Lily and the Prisoner of Magic

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  First published in 2012 by Orchard Books

  This ebook edition published in 2012

  ISBN 978 1 40831 642 9

  Text © Holly Webb 2012

  The right of Holly Webb to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Orchard Books is a division of Hachette Children’s Books,

  an Hachette UK company.

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  For Lily

  ‘No one’s following us?’ Lily asked, a little anxiously, peering back over her shoulder, as Fell Hall disappeared behind a row of softly curving hills.

  The steady beat of the dragon’s wings didn’t slacken, even though he turned his great head to answer her. ‘Were you expecting them to?’

  He sounded as though he was smiling, she thought. Lily had only known him a few days, and she wasn’t sure if dragons could actually smile. His mouth was probably the wrong shape – or perhaps he simply had too many teeth. ‘No. No, I suppose not.’ She stared down at the hills below them. They were so high up that the landscape looked like a picture in a book, dotted with delicate lines of hedges and roads. Unconsciously, she tightened her grip on the dragon’s scales.

  ‘Only a dragon could fly this high, this fast,’ the silvery dragon assured her. Then he was silent for a moment, and this time his wings did seem to falter a little, and Lily saw them lose a little height. The dragon had to beat his wings harder to bring them surging up again.

  ‘What is it?’ Lily asked him anxiously, once he was flying steadily again.

  ‘I had not thought… The length of time we have been – away. Many things may have changed. Are there other things that fly?’ His glittering black eyes fixed on hers, painfully wide.

  ‘Not like you.’ Lily shook her head. ‘Nothing like you. I was being stupid; I can’t make myself not be frightened of Miss Merganser, and the others at Fell Hall. But they didn’t have spells for flying, I’m certain of it.’

  ‘After what they did to you – and to your friends – being frightened is nothing to be ashamed of, Lily dear.’ The tiny old lady squashed up behind Lily hugged her tightly, and Lily had to try not to laugh. She’d never imagined being hugged by a princess, even if Princess Jane was disgraced, and supposedly dead. She patted the thin, white-skinned hands around her waist gratefully.

  ‘I shall fly faster,’ the dragon said firmly. ‘They must not catch up with us, and when it gets a little later, we shall have to put down and hide, of course. Too many towns to avoid on the way to London, or at least there always were.’

  ‘There are more now, I should think,’ Lily told him doubtfully. The dragon had last flown in the sixteenth century, and she suspected that back then even London had been rather small.

  ‘Of course, of course,’ he muttered, giving a little shiver of anticipation. She could feel excitement and magic shimmering through his scales. ‘So much to see. We must get well ahead now. I shall not be able to talk for a while, Lily.’

  The great silver-white wings beat down heavily, and Lily gasped as they lifted even higher in the air.

  ‘Hold on!’ she called back to the others.

  ‘We already are!’ her sister screamed back to her, the words half carried away on the wind. Georgie looked as though she had practically stuck herself to the dragon’s ragged spines, she was clinging on so tight. Her light hair was streaming out behind her, and she looked like a ghost, with her pale face and white school nightgown. She had little Lottie tucked in front of her, and the child’s gingery curls had been blown into a halo round her head. She was squealing and giggling with excitement, and actually bouncing, as though the dragon flight was an amazing treat, like a fairground ride. Behind them, the other children clung to each other as the dragon hurled them through the air.

  His smaller companions darted and twirled around them, and the silver dragon ignored their antics, only snorting occasionally as one of the other dragons shot across in front of his nose. Lily kept an eye out for the midnight creature who had rescued Peter, and was now carrying him caught up in its front claws. Peter swung and shifted as the dragon swooped, and Lily longed to scream to it to be careful. But she didn’t dare. She’d never spoken to any of the other dragons, only seen them here and there in strange visions at Fell Hall. What if they weren’t as helpful as the silver one? The black dragon had gleaming ruby eyes, and a mischievous look. It might drop Peter for the fun of catching him again.

  At last the silver dragon slowed his wings, and spiralled gently down towards a patch of woodland below them. Lily watched the trees grow from something like a clump of dark green moss, taller and taller, until they swooped in amongst them, the dragon drawing in his wings, and landing in the fallen leaves with a gentle scrunch.

  The children looked about them warily, reluctant to loosen their grip on the spiky frill that ran down the dragon’s spine.

  The dragon turned his head, peering back over his shoulder. ‘It’s safe now, my dears,’ he purred, his voice as low and gentle as he could make it. ‘We’ll rest here until dark, and then fly on to London tonight.’

  ‘London,’ some of the children whispered to each other, in a sort of delighted fear.

  ‘We’ve a safe place to go,’ Lily promised, crossing her fingers under a fold of her nightgown. She wasn’t sure how Daniel and the other performers in the theatre were going to react to forty children. And a dozen dragons…

  The other dragons were landing now, shooting in among the trees, and furling their wings gratefully. The blue-black dragon came down in an awkward fashion, with one front leg curled to his chest, and Peter pressed against his scales as saggy as a doll. He limped over to Lily, who was still perched on the silver dragon’s back, and reared up, laying Peter down in front of her. The mute boy sprawled over the dragon’s neck, staring up at Lily in bewilderment.

  ‘Is he any better?’ Georgie asked, leaning forward.

  Lily sighed. ‘Maybe a little. He’s awake, anyway.’ She bowed her head to the black dragon. ‘Thank you – you were so clever to catch him; I thought he was lost for certain.’

  The smaller dragon ducked his head smugly, and sidled away looking pleased with himself, to squabble over the best sleeping places with the others.

  ‘He doesn’t talk, like you?’ Lily asked the silver dragon, curiously.

  ‘Perhaps when we’ve been awake for longer… We’ve forgotten so much…’ The dragon’s voice was wistful. ‘I learned again, from watching the children, and talking with you and your little dog.’

  The little dog shook her ears irritably, but didn’t argue for once. Flying had not agreed with Henrietta, and her black eyes were bulging even more than usual. She wriggled out from under Lily’s arm and picked her way carefully towards Peter, until she stood over him, scowling thoughtfully.

  ‘I’d hoped he would come back to himself, once he was away from Fell Hall. But he still seems to be bound up in those spells.’ She sounded very grumpy, but Lily was sure that was nothing to do with Peter.

  Lily stroked Henrietta gently, running her fingers along her velvety wrinkles, and the little dog nudged her hand. ‘Will you be all right, all the way to London?’ Lily murmured, hoping the dragon couldn’t hear he
r. She didn’t want to sound ungrateful.

  Henrietta shuddered delicately. ‘It may be better in the dark. When I can’t see how far down everything is. Flying is unnatural.’

  Henrietta said it quite clearly, and if the silver dragon hadn’t been so big, and so noble-looking, Lily would have said that the noise he made was a snigger.

  The children from Fell Hall were gradually loosening their frantic, panicked grip on the dragon’s scales now, and sliding down his sides to the ground. Several of them staggered as their feet hit the dry leaves underfoot, their balance thrown by the hours in the air.

  Georgie wriggled down, loosening her clutch on Lottie, who ran off, dancing round the trees and peeping out at the other dragons.

  ‘Be careful!’ Lottie’s older sister, Elizabeth, hissed. ‘Lottie, don’t – don’t annoy them,’ she added in a fierce whisper, glancing nervously at the silver dragon as she hurried to follow Lottie.

  ‘What do dragons eat?’ Henrietta asked conversationally, leaning over the silver dragon’s spiky crest and trying to see into his eyes.

  The dragon stretched, and folded his wings more carefully, as though he was settling down for a while. ‘Anything. All sorts of things… But not children, not now at least. I promise, and they do too.’

  The other dragons twitched, and some of them looked quite regretful. The blue-black one pulled back in a clawed foreleg that had been creeping towards Lottie and sighed, sending out a misty plume of smoke that made the dry leaves dance and sizzle.

  ‘You can breathe fire then,’ Henrietta muttered, shifting her paws a little nervously. ‘Didn’t like to ask. Well, it’s useful, I suppose.’

  ‘Perhaps we could have a campfire,’ Georgie said hopefully. ‘It was cold, flying. And we’ve only got our nightclothes on.’

  Lily shook her head. ‘What if someone saw the smoke?’ She glanced around the wood, suddenly realising that it wasn’t very big, and was extremely full of dragons. Tails were stretching out between the trees, and she was quite sure they’d flown over a village not far away. A village full of people who were probably awake, and maybe even setting out to gather firewood, or hunt rabbits, or just walk through the woods on their way somewhere. ‘We need to hide,’ she said anxiously to Georgie and Henrietta and the dragon. ‘I hadn’t thought!’

  The dragon turned his head rather wearily. ‘Can we hide here or must we fly on and find somewhere else? I can hardly fit behind a tree… And there are all the others too.’

  Lily looked at him closely, hearing the cracks in his deep, velvety growl of a voice. He hadn’t flown for hundreds of years, she realised. He hadn’t done anything for hundreds of years. All the dragons had been sleeping for centuries, deep in the limestone caves under Fell Hall, until the growing tide of fallow magic in the country had woken them again.

  She shook her head, and let herself slip down his side so that she could stand in front of him and look into his eyes. A dry membrane kept slipping over them as they talked, and she was sure his scales were dimmer. He had worn himself out rescuing them all.

  ‘No, we’ll stay here. None of us wants to move.’ Several of the smaller dragons had curled themselves up like cats now, with their tails wrapped round their paws. She could even hear them purring. The children were huddled in little piles, leaning up against the tree trunks, or against dragon backs. They were casting anxious glances around – as though they still thought Miss Merganser and the others might be coming after them.

  Lily reached up to lift Henrietta down, and held out a hand for the princess, who was wrapped round in layers of petticoats and a dress that had been grand, once. Then she looked hopefully at Georgie, who was shivering in her skimpy cotton nightgown, staring out between the trees. ‘We can hide everybody… Don’t you think? Couldn’t we do a spell?’

  Georgie shuddered. It was cold in the early-morning gloom of the wood, but Lily knew it was the thought of using her magic that chilled her, not only the wind. ‘We could try,’ Georgie muttered. ‘But the spells are still inside me, Lily. The dragon unwound all that choking magic from Fell Hall, but the spells Mama planted haven’t gone. I can feel them. They’re awfully keen to be used. If I try any magic of my own, I’m scared they’ll slip out too.’

  Lily nodded, sighing. Georgie was probably right to be cautious. Their mother had been training her in magic, before they’d run away from their old home. She had filled Georgie with strange, dark spells, ones that the girls didn’t understand, and that Georgie couldn’t control.

  ‘I think they’re getting stronger,’ Georgie murmured. She sounded guilty. She knew Henrietta thought she was weak, not being able to control the magic inside her.

  In her worst moments, Lily agreed with the little black pug. She sometimes wondered if when she’d brought Henrietta out of that painting in their old house with her first real magic, she’d put the rudest, grumpiest bits of herself into the dog.

  ‘As though they know it’s almost their time…’ Georgie rubbed her hands up and down her arms anxiously.

  ‘We’ve got Princess Jane with us now,’ Lily reminded her sister, trying to sound confident. ‘She’ll show us how to break into Archgate, and rescue Father.’ She smiled at the little old lady, who was seated decorously on one of the dragon’s forelegs. The princess glanced up from the little basket on her lap, and Lily bit her lip to stop herself smiling. Who else but a princess would carry on with their embroidery when sitting on a dragon in the middle of a damp and misty wood?

  ‘I shall certainly do my best, my dears.’

  ‘He’ll know how to get rid of Mama’s spells, Georgie. He must do.’ Lily nodded firmly. She was trying to convince herself as much as Georgie. What if their father couldn’t rescue her? Or wouldn’t?

  The girls hadn’t seen him since Lily was tiny, since he’d refused to give up his magic, as every magician had been obliged to by the Queen’s Decree. Lily had read a couple of his letters to her mother, but that was all she knew of him. That he sounded pleasant, and weary, and that he would rather be shut away in a magicians’ prison than deny his birthright. They didn’t know whether he had ever supported their mother in her plot against the queen. Maybe he wouldn’t want to help them undo those strange spells. He might even send them straight back to Mama, so that she could keep working on Georgie. Lily bit her lip. They couldn’t know – but at the same time, they had to do something, before the buried spells dug their claws deeper into Georgie.

  ‘Use the rest of them,’ Henrietta muttered, as she padded happily around the tree roots, sneezing and snuffling. She always said she was really a town dog, and preferred paving slabs under her paws, but she enjoyed the occasional country walk. Especially if it was followed by afternoon tea, with hot buttered toast.

  Lily gazed blankly at her curly tail, bobbing about in the leaves, and Henrietta turned round, looking irritated. ‘The others, Lily! Forty little magician children: use them! Well – say twenty, bearing in mind that half of them don’t feel to me as if they’ve got a smidgen of magic blood. They probably just looked wrong, and some idiot packed them off to Fell Hall to be cleansed of a magic taint that wasn’t there in the first place.’

  Georgie stared at the other children, camped wearily around the little clearing. ‘I never thought of that…’

  Henrietta sniffed meaningfully, but didn’t say anything. She was trying hard to be nicer to Georgie, but she slipped occasionally.

  ‘It’s a very good idea.’ Lily nodded. ‘Although… None of them has ever been trained in magic.’

  ‘Neither have you!’ Henrietta snapped back. ‘It comes naturally, to those who have it. Let them try. The worst that happens is a tree falls on our heads.’

  Lily swallowed, and looked around at the children from Fell Hall. They seemed to be recovering from their sudden dragonflight now. Some of the boys were pelting each other with dry leaves, and Lottie was still dancing about all over the place.

  The dragon coughed solemnly, and the boys froze, as though they
thought he might be about to crisp them with a blast of flame. ‘The young lady wishes to speak to you.’

  Lily felt suddenly tongue-tied. This was far more frightening than performing to an audience at the theatre. There she only had to scamper about, smiling foolishly, and be shut into cabinets. No one was expecting her to come up with a plan. The others gathered closer, and even the dozing dragons flickered their eyes open, in case she was going to say anything interesting.

  ‘Um, we need to hide, in case anyone from the village sees us.’

  ‘Will they be chasing us? From Fell Hall?’ Elizabeth pulled Lottie close to her worriedly.

  Lily shook her head. ‘We’ve come quite a long way already. And last we saw of it, Fell Hall was collapsing, after the dragons came up out of the caverns. But we don’t want to be seen anyway. We’re still – well, outlaws, I suppose. And there aren’t places to hide, here in the wood, so we’ll have to do it by magic.’

  Everyone stared back at her.

  ‘What, a spell?’ one of the boys said doubtfully at last.

  Lily nodded. ‘Why not? Lottie managed a spell early this morning.’

  Lottie nodded importantly. ‘Little birds flew round me! It was lovely. I want to do a spell, Lily!’

  Lily looked around hopefully at the rest of the children. ‘Does it feel like you shouldn’t?’

  While the children had been shut up at Fell Hall, the staff had fed them old, half-dead spells, designed to keep their own magic squashed deep down. Everyone had been taught that magic was wrong and shameful. When Lily and Georgie had first been taken there, they’d hoped to find other children like themselves, but instead the pupils had been bewitched into hating their own magical blood.

  The boy wrinkled his nose and flexed his fingers. His feet twitched, and then he looked up at Lily, smiling hopefully. ‘Actually, I’d like to,’ he admitted. ‘I never understood what they’d been doing to us. It feels like we’ve been set free. Not just from that place. Inside me as well, somehow.’

  Mary raised a hand shyly. She was one of the children who’d been abandoned at Fell Hall as a baby, put into a strange stone cradle in the wall and left, because someone thought she was a witch baby.