Free Year of the Griffin by Diana Wynne Jones Page A

“That’s not the right question; he should be asking this !” Before long she was wondering if Policant might not be asking the wrong questions on purpose, to make you notice the right ones. After that she was hooked. It dawned on her that she had chosen the most exciting subject in the world to study, and she read and read and read. In the end she was almost late for breakfast because she just had to finish Section Five.
    She floated into the refectory, feeling utterly absentminded, but terribly alert somewhere, as if her brain had been opened up like an umbrella—or rather, a whole stack of umbrellas, some of them inside out.
    â€œWhat is the matter?” Felim asked, seeing the way Elda’s wings and crest kept spreading and her tail tossing.
    â€œNothing,” said Elda. “I’ve just been reading Policant.”
    â€œGood, is he?” asked Lukin.
    â€œYes, but in a very queer way. I couldn’t stop reading,” Elda said.
    Her friends eyed Elda’s arching neck and shining eyes with some awe. “May I read him after you?” Felim inquired politely.
    â€œYou all must !” Elda declared. “Even you,” she said to Ruskin, who looked up from Cyclina with his eyes unfocused and grunted.
    Elda was so anxious to get back to Policant before Wermacht’s class that she only spared a minute to watch Corkoran racing to his moonlab with his tie of peacock feathers floating out behind him. She stared briefly at his rushing figure and then galloped back to her concert hall.
    Corkoran did not notice her at all. He had problems. Surrounding a peach with a cannonball turned out to make it far too heavy. He knew he would hardly be able to walk in that much iron, even if, as his experiments suggested, he was going to feel lighter on the moon. He was thinking of magical ways to reduce the weight of iron, or maybe pare down a cannonball, and he was simply irritated when he found the neat little stickit-spell the librarian had left on his desk. So his first-year students had taken out fifty-four books? Why not? He had chosen them to teach because they might turn out to be exceptional. He forgot the matter and spent the next two days carefully dunking balls of iron into different magical solutions.
    In those two days Policant went the rounds of all of Elda’s friends, followed by The Red Book of Costamaret , followed by Cyclina and the rest. None of them found The Red Book quite as marvelous as Ruskin had, but Policant grabbed them all, and Felim became so absorbed in the wonders of Tangential Magic , vast as it was, that he forgot about assassins and almost forgot to go to Wermacht’s classes. Olga only got him there by marching up to Felim’s room and snapping her fingers between Felim’s eyes and the book, almost as if she were breaking a spell. Once there in the class, Felim gazed broodingly at Wermacht and shook his head from time to time.
    But Wermacht struck them all that way now they had read those books. As Olga put it, when they gathered around the statue of Wizard Policant after classes, listening to Wermacht now was like trying to hear one raindrop in a thunderstorm. There was just so much more of magic. “But please don’t keep shaking your head at Wermacht like that, Felim,” she added. “The beastly man’s coming right back into form.”
    This was true. For half a day after Corkoran’s threat Wermacht had been almost subdued. He plugged away dictating his big headings and drawing his diagrams and hardly looked at the students at all. Then he started stroking his beard again. The following morning he called Ruskin “you with the voice”—luckily Ruskin was thinking of a really difficult idea in Thought Theorem and hardly noticed—and began to address Lukin as “you with the—” before he stopped and said “golden notebook.” By that afternoon it seemed to have occurred to him that if