The Lost Heir (The Gryphon Chronicles, Book 1) (23 page)

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Oh, come on, man! It’s obvious! You should find out if she likes you, too. Do you want me to ask her for you?”

“Don’t you dare!” Derek scowled, but his cheeks flushed. “Enough of your mischief, you rascal,” he growled.

“You should take her out to a play or something.”

“I do not need advice on women from a twelve-year-old,” he said.

Jake laughed. “Oh, yes, you do! You’re hopeless.”

“Oh, really?” Derek grasped him in a headlock, much as Jake had done to Dani earlier and walked him onward through the field. “You were saying? Go on, keep it up. See what you get.”

Jake, still laughing, tried to trip him, to no avail.

A little while later, they were all sitting around the dining table over lunch. Archie babbled about his progress on the glider contraption. Isabelle reported that she and Dani had found some baby rabbits in the garden.

Derek got caught three times gazing at Miss Helena.

The governess merely lifted an eyebrow at him, but her twin brother seemed to find it amusing.

Henry talked about helping Archie prepare for some scientific conference in Norway coming up in June, where the boy genius would be presenting a paper on aerodynamics.

Aunt Ramona took it all in with her usual stern serenity. “And how did Jacob fare in his training today, Guardian Stone?”

Derek smiled, setting down his lemonade. “Not half bad, ma’am. His progress is impressive. He can make that knight’s suit of armor walk across the great hall using his telekinesis—without getting a headache afterwards.”

“Excellent, Jacob!”

Jake bowed his head with shocking politeness.

“Today we did a bit of sparring,” Derek added.

“Aye, and I would’ve beat him, too, if I hadn’t tripped over one of those stupid frogs.”

“Good heavens! You didn’t hurt the poor thing, did you?” Aunt Ramona asked at once.

“No,” Jake answered, puzzled by her startled reaction. “Maybe we need a cat to scare them away—”

“Gracious, no! You don’t know what you’re saying.” Aunt Ramona put her spoon down with a clatter.

“Well, we’ve got to get rid of them somehow,” Jake replied. “It’s my castle! I don’t want it full of frogs.”

“Jacob,” Her Ladyship said, “those are no ordinary frogs.”

He frowned. “What do you mean?”

The others exchanged puzzled glances while Her Ladyship heaved a vexed sigh and looked away, as if she did not want to tell them. “Those frogs,” she finally admitted, “were once your family servants.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

The Frog Problem

“What, they’re
people
?” Jake cried.

“I’m afraid so,” Aunt Ramona said. “We found them like that shortly after your parents died.”

“No wonder I could never read them,” Isabelle said. “I’ve tried to talk to them, but it’s always been garbled and confusing.”

“Good thing Teddy didn’t eat one,” Dani mumbled.

“Who would do such a thing to those poor souls?” Archie demanded, all lordly indignation.

“Someone who wanted to shut them up?” Jake suggested.

“Criminy,” Dani muttered, but she nodded in agreement. “Silence the witnesses.”

Everyone looked at her in surprise, but when you came from the rookery, you knew about such things.

Aunt Ramona shook her head. “You children may be right. That could be one possible motive of whoever did this to them, but since I haven’t found a way to change them back, we may never know.”

“You can think of another reason, my lady?” Henry asked.

“Revenge,” she answered. “Lord and Lady Griffon were loved by most of Magic-kind. They helped countless magical beings, some of whom can be quite vengeful, like the water nymphs, for example. It was thought perhaps some witch or wizard friend of the couple took matters into their own hands and punished the servants in this manner for not going to their aid that day. The servants cowered inside the house—and so, inside the house they must remain.”

“A curse,” Henry murmured.

She nodded. “I’ve tried to break it and turn them back.” The grand old lady-witch faltered, to Jake’s surprise. She shook her head, lowering her eyes. “But all my efforts could not restore those poor souls to their proper form. They’ve been like that for eleven years!”

Archie harrumphed. “You magical types are a menace.”

“There must be something we can do to help them,” Derek said in concern.

“I have tried every transformation spell I could find in our libraries. Nothing’s worked. Some very powerful ingredient has been used on those poor people. There’s no telling what it might be.”

“Maybe Jake should try,” Archie suggested. “The frogs are tied to the castle, and he’s its rightful master, not Uncle Waldrick. They served his family, so maybe one of those spells would work for him, even if they failed for you, Aunt Ramona.” The boy-genius bit off the end of a carrot. “Seems logical to me.”

“I’m happy to try,” Jake said, “but I’ve never done a magical spell in my life.” While his great-great aunt considered it, his thoughts churned.

If the frogs could be turned back into people, they might be able to provide a few clues about what they had seen that day.

Even though the courts considered the murders of the last Lord and Lady Griffon an open-and-shut case, as Derek had said, he still couldn’t bring himself to believe that Sir George Hobbes was the only one to blame.

Uncle Waldrick had to be involved somehow, he knew it.

Her Ladyship was studying him intently. “If you are willing, Jacob, I suppose there is no harm in letting you try.”

He pushed his chair back from the table and stood. “Then let’s have at it.”

They all hurried down to Griffon Castle, where Isabelle used her particular gifts to summon all the frogs together into the great hall.

Soon the vast space resounded with the throaty chorus of their croaking.

Meanwhile, Dani took Jake aside. “Are you sure you want to do this?” she whispered.

“No harm in trying.”

“You don’t know that, actually,” she retorted.

“Aunt Ramona said so.”

“What if she’s wrong? You don’t know what you’re doing! What if it only works halfway and they end up—you know, half-frog, half-human? Wouldn’t that be worse—?”

Jake stared at her, the blood draining from his face. “Hadn’t thought of that.”

She gave him an I-told-you-so look.

Jake suddenly felt queasy about the task he had agreed to. Good grief, what if he ended up turning these people into half-frog monsters?

Even being a frog—a whole one—had to be better than that. His palms began to sweat.

“Jacob, are you ready to begin?” Aunt Ramona called.

He looked at Dani, his heart pounding, but he couldn’t back out now.

She frowned. “Good luck.”

He nodded to her, dry-mouthed. Then he took a deep breath and went to hear his aunt’s instructions. This was the most responsibility he had ever undertaken.

It was a dreadful feeling. His stomach churned. He listened to every word the old woman said about how to hold the wand, how to clear his mind and concentrate, and how to enunciate each strange phrase of the hand-written spell in her thick, mysterious book.

When she had filled his ears with her advice, she stepped back to let him try his best. The moment was at hand. Jake cast Derek a rather desperate glance. The Guardian nodded back at him in reassurance.

Isabelle laid a comforting hand on his shoulder. “You can do it, Jacob. They want you to at least try to help them. That’s why they’ve been coming around you. They know who you are by your smell. They trust you. I could understand that much from them just now.”

“Right.” He swallowed hard.

“Stand back, children,” Miss Helena ordered, pulling the other three back. Isabelle and Dani clung to each other with Teddy between them, while Archie held his notepad, waiting to scribble down his observations.

“Just read it as it’s written,” Aunt Ramona instructed. “Repeat the words as many times as needed for the change to be complete.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He nodded and raised the wand in his right hand, while holding the book of spells in his left.

Then he began, slowly and carefully:

“No more in mud to hop and crawl,

Misdeeds removed, forgiven all.

No more the form of frogs to ape,

Return each one to his true shape!

SANETIS!”

A wind ruffled his hair, gusted through the great hall, though none of the windows were open.

“Keep going, Jacob! It’s working!” his great-great aunt exclaimed.

Jake spoke the rhyme again, flicking the wand with the final word of the spell, as she had showed him.

The wind blew harder, increasing in strength each time he said the words; it rippled through the ragged white pennant of his ancestors’ ancient battle flag hanging high in the room, a red gryphon on a field of white.

Jake repeated the spell as a distant echo of a horrid screeching filled the room. The sound was all too familiar, though it was quieter than he had heard it before.

It was the same, nails-on-blackboard shrieking that he had heard that night in Newgate when the adults, the dead and the living alike, had gone into a trance.

“Cover your ears!” Derek yelled to the others over the noise. They did, except for Teddy, who began barking madly.

Jake yelled the words of the spell louder, again, to be heard over the angry noise.

“…SANETIS!” This time when he flicked the wand, a bolt of bluish-white lightning burst out of the tip and went crackling into the room, zapping the nearest group of frogs. Jake gasped.

A cloud of smoke exploded where the frogs had sat.

He looked at Aunt Ramona in a panic, afraid he had just incinerated them.

“Keep going!” she shouted. “That’s supposed to happen! Probably,” she added with a faint look of worry.

“Probably?” he yelled back over the gale.

“You can’t quit now!” she cried, the wind making a mess of her neat gray bun. “Believe me,” she warned.

Remembering Dani’s warning of horrible half-frog, half-human results, he saw he had no choice but to forge on. He would
not
turn them into grotesque monsters. He kept on saying the words, and slender lines of lightning kept flying out of the wand, finding each poor frog in the room.

Poof!

Poof! Another one. Poof!

Each frog in turn was obscured inside a thick cloud of yellowish smoke, until the whole hall was filled with fog.

Jake could not see his hand in front of his face.

Suddenly, the wind and shrieking stopped cold.

In the silence, he didn’t hear anymore croaking.

Oh, no, he thought, his heart pounding, his whole body shaking. I’ve killed them.

Derek felt his way along the wall until he found the door. He flung it open and the smoke began to clear. The others slowly uncovered their ears. Dani calmed Teddy down.

Derek strode toward him through the thick fog. “Are you all right, Jake?”

“I think so. Did it work?”

They all stared toward the dissipating smoke.

As the drifting clouds parted, human shapes became visible.

All of a sudden, Archie’s burst of laughter filled the great hall.

“Good heavens!” Her Ladyship uttered. “Children, cover your eyes!”

Derek automatically raised both hands to cover the boys’ eyes. For the servants were indeed whole people again, scattered around on the floor where they had been sitting around moments ago as frogs. They looked groggy and confused. And they were all stark naked.

“Henry, Helena, quickly!”

“Yes, ma’am!”

Jake laughed heartily, letting go of his tension after that ordeal, while the adults rushed into motion, trying to cover up all the ex-frog people with the dust-cloths on the furniture.

“Run and play, children!” Aunt Ramona ordered anxiously. “Off you go! We’ll take it from here! Out, out! Well done, Jacob. Run along, now!”

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

A Visit to Gryphondale

“Ew, gross! Naked people!”

All too happy to escape, the four children ran outside laughing their heads off—except for Isabelle, who was too much of a lady to poke fun at somebody else’s misfortune.