The Pinhoe Egg by Diana Wynne Jones Page A

“Did you invent it yourself?”
    Joe nodded, grinning his sulky grin again.
    â€œThen you must be a brilliant inventor,” Roger said. “I like inventing things too, but I’ve never come up with anything this useful. I’m Roger, by the way. Don’t you work in the Castle? I know I’ve seen you there.”
    â€œBoot boy,” said Joe. “I’m Joe.” He nodded at Cat. “I’ve met him.”
    â€œJason Yeldham used to be boot boy there too,” Roger said. “It must go with brilliance.”
    â€œHerbs, I know,” Joe said. “It’s machines I like, really. But this box—it’s more of a dwimmer-thing, see.” His hand went out to the box on hiscrossbar, and stopped. “What’s in it for me, if I do show you?” he asked suspiciously.
    Roger was commercially minded too. He sympathized with Joe completely. The problem was that he had no money on him and he knew Cat had none either. And Joe could be offended at being offered money anyway. “I wouldn’t tell anyone else about it,” he said while he thought. “And Cat won’t either. I tell you what—when we get back to the Castle, I’ll give you the address of the Magics Patent Office. You register your invention with them, and everyone has to pay you if they want to use it too.”
    Joe’s face gleamed with cautious greed. “Don’t I have to be grown up to do that?”
    â€œNo,” said Roger. “I sent for the forms when I invented a magic mirror game last year, and they don’t ask your age at all. They ask for a fifty-pound fee, though.”
    Cat wondered whether to point out that he, and not Roger, had invented the mirror game by accident. But he said nothing, because he was quite as interested in the box as Roger was.
    Joe had a distant, calculating look. “I could be earning that much this summer,” he decided.“They pay quite well at the Castle. All right. I’ll show you.”
    Grinning his sulky grin, Joe carefully unhooked the small latch that held the box on his crossbar shut. The hinged lid dropped downward to show—Cat craned out of the ditch and then recoiled—of all things, a stuffed ferret! The bent yellow body had bits of wire and twisted stalks of plants leading from its head and its paws to the place where the box met the crossbar.
    â€œMetal to metal,” Joe explained, pointing to the join. “That’s machinery, see. The dwimmer part is to use the right herbs for life. You have to use something that has once been alive, see. Then you can get the life power running through the frame and turning the wheels.”
    â€œBrilliant!” Roger said reverently, peering in at the ferret. Its glass eyes seemed to glare sharply back at him. “But how do you get the life power to flow? Is that a spell, or what?”
    â€œIt’s some old words we sometimes use in the woods,” Joe said. “But the trick is the herbs that go with the wires. Took me ages to find the right ones. You got to blend them, see.”
    Roger bent even closer. “Oh, I see. Clever.”
    Cat got up out of the ditch and went to catch Syracuse. He knew, now he had seen the box, that he could almost certainly make Roger one this evening, probably without needing a stuffed ferret. But he knew Roger would hate that. Cat’s kind of magic made some things too easy. Roger would be wanting to make a box by himself, however long it took. As Cat pushed his way through the hedge, he wondered exactly what Joe’s word “dwimmer” meant. Was it an old word for magic? It sounded more specialized than that. It must mean a special sort of magic, probably.
    Syracuse was not very hard to catch. He was quite tired after hauling Roger uphill, and a little bored by now in the wide, empty stubble field. But when Cat finally had the reins in his hands again, he discovered that Syracuse only had three