Evastany

29 IV-3

‘Excellent,’ said she, with her first smile of the meeting. It was the unpromising kind, a bit too wide and much too toothy, but I tried not to let that bother me. ‘Then I will give you Tynara and two others for your school, on temporary secondment. I also give all of our currently enrolled students into your care, provided your facilities are able to accommodate them.’

‘How many are there?’

‘Eight, so far. There will be more sent to you, as we discover them, and I imagine you will uncover more yourselves.’

I felt reasonably confident that we could accommodate twenty or so in our current building, which ought to cover our needs for a while, so I made no objection.

And that was it, the meeting was over. Dwinal, having apparently got everything she wanted, departed soon afterwards with Tynara in tow. Hyarn — who had said nothing whatsoever for the entire meeting, slightly to my confusion — rose to escort us back to our apartments.

‘You will have a little time to meet those students you are unacquainted with,’ he assured us. ‘And to see what we have been doing with them thus far.’

Good, because there were some things I wanted to look into before we left.

I also needed a little time to think about where to get a few more draykoni from. Hiring tutors from within the sorcery/summoning establishment obviously wasn’t going to be good enough. I’d finally have a use for dear Ori, of course — and what better teacher could I expect to find! He is not only the easiest person in the world to get along with and possessed of endless reserves of patience, he also has just the sort of enquiring mind that would delight in the challenge.

I can’t expect him to manage the job alone, however. He will need help.

Which means, we need to go talk to Llandry.

In the interests of not boring you, allow me to skip over the bit where we toured the school and met all the students. They were much as you would expect of a group of eight disparate people, with nothing in common save a certain accident of birth. We all exchanged nods and pleasantries and they eyed me curiously and I eyed them speculatively and that was that.

As for the school, the “Miss” Faronni had spoken of turned out to be Tynara. “Sir” was a man of around Hyarn’s apparent age (it’s so hard to tell with Lokants) who was introduced as Dan. He had a sloppiness of dress and a laid-back demeanour which interested me, for it set him apart from most of the other people I met up there. Our third teacher was to be… Gio. All very good, except that it would interfere with his espionage activities where Ylona was concerned — something I could hardly expect Dwinal to realise.

Complications, complications.

Anyway, by the time we were kindly escorted home, we were fully up to date with all the official things, everybody was very happy with everybody, and blah blah blah.

I may have sneaked some time to go wandering about the place in hopes of stumbling over this mythical draykon Lania talked of, but I found nothing.