Lily and the Traitors` Spell Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  One Year On

  Copyright

  If you liked this...

  The bullet buried itself in the canvas backdrop with a solid thud.

  Henrietta let out a yelp of surprise, flattening herself against the floor of the stage with her black eyes bulging.

  ‘It’s not meant to have proper bullets in it!’ Lily gasped, turning to stare at Daniel, her fingernails digging into her palms.

  It had been so quick. If the bullet had been about to hit one of her friends, she wasn’t sure she would have been fast enough to stop it.

  Argent, who had been sleeping draped across the back of the stage, shook out his wings a little, and blew out a thin, coiling breath of smoke. ‘I have little experience with firearms,’ he said, in a low, rumbling murmur. ‘But that seemed quite real to me.’

  Daniel was looking at the pistol, with a faintly puzzled expression on his face. ‘It can’t have been...’

  ‘I hate this trick,’ Nicholas muttered. He and Mary had only been working as Daniel’s assistants in the illusionist’s act for a few weeks, since they all returned from Fell Hall, but Nicholas swore to Lily that he had nearly died twice. Lily thought he was exaggerating, but perhaps not very much. Nicholas was ideal for the assistant’s role, being very skinny and good at getting into tight places, but he had an awful memory, and that mattered when one had to be sure in which order very sharp knives were going to be stabbed through the cabinet one was hiding in. Nicholas had been trying to magic himself a sort of metal vest. He said it wasn’t cheating, as the magic wasn’t part of the trick, but no one else was convinced. Mary found it particularly irritating, as she had no magic of her own, and had to rely on getting it right the first time.

  ‘Have you been messing with the pistol?’ Lily asked Nicholas suspiciously.

  Mary glared at him. ‘I bet you have!’

  ‘I didn’t!’ Nicholas protested indignantly. ‘I honestly didn’t! It isn’t fair. Just because of that accidental green rabbit-creature, everyone always blames me.’

  Daniel sat down rather shakily on the edge of the stage, laying the ornate, enamelled pistol down next to him. ‘The rabbit still has a green tinge, Nicholas. And she’s really gone off carrots. I don’t like putting my hand in that hat any more, she bites.’ He sighed. ‘That wasn’t a wax bullet, was it? What happened?’

  Lily came and sat down by him, and Henrietta climbed shakily into her lap, one paw stretched across to Daniel’s leg.

  ‘I don’t think this trick is a good idea,’ Lily muttered. ‘This time you were only testing the gun, but what if it happens again?’

  ‘It won’t.’ Daniel tried to sound reassuring, but it didn’t work very well. ‘There must have been some sort of mix-up.’

  Mary crouched down next to them. ‘If that happened when I was firing it at you, I’d never forgive myself. And I don’t see why this trick is so special anyway. It’s stupid! Who would actually want to catch a bullet in their teeth?’

  ‘But if it worked...’ Daniel murmured wistfully. ‘It’s so dramatic...’

  ‘It is quite dramatic when the back of your head is spread all over the stage, yes,’ Henrietta growled.

  Daniel got up, fetching the shallow box from the top of one of the cabinets. He lifted the lid with shaky fingers, and nudged the glistening black bullets, nicking them with his fingernails. ‘These are real. All of them, apart from this one at the end.’ He lifted it out, rolling it between his fingers. Then he pressed his forefinger to his lips. ‘Sweet. And it isn’t as heavy as the others. This is a sugar one, as they all should be.’

  ‘Mystery solved then,’ Henrietta snapped. ‘Someone ate your sugar-coated bullets. One of the children.’ She glared around at Nicholas suspiciously.

  Daniel frowned. ‘They aren’t all sugar. Just a sugar coat over the wax – baked sugar, to look like metal, you know.’

  Argent shook his wings with an anxious rattling sound, and came a little closer, stepping sinuously across the stage. ‘Ah... The silvery-black things? The odd sweets, with the rather dull centre?’

  Everyone turned to stare up at him, and he ducked his head, looking as embarrassed as a house-sized dragon possibly could. ‘I do so like sweet things,’ he murmured. ‘So much nicer now than they were a few hundred years ago. There was marchpane, and liquorice root... But now! Mint humbugs! And chocolate... I could smell them – so delicious, and the colour so nice. I did put some of the others back in the little box, there was a bag, full of them...’

  ‘Yes,’ Daniel agreed grimly. ‘The real bullets, for showing to the audience.’

  ‘Ah...’

  ‘I should have noticed, when I loaded it,’ Daniel muttered to himself. ‘Perhaps we aren’t ready for the gun trick – but it would get us so much publicity.’

  ‘Banner headline. Tragic death of foolish illusionist,’ Henrietta muttered.

  ‘I really do apologise,’ the dragon said, a flutey, breathless note sounding in his deep voice. ‘I shouldn’t have taken them. At least it was me that the bullet almost hit, in the end,’ he added, snaking his neck down so that he could look up into Daniel’s face. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said again, breathing out a gentle cloud of sparkling, filmy magic that wreathed itself around Daniel’s face and shoulders like smoke.

  Daniel sighed, and then took a breath in, shivering slightly as the magic shimmered through him, sending a silvery sheen across his skin. ‘What did you do?’ he murmured. He shook his too-long dark hair a little, as though he were shaking it out of his eyes, and it glittered. ‘I feel stronger.’

  ‘Mmm,’ Argent agreed. ‘It should last a while. I wanted to make it up to you. I should never have eaten them. But I have my doubts about this illusion, Daniel, my friend. Those thugs in the Queen’s Men will never believe it’s only a trick. Who could catch a bullet in their teeth without magic? They’ll haul you off to prison – or they would if they had one, anyway.’

  He allowed himself a smug little puff of smoke here. Lily and Georgie had broken into Archgate, the magicians’ prison where their father had been locked away. They had not gone alone – Rose, one of the magicians who had set the original guardian spells, had led them through the traps she’d laid so many years before. They had also taken a princess with them – one of the few who could open the secret door, which was spelled to respond only to royal blood. It was pure chance, and luck, that the girls had a princess to hand, having rescued her and taken her with them when they escaped on dragonback from Fell Hall, a reform school for magician children. Princess Jane had been the oldest inhabitant, hidden away there when she refused to condemn all magic. She had been left to grow old in the attics of Fell Hall, while her loving subjects were told she’d died.

  Even with a princess, and a magician to help them, Lily and Georgie had still been caught. The Queen’s Men had attacked them, just as they had managed to rescue their father from the cell he’d been shut in for nearly ten years. Queen Adelaide, the Dowager Queen, hated all magic and magicians, after a magician had murdered her husband. She had been so determined to see them caught that she’d accompanied the guards to the prison, and she’d ordered her men to kill them all. When she woke in the night, Lily could still hear the old queen’s hoarse, delighted voice, screaming gleeful orders as she saw what she had ca
ught.

  But Argent had sensed the danger they were in, and clawed and wrestled his way down the narrow passages and into the heart of the prison to rescue them. The guard spells had no effect on him at all – in fact, Lily thought they’d made him stronger. She was almost certain that somehow he ate magic. Which was good, as she wasn’t sure what else he ate, and she didn’t really want to know.

  The prison had been left less than secure. The Queen’s Men had put it about that a gang of renegade magicians had attacked the palace, as Archgate was hidden under the ceremonial arch that led into the palace courtyards. Lily had read out the newspaper articles about it to Argent, with disgusted comments, until he had pointed out that actually, she was a renegade magician, and now that she had Rose, and her father, as well as Georgie and himself, and Nicholas, however accident-prone his magic was, they were almost a gang.

  Lily quite liked the idea.

  Lily peered around the door, trying to see into the dark little room. Her father was asleep in there, on a pile of quilts and blankets. Or she’d thought he was. If she hadn’t known, she would have sworn the room was empty.

  She took a step backwards. The room was empty. She shouldn’t be there, anyway... Blindly, she turned away from the door and tripped over Henrietta, who was sitting in the middle of the passageway, shaking her head crossly as though her ears were itching.

  Lily yelped and stumbled, putting her hands out to try to keep from falling onto the dusty floor, and then let out a little gasp of relief as someone caught her with a grunt.

  ‘Peter!’

  He shoved her back onto her feet, holding her arms above the elbows, and frowning, as though he wasn’t sure what had happened.

  ‘I just stumbled – I tripped over Henrietta,’ Lily said slowly. She glanced at him to make sure that he was looking at her to read her lips, but then she went back to staring at the dark doorway. It wasn’t right, somehow... And where had Peter come from, just in time to catch her?

  Moving in a sort of daze, she turned back to peer at the darkened doorway, stretching an arm across the opening.

  Empty. Empty. Empty.

  But it wasn’t. She knew it wasn’t. Slowly, as if she were swimming through a golden, sticky syrup, Lily raised the back of her hand to her mouth, and bit down hard on her knuckle. The sharp little pain cleared the sticky honey trails out of her head, enough to make her see what was happening.

  ‘You were in there!’ she told Peter accusingly, speaking loudly, her face pressed close up against his, so he couldn’t fail to understand her. ‘What were you doing? That’s my father’s room!’

  Peter let go of her, stepping back and reaching for the notebook in his pocket. He held it between them, the stub of pencil hovering over the page, but he didn’t write anything. He didn’t know what to say. Eventually, he wrote, in a neat, small script – so much tidier than Lily’s own untaught hand – He can’t talk either.

  ‘What did he say?’ Henrietta demanded. ‘Where is your father?’

  ‘So – you were with him?’ Lily asked, feeling almost hurt. She hadn’t thought of their shared lack of speech as a bond between Peter and her father.

  She had hardly spoken to him herself, since they had dragged him onto Argent’s back and fled from Archgate. It had only been two days, and he needed to recover his strength. He was tired. Overwhelmed. They had understood, and left him to rest in that pile of quilts, bringing him food – the nicest they could afford. And newspapers. Henrietta had thought of those, in case he might like to know what was going on in the world, after ten years shut away from everything on his own.

  Apart from that, Lily and Georgie had tactfully left him alone, just popping in to say good morning, and to bring him his meals. Because once she spoke to him properly, Lily knew that she wouldn’t be able to stop. Questions would pour out of her, about Merrythought, and her mother; and, had he known about the spells that had killed their sisters? Had he let Mama set her evil spells in Georgie? Had he wanted her to?

  And now that he had been set free, could he free Lily’s sister too?

  Lily had walked past his door so many times in the last few hours, each time forcing herself to keep on walking, to leave him till he was better, to accept that he was ill, and broken by his years in the prison...

  Now it seemed that Peter had been talking to him all this time, and in secret, hidden by that cloaking spell.

  Went to take his breakfast plates away, Peter scrawled in explanation. He stopped me. Wanted to know stuff.

  ‘He’s got a spell across the door, though,’ Lily said, frowning. That meant that her father was well enough to do magic – and that Peter had managed to get past the spell.

  He did seem surprised I managed to get in, Peter agreed, after a pause. I didn’t know there was a spell.

  Lily looked him up and down. She’d known him for so long, ever since he’d been abandoned on the little stony beach at Merrythought, when they were both small. She tended just to think of him as someone who was always there. She had hated leaving him behind, after he’d helped them to run away from the island, and she’d begged him to come with them then. But Merrythought was the only home Peter had ever known, and he hadn’t dared to leave it. He had shoved their tiny boat out onto the water, and hidden himself away under the jetty. She had looked back for him, but he was gone.

  Now, even in the dim light of the passageway, she could see that he suddenly looked older. Perhaps it was the effect of the strange spells at Fell Hall. Magic was strictly forbidden now, of course, but there were certain exceptions. When Lily and Georgie had first been sent there, it hadn’t taken Lily long to discover that the cocoa they were fed at bedtime was drugged with spells. Old, dried-out husks of spells, but still strong enough to dose up children. Especially as most of the children at the school had been falsely accused, some of them as babies, and they hadn’t any magic anyway. The cocoa, and the drifts of binding spells wound around the buildings and the outer walls, had dulled most traces of magic in the children, but the staff still carried little blue glass bottles full of powdered spells, ready to squash any hint of rebellion.

  The staff had been convinced that Peter was a witch-child, like Lily and Georgie, and his muteness had only seemed to make them more determined to break him. Even after Argent had cleared the minds of all the children imprisoned at Fell Hall, Peter had been so heavily drugged with spells that he hardly seemed to be there. They had almost lost him as he slipped bonelessly from Argent’s back when they flew up out of the ruins of Fell Hall. One of the smaller, wilder dragons had caught him, but Lily still remembered that moment of horror, when she’d watched him spiralling lightly down through the blue air, like a leaf.

  ‘Maybe magic doesn’t work on you the same way now?’ Lily murmured. ‘After all those spells... Oh!’ She turned, surprised, and clutched at Peter’s arm. Henrietta was already trotting towards the doorway, her ears twitching frantically. Lily followed her, drawn by the sweetest spell she’d ever felt. She wanted to go into that room now. She had to. It would be awful not to...

  ‘That’s very rude,’ Henrietta snapped, as she fetched up against the pile of blankets, staring crossly at Lily’s father.

  Lily was quite glad that Henrietta had said it, so she didn’t have to.

  ‘You could just have asked!’ Henrietta said, in a muted growl.

  He smiled, rather sadly, and shook his head.

  ‘Oh, well, I suppose not...’ Henrietta muttered. ‘But still...’

  Peter stepped towards the makeshift bed, holding out his notebook and the stub of pencil, but Lily’s father smiled again, and waved it away. He closed his eyes for a moment – without their sparkling greenish-blue lights, he looked older, and paler, Lily thought – and then opened them, staring at the wall.

  Lily turned to see where he was looking, and laughed.

  There w
as a baby in the wall. Very small, very plump, and reaching out fat little hands to Lily. She was wearing a faded yellow dress, and Lily frowned suddenly, reaching out her fingers to touch it, before she remembered that the baby was only a picture. She knew that dress. No one had ever thrown anything away at Merrythought, and there had been a dress just like that in the old wooden chest that stood at the end of her bed.

  ‘Is that me?’ she asked excitedly, turning to look eagerly at her father.

  He nodded.

  Lily sat down shakily on his blankets, still staring hungrily at the laughing child. He did remember her, then. He remembered her as a happy baby, not as her mother thought of her, as a weapon, to be filled with magic, and set loose against the queen.

  ‘I didn’t know if you’d remember us...’ she murmured.

  An older child appeared behind the baby, and Lily swallowed painfully. Georgie could only be three, but already she had a worried, frightened look in her eyes, and she was nibbling at the back of her hand. Mama’s lessons had started.

  ‘Why didn’t you stop her?’ she asked angrily, glaring into her father’s eyes. How could he have let their mother do it? He must have known, Lily thought. Even if he had loved Nerissa to distraction, he must have seen...

  By the time Lily was born, her older sisters Lucy and Prudence were already dead. They had not been strong enough to withstand the poisonous spells their mother had dripped into them. Slowly, they had faded and their magic had weakened, until they were useless. Now Mama was relying on Georgie. Lily had never been wanted, although she might perhaps be useful as a spare. But she had not been needed. Georgie had survived, even if she hadn’t flourished.

  Lily could just remember playing with her sister, when she was very small. But by the time Lily was four, and Georgie was seven, her older sister was too busy to play. She spent her days in the library with Mama, hidden behind walls of books and strange magical instruments.

  Lily had wished and wished that Mama would teach her too, but her magic had never shown itself, and Mama already had Georgie. Why would she bother herself with the spare child, especially as this last little girl had no talent?