. ‘It has been built according to very different values. I am disappointed to hear that little has improved since those days.’
Jay rolled his eyes, and slumped back into the cushions in an attitude of despair.
I patted his hand. ‘Hippogriffs are noble creatures.’
Whatever Jay said next sounded suspiciously like a curse.
‘I may be able to help,’ said Luan. ‘But first, I would like to hear more about that lyre.’
‘It’s an Yllanfalen artefact. Its primary purpose is to select a king or queen for Ygranyllon, the kingdom of its origin, and it’s been doing that for centuries. Supposedly it was created by one of their early kings, who the Yllanfalen revere almost as some kind of god, and it’s made out of skysilver or moonsilver or some such fancifully-named thing.’ I paused for effect, and added: ‘Or, what His Majesty Torvaston seems to have referred to, slightly less imaginatively, as “magickal silver”.’
That got his lordship’s attention. ‘Magickal silver?’ he repeated, and sat up in his chair. ‘That is— remarkable.’
‘Just like the Heart, am I right?’
His expression became guarded. ‘I cannot say.’
‘I get it. You can neither confirm nor deny.’ I held up the compass. ‘And am I much mistaken in thinking this thing has a few moonsilver parts to it, too?’
Luan’s lips twitched. ‘I cannot say.’
‘Mm.’
Jay held out the snuff-box, in the palm of one clawed hand. ‘That, too?’ I said, looking at him.
He nodded furiously. I gathered that his possession of the box had taken him somewhere quite interesting indeed. We really needed to get that beak off his face.
‘The key, too,’ I said. ‘So it appears that this substance, by whatever name it is known, is capable of serious business when it comes to magick.’
‘Because of which, it is almost impossible to find any longer,’ said Luan. ‘There was a seam of it in the environs of Vale, long ago, which is perhaps a partial explanation of Torvaston’s interest in it. Most likely that particular source was exhausted before the town was settled.’
‘Are there any more known?’
‘Not at this time. Nor is it possible, any longer, to acquire unworked examples of the metal. Therefore,’ and he looked seriously at me, ‘I need hardly tell you how incredibly valuable is that lyre. Its properties do not surprise me, if it is made entirely from magickal silver. There are people who would kill you in a heartbeat for possession of so much of it.’
I thanked my lucky stars for my odd obsession with the lyre. If it were not for that, Jay would not have had reason to hide it, and we might have been waltzing all over the fifth Britain carrying more magickal goodness than our collective lives were worth.
‘Question,’ I said. ‘Have you heard before of the silver’s having a… mesmerising effect, on some people?
‘Is this what you meant when you referred to its having “adopted” you?’ asked Luan.
‘Sort of. That didn’t happen until I picked it up and played it. Before that, I had trouble resisting the temptation to do so. I practically had to be restrained.’
‘Hmm.’ Luan looked me over thoughtfully. ‘Would it interest you to know that His Majesty was said to have a similar fascination with the stuff?’
‘Why yes, it would.’
‘History does not say why, however. I am unsure whether the reason for it was ever known.’
‘Curse it.’
‘Does it bother you so very much?’
‘It didn’t, until I played the thing. Now I am too explosively magickal to go home, and that bothers me quite a lot.’ I did not add that I felt condemned to Torvaston’s own fate. Exiled from my own Britain, and obliged to stay forever in a place like Hyndorin or Vale. I mean, it was a perfectly lovely tower, but nothing to compare to the familiar comforts and chaos of Home.
A swift stab of intense homesickness took me aback, and I paused to swallow it down.
‘Magickal silver is sought after for more than one reason,’ said Luan. ‘Partly for its propensity to absorb magickal energy. It is only a personal theory, but I believe that may have been the original source for His Majesty’s ideas.’
‘Yes!’ I said. ‘That makes sense. Perhaps he thought it could be used to absorb the excess at old Farringale, and… undrown it.’
‘Perhaps so,’ Luan allowed. ‘But it also, as you have discovered, has the capacity to expend energy in interesting ways — specifically, without much depleting stored magicks. In other words, it absorbs and also generates, in a cycle reminiscent of the behaviour of nesting griffins.’
I nodded. This coincided, more or less, with our own ideas. ‘And Torvaston himself?’ I guessed.
Luan eyed me. ‘I may be wrong, but your condition could prove confirmation of an idea I have long toyed with.’
‘Torvaston was a kind of human griffin,’ I said. ‘His personal papers suggest as much.’
‘Yes. And he may have become so in the same way that you have. Through close contact with, and manipulation of, a charged source of magickal silver.’
That agreed with everything Alban had told us. ‘Was he… ever known to have, um, stopped being a human griffin?’
‘No.’
Damnit. I really was stuck forever.
‘The lyre, perhaps, may prove both curse and cure,’ suggested Luan. ‘But in the meantime, let us tend to your unfortunate colleague.’ He stood up — but then his eyes flicked to me, and he said, ‘Or perhaps you may do so.’
‘Me?’ I echoed dumbly.
‘Imbalance is the problem. Your friend — you called him Jay? — is out of his magickal depth, here, and is therefore vulnerable to interference.’
‘Magickal shot straight to the heart?’ I suggested.
Luan blinked, nonplussed. ‘If you were to share some what you call your excess magick with your colleague, it may stabilise him.’
I liked this idea much better than chugging unicorn organs. ‘But will it make him like me?’ I asked, struck with sudden alarm. Jay might have talked of staying in the fifth Britain forever, but absolutely had not been serious. I didn’t want to condemn him to share my exile.
‘Were the effects of those “potions” you spoke of permanent?’ said Luan, with an amused smile.
‘Strictly temporary.’
‘Then I believe you may proceed with confidence.’
All well and good, but how exactly did one go about magickally supercharging one’s friends? ‘No offence, Jay, but I’m not giving up a kidney for this.’
He gave me a flat, hard look. It probably said, if you imagine I’m drinking any potion made from your internal organs, you’re a madwoman.
Good that we were on the same page.
I thought back a few hours, to our madcap journey up to Hyndorin. Jay had hauled me through the Ways via physical contact, in spite of the fact that touching me produced clear signs of magickal disorder.
But that was outside, where Jay was comfortable and I was not. I’d messed him up because proximity to me had thrown his magickal balance out of whack.
Maybe I was overthinking this. Maybe, in here, all I needed to do was touch him, and I’d throw his magickal balance into whack. Or something.
‘Righto, Jay,’ I said. ‘There’s nothing else for it. It’s hug time.’ I held out my arms, smiling beatifically.
I received a look of narrow-eyed suspicion in return.
‘Look,’ I said. ‘Do you want to spend eternity as a hippogriff or not?’
Damn him, he actually thought it over.
Then he swept me up in a bone-creaking hug, the kind which lifted me a couple of inches off the floor.
‘Whoa,’ I said. ‘Having a beak isn’t that bad.’
Apparently it was, for he did not release me until I’d passed out from lack of oxygen.
Okay, no. He didn’t release me until the feathers were on the retreat and the beak was gone and those weird incorporeal wings had faded into the aether.
Then he dropped me. ‘Finally,’ he said, and I smiled into his reassuringly normal Jay-face once more.
He did not smile back. ‘Ves, do you have any idea what that hound of yours has gone and done?’
I stopped smiling. ‘Pup? No, why? Is she okay?’
‘Oh, she’s fine.’ He began, oddly, to laugh. Mild hysteria. ‘She’s done what she usually does, and scuttled her wriggly little way to a stash of treasure.’
‘That doesn’t sound too bad,’ I said cautiously.
‘I’ll give you a hint. It’s silver, and there’s quite a bit of it.’
‘What— wait, how did she not get ported outside? I thought you said—’ I looked at Luan, and was struck by the gobsmacked look on his face. ‘Not relevant. Lord Evemer? Are you all right?’
He visibly swallowed, and said in a constrained voice: ‘Did you say silver?’
