Thursdays with the Crown (17 page)

“Let's go,” Rolf called over his shoulder.

Wizard Bratsch turned and led them back the way he'd come, holding the lantern in one shaking hand. Rolf followed so close behind him that Celie was afraid Rolf would step on the elderly wizard, and Pogue kept close behind Rolf with an adult griffin on either side.

“I am having the bad feelings about this,” Lulath said.

“He's just really old,” Celie said uneasily.

“I heard that,” Wizard Bratsch called back. He was grinning at Celie over his shoulder. “I've got life in me yet!”

The grin made her fully agree with Lulath. There was something
off
about Wizard Bratsch, but she really didn't know how else to describe it, or why.

Or what choice they had but to keep following him.

The tunnel was sloping upward, and the light was growing brighter. At last they emerged from the tunnel, coming out in the shelter of a half-collapsed corner of the griffin stable. In front of them spread the broken, weed-choked stones of the ruined courtyard leading to the hatching tower Celie had brought back to life.

Which was now engulfed in flames.

The entire forest around the ruins seemed to be on fire. Celie could feel the waves of heat even from where she stood. Rufus raised his wings and screamed at the licking
orange tongues of flame as they ran up the walls of the towers and consumed the trees.

“What do we do?”

Celie looked frantically from Lilah to Lulath to Pogue. They were all frozen with matching expressions of horror on their faces. She looked around for Rolf, but he was still walking without looking back, just as he had done in the tunnel.

“Rolf,” Celie yelled. “What are you doing?”

Her brother was moving across the broken courtyard with long, purposeful strides, his head held high. He was walking straight toward the living hatching tower, seemingly oblivious to the fire and smoke.

And the Arkower.

The Arkower was standing at the other side of the courtyard, also without appearing to notice the flames. He was waving his arms over his head and shouting in a strange language, and Celie wasn't sure if he was shouting insults at them, or if it was all part of his fire spell. She heartily wished that Bran were there to help them, not only with the Arkower, but just … to help them.

Rolf stopped in the center of the courtyard.

Celie thought that maybe he was going to shout back at the Arkower, but Rolf wasn't even facing the old wizard. He was looking somewhere between the tower and the burning forest, his back to Celie and the others, and yet somehow she knew that he wasn't seeing what was in front of him, either.

Wizard Bratsch, who Celie had forgotten was even there, suddenly cried out in his ancient, cracked voice. “Do it, boy! Do it now!”

Perhaps Rolf heard him, perhaps he was just moving with the prompting of the Castle, but he knelt down in the middle of the courtyard, and bowed his head. He took out the crown and placed it gently atop his head, and then slipped the ring onto his right hand, casting the pouch aside.

Celie was sure now that the Castle was directing Rolf. She slid off Rufus's back and walked forward a few steps, wanting to go to Rolf but also afraid of interrupting him. Then she remembered the collar in the pouch, and ran forward to snatch it up, tying it to her sash again.

Rolf brought his arms out, clenched his fists, and then punched the broken cobbles so hard that Celie cried out, afraid he would break both his hands. A ripple ran across the courtyard. Celie could see it and feel it, and she let out a little shriek when it reached her feet. Lilah shrieked, too, as the stones beneath them buckled … and healed.

The broken stone right in front of Celie shivered and then the two halves sealed back together as though they had never been cracked. The crumbling edges smoothed out, fitting themselves snugly against the neighboring stones, which were also now smooth and without crack or chip.

The ripple had run out in all directions, as though Rolf were a stone thrown into a still pond. When it hit the other tower, the one Celie could not awaken, it surged up, every stone shivering and then falling back into place, new
and whole and clean. The tower that she'd already awakened didn't seem to be affected, but it was also completely engulfed in flames.

“I wonder if water will put it out,” Celie said.

“What?” Pogue looked at her, distracted.

“The fire,” Celie said. “I wonder if water will put out a wizard fire.”

“I hope so,” Pogue said. “Otherwise I don't know what we'll do.”

“How could we possibly put out a fire that big?” Lilah looked half-wild. “I say we run for it.”

“Where?” Celie asked simply. “Where would we run?”

“Home,” Lilah said fervidly. “Now that these ruins are awake … Can't we go home and just leave all this?” She made a gesture that included the wizards and the fire.

Celie's heart leaped. They could. They could go home. Maybe this was the Castle's way of bringing them home. But the ripple had passed and Rolf was walking back toward them now, looking dazed, and they still hadn't been pulled back to Sleyne.

And the forest was on fire. And by now the village was, too. And the Arkower was still shouting, and they had yet to find the missing piece of the Eye.

“We are going to need a lot of water,” Celie announced.

“How … we don't even have buckets … there's not even a well,” Lilah protested.

“We have griffins,” Celie reminded her. “And there are buckets in this very stable.”

She moved to the door of the stable and went in. There they were, just as she'd remembered: a pile of buckets that had probably been used to carry feed. Celie picked up a stack and brought them back out to the courtyard just as Rolf reached them.

“We need to bring water from the stream to put out the fire,” Celie told him.

Rolf blinked stupidly at her. The crown had slipped down onto his brows and he looked very young and very tired. “We need to find the Eye,” he said.

“We need to get out of here before we all die,” Lilah interjected.

“We can't let the Castle be destroyed,” Celie argued. “Even this little piece of it. Or the wild griffins in the …” A light dawned. She turned sharply and faced Lord Griffin. “We need water,” she said slowly. “Water for the fire.” She pointed to it, then held out a bucket. “Water, for the fire. Tell the other griffins. Bring more griffins.”

“Celie, they don't understand,” Rolf began.

Lord Griffin gave an earsplitting scream that made the Arkower pause in his shouting, and then he leaped into the air. Celie turned to Lady Griffin and Rufus and gave them each a bucket.

“Bring water,” she ordered. “Water.”

They each grasped a bucket in their beak and then followed Lord Griffin into the sky.

“Are they really going to do it?” Rolf's voice was hushed.

“We can only hope,” Pogue said.

“But of a surety,” Lulath said. “It is the Celie asking, and who is not loving the Celie?” He beamed at her.

Celie blushed. “Well, if you speak slowly and look into their eyes, the griffins seem to understand quite a lot … We'll just keep our fingers crossed.”

The fire was starting to slither around the edges of the newly restored courtyard. Celie sent up a silent prayer that Lord Griffin really had understood.

“What have you done?”

It took them all a moment to realize that the Arkower was addressing them now. He'd been standing to the side ranting for so long that Celie had forgotten that he could actually see them. Now he came storming across the courtyard, robes flapping and face dark with rage.

“What have you done?”
The Arkower stomped his foot on the smooth paving stones, looking wild-eyed. “The Castle will ruin everything now! It's been corrupted by the Hathelocke filth!”

“What have
we
done?” Celie surprised herself by screaming back at him. “
You've
lit the entire forest on fire, and now the towers are aflame!”

“To get rid of you!” the Arkower shouted at her. “To drive you out so that I may regain my Castle!”

“
We
built the Castle!” Wizard Bratsch howled at him. “It's you who tried to subvert it! Who twisted it and broke it!”

“You didn't build the Castle,” the Arkower countered. “Your long-dead king, the only one of you worth my spit, built it to be a safe haven for all who wished!”

“The griffins choose their riders, and they would never choose you, you vile coward!” Wizard Bratsch spit as he screamed the words, his gaunt form trembling like an autumn leaf.

“Nor would they choose you! They saw you for what you are!” the Arkower shouted back.

“This is awful,” Lilah whispered. “Should we leave? I always thought that wizards were supposed to be noble and dignified … self-sacrificing! Not like this.”

“Yes,” Lulath said in a hushed voice. “This is not being noble, this is being madness.”

“They've been here alone so long,” Rolf agreed. “Their obsession with the Castle and the griffins has driven them mad.”

“Well!” Celie started to shout at the wizards again, then changed her mind. “We don't have time for this!” She turned and started back into the stable.

“Actually, this interests me,” she heard Pogue say as she went. “Maybe now we'll hear the truth.”

He was right, but the Castle was still on fire. She couldn't stand there and watch two mad old men screech like birds after the same worm. Her feet itched, she was so anxious to do
something
.

She moved farther into the stable, looking for more buckets. There were a lot of oddments in the corners of the stalls. Rufus liked to hoard things as well, and Celie had a pang of homesickness as she thought of the piles of toys in the corners of his tower back at the Castle. He occasionally
stole shoes and added them, and once one of Celie's favorite bracelets. She patted the lump in her bodice where Rufus the lion resided, and wondered what other treasures Lord and Lady Griffin might have collected over the years. Her feet twinged almost painfully, and she worried that she'd picked up lice or fleas.

“Buckets,” she reminded herself aloud. “We need buckets.”

She scuffed aside branches and bits of old furniture, a bronze arm from a statue that gave her a start because it looked so lifelike, and the chunk of thick, grime-coated glass that she had stepped on when she'd found her toy. She shoved it aside with one foot, and the itching became almost unbearable.

Behind the debris she found a bucket and grabbed it up eagerly, but it had a large hole in the bottom. There was a familiar twist in her head that meant the Castle had moved, and the broad stones rippled. Celie looked around but didn't see anything different. Then she heard shouting — different from the wizards' continued argument — and hurried out of the stable to look.

“More griffins are coming,” Rolf shouted to her, pointing up at the sky.

Golden figures filled the sky, swooping down over the angry red fire. They dived at the buckets that Celie had already found, laid out in neat rows now by a nervous Rolf, snatching them up in their talons and soaring back into the sky, where they circled over the courtyard.

Lord Griffin, his form almost as familiar now as Rufus's,
flew over one of the towers and upended a bucket of water on the flames, then flew off with a scream of triumph. His mate followed, then Rufus, leaving gouts of steam in their wake. The other griffins were quick to follow them away, no doubt to fill their buckets.

“They keep coming,” Rolf said in awe.

“We're going to need more buckets,” Pogue said.

“I found one more, but it's got a hole,” Celie said.

“Show me,” Pogue said. “I might be able to fix it.”

Rolf followed them into the stable and began to look at the other stalls, while Pogue followed Celie down to the end. She picked up the bucket and showed it to him, then kicked around again to see if there was another one hidden anywhere. Her toe connected with the chunk of glass and it skittered away under some dry branches. Her whole foot tingled and the floor rippled.

“What was that?” Rolf called down the aisle.

“Nothing,” Pogue said. “I didn't say anything, did you?” Baffled, he looked at Celie and shrugged before he turned back to the bucket. “If I had a piece of leather I could get this to hold water, but it's probably not worth it.”

Celie made a noncommittal noise. She was trying to find that chunk of glass. She finally located it, hidden by stale straw and wedged under the wooden partition between two of the stalls. When she reached down and put her fingertips on it, trying to pry it loose, her fingers began to itch and the floor shuddered.

“All right, what was
that
?” Rolf demanded.

“What was what?” Pogue asked. He moved on to another stall, setting the broken bucket on a shelf. “I have no idea what you're talking about.”

Celie pulled the glass free and held it up to the dim light coming from the open door. Only now that she was really looking at it, she could see that it wasn't glass. Underneath the grime there were facets and flickers. This was a gemstone, and a big one: curved like a crescent moon, as big as her fist, and with a jagged break across one side and a bit of tarnished gold set on the other. She sighed with relief as the itching in her hands and feet stopped.

“What've you got, Cel?” Rolf called over to her.

“Oh, nothing,” she said, trying to sound casual despite the tremor in her voice. “Only the missing piece of the Eye of the Castle.”

When they stumbled out of the stable, with Celie cradling the pale green stone against her chest and Rolf and Pogue at her shoulders like an honor guard, they saw a continuous line of griffins sailing over the fire, dumping buckets of water, and then wheeling away again. Most of the griffins were smaller and brownish: the wild griffins like those Celie had seen being chased into the forest before. But a few of them were proud golden creatures, screaming battle cries and often carrying a bucket in each foreclaw.