by ‘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?
