Really, really, really not wanting to mewl like a kitten, Polaris still couldn't quite keep his ears from folding or his tail from lashing. "But the data show—"

"Data?" Professor Nacreous waved her paw, a tinkling of bells accompanying the rippling blue wave that pushed aside the papers Polaris had set on her desk. "We study magic here at Capitolia Feline University, Polaris, and magic is all about feeling and control, not about measurements and studying." Her nose wrinkled as if she'd smelled something overripe. "That reprobate Moggy has set us back decades with her insistence on jotting everything down in books." A shiver rustled the professor's long silvery fur.

It took even more effort for Polaris not to leap to Moggy's defense. But, well, Moggy was a national hero, the leader of the Champions of Marigold, the feline whose efforts had kept Bathetic, the Salamander Lord of Pandemonium, from taking over the whole Realm. She didn't need a slab of nothing like Polaris defending her...

Fortunately, the opportunity for him to speak never came; the professor went on speaking as if she hadn't noticed Polaris's reaction. Which she probably hadn't. So few people ever did notice him, after all.

"You're very knowledgeable, Polaris," she was saying, "but knowledge can only get a cat so far in the magical arts." Her glow wrapped around his papers, lifted them, folded them neatly, and deposited them on the part of the desk in front of him. "It might be worthwhile at this point in your academic career to consider your true goals and prospects before you no longer have a voice—or a choice—about whether you'll be continuing here."

It took him a moment to unroll that sentence. Was she saying that he might be expelled?

The smile that spread under her whiskers made him think of a wilting flower: sideways and wrinkled and not quite right. "Off you go, now, and try to concentrate more on what your magic actually does instead of what your paperwork says it ought to do." She closed her eyes and settled back in her chair, tucking her front paws under herself.

A sign that she was done talking, Polaris figured. Which suited him fine: sending a caramel-colored swirl of light out to gather his papers, he slipped from the professor's office into the hallway, stopping to lick his paw till the fur looked white to him again. Not that anything had stained it. Professor Nacreous wouldn't allow good, honest dust anywhere near her...

It just made him want to spit. He'd been aiming for Feline U since he'd learned his first spell, but honestly? The place had been falling short of his expectations the entire three years he'd been a student. He started for the stairs, his magic trailing his treatise after him as droopily as his tail.

The year before he'd arrived, Moggy had only missed being named class valedictorian, the stories said, because she came from a family of library workers with no standing in Capitolia's political pecking order. Still, she'd had her choice of nearly any posting throughout the Realm of Marigold, and she'd gone off to the depths of the Tanglewood to run a podunk little library in Stillwater Township, a place that hadn't had a properly trained mage in close to a century. Probably because she'd known that she wouldn't have to deal with felines like Professor Nacreous ever again out there...

That was where she'd found the records talking about Bathetic's attempts to break through from Pandemonium into Marigold, where she'd seen the signs that he was trying again, where she'd pulled together her team and stopped the salamander when he'd actually pierced the barriers between the Realms. That was the sort of thing Polaris dreamed about.

Those dreams seemed to fade with each step he took down the stairway and out into the spring afternoon sunlight of north campus. It wasn't that he minded leaving the university, he had to admit, but he wanted to do it on his terms. He wanted to look with half-closed eyes at the professors who kept sniffing at his research—who kept sniffing at the very concept of research—wanted to tell them that he'd earned the right to do what he wanted and that he didn't need them.

Now, though? Now it turned out that they didn't need him. Or maybe it was more that they didn't want him. Because they definitely needed somebody to shake them up like Moggy had, somebody to show them how the data they were ignoring was important, somebody to poke a claw at their noses and detail for them their collective ignorance.

Just somebody who wasn't a nobody...

He sighed. But fine. If Feline U wasn't for him, he'd just have to find a place that was.

---

"Wait." Buttons stared at Polaris the way she did sometimes, the whippet's tongue lolling out just a bit and her ears canting back. "You're applying Towser's Harmonizing Principle to the decay rate of magical inscriptions?"

Polaris blinked back, then gestured to the clay tablets the excavation team had carefully stacked in the tent the research team was using. "I couldn't see a reason not to. In fact, Towser's theories are perfect for recovering data from ancient texts like these."

"But you're feline!" Like most canines Polaris had met, Buttons sort of wriggled in place when she got excited. "How do you even know who Towser was?"

Not wanting to bristle, Polaris still did a little bit. "Why wouldn't I know the work of one of the greatest magical thinkers in the history of Marigold?"

"But—!" Buttons leaped onto all fours. "Towser was canine! I mean, when he went to present his findings at the Feline University in Capitolia, they thought he was with the caterers and tried to send him around to the service entrance!"

That got Polaris's tail lashing. "Don't even talk to me about Feline U."

"But..." Saying it this time, Buttons folded her ears completely. "I saw on your résumé that you went there."

"I left there." With an effort, Polaris settled his tail. Three years later, it still hurt to talk about. "Their magic was all theory and no practice, and that wasn't the sort of thing I was interested in at all." Stretching his whiskers, he let beige lightning crackle out to check that the tablets' magical fields were strengthening as the chemical reagents Towser had called for did their work. "This is the magic I want to do: the kind that learns and grows and digs things up and measures them."

Buttons gaped her jaws in a canine smile. "I'm so glad we found you for this project, Polaris." She crooked a claw over her shoulder. "But I just came in to tell you that Parisol's brought the field crew back for lunch, and they've got a whole new batch of inscriptions from the site."

Polaris wanted to do a happy little dance at the thought, but too much jarring wasn't good for the harmonizing spell. He did nod at her, though. "Thanks, Buttons. I'm really glad I found this project, too."

She nodded as well, turned, and padded out of the tent, and only then did Polaris let himself sigh. He was glad, of course, to be here and to be doing this, but, well, ever since he'd left the university, he'd been taking these out-of-the-way, obscure field jobs: canine crews with a few avians to do aerial surveys and every once in a while a feline or two keeping the books or working as quartermaster if the team was big enough. And while he enjoyed the work and had helped uncover a lot of fascinating information about Marigold's past—

He hadn't solved any ancient puzzles, hadn't unearthed any ancient monsters, hadn't done anything he could throw back into the smug muzzles of Professor Nacreous and the others like her. It just wasn't fair!

It was interesting, though. He stepped away from the stacked tablets to clear a space on the other table for the new field data reports.

---

"Whoa," Polaris said, the fur prickling along his back.

"You betcha." Tai gave his wings a slow flap, and the glowing cloud he'd conjured drifted further into the cavern, a few flickers here and there in the darkness suggesting where the ceiling and far walls might be. "Of course, everyone knows there's two cats you call when you find a big, weird hole in the ground, so soon as the team tunneled in, I declared the whole place off limits and took off to get you."

Ancient magic was stirring the base of Polaris's whiskers. Not daring to hope, he sent a glowing cloud of his own out to better illumine the wall immediately to his right, and his whole body tingled at the sight of the scrolls filling the shelves carved into the rock. "Oh, Tai..." Polaris stepped forward gingerly like the stone was wet. "Those glyphs! They're ancient Alsatian! I mean, I've only seen maybe five Alsatian scrolls since I left the university! This...this is amazing!"

Tai chuckled. "Unless it's all, like, some puppy from a thousand years ago trying to write his first poem."

"Even then." Polaris had to stop, sit, and bathe a front paw to calm himself. As much as he hated to admit it, magic items often did respond to the emotional states of the people around them, so he needed to settle down a little.

Behind him, Tai did some more chuckling. "That was pretty much Moggy's feeling, too, when we sent her word about this."

Polaris's insides went cold and hot at the same time, and he glanced over his shoulder. "You...you sent word to Moggy?"

"Like I said." Tai held up a wing, a couple of primary feathers extended. "You call two cats for stuff like this: you and her. That's been standard operating procedure for, like, five years now."

It took effort for Polaris not to start hyperventilating. In the six years since he'd left Feline U, he'd worked a lot of dig sites, had refined his techniques for recovering data from ancient avian stone tablets, and had known vaguely that he was making a name for himself in the archeological community. But pairing him with Moggy? "You mean she's coming...here?"

A tiny bit of a smile curled the base of Tai's beak, but then a shout echoed down the tunnel from the camp outside. "Boss! Dragon incoming!"

"Got it!" Tai chirped loud enough to echo from the distant walls, then more quietly, he asked, "You don't have a problem with Moggy, do you, Pol?"

"No!" One syllable hardly seemed enough to convey his disagreement, so Polaris added, "Not at all!"

"Good. 'Cause that'll be her now." He spread his wings, magic drifting down from them and lifting him into a hover. "Come on; I'll introduce you."

Following Tai up and out through the tunnel, Polaris found his fretfulness growing with each step. When had he last had his claws trimmed? Was he covered with dust? What could he possibly say to Moggy, the feline who'd directly inspired nearly every choice he'd made with his life so far?

Part of him wanted to turn and scramble back into the cavern. Maybe it'd be more impressive if she came in and found him already at work on the scrolls! But if he did that, he wouldn't be there for Tai to introduce him, and that'd look weird, wouldn't it?

Completely unsure, he kept going, slinking out from the tunnel mouth into the sunlight, tropical thunderheads looming across the blue afternoon sky. He hadn't really had a chance to look things over when he'd come in, clinging to the basket gripped in Tai's talons for the two-hour flight over the jungle from the train depot at Ibis Junction, but he'd spent more than half a decade now living on dig sites exactly like this one.

Not that they were exactly the same, he corrected himself. Yes, the tents had a similar loose and moldy look whether they were squatting beneath the banana palms down south here or hugging the arroyo walls on the western plains, and the workers seemed to be similar people, too: rough but stalwart dogs and birds—and the occasional cat—doing their best to increase Marigold's knowledge of its own past.

Of course, those few times he'd been pressed into service to visit the more modern parts of Marigold in search of funding, he'd met those who disparaged the entire profession. After all, Princess Ptolemy had been ruling the Realm of Marigold for more than a thousand years: couldn't archeologists just ask her for information about whatever they needed to know?

It always made Polaris's ears fold. Did people not understand that the princess was a sphinx and therefore breathed an atmosphere of riddle and mystery? Not that Polaris had ever met her, but he—

"Polaris!" a voice squawked, shocking him from his whirling thoughts. He blinked in the direction of the squawk and saw Tai grinning an avian grin down at him. "As I was saying," the big eagle went on more quietly, "Moggy, this is Polaris, the other expert we brought in to look at the scrolls."

"Polaris," a much gentler, warmer, smoother voice said, and Polaris snapped his gaze down from Tai to the honey-colored feline beside him, her eyes bright and her whiskers perked. "It's such an honor to meet you! The work you've been doing to preserve ancient avian clay tablets is so important, I can't even begin to tell you!"

Excitement and magic literally crackled from her fur, and Polaris found that he couldn't move. Moggy. Sitting right in front of him, a couple years older than him, absolutely beautiful, and telling him that she not only knew who he was and what he was doing but that she thought it was worthwhile.

"Ummm," he managed to say.

"Moggy?" a rough voice asked from above, and Polaris snapped his head up and back to see a dragon looking down at them. "Where should I set up your tent?"

Every hair on Polaris's whole body seemed to bristle. It had been literally hundreds of years since the dragons had withdrawn to their Realm, sealed their borders, and refused to have any contact with the rest of the civilized world. And yes, Polaris had heard the earlier cry of 'dragon incoming,' but he'd assumed it was meant figuratively, not...not...

"Thanks, Shard." Moggy was beaming up at the dragon as if nothing completely impossible was happening at all. "Tai, can you show him a spot, please?"

"Sure." Tai spread his wings, magic crackling from them, and drifted up to the dragon's pointed, purple snout, each tooth in that snout—and there were way too many of them as far as Polaris was concerned—bigger than each of Tai's individual talons. "Besides, me and Shard's got an appointment for some racing as long as he's here."

Shard shook his head. "I don't want to show you up in front of your whole crew, Tai." A slow smile unveiled even more teeth. "Not again, I mean..."

The air between them literally sparking, Polaris felt torn between staying frozen on the spot and making a pell-mell dash for the cover of the jungle outside the camp's perimeter. But then a couple dozen pink bubbles suddenly percolated up, popping with a slew of musical tinkles that made Polaris think of tiny bells. "I hope," Moggy said into the silence that followed, "that we won't see a repeat of the rude conduct that marred the event last time?" She voiced it as a question, but Polaris could tell that she wasn't asking.

"Yeah, yeah," both the dragon and the eagle muttered, and that got much friendlier smiles spreading across their faces.

"Come on, then," Tai said, wheeling for the uphill portion of the site, tents there among the trees. "There's a couple great natural flight courses around here. I'll show you after you get unlimbered."

The dragon rose into the air, at least four times as big as the eagle, and Polaris could now see a whole pack of equipment strapped into place between the purple leathery wings extending from his back.

"Those two," Moggy muttered, but when Polaris glanced over at her, she was smiling toward them. Then she turned that smile toward him, and the whole rest of the world disappeared. "So! Where are these Alsatian scrolls?"

Somehow, Polaris managed to lead her toward the hole in the side of the mound. "I only just arrived myself about half an hour ago," he said, feeling like he was stuttering even though his ears told him he wasn't. "Tai was just showing me the site when the call went up that a dragon was arriving." The curiosity that had been gnawing quietly at him for the last several moments began taking bigger bites, and he glanced back at her. "Would it be rude of me to ask about Shard?"

"Not really." Moggy shrugged. "I don't know the whole story, I'm afraid—I don't have to tell you that asking Princess Ptolemy a direct question never works—but apparently the last thing the king of the dragons did before he sealed the borders of the Dragonlands five hundred years ago was to give Shard's egg to the princess. Shard grew up in the palace, and I met him when I was across the street at Feline U; he's helped me out a lot with the little problems I keep coming across."

Something between a thrill and a chill rustled through Polaris's fur. "And you think these scrolls might be one of those little problems?"

"Probably not," she said, but the perk of her ears and the spring in her step made Polaris wonder if she was hoping otherwise. "The Alsatians were the foremost practitioners of the magical arts among the various canine tribes before the unification that presaged the formation of Marigold, though, so anything's possible."

Polaris nodded, stepping into the downward-sloping tunnel. "Towser was half Alsatian, after all, and the way his principles work so well with preservation spells—"

"It's completely fascinating!" A rush of air beside him, and Moggy slipped in between him and the wall of the tunnel, a ball of light sparking into existence ahead of her. "I've always found Towser's theories so beautiful to work through mathematically, but to learn that they're also useful in practical matters? It gets my whiskers quivering!"

Staring across at her face, Polaris couldn't help but notice that her whiskers were in fact quivering.

"Tell me all about it!" she continued, then her ears fell, the enthusiasm that was radiating from her almost as brightly as the light from her spell dampening. "I mean, if you wouldn't mind, Dr. Polaris."

Her use of the title splashed against him as cold and sloppy as a mudball, but with an effort, he kept his own ears from falling. "Oh, I'm not a doctor: I dropped out of Feline U way before things got to that point. But I'll be glad to talk about how I'm expanding on Towser's work if you're interested."

"Yes, please." She brightened up.

And not only did she listen to him as they made their way down the tunnel into the cavern, but she also asked several questions that showed she understood what he was talking about. It had been literally a decade since Polaris had spoken so easily and comfortably to another feline, and it was as if he could feel multiple clenches throughout his whole midsection loosening with each step they took.

"Fascinating," she said again as they moved out of the tunnel, the massive underground space almost swallowing the light of her spell. "So you're using a mixture of chemical reagents and magical metonymy to have the tablets essentially heal themselves, strengthening their power and therefore making the text outlining that power more legible."

"Exactly!" he was about to shout, but the word caught in his throat when a different shade of light flickered across the stone in front of them. Raising his head, he found himself looking at an enormous canine wavering all green and ghostly in front of the shelves with the scrolls.

So instead, he said, "Ummm..."

"Hmmm?" Moggy asked. "Am I misunderstanding the process?"

"Ummm," Polaris said again, pointing a shaking paw.

Black fire seemed to sputter in the holes in the canine's eyes; its lips pulled back, and it barked a word that it took Polaris a moment to recognize. He'd never heard ancient Alsatian spoken, but he could hold his own in several other canine languages: "filthy felines" would've been a polite translation of what the ghost—or whatever it was—had just called him and Moggy. "You defile this holy place!" the canine went on as far as Polaris could tell. "So I shall defile your corpses once I've finished killing you!"

"Ummm," Polaris heard himself say for the third time, not certain at this point if he could manage any other sound.

Beside him, though— "Oh, Trustworthy Spirit!" Moggy cried in perfect Alsatian. She padded forward a few steps, Polaris staring at her, and bowed, one forepaw flourishing into the air. "Please still your righteous wrath and turn a generous ear to a humble seeker of knowledge."

"What?" the ghost yipped, the black fire freezing in his eyes. "You...you speak the Shepherd's Tongue?"

"Of course!" Moggy sat, and what she said next came out more quickly than Polaris could follow: something about how she and her colleague had just been discussing a great canine scientist. She turned back, and Polaris couldn't miss the shiver in her whiskers. "Isn't that true, Polaris?"

Trying to claw the Alsatian words from his brain, Polaris bowed. "Forgiveness," he said, sure it wasn't right but just as sure that it was close. "My familiarness is better toward Dalmatian." He switched quickly to that language, less growly than Alsatian on the throat, he'd always thought, and with a vocabulary he actually knew. "The work of the great scientist Towser taught me how to speak—"

"Towser?" The ghost blinked several times, then continued in Dalmatian, "You want me to believe that you degenerate felines have any idea who Towser of Birken Downs is?"

Knowing that this was absolutely the wrong place to get defensive about it, Polaris still couldn't keep his tail from lashing. "Towser's theories are indispensable for anyone seeking to understand how to preserve ancient texts! Just because no one's ever used them that way before—"

"Wait." The ghost's glowing green ectoplasm turned to mist and petered out about halfway along his back, but he flopped back and sat even though his didn't technically have hind legs. "You can't mean that you're applying Towser's Harmonizing Principle to the decay rate of magical manuscripts."

"Well, yes," Polaris said, looking from the ghost to Moggy, both of them nearly glowing with excitement. "It seemed the obvious application for the—"

"Show me." With a flick of a shadowy paw about half the size of Polaris's whole head, the ghost caused a scroll to shoot from the shelves behind him straight at Polaris's face.

Polaris winced, but the scroll jerked to a stop before it could strike him and floated there in front of him. "Now," the ghost said, and a part of Polaris's brain noted that he'd gone back to speaking Alsatian.

"Ummm," Polaris said, trying to think in that old canine language and failing. He could still manage Dalmatian, though. "My experience with this method has been entirely focused on ancient avian tablets! I've yet to try it on—"

"Show me," the ghost said again, and another flick of his paw wrapped a sudden coil of green light around Moggy's neck. "Or the she-feline dies."

Moggy froze, but neither her whiskers nor her ears drooped, everything about her seemingly as excited as before some giant dead canine threatened to strangle her. "If you wouldn't mind, Polaris," she said, also in Dalmatian, Polaris's brain again noted. "I'd love to see your technique at work."

Unsure in every way that he could be, Polaris looked back and forth between them both again. "I...I'll need the proper reagents in order to—"

This time when the ghost flicked his paw, it sent a streamer of green light crackling deep into the darkness of the cave. Every hair on Polaris's body sprang up, but the streamer returned almost instantly without bringing a dozen more ghosts or instant fiery death. Instead, it was bearing an elaborately carved wooden chest, whisking it out of the darkness and depositing it on the rough stone beside Polaris.

Familiar scents and vibration tickled his whiskers. "Are these—?"

"Reagents." The canine ghost used the Dalmatian word, then cocked his head. "Though when you say 'reagents,'" he continued in that language, "I assume you mean those chemicals that are used to strengthen and reinforce a magical spell or process." His ears drooped a bit. "I've not spoken Dalmatian in centuries or possibly millennia depending on what year it currently is."

"Ummm," was once again all Polaris could manage, struggling to arrange words that might express at least one of the multiple questions and answers crashing around in his head.

"Well," Moggy said, the very image of perkiness despite the green fire looped around her neck. "Regulus the Fourth became the last leader of the Alsatian Coalition in what we call 44 BP: that was forty-four years before Princess Ptolemy united the canines, felines, and avians to form the Realm of Marigold."

"Regulus the Fourth?" The ghost blinked those blazing black eyes at her. "I volunteered to became the spirit guardian of this repository during the sixteenth year in the reign of Regulus the Third."

"Ah." Moggy nodded. "Then it's been nearly thirteen hundred years since you last spoke Dalmatian."

Shaking his head, the canine made a little clicking noise with his mouth. "Time certainly does fly when you're dead." He swung his attention back to Polaris and placed a ghostly green paw on the wooden chest. "This is one of Towser's own cases, so I assume the reagents you need will be inside."

Polaris's fur had started to settle during the discussion, but now it shot back up again. "Towser's own..." He didn't want to get any closer to the ghost, of course, but the thought of examining an item that had belonged to the great scholar himself inched Polaris forward. "How did it come here?"

The canine smiled, something that made him look a lot less like an undead horror. "We went to school together, actually, Towser and I. He's the one who taught me Dalmatian." He brushed a paw at his cloudy green chest. "I joined the Guardian Corps afterwards while Towser continued his scientific and magical studies. We kept in touch as the decades went on, and after he died, when the Coalition was looking for a guardian for his final library, well, I wasn't far from death myself at that point. So I stepped up, and here we are."

His smile vanished, and he lowered his hideous visage to glare at Polaris. "Right here," he growled, "waiting for you to prove to me that you two aren't just a couple fast-talking felines whose interiors ought to be decorating the walls and floor for yards and yards around us."

The way his fur was prickling, Polaris couldn't imagine it would ever again settle into its proper place.

But Moggy was clapping her paws. "Oh, this is amazing! Towser's original manuscripts have a place of honor, of course, in the Capitolia Archives, but none of his work from his final years has ever been found! We have letters he wrote during that period hinting at breakthroughs in the field of numinous energy storage, but his actual notes were long thought to be lost!"

"Not lost," the ghost said, nothing smooth or friendly about him now. "Hidden. Turning stored numinous energy into compact but powerful explosives would be simple and devastating should the knowledge ever fall into the clutches of those who might not have the Alsatian Coalition's best interests at heart." The ghost's green fire surged down his leg and shoved the wooden case toward Polaris. "But if your demonstration is successful, cat, it's entirely possible that your colleague won't feel the force of it melting the flesh from her bones."

"Ummm..." Tearing his gaze away from the canine took so much effort, Polaris almost tipped over frontwards. But he had to see Moggy, could only imagine the hurt and fear that must be filling her face.

Except that she hadn't stopped sitting there calmly and smiling exactly as before. "Go ahead." She nodded to the scroll still floating in front of Polaris. "If there's anything I can do to help, let me know." She blinked and glanced up at the ghost. "Or is this something he has to do alone?"

The canine cocked his head. "I don't see why it should be. You're both equally on trial here, after all."

"Thank you." Moggy nodded, then turned that impossible smile back toward Polaris. "So how about if you narrate the steps of the process as you go about it? That way, if something strikes you as off, you can mention it, and if I or our new friend here have any questions, we can raise them." She looked once more at the ghost. "I'm assuming, sir, that you'd rather not see this scroll become damaged during the demonstration, so let me invite you please to raise any concerns you might have during the course of the proceedings."

The blank incredulity that Polaris was seeing on the ghost's wavering face, he was sure, matched the astonishment he himself was feeling. "You," the ghost said, "aren't anything like the felines I recall running up against when I was alive."

Moggy gave a little laugh. "I'm not sure if you meant that as a compliment, sir, but I'm going to take it that way if you don't mind."

The ghost waved a paw. "Go right ahead. And call me Cavett. Since we're all becoming such good friends..."

His teeth when he grinned made Polaris doubt that last statement. But then the green fire oozing from the ghost moved the scroll closer, and Polaris remembered that the life of the Realm's greatest hero depended on him correctly applying a magical method he'd come up with in a way it had never been applied before.

I can't do this! he wanted to whimper. I'm more of a nobody than anybody in the history of Marigold has ever been! How can Moggy possibly believe that I—?

"Step one," Moggy said, "I'm guessing, would be addressing how a scroll differs from a clay tablet. It's not likely to shatter, for instance, no matter how many hundreds of years old it is, but tearing or shredding would be real dangers."

"Yes!" Polaris more gasped than said, forcing himself to focus on the project instead of the horrible things surrounding that project. "It's the same protection spell for both scrolls and tablets, but you only use a tenth as much reagent on a scroll!" Stepping forward, he sent his magic in sputtering brown curls to pluck at the drawers of the wooden chest.

As the ghost—or Cavett, he supposed he should think now that he knew the name—had promised, the case was fully stocked and organized exactly the same way as every other reagent case Polaris had dealt with over the years. Which made sense: the treatises Towser had written detailing the safest ways to store reagents were still followed by people who didn't want to set themselves or their surroundings on fire...

Talking the steps out in Dalmatian, he found, really helped his nerves, and Moggy kept bringing up points that made him stop, consider what he was doing, and sometimes rethink his approach. Cavett seemed to get into it too, asking during Step Five if anhydrite might be a better reagent than pyrite for something that was softer than a slab of stone.

"Ummm," Polaris said, quickly stoppering the pyrite bottle before making what he realized would've been a horrendous and flammable mistake. "Yes, that's an incredibly good point, sir."

Cavett beamed and nudged Moggy with an elbow so big that, if he'd been more physically present, it likely would've tipped her over sideways. "Towser always said I had a head for magic, but I preferred being a guardian. More thumping villains about the heads and shoulders with sticks involved, you know."

And by Step Eight, the scroll was unrolled and floating in a slightly different sort of regenerative field than Polaris was used to dealing with. But the paper was holding together, and the glyphs on it were darkening with each passing instant.

Peering close at it, Cavett shook his head. "Well, I'll be dipped. Seems like I owe you folks an apology." And a flick of his paw dissipated the green fire that Polaris had forgotten was still circling Moggy's neck. "I'd be mighty interested in hearing more about this Princess Ptolemy and the Realm of Marigold you keep mentioning, too."

"Of course!" Moggy stretched, Polaris unable to keep from glancing sideways at her lithe movements. "Gracious! That certainly took some doing! I'm surprised Tai and Shard didn't come looking for us."

"Oh, they're trying," Cavett said with a yawn. "At least, someone's been slamming magic and rocks and shovels and each other and all sorts of things against the barrier I used to block that opening with when you two walked in."

So that took some more doing, Moggy trotting up the tunnel to send a communication spell out to the frantic dragon and eagle. "The whole camp," she told Polaris later that evening, "seemed to be pitching in to see if they could dig us out. It was quite inspiring to see."

They introduced Cavett to Tai and Merryweather, the canine in charge of the dig team, at that point. Shard, smoke puffing from his nostrils and teeth showing prominently, had wanted to have a few words with Cavett, too, but Moggy pointed out that the tunnel was much too small for him to fit.

That started a discussion about using Polaris's technique to strengthen all the scrolls; Cavett thought that, if they could carry them outside, he might be able to go outside with them. A quick look showed Polaris that the case didn't have nearly enough reagents for that, but he felt sure that the Ibis Junction apothecary shop would have most of what they needed to get started. Moggy gave his list to Shard and Tai, and the two were in much better moods when they got back.

By then, he and Moggy had developed a plan for treating the archive. Cavett had approved, and after a quick break for supper, they got started.

"Amazing!" Moggy said when they'd finished the first application: it was around midnight, but Polaris had never felt more alert and alive in his entire life. "You really need to come to Stillwater and start teaching the process!"

"Teaching?" Polaris blinked at her. "Teaching who?"

"Didn't I mention?" She gave one of her dazzling smiles, the magical torches in Cavett's cave making her eyes sparkle. "I'm starting a university, one that'll teach all sorts of things to anyone who wants to know them."

"Yes," Polaris said, not needing to hear anything else. "If it means more things like this, then absolutely yes."

She did a little dance with her front paws on the stone, and Polaris felt everything clicking into place around him for the first time in his life.